Although imitation is a mode that all players go through in their formative years, the direction they take from there marks varying levels of achievement along the continuum from imitation to innovation. Soloists who have reached the assimilative stage command greater attention and respect than those who have not. For an individual “fully to play himself, rather than to sound like someone else, is possibly the hardest thing to do.” Gary Bartz says candidly. The difficulties are widely recognized within the jazz community. “To actually come up with that sound,” identifiably expressing a musician’s individuality, “is something that everybody dreams about, but not a whole lot of people have actually achieved” (JH).
In fact, the emergent voices of most artists include varied mixtures of their own stylistic features and those of an idol or idols. One trumpeter “was essentially playing Dizzy Gillespie,” whereas another was playing himself, “which had Gillespie in it, as well as some other trumpet players.”48 Bobby Rogovin recalls Lee Morgan saying in a Down Beat interview that although he did not create a new performance idiom, he had a “certain identity.” Rogovin elaborates, “He means he played a lot of the same things other people played, but it came out Lee Morgan. Most of the great players are all coming from the same tradition, but they’re just putting their own identity on it.”
Artists in the assimilation stage typically develop a unique voice within the bounds of a particular performance school. Once having established their personal identities, many are not concerned with larger gestures of change. “Some people are supposed to sustain certain areas of this music, and they don’t look for anything new. That’s their thing.” Walter Bishop Jr. states, “and I appreciate them for what they do.” Improvisers who “play earlier styles are like musical monuments” to Arthur Rhames. “They represent particular schools of jazz and provide excellent examples for younger players who pass through those schools.” Tommy Flanagan muses, “It’s really interesting the way different people arrive at something that they’re comfortable with, a way of playing and being. . . . Even if Clifford Brown had lived longer, I think he still would have sounded just like Clifford.”
Moving along the continuum of artistic achievement are improvisers whose development moves through the stages of successful assimilation and fashioning of identities to innovation. They create personal approaches to improvisation that influence large numbers of followers across different instruments, in some instances forming the basis for a new performance school. Commonly, these artists devote the remainder of their careers to exploring the possibilities for invention within the framework of their new concepts. “Coleman Hawkins always sounded the same to me,” Flanagan continues. “Charlie Parker also sounded about the same from the first time I heard him till the last time I heard him. It seemed to me that he had gone as far as he could go on the saxophone.” At the same time, myriad subtleties within the improvisation styles of unique artists like Lester Young continue to change over an artist’s career.49
Presenting yet another profile as innovators are artists whose musical explorations lead them beyond the bounds of the idiom in which they establish their initial identity. “McCoy Tyner is one of those people whose style evolved from when I first heard him,” Flanagan recalls.
When I first heard him, I thought that his style was going to change, although I don’t know many pianists like that. It’s just like five or six years made the difference in some people’s playing. Like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea also basically played the way I was playing at one time. But they were still moving; they were in a period of transition. They moved along compositionally, and their keyboard technique moved right along with it. I also remember hearing Cecil Taylor when he was playing standards with Steve Lacy’s group. He was on his way then, developing to where he is now.
In the rarest instances, leading innovators pass through a succession of influential stages during their careers. Retaining their personal identities by carrying over characteristic elements of tone color, phrasing, and vocabulary from one stage to another, they cultivate different approaches to music making that excite the imaginations of other performers and provide the foundation for successful musical movements.
With his roots in bebop, Miles Davis helped form the basis for particular schools of hard bop, cool jazz, modal jazz, and free forms of improvisation, and, most recently, jazz-rock fusion. 50 “Miles Davis was always a big sense of direction for us in the fifties and sixties,” Buster Williams recalls. “Each time a record came out with Miles and the band, it created a new dimension for me. lt was like a new awakening.” Calvin Hill similarly remembers that “in the old days when I used to buy records, I was always into Miles, whatever Miles came up with. Like, you could hardly wait for the newest Miles Davis record to come out because you knew he was going to come out with something different. You just couldn’t wait. You’d go and buy the record and rush home and put it on and see what was new.”
John Coltrane’s personal style also evolved through different innovative stages in which he contributed to schools of hard bop, modal improvisation, and free jazz.51 “You can always let people know that you’re still evolving. You can show people signs of what you’re working on. Trane always did that. He always had periods of where you say, ‘Wow, where is he going next?’ He kept moving” (TF). Arthur Rhames credits Coltrane with being “able to see what should be done after he had passed through the hard bop school in order to expand the music. From listening to Trane’s early albums to the last, you can hear a steady progression, a continuous, sequential order that goes from one album to the next. He was constantly plotting each course, each step he was taking to be an expansion of the last step. That’s the highest type of mature artist in the music.”
It is only a minority of individuals whose passage from imitation to innovation produces compelling visions with major ramifications for other players and for their field. “We all take more from them than we do from one another” (RR).
