Moreover, the fact that artists map out particular patterns does not necessarily mean that they will actually rely heavily on them. Knowing that should better ideas fail to occur to them they have ready ideas at hand simply gives artists confidence going into a formal musical event. From performance to performance—and during the performance itself—soloists can alter their guidelines or, as they tire of them, formulate new ones. Furthermore, it is one thing to prepare materials and strategies for solos, but another to implement them. As discussed earlier, improvisation involves reworking precomposed material and designs in relation to unanticipated ideas conceived, shaped, and transformed under the special conditions of performance, thereby adding unique features to every creation. 33
The process does not end here, however. Successful features of improvised conceptions commonly join the artist’s store of precomposed materials where, in forms ranging from the most general strategies to freshly coined vocabulary patterns and skeletal models for solos or new tunes, they await yet further use and transformation in performance. As soloists are perpetually engaged in creative processes of generation, application, and renewal, the eternal cycle of improvisation and precomposition plays itself out at virtually every level of musical conception.
TEN
The Never-ending State of Getting There
Soloing Ability, Ideals, and Evaluations
My development was a gradual thing. I didn’t wake up one day and have it. As you grow older, you realize that you’ve got tomorrow. When I was younger, I used to hear Blakey and Monk say that: “Well, we’ve got tomorrow. We can try it again.” If you mess up a song, you can try it tomorrow. Learning those things, you begin to understand that you don’t have to play all those notes right then and there.
I don’t think my playing style has really changed over the years; it’s just gotten better. I can hear the improvement in comparing older records and later records. I’m referring to soloing ability, to having a better sound, to knowing chords better, and getting rhythmically stronger. It also has to do with ideas—learning how to edit your ideas and being better able to follow ideas out to a logical conclusion.—Gary Bartz
The notion of the ubiquitous third ear is as helpful as it is appealing. As discussed earlier, this ultimate critic of the artist in action guides and evaluates the improvisation in the making. The third ear also assists musicians in aural analysis of other artists’ solos, whether in live or recorded performances. As audience members, artists routinely evaluate each other’s inventions, sharing opinions within the social network of the jazz community. Newcomers soon discover that the discussion of aesthetic issues comprises an essential component of their community’s intellectual life. Some discussions throw light on the interrelated web of values that are integral to jazz, whereas others concern features associated with particular idioms or with the musical styles of individuals, the latter an outgrowth of the intensely personal nature of improvisation. Evaluations address all aspects of the improvisation from a particular solo’s content to a player’s overall contribution to jazz.
Venturing into the arena of music criticism in the presence of knowledgeable improvisers may be as intimidating to the vulnerable student as venturing onto the performance stage itself. As expected, opinions that find general agreement among musicians, for whom art is characteristically a passionate business, promote a feeling of solidarity and reaffirm common musical values. When they are not shared, however, they can cause contention and even embarrassment, calling into question the student’s own knowledge, powers of perception, or taste. Ultimately, by observing critical discussions and participating in them, learners become sensitive to wide-ranging criteria appropriate for the evaluation of jazz that occupy community members, and they gain a deep respect for the refined listening abilities that attune seasoned artists to every nuance and detail of improvised performances.
Swing: Judging Rhythmic Substance
Within the musician’s scale of values, rhythmic aspects of performance are fundamental. “One of the most obvious aspects of the music to people who know jazz.” observes Chuck Israels, “is: How does it feel in the swing? These are things that are very subtle and that jazz musicians appreciate in a particular way. I appreciate the way that Tommy Flanagan swings, the way that Barry Harris swings, the great pulse that Hank Jones and Bill Evans have—and every one of them is different.”
