As Ousley’s remarks imply, the improviser’s world of imagination considers more than musical abstractions. Emotion serves as a partner to intellect in the conception and expansion of ideas. Beyond emotional responses to their evolving creations, artists speak generally of “tapping an emotional reservoir,” whose “energy” represents a distillation of their experiences with life (ER). Roberta Baum considers emotion to be “the biggest part of singing. It has become an extension of how it is to be alive,” she says. In this sense, performances can reflect the individual’s characteristic scope of expression, including extreme fluctuations of feeling.
As alluded to earlier, artists can also draw upon the extramusical associations of the compositions that serve as vehicles. They sometimes set up for performances by dwelling momentarily on a piece’s moods and meanings, recalling, perhaps, the sense of personal identification with the theme of a standard piece that prompted its incorporation into their repertory, or envisioning the characters and incidents depicted in their own original compositions. At times, Dexter Gordon actually sang a few lines of a ballad’s lyrics to invoke its meaning, before switching to saxophone improvisations.26 With song texts, or in their absence, the emotional sentiment and the imagery suggested by titles and musical features also offer direction.27
Overall, a piece’s precise mood has a powerful tempering effect on improvisers, guiding their personal feelings to blend with those appropriate for the performance. For Arthur Rhames, “ ‘God Bless the Child’ [evokes] one set of moods about the remorse of not being on your own or having to depend on others, while a tune like ‘Giant Steps’ may be about advancing yourself”; each provides “different perspectives, different feelings, different moods. And those moods govern a lot of what’s going to come out in your interpretation of the chord changes in your improvising.” Chuck Israels also routinely takes the mood of the piece into account when he prepares to solo. Over the course of an evening, “I’ll play a tune like ‘The Preacher’ that has a certain gospel flavor; then a tune like Bill Evans’s ‘Peri’s Scope,’ which is an outgoing, dancing, lighthearted tune. [Next, I will] play something melancholy, like ‘Nardis.’ ”
There is a constant spending and replenishment of a player’s emotional reserves. Israels performs “tunes that have different emotional states” in order to give himself “different things to think about, different things to feel and to play” when he improvises. Each tune has “its own feelings, its own shapes and patterns that occupy me when I play it,” he explains. “You just jump from one emotional mood to another because the moods change with each piece.” Sometimes, Emily Remler says, “when I play a ballad like ‘I’m in a Sentimental Mood,’ I feel almost sick to my stomach because it is so heartrending and takes so much from me.” A piece’s emotional associations commonly influence an artist’s rhythmic approach or selection of tonal materials, in the latter instance suggesting, perhaps, an emphasis upon blues-inflected melodies rather than brighter, uninflected melodies or upon tense rather than relaxed harmonies.
Throughout the piece, artists may prepare themselves to respond to each of its varied nuances, beyond its most general tenor. Emily Remler, looking forward to “a gig tonight,” knows “that there are sections where I’ll feel a lot of different emotions. The [composition] breaks into a real happy part, and it makes me feel really happy. Then there are other parts where I’ll just feel determined.” In some instances, the elements of a piece combine to reinforce a particular emotional shape overall, suggesting that improvisers structure their own creations accordingly. In a blues, an artist may build toward peaks of intensity at the same point as the harmony and poetic text reach a dramatic climax.
Various aspects of the meanings of compositions are also tied to their performance histories, especially the ways in which earlier improvisers have handled their original compositions (BH). When Jimmy Robinson prepares to solo, he “thinks about the things that have been done on the tune in the past” and what he would “like to do on it.” Of course, he says, if he has “never heard the tune before” or is performing his own pieces, he “just strikes out” on his own. If it is a recent piece by someone like Dizzy Gillespie, however, he wants “to know what Dizzy did on it just to give me an idea to start with, so I won’t be too far off with it.” Robinson’s intention is to be respectful to “the idea” of the composer. “That also shows that I’ve been influenced by Dizzy,” he says, “since he did some very intricate things on it that I wish I had come up with [he laughs]. You try to play in relationship to that to learn what he’s doing, and then you try to build and improve on it.”
Renowned artists have sometimes improvised so effectively within the framework of other composers’ works, bringing fresh interpretations to them, that they leave an indelible mark upon the works’ performance traditions and on those of pieces with comparable styles. Walter Bishop Jr. learned the general principles for formulating solos within modal compositions by analyzing Miles Davis’s solos. Another trumpeter admitted that after “Miles’s playing on ‘Sketches of Spain,’ it is impossible to improvise on any Spanish-type piece without using some of Miles’s inflections.” A composition “like ‘Nardis’ also has a lot of connotation because Bill Evans played it so much,” Fred Hersch observes. Along similar lines, even if Roberta Baum “were to give my own interpretation of a song by Cole Porter, there is no way that I could forget how Ella Fitzgerald had phrased something.” A commemorative piece lends itself particularly to an interpretation imbued with the stylistic traits of the honored namesake. In rendering the ballad “I Remember Clifford,” Lee Morgan integrates his own personal blues-oriented commentaries into the ballad’s theme, at times adopting Clifford Brown’s wide, singing vibrato, unique articulation devices, and characteristic embellishments.28 Sometimes, it is in the very act of improvising that players discover and pursue the deep connections that compositions and the individual styles of soloists reveal to them.29
For improvisers, the meaning of a piece incorporates layers of nuance derived from intimacy with its imagery, its rhythmic and tonal associations, its performance history, and its relatives within the wider repertory of pieces. Among the myriad resources that soloists filter through their imaginations, one of the most striking is the vibrancy of the human connections that inhabit the piece—myriad inflections, personalities, voices, fingerings, and stances, coursing through the mind and into the musical performance. Such varied imagery informs and deepens every story in the telling. In a sense, each solo is like a tale within a tale, a personal account with ties of varying strength to the formal composition.
