One thing I have found in playing a lot of jazz off of lead sheets is that while you can really play some deep and idiomatic music in all the jazz forms, it's almost impossible to recreate much of modern rock by compressing it to a lead sheet.
Especially with the less progressive forms of rock that I enjoy more than the "pedantic" stuff (like various flavors of progressive metal), it gets hard to make "the thing" based off of a reduction of the music to a form.
Like, you can play the fully-notated versions of metallica songs and pull them off, but without a whole lot of notation and rehearsal you're going to have a hard time getting "the thing".
And you're really going to have a hard time pulling off the noisy parts of Neutral Milk Hotel I loved so much without notating a whole lot of that noise which becomes important to the work- so much so that in those generas people don't even bother to play other peoples' work because you only get into an uncanny valley around the artist's affective presentation and personality. That might be the excess you're describing as "more than"- I'd point you to Georges Bataille if you're actually interested in that kind of thing.
What I enjoy about that noisy music is the noise, which is difficult to notate and compress and transmit to other musicians; from where I stand as a musician, noise is what is lost when the art is compressed to its formal notation.
With all the older blues and jazz forms I enjoy (Django or Louis Armstrong or Danny Barker) I can get on stage and perform fairly complex music with minimal or no rehearsal- as long as someone knows the melody the tunes are playable. The "essential" parts of the music are not simple, but there is a lot of history and education in the players about how to properly rehydrate the music.
I wouldn't say that old jazz music or the musicians are "good-er" than the rock and metal folks, though most of the jazz musicians I know also do play pop gigs while pop musicians might have a harder time sitting in.
But it's just not as fun to solo over the changes to Iggy Pop's "I wanna Be Your Dog" or the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" and the skill sets for being able to come up with a part on the fly are different than they are for prodigiously performing a piece note-for-note (which is the same in classically oriented music as it is in indy rock bands, though the memo-ization methods are much different).
While I can't say the music is better, I personally find the chord progressions of older jazz forms easier to solo over because they have more interesting (to me) features. Lately I have a harder and harder time finding engaging-to-me things to play over a 2 chord funk jam or a 3 chord country song, whereas I really enjoy blowing over stuff like Basin St. Blues or Nuages.
My point being that the decoders for these improvisational forms often are doing a lot more interpretive work in decompressing a lead sheet out into music-in-the-world than the folks who are playing note-for-note parts that they've worked out from recordings and that are specific to the tune.
Since the decoders are doing more work, the music becomes quite a bit more "compressible" while retaining a lot of its complexity. "Autumn Leaves" is not "simpler" than "I Wanna Be Sedated", but it more easily compresses into a transmittable form without losing that essential excess that makes me like the Ramones.
With the jazz or blues or bluegrass or old-time or older country dance music or folk, the decoders only need someone in the band who knows (most of) the chords and the lyrics and the complexity of the resulting music is largely up to how the folks playing it decide to play it.
Tonight I am playing pedal steel at a dance and have never played with the band, and that's not big deal because a) I have stored reduced versions of the tunes in my body and b) I have a bunch of strategies for quickly decoding what the other musicians are doing and responding appropriately.
But the music itself isn't simple. "Friends in Low Places" (and much of country and western swing) has more in common with older jazz than with modern rock, and I have worked with a lot of truly bad musicians who think that because a lot of the songs are 3-chord tunes the music doesn't require some attention to play idiomatically.
So with music, it's easy and fun to add the noise back in if you know what to add, but it's not (in my opinion) the case that "simple" music is easily compressed: the "simpler" the music is (at least in the west) the more it relies on the specifics of the noise it produces in order to create its artistic effects, and thus simpler music less compressible.
So from my standpoint, it's very difficult to compress good, "simple" and "noisy" rock music, whereas the more specific designs of stuff like jazz is much easier to compress and transmit.
Especially with the less progressive forms of rock that I enjoy more than the "pedantic" stuff (like various flavors of progressive metal), it gets hard to make "the thing" based off of a reduction of the music to a form.
Like, you can play the fully-notated versions of metallica songs and pull them off, but without a whole lot of notation and rehearsal you're going to have a hard time getting "the thing".
And you're really going to have a hard time pulling off the noisy parts of Neutral Milk Hotel I loved so much without notating a whole lot of that noise which becomes important to the work- so much so that in those generas people don't even bother to play other peoples' work because you only get into an uncanny valley around the artist's affective presentation and personality. That might be the excess you're describing as "more than"- I'd point you to Georges Bataille if you're actually interested in that kind of thing.
What I enjoy about that noisy music is the noise, which is difficult to notate and compress and transmit to other musicians; from where I stand as a musician, noise is what is lost when the art is compressed to its formal notation.
With all the older blues and jazz forms I enjoy (Django or Louis Armstrong or Danny Barker) I can get on stage and perform fairly complex music with minimal or no rehearsal- as long as someone knows the melody the tunes are playable. The "essential" parts of the music are not simple, but there is a lot of history and education in the players about how to properly rehydrate the music.
I wouldn't say that old jazz music or the musicians are "good-er" than the rock and metal folks, though most of the jazz musicians I know also do play pop gigs while pop musicians might have a harder time sitting in.
But it's just not as fun to solo over the changes to Iggy Pop's "I wanna Be Your Dog" or the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" and the skill sets for being able to come up with a part on the fly are different than they are for prodigiously performing a piece note-for-note (which is the same in classically oriented music as it is in indy rock bands, though the memo-ization methods are much different).
While I can't say the music is better, I personally find the chord progressions of older jazz forms easier to solo over because they have more interesting (to me) features. Lately I have a harder and harder time finding engaging-to-me things to play over a 2 chord funk jam or a 3 chord country song, whereas I really enjoy blowing over stuff like Basin St. Blues or Nuages.
My point being that the decoders for these improvisational forms often are doing a lot more interpretive work in decompressing a lead sheet out into music-in-the-world than the folks who are playing note-for-note parts that they've worked out from recordings and that are specific to the tune.
Since the decoders are doing more work, the music becomes quite a bit more "compressible" while retaining a lot of its complexity. "Autumn Leaves" is not "simpler" than "I Wanna Be Sedated", but it more easily compresses into a transmittable form without losing that essential excess that makes me like the Ramones.
With the jazz or blues or bluegrass or old-time or older country dance music or folk, the decoders only need someone in the band who knows (most of) the chords and the lyrics and the complexity of the resulting music is largely up to how the folks playing it decide to play it.
Tonight I am playing pedal steel at a dance and have never played with the band, and that's not big deal because a) I have stored reduced versions of the tunes in my body and b) I have a bunch of strategies for quickly decoding what the other musicians are doing and responding appropriately.
But the music itself isn't simple. "Friends in Low Places" (and much of country and western swing) has more in common with older jazz than with modern rock, and I have worked with a lot of truly bad musicians who think that because a lot of the songs are 3-chord tunes the music doesn't require some attention to play idiomatically.
So with music, it's easy and fun to add the noise back in if you know what to add, but it's not (in my opinion) the case that "simple" music is easily compressed: the "simpler" the music is (at least in the west) the more it relies on the specifics of the noise it produces in order to create its artistic effects, and thus simpler music less compressible.
So from my standpoint, it's very difficult to compress good, "simple" and "noisy" rock music, whereas the more specific designs of stuff like jazz is much easier to compress and transmit.