Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Once aspiring performers have cultivated a rhythmic conception and gained the ground for playing off of time, they can generate an ongoing succession of rhythmic patterns around an unfailing sense of the beat and imbue them with the attributes of swing. Ronald Shannon Jackson sometimes “sets up” for practice sessions by imagining an increasingly intense flow of rhythms until he “hears” their heavy patter “raining down all around” him. From this deluge, Jackson selects the most interesting patterns and plays them, varying their orchestration among the components of his drum set.

  During actual performances, seasoned soloists can similarly enter a piece’s progression at a designated tempo and keep track of their metered progress through the form while taking great rhythmic liberties. Playing inside the time, they double up or triple up on the tempo—improvising patterns precisely twice or three times as fast as the beat. In other instances, mathematical calculation guides excursions outside the time. Superimposed metric frames aid in placing pitches with great rhythmic accuracy at finely distinguished, abstract points in relation to the underlying meter, thereby creating subtle patterns of syncopation and polymetric activity.

  In other instances, speech rhythm provides the means for soloists to create interesting cross-rhythms in relation to the rest of the band. When singers shape phrases according to natural cadences of song texts, and when players imitate the models of language by uttering speechlike patterns with their instruments, they pull their phrases momentarily outside of the time. The physical constitutions of improvisers sometimes dictate comparable changes. In the execution of a long technical phrase, the fingers may perform some maneuvers evenly and others unevenly, causing pitches to lag slightly during particular key sequences and to edge ahead during others.

  Moreover, artists attain great freedom in their rhythmic dance when they deliberately superimpose different tempos upon that of the piece, rushing ahead or falling behind, applying different degrees of pressure to the beat before resubmitting to its regulation.19 At other times, the group abandons tempo as a constraint upon performance altogether. “Tempos are very important:” Carmen Lundy says, “and there’s also taking a tune out of tempo—rubato. There are so many ways of dealing with a tune, and I like the freedom to take a song anywhere when I’m performing:” Performances unbounded by a strict metric frame are not free in the sense of being unrhythmic. Rather, they are driven by rhythmic goals that are elastic. Musicians create constant motion in their parts by mentally supplying and pursuing a movable model of the beat, which they stretch or compress as they improvise. Ultimately, seasoned artists develop the control, within metered performances, to place virtually any number of pitches within any portion of the piece’s underlying structure (ex. 6.5).

  The rich and varied effects of these practices elude precise description and graphic representation in staff notation, which, of course, was not designed to portray them. This is one reason why published solo transcriptions are skeletal representations typically, and efforts to perform them as written sound stilted and lifeless unless performers can interpret them in light of the rhythmic conventions of jazz. Alternatively, efforts to capture the complexity of jazz despite the limitations of notation often result in dense representations—double-dotted noteheads tied together in odd configurations, stems connected with multiple layers of beams, and the like—that are difficult for performers to interpret. Consequently, students absorb and store the rhythmic features of jazz aurally by patterning their playing upon that of mature artists through participating in live performances and practicing along with recordings.

  Once improvisers can conceive rhythms clearly and manage them agilely, they can use the figures as rhythmic templates for the underpinning of melodic and harmonic ideas by combining them with pitches derived from various sources. “I hear rhythms, mostly,” Dizzy Gillespie reports, “and then I put notes to them:”20 Ultimately, the learner’s storehouse of melodic phrases, which yields a repertory divisible into discrete rhythmic models, also yields a repertory divisible into discrete tonal models, “the note heads of the phrases without their stems.” The discovery that, for leading artists, recurring combinations of pitches form the basis for different phrases encourages students to experiment with the abstract pitch collections. They mull over the effectiveness of each collection’s permutations—their resulting interval configurations and melodic contours—when set to different rhythms.

  Many performers also learn other approaches to improvisation in which they apply their rhythmic templates to pitches derived from theoretical constructs. Just as music theory initially provides an analytical tool for classifying vocabulary patterns in relation to complementary chords, it ultimately serves as a useful generative or prescriptive tool. Among the jazz community’s cumulative options, the earliest appear to have emphasized the invention of melodies from chord tones.

