The vocabulary that students acquire from the improvisations of their mentors varies in origin and in character. Some derive from the common language of jazz.14 As the “kinds of things that everybody plays,” they include short melodic figures like traditional blues licks (exx. 4.3a1-a2) and repeated riffs known as shout patterns (ex. 4.3b). Such figures were once associated with particular soloists or repertory genres like the blues but have since been passed anonymously from generation to generation and put to more general use. From the earliest days of jazz, artists absorbed these and other patterns in the context of performance. Although many originated in solos, others originated in a band’s musical arrangements—their introductory figures, musical interludes, and background lines that accompany singers and instrumental soloists.15 Artists sometimes identify anonymous patterns with their respective jazz idioms; for, they characterize them as swing figures, bebop licks (ex. 4.3c), and free jazz gestures.
Primary materials for the jazz artist’s vocabulary also include excerpts of jazz pieces, popular songs, Western classical compositions, and compositions from other musical traditions that appeal to a soloist (exx. 4.3dl-d3). “There’s a little improvisation technique in which you learn to pull things from other songs and insert them into what you’re singing at the moment,” Carmen Lundy says. “Someone like Ella Fitzgerald will often use quotes from other songs in the middle of a song. She’ll sing a few lyrics and then she’ll scat sing, taking you into another song.”
Unique patterns or signature licks from mentors constitute additional primary materials in a learner’s storehouse (exx. 4.3e1-e2).16 Charlie Parker “intentionally played many of the same phrases over and over in his solos. They had become part of his vocabulary, the medium that he was speaking through” (LH). Such is also the case for other improvisers, those who, as Tommy Turrentine describes them, will
always play some kind of recognizable lick and right away you can say, “Oh, that’s so and so.” Everybody uses them in jazz. Like Charlie Rouse. He’s a very unique tenor player. I have heard him play some licks that nobody else plays, and he’s been playing them for years. They sound good and they fit. It’s the same with Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis or Sonny Rollins or anybody. They all have their things that they play. I can tell by the fourth bar of a solo who it is that’s playing.
Students absorb yet other patterns that their teachers themselves have borrowed from leading artists.17 Benny Bailey recalls Miles Davis performing an extensive quotation from a Dud Bascomb solo on the classic recording of “Tuxedo Junction” by Erskine Hawkins’s band. In the recorded performance, Bascomb had displayed a “highly original way” of playing over the tune’s “I Got Rhythm” changes by improvising a “beautifully constructed solo,” Bailey states. “Miles played the quotation in his own way at a faster tempo,” but “if you knew the solo previously, you would know where he got it.” In a similar light, “Brownie [Clifford Brown] used some of Dizzy’s phrases. All the tenor players were influenced by Coltrane and Charlie Parker. You can hear them use their phrases all the time” (JR).
Beyond their functional and pedagogical value, quotations from the historical literature of jazz establish the relationships of improvisers to their larger tradition. Arthur Rhames speaks eloquently of this: “The great players always give homage to their predecessors by recalling certain things that they did. They give it in appreciation and in understanding of the validity of their predecessors. Being able to quote from songs and solos is always part of a mature artist because he’s aware of the contribution of others and its impact, how valid it is. Something that is really valid is timeless.”18
Of course, learners must cultivate the ability to grasp precise gestures within the contours of fluent improvisations, and they must, Carmen Lundy says, be “well versed in the music” in order to appreciate these distinctions. Over years of study, Lundy found that she could “discriminate increasingly finer things” in her listening. Initially all she could identify were “jazz licks.” Later she learned to distinguish “bebop licks,” and finally “Charlie Parker licks and Sonny Rollins licks.” Correspondingly, before students can grasp the intricacies of complex phrases, they absorb into their vocabularies relatively simple and unambiguous phrase components bounded by brief rests or delineated by dramatic changes in melodic direction. At the same time, they learn such complete musical ideas from the language of jazz as short solo figures, call and response patterns, horn riffs, the phrases of familiar tunes, and the like.
As they develop a storehouse of vocabulary patterns, students strive to understand the relationships of the patterns to the larger musical settings from which they come. This, in turn, reveals the construction and application of phrases. “When you listen to a record,” James Moody says, “you listen to all of the surrounding harmonies and rhythms that go with whatever the melody is, and you hear it. Suppose somebody were to sing ‘Body and Soul,’ but they put the chord changes to ‘Star Dust’ behind it. Your ear would just reject that. It’s the same with licks. It’s a matter of ear training.” Experienced improvisers respond negatively to sounds that are harmonically “out of context,” just as they would “to a scream in the middle of a peaceful street scene,” Moody concludes.
Within their tradition’s larger context, associations among vocabulary patterns, compositional forms, and particular chords remain strongly tied to the imaginations of exemplary improvisers, providing ongoing models for other players. When Harold Ousley performs the composition “Tune-Up,” for, he knows that at the opening Em7 chord he can pursue various options, including “certain things that Bud played, or it might be a phrase that Sonny Rollins played, or it might even be something Trane played.”