Accommodating Musical Change
As the larger tradition of jazz constantly changes, certain junctures in its evolution generate turbulence in which artists reappraise their personal values, musical practices, and styles in light of innovations then current. Individuals may find themselves closed to new ideas at one time and open to them at another, adaptable in one case and rigid in another. Between such poles, deep ambivalence can confound the musician. Tommy Turrentine “wasn’t very experienced playing before the transition from swing to bebop came along. When I first heard Dizzy Gillespie, I got confused and I said, ‘Wait a minute! I gotta stop playing and decide if I want to play like Dizzy!’ lt sounded funny at first: right but wrong, wrong but right.” A generation later, a bebop performer described comparable skittishness in the face of the free jazz movement. “I’d get up to solo and wouldn’t know what to do: to play the chord changes or to ignore them-just play colors, textures. Sometimes, I’d let a whole chorus go by without playing, turn around, and walk off the stage. I had to drop out of the scene for a while and figure out what direction I wanted to go in.”
New ways of improvising raise the passions of advocates and adversaries alike, causing a realignment of loyalties within the jazz community. Some members change in response to peer pressure. Turrentine followed his friends “into bebop to keep up with them. I really had to practice hard to play in that style.” When Harold Ousley came to New York from Chicago bearing the influence of Lester Young’s horizontal improvisation approach, he was initially snubbed by local performers who favored John Coltrane’s vertical approach and considered Young “dated, not hip.” Subsequently, Ousley “started changing, playing the types of phrases Trane played that were doubled up and used chord inversions.” He also absorbed elements of style from Sonny Rollins and other contemporary saxophonists, gradually gaining acceptance in New York.
Others remain largely faithful to their former style, continuing to deepen their knowledge and skill within the artistic parameters they had already defined for themsel
ves. “What Herbie and Chick did was just beyond me.” Tommy Flanagan says. “It was something that passed me by. I never bothered to learn it, but I love listening to it.” There are also those artists who resist modifying their current way of playing because they “don’t think that going any further is progress” (RR).
Among individuals who summarily dismiss new movements, some never question their decisions, whereas others are gradually seduced by the same ideas that formerly had seemed inappropriate, even ridiculous. One musician, whose tastes were rooted in New Orleans “hot jazz,” as epitomized by Louis Armstrong’s brilliant, brassy sound and wide vibrato, initially “hated Miles Davis’s cool jazz playing,” with its dark sound and minimal use of vibrato. Whenever a Davis record came on the radio, he turned it off immediately. Despite his protestations, however, the player found that the few snatches he heard were deeply affective. “They kept coming back into my head—something about the sound and the feeling.” The musician grew to appreciate Davis eventually, actually emulating him in his own playing.
In contrast to gradual converts are artists who immediately embrace new movements, finding their particular qualities intriguing. The attraction to new styles may also reflect the fact that an artist’s current interests are on the wane or that the artist’s creativity has become stymied within another performance school. Moreover, change itself is of value to many performers. “Some people can have a house, and they will stay in that house for fifty years.” James Moody observes, “and another person will want to change houses every five years. They’re not satisfied staying in one thing.” Similarly, Moody must have “some kind of change in my life, and musically I think that way too.”
At the same time, artists who value change may draw different implications from a new performance movement. Some display a singularity of vision and devote themselves to its improvisational approach with messianic zeal, minimizing or abandoning that of a former school. Others seek simply to diversify their experiences. “There are musicians like Clifford Jordan who play different styles very well,” Art Davis observes. “He can play bebop, and he usually does when he plays with Barry Harris. But then he goes and plays free jazz with other people. He can do that very well too. I also like the way George Adams plays. He plays free, but he can also play conventionally. It all depends on who the music is coming from.” Davis continues. “There are people who are well versed in both and can do both, and there are other people who just can’t. There are some free jazz players who can’t play the other way and vice versa.”
Besides compartmentalizing their knowledge of different idioms and keeping their approaches separate in performance, musicians commonly combine them experimentally. In the late sixties, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s extended solos sometimes began with clarinet improvisations in the New Orleans style and culminated in free jazz creations encompassing fantastic simultaneous performances of three reed instruments. 52 His medley of styles in these solos spanned the history of jazz at the time.
Some pursue a middle ground between the core conventions of distinctive performance movements. From listening to and performing with players in more contemporary bands, “different things just seeped into my system.” Doc Cheatham says. “When I went to play in the New Orleans style, I would play some other styles too, mixing them up all together.” In this regard, improvisers like Art Tatum, whose personal styles successfully amalgamate elements from different performance schools, elude precise categorization.
Personal taste dictates the precise mix of elements such fusions of materials contain. One bebop player periodically introduces figures based on the theoretical approach of fourths within the flow of his lines, but shuns any greater emphasis upon that material. Influenced by the avant-garde in the sixties, another soloist pursues new melodic courses unconstrained by bebop’s harmonic conventions, but avoids the increased vocalizations and multiphonic techniques associated with “screamers,” a radical faction within the free jazz school. Musicians who share this soloist’s values and admire the fine line he toes praise his improvisations as “free, but not freaky.”
