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of COURSE you already saw this... it's approx. 4 years old.
Jacob brings a simple joy and humanity to music that belies his theoretically knowledgeable trained upbringing. He grew up knowing the joy of learning music. He's a real leader, to me anyway, leading the people to higher ground...
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List of Arts Where Experimentation is Dangerous: 1) Sword-Combat 2) Aerial Acrobatics
Yes, he is talented and his popularity is understandable, but something about his whole style is taking nerd music theory to a level that rubs me really wrong...can’t put my finger on it.
... maybe that fancy-descriptions for fancy chords with a ton of extensions belie the simply pleasant harmony involved?
could that be it? that it's all fancy-talk but actually sounds simple and pleasant? (like the Maj13#11 chord) if so, that was my intention -> to expose the ostensible complexity of music theory as structural simplicity, once again... a typical theme I beat upon...
George Russell's "Lydian Chromatic Concept" basically provides an organizational system in which all chroma sound good together, if correctly-octave-spaced... hence modal jazz. etc... augmented and diminished hybrid = lydian (iii-III-iii-III all the way up...i.e some Maj21x47#45x43#41x39#37#35#33#29#27#25#23#19#15#11 chord...Schoenberg would be proud but argumentative)
my personal beef with Jacob is that he is younger and better looking and more musically talented than I am, and, of course, he blew-up big in the lecture circuit etc...
However, none of that matter. Music is not an athletic competition. It's expression and/or communication.
I identify with this video in that he's playing a bit of everything, and I tried so many times to make a video while recording songs, and editing it next to the songs, but it never worked, and somehow he figured that out...(meaning, multi-track recording and keeping synced video the whole time, not a pastiche of video added on top of a mixed-down song, know what I mean?)
but yes, there's something sickeningly goody-two-shoes going on here :D He needs a junky-alcoholic phase, or at least some stubble, or at least a pimple or 2
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List of Arts Where Experimentation is Dangerous: 1) Sword-Combat 2) Aerial Acrobatics
George Russell's "Lydian Chromatic Concept" basically provides an organizational system in which all chroma sound good together, if correctly-octave-spaced... hence modal jazz. etc... augmented and diminished hybrid = lydian (iii-III-iii-III all the way up...i.e some Maj21x47#45x43#41x39#37#35#33#29#27#25#23#19#15#11 chord...Schoenberg would be proud but argumentative)
I never quite got the point of this idea. Even though I agree with him that lydian is the basis of all music via the stacking 5ths. I guess I don’t see his logic in establishing basically: C Lydian A melodic minor G harmonic minor A melodic minor b5 C whole tone C diminished (b2 version).
All the above rooted on C and given unique names. I mean it seems to be sort of random choices, unless those were “popular” in jazz only at the time? What about lydian #9? Lydian Dominant? Those two are main ones I use anyway after basic Lydian. I just don’t see the point of using bits and pieces of established disciplines to create a new convoluted system unless there is some logic to it. Like it would make sense if you want to derive scales from lydian and do it in some sequence like:
Lydian #2, lydian #3, lydian #5, lydian #6, then the extra sharps from melodic minor etc. So there is a natural progression. Then you can follow with Flats the same way. In the Wiki quote they claim people use his method to study giant steps, but it still modulates by m3 so no difference there than calling them relative minor or Phrygian or whatever you want. Either way it is “wrong” because Coltrane was not doing that. He would play D harmonic minor on the D chord going to G, but not the same thing on the Bb chord going to Eb for example. He was changing scales tonally, ii-V-I and using worked out phrases, not running scales. It is too fast to run scales.
A generational talent. Highly disagree that anything he is talking about is nerd music theory, Jacob is more than just "talented." He's an incredibly rare confluence of talent, hard work, and wonderful taste, as cerebral as he is adept at transmitting emotion/feeling... he'll most certainly go down as a "great" when all is said and done. Obviously folks like Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones recognize that as well, for good reason.
I tried watching a few of his videos on YouTube but couldn’t finish a single one. No matter how talented he is I just don’t like his music. Each to their own.
Just F-ing listen to Miles Davis and grow up. For F sake. Enough.
These You Tube boys didn't invent rotating chords and Poly chords, it was Stravinsky and people like Bill Evans and Miles. All the you tube boys learned this from teachers in academies because it is all standard now. Gosh my saxophone teacher and high school band teacher taught this.
Either way it is “wrong” because Coltrane was not doing that. He would play D harmonic minor on the D chord going to G, but not the same thing on the Bb chord going to Eb for example. He was changing scales tonally, ii-V-I and using worked out phrases, not running scales. It is too fast to run scales.
This is correct, Giant Steps chord changes pass too fast to make scalar improv work, you get left in the dust. Coltrane worked out things ahead of time that he could plug in a quickly modify, but the phrases he used were designed to bridge between the two chords per measure sets he put together in GS. each measure in GS has two chords and the tempo of the piece is already fast, he was cooking up the opposite of a 1 to V modal base for improv, he said ok, lets see how we can have a fast changes that are more dense than even the quickest be-bop changes and make fragments of the chords you can run together over them.
