Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Regionally, aspiring players form relationships through a complex network of interrelated music centers that form the institutional infrastructure of the jazz community. Record shops, music stores, musicians’ union halls, social clubs for the promotion of jazz, musicians’ homes, booking agencies, practice studios, recording studios, and nightclubs all provide places where musicians interrelate with one another and, to some extent, with fans. Amateur discographers and other devotees with extensive holdings of recordings, books, magazines, newsletters, films, and, more recently, video documentaries about jazz, act often as informal archivists for all or part of the community. Throughout the country, participants in local networks of this sort—players and fans—are linked as members of major jazz institutes, subscribers to trade periodicals, audiences for national radio and television jazz programs, and participants in the nightclub, concert, and festival scene. Cities comprise the interstices of the jazz community’s larger network. At its center is Manhattan, regarded both as “a finishing school” and a national stage where jazz artists can interact with the field’s greatest talents (BH).

  Young musicians typically find points of entry into their local community within the intersecting domains of neighborhood and public school where they seek out knowledgeable peers who share their musical passion. Aficionados who recognize the inclinations of prospective artists invite them into the fold by encouraging them to participate in the community’s oral tradition of learning. “I hear what you’re trying to do,” a salesman once volunteered after overhearing a student’s efforts to improvise while experimenting with an instrument at a piano store. “Now what you must do is get around the people who play this kind of music and learn everything you can from them.” For almost a century, the jazz community has functioned as a large educational system for producing, preserving, and transmitting musical knowledge, preparing students for the artistic demands of a jazz career through its particularized methods and forums.

  Informal Study Sessions and Apprenticeships

  One conventional way for young artists to share information is through informal study sessions, a mixture of socializing, shoptalk, and demonstrations known as hanging out. “Most of the guys were self-taught, but they really went at the academics, the mechanics of the music, so thoroughly,” Tommy Turrentine says. “Other guys went to school, and they would pass their knowledge to one another.” Turrentine himself learned largely “by asking about things I didn’t understand.”

  Commonly, performers of the same instruments enjoy a special fraternity. “Drummers always seem to hang out together at drum shops. They’re always sharing information and showing each other how to play different things” (CH). Melba Liston and her junior high school peers similarly followed the buses of the swing bands that performed in their town to locate the hotels where the bands put up musicians so that they could get tips from them. “They were nice. They knew we were in awe of them, and they might show us something or tell us how to clean our instruments,” she recalls. Whenever friends couldn’t locate Liston, her mother would say to them, “‘Oh, there must be another band in town: just look in the trombone section.’“

  Complementing short-lived associations with transient musicians are more sustained relationships in which individuals pool their knowledge, each contributing in the area of his or her greatest expertise. Tommy Flanagan and his young peers were “always learning from one another.” In some instances, one performer assumes primary responsibility for educating others by forming bonds of casual apprenticeship. “It’s hard not to be a little envious of the environment in which some of the great players grew up,” Don Sickler remarks. “Many jazz players grew up with other great players in their neighborhoods. Jackie McLean was telling me not long ago about how, when he was a young kid, Bud Powell was always dropping by the house and playing with him, encouraging him to develop, and inviting him along on gigs.”

  Barry Harris also recalls Detroit’s rich learning environment, which produced so many great jazz artists. “Tommy [Flanagan] and Kenny Burrell were about the hippest as far as modem jazz was concerned, but there were other cats too.” Among them were pianist Will Davis, who, together with Flanagan, was an important model for Harris; trumpeter Cleophus Curtis, “who could play so pretty”; and an alto player named Kokie, whose talent was so remarkable that Harris and his peers “thought he was Bird [Charlie Parker].” Some of the “cats could really play. And we’re talking about teenagers!” Harris emphasizes. Saxophonist and composer Frank Foster was also a major figure as a teacher “for everyone” in the community after he settled in Detroit. Lonnie Hillyer remembers an extraordinarily “creative guy,” Abe Whitley, a pianist and vibraphone player they called “the Thinker.”

  Exceptionally talented educators also emerge at a young age. While still a high school teenager, Barry Harris organized musical get-togethers at his home. Amid the activities of rehearsing and performing, whenever the young artists stopped to “discuss” and “learn about” the music, Harris shared his special gifts as a music theoretician and teacher with them, transforming sessions into seminars for the moment. At the same time as he was interacting collegially with peers like Donald Byrd and Pepper Adams, Harris served as a mentor for an increasing number of musicians. Within a few years, news of Harris’s activities spread to other cities, drawing the attention of performers like John Coltrane, who traveled from Philadelphia to Detroit to investigate Harris’s method. Harris once invited some of his protégés to perform for Coltrane at his home, where, Harris says, “I showed him my system and he wrote down all the stuff. He was really searching.” A list of Harris’s graduates reads like a Who’s Who of Jazz; among them are Paul Chambers, Curtis Fuller, Joe Henderson, Lonnie Hillyer, Yusef Lateef, Hugh Lawson, Kirk Lightsey, Charles McPherson, and Doug Watkins.

