Posting has been rather light from me recently, sorry, but it’s mainly because I can’t get over how mental some of the comments are on this YouTube video of John McLaughlin playing “Cherokee”, and it’s turned into a tight little ball of rage in my stomach that’s preventing me from achieving anything else. Check out what I’m talking about below:
Basically, there is a sizeable element in the YouTube comments section that thinks that what you’ve just seen was unimaginative, uninspiring and not really very musical. Welcome to the world of the bebop snob, one of the most truly ridiculous musical snobs around.
The trouble is that these people exist in real life as well as on the internet. The guy in those comments who attempts to provide a rigorous definition of “swing” in terms of relationship to the drummer’s hi-hat pattern and the notes played through the chord progression is by no means atypical of jazz fans. There are plenty of people who are more than happy to prove the contrapositive of “if you don’t understand it, I can’t tell you”, by showing that “if I explain it, I don’t understand it”, and even to maintain their rigid views on what constitutes “swinging through changes” in the face of contrary testimony from the actual drummer present at the time.
There’s obviously a strong element of raw jealousy and petulance in these, given that McLaughlin is a guitar player – guitar players have a really nasty tendency to disparage the “taste” of anyone who is capable of playing faster than they can[1], and to project like mad in accusing other people of “exercises in pure technique”. This is mainly because most guitar players can’t read music and don’t really understand much theory, so they have quite serious inferiority complexes to work out, plus a solid third of guitar players have bought into an utterly patronising Orientalist myth about “bluesmen”, who select what notes to play out of pure racial intuition, rather than through knowing anything about music.
But I think that there are genuinely people out there who listen to a piece like that and rather than trusting their ears, start judging it against a mental checklist of what ought to be done in order to count as “proper” jazz. It’s completely screwy.
[1]John McLaughlin doesn’t actually play all that fast, at least not by modern standards. The proof of this can be heard on any of the albums where he plays duets with Paco de Lucia; Lucia is playing semi-quavers at a normal tempo and McLaughlin is playing at the same speed. He sounds much faster than other guitarists in jazz or rock because his articulation of the notes is so perfect.
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John Emerson 01.25.07 at 7:22 am
There’s parity of hyperbole, though. Here’s a JM admirer:
No musician in the history of the world has shown more brilliance and incredible variety than this man.
It’s cruel to pick on jazz buffs, you brute. They’re all just nuts. They’ll do things like collect 30 versions of one song by one guy and listen to them one after another. They’ll try to get you to listen with them, too.
To me, saying “McLaughlin doesn’t swing” is like saying he rocks. Different styles. I liked Coltrane because he got away from bebop. Then Miles Davis, McLaughlin, et. al moved further, toward rock. Not better or worse, but I loved it.
The first stuff in that direction that I heard was Charles Lloyd, whi’s now forgotten, I think. Tremendously exciting when he came out — Keith Jarrett and Jack deJohnette got their start with him. Another early guy was John Handy, who self-destructed.
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 7:27 am
McLaughlin’s album “Apocalypse” is severely damaged with symphonic brass, but there’s a little segment in there when he’s playing with just him and the drums and bass, with the electric violin coming in later, which is about my favorite three minutes or so of music.
JMG 01.25.07 at 8:01 am
When I was a student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in the late ’60s and early ’70s, McLaughlin routinely came there to study with the Indian musicians who were there as part of what was then “etnnomusicolofy” and is now usually known as “world music.” So did other jaxx greats. Jimmy Garrison gave bass lessons in return for his studies.
My point, therefore, is that REAL musicians of talent know none of the artificial boundaries too many music fans create to explain a world they love but cannot understand.
Thom Brooks 01.25.07 at 8:21 am
I think you should simply say to hell with the critics: they obviously don’t know a good thing when they see it. Not imaginative playing? How many different positions, modes, approaches to soloing over changes did we just see? Answer: all.
As a guitar player and music degree holder, I can certainly verify that most of the folks I knew did have a problem with reading music (I was lucky to be taught very early) and about everyone didn’t like faster players, often saying they ‘lack feel’. I know too many that prefer playing the blues only because it doesn’t expose technical limitations.
John McLaughlin remains one of my all time favourites, although the most versatile musician label I think must go to Miles Davis instead.
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 8:30 am
I think that the people DD was talking about were buffs and not real critics, and I’m confident that McLaughlin is wise to their kind.
abb1 01.25.07 at 9:08 am
Swing is important. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 9:09 am
Nah.
chris y 01.25.07 at 9:35 am
Swing is important. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
I carefully avoided participating in a discussion somewhere the other day as to whether this means, “The music is reduced to insignificance unless it swings” or “It is irrelevant to the value of the music whether or not it swings”.
I think this is another example of the sort of thing Daniel is complaining about.
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 9:40 am
Nah again.
Matt Weiner 01.25.07 at 9:59 am
John Handy, who self-destructed
In what way? He’s still around and playing — his bio suggests that he went into music education after 1968 which I guess took him away from making records, but was probably better for his financial stability.
The Tonight Show McLaughlin is nice but Devotion is still my favorite work of his.
[Chris Y — hey!]
Neil 01.25.07 at 10:00 am
Well, first, he’s trying to swing, and failing.
Second – and JM’s main fault – he’s just not very musical. Like lots of guitar players, he thinks technique is more important than musicality. It’s because he’s bought into the let’s play as fast as possible ethos that’s he awful (of course, he may have bought into that ethos to compensate for his lack of talent).
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 10:06 am
I didn’t know he was still around. Back in the day he put out about two great albums, and then one or two patchy ones, and then nothing, and his ex-band-members said he was a mess. Glad to know he’s back playing.
His guitar player, Jerry Hahn, did some great stuff real young and then got into teaching in Kansas where he came from. I think he may have continued to do studio work in LA. He was in Portland OR for awhile fairly recently and played some, but he never seemed to get the attention he deserved, partly because he badmouthed other local musicians, I think. The way I heard it, he was better than almost anyone in town but told them so too often.
Matt Weiner 01.25.07 at 10:14 am
his ex-band-members said he was a mess.
Yeah, guess that won’t show up in the bio. I may have a skewed perspective on this because I heard the 1990 performance of Mingus’s Epitaph early on, and he’s on that, so I think of him as around the whole time; it does look like he was with the Mingus ghost band for a while. Anyway, the bio makes it look like he’s been active if not recording much.
Doctor Slack 01.25.07 at 10:35 am
Hmmmm.
Well, I’ve not listened to much of McGlaughlin’s solo work, though a glance at his discography shows that he’s in much more of my other music than I realized. Which does remind me how much of the ensemble work of jazz guitarists gets taken for granted.
Be that as it may, I can’t say as this particular clip is winning me over. While it’s not awful, it does indeed not really sound that good to me, and does indeed make me think words like “technical facility, musicality missing.” I don’t think you have be judging him against a “mental checklist” of “proper jazz” or hating on the agility of his fingers to have that opinion.
Doctor Slack 01.25.07 at 10:40 am
Which is not to defend the YouTube commenters, many of whom are indeed completely mental. And maybe there are other McLaughlin solo clips to be had that are more convincing.
s.e. 01.25.07 at 10:42 am
This from the man who calls budweiser good beer.
Quarterican 01.25.07 at 10:49 am
This kind of BS-banter tends to conflate different issues; certain musical genres have fairly well codified standards of what’s “appropriate” by which you can judge a player or a particular performance. People argue about whether “jazz” is such a genre or not, but “bebop” certainly is. (The people who tend to think that jazz is restrictive in this sense tend to restrict it to something resembling bebop and its immediate descendants.) By these standards, I don’t think McLaughlin is a particularly successful bebop guitarist.
That he’s not, in my estimation, a particularly good guitarist when judged by the standards of bebop has nothing to do with whether or not he’s a particularly good guitarist, which I think he most certainly is. One of the greats. This would be where I depart from the Wynton/Stanley Crouch school of aesthetics; I don’t necessarily disagree about their definitions of what is and isn’t jazz, I just strenuously disagree about what is and isn’t valuable.
"Q" the Enchanter 01.25.07 at 10:52 am
I think McLaughlin is wonderful and very musical, besides being a great chap, but I’m not fan of this approach on a tune like Cherokee. Very cheesy all the way round, IMHO.
