*Sunday Bashing* Jordan Rudess hears Alicia Keys for the first time

[CyberGene]

A disclaimer: the guy is a genius, no denying. I like him and I was at a Dream Theater concert last year and enjoyed it. His playing was brilliant. I’d prefer listening to DT than Alicia Keys. 
 

I just stumbled upon the following video:

Could be me waking up with the ass up (that’s a Bulgarian saying, do you have a similar one?) but the vibe I get from the video is, how stupid pop music is and how Rudess is sooooo much better musician with his perfect pitch to be able to instantly add some supposedly real music on top of that crap. That lady looking like she’s seeing a live reincarnation of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff at the same time. 
 

Again, the guy is fantastic IMO but I just hear some fast diatonic shredding and arpeggios. It just sounds silly, boring and completely out of place. 
 

Any decent jazzman would be able to produce much more interesting comping (or even improvisation lines) on top of it. 
 

What do you think? Am I overreacting? 🧐

[Paul Woodward]

Yeah, he’s a bit arrogant and the ‘noodling’ is just showing off rather than musically pleasing, but I enjoyed seeing how he improvised over a track he never heard that had little more than a beat and some rapping.

Like you say, can’t deny his technical ability (and perfect pitch 😉 ) but if you didn’t know him by reputation, would he be your choice of player to lay down keys on your songs given what you saw there?

[Adan]

This could be the first in a seriesd:

Jordan Rudess hears Norah Jones for the first time.

Jordan Rudess hears Aretha Franklin for the first time.

Jordan Rudess hears Johnny Lee Hooker for the first time.

. . . and so on.

 

In each one he shreds over everything with frequent cuts to the jaws dropping in the control room and hundreds of comments below the video saying "see, this proves everything is better when you add JR Sauce."

 

Seriously, I didn't get the point of that at all.  Unless it was a Kronos ad? That would make some sense.

[Jonathan Hughes]

1 hour ago, Adan said:

This could be the first in a series

It actually is. He also does one where he listens to a song by Animals as Leaders for the first time. Pianote has done a few others with other keyboard players. Their sister site, Drumeo, does a similar series where drummers listen to songs (without the drum track) they've never heard, and then come up with a part for it. It's entertaining and really interesting how they each go about the process. And they're often playing a song that's very outside the genre they're known for, so it's interesting seeing how they approach the song. They all end up coming up with something that would still totally work for the song, but the Jordan Rudess one is just a lot of fast notes with really awful/tacky synth patches.

[nadroj]

I generally like the “virtuoso hears *popular song* for the first time” videos. Larnell Lewis’s ones are outstanding, for example. This one just felt unnecessary to me.

 

He played a thousand more notes, and it was a thousand times less musical than the original. They should have chosen a track by a songwriter who isn’t actually good at piano - unfortunately for Rudess in this video,  Alicia Keys is actually good.  The “pop music bad” jokes at the beginning were edgy internet teen levels of cringe. 
 

This could (or should) have been done with anyone else, and it would have been better. Someone who would play something with purpose, rather than someone who’s there to wank over a keyboard to make the girl behind the glass blush. 

[CyberGene]

10 minutes ago, Jonathan Hughes said:

Their sister site, Drumeo, does a similar series where drummers listen to songs (without the drum track) they've never heard

I think I might have watched one of these where a jazz drummer had never heard of Nirvana. I’m not saying Nirvana are the world’s most famous band and I even remember hating them as a teenager (well I was a nerd who only used to listen to Bach at the time) but being a professional musician who has never heard Nirvana is very suspicious to me. The guy is either really narrow minded and doesn’t listen to any other music than whatever he’s interested in, or the whole story is made up. 

[CyberGene]

Here’s the one with the drummer hearing Nirvana for the first time:

BTW, I think part of what he came up with was great but in the more intensive parts he played a very lame straight 1-2-1-2 rhythm and the Nirvana original is, well, much more original 😀

 

But I must agree I enjoyed it. Unlike the Rudess video. 

[Paul Woodward]

Some great players I would enjoy seeing try this. Rudess wouldn't have made my list, but I suppose it's got the cringe appeal of putting Ozzie Osbourne with a boy band. 

