Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Performance Conventions Surrounding Repertory

  Accompanists also nurture practices that enlarge their flexibility across a broad repertory with variable demands. “What was great about playing with Eddie Harris was that his repertory covered many different styles.” Rufus Reid recalls. “We played many of his tunes, and he wanted you to play each tune in a way that suited its style. If Harris played a ballad, he wanted you to accompany him in a ballad style. What you played had to be pretty, and that was a challenge in itself.” Each genre deserves special consideration. “There is a big difference between playing an up-tempo piece and playing a ballad,” Akira Tana says. “You have to play with more space in a ballad. Since a ballad is slow and is one of the most expressive kinds of songs, you would probably play with brushes instead of sticks. It requires the development of a special touch, producing a unique texture and a color that differs from playing with sticks or mallets.” Ronald Shannon Jackson nicely elaborates the point:

  These are the kinds of things I learned from other musicians by playing in clubs. When you playa ballad, begin the tune with brushes, but when you get to the bridge, switch to mallets. Then switch back to brushes. Build up the singer until the middle or the last part of the song. To give more effect there, switch to sticks, increasing the dynamics. Don’t play the cymbals while she’s singing—play only softly, with brushes. Don’t play louder than anyone else is playing. Shape the dynamics so that you are at your loudest at the end of that person’s solo. At the end of a horn player’s solo, playa loud crash, putting a period at the end of his statement.

  Other types of jazz pieces require accompanists to perform specific rhythmic patterns. “Albert Dailey listens and he knows what’s needed.” Gary Bartz remarks. “When you ask for a samba, he knows how to playa samba. If you ask for a bossa nova, he knows how to playa bossa nova. All that’s important if you’re a piano player or a bass player or a drummer.” Similarly, in Eddie Harris’s band, “if it was a Latin tune.” Rufus Reid says, he and his friends “played Latin rhythms. If it was rock ‘n’ roll, we played rock ‘n’ roll. This meant if we were going to playa rock ‘n’ roll tune, I would listen to the radio to what a lot of rock bass players were doing at the time. We didn’t intermix styles like some do. It was very demanding and very challenging.” In some instances, particular repertory requires performance practices associated with its related idiom. “If it was a bebop type thing.” Reid continues, “Harris only wanted you to play in a bebop fashion, phrasing wise. If he said, ‘We’re now going to play outside or avant-garde,’ he didn’t want to hear any triads. He wanted a spacey kind of sound, and he would play freely—contours and colors. He’d alternate playing very fast with playing very slow.”

  As implied above, the overlapping conventions of idiom and repertory also suggest possibilities for complementary parts within the rhythm section and guide its collective accompaniment. Knowledge of these options is especially useful when arrangements are minimal or incomplete. During a rehearsal of a Latin piece by Walter Bishop Jr., Paul Brown read an arranged bass part that alternated between walking bass lines and a vamp section featuring a repeated rhythmic ostinato. In the absence of a specified drum part, Freddie Waits understood that he should perform variations on a simple swing pattern to reinforce the regular rhythm of Brown’s walking bass lines, then switch to improvised patterns with a strong Latin flavor during the vamp sections, providing a rhythmic counterpoint to the bass part. Rufus Reid’s experience is similar. “Interaction in a band means responding sensitively to whatever the other people are playing. It’s a matter of being complementary,” he explains. “If I’m playing with a rhythm section and the drummer is playing with a two-beat feeling, I won’t start playing a walking bass line in 4/4 time. Or, if the drummer is playing a swing beat and I play a bossa nova beat, that would be a vivid example of not locking in, stylistically. Or vice versa. If he’s playing a bossa nova beat, I wouldn’t playa walking bass line unless I was told specifically that that was what was wanted.”

  In some instances, rhythm section players also heed performance models cultivated by individuals reputed to be successful at interpreting particular genres. “If you’re playing modal tunes, you have got long vamps on one chord.” Kenny Barron declares. “What works best in that kind of situation is playing your McCoy Tynerish stuff. You have to use different colors and things like that.” In part, Barron refers here to Tyner’s innovative interpretations of chords voiced in fourths.

  Similarly, features of specific pieces and renditions by the composers themselves can suggest guidelines to other musicians, leading, over time, to formalized approaches to interpretation and accompaniment. “A Monk tune is so profound that you have to be thinking about every note that you play,” Fred Hersch says. “The whole tune is compositionally tight. Each little inflection—where Monk places an eighth note on one side of the beat or another—means something. Improvising on a Monk tune is like an extension of the composition, because that’s the way Monk plays, and that’s the way he writes. So, your improvisation grows out of the piece itself.”

  Leroy Williams agrees:

  Monk’s music itself demands a certain kind of accompaniment because the music is so strong. Not many people write that way or think that way. It’s so strong that you had to be a strong personality to get your own thing off in it. I used to hear all the drummers that played with Monk, and I thought they sounded alike when they played with him. Now that I’ve played with Monk, I can understand why. There’s a certain feeling, a certain strength, that his music has, the rhythm of it, so that you just had to go with it. There are certain off-beat accents, and the music falls a certain way. At first, I couldn’t relax with Monk’s music, but eventually I learned to. I started listening to the music more, tuning into the little, finer things.

