Common arguments surround two potential spoilers of invention: the performance of inappropriate material, generally, and the flaunting of technical ability specifically. Some drummers “try to get their own thing off, playing the stuff they practiced at home all day, not thinking about how it relates to what the rest of the guys are either capable or not capable of doing. A lot of guys just practice their technique on the bandstand” (KC). The problem is often one of inexperience. “The music of most of the drummers I hear, especially young drummers with amazing facility and dazzling technique, hasn’t evolved as of yet,” Charli Persip observes. Max Roach draws on years of experience when he reflects with understanding on the growth of musicianship. “Today, I don’t have to prove my technique is together, so I can concentrate more on making the drums sound as musical as possible,” he explains.
I don’t have to say, “Well, if I do this, people will say I don’t have good singles or don’t have a good open or closed press roll, or don’t have this or that.” I don’t have to worry about that now. As a young player, I was swayed by those considerations, at times. If you stay home and practice for hours, days, weeks, months in order to acquire your technique, the minute someone turns you loose, you try to crowd all that in at the moment. It can be disastrous at times. It ceases to be musical, and you can overwhelm people. I have heard a lot of people do it, pianists as well.
At the same time, however, rhythm section players argue that soloists should not necessarily dismiss the value of musical creation on the basis of “business” alone. “All the musical players like Elvin Jones and Jack DeJohnette who can play unbelievably busy are never going to play so busy that it gets in the way of the music,” Keith Copeland asserts. “They are only going to play that busy when it fits.” Fred Hersch allows that “there is such a thing as being too busy, just playing fluff, but,” he contends, “there’s also playing busy because you’re excited, and you’ve got a lot to say, and you’re trying to get it all out before it gets away.”
With the shoe on the other foot, rhythm section members commonly lay responsibility for aspects of unsatisfactory performances upon the soloists themselves. Kenny Washington articulates this view when he observes that, “at times, the drummer is just a workhorse, playing chorus after chorus for horn players who can’t play.” Individuals for whom the normal need for support becomes, instead, an oppressive dependence attract special criticism. “It’s sad to say, but many horn players use the rhythm section, they sap your energy,” one pianist complains. “They want you to build them up.” It is annoying that, “because they can’t count for themselves,” they expect the accompaniment to play “all the conventional patterns” behind them, supporting their “little prearranged things.” One bass player considers himself “terribly taken advantage of by someone who can’t keep track of the chords or the tempo by himself and needs my playing to do that for him. It’s a physical thing. You can actually feel it happen, and you get tired of carrying another guy.”
Such experiences lead some to defend themselves, countering that criticism from some soloists simply reflects the latter’s own limited abilities. “Many musicians like less creativity in the beat,” Charli Persip says contemptuously. “They just like me to play straight rhythms and a straight repetitive beat throughout their solos. Their feeble minds get confused when you playa lot of counterrhythms.” Art Davis concurs. “Some players would get immersed in their playing, and they’d forget where the beat was, and they’d listen to the bass to get back to where they should be. If the bass wasn’t playing the roots of the chords on the first and third beats or on ‘one, two, three, four’ of every measure, they’d get lost and say, ‘This guy isn’t good. We don’t need him.’ ” Patti Bown has had similar experiences. “Some people don’t want you to play too far out on piano,” she says, “meaning that the chords are going to fight whatever their musical thing is, because they can only hear as far as the blues.”
At the other extreme, however, talented but self-sufficient soloists who are indifferent to interplay can dampen an accompanist’s performance.11 “At one club, the gigs were like jam sessions, and the rhythm section was strictly utilitarian, like pumping oil for the featured players,” a bass player recalls. Another adds, “There are some soloists for whom you can stand on your toes and nothing will happen.” The experience can be deflating, as for one pianist who describes his disappointment after a concert with a renowned saxophonist: “I felt like I was hardly much use when I played with him.”
Circumstantial Problems Undermining Performances
Fundamental incompatibility between and among artists takes its toll. In other cases, unsatisfactory interplay reflects questions based on any number of circumstantial factors surrounding improvisations: Are musicians generally well practiced or out of shape? Are they well rested or tired? Are they warmed up or cold? Are their imaginations fertile or barren? Are they in the mood to extend themselves to other players or are they distracted by other matters? In one dramatic case that Patti Bown cites, a drummer who had “just split up from his wife” could neither set aside his preoccupations nor control his “terrible emotional problems.” He improvised relentlessly and tastelessly “through everybody else’s solos, trying to obliterate everyone on the bandstand.” In some cases, temporary personal friction between individual band members can lead them to withhold the musical support they normally offer one another during performances.12
More commonly, a temporary attack of self-consciousness or unfamiliarity with pieces impairs improvisation. “If you are relaxed enough, you can listen to the other people you are playing with,” Art Farmer says. “But if you’re uptight, you’re just trying to deal with the horn.” Lee Konitz elaborates candidly:
Frequently, at best, I can only relate to one person in the group at a time. At worst, I can’t listen to anybody else during my solo. Nobody. And to me, that’s really a danger sign. When my attention is so much on myself, I know that I’m in trouble. It has to start there, certainly. We have to get our own thing all balanced out before we extend ourselves to the next person. But if I’m just concerned with what I’m doing, I would tend to go into a more automatic kind of playing.
Konitz refers here to mechanical playing, not the positive experience of being on automatic pilot discussed earlier. “Many times,” he continues, “I’ve felt I was squelching the possibility of my relating to the other musicians by just hammering away at my own thing, trying to keep up or doing whatever I thought I should be doing. No one said you have to keep playing without a break during a solo.”