[drawback]

Never been a fan. JR has always epitomized “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

[K K]

I always found this JR guy to be incredibly boring and musically soulless. Anyone with chops can do similar look-at-me-I-can-play-fast stuff that means nothing. Maybe his main problem is that he wished he were a guitarist - after all, lots of his admirers think his guitar patches are super incredible. As Homer would say...

 

[Stokely]

Not even going to watch it, I have no time for competitiveness when it comes to music.  "Who's the best guitarist? Debate!"  "Why is this band so much better than that one" and so on...reminds me of my college days with lots of long discussions like that.  Wish I'd spent that time practicing  

Now, I do enjoy the series where some pro drummers (Larnell Lewis for one) hear and chart a song for the first time and then play along with it.   Jaw-dropping honestly but that's why those guys are who they are.  No arrogance or belittling of the material in evidence.

 

[Joe Muscara]

When he first started comping with the EP sound, that wasn't bad. I kind of liked a bit of it.

 

Once he started the electric guitar sound, that was WAY too much. I've been revisiting my fandom of Van Halen lately and one thing I've been thinking about is how well EVH worked on/in a tune. He didn't just shred for the entire song, his parts fit in as part of the tune, not over the vocals but between them, leading into the next part. 

 

That being said, you might forgive Jordan because maybe he was experimenting. Sometimes, when we're just jamming and learning a tune, we play a lot of stuff to see what might fit. A lot of what Jordan played could fit. If he gave me all of that to use for a track, I might take a phrase here and one there to use on the track, just not all of it.

 

At the end of the initial listening section after he played the guitar stuff and went to the rhythmic pattern, that could be okay as a bed on the tune or parts of the tune, something underneath that provides more of a feel and not something you really hear. Pop music does this all the time. I feel similarly about the orchestral part he played near the end. Some of that could be okay as a bed.

 

But no, if he's going to just wank over the entire tune, that's not what the tune is about. And no, Alicia doesn't need to add more tracks.  

[16251]

[KuruPrionz]

I got almost 5 minutes in. That was more than enough. He clearly has no idea how to accompany a vocal track. He can zoom around fast but so what? He failed to create an atmosphere or groove with the song. 

[The Real MC]

JR was never a favorite of mine.  All technique and no soul.  I tire of players who emphasize scales/arpeggios/shredding but don't play anything melodic.  Same with John Petrucci.  DT was much better with Kevin Moore, great player and great songwriter.  DT today is just a shred fest, yawn.

[CyberGene]

19 minutes ago, The Real MC said:

DT was much better with Kevin Moore

Admittedly I'm not a huge DT fan but my wife is (she brought me to that DT concert last year) and she's also of the opinion that they progressively (no pun intended) deteriorated. She often plays the "Images and Words" to our daughter who in turn loves the "Wait for Sleep" track and often asks Siri to play it on our HomePods. And so, I listen to it often too and even tried to recreate it on the piano once and realized it's a very clever track. I checked who played the keyboards and yeah, that was Kevin Moore.

[Adan]

I didn't know this kind of video was a thing.  Maybe the JR one is just a bad example of the genre, but I have a hard time seeing why this is a good use of time.

 

I like to think I'm not a JR basher, but putting him in this particular context -- fitting in with soulful music -- is just asking for it . . .

[MathOfInsects]

3 minutes ago, Adan said:

I have a hard time seeing why this is a good use of time.

First day on the internet? 😂🤣

[ProfD]

In one form or another, shredding musicians have been around for a long time now.

 

YouTube has put both the musician olympics and influencers of all kinds on full display. 

 

I can only imagine what it could potentially do to young impressionable musicians. Thank goodness I was never in that crowd. 

 

Completely overlooked is the fact that no matter how gifted and talented some musicians are, they'll never craft a Pop tune. Thankfully for them, there's sn audience that appreciates chops over musicality.

 

Back in the day, some Jazz musicians were condescending of what they considered lesser styles of music.

 

Nevermind that in order to survive many Jazz musicians had to hold their noses while playing down to those records.