  Improvising from Chords

  Before soloists learn music theory, they formulate melodies by ear, kinetically (by hand), and through abstract visualizations in relation to the sounds of each piece’s underlying harmony. Their early efforts are commonly “hit and miss;” as Melba Liston says. She and her friends “knew what notes didn’t fit the chords and didn’t sound good;” so they “just tiptoed around them” when they played, “trying to avoid them.” The increasing complexity of jazz during the forties compounded the challenges faced by the young teenagers. In contrast to pieces based on simple blues forms in which artists “could just about play in one key the whole time,” the bebop repertory featured compositions like “Lover” whose chords “went through a lot of keys” (AF). Youngsters who had yet to learn about harmonic modulation did not necessarily appreciate this distinction, and some improvised stubbornly within the initial key of pieces, producing harmonic clashes that were as distressing to them as they were puzzling (DB).

  Exclusive dependence on ear knowledge eventually limits many performers, even those who acquire great skill in negotiating tunes aurally.21 After unsuccessful efforts at jam sessions playing “on complex tunes like ‘You Stepped out of a Dream,’” Gary Bartz turned for assistance to trombonist Grachan Moncur, who subsequently taught him the theoretical principles of harmony and their application to jazz. The theory was “a great revelation” to Bartz, who had relied heavily on a piece’s melody when formulating solos. At the time, he says, he “had no idea that you could solo from sheet music chords without even knowing the melody of the tune.” Benny Bailey also remembers his surprise at an early session when the guitarist informed him bluntly that he was playing the “wrong harmony.” That day, Bailey “bought a guitar chord book” and stayed up the entire night practicing, “getting fluid connecting chord to chord. It was like a whole new world opening up.” Subsequently, Bailey would not play a composition with other musicians until he “knew the chords.”

  Following the changing conventions of jazz, particular generations of improvisers have formulated solos from various harmonic models. Early soloists commonly played inside the chords by emphasizing their most basic elements. “When I began;” Doc Cheatham says, “we wouldn’t know anything about the sixth or the seventh or the ninth, because jazz was played on the one-three-five chord.... Once in a while, [the other pitches] seeped in around there where Louis and Bix started coming in;” He remembers a rehearsal of Eubie Blake’s band in which “at the end of the tune, [saxophonist] Joe Hyman hit the seventh and Blake jumped up and hit the ceiling, [yelling] ‘Don’t play those seventh chords in there!’ [Cheatham laughs.] It was beautiful.”

  Since the twenties, musicians have increasingly shaded progressions with diatonic upper extensions and altered tones of chords, and incorporated them into their improvisations. Art Farmer initially invented “very basic solos, riding on notes inside the chords like the tonics and dominants [that sounded] consonant” with a piece’s background, then later experimented with other chord tones. Eventually, however, he decided that “spelling chords in performance was nothing by itself,” he explains. �
��It didn’t give you a melody. Playing C-E-G-B on a C7 chord might be nice occasionally, but it still leaves a lot of space to be filled up. You had to find out what notes you could add to it to make some kind of musical idea, some kind of phrase.” In part, aspiring players found the answer by analyzing the pitch choices of great soloists. Subsequently, many visualized their own options as mixtures of individual elements of chord and non-chord tones.

  As the music’s harmonic tension increased during the fifties and sixties, improvisers dealt, at times, even “more in the upper partials of chords than with the main chord tones.” Some conceived of pitch selections as chords superimposed one upon the another—“two triads or the polychord type of things,” as Rufus Reid describes Eddie Harris’s playing. According to Reid, instead of picturing one chord with six or seven individual elements in it, as, for instance, an eleventh or a thirteenth on top of an F minor triad, Harris pictures an “E-flat triad on top of the F minor triad which;” he says, “automatically gives [him] the seventh, the ninth, and the eleventh.” He could “think real fast that way and superimpose different kinds of harmonic things on the chord,” Reid explains, because the materials of triads were already second nature to Harris and readily at hand.

