You got to show me something more!

'Trane - regarding compositional use of Jazz structures... I had a friend in HS who went on to study composition in college and one of the major ideas he was trying to bring in was using these newer structures into his composition. There's some really far out stuff that's being composed these days which fails in certain ways to fit classification. I stumble into contemporary composers from time to time and am always impressed, but I have no idea where I can read or hear about this stuff. So far I've had the most luck by picking up random ECM recordings.

I think frogman and coltrane1 (softy) are comparing apples and oranges here. In my conversations with musicians I've gathered that the kind of theoretical background that coltrane is talking about is necessary for the kind of intense improv and avant guarde composition that jazz performers must be able to do. Less important to a jazz musician is being able to accurately reproduce a score, because in the end much of the technical aspects of his playing is controlled by intense interaction with his fellow musicians. Classical musicians are judged on their ability to recreate a score (especially in a symphonic setting), thus technical mastery is extremely important. Of course these are generalizations and all generalizations have exceptions. There are technically adept jazz musicians, and there are classical musicians who are geniouses of improv, but I think it's safe to say that these groups approach their instruments with a different mindset. Depending on the context, I think both groups are quite capable of playing circles in my head. P.S. to 'trane - I'd say that any modern composer of 'classical' (is this the not most abused vocabulary word in musicdom?) music must be extremely familiar with the compositional ideas which were formulated in this century.