While students grapple with these matters and develop repertories on their own, they also amplify their understanding of harmony and compositions through interacting with other musicians on the bandstand. Many even have the courage to sit in with bands during unfamiliar numbers, learning new pieces, in effect, by performing them. This involves the potentially dizzying activity of analyzing the surrounding parts to formulate a map of the progression’s fundamental features at the very time they are inventing an appropriate part for themselves.
Toward such ends, Rufus Reid strove to improvise a bass line to complement the pianist’s chord movements, which he anticipated on the basis of his “general knowledge of harmony.” Whenever Reid’s pitch choices clashed with the piano part, or whenever he lost his place within the progression, he would “[lay] out for a moment,” put the bass to his ear, and softly experiment with different pitches, looking perhaps for the elusive key of the bridge. Reid then continued his bass line until stumped by another “questionable part of the progression.” Each time through the piece, he would figure out additional details that had eluded him and fix their positions within his evolving map. After initially roughing out the placement of major and minor triads, “the main pivot points of things,” Reid eventually filled in the piece’s complete form. In this regard, the first challenge he encountered in his early development was learning to distinguish aurally major and minor triads, the “big letters,” he called them at the time. Having mastered them, Reid could turn his attention to more complex structures. “I even think it took a long time before I could really understand a major-seven function [as distinct] from a dominant-seven function,” he admits.
Some musicians infer the structure during performances from the bass pitches in the pianist’s own bass lines or chord voicings—either identifying the pitches aurally or reading the keys depressed by the fingers of the pianist’s left hand. Reid recalls a remarkably adroit mentor who, whenever the harmonic rhythm of a piece allowed, would sustain the sound of his chord with the pedal so that he could raise his little finger from the keyboard and point toward the next bass pitch, thus guiding Reid’s anticipation of the chord change. In other instances, newcomers receive direct verbal coaching. Upon hearing Kenny Barron’s harmonic errors at a jam session, for example, a kindly veteran once approached him from the audience, stood discreetly beside the piano, and whispered the piece’s correct chords.
In the final analysis, it is performance that reinforces the musician’s grasp on a new piece. George Duvivier learned chord changes “through sheer repetition, doing it so often, it became like breathing.” Many ultimately develop the ability to imagine progressions outside of performance with the same assurance as recalling melodies. “You start with a simple blues and keep doing it over, memorizing the basic chords, getting them into your psyche. Eventually, you get into the habit of hearing the chords inside your head, in the inner ear” (PB). Certain jazz compositions are “so ingrained” in Gary Bartz’s memory, he says, that even after a lapse of ten years, “I only need to hear a tune once and its harmonic structure comes back to me.”
The Malleability of Form
The learner’s first version of a piece is commonly a discrete chord progression based on a particular oral or written model. With exposure to different renditions, however, students soon discover that experts transform the harmonic structures of a piece as routinely as they do their melodies. Artists make decisions about certain harmonic features during private sessions and rehearsals, fixing them as part of their formal musical arrangements. They determine other features immediately before music events or while actually performing.
Because the operations of seasoned musicians include the melodic transposition of compositions, youngsters embark on the correspondingly arduous course of learning to reproduce the relative movements of a composition’s progression in every key. Many grapple with these challenges early in their professionallives as they encounter bands that avoid comparatively standard versions of pieces to exploit their varied moods and distinct qualities in alternative tonic keys. Additionally, because of the effects of transposition on a melody’s range, singers select keys that are most comfortable for their vocal range. “Some sing ‘Star Dust’ in E,” George Duvivier notes humorously, “when everyone else on the planet plays it in D.” At sessions, moreover, musicians commonly test one another’s skills by performing pieces “through all the keys,” modulating by descending half steps or by ascending fourths with each chorus. “Every day, I would get hung up on something else,” says Walter Bishop Jr., recounting the anguish of such computations, “but I always left those sessions resolving that I wouldn’t return until I really knew the tune so that I would never be embarrassed like that again. That’s how I built up my repertory.”
Youngsters also find out that actual chords are subject to variation—a considerable surprise to those who initially learn the most basic forms of chords as immutable structures. One pianist remembers her early puzzlement when a musician presented her with a tune’s lead sheet at a session and told her “to do something interesting” with the chords. “At the time, I just played them the way I learned them, but for days afterwards, I kept wondering what he meant by that.” It was also a “great discovery” for Carmen Lundy when “real jazz buffs taught me about such things as seventh and ninth chords or altered chords. Up till then, I had only been playing triads,”
Advanced performers draw upon numerous pitch collections in creating their own personal versions or voicings of chords, leaving unchanged their fundamental character or their function within a progression. For the composer and learner respectively, constructing and interpreting voicings involve consideration of endless combinations and permutations of related pitches. The exploration of each chord’s inversions, for example, alters the interval arrangements created from chord elements, changing their placement and spacing in the upper and middle parts of chord structures as well as their prominent positions in the bass. Pitch reinforcement in different octaves through the use of doubling also creates different effects.
