Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  As improvisers manipulate either traditional or original figures as a constant thread in performances, they accord them the additional status of signature patterns. “We all have our little bag of tricks, our special riffs that are identified with us,” Red Rodney says. “You may gain some new ones and drop some of the old ones. You get different personality traits as you get older. But you never lose your bag of tricks completely. That’s just our personalities.”

  Ultimately, while some vocabulary patterns may play consistent roles in the improvisational language of individual artists—used only to begin phrases, perhaps—other patterns play multiple, variable roles from improvisation to improvisation.6 Catalytic figures in some settings serve just as well as cadential figures in others, and vice versa, taking on a different character in each context. A distinctive diminished pattern that is treated motivically in some improvisations—appearing in short sequential treatments, or as the basis for an extended developmental section within a chorus or a cadenza—may appear in others as a fleeting harmonic coloration device.

  As this implies, the player’s concern with varying the roles of vocabulary patterns is tied, at times, to the concern with varying their prominence within a solo. Artists emphasize some patterns over others by repeating them, by isolating them with rests, and by featuring them at the beginnings or endings of longer phrases or at the outermost curvatures of their contours. Performers can avoid particular patterns altogether, however, or significantly reduce their presence when treating them as construction components by relegating them to transitional bridges between more prominent figures. They may even go so far as to bury them within composite phrases where they blend into adjacent figures, compromising or sacrificing their original identities in service to the larger musical gesture (exx. 9.1a–b).

  Similar practices occur at the level of phrase embellishment. A single triplet mordent that occurs as an incidental embellishment in one phrase may be applied to every pitch in another phrase, where, densely embedded within its contour, it comprises an integral part of the idea (exx. 9.2a–b). In other instances, the mordent’s appearance as an ornament among consecutive nonmotivic passages can serve as a subtle unifying element, tying the passages together. A grupetto-like gesture that merely ornaments a composition in some settings can serve, in others, as the catalytic component of an improvised phrase or the phrase’s principal feature (exx. 9.3a–d). Comparing sample appearances of a lick during a year and a half in its life makes evident its unceasing creative potential for the formulation of unique musical ideas (exx. 9.4a–i).

  Gradually, the shifting emphasis that improvisers place on particular patterns changes the accessibility and standing of others within their vocabulary storehouses. This became apparent with Max Roach’s quartet in trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater’s performances, two years apart. At the first concert, Bridgewater introduced an effective device that teased the audience’s perceptions during each solo. Subjecting rapidly repeating pitches to subtle dynamic changes, he created the impression that the source of the pitches was moving alternately closer or farther away from the listener. Ultimately, they trailed off, but in a distant echo. After the concert, Bridgewater explained that he had just “discovered” the technique while “practicing the other day” and thought he would try it out that night. It represented a successful simulation of his personal experience manipulating the sounds of echoes when practicing outside in the city at night. Two years later, however, the figure was absent from his performances. When I shared my recollections with Bridgewater after the concert, he indicated that the figure had simply slipped from memory as his interests turned to other things. “But I liked that,” he added. “I’ll have to think about using it again.”

  If some vocabulary patterns playa lesser role in performances and eventually disappear altogether, they can also reappear again, at times to the player’s surprise. Patterns that Walter Bishop Jr. “worked on three years ago will suddenly occur” in his solos. There are other changes in vocabulary that may result from unconscious Transmutations. In the transition between the artist’s short-term and long-term memory, the pitches and rhythms of some phrases meta-morphize into particular variants. Others transform into more general ideas, which take hold in the artist’s storehouse and serve as compositional models. These include patterns of harmonic motion, impressions of timbral change, and traces of melodic shapes or time spans, whose precise pitches and rhythms artists fill in when improvising. The latter procedures constantly generate additional, fully detailed figures, which replenish the soloist’s vocabulary. As discussed earlier in this study, the interplay between the general and the specific features of their musical ideas is a common theme in artists’ accounts of creativity7

  Preparing Strategies for Individual Pieces

  Amid their drills at solo formulation, performers sometimes find that specific approaches to improvisation work most effectively within the contexts of particular compositions. Subsequently, they may adopt the approaches as guidelines for different solos based on the same composition.8 From a practical standpoint, aspiring players discover that it can be helpful to narrow their options for individual improvisations to a manageable size. Additionally, as students become more discriminating and attune themselves to each piece’s subtleties, they strive to interact with its features in ways that preserve the piece’s integrity.