Criticism distinguishes such salient features from the melodic and harmonic content of ideas. A veteran of Charles Mingus’s band once abruptly stopped his rehearsal of Boston’s all-city high school jazz band after two talented saxophonists, the most cocky in the group, had completed their solos, and he insisted on hearing the rest of the band’s opinions of the performances. When the intimidated youngsters failed to volunteer a response, the director continued: “Well, let me give you a hint. What both saxophonists played was garbage. But there is an important difference between them.” Then he smiled and added, “The second player’s garbage swung!” The first soloist reddened, and the rest of the band chuckled as they exchanged knowing glances. Evaluations highlighting Charlie Parker’s ability to swing drive home a similar point. “The rhythms of Bird’s solos were so strong,” a musician once remarked in conversation, “you could almost add any notes to them, and they would still be great.”
The achievement of swing ultimately depends on the interplay of numerous factors described earlier, ranging from the sheer variety of the artists’ rhythmic conceptions to the stylistic manner in which they articulate and phrase them, imbuing them with qualities of syncopation and forward motion. 1 Such subtleties depend in part on the player’s sense of time or tempo. Whether Billie Holiday performed “the fastest tune in the world or. . . a dirge,” her time was impeccable. 2 In the absence of the appropriate rhythmic quality, performances “feel like they never get off the ground,” a pianist contends. “It’s like reciting poetry with the wrong rhythm.” More specifically, he claims that they lack “rhythmic flow,” that their feeling is “too calculated.” One artist dubbed a former commercial dance band musician as “corny,” or aesthetically naive, because his pitches were “too short and staccato, not legato enough. They sounded rinky-dink, like Lawrence Welk.”
In the opinion of Paul Wertico, “there are some drummers who are great technically and can play the most complicated polyrhythmic exercises, but they can’t make them swing. Their figures are mathematically precise, but they’re stiff and mechanical.” Fred Hersch expresses a general view when he says, “There’s a certain kind of time that’s metronomic, that’s correct, but doesn’t make you want to dance. It doesn’t make you want to move, and it doesn’t make you want to play.”
At the other extreme, however, phrases fail to swing when they lack the requisite “rhythmic punch and definition,” sounding “wishy-washy,” weak, flaccid. One bass player complained that a musician who auditioned for his band “didn’t place things firmly enough; there was no strength or subtlety to his rhythmic placement of notes.” A former soloist with Horace Silver’s band recalled the pianist’s constantly exhorting him to “dig in! Dig in more!” As implied above, improvisers differ in the assurance with which they define the beat or groove; some perform with greater rhythmic conviction than others. The great players enrich performances with minute, controlled fluctuations in their interpretation of the beat. “A lot of guys in New York will only play with an edge. They find their groove and that’s their groove,” Hersch says. “To me, once I do that, there’s no point in playing anymore because it should always be a mystery. Depending on who you’re playing with, there are hundreds of ways of playing. I think that a master can play all those different kinds of time.”
In part, players create subtle schemes of tension and release through changing accentuation patterns and altering the placement of rests within their lines. The trials and tribulations of students bring to light the importance of such features that demonstrate mastery over timing. When a Clifford Brown solo that I had prac
ticed by memory eventually lost its excitement, I checked the original recorded version and discovered that I had inadvertently altered the solo’s intricate off-beat accentuation scheme, causing phrase accents to coincide with the music’s beats and depriving the music of its rhythmic vitality. Similarly, early in pianist Howard Becker’s career, he performed for a jazz veteran the phrases of an idol’s re-created solo, playing the phrases in their proper sequence but leaving pauses of arbitrary lengths between them. The veteran nodded politely, then, exploding with laughter, reprimanded him, “Now go back and learn all the rests!” From the veteran’s viewpoint, the logic of the solo depended as much on its use of space and the rhythmic relationship of its phrases to form as on their contours and harmonic implications.
Because the foundational harmonic blocks of many pieces are square, made up of regular repeating two-, four-, and eight-bar phrases, improvisers evaluate solos as being square, in a pejorative sense, when their patterns consistently coincide with the composition’s harmonic blocks. By altering the design of phrases within a progression, varying their spans, and, at times, superimposing secondary meters on those of the piece, mature artists can obscure the formal elements that guide their inventions in much the same way as the architect, in designing an impressive structure, obscures its underpinnings.3 “Great jazz players start and end in different places as they go from chorus to chorus necessarily come from anyp” Chuck Israels explains.
