LogFAQs > #956611101

Skilled in entirely different ways, by necessity.

There's an interesting phenomenon you witness with extremely advanced classical musicians when they try to improvise. They tend to fucking SUCK at it. Like there are many examples I can give you of the best classical musicians of all time just absolutely dive bombing at other genres of music. Take the greatest classical violinist of all time and get him to try and play some simple gypsy music and he will sound completely wooden and uninspired.

Equally, even the best jazz musicians have awful intonation and clarity. Guys that can improvise at lightning speed and reharmonise anything on a dime suddenly can't recreate a single passage from a classical text with the expected clarity.

Hendrix wasn't famous because he played guitar with the precision of Paco De Lucia or Segovia or like Hilary Hahn plays bach. he was famous because he took everybody's idea of what the guitar was at the time and turned it upside down, inside out and then time travelled it into a different cosmic dimension. The creativity was off the charts. By any guitar teacher trying to teach you how to finger properly, his playing was incredibly sloppy. But then imagine you're a sound engineer in 1965 and you hear THAT. You'd have an existential crisis.

That takes a different kind of skill compared to being able to absorb complex pieces and then interpret them with 100% precision a week after picking up the sheet music.

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CE's Resident Scotsman.
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