Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  As Turrentine suggests, musicians require a fundamental understanding of melody and form before they can know, literally, when “to start and stop” their solos.12 Before Lonnie Hillyer had developed an extensive repertory and learned about progressions, the precise boundaries between individual interpretations of composed melodies and improvised solos sometimes eluded him. At one instructive rehearsal in which he tried to re-create Miles Davis’s recorded rendition of a piece, Hillyer played “right through the tune and halfway into Miles’s solo” before the laughter of the older band members stopped him.

  Kenny Washington’s early difficulty was equally basic. Having not yet grasped intellectually the cyclical harmonic basis for jazz, he followed solos by other musicians in strictly linear terms, perplexed by their widely varied lengths. Likewise, when he improvised with a Music Minus One playalong record that provided gaps for drum solos within each arrangement, Washington had difficulty fitting in his part. The band invariably dropped out before Washington began his solos and started up again before he completed them. However, over time, as the record accumulated scratches, he was able to turn this experience to his advantage, solving his problem with the ingenuity appropriate to a percussionist. He learned to anticipate one arrangement’s events by measuring off the popping patterns that the record’s scratches produced: two prominent pops effectively cued the entrance and conclusion to his solos.

  Even after students learn to follow other musicians’ solos in formal terms and to interpret them as successive ventures through the piece, many still experience difficulty in their own performances. One fundamental problem for the learner involves conceiving and performing patterns in time. In this regard, Barry Harris once dictated a harmonic progression to a group of classical music students at a university workshop and directed them to perform an ascending diminished figure at designated points within the form. The task involved the mental gymnastics of following the progression while quickly transposing the figure to suit the progression’s changing chords.

  Although the students had a good enough understanding of the concept of diminished structures and chords and would have had little trouble recognizing them in a written score, this was their first experience with interpreting and performing them off the page. As a result, their trails produced one failure after another, each fiasco followed by a spate of embarrassed laughter. Having been defeated by exercises in musical thinking that for seasoned jazz musicians simply constituted preliminary routines—far down the scale of difficulty from transforming chords into viable melodies—the workshop participants came to appreciate, for the first time, both the intellectual rigor of improvisation and the agility required to translate ideas into sounds instantaneously.

  Similarly, serious jazz learners soon discover that to think in terms of rudimentary jazz models, conceiving different possibilities for their application, is one thing; to speak in terms of the models by expressing the possibilities with their instruments is quite another. Even the experts themselves “really have to practice the coordination between the mind and the fingers, the ideas and the body,” Art Farmer affirms. “You have to practice finding the ideas on your horn, getting there at the same time the idea comes into your head. It’s a matter of developing instant touch.” Musicians commonly practice this synchronization even when away from an instrument by making up figures and miming their finger patterns simultaneously. The goal is to achieve such close coordination between the body and the conceptualizing mind as to articulate musical patterns with the ease and directness of speech or any expressive gesture.13

  Additionally, as revealed by the incident in Harris’s workshop described above, students must learn to maintain different musical perspectives simultaneously, conceiving patterns for their own evolving part while, in the expert’s terms, engaging in a “conversation” with the piece, regulating their ideas in relation to its formal elements.14 Managing each task is a trial in itself; managing them together is the focus of the learner’s struggles. Greg Langdon worked with more advanced players, but many could not help him to “hear better.” He would play a piece with them and they would “sound great,’ he recounts, “but I’d get completely lost.” In similar fashion, disoriented novices commonly fail to anticipate the chord changes, instead clashing with the underlying harmony. In other instances, they manage to complement successive chords but lose sight of the larger form.

  Repeated trials and arduous practice routines eventually correct such deficiencies as students gradually memorize a progression’s chords, learn to predict the chords’ rate of change, and gain greater technical mastery over jazz vocabulary and other materials. In Harold Ousley’s development as a young musician, there was “an inner awareness” that gradually began “to do all these things” for him, making connections between the various requisite skills. He likens the process to a child’s mastering different operations when learning to ride a bicycle. At first, it “wobbles dangerously from side to side,” but after hours of practice, “you find your center of balance, and suddenly you have the power to control it so it won’t fall either way. It’s the same with music.” he suggests. In developmental “breakthroughs,” aspiring musicians may suddenly discover that they have acquired the control to manipulate phrases accurately in tempo in relation to a progression’s changing features.

  Ousley’s analogy, with its salient features of balance, coordination, and forward motion, is an apt one for jazz veterans, who commonly liken improvising to a mental journey. When tracking the chords of a progression, veterans commonly experience the basic structure itself as stationary, and themselves as moving through it. The form’s successive harmonic chambers seem distinctly multidimensional. Passage through them has about it a feeling of time and space, as artists absorb and negotiate the aural features of their changing surroundings.

