What a nice inspiring topic. Thanks for the discussion!
For me, jazz is variation. You take a straight melody, you play it in swing. After some time, you get bored with swing, so you surprise with a few measures of straight notes. One hundredish years ago, people heard popular music and got kind of bored with it, so they played a million variations on it. When Brad Mehldau does it with Radiohead, with melodies his audience already knows, it’s exactly the same thing.
In Belgium, we have this crazy drummer called Lander Gyselinck. He had a ‘classical’ jazz training, but wanted to do something less ‘classical jazz’, so he took hip hop beats, rock elements, crazy synths coming from a digital saxophone and created weird, crazy and wonderful music. This, for me, was the most jazzy thing to do. It’s all about variation.
The band is called STUFF. by the way. You won’t regret listening to it.
I have to admit that I got in a theoretical swamp lately. On a certain moment, everything I heard and liked, became jazz in my head. And isn’t variation always the essence of interesting music? Bach and Beethoven did nothing else.
And then, you hear a nice version of ‘Round midnight with it’s syncopated rhythms and changes full of tritone substitions and you think: this really is jazz. So there is a style element that cannot be ignored.
What a nice inspiring topic. Thanks for the discussion!
For me, jazz is variation. You take a straight melody, you play it in swing. After some time, you get bored with swing, so you surprise with a few measures of straight notes. One hundredish years ago, people heard popular music and got kind of bored with it, so they played a million variations on it. When Brad Mehldau does it with Radiohead, with melodies his audience already knows, it’s exactly the same thing.
In Belgium, we have this crazy drummer called Lander Gyselinck. He had a ‘classical’ jazz training, but wanted to do something less ‘classical jazz’, so he took hip hop beats, rock elements, crazy synths coming from a digital saxophone and created weird, crazy and wonderful music. This, for me, was the most jazzy thing to do. It’s all about variation. The band is called STUFF. by the way. You won’t regret listening to it.
I have to admit that I got in a theoretical swamp lately. On a certain moment, everything I heard and liked, became jazz in my head. And isn’t variation always the essence of interesting music? Bach and Beethoven did nothing else.
And then, you hear a nice version of ‘Round midnight with it’s syncopated rhythms and changes full of tritone substitions and you think: this really is jazz. So there is a style element that cannot be ignored.