As horn players perform their specified parts, arrangements guide the rhythm section parts to varying degrees. Some prescriptions are general. “There may be a certain way of playing, a certain routine, that band leaders want you to adopt,” Don Pate explains. “It may be a matter of creating a particular feeling or a particular kind of swing. Or they may want you to leave out certain things that you do.” Other prescriptions require designated patterns at particular points in the music’s presentation or throughout. New Orleans drummer Baby Dodds reports that certain jazz pieces require “particular beats or rhythmic patterns,” much as forms of Latin American music like the samba and rumba require specific accompanying patterns. 13
In George Duvivier’s experience as well, players make specific “suggestions like, ‘Let’s play this on the introduction. Let’s do this on the ending.’ With Diz’s music, there are many things for the bass that happen with particular tunes’ arrangements,” Duvivier says, “like the bass patterns on ‘Manteca.’ If you don’t play them, you’re not playing the tune.” Rufus Reid adds:
In Hutcherson’s and Land’s band, they were very explicit about the concept they wanted for the bass. They’d say, “After we do this, we’re going to put a vamp in the middle of this part” [an ostinato over one or two repeating chords]. In another part, they’d say, “Now, in this section, don’t walk [avoid stepwise bass lines, four beats to the measure]. Play in two or you can float [suspend the regular sense of the beat]. When we get here, then you can walk. On this other section, it’s all rubato. Use your bow, if you like. When I nod, you can play whatever you want.”
Betty Carter’s arrangements likewise specified details for the bass. Kenny Washington recounts that she liked to hear “low notes,” especially notes on the “E string.” Also, at the end of pieces, Carter “never wanted the bassist to play the same note she was going to sing. . .. She would always tell the bassist to find another note in the chord.” Washington recalls. “She’d say, ‘Don’t play the root.’ ” At rehearsals, she told Calvin Hill “things like, ‘In this part of the tune I don’t want you to play in 4/4.’ Or, ‘I want you to walk here.’ Or, ‘In this section, I want you to play Latin. Here, I want you to play in the lower register.’ She didn’t ask for particular notes.”
With respect to drummers, arrangements may not only designate particular patterns, but may provide an outline of events that includes the orchestration of the patterns among the drum set’s instruments and the appropriate technique applied to each. “Sometimes, people will require you to do specific things that they feel are sensitive to a particular part of the piece you’re playing that you might not otherwise hear.” Max Roach says. “They may say, ‘Here, I want you to go to the mallets or brushes’; or, ‘There, I want you to play a broken rhythm, but don’t use the bass drum.’ Or, ‘Here, I want you to only accent the first and third beats of the measure for so many bars and then do something else.’ In another section, they may ask you just to use the snare drum alone.”
Kenny Washington details his experience: “Betty Carter had a lot of ideas about what she wanted a drummer to do behind her,” he says. Washington had previously worked with many singers who liked him to play brushes on the snare drum when they sang a ballad. But when “I first joined Betty and I started doing this ballad, she stopped the tune right there and said, ‘Listen to me. I don’t want to hear no brushes on the snare drum on ballads. I can’t stand that.’ She wanted to hear just cymbals [the first and third beat on the ride cymbal, and the second and fourth beat on the hi-hat]. She didn’t want to hear any swishing with the left hand.” Consequently, meeting Carter’s demands was initially “harder to do” for Washington.
In addition, such directions sometimes include precise approaches to accompanying the melody and to representing its harmonic form. When Keith Copeland “played Bird’s tunes [while sitting in] with Barry Harris, you didn’t have to play along with all the melody notes. You could just play part of the figures at the key rhythmic points to enhance what the horns were playing. Those heads went by very fast. So, if you really wanted to accent them—whether it was to play the whole head with your left hand and still keep the ride cymbal time going or just accent parts of it—you had to know the tune just like the horn players did.” Along related lines, Betty Carter used to tell Kenny Washington, “Watch your ‘ones,”‘ when he joined her band. This reminded him of advice he had received earlier from other musicians about using the bass drum to perform off-beat accents delineating the piece’s harmonic-rhythmic structure, typically just before the downbeat of the A section and that of the bridge. From Carter’s perspective, not only did such practices assure her that the rhythm section kept its place within the form of the piece, but “the music hooked up better that way,” making it easier for listeners to follow. “She felt very strongly about those anticipated ‘ones’ especially at the end of the last beat of the A section of the tune, showing that the group was closing that and opening up the bridge. It was like punctuating different sections of a letter.”
