Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Students also develop a storehouse of other patterns appropriate for their instrument’s musical roles. From studying records, Akira Tana learned a selection of fills that “Philly” Joe Jones played in between Miles Davis’s improvised phrases, and copied specific patterns of other favored drummers “trading fours or eights” with soloists.

  Equally important are conventions concerning appropriate schemes of rhythmic density and the shape of an accompaniment overall, which govern the actual application of drum vocabulary. Connie Kay remembers Sid Catlett teaching “little things. He’d stop by where I was working and tell me my left hand was too inactive or my beat on the ride cymbal was too loud, and he’d show me things at his house.”21 Akira Tana was working with Helen Humes down in New Orleans when, at the beginning of one number, he began “playing all these rhythmic figures.” Floyd Smith, the guitarist, looked over and said, “What are you doing? If you’re going to build a house, you have to build the foundation first, then build on top of that. But if you don’t have the foundation, what good is it? . . . Everything is going to collapse.” After that, Tana simplified his playing and concentrated on swinging.

  Keith Copeland recollects that “the lesson I always learned from my father and from other soloists was to see where the soloist starts off and to build in intensity with the soloist. Don’t give him too much in the beginning,” he asserts. “If the soloist starts off real busy and bums right from the beginning, then you’re going to have to come up to his energy level and build even higher before the solo’s over. But other soloists want to start fairly relaxed and build to high intensity as they go along.”

  Beyond learning such general principles and sampling the vocabulary of a variety of different drummers, many students focus on a particular mentor, absorbing the mentor’s precise bundle of musical traits, gaining the ability to improvise new drum parts in the mentor’s performance style. As described earlier, one trait associated with “Philly” Joe Jones is his predilection for rudimental drum figures. Personal musical profiles also include signature patterns, such as “Philly” Joe Jones’s rim shot—the famous “Philly lick”—and Art Blakey’s rim shots and powerful press roll.22 According to Keith Copeland, just as unique is Blakey’s articulation of a ride cymbal beat in relation to his hi-hat pattern “on two and four, which he kept going constantly, even when he soloed.”

  Roy Haynes’s concept, on the other hand, is a “little busier and more complicated rhythmically,” Copeland says. “He wouldn’t always play the hi-hat on two and four. He broke up the cymbal time, playing all kinds of little fills between his two hands. . . . When I first heard Haynes perform, he didn’t seem to playa constant pulse of any kind,” Copeland recalls, “yet I could feel a beat coming from all of his broken rhythmic figures. I said to myself, ‘Wow, that’s another way of playing altogether!’” Charli Persip, too, praises Haynes’s unique approach, describing his “very sharp snap, crackle, sassy, shisazz sound in the hi-hat and snare drum. We used to call him ‘Snap, Crackle, and Pop’ because he had that kind of rhythm.”

  As in solo performance, the relative melodic and harmonic sensitivity that drummers bring to their accompaniment, and the degree to which they acknowledge the structural elements of a piece, also distinguish personal styles. Many revere Max Roach, not only for his unique signature patterns, but for his “melodic approach to rhythm,” as Charli Persip puts it. “Max was so musical,” Kenny Washington adds, remembering his own indebtedness to Roach. “Through records, he was the first cat to teach me about melody and form and tuning the drums.” When Washington studied Roach’s recordings and played with them in practice routines, he noticed that Roach improvised different rhythmic patterns during the contrasting harmonic sections of progressions. Other admirers describe how Roach made periodic references to the melodies of pieces by quoting the rhythmic elements of phrases, at times even simulating their contours. Gary Bartz explains that, from the soloist’s viewpoint, Roach’s practice of “playing the melody” in the context of an accompaniment “always lets you know where you are” with respect to the composition’s form.

  Roach’s renown as a leader in the “melodic school” of drumming finds a parallel in Elvin Jones’s renown as a leader in the “polyrhythmic school.” Among other approaches, Jones routinely superimposes patterns derived from triple meters upon those derived from duple meters. “Elvin was breaking up the time on the cymbal,” Keith Copeland explains, “and he had a hell of a feeling of six going through all of his playing. He was playing time, but it was like he was dancing with the time, all around these quarter-note triplets and stuff happening against the ride cymbal. It was so laid back. He could do it at fast tempos too. He could still emphasize the time and dance with it, and he’d never miss the ‘one.’ You always knew where he was.” Of course, there is more to the contribution of great mentors among accompanists than the simple identification of prominent characteristics in the styles through which they made extraordinary contributions to the jazz tradition. As long as innovative drummers continue interacting with one another, features of performances they appreciate in others, as well as their own stylistic experimentation, continue to inspire their artistic development.

  In the sixties and the seventies, innovators Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette built upon the practices of their predecessors, taking particular interest in the increased rhythmic activity of Max Roach and Elvin Jones fleshing out their roles as accompanists. The young virtuosos cultivated what has become known as the soloistic concept of drum accompaniment. Musicians adopting this approach within rhythm sections improvise parts that possess the complexity and density of patterns formerly associated with drum solos, providing an intense musical commentary on the featured soloist’s performance. “The role of the drummer has changed so much.” Akira Tana says, “that today you find a lot of drummers not just keeping the time anymore. I mean, you could take away the rest of the group, and the drummer would be soloing throughout everything. That’s the kind of respectability that the drums have now.”

