Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Ultimately, significant disparity in individual preferences could threaten the entire group’s foundation. “There are times when I am playing with a drummer who wants to play more on top of the beat than I do,” Calvin Hill says. “I feel like he’s rushing, so my reaction is to hold back. Since I like to play on top of the beat myself, if someone is playing even more on top of the beat, it usually means the tempo is going to pick up, so I have to step back and hold the beat down.” For many, the pressures involved have physicality. One bass player likens his experience to steadying a boat’s course on a rough sea by holding the mainsail taut against the wind.

  Besides the problem of undermining the groove, other conflicts reflect a difference of personal taste surrounding a multitude of subtle issues, including dynamics. “Many drummers play too loud, and this can really do damage to a delicate acoustic instrument like the piano,” Charli Persip explains. “There are many wars between pianists and drummers.” Soloists also “have to deal with too much or too little volume from drummers at times” (AF). John McNeil admits that “it can be very discouraging to have a drummer just keep roaring right on through your solo. One drummer played so loud it was difficult for me to play. I didn’t like to play that loud all the time, because after two or three tunes, I’d be wasted. I would have to force my sound just to be heard over him, and then the leader would say, ‘Man, your sound is really brittle.’ When you hear that enough, you begin to doubt yourself.”

  Whereas in the past the problem of excessive volume primarily centered on drummers, the increased role of amplification and the recent development of smaller, custom-made drum sets now occasionally shift the problem to bass players and pianists. “When you have bass players with amplifiers,” Jimmy Robinson remarks, “the pianists and drummers get mad because they can’t hear over the sound of the bass. Then when you go on a job, no one can adjust to the acoustics or hear anyone else, and it’s just chaos.” One bass player’s assessment of the situation is particularly pointed:

  Amplifiers, pick-ups, and the fender bass have brought the level of the bass up to the point where it can be as loud as any drummer. The problem is that once you even begin to approach that volume, you lose the subtleties of dynamic shading. There is less difference between the loudest and softest thing you play. Among other things, what this has also done is to drown out the piano players, who need to use two microphones. The horn players also have to stick their horns into the microphones, and some pianists are forced to switch to electric piano just to be heard. This just electrifies the music in a negative way, robbing it of all its nuance.

  The other night, I went out to hear a friend’s band, and the rhythm section was playing so loud, the music just started off screaming and screamed all night. I was out of work and went to the club wishing I was playing there, but I left feeling relieved that I wasn’t.

  Changes that amplification can bring about in the sound of an acoustic instrument, such as in its characteristic patterns of articulation, sometimes have negative ramifications for the group. Lonnie Hillyer says regretfully, “I don’t know what’s happened to bass players since they started using amplification. At times, it’s indistinguishable where the beat is in their playing.”

  Improvisers also criticize problematic aspects of musicians’ qualities of sound. Some perform “out of tune” or “with a rotten tone” that can grate on the ears of fellow players. Others perform with a too limited range of timbral colors. John Hicks describes one group that replaced acoustic piano with electric piano as having “very little contrast from one tune to the next because of the nature of their instruments. Even though,” he concedes, “they’re great musicians, there is a certain electric sound that doesn’t lend itself to great variety.” Kenny Barron finds that “there are very few drummers besides Ben Riley and the old masters like Max and ‘Philly’ Joe that I enjoy playing with when they use brushes. [The masters] are very smooth in the way they play, but other players can sound very scrapy. When they switch to brushes, it sounds like the whole bottom of the music has dropped out.”

  Indeed, new performance practices within the jazz tradition sometimes overshadow or supplant the old. “Brush work is almost a lost art today. There are not many players who know how to use brushes anymore, especially the younger players,” Akira Tana rues. It may be that this trend reflects accommodation of the diminishing importance of ballads among young performers and the increased volume that amplified instruments emit, rendering brush work ineffective in many situations.

  Improvisers cite other weaknesses among rhythm section players. John McNeil recalls “one bass player we had for a while who could play different rhythmic patterns, but whenever it came time for him to walk, four beats to the measure, he just played unaccented quarter notes. He couldn’t throw accents around within that, doing the kind of things that make you want to dance. Even if what he did had been metrically perfect, which it wasn’t, it felt horrible. It was a perpetual drone of quarter notes.” Weakness in harmonic practice can be offensive, as Chuck Israels makes plain:

  Certain kinds of root motion belong in certain places in a bassist’s harmonic phrase. There are rules for this that you can extract from common practice. The weakest kind of root motion is to move a third or sixth; the strongest is to drop a fifth or go up a fourth. In between those extremes are stepwise motions of all kinds. One of the perennial errors made by people who have not studied bass lines is to put too many movements by a third in there or to put them in the wrong places. Movements by thirds work in a very special and specific way when they’re used. When they are used right, they are a beautiful thing. When they are used wrong, the sound is dumb and weak. I don’t really know how to talk about this except to compare it to grammatical practice. If you put prepositions at the end of your sentences, I can still understand you, but it sounds weak. When players string together ungrammatical phrases and seem to wander into situations like that, unless they’re trying to create purposeful mistakes for a deliberate effect, it simply vitiates the music for me.

