Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Once the sound of the interaction of two instruments has been absorbed, many musicians acquire, as a kind of sixth sense, the ability to hear their absent partner. Ronald Shannon Jackson routinely practices improvisation to an imagined ground of bass lines, and Calvin Hill, a bass player and an amateur marathon runner, when preparing for physically taxing performances with Max Roach’s band, used to jog ninety miles a week to the internal resonance of Roach’s ride cymbal beat.

  As youngsters enter into successive musical relationships, they discover a world of subtle nuances involving the collective maintenance of the beat. At issue are concepts of rhythmic phrasing and differing timbral and acoustical qualities. As Akira Tana knows,

  finding the time is very important. So is how the time feels. A drummer can be very stiff or loose when he plays in terms of the elasticity of the beat. He can play the beat very stiff and staccato, like a European march with a straight eighth-note feel, or he can play more with a swinging triplet feel. I was recently talking to Percy Heath about this. Part of the elasticity of the beat also comes from the way the bass player articulates his notes together with the cymbal beat. It can be made to seem long or short according to whether the bass player plays staccato or whether he sustains his notes between the cymbal beats.

  Sensitive to specific timbral characteristics of different instruments and their particular attack envelope, Chuck Israels also listens for “a certain sound” that he and the drummer make together when they play.

  The drummer has such a percussive sound because the beat is carried on the ride cymbal; a wood or Teflon drum stick hitting that metal cymbal makes such a definite sound when it articulates the beginning of each beat. As a bass player, you add your somewhat less defined and fatter bass sound to fill up the space in between those cymbal beats. It feels good when you feel you’re right in between those beats. If you feel like your sound is leaking out the front or back of them, you feel a whole lot less comfortable.

  Eventually, musicians learn to make distinctions in the interpretation of time that will enable them to articulate a regular four-beat pattern in slightly different positions, before, on top of, and after the beat, without changing the actual tempo. These precise positions, often imperceptible to the untrained ear, assume, for experienced improvisers, such tangible qualities that the beat seems a physical object, a palpable force. “There’s an edge I feel when I’m playing walking bass lines on top of the beat. It’s like if you are walking into the wind;” Rufus Reid observes poetically, “you feel a certain resistance when your body is straight, but you feel a greater resistance if you lean into the wind:”

  Personal preferences sometimes require minor accommodations among group members. Leroy Williams discovered that saxophonist Johnny Griffin is “the type of player who likes a drummer to play way up on the beat:” Although Williams “wasn’t what you’d call an on-top-of-the-beat player at the time”—it wasn’t “my natural flow,” he says—he tried “to play more that way for Griffin.” In another instance, a bass player known for playing “way behind on the beat” joined a drummer known for playing “way up on the beat.” Despite their opposing tendencies, they adjusted their differences to maintain a “steady, swinging groove” throughout the performance (HL). Tied to individual preferences is the role that the drummer plays in discourse with the soloists. “If you play really ahead of the beat, where you’re pushing everybody and telling them where to go,” Paul Wertico says, “you’re carrying a big responsibility [as to] the direction of a solo ... [whereas] if you just sit on the beat or on the back of the beat a little bit, you can just kind of cruise and add periods and commas to their statements.”

  Musicians strive to avoid major changes in tempo, although subtle fluctuations within the groove are tolerable. If one musician shifts positions from behind the beat to just before the beat and others follow suit, the group’s overall tempo might edge ahead slightly, then steady itself within a margin of acceptable variation. Rufus Reid refers to this practice when he explains that “some guys can play in tempo together as it swells in and out. As long as everybody is doing it together, they sound like they are perfectly in time:” Indeed, when groups desire greater expressive freedom, such controlled flexibility enhances their music. “When you’re in the rhythm section and everyone can play in all those places [i.e., on the beat, behind the beat, and on top of the beat];” Don Pate observes, “then you’re not limited .... There can be a shift in where the beat is. Everyone responds to it ... as opposed to the predictability of having to stay in one place:”

  At the same time as musicians introduce subtle variations in the tempo’s ebb and flow as a matter of personal taste, the piece’s structural features are also influencing them. “When I’m playing walking bass lines, I try to have the line moving somewhere,” Reid continues. “This has a lot to do with harmonic phrasing. If I’m playing a ii-V-I progression, I’m not just playing the notes of the chord. I’m moving toward V when I’m playing ii. I’m constantly flowing, pushing toward I. If you think consciously of moving somewhere harmonically when you play, it assimilates this swinging sound, because harmonic sound is motion:”

  Improvisers sometimes increase the tempo slightly as a piece’s harmonic rhythm increases and then relax it during static parts of the progression. They may increase the tempo slightly over the harmonic cadence at the close of a chorus, only to relax it with the beginning of the new cycle. Through the entire performance, group members alternate between asserting their own interpretations of time and adjusting them to those of other players.

