How do you learn to play jazz?

Hi Leo, I read your article; I agree, but one should open up more on certain points.

I have been fortunate enough to be literally a child of technology. When I was born, technology was beginning to take its most important steps, and one way or another, I have experienced them all, starting from the first personal computers, moving to the first mobile phones, and seeing how the computing world has become increasingly linked to telecommunications.

If we think about it carefully, a phone call, rather than "extending life," as a famous commercial for a well-known telephone company used to say, I believe it shortens distances, and since they thought of sending data over a telephone pair, the issue has become increasingly filled with important events.

When I find myself talking to people of a certain age, I always happen to encounter a certain resentment towards technology, and on one hand, this amazes me. I remain amazed because more and more often I notice that these people find themselves hating technology without even knowing it, without knowing its potential and the benefits that can be drawn from constructive use. Very often they don't even know how to turn on a computer, they have never browsed the internet, etc.

For my part, just to draw a parallel, I have never farmed a field; I wouldn't know how to sow, I wouldn't know how to plow the earth, and I wouldn't know how to make its fruits grow. Despite this, however, I cannot say that I hate nature; on the contrary, I feel I have a strong bond with it. In the end, we are all children of nature on this planet! In any case, I have technology on my side; I can open a website that explains how to cultivate the land and surely I won't die of hunger...

The important thing for me is always to divide and recognize what is good in something from what is not, and this ability must be developed regardless of technology.

I'll give an example: "the internet has caused an economic collapse of record companies..." My version is: "the dishonesty of people who use a new technology for purposes other than those for which it was designed has caused the economic collapse of record companies". Or, to bring the topic back in line with your article: "The consequence of this technology is that today's musicians are very well-prepared, versatile, and cultured; the technical level has risen, but originality and creativity have decreased". My version: "Technology has brought information and multimedia within everyone's reach; many of these people have preferred to follow the path of theoretical knowledge at the expense of experimentation and creativity".

Speaking of creativity, I don't know how true this sentence is... Creativity exists, but the way of expressing oneself has changed, and perhaps the attitudes necessary for this creativity to bear fruit have also changed; perhaps the most representative figures of this creativity are lacking because maybe, by requiring fewer skills, it produces a more mediocre result. I believe that today much more music is produced with PCs than was done before without their use; therefore, I don't see this problem of creativity, rather I read between the lines a problem of the quality of the creative product... Imagine if Mozart had been able to use musical notation software when he wrote, how much time he would have saved!

Today almost everyone can afford to write music; certainly it won't be the music of great composers, connecting back to my previous point, but perhaps for this genre of music all those rules of classical harmony are not even needed. There is those who compose using audio loops, those who take MIDI loops and modify them, those who use synthesizers and create their own personalized sound, those who try chord sequences on a guitar, those who mimic motifs on a master keyboard connected to a VST. In short, if we analyze it today, we have many more tools to use in order to be creative.

Certainly, if we restrict the field to Jazz, this branch is probably experiencing a phase of decline, just as classical music is. Certain contexts will become increasingly dedicated to an elite of people, technology or not...

Thank you Simone, your contribution is very interesting. In effect, everything we do today goes through a relationship with technology, but music seems to be more interested than other disciplines, perhaps it is precisely the one most involved, starting from the creation of new music, moving through listening, study, and preservation.

Aside from sharing TheSimon's thought, I can say that nowadays a composer who ignores technology, even in compositional methodology, is not a truly complete composer.

Not so much because technology can or cannot lead to a greater or lesser quality, but because composition has always been linked to methodology, and new methods can give us new music.

Even simply writing by moving from a piano to writing by using MIDI changes the matter significantly; for one thing, one is not bound to one's own way of using pianistic technique, and an error on the piano can generate interesting situations within the scope of 10 fingers, whereas an error on MIDI can also involve a (much) wider extension. Not that one shouldn't take hand extension into account, but certainly if I am playing in the bass section of the pf, I might commit an eventual error there; I will encounter an unexpected situation that can fuel creativity and become like a germ. This is just a point of view, I started from the unexpected situation to exemplify the idea... it's not that a composer goes at random, but those who improvise know that the unexpected happens, and the good ones turn them into music.

Aside from the instrumental gesture, composing on a computer allows one to simply let the head work, which in the first instance does not even have to deal with the problem of playability, which can be managed later during instrumentation or orchestration.

As I was saying, the method. Let's think for a moment about algorithmic composition. Just one of the reflections to broaden the field.

I fully agree with Frank. If we want, while composing, by using a keyboard connected to a PC when recording a MIDI track, we also relieve ourselves of the worry of having to remember what that unexpected error was that opened a new door for other ideas.

Regarding the change of methods, perhaps we should take an example from the pioneers of this new way of making music, see Berio, Nono, Stockhausen just to name a few. They are the precursors and the true researchers of a new way of making music by exploiting new technologies. With them, electronic music was born in the strict sense of the term. The combination of electronic events, no longer acoustic, that converge into a musical idea. The transformation of what is an electrical signal and its subsequent filtering into a staff representation. I believe that technology has truly opened, contrary to what is thought, the way for new artists, and the use of modern software has further lowered the threshold of use. The first VCO oscillators, the first VCF filter banks, and the first VCA wave amplifiers were instruments that occupied a room. Today, the digital world has infinitely reduced their dimensions while infinitely increasing the power and versatility of these objects. Even the poorest digital oscillator does its job as well as its respective electronic oscillator. Reducing size and complexity leads to an increase in usability and versatility of an instrument and therefore a larger user base. I don't know, I see it exactly the opposite of what you wrote in your last point Leo, perhaps because I am involved in it and have clear sight of the possibilities this world offers... I see people who do not know the basics of music theory performing in venues and playing more or less catchy tunes which most of the time are liked. I should try to imagine if we hadn't had computers at our service to exploit for computer music... We would probably have saturated the possible ideas for the acoustic orchestra... Welcome to the computers, if they are known how to be used in a constructive and skillful way!