As artists indicate, sluggish responses to musical maneuvers requiring split-second timing and mutual support can have drastic consequences for a performance. Curtis Fuller humorously compares these to the risks taken by trapeze artists. “If someone does something adventurous and the other person isn’t there at the right place at the right time to catch him, it’s like splatsville! [laughter].”
Conflicting Notions of Tasteful Conversation
Once group members are familiar enough with each other’s musical concepts to interpret ideas in another part correctly, anticipating its course, conflicts can arise over different notions of what is tasteful response. “If the music goes, ‘da-dada-da-da’ [‘Pop Goes the Weasel’] and someone else answers, ‘da-da.’ [‘pop, pop’], I feel, ‘Well, damn, why don’t you do something else?’” James Moody says. “I always like the subtle things, not the obvious. They are the hippest.” Moody also avoids various other performance conventions that he regards as predictable or unoriginal. “I’ll tell you something else that really gets on my nerves. It’s when I hear a horn player who comes in playing the last phrase of someone else’s statement. I never do that. That’s that person’s statement, he’s got it. Let me do something else.”
Comparable criticism applies to strict imitation between a member of the rhythm section and a soloist, what some deride as the “parrot school of jazz” (PW). “There might be times when you would play exactly what someone else plays, but you don’t really like to do that,” Leroy Williams contends. Rufus Reid agrees. “If you heard imitation all the time, it would be boring.” Chuck Israels also condemns the practice. “If each time you say something in a musical situation, I repeat it back to you, it really kills conversation.” John McNeil’s discourse on imitation presents a model for appropriateness. “I want a drummer to listen to me, but not to play my stuff back to me. If I go ‘fot do dot,’ there are guys who will go ‘flop ba ba, flop ba ba.’ Some drummers and pianists will do that just to show that they’re listening. If it happens once a night or so, that’s fine, but sometimes guys will do that to you to the point that you’re sorry you played the idea in the first place. I mean, I don’t want to hear it three times. I just wanted to hear it the one time I played it. If I make a thing out of it, if I take a figure and play it over and over, then he can pick up on it and it’s all right.”
Also subject to critical evaluation is the particular balance the rhythm section maintains between supportive, responsive performance, on the one hand, and assertive, aggressive performance, on the other. Commonly, players charge accompanists who increase their own part’s interest and complexity with doing so at the expense of the delineation of a piece’s form and the complementing of soloists. A typical case would be the pianist’s misuse of chord voicings and substitutions. “Since the piano player is the one playing the chords, the soloist has got to go with him. Some people try to lead you to places that you might not want to go,” James Moody states. “Few pianists are hip enough to come in at just the right time, then to layout enough to let you have the expanded harmony and then come in,” Wynton Marsalis adds. “When you’re playing something, some pianists will come in playing in the middle of what you’re playing and play the wrong harmony.” In Art Davis’s opinion, as well, “pianists, or whoever is feeding the chords, can really do things that get on soloists’ nerves. They’re thinking about the harmony one way, and the other person is dealing with the chords a different way. The soloist may be thinking of a certain chord, and the pianist may playa substitute chord. That can constrain the soloist to the substitute chord when he wants to play something else. If he tries to play something else, it will sound like a clash.”
Accompanying melodic figurations become a point of contention, at times. Lou Donaldson complains of harmful inconsistencies. “Some pianists put a lot of weird comping stuff behind you while you’re playing,” he says, “weird little figures and interludes. But when they get a solo, they don’t play any of that stuff. They just play straight.” Others object to undesirable rhythmic features of comping patterns. “An insensitive pianist can rush you. If the pianist isn’t listening to you, you can’t take a tune or a phrase and stretch it out in a relaxed way. You have to do it the way the pianist is doing it. That stifles your creativity” (VW). Some pianists, in particular, “bang and smash when they compo They comp on top of the beat, behind the beat, all in the wrong places” (WM). At the other extreme, however, are weak players who “have a less rhythmic feel than others. They just seem content to play the chord on the first beat of every chord change” (AF).
Other differences concern the appropriate shape and complexity of the accompaniment. “From the horn player’s point of view, if you don’t give him room to establish his ideas first, then you can sabotage the whole solo,” Lonnie Hillyer insists. “There may be a disagreement over how the piano player supports the soloists,” Akira Tana explains. “He may be a very nervous, busy player, playing a lot of rhythmic figures and really jamming things in.” Such density can be annoying to soloists, unduly challenging their creativity. “Whenever I play with this one cat, I never have any ideas,” a trumpeter remembers.
All I hear is his noodling around, filling up all the space. There’s another piano player I worked with who would never leave any space between his figures. There were chords all the time, and I could very rarely play anything I wanted. From a horn player’s point of view, I don’t think he ever realized how much he tied your hands. Maybe some guys need that kind of support, but I never did. If you give me too much support, I have a great deal of difficulty thinking of anything to play, because, if I want to outline the harmony and change the sounds around a bit, it’s like all those sounds are already being played for me, and anything I do would seem sort of repetitious. What I have to do under those conditions is just to think more of very rhythmic punctuation or just playing high and loud to cut through all the comping. It becomes high intensity all the time.