  The Rhythm Section’s Improvisation within the Groove

  Defining the beat is its ongoing responsibility, but the rhythm section must also attend to other demands in order to ensure a truly complementary performance. Toward such ends, the players in the rhythm section delineate the piece’s harmonic-rhythmic form, support one another’s evolving lines of thought, and fashion individual parts with “inherent interest and change.” Musicians often rotate their time-keeping responsibility. “You can play in a way that either states the time or implies it;” Walter Bishop Jr. explains. “My preference is to have someone state the time when the others aren’t, so that what the others are doing works against the time. Then you have poly time, and it becomes much more exciting, much more creative.”

  Typically, either the bass player or the drummer provides an anchor or rhythmic ground for the more adventurous performances of the rest of the band. According to Wynton Marsalis, “The bass player is the key. He needs to keep a steady pulse, to provide the bottom and to hold the music together. This frees the drummer up to play.” Within this arrangement, it is a challenge for bass players to maintain a steady time-keeping pattern in relation to the tug and pull of their counterpart’s complex off-beat figures, even if drummers include a regular reference point within their parts by playing the hi-hat cymbal on beats two and four. “Donald Bailey is an incredible drummer this way,” Chuck Israels remembers. “I made a record with him and Hampton Hawes, and his playing was constantly churning and changing rhythmically. It was inventive and interesting all the time so that you never had a moment in which you were not being kept alert” (exx. 13.1 a-c).

  On the other hand, the bass can also “be free at times;” Marsalis observes, “but when the bass player gets free, the drummer has to be restricted somewhat. It’s just a trade-off.” Calvin Hill shares this view. “Last year when I heard Richard Davis, I was knocked out by the creative energy and natural flow to his bass playing,” Hill recalls. “Something was always happening. Rhythmically, he’d walk for a while. Then he’d stop and start playing a broken tempo for a while. Then, maybe, he’d switch to a little bit of arco [bowed bass]. It was very refreshing and very stimulating.”

  The accompaniment that Roy Haynes and Buster Williams provided Kenny Barron’s solo at one New York concert demonstrates a particularly successful and sensitive interchange between bass player and drummer. When Haynes generated complicated rhythmic
figures that obscured the beat, Williams stabilized the music with a steady walking bass line, but when Haynes reduced his part to a regular swing pattern, Williams varied his own part’s rhythmic tension by repeatedly venturing outside the time, then returning to it. Typically, he entered the performance behind the beat and improvised intricate, gradually accelerating melodic phrases that aligned with the patterns of the other players at major structural points, resolving like successive waves that overtake one another, then break together (exx. 13.2a-b).

  Such examples suggest that improvisers are concerned not only with sharing their time-keeping role, but with occupying complementary space within the music’s texture and achieving a collective transparency of sound in which each part is discernible. Within horizontal space, musicians seek to create a complementary level of rhythmic activity by improvising patterns whose rhythmic density is appropriate for the room that others leave for them. In vertical space, they try to improvise in a melodic range that does not obscure the performances of others.

  Here, the pianist figures prominently within the accompaniment’s larger equation. In McCoy Tyner’s group, Tyner “played a lot of notes on piano” and the drummer “played a lot of rhythmic things.” Because their contributions “seemed to fill up every space” in the music, Calvin Hill confined his bass performance to “Eastern things like drones,” playing them in a manner that was “not too rhythmic:” Hill improvised parts with greater variety in Pharoah Sanders’s band, however, because of the constraints on the pianist. “Pharoah liked to have the piano set up a basslike vamp or ostinato, holding its fixed rhythm in” over the course of a performance. Other approaches that call attention to the piano part, even when it features spare comping rhythms, are “relatively high registral placement” and dissonant voicings.4 The range and configuration of chord voicings affect, as well, the bassist’s inventive course. Larry Gray states that he can pursue greater options in formulating a bass line, without clashing with the pianist, when the pianist omits the chord’s root and voices chords above the bass’s range.

  In other instances, when the rhythmic density of the performances of all three accompanists remains fluid, change in any one is potentially of influence to the others. Ronald Shannon Jackson explains that if pianists switch from sustained chords to “playing driving eighth notes;” then he might switch from a regular quarter-note drum pattern to “sixteenth notes, filling in between the spaces of what the piano player plays and increasing its intensity.” John Hicks gives another example. “In Arthur Blythe’s group, we have this little break tune which sometimes takes the form of a very slow, almost dirgelike tempo. But then, sometimes, Fred will double it up on the bass and Steve will do the same thing on drums. So, what I might do is double it up and stay with the double time for a while, then break it back down. Or, I might just let them play the double time, and I would play something against that like the slower half time.”

  Besides shifting complementary positions among streams of patterns representing even-numbered subdivisions or multiples of the beat, performers also respond to one another by inventing asymmetrical counterposing patterns and interjecting fills between the discrete phrases of other artists. “Playing with musicians is like a conversation;” Chuck Israels observes. “If when I speak, you say, ‘Yes,’ or you look at me and blink your eyes or interject some comment of your own, that keeps me going. Just listen to Roy Haynes! To say that he’s a great rhythmic contrapuntal conversationalist doesn’t do justice to what he does. What he does is just magic.”

