48. "Are you sure about this?" In response to In response to 32 Sun Jun-15-14 06:52 PM by Jakob Hellberg
And >most jazz musicians had to be fluent in classical in the early >days.
In the big band era it became necessary for musicans to be able to read music for obvious reasons and the ability to read music is strongly connected with a classical background-as opposed to say folk or blues-but were the New Orleans guys fluid in classical? I don't think that is what the musicians really came from. They of course had frequently played marching-band stuff and shit but the fact is that there's a reason that a lot of New Orleans-era musicians didn't cut it in a big band context was simply because they couldn't read that stuff but instead had learned by ear.
Basically, the very *need* to find musicians who were well-versed in notation and shjt pushed jazz towards an emphasis on classically fluid dudes but I doubtr that was the case in the beginning.
In be-bop meanwhile, the musicans at least in the early days came from a background in playing in big bands so they had that and utilized it in different ways; like borrowing books from the library about complex relationships between various chords and scales and studiying Stravinsky etc. to make the solos more sophisticated (Charlie Parker was heavily into that and theory was actually genuinely hip in the bebop day).
It wasn't really until SOME branches of free-jazz that jazz-musicians got out of that bag and got more about *voice* and sound like in the early days as opposed to technique and complex chord/scale relationships