Matt Weiner 01.25.07 at 11:09 am
As the host of the “It don’t mean a thing” discussion I should disown any implication that only certain relations to the hi-hat pattern are acceptable; as Duke Ellington himself said “There are two kinds of music — good music, and the other kind.” (Bubber Miley’s views on the question are not known.)
Daniel 01.25.07 at 11:34 am
Second – and JM’s main fault – he’s just not very musical.
While it’s not awful, it does indeed not really sound that good to me, and does indeed make me think words like “technical facility, musicality missing.â€
And yet if I were to delete and ban these two commenters for trolling, it would be me that people said was being capricious and unfair. Where’s the bloody justice?
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 11:35 am
Why don’t you just curse them and their seed down to the third generation, and their mothers too?
"Q" the Enchanter 01.25.07 at 11:50 am
Well, let me wade in on the issue of “swing.” I agree with the statement that this recording does not swing. I think the main problem is that the orchestra and McLaughlin are taking two different rhythmic approaches, although I also think that McLaughlin’s quasi-gypsy swing approach is sounding pretty stiff and square on it’s own. The thirds-approach on the chord melody arrangement, also a little square and stilted. Making bop swing on guitar is awfully difficult, and I just don’t think McLaughlin’s pulling it off. Generally, it’s not his milieu, although I do think he swings a little more successfully in this sort of setting (here playing “All Blues” with Bireli Lagrene, whose guitar is a little too loud and compressed).
Dan Simon 01.25.07 at 11:52 am
If you’ll forgive me, Daniel, for butting in (on a non-political, and therefore hopefully less contentious, topic), I think this whole thread (both here and at YouTube) simply demonstrates that people look for different things when they listen to music. Many jazz fans look for interesting interplay between the melody/improv line and the harmony, and McLaughlin simply doesn’t provide much of that in his solo. Others focus on rhythmic subtleties–I think of these as more “rock-oriented” people–and McLaughlin doesn’t provide them with much, either. A third group look for pure melodic elegance within a straightforward harmonic structure–I think of these as the more “classically oriented” people–and this latter group might well find McLaughlin’s solo immensely enjoyable. And of course there are combinations of these approaches, as well as other, entirely different musical foci.
Personally, I’m in the first camp, so I sympathize with those who described McLaughlin’s solo as “all technique, no musicality”. But I recognize that that’s because I associate “musicality” with melodic/harmonic interplay, making my judgment personal, not definitive. In general, I think most of the friction generated in arguments over music is simply the result of failure on the part of the participants to recognize that there are different approaches to appreciating music.
Daniel 01.25.07 at 11:59 am
I love it. If any more bebop snobs want to give their ludicrous, pretentious definitions of what they mean by “musicality”, this is certainly the thread.
The only commenter on that thread who makes any sense is the one who suggests that if you can’t hear the changes in that solo, you’re not listening fast enough.
Daniel 01.25.07 at 12:05 pm
(I reiterate, by the way, that it might possibly be the case that Crooked Timber has no fewer than five commenters who are better able to judge the presence or absence of “rhythmic subtleties” at a metronome mark of 200, from a video clip, than Ed O’Shaugnessy was while actually playing the drums on this track, but that is certainly not the way to bet).
Guest 01.25.07 at 12:06 pm
Everything about that clip was tight. But, frankly, what the hell are you doing reading comments on Youtube? It’s a well-known cesspool of random idiocy.
Dan Simon 01.25.07 at 12:16 pm
if you can’t hear the changes in that solo, you’re not listening fast enough.
I can hear the changes–it just sounds to me as though McLaughlin is flattening them out, removing a lot of their richness.
(I reiterate, by the way, that it might possibly be the case that Crooked Timber has no fewer than five commenters who are better able to judge the presence or absence of “rhythmic subtleties†at a metronome mark of 200, from a video clip, than Ed O’Shaugnessy was while actually playing the drums on this track, but that is certainly not the way to bet.)
Fair enough–I’m not much of a “rhythmic subtleties” guy, so it wouldn’t shock me if there are a whole bunch there that I missed. In fairness, though, O’Shaughnessy doesn’t say why he liked that performance so well–perhaps he was proud of his own contribution to it, rather than thrilled with McLaughlin’s.
dave heasman 01.25.07 at 12:19 pm
I liked McLaughlin in the 60s and bought “Extrapolation”, but the Mahavishnu stuff got, perhaps unfairly, linked in my mind with the rest of the fusion malarkey and those stiff rhythms were very off-putting. There were some off-putting quotes from him at the time too, to the effect that he viewed his solos as technical solutions to problems that the theme/s raised, and even then I was asking “what about the story?”
I’m at work and can’t yet listen to the clip but I’m so grateful for the Ed Shaughnessy link.
He’s great, and so versatile. In 1961/2 he played, brilliantly, on both Jimmy Smith’s “Walk on the Wild Side” and on the Gary McFarland/Bill Evans album.
Daniel 01.25.07 at 12:19 pm
I can hear the changes—it just sounds to me as though McLaughlin is flattening them out, removing a lot of their richness.
I reiterate, if anyone else has any hilarious views like this, bring them out. It seems a shame to make Dan Simon carry the whole burden of trying to pretend that this was a pretty pedestrian and workmanlike solo over the changes of Cherokee.
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 12:24 pm
You don’t think that we’re actually listening to the piece, do you? This is the internet.
dave heasman 01.25.07 at 12:54 pm
Oh and Charles Lloyd isn’t forgotten, in England anyway. Still playing, just turned 80. I doubt he’ll ever top the 2 records he made for Chico Hamilton, with the sadly-lost Gabor Szabo on guitar.
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 1:05 pm
I just realized that when someone disappears from sight it might be because I stopped following them. But for about two years Lloyd seemed enormous, but as time went on he faded as more people did the same thing better.
Dan Simon 01.25.07 at 1:11 pm
I reiterate, if anyone else has any hilarious views like this, bring them out.
My apologies, Daniel. I somehow got the impression from your original post that you’re against arrogant, narrow-minded snobbery in music criticism. Thanks for the clarification.
Alex R 01.25.07 at 1:19 pm
I’m neither an expert nor a real “aficionado” — whatever exactly that is — but I just wish that we could have heard McLaughlin play for a little longer without the horns trying to drown him out. Jazz guitar can provide rhythm, melody, and harmony just fine as a pure solo, thank you, and to me the backup band detracted from the performance.
Daniel 01.25.07 at 1:20 pm
No, I’m against people denying the plain evidence in front of them in the mistaken belief that they are looking clever, which is why I banned you in the first place.
Daniel 01.25.07 at 1:21 pm
I agree and disagree with Alex R on that one – I would certainly be pretty scared of somebody whose entire record collection was made up of tracks that sounded like that one. But the whole fun of the track is putting the classical guitar into such a ludicrously overblown ambiance and seeing if JM can pull it off, which he does, spectacularly well.
Randy Paul 01.25.07 at 1:50 pm
John Handy, who self-destructed
I took John Handy’s Jazz Survey class at San Francisco State in Spring 1978. It was terrific. We’d go to the Keystone Korner to see someone and the next day they’d come to class.
bob 01.25.07 at 1:55 pm
I’ve heard this before, and it certainly isn’t on of McLaughlin’s finest performances. His approach to the tune certainly doesn’t work in this context.
radek 01.25.07 at 1:59 pm
severely damaged with symphonic brass
Whoever invented that should ripped apart by rabid dogs
Doctor Slack 01.25.07 at 2:03 pm
And yet if I were to delete and ban these two commenters for trolling, it would be me that people said was being capricious and unfair.
No, it would just make you almost as psychotic as the people you’re complaining about. Especially since one of the commenters in question said he was specifically not defending the kind of wankery in the YouTube thread. If you ever see me complain McLaughlin “flattening out the changes,” you should feel free to shoot me.
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 2:05 pm
38: I’m pretty sure it was McLoughlin’s idea to use the brass.
39. Shoot him anyway, DD, he’s trying to tie your hands with quibbly conditions.
"Q" the Enchanter 01.25.07 at 2:16 pm
Daniel, with respect, I think this appeal to O’Shaughnessy’s authority in re “rhythmic subtleties†is bogus. Wynton Marsalis is certainly no less an authority on swing than Ed, and he would surely characterize this performance as a stain on the tradition. I myself wouldn’t go so far. But that’s neither here nor there. Appeals to musical authority can only help one in assessing certain facts and features in the music and its performance; they can’t stand in independently as a dispositive argument about quality.