  Elaborating upon the drummer’s role as musical commentator, Ronald Shannon Jackson recalls early snare drum comping instruction aimed at creating varied “polyrhythms” whose accents occur “either before or with or after the figures of the piano player.” Today, if a pianist “plays something that is really driving,” Jackson will hold the basic beat on the cymbals or the hi-hat “to provide a foundation,” at the same time “comping on the snare drum or the bass drum ... to inspire the pianist’s drive;” he says. The two musicians “will work in and out of what each other is doing ... calling and answering.” Similarly, to prevent the music from becoming “stale;” Michael Carvin features “short, staccato spurts ... like a boxer, jabbin’, jabbin’, always keeping something happening:”5 McCoy Tyner’s drummer also conversed with other musicians by performing “lots of polyrhythms;” Calvin Hill reports, adding that during breaks the drummer usually superimposed “odd rhythms” derived from such meters as 7/4 over the simpler underlying 4/4.

  Within the music’s ever-changing texture, new phrases that insinuate themselves above, beside, or below other phrases ultimately provide rich ideas that any of the players can seize and combine within their own. Musicians periodically depart from an independent course to echo fragmentary patterns just heard from another (ex. 13.3a). Alternatively, they can reinforce a recurring phrase or any constant element within another member’s performance by repeating it together with the inventor, perhaps with rhythmic embellishments. Common operations include accenting the second half of the fourth beat or briefly developing the combined effect of playing on different parts of the same beat (exx. 13.3b-c). At times, increasing its coordinated punches leads the rhythm section to create intense developmental episodes (ex. 13.4a); other times, sparser routines such as ostinato shout patterns result (ex. 13.4b).

  In college, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Julius Hemphill, and other classmates provided John Hicks with invaluable coaching, deepening his understanding of such interplay. In addition to teaching him “how to loosen up rhythmically on piano, listening to the drummer, and locking into a groove;” they demonstrated “different rhythmic things done by the drummer on the ride cymbal.” This clarified specific figures and “little nuances” that had never been as clear to him from recordings, such as “the drummer’s hi-hat cymbal pattern on beats two and four.”

  Pianist Kenny Barron recalls the relevance of comparable discoveries to his own comping skills. “The drummer has become a very, very important partner for me as my playing has evolved. At one point, I started really listening to the things the drummer would play, and I’d play the same things rhythmically.” Barron initially adapted his performances to those of “older drummers” who maintained a regular “almost staccato” four-beat pattern on the bass drum. He subsequently collaborated with younger drummers who performed with a different “time-feel” and with surprising off-beat accents that, he admits, “forced me to play another way. At the time, I loved that.”

  As Barron’s own musical vocabulary grew, he found that “some of the patterns drummers played were standard,” and he could periodically anticipate their performance, even within the improvisations of musicians he played with for the first time. “When you just lock up and play rhythmic things together that are not planned:” he explains,

  it sounds like you actually rehearsed it all, and it makes a rhythm section sound cohesive. One small example might be to anticipate the “and” of a phrase together with a drummer. Many drummers anticipate the first beat of a measure by playing two eighth notes, accenting the “and of four” and the “and of one” of the next measure. When I do those kinds of things together with drummers, many are surprised and go, “Oh, yeah?” But I can only do that because I listen to drummers so much. The figures we play together are most likely to occur at the end of phrases, like four or eight-bar phrases. That helps to define the form of the tune.

  Within their constantly changing scheme of interaction, successive “punches” of pianist and drummer produce different mixes of on-beat and off-beat accents. From beat to beat, elements of their comping figures converge, reinforcing one another, or diverge, creating cross-accentuation schemes or interlocking patterns, one part’s components occupying the space left by its counterpart. Throughout, drummer and pianist regulate these features of their interplay, adding momentum to the performance and contributing to its dynamism.

  Equally crucial is the relationship between pianists and bass players, bec
ause they overlap in their function of representing the piece’s harmony. The harmony produced by jazz players is not the uniform representation of a lead sheet model, but a lively composite creation, the product of multiple, ever-changing interpretations of the progression. Enriching the basic structure in endlessly varied ways, players may choose to reinforce or complement each other at one moment, to diverge at another, interrelating different harmonic pathways. The effects of such decisions may require immediate accommodation across the parts. “Buster Williams, or whoever the bass player is, may play a different bass note than I expect or play a chord substitution:” Barron comments. “I have to be able to hear that and, at the same time, hear whatever rhythmic pattern is played by the drummer. If the bass player changes the whole chord, then I have to be aware enough of where he’s going to go with him, or I may change the chord, and he has to be cool enough to hear where I’m going” (exx. 13.5 through exx. 13.7)6 As in the interplay between pianist and drummer, the pianist and bass player depend on their knowledge of each other’s generation or style period and musical personality to anticipate the ideas their counterparts are likely to perform in particular sections of the composition. Moreover, artists may repeat a pattern periodically or hint at it through variants to set up the idea for simultaneous performance, or for motivic treatment amid complementary counterparts. A bass player may pick up a recurring melodic fragment from one of the voices within a pianist’s chord line and incorporate it into a bass part, just as a pianist may pick up a recurring fragment from the bass line and harmonize it as a comping pattern (exx. 13.7cl-c3). Melodic-rhythmic interaction is also common between them (exx. 13.8a-c).