  Conventions Associated with Instrumentation

  Performance practices involving a group’s instrumentation figure into strategies for accompaniment and can affect each part’s formulation within the rhythm section. Some pianists, for example, tend to improvise comping patterns in the piano’s middle register to avoid potential conflicts with the bass player in the lower register or with soloists in the upper register.39 As a bass player performing “with a horn player,” Calvin Hill “might play up in the same range [as the horn], but it might make a [singer’s] voice sound weak if I did that. I’d have to really come down to the bottom register of the bass to give a singer support.” Playing with Betty Carter brought about a similar challenge. For her, Hill “would play more low notes and be more sensitive to volume than with a horn player.”

  As different combinations of instruments perform together from one section of an arrangement to another, the rhythm section constantly adapts. Pianists sometimes double their voicings or melodic figures in both hands and move entirely into the treble or the bass register to match the increased volume of other instruments or to complement changes in the music’s overall texture. Drummers similarly vary the dynamics and orchestration of their patterns to provide different soloists with sympathetic accompaniment. “Since the intensity of a piano and a horn is different,” Walter Bishop Jr. asserts, “a drummer should not accompany me like he would a horn player. He should play the top part of the cymbal, where it doesn’t ring as much, or play with one stick instead of two, or use brushes.” Max Roach summarizes the conventions:

  While every different situation presents special problems, there are some cardinal rules. For example, you should try to match the timbres of the particular instrument you’re accompanying. If a piano solo is followed by a saxophone solo, you should give each proper consideration, using your imagination to play things that are musically appropriate behind each player and making the multiple percussion set blend with the entrance of each new instrument. To change and keep everything interesting, you might use brushes on the snare drum to accompany the pianist and then switch to sticks on the cymbals when the horn player enters. If there’s a soft passage wher
e a trumpeter is playing with a mute, you wouldn’t pick up some heavy sticks and start pounding. By the same token, if you are backing an electric guitarist who is blasting away, you wouldn’t pick up brushes and tip lightly, or you wouldn’t be heard.

  Players featured in groups with unconventional instrumentation, or within portions of arrangements that feature unusual combinations of instruments, sometimes experiment with approaches to improvisation that would be inappropriate in other contexts. They may even assume different musical roles, including that of an absent instrument. In such situations, improvisers often have carried over and reinterpreted, within unique musical settings, conventional performance practices associated with other kinds of groups and instruments. With respect to early jazz practices, Jelly Roll Morton advised pianists, “Always have a melody going . . . against a background of perfect harmony and plenty of riffs. . . . No jazz piano player can really play good jazz unless they try to give an imitation of a band, that is, by providing a basis of riffs.”40 Years later, within small hard bop groups, pianists like Jaki Byard incorporated into their accompaniments of soloists specific rhythmic figures and “thick close voicings” derived from riffs and “arranged . . . shout choruses” of big band accompaniments.41

  This principle of exchange holds true as well for improvisers experimenting with the avant-garde. “When Anthony Braxton and I did our duo album, Birth and Rebirth,” Max Roach recalls, “Anthony just automatically simulated a bass line on the saxophone, playing half notes and whole notes rhythmically whenever I played a solo. I accompanied him, and he made sure he accompanied me. That was the beauty of the first album we did together.” Similarly, Keith Copeland greatly appreciates the liberty he had to experiment in the atmosphere of jam sessions without pianists and guitarists. He recollects that

  Albert Mangelsdorff didn’t use any chord instruments at his jam sessions in Germany—just bass, drums, and horns. It gave me the freedom to really experiment with the way Elvin Jones was playing when he played with other people who didn’t have piano players in their groups. It was perfect for me at that time because I was really getting into Elvin, and I was trying to play like him with all those poly-rhythms. I was just starting to understand that then, and I was trying to duplicate that feeling. I could really do that with Albert because there was nothing to hold me back like having to make it fit with someone else who was comping. If someone else was comping, I couldn’t necessarily take those liberties. Also, when there was no comping instrument like piano and I was just playing off the bass, I had to hear the changes from the bass and the way that the bass was relating to what I was playing. I really had to know the songs and know the changes to play that way.

  Rhythm section players draw upon their knowledge of the interrelated performance practices sampled above to improvise compatible accompaniments within arrangements, thereby satisfying the group’s expectations for successful interaction. These practices have evolved over the history of jazz as a consequence of technological changes in instrument construction, the advent of amplification, the movement of jazz from the dance floor to the concert stage, reinterpretation of former conventions by great musicians and bands, and artistic innovation. For each generation of improvisers, in effect, the jazz tradition’s cumulative performance practices have served as general compositional guidelines, delimiting otherwise infinite possibilities for invention within each instrument’s part and contributing cohesion to collective musical invention.

