Additional differentiations among drummers concern their individual approaches to time-keeping and emphasis on different drum set components. Drummers in the thirties commonly centered their action on the snare or tom-tom drums, accompanying themselves with a steady four-beat bass drum pattern and with punctuations of cymbal crashes. In the fifties and sixties, players like Elvin Jones and Tony Williams established the trend toward a more implicit than explicit representation of meter, the exploitation of diverse timbral colors, and greater activity involving different drum components in complex polyrhythms and asymmetrical phrases. Since the free jazz period, drummers Andrew Cyrille, Sunny Murray, and others have tended to minimize the use of conventional cymbal patterns and ostinatos, instead exploiting their instruments for wide-ranging “percussive textures and dynamic shadings:”32
Constellations of Traits and Concepts
Eventually, students learn to identify the musical personalities of great improvisers through comprehending the various constellations of traits and concepts described above. For example, matters of diction for singers are commonly tied to other issues bearing on the formulation of melodies. Singers with a dramatic concept are primarily concerned with the literal meanings of songs, and they deliver texts precisely. Others, whose approach some view as more personal, may sacrifice the clarity of song texts for increased musical inventiveness, taking great liberties with a song’s rhythm and melody.
Sound, melodic range, and performance technique may be inextricably linked for wind players, representing a unique trade-off of artistic possibilities. Trumpeters like Cat Anderson distinguish themselves as high-note virtuosos, capable of improvising in the range of double high C, a pitch once considered well above the range of a B trumpet. Typically, they achieve this dazzling feat by performing with a tight embouchure and a shallow mouthpiece, which renders an unusually light tone. Trumpeters like Tony Fruscella perform in the middle and lower range of the instrument, with an unusually dark, warm, flugelhorn-like tone. To achieve this, they typically choose a deeper, more conical mouthpiece and perform with a loose embouchure.33 Between these extreme approaches, players like Clifford Brown and Booker Little perform melodies over a full three-octave range with more conventional bell tone trumpet sounds.
John McNeil describes other combinations characterizing an individual’s approach. Louis Armstrong “tongued a lot and played lots of quarter notes and lots of triads, whereas Freddie Hubbard slurred his notes and played a lot of eighth notes and sixteenth notes and scalar things instead of arpeggios:”
By comparing the distinct profiles of leading improvisers, learners also gain insight into the formative influences of improvisers upon one another. John McNeil observes that “Freddie Hubbard never messed around with his sound in his early years, but he did in his later career when he began copping Miles’s stuff—putting air into his sound like Miles did on ‘My Funny Valentine.’ ” Another young musician, initially under the impression that the phrases he had copied from Lee Morgan were unique, realized, after learning several Kenny Dorham and Dizzy Gillespie solos, that Lee Morgan “had taken phrases from both of them.” Young artists continue to flesh out and revise their musical genealogies as they study increasing numbers of artists. Eventually, they learn to discern, for example, elements of style and practices of improvisation passed directly from Joe Oliver to Louis Armstrong to Roy Eldridge to Dizzy Gillespie to Fats Navarro and Miles Davis, in addition to Gillespie’s subsequent disciples, Lonnie Hillyer and John Faddis, and through Davis to Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Wallace Roney, and on to the youngest generations of trumpeters (fig. 5.1).34
Just as their early idols had learned from numerous mentors, aspiring musicians learn to re-create faithfully discrete bundles of traits and concepts from a succession of idols. Veteran artists reflecting on this aspect of learning recognize a few resulting constraints on early improvisations. When Roberta Baum reviews tapes of her own early performances, she says, “I can hear very distinctly which song is Ella Fitzgerald and which song is Betty Carter.” A promising saxophonist’s recording reveals Dexter Gordon’s predominant influence on one track and Sonny Rollins’s influence on another. “He’s still a young man;” Red Rodney comments. ‘All of us go through that.”
