Harmonic colors and tensions produced by combining chord tones and altered tones derived, say, from diminished structures are equally intriguing to players. When they lead an improvised line with a clear sense of melodic direction and harmonic grounding into a diminished pattern, they temporarily suspend the line’s tonality and experience the excitement that accompanies the expansion of possibilities for melodic exploration. Subsequently, when they exit from the diminished pattern, moving from an altered tone to chord tone, they resolve the ambiguity of the line and continue its progress. At a certain point, someone said to Chuck Israels: “‘Here’s a double-diminished scale that fits certain harmonic situations.’ I could see it as a beautiful, ambiguous piece of music which was marvelously pivotal and wonderful, like running down the street and all of a sudden jumping on a lazy-susan turntable and being able to come out facing in another direction. It was a great turning device.”
Similarly, when Al Olivier learned how to use diminished chords from Barry Harris, he gained the control, he says, “to color my playing with chord changes in and out of the melody line, sliding in and out of the harmonic structure of the piece without getting the feeling of being lost.” As in the case of other structures like augmented chords and pentatonic scales, the unvarying and ambiguous character of diminished figures can restrict their application. Barry Harris recommends that learners tastefully introduce, as Charlie Parker often did, a diminished or augmented sound into their performances by periodically applying it to major seventh or seventh chords at prominent harmonic pivot points within progressions such as the movement between the eighth and ninth measures of a blues. The mixture of different kinds of musical models vastly expands their applications for creative invention.
The Implications of Ideas
The language metaphors adopted by jazz artists to describe their conceptions convey more than the notion that, within the bounds of their unique language system, “musical ideas” should have substance. They also suggest that, for improvisers, the patterns are not ends in themselves, but have ongoing implications for thought. In this light, the interest in exploring the relationships among ideas is fundamental to both musical and verbal thinking. As implied earlier, improvisers experiment with the vertical relationships of their ideas by applying vocabulary patterns within different parts of a piece’s harmonic-rhythmic form where their blend assumes distinctive attributes. At the same time, improvisers pursue the linear relationships of their ideas by combining vocabulary patterns in different ways to create new phrases.
Students first glimpse these aspects of improvisation when studying their mentors’ solos; direct discussion amplifies their understanding. In listening to Charlie Parker, Lonnie Hillyer learned that he “could intermingle and interchange the same phrases in different combinations.” Similarly, when a famous saxophonist once asked Walter Bishop Jr. how he played “those long, long lines that just keep going,” Bishop replied that it was “easy really; you just string together lots of smaller melodies.” The component parts of pieces also function this way for him. He regards them as being like “toy structures,” which he can easily rearrange. “If I want to, I can improvise on the blues all day long, just by quoting from my colleagues’ compositions, paying tribute to Thelonious Monk or Bud Powell or any of those people who have written tunes based on that same structure,” Bishop says.
In Curtis Fuller’s experience with this process, rumination over musical options is itself reminiscent of moments of self-conscious language use. “So many words,” Fuller explains, “convey the same basic meaning. I’ll stop sometimes when I’m talking and ask myself, ‘What is the best word to use here?’” When creating musical phrases as an improviser, Fuller sometimes hears different melodies that fit the same chord “superimposed,” one upon another, and strives to select the best ones. He regards the alternative patterns as musical synonyms for their shared harmonic elements.20 At other moments, however, players are less self-consciously aware of the subtle processes by which the brain constructs and transforms ideas; their full attention is on the musical ideas themselves. Their consciousness is fully occupied by the musical lines of thought they are developing. Josh Schneider makes the analogy to acquiring skill with a second language; he “first learned the words” of jazz, then, after having “mastered them,’ found himself recombining them “naturally” when improvising.
At the same time that improvisers draw upon a common language, manipulating it as the basis for formulating ideas, their activity entails coining new musical words as much as inventively applying conventional ones. To a greater degree than for verbal expression, the two are integrally related processes for jazz musicians.
Artists gain experience with these operations when, characteristically, they experiment with their vocabulary patterns in practice sessions. Many initially practice them in a simple key such as C, perhaps visualizing them in relation to a C7 chord independent of a particular composition’s setting. Simple keys serve as convenient meeting grounds for improvisers to introduce the patterns within their vast storehouse to each other, preparing them for their role in the construction of solo lines.
The same harmonic concepts that initially guided students in their theoretical analysis of figures can also provide principles for systematizing and efficiently retrieving them for integration into other patterns. At one level of organization, musicians can call up discrete families of harmonic synonyms. At another level of organization, they can divide each family into subgroups whose patterns begin on the same chord tones and chord extensions. The association of individual patterns with different pitch levels facilitates the artist’s effort to join synonyms into composite shapes. In the course of experimenting with different combinations, musicians memorize the distinctive sounds of the patterns’ opening pitches and their special qualities of consonance and dissonance in relation to the tonic, ultimately reinforcing and finely honing fundamental aspects of their harmonic understanding.
