Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Ultimately, musical saves require that a soloist have the imagination to conceive an instant solution in the face of error and the technical control to implement it. To repeat a problematic pattern, musicians must initially grasp and remember its precise variation on the intended model. One teacher expressed exasperation when his students could not remember, for repetition, their “good mistakes,” those inadvertent but acceptable variations on the model phrases he dictated to them. “They’re supposed to be your discoveries,” he implored. Moreover, to resolve unfortunate accidents, the artist must be deft enough to treat pitches outside the piece’s structure as grace notes, passing tones, appoggiatura, or other figures leading into chord tones. To transform the troublesome portion of a phrase to suit unexpected formal circumstances requires experience with the full complement of improvisation techniques rehearsed endlessly in the practice room.

  The methods underlying musical saves are the payoff of the musician’s intensive, rigorous preparation. Mastery over scales, intervals, and arpeggios allows the student to change melodic direction via any of their tonal paths at a moment’s notice, stepping or leaping to optional points within each piece’s chord progression and resolving dissonant pitches. Similarly, the sense of rhythmic phrasing that Barry Harris’s students absorb from drills embellishing two- and four-bar scalar patterns with chromatics prepares students to expand ill-conceived melodies instantly with extra pitches so that the phrases “come out right,” ending, perhaps, with an intended target pitch such as a chord tone on a particular beat of a measure. It is logical here to draw a connection between these techniques and those described earlier as conventional procedures for ornamenting and varying jazz tunes, vocabulary patterns, and theoretical materials. Such conventions themselves may have initially grown out of, or been reinforced by, the special challenges improvisers face as composers, resolving the disparity between musical intention and realization in performance.

  Accidents and saves may have contributed additional stylistic traits to jazz, in some instances cultivated by originators who appreciated the effects of their saves, or in other instances unwittingly perpetuated by students and by the recording industry before the development of sophisticated editing techniques. Jim Maxwell observes that some effects, “like the fall-off,” are closely tied to the idiomatic characteristics and difficulties of an instrument. “Instead of holding a note way out there on the trumpet when your chops start to hurt you,” Maxwell says, “you let it drop in pitch. Also, the rip-up. It’s hard to make large interval leaps on the trumpet, so if you just start ripping up, hitting all the notes in the overtone series, eventually you’re going to hit the note you’re striving for an octave above where you began.” Maxwell adds that he first heard the do it in a Harry “Sweets” Edison solo. “It sounded like an overshot at that note to me, but other people picked it up off the record as an intentional effect, and it became standardized. Another is the shake. The first time I heard that effect was on an early Louis Armstrong record. It sounded like a wide vibrato that had gone temporarily out of control, and again, people imitated it from the record as a distinct effect.” 36

  The Improviser’s World of Consciousness

  As the multiple associations of their ideas wash over improvisers, they put into operation their well-practiced skills at negotiating the many possibilities. They select some for development and tightly manage their interrelationships. Besides those unexpected transformations that periodically arise from the discrepancy between conception and execution, improvisers constantly strive to put their thoughts together in different ways, going over old ground in search of new. The activity is much like creative thinking in language, in which the routine process is largely devoted to rethinking. By ruminating over formerly held ideas, isolating particular aspects, examining their relationships to the features of other ideas, and, perhaps, struggling to extend ideas in modest steps and refine them, thinkers typically have the sense of delving more deeply into the possibilities of their ideas. There are, of course, also the rarer moments when they experience discoveries as unexpected flashes of insight and revelation.

  Similarly, a soloist’s most salient experiences in the heat of performance involve poetic leaps of imagination to phrases that are unrelated, or only minimally related, to the storehouse, as when the identities of formerly mastered patterns melt away entirely within new recombinant shapes. “There are times when you don’t even try to do anything new, and all of a sudden it will happen; you avoid all the clichés,” says Bobby Rogovin. “Something fresh will come up which you didn’t even know you could play. That’s what playing is really all about, the magic that happens when you least expect it.” An improviser sometimes initiates the first few pitches of a familiar phrase, then conceives a new melodic shape for the pitches’ extension and abandons the initial model altogether. Amid the ongoing bends and twists in the contour of an evolving solo line, players commonly have the impression of a constant alternation between known figures and new figures. Soloists “always have crips that they can play when they improvise, but in the course of playing them, other things would come to them,” Tommy Turrentine explains. “A crip is like a crutch. It’s like a brace or a bridge from one idea to another. Bird might rip off something real mean and then play a crip. And after that, he’d come out of the crip, and he’d rip off something real mean again—melodically or harmonically or rhythmically.”

