Rank and file band members may also introduce changes. At one engagement, a conga player spoke to the group’s trap-set drummer as they prepared for the second set. “I’m feeling wasted tonight,” he lamented. “Can you support me on my solo? Keep a strong thing going on your hi-hat and watch me. If I tire, we can trade fours like we did the other night.” The drummer nodded in agreement.
The flexibility of an arrangement depends in part on the band’s size and on the form the arrangement takes, whether it be oral or written. The quartet Art Farmer organized with Jim Hall “was very free. We had arrangements, but if someone wanted to change, you didn’t feel you had to do it the same every night.” he recalls.
If you have six people in the group and you want to do something different, you have to go around whispering to everyone on the bandstand. It’s like the more people you have on the stand, the more restricted you are. If you try to do something different without telling everybody else what you’re going to do in advance, then they’re thrown and they don’t know how to react. If you’ve had a rehearsal and told people you’re going to do one thing and then go on the job and do something else, it’s disruptive. Especially if the arrangements are written up.
The practices associated with arrangements can also differ, even under the same leader, as a function of the band’s changing membership, the ability of players, their sympathetic understanding of the music, their familiarity with one another’s styles, and various circumstantial factors surrounding specific engagements. 29 As is clear from musicians’ comments, however, many features that jazz’s dynamic tradition values would stultify if players could not apply their myriad skills to revising arrangements to some degree. Successful alterations themselves heighten the creative excitement of improvisation.
Conducting Arrangements
With the exception of big bands, jazz groups typically perform in public without a conventional conductor or conductor’s baton to coordinate different parts or direct transitions between events. Band leaders or members acting as music directors periodically assume particular responsibilities for guiding the group. Sometimes, they announce each piece before its performance and count off the tempo. If the order of soloists has not been established beforehand, they may signal each soloist’s entrance.
For cohesion, groups most commonly regulate performances through a variety of subtle cues. In the absence of specified directions, performers may infer the appropriate tempo from a soloist’s initiation of the melody, or a rhythm section introduction. “Betty Carter had different ways she’d want you to play in terms of the tempo.” Kenny Washington remembers. “You had to watch her on the bandstand, her hands and her movements. She would bring her arm down a certain way to establish the beat. There would be no counting off, like ‘one, two, three, four.’ The secret was being able to figure out the tempo from the way she brought her hand down.” Barry Harris recalls Lester Young dictating the tempo with subtle movements of his shoulder, and Max Roach describes Dizzy Gillespie directing the band through his inventive dance movements.30
Similarly, if arrangements do not designate a solo’s length, the soloist, perhaps by raising the instrument slightly, can indicate that the chorus in process is the last and its ideas are near completion. This allows the next soloist to get ready for performance. Within the free jazz context, artists sometimes give musical signals for such additional operations as “changing modes by holding tones related to the modal level toward which the music is moving.”31 Other cues relate to dynamics. “I might tell the drummer, ‘When I pick up the bow to play, I want you to play stronger,’ ” Rufus Reid explains. Without such planning, he finds that when he begins bowing, “drummers stop playing or play timidly. I would rather they play with a little more gusto because that gives me a little more to playoff.” Kenny Washington learned about comparable cues in Betty Carter’s band. “Betty also taught me a lot about dynamics,” he asserts. “She would have a certain arm movement which meant play soft and another one which would mean to stroll or layout altogether. Not only that, she’d also cue you in for certain accents while you’re playing. Like she wanted you to play what she called ‘anticipated ones,’ that is, the ‘and of fours.’ You’d be playing a tune at one of her fast tempos, and she’d make this body movement on the ‘and of four’ just at the same time you played it, and it was so hip for the audience.”