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 2:18 pm
Wynton Marsalis should be ruled out of order. He’s a musical ideologue.
"Q" the Enchanter 01.25.07 at 2:20 pm
BTW, I don’t have a metronome to hand, but the metronome marking is more like 360. Smokin’!
"Q" the Enchanter 01.25.07 at 2:21 pm
“Wynton Marsalis should be ruled out of order.”
Sounds pretty…ideological.
shane h 01.25.07 at 2:23 pm
…what the hell are you doing reading comments on Youtube? It’s a well-known cesspool of random idiocy.
How true…
shane h 01.25.07 at 2:26 pm
Oops. Er,try this.
Chris L 01.25.07 at 2:28 pm
I just don’t take the comments too seriously. Often they are just another way of someone expressing their distaste for a particular style. Sometimes their ears just aren’t open to it. Some people love early Coltrane and hate “sheets of sound” and say it was just a bunch of notes. Some people hate fusion, don’t feel that it “swings” as much as it should. It was ever thus.
Personally, I thought this clip *did* swing more than you would have thought, though such things aren’t all important. I enjoyed it… I also felt that there were more than a few moments when McLaughlin was complacent and fell into some patterns when he could have been more creative, but every player does this. It’s almost a way of providing a quick rest in a song.
Luc 01.25.07 at 2:28 pm
The band swings, the guy is having fun on an acoustic non jazz guitar, and it ain’t bop. Duh.
Look, the band should play weird stuff that makes you get lost in the changes, the guitarist should play a 175 from the right vintage, there should be a valid theory about when to play melodic minor over dominants, and well it should be bop. Oh and, Emily Remler should be your heroine.
That’s all there is to it, really.
radek 01.25.07 at 2:32 pm
40: Ok, ripped apart by vacinated dogs
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 2:36 pm
I don’t really have a five-point program for music, but Marsalis does, and there’s no way he’d ever like McLoughlin.
Colin Danby 01.25.07 at 2:39 pm
Luc’s right. Also remember this is on Johnny Carson, and probably intended more to be watched than listened to, which may explain some of the musical choices.
blatherskite 01.25.07 at 2:40 pm
A) That McGlaughlin performance was a lot of fun, but I’d not toss out my Joe Pass or Tal Farlow versions, among guitarists. Let’s not start on sax player’s versions.
B) I’m surprised Shakti hasn’t come up yet. They did at least a couple discs I still play occasionally and McGlaughlin’s esthetic is perfectly developed in those recordings.
C) At some point, musical fandom becomes nearly indistinguishable from sports fandom. And I’m no fan of sports fandom.
D) All hail Ray Noble!
dsquared 01.25.07 at 2:42 pm
Q: I think we’re probably in agreement. If the bebop crowd want to give a rigorous definition to a transparent nonsense-word, there is probably no way of stopping them from being purists about it; Shaugnessy only actually said that it was one of his favourite performances, not that it “swung”. But I part company with them when they start using their definition to try and make actual judgements about whether things are good or bad (or specifically, when they try to use their definition to make the judgement that something’s bad when it’s good).
Chris L: you’re right, there is a bit at 2:30 and then again at 1:20 (on Youtube’s odd countdown) where he’s clearly treading water, but my god has he earned it by that point.
"Q" the Enchanter 01.25.07 at 3:04 pm
I just remembered a story about McLaughlin from an old interview in Guitar Player. I remembered he talked about his formative experience going into jam sessions in clubs, and how he’d got clubbed over the head when he faced an uptempo “Cherokee.” I surfed around and found the interview here. The relevant excerpt:
I’d love to hear a recording of that performance.
dave heasman 01.25.07 at 3:08 pm
I’ve heard it now; I like the way McL splits the beat on the theme, the delay almost making it 6/8 for a bit; I wish he’d kept that in his solo. The band was a bit too Buddy Rich for me; and how you can presume “rhythmic complexity” when you can only intermittently hear the drums I dunno.
I imagine every jazz musician (apart from the NORK crowd) plays “Cherokee” in his head daily, and it’s a great tune for practice, so there’s a massive foundation of understanding a some level. It’s invariably done at that pace, ever since “KoKo”, and we all have our favourites.
Daniel’s right, no doubt, about the quality of the intonation, and it’s what all those guys practising are aiming at. Have you heard Clifford Brown do it? He’s a very clean player, too.
dearieme 01.25.07 at 3:23 pm
Cherokee is a loathsome old warhorse, the band reminded me why the big swing bands died, and I’m about to go upstairs and listen to some Oscar Aleman, some Charlie Christian, some Johnson and Lang, some Teddy Bunn, some Van Eps and perhaps even the Gypsy Genius. I might close down for the evening with the NORK “Tin Roof Blues”. Just personal taste, isn’t it? Hey ho, Haydn and Mozart tomorrow and a Burns Supper on Saturday. Yippee.
Winneigh 01.25.07 at 3:30 pm
Go ahead, shoot the trolls.
This reminds me of a guy I knew in high school named Wayne Krantz. He and his pals would spend their evenings listening to the Mahavishnu Orchestra. It seemed a bit cultish to me, and maybe that’s why Birds of Fire seems a bit bombastic to me. But a decade later I picked up a copy of Music Spoken Here and have yet to tire of it. JM may not be God, but he sure knows how to have fun with a guitar – and who cares if it’s jazz?
John Emerson 01.25.07 at 3:44 pm
I knew we’d get a pre-bop purist soon enough.
Matt Weiner 01.25.07 at 3:58 pm
John E., as I understand it Charles Lloyd was off the scene for a while, but he came back with a bunch of ECM albums in the mid-80s up to today. Saw him at the Chicago Jazz Festival with Billy Higgins and John Abercrombie in 2000.
winneigh, I picked up an album with Wayne Krantz the other month (Wide Open Spaces by Michael Formanek, avant-gardish jazz stuff, about a dozen years old) — pretty sure he’s still playing, though I don’t know if I’ve heard anything else by him.
novakant 01.25.07 at 4:10 pm
whatever happened to de gustibus … ?
"Q" the Enchanter 01.25.07 at 4:10 pm
FYI, here’s Wynton on the tune.
LarryChicago 01.25.07 at 4:39 pm
The work McLaughlin did with Shakti is truly extraordinary: a virtuosic melding of intensely swinging improvisation with searingly fast and mind-bogglingly extended melodic lines from Indian classical music.
dsquared 01.25.07 at 7:02 pm
whatever happened to de gustibus … ?
I think they split up in ’72 after the tour with “Ad Hominem” and “Volenti non fit inuria”. Gene still occasionally plays with the Joe Zawinul Orchestra though.
dsquared 01.25.07 at 7:02 pm
whatever happened to de gustibus … ?
I think they split up in ’72 after the tour with “Ad Hominem” and “Volenti non fit inuria”. Gene still occasionally plays with the Joe Zawinul Orchestra though.
condorcet 01.25.07 at 7:10 pm
Chocolate ice cream is better than Strawberry. If you disagree, I will laugh at your silly efforts to justify preferences that are manifestly and self-evidently wrong.
Seriously, guys. Just buy a “the music you like sucks” t-shirt and get on with your lives.
albertchampion 01.25.07 at 8:57 pm
i caught jim hall at the jazz bakery in LA last year.
a lovely show.
Randy Paul 01.25.07 at 10:11 pm
Back in 1984 I went to a concert at Avery Fisher Hall that featured The Marsalis Brothers followed by the Maynard Ferguson AllStars. The latter featured McCoy Tyner, Eddie Gomez, Peter Erskine and Slide Hampton as was a great group, much more than Wynton and company.
However, what got much of the attention was a young guitarist named Stanley Jordan who played guitar in a way I had never seen before: tapping on the fretboard in a style that more closely resembled piano than guitar.
I thought it was stunning and listened to him for a couple of years. Then after a while, I began to find it rather dull. His dynamic range was very limited.
Indeed (and this is the point of the story), McLaughlin – on an acoustic guitar showed a far broader dynamic range than Joirdan did in my experience on an electric guitar.