To describe the methodical nature of these preliminary routines, however, is only to begin to penetrate the complexities of musical thinking for improvisers, only to hint at the potency of their vocabulary store. Because of the rich associations that vocabulary patterns have as musical ideas and their capacity to form dynamic relationships with their counterparts, the patterns function, in a sense, as living entities, capable of stimulating the player’s creative powers. This becomes apparent when, in the natural course of artists’ musings in the practice room, they focus on exploring the potential of particular figures. They might hold one of them in mind, perhaps, or perform it repeatedly, while trying out its combination with other vocabulary patterns within a discrete community of ideas.
As individual figures encounter one another in thought, they can produce various types of imaginative unions whose precise features may have unexpected implications for artists, suggesting a wealth of derivative ideas for consideration and pursuit. In the absence of a commonly held terminology, one kind of union might be called direct coupling.21 This results when the last pitch of the leading pattern is contiguous to the first pitch of the following pattern, enabling them to adjoin in stepwise motion, or when a larger interval formed by the pitches provides a smooth, seamless link between the two figures. In such instances, figures unite relatively easily, without actually necessitating changes in either. but the process produces a unique shape whose components may be recognizable no longer.
An alternative process. which might be called fusion. results when the last pitch of the leading pattern is the same as the first pitch of the following pattern. On the one hand. should the pitches merge or elide in their union. with the former swallowing up a portion of the rhythmic value of the latter, the latter figure can become displaced. On the other hand, if the rhythmic values of the adjoining figures’ redundant pitches are merely tied together, displacement does not occur. Players may also modify the last pitch of a leading pattern to conform to a chord change at the juncture of two adjoining patterns.
<
br /> Fusion, pitch modification, and direct coupling often act as partners in formulating chains of ideas. In addition, related processes, contour crossover and overlap, occur when two discrete envisioned shapes intersect one another. The overlapping component serves as a segue from the initial portion of one to the remaining portion of the other. suggesting the creation of new phrases from uniquely combining the segments.
It is partly by methodically practicing the formulation of phrases over discrete sets of chord changes that artists discover new cross-routes through the chords’ associated vocabulary patterns, creating new models for larger chains of ideas (ex. 7.6). Such models provide an unlimited field for exploration. Artists can practice generating phrases of differing lengths by beginning and ending their performance at different points in the chain. Or they can experiment by holding a particular figure within the chain constant while trying out new melodic routes for entering and leaving that figure, discovering effective schemes of pattern substitution. Substituting variant components slightly longer or shorter than an original component subtly expands or contracts the chain. Each generative experiment contributes new melodic possibilities to the ever-expanding network of ideas that comprises the artist’s personal system of improvisation.22
Still other inventions arise through the process of interpretive extraction. That is, as players reflect on the dynamic quality of a phrase, they may subject it to different interpretations, perceiving new emergent shapes within its contour and performing them as discrete ideas (exx. 7.7a-b). These experiments can lead players to discover, in turn, the value of two other related practices, truncation and contraction (exx. 7.8a-b). Truncation occurs when the deletion of the last chunk of the original phrase leaves a remaining chunk that can stand on its own as a viable pattern. Contraction occurs when the deletion of the midsection of the original phrase produces two remaining segments that couple comfortably. These can be joint operations, as when, for example, a player truncates the first component of a two-component model phrase and leads it into a variant of the second component or a substitute for it (ex. 7.8c). Whether used jointly or independently, the procedures of extraction, truncation, and contraction provide ready options for generating jazz figures from phrases.
As musicians become fluent at thinking in terms of particular figures, they treat the ideas with increasing flexibility each time they perform them. With virtuoso control, they eventually manage the dramatic operations of joining vocabulary patterns into larger phrases, as they self-consciously apply the diverse processes of interpretation, embellishment, and variation to their models of patterns, processes they had cultivated earlier for transfiguring compositions.
Traveling along the contour of an evolving phrase, improvisers may envision the uninflected model of an upcoming pattern, but add interest to its performance by bending its tones or varying its timbral qualities. When instrumentalists growl through their horns and inflect pitches, or when singers feature different scat syllables with marked changes in head or chest resonance, they can alter the mood of the original figure and even create the impression that its contour has changed. During my experiments improvising vocal phrases and endeavoring to calculate the interval between the phrase’s first and last pitch, I was surprised to discover that changes in syllables sometimes initially disguised the fact that I had ended on the same pitch on which I had begun.
Additionally, players may create changes by retaining the pitches of the envisioned model but altering its rhythm.23 Conversely, they may preserve its rhythm but change its pitches. Within such general approaches, operations can be subtle, as when artists substitute individual pitches for one another within a pattern’s contour (exx. 7.9a-b). As mentioned above, substitution can also be applied to larger musical units. Artists may replace a component of a phrase, such as its midsection, with distinctive vocabulary patterns that occupy their predecessor’s precise space and intervallic span so as to hook up successfully with the adjacent components and play the same role, creating, perhaps, melodic motion between the chord’s third and seventh pitches that describes the harmony clearly.
