Ousley describes, as well, the “power of concentration” and analysis required on the part of listeners if they are to interpret a great artist’s performances accurately and derive “some kind of feeling or meaning from it.” He generally distinguishes “visual listening,” with its rich accompanying imagery, from “verbal listening,. . . the ability to hear conversations” in jazz as if a player “were talking to someone.” Correspondingly, the skill to incorporate verbal language patterns within improvisations is well recognized in many players, including Lester Young, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.14 In the latter regard, Doc Cheatham informs us that “if a guy plays a beautiful solo and he’s playing from the heart or he’s talking with his horn, we say, ‘He’s telling a story.’ If he’s playing bad, we say, ‘He plays like he’s got rocks in his blood.,” In more general terms, the ability of an instrumentalist to perform with all the nuance of the voice also matters. Trumpeter Joe Louis’s “tone had soul and packed so much emotion that it could easily have been mistaken for a woman singing.”15
Soulful performances embody such affective qualities as pathos, intensity, urgency, fire, and energy—each solo expressively rendered as if it were “the last one you were going to play in your life.”16 Musicians use the term energy both literally and figuratively. Just as it requires energy to produce and project sounds on musical instruments, it requires energy for performers to draw upon feelings as they infuse sounds with emotion. Moreover, the sound waves themselves comprise a form of energy that touches listeners physically, potentially also touching them emotionally. Miles Davis remembers distinguishing, at an early age, perfunctory radio performances by white swing bands that “wouldn’t go in my body” from the visceral impact of substantive performances by the black bands that inspired his career in jazz. 17 Benny Golson describes the “mystical charm” of Clifford Brown’s style, in particular, which “radiated emotional impulses,” making listeners “react physically. . . twitch, move your feet. . . as though something tangible was reaching out and shaking [your] body.”18 Because of the close association between music and dance in black music traditions, one indication of successful performances is their effectiveness in inspiring listeners to respond by expressing themselves in varied and subtle ways through myriad forms of dance, as they feel “dispose[d]. . . to bump and bounce, to slow-drag and steady shuffle, to grind, hop, jump, kick, rock, roll, shout, stomp.”19
Along similar lines, “jazz is not,” for Lonnie Hillyer, “about a particular instrument.” Rather, in more general terms, it is about “a player’s sense of love—love of music and love of life.” It involves the “human soul” and the ability to express “the whole span of human emotions from jealousy and love to hate and all of those different things. How some people express this through their music is unbelievable. That’s what separates Charlie Parker from many of his imitators.” Hillyer also regards Miles Davis as “one of the most gifted people, who knows well how to work with moods when he plays.” Once when Hillyer was a “kid back in Detroit.” Davis took him along to a dance where he was playing.
At one point, people were dancing, and he started to play a ballad. The people just stopped dancing and crowded all around him, listening to this cat play this ballad. You know? Miles STOPPED people from dancing, and I’ll never forget that as long as I live. That’s mood. And of course, Miles can also make people dance when he wants to. Another is Gene Ammons. I was working with Gene Ammons in one of Mingus’s big bands when this cat played one note and hushed the whole room. The emotion behind one note, it was fantastic!
The sounds that artists manipulate are sometimes earthy and sensual, other times “gritty,” reflecting the rough side of life. Especially evocative are the muted, growling “gutbucket” techniques of horn players, which, for Doc Cheatham, still carry associations of the “gutbuckets” in which plantation slaves carried the entrails of animals. “Bubber [Miley] used to say, ‘If it ain’t got swing, it ain’t worth playin’; if it ain’t got gutbucket, it ain’t worth doin’.”20 Like the sounds of spirituals, sounds that embody the moods and inflections of the blues signify various facets of African American culture. For W. C. Handy, they reflect “our history, where we came from, and what we experienced”; they harken “back to slavery, back to longing.” 21 Duke Ellington recounts that when “[Artie] Whetsol. . . played the funeral march in Black and Tan Fantasy, I used to see great, big ole tears running down people’s faces,” adding, “I like great big ole tears.”22
Within the broad emotional spectrum of performances, humor, too, assumes its rightful place, as when improvisers display their mastery over the language and tradition of jazz by flaunting its conventions in the creation of musical jokes. Such practices can also be interpreted as a kind of musical signifying, analogous to the practices of certain African American vernacular “rhetorical games.”23 Typically, humor involves deliberately distorting particular musical elements and stretching the limits of form. Humor often allows the artist to operate temporarily outside of formal constraints before successfully returning to them—in the process, teasing listener expectations. One evening Bill Evans concluded a piece by improvising what seemed a limitless series of endings. “You couldn’t help but crack up when you heard it. It was amazing that Bill could keep generating cadence after cadence like that” (CI).