In the long run, however, the habit is more valuable than restrictive. Sometimes, a mature musician has reason to assume the musical personality of another artist. Rahsaan Roland Kirk once guided his improvisations during a deeply moving memorial concert for John Coltrane with the precise concepts that Coltrane had explored on his final album, Expression. Similarly, as recalled by Lonnie Hillyer, in a Charles Mingus composition built around “parodies on different musicians;” Jaki Byard once depicted the entire chronological development of jazz on the piano “from Scott Joplin and ragtime through free jazz.” During the appropriate historical segments, drummer “Dannie Richmond would play like Max Roach or ‘Philly’ Joe Jones;” and other band members “would mimic some of the old horn players.”
When the piece “progressed to Miles Davis,” Lonnie Hillyer took the spotlight. He not only imitated Davis’s performance but, he adds, “behaved like him too. I’d put the music in the end of the horn like a mute and play ‘Bye Bye, Blackbird’ and turn my back to the audience. One night I was doing this,” Hillyer recalls, “and Miles walked into the club. I didn’t know it, but the audience went wild. Miles just walked onto the stage, and I gave him my horn. It was beautiful! Spontaneous things would always happen like that. One night [a saxophone player] had been imitating Sonny Rollins, but when Sonny Rollins walked into the club, he stopped. He wouldn’t do it [Hillyer laughs]. But it’s like they say, imitation is the greatest form of compliment, and I had known Miles from the time I was a kid:”
Creativity as the Act of Fusion and Transformation
Although successful imitation requires the invention of new solos within the distinct bounds of an artist’s style, conventional wisdom ultimately encourages musicians to cross over these boundaries by exploring the relationships between and among the ideas of different improvisers. “When you’re playing, play by all of them. Play by all of them because you learn from them all;” a sax player once advised Hillyer. Arthur Rhames similarly views great jazz players as those who have “the ability to take different musical perspectives and to integrate them into their own. They symbolize the potential that everyone has to draw on many sources and bring different understandings together in the perspective of their own lives.”
In light of this, many youngsters redefine their early artistic goals to include an amalgam of the features of their favorite improvisers within their instrument’s lineage. As implied earlier, this approach enables students to move in the direction of forging personal styles, while at the same time operating confidently within the bounds of the jazz tradition. Students faced with an ongoing array of models find themselves carefully weighing the value of each influence. When reviewing the recorded literature of jazz, for example, aspiring players are drawn to some artists over others. Moreover, from the recordings of an individual artist, they are drawn to some solos over others. Even when the same solo appeals to several young musicians, each commonly derives unique lessons from it, perhaps selecting different phrases for their vocabularies.
Ideally, Bobby Rogovin wants to be “a reflection of all the world’s greatest trumpet players: a little of Dizzy, a little of Kenny Dorham, a little of Freddie Hubbard, all sort of combined into Bobby.” Tommy Turrentine’s approach has been much the same. “Fats Navarro, I loved him; Art Farmer, I listened to him. Miles, Dizzy, Woody [Shaw], Donald Byrd, Blue Mitchell; a lot of cats, man. I listened to them all. I’d take anything that pleased me, anything that sounded beautiful. It might be a phrase. It might be a scale. It might be anything. I guess if it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn’t be sounding the way I’d be sounding:”
Leroy Williams similarly absorbed Max Roach’s “melodic approach to the drums,” Kenny Clarke’s “sense of swing;” and El
vin Jones’s “concept of polyrhythms;” striving to “make one drummer out of them all.” Vea Williams imitated Sarah Vaughan’s “tonal quality and vibrato” and Carmen McCrae’s diction. “In the case of a pianist,” Walter Bishop Jr. says, “you take this person’s rhythms, that person’s harmonic structures, and another person’s lines, and you put it all together yourself.”
