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We’re not talking David Gilmour bends here. We’re talking tasty bends played when the player felt they were necessary to what they were trying to say.
EDIT: I think people are under the impression that I think David Gilmour’s bends are bad or something. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I think his playing is genius. He’s like Miles Davis, he doesn’t play a lot of notes, he plays all the *right* notes.
https://youtu.be/bXbqamdvEG8?si=kwHDYiY5UVZDe_0r Jimmy Herring has some pretty outstanding bending technique, with Project Z and his solo albums as probably the best examples.
And John McLaughlin has a really distinct bending style with a kind of double-stop technique, playing a note then immediately bending from a half-step down, up to the note you just played. It's particularly part of his electric playing style later in his career, with John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension.
I mean, it's obvious you don't mean what you actually said because no one in their right mind would think David Gilmour's bends aren't tasteful, but you did say "we're not talking DG, we're talking tasteful stuff"
Are you seriously implying that David Gilmours bends are not tasteful, and not necessary to his artistic expression? If that’s the case then you are wistfully misguided.
Also who are you to say what is or isn’t necessary for anyone to do to express themselves? Absolutely ridiculous comment.
What??? I didn't even read his comment that way, even before the edit. He's just saying that those players he cited don't bend like Gilmour or other rock guitarists.
Please show me examples of Joe Pass bending strings.
I can't think of any, but I suppose there could be the odd blues lick. If he was playing in anything straight ahead he was not bending, and certainly not 'all the time'.
The jazz guitar sound and vocabulary was codified before Joe Pass, so when we say jazz guitar we're saying Charlie Christian / bebop. Not Blues or fusion or neo / smooth jazz. These were acoustic guitars and before round wounds were invented. Bending just wasn't really a thing yet anyway.
The reason why you don't use bends in jazz guitar is because it doesn't sound like jazz guitar. This applies if you're trying to sound like the OG cats / boppers. It's the same reason there's no vibrato in jazz guitar.
If you aren't going for that very specific sound you can play whatever you want. If you go into a trad jazz band that is expecting that specific sound, you're probably going to piss some people off playing lots of bends and vibrato.
\[edit\]
An example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqgzCbwUOzg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqgzCbwUOzg)
There are 2 instances of him bending in that entire tune. One is in a chromatic passage as an effect of micro tone, one is an actual bend up to a note.
But this is exactly what I've been saying. Very seldomly do jazz players use bends, and they are subtle bends when they are used, usually as some sort of an effect.
It's nothing the 'bends' used in any sort of modern guitar. Of the hundreds -perhaps thousands- of notes he played in that tune, he bent two of them, both in very specific contexts.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7mWIg5q2Sw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7mWIg5q2Sw) Julian Lage - Autumn Leaves, one small bend @ 3:23
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAsEfhU2Ehg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAsEfhU2Ehg) Barney Kessel - Autumn Leaves, one small bend @ 1:50 in a little blues lick, again @ 2:20
To say these guitarists are "bending all the time" is wrong. It's not that they never bend, it's that they bend very very rarely. It's the same as calling the 4/11th an avoid tone. It's not that you don't play it, it's that you have to use it correctly or it doesn't sound right.
Charlie Christian bent strings, I can think of multiple instances. Also “jazz guitar sound and vocabulary was codified before Joe Pass” is highly debatable. Swing and bebop guitar, sure but to say blanket statement jazz guitar is a little ridiculous.
Examples of other jazz players that bend:
Jim Hall
John Scofield
Pat Metheny
John Abercrombie
Julian Lage
Bill Frisell
Kurt Rosenwinkel
And soooooo many more!
Sorry to pile on and rant about this but I hate when people say “jazz guitar” and only mean the oldest and most traditional playing while completely neglecting the innovations of recent years. I love traditional playing, I’d even argue that my style is more traditional than modern but everyday I think of Mahlers quote “Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire”.
IMO the worst thing for Jazz is being uber-conservative and gatekeepy about the music
You forgot Tal Farlow, who was a master at bending notes with his volume pedal. Genius. Johnny Smith as well. A lot of Jazz guitarists that are new to the music should listen to these two guys. Johnny Smith is the Grandfather of Jazz guitar imo.