When an instrument restricts physical gesture, musicians commonly signal with slight movements of the head or eyes. As mentioned earlier, Bobby Hutcherson and Harold Land sometimes direct transitions from one section of an arrangement to another by nodding. Such nonverbal gestures serve equally well to regulate performance in the face of error. “There was a lot of pressure from within the bands,” Lou Donaldson says. “You just missed one note in the arrangements or blew the dynamics, and every head in the band turned toward you. Nobody would have to say anything. You’d never do that again.” In a lighter vein, Dicky Wells remembers Lester Young reprimanding fellow band members with “his little bell. If somebody missed a note, or you were a new guy and goofed, you’d hear this bell going—‘Ding-dong!’. . . Jo Jones had another way of saying the same thing. Bing-bing-bing, he’d go on his cymbal rod. . .. And if Pres [Young] saw someone getting angry, he’d blow the first bar of ‘Runnin’ Wild.’ ”32
Some leaders take more dramatic measures to ensure their music’s faithful rendition. At a Charles Mingus concert in which the pianist forgot a portion of his part, Mingus rested the bass on his shoulder and mimed the performance of broad, sweeping arpeggios until the pianist took his meaning, switching from block chords to arpeggiated figures. Mingus also directed the performance verbally at times. 33 So did Jaki Byard in his own bands. Byard would periodically callout for drummer Alan Dawson to “walk it,” that is, change the music’s rhythmic feeling by improvising with emphatic backbeats. At times, Byard also would orient the band to the composition’s form by shouting “one” at the beginning of the chorus or “four” to signal the remaining measures before the beginning of the next chorus. 34
Tommy Turrentine recollects his experience with Mingus’s band:
One night at Birdland, we were playing Mingus’s suite “Tours of Manhattan;” and I forgot a little interlude that we were supposed to play about Chinatown. Do you know what he did? He stopped the whole band in front of the audience. The place was packed, and he walked up to the microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, as you know this is called the Charles Mingus Workshop. We had just left the Village on our way to Chinatown, but it seems like our trumpet player got lost. So, if he can remember his way now, I’ll give him a car check and we can go back to the West Village and resume our journey to Chinatown. Can you remember that, Tom?” I said, “Yes, sir,” and we continued playing the suite.
Turrentine concludes the story with a bit of chagrin: “We had just learned the music.”
Prototypes for the diverse orchestral designs described here have remained a part of the jazz tradition, cutting across different style periods. From the elaborately arranged events in such early jazz groups as Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers and Joe Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band to the works of Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra and Jimmie Lunceford’s band, in which “everything was written out—chord symbols and sometimes even the bass lines” (GD)—some provide considerable musical detail.35 Arrangements may even require performers to playa designated part throughout the piece’s performance, leaving no room for improvisation.
Other arrangements, however, give minimal detail. Count Basie’s arrangements for up-tempo compositions often included only the spare plan of a several-bar introduction, the melody’s statement, “brass or saxophone figures” to accompany soloists, and “one or more choruses of climactic riffs by the entire band” as the close. 36 Years later, the arrangements of John Coltrane’s Ascension band, in addition to occasional reiterations of melodic lines, simply indicated “certain tonalities that particular instruments had to stay within when they improvise
d” (AD).37 Kenny Barron remembers that “one of Yusef Lateef’s tunes was also very free. We had to improvise using a classical composition technique he had gotten from Stockhausen like a twelve-tone row. Yusef wouldn’t tell you specific things to play,” Barron recalls, “but he might ask you to project a certain kind of mood.” 38 Some free jazz groups perform without using any compositions or formal arrangements as vehicles for improvisation.
In between these extremes, most arrangements entail a general set of guidelines delineating the overall structure of renditions and successive events within them. Whether adopting conventional pieces as vehicles or experimenting with new compositional forms, they allot space for improvisation at selected points and prescribe fully orchestrated patterns at others, ensuring cohesion within the ensemble for the music event. 39
TWELVE
Adding to Arrangements
Conventions Guiding the Rhythm Section
The first thing I look for is how well the drummer is propelling the band, because that's his main function. I listen for how creatively he is propelling the band, that is, how he phrases and how well he plays the arrangement: making the proper breaks, punching the melodic figures of the band in the right places. And, of course, I listen to what he adds of his own to the arrangement. —Charli Persip
With much of the music’s detail left to their discretion, jazz musicians improvise their parts around those patterns and events predetermined by arrangements, fleshing out the larger presentation to render each composition anew. An interrelated web of traditional performance practices guides this collective music-making process and contributes to the improvisation of mutually sympathetic musical parts. Some practices are associated with distinct repertory genres, others with different jazz idioms and the personal performance styles of leading rhythm section players. Yet others concern the musical roles of the mainstay rhythm section instruments.
