Reinforcing such values, veterans who teach jazz vocabulary directly to students never suggest that phrases be ends in themselves. Instead, they represent their demonstrations as examples of the kinds of things you can do. Learners eventually recognize this as well. “If you hear something intriguing in somebody else’s solo, the main thing is to find out how it works, to find out what’s intriguing about it, and then to apply it differently in your own way” (BB).
Applying Knowledge toward Original Invention
To discover their own applications for model phrases, musicians commonly analyze a phrase for its central elements, focusing on one derived principle as the basis for creating new analogous patterns. Sometimes a phrase’s melodic contour is its salient feature. “You can copy Wes Montgomery—just one little thing that he uttered, just one bar or a four-bar phrase—and it’s such a well-developed melody, such a well-developed composition, that you could base ten million of your own licks, or a whole solo, on that one thing. By using thematic development, you could write forty tunes from that one bar” (ER).
Rhythmic ingredients can also constitute the fundamental idea for original figures. Walter Bishop Jr. says that after absorbing Bud Powell’s phrasing he “began to think like Bud” so he could abandon Powell’s precise lines and create his own “in the same idiom, playing with the same kind of feeling and intensity.” Arthur Rhames views the process as analogous to emulating personal styles of speech. Because all artists speak: with “their own natural rhythm and sequential order,” it is possible to “emulate a person whose speaking you like, using his same effect—how he comes into a sentence or the way he constructs his things”—but without saying the “exact same thing.” That is how Rhames learned from John Coltrane.
Without directly copying his melodic line, I tried to get the feeling of the line, the phrasing, which allowed me to understand how Trane was talking when he played. What I wanted was the form, the basket that he was using, but the contents I wanted to fill myself. I knew that I had something to say, and I wanted to deal with that. So what I copied was the way John constructed his phrases and their rhythmical base, the stems without the notes, and I put my own notes and harmony—the things I thought about—on top of it.
In other instances, it is a pattern’s harmonic content that inspires. When transcribing an exceptional phrase by Charlie Parker, for example, and discovering its “use of a fourth over a minor seventh chord;” Benny Bailey composed numerous figures in which the fourth remained the predominant component.
Experimentation also teaches students to create new figures by applying to model phrases the same techniques they had learned for embellishing jazz tunes and by combining fragments of different phrases, both those of other artists and those of their own design. From the beginning, Jimmy Robinson “put my things together with the technical—the real intricate, hard-to-do—things I liked in different players’ solos:” Don Friedman invented his “own melodies” to complement the voicings he copied from Bill Evans. Fred Hersch has combined musical traits from his principal jazz mentor, Herbie Hancock, with the “contrapuntal practices” of classical music composers like Mozart.
If original sparks of musical imagination and unique technical abilities are ever-present ingredients within the earliest improvisational blends of some students, prolonged apprenticeships initially content others, who succumb to more inventive practices only after they become bored with mere imitation of their idols. “Even if I didn’t sound as good as the people I copied when I made up my own things,” one musician says of the first turning point in his development, “at least I was starting to express myself, and that was the most satisfying thing for me at that point.”
Others find the impetus for personal development in the realization that attractive idiosyncratic features of a mentor’s style are impossible for anyone but the mentor to re-create. This can be a function of unique physical aspects of the elder’s control over an instrument, the characteristics of a particular instrument itself, or hidden techniques underlying musical effects that baffle students.41 “A lot of Bud Powell’s playing may sound simple when you hear it,” Tommy Flanagan says, “but then trying to play it yourself is another matter.” This itself is something that “helps people create their own styles.” When learning great artists’ recorded solos, Flanagan sometimes composed original phrases to replace those he “couldn’t figure out,” a practice that encouraged his development as an improviser. “So after a while,” he concludes, “you’re just playing your own lines.” With self-effacing humor, Lee Konitz maintains that he developed an overall style that was relatively independent of Charlie Parker, not only because he was already under the influence of Lennie Tristano, but also because he lacked the virtuosity required to imitate Parker as closely as he might have liked. In a comparable instance, when limited endurance prevented one trumpeter from fashioning solos after a model’s long melodic lines, a more experienced musician advised him to devise an approach that took advantage of what he could do—building solos around shorter, simpler phrases and exploiting the use of space; this strategy provided more frequent rests when he played.