Many complement their aural understanding of the relationship between harmony and melody by theoretical analysis of patterns, a practice whose value for improvisers is implicit in their criticism of standard publications of solos. “It may be helpful just to see what someone like Miles played, but the books don’t really teach you anything about why Miles did what he did, what his thinking was. That’s what’s needed” (BB). Art Tatum assessed one of his imitators accordingly. “Well, he knows what I did on record, but he doesn’t know why I did it.”19 Artists are on a continuous search for illuminating the what and why of great improvisations. A case in point is Doc Cheatham’s response to Bobby Hackett’s recorded solo on “lada.” Cheatham asked himself, “How can a man play like that on that melody? . . . What is he thinking about? How could he think of something like that?” Ultimately, Cheatham’s transcription and analysis revealed to him the concept of “alternate chords.” He recalls that “how to build one chord off from another” was a novelty to him at the time.
Two music generations later, Art Farmer transcribed “the fantastic things” his idols improvised in the bebop idiom so that he could learn “where their choice of notes came from. There’s value in learning the licks just to see what people did, how a solo was constructed, and to see what you could do with chords.” Tommy Flanagan also comments on his personal experience:
Sometimes, you would try to duplicate something the soloists did. It was almost like they put it down there for you, like they were showing you something. So, you might try to duplicate a run or buy a transcription book to see how it looked on paper and then apply it, use it yourself from there. Mostly, they showed you a general way of thinking about playing a song or a phrase. Or they showed you another way of looking at a chord, how it related to other things—like the way you can make one little phrase cover three or four chords. It was very interesting and a good study for the ear.
In such fundamental applications, music analysis explains the complementary relationships between jazz phrases and chords, in which the former can be viewed as the horizontal counterpart of the latter.
Learning by Observing Performances and Demonstrations
Despite the value of recordings as an important source of musical vocabulary—especially during major periods of innovation in jazz
—they are not equivalent to live performances. Because many artists have but infrequent opportunities to record, their music is usually available to learners only at concerts or jam sessions. Moreover, some performers hold back their best material during recording sessions, keeping their ideas less accessible to imitators. Some, like Freddie Keppard, have been reluctant to record at all. In other cases, the limitations individual improvisers place on taking risks during recording sessions, the conservative policies of record companies catering to a commercial market, which constrains artists’ adventurous productions, and the common lag of six months or more between recording sessions and the subsequent release of the recording can render albums unrepresentative of the improvisers’ current performance practices.20
Recordings also have various technical drawbacks. Twenties recording equipment could not always adequately process the dynamic range and complexity of the drum set’s patterns, forcing some drummers to simplify their performances and even to restrict their use of the drum set’s components. Changing fashions in sound transparency and taste can also complicate the efforts of learners. During the fifties, when record companies boosted the string bass within the overall sound mix of recordings, Ronald Shannon Jackson and his peers could not hear the complete drum parts; the bass drum patterns or the ride cymbal patterns were annoyingly obscured at times. Moreover, malfunctioning recording or remastering equipment has, in some instances, transformed an original performance, substantially changing the tempo, and correspondingly lowering or raising the pitch as much as a half step and distorting the music’s tone quality.21
Inability to see performers and their instruments poses numerous other problems for aspiring musicians trying to reconstruct the playing techniques of recording artists. Shortly after Kenny Washington’s father invested in a new drum set for him, Washington, then ten years old, became enthralled with Max Roach recordings in which the drums sounded “very high pitched” and tuned precisely in large intervals “like fourths or fifths.” To match Roach’s equipment, Washington tightened the tuning pegs of his own tom-tom drums, stretching their skins. Although he was initially ecstatic when the adjustments enabled him to imitate Roach’s “melodic” drum solos, his excitement was short-lived. After three days, the tension on the drum heads collapsed their shells. Washington still vividly remembers the great trepidation he felt in bringing this news to his father—a strict disciplinarian who conducted weekly inspections of the drums—and his ultimate relief when his father merely burst into laughter at the well-intentioned experiment. Without seeing Roach’s instruments, Washington did not consider size as the factor principally responsible for their pitch.
Keith Copeland likewise acknowledges that “it’s hard for drummers to learn from records because you can’t see what the drummer’s doing with his hands and his feet, what sticks he’s using and exactly what part of the drum he’s hitting.” Encountering comparable difficulties, one young trumpeter, fascinated by the microtonal effects of blue notes on some favored recordings, sought to master them. Unable to see his idols making slight depressions of valves, he achieved the same effects by distorting his embouchure and varying the pressure of his air stream. A further complication for many beginners is that studio and audio equipment often artificially enhance a performance in ways impossible for them to recognize. The student just mentioned also acquired an unconscious habit of forcing his air through the trumpet, in a naive effort to match the extraordinarily large sound of his models as amplified by the stereo system. Without the correct and constant air support required for performance, the trumpeter eventually lost his endurance and had to relearn with a teacher the very fundamentals of trumpet playing.