  It is in dramatic movements from formerly mastered phrases to unrehearsed patterns, from commonly transacted physical maneuvers to those outside the body’s normal reach or hold, and from familiar frames of reference within compositional forms to uncalculated structural positions, that improvisers typically push the limits of their artistry. Kenny Barron surprises himself in his playing “in a lot of different ways.” He may play “a chord or a particular voicing or chord substitution” that had not occurred to him before and say, “Oh, wow!” Or, he reports, it may be “a technical thing, a particularly difficult run that I had never played before, but executed perfectly the first time.” Fred Hersch has experienced this as well: “I was playing this week, and I played all this technical stuff that I couldn’t sit down and play now—even if I could practice it for eight hours. At that moment, the music was happening. Everything just fell into place in my hands and in my head. I felt I was expressing something with everything I played. When I’m playing well, there’s a certain freedom of just being able to do anything, really.”

  Under the soloist’s extraordinary powers of concentration, the singing and visualizing aspects of the mind attain a perfect unity of conception with the body. The artist becomes intensely focused on thoughts in the language of jazz, and as they come—one upon the other—they are articulated as instantly as conceived. No lead time separates conception from expression, and the gap between intention and realization disappears. Some illuminate this experience with the metaphor of dance in its broadest sense. When Curtis Fuller gets “caught up” in the music, he says, “I dance with it. That’s my emotional state when I play. That’s my feeling of expressing my total self in the music.” At such moments, a soloist is propelled through the structure of a piece by the logic and flow of the performance, with each phrase opening the door to others. Figures that normally complete an idea turn spontaneously into transitional bridges to other figures. Preplanned events are either integrated smoothly into the solo or simply evaporate in the face of more pressing thoughts.

  As exciting ideas flood their imaginations, continually presenting new melodic options, improvisers articulate them so effortlessly that they feel at times like recipients and conveyers, rather than inventors, of ideas. John McNeil describes himself as “a spectator in a way, and I’m usually surprised by what I play,” he admits. Similarly, although Art Farmer sometimes “thinks about form in the long range of things,” his improvisations “seem to have a life of their own. From the first note I play,” he says, “one note leads to the next. It just goes from one place to another, developing
by itself.”

  Carried during each improvised tale by the momentum of invention, artists are as eager as their audiences to discover precisely where the story will lead. There are constant revelations over their narrative’s unfolding course. So that’s how you can get from here to there! exclaims the third ear as the artist improvises effective musical segues among new combinations of vocabulary or transforms larger phrases with uniquely fashioned substitute patterns. Moreover, there are the gratifying feelings associated with long-range achievements. “The natural progression of the melody is set from the first phrase you play,” Buster Williams explains, “and it becomes exciting by itself as you move forward toward the punch line. The excitement is shared by everybody. When I start off, I don’t know what the punch line is going to be. It’s all formed as it goes.” The intense joy that accompanies successful musical journeys causes some soloists to “break up laughing” in mid-performance (BB).

  Throughout, the artistic poise that improvisation requires is evident in the soloist’s instant response to the musical turn of events and agile handling of vocabulary. It also underscores the musician’s tolerance for ambiguity and courage in the face of risk. The attitude Roberta Baum carries within her when she sings is, she reports, “throw all caution to the wind!” Each performance is “an adventure,” and from moment to moment “I don’t necessarily know what I’m going to do next.” For players, the adventure of jazz can be both exhilarating and awe-inspiring. Abdullah Ibrahim likens the improvising musician to “a samurai warrior,” implying that it is the “fearless” confrontation of almost limitless challenges under tremendous pressure that leads to artful mastery and the ultimate achievement of “bliss.” 37

  At times, the soloist pursues musical conceptions aggressively, undaunted by the complications that arise from unforeseen technical or aesthetic problems. In fact, a veteran in pursuit of a challenge often deliberately introduces problems into a solo and then proceeds to solve them. Following an impulse to reach for a pitch of indefinite determination, performing a melodic· shape on which there is only a tenuous hold, experimenting with especially dissonant sounds in relation to the harmony, or inventing complex rhythmic figures outside the meter and tempo, the improviser strives to work out the ramifications of ideas by reconciling them within the piece’s form. In the process, the player commonly transforms the ideas in unusual ways, leading to discoveries that provide further stimulation for the performance. Players may proceed rapidly along the model of a familiar chain of ideas, then suddenly deviate from it, bringing about a change, perhaps, by altering the rhythmic value of a prominent pitch or rephrasing a component, then taking up the new rhythmic features motivically (ex. 9.8).

  At other times, artists feel that realizing their goals depends on having the self-assurance and flexibility to back off from intentional pursuits—to relinquish control. A conga drummer in Chicago once followed this course as he periodically dropped his hands limply onto the drum head from different heights, allowing them to rebound freely, then immediately imitated their complex aleophonic patterns and played off of them. “There is such a thing as letting the music take you, if you are willing, or if you are open enough” (DP). “Instead of trying to play the music all the time,” a musician advised Leroy Williams years ago, “you sometimes have to let it play you, and you have to be relaxed enough to let that happen.” Developing the confidence to do this can be an important turning point in the maturation of improvisers.38

  This paradoxical relationship between musical actions calling for a passive performance posture and others calling for precise artistic control contributes to the mystique that surrounds improvisation.39 Typically, Walter Bishop Jr. is sometimes “leading” and sometimes “being led through” his performances. “I’ll plan quotes from different tunes or solos and use them, but spontaneous things also happen in my playing. Or I’ll let something else in the music take me somewhere. I’ll deliberately pick up on the last soloist’s phrase and build my solo from there.” Barry Harris characterizes the soloist’s optimum state as “calm but alert, ready to go with any possibility.”

