-
The rational unexplainability of some things made simplest natural phrases very complex for him...
graduate from college
-
06-16-2020 09:13 AM
-
You know the old joke?
BA - MA - PhD - MAD
-
Originally Posted by Jonah
-
Originally Posted by Jonah
Again, Michael Polyani's division between tacit knowledge and formal knowledge isn't just academic. It's of vital importance. Most sensible educators have some concept of this distinction. Kenny Werner talks about left brain/right brain for instance.
That said, anyone who finds Peter's lines complex in the formal way hasn't worked out that half of the time he's playing lines directly from chord shapes sliding around chromatically. If anyone tries to relate this to chord scale theory, they are going to get the impression that it's super complicated. It's like that hilarious analysis of Lester Young above. Some people are so dogmatic in their approach. They are like 11th century monks or something.
There's tons of workshop videos of Peter demonstrating this and explaining his disarmingly simple concept. And yet jazz guitarists seem unwilling to engage with what he is saying. Sunk costs, maybe, intellectually and also financial (what I spent thousands studying jazz and the shit they taught me isn't the real deal?) But actually I don't think it's that simple. It's actually a deeply ingrained thought processes. We are training jazz students to engineers or something rather than musicians.
Polanyi was a fucking chemist, which makes it more absurd.
Of course to make what Peter does sound good requires much more than a postivist, mechanical understanding. You have to, basically, be good at playing jazz to pull it off, and this is of course tacit, unexplainable knowledge that comes from, listening to loads of jazz and being on stage every night with the best in the business. So... pedagogy fails. It can't do anything but fail.
People seem to be looking for pedagogical solutions for things that are best learned experientially. But this is actually really well understood and described in the academic education literature. Much more so than jazz edu materials.
It is useful to me in my line of work that I can justify this fact (that is obvious to anyone who has been around the music) to people who don't have a clue about jazz. Which is a lot of education people to be frank.
OTOH for jazz people to reject what has been learned about learning and education just because it is 'academic' is equally dumb. Academics understand the limitations of pedagogy better than a lot of 'practical' jazz musicians. If this stuff was obvious to educators this thread wouldn't be contentious in any way.Last edited by christianm77; 06-16-2020 at 11:09 AM.
-
Actually I was having a convo with a friend of mine who teaches improvisation and jazz at a university, and in fact is doing a PhD... and we are both like; screw pedagogy. 'Teacher leave them kids alone!' haha
The more you learn about education, the more you realise the limitations of your role, and your ample opportunity to mess people up.
-
06-16-2020, 12:33 PM #131joelf Guest
I use the horizontal approach a lot:
I hardly get out of bed...
-
Originally Posted by christianm77
The only way for them to keep on was to gain authority which seems to be just a matter of luck...
-
Yes. It's worth being skeptical of what gets published... but that's what they are meant to teach. Be skeptical of everything. Read critically.
In practice it's not quite like that in reality, there are bandwagons people like to jump on.
Also, after sitting through many a tedious lecture on what's wrong with education and how to fix it, I find myself thinking, it would be nice if more education experts actually embodied their beliefs.
-
Actually I loved languages and linguistics, I was at the best university in the country, I was promoted by professor to the second year without exams after 2 months in my first year, I never learned anything, it was very easy for me... and in my 3rd year I quit for the army... and never came back. I just stood up in the middle of the class, went out and never returned. I did not even collect the documents.
I just could not stand it.
And until now I am not sure if it was a strong (and stubborn) character or a terrible compromise?
-
So, at risk of triggering Jonah again, this is a quote that I think sums up why dogmatic approaches to learning jazz have been so terribly successful:
"If educators as a group have an inferiority complex about their professional status, then music educators, who work in a field of “soft” knowledge in an era of shrinking budgets and disappearing programs, seem to have even more to prove. Unfortunately, professional aspirations that manifest themselves in this manner push the music education profession toward a mistaken view of knowledge as unified and discoverable in its entirety."
Music Education’s “Legitimation Crisis” and its Relation to One-Dimensional Thinking, J Paul Louth (2018)
http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Louth17_1.pdf
In this quote I think I can really see the difference between someone like Reg, who uses chord scales as improvisational Praxis, and what chord scale theory has become - a unified and discoverable body of knowledge that can be applied to the analysis of music.
This unified analysis approach is, of course, not in fact always helpful (again see the Lester Young analysis above) because improvisers historically have used a diverse set of approaches, but it doesn't matter, because it helps legitimise jazz as a serious field of study, rather than an open ended creative pursuit. As Rick Beato put it 'they had to come up with a syllabus.'
-
Originally Posted by christianm77
I've often said our mission statement might be "This school exists to be assessed and to conduct self-assessment. In order to do this, we must offer a few classes..."
Maybe music programs have been under the same pressure. It's not just social pressure, it's economic and institutional.
-
Originally Posted by ragman1
MS = More Shit
PhD= Piled high and Deep
John
-
This unified analysis approach is, of course, not in fact always helpful (again see the Lester Young analysis above) because improvisers historically have used a diverse set of approaches, but it doesn't matter, because it helps legitimise jazz as a serious field of study, rather than an open ended creative pursuit. As Rick Beato put it 'they had to come up with a syllabu
Same thing happens on HIP... you find the topic, overemphasize it, overload it with scientific details and frame properly .. and you own it and establish a trend ( like it was with tacitus or partimenti). Mediocre players eat it because it is easier for their meritocracy than open ended creative pursuit.
Early music musicologists seek for I known average composer of baroque and try to convince everyone he is forgotten genius...
Even gifted people seem to get stuck in scientific approach
-
Originally Posted by Jonah
No it's easy to blame the people. There's something about academies, books and so on that shapes the way people frame their thoughts. I remember exactly when it was in a Barry Harris class that the full weight of jazz as an oral tradition, a community, a shared memory hit me.
Same thing happens on HIP... you find the topic, overemphasize it, overload it with scientific details and frame properly .. and you own it and establish a trend ( like it was with tacitus or partimenti). Mediocre players eat it because it is easier for their meritocracy than open ended creative pursuit.
Early music musicologists seek for I known average composer of baroque and try to convince everyone he is forgotten genius...
Even gifted people seem to get stuck in scientific approach
Anyway, we are stuck with these formal education institutions, jazz in particular is intimately bound up with them now. The path forward is find ways to make them better.
-
Originally Posted by christianm77
Probably I would prefer to stay alone and away from it all, rather than trying to find paths in the system...
Academies of Greeks or Renaissance and Baroque made sense...
but today it is just dead formalist routine hostile to creativity and spirit of living art...
I guess I am not interested.
-
Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Frank Zappa once said of Elmore James that he played the same slide lick in every song but Frank felt like he meant it. Which was a way of saying it worked rather than sounding rote even though it WAS rote. ;o)
-
Originally Posted by christianm77
I see no harm in delving into the theory of anything. You never know, we might stumble upon something we can actually do relatively intuitively at a high level.
-
Originally Posted by ragman1
Totally agree
Body and Soul at a local session
Yesterday, 10:48 PM in From The Bandstand