Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Saturated listening night after night further amplifies the skills of learners. George Duvivier found it “pretty easy” to write arrangements for the Lunce-ford band because he already knew the voicings just from “being around the band so long.” He wrote “half the book” for the band, for eight brass, five reed, and four rhythm section instruments. Ultimately, each tenure with a different group provides an artist the opportunity for enriched understanding of arranging and developing a repertory. So important are these patterns of development that they become the subject of anecdotal conversation within the community. Tommy Turrentine, for example, relates a typical profile of the development of jazz arrangers. “J. J. Johnson had previously been in the Snookum Russell band, and Russell also got him on his P’s and Q’s about writing. Later, J. J. went on to work with Benny Carter, who opened him up to Carter’s writing style.”

  What Goes into Arrangements

  Significantly, the initial decision a leader makes about a band’s instrumentation, thereby determining the collective palette of sounds, is the first step toward defining the nature of arrangements overall. Models for these and other decisive group features commonly originate with historic bands whose sheer excellence of musicianship, forceful musical personalities, and innovative concepts exert a disproportionate influence on their contemporaries. As an increasing number of groups emulate these bands, their arrangements and collective performance practices gradually acquire the status of conventions, contributing, in some instances, to the definition of different style periods or jazz idioms. Joe Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in the twenties, Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra featuring Don Redman’s arrangements in the thirties, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s quintet in the forties, and Ornette Coleman’s pianoless quartet in the sixties each became the prototype for many bands performing, respectively, in their New Orleans, swing, bebop, and free jazz styles.

  Small groups predominated during the early jazz or New Orleans period, featuring standard “front line” instruments—cornet, clarinet, and trombone—with variable accompaniment. During the swing period, larger ensembles with fifteen or more members enriched the possibilities for orchestration and musical interaction. Entire sections of brass or reed instruments engaged in contrapuntal interplay. They also provided thickened presentations of melodies and harmonic textures, as well as a great variety of contrasting sonorities.

  Arrangements returned to a simpler format during the bebop period, placing a renewed emphasis upon small groups. Typically, they would feature the voice of a single horn or a pair of horns playing the tune with accompaniment. In the after math of the bop period, some groups involved with the cool jazz and third stream movements experimented with combining conventional jazz and orchestral instruments, including flute, oboe, bassoon, french horn, and strings. Additionally, they increased the size of ensembles and the amount of ensemble performance in relation to that of their soloists. Within the early free jazz movement, bands also experimented with different instrumentation. To diversify their colors, some incorporated into their arrangements traditional instruments from around the world—Indian and African percussion and melodic instruments, for example—as well as a myriad of “little instruments” ranging from slide whistles to kazoos. 3 In recent years, jazz fusion arrangements have combined acoustic instruments with synthesizers, sequencers, drum machines, and, in some instances, the sounds of prerecorded tape tracks. Moreover, affordable studio technology such as “digital delay and reverb” units and “multi-effects” processers (which typically include such devices as a harmonizer, a pitch transposer, and various types of noise gates) has allowed artists to manipulate their instruments’ sounds to produce a vast array of special musical effects.

  Although influenced by the prevailing conventions for instrumentation and other features of arrangements associated with particular style periods, jazz musicians are not bound by them. Many engage in idiosyncratic practices, carrying earlier conventions across idiomatic and generational lines to place them in different group contexts and rework them to their tastes. In the twenties, Louis Annstrong recorded unusual duo renditions of pieces with pianist Earl Hines on which Roy Eldridge later patterned his own arrangements with Claude Bolling in the early fifties. 4 Similarly, Coleman Hawkins’s experimental solo for unaccompanied saxophone on “Picasso” in 1948 and that by Sonny Rollins in 1958 on “Body and Soul” —a tribute to Hawkins—anticipated practices of extended solo improvisations and solo concerts by free jazz horn players that were to become common in the sixties. 5 Although small groups were the norm during the bebop period, Dizzy Gillespie presented bebop soloists successfully within the framework of his big band. Furthermore, he added an African Cuban rhythmic flavor to the music’s accompaniment by collaborating with Chano Pozo, the renowned hand drummer.