Personal taste evolves along with the styles of aspiring players, with different layers of their features revealing the influence of successive mentors. Kenny Barron initially acquired Horace Silver’s “hard touch and strong rhythmic feeling;” subsequently imitating Wynton Kelly’s “sense of swing.” Later, Barron copied Tommy Flanagan’s “smooth, fluid, lyrical” melodic concept and his “light touch;” developing the ability to articulate pitches “softly, but with great intensity.” More recently, he has learned McCoy ‘Tyner’s “unique ways of voicing chords and concept of playing with power.” Producing ever more subtle mixtures, one bass player patterned his upper register upon Scott LaFaro’s sound, but imitated Ron Carter’s sound in the lowest register, particularly the unique resonance of his low C. In similar fashion, a young tenor saxophonist copied Billy Mitchell’s sound in the subtone register but John Coltrane’s sound in the altissimo range.
As their search for ways to express their ideas advances, students begin to imitate jazz’s most imaginative artists, regardless of the instruments they “happen to have adopted” (LH). This practice pays homage to performers as music thinkers and different instruments as inspirers of invention. Because the trumpet “lends itself most naturally to scalar patterns” and the saxophone is especially well suited to the performance of “wide intervals,” Tommy Turrentine studies saxophone solos for “intervallic ideas” that he might not otherwise conceive in his own performances. Guitarist Emily Remler has imitated “Bill Evans’s acoustic piano sound and his chord voicings,” and she performs other material learned from drummers. “They can really expand your usual repertory of patterns, showing you millions of different ways to approach rhythm, because we melodic players are babies rhythmically,” she explains. In an ongoing cycle of influence, drummers like Max Roach have acquired unique patterns from the footwork of tap dancers they accompanied, and Baby Lawrence absorbed into his “jazz tap percussion” routines the influence of pianist Art Tatum’s remarkable sense of rhythmic phrasing.35
Indeed, some improvisers periodically avoid listening to performers of their own instruments in order to absorb varied influences. Lester Young found the model for his light tenor saxophone timbre in the C melody saxophone’s characteristic sound as interpreted by Frankie Trumbauer, and he absorbed Trumbauer’s way of slurring pitches as well. He also adapted alto saxophonist Jimmy Dorsey’s technique of producing “honks.”36 Those who switch instruments during their careers commonly transfer practices from one instrument to another. According to one interpretation, Young favored the use of alternate saxophone fingerings to create rhythmic and timbral changes on the same pitch, performing rhythmic patterns that he had absorbed from his early experience playing the drums.37 John Coltrane’s performances on soprano saxophone led, as he put it, to his “pulling up my conception” on tenor saxophone, prompting him to develop the technique of performing ideas in the soprano range.38
Earl Hines’s development of the trumpet style of piano performance, described earlier, grew out of his own early training as a cornetist and his admiration for other great players like Louis Smith and Louis Armstrong.39 In another instance, when the leader of an early band lacking clarinetists required trumpeter Jabbo Smith to play the clarinet parts on his instrument, Smith acquired, in effect, special training in hearing and conceiving dexterously fingered, intricate patterns in the trumpet’s high register. This ultimately established the ground for his high, fluent trumpet style, rare for trumpeters of his generation.40 Subconscious visions may inspire such transferences on occasion. An instrumentalist once dreamed that Dizzy Gillespie was performing the trumpet, but instead of the trumpet’s sound, scat syllables poured out of his horn. At the end of the dream, Dizzy Gillespie’s image merged into that of the dreamer. The experience encouraged the musician to pursue his interest in vocal improvisation.
Not all musical ideas translate well from one instrument to another, however. One player who copied several spare figures improvised by Yusef Lateef during a flute solo found, to his disappointment, that they sounded “simplistic and silly” when he tried them on the trumpet. Their original vitality and effectiveness had depended on the flute’s full-bodied, pulsating sound. Additionally, technical problems can cause a lag in the transmission of ideas among instrumentalists. Just as string bass players faced challenges adapting Charlie Parker’s fluent melodic lines to their instrument, many trombonists initially found learning bebop patterns discouraging. When artists like J. J. Johnson and Urbie Green, through the use of such techniques as alternate slide positions, demonstrated the possibility of performing pitches rapidly with minimal movement of the right arm and wrist, trombonists began to feel at home with the new idiom (CF).
