Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Although such discrepancies sometimes initially confuse students trying to understand jazz in consistent theoretical terms, many apparent conflicts simply reflect the complementary relationships among chords, scales, and intervals in which each can be defined in terms of the other. Learning jazz is like circling a large “globe;” Josh Schneider proposes. Players constantly strive to understand it from different perspectives, different angles. Ultimately, performers make choices among constructs on the basis of their effectiveness as memory devices. Greg Langdon decided that it was more efficient to think of one of the patterns described above as a “diminished chord with chromatics” because he could recall its pitches “much faster” by picturing stacks of minor thirds and embellishing them with routine chromatic gestures than by “trying to remember all the notes of different double-diminished scales.”

  Artists typically design and perform intensive musical exercises based on theoretical models, initially striving to master them outside of the contexts of compositions. Wynton Marsalis rehearsed the blues for an hour each day when he was in school. “Sometimes, I’d skip lunch and I’d just be playing up and down that blues scale in the stairwell every day.” Similarly, Bill Evans practiced scales in “as many different ways as he could;” exploring their varied versions in every key (CI).

  Through such procedures, jazz musicians emphasize equally the development of technical control over the materials’ elements and their methodical exploration. Scales, for example, are mastered not only through practicing their inversions, but through practicing discrete exercises that probe endless arrangements of diatonic intervals (alternating seconds, alternating thirds, and so on), triads, chords, and their various extensions. From one drill to the next, musicians strive to “exhaust all the possibilities” through the “law of permutations;” as a student of Jimmy Cheatham’s recalls him saying in his workshops. How else can improvisers discover what patterns they especially like?27

  Eventually, the sheer persistence with which learners study theoretical models—absorbing their elements through various mnemonic devices—concretizes the models for learners and embeds them deeply in memory. Within teenaged bands, recommended exercises strengthen recall of musical materials and teach students to appreciate their cross-relationships. One pianist used to sustain a B on the keyboard just before he and Tommy Turrentine left rehearsals, instructing Turrentine to remember it. As they walked home, the pianist hit different iron poles with a hard object to set them ringing, then quizzed Turrentine about their pitches. Turrentine would figure this out by recalling the sound of B and calculating the number of scale degrees that separated it from the pitch of each pole.

  Whereas numerical and lettered imagery remains an integral part of the musical conceptions of some performers, for others it is but a useful learning tool that eventually metamorphizes into firm aural and physical impressions. Miles Davis recalls his early rigorous training in the language of bebop, which included the exploitation of tritone pitch relationships. “We really studied.... If a door squeaked, we would callout the exact pitch. And every time I heard the chord of G, for example, my fingers automatically took the position for C# on the horn—the flatted fifth—whether I was playing or not:”28

  The amount of time and practice required to reach such goals is itself a surprise for some learners. Benny Bailey reflects on disciplinary demands of jazz, citing the case of Joe Farrell, “a traditional-type tenor player,” who once reported that it “took him a year of studying those fourth patterns before he could work them into his solos.” Bailey explains, “It’s one thing studying something every day, and it’s another really using it. That’s difficult. You just have to keep on doing it over and over and over again until it comes automatically. Woody Shaw is an extreme example of that; every note he plays is a pentatonic, and he really makes it work. He says he thinks like that automatically now. He hears things in fourths.” One surprised beginner recalls his mentor’s counsel: “I can show you the basic theory you need to play jazz in a few hours, but you will spend the next five to seven years studying it before you can make much use of it in your playing.”

  Integrating Different Theoretical Models

  Besides mastering individual theoretical models, artists doggedly explore their relationships. Barry Harris’s integrated theory of improvisation and teaching method, derived from his analysis of solos by bebop masters, well illustrates the practice of combining models from different approaches to improvisation.29 In Harris’s method, major scales and mixolydian or dominant seventh scales (often simply called “seventh” scales) serve as focal points for the mixture of other compositional elements. Altogether, they can be performed over related major seventh and dominant seventh chords. Harris begins by teaching a basic set of rules governing the scales’ chromatic embellishment and the embellishment of arpeggios, chords, and intervals found diatonically “on scale.” Within an initial framework of two-measure phrases, students practice performing simple scale patterns in descending streams of eighth notes, occasionally ornamenting them with spare embellishments. One common embellishment, described earlier in connection with tune renditions, is an triplet eighth-note inverted mordent. Another is a sixteenth-note inverted mordent on triplet rhythm, incorporating the motion from a pitch to the scale degree above it, a return to the first pitch, and then the scale degree below it (exx. 6.7a-c).

