One of the differences between playing classical music and jazz is that jazz is all about improvisation. Never play the same song the same way. You might repeat certain lines or phrases, but especially when you’re soloing it’s a freedom dance. You don’t want to be restricted to something you’ve memorized; you want to employ all your knowledge and skill to express how you’re feeling about that song in that moment. On the other hand, contemporary classical musicians consider it an aberration to stray from the page. Their accomplishment is in executing as the composer intended what can be extremely difficult passages, and interpreting those written notes and passages in a manner that separates them from, say, a less skilled musician.
My co-host of our Music Life and Times podcast, Kevin Bales, tells the story of how he and the great jazz trumpeter, Marcus Printup, both studying classical music at the time at University, would meet in a rehearsal room to play jazz until they’d be interrupted and asked to leave so the practice room would be available to more serious students.
There are a host of examples of classical musicians looking down from their perch on jazz, of jazz being considered something less serious or less sophisticated than classical. But there is also counterpoint. In New Orleans in the late ‘70s, my band Metropolis was for a time the house band at The Absinthe Bar, a Bourbon Street club. A couple of horn players from what was then the New Orleans Philharmonic Symphony started coming in after a performance to sit in and try to play jazz. They were fine, educated players with great technique, but really struggled when it came to soloing with us, at least initially. But they loved jazz and trying to improvise, and as you can imagine, they got better over time. Maybe it was the New Orleans in them.
This is one of my favorite stories on the subject from Kevin:
“There was the violist seated in front of me—the piano was placed at the back of the Symphony near the percussion section—during a performance series with the Atlanta Symphony. We were playing jazz compositions, and I had several opportunities for improvisational solos. When we were packing up after the first night, the violist complimented me on my playing, then asked, “Would you mind coming in about 15 minutes early tomorrow night to show me how to improvise?”