Gold dust

Greatape

EI: "Charles, at one of our lessons you said a phrase that I wanted to toss out again. You said the harmony is there — the changes are there — but you don’t play the changes. That’s sort of what Bird sounds like to me: like the changes are there, but he’s actually not playing the changes."

CM: "See, here we go with, “There’s a lot of ways to be a typewriter,” because a lot of people chase chord changes. But harmony and chord changes are just there as collateral. They tell you what group of notes might be valid for the moment, but they don’t tell you what’s the best note for the moment. Your eyes can tell you right notes if you know harmony, but your ears — if you got some — will tell you the best notes out of the many right notes. It’s up to the melodic ear to eke out the greatest four or five notes for the moment. That’s when the phrasing and rhythm comes in.

And this is one of things that the younger children of the bebop guys did not really understand from the real founding fathers of bebop. The younger players could get wrapped up in treating complex chord changes as the greatest thing of all. You gotta realize that the founding fathers of bebop — Bird, Dizzy, Monk, and the rest of those guys — they basically were just the younger swing musicians. They’re just the younger guard, they’re just a little bit younger than Harry Edison or Lester Young. Kenny Clarke is just a couple of years younger than Papa Jo Jones. They got all of the lessons from the great swing players, and the greatest of them were virtuosos. People like Don Byas, man, come on! Harmonically Don Byas is off the charts. The younger guys learned everything from people like Lester Young and Don Byas and had their own natural talent, and that’s how you get a Bird or a Dizzy. But Bird and Dizzy played so well and so correctly that it was very easy for the younger players to start treating chord changes as the greatest thing of all. There’s a danger there because chords are not the “reason why.” Chords shouldn’t be the jumpstart of your creation. Your jumpstart of creation is your melodic ear and rhythm.

The chords are there, they’re like parts of speech. Nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, adverb phrases: they’re meaningless on their own, but they’re there to create sentences, paragraphs and stories. But parts of speech are not the reason for your creation. When you get ready to speak your thoughts and express your feelings, you’re not saying, well now let me use a noun or a verb or an adverb.

It’s the same when you play an A minor seven. An A minor seven has no dignity unto itself. It just is what it is. The A minor seven is just acting as part of speech, helping you express your emotion. A lot of the players after bebop on became top heavy with the harmony. Now we have a bunch of players who will basically chase chord changes, that’s all it is. If they’re grammatically correct, they think they’re great, you know? And that’s part of it, of course. At least you’re in the ballpark if you outline the changes. But that ain’t the main event!"

Charles McPherson, interviewed by Ethan Iverson

https://ethaniverson.com/interview-with-charles-mcpherson/

Roland

Greatape said:

... harmony and chord changes are just there as collateral. They tell you what group of notes might be valid for the moment, but they don’t tell you what’s the best note for the moment...

Bingo! The same can be said of scales, and of finger positions. None of them give a clue about note transitions, slides, bends, hammers, etc.

Greatape

Roland said:

Greatape said:

... harmony and chord changes are just there as collateral. They tell you what group of notes might be valid for the moment, but they don’t tell you what’s the best note for the moment...

Bingo! The same can be said of scales, and of finger positions. None of them give a clue about note transitions, slides, bends, hammers, etc.

Yeah, it's a level that is simultaneously deeper and simpler ...no patterns (despite what a great many people will say about 'it's too fast; you have to use a pre-learned pattern.') 

His remarks about the beat and space between are spot on, and akin to what I was (clumsily) trying to allude to in the 'Justin Guitar' thread recently. 

viz

No writer is thinking about the alphabet when they write their novels. The arc of the story is what matters.

Greatape

viz said:

No writer is thinking about the alphabet when they write their novels. The arc of the story is what matters.

Or indeed when you are talking to someone.