  To clarify these issues, trumpeter Dick Whitsell once broke into a little dance in the doorway of his living room. Bobbing up and down and snapping his fingers to the pulse of an imaginary rhythm section, he announced: “We’re going into a blues. The first chord is B,” and he stepped in perfect time onto

  the floorboards. Propelling himself forward with the passing beats, Whitsell delineated each chord as a discrete space in the room. Dancing within the perimeters of the prescribed chord for its duration before moving on to the next, eventually he advanced through the piece’s entire structure. Going through the choreography a second time, following the same floor plan, he added scat improvisation to his performance, interrupting his vocal lines only long enough to announce each impending chord.

  Whitsell’s clever kinetic dramatization illustrates how translatable into concrete analogies are harmonic-rhythmic places, once soloists develop a deep understanding of structure. For Whitsell, it is clearly an obvious transition from body language and scat vocals to the trumpet improvisation that follows. His scat phrases translate easily into trumpet patterns. The harmonic places he explores are not designated spatial areas within the living room, but conceptual coordinates encompassing successive tonal centers and related compositional elements, which change according to the progression’s dictates. When he solos, Whitsell’s swaying to the music’s beat and fingering of his instrument as he pursues particular melodic routes through the form are themselves subtle dance movements creating an integrated performance.

  Youngsters develop comparable ease as soloists only after they have assimilated the conventional harmonic movements of jazz and have become adept at determining the tonal models that provide effective pathways through them. As with every operation in jazz requiring choice, it is each artist’s “musical intelligence”—an “inner essence”—that directs the decision-making process (HO). Eventually, artists learn to conceptualize the structure of a piece so they can include appropriate selections of vocabulary. At various points within their structural designs of a composition, artists begin to envision cumulative patterns associated with particular chords beside related variants of the composition’s melod
y. Together with the player’s rhythmic and theoretical materials, these conceptualized tonal models provide numerous options for improvisation.

  Depending on their backgrounds, artists may encounter different challenges in achieving versatility in the use of these options. When learners whose understanding is primarily aural take up theory, they commonly require a period of readjustment before assimilating their newly acquired knowledge into their storehouses and maps of compositions, so that thinking in terms of chord symbols calls up the sounds of melodic patterns, and vice versa. The ability to translate rapidly between aural and theoretical realms can be useful to artists as they face musical dilemmas. Many periodically interpose thoughts of a theoretical nature on the flow of an improvisation when problems threaten their aural grasp on a composition’s form. “If the rhythm is right and the band is really jumping,’ Lou Donaldson “doesn’t even think about the changes. But if the rhythm is dragging or something,” he says, “I really do visualize the changes to make sure I’m playing correctly.”

  Toward the same goal, testing the form with particular vocabulary patterns can be effective. If, while playing a piece like “I’ve Got You under My Skin,” Harold Ousley is unsure about the portion of the progression he is approaching, whether, for example, an anticipated chord is to be, in his words, “a Gm7 or a G chord, I can play certain phrases when I get there that will enable me to figure it out.” His understanding of how the phrases sound in relation to different chords clarifies the issue for him. Reaffirming or revising his mental chart of the progression accordingly, Ousley then applies vocabulary patterns with greater assurance throughout the performance, combining them with other suitable options in the solo’s ongoing invention. Ultimately, a soloist strives for such mastery over form as to improvise without external support. This became apparent to Patience Higgins during his early study with Barry Harris. “You should be able to outline a song without a rhythm section,” Higgins maintains, “and be able to tell when you’re at the bridge or the last eight bars of the tune.”

  The Singing Mind’s Conception: From Technical Exercises to Ideas

  Once musicians achieve technical control over their materials, methodically plotting out their course and correctly applying selected options within the settings of compositions, they build upon their success by changing the emphasis of their practice routines. Increasingly, they strive to apply their materials “musically.” For many, this means stressing aural conceptualization over other forms of music representation when interpreting and negotiating the constructive elements in their store—even those elements initially derived from theoretical models. Kenny Barron does not “think in terms of scales and chords” when he improvises, but he does “think in terms of their sounds.” Similarly, Josh Schneider’s goal is to improve his ear so that he can “hear millions of different intervals” in his imagination “before he plays them” and then “play them instantly.”

  Experts use the metaphor of singing to elucidate their own experiences with this mode of conception. According to Lee Konitz, “Improvising is a singing, whistling phenomenon when it’s really happening. It’s the expression of the sound that you can conceptualize on your own steam. It’s a matter of getting intricately and sophisticatedly involved with a melodic line so that it is one with the performer.” New Orleans trumpeter Mutt Carey elaborates, “When I’m improvising, I’m singing in my mind. I sing what I feel and then try to reproduce it on the hom.’15 In his own case, Fred Hersch is not really sure which “comes first, the singing or the playing, but it’s the same thing really.” He teaches his students that “any jazz player should be able to scat sing his solo.” This wisdom is long standing. Indeed, early New Orleans musicians cautioned, “If you can’t sing it, you can’t play it.”16 It may be possible to perform phrases on an instrument mechanically, the argument goes, by translating representations like chord symbols directly into finger patterns without pre-hearing the sounds for which they stand, but singing requires that artists both grasp ideas firmly in their imaginations and invest them with expressive qualities.