Calvin Hill describes the rambunctiousness of Jaki Byard’s band during one of their performances as deliberate “rhythmic anarchy.” Byard eventually resolved the group’s energetic activity with a rhythmic signal, bringing his players back into alignment just moments before the composition’s conclusion. In another instance, a trumpeter brought peals of laughter from the audience when he led an intricate melodic line into a simple rhythmic phrase of restricted range, distorting the timbre of its pitches and pulling them increasingly out of tune before resolving the idea. 24 At a concert in Connecticut, Rahsaan Roland Kirk once exploited a similar device to deride a competitor, as the two players traded fours, by imitating and exaggerating the trumpeter’s improvisation style to the point of caricature.
Self-conscious verbal parodies periodically woven into performances represent another side of these practices. In response to an abusive audience member who “got up to walk out” on a performance of Charles Mingus’s band, Clark Terry once manipulated his trumpet and plunger mute so skillfully that he clearly pronounced the retort, “Go on home! Go on home!” causing the audience to burst into laughter (LH). Mingus and Eric Dolphy carry on a musical dialogue in their classic recording of “What Love” that mockingly depicts a former disagreement between them so faithfully that the listener can almost follow their arguments literally.25 Conversely, in a popular comedic pantomine routine, drummer Frankie Dunlop used to play recordings by Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Fats Navarro on stage, while he and a female companion interpreted the rapid musical exchanges between saxophone and trumpet as lively banter between husband and wife (HO).
In other instances, performers create jokes by deliberately juxtaposing patterns that are incongruous, quoting a trite popular tune within a sophisticated solo, for example, or shifting a solo’s mood unexpectedly.26 Incongruous elements sometimes permeate a piece’s performance. One saxophonist produced hilarity by weaving a medley of nursery rhymes into his improvisations, “swinging them so hard it didn’t matter what he played” (TT). Chuck Israels remembers that
Bill Evans had a way of playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in which the melody was displaced rhythmically, and it, too, was terribly funny. He also did a version of “Tenderly” in which each individual note in the melody was harmonized with a chord which fit it but which didn’t fit with the chord that either preceded it or followed it. If you just froze each beat and listened to the melody with its chord, it was just beautiful. But the progression that the chords created together was absolute gibberish and wonderfully funny.
Youngsters commonly begin to respond to such nuances as humor when they absorb enough of the conventions guid
ing musical logic in jazz to begin anticipating soloists’ ideas during performances. One learner remembers a solo in which Kenny Dorham played “this whimsical little chromatic pattern which seemed to be going somewhere, but, in the end, it led right back to the place where it started. It really cracked me up,” she recalls. “It was the first time anything I ever heard in music actually made me laugh.” As young performers mature, they become increasingly adept at following solos in terms of their subtle shifts in mood. This type of musical apprehension, an alternative to focusing on its technical elements, allows jazz initiates that additional layer of shared meaning—and at times a complementary kind of charged meaning—to tighten their hold on the tradition.
Of his mental involvement as a listener to jazz, Bobby Rogovin recalls, “I thought of the soloist’s lines like the way we talk sentences, and I heard all the emotion in them.” Rogovin appealingly recapitulates one of his internal commentaries on a performance event as follows: “He’s saying this now; he’s saying that next. He’s sad there. He’s getting a little cocky here. He gets a little happy there. He builds up here. He relaxes there. Things phrased in a certain way have a certain meaning. Like if you bend a note, it’s almost like trying to be cute. Miles is really good at this. It’s not so much the notes he plays as the way he plays the notes.” Mentally annotating a performance is common practice among interested, knowledgeable listeners.
As learners develop their skills at listening, they make efforts to deepen feeling in their own performances. This involves control, not only to imbue phrases with particular moods but to sustain and manipulate them over a performance’s course—playing off of emotion, in a sense. Harold Ousley emphasizes that an integral feature of the “maturity of musical ideas” is their “emotional content,” their “depth of feeling.” Life experience is a teacher in this matter. Tommy Turrentine recalls two instances, one during a tour with Max Roach’s band and another with Dizzy Gillespie’s, in which the leaders, angered by offensive treatment (in the first instance by a rude radio interviewer, and in the second by management), infused their solos with such intensity that the two experiences remain among the “high points” of Turrentine’s memories. For Percy Heath, too, the way he plays has “to do with the way you feel that night. You hear that your kid was hit in the face three thousand miles away or you’re lonesome and haven’t found anybody to talk to or you’re tired of the town and sick of each other; it all comes out in the music. . . . You have to know how it feels to be miserable, how it feels to be sad, how it feels to be in the dumps before you can project it. When that slave cried out in the field, he wasn’t just making music, he felt that way.” 27
For students, responses by a veteran to their own efforts sometimes signal major breakthroughs in development. One student used to take lessons from a great artist who had the reputation of being extremely critical. The teacher listened to him month after month without expressing encouragement. One day, soon after the student’s devastating “break-up” with his girlfriend, he “played a blues during my lesson and, somehow, all the welled-up feelings inside me came out. The whole time I played, they filled my sound and just hung in the air around me.” At the solo’s completion, the teacher stared at him curiously for a long time. “You can have a future in this music if you want it,” he suddenly remarked and walked out of the room, leaving behind a student “in shock.”
