Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  In another instance, when I was practicing a long Lee Morgan solo from memory, my fingers leaped smoothly and directly from the first half of a phrase in one solo chorus to the second half of another phrase in another chorus. Only then did I realize that the two phrases contained a fragment in common that, serving as a bridge in performance, led me instantly across all the intervening material and created a new phrase in the process. These incidents illustrate the body’s capacity to dictate with great assurance during improvisations by giving momentary primacy to the physical logic of patterned movement over the strictly aural logic of melodic form.

  The changing character of the body during performances can also amplify or modify the improviser’s conceptions. Betty Carter contrasts classical music, wherein the performer’s body is asked to reproduce the musical gestures of another composer, with the self-expression of jazz performance. By constantly monitoring her own instrument’s responsiveness as she scats and by shaping her inventions accordingly, Carter not only “spares” her voice but provides each solo with unique musical features. 34

  Particular issues can differ from instrument to instrument. As the fingers of pianists warm up and become more dextrous, they have access to a greater variety of rhythmic patterns and tempos. As the facial, lip, and tongue muscles of brass players become more limber, they can extend the range of their solos. Conversely, as players tire, they can lead melodic lines into a lower, less taxing register, perform shorter phrases, interject more frequent rests into the performance, or limit the lengths of their solos overall.

  Moreover, the body influences events simply by faltering in its efforts to accommodate the singing mind. “If you’re playing an instrument like the trumpet, which is based on the overtone series, sometimes you go for one note, and another one comes out. You might have a certain phrase in mind that you intended to begin on an A, but instead of A, some other note like G or B might come out. God knows why,” Art Farmer laughs, “but it does,” Such discrepancies are sometimes incidental to the ongoing realization of an idea, as when one rapid pitch inadvertently substitutes for another within the intended pattern. At other times, the spontaneous soundings produce results that performers regard as significant and desirable. If bass players “reach for a note physically and miss it,” Chuck Israels observes, the accident can produce “a nice effect. For example, in certain situations, the chord might be G7(#9). If you are up in the high register of the bass and go for the sharp ninth, you might hit the natural ninth instead and still find that it’s a nice, juicy thing to do.”

  From time to time, problems with equipment can play a substantial role. At one Village Gate performance I attended, a valve on Miles Davis’s trumpet became stuck in the midst of an improvisation. Davis simply accepted the loss of its associated pitches as a compositional constraint and formulated the rest of his solo without them.

  The unpredictability of musical events produces results along the full spectrum of satisfaction from serendipitous to undesirable. Harold Ousley comments on the problems that can arise when a player prepares to initiate a phrase “and it doesn’t come off, either because a saxophone pad is sticking, or, for a trumpet player, a valve might stick or the embouchure might not be set right.” Sometimes problems arise concerning the actual value of ideas and the relative precision with which artists conceive them. As with language use, it is sometimes not until individuals actually express ideas borne in mind that they discover how firm a grasp they have upon them and whether they are generally to their liking. Art Farmer is enlightening on this matter:

  Here and there you have unrealized ideas. Either you have an idea and it doesn’t come off the way you conceive it, or else you might have a stupid idea to begin with—and you have to try them all. Like if you have an idea that comes to your head, and you don’t know whether it’s going to work or not, well then, you have to try it. That’s the only way you’re going to find out. By a certain idea, I’m talking about a particular choice of notes, some kind of melodic idea that would come into your head. Like you hear something in the music and would like to play something against that. Like if you’re playing in the key of C and the chord is C, but instead of playing the notes that are in the chord, you play some notes that are completely outside of it. Sometimes it comes off and sometimes it doesn’t. Or you might start out an idea okay and you want to develop it, but then you go as far as you can with it. It gets to the point where you can’t handle it anymore because you don’t have the technique and coordination between the head and the body.

  Such commentaries underscore one of the special conditions of composing music in performance. Improvisers cannot retrieve their unintended phrases or unsuccessful “accidents.” Rather, they react to them immediately, endeavoring to integrate them smoothly into their performances. Mistakes, in particular, they treat as spontaneous compositional problems requiring immediate musical solutions. The solutions result in what may properly be described as musical saves.

  Musical Saves

  Experienced improvisers raise the musical save to the level of high art. According to Kenny Barron, “part of the act of performing jazz is taking chances, and sometimes the chances you take don’t work. But the craft is taking an idea that doesn’t work and turning it into something that does work.” Art Farmer elaborates:

  Whether the chances you take come off or not, either way, you have to preserve the continuity of the ideas that you’re playing. If an idea comes to you and you don’t make it, you have to experience making something else out of it. That happens all the time when you’re improvising. Or if a wrong note comes out, you have to make something out of that note. You can’t just let the solo fall apart. As instantly as a note comes out which is not the one I intended, some other alternative comes to me. Of course, years ago, when I didn’t have the technique I have now, a lot of times an idea would come to my mind and then doubt would follow it: no, you can’t play that; you have to think of something else that you can get to.

