The Jazz Age Reading Answers

[Jackie Bullinger]

Asa non-professional, intermediate-level guitarist interested in playing jazz, I wonder how important it is for me to be able to sight read music (and I mean standard music notation, not guitar tablature, etc.) in order to "take it to the next level".

While I can certainly think of many situations where reading may be required/helpful (e.g. some gigs, recording sessions, etc.), I also suspect that there are many highly skilled guitarists that do not know how to read.

I assume that it certainly "wouldn't hurt" to have this skill, but I'm not convinced that it's worth the significant investment. My current thinking is that it is more important to spend that time practicing in other ways, e.g. learning many scales, chord voicings, existing songs, working on rhythm, etc. However, I'm worried that I may be making a mistake.

I should have been clear that I'm more interested in informally playing in 3-4-5tets, but regardless, all the answers are really helpful. I think that what I'm going to do is try to invest a small amount of time to be able to read well enough to figure out new melodies/songs when I'm on my own, but I probably won't be investing the significant amount of time necessary to read and play unfamiliar music "in real time".

Personally, I play in 3-4-5tets and we don't really use music, we just call out tunes that everyone knows. I've had the pleasure to play in Paris as well, and there it is the same way; you don't see those guys looking at a paper while they play. In that case, the most important knowledge is knowing your way around chord progressions. While knowing the melody is also important, you don't have to play it note-for-note, rhythm-for-rhythm as it is on the page. That's frowned upon actually... you have to be able to improvise around a melody as well as chords.

So yes, while sight-reading is generally important for some setups, it's definitely far from the most important thing if you're a non-professional just looking to get some small group gigs and sit in places. Hope this helps!

Do you want to be able to play with other jazz musicians? Especially piano and horn players? They will NEVER have tab for you. NEVER. If you say "hey, do you have tab for that tune" they will either laugh at you or tell you to leave. They have standard notation that you will have to read off if you want to play a tune with them you don't know. If you are expected to play the melody of the tune, you will have to learn how to read, and probably transpose as well.

Do you want to be able to learn from the 400 years of music written down already using notation? Maybe learn some trumpet solos, or study a Coltrane lick or Debussy or Bach? If so, then you should learn to read chord charts at the very least for playing jazz. If you would rather not take advantage of all that learning that has already been saved, organized, and documented for you, then don't bother.

Those are the only two ways that you will be presented with new music in a live playing situation by proficient jazz musicians. No one is going to say "Hold on audience, while we teach this song to the guitar player". They are going to give you a chart, or just start playing and expect that you know the tune or can jump in and get it. This included auditions.

The trick is doing it. Every day. Look at some printed music. It is a water-wears-down-the-stone thing, you can only get six months good at reading music by reading music everyday for six months. You will get better at it the more you do it. Just get a fake book, crack it open and have at it. It will be slow and frustrating at first, but it will get better. The more you do it the faster it will improve. There is no trick or secret, just gotta do it.

But on the other hand be able to sight read is much less demanding. And You will have much deeper understanding of music You're playing/hearing. Areas which are much easier with sight reading than with tabs (or putting notation into a software like Guitar Pro) are: rhytmic playing, harmony, fretboard knowledge/phrasing and probably much more.

So if You are serious about it (and it's hard no to be serious with jazz) invest time to teach Yourself sight-reading. The progress will be slow, but it will gradually improve. Be patient and You will see what i'm talking about.

Lead sheets are the de facto standard resource for learning jazz songs. They have chords notated but the melodies are written in treble clef. The ability to sight read a single melody line is useful to the extent that you will be learning jazz songs from lead sheets. If you would like to be able to learn new songs on the spot, your sight reading will have to be good enough to allow it.

I'm a horn player (sax) that stumbled on this page by accident and I find that this issue even exist to be amusing. From a horn players perspective, the one thing that ticks me off about guitar players is they refuse to read. I'm not talking about chord charts or tab but standard musical notation. I have a jazz band that will set up between 3 to 15 musicians depending on what the gig calls for. We work from a "book" of loose leaf sheet music that has over 600 tunes and any one of them can be called on the gig. I expect the guitar player to see the music and play it note for note. If there is a melody line, the guitar player will need to play it not just strum chords.