  THIRTEEN

  Give and Take

  The Collective Conversation and Musical Journey

  Usually, everyone takes their cue from the soloist, but anyone could initiate something and we would all follow suit. Buster Williams may play something and I’ll say, “Oh, yeah?” and try to follow him because it makes the group sound more cohesive. It’s a matter of give and take.—Kenny Barron

  Musicians discussing the background and knowledge they bring to performances comment often on how much more complex jazz is than it is possible to verbalize in an interview. Clearly, talking about the preparation for collective improvisation is one thing, the actual experience of improvising quite another.1 “No matter what you’re doing or thinking about beforehand;” Chuck Israels explains, “from the very moment the performance begins, you plunge into that world of sounds. It becomes your world instantly, and your whole consciousness changes.”

  Despite the difficulties of verbalizing about essentially nonverbal aspects of improvisation, artists favor two metaphors in their own discussions about the subject that provide insight into unique features of their experience. One metaphor likens group improvisation to a conversation that players carry on among themselves in the language of jazz. The second likens the experience of improvising to going on a demanding musical journey. From the performance’s first beat, improvisers enter a rich, constantly changing musical stream of their own creation, a vibrant mix of shimmering cymbal patterns, fragmentary bass lines, luxuriant chords, and surging melodies, all winding in time through the channels of a composition’s general form. Over its course, players are perpetually occupied: they must take in the immediate inventions around them while leading their own performances toward emerging musical images, retaining, for the sake of continuity, the features of a quickly receding trail of sound. They constantly interpret one another’s ideas, anticipating them on the basis of the music’s predetermined harmonic events.

  Without warning, however, anyone in the group can suddenly take the music in a direction that defies expectation, requiring the others to make instant decisions as to the development of their own parts. When pausing to consider an option or take a rest, the musician’s impression is of a “great rush of sounds” passing by, and the player must have the presence of mind to track its precise course before adding his or her powers of musical invention to the group’s performance. Every maneuver or response by an improviser leaves its momentary trace in the music. By journey’s end, the group has fashioned a composition anew, an original product of their interaction.

  Striking a Groove

  Among all the challenges a group faces, one that is extremely subtle yet fundamental to its travels is a feature of group interaction that requires the negotiation of a shared sense of the beat, known, in its most successful realization, as striking a groove.2 Incorporating the connotations of stability, intensity, and swing, the groove provides the basis for “everything to come together in complete accord” (HO). “When you get into that groove;” Charli Persip explains, “you ride right on down that groove with no strain and no pain—you can’t lay back or go forward. That’s why they call it a groove. It’s where the beat is, and we’re always trying to find that.” The notion is shared. “I don’t care what kind of style a group plays as long as they settle into a groove where the rhythm keeps building instead of changing around;” Lou Donaldson asserts. “It’s like the way an African hits a drum. He hits it a certain way, and after a period of time, you feel it more than you did when he first started. He’s playing the same thing, but the quality is different—it’s settled into a groove. It’s like seating tobacco in a pipe. You put some heat on it and make it expand. After a while, it’s there. It’s tight.”

  Although potentially involving all band members, the groove depends especially on the rhythm section’s precise coordination, the relationship between drummer and the bass player usually being the most critical. “For things to happen beautifully in the ensemble;” Charli Persip metaphorizes, “the drummer and the bass player must be married. When I listen to the drummer and the bass player together, I like to hear wedding bells.” One basic obligation of this union involves the synchronization between the walking bass line and the cymbals’ time-keeping pattern (fig. 13.1). “You play every beat in complete rhythmic unison with the drummer;” Chuck Israels explains, “thousands upon thousands of notes together, night after night after night. If it’s working, it brings you very close. It’s a kind of emotional empathy that you develop very quickly. The relations
hip is very intimate:”

  Because the groove depends on the musicians’ ability to maintain a constant beat at different tempos, artists concentrate on developing precise timing. Many prepare for their roles by playing with a metronome. Leroy Williams and Akira Tana also practiced playing time along with records, getting, as one drummer put it, as close as possible to performing with a band without actually joining. Better amplification and the advent of high-quality earphones have greatly facilitated such methods. With earlier equipment, drummers needed to exercise great restraint when practicing in order not to drown out the sound. At times, they simply pressed their ears to a radio speaker, restricting their movements to brushes on a snare drum, or, as in Charli Persip’s case, they would mime their accompaniment by “playing in the air” along with the music. Music Minus One records have also served as useful tools for students learning to coordinate their performances with those of other rhythm section players.3

  Youngsters would also benefit from the guidance of seasoned rhythm section players. Rufus Reid practiced formulating bass lines with an older drummer who maintained “straight cymbal time” and regulated subtleties in Reid’s performance by periodically calling out, “You’re dragging, man,” or, “It’s not swinging enough.” Buster Williams’s father, an expert drummer and bass player, coached his son’s bass playing from the drum set, “giving instructions from the drummer’s standpoint” and coordinating the performance of both parts. Williams eventually learned to operate the hi-hat cymbal’s foot pedal while performing the bass so that he himself could simulate the interplay of both instruments during practice routines.