Ken 01.25.07 at 10:12 pm
All of those who think McLaughlin can’t swing need to listen to “Pork Pie Hat” on “My Goals Beyond.”
Phrog 01.25.07 at 11:27 pm
Not very good, played rather muddily and no faster or differently than any second rate mandolin player.
Jeff Berger 01.25.07 at 11:45 pm
The comments posted after Lennon’s “Imagine” would also break your heart. Left me in tears …
Bruce Baugh 01.26.07 at 2:00 am
There was a time when I was a serious music student, but decades of complex disability have made that all long gone – as it became clear that I was unlikely to ever play or sing competently again, I simply let my theory lore rot. So speaking here purely as a listening type person, I have to say that I really liked the clip. It was fun. I would like to know what the people doing it call what they’re doing, so that I could hunt up some albums like it. I am very uninterested into whether it’s bad from this viewpoint or that, and very interested in having some more fun like that.
Daniel 01.26.07 at 4:29 am
I have more time for Stanley Jordan than Randy does – I still listen to “Magic Touch”, although admittedly his subsequent albums have been pretty disappointing. I think Stanley gets a lot more light and shade out of the guitar than you’d expect, given that he clearly has to work with some serious compression on the signal to make the tapped notes sound equal (although I seem to remember he did actually do a couple of acoustic guitar pieces). But this is the sort of thing that reasonable people can disagree on, and where it is a matter of taste. Saying that John McLaughlin is unmusical and his playing is a pure exercise in technique, isn’t – it’s just wrong. And this one:
Not very good, played rather muddily and no faster or differently than any second rate mandolin player.
is simply trolling (gosh, I wonder what it would be like if McLaughlin toured with the more or less undisputed greatest mandolin player in the world?)
Vanya 01.26.07 at 6:06 am
This is mainly because most guitar players can’t read music and don’t really understand much theory,
Hunh, see I have the opposite impression. To my ears McLaughlin is playing precisely for people who don’t really listen to music very carefully. He’s on The Tonight Show playing for a mass audience so he’s purposefully picked a very show-offy piece that is basically just running scales. The only point is for people at home to go “wow, that’s fast.” I don’t find his solo on this piece interesting musically, although, yes, the technique is brilliant. There may be a case to be made for the overblown guitar wankery that illiterate punk rock and blues aficionados detest, but this clip doesn’t do it.
Thom Brooks 01.26.07 at 6:20 am
Well, first, he’s trying to swing, and failing. Second – and JM’s main fault – he’s just not very musical. Like lots of guitar players, he thinks technique is more important than musicality. It’s because he’s bought into the let’s play as fast as possible ethos that’s he awful (of course, he may have bought into that ethos to compensate for his lack of talent).
I find these remarks hysterical…not simply as I was the first to note that his solo deliciously danced through the various changes at 4.
I’m not sure what is meant by this ridiculous comments. Perhaps by ‘swinging’, JM should have played very slowly—maybe sexily sneaking in the odd quarter note triplets–so that those of us who don’t know an amazing musician when we see one can more easily follow the improvisation, without getting into so-called ‘false’ notes and various approaches to covering changes, focusing on alternating modes. One need not study music at degree level to appreciate such things.
I simply don’t buy into the view that someone who can play fast lacks talent. They may lack a suitable imagination, but not talent. In fairness, when we listen to someone play about anything by Bach, we don’t say that the pianist ‘lacks talent’ because s/he is able to play a difficult piece of music. Instead, we often claim musicians are quite talented when they have technical prowess the vast majority of us lack. Is this not true…?
The charge then seems not whether JM lacks talent (he has talent), but his imaginative creativity. Here I think we all simply disagree as a matter of taste. Those who have more nostalgic and conservative views about music, want a chug-chugga-chug approach to guitar playing where the guitarist plays a simply piece of melodic noodling one might have heard on the radio during WWI. Others who have different musical tastes enjoy hearing JM open this song up in a new way…and on an acoustic, rather than his famed double-neck electric. It’s a matter of taste.
For those who would like to hear JM swing, buy his ‘After the Rain’ tonight. For those who think JM lacks any sense of melody and plays fast to cover up for this shortcoming, buy anything with Shakti…most especially Shakti live. Beautiful stuff…..
stostosto 01.26.07 at 6:36 am
The jazz police can be brutal and need to be reigned in from time to time.
McLaughlin is a great guitarist who when I first heard him on a TV program with Al DiMeola and Paco de Lucia (early eightiesish) almost brought me to tears.
However, I do think that the critics in this “Cherokee” case have a point or two. Above all: Does it really swing? I’d say no. And I am of the conviction that it should. The problem is not only in the “too many notes” bits in the McLaughlin rendering, but is demonstrated from the very start where his intro is an almost provocatively going-through-the motions like sketching of the melody. His lifts are so early as to be simply premature, imo. Like a precocious youngster.
The debate had me wade through a lot of different recordings of Cherokee. (The net is a marvellous thing – have you tried eMusic.com?)
Cherokee is a wonderful standard. Many great musicians have had a dig. As noted, I am partial to the plastically swinging ones, and in that category I’d certainly include the Wynton Marsalis rendition linked to above.
Also, I love Benny Goodman’s version with Charlie Christian, true to form, delivering an exceedingly beautiful guitar solo. (So tragic he had to die so young).
Then, as someone mentioned, there are the sax players.
Like this one with Jesper Thilo & the American Allstars (it’s just a snippet).
Daniel 01.26.07 at 7:01 am
Above all: Does it really swing?
I don’t think that the bebopsnob position can be stated more concisely than this, so thanks. I disagree with it in two points; first that “really swing” is a term that can or should be given any real content, and second that even if it can, that whether something “really swings” or not is a criterion that should be placed “above all” others.
The very coolest thing, of course (apart from McLaughlin’s suit, which is itself a revelation for anyone who thinks that we all looked terrible in the 1980s) is the way he just walks on, waves, sits down and starts playing the chord melody zat brutal speed as if it’s no thing. It builds up your confidence in the solo, because he’s demonstrating that this tempo really doesn’t frighten him (and I disagree with Dave Heasman on this one, I think – Cherokee is usually played fast, but not this fast).
meanwhile in #51, John notes:
I don’t really have a five-point program for music, but Marsalis does, and there’s no way he’d ever like McLaughlin.
I think there is indeed some needle between them; JM has certainly poked gentle fun in interviews at that whole school of thought.
W. Kiernan 01.26.07 at 7:13 am
Preprocessing for music criticism:
s/”this is bad music”//”I don’t care for this music”
s/”this is great music”//”I like this music a lot”
Daniel 01.26.07 at 7:19 am
I don’t really agree with 78. There’s quite a lot of music criticism that is a matter of personal taste. But if, on the other hand, someone were to say that the Ode to Joy was just a mindless progression up and down the scale with no real musical content, then we’d have to say that the critic in question didn’t know what he was talking about, or was trying to be provocative on purpose, or was trying to push some unrelated agenda. I don’t have much of a problem with people not liking McLaughlin or finding his approach dull or whatever. But there are lots of people claiming that he’s just mindlessly running through scales and performing exercises in guitar technique, and that’s a specific factual claim that’s transparently false.
John Emerson 01.26.07 at 7:51 am
Daniel was too polite to point this out, but either you’re a relativist or you’re not. Relativism about music leads inevitably to propositions like “Some cultures believe that it’s ‘wrong’ to murder innocent civilians by the million,whereas others have a different, more tolerant view.” And once you believe that, then you end up opposing the desperately-needed World War Four against bad people. Kiernan is fundamentally unserious.
And then, what about Charlie Parker? Did he swing?
I say no. If only there’d been someone there to say to him ” Chill it Charlie, adjust your meds, that’s way too frantic!” But instead, everyone was telling him he was God (which by the way is not true.)
stostosto 01.26.07 at 7:56 am
I think vanya at #74 pretty much nails it.
stostosto 01.26.07 at 8:19 am
I don’t think that the bebopsnob position can be stated more concisely than this, so thanks.
Not at all.
I disagree with it in two points; first that “really swing†is a term that can or should be given any real content, and second that even if it can, that whether something “really swings†or not is a criterion that should be placed “above all†others.
