Stereotypical thoughts....

Time for a somewhat deep conversation:

Saw a documentary film on the state of jazz in these times and two things kinda' stuck out that are at odds with each other. Players seems to agree that yes, there is quite a bit of the history that we should all learn and know of the music. Academically speaking this means that you can't say anything new until you've at least familiarized yourself with what's already been said - this is why you have so many colleges cranking out jazz performance students who know every tune in the Real Book and can't seem to play anything newer than 1978.

On the other hand, alot of these young jazz artists, see people like Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, Coltrane, Miles, etc.,....as the humans that they are, and not the gods they're made out to be. Their attitude bordered on out-right belligerence against the very artists they were taught to emulate. It was interesting to hear how a young jazz artist realized he would never be Wayne Shorter regardless of what he'd done, be cause after meeting Mr. Shorter, the student realized that everything Wayne Shorter knew, was based on who he was. And this young person was never going to be able to relate to any journeys Mr. Shorter had taken to become the artist he is.

It was an interesting film. Jazz is now everything, and it is nothing at the same time. New jazz artists, utilize all kinds of different sounds and mediums for their work. You could argue that Jojo Mayer and Nerve is a new form of jazz because of the free-wheeling improvisation they do within their context of break beats and dub-bass.

But what struck me was this: if jazz can be anything, why do we still deal with the look of the little Gretsch kit with the 18" bass drum? Big cymbals and little bass drums. Talk about stereotyping. There's alot of this discussion here too: I'm playing jazz, what kind of small jazz kit should I get? Or, is a 22" bass drum good for rock n roll? Or should I go bigger? I think if we all realize that there are no rules (and I'm not saying we haven't realized this), then we wouldn't be looking at our kits and saying "I can't use it for __________ music, so I must get another kit". Louie Bellson and Rufus Jones had it right when their kits got bigger for the jazz they play.

I think if Bernard here got a nickel for every post asking what kind of drums a person should get for jazz playing, or rock playing, he'd be a millionaire (maybe he already is, eh?).

I absolutely agree. While not a jazz musician myself, I do often wonder about the contradiction inherant in learning the traditions, and indeed rules, of a genre that has always been heavily focused on improvisation and creative freedom. Obviously it's worthwhile knowing where your influences have come from, but it's by no means essential.

What was the name of the film?

Its the people that are uneducated in jazz that think its all about little bop kits, but the first jazzers were using massive marching bass drums as there kick drum, and little oriental cymbals until the cymbals we know today started being made.

One of mates at uni did an experiment with some guitarist he knew, they all played different genres, he blind folded them and plugged them into different amps without telling them what it was and all but one picked the opposite amp to what is 'standard' for there genre.

I would be one of those that admittedly doesn't know enough jazz to really comment on the state of jazz, but find trouble with this sentence,Their attitude bordered on out-right belligerence against the very artists they were taught to emulate.

Should they be emulating anyone at all? Or just doing what feels right to them in expressing their music. We tell young kids to not worry about getting Joe Blows drum sound but to get their own drum sound and make that known.

Nothing wrong with knowing the history but maybe playing that history rather than trying new stuff would tend to make it stale.

great post dude. i totally agree. no one can be better than you at being yourself.no one can be better than me at being myself.we all have our own styles and how we got there.but there are so many guys these days that cant help but follow stereotypes and see everything from the perspective of a certain set of thinking/ideologies. applies to drumming and life!

for drumming you take bits from different musicians and use it to create your own original style.

so people can say this guy is better than this guy to a certain extent but everyone is best at being themselves.

jazz should be anything i feel.people need to create their own swing patterns etc.jazz should be all improvisation and feeling and not so much recreating what you want to/what you've heard/what everyone thinks is cool.

I don't know, I think if it isn't a swing or shuffle, it's not jazz. And obviously it isn't automatically jazz if it shuffles or swings. "Hot for Teacher" isn't jazz. Jazz came from a particular people at a particular time, with a few particular signature attributes. Even though it's a freedom of expression-based thing, there are still rules. Outside the rules is fine, but it isn't jazz imho. Latin grooves played in the jazz idiom are recognized, but accepted, departures from the rules as long as they are played "like jazz".

If you're looking for a broad-brush term to encompass all creative, free flowing expression, maybe just call it art.

Thoreau wrote in his book Walden that listening to the old is pointless because you will inevitably come across things they have never experienced.