  To address specific musical problems and to stabilize solos, there exist, within the jazz community, conventions for effecting musical saves. “I’ll go for one note and hit another that has the same fingering, and say to myself, ‘Damn, how am I going to get out of this one?’ ” Tommy Turrentine says, laughing. For him, the answer sometimes lies in the advice a veteran player “gave me long ago: ‘Your chromatics will get you out of anything. Man, you hit a wrong note and just go to your chromatic. You ain’t got but two ways to go—up or down or wrong—so your chromatic will bail you out.’”

  In another instance, Turrentine says, he might “think of another interval that’s complementary to the chord or to the phrase I just played and slide out of the mistake that way. Cannonball [Adderley] was a master at that. He’d be going fast, man, and a chord would sneak up on him and bam, hit him upside the head. He’d just go ‘Oh, oh!’ and get right out of it. Yes, sir. That’s just knowing your horn and knowing your scales, being in command of your instrument.”

  Comparable strategies can address even the most “horrible accident” successfully. Suppose the basic harmony was a C minor chord, and a player “dives for an E, but overshoots and hits an E,” Chuck Israels posits. “He had better use that note as an appoggiatura to an F or it’s going to sound awful. There are few notes that sound as awful as a major third on a minor chord or that would be any more difficult to resolve.” he asserts. In addition to saving the situation with a chromatic movement, a really gifted artist could “pick a bunch of intervallic relationships and, say, move away from the E quickly, in fourths, like E, A, D, G, C, F, or something like that, so it would feel like you had deliberately started out with a tension away from the harmony of the chord and then deliberately moved back toward it.”

  In some instances, surprises in the conversation between soloist and the piece, such as encounters with unintentional rhythmic displacement, may suggest the use of particular options. One way of responding to the deviation is to subject the displaced figure to furth
er displacement for a couple of measures until it arrives at its intended metric position. To manage such changes successfully, however, soloists must remain undeterred by the different rhythmic feeling figures acquire with each entrance. Another resource for offsetting the effects of displacement anticipated during the fusion of vocabulary patterns is for improvisers to enlist techniques of embellishment, inserting chromatic pitches between the patterns, perhaps, to adjust their rhythmic relationships to the beat.

  Or suppose a player, after beginning a long phrase several beats later than intended, finds its last fragment threatening to spill over into incompatible harmonic territory. Several options present themselves. One is to head off the problem by altering the fragment to fit the new position’s requirements, transposing it into another key or raising or lowering one of its elements to suit a chord of a different quality. Deleting the problematic fragment altogether and truncating the original phrase also serves the player well, as does substituting a more suitable fragment for it. Compressing the original figure by speeding its performance is another common method. If artists begin an intended phrase too soon, so that it threatens to fall short of filling its portion of the progression, they can compensate for this by expanding the phrase through various means. They can sporadically insert chromatic pitches, rests, or short melodic figures along its contour, replace a particular component with longer substitute patterns, either formerly mastered or invented at the moment, or improvise a cadential extension.

  Other saves combine short corrective patterns with the deliberately reproduced mistake, as when soloists conform to their initial misinterpretation of a piece’s form. Curtis Fuller has a copy of a Coltrane album in which, he notices, “on one track, he got to the bridge too soon every chorus. He did it every time, and now when you listen to it, it sounds like it’s intentional. People listen to that and say: ‘Man, he sure was slick when he played there’ [Fuller laughs]. Those are the treasures of my craft.”

  Kenny Barron gives similar counsel: “One of the tricks is that if you play something that you didn’t really mean to play, play it again. If you repeat it, it sounds like that’s what you meant to play.” Barron recalls Dizzy Gillespie’s advice to him: “When you make a mistake, make a loud one, because if you’re timid about it, then it really sounds like a mistake. It really sounds like you messed up.” Sometimes, Barron says, when he begins an idea he can “tell that it’s going to come out wrong.” He continues:

  You can tell before your fingers land on the final note that it isn’t going to work, but rather than backing off, you just keep going—whatever happens. The important thing is that you’re not lost. You can repeat that same wrong idea and make it work. That’s part of the craft of it. For example, suppose you’re ending a phrase on a note that is really out in left field. We have a tendency to end phrases or to end lines almost without fail on the first, third, fifth, seventh, or ninth degrees of a chord. So, if you’re ending on an EM7 chord and your phrase ends on an E, that’s going to sound wrong no matter how you look at it. And you can tell a split second before you land there that that’s where the line’s headed. If I did that, I might repeat the line and then find a way of moving the E to a note that’s in the chord.

  A performer also periodically reworks a problematic phrase whose flaw lies in its articulation rather than in its design so that it can serve a predetermined musical function. If Harold Ousley tries for a particular “starting phrase that doesn’t come out properly—there aren’t enough notes and it doesn’t fit within the context of the space—I’ll repeat it in the second bar because it’s something that I want to lead me to other things. I’ve even heard Bird and Clifford Brown do this.”

  As in Ousley’s case, personal experience with comparable operations informs the artist’s interpretations of performances by other players and increases appreciation for their adroit responses. At one concert, a soloist’s drumsticks slipped through his fingers and rebounded on the drum head with a unique syncopated figure. As soon as the drummer reclaimed his sticks, he deftly repeated the syncopated figure, treating it as a motive. In another instance, when a trumpeter overshot a target pitch and hit a painful wrong note, he instantly pulled his finger off the offending key—inadvertently raising the pitch a step—then produced a rapid descent to the original target pitch. At that point, he deliberately proceeded to ornament each pitch of the chord in the same manner, creating a new phrase from the maneuver.