  Other violations concern conventions of repertory. James Moody was once “playing a simple blues line, just gutbucketing it, and when we got to the end of the progression, the bass player played some complicated, sophisticated turnback. Now, there’s no need to have one of those hip turnbacks there. The bass player was trying to be intellectual on a funky, down-home blues. He ought to use a line like that on a different piece altogether.” Art Farmer shares this concern:

  One piece is completely different from another. You shouldn’t play two songs the same way. For example, if I playa show tune, I’m not playing that tune in order to be destructive. If I play a song like “Namely You” or “Here’s That Rainy Day,” then I want to hear the harmonic structure. Some piano players play those songs like they don’t really want to play them, as if the songs were not hip enough. They alter the chords so much the song is barely recognizable. They obscure the form of it. Some of them play the chords the first chorus, and then they just want to vamp, which has nothing to do with the song. They play the same chord over and over, even when they’re supposed to be playing the harmonic form of the tune.

  Related problems can arise in the rhythm section’s collective assessment of the requirements of particular pieces. “On a tune like ‘Giant Steps,‘ ” John McNeil points out, “there are so many changes, and they move so quickly, all the rhythm section has to do is keep the rhythmic flow going and compo But a slow tune like ‘Little Sunflower’ is different. If you have a rhythm section that is just laying there in an uninteresting way, you can’t possibly play anything interesting over them and sustain it very long.”

  Musicians also describe their discontent with individuals who do not understand the performance conventions established by historic bands. “It can be frustrating to play certain ways unless the whole band context is suited for it,” Max Roach declares. “Jo Jones played the way he did because Basie played the piano the way he did. Sidney Catlett played the way he did
because Armstrong played the way he did. Elvin Jones played the way he did because he was playing with Trane.” Young performers discover the importance of this matter when they first attempt to improvise in their mentor’s style but lack the musical support that their mentor received. “After a few months playing with this group, I started feeling confined,” one pianist recalls. “At the time, I was listening to Herbie Hancock and to a lot of rhythm sections and how they interacted. Since I was trying to play like Herbie Hancock, I was frustrated that I couldn’t play with people like Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette. I felt like I couldn’t really get the music off.”

  As players contend with and work through individual challenges that occasional deficient musicianship or incompatibility of style present, they confront additional challenges in understanding the precise musical ideas of other group members.

  Problems Apprehending and Interpreting Musical Ideas

  Probably the most basic concern within the realm of apprehending and interpreting the improvisations of fellow artists is uneven attentiveness to the music. “A drummer might set up a pattern that really swings, but if he’s not listening to little things, like the way the piano player is comping, it’s not going to complement the whole group,” Leroy Williams explains. Ultimately, many leaders “chose individuals for their bands not because they are the best improvisers, but because they are the best listeners” (LH). In Charli Persip’s opinion, “that’s where the real artistry comes in.” During the period in which the young Persip held a prestigious position with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, he was once “devastated” by the news that Miles Davis “couldn’t stand” his playing. The remark made Persip aware that he had been concentrating mainly on himself during performances. It was as if “my father” had once more “thumped me painfully on the head,” he recalls with laughter.

  Inhibitions about extemporaneous invention and overreliance on prefigured patterns can exacerbate the problem of inattentiveness. “If the bass player is playing from something he heard somebody else play on a record, then there’s always the time problem and other things that can go wrong,” Ronald Shannon Jackson points out. “If the player is trying to play somebody else’s licks, then the time doesn’t get real settled, because he’s thinking ahead of the notes, thinking of certain passages that somebody else played. But if he’s thoroughly trained and relying totally on his own playing, then you have music, and you don’t have to worry about the pulse, either,” Don Sickler similarly recalls his early naivete concerning the risks of depending on complete pre-composed solos within collective musical discourse. “Once, I copped another trumpet player’s solo so that I’d sound really good when I played with an experienced band I was invited to play with. What I didn’t count on was that they took the tune at a much faster tempo than on the record,” he says, chuckling. “I could barely play the slow part of the solo, and when the double-time section of the solo came along, I fell apart completely. The other musicians just laughed. They seemed to know what had happened.”

  One pianist used a novel method to set up a student’s skills in the flexible treatment of preplanned material, at the same time demonstrating the multiple levels of cognition that sympathetic improvisation requires. Initially, the pianist instructed the student to invent several phrases and practice them repeatedly in all keys until he had achieved “bodily mastery” over them. To demonstrate his progress at the next lesson, the student began improvising a solo based on the invented phrases. The teacher inquired loudly whether the assignment had posed any difficulty, insisting that the student answer him, thereby causing the student to lose control of the performance. “Now,” the pianist said, “go home and don’t come back until you learn those licks so well that you can use them in a solo while carrying on a conversation at the same time. When you play in a jazz group,” the mentor advised, “you’ll be too busy concentrating on everything else that’s going on around you, for you to be able to think about what you’re doing alone,”7 Barry Harris describes pianists for whom particular improvisational paths had become so routine, in fact, that they could literally carry on a conversation while performing.

