Who is your favorite Jazz musician and what is your favorite song?

[Hornbein]

Hiromi Uehara.

 

[pinball1970]

Hiromi Uehara.

Wow.

 

[Hornbein]

I saw this pianist in Osaka and solo in Kyoto and was quite impressed. Sax player Yukari Nishimura is new to me. Wow! You never know when some unknown is going come along and knock your sox off. And I used to go to jazz clubs dressed as is that bass viol player. Once I went as Elwood Blues and the waitress couldn't stop laughing.

Encore!

 

[Hornbein]

A very expressive singer, the opposite of power singers like Whitney Houston. She's still big in Japan.

 

[Zaciekawiony]

She is good. I discover this week.

 

[Zaciekawiony]

Another from her

 

[Ken Fabian]

Hard to say who I like best and my exposure to jazz is limited (but heard a lot of Dixieland as a child - dad liked it).

The tunes/songs I like best are probably the more widely heard 'commercial' sorts the dedicated fans might call selling out. eg ones like Take Five, Watermelon Man, Girl from Ipanema. And ones like Walkin' Shoes, So What. What else they have done may not suit my taste - I'm not a big fan of other tracks by Miles Davis but I really like So What.

Hard to pick a favourite musician - so many are extraordinary talents. Lately I've been especially impressed by the jazz bassists, who seem so pivotal, even if other instruments are more out front. The bass from So What is awesome - Paul Chambers. Bob Whitlock on Gerry Mulligan's Walkin Shoes. For sheer double bass virtuosity - an Art Tatum of the double bass - the late Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen.
Monty Alexander with NHOP -

 

[pinball1970]

Bepop style guitar.

 

[pinball1970]

 

[Hornbein]

 

[pinball1970]

Beautiful.

 

[Hornbein]

My fave jazz singer.



You just can't get famous singing jazz in Sweden.

 

[Hornbein]

Hard to say who I like best and my exposure to jazz is limited (but heard a lot of Dixieland as a child - dad liked it).

The tunes/songs I like best are probably the more widely heard 'commercial' sorts the dedicated fans might call selling out. eg ones like Take Five, Watermelon Man, Girl from Ipanema. And ones like Walkin' Shoes, So What. What else they have done may not suit my taste - I'm not a big fan of other tracks by Miles Davis but I really like So What.

Hard to pick a favourite musician - so many are extraordinary talents. Lately I've been especially impressed by the jazz bassists, who seem so pivotal, even if other instruments are more out front. The bass from So What is awesome - Paul Chambers. Bob Whitlock on Gerry Mulligan's Walkin Shoes. For sheer double bass virtuosity - an Art Tatum of the double bass - the late Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen.
Monty Alexander with NHOP -

Niels has great intonation, sounds perfect to me. But loose intonation can be nice too. Here's one of my faves. In my opinion it's not really jazz, more like modern classical. It even has bowed bass viol.



I've played a lot of jazz bass but was never very good at it. I'm a rhythm guy, not a melodist, so I could never get behind playing nothing but quarter notes.

 

[Hornbein]

Playing a Thelonious Monk tune. Some of the more amazing guitar playing ever, if you ask me.

 

[pinball1970]

Playing a Thelonious Monk tune. Some of the more amazing guitar playing ever, if you ask me.

She should just learn piano and be done with it! Great technique to do that. Image Joe Pass seeing that for the first time? Or Hendrix!?

 

[Hornbein]

Tory has got to be one of the most skilled electric guitar players in the world but looks so lonely and depressed. I'm trying to get her hooked up with the women of the Tokyo fusion scene who are on the same level of skill. Surely they would appreciate what she can do, which is equally surely not the case in Albuquerque.

 

[Hornbein]

She should just learn piano and be done with it! Great technique to do that. Image Joe Pass seeing that for the first time? Or Hendrix!?

I'm sure they would be pretty damn impressed.

With ebass I messed around with harmonics and chords for twenty years. I got fed up with the awkwardness of it and took up keyboards. It took another twenty years before I was any good at it. I only practiced when I felt like it which is partly why it was so slow, but playing keyboard two handed is a hard thing to learn.

Unfortunately I learned non-optimally. I depend on sight, which doesn't work when the two hands are a couple of octaves apart and you can't see them both. I finally figured out that skilled pianists learn to play by sight reading. Not a useful or interesting skill for me but it forces you to play without looking at your hands. They do it by literally feeling the peculiarities of the key layout. I wish someone had told me that. Maybe they don't know what they themselves are doing. I've tried to do it that way but it seems to be too much work so for now I'll stick with what I have.

