The Physical Realization and Exploration of Ideas
As improvisers practice these maneuvers, simultaneously grappling with the tests on their imaginations and the demands of negotiating their instruments, they contend with different relationships between the singing mind and the body. Under the aegis of the singing mind, there are moments in which musicians see no further into their evolving line than a few pitches, their body and mind so tightly joined as to be fully absorbed into the performance’s immediate progress. One artist colorfully likens the intense experience of prehearing an idea, then grabbing onto and following it, to “chasing after a piece of paper that’s being blown across the street.”25 At other moments, however, the ideas that soloists realize during performances depend as much on the body’s own actions as on the body’s synchronous response to the mind. The body can take momentary control over particular activities—such as articulating a well-worn vocabulary pattern or a lengthy new phrase transmitted to it—while the mind shifts its focus to the next idea.
When Henry Allen improvises, he says, “I concentrate a couple of bars ahead at all times. You have to have an idea where you are going.”26 Chuck Israels’s “mind sometimes jumps ahead” to think of a pattern for his own solo’s initiation as he concludes his accompaniment to another musician’s solo with a conventional bass line. Benny Bailey periodically resorts to “automatic patterns of fourths and repeated high-note riffs requiring little thought.” Both enable him to maintain the momentum of his performance while he “rests,” considering other ideas and preparing to perform them. In fact, the improviser sometimes prolongs the repetition of a phrase as a deliberate tactic to awaken a sluggish imagination, forcing it to respond creatively to the material’s increasing momentum or, alternatively, to its impending monotony.
The body plays an even more active role when, through its motor sensory apparatus, it interprets and responds to sounds as physical impressions, subtly informing or reshaping mental concepts. The dance of agile fingers on the keyboard can infuse melodic patterns with swing. Furthermore, as students learn early, the body can engage itself directly in the composition of new phrases, revealing its own capacity for creative thinking.27 “Sometimes, the ideas come from my mind, and I have to find them quickly on my horn,” Harold Ousley says. “But other times, I find that I am playing from finger patterns; the fingers give it to you. As I play, my fingers are walking through the yellow pages [in the phone book], so to speak. They roam around and they come up with ideas that I like.”
When leading, the body pursues physical courses shaped not only by the musical language of jazz, but by idiomatic patterns of movement associated with the playing techniques of an instrument. These, in turn, reflect the instrument’s particular acoustical properties, physical layout, and performance demands. Ultimately, all of these factors define the body’s world of imagination, inviting it to explore their relationships. Emily Remler, as a case in point, “sometimes falls into going up the neck in a guitar sense, finding a certain riff, repeating it, and doing different things with the rhythm.”
Whereas the piano’s regular arrangement of keys and the mechanical nature of its sound production enable competent improvisers to sustain musical invention in any register, Chuck Israels considers that “it’s hardest to achieve a keyboard kind of freedom in the low register of the bass or trombone.” If the intention is to “improvise in subtle and quickly changing ways,” the performer must “move into the highest register of the instruments, because that’s where the notes are physically closest together.” In contrast, the demands of high-note playing for trumpeters may temporarily erode endurance. Unless they possess exceptional strength, these artists typically venture into their highest register only for short excursions, for instance, to provide peaks to melodic phrases or to create musical climaxes. Other distinctions also come into play. Wide leaps with the trumpet involve demanding embouchure changes, whereas saxophonists can exploit an octave key and bass players can play such large intervals as fourths with the ease of movement over their instrument’s open strings. There are, however, efficient trumpet patterns requiring only slight embouchure change that can be produced with the simple, repetitive motion of a single finger (ex. 7.15).28
Within each instrument’s general constraints, the pleasure that individuals derive from particular motions can also influence performances. “I like to play swing,” a drummer once explained while demonstrating a swing pattern for snare drum and brushes with wide, circular arm motions. “I like the way my body feels when I’m moving like this. But there are other ways I like to move too, other ways my body likes to feel.” In Paul Wertico’s experience, drummers commonly “feel [that their] legs are dancing” when maintaining the regular hi-hat or bass drum beat, in relation to which their “arms” can take greater expressive liberties through movement, “doing whatever they want.”
Finally, incidental factors can enter into the bodily negotiation of musical instruments. Pianists sometimes discover interesting melodic patterns when working around such literal obstacles as broken keys on a nightclub’s unfamiliar instrument. Art Davis recalls the dramatic incident that occurred on a tour with the Max Roach quintet in which fellow band member Booker Little accidentally closed a car door on Davis’s hand. During the quintet’s subsequent performances, Davis’s broken finger forced him to explore alternative techniques involving multiple fingers that resulted in ways new to him of moving around the bass. He has continued to develop this approach over the years, evolving a technique that involves four left-hand fingers as well as those of the right hand to achieve maximum speed and agility in bass playing.
With experience, students become increasingly sensitive to varied nuances of the body’s interplay with the singing mind. Adjusting to the role played by the body is a requisite to handling vocabulary patterns, as learners proceed to the next creative level of expression through the language of jazz.
