Practicing to be a jazz guitarist is hard work. Duh. Lately, I've been finding that the technique is a real bastard. I admire classical musicians, and their static licks. When you encounter a hard run in a classical piece, you can rest comforted in the knowledge that you can just practice it, thousands of times a day if necessary, until you get it right. And because you're in the classical mentality, you're never going to play it absolutely perfectly and you'll suffer a career full of guilt for not being a music-producing emotion machine and you might as well just commit suicide right now, but at least you have the discrete nature of what you play. You play the black notes on the page.
But it's different for a jazz player. You have to practice and practice, sure, but, what, exactly? You have to know your standards, yeah. That doesn't take very long, and in fact, you can play songs that you've never even heard as long as they're in your book when you're on stage, or whatever. No, you just sort of have to practice for contingencies. "What if the song I'm playing has this crazy chord in it, and there I am stuck with nothing to play? What if I want to play really fast all of a sudden, and my fingers won't let me?" You just have to be prepared, and it's frustrating. I guess this is why it's best not to practice jazz alone, if you can help it. Jazz, like all other addictive habits, is best practiced in groups, in relative moderation.
Man, I gotta get somewhere where I've got musician friends. This country is in some crazy alternate music dimension where bad house and cheesy everything else reign. Well, to be fair, one can hardly blame them for making cheesy songs. Have you heard the French language?