As a matter of personal taste and other factors discussed later in this work, artists may, at times, emphasize voicings that are spare, utilizing perhaps only two elements of the chord such as its third and seventh or its root and third. Alternatively, they may emphasize voicings that are rich, combining many chord elements and chromatically altered pitches. Some may prefer to create airy structures, leaving open space between chord elements and spreading them over two or more octaves; others may favor dense, thickly textured voicings using pitch doubling. Adding further distinctiveness are such features as emphasis on right-hand (treble clef) or left-hand (bass clef) formulations or their combination; emphasis on wide or close intervals (for example, clusters including seconds) or various mixtures; and emphasis on rootless or root-oriented voicings, the latter presenting the root in the bass or, more subtly, in another voice. Grace note embellishment also gives voicings a special character, in some instances, creating blues effects by moving between the flat third and the natural third (ex. 3.6a). Even in the realization of a single chord type, the possibilities seem endless (exx. 3.6b–c). “Probably the most frustrating thing was trying to figure out the hipper voicings from records,” Kenny Barron says. “It was no problem for me to get the basic character of the chords, to figure out what chords were minor or major, but you can drive yourself crazy trying to figure out the notes in between the bass notes and the treble notes.”
Rootless voicings compound such challenges, requiring players to infer the character of a chord from the pianist’s elusive mix of other chord tones and color tones, or from the bass player’s part which commonly includes the root. In fact, difficulties in apprehending chords and learning a composition’s structure from a recording or a performance can produce inadvertent variants among players. Demonstration frequently compensates for these differences. According to Kenny Barron, “At sessions, people would sometimes sit down at the piano and say, ‘Why do
n’t you try putting a flat nine in that chord and voicing it like this?’” Tommy Turrentine “copped voicings” by watching Barry Harris when he played, and sometimes he simply asked him directly, “What was that thing you did on such and such a chord?”
Besides representing a particular version or model of a composition’s progression with different voicings, players may decorate its structure with embellishing chords, enlivening the piece’s harmonically static segments. Such practices are reminiscent of those within the realm of melodic treatment by which soloists embellish and vary pieces. Typical embellishing techniques described by pianist Bill Dobbins include stepwise motion created by the addition of diatonic or chromatic neighbor chords (exx. 3.7a–b) and passing chords between the structural chords. Neighbor chords move away from and back to the structural chord; passing chords connect different inversions of the structural chord. When alternating a diminished seventh chord and a chromatic embellishing chord, improvisers can also create dramatic appoggiatura-like motion between them by approaching the embellishing chord from an interval of a third or larger and resolving the dissonance through chromatic movement in the opposite direction.30 For novices, apprehending the sounds of structural chords amid the surrounding motion of embellishing chords can itself require intense training.
This is by no means the extent of the youngster’s dilemma, moreover, for seasoned improvisers also commonly transform features of their model of a piece’s actual harmonic plan. While retaining its conventional rhythmic cycle, players ornament core movements with different types of chord substitutions, drawing, in part, on an elaborate rule system, only sampled here, whose structures and procedures have been passed from generation to generation among jazz artists.31 Curtis Fuller considers options for substitute chords to be harmonic family members with ties of varying degrees of closeness from “first cousins . . . to fifth or sixth cousins.” Dobbins describes as “harmonic alteration” one type of substitution that keeps the original root but adds diatonic extensions or chromatic alterations or changes the quality of the chord. Examples of the latter practice would be changing a dominant seventh to a minor seventh or a major seventh to a dominant seventh (exx. 3.8a–b).
The artist also has the option of substituting a new chord with a different root for the original chord (exx. 3.9a–b). Chords can usually serve as effective replacements for one another when they are closely enough related through common tones to perform the same function within the piece’s structure, preserving “essential lines of the original progression.”32 At times, substitute chords can have the effect of modifying a distinctive portion of the conventional progression, as when minor chords substitute for diminished chords.
A third approach to substitution is “harmonic insertion,” adding connecting chords between those in the original progression. As for embellishing chords, harmonic insertion chords are commonly used to break up the static harmony of a piece’s form, but they accomplish this through more radical movements away from the structural chords. Insertion chords can be a basic ii–V movement anticipating a structural chord or an elaborate sequence between structural chords (exx. 3.10a–b). At times, players introduce distinctive features to the progression by inserting a diminished chord for color or producing blues effects by alternating a structural chord containing a natural third with an insertion chord containing the flatted third (ex. 3.11). Artists commonly use the terms turnarounds or turnbacks when referring to insertion chords found at the end of either a major harmonic phrase or a complete chorus. Typically, they are excursions of four chords that lead back to the initial chord, providing a smooth transition to the next harmonic phrase or returning to the start of the progression (fig. 3.6).
