Some good news for me today - this blog has it's first comment from a reader! Hurrah and a big thanks to Tom for his input!
I'm grateful to anyone who takes the time to share their thoughts on this blog and I started to reply to the comment. It started to get a bit long so I thought I would turn it into a post. Tom's original comment is below to save you scrolling down:
I've just read your first few posts and I shall probably read your future ones too. But I would just like to say that I don't think jazz is necessarily any more difficult to do well than other musical forms that require many years of practice. I don't think you could objectively prove that playing jazz piano is harder to do well than to play reggae bass to the standard of (say) Robbie Shakespeare, or classical cello to the standard of Heinrich Schiff. They all take 20 years to get to the top of the game.
Personally, I play Blues guitar as an amateur and I get a lot of pleasure from it. I could have chosen jazz instead but I simply prefer Blues.
Tom.
I do take the point about the top level in all music being equally difficult to reach, but I guess that the reason I claim that jazz is the most difficult kind of music to play is that you have to get to a reasonably advanced level before it starts to sound even remotely plausible.
If we took your example of guitar playing, when you start learning blues, learning three easy open chords of, say, A7, D7 and E7 will have you bashing out a basic 12 bar pretty soon. There are plenty of guitarists playing (and gigging) in blues bands with just a few chord shapes and a single minor pentatonic/blues scale shape in their musical armoury. They may not be great, but they're good enough for the Dog & Duck on a Friday ni
However, in order to get around even a basic jazz standard and to improvise at a very basic level you're going to need to know a lot more about how music is put together and which notes can be played on which chords. Sure, there is modal jazz, which has relatively little harmony but that's a tiny area of the music (and creates its own problems!). Most standards will contain several key changes which need to navigated successfully simply to stay in tune.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that jazz is any way superior to other forms of music - my degree is in classical music and I have a CD collection full of just about every kind of music there is; it's just that I think that the level of knowledge and ability required to play even passably authentic jazz is higher than that of other kinds of music.
Having said that, I do agree that great musicians are equally great regardless of the genre that they play in. Is it harder to play like Pat Metheny than B.B. King? Absolutely not - nobody phrases like B.B.!
To get to the top of the tree is damn difficult and requires equal dedication in all kinds of music. All I'm saying about jazz is that it's probably harder to get to the lower branches in the first place!
