[Dixielandjazz] Faking

[Larry Walton Entertainment - St. Louis]

Steve --Those jazz
> historians who equate faking with improvisation are way off base.
____________________________________________

I'm sure you are right but there is a thing that many artists of all types 
do and that is tinker with their work.  They try it many ways before they 
get it right.

In the artwork I do sometimes it's almost irresistible to not fool with it 
once I have it done.  I have spent, on too many occasions, extra time that I 
didn't get paid for re adjusting, moving things around a bit, making that 
line heavier, putting in something or refining a detail.

This happens in music too where the player, in this case Bach, improves (or 
improvises) on the composers work, in this case his own, maybe after several 
playings before being written down.  The figured bass of the time, while it 
had many rules, was in fact an open invitation to improvise on the melody or 
at least the inner parts just as our chord symbols do today.

I don't know if I have it right or not but I can certainly call what Bach 
was doing, improvisation and what jazz musicians do as faking but you might 
read a lot more into each than I do.

It seems to me that most jazzers use both terms interchangeably.  Americans 
tend to use slang a lot and "faking" is certainly a slang word for 
improvisation.  Calling Bach's variations and improvisations "faking" might 
not be thought of as dignified enough for a great master and maybe what some 
jazzers do to music does not rise to anywhere near the stature of Bach 
improvisations and variations.
Larry
StL


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