  When the ambitions of performers lead them to New York, many maintain their former relationships as they join new, closely knit study groups that form within the remarkable pool of talent around them. When Kenny Barron left Philadelphia for New York at the age of eighteen, he initially lived with his brother, saxophonist Bill Barron, then moved next door to room with bassist Vishnu Wood on East Sixth Street. Barron describes his neighborhood: “This was 1961, and at that time, it was an incredible block. Elvin Jones and Pepper Adams lived upstairs, the guys from Detroit. Across the street in one apartment were all the guys from Philly—Reggie Workman, Lee Morgan, Percy Heath, and somebody else. Up the street a few doors was Ted Curson. The Jazz Gallery was around the comer. The Five Spot was three blocks away. There were a lot of coffee shops and a lot of music out there. This was 1961.”

  Curtis Fuller views the same period as “the most beautiful in my life. I stayed at 101st Street, and Coltrane was at 103rd Street, and every day I could just take my horn and walk around there—stay over there all day. We’d have some tea and we’d sit and talk, and we’d laugh and put on records.” After this ritual of social amenities, they would get down to the music. Fuller continues:

  Coltrane would say, “Hey Curtis, try to play this on the trombone,” and I would try to run something down. I’d struggle with it and he’d say, “You’re getting it”—and so on and so on. Paul Chambers lived all the way in Brooklyn, and he would get in the subway and, gig or no gig, he would come over to practice. He got this thing from Koussevitsky—the Polonaise in D Minor—and he’d say, “Hey Curtis, let’s play this one.” It wasn’t written as a duet, but we would run that down together for three or four hours. A couple of days later, we’d come back and play it again. The whole thing was just so beautiful, the camaraderie.

  In addition to exchanging knowledge among peers, many young artists also develop apprenticeships with jazz veterans outside their hometowns, occasionally at the latter’s initiation. When a famous saxophone player briefly met a jazz student at a midwestern saxophone store, he disarmed the student with his ingenuousness, inviting him “to drop by” his apartment and “practice together” whenever he came to New York. Purs
uing a similar arrangement, Curtis Fuller was not able to meet regularly with one of his mentors, J. J. Johnson, so he wrote letters to him. Whenever Johnson came to town with Kai Winding, however, Fuller would “run by” his hotel from school and “sit over there two or three hours in his room and have a little session together.”

  Despite the disruption caused by touring, many relationships of this nature endure over a musician’s career. Calvin Hill describes a Max Roach concert in which four generations of jazz drummers, including “Papa” Jo Jones, Louis Hayes, and a teenaged drum prodigy, appeared in the audience to show their appreciation and support. “Max treats Papa Jo with such concern and respect, the same way the younger drummers treat Max,” Hill remarks. “They take him as a mentor and adviser and they look up to him.”

  From the student’s side, these relationships sometimes verge on idolatry and, as in Arthur Rhames’s earlier account, include emulation of the mentor’s personal style. Lonnie Hillyer and his teenaged peers were so impressed by the “images” of artists like Miles Davis that they copied their dress.2 George Johnson Jr. used to study Eddie Jefferson’s “every move, the way he would gesture,” eventually getting to the point where he “would sit up and be acting like him.” Johnson still remembers the circumstances surrounding his first meeting with Jefferson, in 1976, as “a dream come true. For the past couple of years, I was practicing this cat day and night. I realized there was something very valuable in what he was doing—he was writing jazz lyrics and there wasn’t many people doing it. So when I heard he was singing at Fort Dupont in the park, I went down there about two hours early and I practiced, boy! I knew this was my time to meet Eddie.”

  Although he had intended to maintain a semblance of reserve as he introduced himself, Johnson lost his composure the moment he recognized Jefferson on the concert grounds and “jumped up and hugged him.” During their encounter, Johnson sang for Jefferson. As it turned out, Jefferson already knew of him because word had spread within the jazz community that a young performer was patterning his style after Jefferson and performing his material. The two became fast friends.

  We talked a lot, and we stayed with each other. Whenever he came to D.C., he stayed at my house, and whenever I came to New York, I stayed at his house. I would go to hear him perform whenever I wanted to. If he would be in Detroit, I would fly to Detroit. If he would be in Philly, I would go to Philly. I had stacks of eight-track tapes of his records in the car, and I would play them everywhere. He would get tired of me playing his songs, but he never got tired of me asking questions. We were like buddies. We talked about everything. Eddie was like a walking encyclopedia. This cat knew everything.

  In the exciting atmosphere of exchanges between veterans and novices, the latter discover the disparity between their romanticized view of the jazz world and the stark social and economic realities with which performers actually contend. Equally enlightening is counsel about music copyright laws, potential exploitation by the recording industry, the insidious lure of commercial music, and the pressures students must be prepared to face within the jazz community itself. Before Buster Williams embarked on his first professional tour—with Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt’s band—his father took him aside and taught him how to smoke marijuana “without inhaling” so as neither to offend other musicians nor pick up their bad habits. He also warned him always to stuff a few dollars in his Bible, in case dishonest managers left him “stranded on the road.” And everyone has advice about problems with love relationships, their wisdom the product of the profession’s transiency and the economic instability inherent in it.