Arrangements can also delineate the precise mix of figures that provide the background for different soloists. According to Dicky Wells, Sid Catlett would ask newcomers in the Snowden band what they wanted him to play behind them, whether brushes or sticks or Chinese cymbal. “And he’d do whatever it was until you told him to change it.” 14 Leroy Williams has played with horn players “who like to hear more sock cymbal [hi-hat] because they feel that they can playoff of that better. Booker Ervin always wanted me to playa lot of sock cymbal,” Williams recalls. “He needed more than most people. Others might want more bass drum or less bass drum.” Soloists have also given instructions to pianists. Tommy Flanagan mentions that “horn players sometimes taught me things, too. They’d hear things differently from the way 1 heard them, and they’d share them. They’d sit at the piano and say, ‘I voice that chord like this.’ 1 worked with Miles for a short time,” Flanagan continues. “He told me the kinds of things he likes to hear and then showed them to me at the piano. He had a specific way he likes the piano to play for him.” 15 At times, Miles Davis prefers to improvise with the bass and drum accompaniment alone and asks pianists to layout, that is, temporarily refrain from performance.
Convention commonly dictates that drummers and bass players receive proportionately fewer solos than other musicians, in part to avoid adding undue burden to the demands of constant performance in their roles as accompanists. Bass players and drummers typically take solos without musical support, so they must track the composition’s form unerringly as they improvise. “With McCoy [Tyner], the situation was basically, ‘It’s the bass’s solo, so you’ve got it.’ The rest of the band would drop out,” Calvin Hill says. At the same time, bands may experiment with alternatives. Pharoah Sanders would “sometimes have a percussionist as well as a hand drummer, so a lot of bass solos involved playing with percussion instruments” (CH). Departing further from convention, Max Roach routinely likes to have “some kind of accompaniment” when he takes an extended drum solo, just as if he were performing any other instrument. “Sometimes, I just have bass play behind me, and I’ll embellish around the bass figure. Other times, I like to have a horn accompaniment, which adds another dimension to the whole solo. Sometimes, you have to write that in order to get what you want. Other times, musicians can deal with that improvisationally. ”
Rhythmic features of each solo’s accompaniment are sometimes specified by arrangements. Arranged tempo changes may require the rhythm section to double up for a chorus or more, performing twice as fast as the original tempo while the piece’s harmonic rhythm remains the same. Other devices, with roots in early jazz practices, include arranged breaks, in which the entire rhythm section suspends its performance for a few measures—commonly at the beginning or ending of a chorus—leaving the soloist temporarily without an external rhythmic point of reference. Jelly Roll Morton regarded the break, with its “musical surprise,” as being essential to the special qualit
y of jazz, providing a foil to the continuity and momentum established by the band’s background riffs, which provided the music’s “foundation.” 16
Adding distinctiveness to their music, groups introduce breaks at different points in a composition’s form, featuring different individuals and combinations of players. 17 Breaks can extend over different durations, even over the larger part of a chorus, at the extreme. Another arranged device is stoptime, in which the rhythm section collectively suspends its normal routine, restricting its performance to the articulation of each measure’s downbeat. Dramatic changes in rhythmic accompaniment, like changes occurring in arranged horn riffs, elaborate background lines, and harmonies, build variation into each performance’s larger structure and provide different impulses to stimulate the imaginations of soloists.