I cant begin to count the number of guitar players that have asked me to see the music before the gig so they can "practice", or they want to know what keys we do the songs in. I inform them they get the music at the gig or rehearsal and if they want to take the music home to practice I appologize and say no. (I've lost to much music over the years to risk this anylonger). There are only about 3 guitar players in my area I honestly trust and I know can do the job, even though they may not be the best "soloist" but they are the most consistent and can play the charts.

To play jazz, you need to understand chords (harmony), which major and minor keys these are derived from, and how to voice these chords on your instrument. You need to understand the theory. This is the only thing you need at gigs. People generally don't take sheet music to gigs, they take lead sheets which just give you the chords and melody (so if you don't read music you need to be able to pick out a melody by ear. Not a hard thing to do if you are already doing the other.)

But here's the thing: to get to the point where you're understanding the harmony, you may need to be able to read music, because if you want to learn those things from books, that's the only way. Your other option is private mentoring (or online video lesson) where someone shows you what to do: hence there is no need for sheet music in this case.

But as the number of people using Stack Overflow - and Stack Exchange - grows ever larger, self-answering as the "blog" portion of the not-quite-venn-diagram has repeatedly been ignored, disparaged, and simply forgotten. We've toyed with the idea of introducing wiki pages or articles as first-class citizens a few times, but always came back to the realization that... They've always been first-class citizens. Just quiet, well-behaved ones.

We'll be watching this closely to see how it works, and whether or not it causes unexpected problems. Update: The rep threshold has been dropped to 15 and will stay there unless we find people are abusing it.

I like it - answering your question at the same time as asking is going to save other people the time of answering (and possibly even reading) your question while not knowing that you already had an answer cooked up.

Here is a suggestion to go with this new feature when it is rolled out beyond the Meta-verse: you want to encourage new (competing) answers where appropriate on these instantly-self-answered* questions. I'm think possibly this can be a new badge, i.e. receiving [x] more upvotes than the marked self answer?

I'm thinking that we don't want to have these questions avoiding the technical scrutiny of the community, we don't want people posting theoretical question-answers where the answer is possibly not that technically accurate.

On February 16, 1944, a dozen jazz musicians met at a New York recording studio to record three songs for Apollo Records. The band's leader was the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, who at age thirty-nine was the oldest jazz musician present and easily the most famous. Almost five years earlier, Hawkins had recorded "Body and Soul," on which he improvised seamlessly for about three minutes without once playing the famed song's original melody-except for the opening four bars. Hawkins's brash reworking of the Tin Pan Alley standard had become a jukebox hit for RCA Victor and made Hawkins a saxophone sensation. But jazz reputations in the 1940s required reinvention and fresh achievement. To remain ahead of the creative curve, Hawkins frequently invited younger jazz musicians to challenge him in clubs-a risky move because it exposed him to a possible besting by up-and-comers. But the open invitation also allowed Hawkins to stay sharp and remain in control. The musicians who assembled that day for the Apollo Records session were both his admirers and his stylistic rivals.

The February 16 gathering at Apollo was the very first recording session of the label, which had been founded just weeks earlier by Teddy Gottlieb, the white owner of the Rainbow Music Shop on 125th Street, one of Harlem's most popular record stores. With the Apollo label, Gottlieb hoped to create a pipeline for his record store by having musicians re-create on disc the excitement of Harlem's after-hours clubs. He also fully expected the label's records to sell well in the store's neighborhood, particularly among younger buyers, who weren't old enough to gain entry to the clubs. In Gottlieb's favor was the Rainbow Music Shop's regular sponsorship of the After Hours Swing Session, an overnight radio show on WHOM hosted by "Symphony Sid" Torin. The animated disc jockey had been on the air in New York since 1937, spinning jazz records by black musicians, and the show was revered by Harlemites.

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