  Artists in many fields experience a creative tension when they explore new lines of thought and interact in unpredictable ways with materials and ideas. A sculptor chipping at a marble block mediates between the initial vision for the sculpture and its evolving shape. Each chisel stroke potentially alters its form in unintended ways or reveals new features in the grain’s internal flow that suggests modification of the artwork’s design. Similarly, for novelists, writing is not simply an exercise in recording formerly held thoughts, but one for pursuing their unexplored implications. No sooner do authors create characters than they struggle to control them in the face of ever-expanding possibilities for their development and interaction. In the heat of writing, novelists are at times. spellbound by their own characters, who, much like the melodies of improvisers, appear to assume lives and voices of their own, revealing new insights that can shift a work’s emphasis in unanticipated ways.

  The sense of exhilaration that characterizes the artist’s experiences under such circumstances is heightened for jazz musicians as storytellers by the activity’s physical, intellectual, and emotional exertion and by the intensity of struggling with creative processes under the pressure of a steady beat. From the outset of each performance, improvisers enter an artificial world of time in which reactions to the unfolding events of their tales must be immediate. Furthermore, the consequences of their actions are irreversible. Amid the dynamic display of imagined fleeting images and impulses—entrancing sounds and vibrant feelings, dancing shapes and kinetic gestures, theoretical symbols and perceptive commentaries—improvisers extend the logic of previous phrases, as ever-emerging figures on the periphery of their vision encroach upon and supplant those in performance. Soloists reflect on past events with breathtaking speed, while constantly pushing forward to explore the implications of new outgrowths of ideas that demand their attention. Ultimately, to journey over musical avenues of one’s own design, thinking in motion and creating art on the edge of certainty and surprise, is to be “very alive, absolutely caught up in the moment” (GL). Few experiences are more deeply fulfilling for improvisers than the compelling, all-absorbing nature of composing music in performance.

  NINE

  Improvisation and Precomposition

  The Eternal Cycle

  If you listen to many jazz compositions, a lot of times the melodies were actually once solos. I know because a lot of songs which I’ve written have come from just my plain practicing of certain solo phrases. When I’m soloing, I’ll hear a certain phrase, and I’ll say, “Hey, I like this; I think I’ll write a song with this phrase in it.” — Harold Ousley

  In creating solo after solo, jazz improvisers continually explore the relationships of musical ideas, negotiating among a mixture of fixed elements, which derive from their storehouses, and fresh, variable elements, which present unique challenges and surprises. Reflecting this dichotomy are the different uses to which artists put the very term improvisation as they apply it in different contexts, thereby illuminating various facets of their creative activities.

  When players use improvisation as a noun, referring to improvisations as artistic products, they typically focus on the products’ precise relationship to the original models that inspired them. In describing tune renditions, Lee Konitz distinguishes improvisations, by which he means the most radical trans-figurations of the melody and “altogether new” ideas, from progressively subtler alterations falling within the realm of variation, embellishment, and interpretation. Similarly, in terms of this full range of transformations, artists can describe the relationship of their formulations to such musical models in their storehouses as theoretical materials and vocabulary patterns.

  When artists use improvisation as a verb, however, they focus not only on the degree to which old models are transformed and new ideas created, but on the dynamic conditions and precise processes underlyin
g their transformation and creation. Typically, they reserve the term for real-time composing—instantaneous decision making in applying and altering musical materials and conceiving new ideas. Players distinguish such operations during solos from the recall and performance of precomposed ideas, those formulated outside the current event in the practice room or in a previous performance. From this standpoint, unique features of interpretation, embellishment, and variation, when conceived in performance, can also be regarded theoretically as improvised.

  Over a solo’s course, players typically deal with the entire spectrum of possibilities embodied by these separable but related applications of improvisation. At one moment, soloists may play radical, precomposed variations on a composition’s melody as rehearsed and memorized before the event. The very next moment, they may spontaneously be embellishing the melody’s shape, or inventing a new melodic phrase. There is a perpetual cycle between improvised and precomposed components of the artists’ knowledge as it pertains to the entire body of construction materials on any and every level of solo invention. The improvised exploration of individual pitch combinations produces new vocabulary patterns that, once entered into the improviser’s store, take on the nature of relatively fixed, precomposed materials. When the soloist retrieves them in performance, however, they serve as improvisational elements that recombine in unique ways in the construction of phrases. During this process, invention can turn back toward precomposition when the exploration of relationships among vocabulary patterns produces increasingly fixed vocabulary chains, capable of being retrieved as elaborate construction materials for that or other solos. The proportion of precomposition to improvising is likewise subject to continual change throughout a performance.