Eubie Blake describes the trials and tribulations by which young artists sometimes learn to appreciate their own uniqueness.
You hear another guy play and say to yourself, “Man, listen to that! I wish I could play that good.” Then you hear somebody else and you say the same thing. Then comes a time when you realize that the first guy can’t do what the second guy can and the second guy can’t do what the first guy can. That makes you feel a little better when you know that. Well, then, when you come to find out you can do things both them other guys can’t do, you discover that ain’t got anything to do with who’s good and who isn’t. It’s just that everybody puts his own personal style to the music. Of course, if he doesn’t, then he just ain’t a musician.42
As youngsters follow the jazz community’s traditional learning methods, they cultivate skills outside of performance that prepare them effectively for the demands of individual and collective improvisation. Absorbing features from a large selection of virtuoso artists, emerging musicians learn the musical conventions associated with different performance schools. At the same time, students, already familiar with the characteristics of their own instruments, acquire specialized skills to hear and interpret across instrumental lines patterns of sound distinctive by virtue of their diverse timbres, unique playing techniques, and different ranges.
The actual benefits of such training sometimes catch learners by surprise. One young saxophonist who had transcribed numerous piano solos at his teacher’s insistence was excited to find that, for the first time at sessions, he could hear details within the piano accompaniment to his own solos. Similarly, one aspiring trumpeter striving to master his idol’s solos slowed them to half speed, thereby lowering their pitch an octave. The practice of transferring the passages from an octave below the instrument’s range to their original pitch inadvertently left him with such a proficiency in apprehending pitches in the lower octave that, from then on, he could discern the precise patterns of trombone parts and bass lines that had formerly eluded him in performance.
Through other exercises, such as replacing the inaccessible passages of recorded solos, young artists train themselves in matters of musical logic and stylistic continuity, learning to compose smooth melodic transitions between the preceding and following passages and to shape their creations to appropriate harmonic forms. Finally, when experimenting with an idol’s phrases as models for invention, students are, in effect, practicing those fundamental techniques of variation soloists need in order to develop their own ideas in performance and respond appropriately to the ideas of other musicians. This combined training eventually enables students to interact appropriately with various kinds of jazz bands.
SIX
The More Ways You Have of Thinking
Conventional Rhythmic and Theoretical Improvisation Approaches
The more ways yo
u have of thinking about music, the more things you have to play in your solos.—Barry Harris
Thinking of rhythm can be very effective; you can just play a few notes and with the right rhythm, it makes them very interesting. Other times, you’re thinking in intervals, or you’re thinking in scales. Actually, the first thing cats did was to play vertically, running chords. They really learned chords from top to bottom. That was the way I learned; I didn’t know about scales until later. Lately, musicians have been playing intervals. It’s a way of getting out of running chords really, because if you play a lot of intervals, you can play them anywhere against the most difficult chords.—Benny Bailey
The improviser’s evolving storehouse of knowledge includes musical elements and forms varied in detail and design: jazz tunes, progressions, vocabulary patterns, and myriad features of style. Performers can draw faithfully on their assorted materials, as when they treat a formerly mastered phrase as a discrete idea and play it intact. Soon, they realize the infinite implications of their knowledge, for virtually all aspects can serve as compositional models. Pursuing subtle courses, musicians carry over the inflections and ornaments of particular phrases to embellish other phrases. Venturing further, they may extract a figure’s salient characteristic, such as melodic shape or rhythmic configuration, and treat it as the rudiment for new figures.
Gradually, artists come to generalize about the underlying tonal and rhythmic properties of their materials. This is essential if improvisers are to develop the conceptual grounding on which their operations depend. “In improvisation you’ve got to have a melodic concept and a harmonic concept;” Tommy Turrentine maintains, “and a rhythmic concept especially.”
