For jazzers -- What do you love about jazz?

[Bob]

I like the harmonies.  I can't seem to wrap my mind around improv and the melodies though, if an improvised line is still a melody.  Or maybe I just like simple melodies and jazz lines are complex melodies.

[littletune]

Well I like jazz. Sometimes some things get a little too complicated but what I love the most about it is that you can see that people who play (or sing) really love it a lot and they're like in another world (when they're playing and singing) and that's really cool!   

[oxy60]

What I like about jazz is that you don't don't need to rehearse, anything you play will fit, and there doesn't need to be a beginning middle or end. Any note combination will become a chord. Any series of notes will become a melody. And the further outside you play the more accepted you will become..

[dapianokid]

Eh jazz is ok.

[thalbergmad]

I love dixieland

[dapianokid]

Ragtime.


NO! Anything composed by chopin. Wait! Rachmaninoff. Please, say Aye if he is your favorite composer.

AYE!

[thalbergmad]

I have never got on with ragtime.

Prefer stride.

Thal

[dapianokid]

I have performed ragtime man. I love it.

[Derek]

I love really old jazz/blues, but when you get up to modern stuff, it bores the living crap out of me, to put it mildly.

[prometheus]

Improvisation, obviously. You can hear if something is improvised, which is something you may think is not really possible. How can you know if you only know the notes? Well, it is of course possible to trick someone. You can memorize some else his improvisation.

You judge improvised music differently from composed music. Composed music needs to be absolutely perfect, whatever that means. Improvised music shows, in a sense, personality. The improviser needs to be 'perfect'. How perfect is what she plays doesn't really matter.

Also, I find it strange people say what they like about jazz is harmony. Because harmony is the no.1 thing in classical music. In Jazz they just string a bunch of chords together and repeat that several times. And in a sense, no matter what the chords actually are, it will do. Just play it the right way and then play the right notes over it and it will be jazz. And the better the improvisers are, the better the jazz.

[Bob]

I like seventh and extended chords.  That's what I meant by liking harmony.

[prometheus]

Well those chords don't come from African culture. They come from western classical music.

It's not something distinct about jazz if you ask me. Jazz just exists within the western musical tradition. So that's why they ended up using the chord progressions they did.

As for melodies, often in jazz they don't play melodies. Like Parker and Coltrane, they paint harmonies with their horn lines. They aren't playing 'melodies' as in 'tunes'. They are playing a string of notes that work because of non-melodic reasons, even though they are still technically melodies.

[Bob]

I just like the harmonies I tend to notice more in jazz than in other music.

And yes, jazz is Western.  Harmony is Western.

I'm also wondering what people hear in improvisation.  I haven't been able to quite get into that when it's a stream of notes as the melodic line.

[oxy60]

As far as understanding what is being played by the cats, I am just as baffled as Bob. I really shouldn't be in the dark because several icons of the Southern California jazz scene are friends of mine (no name dropping). They've tried to explain it to me but their explanation is as obscure as their music. I've sat for hours listening to them build up a riff and I still have no clue.

However, it's still great to get together with old friends, even if I'm in the dark..

[keyofc]

Classical music has great harmony -
but what has better and more surprising harmonies than jazz?


"There is no wrong note" approach can be taken too far -
because jazz is orderly - but 'out of order' for classical rules.

As much as I love it - and have studied it- it is more of a mystery to me than
classical - but what I love about it is the sound.

But mysteries are not admired for their secrecy - for the things that they hint at.