Chord insertions, changes of chord quality, and chord extensions create effects easily observable by comparing a common jazz blues to a basic model (ex. 3.5). The jazz version enriches the basic root progression by replacing some triads with seventh chords and inserting new chords into previously static harmonic segments. In measures 11 through 12, this creates an “I Got Rhythm” turnaround and provides greater harmonic motion throughout. Similarly, a comparison of the same bars of compositions as represented in different lead sheet versions illustrates principles of harmonic transformation (fig. 3.7). This is also true of scanning the alternative courses adopted by accompanists on different groups’ recordings of the same piece (ex. 3.3c).
Selecting from their varied options, artists pursue the goal of designing an imaginative, graceful version of the progression that clearly delineates the piece. Enumerable conventions within the jazz tradition guide players. Pianists endeavor to formulate successive structures that involve minimal movement in the left hand and create a sense of melodic shape and flow in the upper voice of the changing chords. They commonly resolve chord extensions and chromatic alterations, and the like, by leading them through descending steps to the triadic pitches of subsequent chords. 33 As is implicit in the discussion of harmonic practice above, the jazz community also values the formulation of a strong, smooth root movement. Moreover, the appropriateness of the bass line “as a counterpoint to the original melody” is of special importance to artists like Bill Evans, inspiring them to create unique harmonic designs for compositions, even those sharing the same basic progression (CI). Joe Giudice, too, considers “the melody and the bass line to be the most important features of my arrangements of pieces. After putting the melody note on top of a chord, I’ll spend months working on a small harmonic section of the progression-trying out different chord substitutions until I’ve found the ones that produce the most beautiful bass lines and the most intricate inner voices.”
To achieve this through chord insertions, players may choose to precede a major, minor, dominant, or half-diminished chord in a progression by a dominant chord whose root is either a fifth or a half step above that of the structural chord or by a diminished chord whose root is a half step below it. Connecting chords generally create such desirable root motion as descending fifths or major thirds or ascending diatonic scale steps or minor thirds. Other popular movements feature a series of descending half steps or whole steps, or alternating half steps and whole steps.34
George Duvivier learned about these and comparable matters from Clyde Hart, the pianist in Coleman Hawkins’s band. Hart was a “wonderful arranger” and a “kind, gentle, human being,” he says.
And whenever I did anything wrong on the bandstand, he’d look at me and wink. And when the gig was over, he’d say, “Come by the house tomorrow afternoon.” . . . He’d sit down and play the piano and explain this and that . . . [and] would say, “Tomorrow night, let’s do this here [in the progression]. . . . For example, say you’re going from an A[m]7 to a D. Assuming that he had time, he would run cycles like Bm [to] E[7], A[m] to D[7], A[m] to D. And no one was doing that then. They’d say A[m] for four beats: ding, ding, ding, ding; D[7] for four beats. . . . [In three months with Hawkins’s band] I learned to play jazz in all keys. I learned all the tempos and a lot of harmonic things I’d never come across before.
If artists sometimes restrict their application of chord substitutions to localized portions of progressions, at other times they freshen their renditions by replacing larger harmonic segments such as bridges. Doc Cheatham recalls how bored he became with hearing seemingly endless repetitions of stereotyped bridges on some popular standards and show tunes. “But,” he adds, “Dizzy really straightened out jazz,” by inventing new bridges for pieces like “I Got Rhythm.” In yet other instances, elaborate substitutions permeate an entire progression, imbuing it with a continuous sense of harmonic motion. 35 Harold Ousley and Barry Harris describe an exemplary one having many chord sequences in which artists change chords nearly every bar (fig. 3.8). Beyond their initial design of a particular version of a progression, over the course of performance improvisers continually select from among the options at their disposal. As they reinterpret the form, they can give it a very different complexion. Through combined or selected operations of
embellishing the principal chords and engaging in chord substitution, including changing chords’ harmonic qualities, they can either accentuate or elaborate selected features of the progression. Alternatively, they could remain close to the basic structure or simplify its features (exx. 3.12a–b).
Extensive transformations can require major readjustment on the young musician’s part. Once, to assist me in learning “Oleo,” a pianist recorded two takes of his own performance of the piece and encouraged me to study them. Listening repeatedly to the first, I gradually absorbed the spare, relatively consistent chord changes that made up the version’s contrasting A and B sections and mapped out their larger arrangement within the piece’s form. Feeling secure in my understanding of the piece, I proceeded to track the harmonic course of the second version. But there I received a rude shock: I began to feel as if I had entered an awesome and alien musical forest, a dense harmonic environment whose features changed more quickly than I could grasp them, presenting alternative routes consisting of root movements and successive qualities of chords that I could neither anticipate nor follow.
Thinking in Jazz Page 13