The only reason I can think of at 9 in the morning on a Saturday for learning the traditions of American jazz is because it's still a fairly popular music form. People enjoy the old stuff, and if you want to get by as a musician in the business you need to be able to play things that you're asked to play. I suppose here lies the contradiction, because the inverse is just as true: People enjoy listening to modern jazz and its many incarnations as well, and creativity is just as valued as being able to play the oldies, as it were.

My band is fighting the all-too-common struggle to become locally successful, and I find it difficult to balance originals with covers. There are crowds for both down here, and starting off in one scene is going to follow us for a while.

Nice post, Bo. It's a paradox. You have the spirit of jazz - swing and improv - and you have the language of jazz, based on the traditions laid down by the old masters.

It's a funny thing - an art form based on being free and easy but it has so many rules. However, if jazz is what you make it, then it's also what all the other players make it. If they have a shared understanding then it's up to you to fit in, and that means knowing the musical language they speak and the customs they share.

The jazz language is recognised by jazzers and, if not universally known, it's definitely widely known. If you approach a jazz jam with the spirit of jazz beating in your breast/s but you don't know the language, well, you become acutely aware of it pretty soon based on the reactions of the other players. I've been there ... and yes, I wasn't invited back.

I didn't even know what the problem was back then, just that what I was playing didn't quite seem right (yet it seemed right when I played along with jazz albums). The exception was when I played with some Dixie guys. I knew I didn't really sound like a proper Dixie drummer but they seemed to appreciate my solid time, whereas the guy I was filling in for could get pretty woolly but he had the practice space so he stayed. They were a pretty casual group

There were some jazz players in the old days who seemed to define their own path seemingly by force of will, like Monk and Ornette. The notes they played were right because they deemed them to be right. I'm not sure jazz is as fluid today to allow renegades like that in because the tradition has had decades to become more established. I could be wrong, it's just an impression I have. Someone here might be able to confirm or correct on that.

I believe that jazz is a mindset and an approach rather than a specific sound. It can borrow from anything and go in any direction. As long as the music is pure and expressive then it can be jazz.

Yeah, sorry for the deep discussion on a Saturday mornin'....

I think the title of the film was Jazz in the Present Tense. And really, when you look at the academic institution of jazz in colleges, it has become like classical training in a way: you must do such-and-such courses and so many recitals, and voila! You've graduated as a jazz musician! And of course, to answer Gruntersdad, the only way you can graduate is if you've assimilated into the program and can emulate certain seminal jazz artists.

Jazz in the beginning was really like rap or punk back in its day: there were no schools for it, just a generation of people who evolved from the field chants and church hymnals during the days of slavery, which begat the blues, then jazz, then eventually rock n roll. Without getting into a music history discussion, it was really the common-peoples' music, right? As soon as it got big enough to be taught in an academic setting, then it became classical, yes?

And with that classical training, came the stereotype of what equipment you should play. Hence why I brought up the little bop kits. Even in this movie all you saw were little bop kits, so the movie itself probably unconsciously promoted this stereotype: big cymbals and little bass drums from the bop era. It's like if you showed up with a 26" bass drum and little cymbals, it would be just wrong. It'd be Dixieland, and that's not jazz as everyone knows it, eh?

I think it's so hard for people to get their heads around the idea that jazz can be everything because things must be measured (in order to graduate with a jazz degree, for example). Art just is. But as soon as there's a program to get you there, you're at the mercy of the program to define who you are.

And getting back to the gentleman who realized he couldn't be Wayne Shorter, he said the most frightening moment for him was the realization that he didn't know who he was! Imagine that.

I just try to do my job. Sometimes that means going for a certain "authentic" sound and vibe. How flexible things are depends on the gig, but most of us have grown up in a do the best with what you have situation and is what it often comes down to these days, too. No complaints so far except from a couple of insecure teenagers. lol

I think when you first start down the road of "I want to play a drums set" the natural tendencies is to figure out what the rules are. I know when I got my first drum set, I was very into thinking about the rules of "what I can and can not do" and it wasn't until a few years later I realized how dumb that train of thought was.

When you're young, you just don't know any better. Which is why I try to answer as many questions on here as I can, because I remember being that young and stupid about drums and drumming.

Back to the topic of jazz, I'm not much of a jazz guy, but I am so into drums I wanted to know the history of what I what I was doing. So I took jazz history classes, and studied the style, and learned how to play the basics (or as I say, I can play jazz well enough to realize no one should ever hear me do so). I do think it's important to know where things came from.

