Why Everyone Hates Jazz

like jazz music because it it all sounds the same yeah definitely i've never never ever played that before before we write those those people off or jump to correct them i think it's it's helpful to understand why sometimes people think that jazz all sounds the same and maybe to some extent maybe they're right now to you and i who are either musicians or jazz fans or whatever we can of course look at the insane variety that generally we sometimes consider to fall into the giant realm that is jazz so we can easily look at the accusation that jazz all sounds the same and be like no it doesn't but what is it that people are sometimes talking about when they say something like that is there any truth to that does it matter and what can we actually learn from the idea that it all is kind of the same for the purposes of addressing this idea we're going to be talking mostly about what we generally call like straight ahead jazz not quite as as old as like earlier swing and big band styles like benny goodman and it's not really modern like getting into some of the later modal stuff of john coltrane miles second quintet we're gonna talk right in that sweet spot of like miles first quintet bebop that sort of era because there's actually a lot that we can learn when we start to understand why people sometimes say that jazz all sounds the same before diving into those components the first thing that we should talk about is does it even matter and to that i say no who cares if it all sounds the same there's a reason that you like a certain genre of music it's because most of the things within that genre sound like that genre people that love straight ahead jazz like you want more of that you want more of the solos and the improv and and the swing and the style of the tune it's not a bad thing to have a genre that sounds somewhat congruent it's of course incredibly exciting that from there we can take jazz and go in a bazillion different directions but as a baseline most of what i learned came from straight ahead jazz and bebop i still play a lot of that stuff today and it serves as an incredible basis to work from for understanding improvisation being able to navigate chord changes in improvisation and much much more so what is it that's making it sound that way and how can we actually leverage that to make progress in our own music if you got really used to hearing german spoken you'd probably be able to recognize german even if you didn't speak german when you compare that to something like spanish those two languages sound drastically different from each other and most people can be presented with one or the other and say oh well that sounds much more german and this sounds much more spanish even without speaking the language at all so the key component here is to understand number one we have to look at music as a language genres all they are are different languages the same way that there might be a certain set of components that are common in country music if you were a studio musician in nashville you would know certain things about how to read music how to present new music how to write music and the different commonalities that you find in the genre of country those would be just second nature to you because that's the language that you learned likewise jazz has its own language it has its own set of of common devices and things that we know and things that we can count on one another to know which allows us to play together even if we never have before what's a tune what's the tim goods uh do you know softly as in a morning sunrise oh sure you want to do the last a section in a and then everything else and then back into c minor [Music] [Music] so if we take apart the pieces of that language and we start to learn how to utilize them you're going to get way better as a musician very quickly so the first and probably the most overall component that makes up the language is repertoire there is a huge bank of tunes and songs from many different eras from great american songbook to bebop tunes all of this music makes up the general repertoire of jazz and of course it's completely unbounded and can include things from so many different places but there are generally some things that if you walk into a jam session you're going to be able to call a tune and 95 of the people there will know it these are tunes like all the things you are stella by starlight different commonly played blues heads rhythm changes all of these things are considered staple content that you kind of want to have together before you you know walk out to a jam session and sit down to play there are just certain expectations that everybody sort of has in terms of like a general working knowledge of a certain number of tunes but within that there are many common things shared amongst all these tunes that sort of create the sound of jazz the language of jazz at least in the context that you know a lot of the people are talking about when they say oh all jazz sounds the same it's like okay well what are those parts that share across many different songs that make it sound the same well the first thing is chord progressions there are a lot of very very commonly used chord progressions in the genre of jazz overall and i could sit here and just play a series of chords and chances are your your brain might go oh wait what does that sound like that sounds familiar and the reason it sounds familiar is because yeah these are these chord changes are used all over the place there are so many little segments of chord progressions that just show up everywhere and you can listen to any of them and immediately start thinking of like oh that sounds like eight different tunes that i know and that has to do with many things including just the style of writing at the time the tunes were written as well as just the fact that a lot of times those chord progressions just work really well for a combination of reasons including voice leading moving around the circle of fifths etc one of the most common devices that you probably hear about a lot is a two five one many of you probably know this but just really quickly we'll go over it if we're talking about a c major scale we're gonna make that into numbers one two three four five six seven and that's one repeated so a two five one is simply going to be chords built on the two of that scale one two and the five one two three four five two five and then our one of course is c that's like the really really quick uh explanation of the number system and what a two five one is so it's just the chord built on the two chord builds on the five and then the chord built on the one [Music] and we can add all kinds of different