The principles that artists derive from their studies ultimately provide them with the basis for diverse approaches to musical thinking, encouraging flexible invention in the styles of jazz that are more independent of the individual’s precise repertory of patterns. Perhaps the most fundamental approach to improvisation emphasizes rhythm, commonly known in the jazz community as time or time-feel.
Playing off of Time
Ken McIntyre once commented that a great improviser could play an entire solo based on one pitch alone. Coincidentally, during an interview with a young drummer, a soft background recording featured flugelhornist Wilbur Hardin, who was generating tremendous excitement with a stream of single-pitched rhythmic patterns at his solo’s opening.1 Carrying on the tradition of soloists like Louis Armstrong who could also create great variety in this manner (ex. 6.1a), Hardin manipulated timbre and articulation subtleties to cause his pitches to form different rhythmic groupings, in effect superimposing varied metric schemes upon that of the piece (ex. 6.1b). The drummer suddenly burst out laughing and, with an apology for his distraction, added: “Did you hear that? That’s what our music’s about. Listen to all that brother can say with one note!”
The performer’s rhythmic conception can produce phrases whose melodic content is secondary, but it also forms the underpinning of successful melodic excursions. Praised for their swing, effective improvisations are “natural, flowing, uncontrived, and spontaneous”; they display strong rhythmic momentum, “rhythmic elasticity, bounce, and vitality.” These essential aesthetic qualities are the product of a combination of the rhythmic elements that make up improvised figures, the manner in which the figures are articulated, their placement within the piece’s metric scheme, and their relationships to the surrounding figures of other band members.
Such critical aspects of performance may be rooted in the appreciation for rhythmic complexity and drive evident in many parts of Africa.2 In Ghana, for example, traditional compositions for singers, dancers, and percussion orchestras commonly include multilayered cyclical parts performed by several drums that support the master drum part. Based on duple or triple meters or carrying connotations of both, the drum parts are unified through their relationship to a repeating bell part or time line, itself supported by an interwoven shaker pattern and by polyrhythmic handclapping patterns. The liveliness of compositions derives not only from the sheer variety of their rhythms, orchestrated at distinct pitch levels and voiced in the colorful timbres of different instruments, but also the rhythms’ dynamic relationships.
Individual parts produce different schemes of counterpoint with each of their neighbors as their patterns alternately reinforce or cross over one another within the larger musical texture. Additionally, like multidimensional sound sculptures, the compositions exhibit new features as listeners adopt different rhythmic viewpoints or frames of reference for apprehending and organizing them. When listeners shift perspectives from the triple to the duple handclap-ping accompaniment—framing the music in terms of the slower delineation of time—the bell, shaker, and drum parts alter in stress, phrasing, and shape. They seem to begirt and end at different points along their cycles and to bear different relationships to the surrounding parts, displaying a playful ambiguity.
Within this kaleidophonic array, melodic-rhythmic elements of comparable pitch, timbre, or hardness of attack appear at times to break away from their original configurations to form new parts. This phenomenon compounds the effects of the changes that musicians occasionally create through variation and improvisation. Together with dancers’ dramatic interpretations of the music and vocalists’ overlay of successive song texts, the performance comprises a constantly changing musical environment around the orbit of the time line and its underlying polymetric foundation. Ultimately, the compelling interplay of each composition’s dance, vocal, and instrumental patterns—in which different groupings coincide at one moment to relax rhythmic tension, then pull away from one another to increase rhythmic tension—keeps the music in a perpetual state of excited motion.3
In the New World, early African American composers strove to preserve a semblence of the rhythmic life of their musical heritage within the comparatively simple framework of European music composed in single meters. Underscored by the motion of the conductor’s baton, the stress patterns of melody and accompaniment in hymns, marches, and dance tunes characteristically reinforce the downbeat and other strong beats of the meter, such as the third beat in a four-beat measure. This orientation reflects the value that Europeans and their American counterparts generally attach to rhythmic congruity and uniformity in the organization of musical parts, while allowing for periodic contrast by creating polyrhythms and stressing weak beats to create syncopation.