  Beyond the issue of group instrumentation, arrangements can differ markedly. They range from the “strict, unadorned rendering of a tune” to the most imaginative “reworking. . . [or] recomposing of such material,” unique transformation equivalent to the composition of original works. 6In between these extremes, arrangers typically design a particular treatment for every piece’s melody and harmony, and decide upon the larger performance’s sequence of events. Within this framework, they designate each part’s opportunity for improvisation in relation to the performance of precomposed material. In addition, by determining which instruments play together, and when, they establish a balance between events featuring soloists and events featuring the ensemble.

  The regulation of these matters offers artists musical guidelines with differing degrees of specification. The conventional arrangement allowing individual horn players their own interpretation of a piece’s melody at the opening and close of the performance, with various group members alternating solos in between, is, perhaps, the most general. Meanwhile, the rhythm section—bass, drums, and piano (or another chording instrument like banjo, guitar, or vibraphone)—provides accompaniment, interpreting the harmony and generating a constant beat. Easily incorporated within the design are such conventions as short improvised introductions, “trading fours” among individual group members, and concluding performances with a repeated unison riff or with an intense chorus of improvised polyphony.

  For variety, artists can specify a multitude of precise details. “We’d work on a tune like you would paint a portrait.” Jimmy Robinson remembers. “You want something special to come from it. We’d work on all the possible shadings, the softness, the loudness, balancing the way the tune sounded. We’d work on phrasing the tune. There are so many things you can do to make each tune say something so that you wouldn’t forget it and its effect would be lasting. Working this way is a matter of sensitivity. It’s what I call being a true artist.” Similarly, encouraging expressive interpretation, Max Roach once coached musicians at a rehearsal, “Play every phrase as if it were the whole song.” Performers also consider articulation and accentuation. “On one particular tune.” Horace Silver asked John McNeil “to tongue a little harder on specific patterns that had the character of drum patterns.”

  Arrangements differ in the keys and progressions they assign to particular pieces, altering their mood and providing new challenges for improvisers. “Even when Joe Henderson and Bobby Hutcherson played something standard, like a blues, they wouldn’t do it in a standard key like B. They did it in A or D” (RuR). Tommy Turrentine recalls the imaginative arrangements that trios in his hometown of Philadelphia, like Ahmad Jamal’s, would work out. Jamal “wouldn’t play ‘I Got Rhythm’ changes the standard way.” He would devise his own version of the progression, or “he might do it like Monk did it.”

  Musicians sometimes alter larger harmonic plans to give their arrangements individuality. Kenny Washington remembers Betty Carter advising her band, “If you’re going to do a standard tune that’s been done a lot, don’t do it like everybody else does it. Change it. Do it your own way.” Another alumnus of her bands, John Hicks, elaborates, “First of all,
we’d work out the form of the tune. Betty would usually alter the standard form.” For example, many “old standards” originally had verses composed for them, “introductions with lyrics,” and although most singers and instrumentalists cut them out today, Carter would sometimes sing them as “extensions” of the songs. Kenny Washington recalls that “in one version of ‘But Beautiful,’ she sang the verse as the bridge of the song instead of putting it at the beginning.” He laughs: it was “such a hip extension of the tune, you’d swear it was part of the tune.” Along similar lines, a group may add variety to its production by designing a progression for soloists to use as a vehicle that differs from the progression used for the melody’s accompaniment.