This also explains why the equitone key layout with strictly alternating white and black keys will never catch on. It takes a long time to learn to play in all twelve keys so it would seem easier to go to a layout where there are only two different ways. But then you wouldn't be able to play strictly by sense of touch. I suppose there could be some other way to make the keys feel different -- different heights maybe -- but that will never happen.

While we're at it a couple more keyboard facts. It seems strange that the most popular scale begins at C instead of A. It's because in the old days A minor was the more popular scale as it sounded solemn and religious. I also think it is funny that black key scales like C sharp major are easier to play. You'd think wider keys would be easier but the opposite is true. With the white keys one finger is more likely to hit two keys at once, which always sounds terrible.

 

[symbolipoint]

Pianist who works at a hotel lounge in Virginia, Sangah Noona

https://www.youtube.com/@SangahNoona

As for the second part of the question, "favorite song", irrelevant; no answer available.

 

[Hornbein]

Pianist who works at a hotel lounge in Virginia, Sangah Noona

https://www.youtube.com/@SangahNoona

As for the second part of the question, "favorite song", irrelevant; no answer available.

I like the most her ebass playing.

 

[Hornbein]

Tory again playing a Starr Labs ZTar. This company makes dozens of products, all custom made.



As far as I can tell the ZTar doesn't produce any sound itself, it's a controller only. This particular model has strings for the picking hand, unused in this case. These cost about $1500, on sale in July.

I thought it had a weird button layout but not, some of the buttons are black. They are equiv to the decorative inlays on a guitar neck that help find the right key.

 

[Hornbein]

Got to be the best alto sax in the world for ballads.

 

[Ken Fabian]

It seems strange that the most popular scale begins at C instead of A.

I always thought that was because C is in the middle. Which most voices could manage? In my inexpert, mostly self taught way, I tend to lump C major scale together with the (relative) A minor; even if not the same they seem to overlap, at least for chord and note options.

 

[Hornbein]

I always thought that was because C is in the middle. Which most voices could manage?

Middle C is the note halfway in between the bass and treble clef in Western musical notation. They could have named it A. I don't know why this is.

My take is that Western musical notation is a weird illogical kludge that makes things more difficult than they need to be. People do many things that way. Languages in particular. Most non-classical guitar players don't read music, they go for tablature which doesn't include rhythm but is easier to read.

Eddie van Halen started out as a little kid playing the piano in Indonesia. His piano teacher would play a piece for him and send him home to practice it. Eddie was able to remember the music so well that he never bothered to learn to read music. It was years before his teacher figured out this was what was happening. Jaco Pastorius also had this ability.

 

[Ken Fabian]

My earliest music was playing a soprano cornet in a brass band (until I reached an age when that was not groovy) - understanding music was not a big part of what I got taught and even the transposing of how it was written for brass bands - what was C on the clef was actually E flat for the part I played - wasn't something I realised at the time. So there is some practical variation to C as the baseline for music written for some instruments.

My guitar playing now - just for fun, usually with an audience of just one at most (a tolerant wife) - is idiosyncratic (kinda percussive and a bit undisciplined) and is more usually a kind of improvisation around a framework of chords, which can also be subject to change without notice. It is probably a bit (a lot) repetitive with exploring variations rather circling in on a 'finished' form. Playing to achieve precise repeatability is not a strong point, but nor am I a great improviser. By working on my flaws long enough... they have become features.

 

[pinball1970]

General consensus was Buddy Rich did not read or at least read very well. He listened to a chart, memorized it then played it twice and had it down.
He did that with the "Channel one suite," which is absolutely nuts if that is true.

 

[Ken Fabian]

The good bits I come up with - I make stuff up... out of borrowed bits - are usually gone again without sticking. And when I do think it is kinda good I can't help but wonder if the reason is it sounds like something good I've heard before.

Wasn't it a rule Lennon and McCartney used that if they couldn't just remember how a song idea went when they came back to it they abandoned it? Like not writing stuff down (which would be maybe chords and lyrics, not musical notation, or even tab) was their way to ensure only the memorable ones survived. Which requires coming up with memorable ones. But I do wonder if some good ones got away just by not jotting things down at the time.

(I do sometimes try and play in public - an open mic at a local markets or at a local music club gathering - but disinclination to seriously rehearsing probably contributes as much as self consciousness does to the fingers getting all stiff and unresponsive under pressure.)

 

[Hornbein]

A playful version of I Got Rhythm.