  Other features of mistakes in improvisations contribute an endless variety of effects. The involuntary reversal of two fingers in a patterned sequence of movement imbues a phrase with a new melodic twist for the artist’s consideration; a grace note inadvertently appended to the initial pitch of a phrase by sluggish fingers might suggest ornamenting other pitches accordingly. “When my fingers come up with an idea, I’ll hear it and say, ‘Oh, I like this!’ and I’ll consciously play it again,” Harold Ousley says. “Later, I’ll practice the phrase, re-recording it in my mind so that I’ll know it and be able to get a playback on it when I need it.” If the consequence of weighting subsequent pitches with grace notes was to segment the line into different groupings, the pattern created by the segmentation can provide the model for the next idea. Similarly, if the tongue does not move quickly enough for a clear attack on all the pitches in the phrase, the melodic shape of the partially ghosted and fully articulated pitches can catch the soloist’s ear and serve as a design for other phrases.

  Suppose that, in the context of executing a larger phrase, the soloist’s fingers inadvertently strike a tone above an intended pitch, then overcompensate by striking a tone an interval below it. In such a case, the artist can use an ascending scale fragment to return to the original target pitch, continuing the original phrase as planned, although with a slightly expanded midsection. If the player loses the grip on the initial idea in deviating from it, or if the deviant maneuver appeals, the player can use its melodic shape and rhythmic motion as the improvisation’s next statement. An alternative would be to rest after departing from the phrase, then start it over again from the beginning.

  If a piece’s successive chords will not accommodate the immediate revision of a passage, a performer can reserve it for the next compatible part of the progression. This requires the mental agility both to imagine and perform new short-range ideas while planning and managing longer-range strategies. Curtis Fuller occasionally conceives an idea during a solo that takes him longer to work out than he has anticipated. “If it doesn’t come out right,” he says, “I’ll go back and try the thing again the next chorus to see if I can resolve it.” Artists face comparable challenges when, as increasingly sophisticated musical thinkers, they derive stimulation from performance. “Sometimes, when you go through a channel, you figure, ‘Well, what I really should have done is something else.’ So, the next time I get to that spot again,” Lou Donaldson reveals, “I’ll use some other phrase I wanted to play, but didn’t get to before.” Under such circumstances, soloists typically strive to lead an evolving line through the remainder of the form, then directly into the intended figure, or they can provide the line with a logical conclusion just before the figure’s entrance and use the figure to begin the next phrase.

  A story familiar within the jazz community, as recounted by Fuller, brings to light the dilemmas that these challenges can hold for artists:

  Sometimes, I won’t approach a part of the tune right. It’s like a pilot coming in for a landing and not approaching the runway right. “Oh, wait a minute, I’ve got to go back and do it again.” That’s why some guys can’t stop their solos. Like Trane was playing a record date one time, and he must have played ninety choruses. Afterwards, he got a big frown from Miles. Trane said, “I’m sorry, Miles. I just couldn’t stop.” Miles said, “Just take the horn out of your mouth” [Fuller laughs]. I think of little things like that when I get caught up with an idea that is not resolving right. I can try to make it work out over two choruses or so, but I put a limit on th
at. It’s like the old saying goes, “If it don’t fit, don’t force it.”

  Should artists be successful in such maneuvers and strive to repeat them in subsequent choruses as planned events, they face continued risks of handling multiple ideas, performing some while plotting others. “I might play magnificently on the outside of a tune [the A section],” Fuller reports, “but get to the bridge and go, ‘Oh, my God!’ and mess it up. Then I’d figure out the bridge, but when I’d go to play again, I’d get so involved thinking about the bridge that’s coming up, I’d blow the part that I was playing [at the time]. That’s natural.” Fuller remembers being in the recording studio one time with a friend “who wanted to do forty-one takes of a song. Every time we did it, there was something he wasn’t happy with in his solos. Sometimes it’s like that,” he says ruefully.

  As suggested above, individual interpretations of unexpected events, changing impressions of the original ideas, and the choice of alternative saves have different consequences for the solo’s development at each turn. Through the skillful negotiation of problems associated with particular phrases, artists commonly change their intended emphasis upon them. Nevertheless, in the process, they accomplish the same developmental goals for which they strive during the normal course of performance. Reworking a troublesome phrase at separate harmonic positions within the piece’s form can provide the solo with a unifying theme. Alternatively, immediate repetition can serve such a phrase as a satisfying tension-building device, with its successful resolution retroactively imbuing the sequence with the character of a planned motive variation. 35

  With increased experience and skill, improvisers respond to accidents with composure and ingenuity, performing saves with such speed and assurance that listeners are unaware that any element of the performance is unintentional. Beyond the immediacy of these occurrences, artists sometimes “remember their successful solutions to past accidents.” The musical saves become part of their “musical knowledge, and they can draw on them when they come across other musical circumstances involving similar elements” (CI).