What does it mean to be called square in Jazz music?

I am a Classically trained pianist in a Jazz band. Unfortunately, my instructor tells me that I am square all the time. He says I need to be triangle. What the heck does that mean?|||you dont swing


everything is on the beat


your chord voicings are very basic|||Your best answer is the first answer. Give a listen to Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, Teddy Wilson, Cedar Walton on You Tube. Note how each uses different phrasings if you listen to each playing the same song. A couple of minimalists who come to mind who really could swing are Hampton Hawes and Ahmad Jamal. Bill Evans used a classical approach but he took swing to a new level- his work on the Miles Davis masterpiece "Kind Of Blue" changed jazz as we entered the 1960s.|||Square means that you don't swing. A good way to hear swing is to play a scale of eighth notes, then have your instructor play the same scale of eighth notes ( assuming that your instructor can swing). There should be a difference. Your classical eighth notes will be even, but your instructor's will not be even, they will swing.|||You aren't "letting yourself go". You are being a technician, rather than a soulful improvisationalist. Step up the "cool" factor, and don't be too tight. If you were a portrait painter, I'd say start painting abstracts. It's in the FEEL of the playing, as opposed to hitting all the right notes.|||Your playing is too classically. You don't really feel the swing in the jazz. You don't lay back quite right when playing with jazz music. Never heard of triangle though.|||You could ask your teacher. Obviously he wants you to swing, but what that means you'll need to find or (or better "feel") for yourself.





I have never heard of being triangle -- that's a strange thing to say.|||I havent heard anyone use that term for a long time. It means you are not hip, not with the program whatever it is in his mind or too conventional.