did Cziffra have the greatest pianistic/technical vocabulary of any improviser

[prometheus]

Well, if he is a good improviser he must have played jazz.

[stevie]

Well, if he is a good improviser he must have played jazz.

whats the logic in this?

improv doesnt = jazz, improv = improv.

he did happen to play jazz, but not primarily, id say of his piano playing life, he spent 40% on pieces, 40-50% on non-jazz improv, and the remainder on some jazz improv pon the side. possibly.

[prometheus]

Improv = jazz if you ask me.


I find it very strange that someone would suggest that a classical pianist is the best improviser out there. Maybe it is an utter underestimation of jazz. I remember that people disagreed with me way back when I said that jazz was harder to play than classical music.

[mephisto]

Improv = jazz if you ask me.

Yes of course, Norwegain peasants invented jazz in the 11-hundreds

-da Meph

[stevie]

Improv = jazz if you ask me.


I find it very strange that someone would suggest that a classical pianist is the best improviser out there. Maybe it is an utter underestimation of jazz. I remember that people disagreed with me way back when I said that jazz was harder to play than classical music.

stick a bun in the oven and give it a name

[prometheus]

We already know you are extremely childish.

[stevie]

i know you are, so what am i?

[lisztisforkids]

Improv = jazz if you ask me.

Not true

[mephisto]

We already know you are extremely childish.

So you are basicly saying that Beethoven was the best jazz pianist of his time?

[prometheus]

Beethoven has been dead for a long time. So has the improvisational tradition of the western classical music tradition. It is a lost art and one can only argue about how sophisticated it really was.


At this point all the musicians with great improvisational skill playing western music are jazz musicians. Jazz is about improvisation. Classical music today does not allow improvisation. It is even a taboo. You don't 'butcher' classical pieces by taking liberties. That this was very different in the past, even back to the dags in where jazz did not exist yet, has nothing to do with this. Today it is just very different and classical musicians can't improvise. Those that can are very limited in their ability because they have to build from scratch. Often these people only start to improvise later in their lives or they don't take improvisation as serious. Improvisation is naturally more playful and this seems to suggest improvisation is a game.

[stevie]

jazz is a style of music, what youre saying is mildly bullshit

[quantum]

stevie I randomly agree with you.

Improvisation is a form of composition.  Prometheus, so what you are saying is that since western classical improvisation is dead that all composition is now directly oriented towards the creation of a score, and that composers think of ink on a page instead of trying their ideas on their instrument first. 

[andyd]

My answer to the original question would be no.  Music is subjective, but for me Art Tatum is the greatest pianist I have ever heard.  He is widely regarded as the greatest jazz pianist ever.

To quote someone else, "Monstorously gifted classical pianists such as Horowitz, Rubenstein, and Gisikieng were themselves absolutely awestruck when seeing and hearing Tatum"

Horowitz I believe described technique as the ability to conjure up many different sounds out of the piano, which is certainly different from sheer dexterity. 
For musicality, for improvisation, Tatum had a God-given gift.

Andy

[stevie]

My answer to the original question would be no. 

do you understand the original question?

im not asking who the greatest improviser is, just the one with the widest vocabulary of pianistic figurations and deviced at their disposal.

i ask this, because compared to cziffra, everyone else just sounds colourless in comparison.

[m]

i ask this, because compared to cziffra, everyone else just sounds colourless in comparison.

???

Sorry to put a rain on the parade, but with all my love and admiration, Cziffra's is pretty colourless. He lacks grace and elegance and basically "screams" all the time, while improvising. What "colour" and devices are you talking about?

It is nice to see that not many members here share your opinion about "tools" and "building".

[daniel patschan]

We may not forget that itīs really not an improvisation in the usual sense ! Itīs not something which he invents completely new in a special moment in a musical context. Itīs just like: "Look everybody what Georgesīfingers are capable of, look and wow !" But once again, we donīt have the smallest idea what other professional classical pianists can do with common scales and arpeggios if they are forced to. Even me, a very bad amateur, can play some scales and arps. in a relatively fast manner. Some people (that are not familiar with piano and music at all) might think: "Thatīs true virtuosity !" But i could ensure them that itīs just rubbish. Cziffra can impress the majority of us with stuff like that but itīs so vulgar - it shows his weakest side ! And in the middle of everything he slaughters 10/1. He plays it with so much disrespect ! Donīt you think A. Gavrilov for example could play it that fast (and dirty) with ease !?

