I can answer him halfway through his phrase while he’s still creating it and know where he’s going after that, so that we end up playing phrases together that match each other. It’s like we’re talking together at the same time. One example is Charlie Rouse. Charlie has that ability to make you hear one thing and play something else against it. He does this by the way in which he builds his solos. Ahmad Jamal has that gift too. He’ll have you in the palm of his hand. He’ll bring you to the point where you can actually sing what he’s going to play next, and then, instead of playing that, he’ll play something against it which complements what you’re singing in your head.
Epitomizing this special rapport is an event Howard Levy recalls, in which a pianist and a guitarist confused the order of their solos and began their performances together by improvising “the exact same melody.” Comparable occurrences are familiar to George Duvivier. “Playing jazz is a spontaneous thing,” he says, “and I’ve experienced times in which it was almost like I’ve been able to read a soloist’s mind. I’ll playa phrase, like a descending passage, at the same time he does. We’ll come down together in unison or maybe in harmony, and we’ll hear it and react to it almost after the fact. After the thing is over, we’ll say, ‘Hey, man. Did you hear so and so?’ [he laughs]. There are some things you just can’t explain” (exx. 13.11d1–d2).
Within their heightened state of empathy, improvisers not only respond supportively to their cohorts, they also stimulate one another’s conception of new ideas that grow directly out of the group’s unique conversational interplay.2 “Jazz musicians interact and learn from one another as they perform. That’s what jazz is. Many times, I’ve listened to recordings I’ve made and said, ‘Wow, I don’t remember doing that! I never practiced that phrase before.’ I played it because of what the other musicians were playing at the time” (RuR). Occasions when Fred Hersch played with Buster Williams are equally representative. “Buster’s made me play complex chords like Herbie Hancock sometimes plays—that I couldn’t even sit down and figure out now.” Hersch attributes such remarkable inventions to “the effect of the moment and the effect of playing with Buster and really hearing everything, hearing all these figures.”
Similarly, when Bob Moses and Emily Remler “play together, he always shows me different paths,” Remler explains. “He can interpret things I play in the hippest way, hearing things in what I did that I never even thought of. For example, when I playa phrase, he’ll playa rhythmic counterpoint to my rhythms that is very original. It will show me a different way of doing things and even push me to a point that I’ve never been before. I’ll hear myself do something because of what he played and say, ‘How did I ever think of that?’ I just played the way I play, and he played his thing against it, and we came up with a new thing together,”
In this connection, it is high praise for rhythm section players when their associates judge their creations to go beyond supportive accompaniments to stand on their own as independent parts. Larry Gray praises the richly varied textures in Herbie Hancock’s accompaniment of Miles Davis on “I Thought about You” as characteristic, maintaining that together with the trumpet part, it could serve as a “double concerto”; alone, it could be “a piano prelude” (ex. 12.10b). Expressing a similar sentiment, Gil Evans once told Walter Bishop Jr. that from the “comping alone” on one recording of Bishop’s he “could have made an arrangement” (WB). Another player says, “If you want to hear how it’s possible to play exciting music with brushes, just listen to Elvin Jones on an album of Tommy Flanagan’s called Overseas. Elvin plays nothing but brushes and, if Tommy weren’t playing such brilliant piano, you could play that record over and over, just listening to Elvin’s playing.” By extension, artists appreciate successful collaborations for producing complex music in performance as cohesive as any produced by written composition.3
The experience of exceeding an artist’s normal intellectual powers and creative abilities is also tied to exceptional emotional empathy and compassion, as when musicians exchange confidences “about how sad or lonely they feel, or how happy or angry.”4 Additionally, players express a keenly honed comic sensibility in shared playful expressions of musical humor.5 Charlie Parker would tease fellow band members who had learned of their induction into the army by playing “a phrase which translated ‘Bring enough clothes for three days.’ ”6
The intensity of impassioned performances can take on a religious quality, a “spirituality,” evocative, for some players, of their early participation in African American church services. “The band I played in with Roy Haynes and George Adams was very spiritual,” Don Pate says. “The energy was so intense and the spirits were up so high, the band was really hot. It was always a challenge to be a contributor to those high-energy situations.” For Carmen Lundy as well, jazz recalls reverential aspects of church performance. She draws a focused analogy between them. “What I hear in jazz is also spiritual,” she says.
It involves that same kind of interaction, that ability of people to have this musical experience at the same time that they are actually participating in it. When you are in a congregation, everybody, not just the people in the choir, is part of the music—the person next to you, the people in front of you and behind you. You hear someone clapping this way, and someone else clapping another way. You feel this pulse generating the rhythm, and the rhythm is getting stronger and stronger and more intense, and you feel this interaction between the people as the rhythm is going on. You are all beginning to clap more, and the spirit is getting more involved. There is some feeling coming through the music, and much of it has to do with rhythmic pulse.