Similar complaints are aimed at drummers and their capacity to dominate the group’s musical texture. Walter Bishop Jr. condemns those drummers who “fill up all the space, making me feel like I have to fight to get my lines across.” Curtis Fuller reasons that “things get out of hand, as they do with so many drummers, when they cease to be the accompanists and become the soloists themselves. When you’re trying to develop something and the drummer takes away the rhythmic foundation,” he concludes, “it can create a great deal of confusion.”10
A comparable problem occurs when players emphasize the role of responsive interaction over essential time-keeping. “Some drummers are too influenced by what is going on in front,” George Duvivier points out. “They try to catch every lick, to anticipate everything the orchestra or soloist will do, every syncopation, and they forget that they’re the support for the whole thing. They’re the ones that the soloist is leaning on. The soloist can do whatever he wants, as long as we, the rhythm section, remain constant. The rhythm section must be the foundation at all times. If you try to follow an erratic soloist when he goes off, then everyone’s in trouble.”
John Hicks warns of additional danger in “overplaying or overstating” a rhythmic concept after “picking it up from somebody else in the band.” Illustrating his point, he dictated a rhythmic pattern for me to repeat, then performed a complementary interlocking pattern. “If the pattern I’m clapping is overdone and it becomes a statement on its own,” he cautions, “it loses its complementary feeling. You’ve blocked the effectiveness of the original statement, the groove that’s been set up.” Among the transgressors are players who unilaterally double time their figures when neither the arrangement, nor a gesture in the soloist’s part, nor a lull in the performance suggests the need for a radical change. Indeed, it can inadvertently destroy the music’s mood.
On the other hand, musicians who weight their foundational responsibilities excessively may invite scorn. “Some drummers are too servile. They just play their limited thing, rarely responding to y
ou,” one pianist complains. Tommy Turrentine’s good-humored lament is likewise telling: “The other night, the drummer was just playing ‘tit-a-ting, tit-a-ting, tit-a-ting, tit-a-ting,’ all night long. Now, what in the world can that generate?” He laughs. “Shoot, it was pitiful. This music is about listening and feeling and intensity. If the feeling ain’t there, you got nothing.” Curtis Fuller similarly implores drummers, “Don’t leave me all exposed like that.”
Lack of knowledge and experience sometimes lies at the root of deficient accompaniment. In Kenny Barron’s early years, “there were good experiences, but many discouraging experiences as well. I still wasn’t familiar with what was supposed to happen on the bandstand.” Another pianist remembers her youthful puzzlement when, after a jam session, a disgruntled soloist advised her specifically, “You should really feed me more when you play.” She had never heard that expression before and wondered what was expected of her beyond the accurate performance of the lead sheet’s chords. “When you’re still young, you’re just figuring out what you’re doing. You’re more involved with expressing yourself than playing with other people. You don’t really learn to feed other people ideas until you’ve been playing for a while and feel independent enough as a player,” she reflects.
Differences reflect individual stages of artistic development and personal taste. In addition, disagreements described above commonly reflect strong allegiances to particular jazz idioms and their respective conventions of group interplay. Lou Donaldson sets forth the perspective of many bebop performers when he deplores aspects of the current jazz scene.
I want the piano player to playas basic as he can. He should play the basic chords to the song and leave the improvisation to me. A lot of piano players talk about feeding me ideas, but I don’t need no feeding. Jazz is very simple music. That’s what makes it. You take a simple motive and you build from there, if you’ve got the talent. Also, in a small band there is nothing more important than the drummer, because you have to have your rhythm to make the band tight and to project to people. But a lot of drummers don’t understand that.
The toughest thing for any of them to do is just to play “one, two, three, four,” just regular swing. It’s not supposed to be this way, because playing swing should be as easy as turkey for a jazz drummer. But it’s not, today. They’re taught a lot of nonsense about improvising and doing stuff that they have no business doing. They get into those habits, and when they get into a spot where they have to swing, they can’t do it. They play much too busy. When I was starting out, there wasn’t any problem like this. If they didn’t swing, they didn’t have a job. You knew that if you called somebody they could do it, because it was a prerequisite for playing the music. Today, even if they can’t swing, they can work. And they’re stars!
Such views reflect, in part, the training that earlier generations of jazz musicians received in the context of dances. “You really learned the importance of rhythm then,” Barry Harris recalls. “You had to keep steady time to swing and to make people feel like dancing.”
In marked contrast to the traditionalists are musicians who champion the values of later performance trends. “You see, in the 1960s the beat was freed up. Tony Williams killed it,” Wynton Marsalis says in admiration of Williams’s trailblazing. Marsalis further outlines recent developments:
In the 1980s, drummers who have to keep going back to “one” don’t have a feeling for the music. In the 1980s, drummers who have to keep playing the sock cymbal on two and four are corny. So are cats who have to keep playing the bass drum all the time. That’s corny unless it’s a drummer from the period in which they played that way. Today, a drummer has to keep the time, but the time now has a flow. It is no longer something locked in like a beat. Time is now something that just goes by. It still has structure, though. The purpose of the drummer is to keep the time flowing, not to keep steady time, “ONE, two, three, four, ONE, two, three, four.” Now, the time is like, “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, etc,” It’s not 4/4 or 6/8. It’s just a steady flow of pulses.