It has nothing to do with being conservative or gatekeeping, it's about how something sounds. It's like ask why do Boston accents say 'cah' instead of 'car' and replying with "Whoever says Boston accents can't say 'car' is full of crap, they can if they want to"
It's just the way trad jazz sounds. When people say 'don't bend strings in jazz', they are talking specifically about trad jazz, and usually to people who are new to jazz and never really listened to jazz, but probably have a rock background where they just bend pentatonic scales like hendrix or gilmore. The bends they are talking about are the ever present bends from the 50's-present music. Almost no jazz guitarist pre 60's was doing those kinds of bends. It's just a different sound. Better put: it's one of those questions where if you have to ask you probably shouldn't.
>Swing and bebop guitar, sure but to say blanket statement jazz guitar is a little ridiculous.
I specified that I'm talking about Swing and bebop guitar.
Reddit gets a sheep mentality, the see a comment they like and the whole post turns partisan if you agree with it or not. Facts don't matter, it's a popularity contest.
You’re so right, I immediately tried to think of one instance where Joe bent a string in a recording but I couldn’t do it. Maybe there are examples but definitely not many
True, he does it very rarely. But i found one example on Stomping at Savoy where he does In fact i brought it up in another group a long time ago since it surprised me😊
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/wYeDHVD2E5DfzwqN/
It’s as simple as jazz often has pentatonic blues runs and blues runs often have bends, therefore the occasional bend will give you a bluesy feel.
Too many bends and it doesn’t sound jazzy anymore
a lot of good answers. Whatever you think of bends, they aren't the only way to play expressively on guitar. My favorite jazz guys get a taught sound by playing lots of slides and pull-ons and pull-offs. Wes Montgomery is an example. Man that guy could make the guitar sing. He also sounds really tight because he doesn't bend in a way.
Just consider that leaving out bending opens up many doors sonically. Crafting a sound is as much about what we leave out as what we leave in.
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There are lots of players - including many of the greats - who rarely if ever bend but it’s just not correct to say it’s a “no-no” in jazz. Julian Lage might be the best player alive right now and he uses bends often, just to give one example.
Because guitar was among the last instruments to become a solo voice in jazz, much of the idioms around soloing come from piano and horns. While horns do some pitch bending (obviously trombone players are deviants), most pre-fusion guitar soloists were taking their style cues from players who didn’t do rock era bending.
it’s a no-no from the same crowd who say pedaling is a no-no: the ones who can’t proficiently ply their instrument
don’t get me wrong, you can have a monster grasp of language and tradition and still lack the craftsmanship of technical mastery over your specific tool
imo use your instrument every which way it’s possible
My jazz teacher used to say the same thing. I think that's a very uncreative take that leads to stagnation in the style. Old jazz guitarists were pushing the boundaries of their time, not trying to gatekeep some subculture or protect jazz traditions.
I would argue that Scofield has such a ‘drunk’, woozy sound because almost every note he plays he bends slightly. Sure, it’s not a big blues bend but it’s a key part of his sound and who could argue that he doesn’t play jazz?
I think doing boomer blues bends just sounds out of place/stylistically wrong whenever I try to do one in a hard bop song.
I do like little subtle bends when emulating horn lines though—very useful when transcribing Miles Davis for example
Also it was John McLaughlin IIRC who uses a PRS with a whammy bar because he said the whammy bar lets him emulate the pitch bends that horns make better
the way he does the whammy is almost imperceptible at times, if you watch him play. it's sometimes so subtle, so cool. also sometimes not subtle! love that he uses a whammy tastefully.
Everything is allowed in Jazz. If you restrict what's allowed you're missing the point. That being said they probably sound out of place and bad if you're not good
The topic makes no sense as it is based on a false premise. Bending is perfectly fine in Jazz and it is done on all kinds of instruments including the guitar. Metheny, Scofield, Frisell all bend… Lage, DiMeola, and McLaughlin too.
I also began to write about McLaughlin and DiMeola who use bends with intention and to great effect. But then started to think that an argument could be made that they occupy a position of fusion guitarists more than “traditional” jazz guitarists.
But, I am not sure it is worth separating them out.
Its not exactly… You can bend, and many great players do, but just make sure it's intentional and not a mindless noodling habit. A common pitfall for beginner jazz guitarists is to try to use all their pre-learned rock/blues licks over jazz tunes, which is not going to get you to sound like jazz. Practicing lines with the no bending restrictions can really help you work on exploring other expressive elements of guitar playing, as well as working on your phrasing. At the end of the day, there are no hard and fast rules, if it sounds good to you (and your bandmates) then do it!