On the other hand, learning from recordings sometimes has serendipitous effects. In George Duvivier’s endeavor to master a recorded bass solo distinguished by its extraordinary rhythmic complexity, he developed a special complex fingering technique that allowed him to play most of it. Later, Duvivier attended the band’s performance of the piece, “The Big Noise from Winnetka,” and discovered that the solo was actually a duet: drummer Raymond Bauduc performed rhythmically with drumsticks upon the bass strings near the instrument’s bridge, while bassist Bob Haggart fingered different pitches on the neck of the bass. With great amusement, Duvivier recalls how his own misunderstanding led to his unique version of the solo. It also gave him a new technique, involving light finger action across the strings, that increased his facility on his instrument.
To avoid potential difficulties, aspiring musicians make a point of observing their idols in performance. “When you see people you admire doing what is so difficult for you, it’s a whole new experience,” Buster Williams says.
You can not only hear it on records, but you can see it happening and you understand. When I saw Ray Brown for the first time, I was totally floored. In fact, I had a dream as a result of seeing him. In the dream, Ray Brown was actually Percy Heath. The bass was like ten feet tall, and Percy was like twenty feet tall, and his fingers were about a yard long. It seemed like he just stood there and laid his hands on the fingerboard. His fingers just crept allover the fingerboard and played all the notes. That was the effect that seeing Ray Brown had on me.
From such studied observation, horn players learn alternate fingerings and valve or key combinations that, however unconventional by the norms of classical music performance practice, enable improvisers to execute intricate jazz figures that are otherwise awkward or impossible to perform. They may have further use as well, making it possible for students to assimilate idiomatic improvised passages by performers of other instruments that are not easily translated onto their own. Moreover, alternate fingerings can serve as rhythmic articulation devices for repeated pitches or tremolos, and produce diverse timbral and microtonal effects, some with speechlike inflections.22
Figuring out other features of the performance of their idols can be critical for students if they are to duplicate precise sounds. Some musicians go so far as to purchase the artist’s brand of equipment. When Harold Ousley discovered that Gene Ammons played a Conn saxophone, he obtained one of the “same make,” as well as “the same kind of mouthpiece that Ammons used, a white one, real hard.” Another musician chose a Martin trumpet so that he could reproduce Miles Davis’s “especially dark, moody sound during those days when he played that kind of instrument.”
Through observation students can also surmise whether horn players stylize their personal vibrato with subtle movements of the instrument, or whether they depend exclusively on the manipulation of air flow and subtle movements of the tongue and lips. John McNeil learned to imitate Miles Davis’s effect of “putting a lot of air in his sound,” by sticking out his lower jaw when he played. To color the instrument’s sound more radically, Doc Cheatham copied the hand positions Joe Smith used for manipulating a rubber plunger mute to create such vocalized tonal qualities and effects as a singer’s rasp, nasality, and pitch inflection. He also perfected the growling and flutter tongue techniques used by Paul Whiteman’s trumpeters.
Investigating comparable matters for his own instrument, Kenny Washington “watched drummers like ‘Philly’ Joe Jones. My brain would take pictures of the ways they were playing, like the different brush strokes they used, and I would rush home and work on that.” A young bass player copied “certain glissandos and double stops and triple stops.” pitch clusters characteristic of the styles of Buster Williams and Richard Davis (GD). Young Barry Harris also routinely lodged himself next to pianists at jam sessions and dances, “trying to see something, trying to learn a few runs” or a chord that he could “take home” with him. Harris initially memorized the finger movements of pianists over the keyboard because “I was not yet that good with sound.”23
Such practices are of long standing within the jazz tradition. Early ragtime pianists who could not read music learned their art partially by observing the patterns made by the depressed keys of scroll-driver player pianos, then recreating the patterns on standar
d pianos. Some musicians gleaned information from record jacket photographs showing the posture of an artist’s hand or precise finger positions on a musical instrument, or studied the early film clips or three-minute soundies of swing bands, which could be seen at bars and clubs in the forties.24 At one time, aspiring artists could observe performance techniques of musicians at local music shops where their performances promoted the sale of sheet music. Extended viewings of jazz performances, historical as well as contemporary, are now readily available on video cassettes.
Beyond building vocabulary, such close observation of detail leads self-educated musicians to an increased understanding of performance technique, whose rudiments they had acquired earlier from method books and personal experimentation. Sometimes, learners fortify their new understanding by rehearsing it silently during presentations by other musicians. At one Count Basie concert I attended in New York, two young teenagers seated themselves strategically in the front row of the balcony, where throughout the program they rocked back and forth to the music’s beat while miming their idols. One swept the air before him and imitated the broad circular movements of the drummer’s brush strokes; the other plucked up and down the strings of an imaginary bass.
Thinking in Jazz Page 16