things to that we can change the quality it can be minor major the 2 5 1 just refers to the root of that chord so in our case a 2 5 1 is like so here we're playing a d minor 7 chord and that resolves itself to a g dominant seventh chord which resolves to a c major chord now the reason why that's one of the most widely used devices in jazz and in music in general is because it's extremely powerful in its implication of resolution so what i mean by that is [Music] hear how every chord in that sequence really steers its way into the next chord very very well it really makes you go oh yeah that really just wants to and then sitting on this court of course it doesn't it doesn't sound at home it's like very suspended that's one of the reasons we call it dominant it's like it's got such a draw to want to go and resolve right it makes it extremely powerful to end phrases and sections with so we see it crop up all over the place now if we're talking about how to extend that we can sometimes add the three and the six in front of that so again let's go back to our c major scale one two three one two three four five six so three six two five one i'm gonna play that and you're gonna go oh yeah that sounds incredibly familiar check this out what if i start the chord progression on the one add the four and then go through that whole three six two five one thing watch this [Music] tell me that's not identical to like a thousand different tunes you've probably heard before what if i then added a 2 5 but going into a different key what would that key be based on what if we base the new key on the fourth of that major scale what if we went to f and called that our new key for just a moment and we'll play a 2 5 in front of that let's add that to the end of what we just played we're literally writing a standard that you've probably heard many many times so without diving too far into just writing a completely new standard what i'm illustrating here is that there are certain bite-sized components that are extremely common in jazz and if you learn them and if you learn them in all keys like we just played that whole thing in c but what if i did it in i don't know let's do it in a flat if you master these phrases and these sections and all types of keys what you are doing is you are essentially adding pieces to your language to your understanding and your fluency in the language and what that allows you to do is you can get up on a bandstand and somebody can call a tune that you don't know and you can work it out because once you start recognizing these individual phrases and pieces of how the language of jazz is constructed you can now recognize that just by ear anywhere and you can begin to make assumptions about what's coming next so you can be like oh oh i hear this thing it sounds like it's moving oh oh there's a 36251 that we just talked about and once you know that in all 12 keys and you've played around with that and you've played a number of different tunes that contains that particular sequence of chords you're going to recognize that anytime you hear it on the fly and you'll be able to play along this is such a powerful thing that allows jazz musicians to just hear things and be like oh yeah okay and they just play along i can sit down with people i've never met before and play together because we have this common understanding and a fluency in the language to the extent that we can hear each other play things or we can decide to play a tune and we all know exactly what's going on because all of these bits and chunks of the language we understand the same way that you know if i said to you hey the grass is always i would bet that the vast majority of you can complete that phrase why what does it mean does it mean exactly what we said no it's an idiom it doesn't it doesn't mean what we say but we all kind of understand what it's saying and we all know how the phrase goes this is basically how jazz is constructed and a lot of the reason that jazz musicians can play in an improvised manner in the way that we do all different genres are full of their own idioms they're full of their own phrases and things that everyone just knows another reason that people might consider jazz all sounding the same has a lot to do with improvisational style something very close to what i just played i've probably played it a thousand times and i certainly am not the first person to play it we steal that language from each other and we look at history and part of what you do as a student is transcribe a lot of solos and artists that came before us to learn the ins and outs of this language it's the same thing as a child growing up and just hearing the environment around them and being able to speak their native language via just listening eventually you develop an understanding of the language and you develop an ability to execute that language physically on your instrument and that is what can oftentimes have that typical sound [Music] a lot of what i have played and have inserted into my personal vocabulary as a musician when i'm playing this particular style it's coming from all of the influences and all of the work that i've put in over the years transcribing various artists and adding to that bank of tools that i have to play over anything i encounter now as musicians we always of course want to strive to insert our own level of individuality and kind of create our own sound and that's how we wind up pushing genres in new directions and coming up with totally new sounds but as a basis we always kind of get to go back to this underlying understanding of the language that we all learned this is why most of the time if you go to a music school they're really going to stress the importance of learning the traditional repertoire even if that's not necessarily what you want to go and do with it but it provides a really great basis from which to work and develop all kinds of new sounds and styles so maybe all jazz does sound the same which is completely not true but in certain subgenres of jazz you could maybe make an argument for that i mean i found myself over the years being extremely frustrated by listening to tunes and having it be the same formula of head in solo solo solo trade fours with a drummer head out i got to a point where i was like i just don't want to listen to any of that anymore as great as it is it can become tiresome that's gonna be all for me today thank you so much for watching and we will see you in the next video you

Channel: Charles Cornell

Views: 254,789

Keywords: Charles, Charles Cornell, Charles Cornell Studios, Studios, Cornell, Piano, Piano Covers, Piano guy

Id: feNV4gCNcSE

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021