  As students increase their proficiency, the class designs increasingly varied patterns based on the material. Students “run” from any pitch in a scale to any other pitch. They repeat pitches, skip pitches, “double back” over scale fragments, and combine them with chords and intervals on scale and their inversions. Harris further stylizes the inventions of students with practices that dictate precise melodic shape. One practice is “pivoting,” using one pitch as a launching point for leaps to any other chord tones, then arpeggiating the chord in the opposite direction (exx. 6.8a-b). He also suggests sophisticated harmonic mixtures of pitches derived from different types of chords, intervals, and scales. Combining fragments of diatonic scales with diminished chords or with augmented triads, or alternating the elements of minor chords and diminished chords, can produce melodies with diverse colors. There is no end to the possibilities. One common effect of Harris’s system is to weight the use of chord tones. Even when surrounded by neighboring or altered pitches, chord tones commonly emerge as the prominent pitches of melodic shapes and as the target pitches of phrase endings, occurring, in many instances, on the beat.

  While sharing basic theoretical elements with other methods, Harris’s is unique in both its emphasis and detail, for it teaches students precisely how to transform the elements into credible phrases and focuses as much upon the creative processes of improvisation as upon its products, effectively clarifying the relationship between theory and performance practice in the jazz tradition. Before one class member studied with Harris, he had received advice from many other musicians that he needed to know chords to play jazz. The student, however, could never really see the connection. Whenever he played “patterns out of chord books,” as he put it, “they just sounded like patterns out of chord books.” Similarly, another pupil used to “hate” scales because his teachers insisted that he play them “like technical exercises—straight up and down the octave.” That, he thought, was “all” scales were. Having learned from Harris what improvisers “can do with scales,” however, he now finds them to be “really interesting,” and he asserts, “I never get tired of practicing them.”

  The explicitness of Harris’s method in describing the elements of great solos provides students with a language and an analytical key that enables them to “unlock the mysteries of jazz” for themselves. When analyzing recorded improvisations, they begin not only to grasp formerly impenetrable patterns, whose components had eluded them aurally, but to name them in theoretical terms. “I’ve heard that before; that’s just a descending seventh scale with a half step between the one and the seventh, run down to the third,
and diminished up from the third.” Each revelation carries students over another threshold toward understanding the common language of jazz and its personalized vocabulary as coined by the great improvisers. For instance, although many artists periodically superimpose the sound of a diminished chord over a seventh chord, students find that each may favor different pivot notes, melodic shapes, and articulation schemes.30

  Learners take heart in their own developing skills as they come to recognize the intimate details that characterize stylized treatments. Initially overwhelmed by the complexity of jazz and the gulf that separates their abilities from those of their idols, they eventually gain confidence. Having lived with the familiar impression “Oh, no. I could never do that!” they begin gradually to indulge a new sense that encroaches upon their awe until they can assert with some cockiness, “I know what that is; I can do that!” Sometimes, this expression of confidence is followed by a slight tinge of disappointment. The sense of lost innocence that accompanies the demystification of their elusive art diminishes quickly, however, in the face of new challenges to the learner’s understanding and development.

  In this regard, Harris’s theory is an expansive generative method. It encourages musicians to create original phrases based, in part, on the cross-fertilization of rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic models embodied in the rules Harris promulgates. These activities gripped Lonnie Hillyer and Charles McPherson as youngsters. They would get together unfailingly after school and practice making up lines, “playing two-bar phrases back and forth all night long.” One of “the great things about Barry’s system,” Hillyer observes, “is that everyone who studied it came out sounding different.” Similarly, another learner who had just come to appreciate the method’s “infinite possibilities” once animatedly shared his vision with me after class: “Now that Barry’s laid it out for us, I know what I need to work on for the rest of my life.” This is a fine testimonial, indeed, to the method’s effectiveness and comprehensiveness, a grand tribute to a master teacher.

  The Ongoing Interplay of Theoretical and Aural Ideas

  Over the careers of improvisers, their theoretical and aural knowledge constantly inform one another. Sometimes, artists design phrases from theoretical calculation and, as was true for some in their early training, derive stimulation from theoretical expositions in such other musical fields as classical music. Musicians at Boston’s Schillinger House (later the Berklee College of Music) studied the Schillinger System of Musical Composition during the forties.31 Doc Cheatham also studied for a couple of years with a musician “who had his own ideas” about the Schillinger system. Cheatham could relate his aural knowledge of various facets of jazz harmony to the system and, subsequently, found it useful in his own experience teaching jazz to younger musicians. TWO decades later, in the course of pursuing graduate studies in music, Donald Byrd discovered Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, a reference book that is “systematized in a manner convenient for composers in search of new materials.” Byrd brought the book to the attention of John Coltrane, who, having absorbed some of the principles of Barry Harris’s method years earlier in Detroit, now found Slonimsky’s material useful for his own music. As word spread within the jazz community that Coltrane was practicing from the book, performers from San Francisco to New York City experimented with its use.32

  It is also possible for theory to bridge different realms of musical knowledge for students, facilitating their appreciation for the common foundational materials used by improvisers and classical music composers. George Duvivier recalls that within the jazz community “Dizzy Gillespie made people aware of the flatted fifth and the flatted ninth—which actually goes back to Bach fugues:” Similarly, when Barry Harris once discovered that a group of classical music students who attended his master class had difficulty assimilating even the rudiments of his theoretical approach to improvisation, he shook his head incredulously, then seated himself at the piano for a demonstration. To the surprise of listeners expecting to hear jazz, he began by performing an exquisite melody with a diminished quality from a Chopin composition. With the passage’s completion, Harris admonished the students: “Now, if Chopin hadn’t known his diminished chords, he never could have thought of this.” Then Harris quoted a compelling Charlie Parker solo, interjecting: “And if Bird hadn’t known his diminished chords, he never could have thought of that.”