Further along the evolving phrase, players may conservatively rephrase, through rhythmic substitution, the internal features of any of the model’s components (exx. 7. 10a-b). Periodically, they substitute two eighth notes for a quarter note, or an eighth-note triplet for two eighth notes, or vice versa—adding or deleting pitches that do not dramatically disturb the component’s overall shape and character. Should they feel more adventurous, however, they can adopt radical rephrasing procedures, which extend beyond the rhythmic boundaries of the phrase component to vary its form (exx. 7.11a-b). Changing the distribution of quarter notes and eighth notes along the same line of pitches can create different melodic groupings with altered on-beat and off-beat characteristics. Comparable alterations occur as a consequence of fusion operating among adjoining patterns when the latter figure shifts metrically to the preceding beat or displaces by half a beat, reversing its particular on-beat or off-beat character and producing a transformation in its melodic shape as well.
An alternative technique is rest fragmentation, which also can result in radical rephrasing (ex. 7.12). Artists can substitute short rests for pitches or insert rests at different points within the contour of a phrase, cleverly causing it to break up into consecutive shapes whose relationship to the original model may, at times, be barely discernible. Similarly, through Barry Harris’s technique of “outlining,” students learn to generate new material by preserving the overall span of a favorite phrase, and, perhaps, its opening and closing rhythmic fragments, while selectively altering the phrase’s internal rhythmic features, deleting particular elements or creating variations on them.
Varied articulation and accentuation methods can accomplish comparable results, not only invigorating old ideas, but suggesting new patterns contained within the larger phrases for interpretive extraction, and, possibly, for linkage with other associated patterns. Substantial rests that shift the figure’s placement within a measure can also cause the figure to become transfigured in unexpected ways. A single-bar pattern initiated on a downbeat is perceived as a unified shape, framed by the entire measure. Initiated on the fourth beat, however, the barline intersects its shape, causing, in some instances, three-quarters of the pattern to emerge as a discrete idea within the next measure.
Trial bouts with performance teach that the complexity of musical ideas can derive as much from their rhythmic relationship to form as from their actual content. Here is an account of one player’s revelation. Trading phrases with his teacher over the accompaniment of a playalong record, the student botched an intricately embellished figure. In response, the teacher stopped the record and stripped the pattern down to a mere succession of eighth notes, which the student copied without great difficulty. It was only two beats long, and he thought of it as beginning on the measure’s first beat. When the student tried to repeat the musician’s subsequent example along with the record, however, the same disorientation overcame him, forcing him to stop again. In the context of the piece, the pattern actually spanned the last beat of one measure and the downbeat of the next. This displacement caused the pattern to assume a complexion radically different from his expectation, producing the feeling of “turning the beat around.” That is, it reversed his perception of the meter’s delineation of weak and strong beats and called into question the plot he constructed for the boundaries of measures.
The veteran did not immediately understand the student’s difficulty. Because his own flexible orientation enabled him to initiate phrases with equanimity on every beat of the measure, and because, for him, the life of the phrases lay in their placement over the barlines, it had not occurred to him to simplify this aspect of his demonstration when the student had faltered initially. Only after considerable practice could the student introduce the phrase into the music’s flow with assurance. Eventually, he learned to maintain his conceptual framework for the meter while taking pleas
ure in the phrase’s rhythmic pull and temporary challenge to the piece’s order.
Such flexibility is a requisite for improvisers. “Music is [rhythmic] feeling,” says Harold Ousley, “and you have to learn how to feel the phrase you want to play in relation to the chords. You have to know how to get into the chord with your phrase because, depending on what you’re playing and what you hear, the phrase may not start on the first beat of a new chord. It may start on the ‘and of one’ or on the ‘two,’ or the phrase may start in the middle of one measure and go to the middle of the next and you’ve got to feel that.”
Equally radical options include phrase expansion through interpolation—the opposite of phrase contraction—inserting chromatic pitches or short patterns into the model (exx. 7.13a-b).24 Moreover, artists can reorder a model’s tonal elements, applying techniques learned earlier for personalizing a mentor’s vocabulary. John McNeil mainly practices phrases so that he “can absorb what makes the phrase work—the principle of it—and discover why it appeals to me. Not so that I can play it exactly like that,” he maintains. “I might practice a particular phrase going from a D minor to an A minor to C, then practice another one that used the same kind of thing, getting that sound.” Subsequently, when he is “improvising along,’ he will sometimes “just go to the notes those phrases use at the right spot in the progression and try to make a new phrase out of them.” It might turn out to be something he “practiced before, but it might not.” Specifically, Harold Ousley sometimes performs a variation on an envisioned pattern by “playing it backwards.”
Finally, adopting another technique when approaching the end of a phrase, artists can vary their model of its last component with short cadential extensions or more substantial melodic excursions (exx. 7.14a-g)—the opposite process of phrase truncation. After Bobby Rogovin began to associate “particular lines with chords,” he started “building other lines like the ones I played and extending them in different directions.” Ousley sometimes performs the first “half” of a phrase and then “adds something else to it.”
Thinking in Jazz Page 28