  With increasing sophistication in such matters, students adopt a more studied approach to solos, assessing each composition’s character before performance, adapting their “thinking [to] whatever the type of tune calls for.” Patti Bown likens this practice to “an actress doing research before she’s on stage, preparing for the great role that she’s going to play.”

  Some pieces suggest the approach of creating solos around the melody. “Songs based on the blues and more elementary progressions often have a very strong, lyrical, positive melody,” Curtis Fuller says. Exemplary are those “by writers like Benny Golson, Quincy Jones, J. J. Johnson, and Miles Davis, and classics from the twenties and thirties, like ‘September Song,’ [whose melodies] just walk around whistling the song.” The time elapsing between the beats of a relaxed blues or a ballad like “September Song” invites players to personalize renditions with subtle pitch inflections, timbral changes, and flurries of melodic ornaments, most practical and effective at slow tempos. They also provide the greatest opportunity for “phrasing a beautiful song” with rhythmic nuance, exerting different degrees of pressure on the beat and subdividing it cleverly during improvised flights of fancy.

  Up-tempo pieces with “strong melodies” can also offer themes. “If it’s a tune worth playing, it should teach you something,” Fred Hersch insists. “A Charlie Parker tune like ‘Confirmation’ should give you information; that’s what a theme does. If we’re going to play theme and variations, let’s pull it apart and play it in twenty different ways, not just one. So, improvising on ‘Confirmation’ is like breaking up the little motives, redefining certain aspects of the melody.” Moreover, a composition’s specific “built-in” rhythmic features that distinguish it from other pieces can inspire artists to “do certain things,” to play with a particular rhythmic concept. Hersch elaborates:

  A tune like “Confirmation” is jubilant, and it should be articulated the way you articulate a theme from a Mozart sonata. In contrast, those really lush Ellington or Strayhorn ballads like “Star-Crossed Lovers” or “Mood Indigo” give a feeling of much more space than some of the bebop tunes. Or, comparing bebop tunes to a mysterious piece like “Nardis.” even if I played them at the same tempo, improvising patterns of eighth notes, I wouldn’t play the notes with the same edge or as cleanly articulated on “Nardis.” I would play more shapes and rolling time. With “Confirmation,” there’s a time going on that’s more precise. “Nardis” is more evocative; it’s more moods. I wouldn’t swing it. I might imply swing for a second or two, or maybe half a chorus, but even if I did, it wouldn’t be a rollicking swing like “Confirmatio
n.” It’s not that kind of piece.

  Besides features of melody and rhythm, soloists examine the harmonic features of pieces to determine an appropriate approach. “Some songs’ melodies are not strong enough for the musician to play them over and over again. If a guy writes a tune without a strong melody for the player to lean on, then the development is all in the chord progression” (CF). A piece’s chords sometimes suggest precise guidelines. When Benny Bailey plays on “a normal, basic blues,” he would not “think much in terms of chord substitutions unless the tune were written with a harmonic background that would support” them. Otherwise, he would “clash with it.” Similarly, he might try “to play a little of the fourth things that cats are playing nowadays, but not too much.” In general, Bailey says that he would “try not to get too far away from the basic structure, or,” he continues, “I’d keep coming back to it. Some tunes are very strict, and you have to follow them very closely.”