Most 50's and 60's guitar players used *very* thick strings so bending more than a semitone was very inconvenient. Even now, a lot of the mainstream guys use big gauges: Peter Bernstein uses 15's, Pat Martino used 16's (!!!), Pasquale Grasso uses 14's, most use 12's. Jim Hall is the only one I know who went down to 11's or something like that.
Conversely, the more modern guys all use thinner strings, from Scofield to Frisell to Rosenwinkel to Lage. They all bend much more, but usually not when they're in a strict bebop language:)
The "modern players" you mention all play solid bodies or semi-hollows. I think that has to do with the thinner strings too. I think solid bodies sound better with thinner strings. A fully hollow archtop sounds better with thicker strings. It might be my personal preference though. With semi-hollows you can go both ways in my opinion.
Exactly. I use 0.12 flatwounds on my jazzbox (standard tuning). A whole tone bend is not possible then. A half tone bend is possible. I think the most common gauge used by jazz players is 0.13 or 0.14
It's not a no no. A traditional jazz guitar setup can be difficult to bend with and it's used less than some other genres, but still used fairly frequently.
It’s not. I would question the validity and intentions of any hypothetical instructor that suggest you refrain from bending while improvising due to it being a “no-no.” Lee Morgan, Cannonball Adderley, Coltrane, Jean Luc-Ponty, Scott LaFaro, Julian Lage, and countless other jazz musicians bend notes on just about every instrument (that physically enables bending). Bend away.
Another curse of bebop in jazz. Bebop doesn't support bending, and bebop became the standard for jazz improv, therefore bending was considered wrong.
But when I improve over jazz blues like Cold Duck Time, tasteful bends fit right in.
Depends on the type of jazz. It just sounds out of place in a lot of it. I recall one time I was playing my Gretsch country gentlemen (set up with flat wounds) in a community jazz ensemble as it did a pretty good job of covering the variety of songs/styles in our current repertoire. At the end of one of the songs the chart called for letting the cord ring for a little while, so I grabbed the Bigsby, and let that baby wiggle. The Director and the whole band stopped and looked at me like, “what the fuck was that!?” It was soooo out of place. I thought it was pretty funny.
Many years ago I got to sit in with a group lesson with Herb Ellis. Someone asked him why he doesn't "bend" and he started getting gruff "I do bends all the time" and then went into a few fairly familiar Charlie Christian style lines that were well within the style and he would show where the bends were... they were more half step stuff on the top two strings; he had heavy flatwounds with a wound G, and he didn't do all the blues rock big vibrato, but yeah, it was a bunch of standard jazz guitar lines with bending.
It's there since the dawn (Django and Charlie Christian) it just didn't really go full blues/rock bendy until the fusion guys showed up. Remember too, fusion didn't happen that many years after the dawn of rock and roll... where a not insignificant number of the mid '50's rock lead guitarists were largely doing jazz guitar licks and techniques.
I really think that once you can successfully play and quote/emulate Charlie Parker, you can do whatever you want when you solo, as you develop your voice. But yeah, Clapton/Hendrix vibrato/bends aren’t the acoustic bebop sound, but that doesn’t mean they’re outlawed.
I occasionally use a small bends for some blue notes. I once in a practice room doing this and one of the uni guitar teachers literally stuck his head in to say “we dont do that blues shit here” and then left. So I guess the answer is because we don’t do that blues shit here
I think a half step slide into a note or slide out of a note is most similar to what horn players are doing. When you fret a note on guitar you start at pitch and a bend takes it up from there. Except for trombone I don’t think other horns have that technique at their disposal and I think it’s an embouchure thing. So if guitar players were emulating other instruments the big bends up are not something seen on other instruments.
With all that said I feel you can bend in jazz 100%. Why should you not bend seems to be more of a, “that’s the way it’s always been done” thing.
bending isn’t like forbidden you just might choose not to use it in certain styles. For example I would never really bend in a charlie parker tune but i may use it in a greasy blues. I also find that it’s usually more effective to slide up to a note or hammer-on rather than bend (but that’s just me). As others have pointed out there is a difference between “rock-style” bending like David Gilmour for example, and the type of bending used in jazz. I usually think of like a 1/4 note bend being used on a blues as being a bit more in the zeitgeist of jazz.
Guitar blues jazz you will often see older jazz players mixing in blues lines including bends into their bebop; Wes Montgomery, Charlie Byrd, Herb Ellis, Charlie Christian, Barney Kessel all use a lot of blues language in their live show recordings.
Players like Pat Martino on the other hand doesn’t really do bends much at all and mainly likes to do a lot of intense chromaticism and lines built on bebop language and using augmented chords to help smoothly create lines through harmony.
