Read on Twitter
A lot of American musicians are arguing about music theory on twitter. Well...there's no one theory of music that's gonna make you a finished American musician. Americans are blessed to be impure from the git-go. It's fabulous. FWIW, I have already written a lot about this topic:
1) "...acquiring old-world academic tools was frequently a step along the way to being a professional American musician." https://ethaniverson.com/black-music-teachers-in-the-era-of-segregation/
2) "In 2019, our feverish culture war includes hand-wringing about the participation of African-Americans in 'classical music,' in this case referring to music that holds European-based presentation as the ideal." https://jazztimes.com/features/columns/remembering-harold-mabern-larry-willis-richard-wyands/
3) "Charles McPherson suggested to me that the songbooks are generally how jazz musicians learned European harmony, and I suspect he’s right. Indeed, before fakebooks, the piano players had to have the sheet music." https://ethaniverson.com/deepening-your-relationship-to-musical-theatre/
4) "Early black jazz musicians worked over the European harmonic system to include an African aesthetic." https://ethaniverson.com/lil-hardin-teaches-the-blues/
5) "Music theory is bunk." https://ethaniverson.com/are-polychords-problematic/
6) "In some circles, 'jazz harmony' is held to be a valid discipline. It’s not. 'Harmony' is the correct discipline." https://ethaniverson.com/theory-and-european-classical-music/
7) "Consecrated jazz drummers have less accurate time than rock and fusion drummers for a reason. The beat is connected to the cycle of life and playing with an ensemble." https://ethaniverson.com/rhythmic-folklore/
8) "Magic happens at the drum kit when the four limbs are slightly desynchronized. Any truly swinging or funky drummer does not always place the articulations of the two hands and two feet at exactly the same time" http://threepennyreview.com/samples/iverson_sp20.html
9) "Ellington, Monk, and McCoy all share the basic European information but their non-European information is harder to pin down. They relate harmony to rhythm in a 'jazz' way but intellectual analyses of these procedures are rarely convincing." https://ethaniverson.com/theory-of-harmony/
Great jazz fixes everything. I wish everyone scolding others on twitter about music theory diversity issues would step back from the dunking game and see what they could learn from some Duke Ellington and John Coltrane records...