When African Americans interpreted European pieces in light of their own values and performance practices and adopted their structures as vehicles for original composition, they commonly increased the music’s rhythmic complexity by accenting the weaker upbeats or backbeats, that is, the second and fourth beats in a four-beat measure. As James Reese Europe explained in 1919, “We play the music as it is written, only that we accent strongly in this manner the notes which originally would be without accent.”4 By imposing a contrasting rhythmic frame of reference upon that implicit in the music, listeners and musicians create a dual accentuation scheme that exerts an alternating pull upon the music from one beat to the next and imbues performances with a rocking, swinging quality like the dynamic motion of a pendulum.5
In many African American musical genres, the accents of the drummer’s hi-hat cymbal, together with the audience’s complementary handclapping and finger snapping, reinforce patterns that fall on the backbeats and intensify the backbeat’s pull away from the strong beats. This, in turn, maximizes the force of the subsequent swing back toward the strong beats. For this reason, the backbeat provides an important rhythmic target point for improvisers. In this sense, from the viewpoint of African American music, the backbeat itself can be viewed its the strong beat. John Coltrane explains that he “thought in groups of notes ... [and] tried to place these groups on the accents and emphasize the strong beats—maybe on 2 here and on 4 over at the end. I would set up the line and drop groups of notes—a long line with accents dropped as I moved along.”6
Carmen Lundy provides a comparative perspective on her preferences, explaining that they are the product of her upbringing.
Certain cultures feel the rhythm on the downbeat more so than the backbeat. I have been brought up in a culture where I feel the backbeat of the rhythm as opposed to the downbeat. Not to say that I don’t feel that too, but the stress is on the backbeat for me, and all the other things that I hear in the music are intertwined with the backbeat. In this way, there was something about the rhythm of jazz that I equated exactly with the gospel. I mean, the way we used to sing and clap our hands in church was just like the jazz drummer playing cymbals. It was the same swing feeling—the gospel swing and the jazz swing.
Similarly, for early jazz players like Buddy Bolden through bebop innovators like Dizzy Gillespie, and for prospective jazz musicians from outside the black community as well, the sanctified church was commonly the training ground for absorbing essential rhythmic features of African American music.7 In its vibrant musical setting, congregants learned to keep their bearings with respect to meter and “stress” amid a complex, ever changing scheme of rhythmic counterpoint. The “sanctified church had a deep significance for me, musically,” Gillespie reports. “I first learned the meaning of rhythm there and all about how music could transport people spiritually.... They used to keep at least four different rhythms going, and as the congregation joined in, the number of rhythms would increase with foot stomping, hand clapping, and people catching the spirit and jumping up and down on the wooden floor, which also resounded like a drum.... The sanctified church’s rhythm got to me as it did to anyone else who came near the place.”8
Young artists build upon their early experiences by engaging in formal time studies. Under the tutelage of a former vaudeville performer, Melba Liston’s junior high school music group learned various song and dance routines and the handclapping and dance exercises of “eurhythmics.” Competing in “counting contests;” they pitted their skills against one another to grasp and imitate increasingly complex rhythms. David Baker’s high school band leader required members to tap and sing syncopated passages from a swing method book. Aspiring drummers commonly practiced and shared exercises from “syncopation” or “modern drumming” method books by Jim Chapin, Ted Reed, and others. In Barry Harris’s workshops, students learn a store of patterns with short figures of eighth notes and sixteenth notes occasionally embellished with eighth-note triplets and sixteenth-note triplets, as well as figures including sustained rhythmic values with alternating on-beat and off-beat characters. From these cells, learners could create longer phrases. Moreover, those youngsters who recognize the necessity of acquiring a “rhythmic vocabulary” discover that they can derive a complementary repertory of rhythmic patterns from their repertory of melodic phrases by extracting “the stems” of the phrases from their “note heads” (AR).
Thinking in Jazz Page 22