[stevie]

Sorry to put a rain on the parade, but with all my love and admiration, Cziffra's is pretty colourless. He lacks grace and elegance and basically "screams" all the time, while improvising. What "colour" and devices are you talking about?

It is nice to see that not many members here share your opinion about "tools" and "building".

im not talking about 'touch', thats a whole other topic, but im talking about his utilisation of the piano's registers and the variety of texture he encompasses with his different improvisations.

plus, grace and elagance are relative, the improvs youve heard are him in 'inzane pregnant cat' mode, still in the bbc improv especially he displays some stunningly fluid bravura elegance.

[stevie]

We may not forget that itīs really not an improvisation in the usual sense ! Itīs not something which he invents completely new in a special moment in a musical context. Itīs just like: "Look everybody what Georgesīfingers are capable of, look and wow !" But once again, we donīt have the smallest idea what other professional classical pianists can do with common scales and arpeggios if they are forced to. Even me, a very bad amateur, can play some scales and arps. in a relatively fast manner. Some people (that are not familiar with piano and music at all) might think: "Thatīs true virtuosity !" But i could ensure them that itīs just rubbish. Cziffra can impress the majority of us with stuff like that but itīs so vulgar - it shows his weakest side ! And in the middle of everything he slaughters 10/1. He plays it with so much disrespect ! Donīt you think A. Gavrilov for example could play it that fast (and dirty) with ease !?

wrong....do you understand what tatum did when 'improvising' too?

improvisation is ALWAYS simply new combinations of ideas worked out through practice sessions and experience at the piano, things arent spontaniously created in the sense many people may think, musical ideas are selected with musical taste and spontanaity from the preformed 'repertoire' of pianistic devides, harmonies, melodies, etc. that the pianist has had experience with.

i love the 10/1 performance...thats subjective opinion, as is yours.

and you think you can do what cziffra does because you can play scales and arpeggios? 

i can play all the scales, arpeggios, and octaves in the hanon book, and my improvisational command still doesnt equal even a fraction of cziffra's.

[andyd]

There's a difference between 'greatest' and 'largest'.
If you are taking away touch, harmony and melody,  everything that defines music and makes music beautiful, and simply reducing it to the 'figures', ie. two notes or more, I have no real way of answering the question.
But I would say, you can learn all 26 letters of the alphabet, but if you can't say them properly in a meaningful order, then someone who knows and speaks perfectly with only 24 letters wins the 'greatest' accolade. 
Musically speaking, we are adding letters to the alphabet all the time.

Whatever Tatum's inclination or aspirations to play classical, we have hardly any record of it, and as an Afro-American he must have felt frustrated that his career was so limited by his ethnicity.  He could obviously play Chopin, Debussey, Massanet, Dvorak.
What record do we have of Cziffra playing a 'vocabulary' other than classical?  Does this line of thinking not count?.

Andre Previn was one of the few players who clearly demonstrated he could play various styles.

Regards

Andy

[stevie]

cziffra played jazz, indeed.

the alphabet analogy is interesting, but the point of this question is to objectively judge how many 'letters' piansits can use, not what they do with them, what they do with them is down to taste.

i prefer tatum's jazz improvs to cziffra's, but i prefer cziffra's 'lisztian' improvs even moreso, this is all irrelevant, its just like technique topics turning into musicality topics...

what other classical piansits have improvised?

people seem to think that any classical pianist can just pick up improv and play like cziffra did....how?!

[andyd]

Well, I'm not sure how apt the analogy was, but I suppose any decent pianist has all the letters in their elemental form.  Once we work-up these letters into words(vocabulary/figures - two or more notes) we inescapably give tonal and rhythmic qualities which are all important to musicians.  Words then become parts of phrases and sentences. 
How to (and why) deconstruct in any meaningful way?  How to (and why)separate a musical vocabulary from it's inherant musicality? 