  As suggested earlier, many artists practice conceiving patterns through singing before transferring them to instruments. It is said that Clifford Brown devoted as much time to singing as to instrument practice. Moreover, Louis Armstrong and many other outstanding soloists developed the skill to double as vocalists. Not only could they render unique interpretations of song texts, but they could expertly alternate instrumental and scat improvisations. Others, like bassist Slam Stewart, sing or hum simultaneously with their instrumental solos, creating special timbral effects and reinforcing their conceptualization.

  One saxophonist cultivated comparable abilities through another stringent routine that won the admiration of the musicians who were his housemates. While the other players improvised constantly in their practice sessions, apparently performing all the material that occurred to them in order to hear and evaluate it, the saxophonist restricted his own performance to his most effective conceptions. Practicing while seated cross-legged on the floor, he combined melodic rumination with meditation, sounding his discrete phrases only sparingly, separating them, at times, by silences of fifteen minutes or more.

  Under the aegis of the singing mind, players continue to practice small-scale invention within the forms of compositions but concern themselves with a higher level of expression by training themselves to produce viable jazz phrases. Improvisers, in Kenny Barron’s words, “primarily think in terms of musical ideas. An idea would be a melodic phrase.” Or as Art Farmer puts it, the idea could be “one bar long, two bars long or as much as eight bars long.” The reference to musical patterns as ideas is prevalent among veterans. Such language metaphors complement that of singing to distinguish initial practice routines aimed at mastering musical materials from the artists’ subsequent goals and achievements.

  Although the use of theoretical models serves learners by isolating “correct” tonal options from the vast possibilities available, eliminating some of the guesswork and harmonic error inherent in the soloists’ early inventions, the models themselves comprise only raw compositional materials.17 Transforming them into ideas involves exploiting these materials from different vantage points and treating their elements creatively. Each artist’s rhythmic conception provides an important key. Improvisers breathe life into pitch collections by applying their rhythmic templates to them, imbuing them with swing. A cornerstone of Barry Harris’s improvisation method extends those practices already described by involving students in composing attractive, new rhythmic patterns, then adding pitches to them. Rhythmic procedures also assist players in altering materials from other music systems, adapting them to the jazz tradition. Drummers alter the rudimental figures from conventional drum pedagogy by “accenting them in unique ways and making them swing in the jazz style” (KC). John McNeil tailored “certain scalar patterns” from Herbert Clarke’s Technical Studies to his own use by “adding chromatic eighth-note pick-ups” because “phrases usually begin before the downbeat in jazz.” He also changed “the tonguing marks around so that the accents would come on the off-beats.” Clifford Brown’s rhythmic transfiguration of what appears to be an excerpt from a technical exercise in Arban’s The Complete Conservatory Method for Trumpet is also instructive on this point (exx. 7.5a-b).

  As artists methodically experiment with transforming different pitch collections into ideas, each soloist’s “melodic conception” is also a guide. Included in a performer’s melodic conception is the essential sense of contour shaping and phrasing learned from studying such models as jazz compositions and vocabulary patterns. It encompasses, as well, the timbral subtleties embedded within the models—the endless shades of color and microtonal inflection reminiscent of the human voice. Characteristically, when Emily Remler “uses arpeggios and scales in a solo,” she strives “to make valid melodies out of them, melodies which would be so good that you could make a tune out of each four-bar phrase.” Buster Williams receive
d an especially “good foundation for melodic playing” from his father, who used a bass method by Bob Haggart that provides “different types of patterns to play within scales and teaches you to play scales in many different ways,” The senior Williams, who used the approach himself, “had a way of incorporating those patterns in his solos so that they didn’t sound like those patterns.” Similarly, Benny Bailey may “think about a scale” during his solos, but he strives to “play it so that it’s a little different—so it won’t sound like a cliché and you won’t recognize it.”

  Soloists commonly combine the elements of different musical models to mask their respective characters and to increase the interest of phrases fashioned from them.18 “It’s the same if I played fourths,” Bailey continues. “I’d try to play them so that they didn’t sound like fourths. No one wants to run things so that they sound so academic because it’s boring after a while. We try to mix it up with other things so that it’s not so obvious that we’re using fourths.” More specifically, as Doc Cheatham learned in his youth,

  If you could jump out of a chord, you could always jump back in. That was a trick I learned from listening to Louis Armstrong and many of the New Orleans musicians like Joe Oliver and Jimmie Noone. You hear the same thing if you listen to trumpet players like Clifford Brown play melodies.19 They call what they use grace notes. Theoretically, they call them neighboring tones, and they’re beautiful. So, if you play a solo and you’re smart, you can jump out of those chords and jump back in by using those. You’ve got your half neighbors and your whole neighbors, so you can get three notes out of the way and still come back in there. All those things come to me when I’m playing.

  Bass players typically embellish this basic approach when improvising walking bass lines within the rhythm section’s accompaniment, “using the roots and fifths to outline chords, adding occasional passing notes or higher or lower neighbors and adapting such harmonically correct pitches to idiomatically acceptable rhythmic patterns” (CI).