Jazz AI

 

Guitar solos are dead only to the degree that they exceed the attention span of the listener. If you look at the popularity of videos featuring soloing, the attention span is longer. But these days, I think it’s more about the power of getting Likes. The old-school version of soloing is probably dead and follows the decline of interest in jazz in general. 

Back in the day, people spent their time actually studying and practicing rather than making and/or watching videos. Everyone knows people that assert that they don’t like or understand jazz. A lot of it has to do with impatience, again the result of shorter attention spans.

Solos can be effective but they cannot be boring. There are ways to make them less boring, but that takes lots of practice, which people aren’t spending their time doing.

8/6/2019

[8/6/2024: Pop songs typically don’t have solos in them, although they frequently did in the 60s and 70s because of the influence from jazz. Any 20-something guitar player in the 60s was born in the early 40s and jazz was on the radio at that time. AI-generated pop songs don’t yet have solos in them but could be an interesting feature–where the solo in a bridge would be different each time you played it].