It’s often beautiful to start a phrase just before the end of one chorus and carry it over into the beginning of the next. Because that’s such an obvious line of demarcation in the form, you want to dovetail that joint together. These are the formal issues, and some people have an instinct for them and some don’t. Charles Mingus once said, “How come all these modem players play ‘I Got Rhythm’ with the same eight-bar phrases? How come they don’t play from the end of the second eight bars into the bridge or from the end of the bridge into the last eight bars? Why do they always breathe after every eight bars?” With great players like Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, you could never predict the places where they were going to breathe.
Barry Harris similarly appraises solos of uniform phrase length to be as “monotonous as the drone of a dull speaker.”
Another sensitive issue is the variety of rhythmic values that improvisers incorporate within phrases. One performer considers even extraordinarily fluent solos to be “boring” when they involve regular streams of unaccentuated and uninflected pitches without diverse articulations and dynamic nuances, that is, without “rhythmic shape.” A related problem concerns the predisposition of youngsters to “fast, flashy” patterns, which, for their lack of substance, seasoned artists regard as “filler” material. Lee Konitz remembers Lennie Tristano trying to keep him “away from mechanical playing, the tendency to play double time—that sixteenth-note kind of facility that doesn’t necessarily come from anyplace.” Ellis Marsalis similarly cautioned his son Wynton, “‘You’re playing too many notes. Look, man, calm down.’ That was because of my technique.” Wynton recalls. Having heard Clifford Brown “play all those fast runs, I used to really practice Clarke trumpet exercises all day long so that I could play fast. That’s all I wanted to do. I was like a child with a toy,” he recalls with laughter.
For some novices, the performance of unvaried patterns serves as a crutch for marking each passing beat in its progress through a piece’s structure. It is only after developing command over the forms of compositions and the diverse rhythmic models of jazz that they can engage in creative rhythmic thinking without losing their bearings. At a workshop, Alan Swain once forced this issue by insisting that young musicians follow his cues to begin and stop playing during the course of solos, in effect directing the insertion of rests into performances. By breaking up the students’ constant stream of pitches, even in the most arbitrary manner, Swain immediately and markedly improved their improvisations. Filler material eventually becomes less attractive to students as they awaken to the deeper values of jazz. One of Barry Harris’s students “went through a stage in which,” he says, “I just played the right notes real fast through the changes; but that just doesn’t do it for me anymore.” Another says he “used to admire players who could play fast, but since then, I’ve learned to listen for other things in solos. I’ve become disappointed with some of the same players I used to enjoy,” he rues, “and I don’t listen to them anymore.”
The Melodic Substance of Ideas
Closely tied to the musical component of rhythm is melodic substance. As John Lewis puts it, this involves fashioning notes into “independent recognizable idea[s),” finding “a graceful way to get from one place to another, one note to another, one phrase group to another.”4One goal is to create lyrical or tuneful phrases, “pretty” phrases, “the ones you can sing, the ones you can remember” (JS). Sometimes musicians draw out the word with a slight pitch ascent in obvious pleasure—”purrrrr-iiii-ty” —indicating that they are not offering faint praise. Rather, they are recognizing qualities they deem exceptionally beautiful. Sometimes an artist specifies the pleasing melodic contours at issue by singing them or naming their theoretical pitch collections. It is common for artists to observe that analysis of the “hippest” figures in a favorite solo reveals “some kind of diminished or augmented thing happening” (HL).