EIGHT
Composing in the Moment:
The Inner Dialogue and the Tale
After you initiate the solo, one phrase determines what the next is going to be. From the first note that you hear, you are responding to what you’ve just played: you just said this on your instrument, and now that’s a constant. What follows from that? And then the next phrase is a constant. What follows from that? And so on and so forth. And finally, let’s wrap it up so that everybody understands that that’s what you’re doing. It’s like language: you’re talking, you’re speaking, you’re responding to yourself. When I play, it’s like having a conversation with myself.—Max Roach
As practicers discover the challenges and rewards of formulating musical ideas, they devote less time to applying fixed tonal materials within harmonic forms and more time to interpreting the materials in different ways. As described earlier, the natural tendency toward transformation displayed at times by the body and the singing mind aids students in their efforts, as does their growing appreciation for the value the jazz community attaches to invention. At the same time, aspiring players must learn to manage artfully the impulse for change.
Experts drive home the point once again by invoking language metaphors. Whereas previously these images of verbal expression crystallized such general processes as constructing musical sentences from vocabulary patterns, this time, in elucidating these other features of their music system, their purpose is to emphasize fundamental principles of musical logic and development that guide expression in jazz.1 For Lonnie Hillyer, as for Max Roach, improvising “is really like a guy having a conversation with himself.” Hillyer sometimes thinks of himself as “making statements and answering them” when he performs. His objective is to “expand on” musical patterns, “trying to get the notes to grow into something, shaping them into different ideas. It’s like taking a couple of words and expounding with them.” Others agree. “The phrases you play ... are your message while you’re playing. [They] should relate to one another,” Tommy Flanagan states, “and they should be logic
al.” The “vital part” for Lee Konitz, too, “is thinking while you’re moving, and once the momentum has been started, I don’t like to break it. I’m concerned with the continuity in motion.... If you’re not affected and influenced by your own notes when you improvise, then you’re missing the whole essential point.”
One conventional approach for achieving such qualities focuses on what players describe as motivic or thematic development, in which they subject an idea to recurrent use and variation while preserving its fundamental identity.2 For learners, there are plentiful examples of this approach within the developmental sections of jazz compositions and recorded solos, as well as in the works of other musical traditions.3 Also exemplary are performances in which jazz veterans alternate quotations from tunes with their own related commentaries and interject imitative fills between the phrases of singers when accompanying them.
Analysis of other artists’ performances reinforces the knowledge of motivic development students acquire from direct experience, as, for example, when they perform a vocabulary pattern in the course of their practice, then use their recollection of it as a model, transforming it to produce consecutive variants. This involves procedures similar to those already discussed, in which artists use envisioned but unvoiced models to produce variant figures that do not function as motives, such as when they appear as isolated events in separate performances or as seamless components of larger phrases. When practicing motivic development, artists may initially apply it to vocabulary patterns in free rhythm, but they subsequently increase the challenges by creating variants in time. Eventually, they acquire the ability to treat new ideas motivically, holding onto them the instant they conceive them, manipulating them, and exploring their implications within the framework of a passing beat.4
Although the process of establishing thematic relationships between musical ideas can be daunting initially, aspiring improvisers eventually discover that the method actually facilitates the ability to think on their feet by providing them with well-defined materials for composing their ongoing parts. This, in turn, reduces the infinite field of elements for consideration, relieving the pressure of conceiving new figures unrelated to the current stream of events. Within the constraints performers set for themselves, the possibilities for developing ideas, which constantly present themselves, still seem vast.5 So, too, are the challenges associated with realizing their ideas, for, with split-second responses, they must project before them, and pursue in musical time and space, images and goals derived from the sounding model or the one immediately preceding it.
As soloists immerse themselves in their internal dialogue, the most obvious way for them to advance their conversation—responding to their “own notes”—is by pausing briefly after an initial statement, then repeating it, perhaps with minor changes such as rhythmic rephrasing. This also allows time for the player to conceive options for the subsequent phrase’s formulation (ex. 8.1). Taking a slightly different tack, artists may “run” the figure directly “into itself,” perhaps through a slight extension or short connecting pattern, treating the figure as a component within a longer phrase (ex. 8.2). Or they may answer the idea by rephrasing it an octave lower (ex. 8.3), or re-create its shape at multiple pitch levels, creating sequences (exx. 8.4a-c). Harold Ousley might begin a solo with “two phrases a flatted fifth apart;” an effective approach he learned from Kenny Dorham. He then adapts it to the upcoming chords during a chorus “all the way down the line.” In a similar vein, to prepare students for such musical discourse, Barry Harris has them practice transposing effective figures compatible with seventh chords and applying the figures to a progression like the “Rhythm” bridge.