  The teacher’s reference to conversation in the drill above is reminiscent of the term’s use earlier as a common metaphor for improvisation, emphasizing the diverse demands that musicians formulate ideas with assurance and independence, at the same time interacting sensitively with their counterparts. Many eventually cultivate both skills; others, however, fail at the latter. “Some people only hear themselves when they play,” James Moody observes. As a permanent feature of personality, self-absorption presents the same liabilities during performances as overdependence on precomposed material. “Playing is like speaking,” Wynton Marsalis suggested during our interview. “As we are talking now, I only know what I’m going to say a second before I say it. People who don’t do it like this can be the worst people to talk to. When you’re talking, they’re thinking about what they are going to tell you next, instead of listening to what you’re saying.”

  Even for skilled listeners, however, the effort to anticipate the ideas of other players meets with variable results. “I have to be kind of hard on myself or I wouldn’t develop,” Leroy Williams confesses. “Some of the recordings I have made are okay, but I’m always so critical of my performances. I’ll listen to myself and say, ‘I could have done this; I should have done that. How could I have let that go by?‘ ” Tommy Flanagan also describes the need for self-criticism in performances:

  Most of the people I’ve played with, from Coleman Hawkins to Ella Fitzgerald, give you the feeling that you’ve got to be on your toes all the time. Even though they are the ones in the spotlight, there is no room for you to underplay anything. There are always things that you could do that would take away from something marvelous that they played, and you would feel just terrible about it, like you had ruined a masterpiece. You always have to be careful. The problems have to do with not knowing a person well enough and maybe anticipating them wrong. You have to really get the feel of who you’re playing for. You have to get a feeling for their phrasing and where they’re going in order to be one hundred percent correct when you’re anticipating what they’re going to do.

  Lack of rapport among musicians sometimes reflects their unfamiliarity with each other’s melodic concepts. This extends to the stylistic bounds within which they create melodies and the logic that dictates their selection and development of motivic material. “In my experience with this one saxophone player, it was easier for me to get lost accompanying him than anyone else I ever played with,” Ronald Shannon Jackson recalls.

  The challenge of playing with him was to play free and not free at the same time. He had such a raw sound that when he played the tune’s head, it made you feel like he was playing free, but he really wasn’t. He was in the conception of bebop. But when he got to the improvising portion, he was playing freely, really. The problem I had was following his improvisation and knowing where he was going to go next. I’d start off playing with him, and I’d hear one thing and start working on that, and by the time I got to developing and resolving that, he’d be resolving something else that he started midway after I got on the track of the thing I had first heard him doing.

  Comparable confusion can arise over harmonic concepts. “Some bass players’ choice of notes is just not good when they walk a line,” Kenny Barron complains,“and it makes the particular chord voicing I’m using sound wrong. Or it just prevents whatever I’m using from sounding as good as it would if the bass player had chosen other notes.” On the other hand, Chuck Israels asserts, “There are many approaches to improvisation that are very satisfying for people like pianists, but some of those ways drive me nuts as a bass player. If you take Art Tatum, for example,” he continues,

  he was a genius who would stick close to the original melody while varying the harmonization from chorus to chorus. That could drive a bass player nuts, because there’s no way of knowing where a piano player like that is
going. Since his improvisation is in the harmony, you either had to play something that was so basic that almost anything would work with it, or you would have to play the melody, since that was the predictable part that you would play with him. Or you would have to be able to read his mind. These are the reasons why players like Tatum were often most successful as solo performers, although there may be sides of them that are sympathetic to playing with other musicians.

  Yet other sources of conflict are rhythmic concepts, especially the imaginative play of soloists in relation to the group’s groove.8 “As my time started getting pretty good, I would experiment with playing things against what the rhythm section was playing,” Emily Remler recalls. “I would play against the rhythm with polyrhythms. When I did this, some guys would not trust me enough that I knew what I was doing, so they’d actually skip a beat to follow me, figuring that I had made a mistake.” Roberta Baum has confronted the same problem.

  There was one group I played with, and I felt we were fighting each other very often. There were certain things that I would do that would throw the other musicians off, if they didn’t know the way I sang and weren’t able to anticipate those things. For example, I may have had some preconceived notion that jazz involved constant syncopation, so when the beat came down I was always a little ahead of it or behind it. When I was in the position of taking the lead with songs, and the musicians didn’t know me, it seemed to them like I was coming in at some obtuse angle. They had no point of reference for where the beat was, or maybe they hadn’t worked enough with singers to understand the ways I would phrase on a regular standard. I would very often phrase against the lyrics. I’d speed up a line or slow it down. I’d take a word and stretch it over a couple of measures. Or I might condense a whole phrase into one measure and make up my own melody. Often, when I took those liberties, I felt the group wasn’t really moving with me.9