I agree that swing is not something that “can or should be given any real content”. Swing is an energy that just is (if it’s there), a physical force that bypasses your normal consciousness and tugs directly at your muscle fibers. Like when spring is in the air. As to the “above all” part: If it isn’t there, you’ll inevitably miss it. No matter how much you talk about it or refer to it, as I think McL does here very eloquently, it’s not the same as having it.
Good thing I am not at all pretentious, or else I would say “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”.
stostosto 01.26.07 at 8:22 am
And then, what about Charlie Parker? Did he swing?
Always. (But you obviously know that, otherwise you wouldn’t ask).
Luc 01.26.07 at 9:23 am
Do you guys and gals actually play?
I mean swing is basic. It’s the first thing you’ll have to know when you see a sheet of music.
Default – swing, ballad/bossa etc. no swing.
And except for a handful of talented people, keeping that swing at 200bpm on a guitar requires practice.
It is technical and well defined stuff.
But the main thing that makes this piece enjoyable isn’t the technical aspects of his solo. It is the interaction with the big band, the dead giveaway being the praise of the drummer.
Evaluating this solo without ever noticing he plays with a big band at full volume is a bit pointless.
John Emerson 01.26.07 at 9:24 am
I doubt that a Duke Ellington / Count Basie type would grant the swingingness of Parker. I love Thelonius Monk, but his swingingess seems quite doubtful — he was famous for not giving rhythmic support, to the point that Miles David asked him to sit out.
If swing is taken as a specific trait rather than the criterion for all jazz, it probably started to decline about when Charlie Christian died.
“Frantic”. Good or bad? I say bad.
John Emerson 01.26.07 at 9:27 am
The “Ode to Joy” pisses me off, though. It ultiately led to that catchy patriotic melody in the stupid 1812 Overture. Beethoven killed the symphony.
stostosto 01.26.07 at 9:43 am
Beethoven killed the symphony.
Would seem symphony also killed Beethoven.
Daniel 01.26.07 at 9:48 am
It is the interaction with the big band, the dead giveaway being the praise of the drummer
If you keep an eye on the pianist’s facial expressions in the background, he also does not appear to be going “ho hum, what a meaningless technical exercise running scales with no musicality at all”. And he is actually playing fills which are if anything faster than McLaughlin’s solo.
Steven Poole 01.26.07 at 10:02 am
McL is a superb guitarist, but that clip just makes me go “Meh”. Thanks to q the enchanter for posting the clip with Bireli Lagrene, though – now he swings like a bastard.
Pace Daniel, “swing” does actually have a simple musical meaning. If you see a row of quavers and play them all with equal time value, you are playing them “straight”. If you play them long-short long-short etc you are “swinging” them. The “correct” ratio of long to short is indefinable, except that a 3/4-1/4 ratio usually means you are a classical musician who can’t swing.
None of this means that getting out a stopwatch and seeing if McL was “really” swinging is a sensible thing to do. And it’s true that some people say “It doesn’t swing” just to mean they don’t like it. And not all good jazz has to swing.
Also, Wynton Marsalis can’t hold a candle to Branford. Fact.
John Emerson 01.26.07 at 10:08 am
That strikes me as more a quick and dirty summary than a definition.
"Q" the Enchanter 01.26.07 at 10:09 am
The fact that the term ‘swing’ is sometimes vague or ambiguous doesn’t mean it doesn’t or shouldn’t have content. Welcome to the world of evaluative concepts.
Anyway, given the macho posturing going on in this thread, there is clearly only one solution: The Commenters v. Timberists Jazz Guitar Shred Off!
Steven Poole 01.26.07 at 10:10 am
Sure, it’s a quick and dirty summary of what “swing” actually means when it’s written on a lead sheet. The problem is the word also expands to signify “cool” or “good” more generally.
John Emerson 01.26.07 at 10:28 am
Yeah — “swing” it can mean a particular kind of music (“swing band era”), a specific characteristic of most jazz, or be a word of praise for stuff that “really swings”. So someone could be playing in a recognizably swing (rather than straight) way without “really swinging” because there’s a lot of other stuff too, about the way the various musicians work together, etc.
I like a lot of non-swinging but jazzlike European music, e.g. Jan Garbarek’s early stuff.
Steven Poole 01.26.07 at 10:35 am
Yep, that’s all true: especially that it can describe a certain quality of ensemble playing. Also a lot of soloists will happily switch between swung quavers and straight semiquavers in the same tune. So the question “Does it really swing?” is really many questions.
Daniel 01.26.07 at 10:40 am
“Swing” is clearly capable of precise mathematical definition, otherwise quantising algorithms for sequencers wouldn’t work. But my problem is more with the modifier in “really swing” in #76 above. Swing as it is played is a matter of true or false (and in fact, McLaughlin clearly is using it in the opening and closing sections of the piece; it gets kind of hard to tell in the solo). But “Real Swing” (is there a CAMRS?) is clearly meant as a more metaphysical property, the ding-an-sich of which the mere outward appearance of swing is just a shadow.
Daniel 01.26.07 at 10:43 am
(in other words, even if the answer to all of the more complicated questions in Steven’s #94 above was “yes, swing”, there would always be some bebop snob hanging round saying “ohhhh noooo, god I can’t believe you’re listening to that stuff it’s so sterile and empty it doesn’t swing”.
John Emerson 01.26.07 at 10:45 am
Is there no one here to defend Thelonius Sphere?
"Q" the Enchanter 01.26.07 at 10:47 am
“my problem is more with the modifier in “really swingâ€
I don’t think this type of question’s overly idealist. Asked of, say, Gymnopedie No. 3, the question “Does it really rock” has a pretty clear answer. Maybe the answer’s not as clear with respect to “swing” in the present case, but the problem is in the ambiguity rather than metaphysical transcendence.
But, seriously, what about the Jazz Guitar Shred Off? Anyone?
Steven Poole 01.26.07 at 11:44 am
“Swing†is clearly capable of precise mathematical definition, otherwise quantising algorithms for sequencers wouldn’t work.
Not really, since no humans play precisely the same mathematical ratio of note-lengths consistently from one moment to the next. (The subtle variations of the ratio are part of the swing, as is pulling ahead of the beat or dropping behind it by varying distances.) So if you just enter a row of quavers into your sequencer and set the quantization to one of the “swing” presets, it won’t really swing. ;)
Daniel 01.26.07 at 11:57 am
Not really, since no humans play precisely the same mathematical ratio of note-lengths consistently from one moment to the next.
Billy Cobham does :-)
More seriously, the state of the art in quantise algorithms is really quite good in terms of recognising the difference between playing that swings and playing that’s just out of time.
Frank Sinatra, of course, was plagued throughout his life by orchestras that would always play slightly behind the beat and about half a semitone sharp.
Steven Poole 01.26.07 at 12:46 pm
Maybe my copy of Logic Pro has particularly bad quantizing algorithms compared to your state of the art; but while it can be good at tightening up a pre-recorded performance to varying degrees, if you just enter a bunch of straight quavers and choose a swing-quantise setting, it’s still going to be crap because it’s too consistent and artificial. (Further “humanize” processing notwithstanding.) If it plays according to any one precise mathematical definition of note-length ratios, it ain’t gonna swing.
Steven Poole 01.26.07 at 12:52 pm
But if you are slightly swinging the hi-hat semiquavers in techno, that’s a whole different story again. ;)
Daniel 01.26.07 at 12:58 pm
I’ve got Sibelius and its “Live Playback” library is pretty good.
"Q" the Enchanter 01.26.07 at 1:02 pm
“Billy Cobham does :-)”
Actually, I remember some mag (probably Modern Drummer or something) did an analysis of leading drummers’ ride patterns, and out of the sample Weckl was the only one with precisely swung eighths. (Which maybe is one reason I don’t much care for Weckl’s swing. ;-)
Daniel 01.26.07 at 1:07 pm
Thinking about this, putting swing into a set of eighth notes is a classic “reverse-scattering” problem and bound to be much more difficult than quantising a live performance, so I don’t think the fact that most quantisers don’t produce results that are indistinguishable from a human being is necessarily proof that there isn’t a mathematical description of swing. It’s also a bit unfair to take the straight application of swing quantise to the whole piece as your standard; you can apply different degrees of quantise to different bars or even different notes, and I bet you could get an algorithm to vary this for you.