  In rendering an expressive blues performance, soloists may consider conventional blues licks and various theoretical materials, whose relationship to the underlying chords and whose relative harmonic flexibility influence the extent of their use. Improvisers can create phrases within the successive harmonic areas of a simple blues by drawing on three corresponding seventh scales that each unambiguously describes its respective area’s tonality. Alternatively, players can formulate an entire solo from a single blues scale that embodies the combined tonality of the blues chords, or they can play different blues scales built on the tonic of each seventh chord to add greater variety to the performance. In more general terms, Clark Terry teaches his students “the concept that the old-timers used. They knew,” he explains, “that they could playa series of notes that they called the blue notes, which was the tonic, the minor third, and the flatted fifth. . . . If you can find those blue notes from any given note on your horn, you can play with the greatest rhythm section in the world. You’d be surprised what you can do with those three notes.”9Another choice is to base an entire solo on a pentatonic scale that increases its ambiguity over many other scales by eliminating half-step intervals10

  The density of a piece’s progression, as well as the nature of its movement, also influences the choice of the approach to improvisation. Compositions based on the changes of “I Got Rhythm” introduce soloists to a more extended harmonic form than the blues, whereas others test the technical skill and ability of soloists to “think on their feet” at extremely fast tempos under maximum pressure. In “Cherokee,” for example, artists must negotiate a hazardous bridge that extends the circle of fifths through the most difficult sharp keys; for “Giant Steps,” they must invent melodies through an unconventional chord progression. “Songs like ‘Giant Steps’ are difficult for a guy,” Curtis Fuller points out, “because you have to learn little phrases and figures that fit the progression and follow it. You have to have a strong sense of harmony to deal with a song like ‘Giant Steps,’ because that is what the song is.” Some artists develop a “special language for the tune,” unless they “use the changes to hang some pentatonic patterns on or use substitute changes that are far removed from the original changes.” Although compositions “like ‘Giant Steps’ are far more difficult than others technically, they have their own built-in interest. If you just make the changes and the tempo, it’s going to be pretty amazing” (JMc).

  As implied earlier, modal or vamp tunes based on one or a few alternating keys pose the opposite challenge. Walter Bishop Jr. recalls his initial puzzlement. “What do you do with a piece like ‘So What’? You can’t think in terms of the piece’s chords, because there aren’t a lot of chords.” John McNeil makes a similar observation. “‘Little Sunflower’ has a very slow harmonic motion and an easy Latin tempo. It’s got like three chords in it and is about eighty bars long. . . . Nothing happens harmonically, so you have to be conscious of other things when you improvise, like changing registers for contrast. Also,” McNeil continues, “when you play on that, you’re going to leave a lot of space. If you tried to leave that much space on ‘Giant Steps,’ half the tune would have gone by.” Artists who hold that “modal playing involves using more space than does bebop” recommend staggering solos with substantive rests and breaking up “fast runs” with sustained pitches.

  Beyond technical considerations, artists may also consider the emotional character of solos associated with particular vehicles, planning rich accompanying visual imagery to guide them in achieving a particular mood when telling their own tale with the narrative of the piece. Duke Ellington explains, “Call was very important in that kind of music. . . . People send messages in what they play, calling somebody, or making facts and emotions known. Painting a picture, or having a story to go with what you were going to play, was of vital importance in those days. The audience didn’t know anything about it, but the cats in the band did.”11

  The Combined Use of Improvisation Approaches

  Although a vehicle’s character sometimes warrants the use of one approach over another, in many cases the piece lends itself to the greater variety of combined approaches. Fred Hersch draws an analogy between this type of improvisation and a poem by Wallace Stevens that consists of “thirteen little haikus describing different ways of looking at a blackbird.” Sometimes, Hersch “feels that way” as an improviser, wanting “to look at a tune from a whole bunch of different perspectives—from a textural point of view, from a melodic point of view, or from a rhythmic point of view.” In some instances, the general characteristics of a progression’s differing segments compel improvisers to conceive distinctive melodies for each. On a recording of one Booker Little composition, the progression alternates between the A section comprising “quickly-moving chords” and the B section comprising “more open spaces where one chord repeats.” Each time Little came to the first part of the progression, he improvised intricate nonmotivic melodic lines, but when he came to the bridge, he deliberately changed his approach to “show the form of the tune,” as improvisers sometimes “like to do” (DF).12 There, he played “lyrical melodies” with sustained pitches, “left more space between his figures,” and occasionally performed single-note riffing figures or developed simple patterns as sequences.

