Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Practices of the late hard bop idiom diverged considerably from those of its antecedents. “In the 1950s, rhythm sections became much more active in the music than they had ever been before, and the textural variety in the music became tremendous,” Chuck Israels relates.

  The bass was freed up from playing constant quarter notes. You could play note values that occurred in different places, in very fine subdivisions of the pulse while the actual pulse stayed the same. Bassists like Steve Swallow and I could play with a strong sense of rhythm without having to play every quarter note. Both of us were loose enough to be able to play a variety of note values and still play time. Sometimes, we would skip a quarter note and break up the steady bass pattern. You could come back in on the next quarter note or on an eighth-note subdivision or on a triplet subdivision, if you play it in the right place. Sometimes, if I were playing a piece in 3/4, I would play two dotted quarter notes, or I would play four quarter notes in a 3/4 measure. And if I laid them in there as an obvious polyrhythm, three against four, that was playing time to me. And that was the way that Bill Evans thought about it, too.

  Later, things loosened up even more with drummers like Elvin Jones, Pete La Roca, and Donald Bailey. The cymbal pattern was freed from playing a constant ding, ding, ding, ding to varieties of patterns that implied ding, ding, a-ding, ding but were not exactly like that. The drummer’s polyrhythms, what they would do with their left hands and left and right feet, also became much more complex. They’d play polyrhythms anywhere in the measure, placing rhythms across the main 4/4 pulse or across the barlines.

  During the sixties, the avant-garde advocated even greater liberty for the rhythm section. In some instances, free jazz groups abandoned meter as a compositional constraint and avoided conventional rhythmic vocabulary. “Albert Ayler opened me up so wide, in terms of listening and playing as a drummer,” Ronald Shannon Jackson declares.

  He’d say, “Fill all that space out. I don’t care how you do it, but do it.” He didn’t want any space or holes in the music. He wanted to hear rhythms allover. The only thing he’d tell me was, “No time, I don’t want to hear ching-ka-ching-ka-ding—no bebop.” In other words, he didn’t want to hear the boom-boom-boom-boom bass drum pattern from the swing period or the syncopated, accented bass drum pattern from bebop. There was a pulse to the music because of the melody being played, but not the kind of pulse you were normally listening for. The time-feeling was more suspended, like waves that moved along with the song. You didn’t have to worry about the time. You were either playing before, or after, or in the middle of the notes Albert was playing. He would play three notes, like the first three notes of “Summertime,” and each note he played made you hear a pattern of fifteen other notes around them. I was just phrasing on the drums around the notes that he was playing.

  Tied to these musical practices are values that relate to the general function of instruments within the rhythm section. “It takes time to learn the proper role of the drums in different groups.” Akira Tana says. “There are different ways of playing in which drummers express themselves in mainstream groups, in avant-garde groups, and in groups which came along in that transitional period between the mainstream and the avant-garde. There are different levels at which you can play, different ways and different times in which the drummer expresses himself. It takes time to learn when to play a supportive role, just playing time, or when to take a more aggressive role, introducing a lot of different figures and not concerning yourself with playing time.”

  Free jazz groups that express concern for democratizing jazz minimize or eliminate: the distinctions between soloists and accompanists, at times involving band members in constant simultaneous solos throughout performances. Moreover, some groups reject altogether the use of pieces as formal structures guiding improvisation, depending rather on collective sensitivity to work out, in performance, a consensus concerning the music’s formal features of key, harmonic progression, and rhythmic organization. Lennie Tristano’s early experiments, unusual at the time, anticipated such practices. “As you may know,” Lee Konitz states, “we recorded the first totally free music in 1949 or so. It was just a couple of 78 rpm records. ‘Intuition’ was the name of one of them. And we were doing that kind of thing where we would just start playing with no plan at all. We knew each other well enough to be able to do that, and it was a lot of fun. . . . It’s very difficult to really make a fine art out of, but as a procedure, it’s one of the very, very important ones, I think, in playing together.”