While absorbing the conventions associated with idea formulation and storytelling in the jazz tradition, artists place different emphases upon the conventions. They apply them uniquely according to each individual’s temperament, personal style of jazz oratory, emotional response to compositions, and specific goals for the solo under formulation. As expected, the differing emphases result in correspondingly varied transformations of jazz vocabulary and in different formal characteristics among the solos produced by improvisation (exx. 8.25a-d).30
Underlying their efforts to achieve such diversity of expression is rigorous practice on the part of jazz learners, as they develop flexibility in the use of initially limited stores of vocabulary, devise a systematic way of relating vocabulary patterns one to another, and absorb the aesthetic principles that guide vocabulary usage. Students with such comprehensive training are in a far better position as improvisers than are those among their counterparts who may have acquired a large store of vocabulary patterns, chords, scales, and the like, but yet fail to appreciate these other critical aspects of jazz knowledge. Ultimately, learning the tools and techniques of the art provides only the ground for the student’s development. To build the foundation, aspiring musicians must commit endless hours to practicing improvisation—mentally simulating the conditions of live performance events—if they are to acquire the cumulative experience upon which effective
storytelling rests. Among the challenges practicers confront in their earliest efforts are improvisation’s capricious aspects, which can operate as powerful forces to influence a work’s musical outcome.
The Teller’s Trials
Under the pressures of thinking in motion and amid the rapid-fire interplay and continually shifting frames of their conceptions, improvisers routinely contend with a variety of challenging, potentially daunting, experiences. One concerns the unpredictable relationship between the musical materials they have mastered for their large store and the actual ideas that occur to them during solos. Things are always happening “spontaneously,” according to Harold Ousley. He “practices certain phrases” but finds at times that “none of those phrases will come out in my solos, and I’m playing something altogether different.” Or, to his surprise, patterns “come out that I’ve only practiced a few times and didn’t think I knew well enough to play.”
Even an artist’s own allusions to the jazz literature can catch the artist by surprise, as when Cheatham “jumped right into playing two choruses” of a Charlie Parker solo. “I didn’t realize that I was going to do it till afterward,” he recalls. “I just automatically fell into it.” Years earlier, Cheatham had learned the solo when working with Lionel Hampton’s band “from the younger fellows in the trumpet section.” They used to perform it together as part of an arrangement of “I Got Rhythm.”
If at some moments soloists must respond artistically to unexpected phrases arising from their vocabulary store or from their improvisations’ associations, at other moments they must contend with the occasional repetitive or hackneyed use of vocabulary. “Sometimes, when you get ready to play, you say to yourself, ‘I don’t want to play the same stuff I always play,’ so you deliberately try not to play it, but you end up playing the same old stuff anyway,” Bobby Rogovin says ruefully. Lonnie Hillyer’s experience is much the same. “Just trying to make phrases come out differently is hard at times, very hard,” he says, “because we’re programmed. It’s almost like working against the grain at times because you want things to come out differently, and they just don’t.” Improvisers may push themselves off one well-known melodic course as soon as they realize that they have started down it, only to find themselves proceeding along another familiar path.
In one of the great ironies associated with improvisation, as soon as artists complete the rigorous practice required to place a vocabulary pattern into their larger store, they must guard against its habituated and uninspired use. The demands of improvisation make this challenge unavoidable. “Everything is passing by very fast when you’re playing, and you’ve got to play something,” Harold Ousley says. “I remember a time when I wouldn’t want to play anything that I had heard before. I always wanted to play new and different things. But that attitude used to hang me up because I would refuse to play certain familiar phrases that came to me, and it would make me late in playing something else. When I’m practicing or performing a piece now,” he continues, “I’ll play whatever comes to me.” Typically, soloists must be prepared to manage ideas arising in various transformations without the artist’s preconception or volition. “When it’s time for a particular phrase to come out,” John McNeil observes, “it’ll come out, but it’s usually not the way you practiced it. It’s usually altered somewhat. Maybe, it comes out a half beat to the right or left of where you practiced it, with a few extra notes thrown in. Or it might be connected to a different phrase,” he reports.
These capricious occurrences can be explained partly in terms of the pressures under which improvisers operate and the inevitable discrepancies that occur at times between intended and realized ideas. Beneath the surface of such discrepancies is the potentially complex nature of musical conception in the face of myriad subtleties that define improvisation as an activity. Like the improviser’s store of musical knowledge, the ideas that occur during a solo assume different forms of representation: sounds, physical gestures, visual displays, and verbalizations. Each potentially involves distinctive thought processes and distinctive qualities of mediation with the body.