  The Piano

  In jazz’s early period, the piano was a variable component of jazz groups; since then, it has come to playa fundamental role within the jazz rhythm section.23 In its unique capacity, the piano typically shares various tasks with the string bass and drums. Like the bass, the piano can suggest harmonic form through the performance of its own bass line, but it can also represent the harmony explicitly through the performance of chords. Like the drums, the piano can punctuate the music rhythmically, yet it has the ability to mix short accentuating punches with long sustained sound. Introducing constantly changing shapes into the accompaniment, the pianist can repeat the same rhythmic pattern while altering chord voicings, or hold particular voicings constant while applying them to different rhythmic patterns. Taking different tacks, the pianist sometimes invents a single-line counterpoint to the soloist’s phrases or improvises melodic fills between them as commentaries.

  From the many approaches to accompaniment that favor particular musical structures and different aspects of the piano’s role, artists commonly distinguish two, in particular, as characteristic: the block chord and the orchestral approaches. In the block chord approach, both hands strike the keys simultaneously, producing vertical harmonic structures in a highly rhythmic comping style. The inventive, ever-changing patterns of accentuation the pianist creates over the course of the chord progression, and their fit with patterns of the rest of the ensemble, are equally important to the pianist’s creative harmony.

  Learners develop a vocabulary of comping patterns by analyzing recordings, performing with professional groups, and observing the interaction of seasoned improvisers at informal music-making events. “The advantage of jam sessions was that you could learn what a horn player expects or would like to hear from a piano player,” Tommy Flanagan remembers. “Such things were often discussed. It was also good to see what other pianists played behind soloists. At close hand, you could see how they really accompan
ied someone else.”

  Trial and error follows observation. At a practice session, an expert saxophonist once demonstrated several comping patterns on the piano for a student and requested that he take up their performance so that the teacher could improvise a saxophone solo over them. When the student tried to reproduce and maintain the figures in the face of the contrasting solo part, however, he discovered that his grasp on the patterns was more vague than he had realized; their complex mix of on-beat and off-beat alternations and sustained chords eluded him. Impeding the student’s comprehension was the fact that his teacher had not tapped his foot when demonstrating the figure, nor had he given any other direct indication of the beat. “In the beginning, it was very frustrating. I got thrown off right away because I couldn’t figure out where ‘one’ was. It sounded simple when he played them on the piano, but when I tried to imitate him, I couldn’t figure out how the patterns fit into the measure and into the progression.”

  Once students become familiar with jazz’s conventional comping figures and what seem like abstract rhythmic relationships to the underlying structure of pieces, they can infer the latter from the former. For many, this skill develops only gradually, as students practice mentally superimposing a model of the piece on comping figures when absorbing them from demonstrations, and subsequently practice retaining the model as a point of reference when performing the figures in their own improvised accompaniments.

  Differing from the punctuating, block chord approach to piano accompaniment is another described variously as “orchestral,” “pianistic,” or “choral.” This approach fully exploits the piano and creates wide-ranging textures, in which there is a constant interplay among different voices. Pianists can maximize their instrument’s inherent versatility by improvising intricate syncopations and polyrhythms with the independent play of the fingers, exploiting eighty-eight keys and just over seven octaves. They may improvise dramatic intervallic leaps between the two hands or interweave simultaneous melodies, inner lines, and bass parts, producing a dense polyphonic fabric throughout an accompaniment.

  Within the bounds of different approaches, pianists juggle possibilities for interpreting harmony in the creation of voicings. The considerations when accompanying other soloists are the same as when formulating a left-hand accompaniment to their own solo lines. At every turn, they make decisions as to the registral placement of chords, the number and nature of chord elements, and their precise arrangement. As described earlier (exx.3.6 through exx 3.12), players’ individual practices for interpreting chord progressions reflect such harmonic concepts as emphasizing harmony based on intervals of thirds or fourths in the construction of chords. Each approach provides distinctive color.

  Pianists like Al Haig emphasize spare voicings with only two elements, at times playing only the root and seventh. Thelonious Monk makes use of dissonant intervals like seconds.24 Others like Red Garland favor four- to six-voice chords that alternate or combine sevenths and thirds in the left hand. With the developments of modal jazz, many pianists, such as McCoy Tyner—a leader in this movement—would feature voicings in fourths. Representing a related development, contemporary pianists tend to play “less left-hand root music” than their predecessors (DF). Practices like omitting chord roots, building chords around fourths, and increasing color tones result in enlarging the harmonic ambiguity of voicings. In Bill Evans’s impressionistic style, rootless left-hand voicings sometimes imply a choice of several chord roots, allowing the right hand to play “contrasting chords, sometimes setting up dual harmonic implications.”25 This was a point of fascination for Emily Remler, who, as a learner, imitated Bill Evans’s characteristic “four-note chords, with fourths on the bottom and thirds on the top.” Other students emulated Evans’s dense, close-voiced chords, including pitch clusters (LG).