  Performers also experiment with the use of polychords or compound chords to mix triads with altered pitches, in some instances emphasizing elements outside of the tonality of the key. John Hicks experienced a “new freedom” in his performances when he first began thinking of “two chords a tritone apart” as a way to mix a triad with its raised-eleventh, flatted-seventh, and flatted-ninth degrees. At these operations, as Reid describes it, Eddie Harris’s facility “was so enormous that he could go in and out of key so fast that you wouldn’t even know that he had put a whole other sound on the chord. That is also what Harold Land and Bobby Hutcherson were doing.” Many liken such controlled harmonic mixtures to the subtle blending of colors by visual artists.22 “Everybody’s approach to chords is different. Some people move in and out of harmony so quickly that you would hardly recognize the difference, but that adds beauty to the music. It’s just like someone’s making a picture. You can take the same chord, but add different colors to it. You can make a little red streak, then you add a little pink to it and a little streak of black, and it makes it more beautiful” (DC).

  Beyond imaging inventive mixtures of chord tones and color tones, soloists can stimulate their melodic ideas by envisioning various chord insertions as they perform. Lee Konitz finds constant challenges in devising new substitutions that “add enrichment to the basic harmonic progressions” of sophisticated compositions like ‘All the Things You Are:’ Similarly, Harold Ousley puts substitute chords like those designed by Charlie Parker in “different places” within a progression to prevent his own playing “from sounding too monotonous.” He also regards John Coltrane’s improvisations as exemplary in this regard. Instead of playing the same chord for two bars, “Trane might move through two, three, or four chords, just giving a beat or two to each;” imbuing that portion of the progression with “a different sound” (exx. 6.6a-c).23 Substitutions are equally helpful in the face of awkward progressions that are inhospitable to improvisers, however suitable for the tune’s accompaniment, making it difficult for soloists to weave melodies through them that do not sound “contrived” (HO).

  Improvising from Scales and Intervals

  The theoretical construct of scales, like that of chords, provides an alternative way of thinking about pitch relationships. An awareness of scales has not always been a part of the young musician’s perspective on music, however. As youngsters, Barry Harris and his peers “just thought about chords. We didn’t know about scales until later:” Many musicians became aware of the value of scales through the practices of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, whose interest in creating phrases of longer lengths and greater rhythmic density than their predecessors’ led the innovators to combine chord tones with additional material, emphasizing at times a linear concept in their improvisations.

  Previously, soloists “had been playing a more riffing style, playing little licks;” Tommy Turrentine recalls. He also regards early artists like Dud Bas-comb, Ray Nance, Buck Clayton, and Harry Edison as being “more melodic,” or tuneful in a conventional sense, than were Gillespie and his collaborators, who “came along playing all kinds of new scales. They’d hit those flatted ninths, flatted fifths, and those whole-tone progressions, turning the music all around.”24 David Baker adds, “You had Don Redman and Duke Ellington experimenting with chromaticism in the swing period; but only with bebop do you get the breakthrough of adding extra chromatic notes to the various scales to make them ... symmetrically correct [rhythmically].” From Baker’s standpoint, the styles of Harry Carney, Ben Webster, Johnny Hodges, Coleman Hawkins, and even Lester Young are more emphatically “diatonic.” The players of their generation did not emphasize, to the same extent, “those extra half steps that you hear when you listen to Dizzy or Bird.”

  For learners, the discovery of scales and their theoretical relationship to chords constitutes a major conceptual breakthrough with immediate application. They can construct a scale or mode that is compatible with each chord by filling in the diatonic pitches between its tones, increasing the chord’s associated pitch collection from four to seven, and grouping optional tonal materials together as a string of neighboring notes. Images of scales or scale fragments provide ready combinations of pitches inside and outside the chord for creating smooth linear phrases. Furthermore, rather than addressing the chords individually, improvisers can use the scale as a compositional model over the span of a diatonic progression. In the bebop era, these models provided soloists with efficient ways of conceptualizing melodic options as tempos increased substantially and the harmonic structures of pieces became denser, changing every two beats in some instances.