  Other free jazz groups challenged earlier conventions associated with instrumentation and the length and dramatic shape of music presentations. Elvin Jones recalls a performance by John Coltrane’s quartet in which the entire three-hour program was devoted to improvising on a single composition.27 Keith Copeland attended another performance at Birdland where the quartet filled an hour-and-fifteen-minute set “with only two tunes.” The music was so intense that, to Copeland’s “complete and utter astonishment,” pianist McCoy Tyner and bassist Jimmy Garrison dropped out of one of the performances after the first fifteen minutes. This left Coltrane in front of Jones’s bass drum “just blowing up and down, an endless flow, [while Jones] remained in back of him just bashing, slashing, and crashing away.” Copeland was spellbound by the unconventional duet, having “never seen anything like it before. Trane and Elvin played at such an energy level all the time that it scared you to death the whole time you were listening to them. It was just a constant conversation between them, all the time. They broke all the rules I had learned about starting gradual at the beginning of solos and building from there. Trane would start off at a level that would be way up there, and he’d continue to go from there.”

  In marked contrast are the more recent conventions of fusion music, which carry familiar features from soul music, rock, and other popular musical genres into the arena of jazz performance, including, in some instances, a clearly delineated, danceable beat. Sometimes, fusion music connects the talents of rock and jazz musicians. At other times, jazz musicians switch to electric instruments and learn what they need from rock to draw upon its elements for use in jazz performance. In fusion groups, bass players called upon to perform rhythmic rock ostinatos commonly take up fender bass to complement the timbre and volume of electric pianos and synthesizers. “Today, rock drummers have a complex rhythmic language of their own, which is different from jazz,” maintains trumpeter Donald Byrd, who has contributed to fusion music. “It’s also a challenge to work within that.”28

  Unique Stylistic Fusions

  Whereas some band leaders organize groups around the conventions of a particular jazz idiom and strive to preserve its core characteristics, others find artistic stimulation in juxtaposing and integrating diverse idiomatic elements of jazz. As in the case of some jazz-rock fusion groups, leaders may accomplish this by hiring performers whose personal styles embody the aesthetic values of different performance schools. Gary Bartz cites an example of the fusion of swing and bebop: “Coleman Hawkins was the first to hire Thelonious Monk. From Hawkins, I learned that music doesn’t have to be dated. Hawk always kept up with the music.” In fact, when Hawkins first heard bebop, he expressed it as his intention to “surround” himself with proponents of the new music and make a recording.29 Years later, Max Roach, who with Dizzy Gillespie was part of Hawkins’s fusion record date, recounts that “when Cecil Taylor and I recorded together, people in both bebop and free jazz wondered what we were both up to, and many were skeptical. But we had a great time playing together.”

  In creating musical fusions, band members sometimes adapt the characteristic improvisational vocabulary of one idiom to another’s structural forms and repertory.30 “Louis Metcalf was somewhere between Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge stylistically,” Walter Bishop Jr. says. “It was a tremendous experience playing with his band, because I wanted to learn their tunes. They liked the freshness and drive that I brought to the band and were open enough to appreciat
e bebop. They let me do my thing, so I just played the way I normally played, but in their context.” In another instance, Red Rodney claims that “Ira Sullivan and I are still really bebop players, but we’ve embraced the newer modal-like forms and have molded our individual styles of playing toward them. The young people in our group also help us with this. We’re playing original tunes with today’s patterns, changes, modes, and feelings.”

  Alternatively, in performances, groups vary the stylistic constraints upon collective improvisation from one part of a piece to another. Earlier, Lonnie Hillyer described a Charles Mingus composition that depicts the chronological history of jazz, requiring band members to remain faithful to the style of each arranged episode from ragtime to the avant-garde. Representing another approach, groups may combine the performance practices of bebop and free jazz by alternating improvisations inside and outside a piece’s structure. Soloists may, for example, periodically perform free or atonal passages against the rhythm section’s conventional harmonic accompaniment, a dramatic effect that maximizes the tension between the parts before soloists return to the piece’s structure.