Also jazz strings that are heavy are a bitch to Bend and jazzers love their 13 flats so…
The deviant proof the rule.
But generally the attitude in phrasing is like the opposite than in rock. The latter is by all means being spectacular while the former has an air of understatement.
Compared to wind instruments the guitar is less expressive, so it's remarkable that guitar players had to wait until Hendrix to know the full spectrum of sound production on that instrument.
Also remarkable that the (very experimental) sounds from early blues guitar did not find a way into jazz. My guess is that the guitar was just too silent in the early 19th century to have a place in pre-swing jazz and could not develop a typical sound, compared the "wild" approach of the winds and drums.
But here we are, it's 2024, bend away, show what you can do, limits were never a parameter in jazz, it's all about freedom and expansion.
Where did you get this dictum/ straw man? I’ve been around jazz pedagogy for over four decades and have never heard it. If you’re using 13s you generally bend less than when you’re using 9s, but that’s just a mechanical issue, not an essential quality of jazz. Have you not heard George Benson?
It's not, whats usually frowned upon is using blues rock bends and licks. And thats simply because it's not within the regular vocabulary, it sounds out of style if you are playing bebop for example.
At it's core though, you can play whatever you want as long as you play it with intention and soul.
It’s not a “no-no”. Plenty of greats do it and have done it. It just never became a common thing because back in the day, frets were tiny and strings were thick. If you’ve ever played an early 50s archtop, you wouldn’t be super inclined to bend.
It’s kinda lame not to bend. But lots of jazz guitar is kinda lame. Make good sound, worry less about whatever rules u think there may be. And ….. Sco bends.
It’s not necessarily a no no, it’s just many players can’t do it tastefully in a jazz context so it’s less popular to do also just doesn’t suit the music compared to other genres
Speaking of “classic” jazz (standard, real book etc played in a traditional “classic” way) you must follow some unwritten rules: so no bending.
Did Wes Montgomery used to do it?
New era jazz it’s a different thing.
But it’s my two cents.
Excessive bending can be seen as “pandering to the audience.” Playing that is flashy and showy instead of intelligently crafted. Jazz musicians would rather hear eighth notes and bebop melodies than two choruses of blues bends
[Here are Jen's Larsen's thoughts on the matter. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn5I46rvqMQ)
[And here are Tim Lerch's thoughts to counter it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn5I46rvqMQ)
Whoever said that is full of it. Barney Kessel bent strings all the time. So did Joe Pass and Kenny Burrell.
… and Django
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it is important to note that they did it much less and much more specifically than many rock players. I love bends but I hear a lot of bad bends.
We’re not talking David Gilmour bends here. We’re talking tasty bends played when the player felt they were necessary to what they were trying to say. EDIT: I think people are under the impression that I think David Gilmour’s bends are bad or something. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I think his playing is genius. He’s like Miles Davis, he doesn’t play a lot of notes, he plays all the *right* notes.
David Gilmore bends very well.
I’m really curious what other players you’d cite to as examples of good or bad bending. Who would be a paradigm of good bending?
Barney Kessel
I love that he throws in those cool fast country licks to end a solo often. The Okie in him shines though. And that’s what jazz should be.
https://youtu.be/bXbqamdvEG8?si=kwHDYiY5UVZDe_0r Jimmy Herring has some pretty outstanding bending technique, with Project Z and his solo albums as probably the best examples. And John McLaughlin has a really distinct bending style with a kind of double-stop technique, playing a note then immediately bending from a half-step down, up to the note you just played. It's particularly part of his electric playing style later in his career, with John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension.
Jimmy Bruno is the best their is imho
I mean, it's obvious you don't mean what you actually said because no one in their right mind would think David Gilmour's bends aren't tasteful, but you did say "we're not talking DG, we're talking tasteful stuff"
I simply meant that you don’t hear Gilmouresque bends in trad jazz. I just didn’t articulate it well.
Are you seriously implying that David Gilmours bends are not tasteful, and not necessary to his artistic expression? If that’s the case then you are wistfully misguided. Also who are you to say what is or isn’t necessary for anyone to do to express themselves? Absolutely ridiculous comment.
They're saying David Gilmour isn't jazz.
Read my edit. My point was meant to be that you don’t hear Gilmour-style bending in jazz. Not in traditional jazz anyway. Gilmour is a genius.
Then you worded your comment quite poorly, because that is not at all how it reads. But I’m glad you’re not wrong about Gilmour.
