Jazz is easier than pop
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- Опубликовано: 6 фев 2025
- 🎷 Why Jazz Might Be Easier Than Pop 🎷
In this video, we challenge the assumption that jazz is inherently more difficult than pop music.
The whole purpose of this is just to inspire curiosity and encourage you to try what you first wrote off not to definitively prove pop is harder than jazz.
We'll explore 7 reasons why pop music can be surprisingly challenging, including:
Complex chord progressions
Strict rhythmic requirements
The pressure of perfection
And more!
Whether you're a seasoned musician or just starting out, this video will open your eyes to the joys and challenges of both jazz and pop music.
#jazz #pop #music #musician #musictheory #improvisation #jazzmusic #popmusic #musiceducation 
Игры
We got musician Mark Zuckerberg before gta 6 🔥
At the highest levels, every musical style demands its own set of challenges, making comparison not just meaningless, but misguided. Is a chess grandmaster “better” than an Olympic sprinter? The question itself is flawed-they excel in entirely different pursuits. Likewise, the pinnacle of jazz and the pinnacle of pop each require mastery, but mastery of different things. The only rational stance is appreciation, not competition.
Dope take
You cannot compare a language to general music trend. “Knowing 2 5 1s in all keys” is diminishing what jazz is so much (you must be talking about that “elevator music”. That’s not jazz either). There is so much depth, history, rhythm and tradition to this art form. You have to fully immerse yourself in that environment to understand it. Pop music however is whatever is popular at the moment. So anything that appeals to the general population at a given time is basically pop(that could even be “jazz”).
I think you mean to talk about the performative aspects of jazz and pop. In any case the only thing that’s different is that you are reciting music when playing pop. Playing a song perfectly is the only aspect that would be “harder” than playing jazz. In that case, wouldn’t this apply to any other genre.
Pop and lots of genres are hugely influenced by jazz, so in reality jazz trained musicians are probably more qualified to play pop music than pop musicians. (Ok that last one was my biased opinion 😅)
Wynton Marsalis once said he preferred playing jazz over classical music,because he didn’t have to practice
You can bet that Wynton practiced countless hours before he could improvise so well that he didn't have to practice improvisation.
I think that more has to do with growing up in one of the most prolific jazz families in the world than jazz being easy
Did he just say Jazz is "three chords"
Oh Lordy Goodness!!!
I was thinking the same thing lol
Go ahead, upload your sick solo over rhythm changes at 225bpm, don't worry, I'll wait!
Had to chime in…professional musician here - R&B and Pop is what I grew up listening to and it’s what I’m best at. I’m also extremely fluent in Jazz Harmony and teach it at a high level, for a living…
I know you are trying to make Jazz seem more accessible to those who are intimidated by it, but your description of it is like an outrageous oversimplification (respectfully!)
Jazz is undeniably more difficult than Pop is to play at a high level.
I think what you mean to say is that getting to an ELITE level at pop, is more difficult than being mediocre at Jazz. Which I can agree with.
But actually getting good at Jazz, playing in a way that truly makes you FEEL, will most definitely make your Pop playing better, because it’s much simpler than Jazz.
Getting to a place where you’re making high level choices in Pop vs. Jazz? Jazz takes much more work.
And again, this is not coming from a Jazz-head lolol
And just want to add, some of the things you are saying in this video are just flat out wrong…like Jazz not using diatonic chords (Nashville number system as you referred to them)…Jazz has WAY more inside common practice vocabulary than Pop does. Also, don’t confuse more “available” notes with more “right” notes. Just because there are more options doesn’t make it easier to make good choices, it makes it harder.
As an amateur musician myself, it took me way too long to see this reply! ..... and it only took me about 1 second ^^
@ :) haha appreciate you
100% on point, as a jazz player (electric bass),but I do see this guys point ,and maybe we can inspire some new jazz players,just ask him to break down "Giant Steps " 🥴 I think his point is there's stricter "rules " in pop,because with jazz it's ok to break them,after all that IS jazz
Well said.
I noticed the author of the video was liking comments that agree with his opinion, but when someone takes the time to draw from their own experience in a way that seems to conflict with his simplifications, he does not like those.