Ultimately, the early musical capabilities and personalities of students influence their interpretation and selection of an idol’s solo features, producing, in the course of borrowing them, sometimes subtle and sometimes bold transformations of musical materials. When copying vocabulary patterns, students can absorb the model’s timbre, or they can infuse it to varying degrees with their own. Eddie Jefferson was “thrilled” to hear George Johnson Jr. perform his vocalese texts because, as Jefferson had told Johnson, he felt self-conscious about his own vocal quality and “always wanted to know what his things would sound like if they were sung by a young cat with a smooth, silky voice.” In other cases, youngsters initially absorb a particular idol’s sound before altering it. Harold Ousley, for example, after successfully imitating Gene Ammons and seeking to cultivate his own personal sound, experimented with different brands of saxophones, mouthpieces, and reeds.
Musical training also affects the student’s reproduction of model phrases. Akira Tana points out that “Jimmy Cobb took ‘Philly’ Joe Jones’s rudimental approach and cleaned it up.” Cobb’s rudiments “sounded clearer” than those of Jones, whose technique was “rougher, more natural;” he explains. In a comparable instance, a trumpeter imbued borrowed lines with distinct articulations of double and triple tonguing techniques, which he had learned in the classical music tradition, and a classically trained bassist adapted to bowing some patterns that his mentor performed by plucking.
Representing more substantial changes, learners who transpose the vocabulary patterns of an idol into keys in which they can easily perform them also vary the pitch levels and timbres of the patterns. Such changes, when combined with the artist’s individual sound and personal approach to phrasing and embellishment, are sometimes great enough to mask the identities of the original models. Discovering that certain, apparently different phrases gleaned from disparate solos share a similar basis is a familiar revelation for students and encourages subsequent efforts to identify and catalogue common jazz components and their variants (exx. 5.6a-k).
Even more radical transmutations result when, in the course of learning entire solos, students encounter passages that exceed their abilities to imitate them or that are obscured by the volume of the band’s accompaniment or the soloist’s imprecise articulation. Some youngsters delete the inaccessible passages, substituting rests for their performance. Others copy the discernible pitches and complete the passages with pitches of their own. Unconscious changes occasionally occur as students unknowingly alter the rhythmic phrasing or pitch configuration of recorded passages and add them to their storehouses as inadvertent variants. Sometimes it is only after years have passed that, upon reviewing earlier transcriptions with the perspective of “older ears;” they discover these alterations. Musicians may decide, of course, that they prefer their own variations to the original phrases.
Sooner or later, personal affinity for particular mus
ical elements can also modify patterns. When Chuck Israels was a youngster, he could “always” recall the rhythms of other artists’ phrases, but he had difficulty remembering their melodies. As a precise contour faded in memory, Israels compensated by adding new pitches to the phrase’s rhythm. Such transfiguration sometimes operates on models offered up by the subconscious. After John Coltrane’s death, a musician was once awakened by a vivid dream in which Coltrane’s group presented a sensational and extraordinarily vibrant performance, one that the musician could not recall ever having heard before. He struggled to recall fragments of its sounds as they receded from his memory. Although the experience left him but a small legacy of actual music, the psychological and emotional impressions were lasting ones.
The most elaborate changes commonly occur when students deliberately vary phrases learned from their mentors by adding personal marks to them, in a sense legitimating their use. Because the jazz artist “was given credit for being innovative as a soloist,” Max Roach and his peers “grew up wanting to do something a little different from everybody else. It was the crowning achievement if you could invent an idea, and everybody would say, ‘That’s Max!—even if it was the simplest thing.” Roach refers here to such details as taking a common pattern and orchestrating it differently among the drum set’s instruments. He also recounts an incident from his very young performing years. Roach was only fifteen when Cecil Payne came running up to him at one jam session, calling out, “‘I heard the music from the street, but I knew it was you who was playing!’ That was a great compliment at the time.”
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