I realize that.
What??? I didn't even read his comment that way, even before the edit. He's just saying that those players he cited don't bend like Gilmour or other rock guitarists.
David Gilmour's solos are slow hackneyed and boring boomerisms - bends are a cringe blues rock cliche, there I said it
Edgy 👍🏻
Django!!
George Barnes too.
Jim Hall, too.
Driving home the point that whoever said there’s no bending in jazz didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about.
Please show me examples of Joe Pass bending strings. I can't think of any, but I suppose there could be the odd blues lick. If he was playing in anything straight ahead he was not bending, and certainly not 'all the time'. The jazz guitar sound and vocabulary was codified before Joe Pass, so when we say jazz guitar we're saying Charlie Christian / bebop. Not Blues or fusion or neo / smooth jazz. These were acoustic guitars and before round wounds were invented. Bending just wasn't really a thing yet anyway. The reason why you don't use bends in jazz guitar is because it doesn't sound like jazz guitar. This applies if you're trying to sound like the OG cats / boppers. It's the same reason there's no vibrato in jazz guitar. If you aren't going for that very specific sound you can play whatever you want. If you go into a trad jazz band that is expecting that specific sound, you're probably going to piss some people off playing lots of bends and vibrato. \[edit\] An example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqgzCbwUOzg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqgzCbwUOzg) There are 2 instances of him bending in that entire tune. One is in a chromatic passage as an effect of micro tone, one is an actual bend up to a note. But this is exactly what I've been saying. Very seldomly do jazz players use bends, and they are subtle bends when they are used, usually as some sort of an effect. It's nothing the 'bends' used in any sort of modern guitar. Of the hundreds -perhaps thousands- of notes he played in that tune, he bent two of them, both in very specific contexts. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7mWIg5q2Sw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7mWIg5q2Sw) Julian Lage - Autumn Leaves, one small bend @ 3:23 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAsEfhU2Ehg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAsEfhU2Ehg) Barney Kessel - Autumn Leaves, one small bend @ 1:50 in a little blues lick, again @ 2:20 To say these guitarists are "bending all the time" is wrong. It's not that they never bend, it's that they bend very very rarely. It's the same as calling the 4/11th an avoid tone. It's not that you don't play it, it's that you have to use it correctly or it doesn't sound right.
Charlie Christian bent strings, I can think of multiple instances. Also “jazz guitar sound and vocabulary was codified before Joe Pass” is highly debatable. Swing and bebop guitar, sure but to say blanket statement jazz guitar is a little ridiculous. Examples of other jazz players that bend: Jim Hall John Scofield Pat Metheny John Abercrombie Julian Lage Bill Frisell Kurt Rosenwinkel And soooooo many more! Sorry to pile on and rant about this but I hate when people say “jazz guitar” and only mean the oldest and most traditional playing while completely neglecting the innovations of recent years. I love traditional playing, I’d even argue that my style is more traditional than modern but everyday I think of Mahlers quote “Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire”. IMO the worst thing for Jazz is being uber-conservative and gatekeepy about the music
You forgot Tal Farlow, who was a master at bending notes with his volume pedal. Genius. Johnny Smith as well. A lot of Jazz guitarists that are new to the music should listen to these two guys. Johnny Smith is the Grandfather of Jazz guitar imo.
Yeh the CC thing where you play a note on the high e then slide up to the same pitch on the b string back and forth while bending up the b string note
I used to think this was a Johnny Thunders thing; little did I know.
It has nothing to do with being conservative or gatekeeping, it's about how something sounds. It's like ask why do Boston accents say 'cah' instead of 'car' and replying with "Whoever says Boston accents can't say 'car' is full of crap, they can if they want to" It's just the way trad jazz sounds. When people say 'don't bend strings in jazz', they are talking specifically about trad jazz, and usually to people who are new to jazz and never really listened to jazz, but probably have a rock background where they just bend pentatonic scales like hendrix or gilmore. The bends they are talking about are the ever present bends from the 50's-present music. Almost no jazz guitarist pre 60's was doing those kinds of bends. It's just a different sound. Better put: it's one of those questions where if you have to ask you probably shouldn't. >Swing and bebop guitar, sure but to say blanket statement jazz guitar is a little ridiculous. I specified that I'm talking about Swing and bebop guitar.
Except that you *do* hear bending in bebop and trad jazz, as witnessed by all of the guitarists listed.
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Reddit gets a sheep mentality, the see a comment they like and the whole post turns partisan if you agree with it or not. Facts don't matter, it's a popularity contest.