In jazz, it’s the same thing. No one in the group knows exactly what is going to be played next, so you all rely on your instinctive knowledge of music. It’s that freedom of expression and expressiveness that comes through from a feeling you have of musical rapport with other people. It’s something that you really can’t touch, but you know when you are sharing it with another musician. That’s the same thing that I shared with the person next to me when everybody was participating in the service. I can remember some unbelievable things from that time which I experience even now when I sing jazz. Sometimes, I really feel that I am just the vehicle, the body, and that something is really singing through me, like I am not controlling everything that I am singing. The last time I sang, I thought to myself, “Gosh, I feel like something is just singing through me.” That’s what I mean by the spiritual thing.
Such accounts harken back to those told earlier by soloists who, during the heat of their own part’s conception, occasionally feel as if their creations come from outside themselves. The collective aspects of improvisation give a literal quality to these impressions, perhaps intensifying them by presenting an ongoing dichotomy between inside and outside sources of musical ideas, any of which can stimulate individual players.
At some moments, the rapid interaction of improvisers blurs these distinctions altogether. The effect is to dissolve the boundaries that normally separate musical imaginations, sensitizing artists to the “telepathic” receptivity mentioned earlier, thereby creating a deeply satisfying sense of unity within the group. “I don’t know if I can describe it,” Melba Liston says, “but I know it when I feel it. Just one night, everybody can feel what each other is thinking and everything. You breathe together, you swell together, you just do everything together, and a different aura comes over the room.” Guided at such moments by the unspoken consensus, group members discard the hesitancy associated with more studied operations in pursuit of ever-emerging goals. Proceeding directly and easily, it is as if, as a collective unit, they no longer govern the performance. For many artists, the experience is like “being on automatic pilot” (DP). “With Miles,” Buster Williams recalls, “it would get to the point where we followed the music rather than the music following us. We just followed the music wherever it wanted to go. We would start with a tune, but the way we played it, the music just naturally e
volved.”
Experiences heightened to a level of the mystical, in the minds of some artists, sometimes accompany these events. Ronald Shannon Jackson explains that
with certain groups, like Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Blood, and now my own group, The Decoding Society, there is a level of playing which we try to reach which is the same thing that people do when they do transcendental meditation and yoga. They talk about “out of the body” experiences. That’s what this music is. It’s chanting; it’s meditation; it’s yoga. It’s all these things. In order to play, something transcends. Something happens with the physical, the spiritual, and the mental state in which they combine, and their energy is turned free. It’s a cleansing experience which in a religion they would say, “It’s of another world.” The state I’m talking about even transcends emotions. It’s a feeling of being able to communicate with all living things.
Leroy Williams expresses a similar idea. From his perspective, there are many “hardships in this business, but I wouldn’t give up anything for some of the experiences I have had playing this music. There’s a feeling that you just can’t buy,” he declares.
It’s a beautiful, floating feeling that is hard to describe in words. It’s a wonderful feeling, almost like getting out of your body. I never know when it’s going to happen, but when everybody is there and it happens, it really happens. I’ll get it playing with Barry Harris because we can really get into the music together. It’s almost like there’s a oneness. You and your instrument are one, there’s no separation. And it’s like a oneness with the music. It’s like you’re in tune with the universe.
Commenting self-reflectively on this matter, Paul Wertico states that he is “not necessarily a religious person, by and large, but there are many times,” he admits, “where I’ll play music and just kind of look up and say, ‘Thank you.’ And it’s a real strange feeling. It’s like I’m in touch with something so big and the joy is so incredible. And I don’t even know why. It’s not like I’m looking up and I know there’s a heaven and a hell, but it’s like I’m thanking the big picture for just the opportunity as a human being to feel this way—which is incredible.”
Such exuberance also finds expression in the metaphor of love. Don Pate mentions that “love is another level of high feeling, high emotional intensity. I’ve often been described as being in love when I’m playing, being in love with playing or being in love with the music. When the music’s happening, I’m in love with the bass—and I’m in love with life.”
Love across its spectrum of emotions can also embrace group interaction, where it is revealed by the players’ close attention to nuances and details in each other’s musical personalities. According to Chuck Israels:
The more prevalent situation in a band is of the people really loving each other’s playing, loving the music, and supporting each other. Recently [the National Jazz Ensemble] did a concert, and it was just electrifying. Everyone in the band was caught up in astonishment and pleasure at that. Every time Sal Nistico gets up to play, the band is ready to cry from the pleasure of the swing in the guy’s playing. Tom Harrell shuffles modestly to the front of the band, and people are deeply touched by his playing. Bill Dobbins plays a piano solo, and people just get knocked out with that. Every once in a while, Joe Temperley will get up and play a baritone solo that’s bubbling over with joy, and he’ll get the whole band just romping. There’s a great sense of mutual respect and appreciation in working together in any band that is functioning well. Those are the high points.
Journeying together through the medium of performance, musicians assist one another in entering an incomparably intense realm of human experience where thrive diverse overlapping domains of sensitivity and knowledge: intellectual and “intuitive”; aesthetic and emotional; physical, sensual, and spiritual; private and communal. Once touched by such experiences, improvisers retain them united as their principal goal, the standard for all performances. Trumpeter Herb Pomeroy explained it to me years ago: “One of the most wonderful benefits of this career is the feeling you’re left with after an evening when the music is really happening,” he said emphatically. “It’s an incredibly warm feeling that you have, one that you’ve shared with the other musicians and you’ve shared with the audience. And when the evening’s engagement is over, you still retain it. It fills you up inside, and you feel it like there’s an aura all around you when you leave the club to go home. It’s the kind of precious feeling that no other kind of career can give you.”
In the aftermath of such euphoric states, improvisers commonly require a period of transition to ensure a successful return to the normal routines of life—which, in many respects, pale by comparison. Sometimes, band members socialize together over a meal in the early hours of the morning to reflect on the evening’s events before going their separate ways. At other times, they choose to be alone directly after performances to harbor the profound sense of inner peacefulness.
Finally, some artists also endure wide swings of mood, and even deep melancholy, in the transition “back into reality.” Paul Wertico has experienced this emotional intensity. “It happens on the road a lot,” he reveals, “especially after a great gig. If we play a big city like New York—like musicians in the audience, and the band’s burning, and you get back to your hotel room, and there you are with yourself again—it’s not only just a loneliness; it’s the feeling [that] you’ve broken the connection with that big picture you’re able to relate to when you’re playing. . . . You know,” he says resignedly, “life’s not like that all the time.”
Just as musicians must deal with the high and low points of their transition from an exalted state to mundane existence, over the course of their musical journey, they must face low as well as high points of performance.
Deficient Musicianship and Incompatible Musical Personalities
Although peak experiences improvising provide musicians their greatest professional rewards, it is not uncommon for problems to prevent musicians from fully realizing their goals. “Very few bands have everything perfect. It may look like things are perfect, and you may not be able to tell in the audience, but there is always some kind of conflict going on in the band” (GB). Some problems stem from deficient musicianship; others from incompatible styles. “Meeting people on the bandstand is just like meeting people and interacting with them in other aspects of life,” Akira Tana remarks. “There may be certain idiosyncracies in their musical personalities that conflict. It doesn’t mean that they’re bad players. It’s like, you get along well with some people, and you don’t get along with others.”
Don Pate agrees. “The chemistry between musicians is just not predictable,” he observes.
It is always a pleasant surprise when you play with a musician who’s a stranger, and it happens automatically, the music really flows. But you never know until the actual performance situation whether the right combination is there.
It’s like love. Sometimes, you look at somebody and decide you’re in love, but you find out differently later. The greatest things don’t happen in bands often, because the chemistry between the combination of players doesn’t lend itself to the most positive or highest level of music. It seems like it’s a stroke of luck or genius when everyone is matched perfectly and the music’s really happening.
A sample of the many difficulties that can plague a group more fully illuminates the demands of collective improvisation. Several problems, including “discrepancies in the way players interpret rhythm,” are especially serious when they affect the rhythm section’s fundamental interaction (BH). As in the case of soloists, some rhythm section players can represent the beat consistently, maintaining a particular interpretation of it or varying it with great control. Others cannot. “Rhythm sections are very fluid,” George Duvivier says. “Some musicians rush, others pull back, and some do both.”
These tendencies create various dilemmas for other members. Accommodating a weaker player might further destab
ilize the group. “Sometimes, the tempo doesn’t stay where it should,” Art Farmer points out. “If it gets too slow, the life goes out of the music. If it gets too fast, it just sounds amateurish.” In an attempt to stabilize the group, strong members can try all the more to reinforce each other’s performances and draw a weaker member into alignment. When Gary Bartz sees “that someone’s time isn’t very good, I won’t listen to them but will listen to whoever in the band is the strongest rhythmically, whether that be the bassist, the drummer, or the pianist.” When such a tactic fails to correct an erratic performance, however, “you can get different tempos going in the group, and before long everybody’s not on the same chord at the same time. That just adds to the distortion of the music” (HO).
In other instances, “you might end up at the same bar at the same time as the piano player or the bass player, and all your eight-bar phrases are ending up in the same places, but within that, the strong beats or downbeats are wishy-washy. When nobody is taking charge in laying down the time,” Josh Schneider deplores, “it makes everybody’s time sound funny.” Unresponsiveness to normally acceptable time fluctuations within the group contributes to the problem. “Some people can only play metronomic time, and they’re lost if the tempo changes,” Rufus Reid complains.
A related concern would be failure to accommodate another’s individual predilection for playing on different parts of the beat. “When the bass player or the drummer is right in the middle of a beat and the other is not, there’s going to be a little tug, and you’re going to feel it,” Tommy Flanagan insists. Chuck Israels concurs. “If the relationship between the bassist and the drummer is not working, you know that right away. It’s just painful if we can’t agree.”
Thinking in Jazz Page 59