Beyond strict imitation, a more subtle way for improvisers to imbue successive phrases with a sense of logic is by varying the initial contour of the pattern when they first repeat it. They may re-create its general shape but change its intervals. Or, they may append to the pattern a short cadential extension (exx. 8.5a-b), or a short introductory figure (ex. 8.6a), or both (ex. 8.6b). Taking another tack, they can create rhythmically balanced imitative phrases whose respective endings rise or fall in relation to one another, as if asking, then answering, a question (ex. 8.7). Alternatively, through interpretive extraction, soloists select particular features of a figure they have just improvised—whether a single prominent pitch or a melodic-rhythmic fragment—as central ideas for the figures that follow (exx. 8.8a-c). It is common for players to focus on the rhythm of an invention, devoting entire developmental sections to its treatment as a rhythmic ostinato.6 Throughout, they vary its pitches to produce imitative shapes and, in some instances, varied accentuation schemes (exx. 8.9a-c). The opposite procedure is as common. They may introduce a simple tonal idea like spelling a triad and develop it through rhythmic variation (ex. 8.10).7
The longer and more complex the musical idea artists initially conceive, the greater the powers of musical memory and mental agility required to transform it. Experienced improvisers can create variations on each feature of extensive melodic-rhythmic material within the framework of lengthy antiphonal phrases (ex. 8.11). Or, given a complex call of three components, soloists could subsequently formulate a response by repeating any of the three for its motivic value, while radically altering the others. Or they can drop two of the components and select, perhaps, the last component for continued use, either beginning the response with it, or approaching it through another figure so that it becomes the second component of the new pattern.
Phrase length and range can themselves serve as models for evolving ideas. Lonnie Hillyer illustrates this by improvising pairs of short call and response patterns that alternate between the trumpet’s upper and lower registers. “One approach is for me to think of myself as being two players. See, the upper player was one guy and the lower player was another guy. I was telling the story as if there was a dialogue going on between the two players. I’ve heard Trane and Bird and other players do that kind of thing on records, like they were accompanying themselves.” Lester Young and Miles Davis sometimes constructed ideas for the larger part of blues choruses and major sections of thirty-two-bar pieces by performing variations on short call and response patterns (exx.8.12a-b).8
Within a performance’s normal stream of events, improvisers typically allow their adequate inventions to pass by without necessarily treating their elements motivically. Rather, they await the appearance of figures that especially interest them, then explore their implications. The identification of such patterns and the treatment of their features vary with the soloists’ changing sensitivities. They may hear different possibilities in, and derive new value from, the same vocabulary pattern as they perform it on different occasions. For immediate use, they may adopt the shape of a selected component, an appealing feature of harmonic color, or, perhaps, a particular rhythmic configuration highlighted by a slight hesitation in phrasing that throws a new accent on its form. Moreover, within the artist’s personal store of knowledge, these differing elements can each carry associations that influence the performance of subsequent ideas: harmonic qualities suggesting linkages with particular harmonic synonyms, rhythmic elements evoking other patterns with similar configurations, and yet other features invoking figures with comparable contours, phrase lengths, compatible moods, or finger patterns.
The interdependence of a soloist’s ideas and the oral literature of jazz can also prove stimulating. Once, after an improviser’s solo led directly into one of Kenny Dorham’s characteristic cadential phrases, the player found himself coloring subsequent phrases with Dorham’s pitch inflections before the associations weakened for him. Doc Cheatham sometimes performs “a few little bars from players like Clifford Brown, Clark Terry, and Dizzy that come to me all of a sudden in my solo work.” In another instance, when Harold Ousley improvised a melody that reminded him of “Old Man River,” he worked other patterns from the tune into his performance and “played off them for a while.” Connections between the extramusical meanings
of compositions can also come into play. George Coleman once concluded his improvisation on “You Don’t Know What Love Is” by quoting the musical chant from John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”9
The chains of ideas that guide the soloist also reflect unself-conscious absorption of material. From time to time, Ousley plays a pattern that sounds new to him, but he “realizes afterwards” that it is actually something he had previously heard “someone else play on a record.”
Just as a figure’s embedded associations may involve the ideas that surround it in different musical contexts, at times leading a player to quote subsequent material from the original performance, it may also include a range of actions for the treatment of ideas. That is, each figure has a particular history of usage and transformation—its own track record of applications—both within an artist’s own performing experience and within the larger musical tradition. 10 One short pattern that occasionally occurs as an isolated idea in the improvisations of Kenny Dorham and others forms the basis for many short developmental episodes in Clifford Brown solos, where it functions as a signature pattern. A version of the same pattern arises as the theme for a Rahsaan Roland Kirk composition dedicated to Clifford Brown, the motive for an entire blues chorus by Booker Little, the introductory figure for his original composition “Memo: To Maurice” (exx. 8.13a-c).11 Associations of this nature abound within the oral texts of jazz, bringing the features of improvisations, compositions, and arrangements into cross-relationships.12 Forty-six years in the life of a lick, as it reappears across performances by different instruments in bands representing different jazz idioms, epitomize such relationships (exx. 8. 14a-o).
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