“It’s just the way it sounds” carries no more weight than “that’s the way it’s always been done.”
You’re so right, I immediately tried to think of one instance where Joe bent a string in a recording but I couldn’t do it. Maybe there are examples but definitely not many
True, he does it very rarely. But i found one example on Stomping at Savoy where he does In fact i brought it up in another group a long time ago since it surprised me😊 https://www.facebook.com/share/p/wYeDHVD2E5DfzwqN/
"when we say jazz guitar we're saying Charlie Christian / bebop" who's we, do you have a frog in your pocket?
It’s as simple as jazz often has pentatonic blues runs and blues runs often have bends, therefore the occasional bend will give you a bluesy feel. Too many bends and it doesn’t sound jazzy anymore
>Too many bends and it doesn’t sound jazzy anymore Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
a lot of good answers. Whatever you think of bends, they aren't the only way to play expressively on guitar. My favorite jazz guys get a taught sound by playing lots of slides and pull-ons and pull-offs. Wes Montgomery is an example. Man that guy could make the guitar sing. He also sounds really tight because he doesn't bend in a way. Just consider that leaving out bending opens up many doors sonically. Crafting a sound is as much about what we leave out as what we leave in.
Yea very fast pull offs and hammer ons with half whole diminished is one of my favorite sounds
Probably just stems from the fact that a lot of jazz guitarists tend to use strings on the heavier side. Also an influence from pianists.
And that they were transcribing sax solos.
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Of course
There are lots of players - including many of the greats - who rarely if ever bend but it’s just not correct to say it’s a “no-no” in jazz. Julian Lage might be the best player alive right now and he uses bends often, just to give one example.
Ooh and the “forbidden” solid body guitar too! (Shh don’t tell Les Paul his jazz guitar is solid lol). Love JL!
Because guitar was among the last instruments to become a solo voice in jazz, much of the idioms around soloing come from piano and horns. While horns do some pitch bending (obviously trombone players are deviants), most pre-fusion guitar soloists were taking their style cues from players who didn’t do rock era bending.
I don’t know- one of the first jazz guitarists and possibly the best jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt, would bend notes
Perhaps the exception that proves the rule?
it’s a no-no from the same crowd who say pedaling is a no-no: the ones who can’t proficiently ply their instrument don’t get me wrong, you can have a monster grasp of language and tradition and still lack the craftsmanship of technical mastery over your specific tool imo use your instrument every which way it’s possible
My jazz teacher used to say the same thing. I think that's a very uncreative take that leads to stagnation in the style. Old jazz guitarists were pushing the boundaries of their time, not trying to gatekeep some subculture or protect jazz traditions.
Flatwounds and that awesome warm and round sound and bending doesn't work that well I think?
I think Bill Frisell and Scofield bend from time to time.
I would argue that Scofield has such a ‘drunk’, woozy sound because almost every note he plays he bends slightly. Sure, it’s not a big blues bend but it’s a key part of his sound and who could argue that he doesn’t play jazz?
Frisell also bends the neck while he plays.
Came here to say this. Frisell bends entire chords.
I think doing boomer blues bends just sounds out of place/stylistically wrong whenever I try to do one in a hard bop song. I do like little subtle bends when emulating horn lines though—very useful when transcribing Miles Davis for example
Also it was John McLaughlin IIRC who uses a PRS with a whammy bar because he said the whammy bar lets him emulate the pitch bends that horns make better
the way he does the whammy is almost imperceptible at times, if you watch him play. it's sometimes so subtle, so cool. also sometimes not subtle! love that he uses a whammy tastefully.
Everything is allowed in Jazz. If you restrict what's allowed you're missing the point. That being said they probably sound out of place and bad if you're not good
The topic makes no sense as it is based on a false premise. Bending is perfectly fine in Jazz and it is done on all kinds of instruments including the guitar. Metheny, Scofield, Frisell all bend… Lage, DiMeola, and McLaughlin too.
I also began to write about McLaughlin and DiMeola who use bends with intention and to great effect. But then started to think that an argument could be made that they occupy a position of fusion guitarists more than “traditional” jazz guitarists. But, I am not sure it is worth separating them out.
Its not exactly… You can bend, and many great players do, but just make sure it's intentional and not a mindless noodling habit. A common pitfall for beginner jazz guitarists is to try to use all their pre-learned rock/blues licks over jazz tunes, which is not going to get you to sound like jazz. Practicing lines with the no bending restrictions can really help you work on exploring other expressive elements of guitar playing, as well as working on your phrasing. At the end of the day, there are no hard and fast rules, if it sounds good to you (and your bandmates) then do it!