  Each pianist’s musical personality also expresses itself through the relative complexity and density of his or her style of accompaniment. Performances by Count Basie and Monk are relatively spare. Pianists such as Horace Silver, Cecil Taylor, and Jaki Byard are often just the opposite, creating dense or busy musical textures behind soloists. Personal features also emerge in the artist’s precise vocabulary of comping patterns and their application within the context of form, as in the balance of on-beat to off-beat accents each favors in rhythmic punctuations. Some emphasize regular time-keeping patterns. Erroll Garner produces, at times, a “continuous strumming in his left hand, articulated by occasional accents in the lower register” as if re-creating the full accompaniment of the “swing rhythm section.”26 Pianists like Thelonious Monk comp with unpredictable, angular rhythms.

  Beyond the general characteristics of individual comping styles, pianists make decisions within the boundaries of each composition and from one solo-ist to the next to lend distinctiveness to a group’s music. Pianists constantly determine what emphasis to place on particular rhythmic patterns, where precisely to emphasize repetition and change, when to provide formal markers, and when to withhold them. Like other rhythm section players, they can vary the accompaniment in relation to a piece’s harmonic-rhythmic sections, delineating form at different structural levels.

  To portray large structural units, pianists can punctuate the music rhythmically with block chords over an A section, then create a contrasting texture by improvising sweeping free-rhythmic arpeggios over the B section, thus floating the time. In subtler terms, they can outline short structural units by repeating a crisply articulated off-beat pattern over the course of four-measure progressions, then resolve the pattern’s tension with a chord on the downbeat of the fifth. At the same time, players may use different kinds of voicings to set off a piece’s features, for example, shifting the balance between explicit and implicit interpretations of chords from one section of the larger progression to another.

  Additionally, they may embellish progressions with personal chord substitutions. According to taste, pianists can increase or decrease the progression’s density, and emphasize or ignore distinctive features of the original model in their own interpretations of it. An example of unusually spare density is the practice of an eccentric like Thelonious Monk, who would sometimes strike an occasional chord, then rise from the keyboard to perform an animated dance around the piano before returning to strike another.

  Some pianists are generally less concerned with explicit time-keeping aspects of their role and may consequently minimize or abandon the performance of repeating structural markers. They are more concerned, rather, with developing, according to their own internal logic, original ideas that occur to them, or developing ideas that emerge from the collective conversational aspects of improvisation. While situating their overall accompaniments within the larger chorus form, their parts’ successive rhythmic figures, phrase structures, and thematic episodes overlap the major harmonic-rhythmic components of the composition. Comparing the comping styles of three influential artists, Red Garland, McCoy Tyner, and Herbie Hancock, demonstrates the varied art of jazz piano accompaniment (exx. 12. 10a–b).

  Like the styles of the horn players they accompany, the styles of pianists and other rhythm section players ultimately include personal musical traits, vocabulary patterns, and improvisation concepts, fused together with those of various teachers. When drummers fulfill the general role of propelling a band, for example, they may choose between the alternative models of Max Roach’s melodic approach or Elvin Jones’s polyrhythmic approach. Within such guidelines, they select different possibilities for the orchestration of their patterns, maintaining time with a constant hi-hat cymbal beat or dividing up the time among the drum set’s components. Over the course of the performance, they increase or decrease their use of rudimental figures in a particular part of the piece’s structure, whereas in another part they rely upon fills learned from their mentors or mix their elements with their own. Similarly, when bass players and pianists improvise their accompaniments, they vary and recombine their precise vocabulary patterns and apply the gener
al principles absorbed from analyzing inventions, those of their mentors and their own. Other times, accompanists depart from patterns or principles familiar to them in order to pursue radical musical ideas that occur to them in performance.

  To fulfill their roles effectively, the rhythm section players constantly negotiate between each other’s artistic creations, striving to formulate mutually complementary parts. Over the years, pianists, drummers, and bass players have assumed greater independence from one another, facing increased challenges of performance and invention. Not only must they compose interesting individual parts, but they must confidently uphold them amid the group’s dynamic and complex musical texture.

  Conventions of Accompaniment Associated with Different Idioms

  As implied above, performance practices associated with different instruments intersect other practices associated with different generations of artists and their respective style periods. Consequently, when rhythm section players join bands with an allegiance to a particular idiom, their knowledge of its stylistic conventions shapes their expectations for group interplay and guides their musical accompaniment. “When I was the house bass player at the Jazz Showcase, the concept of many of the musicians I played with was a swinging kind of bebop,” Rufus Reid recalls. “Bebop required straight-ahead walking bass lines without much in the way of syncopated rhythmic embellishments or jagged rhythmic lines. Also, no matter who I played with, I knew what was going to go down harmonically. If it’s this chord, then you’re likely to hear this kind of bebop line played over it. Of course, different people play differently within that, but you can rest assured that it’s going to be in a certain fashion.”