  At the same time, artists’ aural understanding and appreciation of music guide interpretation of theoretical material and drive its applications. Attraction to the sounds of their own successful constructions and to the inventions of others commonly enlightens students to the relevance of theory. Josh Schneider has “often had the experience of working on things” and realizing he has “just rediscovered” a principle that “someone told me about years ago, but I wasn’t ready for it at the time. It may be a certain way to go through a certain chord, a different way to play a dominant chord, or a way of using the notes on the top of the minor chord going to a dominant chord, or applying a certain pattern like a diminished pattern to a dominant chord. After you’ve done it, you say, ‘So that’s why that worked on this particular thing!’” Comparable revelations in his analysis of solos by Charlie Parker and other great artists provided the basis for Barry Harris’s improvisation theory and method (ex. 6.9).

  For many, the ability to interpret an appealing idea in theoretical terms facilitates exploration of the idea’s implications, generating new phrases in the process of experimentation. Barry Harris’s pupils learn that every detail noticed or discovered in an effective improvisation opens the door for further invention. If one thing is true, they reason, inspired by Harris’s tutelage, then what follows from it? Suppose an artist’s beautiful gesture contains a descending seventh scale from the second with a half step between the tonic and the seventh, run down to the third, diminished up to the flat ninth, and resolved to the tonic. What would it sound like if the descending scale were run up a chord on scale from the third degree instead of run up a diminished chord? What would it sound like if the pattern were run past the third to the seventh below the tonic and then up a chord on scale? What would it sound like run up an augmented chord? What would it sound like if the half step were put in a different place within the descending scale? What would it sound like if a major scale were substituted for the seventh scale? And so on. Students answer these self-construed questions by performing the different possibilities and selecting for practice those patterns that most appeal to them.

  In a continuing cycle, analysis of exciting, aurally conceived phrases can reveal new relationships among their elements, leading to the formulation of yet other theoretical constructs, which, in turn, stimulate further composition. In this sense, artists constantly “make up their own rules in jazz” (WB). “Dizzy’s got a very complicated brain, and he comes up with some funny lines that are really a knockout:” Benny Bailey says. “He’s got a whole lot of things that he’s figured out for himself—funny oriental-type scales and things. He’s always happy to discover new ones, and he uses them in his solos. His mind is always working on those things.” In recent years, Art Farmer, too, “mainly make[s] up different scales and practice[s] making melodies from them.” Representing a particularly imaginative strategy, Jimmy Cheatham sometimes advocates inventing a unique scale from the pitches of each composition and using the scale as the basis for the composition’s respective solos.33

  Like their vocabulary stores, performers’ individual theoretical methods typically synthesize their personal discoveries with the most useful ideas gleaned from other players. The ease with which artists can negotiate patterns derived from theory when actually mapped out on an instrument, in part a function of their idiosyncratic physical characteristics, further delineates individual methods and contributes to the basis for personal styles or systems of improvisation.

  Improvisers have increasingly formalized the fruits of their studies by producing method books, teaching tape
s, and, most recently, videorecordings, which are available to peers and learners within the jazz community.34 Altogether, the varied music models associated with theoretical and rhythmic approaches to improvisation complement the artists’ models of jazz tunes and fully formed vocabulary patterns, diversifying options during performances and guiding the conception of solos.

  SEVEN

  Conversing with the Piece

  Initial Routines Applying Improvisation Approaches to Form

  Soloists elaborate upon what the structure of the piece has to say; what it tells them to do.—Tommy Flanagan

  Keeping the melody in mind, you always know where you are, even when you play intricate things.—Lou Donaldson

  The routines by which artists absorb different approaches to improvisation and learn to create phrases based on their materials are but preliminary exercises during practice sessions. Performers go on to consider the applications of their materials within such formal musical contexts as tune and solo renditions. Pianists and guitarists have the instrumental capacity to reproduce harmony while simultaneously performing tunes or inventing melodic lines. Others practice along with records. As they sense the progression from the rhythm section’s accompaniment of soloists, they superimpose their own improvisations over those of the recording artists, “weaving in and out of what they’re doing” (RB). In fact, artists like Henry “Red” Allen learned to improvise “in all keys in New Orleans by playing along with records set at every different speed. Each speed would put the music in a new key.”1 For Billie Holiday, singing publicly with Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong recordings formed part of her early teenage apprenticeship.2