@Errikos said:
You think the puerile, petty rhythmic requirements of any jazz work, or any complicated underground dance sub-genre drum-kit programming (humanly playable) holds a candle to the rhythmic intricacies of difficult classical music?
Wow, someone has a pretty profound ignorance of the entire genre of jazz. And if jazz is so easy, then when classical players attempt it, why are the results so horrible the vast majority of the time?
I do agree with you about the irrelevance of bringing up sound design in regards to Williams.
Personally, I have no love for almost the entire genre of jazz; pure jazz I hate as an idea. This doesn't mean I am ignorant of it (quite the opposite!), except if you're saying "if you know it, you gotta like it..." However, I know that I am in a minority and perhaps the loss is mine. That also doesn't mean I can't tell a bad performance from a good one, or a good one from a great one. As far as your question goes:
1) A great lot of classical musicians suck at jazz because they also suck at classical music, it's just that most jazz-people can't pick that up because their knowledge of classical music with its so many complex layers of sensibilities is only cursory. And by the way, a great lot of jazz-people suck in playing jazz as well, YouTube is replete with them (most play worse than the bad classical players playing jazz). It takes a great musician to play great music.
2) Nobody said jazz was a piece of cake! - see point n.4 - If a great musician plays classical music beautifully, this has come not only from natural talent, but also from extreme, endless amount of study (not just technical) and rituals of different levels of initiation with the material, the list is endless. The same is true on a different scale of jazz players. Talent aside, in their own fashion they study the appropriate repertoire, the different sub-genres, the recordings of the greats, etc., etc., and of course improvise and play in jazz ensembles ceaselessly throughout their lives. It must be a musical ignoramus that will expect a practitioner from a separate style of music to instantly have the skills to mix it with the great - let alone best - practitioners from a different style to his own. If they really wanted to do it though, the classical musician has a much better chance and will adapt to jazz a lot faster (and will enrich it too), than the other way around, because technically he is the superior by a universe apart. He will therefore only have to study the "feel" for a couple or more years, and then only the top jazz people will be his betters (through talent), and not at every level. For a great jazz musician - say pianist - to go from 'swinging', and playing some periodic rhythms, to play 6-voice counterpoint clearly and 'Le Gaspard de la Nuit', it will take a few re-incarnations, but some will eventually be able to do it.
3) I left the aspect of improvisation out of comparing the practitioners of the two styles, because as far as I'm concerned that's composition. And if you wish to compare the - otherwise great - compositions and free-style improvisations of Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, you name them, with Bach's B minor mass, the Pastoral, the 9th, The Marriage of Figaro, the Meistersingers, Adagio for Strings, the entire piano oeuvres of Chopin, Debussy, Ravel and Prokofiev, Liszt's paraphrases (Improvisations with capital 'I') etc. that is always your prerogative.
4) The snippet from my own post that was quoted is actually absolutely correct whether one prefers one genre to the other. It is not an opinion, it is a fact. When I hyperbolize by saying "puerile" and "petty", it is always in context of comparison of course (say with Michael Finnissy pieces for example), and not indicative of the genre per se.
5) Please don't let 'civilization 3' think that you also agree that Mozart and Tchaikovsky wrote puerile melodies, for I didn't see you criticize any of his positions...
6) Again, this is not the kind of hopeless, futile discussion I was hoping for this time, I just hope a few of you found the article of some use.
P.S.: Paul, do you think 'civ.3' could be Trevor's alias here?