  Bands also commonly arrange rhythmic features. “People have given me specific advice about tempos,” Fred Hersch says, “like really taking a couple of seconds to find out exactly what tempo you want before you count it off—not being casual with tempos because every tempo is different. Certain tunes will really feel strange if they’re a hair too fast or a hair too slow.” If the challenges associated with some arrangements involve recalling and maintaining one precise tempo, other arrangements challenge improvisers to recreate “tricky” changes. “The hardest thing” for Ronald Shannon Jackson to do in Betty Carter’s group “was to learn her arrangements, because you could be going along at a fast tempo and instantly change into a ballad.” Moreover, within the same piece, “you might have to change from sticks to brushes or switch from playing bebop to a march-type thing.”

  Choice of meters can further distinguish a tune’s treatment. “As you know, ‘My Favorite Things’ was originally done in 3/4, and then Trane went on to do his version of it in 6/8. Betty didn’t want to do it either of those ways, so she came up with playing it in straight-ahead 4/4 time” (KW). Similarly, when Rufus Reid “was working with Bobby Hutcherson and Harold Land, their music might switch back and forth between six bars of 3/4 and six bars of 4/4. I had never seen anything like it before.”

  Artists also regulate such aspects of improvised interplay as the order of soloists and the lengths of performances, limiting players to one or two choruses, perhaps. In the absence of specified guidelines, etiquette commonly dictates solos to be roughly the same length. In this respect, players take their cue from the first soloist.7 Other planned events designate that particular individuals trade improvised statements of two, four, or eight measures over the progression’s course for a number of choruses, or that they improvise introductions and endings. When fulfilling the latter responsibilities, performers typically incorporate musical elements from the melody within their inventions so that they bear “a logical relationship to it” (TF).

  Arrangements may also sanction different degrees of improvisation and varied intensities of performance at various times within ensemble parts. In conventional polyphonic settings of New Orleans-style jazz groups, cornet typically plays each piece’s melody with minor variations while clarinet plays a contrasting part in a higher register and trombone or tuba creates a bass part, which outlines the chord progression. These restrictions to specified roles for the greater part of each piece’s performance are sometimes suspended in the last chorus, or out chorus, of a piece, where the front-line players may take the liberty of creating spectacular parts with the character of simultaneous solos, carrying the music to full intensity and bringing about its final climax (DC). An example from the bebop era would be a rendition of “Mean to Me,” in which Dizzy Gillespie initially performs the first half of the tune with minor variations while Sonny Stitt improvises a counterpart that weaves in and out of Gillespie’s line. In the second haIf of the tune, the horn players switch roles. Similarly, within the rhythm section, one accompanist may play variations on a composed part while another improvises a complementary part.

  Within the largest frame of presentation, some leaders organize entire repertory programs in advance of an event. They imagine alternative sequences of pieces, balancing the need for continuity in mood and style at one point against the need for contrast at another. Each piece should “set up the audience for the next” (CF). Medleys of related pieces formalize this consideration. “Betty [Carter] was also great at putting medleys of tunes together,” Kenny Washington recalls.

  We used to do a Charlie Parker medley and medleys of old ballads. The way she’d hook all these tunes up was so beautiful. We would do a breakneck tune like “My Favorite Things,” and after that, she’d say to the audience, “Thank you. This next tune is about a couple that’s living together, but they’re not speaking and somebody’s got to break the ice.” Then she’d pause and ask, “Can’t we talk it over?” and the band would come in with the tune, “Can’t We Talk It Over?” Then, at the end of the song, she’d say to the audience, “Because it’s love or it isn’t,” and the band would go right into another ballad, “It’s Love or It Isn’t.”

