Unanticipated time changes can also create new challenges, catching off guard musicians who are inexperienced or inattentive. One student confessed to me the confusion he felt on the first occasion a rhythm section shifted into double time during his solo: “I had never heard anything like it before, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have the technique to play twice as fast as I was playing, but I felt dumb not making any change in my playing, so I just dropped out of the music.” Moreover, as Kenny Barron observes, performers might do “something so daring rhythmically that it actually stops the music’s tempo all of a sudden.”
Even veterans must be alert to complicated and instant shifts in time. “Charles Mingus was one of the first people in jazz I remember who was into freeing up the tempos and meters,” says Lonnie Hillyer. “We’d be playing at one tempo, and suddenly he’d slow it way down and change meters. We’d move from 4/4 to 3/4 to 2/4 or whatever. Other times, he’d really speed up the tempos. The changes gave a whole new feeling of freedom of expression to the music.” John Hicks recalls like practices:
Art Blakey would sometimes take the bridge of the tune into this 3/4 waltz time thing and then with a drum roll, take it back into 4/4. Or it might be that he’d play some stoptime pattern in there, or one of the shuffle type things he’d do on “Moanin’,” or the kind of thing he played on the “Blues March.” He would break up the time and throw these things in different places in different tunes, just to change the whole flavor of the tune around. You would listen to what he was doing and go along with it. You’d have to translate on your instrument what was happening there rhythmically, dealing with the rhythm section, and at the same time, deal harmonically with what the horn players were playing.
Once, at the close of a ballad in a set at New York’s Sweet Basil, Lonnie Hillyer slowed his tempo suddenly and began improvising a cadenza in unmetered time. Looking up from the keyboard in surprise, the pianist instantly slowed his comping patterns and exchanged quick glances with the drummer, who switched from sticks to brushes to create free-rhythmic waves of sound with his cymbals. As the music’s tempo and texture changed around him, the bass player appeared flustered initially and stopped performing. Soon, however, he began to strum the bass softly like a guitar and phrased in step with his counterparts as Hillyer concluded the ballad. During another concert, Jackie McLean brought his solo to a close with an extended improvisation and was able to conduct changes in the dynamics and tempo of his rhythm section’s accompaniment by dramatically raising and lowering his saxophone as a sign.
Finally, musicians sometimes deliberately introduce surprises into their performances, not only to inspire other group members, but to test their abilities. “Mingus demanded so much of a musician that he would bring out stuff in you that you didn’t even know was there,” Hillyer remembers.
He’d really put you on the spot, and that helped you to develop your personal strength. One of his devices was to stop the entire band, including the rhythm section, and to leave you soloing out there by yourself, which I thought was beautiful. If you didn’t want to look like a fool, you had to play something. One night I overslept for the gig and came in about forty-five minutes late, and Mingus decided to screw with me. They were playing a ballad when I walked in, and after a couple of choruses, before I had hardly warmed up, he pointed to me and said, “You got it.” He just left me out there by myself, and I had to come up with something [laughter]. Actually, it went over very well, and I felt very good about it.
Mingus also had a healthy sense of competition. He would sometimes kick off songs at a breakneck tempo, so fast it would be ridiculous. One night, I was really up and playing well. He was playing something so fast that he tired out and I just kept going. Then I looked at him and said, “What’d you stop for, man?”
In order to work with a guy with such an overbearing personality, you had to shape up and try to toe the line with him.
Calvin Hill also describes a “refreshing performance” by Jaki Byard’s band in which bassist “Richard Davis was picking apart the tunes, goofing on everything, and there was a lot of humor.” In the middle of one piece,
Richard started changing things all around. At one point, everything was getting very shaky. The tempo was about to fall apart, and the drummer was trying to keep up with Richard, trying to figure out what he was going to do next, which way he was going to go. It got very chaotic for a minute as they were coming to the end of the chorus. It was just like an airplane coming in for a landing that was about to crash. No one knew what was going to happen or how they were going to get out of that. At that point, Jaki was coming to the end of his solo, and he played this really strong rhythmic figure on top of what everyone else was playing, which brought all the different tempos back together and led everyone right into the “one” of the next chorus. Everybody just came right back in together for the beginning of the next chorus.
In that instance, Richard deliberately introduced something rhythmically into the music that made the other players feel uneasy. People will do that sometimes. They might play something that goes against the established tempo, or they might play polyrhythmic things or start playing an odd meter against the established meter, and that makes the music feel unstable. In this case Jaki Byard knew that Richard did what he did deliberately, and he resolved it in the end by bringing it all back in.
To emphasize the value that he places on adventurous experimentation, producing music as “fresh” and “honest as it can possibly be,” Miles Davis would periodically encourage his band members to avoid their routine maneuvers. “I pay you to practice on the bandstand,” he would exhort them.30 In a similar spirit, some leaders build extemporaneous interaction into performances—requiring musicians to rely heavily on their ingenuity and their sensitivity to one another—by limiting rehearsals and minimizing discussion about the music. When these conditions conspire with capricious turns of improvisation in a way that defies the expectations of the band altogether, they are what Herbie Hancock likens, within Miles Davis’s band, to the unpredictable course of conversations. “How many times have you talked to somebody and you got ready to make a point, and it kind of went off in another direction? Maybe you never ended up making that point,” Hancock admits, “but the conversation just went somewhere else and it was fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. Maybe you liked where you went. Well, this is the way we were dealing with music.”31
In yet other situations, musicians pursue musical tangents their counterparts introduce into the conversation, while keeping sight of the original topic as a point of return. Lee Konitz describes such spontaneous interplay in Lennie Tristano’s band:
When we would play “All the Things You Are,” we would get to the point where the music was moving so intensely that the music would start to leave the song form, the actual structure of the song. We might get involved with one tonal area and would just stop the progress of the song right there and play freely in that area. That could just stretch out as completely as we would want it to go and then return to the song. This was a note-to-note kind of playing. It was an impressionistic utilization of the song.
Challenges Presented by Musical Error
To those unforeseen turns of event that form the normal basis for collaboration, errors in performance present additional challenges. “Last week I was playing one song and, during my solo, my mind threw me into another melody altogether,” Doc Cheatham reveals. “I realized what I was doing way into the song, and the piano player guided me right back where I should have been. I put my ear right back to the piano because he was playing straight ahead. I realized where he was and I went right on in. Nobody in the audience knew the difference.”
During moments when the rhythm section interprets the forms of pieces allusively, however, soloists must rely heavily upon their own internal musical models, and the consequences of any mistake become a problem for the entire group. A miscalculation on the soloist’s part can call into question the representations o
f other musicians and potentially obscure formal landmarks for everyone. If someone is not aware of the problem he or she has created, other members may alert the musician by calling softly on the bandstand or, to avoid distracting the audience, by signaling visually. For Leroy Williams, “watching soloists is as important as listening to them.” Similarly, before performances, Roy Haynes used to decide upon the best place for Don Pate to stand, because eye contact between them was crucial. “Sometimes, just a look, just eyes meeting, can tell you what’s required of one musically,” Pate explains. “That’s a very subtle way of signaling without even a spoken word. We didn’t need it all the time, but just anytime we wanted it. Between Roy and me, a look might indicate that he wanted to pick up the tempo a little more or that he wanted to play more laid back.”
During a Sweet Basil engagement in which Lonnie Hillyer’s solo faltered, he temporarily held and played the trumpet with his right hand, while he ran his left through his hair with a single motion, as if to scratch an itch, then lightly brushed his ear before replacing his left hand on the trumpet. Understanding the gesture, the pianist instantly switched from elusive comping patterns to explicit chord voicings, which he continued until Hillyer regained his confidence.
In the event that improvisers are too preoccupied to notice verbal and visual signals, their friends try to reach them through the music itself. One evening at the Jazz Showcase, a pianist fell behind within the form of a piece. Initially, the bass player stared at him and repeatedly formed the word turnaround on his lips. When the pianist neglected to look up, the bass player turned up his amplifier and transposed his part into the instrument’s highest, most penetrating register, effectively underscoring the disparity between the parts and directing the pianist to the correct position at the close of the chorus.
If the rhythm section loses its harmonic bearings, soloists can assume a temporary place-marking role and alter their own improvisations to stabilize the music. “It can happen if you’re playing with inexperienced people, or it can also happen to experienced people,” John McNeil states.
You can be playing along and suddenly there’s no bridge where there should be one, say, on an AABA tune. Musicians never seem to put two bridges in there by mistake. They usually add an extra eight bars of an A section. Or, they leave out eight bars of A.32 That will happen on a tune like “Just Friends,” where the two halves are almost identical except for the last major chord. If the guys don’t concentrate and their knowledge of the form of the tune isn’t really solid, the minor differences between the halves become obscured. At that point, things can really fall apart. If the bass player is playing a pedal then, the piano player can’t figure out where he should be from listening to the bass. What I try to do in that situation is to allude to the melody in my improvisation, since the melody’s a little different at the end of the tune, and that will direct them back to the form.
Related issues, alluded to earlier in the playful performance by Jaki Byard’s band, include the loss of the groove and rhythmic displacement of the measure. When improvisers deliberately stretch the limits of form by placing their patterns in an especially abstract relationship to the underlying meter, they potentially upset their own or others’ perceptions of where measures actually begin and end, unintentionally turning the beat around. As Akira Tana explains, there are multiple disorienting possibilities.
Sometimes, you’re trying to play something and all of a sudden the beat gets turned around, and you don’t know how to get it back where it should be. Suddenly, you find yourself playing on “one” and “three” where “two” and “four” should be. It might be that you would do a fill or try for some rhythmic figure and you’d come out of it wrong, with an extra beat in there. It also happens to me sometimes when I play with musicians who embellish things rhythmically a lot, or who explore very complex rhythms. All of a sudden their patterns give you the illusion of the beat being turned around, and if your concentration has lapsed, you try to hook up with what you think they’re doing, only to find when they come out of it that you’re one or two beats behind.
Leroy Williams discusses how unique approaches to time can add an intriguing uncertainty to performances.
Everybody interprets time differently, but some bass players not only have good time, but creative time. Wilbur Ware was one of my favorite bass players because he had a different sense of time. It was not straight time. He would do unexpected things with it. He had an uncanny way of being there when you thought he wasn’t. He might go off rhythmically and you’d say, “How is he going to come back from there?” Some players can stretch the time to that fine line of almost turning the beat around, but they can always come back. For example, with Wilbur Ware in Monk’s band, they would play so close to that thin line rhythmically that, if you weren’t careful, you’d find yourself playing on “one” and “three,” instead of “two” and “four.” If you weren’t careful, you’d be right off it. It has to do with where you put your accents when you’re improvising. It was an amazing experience for me, like walking on a tightrope. Not everybody plays that way, but certain people like Barry Harris do. That’s freedom to me. That’s what I like.
Soloists are particularly vulnerable to turning the beat around when they improvise without the rhythm section’s accompaniment, as during arranged breaks in a piece’s performance. “We were playing ‘A Night in Tunisia,’” Max Roach remembers, “and we came to a four-bar break in Dizzy’s solo. Dizzy was doubling up, and when we came out of the break, there was an uncommon ‘one.’” A similar vulnerability carries over to the unaccompanied bass or drum solo. “It’s one thing for a soloist to play adventurous things across the barlines when there is a rhythm section behind him, giving him a point of reference; the harmonic progression is holding it together,” Chuck Israels asserts. “But when a drummer solos, there is often nothing else going on behind him, and it is harder for him to hold onto the progress of the piece in his own mind and avoid errors. If his adventurousness leads him to make an error,” he conjectures, “it’s difficult for the rest of us to know exactly where that error has been made and to compensate for this when the whole band comes in.”
In the face of this problem, improvisers can pursue various courses. “You can keep playing the way you think it is, or you can just lighten up and forget what you’re doing and try to hear what other people are doing,” Akira Tana offers. “If you know the song and the chord changes, you can listen to the music harmonically to find out where things fall into place. Or you can just stop and begin again.” Max Roach elaborates upon the “Night in Tunisia” incident cited above: “When the beat got turned around at the Festival, it went on for about eight bars. In such a case, someone has to layout. You can’t fight it. Dizzy stopped first because he heard what was happening quicker than the rest of us, and he didn’t know where ‘one’ was. Then it was up to Ray Brown and Bishop and myself. One of us had to stop, so Bishop waved off. Then it was up to Ray Brown and myself to clear it up. Almost immediately, we found a common ‘one,’ and the others came back in without the public realizing what had happened.”
As for the musical saves of soloists discussed earlier, jazz groups simply treat performance errors as compositional problems that require instant, collective solutions, in some cases the skillful mending of one another’s performances. In Miles Davis’s band, if, despite the rhythm section’s effort “to keep the groove happening,” it began to fall apart, Herbie Hancock recalls, “Miles with his playing would center it ... tie it all together—as though he sensed what the link was—and get the thing to grooving so hard that it was like being in the Garden of Eden [laughter].”33
When Emily Remler was playing with Eddie Gomez, he gave her such adequate support that if she made a mistake, “he’d do something to make it right,” Remler attests. If she played a “wrong chord in a piece,” Gomez would “hit the appropriate bass notes to justify the chord” that she had played.34 Within group interaction, the responses of other artis
ts to unintended events may, in fact, reveal their value to a player. One renowned pianist remembers the relief he felt during a performance when he missed several keys he intended to hit, and Charlie Parker exclaimed, “I hear you,” having interpreted the erroneous pitches within the piece’s framework as an “interesting chord voicing.”
Don Friedman discovered a similar pattern of accommodation when listening to a recording on which he played piano and Booker Little played trumpet.35 At the time of the session, Friedman guided his performance of a ballad with a structural model that inadvertently deviated from the standard version. In a segment of the progression calling for six beats of D minor, he played one measure of D7 followed by two beats of D minor. It was twenty years later, when Friedman and I were working together to transcribe his piano part, that Friedman recognized the error and how cleverly Booker Little had covered it.
Little apparently realized the discrepancy during his solo’s initial chorus, when he arrived at this segment and selected the minor third of the chord for one of the opening pitches of a phrase. Hearing it clash with the pianist’s part, Little improvised a rapid save by leaping to another pitch and resting, stopping the progress of his performance. To disguise the error further, he repeated the entire phrase fragment as if he had initially intended it as a motive, before extending it into a graceful, ascending melodic arch (ex. 13.22). From that point on, Little guided his solo according to a revised map of the ballad. “Even when Booker played the melody at the end of the take,” observed Friedman with admiration, he varied it in ways “that fit the chord I was playing.”
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