  Pursuing another approach, the rhythm section may follow the soloist’s lead in temporarily abandoning, then returning to, a piece’s harmony. In some such cases, an unvoiced and sometimes elastic model of the piece’s melody or rhythmic cycle serves as a structural referent. Lee Konitz recalls a period in the forties when Lennie Tristano wanted a strong group capable of playing “firmly together” within the structure of a song and then “letting it go outside, so to speak, from there.” The group could “expound upon it, and then come back into the song.” Also, as jazz has become “more and more flexible over the years,” Konitz explains, there has been that same opportunity, “within the particular discipline” of playing standards like “Stella by Starlight,” to improvise within the form, “as well as to take it out and bring it back—in the right place. Miles Davis’s groups with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter were able to do that extremely effectively.” Such flexibility depends upon the artist’s familiarity with the forms of compositions and “newer sophisticated improvisation techniques,” which have become part of the jazz tradition since the sixties. Kenny Washington places Joanne Brackeen and some of her peers in this context. Brackeen “played in the tradition, but very free,” he explains. “She would slow down the tempo or play straight ahead, and then all of a sudden play free, and then come back in. There is a way to play like that, in and out at the same time. Drummers like Jack DeJohnette, Billy Hart, and Al Foster do that very well.”

  Such approaches minimize or obscure conventional musical signposts of the structures of pieces, teasing, as a result, the perceptions of listeners and increasing the music’s challenges, ultimately testing each player’s independent grasp of form and self-assurance as improviser. Buster Williams describes his brief tenure with Miles Davis’s quintet. “Playing with Miles, I learned how to keep a structure in mind and play changes so loosely that you can play for some time without people knowing whether the structure is played or not, but then hit on certain points to indicate that you have been playing the structure all the time. When you hear those points being played, you just say, ‘Wow! It’s like the Invisible Man. You see him here and then you don’t. Then all of a sudden you see him over there and then you see him over here.’ And it indicates that it’s been happening all the time.”

  As some of these examples indicate, Miles Davis’s classic sixties quintet exemplified the cross-fertilization of different idiomatic practices. Striking a middle ground between hard bop groups that retained the aesthetic values of bebop, and avant-garde groups that improvised without formal vehicles, the quintet composed original pieces and arrangements with more ambiguous harmonic structures than bebop pieces and loosened the constraints upon melodic and harmonic invention.31

  During up-tempo compositions, for example, the quintet’s rhythm section often treated the elements of form allusively by producing a steady, unaccented beat that provided little indication of meter or measure. Ron Carter alternated between such regular quarter-note bass lines, fragmentary rhythmic patterns, and sustained pedal points, while Tony Williams provided an equally dynamic performance. In Williams’s innovative style, he commonly kept the time with the hi-hat, while producing constantly changing patterns on the ride cymbal, a practice requiring considerable reorientation of listeners accustomed to former bebop conventions.32 At times, Williams delineated the beat with simple, hard-driving cymbal patterns; at other times, he accompanied the soloist with poly-rhythmic waves of percussion that predominated within the group’s sound, encasing it in a brilliant, shimmering atmosphere of cymbal color and suspending the music’s feeling of time. Meanwhile, pianist Herbie Hancock punctuated the music with spare comping patterns or dropped out of the performance for extended periods. Altogether, the quintet’s conversational interplay was more intense than that of some bebop groups, but more restrained than that of some free jazz groups.

  Herbie Hancock elaborates upon the group’s artistic vision:

  What I was trying to do and what I feel they were trying to do was to combine—take these influences that were happening to all of us at the time and amalgamate them, personalize them in such a way that when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other hand—because Miles was that history. He was that link.