Amid the interplay of a performer’s shifting modes of thought, different mental images sometimes occur simultaneously to reinforce the same musical pattern; other times, one kind of image predominates, favoring ideas peculiar to its own world of representation and imagination, and temporarily altering the nature of the solo. As different modes of thought wield varying degrees of influence within their separate or overlapping spheres of activity and periodically prevail over one another, their ever-changing balance constantly affects an improvisation’s progressive musical events. The balance is, in turn, constantly affected by them. Ultimately, the dynamic interplay among different modes of musical thinking forms the heart of improvisation as a compositional process.
In response to a problematic musical gesture, the verbalizing aspects of the player’s mind might come to the fore, assuming an evaluative role and reminding the player of aesthetic issues integral to jazz language use.31 Emily Remler is “constantly reacting” to what she plays, giving herself “little congratulations and little condemnations.” In Fred Hersch’s experience, “it’s like you’ve got this third ear that oversees the whole business—the craft part—and that’s what tells you what to do when you solo,” He explains, “If you’re going to repeat a phrase, repeat it in a different way, change it a little bit; make it say something; make it speak differently. Make the phrase I’m now playing shed light on the phrase I just played or the one I’m about to play. Do something to give the music contrast. Don’t keep beating a dead horse this way. Try something else. Be resourceful. Use your left hand more.”
If Hersch “plays the whole keyboard or just one part of it, it’s a conscious decision. If I switch,” he says, “it means, I was bored with whatever else I was doing, and this presents a contrast. I’m really just trying to keep it all interesting for myself.” The nature of this dialogue can affect the overall length and shaping of the solo. John Coltrane also speaks to this. If in the middle of a solo “I feel like I’m just playing notes ... maybe I don’t feel the rhythm or I’m not in the best shape ... I’ll try to build things to the point where this inspiration is happening again, where things are spontaneous and not contrived. If it reaches that point again, I feel it can continue—it’s alive again. But if it doesn’t happen, I’ll just quit, bow out.”32 The third ear’s various concerns include blending emotional energy with the logic of musical ideas and keeping them in balance. When improvisers reach “ecstatic states” during solos, they must eventually “pull back and ask, ‘Where can it go from here?’ ”33
In response to the question—or, otherwise, in response to waning inspiration or to performance problems described earlier—theorizing aspects of the improviser’s mind might invoke the image of a theoretical model, and successfully urge that the next few pitches be drawn from its collection. If Melba Liston has “got the feeling going,” she says, “then I’ll go by ear. If not, I’ll pay attention to the chords and go by the changes. I know my chord scales and all that business, so I can pick out the notes whether I’m inspired or not” Liston is generally “more deliberate” when she solos “nowadays,” and she does not always rely on her ears alone. Similarly, Benny Bailey says he tries “to open up my mind a bit so that I can play something a little different, because I’m boring myself sometimes by playing the same things over and over again.” Bailey laughs and elaborates:
So, I’m trying to work on things outside the chord, to approach the chord indirectly—like from a half tone above it or below it, the outside notes—and to mix those with the inside notes. If you think of something outside, it’s going to make you play different things. It will give you a bigger overall picture of music and stimulate the fantasy. Or I’ll think of playing certain intervals. If I think of an interval like an augmented fifth, it’s going to change the way I play. I’ll surprise myself and play things I’m not expecting to play.
As imme
diately as the artist responds to such a theoretical concept and performs the interval, however, the singing mind might assume control and choose the next several tones aurally, extending and binding the entire succession of pitches into an effective phrase. Then the singing and verbalizing mind, approving of the action, prepares to repeat the phrase, when suddenly the player’s body unilaterally pursues another option. A trumpet player, for example, transposing the figure for sequential development, might begin it at a miscalculated pitch level that requires the figure’s instantaneous transformation at the outer limit of the player’s range, cutting off the figure prematurely or reversing its melodic direction.
Under other circumstances, the fingers substitute pitches within the intended phrase’s contour to make its execution more comfortable. During one performance in which an arranged bass ostinato “cramped” Don Pate’s fingers, he invented variations on the ostinato for physical relief. Idiomatic figures that lie readily at hand on an instrument and are easily negotiated over its physical terrain commonly fulfill this role. Alternatively, the fingers may dance an inventive rhythmic variation upon an intended figure in response to an emotional impulse, or proceed as a matter of reflex to an altogether different phrase, one associated with the piece’s sounding chords.
Additionally, the fingers can alter the singing mind’s conceptions by exploring their physical relationships to other patterns. On one occasion, I had no sooner begun a phrase designated for my solo’s eighth measure than I found myself playing another phrase altogether, one that I had practiced rigorously months earlier and then abandoned. What was interesting about the maneuver was that the intended phrase and its inadvertent replacement, although comprising different melodies, began with the same finger pattern sequence. It was as if my fingers considered the two phrases to be logical equivalents on this basis and switched me from one to the other with the ease of a signalman switching a train to an adjacent track.
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