Speed kills the swing/time to get back to dancing.

dennis

rimm wrote:

Dennis, with all due respect you have just hijacked a fairly interesting topic and told me how great you are. Anyway, yes, speed does kill the swing in my opinion, but the greats like Moignard and Gonzalo do pepper there solos with slower interesting parts. I think that younger players all try to play fast at the start-I know theres a quote somewhere by Django when he was asked about the bebop players basically saying that 'Man they play fast but when I started I showed them a few tricks'

far from it, i was merely commenting on the academic issue... After all, I don't go around posting ads/videos of "authentic gypsy jazz"

anyway, people play as they are, which is why i don't feel like commenting on the general issue... furthermore, i know a lot of the gypspy players personally and have spent considerable time with them.. these aren't issues that they think about; they jsut live their life and want to have fun.. they don't all see it as an "artform" so to speak, it's just a way of life for them... I'm not saying all of them are like that, but for the most part, it's just the way it is, and i think there's beauty in their "simple" way of thinking.

rimm

-I do play in a gypsy jazz band and one of our members is a gypsy..anyway, speed does kill the swing.


Lets move on.

roch@rochlockyer.com

anyway, people play as they are, which is why i don't feel like commenting on the general issue... furthermore, i know a lot of the gypspy players personally and have spent considerable time with them.. these aren't issues that they think about; they jsut live their life and want to have fun.. they don't all see it as an "artform" so to speak, it's just a way of life for them... I'm not saying all of them are like that, but for the most part, it's just the way it is, and i think there's beauty in their "simple" way of thinking.

Well Put D...I just got on the forum for the first time since Samois and read this thread... wanting to give thumbs up to your comment...which I think holds weight given your journey in this genre....

I don't think these sort of discussions are constructive debates and the peeps I have encountered working at it & spending time playing and learning from each other generally aren't thinking this way...some peeps play slow, some fast, a precious few improvise, some great players memorize 1000"s of licks...whatever ones journey! It's all part of our collective process.

Best,
Roch
www.rochlockyer.com

anthon_74

As the person who originally posted this, I DO think this is a very valuable discussion.
One thing I should clarify, however, is that when I say "speed kills the swing" I mean the super super speedy TEMPOS more than speedy solo phrases. It's the 300 bpm tempos that kill the swing, and make it pretty hard to even hear the melodic changes in the song. As a dancer AND a musician, I've been on both sides. My concern is not just for Gypsy Jazz, but rather for the world of music in general. Part of the celebratory beauty of music is DANCE. Nowadays, when you go to ANY concert, be it gypsy Jazz, pop, rock, etc, nearly everybody just sits. Often MANY of them sway in their seats and tap their legs, and you can TELL that if it was more socially acceptable to get up and dance they would, but they don't because everyone else is sitting.
This is a MAJOR change from the past. Before the 80's came along and ultra conservativised the world, when you would go to a live rock concert, many many people would be dancing in the general admission area. nowadays, many bigger venues don't even have non seated areas, so if you want to dance, it has to be with your chair jabbing you in the legs.
I'm proposing more of an across the board return to including dance into the musical culture. And, yes, that may mean only playing "St. Georgia brown" at 220 bpms instead of 300.
And frankly, I KNOW most musicians don't even think this way in terms of "am I playing too fast" or this or that, but rather just enjoying the jams, but that doesn't mean they don't have something to learn from these perspectives. and the fact remains - when everybody is treating "playing fast" as the mark of a great player, you feel pressure to play fast as well to fit in as an equal.

Interesting side note - I had a feeling that once folks started returning from Samois there would be more post disagreeing with the original concept. It was far to cordial and agreeable in the beginning. Glad to hear the alternative opinions coming in.

bbwood_98

I'd have to second D and Roch.
Both right on the money.
B.

Jazzaferri

There is a big difference between what happens at a jam that may be semi public and what gets performed at concerts or recorded.

What goes down at a jam well..... The players are having fun and maybe strutting their stuff a bit. To be expected and to my mind not really relevant to this thread,

Bob Holo

This makes for fascinating sociology. This is an amazingly intricate web of relatively innocuous statements that are in the process of being spun, re-spun, sharpened, honed, collated and formed into meta-concepts and re-stated in ways that make them mean something completely orthogonal to the original statement. It's a beautiful pattern if you take the egos and politics out of it. It is the miracle of our pre-frontal cortexes doing what they do best. It simultaneously proves that we are all among the most brilliant creatures on this planet, and yet that none of us has the common sense it takes to pull our hands back from a hot stove.

I wonder if Al Gore knew any of this was going to happen when he invented the internet.

Passacaglia

Is this really an issue? Django's early music, post-musette, was created in the swing era. Swing is nice. Some of his work blazed, in a way that I can't imagine anyone dancing to. Speed for speed's sake isn't artistry. Anything generally driven by ego can't at the same time come from a soulful place. Speed that makes sense is thrilling. Hot jazz is hot, cool jazz is cool, and it's a big world to appreciate - whether I feel like getting up to dance, or just seriously grooving on some inspired lines.

Can't we all just, um, get along?

Bob Holo

Passacaglia wrote:

Is this really an issue?

No... it's not an issue. You're absolutely and completely spot on about that.

The original author 'anthon_74' even came back and said: "Man, that's not even what I meant"

We have one of these every year or so. lol.

Don't worry. It sounds like it's very near the end now.

Jazzaferri

8) :P

Yep