  With respect to the technical aspects of jazz, mentors typically create a congenial atmosphere for learning by conveying the view that student and teacher alike are involved in an ongoing process of artistic development and that the exchange of knowledge is a mutual affair. Barry Harris jokes warmly with students in his workshops, insisting that he is simply “the oldest member of the class”; he takes obvious pride when he learns “something new” from another’s musical discovery. He delights in quipping, “I try to steal as much as I can from my students. After I steal enough, I will refuse to be the teacher any longer.” This is received as a great compliment by learners, who know Harris’s own knowledge to be inexhaustible.

  Wynton Marsalis reveals comparable humility on his mentor’s part, whether at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts where he used to teach or at home:

  My father’s so much hipper than me and knows so much more, but I can tell him, “I don’t like what you played on that,” and he’ll just stop and say, “Well, damn, what do you want?” Then I’ll say, “Why don’t you do this?” and he’ll try it. That’s my father, man. . . . If I said that I didn’t like it, he’d change it and at least look for something else, because he’s a sensitive musician. The more I get away from him, man, the more I know how much I learned from him just by looking and watching. I grew up with one of the greatest examples.

  Learners grappling with the hardships of mastering jazz often derive as much inspiration from their personal interaction with idols as from the information they acquire. “More than anything specific, it was a matter of Jackie McLean being a model for me,” a saxophonist remembers. “It had to do with his personality, too, his sense of humor about life. He was always so positive that just to have a word from him was enough to send me home to practice for hours. It was enough to keep me going until the next time I saw him again.” Such relationships are especially significant when they are the first adult friendships of youngsters outside their families, friendships earned as members of a professional community.

  Jam Sessions

  As essential to students as technical information and counsel is the understanding of jazz acquired directly through performance. In part, they gain experience by participating in one of the most venerable of the community’s institutions, the jam session.3 At these informal musical get-togethers, improvisers are free of the constraints that commercial engagements place upon repertory, length of performance, and the freedom to take artistic risks. Ronald Shannon Jackson’s grade school band leader allowed students to conduct daily lunch-hour jam sessions in the band room. “During those years, I never saw the inside of the school’s official lunch room.”

  Ultimately, sessions bring together artists from different bands to play with a diverse cross section of the jazz community. “New Yorkers had a way of learning from each other just as we did in Detroit,” Tommy Flanagan says. “From what I heard from Arthur Taylor, Jackie McLean, and Sonny Rollins, they all used to learn from just jamming together with Bud Powell and Monk and Bird. Even though Bird wasn’t a New Yorker, he lived here a long time and got an awful lot from it.”

  Some sessions arise spontaneously when musicians informally drop in on one another and perform together at professional practice studios. Improvisers also arrange invitational practice sessions at one another’s homes. Extended events at private house parties in Seattle “lasted a few days at a time,” Patti Bown remembers, and they held such popularity that club owners temporarily closed their own establishments to avoid competing for the same audience. Guests at the parties “cooked food and ate, [then] sat down and played,” Bown continues. Musicians “could really develop there. Sometimes they would really get a thing going, and they would keep on exploring an idea. You would go home and come back later, and it was still going on. . . . [Improvisers] sometimes played a single tune for hours.” Other sessions were similarly very relaxed: “Everybody was in the process of learning. Some guys were better than others, but it was always swinging, and the guys went on and on playing. We played maybe one number for an hour, but nobody ever got bored with it” (BB).

  Jazz organizations such as the Bebop Society in Indianapolis and the New Music Society at the World Stage in Detroit, where Kenny Burrell served as president and concert manager, promoted more formally organized sessions. Others took place in nightclubs, especially during weekend afternoons or in the early hours of t
he morning after the clientele had gone. In Los Angeles, according to Art Farmer, opportunities abounded for young people. “During the day you would go to somebody’s house and play. At night there were after-hours clubs where they would hire maybe one horn and a rhythm section, and then anybody who wanted to play was free to come up and play. Then these clubs would have a Sunday matinee session. We used to just walk the streets at night and go from one place to another.”

  Musicians distinguish some sessions in terms of the skills of participants. The New Music Society would have a group “the caliber of Elvin Jones, Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan, and Kenny Burrell,” and then they would have “the next crew of guys” like Lonnie Hillyer and his schoolmates, who rehearsed a couple of weeks in advance to prepare for their own session. The youngsters “wouldn’t interfere” with those involving “the guys of high caliber.” At times, the arrival of musicians from out of town intensified session activities—artists like Hampton Hawes and John Coltrane “who’d be working in some band and had that night off. It was a hell of a playing atmosphere going on there” (LH).

  Likewise in Chicago, musicians knew that the session “at a certain club down the comer was for the very heavy cats and would not dare to participate until they knew that they were ready,” Rufus Reid recalls. As a matter of respect, “you didn’t even think about playing unless you knew that you could cut the mustard. You didn’t even take your horn out of your case unless you knew the repertoire.” At the same time, naive learners did periodically perform with artists who were a league apart from them. David Baker used to go to sessions including Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray “when they came to Indianapolis.” He adds with amusement, “I didn’t have the sense not to play with them.”