I went back and started listening to bebop,
and I couldn't tell if I liked it or was fooling myself
into liking it.

I mean, it was cool hearing the runs and the off
kilter rhythm sections, but... and I know this
must have been obvious to everyone but me...

Jazz doesn't resolve.

Pop is the opposite of that.
Pop songs are geared towards reslolving.
Good pop doesn't reslove exactly how you'd expect it to...
but your ear can subconsciously predict where it goes.

All this time I thought folks listening to charlie parker
had a jazz ear that could predict his choices and
sense where he was going with his solos.

And maybe they can to a degree.

But the appeal of bebob to me s least is that you CAN'T
predict the solos, and it doesn't resolve, yet something makes you listen. It can't be all peer pressure.
Charlie parker solos make me want to listen to them.

But I still couldn't identify a wrong note.
Not even if you put a gun to my head.
Maybe that's the point. Maybe there ain't no wrong notes, not really.


Which brings me to miles in the 70s.

These songs resolve even less. You can't play it on piano.
You certainly can't hum it. (Or at least I can't.)

And I can see how some would say that's a cop out...
But what makes it any less indecipherable than bebop?
There's just SOMETHING there. the challenge is to find what that something is.

When ppl say miles sold out, I think that's unfair.
He wanted to be modern.

George clinton said once that your music has to hit the frequencies kids listen to. You can play how you want, but if uou don't put your work in the context of sounds that somewhat resemble what kids like, ppl won't dig it.

So if miles didn't want to stay still... he HAD to
addresss the fact that rock sounds were a thing. He also had to address funk.

So his 70s albums have traces of those sounds, even though it it could be confused for rock or funk.

I mean, I still can't tell if he's ever playing a wrong note...but it's intriguing music.

Even an album like tutu gets me.
It's taking sounds from the 80s,
and playing his trumpet in that context.


Is it good?

Maybe nobody will ever know for sure. I'm starting to think it doesn't matter.

With bebop, there aren't really any 'wrong notes' and so the only way to determine if a song is 'bad' is if the song is able to keep some thematic sense and doesn't devolve into a couple of saxes, a drummer and a pianist playing solos. The 'music' is the reaction you get, not so much the notes being played.

As far as I know, it helps knowing jazz standards to better appreciate the virtuosity of the musicians. That being said, I haven't made time to listen to those standards.

In the case of 'My Favorite Things', Coltrane was able to take something poetic and romantic and turn it into the feeling someone has when their head catches on fire. (side note: Is 'My Favorite Things' about heroin?)

In that case, bebop seems to have unintentionally birthed a style that hip-hop grew into 30 years later - recontexting older music.

'If it ain't got that swing, it don't mean a thing...'

My dad is a big Miles fan and one day he mentioned, 'Bitches Brew'. I hadn't heard it and didn't until after I turned 21. I can only say that it was 'interesting' but it wasn't so that it was worth listening to again.

About four years ago, I tried again with Miles' 'In a Silent Way' and it was interesting, but I don't have any reason to listen to it again.

Mostly because it's more Art than music. The release comes from deconstructing the elements, rather than simply experiencing the timing of the horns or the keys.

Your point about Miles taking the spark of creativity that jazz musicians have and applying it to new or modern sounds is a valid one. I think when Miles heard Hendrix, he was driven to incorporate electric instruments. His GF/Wife at the time, Betty Davis, might have had something to Miles going into electric as well.

But that being said, I can relate more with Sun Ra, because there's an atmosphere to his music, or some way to relate, but with alot of Miles' stuff, I feel I need an interpreter because I just don't think there's anything to 'get' or at least that I can 'get' from his works.

do genuinely enjoy a lot of Miles, Bitches Brew included. But Sun-Ra has that atmosphere and flavor, while a lot of Miles stuff feels a tad sterile and dry for me. Its not like Miles is strictly for the experts, but I think its easier to get bored quicker after the initial shallow pleasure if you don't have the expertise to unpack the theory. Similar experience as Steely Dan imo. If you really get what they're doing or if you are an audiophile who loves "perfect" mixing techniques, you can listen for Steely Dan for days, but if you're like me, you have a handful of Steely Dan songs you love and get next to nothing out of their albums.

All tonal music resolves, depending on your definition of "resolve."

Do you mean "the harmonic progression does not clearly establish a tonic, and end on it?"

a hook.

Ex: billie jean...
tension builds when he's like

People always told me, be careful what you do...
don't go around breaking young girls hearts.

it builds more when he's like

but she came and stood beside me
I could smell her sweet perfume.


There is frantic tension when he goes


this happened much to soon...
she called me to her room.


the bass line drops for the hook
and you feel relief.
no more (or less) tension.

I essentially mean you can hum it
and there are spots you look forward to humming.



I couldn't hum a charlie parker solo unless I
practiced for a long time.


but I could hum a song like I just called to say I love you
after hearing it once.


I can hum the head of "night in tunisia,"
but that seems more rare.

I listened to a lot of charlie parker last night,
but if you put a gun to my head I wouldn't be able to
sing a run he did back to you.

I don't remember how they go.








>All tonal music resolves, depending on your definition of
>"resolve."
>
>Do you mean "the harmonic progression does not clearly
>establish a tonic, and end on it?"