The initial perception that aspiring performers have of these matters sometimes contributes to their early specialization. George Duvivier found the string bass to be an especially compelling instrument because its low resonant sound generally provided the “foundation” of orchestral music, “these big notes pouring out,. . . the powerful descending bottom line.” For a similar reason, Keith Copeland decided to become a drummer after his study of records by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers lead him to conclude that, however subtly, “the drums actually controlled what was going on in the rest of the band.” In some instances, musicians deepen their intuitive grasp of these distinctions by learning to perform multiple instruments, gaining direct experience with the ways in which each complements its counterparts within jazz groups. “Art Blakey was a pianist before he became a drummer.” Max Roach recalls. “And I also played piano on some dates. Wynton Kelly and Horace Silver were both fine saxophonists when they came to New York, as well as piano players.”
In the most general sense, the rhythm section’s collective function is to “comp,” a term that carries the dual connotations of accompanying and complementing. To Walter Bishop Jr., this special skill means “to get under the soloist—not over him or on par with him—and to lay down a carpet. One of the reasons why Bird hired me was that he liked the way I comped. Comping has been one of my strong suits.” To learn to comp with subtlety and improvise with distinction, young bass players, drummers, and pianists must master the performance conventions associated with their instruments through a long process of disciplined study, trials, and discoveries.
The String Bass
Since the early days of jazz, the bass has played a central part within rhythm sections by interpreting and delineating the harmonic-rhythmic structures of pieces. 1 Due, in part, to the slow playing action of the early instruments, bass parts were initially spare, in many instances comprising regular two-beat patterns of chord roots and fifths alternated on the first and third beats of measures. At the same time, players like John Lindsay with Jelly Roll Morton’s band periodically varied such practices by switching to vigorous four-beat patterns, stoptime rhythm, bowed bass, and slap-bass techniques. 2 The latter involved “slapping the fingerboard with the open palm of the right hand while grasping the string to be plucked” or pulling the string “up away from the fingerboard” and releasing it to produce an especially “forceful slap (or snap) sound.” Variations in timbre and dynamics produced by different slap-bass methods were considered the equivalent “hot sound” to growling through a horn. 3
Pops Foster recalls both the varied procedures of bass players and the changing conventions surrounding bass accompaniment: “In New Orleans we’d have two pick notes in one bar, then you’d go six bars of bowing, and maybe have one note to pick. . .. In New York we started picking four to a bar. Now we pick four or eight beats to a bar.”4 Beyond outlining the chord progression, Foster created “countermelodies” to the horn players’ lines in either plucked or bowed bass style and, at times, responded antiphonally to the pianist’s creations.5 During the swing period, Walter Page’s largely stepwise walking bass accompaniment in Count Basie’s band epitomized the changing emphasis on the four-beat approach to meter described by Foster.
