I've been studying Jazz for years. Every now and then I have to reset my current understandig of what Jazz is and how to play it. The reason for this is that the knowledge I recieve comes from different sources. And since different sources produce different kinds of kowledge, the student's job is to integrate all that knowledge into one single understanding. Most of the times this understanding is subjective, and not shared by everyone in the same way.
However, a true musician will always strive for something “objective” (as opposed to subjective), not knowing for sure if such kind of knowledge can ever occur.
With this approach I will try to present the most complete and useful ideas that have served me to understand and play Jazz for real. These ideas may not be “objective” regarding to terminology, sytax, and rules compared to traditional schools, but they seek for the same or better results.
None of the ideas treated in this method are new, moreover, some of them are very old. The difference here is that they are organized to work in a context, taking their meaning from the context, instead of having one single, standalone interpretation. This means, for example, that a sequence of notes may be or may be not a melody or a scale. This depends on the structure of the sequence itself, if there is an (acompañamiento), how long it is, if it has regular accents or not, etc. So, to say that a melody is “a squence of notes...” with this or that property, is not exactly precise, besides of usless, since the best way to know what a melody is, is to listen one or many.
Spite of this, there are many concepts that one can formulate to refer to specific processes in music, not clearly recognizable, but that rule as precisely as gravity rules in our everyday lives. To aquire an understanding of these ideas, regardless of how thery are formulated, to learn to observe them working in real life, is an investment that every serious musician should do to be a real master of his craft. Here I want to formulate the set of concepts that I have elaborated after many years of Jazz piano study, and proved to be useful, complete and consistent.
To be continued...
Soon in The Structure of Jazz Piano: