Good ears Alan, others have mentioned this also. I now realize I have some compression on both the guitar track and the master buss but I’m definitely not skilled with compression so that needs some work.
But you know the only way to get a guitarist to turn down though right? (Hand him some sheet music.) 
Oh, OK. Well maybe it’s just right then. I didn’t feel there was too much compression, at least on the guitar. The other elements are softer and more of a supportive rhythm section IMO.
Nice tune Ingo! Nothing to add that hasn’t already been said, so I’ll just add that was cool! 
Tasty stuff Ingo! You’ve already got a lot of great comments, so I’ll just offer a couple observations. I understand going for the looser feel (I’m fond of doing that myself regularly). I think the keyboards are being played in such a way as to prompt the listener to seek regular timings, the way the chords are sounded. The keys sound a lot more “on grid” compared to the other instruments, so perhaps you could apply a “humanize” function to the keyboard midi to mitigate? Worth the experiment anyway.
When it comes to Izotope plugs, I tend to use Alloy on an instrument track, rather than Ozone, which I use only on the master, but there’s no law saying one can’t use whatever one wants!
This reminds me of this great set of quotes from jazz aficionado and baseball legend Yogi Berra:
Interviewer: What do you expect is in store for the future of jazz trumpet?
Yogi: I’m thinkin’ there’ll be a group of guys who’ve never met talkin’ about it all the time…
Interviewer: Can you explain jazz?
Yogi: I can’t, but I will. 90% of all jazz is half improvisation. The other half is the part people play while others are playing something they never played with anyone who played that part. So if you play the wrong part, its right. If you play the right part, it might be right if you play it wrong enough. But if you play it too right, it’s wrong.
Interviewer: I don’t understand.
Yogi: Anyone who understands jazz knows that you can’t understand it. It’s too complicated. That’s whats so simple about it.
Interviewer: Do you understand it?
Yogi: No. That’s why I can explain it. If I understood it, I wouldn’t know anything about it.
Interviewer: Are there any great jazz players alive today?
Yogi: No. All the great jazz players alive today are dead. Except for the ones that are still alive. But so many of them are dead, that the ones that are still alive are dying to be like the ones that are dead. Some would kill for it.
Interviewer: What is syncopation?
Yogi: That’s when the note that you should hear now happens either before or after you hear it. In jazz, you don’t hear notes when they happen because that would be some other type of music. Other types of music can be jazz, but only if they’re the same as something different from those other kinds.
Interviewer: Now I really don’t understand.
Yogi: I haven’t taught you enough for you to not understand jazz that well.
Thank you Mike, all the responses have been great, I’m again impressed by the helpfulness and talent of our community here including yourself!
For the record, I agree with this sentiment. You have some really good stuff in here, but it would be more impactful and more interesting to break it up a little…
This made me think of the tune I’m working on now. I’ve got a cruddy entry level looping pedal and was playing with it one night. You can only remove the last part you added – or – reset the whole thing. I got on to something I really liked and parts just kept flowing. THEN I thought, maybe I should record this? So I dumped the pedal loops into my DAW (in mono of course) because I had no other option.
For the life of me though, I couldn’t recreate it piece by piece. So I’m just going to use the loop as an “intro” for the song it inspired… I mostly just mix these days, but I really need to set up my DAW so it’s ready when the mood hits.
That’s a very good point Dave which I had never thought of and certainly is worthy of some experimentation, thanks for that. To me different styles and musicians of course have different degrees of ‘looseness’ . It seems that the size of the group also enters into this; the smaller the group the easier it is to have some players ‘floating’ and fewer players ‘anchoring’.
In my experience, and you, @ptalbot and @Tmasterp may want to correct me on this, a typical mainstream jazz combo has either the bass and/or the hi hat or ride cymbal 'anchoring; while everyone else (including other parts of the drum kit) ‘floats’ to some degree. And that’s the source of a lot of comment and controversy in my experience. More discussion encouraged here!
Good stuff, thanks for quoting! I feel like I understand jazz pretty well. Until I try to play it. 
I’m sure you’re right about that. I had originally planned to do it that way, but I took one shot at a solo and decided to keep it. The market for 4 minute guitar solos is not exactly red hot at the moment so I may have to rethink that decision, but I do like this solo.
Yeah, that’s a good point. That first attempt often has a certain appeal to it that is difficult to recapture but I have to remember to get in tune and have a direct in that I can reamp or whatever set up before starting off. The other thing of course is to try and leave some access points where you can edit easily, don’t cram the killer idea up next to a bunch of garbage where you can’t get to it, I’ve done that for sure.
I once played drums in a newbie jazz group. I was all right with the funky stuff and basic jazz shuffles, but then the band wanted to play an African 3/4 rhythm (I think it was an Ornette Coleman piece). I loved it but for the life of me couldn’t play it. It was somehow very alien to my nervous system. I was trying so hard to keep time that it was anything but loose. That’s when I knew I’d never be a good drummer…
This is great stuff, nice solo.
I would definitely go for some more room on the drums and you could maybe hpf the keys so they are a bit thinner?
and can you get in to the drum part and adjust the quantization? maybe bring the hats back like 5 ticks. that would help it lay back a bit more.
This is why I don’t call myself a jazz musician, they are big on skill sets and I just wanna have fun! That said, it is possible to get a lot of mileage out of a few well practiced pieces. Here is studio legend Tommy Tedesco illustrating the point:
Thanks Taylor! This is a great suggestion and I intend to post version 2 of this tune using this and the other helpful hints I have gotten in this thread. When you say quantization I’m assuming you mean volume of the hats and not the rhythm?
Wow. Sounds like absolute nonsense. And yet it’s spot on! I never read that quote before. He’s right. Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
No actually i meant time! The kick is holding it down on the exact down beat… creating tension between down beat and “human down beat” is what the feel is all about. To me, pocket is the space between the absolute metronome time and where the drummer puts the accents. Talking fractions of a second
I looked at the midi tracks on this tune and the all of the drum parts are dead on the beat whereas the keys and bass are often behind the beat. The guitar of course . . . well anyway so your suggestion is to bring the hi-hats back a bit closer to the bass and keys? I’ll try that, I’m working on including the other suggestions I’ve gotten here, thanks!
Nice Ingo 
I needed a bit of my IRD fill. Came across your track and it was just what I needed! memories!
Thank you for remembering this tune @FluteCafe. Of course the one we all liked better was this one where we collabed on the same tune 
What kind of guitar are you using? If it’s DI with just a little tweaking, it is very, very good. It sounds a lot like a Polytone amp, but with more clarity and attack than you would typically hear. Impressive!
Thank you @StylesBitchley for the encouragement. I was playing either a Les Paul Junior with humbuckers or a Les Paul standard, I don’t remember. I usually have both pick ups on and I usually don’t roll anything off.
I plug straight in to my interface and on this track I had a PSP vintage warmer plug in with default settings and the Izotope Ozone 5 suite with a guitar preset shown here that I tweaked slightly.
I had intended to develop this track into an arrangement but I liked the long solo so I kept it.
ingolee,
Thank you for the review. Now your song: hey this is really nice! Kind of reminds me of Steely Dan, which is my favorite group that is a bit jazzy. Nice audio quality and lead guitar playing! Nice job!