This was common knowledge to jazz students by 1985 at least.
High school band teachers explain poly chords and such ...since the 1950's when playing 20th century music for symphonic band.
This was common knowledge to jazz students by 1985 at least.
Right. I was referring to the wiki article that made the claim that students of the Lydian chromatic thing were using it to deal with giant steps and I was thinking that didn’t make a lot of sense unless the students were slowing the tempo down 8x. I tried that thing doing basic ionian, and it only works very very slow. Anyone can check coltranes transcribed solo on youtube and see how repetitive it actually is in terms of his operational phrases. They are falsetas.
About Jacob collier, I’m glad some people really like him. But the thing he excitedly explains to people, negative harmony and palindromes etc this stuff, it is “nerdy” to me because they are musical devices that seem more complex than they actually are. There’s the circle of 5ths and that’s it. The next nerd level is to violate the circle with non-ET tempered intervals. I am glad he is having fun with that, but as Pythagorus already knew, it sounds weird.
It's getting worse too. Everybody's in a frenzy now to try and beat the new world record:
Re: Collier, personally I enjoy his stuff, though I wouldn't put him head and shoulders above the rest of his generation, so "generational talent" isn't how I would think of him. I don't know how much influence he'll end up having. Dunno, things like changing the tuning during the song above from A=43é to 440, use of non-tempered pitches, etc. It's all very interesting but I doubt many people will replicate it. So if you go too far in that direction, then you just end up being Ben Johston and his bizarre quartet that everybody knows about but nobody ever plays.
Though in Johnston's case, it's different because the pay-off is very noticeable. In Collier's case though, not so much. The reason I doubt people will replicate is simply because it's too much investment for too little pay-off. If even the very noticeable pay-off in Johston's work isn't being replicated because people don't find it worth the investment, then all the more so with Collier where the pay-off is far less noticeable. If you wanted to play the song above live, without simplifying it, you'd have to either go fretless on some of the instruments or have two of each fixed-pitch instruments. In another song, if you want to add those one or two notes that are some cents off of the tempered pitch, you'd have to program your keyboard to do that, with all the time and effort required to learn how to do that. And the pay-off is minuscule, and in many cases it just won't be noticed at all by most people.
As for the "normal" harmonic complexity and how he still manages to make it sound simple, maybe I'm missing something but to me that's just about leaving a simple melody front and center. As long as you do that, you can add whatever kind of complexity you want and it'll keep that feeling of being anchored in something simple. If he starts including sections where he drops the melody to do some soloing, improv, etc. all the sudden people are going to feel that it's all very complicated. Dunno. Take jazz standards but only keep the parts where they're playing the main theme and you get essentially the same thing. And jazz would probably be a whole lot more popular if they had just done that all the time. But it also would've been less interesting and less fun for the musicians.
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Calling the Coltrane lines in GS as falsetas is good way to explain it. After he used the material in Nicholas Slonimsky’s repository of scales and played with Davis et al, he had figured out ways to put pentatonic scale fragments together in lyrical ways. He could play scales as fast as anyone ever will, but that ultimately was not the point. Looking at Coltrane via the stacking chords that Lydian analysis isn’t what Coltrane was doing. It’s maybe a way of seeing into part of it, but his ideas for the most part are about scale permutations that he carefully learned to create very expressive long lines by hearing him cycle through his personal sets of permutations. It’s more about the way he drew from interpolation and infrapolation of stuff mixed with pentatonic work and chord fragments linked via pentatonics.
The other guy to study is Yusef Latiff. These fellas on you tube do a great service, but most of that information is standard music school info. Poly chords have been in frequent use for a hundred years now. And there’s still that weird Beatles chord.
It's getting worse too. Everybody's in a frenzy now to try and beat the new world record:
Don’t understand the point or big deal of the video? Play the same music at faster tempo? He didn’t play coltranes solo so I don’t get it.
And just fast is not the point. You have to deliver the feel. That is why I prefer Junna, right in the pocket. Slow it down if you have to, it still feels good.
Don’t understand the point or big deal of the video? Play the same music at faster tempo?
I don't think there is one. It's just a ****post full of memes. The reference you might be missing is the "any% speedrun". There's a subculture in video gaming where players compete against each other to complete a game as fast as possible, even when time wasn't a factor at all in the game itself. So they just turned everything into a race, with their own sites with time records, scoreboards, etc. Now that some of these speedrun games have been going on for a few decades, you can find these videos on youtube that present a history of the world record, kind of like a documentary. And it's all rather funny when you're not part of that world. It's all very dramatic for stakes that are very low.
So anyway, that video is modelled after those, using the same kind of language, references, etc. He probably saw the video of that guy at the end playing Giant Steps really fast for some reason, and figured it would be funny to imagine a world where "music speedrunning" was a thing. ^^
quote:
Junna
Nice! Man, 20 years later and I'm still kind of jealous of people who have a double pedal on the kick drum. I wanted one sooo bad back then. Doing Sonata Arctica covers without one just sounded really wrong
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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