  Besides parent diatonic scales, jazz performers use a wealth of additional materials. Soloists can produce a common pentatonic scale from a major scale by eliminating its fourth and seventh degrees. There are, of course, also blues scales mixing harmonically ambiguous chord tones and altered tones.25 Such theoretical abstractions for melodic patterns, inherited from the earliest days of jazz, utilize the tonic, third, fifth, and sixth degrees of the major scale in variable combinations, as well as such blue notes as the flatted-third, flatted-seventh, and flatted-fifth degrees. “Listening to different cats” taught Wynton Marsalis that the “blues is the key to playing jazz.”

  Art Farmer and Benny Bailey, as members of George Russell’s band, experimented with his improvisation method based on the “Lydian chromatic scale.”26 Popular among students at the Berklee College of Music was the melodic or “jazz” minor scale. “When a dominant seventh chord moves, resolves down a fifth, like it should properly,” Emily Remler explains, “you can use the jazz minor scale up a half step from the root of the dominant seventh.” A case in point is the movement from G7 to C major, which invites the use of the A jazz minor scale. “That gives you all the best tensions to use upon it—sharp eleven, flat nine.” Providing further contrast are such symmetrical scales as the chromatic scale; the diminished or double-diminished scale, comprising alternations of half steps and whole steps; and the whole-tone scale—a signature pattern of Thelonious Monk. The peculiar pitch collections and varied interval configurations of different scales distinguish the harmonic color and shape of the melodies created from them.

  Overlapping to some degree with the use of chords and scales is another theoretical approach to improvisation emphasizing intervals as compositional models. Musicians sometimes use particular interval arrangements derived from chords as threads in their performances, transposing them to complement the piece’s progression. At other times, they favor interval sequences that weave in and out of diatonic harmony. “Today, you can use one interval like a fourth and play it anywhere;” Benny Bailey says. “Even if all the notes don’t fit the chords, the ear accepts them because they’re a complet
e pattern of fourths. Like on a C7 chord, you can play E, A, D, and Gs, and it won’t sound too far out, even though the notes are not in the chord. There are so many different kinds of things you can play like this that there are books full of fourth studies. That’s all a lot of young players are studying and playing these days.”

  As Bailey indicates, thinking in terms of interval patterns enables musicians to call up alternative sets of pitches having different harmonic relationships to the underlying chords. By pursuing Bailey’s example, the soloist formulates a melody from the flatted-third, flatted-fifth, raised-fifth, and flatted-ninth degrees, deliberately avoiding the chord tones and producing relatively high harmonic tension. If the same interval sequence were built on the chord’s tonic, the resulting phrase would include two chord tones—the tonic and the flatted seventh—and produce comparatively less harmonic tension. During the sixties, artists who popularized intervallic improvisation approaches included McCoy Tyner, Oliver Nelson, Eddie Harris, and Woody Shaw.

  Emphasizing sequences of larger intervals, like fourths, distinguishes melodies from those based on thirds, which more readily derive from chords, and from those based on seconds, which more readily derive from scales. At the same time, aspiring performers experimenting with different theoretical approaches discover that their materials sometimes overlap. Greg Langdon had a “revelation” when he played a “G harmonic minor scale up from the fifth degree” and found that it produced the “same pattern” that he had learned from another musician as an “E major arpeggio with half steps” added below each degree. Similarly, the double-diminished scale that Langdon learned from a performer at one session turned out to be the “same as the diminished chord with chromatics added beneath each note” that Barry Harris had taught him at a workshop. Another student found that the pattern he had learned as a pentatonic scale was simply a particular ordering of an interval pattern of fourths. For example, the scale B-C-D-F-G is simply a reordered compression of the arpeggio D-G-C-F-B.