I read an interview with Nile Rogers once where he talked about manually quantising the drums on one of Chic’s albums – literally taking the ive performance and cutting up the tape so as to justify it to a click track.
John Emerson 01.26.07 at 1:11 pm
What do you call a guy who hangs around with musicians all the time?
cw 01.26.07 at 1:24 pm
I like Mac alot, but he’s not a really good straight ahead jazz player, has never had a reputation as a good straight ahead jazz player, and that video was a pretty typical representation of his straight ahead jazz playing. You complain other people setting themselves up as experts and then you do the same thing. Judging from your posts, I frankly don’t think you know what you are talking about.
cw 01.26.07 at 1:54 pm
I listed to it again to see if I was overstating and if anything, I understated. That sucked. The bands arrangement was super cheesy, Mac’s guitar sounded awful becasue when you play that fast you have to dampen the strings with you palm or else the ringing of one note messes with the next note, and all the blur of notes he played meant nothing.
And as for swing, when it is written out as it occasionally is in fake books, it’s written dotted 8th, 8th….. Swing is quatifiable, just like any tradtional rhythm pattern is quantifiable. Swing is one of the things that originally chracterized jazz along with improvisation and the blues scale. It’s a traditional rhythm pattern and the human ear can hear it. It’s not some mystical quality. Maybe some people make that rythm pattern sound better than others and it’s a mystery how, but swing not simply an aesthetic quality.
And Mac is great at some stuff but straight ahead jazz is not one of them.
So I guess I’m setting myself up to be an expert which I criticized in my last post. Sorry.
Anarch 01.26.07 at 2:06 pm
In fairness, when we listen to someone play about anything by Bach, we don’t say that the pianist ‘lacks talent’ because s/he is able to play a difficult piece of music. Instead, we often claim musicians are quite talented when they have technical prowess the vast majority of us lack. Is this not true…?
Can’t speak for anyone else, but in my circle of musicians there’s a vast distinction made between technical virtuosity and musicianship. They’re not incompatible, but neither do they imply each other.
"Q" the Enchanter 01.26.07 at 2:45 pm
“putting swing into a set of eighth notes is a classic “reverse-scattering†problem and bound to be much more difficult than quantising a live performance”
Your standard protools typically have “feel injector” plugins. I take it that these use exemplars rather than (or at least in addition to) randomizing algorithms.
In re Nile Rogers, I recall hearing something like that. These days it’s pretty routine to “tab to transients” (go through the wave form to spot the peak frequencies that generally represent attack points), create edit points, then quantize them to some specified rhythmic subdivision. Fun, and (generally) makes you sound so much better than you actually are!
Steven Poole 01.26.07 at 3:00 pm
But no one actually plays it as [dotted 8th, 16th] – except the aforementioned classical musicians who can’t swing. ;) It’s closer to 2 tied triplets plus the third but not exactly that either. (And like I said, varying the ratio is part of the “feel” of real swing, too.)
Yep, all the sequencers let you map onto some notes a “groove” template originally taken from mathematical measurement of a real live performance. But then the “swing” comes from the person who originally played it.
cw 01.26.07 at 3:17 pm
“But no one actually plays it as [dotted 8th, 16th] – except the aforementioned classical musicians who can’t swing. ;)”
Dotted 8th, 16th… duh. I’ve always had a hard time with written rhythm.
luci 01.26.07 at 3:19 pm
Here’s one of those Shakti and McLaughlin things on youtube.
John Emerson 01.26.07 at 3:31 pm
Even 40 years ago the reverse problem was recognized in classical teaching — students playing triplet rhythyms instead of dotted rhythms.
radek 01.26.07 at 5:59 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPtLcfkrPIE
No comment.
sharon 01.26.07 at 6:40 pm
Listened to it now. Quite liked the band. What was that guy on guitar up to?
Gonna go listen to something interesting on iTunes now, thanks very much.
stostosto 01.26.07 at 7:50 pm
Hey! I found a clip with the McLaughlin/Al diMeola/Paco de Lucia act that I talked about earlier: YouTube is fabulous!
It’s from 1981, so early eighties was right.
This is not jazz, and in my opinion it suits John McLaughlin a lot better.
"Q" the Enchanter 01.26.07 at 8:05 pm
Fun, Radek. When I was first learning guitar I used to listen to “Black Star” over and over again, much to my dad’s annoyance. (“Ah, Christ, is it that Huey Malmberg again?”)
stostosto 01.26.07 at 8:17 pm
(I also stumbled on the “chord progression” (is that really the term?) for Cherokee.
Here.
If you know chords, this isn’t all that difficult, actually).
seth edenbaum 01.26.07 at 8:45 pm
John McLaughlin, Yngwie Malmsteen, Daniel Davies, JRR Tolkien, Henry Farrell, Budweiser, Chardonnay. Guns, Germs, Graphs, Trees, Materialism etc. etc. and the fear of sophistication. ” Brian Leiter would call it “depth.”
“Those connoisseurs with their fake french accents and they’re snooty ideas don’t know shit! I got a PhD. in economics… muthafuckahh!”
And speaking of product placement this site is full of plugs for gadgets that are little more than expensive children’s toys.
There was a time when connoisseurship was considered a necessity for the intellectual life. Now you can be a high functioning autistic and any university will give you a job in the humanities dept. You can even get a job at a democratic politcal consultant [the sort who loses elections]
This isn’t the common touch, it’s the anti-intellectualism of the emotionally immature MIT engineering student.
Ideas are never subtle.
Matt McGrattan 01.27.07 at 2:59 am
re: 91 and 98
I’ll take you up on that one. I’m not a great jazz player, though, I’m learning. Here’s a clip I recorded a year or two ago over some standard changes as part of the learning process.* More obviously swing than bebop.
http://www.mcgrattan.f2s.com/rc_mmcg.mp3
FWIW, I love a lot of McLaughlin’s stuff but his bop playing isn’t really to my taste. His stuff with Miles Davis is some of the most inspired guitar playing ever and I really like a lot of his more acoustic playing whether with De Lucia and Di Meola, or with Shakti or on Zakir Hussein’s solo album but his bop playing doesn’t particularly grab me.
Nothing to do with his speed, or the relative sophistication (or lack of) of what he’s doing but his personal style doesn’t work that well for me in that idiom.
Daniel is right about the prevalence of Orientalist bollocks driven partly by jealousy among guitar players, though. There’s an active school of Luddism that positively disparages anyone who plays faster than 120bpm or who strays away from minor pentatonic licks over I-IV-V changes and clothes it in a lot of crap about ‘feel’.
* played on acoustic guitar in more of a 30s swing idiom, though…
abb1 01.27.07 at 4:13 am
In the old days you’d need an expert to analyze, say, a chemical compound; these days (see any CSI episode) you just shove it into a machine, push a button – and viola!
Since, as others noted (and, of course, described in wikipedia), swing is a quantifiable characteristic, there no need for experts – all we need here is a piece of software.
It takes digital audio track as an input, analyzes it and spits out the amount and quality of swing for every instrument in the band. All there is to it, folks, and you don’t even have to listen. If there are any Opensource people here – this is your chance to become famous, don’t miss out.
Nabakov 01.27.07 at 7:04 am
Frankly Daniel, I reckon you’re talking bollocks here. McLaughlin’s suit is not very good at all. Look at how it rides up over the collar once he sits down.
Thom Brooks 01.27.07 at 7:45 am
109 quotes me as saying: “In fairness, when we listen to someone play about anything by Bach, we don’t say that the pianist ‘lacks talent’ because s/he is able to play a difficult piece of music. Instead, we often claim musicians are quite talented when they have technical prowess the vast majority of us lack. Is this not true…?” adding the following: “Can’t speak for anyone else, but in my circle of musicians there’s a vast distinction made between technical virtuosity and musicianship. They’re not incompatible, but neither do they imply each other.
It is certainly true that technical brilliance and musicianship are not mutually exclusive. This is something lost on most of the critics of JM’s solo: he plays too fast to “really” swing. It is also true that the two are not always the same. In fairness, I’ve found the two to be quite often the same, not least when I completed a B.A. in music about ten years ago. The players I hung out with in New York that had more technical prowess simply had a greater range of sophistication. Others lacked the physical ability to explore as many options in their improvisation. It is true that what makes a great solo something “great” is definitely difficult to pin down and I wouldn’t want to claim that only players with the best hand-eye coordination are the best soloists. It is simply my experience of being in various jazz and rock groups (with the occasional classical guitar duet) that those with the most able fingers were both in command of great technical skill beyond most and were the best musicians.