 

That video is a classic example of 1) what not to play depending on the context of the music and 2) less is more.

 

As someone with a sense of humor, I can see and hear the entertainment value in a circus act or parlor trick. 🤣😎

[BluMunk]

54 minutes ago, Adan said:

 

I didn't know this kind of video was a thing.  Maybe the JR one is just a bad example of the genre, but I have a hard time seeing why this is a good use of time.

 

I’m not anywhere I can listen to this yet, but from descriptions it sounds like a departure from the small handful of similarly-themed videos I’ve watched with drummers.

 

In those, the point seems to be to show how the musicians skillfully come up with a stylistically appropriate part for a song, regardless of their genre of focus. 
 

This sounds like JR ignoring the genre of the tune and forcing a prog/shredding aesthetic onto a song that does not call for it. 
 

It’s kind of like if the drummer in the link @CyberGene posted just played swing over the Nirvana tune because that’s “his style”.

 

If you’re just going to play your thing, there’s very little interesting in doing it over a song where it doesn’t fit.

[jazzpiano88]

9 minutes ago, BluMunk said:

If you’re just going to play your thing, there’s very little interesting in doing it over a song where it doesn’t fit.

That’s kind of my observation.   He can only play in one idiom well, and I’m not even sure what you’d call it.  Never any good sounding chords.  

[Synthaholic]

Being able to play along with a song the first time you hear it . . . is this supposed to be some great genius talent? I've been doing that my entire life, and I'm sure many of you who play by ear have, also. Or maybe I'm some genius talent . . oh, wait - I'm not.

[CyberGene]

13 minutes ago, jazzpiano88 said:

Never any good sounding chords.

That’s something I wanted to say many times but then who am I… Yeah, the sales pitch for JD is often his perfect pitch (pun intended) but he has such a limited harmonic vocabulary I’m wondering where it all goes. 

[BluMunk]

15 minutes ago, Synthaholic said:

Being able to play along with a song the first time you hear it . . . is this supposed to be some great genius talent?

Well, I think what’s fun about these videos usually is to see how a good ear, matched with quick learning, matched with an understanding of how the other parts fit together, can sometimes lead to improvised parts that are close to/identical to the original recordings.

 

It’s an exercise in deconstructing arrangements- if all the other instruments are doing that, then my part must be something like this.

 

 

[Mighty Motif Max]

I saw this video a few months ago...I'm a big Jordan Rudess fan, just not much of a fan of this video. I think he was uncomfortable and way out of his normal genres. And maybe some people find that entertaining, but to me I almost felt bad for the guy. Again, big fan of his - this video just doesn't do justice to much of anything IMO.

[Bill H.]

The most astonishing thing to me? This was the first time Jordan Rudess had heard Empire State Of Mind! This track was absolutely huge when it came out around 15 years ago, and lives on as aural backdrop for many things NYC. I don't know how anyone could have avoided it all these years. 

 

I thought his first funky comps were cool, but once he tried to impose his will on it I was out. No Jordan Rudess bashing here though - he's just screwing around and having fun. 

[Old No7]

5 minutes ago, Mighty Motif Max said:

I think he was uncomfortable and way out of his normal genres. And maybe some people find that entertaining, but to me I almost felt bad for the guy...

 

Me too, after reading all the posts above. 😉

 

4 hours ago, drawback said:

 “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

 

That's very appropriate for this; as he wouldn't be getting the flack he's getting on this forum if he'd stayed in his lane.

 

Old No7

[TommyBoy]

I'm an accordionist. There are hundreds of videos out there of players just playing notes as fast as humanly possible. None of it is musical.  I can usually take about 10 seconds of it before I move on to Frank Marocco and some musically brilliant jazz chords or improvisations.

 

I saw the OP's video in my feed one day and started watching. I lasted about 10 seconds.

[AROIOS]

10 hours ago, CyberGene said:

...
What do you think?
...

Lipstick on a pig

[Polychrest]

1 hour ago, Old No7 said:

 

[Rudess] wouldn't be getting the flack he's getting on this forum if he'd stayed in his lane.

Yeah, stay in your lane like Lachy Doley does.
 

Wait . . . . never mind