I do think it's funny though, that people post things like "I want to play jazz, so I need an 18" bass drum and an old K ride" when actually, that only represents one small aspect of jazz history. For a very large chunk of jazz history, guys were playing big bass drums, and using A's or just what ever cymbals they could find. Tony went to a 24". The big band/swing guys never scaled down, and many of them used heavier cymbals to cut through the horns.

Double bass didn't start in metal, it started in big band/swing music. Visual aspects like twirling sticks, flips, and such aren't from 80's hair metal, but go back to the 1920's and 30's with Krupa and Papa Joe. It was Buddy Rich who first played a drum set upside down.

Yet, despite facts, the stereotypes persist.

Here's one I experienced. My current band always wished I had huge deep toms "you need a Metal kit, with deeper toms". These guys never heard drums tuned well in the first place so when they heard how well my fast toms sounded they were ok with it. It was not until we finally recorded our first CD that they realized "deep toms" don't really matter.

I think cp84 put the abstract pretty succintly. When I attended community college, I played in a jazz ensemble and it always seemed to be more of a concern that that whatever I played matched the feel and time of the music more than making the beat sound "authentic". The school provided a kit that I had come to see as a standard setup for rock/metal drummers.

Seeing music taxonomized into genres has become a sort of frustration for me in the past decade or so. As someone trying to get established in the local scene, I have attended a lot of shows and answered a lot of ads. Inevitably, the question comes up, "What type of music do you play?"

My experience has been that musicians tend to identify themselves by the style of music they want to play. And because of that, they work hard to 'qualify' in that genre by using only the techniques and terms by which that genre is defined.

I was actually kicked out of a metal band because I told the guitarist and singer that a double bass pedal was not necessary for me to do the job. No hard feelings about that though, but it does become a bit more difficult to find bands that will keep me because I do not identify myself so much by the styles or genres that I play.

A well-tuned resonant 18" bass drum sounds really good in an acoustic setting. It works, in other words. That's not to say that it's the only thing that works, of course.

Why do metal drummers seem to all use gigantic kits with two bass drums? Because those kits work in a metal setting.

I never felt the need to learn all styles of jazz going back to New Orleans marching bands. I had to learn what I learned in order to work, and that was the basic bebop style playing the jazz standards. Boring stuff for a kid who wanted to play all the "hip" stuff of the day.

My main gripe with jazz education is its chord-scale functional harmony basis for all things jazz. Guys leave school with a bag of licks that all work nicely over the rhythm changes, but show them something that defies conventional analysis and they either play modal or they play out. In the end it all sounds like watered-down Coltrane.

The Sammy Nestico book, the "arranger's bible," right from the start you take a look at the chords and oh no! It's those changes again!

Bo Eder said:

if jazz can be anything, why do we still deal with the look of the little Gretsch kit with the 18" bass drum? Big cymbals and little bass drums. Talk about stereotyping .... 22" bass drum good for rock n roll? .... bigger?.... Louie Bellson and Rufus Jones had it right when their kits got bigger for the jazz they play.

Click to expand...

The movie in question is called Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense. I have the DVD. It is quite interesting. Peace and goodwill.

A lot of the discussions here on Drummerworld regarding jazz are angst-ridden.
Then again, I may be stereotyping.

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Sup, well I'm not sure about the size of drum kits and that type of thing...I practice on an electronic drum set at the moment...still... it refines coordination for as far as I know.

I'm new to jazz. But I've been playing grooves that follow a jazz feel out of necessity. It just seems like the style we've been grooving too. I think we had some pretty good jams earlier...I've been wanting to post something for a while to see if other drummers think I have potential...obviously it should be me who thinks so and I do...

Oops, but yeah, as far as I know, my friend let me listen to this guy called Miles Davis. I would say it's a newer type of jazz, something after the new millenium? I'm pretty inexperienced, but as far as what I've heard and have been trying to play, jazz is swung based, around triplets. In fact couldn't we agree that most of the jazz drumming incorporates mostly triplets of various types, you know what I'm talking about, to play? Compared to say, Louis Armstrong type jazz, it certainly has become something new now. And it's not very surprising considering as far as I've learned and there is much more to learn obviously , because it also utilizes the idea of improv. I mean once you get at least say 70 % of the various triplet combinations memorized a type of feel develops and you can essentially do whatever the drummer feels necessary. That's what I've been doing anyway, and most of the beats are probably simple, but I would like to see what yall think. Okay peace.