:(
We got jazz ragebait before gta6
Despite other comments, I think the key point is easy to agree with. Jazz, like freestyle dance vs some particular style with its formalities and rigidly defined manouvers, is much more "forgiving". As he mentions, the "wrong" notes can always be finessed and add to the raw emotional texture of moments where the ear is already to some extent lost. Of course capital-J Jazz, the so-called high level requires a level of precision closer to or exceeding pop. But I think the characterization of jazz as being all about 1 4 5 chords feels broadly accurate in that the key center is always somewhat ambiguous so everything played can be oriented to these simple kinds of relationships, and consonance always exists on a spectrum of harmonics, whereas pop tends to operate on unambiguous keys that effectively swap in and out on for the occasional bar or whatever. Whereas in jazz you can use improvization to sound out the note you're looking for, pop falls apart without the exacting placement and timing of those very specific intervals. Most crucially, jazz is more authentic in giving space to the player's particular mood or context while playing. Not to say there's "no wrong notes" exactly, but those wrong notes still represent an honest intention and communicates the player's rythmic sense in a way that pop doesn't really give space for. Cool video and glad more people are trying to destigmatize jazz! Mashing hands against the keys is valid! The piano's percussion after all :D
It's difficult for humans to perform like a machine. Pop music is made by machine, even the vocal performances, with a few exceptions.
If modern jazz musicians knew how to combine all their years of training and education with the tiniest bits of soul and depth, I'd say they'd "earned the right" to be snobbish. As it is, most self-proclaimed "jazzists" are people with vast amounts of knowledge who treat music like math, and it shows in their playing.
Most ironically, they dedicate their lives to improvisation, yet, if you won't give them the chords and melodies in printed form, they become helpless (and would blame you, probably, for breaking the academic rules of jazz).
Yes not every jazz musician is great, there are mediocre ones. But don't get me started on the mediocre pop musicians. A mediocre small combo jazz player still has to reach a much higher level of musicianship than mediocre musicians in other styles.
@tal_175 you're right, of course, no question that 99% of pop music is pure garbage by people who can barely call themselves musicians, they're DAW technicians at best. Not to mention "pop musicians" who never wrote a song in their life, which is most pop singers.
No Jazz musician that I know of uses sheet music while playing. Improvisation is not possible if one is reading and playing a melody.
I doubt anyone will actually read this comment but wow, when a video this ridiculous comes my way I feel compelled to make a reply. I'm glad i'm far from the only one who thinks this video is complete bogus. If you wanted to make jazz less intimidating and humble pretentious jazzers, two things I think are worthy causes, this is not the way to do it.
2:20 If you are going to grossly simplify one and not the other, the comparison is pointless. Can you name me a single jazz tune that is comprised of only ii-V-Is? I can think of one - Giant Steps. While the easiest jazz tune I can think of is Autumn Leaves, and that uses all seven chords in the key. The number of different chord types is irrelevant to the difficulty. By the way I could name 50 pop songs that use the exact same four chord loop. I can use a double standard too!
3:50 I don't even know where to start with this... Learning every ii, V and I in every key and at least one inversion, thats anywhere from around 70 to 140 different chords, is a huge task for a beginner, and it's not even the right thing to do. With that knowledge you wouldn't get through a single jazz tune. It would be infinitely better and easier to learn the seven chords from one or two realted keys.
5:46 That's like saying chess is easier than tic-tac-toe because there are more options. If you are happy listening to someone make a bunch of mistakes and say "thats OK it's jazz" then I can only assume your primary source of information is memes.
7:40 Completely irrelevant, unless you are virtuosically switching all the settings on your keyboard mid-performance... Regarding instrumental playing, texture refers to the rhythmic and harmonic arrangement of notes, for example arpeggios, counterpoint, syncopation etc. which is a huge focus in jazz, you might even argue that texture is the thing that most differentiates one jazz musician's style from another.
9:13 Playing one great idea 20 times is 20 times easier than playing 20 great ideas one after the other. If you want to demonstrate otherwise, I would be very interested.
Either you are dishonest and the purpose of this video is to rage-bait and gain views without making any well informed points, or you are incredibly ignorant.
You can't compare the two. You're making several logical errors. Any beginner can remember a simple triad chord and play it at the right moment without needing formal training in theory or ear training. However, even at a beginner level in jazz, you need to invest countless hours of practice just to improvise a basic solo over a standard. And that's just at a beginner level, let alone truly mastering the changes and creating something beautiful.
Moreover, any competent jazz musician can easily play a pop song, whereas only a small fraction of pop players could successfully navigate a jazz standard. That alone proves which is more difficult.
And what you say about textures is honestly complete nonsense. What's so hard about pressing a preset and playing a different sound? If anything, it makes things easier because your sound is enhanced beyond its natural quality. With a piano, you're fully exposed, there's no hiding behind effects.