I do think with classical music there are better/worse renditions of, say, Bach’s inventions, but that the ability to flawlessly perform one is often a mix of musicianship and technical skill…and perhaps more of the latter than the former.
seth edenbaum 01.27.07 at 9:40 am
Pablo Casal vs Yo Yo Ma.
Who is more precise, and who’s the better “musician.”
If you say Yo Yo Ma is better then there’s nothing I can say. Enjoy your Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Howe etc; and I’ve go some old Genesis on vinyl if you want.
I’ll say this for Pwog Wock. It did give us Robert Wyatt, always my favorite Stalinist.
Michael E. Sullivan 01.27.07 at 9:46 am
I love JM, but I’m not really impressed with that clip as a great musical performance. It’s a very fun romp at doing a jazz standard largely out of style, and it plays well to a mass audience because McLaughlin plays fast and pretty clean.
Daniel, don’t try to tell me that his clean playing makes him sound faster, it’s his sharp attacks — his playing is not as clean as guys like Joe Pass, Charlie Christian or George Van Eps (though they rarely play extended riffs that fast or faster). Also, there are probably hundreds of classical and flamenco players that can do runs like that cleaner. It’s not called for in most jazz because you’ve got a big band behind you, but solo or small group acoustic guitar exposes sonic flaws that you can’t hear in a larger band setting unless you really know what to listen for.
It’s a romp, it’s fun, and McLaughlin is no doubt a great player, but this isn’t a good example of his real greatness as a musician. He’s playing out of style and he hasn’t turned it into something that becomes it’s own new style, in the way that his work with Miles, Shakti and the MO does (and probably many others I’m forgetting – he’s really played around).
I’m specifically leaving out the “three guitarists” recordings most of which reminded me a lot of this clip, and what I sometimes describe as “musical masturbation”. It’s pretty and clean and fast and wicked cool, but there doesn’t seem to be much point beyond admiring the playing. It has a complete lack of strong emotional content.
So while I don’t have a lot of patience for uber-jazz-snobs either (I think a lot of revered players [cough]Coltrane[cough] do the same thing I’m describing as musical masturbation), I gotta agree with some here that this clip isn’t the greatest example for your case. Frankly I’d be shocked if JM considered this one of his great performances.
Note that I grew up *idolizing* JM as a teenage wannabe guitarist.
Now that I’m an actual classical guitar player and have studied composition and theory, my views of him and many other famous performers are somewhat more nuanced. I have a *lot* more respect for players who never do anything technically astounding but can play tight and convey clear emotional messages thoughout a song, than I did before I became a real musician and found out just how much skill there is to that even you when never play fast.
I hardly hate that JM can play fast. While I can’t deny a certain jealousy, I *love* that he can play fast, I just wish that he would use his powers for good more often. :)
Also, BTW, the skill to playing fast in these jazz solos is much less technical than it is facility with improvising melody. IOW, it’s in the brain, not the fingers. It’s quite easy for most very good guitar players to play something they’ve memorized and practiced at the speed JM performs in that video. I play lots of pieces with runs that fast. What’s hard is making it up as you go along that fast while reacting to the changes appropriately. There are tricks even to that though, and JM clearly knows them. It really isn’t as hard as you would think if you’re not a player.
I was actually more impressed technically with his playing of the basic tune and simple variations than I was with the single note solos.
Matt McGrattan 01.27.07 at 10:01 am
Yeah, I can play that quickly if I am just running a scale but can’t improvise at even a fraction of that tempo — as you say, it’s all mental, rather than raw physical technique.
I’ve never really liked his single note soloing in that sort of bop context. To me he was more of an innovator as a rhythm player — his chordal work with Miles Davis is unsurpassed for me. He seemed able to do the exciting harmonic things that piano players do, while keeping the groove and feel of good R & B type rhythm guitar playing.
John Emerson 01.27.07 at 11:32 am
After finally hearing the piece when my computer got fixed, it didn’t seem that the soloist and the band meshed very well, which isn’t surprising given the context. I basically agree that McLaughlin isn’t a real bebopper or swinger, but that’s OK with me, neither am I.
Steven Poole 01.27.07 at 3:29 pm
abb1:
Eh, but the wikipedia article you link to says: “The following points of reference are reliable only as approximations of musical practice”, which is correct, since it ain’t quantifiable.
thom brooks:
I think this is an important point. Given that McL has decided to play so fast, to then complain that he isn’t “really” swinging is a bit like complaining that he isn’t playing the clarinet.
Neil 01.27.07 at 3:52 pm
Um, Coltrane? I said above that JM is trying to swing and failing. It’s the comping on the intro that constitutes my evidence that he’s trying. I used to like his stuff with Mahavishnu Orchestra. I grew up. It’s not a crime not to grow up, though (I retain fairly juvenile tastes in other things).
Steven Poole 01.27.07 at 4:03 pm
Oh, I was just talking about the semiquaver solo stuff, which isn’t really amenable to swinging at that tempo (at least I think that’s what thom was saying). I don’t think Coltrane swings in passages of that speed either – but then he is able to swing at will when taking it down. Whether McL swings when playing at a pace that really should swing, like in the comped intro, is a different question. Personally I think Lagrene swings much harder than McL in that other clip that q posted.
Roy Belmont 01.27.07 at 6:18 pm
Neil -“It’s not a crime not to grow up, though (I retain fairly juvenile tastes in other things).”
Advancing to adolescent status-competition out of the simple landscape of childish concerns is “growing up”, but it’s not synonymous with being “grown up”.
Some of us are wondering if maybe whatever process that is just keeps on going.
cw 01.27.07 at 6:39 pm
“What’s hard is making it up as you go along that fast while reacting to the changes appropriately. There are tricks even to that though, and JM clearly knows them.”
Here’s a challenge that might end this debate. Someone transcribe that freakin solo. I will bet you a million dollars that it will not sound like much at a slower tempo. It’s really easy to play simple patterns over chords, and at that speed it can sound impressive to some people. The challenge of improvising is to play some thing musically meaningful. There’s this one pat methany record where he just plays sheets and sheets of unrelenting fast notes, but hes all over the palce harmonically. IT actually seems like a musical statment. You can also do interesting textural things at that speed but Mac wasn’t really even doing that, You listen to what he’s playing on that Shakti cut and there the long even strings of notes seem rhytmically appropriate, the fit with the perrcussion and they serve a textural, percusive end. In the cherokee piece it’s just like one long drum roll.
PS. I disagree about coltrane at speed. He had a lot more color in his tone and he played much more interesting patterns over the changes. Plus I don’t think he played that fast.. I guess there is eveidence that he also memorized some of those solos, which means it’s not just simple scale patterns over chords.
John Emerson 01.27.07 at 7:55 pm
“Cherokee” was by the Brit Ray Noble and had interesting chord changes:
http://www.freejazz.org/?q=node/1350
but teh hokiest lyrics ever:
http://www.bluesforpeace.com/lyrics/cherokee.htm
It became a bebop standard and the style seemed to become part of the song.
Steven Poole 01.27.07 at 8:10 pm
Oh, I entirely agree with that. But here we are coming back to different definitions of “swing” again. ;)
Mickey Maus 01.27.07 at 9:31 pm
On YuToob: Art Tatum
dsquared 01.28.07 at 5:38 am
I guess there is eveidence that he also memorized some of those solos, which means it’s not just simple scale patterns over chords.
this looks perilously like a metaphysical property which exists over and above the actual notes played.
Bruce Baugh 01.28.07 at 12:46 pm
There seems to me a strong streak of aesthetic puritanism at work here. I recognize it as something I’m prone to in other fields: the idea that it’s wrong to enjoy fluff (no matter how technically competent), that unless we are in some sense doing work to appreciate a piece, it’s unworthy of our consideration. The end result, of course, is to insist that people should have more banal and uninteresting lives overall – if the great art (whichever it is in a particular enthusiast’s case) is never to be engaged with lightly, in practice most people will never engage with it at all. But a life devoid of art and craft is not what anyone who actually cares about human beings should be wishing for. We need more good fluff, along with the more demanding manifestations of the great art.
