On Roots (Cont)

 

Watched a performance of Pat Martino who just died last week. It was a duet with a piano player on a standard. A friend commented that he didn't think that it was substantive--he was just playing scales and it didn't seem to have any form at all. I made the counterargument that younger metal players just play fast arpeggios. It's not compositional. But he argued that it is compositional and improvisation in the sense that it looks like it's improvisation. That kind of playing is almost scored. It's practiced over and over again. It's essentially a cadenza. Cadenzas don't exist in jazz but they do in pop, rock, and metal. Both styles have their roots in classical, but different roots. 

11/7/2021

[11/7/2024: When we say something or someone has “roots” we tend to think it’s just a few branches, but roots are huge entangled networks. They are ‘fungible” in the sense that you can’t separate one root from another. One or two roots might be from the classical tree, a few others from the jazz tree, but they still look like any old root.]