What is Musicality?

Frogman,

I fully agree. I would even go as far as to say, that technical perfection, both in classical as well as in jazz music is the prerequisit of a great artist. This alone does not necessarily makes his playing "musical". There are performes in both fields with stupendous technicality, whose performances are "dead", without life, do not take you in and in the end just bore you. They do not "live" their music but just use their score or theme to show off how good they are.

They do not "live" their music but just use their score or theme to show off how good they are.

Ingwie Malmsteen is known for that(dare to say)... No musicality there either. In fact hardly anyone(no matter classical jazz or even rocker) who live their music just to show off was ever successful. Public knowledge or apearances would also often put little to no weight in terms of musician's success or musicality. Success in business often in conflict with success in music or musicality as well.

According to my judgements on musicality in terms of musician's qualities, the classical music and jazz requires substantially more training efforts as well as studyings vs. pop or rock, hence the end product certainly values substantially more in terms of music.

Frogman, just the way it seems to me as a non musician.
Only thing I THINK I've seen is both a jazz quartet
and a 90 member symphony can have somebody SO good the whole group seems to "ride on" them at times
As an example the great Chicago SO oboist Ray Stills
seemed to be the conductor at times. From Jazz i don't know.

Schubert, you're exactly right. And what a great example of what you talk about! Ray Still was one of, perhaps THE, defining voice of that orchestra; aside from the brass section, of course. Anyone interested in what you talk about should listen to their recording of Rossini Overtures on RCA; Ray Still was a monster player. In the jazz world a great example is Sonny Rollins, a player with such a strong musical stamp that the rhythm section always seemed to be subservient to HIS rhythmic core.

It doesn't matter how technically proficient a musician is, if their soul isn't intertwined with what they're doing there is no “musicality”, which is also why recording music is such a challenge in the first place, i.e. getting musicians to reproduce the magic after twenty five takes caused by technical issues, and by which time they're bored and hungry and officially over it, or if there was no soul-intertwining possible from the outset, as is the case with, say, The Dave Matthews Band, who have an extremely high level of technical proficiency but are impossible to listen to without intuiting that they'd rather be at home cleaning out their golf bags because that's the only place their lost sweater could possibly be. Assuming there's musicality in the source, then, the next challenge is to reproduce that through a stereo in such a way that there is involuntary toe-tapping, head/torso-swaying etc, symptomatic of musicality in both live and recorded music, and the reproduction of which probably has something to do with a fast attack and a slow decay, a lively but lush sound that doesn't skimp on the mid-bass rhythm section and is so crucial to an amplifier that it's dumbfounding why so many high end products don't possess them. Are they doing it on purpose? It's possible that the nimble, bone dry sound of a fast attack/fast decay is necessary for the spec sheet, or is a sound that some people associate (incorrectly) with neutrality.