  Other band leaders provide more extensive introductions to compositions, in the form of dramatic commentary or praise for the artists who inspired the renditions. In effect, they create narrative segues or interludes between numbers. 8 “There comes a time in every tenor saxophonist’s life,” a renowned player on the instrument announced at one event, “in which he must attempt to solo on the tune that Coleman Hawkins made famous, ‘Body and Soul’. The arrangement I’d like to do for you,” he added, “is the one that Dexter Gordon recorded.” In words familiar on the bandstand, he concluded self-effacingly, “Although I can’t guarantee the performance will be up to Dexter’s, I’ll give it all that I can.” Groups may also compose musical segues that continue the performance’s momentum from piece to piece, carrying listeners through formal transitions in key, meter, or mood. John Hicks describes Betty Carter’s use of key changes to further personalize a tune like “But Beautiful,” which inventively uses the original verse as the bridge. After singing the verse, “she modulates.” Hicks says. “She’ll have a note. . . and a particular range that she’s going [for], say, from a G to an m. Now, when she hits the E, she may want to go to an A major, coming from the C, like say, the G is the dominant of C major. So, she’ll hit the E, like the minor sixth, and we’ll go to A major.” Carter uses the same design for her rendition’s ending or tag section. Moreover, after modulating there, she sometimes extends the performance by going “into a slow blues in A.” With minimal theoretical discussion, Carter composes and transmits such ideas, according to Hicks, “on sounds alone.” constantly creating unique forms for her band to interpret.

  Finally, it is not uncommon for groups to plan the use of a particular break tune at the end of a performance set to signal periodic intermissions in the evening’s program.

  Specifying Parts within the Larger Designs of Arrangements

  Within the larger formal design of renditions, musicians exploit their group’s sound palette by varying the use and roles of instruments from one musical episode to another. Early jazz arrangements often designated only piano to provide the accompaniment for a soloist during one segment of the performance, then used the larger ensemble in contrasting accompaniment to another soloist. Another practice allowed the string bass occasionally to double “the trombone or cello part during melodic interludes or bridge passages in multithematic compositions.” 9

  Arrangements, then and now, highlight particular instruments, or groupings of like instruments, such as the brass section, in the performance of repeated melodic riffs during designated parts of the music’s structure. Jelly Roll Morton, one of the most influential of early jazz arrangers, maintained that “a riff is something that gives an orchestra a great background and is the main idea in playing jazz.” 10 Additionally, bands often feature alternating brass or reed sections in call and response routines, or involve members of one section or the other in unison performance of elaborate lines with the character of solos, or combine the sections in complex schemes of polyphony. “Personally, I love the undercurrent created by the third or fourth horn parts in big ensembles,” Tommy Turrentine s
ays. “The way the voices move and cross each other. At times, that can be more interesting than the melody. I listen to how those parts are constructed in any arranged composition.”

  The harmonic qualities of parts can be as varied as their linear qualities. Arrangers cleverly combine the sounds of instruments to create new timbres, just as painters mix primary colors to invent new colors and endless variations of hues. “Some of Ellington’s voicings and orchestrations were so unique that you couldn’t tell which instruments were playing together on the records,” a musician recalls. “You had to see the band in person to figure it out.” Ellington’s works epitomize the elaborate, inventive design of jazz arrangements, as do those by Gil Evans. 11

  Mixtures of the precise timbres associated with the musical personalities of individual artists create interest for discerning listeners by revealing sounds within sounds at the microlevel of an arrangement’s orchestration. This is so even within renditions by smaller groups, such as bop or hard bop quintets, in which the horns perform the melody in unison or parallel intervals. The blend of personal sounds contributing uniqueness to renditions of compositions is distinguishable from band to band (MR).

  When Jazz Messengers trumpeter Lee Morgan and tenor saxophonist Benny Golson perform the melody of “Moanin”‘ in octaves, Golson’s warm, reedy, diffuse sound enfolds Morgan’s bright, finely articulated melodic line. Equally unique unison effects are achieved when Dizzy Gillespie’s cup-muted horn blends with Charlie Parker’s alto saxophone or Miles Davis’s harmon-muted horn blends with John Coltrane’s tenor saxophone. Within such closely fashioned unison parts, subtle differences in phrasing and vibrato stand out, and slight pitch movements sometimes forcefully emerge in relief. In Eric Dolphy’s and Booker Little’s band, trumpet and alto saxophone meld in perfect unison for the greater part of their arrangement of “The Prophet,” then separate into a brilliant, searing, sustained minor second. 12