  We were sort of walking a tightrope with the kind of experimenting we were doing in music, not total experimentation, but we used to call it “controlled freedom.”33

  Davis’s quintet and other musical collaborations described above indeed epitomize the stylistic fusions, each one unique in itself, created by many jazz groups. Bands select and emphasize different features from the jazz community’s complex of performance practices, subtly rearranging and transforming their elements, striving to develop original approaches to collective improvisation. These processes highlight, once again, the limitations of applying conventional labels to style periods and idioms when describing the diversity of music making within the jazz tradition.

  Practices Established by the Bands of Renowned Artists

  As suggested above, the bands with leading soloists and rhythm section players commonly represent discrete models for collective performance. To Tommy Turrentine, each group displays distinguishable and consistent patterns of group interaction. “The Modem Jazz Quartet sounds altogether different from Erroll Garner’s trio,” he insists. “Then you’ve got Miles Davis’s rhythm section, Red Garland and Paul Chambers and ‘Philly’ Joe Jones. They had another way of playing. And then there’s Ahmad Jamal’s trio with Vernel Fournier and Israel Crosby. They had their own way of playing. Every band should have its own characteristics.” Correspondingly, youngsters learning how to function within a rhythm section strive to understand the relationship between the “ways of playing” adopted by their idols and those of fellow players. Don Pate explains that he “always identified with the particular unity that different groups had.” For Pate, “it was a trip to hear the different parts within the unity and to focus on who was playing what, to hear what different people were doing.”

  Appreciation for the aesthetic interdependence of styles of accompaniment associated with individual players has immediate application for students. When joining a band, performers typically assess the musical requirements of a position by recalling an idol’s performance in the context of a similar group. Band leaders themselves periodically suggest models to newcomers, proposing particular accompanists whose styles are compositionally compatible with the band.34 “Within most groups, the leaders would have some drummer in mind that epitomized the drums.” Ronald Shannon Jackson says. “You would almost have to play in a certain framework. They wouldn’t tell you precisely what to play, but I’ve had instances where they’d say, ‘Give me more of that Elvin Jones type of thing’ or ‘Give me more of that “Philly” Joe Jones type of thing.’ �
� Such allusions serve as a shorthand for a constellation of musical elements ranging from the artist’s original repertory of phrases and performance techniques to such subtle mannerisms as touch, articulation, phrasing, and time-feel. Sometimes leaders are even more specific. Dizzy Gillespie would “make” his drummers play a particular Art Blakey figure because, he claimed, “I must have that in my solos.”35

  In well-established bands, newcomers may also be expected to learn particular musical practices that have become conventionalized over time by players who formerly held their positions. This guarantees stylistic continuity within the group. “Since I was living in New York City, I was often the first drummer to play with certain bands that other drummers from Philadelphia and Boston played with later,” Max Roach recalls. “Sometimes, I had the chance to set up a certain kind of feeling in these bands. When some of the others came along, they would be required to do some of the things that I did, along with what they brought of their own.” Similarly, pianist Patti Bown remembers band leaders who advised her, “This is the person who played before you. That’s the sound I’d like to have.”

  In fact, despite the jazz community’s emphasis on originality, leaders may even fill the vacated chairs of featured soloists with other individuals who have absorbed elements of their predecessors’ styles.36 Just as band leader Teddy Hill replaced virtuoso Roy Eldridge with Dizzy Gillespie, band leader Billy Eckstine later replaced Gillespie with Fats Navarro. Eckstine remembers, “Great as Diz is . . . Fats played the book and you would hardly know that Diz had left the band. ‘Fat Girl’ played Dizzy’s solos, not note for note, but his ideas on Dizzy’s parts.” He adds that “the feeling was the same and there was just as much swing.”37 Miles Davis similarly replaced John Coltrane with Wayne Shorter because Shorter sounded “so close to Coltrane.” Fellow players referred to both saxophonists affectionately as “egg scramblers” for the rapid, intense mixtures of pitch and rhythm that characterized their improvisations.38 Hiring practices concerned with continuity of style and concept highlight the far-reaching influence of great thinkers within the jazz tradition, whether they contribute new compositional approaches to solo formulation or rhythm section accompaniment.