Without getting too theory-ish, you're hearing in Billie Jean etc., types of melodic and harmonic cadences that firmly establish a starting/ending spot. Strong cadences create a firm sense of resolution, while weaker cadences leave things (relatively) unresolved. Jazz styles often choose weaker, or less common cadences, both melodically and harmonically. Resolution is relative, in the modern context.

Or even understand what he's doing without looking at a chart, most of the time.

Bebop, and certainly hard bop, is a case of musicians starting to play much more for other musicians than for a general audience, at the cost of mainstream/commercial appeal.

Slower rhythms, less hectic and jerky/more "groovy", more pronounced blues- and gospel-influences etc.

and bebop in general definitely does resolve. The genius of Bird's solos is in the way that they resolve. In pop music, we tend to look for cadences at the end of a chorus, maybe a tag ending or the ninth bar of a blues. In other words, tension is built up and resolved over a longer span of bars. In a bop solo, tensions can happen in the melodic structure and be resolved in a matter of a few notes.

Here's an example of a typical bop resolution: play the flat 5th interval of a chord, skip forward to the 6th and then step backwards to the perfect 5th. Here, the dissonance comes courtesy of the flat 5th which is then resolved by ending the phrase on the more consonant perfect 5th.

It's the constant cycle of introducing non-chord tones in a melody and then resolving them on chord tones that makes up a lot of what you hear in a bop solo.

I hope this helps some.

the fundamental of jazz is the head. it's not the melody. it's not the rhythm. it's the head.

the head is a phrase or a series of phrases. take so what and break it up into its phrases. note when there's a new phrase or when a phrase has just been transposed. note which phrases are takes on previous phrases. now when you listen to those solos try to identify those phrases or elements of them. there can be a rhythmic component to the phrase. a melodic component. a harmonic component. a modal component. and all of those things can get echoed back throught the song.

the players weave in and out of the head providing space for everyone to be able to play with the heads. playing with the head happens in various ways. cutting the phrase, drawing it out, transposing it, inverting it, taking it through intervals to arrive at another head and then back.

Jazz is all about making connections to the head, figuratively and literally. the player is constantly trying to improve upon his ability to take any head to new places and then bring it back home again.

that's the resolution, not necessarily in the traditional sense where a chord progression resolves itself, but where the head is called, expand upon and resolved back into itself.

free jazz incidentally is allowing the head to be born in the moment and giving it the authority to transform itself so that it never has to resolve (though it can as well). free jazz frees the player from the head by allowing the head to be free as well.


█▆▇▅▇█▇▆▄▁▃
Big PEMFin H & z's
"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1 thing, a musician." � Miles

"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

Every time I dive into my fairly large Dizzy collection, I want to move. Yeah I'm definitely cerebrally stimulated, but I'm also emotionally stirred and my body gets into it. Sure, it might not lend itself to a particular easily established set of dance steps, but I always found it ironic that Dizzy was simultaneously criticized for co-founding an "undanceable" jazz while also being shorted for being too much of a dancer for serious jazz heads lol.

I know very very very little theory, I'm familiar with a wide range of jazz, and Dizzy Gillespie is my favorite jazz artist period. Bebop or otherwise.

Bebop is cerebral but its not like only theory experts can enjoy it. Its also packed with flavor, at least when it comes to Diz or Sandoval. Charlie Parker might be a bit more "strictly for the sport". I still truthfully find his music more "impressive" than rewarding, tho I'm sure plenty Bird afficianados would object. To me, Diz represents the perfect marriage of Brain & Booty.

For a bebop novice, Dizzy might be the better starting point (over Bird) from which an appreciation of Bird and bebop in general can spring. That's not because Dizzy is less sophisticated (I'm sure ppl would debate both sides of that), but if you're like me you can have more immediate dose of pleasure while organically growing a deeper familiarity with the mechanisms of bebop. I don't have the theory vocab to talk about it the way others in here do, but I'm pretty sure my ear&mind is noticing and picking up on many of the same principles they describe and that comes with familiarity, which comes from really enjoying it enough to listen a lot.

I think Charlie was more stringently blues-based; granted, he played the blues-scale in keys that were "wrong yet right" harmonically and thus sounds quite wacky at times but the point is that his melodicism was very blues-based.

Dizzy on the other hand was very blues-based too but I think he put in more "off"-notes and chromaticism and non-scale passing-tones in his solos so it was like expanded blues just like Charlie but a bit different in approach, like maybe Dizzy was more in tune with the expected tonality but put a lot of "off-notes" and chromaticism in there whereas Charlie was more "out" harmonically but more "in" melodically if that makes sense.

Then again, it could be because of the relatively more inprecise pitch of the trumpet compared with the sax that make me feel this way; the trumpet is of course a very "out" instrument in terms of pitch...

In that way and in other ways, you could say Diz took greater risks or whatever (they both took risks)

Yet, I FEEL all that stuff (dissonance and all) in a way that I don't (yet) FEEL it with Bird. And by "feel" I dot mean its more bluesy or whatever, I just mean I feel it in my bones.

Bird is like a supercomputer generating the most intricate mathematically precise shit you can imagine (Eminem), while Diz is arguably just as intricate and precise, but in a way that can't be graphed by a computer, breaking more rules and touching more of those human nerves (Pharoahe Monch)

You can do all kinds of complex amazing stuff in music (and art) but if it doesn't have the kid-appeal in its core somewhere, it becomes a mere science project. That's not to say that the final product has to be something a kids love, but the kid in people should at least be addressed.

It will probably be dominated by Dizzy. But if I do, I'll share.