  Beyond ensuring their performances a degree of diversity, soloists commonly prepare different approaches to address problematic features of a piece, just as “chess masters study different moves and plan strategies before a match” (AD). Lou Donaldson sometimes “runs into a different type of song like ‘It Was Just One of Those Things,’ which won’t fit the common categories” and requires intensive practice. There are “a couple of spots that are really hard to play” because few conventional patterns fit them. Artists have “got to know what’s to be played there.” It is not enough for them to rely on their ears. Donaldson “used to work out little patterns” to make sure he could “get through” the difficult spots.

  These kinds of considerations are often on players’ minds. At a rehearsal in New York, Benny Bailey and Charlie Rouse stopped during a new composition by John Hicks to work out their own strategic models for use within a difficult part of the progression. Whereas Hicks conceived of the harmony as compound chords, which he visualized as “triads imposed over the basic chords.” Rouse invented a scale that embodied the chords’ tones and altered pitches, and Bailey composed a few melodic phrases that suited the harmonic segment. When Bailey and I got together on a later occasion, he discussed additional approaches he calls on when preparing to play a piece, in this case “Aquarian Moods.” Scanning the lead sheet, he skipped over the chords “whose logic” he could “see right away” and located the “tricky” harmonic sections. Coming upon a D7 chord with a flatted thirteenth and a raised ninth, Bailey decided to think in terms of a B triad or B9 chord in that section to exploit the compound tonality implied by the original chord. “This way I would only play the top notes of the D7 chord,” he said. “You get a very effective sound like that, just playing a few notes; the fewe
r notes the better, as long as they are the important ones in the chords.”

  In considering the harmony further, Bailey said that

  this tune lends itself to different ways of playing because the chords are so big. This chord is about three or four chords in one. It’s very intriguing, and it’s very challenging. Each time through it, I would try to play it a different way. For example, the way it’s written, the chord goes beautifully into the next one, the G minor. When a cat writes chords like that, you can apply all these new fourth techniques, and it works beautifully because you’ve got the F and the B in the first chord carried over into the G minor. Or, instead of playing that, I’d just play the ninth of the G minor. This tune has a lot of possibilities. What I always like to do is to find a common factor between the different chords so that what I play sounds simple. Instead of trying to play all the notes in the chords, I try to find the common tones so that the solo flows and doesn’t sound like I’m running a lot of changes.

  Continuing his scan of the piece, Bailey stopped at a symbol written A/B. “Here are some of the weird, tricky chords,” he remarks. “See the B in the bass and the A triad on top of it? I’d have to hear that on the piano to know what the composer meant. Sometimes, you can look at the melody and that gives you a clue; sometimes the notes of the melody adhere to the tune’s chords, and sometimes they deviate.” Discovering that the composer used the third of the A triad as the melody’s focal point in this section, Bailey elected a similar approach for his solo. “One thing that you can do when you get to this part of your solo,” he explained,

  is just play the C# there. I would like to do other things there too, but it sounds good just playing around the C# like the composer did in the melody. But I’d play it with a different rhythm; sometimes, it helps to just play the melody and then mess around and deviate from it. Further over here, see the chords E7(#11), B 13, and D7(#9, 13)? The composer is also sticking around those predominant notes in the melody there, B and F, and the whole four bars has the flavor of B. Thinking around those notes, you can actually improvise the whole four bars with them. You can play around with other notes to connect them, but if you just think of those notes, you’ll come out okay.