This past Saint Vee had me thinkin’ about being smooth. I’m talkin’ the jazz kind of smooth… the mellow pulses of bass and brushes with splashes of guitar and piano (and even horn). My boy Chuck Mangione has always comes through for me, but there are a slew of others who got themselves some smooth style, including Spyro Gyra, George Benson (definitely on the funkier side of smooth), and even *gulp* Kenny G (who has taken a lot of flak… only some deservedly so).
Now, there is actually quite a controversy as to whether or not smooth jazz is even jazz. Purists will state that it is an over-commercialized aberration more suited for an elevator. I think purists in general are idiotic, and this is no exception. Sure, smooth jazz tends to be evenly dynamic with mellow rythms… hence the label smoooootthhh. Have you ever tried setting a mood with some free jazz? Here’s part of Wikipedia’s definition:
Free jazz normally retains a general pulsation and often swings but without regular metre, and often with frequent accelerando and ritardando, giving an impression of the rhythm moving in waves. Often players in an ensemble adopt different tempi.
This is all a musical pet peeve of mine. Maybe it’s my engineering roots, or my military ones, but the whole thing with players adopting different tempos and doing their own chaotic thing has always been a cacophony to me… I never, EVER liked free jazz. I’ll walk out of Borders before listening to it for long.
You may also hear smooth jazz smeared as “white jazz”… an implication that it is de-souled “real” jazz made to be more palatable for the rhythmically-challenged middle-to-upper-class white suburbanites. This is just Chocolate City nonsense, as radio demographics reveal middle-to-upper-class blacks make up just as large a percentage of smooth jazz listeners. Of course, this makes perfect sense to me, as I’ve always believed that classy people enjoy classy music… and that skin color was NOT a factor in determining classiness.
Smooth jazz is just so classy and sets such an ambiance… you can’t help but slip into a setting feeling a bit of style. Ask a DJ and they’ll tell you that smooth jazz (and a few of its cousins) is some of the best music to play for banquets not requiring dancing… because the rock and dance-type music is too beat-y for conversation. Some people think classical music fits the bill for conversation-heavy get togethers… but they would be horribly wrong… because the huge dynamic range of most classical pieces produces music that is either way too soft or WAY TOO LOUD! The only classical exception is Baroque… but eating to that would feel too much like a Renaissance festival [insert wench joke here].
Enough talk… let’s create a little jazz on our own. Let’s take the cool chord from my post here, and combine it with a few other quasi-cool chords.
x x x ----------- ----------- ----------- 1 | 2 | | | <5 | 1 | 1 | 1 <5 | 1 | | | 1 <3 ----------- ----------- ----------- | | | 3 4 4 | | | | 2 | | | | 2 | | ----------- ----------- ----------- | | | | | | | | 3 | | | | | 3 | 4 | ----------- ----------- ----------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------- ----------- ----------- A7(#5b9) Dm7 Cmaj7
Now keep in mind all of these are "movable" chords, meaning you can play them anywhere on the neck. The only one we'll be moving is the first one, which we'll play as shown at fret 5, but also move down to fret 3 for a G7(#5b9). Are you ready? Okay... the progression is shown below. You can play this fast and rhythmic for some up-tempo jazz, or you can play it slower in a mellow arpeggio style for some (you guessed it) smooth jazz.
║: Dm7 | G7(#5b9) | Cmaj7 | A7(#5b9) :║
I'm a Christ-follower, compelled by my faith toward reason, which points directly toward conservatism. This world's daily onslaught of lunacy offends my intellect and senses, so this is my venue to blow off steam.
I like it! thanks…..:))
It’s been a while since my days of playing in mediocre high school jazz bands that concentrate on the big band jazz, with some swing thrown in there. But I can safely say that I listen to jazz more than any other genre. I agree that jazz is the best music to play in the background. Kind of hard to focus on something with Ludacris’ “Pimpin’ All Over The World” playing.
Being In southern California and to close to Mexico (and Latin America in general) we have several, how would you say, ‘International’ music stations. And with my Sirius Satellite Radio, I have access to even more. But They have jazz that is also totally different from the classic or smooth jazz of the U.S. I seem to find jazz grouped into Pure or free jazz, international, and then ‘Contermporary’ which is the same as smooth in my opinion.
After listening to latin jazz, I totally agree that smooth jazz is not really for white America but ‘Americans’ in general. Sure, we can credit the African Americans for their early talents and creating the genre, but snubbing the newer smooth jazz as watered down, bleached out jazz is stupid. Perhaps we should just label jazz created in the U.S. as American Jazz and the jazz from Mexico or Cuba or Brazil as Latin Jazz.
In future milleniums, it will be labeled as “Earth Jazz” anyway, when humans begin to colonize space and even find alien planets. Soon we will be socializing with Romulan music or Tattoine music playing in the background.