And as for repetition, that exists in jazz too. What about So What or Cantaloupe Island?
I came into this video with an open mind. Maybe he was going to talk about production, or how jazz musicians don’t always know when to reel in their vocabulary in pop settings. Maybe it was about having to be more tasteful in pop or something. Instead it was just a video that completely mischaracterized jazz
That is an oxymoronic title if you know anything about music because pop sticks to basic number formulas and usually doesn't go outside of minor and major and it's based off of predictability unpredictable and full of modal chords and you have to be very familiar with all of your scales because of the nature of the Improv therefore adding to several layers of complexity which makes it off the rip much difficult than pop music
Thanks for this. Very encouraging
I'm so used to all the ii,V, i in jazz so pop songs can take slightly longer to get right chords when you play by ear
Cadences are on a different levels than chords. And even if ii-V-I is the most famous and used (like in all west music), there are a ton of other possibilities for the Jazz musicians. Stated that, actually, most of Jazz is improvised on popular songs so every structure is fair game as long as you know the melody and the original chords.
Why does playing music need to be easy at all coast? It's just hard like every other art form, or subject to be honest. That is if you really wanna learn
Audiences mostly don't care about the difficulty of music. They just want it to sound good. They want to feel something, not be impressed by virtuosic skill. Sometimes those things go together, but not always.
😂😂
*bait title*
"This is not bait: terrible jazz is easier to play than good pop."
*audience rages*
This video is for me. I only know my basic major and minor chords and their inversions. I play pop songs but I HUNGER to be able to play some jazz standards and basic improvisation.
I would love to see a future video of jazz theory, as you mentioned. But a series of intro to jazz lessons would be a dream come true. I'd love to be able to play 'In a Sentimental Mood,' 'All Blues, 'So What,' 'Stardust,' etc.
Go get Jimmy Bruno's "No Nonsense Jazz" course. He'll take you from rock/blues into playing jazz.
There are more dominant chords in jazz than there are chords in pop. The person in the video is not a competent jazz musician or even a jazz musician (hopefully he doesn't claim to be so). Take what he says with a huge grain of salt (unless you just want to feel good about telling yourself that jazz is easier than pop).
There’s a ton of chords in jazz but the way they are organized is actually quite simple and basically exists in three categories 2 5 and 1 once you understand jazz theory. The goal of this video is mostly to demystify how intimidating jazz is to non jazzers
@@RobertMonroeMusic 2 5 1 is not very refined view of jazz. It's basically how it is taught to beginners. When people gain more experience, they start to see it as just cycles of V I's with substitutions. Later on you realize that it's all tension and release using voice leading techniques. But you can say this about all functional music including pop. A lot of jazz is based on pop songs of the 20's. The devil is in the details.
I think he’s implying pop must be performed perfectly (and probably a lot more other genres). But should it be tho? Most audience won’t even notice one mistake. So does it really matter? Jazz music didn’t have to be mentioned to get this point across
jazz was pop at some point
There is no such thing as a “Harder” genre, both genres have their own details, arguing which one is harder is just a matter of perspective, purely subjective, not an objective debate at all, also take into account that jazz is basically the grandfather of what we now call pop
Good pop music is really hard
Really hard to produce, yes.
but honestly, just how many times has the l, lV, V, lV progression topped the charts? xD
I 100% get you my man, I absolutely get what your're trying to say and as a Jazz musician I understand the overall message, and I have always seen this that your're trying to say.
I mean when you talk about the difference in texture, I obviously know that you are leaving behind the history of Written Jazz for big bands, I understand why you would say that in order to prove a point about a different thing you're talking about.
Comparing the difficulty of working in a cruise ship as a jazz musician and a pop musician would have been convenient in this video!
Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented - Tony Wilson
This just sounds like he's twisting reality into something that isn't true, in order to fit his narrative. No, playing minor pentationic scales, ad naseum, doen't compare to the complexity involved with getting creative with far more notes (involved with jazz.) It's like saying that writing a story involveing "see spot run" is harder than writing a novel. It's a ridiculous claim. About 2m chords always going to the dominant five chord, wrong again. Although 2m - V7 are common, this isn't always the pattern (like he implies.) the 2m chord doesn't have to lead to another diatonic minor chord, if the V7 is not used (In jazz.) This is just an oversimplification. About playing something short and repetitive being harder than reading a jazz chart, that's a bunch of cr*p, too. Jazz has a lot of challenging chord progressions that are way more difficult to play than the repetitive chords of Louie Louie. About trading dymanics (like found in simple pop songs, think of Whole Lotta Love by Led Zepplin, which I consider to be pop/rock/blues, and all of the studio techniques needed to bring this incredibly repetitious song to life) yes, jazz trades the gimmicks found in pop tunes (with production, dynamics, effects, etc.) for the excitement of harmonic possibilities, interesting (sometime complex) improvisation, and phrasing. Pop being more complex in this regard: No, it's just more full of gimmicks. By the way, twisting knobs to find a gimmick sound with a distortion box or synthesizer, is more akin to engineering work, than musician work. It's not playing music, it's looking for sounds. About the pressure of perfection, in some regard I agree with him. If you screw up the main lick in Day Tripper, everyone will notice, That said, it ain't rocket science to play this lick. And yes, as someone said: "Jazz is made up of great recoveries." Yes, there is more latituce when improvising. However, if you're playing the head or tail to a song that has a fixed, composed lick (to a jazz tune) and you mess it up: People will notice just as if you messed up the lick or chord to a pop tune. After having said all of this, I have to say that there is a wide range of talents with what is expected from a pop musician. Some of it can be difficult and some of it can be easy. Where jazz gets hard is in knowing your scales, modes, chord substitutions, altered chords, diminished chords, tritone substitutes, etc. Generally jazz musicians have a more thorough knowledge of their instruments. Jazz takes more practice to sound decent at. Listen to McCartney's frenetic, scalar guitar solo on Taxman, and compare that to a solo that Wes Montgomery does. Wes dedication and time spent learning guitar, obviously was far greater than what McCartney put into learning how to improvise on guitar. You can claim otherwise, but the facts are obvious. About shedder metal players, yes, some of them are very good. Generally, though, they use more predictable patterns. Generally their prowess is in their technical skills (think speed) rather than the cleaver notes of something like a bebop solo. (PS: I wonder how many jazz tunes the author of this video has actually written? There is some difference between being a cover song player in pop, and being a composer/jammer in jazz.)
Wise words here!!!
I don't think you've checked out a lot of the current jazz sites. People like Peter Martin and Adam Maness of Open Studio are tremendous musicians but very modest and open-minded and it's plain to see that they really enjoy and respect many genres of music. Same for Aimee Nolte, Adam Neely and many others.
It never helps to pit one genre against another, but not many people are ever going to think that pop is more difficult than jazz.
So much special boys in the comments it's just funny. My favorite type is people continue to insist on harmonic complexity, despite author mentioned it, and explained about soinc complexity of pop music.
Dub techno usually have only ONE chord, and ZERO harmonic movement. Go and make good dub techno track. It should be much easier than Jazz by your metrics 😂
The rejection of jazz fusion by the jazz world tells your everything you need to know about the jazz world. Pretentious and more concerned about DEI and some fake stale air of "cool" than about the emotive power of the music.
how about you actually learn and get good at jazz before making comparisons like this. some comparisons don't even make sense. on your second point you said "thicker chords mean note choices mean more variety, which means more right notes" in comparison to pop. Fine, 3 'right notes' in the Gb maj chord for the Rihanna song, but remember, jazz is built upon improvisation but pop isn't. There is no 'right notes' in improv, it is heavily based off musical context.
on your fourth point, "memorisation is requried in pop, but you can fudge it a little in jazz". Fudge what? the improv solo? you don't memorise the solo melody itself cause it's improv, but you certainly have to memorise the tune's chord changes. you don't have to, sure, but I am certain that anyone who is picking up jazz has the desire to get better at their craft. the memorisation of chord changes is especially important if you're jamming with other people. if you're not talking about the "highest level in jazz" here, then why be so strict with pop when there's a minor slip up? do you even *listen* to jazz?
It would be more convincing if you could demonstrate this with some tracks or your own instrument.
I doubt people dance in odd times signatures 😅 as an example.
Video does seem like a false equivalency. Like who is saying this lol 😅
hee hee hee ii-V-I go brrrr
Jazz has three chords? Bro what? This guys is out of his rocker.
Texture = Production right?
This is also ludicrous. Jazz is the notes, If you want to produce jazz with lots of sounds you can. That is what Lofi is ni?
All around this is a bonkers comparison
Jazz is harder than pop to play other people's songs writing a pop song is really hard though like I'd say that the beatles are more talented and creative than the average jazz musician not someone like herbie hancock though jazz is easy if you have a good teacher like me but otherwise hard I learned on my own and it wasn't easy
3/10 jazz ragebait
cooool