Before amplification and steel strings, the bass commonly receded within the group’s overall blend of sounds. Sometimes, its part was reinforced by the bass drum pattern. In the forties, the development of instruments capable of faster playing action and increasingly sophisticated amplification techniques enabled bass players to assume a more dominant role in accompaniment. Amplified, they could stand alone in maintaining the music’s lowest voice. Improved playing action also enabled them to perform parts that were more complex. Artists mixed chord arpeggiations with the smooth stepwise motion and four beats to the measure of walking bass lines, occasionally varying such regularity. Bass players in the forties and fifties added to the evolving conventions of bass accompaniment; over the past few decades, the bassist’s options have continued to multiply. Players like Charles Mingus departed from their instrument’s conventional time-keeping role by constantly changing the rhythmic feel of their performance. 6
As bass players formulate a part today, they regulate various interrelated features of rhythm, harmonic color, and contour according to basic principles of tension and release, their alternation contributing to the music’s swing and momentum. With respect to rhythm, players can structure their improvisations in ways that establish different time-feelings at the level of both pitch-to-pitch movement and metric organization. They commonly reinforce the music’s four-beat character by performing steady quarter notes, but enliven it by minutely varying the placement of pitches in relation to the beat.
Artists can enhance the line’s syncopation less subtly by emphasizing beats two and four through the performance of double stops, non-chord tones, and, occasionally, ghosted or indeterminate pitches whose effects are predominantly percussive. Moreover, bass players periodically add spice and variety to their more constant patterns by substituting two eighth notes or an eighth-note triplet for individual quarter notes, or by playing syncopated eighth notes tied to quarter notes. The alternative positioning of rhythmically active figures produces varied effects. Triplet subdivisions on beat two or four stabilize the music by drawing the ear to subsequent quarter notes on the third beat or the downbeat. Displacing the triplet by a beat draws the ear to quarter notes on beats two and four, temporarily destabilizing the music, but ultimately increasing its syncopated drive toward subsequent points of resolution on strong beats.
Among the various rhythmic subtleties that players can add to quarter-note playing is “pulsing” or “dead string” playing, a technique integral to the styles of players like Jimmy Garrison. Pulsing consists of adding, underneath the primary figures of a line, “very soft upbeat accents” produced on an open string by an additional finger. Although effective in performance, the technique is not necessarily audible on recordings (LG). Pursuing more radical options, bass players may suspend regular reference to the beat by sustaining pitches or introduci
ng rests into the bass part. Bass players may also perform complex rhythms over the barline.
In addition to such flexible treatments of the underlying meter, bass players may produce a different layer of metric organization within the music’s texture by moving from pitch to pitch at rates consistently slower or faster than other band members. They can play half-note patterns to create a two-beat feeling, establishing this, perhaps, as the music’s overriding metric framework while the other parts proceed in 4/4 time. They can also superimpose poly-metric patterns over the principal meter, playing ongoing figures of six quarter notes within the time frame of four.
While managing various time-keeping aspects of their role, bass players make constant decisions about their part’s harmonic and melodic features. The instrument’s function tends to limit their rhythmic activity, but bass players share many of the soloist’s concerns regarding pitch choices, alternative ways of interpreting harmony, and the like. In the most general harmonic terms, they have the job of outlining the progression. This is neither a mechanical nor a static process; rather, it is one of constantly reinterpreting the composition’s chords and their harmonic-rhythmic motion. Bass players commonly lead their melodies toward such goals as chord tones on beats one and three. Larry Gray explains, “You’re always phrasing into downbeats.” In 4/4 time, for example, players tend not to think in terms of the beat grouping “one, two, three, four” but in terms of the beat grouping “two, three, four, one.” In this sense, their lines are “always moving ahead,” Gray says. “Jazz is over-the-barline music.”
Such general conventions still allow bass players great liberty in formulating their parts. Their options encompass a vast world of possibilities. They can describe each chord and its rhythmic boundaries unequivocally by playing the tonic on the downbeat of the change, creating arpeggiated figures throughout its harmonic area. Adhering to the progression strictly from chord to chord and emphasizing vertical melodic constructions tend “to divide the music into different measure groups” one or two bars long and to produce relatively “less forward motion” than other options. For contrast, bass players can emphasize horizontal constructions such as diatonic or chromatic scalar passages, carrying the listener over the barlines of measures toward longer-range goals. The static harmonic effects of periodic drones or pedals (pedal points), which typically sustain the tonic or the fifth of the piece’s key, further diversify bass parts.
Thinking in Jazz Page 47