Band leaders whose group concept fuses the conventions of differing idioms sometimes face a diligent search for drummers with the requisite combination of skills. “It’s hard to find a drummer who can keep a tempo and can swing,” Art Farmer finds.
But even if you can get some of the older guys who play bebop who can do that, it’s hard to get the balance you’re looking for. That is, it’s hard to find a drummer in the 1980s who’s from the era that I came from who is not stuck in that period. Some of the older guys will sit down with you and play the same thing chorus after chorus, cha, cha, cha, cha, all night long. They’re not flexible. They don’t seem to be able to respond to you the way the younger players can. The younger players are into more spontaneity, which comes from the free jazz thing. They have been exposed to that type of playing, so they are not going to be content to sit there and play time all night long. They are not bound to that type of thing. Hopefully, they are going to be able to sit there and play time and to be able to respond to the moment. And if you play some pattern like five against four or three against four, they are going to be able to play something that goes along with it, instead of just doing the same thing regardless of what you play. The problem is that it’s not easy to find young drummers who can twist and turn like that, and who can also play with a feeling of swing. They often don’t have a good time-feel, so it’s awkward to play with them. It’s simply hard to find a drummer with the balance I’m looking for.
Comparable issues emerge from the soloist’s interaction with bass players as they attempt to determine the desirable degree of musical activity within their respective parts. “When an insensitive bassist goes off in his own musical world, he can really kill the soloist’s spirit,” James Moody asserts. Similarly, Curtis Fuller finds that some bass players “undermine what you do as a soloist when they’re trying to develop something else at the same time you’re trying to develop something.” Kenny Barron has also experienced the frustration of encountering this obstacle to a satisfying solo performance. “There is a way of playing more than bass notes without it becoming too much, but when it’s overdone, it drives me up a wall. I was once playing with a bass player who’s a fantastic technician, but we were playing a ballad and he was playing so much, I just stopped in the middle of my solo and let him play by himself.”
Such conflicts have increased with the changing performance practices of jazz tradition. As a bebop player, Lou Donaldson recognizes that he has “to have walking bass. If I don’t have that, I’ll just put my horn up. If he’s skipping and jumping all around and soloing while I’m soloing, then I’ll just give it up.” Donaldson gives an explanation for his attitudes: “There is a certain thing called a groove that the whole band should settle into at the beginning of the piece when we play the melody, and that needs to be maintained. If that groove is broken, then it’s all over as far as I’m concerned. A lot of cats like bass players to do other things, but not me.”
Art Farmer places such matters in historical perspective. “Today, with all their technique,” he observes, “young players feel confined by limiting themselves to playing a good bass line and providing the root and foundation for the group. It doesn’t give them enough of a challenge. They don’t understand the value and the beauty of just playing bass. They want to play a thousand notes, all on top of the harmony. Mingus and LaFaro began to take it there, and then everybody started becoming freer in their playing. Now bass players become easily bored.”
John McNeil’s colorful imagery reflects the views of many improvisers:
If we’re playing a tune that requires a walking bass, and instead the bass player is sustaining notes, playing syncopations and complicated rhythmic figures, soloing is like trying to walk with an anvil tied to one leg and someone constantly trying to trip the other leg. A lot of young bass players don’t understand the importance of having an ongoing flow of time in the group. They
hate to walk because they think it’s not creative. If they can play other things besides regular walking lines and still keep the time going, then fine. The guy who plays quarter notes all the time is boring to listen to and boring to play with. But the chances are, if you do too many other things besides walking, you’ll lose the time.
Besides that, if you are really listening to my solo, there’s no way that you can possibly play all that other stuff, because it stops me from playing. It stops me from achieving any ongoing sense of time when it goes against everything else that’s being played.
We are all in this together, but as the soloist I am the leader of this particular musical expedition. I’m glad to listen to anyone else’s suggestions as to what direction we should go in, but overall it’s my safari, pal, and if I think we should go this way through the jungle, then we should go this way.
The role of the soloist continues to figure importantly in the group’s negotiation of tasteful interplay.
The Rhythm Section’s Response to Criticism
Band members sometimes agree with the criticism they receive from soloists. The misappropriation of musical space or intrusive replication of roles that upset the soloist’s flow of ideas sometimes also interfere with the formulation of parts within the rhythm section. “Some guitarists can absolutely smother the rhythm section by playing ‘chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk,’ four beats to every measure,” George Duvivier remarks. “They should play occasional fills or break the line up, because you have a drummer and a pianist—so you don’t really need everyone playing on the beat like this. What they are trying to do,” he continues, “is to imitate Freddie Green with Basie’s band, but there’s an art to that. Freddie Green does it without getting in the way. He’s supporting, not drowning out, the others. You can always hear the bass and drums when he plays.” Another musician recalls a pianist who “played so much in the lower register that he was in the bass player’s way—down there all the time. The bass player felt the bass was sort of extraneous in the group. His bass lines were just duplicating the pianist’s left hand.”
Thinking in Jazz Page 61