How to quantify theoretically, objectively, the 'words' available to reference from a (now dead) pianist's memory?  Cziffra must have known and could therefore reference more classical stuff, while Tatum could reference hundreds of popular songs.
 
To give Cziffra respect if he did play jazz, there are very few classical players who can.  It's mainly a one way street, with jazz players often doing a fair classical rendition.  This always brings to mind the Grapelli - Mehnuin recordings which are lovely to hear, but poor Mehnuin had to have all the notes written down for him

I'm off to do some much needed practice.

Regards

Andy

[stevie]

why am i discussing it?

because i think has far and away the most advanced improvsational vocabulary of any pianist ive heard, from a purely figurational sense.

the harmonies arent that complex, but the way things are laid out on the piano.

the basic figuration test is, with 1 chord, lets say A minor, play as many possible figurations based on this chord, with arpeggios, broken arpeggions, passing note arpeggios( with the notes D A C D for example), and an virtually infinite array of ways of using this simple harmony, this is the test of the kind of skill im talking about.

then theres the ability of putting them all together seamlessly in an actual improv, which cziffra does awesomely and fluently,

[prometheus]

Prometheus, so what you are saying is that since western classical improvisation is dead that all composition is now directly oriented towards the creation of a score, and that composers think of ink on a page instead of trying their ideas on their instrument first. 

What you say is true. But my point is that a classical musician can never be the greatest improvisor since he has no foundation to build upon. A single classical pianist has to compete against a whole tradition of jazz pianists.

Furthermore, there is no classical music pianist that focusses solely on improvisation. So a classical painist will always be as good at improvisation as a jazz pianist is at playing classical pieces.

So unless western classical music redevelops the art of improvisation into something mature a classical pianist can never be a great improvisor unless this pianist is also a jazz pianist.

Just listen to the Cziffra file and you will hear it is just about random technique and not about composing music 'on the fly'.

Furthermore, there are some classical pieces that require a pianist to play an improvisation. These improvisations are often composed. Either the pianist composes something for himself or uses a 'famous cadenza'. It has even gotten that bad that even jazz musicians often use a composed solo on their studio recordings.

the basic figuration test is, with 1 chord, lets say A minor, play as many possible figurations based on this chord, with arpeggios, broken arpeggions, passing note arpeggios( with the notes D A C D for example), and an virtually infinite array of ways of using this simple harmony, this is the test of the kind of skill im talking about.

If you call that vocabulary, then maybe. But I don't call that 'vocabulary'. If you knew something about improvisation you wouldn't call that vocabulary because vocabulary is an important concept in improvisation. It is not about how many ways a pianist can play a single chord. It is about how many 'musical words' a pianist has. In this example of Cziffra he has only one, the A minor chord.


It takes some 10 years of daily practice to become a great jazz improvisor. It takes 20 years to become a master.

[stevie]

no, i call that 'pianistic/technique vocabulary'

not harmonic, or melodic, which might be what you mean.

basically a comparison can be made with comparing a string quartet to an orchestra - a string quartet can produce the same melodies and harmonies, but the orchestra has much more variety in the ways it can be laid out, this - converted to the piano - is what cziffra excells at in particular, and sets him apart from any piano improviser ive heard...post a recording to prove me wrong.

[alejo_90]

why am i discussing it?
because i think has far and away the most advanced improvsational vocabulary of any pianist ive heard, from a purely figurational sense.
 

That's true, I agree.

I know this off-topic, but...... Would someone mind to upload Cziffra's HR2 ?? (the one from the 10HRs disc)... please, please  !!! 

Best
Alex

[andyd]

Cziffra improvising Tea for Two:

Link to Tatum improvising Tea for Two:
https://www.savefile.com/files/865634


Regards

Andy

[opus10no2]

I feel Tatum was evidently the greater Jazz improviser, but the topic is about something else, which Cziffra had a greater command of.

[andyd]

Cziffra could certainly play fast, no doubts about that.
Any other clips of him improvising available?

Regards

Andy

[opus10no2]

Some, search youtube, speed isn't the issue here.