Re: vid: sum Bird licks

On Nov 24, 7:34 pm, "Five Sharp" <d.onst...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
And Wes didn't seem to know the names for all the stuff he played.
But not knowing the names doesn't mean you don't "know" the theory.

Mmmm ... I don't see that. This has been discussed here earlier and I am not
convinced. The question is if playing jazz is a skill (behavior) or
knowledge. I think for some, like Wes and Stochelo and Bireli, it's just a
skill, just behavior they mimicked and developed by sheer exposure. There
may be little or even no cognitive processing involved at all. Hans van
Leeuwen that posts here comes to mind too. I don't think Wes had much - if
any - knowledge but he did have the skill, the behavior. You can learn a
language without actively knowing the building blocks (grammar). OYou learn
by sheer exposure and that's how most people learn to speak in the first
place. I have no problem with the statement that Wes did not know theory
because I think he actually didn't. On the other hand you have guys that
write books on jazz theory and know all there is to know and still sound
like ***. Cognition or knowledge is not exactly a conditio sine qua non in
jazz.

If you speak perfect English without knowing the fact that you are,
e.g., correctly conjugating all the verbs, or even that there is such
a thing as "conjugating verbs," the only thing you don't know is THAT
you are doing it. You do in fact know how to conjugate all the verbs
because when quizzed you would always have the right answer.

Even if it's true (and it appears that it may not be true) that Wes
didn't know the names of chords or chord progressions, he always
recognized it/them and could play a series of melodic lines, in the
bop idiom, over it/them. He spoke the language as perfectly as did
the bop player who had studied theory.


And obviously you can speak a language fluently without the theory
(i.e., knowledge of the "rules" of grammar) because many people do it
in many languages all the time. It's only the theorist that has to
know the names. I speak English but don't remember what terms like
past pluperfect means. I'm pretty sure that I will have conjugated
most of my verbs correctly by the time many of you will have read
this, however.

If theory only means "knowing the names of what you are playing" then
it is undeniably true that if you don't know the names for something,
you don't know the theory behind it. But if knowing theory means
understanding the rules, then you can understand them without knowing
the names for them.


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