A sampling of aspects of four different renditions of “Like Someone in Love” illustrates the constellation of features that distinguish small group arrangements. Chet Baker delivers his group’s vocal version in a slow ballad style, whereas versions by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and by a recording session band featuring John Coltrane move at a medium bounce tempo. The rhythm sections of Baker’s group and Coltrane’s group maintain a regular beat and improvise complementary parts throughout, but Blakey’s rhythm section has worked out syncopated figures that they perform in unison at particular points in the progression. Individual artists clearly state the melody in each of these versions, taking liberties primarily in embellishment.
Providing a greater contrast is Eric Dolphy’s and Booker Little’s distinctive version, in which, after a brief introduction, Little’s trumpet, Dolphy’s flute, and Richard Davis’s bowed bass interpret the piece allusively, without accompaniment. They improvise a tightly interwoven three-part polyphony that proceeds through the piece with an elastic sense of rhythm at an almost dirgelike tempo. At the head’s conclusion, Davis switches to an active pizzicato style, joining the rhythm section to provide solo accompaniments that alternate between a medium tempo and double time. After the solos, Little and Dolphy resume their reflective discourse on the melody, accompanied by the rhythm section’s steady beat. Then, the entire ensemble, with Davis again on bowed bass, creates a free-rhythmic section that culminates the performance. In these four renditions of “Like Someone in Love,” each band’s arrangement is unique, allowing for differing interpretations of the piece and representing different qualities of amorous experience. 18
Transmitting Arrangements
Bands usually arrange and teach their material during formal rehearsals. Consequently, the amount of time they allow for rehearsing, usually a function of the particular circumstances surrounding performances, strongly influences the nature of arrangements. When touring headliners or featured soloists meet local rhythm sections for the first time just before performances, or when pickup groups hastily form for particular engagements, their interplay commonly assumes the character of a jam session and includes little planned activity. In such situations, leaders dictate minimal directions at each number’s outset or simply assume the adoption of the simplest conventional format for arrangements described earlier.
Groups that work as stable units, on the other hand, have the opportunity to rehearse regularly and arrange their repertory formally. “We used to rehearse all the time when we were together with Harold Land,” Jimmy Robinson declares. “We’d get together maybe two or three times a week if we weren’t busy with other gigs. We’d play every night, and then, later in the day, we’d go back to the club and rehearse.” As mentioned earlier, some bands develop books of arrangements, which provide continuity to performances even as band membership changes. “Most of the tunes we did with Blakey were from the Jazz Messenger’s Mosaic album and other albums that they did when Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter were in the band,” John Hicks recalls. “Those arrangements were already set.”
Some groups rely exclusively on the oral transmission of head arrangements. Lou Donaldson recalls his surprise when an old musician who played “the fourth sax part” in a New Orleans band informed him that he had learned the band’s entire repertory—complex counterparts, interludes, breaks, and all—through patient demonstration and memorization. Similarly, for years, Charles Mingus required that musicians “learn everything by ear. It wasn’t until he formed his big band in the late sixties and seventies that we read any music.” Lonnie Hillyer recalls. “For the most part, it was very difficult music. Mingus heard all these strange intervals. His compositions were very intricate, with a lot of chords. He also had a hell of a knack for range.” Hillyer continues. “He had this very high-pitched voice, and he heard things that way. He’d sing some things and then play them at the piano, and we’d learn them from there.”
Tommy Turrentine elaborates on performing with Mingus:
Once everybody had gotten the melody, Mingus would play the rhythm. Once you had the two together, he would work out the harmony. He’d say, “ Alright, Tommy, I want you to play such and such.” Once I could play it back, he’d say, “Okay. Now, tenor player, I want you to play this.” Then he’d say, “Let me hear you play it together.” He’d do that through each tune, section by section, and then we would work on the background lines. That’s how we’d rehearse. The ways we did Mingus’s music was so complex, the only way to be able to play it was to live with it. I remember one suite we did called “Tours of Manhattan.” The ensemble part alone was thirty minutes long. With solos, it was about forty-five or fifty minutes.