While improvisers strive to project feelings with great conviction, like actors, they must also learn to control them, relating them to other elements of performance. One soloist describes the danger of “too much emotion” potentially hampering a performance and the occasional need to restrain expression rather than “overplay a piece for its intended feeling.” 28 Fostered early in such special environments as the preschool classroom whose decorations exhort children “To Feel and Therefore Be,” and, more typically, in the musical life of sanctified churches discussed earlier, the fundamental value of expressivity in performance continues to find nourishment at every stage of the artist’s education in improvisation.
Instrumental Virtuosity and the Technical Features of Ideas
Because of the constraints that musical instruments potentially place upon the expression of feelings and ideas, technical command over instruments— commonly described as chops—is a matter much discussed by artists. “Sometimes, it’s exciting just to hear a trumpet played high and fast and clean” (BR). Discerning listeners may “admire the difficult technical aspects” of the ideas of players, Harold Ousley explains, “because it shows they’ve spent a lot of time developing their technique. Some ideas are built around that.” It is a tribute to the skills of great improvisers that performance techniques requiring years of rigorous practice sound effortless in their solos. “There was a time when Miles played a lot of notes too. Those scales would just run in his plate” (‘IT).
The prowess of some artists is legendary in this regard. Their dexterity and physical adaptability permit them to manipulate instruments as if they were “toys.” Many create innovative approaches to performance inspiring the awe of others who play the same instruments, in some instances developing techniques for performing outside the conventional range of the instrument. “One day, if they ever dredge the East River in New York,” a swing trumpeter wryly remarks, “they’re going to find a whole layer of trumpets on the bottom, because that’s what every trumpet player felt like doing with their instruments when Roy Eldridge came to town. No one else could play with that range or that fluently.”29
Similarly, problems related to the uneven quality of material and manufacture of an instrument or its idiosyncratic characteristics present challenges that great virtuosos have the capacity to overcome. Bass players routinely confront such challenges when sitting in at various sessions, borrowing the instrument of each house bass player rather than “lugging” their own around. This requires them to adapt to instruments of different sizes and to strings of varied tension and gauge arranged at distances different from those on the soundboards of their own instruments. “Many musicians used to complain about that, and they’d blame the instruments when they didn’t play in tune or made a puny sound,” a drummer says. “But when Wilbur Ware took over the instruments, no matter whose they were, those basses always played in tune, and they filled the whole room with sound. And that was without amplification.”
Another account epitomizes the virtuosity of renowned players. Charlie Parker once visited a pawnshop in a European village where a “beaten-up old saxophone” was displayed in the window for the equivalent of twenty-five dollars. Despite its unplayable condition, Parker tried out the instrument and performed a solo with such incredible facility that the astonished shopkeeper immediately raised the instrument’s price three hundred dollars when Parker left the shop.30
Beyond the issue of natural talent, musicians account for the capabilities of players according to their discipline. “He never was that much of a practicer,” a friend explained after hearing a trumpeter’s “shaky” intonation and muffled execution of a few pitches on a recording. “Other players, like Woody Shaw, never stop practicing.”
While praising individuals for their technical mastery, musicians rarely appreciate such accomplishment as an end in itself. Many distinguish the physical strength and technical dexterity that performers sometimes exploit in “empty displays of virtuosity” from the ability to play with sensitivity, to create meaningful music with an instrument. Artists are alert to these distinctions in their own musical development. “I can’t say that I’ve become a better player technically, but I have become a more expressive player,” Tommy Flanagan remarks. “I can feel better about what I play because I have been playing so long that I can express it better than I did twenty or thirty years ago, although I may have played better technically then. I play with more feeling now than I did then. I played what I knew I could play then, and now I play what I feel I can play, which is the way I’ve grown musically.”
Similarly, Lonnie Hillyer
was “another kind of player when he was nineteen.” He does not try to use the trumpet “as technically” as in the past. Twenty years ago, he might have been “a little better—played stronger, higher, and with more endurance.” He regards that as “a physical thing” he could master again if he wanted to. “I don’t look for that in the trumpet anymore,” he insists. “All I’m looking for is to get what I feel through the horn. When I was younger it was like I was trying to get what Dizzy felt through the horn, but, eventually, it’s got to come to be about you. Emotions are what it’s all about.”
In evaluating other artists, Hillyer also distinguishes between “feeling players” and “sound players,” the latter referring specifically to musicians whose sounds are beautiful by conventional standards of Western classical music. Trumpeter Freddie Webster’s sound was “so pretty, so big and forceful.” Hillyer says, that “he had to stand far back from the microphone in order to blend with the rest of the band.” Similarly, Clifford Brown, whose style was strongly influenced by Fats Navarro, “had one of the purest sounds you ever heard. His notes used to reach out and just shake. It was almost like what he played was really secondary.”
Thinking in Jazz Page 39