Learning from Horn Players
In Jim's intro blues lesson he comments at one point about the difference in phrasing between a typical blues guitar lick and that of a jazz horn player. I was glad to hear that as I think about it a lot when listening to jazz. I find myself replaying passages from sax greats like David Fathead Neuman and Ben Webster. Wynton Marsalis has some signature phrases that I want to understand better. Because breathing for horn players of all types can influence volume dynamics, I wonder if electric guitar players really need to master tone/volume swells to capture this technique. I think it is a rich subject and I'd love to hear the perspective of others on this.
Comments
What a great subject for all of us, although I don't remember saying that!
Back when I was starting out, I remember reading about the "horn lines" Charlie Christian played . I felt confused and inadequate because I didn't know what that meant. I was afraid everyone else knew but me!
Maybe knowing what they obviously aren't, might bypass confusion...
Just so everyone is on the same page, "horn lines" is a general term, might refer to cliches originated on the horn... one thing for sure, these "horn lines" don't sound like Jimmy Page on the "Stairway to Heaven" solo or Mark Farner on "Inside Looking Out" solo which is more guitaristic approach - and is less based on lines that require breathing.
Me? I don't think volume swells are essential but they might add a nice trumpet-like effect.
Additionally, I think the telecaster is a underrated jazz guitar! I sounds sassy and earthy, more like Billie Holiday, Louie Armstrong, Nina Simone... then an ES175!
But, if you have an amp that responds well to your touch, then you should be able to create a large dynamic range by just varying the attack on the instrument.
That said, I like using the volume control on slow notes, so that the note really swells out after the initial attack.
Eric
also, horns force me to think more up and down the neck rather than playing in position. sometimes during fast horn runs to get from point A to point B is difficult on guitar.
as a side note i read in an interview that bill frisell likes to use overdrive to imitate the miles davis 70's horn sound.
A long time ago, I learned Charlie Parker's Moose the Mooche solo from the Omnibook.
It's an awesome picking exercise, if you pick every note.
At the same time, you can try slurring some of the lines to make them sound more like Bird's delivery.
True. The shape of the lines will make you re-think the way you play on the neck.
At any rate, I've always felt my role as a guitar player is to create space, and my role as a horn player is often to fill that space. This actually drives me nuts, because I don't have any innate musical sensibility left on one side of that fence or the other anymore. I probably just play too much all the time as a result. But horn players definitely have to think about phrasing more, and guitar players probably at some point or another have to think about comping more.
I've been revisiting a lot of horn lines lately, though, because they're really handy to keep in mind when playing pedal steel. I never thought about it that way till I saw a friend of mine (and a MONSTER pedal steel player) doing R&B gigs as part of the horn section. There'd be 2 or 3 horns, and then him filling out the chords with this great big vibrato... man. Coolest sounding horn band on the planet. I don't really take his approach, mainly because I don't have his depth of understanding of chord structure (both in general and more specifically when applied to a pedal steel, which is a whole different world unto itself). Even so, the idea of filling spaces between phrases and such or playing some sort of pad or part underneath another soloist or a singer, there are a lot of similarities between being part of a horn section and being the pedal steel player.
Predictably, breath factors in in a big way... horn players have to breathe, so they have to find places in the phrase to do it. So do certain scales in certain keys because of their relative ease to play on the horn. It's particularly worth noting that some interval jumps would be much easier to play on a guitar than on any brass instrument. Jumping from one note to another that has the same fingering on a horn is much more cumbersome than jumping between two notes that don't require much adjustment of the embouchure or breath speed. Wider jumps are always tough on brass for that very reason, but it's not as difficult to jump as much as a fifth, so that sort of deviation when running through a scale or something to that effect is fairly common.
Come to think of it, and I guess I never really considered this before, but when two horn players are playing together, they're each playing a single note line that is 100% of their playing and they can focus on every note and take the melody in any direction, regardless of what the other players around them are doing. But, when a guitar player starts playing multiple notes at once, each finger kind of has to do its own thing, and at least for most of us those fingers are all attached to the same hand... so, there are limitations there as well in terms of what we might/might not be able to pull off.
Another thing I've noticed over the years listening to a lot of good horn players and a lot of good guitar players is that horns have a bit less to work with as they're monophonic instruments, and that often results in more rhythmic complexity. Whereas guitar players could find ways to make a solo that is entirely comprised of 1/8 or 1/16 notes sound fascinating if the harmonic complexity made it so.
There's a fun little challenge/exercise a fellow trumpet player put me up to once, and I bet it would be really interesting to adapt it if any of you are interested in trying it out. I was stuck in a rut playing-wise and wanted to bust out of it a little, so my friend suggested going on a "music diet." I had to pick a record, and then for the following month, every time I consciously listened to music it had to be that record. It's a lot tougher than it sounds come week three or so, holy cow. But I went with my favorite hard bop record, Hank Mobley's 'No Room for Squares', and paid a lot of special attention to Lee Morgan's trumpet playing. The nice thing is that Hank Mobley is a great sax player too, and the two of them have some great horn passages for studying, individually and as a sort of interweaving mini-section as well.
At the time, I was gigging more on guitar and I have to say, due to the laid back and relatively sparse nature of the playing on the record I chose (plus all that time listening to some really good piano comping), my rhythm playing definitely improved, and my improvising definitely sounded a little different. But, you know how it is -- your hand does get into patterns of muscle memory and some of those are inextricably linked to the tangible aspects of playing - for example the shape of the neck, the size of your hands, whatever scale you first went to the woodshed with, etc. So we're not talking about a sea change in the way my playing came out, although there were a lot of neat little ideas I could pull in here and there. For what it's worth, I think a lot of them were rhythmic, not so much harmonic. But it gave me a new love for stringing certain chord changes together with diminished chords in ways you don't hear too often outside of jazz, so that was cool. I've re-appropriated some of those runs in all sorts of inappropriate places since
This is a neat thread, by the way! The more I think about it, I kind of want to go back to a song or two from the hard bop era and pick apart some of those duet lines played by sax and trumpet. They're all over those records. And it would give me a great excuse to go buy up more of the vinyl Blue Note has been reissuing...