Other groups use a combination of written and oral methods. Sometimes, Bobby Hutcherson’s and Harold Land’s group used written arrangements; at other times, they “would just hand me a blank piece of paper,” Rufus Reid recalls, “and dictate the things they wanted me to remember to do at different points in the pieces.” At Miles Davis’s rehearsals, he “would have some of the music written down, and other things he’d just play for you and you’d learn directly from him” (GB). Yet other groups rely upon scores. In Horace Silver’s band, John McNeil and cohorts “never played anything that we didn’t rehearse. We even had rehearsals on the road. If Horace wanted to add a new tune or do one of the old ones, he’d just hand out the music and tell us to memorize it. We played so many different kinds of pieces, including one that was through-composed. There was no improvisation in it at all. It had some repeated sections, which made it easier to memorize, but it was quite long.”
Given the difficulty of notating idiomatic nuances of jazz, and, in some instances, of reading idiosyncratic manuscript styles, credible interpretation of written parts depends on general understanding of jazz performance practices and knowledge of specific conventions developed within each band. Despite the fact that the through-composed piece mentioned above “was so detailed.” John McNeil recollects, “Horace [Silver] spent a lot of time getting the bass and drums to play the right patterns, accents and everything.” Benny Bailey describes similar practices:
When Dizzy taught us in his big band, he would show us the way to think when we were playing. Every pattern was a different challenge. Accents had a lot to do with it. You can take triplet figures and, by accenting them a certain way, you can create an optical illusion on the ears. The figure sounds like it’s turned around; a lot of it has to do with false fingering also. Those’ figures get very tricky, and nobody would ever find out how to play them unless someone showed them how to do it.
The interpretation of a piece’s melody may depend on comparable subtleties. As a trumpeter eager to learn about jazz, I once was invited to try out for the lead trumpet chair of a swing band. At the first rehearsal, I interpreted the written music according to the Western classical performance practices with which I was most familiar and blended somewhat inconspicuously with the rest of the brass section. The leader hid his disappointment but, at the next rehearsal, invited an experienced trumpeter from another band to share my position. Seated beside him, I was amazed by the music’s transformation. The trumpet assumed the most prominent voice wit
hin the band, and he filled the room with his sound. He phrased his part with great conviction together with the drummer, not only breathing new life into it, but pulling the entire band along with him in shaping its performance.
In between pieces, the trumpeter leaned over and counseled me concerning aspects of the performance that were nowhere indicated on the written music. The eighth-note patterns, which I had articulated distinctly and with equal value, should instead be slurred together in longer phrase groupings and performed with a triplet swing feeling. “Remember,” he added, “since we’re playing in a section now, no constant vibrato when the parts are unison. Begin phrases softly. On a sustained note at the end of a phrase, attack it hard, then back off, then let it get loud again, putting a big vibrato on the end.” Subsequently, when I doubled his part, I strove to memorize its sound and to match its exciting qualities. By repeatedly recalling his powerful performance, I gradually came to interpret the music properly on my own.
In such situations, group members other than the leader, and in some instances former members, commonly help newcomers. John Hicks initially learned the Jazz Messengers’ compositions on his own, but then he “got a fine-tuning from cats like Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, and John Gilmore who were in the band. Most of my rehearsing was done on the bandstand,” he reveals, “because, with just one or two new guys coming into the band, there wouldn’t be special rehearsals unless something special came up—like a television program. I got my experience right there on the bandstand listening to some of the vets with the band who already knew the arrangements.” Art Davis recalls that “in Max Roach’s band, we did some of Kenny Dorham’s arrangements, because he was in the group before Booker Little. So, Kenny would come over sometimes and rehearse his pieces with us. He’d make certain suggestions like, ‘This isn’t right; phrase that this way.’ We’d just play the arrangements down, getting the phrasing of the melody right for the horns and getting the bass notes right. There were certain lines written for the bass.”
Thinking in Jazz Page 45