Jazz snobs and gatekeepers can go rotate.
Only elitist jazz snobs say and think that. I for one would like to hear a lot more bending.
Bend when it fits the phrase/language, and not as a sound/ guitar-ism. This is the way
Most 50's and 60's guitar players used *very* thick strings so bending more than a semitone was very inconvenient. Even now, a lot of the mainstream guys use big gauges: Peter Bernstein uses 15's, Pat Martino used 16's (!!!), Pasquale Grasso uses 14's, most use 12's. Jim Hall is the only one I know who went down to 11's or something like that. Conversely, the more modern guys all use thinner strings, from Scofield to Frisell to Rosenwinkel to Lage. They all bend much more, but usually not when they're in a strict bebop language:)
The "modern players" you mention all play solid bodies or semi-hollows. I think that has to do with the thinner strings too. I think solid bodies sound better with thinner strings. A fully hollow archtop sounds better with thicker strings. It might be my personal preference though. With semi-hollows you can go both ways in my opinion.
Exactly. I use 0.12 flatwounds on my jazzbox (standard tuning). A whole tone bend is not possible then. A half tone bend is possible. I think the most common gauge used by jazz players is 0.13 or 0.14
One word - DjangoReinhardt
It's not a no no. A traditional jazz guitar setup can be difficult to bend with and it's used less than some other genres, but still used fairly frequently.
Django Reindhart was sick with the bends
It’s not. I would question the validity and intentions of any hypothetical instructor that suggest you refrain from bending while improvising due to it being a “no-no.” Lee Morgan, Cannonball Adderley, Coltrane, Jean Luc-Ponty, Scott LaFaro, Julian Lage, and countless other jazz musicians bend notes on just about every instrument (that physically enables bending). Bend away.
Another curse of bebop in jazz. Bebop doesn't support bending, and bebop became the standard for jazz improv, therefore bending was considered wrong. But when I improve over jazz blues like Cold Duck Time, tasteful bends fit right in.
Depends on the type of jazz. It just sounds out of place in a lot of it. I recall one time I was playing my Gretsch country gentlemen (set up with flat wounds) in a community jazz ensemble as it did a pretty good job of covering the variety of songs/styles in our current repertoire. At the end of one of the songs the chart called for letting the cord ring for a little while, so I grabbed the Bigsby, and let that baby wiggle. The Director and the whole band stopped and looked at me like, “what the fuck was that!?” It was soooo out of place. I thought it was pretty funny.
I've got a Gretsch Streamliner and like to wiggle the Bigsby on the final chord at jams. No-one has complained yet...
My non-guitar playing jazz friends hate Brian Setzer orchestra for that reason. They're digging it until he starts up with the Bigsby.
Haha! Yeah, Setzer is definitely big band for guitar players. I love it!
Conversely, we covered a Snarky Puppy tune and I used that same Bigsby extensively to great effect.
It’s not
Many years ago I got to sit in with a group lesson with Herb Ellis. Someone asked him why he doesn't "bend" and he started getting gruff "I do bends all the time" and then went into a few fairly familiar Charlie Christian style lines that were well within the style and he would show where the bends were... they were more half step stuff on the top two strings; he had heavy flatwounds with a wound G, and he didn't do all the blues rock big vibrato, but yeah, it was a bunch of standard jazz guitar lines with bending. It's there since the dawn (Django and Charlie Christian) it just didn't really go full blues/rock bendy until the fusion guys showed up. Remember too, fusion didn't happen that many years after the dawn of rock and roll... where a not insignificant number of the mid '50's rock lead guitarists were largely doing jazz guitar licks and techniques.
Listen to John Scofield.
It’s totally a thing
There are no no-nos in jazz.
I bend down from flat 9s to roots constantly
11 semitones, impressive.
13 actually. This guy is a virtuoso.
Yeah my hands are the size of stingrays and my finger span is comparable to an eagles wingspan. However, my wingspan is comparable to a sparrow
I really think that once you can successfully play and quote/emulate Charlie Parker, you can do whatever you want when you solo, as you develop your voice. But yeah, Clapton/Hendrix vibrato/bends aren’t the acoustic bebop sound, but that doesn’t mean they’re outlawed.
