acoustic Jazz

thanks for the clarification. i can say now that i was honestly a little upset with your original post in that, with all that I wrote, you took that small portion away and argued with it. this is why i feel it is important to give people the benefit of the doubt as people don't always write what they're thinking, and i appreciate what you've said and that is also why i'm cautious with what i write. i've seen very meaningless topics go way out of proportion with people swearing at each others on forums, and i just feel that usually (if not always) that's pointless and i walk away.

i think we basically agree (if you look at one of my posts you will see that i talk about genres overlapping and that what someone considers the genre of a song is not what someone else does). you're in england and i'm in canada, so i'm not sure if you have access to this but i subscribe to yahoo music. i can take an artist that i like and they will arrange a radio station with songs "like" this artist's song. i cannot tell you how many times i wonder how they come up with what they do and i disagree with their choices (or the database choices), but what we've been discussing is that it is very difficult (if not impossible) to type cast the music of a specific artist.

i'm not a fan of wes montgomery's music or jazz in general, which makes this discussion a little funny. i mentioned wes montgomery b/c an earlier post talked about his jazz as an example of jazz guitar. i listened a bit to one of his albums and although it is impressive i didn't like it at the time. now as my guitar skills are progressing i will probably have another listen. i am however a huge fan of smooth jazz guitar, however it is being defined :D

thanks for your post and your clarification. talk to you later,

paul

Paul,

no probs, I'm glad my second post went cleared things up a bit. I agree that what is written and what is meant are often two completely different things (we need a good tube-forum, then we'll get some real tone to these convo's lol j/p)....I gotta confess, I do have a tendency to post-now-explain-later which may be my downfall.....

looking back at the thread, I was very out of line posting that way I did with no further explan in that post, so I'm sorry I caused offence, it wasn't intended that way. I'll try to exercise a bit more caution in future if I'm disagreeing with someone, or saying something that could be taken as flat-out disagreement.

I don't have yahoo music (dunno if I have access to it), but last.fm does a similar thing, and I use that fairly often. My problem is my tastes span so many different 'genres' there's no way of predicting what I'll like next, lol. Usually, I'm looking for something outta left-field, totally different to whatever I've been listening to at the time, so last.fm's recommends don't usually cut it, they're either stuff I already know of, or stuff too close to what I've been listening to. that's the kewl thing bout places like this, give it a week and someone will post with a link to something I'm not expecting. Even if I don't like it, it usually gives me something to think about.

I'm not a great fan of Wes either, although I respect it....I suppose that partly prompted my posting the way I did. I'm actually not very big on jazz guitar generally (although I do love Jim Hall and some random french bloke I found on youtube recently but forget his name), I much prefer horns or piano for that stuff, so I guess its a bit of a thorny topic for me - I wanna play jazz, but I'm not that keen on most jazz guitar I've heard.

Sara

There are accepted genres of jazz as a fairly well studied art form. Now it's very true that most artists fall into different genres at different times (Miles Davis basically invented 3 of them, for example) and that even on any one record or within one song different genres may be explored.

Wes is an example of an artist who covers a variety of styles. In his Riverside Record days, Wes was a guitar tour-de-force in the jazz world. He moved to Verve and started doing more orchestral arranged stuff. Music with a "jazz" sound, but none of the trademarks of jazz music. He moved from Verve to A&M with producer Creed Taylor (who later started CTI) and arranger/conductor s Don Sebesky to do instrumental versions of pop songs. This was named "smooth jazz," but is decidedly not jazz -- it features no improvisation and no re-harmonizations, it was entirely arranged and conducted music, a production effort often with different parts recorded independently of the other musicians.

So when someone talks about making music like Wes, they might be talking about post-bop guitar work ala Jimmy Smith, or they may be talking about orchestral horn/guitar music, or they might be talking about doing mass-market pop. And one doesn't sound anything like the other.

Put on a track from Far Wes and compare it to a track from Boss Guitar to a track from A Day in the Life and you will hear 3 very different styles of guitar. Some things, like block chord choices and octaves for melodic riffs will give you an idea that the guitarist in each may be the same person. But once you look at the structure of the music, it's very clear these are different styles.

My take is that the original poster isn't interested in Jazz -- as he's referencing "smooth jazz," which almost always has on it's label the words "arranged and conducted by".