An important aspect of the improviser’s maturation as a melodic thinker involves learning to imagine, manipulate, and edit ideas derived from various musical models in performance. Dizzy Gillespie tries to “play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it’s supposed to be in that particular spot. . . . You have many things to pick from while you’re playing,” he explains, “so you try to train yourself to pick out the best things that you know.” 5Lee Morgan used “to stand behind me.” Gary Bartz says, “when I was playing a ballad and he’d be hollering, ‘Play the pretty notes, man, play the pretty notes.’ I thought I was playing the pretty notes.” Bartz laughs. “But you know, things like that help you to reach a little further.” Other improvisers are “constantly trying to think of some other way of doing things like playing a four-bar phrase, eliminating things that just don’t fit well” (MR). In this light, Wynton Marsalis still does, in his words, “play too many notes at times, but,” he explains, “it takes all your life to learn how to choose the best notes. That’s the difference between the good players and the great.” Playing with Lester Young taught Art Farmer about “economy: that what you played had to have meaning, not just a bunch of sixteenth notes.” Farmer sometimes finds patterns that he has played on earlier recordings that he “wouldn’t be interested in doing anymore,” he admits. “You learn to make better choices of notes as you get older.”
The related standards of economy of expression and lyricism, described earlier, are underscored by the traditional maxims of the jazz community that forewarn newcomers of improvisation’s potential pitfalls. New Orleans musicians advised, “If you can’t sing it, you can’t play it,” exhorting soloists to perform melodies that they can conceptualize clearly in their singing minds, rather than allowing the physical aspects of performance to dominate a solo. Lee Konitz observes that “there’s a line built into an instrument, and when people play that, the music becomes mechanical and technical.” Konitz’s ideal is a “note to note kind of playing,” with corresponding control over the selection of pitches and shaping of melody. 6When the physical drive to perform an instrument becomes a nervous tick creating problems for soloists comparable to those of compulsive talkers, seasoned players criticize them for “not saying anything; not making a real statement” (MR). Solos “should talk,” a veteran once advised a novice, “and when you don’t have anything to say, you should stop playing.”
In addition to potential problems with the role of physicality in melodic invention, improvisers may face difficulties arising from the interplay between theoretical and aural musical thinking. Artists concerned with disguising compositional technique, for example, o
bject to the unsubtle use of theoretical improvisation approaches and criticize some players as being “chord connectors” rather than actual improvisers. “I don’t need to have people spell the chords for me.” Curtis Fuller argues. “This isn’t a spelling bee. It’s all in the book. I like to hear chord progressions when they’ve been altered lyrically.” Here, the process of transformation is again tied to editing. Miles Davis “used to play fast, but the older he got, he started just taking out the pretty notes of the scale and just playing them. That’s what you call mellowing” (TT). Similarly, as Emily Remler puts it, “If I take a lick from [some players], I’m not going to get that many variations from it, because their phrases are just based on a scale. That’s why I say Wes Montgomery has more substance than others. I find myself listening to the older players. You see one bar of theirs and you can get one hundred more licks out of it.”
Remler’s observations suggest that older soloists, who initially learned jazz by ear, absorbing models for melodic shape, phrasing, and inflection from their idols’ performances, developed a comprehensive base of aural musical knowledge that enables them to transform theoretical models effectively. Contemporary jazz students, however, whose learning methods emphasize theory over the arduous discipline of aural learning, risk confusing theory with performance practice, thereby developing naive notions about theory as a compositional tool.
An incident in one of Barry Harris’s workshop sessions illustrates this problem. When he requested that, for additional color, the class invent phrases based on his “rule” mixing a scale’s pitch collection with those of a contrasting chord, four students demonstrated their phrases. After each, Harris smiled warmly and nodded in approval. At a fifth student’s performance, however, he shook his head and remarked, “No, you wouldn’t do that in this music.” Stung by the rebuke, the student defended himself: “But you said to follow the rule you gave us, and this phrase follows the rule.” “Yes.” Harris admitted, “but you still wouldn’t playa phrase like that.” “But give me one good reason why you wouldn’t,” the student protested. “The only reason I can give you.” Harris replied, “is that I have been listening to this music for over forty years now, and my ears tell me that that phrase would be wrong to play. You just wouldn’t do it in this tradition. Art is not science, my son.” The student left the workshop early that evening, not to return for months.
Thinking in Jazz Page 37