POST # 228 More Sonny Rollins on Cliches

There’s something else that Miles hated: cliché people. These are some of the best artists in the world who have tremendous skill, but they play clichés. A cliché is something which is proven to be effective, but if you just use clichés, it’s a different type of playing. It’s not really the height of jazz improvisation, it’s not where I want to be anyway. Look, I don’t put any kind of playing down, certainly there are some great players who play clichés [who] I admire. Because it takes a lot of skill to play clichés in an effective way. But it’s not—Miles and I used to talk about this all the time—it’s not the optimum. It’s a different way of playing, but it’s not the way I want to play. It’s not the way other people play that I look to, these people in the firmament played. - Sonny Rollins

( I started to learned to play jazz by learning a few cliches, few bebop ii V patterns, transcribing etc but it did occur to me one day that... am I just really learning heaps of licks so that when I go to a jam session I can 'show off' my licks? Whats the point of that!! Its good from a technical point of view and learning the language of jazz but it feels somehow hollow to me after a while..Wayne Krantz talk about a similar thing from the video below. - Ed )