Sometimes, the musicians’ decisions reflect their sense of propriety about musical style as a generational emblem. Red Rodney adapts his bebop vocabulary to suit the “modal structures of contemporary pieces because it helps me stay young.” Doc Cheatham occasionally “throws some bebop phrases” into his solos to show that he has been listening to younger players and to keep him “from getting corny in the music business.” As a member of his generation, however, he feels he would “look like a fool” performing primarily in the bebop style. Yet another factor is the extensive conceptual and technical retooling required by different emphases or major changes in approaches to improvisation. In learning the language of bebop some swing trumpeters encountered great difficulty modifying the earlier style’s wider, more constant vibrato, which had become a habit for them, and developing the flexibility in their lips and fingers necessary for the tempos of bebop (RR). A generation later, Warren James reflects ambivalently on his own efforts to “make the transition” to free jazz by excising the conventional harmonic patterns of bebop from his improvisations. “Sometimes, I’m not sure it’s worth all the dues you have to pay in order to learn to play bebop; it’s so hard to unlearn afterwards.”
The initial controversies surrounding stylistic changes in jazz have to some extent been carried down to the present jazz community by discrete camps of musicians with specialized loyalties to one or another of the tradition’s idioms. Regardless of how creatively bebop players improvise, their solos are sometimes deemed, on the one hand, old and unoriginal by free jazz musicians whose notion of “new” minimizes or precludes the use of conventional jazz vocabulary and traditional jazz pieces as frameworks for improvisation. On the other hand, when free jazz musicians depart from older conventions, bebop players commonly object that their improvisations lack discipline and roots.
The camps also differ in the predilection to harmonic tension, the treatment of dissonance, and the interest in such qualities as lyricism. A free jazz player praises Eric Dolphy for his experiments with “polytonality,” whereas a bebop player puts down the same performance for containing “too many wrong notes.” Similarly, a free jazz musician praised for his vocalizing timbral qualities and emotional intensity as “screaming beautifully” by one school is ridiculed by another for his “noise.” Improvisers sometimes temper such judgments about the styles of individuals by considering the relative values of different schools and the era in which individuals learned jazz. One artist accepts specific performance practices as appropriate for older drummers, while maintaining that young drummers who play that way are “corny.”
Controversies of a smaller order concern specific features of repertory treatment or approaches to improvisation or, at times, both. The constraints of improvising within hard bop compositions of dense chord progressions may frustrate even the most skilled of artists. “When the chords change every two beats, all you can do is spell chords to get through tunes like that” (CF). In another situation, a renowned singer objects to harmonically static modal pieces, which allow soloists to avoid the rigors of improvising within harmonic progressions. “Anybody can improvise in one key,” she says contemptuously. Other artists take issue with various contemporary improvisation approaches. “A lot of players today are playing different cycles of interval patterns like fourths. I like to study them to open up my ears, but to play like that,” a musician complains, “you could be anybody. Everybody sounds the same, playing that stuff. A lot of guys I know are going in that direction, and they’re going to get trapped if they’re not careful. They’re going to find out that once they get into that, they’re not going to be able to get out of it,” he warns. “After learning to play that way, they go on a record date and have to play on more conventional tunes, and they don’t know where to begin. They can’t play that way as well anymore.”
Lou Donaldson similarly feels that “all players are sounding al
ike today. They’re all working out of Oliver Nelson’s book. They play mechanical sequences of changes that will fit anything. When they get to a chord change, they skate through it. They work out clusters of notes, whole-tone patterns and things, to get through it. In the old days,” he recalls, “we played the exact chord that was supposed to be played. They don’t have a feeling for tonal centers in the music anymore, or they just improvise on the harmony in ways that have nothing to do with the song.”
As new practices draw enough of a following to ensure their survival within the jazz community and acquire greater legitimacy, former detractors sometimes soften their positions. Reinterpreting the relationships of new to older practices, they may stress the continuity of particular values. Innovations initially regarded as radical departures from convention, for example, can begin appearing to be unique syntheses and subtle transformations of traditional musical elements drawn from the jazz community’s cumulative pool of ideas.
“Parker was just a little more evolved than the music before him,” Lou Donaldson explains, speaking of the development of bebop. “He was really like Eddie Vinson soundwise—and the way he phrased the blues. He was just a lot faster and more involved.” Jay McShann likens Parker’s early playing to that of “Prof” Buster Smith, in whose band Parker worked, and describes once having mistaken the former for the latter when Parker replaced Smith on a radio broadcast. 53 A bebop saxophonist commenting on the transition between bebop and free jazz “didn’t understand Eric Dolphy at first, but after a while I realized the rhythm of his playing was a lot like Bird, but his harmonic concept was different.” Similarly, a swing trumpeter recalls, “Ornette Coleman’s playing seemed very different when I began listening to him, but I finally figured out that what he was doing was playing a lot of old swing patterns and putting them in different places than we did, phrasing them differently within the beat.”
Thinking in Jazz Page 42