![]() Metheny, in general, can't see how that's going to get you where you want to be. Joe Zawinul the founding member famously said of that group, "We never solo, we always solo." So, I dunno.on the one hand you may find the approach to improvisation they had appeals to you - lots of collective, gradually shifting soloing, less overt "head/solos/recapitulation" stuff - but it is heavily improvisation based, in general. Weather Report is an interesting idea, kind of depends, again worth checking out for yourself to see what you think. I really don't have any clear idea whether that would resonate with you, but worth a try if you can stream for free to sample. Now again, their recordings have a lot of improvisation in general, but there is more structure to the writing and often long scored sections. It seems you're maybe looking for a different kind of music.Ībout the only other thing I could add would be to consider checking out work by Maria Schneider and also work by Vince Mendoza, particularly the ones performed by larger ensembles. Imagine someone saying "I really love rock and roll but not when they have that loud bass and drums pounding out the beat." To me that's kind of like what you're saying. It's fine either way of course, but if you're looking for non-improvisational, more or less fully written out music, you really aren't looking for jazz, you're looking for something else, which is fine, but it is what it its. The key thing is, one either likes what jazz from the late 40s or so on has to offer, or doesn't. Unless you hear some kind of 1930s/40s revival big band (most of which I'd avoid like the plague, since it's like listening to some weaker facsimile of the real thing, a museum piece), you're still gonna hear a lot of long solos. So I'd have to graciously and respectfully disagree with our Host on that comment. And even those larger ensemble pieces that have more scored sections tend to also have lengthy improvised sections. You could argue that's a good thing, leave 'em wanting more and all that, but to me, I'd rather hear the more rather than be wanting in the case of truly great improvisers like these musicians are.Īlso I have to say that I have listened to a ton of modern big band music, recorded and at many different jazz festivals, and I would observe that big band arrangements for a long time have had the same kinds of long strings of lengthy solos that small group modern jazz does, often with brief heads or melody statements to launch the soloists. They are btw wonderful for what they are, and it is so admirable at how many great ideas those soloists were able to pack into such short statements - incredible intelligence and discipline required to do that - but at the end of the day most folks who enjoy jazz find those kinds of short spots a bit frustrating and constraining, they're often seemingly just getting started when the solo ends. That era is long gone and you simply aren't going to hear those kinds of almost haiku-like solos anymore. As a result, solos were very brief, concise. But the key difference was the balance - partly due to tastes of the time, partly due to absolute physical limitations in recording media, and partly because jazz was actually popular music at the time and therefore pitched at selling records and bringing large numbers of people to live shows, recordings were very short and there just wasn't a lot of room for long solos. I say this because even "big band era" jazz included improvisation (solos) as a fundamental element. But, I'm guessing that perhaps part of the problem is simply that you don't like the length of many post-swing era jazz recordings, which left more room for stretching out during solos. Click to expand.It's hard to unpack all this.
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