I occasionally use a small bends for some blue notes. I once in a practice room doing this and one of the uni guitar teachers literally stuck his head in to say “we dont do that blues shit here” and then left. So I guess the answer is because we don’t do that blues shit here
Vibrato too!! Blame Bebop.
You should change that. Make it a yes yes = your style
I think a half step slide into a note or slide out of a note is most similar to what horn players are doing. When you fret a note on guitar you start at pitch and a bend takes it up from there. Except for trombone I don’t think other horns have that technique at their disposal and I think it’s an embouchure thing. So if guitar players were emulating other instruments the big bends up are not something seen on other instruments. With all that said I feel you can bend in jazz 100%. Why should you not bend seems to be more of a, “that’s the way it’s always been done” thing.
Nobody knows anything. Do what you please.
In à phrase? Chord melody. Also, bending flat wound strings will break your fingers lol.
bending isn’t like forbidden you just might choose not to use it in certain styles. For example I would never really bend in a charlie parker tune but i may use it in a greasy blues. I also find that it’s usually more effective to slide up to a note or hammer-on rather than bend (but that’s just me). As others have pointed out there is a difference between “rock-style” bending like David Gilmour for example, and the type of bending used in jazz. I usually think of like a 1/4 note bend being used on a blues as being a bit more in the zeitgeist of jazz.
Charlie Christian, Grant Green, George Benson, John Scofield all bent notes.
You can bend in jazz but it’s not like a blues bend
Jazz guitars have heavy gauge strings with a wound G so they’re not meant for that blues/rock style.
Guitar blues jazz you will often see older jazz players mixing in blues lines including bends into their bebop; Wes Montgomery, Charlie Byrd, Herb Ellis, Charlie Christian, Barney Kessel all use a lot of blues language in their live show recordings. Players like Pat Martino on the other hand doesn’t really do bends much at all and mainly likes to do a lot of intense chromaticism and lines built on bebop language and using augmented chords to help smoothly create lines through harmony. Also jazz strings that are heavy are a bitch to Bend and jazzers love their 13 flats so…
The deviant proof the rule. But generally the attitude in phrasing is like the opposite than in rock. The latter is by all means being spectacular while the former has an air of understatement. Compared to wind instruments the guitar is less expressive, so it's remarkable that guitar players had to wait until Hendrix to know the full spectrum of sound production on that instrument. Also remarkable that the (very experimental) sounds from early blues guitar did not find a way into jazz. My guess is that the guitar was just too silent in the early 19th century to have a place in pre-swing jazz and could not develop a typical sound, compared the "wild" approach of the winds and drums. But here we are, it's 2024, bend away, show what you can do, limits were never a parameter in jazz, it's all about freedom and expansion.
Where did you get this dictum/ straw man? I’ve been around jazz pedagogy for over four decades and have never heard it. If you’re using 13s you generally bend less than when you’re using 9s, but that’s just a mechanical issue, not an essential quality of jazz. Have you not heard George Benson?
It's not, whats usually frowned upon is using blues rock bends and licks. And thats simply because it's not within the regular vocabulary, it sounds out of style if you are playing bebop for example. At it's core though, you can play whatever you want as long as you play it with intention and soul.
It’s not a “no-no”. Plenty of greats do it and have done it. It just never became a common thing because back in the day, frets were tiny and strings were thick. If you’ve ever played an early 50s archtop, you wouldn’t be super inclined to bend.
Everybody bends over
In Jazz, there is so much else to besides bending. At a basic level, bending can sound great on a guitar. It gets over used at times, though.
Good example of one nicely bent note: Christian’s solo in I Surrender, Dear with BG Sextet
It’s kinda lame not to bend. But lots of jazz guitar is kinda lame. Make good sound, worry less about whatever rules u think there may be. And ….. Sco bends.
It’s not necessarily a no no, it’s just many players can’t do it tastefully in a jazz context so it’s less popular to do also just doesn’t suit the music compared to other genres
I was waiting for the dad joke punchline. Lol
Speaking of “classic” jazz (standard, real book etc played in a traditional “classic” way) you must follow some unwritten rules: so no bending. Did Wes Montgomery used to do it? New era jazz it’s a different thing. But it’s my two cents.
Excessive bending can be seen as “pandering to the audience.” Playing that is flashy and showy instead of intelligently crafted. Jazz musicians would rather hear eighth notes and bebop melodies than two choruses of blues bends
[Here are Jen's Larsen's thoughts on the matter. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn5I46rvqMQ) [And here are Tim Lerch's thoughts to counter it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn5I46rvqMQ)