Mickey Maus 01.28.07 at 1:37 pm
No. What there is a fear of fluff, fluff being art and the possibility of judgment concerning art. “Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.” But science is serious [sic] because it’s not about opinions but truth.
That logic leads to this stupidity: good chops make good art.
“de gustibus non disputandum est.” Except that even with fads and fashion history is a pretty good judge.
But Bouguereau and Norman Rockwell painted real good didn’t they? Lots of pretty pictures.
abb1 01.28.07 at 3:37 pm
It’s not about fluff; snobbery is a rejection of anything that’s popular, just because it is popular. It may or may not be fluff (though it usually is). There’s nothing wrong with criticizing fluff.
global yokel 01.28.07 at 8:29 pm
McLaughlin’s tone on that guitar is no match for a powerhouse band like the Tonight Show guys. He sounds like he is playing on one of those plastic guitars your parents might have given you at age 5. The tempo is so brisk that the instrument doesn’t have time to speak in a pleasing way, and McLaughlin looks and sounds to me like he is hanging on for dear life, just hoping to get through the tune without embarrassing himself too badly.
For me, jazz tunes ought to have a deliciously sexy groove– the genre began its life as dance music. This performance comes across as hard work and no fun.
Mickey Mauss 01.28.07 at 8:32 pm
Joseph Epstein says he’s can be called a snob because he likes to brag he’s friends with Oprah Winfrey. The snobbiest person I’ve ever met, a tragic racist self-hating southern homosexual, is a roaring fan of Italian Opera and used to play cd’s of British music hall all day. He loves Noel Coward.
Puccini is ripe for snobbery not because it isn’t popular and vulgar but because it pretends not to be and in doing that it reduces itself to fascist kitsch. Aristocrats aren’t snobs, they have no need to be. Snobbery is the pretension of certain members of the middle class to being better than their peers. “Hyacinth Bucket” of Keeping up Appearances is a snob.
What you’re describing is a shallow attempt at a defense of democracy and democratic art [as if democracy were anti-intellectual by nature!] against what people want to see as aristocratic. And this about Jazz, the epitome of democratic art in the last century [and no that’s not an oxymoron]. It makes much more sense in this context to see this as I said as an expression of the anxiety of experts around connoisseurs (and no I’m not talking about geeks commenting on you tube). As if there were no difference between a race car mechanic and a driver. This is a running theme here: experts see the world through the lens of their expertise, but they don’t want to talk about the limits of their framing devices. So we get things like D2 doing his Brad DeLong imitation, defending cheap beer and perfectly round inedible tomatoes in the name of the ideas of individualism and economic progress. As if ideas were ever as subtle as tastes (or words). To be fair I’ve never heard DeLong defend lousy food, at least for himself. His blog reads like the home shopping network for the post-grad bourgeois home. But he’s a full on vulgarian who claims not to be. As if data were synonymous with honesty.
If you want to hear a great pop jazz guitar solo, listen to Larry Carlton on Kid Charlemagne. And as for honesty, there’s an article on the Goncourt Brothers in the NYR this week. Check it out.
cw 01.28.07 at 10:16 pm
“this looks perilously like a metaphysical property which exists over and above the actual notes played.”
I’m not sure what you meant by that. What I meant was that if Coltrane took the time to write and memorize a solo, it most likely would have been move than basic scale patterns over the changes, which is what you do when your just trying ot cope.
John Emerson 01.28.07 at 10:17 pm
I agree that the Tonight Show’s generic band was not the right one for McLaughlin.
mick 01.28.07 at 10:53 pm
Alex is, I think, on to the real problem here: a pedestrian, bloated, self-important arrangement. It’s so bad, so…ordinary (like most of the Tonight Show Band’s arrangements) that I doubt Bird himself could have overcome it. Probably he wouldn’t have tried.
There isn’t an acoustic guitar in the world that could have survived either that arrangement or its sheer volume. An electric rock guitar wouldn’t have been any better a fit since the player would have had to use volume to overcome volume, which would lead him in another, rocky-er direction, and that woukld have clashed with the arrangement, too.
The third problem with the arrangement is that it isn’t set up to give a soloist any support. When you arrange a piece to back a soloist, you arrange it for that particular musician’s style, to give him openings to launch from and rhythmic and harmonic support that suits his playing.
That arrangement sounded to me like a standard Tonight Show band arrangement that they grabbed at the last minute, or else they said, “Well, John, this is what we’re doing tonight. You can play on this if you want,” and then winged it in rehearsal (where there’s only time to mark the changes and little else).
Also, the placing of the solo spots seemed arbitrary and unhelpful, as if they’d been picked at random in a chart that originally hadn’t included them. I really suspect that the arrangement was written as a before- or after-show piece (probably after, given all the horns) and then just drafted to do duty for McLaughlin’s appearance. Was it a last-minute gig? “John McLaughlin’s in town. Let’s get him on and let him do something with the band.” I don’t know.
Finally, I know how hard it is to even hear McLaughlin over that steam whistle in the background, but there’s nothing whatever wrong with his tone. It’s beautifully articulated, clean as, say, an Eddie Condon solo, and unadulterated by tricks or the kind of horseshit cliches that arrangement is demanding.
As for his musicality, once again I think the arrangement is at fault for the fact that some of you can’t hear it. McLaughlin’s ideas are cohesive, playful, and rhythmically complex – far more so than anything the band is doing. It was if he decided that since he couldn’t beat them or join them, he’d just go off in his own direction and leave them to batter around trying to keep up.
They failed, not him. Those solos, especially the first one, are so good, so inventive, that he left the band in the dust almost as soon as he started playing them. They make one wonder what would have happened if he’d concentrated on jazz alone for a while. A modern Django? Could have been. All the elements are there.
Don’t let the speed or the dazzling technique fool you: they’re in service to brilliant musical ideas, not replacing them.
global yokel 01.29.07 at 12:01 am
One of my criteria for good art is whether I would be inclined to want to see/hear the performance again. In this case, no thanks. None of it stuck in my memory or my heart.
Daniel 01.29.07 at 4:55 am
So we get things like D2 doing his Brad DeLong imitation, defending cheap beer and perfectly round inedible tomatoes in the name of the ideas of individualism and economic progress.
I don’t think I’ve ever spoken up for round tomatoes. I have on occasion defended Budweiser beer, but that’s because I think it’s an excellent product, wholly deserving of the numerous international trade show awards it won in the first half of the twentieth century (it also has a *longer* pedigree than the Czechoslovakian Budvar, and IMO Anheuser-Busch got really badly screwed in their WIPO case over the name “Budweiser”).
Opinions can differ about whether or not it’s a good piece of music – as I said, I liked it, but I’d be pretty scared of someone whose entire record collection sounded like that. What I will die in a trench for, though, is the proposition that McL was playing music, which is what bebop snobs want to deny, and which gets them into logical contortions like the one in comment 133, where CW describes a Pat Metheny solo that wasn’t really a musical statement – it just sounded that way.
Daniel 01.29.07 at 4:56 am
(note above that I refer to Budvar as “Czechoslovakian” rather than Czech. This is intentional, on the basis that if they’re going to lay a claim to “Budweis” while calling their town “Ceske Budowice”, they can hardly expect anyone else to show any greater respect for their recent political history).
stostosto 01.29.07 at 9:51 am
Daniel,
Regardless of our differences in view on McLaughlin’s performance, I’d like to thank you for posting this clip and starting this discussion. I have enjoyed it very much, and I have been practising my Cherokee licks all weekend in a surprising revival of my otherwise rather slumbering hobby of guitar playing.
In my next life, I am going to be a jazz guitarist. (Although I am going to model myself on Joe Pass rather than John McLaughlin).
Mickey Mauss 01.29.07 at 10:04 am
I’ve been wondering if I still had it in me to put up a good fight on short notice about entertainment and beer. I was afraid I’d wasted my best efforts on politics.
“Music nerds”: White college educated and can’t sing, let alone play an instrument. Don’t get laid enough, if ever. Dungeons and dragons for audiophiles. As likely to be Fusion fanatics as Bebop snobs, because the music itself is irrelevant. Northern Soul without the irony or humor.
And I drink Urquell anyway.
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