Within the fluctuating state of improvisation, intermittent problems that beset any part can potentially compromise the others. “Everybody’s part is equally important,” Wynton Marsalis states. “If you have one weak link, it doesn’t happen, man.” Chuck Israels sets forth an explanation for the effects of a typical off night: “If there is something wrong, it makes for a pulling back of our sensitivities. You have to defend against it in some way. This usually means you don’t listen as sharply as you would ordinarily, and you’re not as sensitive to what is going on around you. You just block it out and do your job.”
In discussing some of the ramifications of losing one’s sensitivity, Harold Ousley indicates the need for artists to work through the difficulty and attempt to take some responsibility for regaining equilibrium.
Maybe the soloist is nervous and uptight and can’t get his thing together. Everyone else might really be able to do it, but the soloist is so tense, it makes everybody else tense to the point where nobody can find nobody else. It’s just a matter of feelings. People can feel each other’s tension. Like when a person is speaking, if the person is nice and relaxed, then everyone is relaxed when they listen to him. But if that person is nervous, sometimes you don’t even want to watch someone who’s nervous, because it makes you so uncomfortable [laughter]. It works the same way with musicians.
There was a time when the piano player might be playing the wrong chor
ds, and as soon as I became aware of that, it got in the way of my own concentration and I began to fumble. Or I could forget a chord when I worried about those things. Whenever something was going wrong, I tended to go wrong with it. Fear used to do this to me. I wouldn’t get completely immobilized, but I couldn’t play my best all tensed up. Tension is one of the main reasons why things go wrong in a band. I’ve had to overcome that kind of sensitivity. I’ve had those moments when I could say, “Well, let me anchor everything,” and I was strong enough to pull everything in that went astray.
There are instances when anxiety initially causes, or further aggravates, problems with a rhythm section player’s timing, constraining, in turn, various aspects of invention within the group. “If the bass is not right,” Ronald Shannon Jackson observes, “I don’t have the freedom to play whatever I want. I can’t play different rhythms without clashing. I’m not at liberty even to think about playing different rhythms, because I will be trying too hard to keep the time together.” Under these circumstances, polyrhythmic activity and the creation of cross-rhythmic effects by deliberately “turning the beat around,” as described earlier, become risky business. “When I solo, I always know where I am, and I like to play with the time,” Gary Bartz comments. “I might play a figure implying that I’m on ‘one’ when I know that it’s not ‘one,’ just to fool somebody. If the other player’s time is not good, they will think that I really am on ‘one’ and go with that and mess up everything for the whole band. So, I won’t be able to do those kinds of things in my playing. It really makes me feel restricted when I solo.”
Should an unstable and disruptive patch of performance result in major discrepancies in the rhythm section’s interpretation of the beat, it can be disheartening for soloists. “When you have different guys in the rhythm section playing on different parts of the beat, they’re going to be fighting each other constantly, and it’s very difficult to solo against that.” The focus of Jimmy Robinson’s insights on this matter is that of long years in the tradition:
Especially on fast tempos, if the rhythm section is not working together like a well-oiled machine, and I’ve got three different rhythms going on behind me, I can’t relax in my playing. I can’t concentrate on the tune and the chords when I’ve got to listen to what they’re doing behind me and worry about their messing me up, making me sound bad if I playa certain phrase or something, even if I’m playing right.
Some soloists have the attitude, “The tune goes this way, and this is the tempo,” and they just keep playing their ideas that way. They don’t care where the rhythm section is. It’s up to the rhythm section to catch up to them or just fall by the wayside. I used to play like that when I had the chops and the endurance, but I’m not strong like that now, since I haven’t been playing for a while. So now, I’ve got to depend on the rhythm section’s cooperation. If things aren’t right, it’s going to pull me off.
Group Interplay: A Comparative Perspective
The disruptive experiences cited above illustrate why musicians diligently cultivate sensibilities to group interplay on the bandstand. By necessity, the process is a gradual one. Excited by their discovery of jazz, students initially seek opportunities to improvise at every accessible performance venue and in any group that will have them. They are, in the beginning, less particular about the partners with whom they form musical relationships, because they have yet to appreciate the subtle dimensions of interpersonal communication and the intricate meshing entailed in successful improvisation. Many are not immediately attuned to the exceptional moments of performances, nor acclimated to the extramusical experiences that accompany them. “I remember the first time I experienced that floating, out-of-the-body feeling,” Leroy Williams recalls. “It was a number of years ago, when I was playing in Chicago. At the time, I didn’t know what it was. I said, ‘What is this?’ and I backed off it for a minute.” Charli Persip reminisces along similar lines. “The first time I ever got the feeling of what it was like to strike a groove, I was pretty young. At the time, I didn’t have enough sense to realize that it was one of the few times that I was playing smart. But I learned that later.”
With growing sensitivity to the nuances of collective improvisation and a new perspective on earlier musical encounters, performers attach special significance to the support and emotional warmth they had formerly shared with players in particular bands. Over time, they increasingly discriminate in forming their associations. As in other kinds of human encounters, it is sometimes not until individuals have broken the bonds of one relationship to take up another that they appreciate how special were the qualities of the first. “There has to be a certain empathy among all the players in a group before the beauty in this music can really happen,” Leroy Williams asserts. “In some situations, everybody is trying to outshine everybody else. Once you experience how beautiful this music can be, and then you play with musicians who aren’t up to your level or who don’t have the same chemistry, then things don’t happen in the music, and it’s bad. It’s like when you’re used to champagne, and you’re given beer.”
Similarly, for Lou Donaldson, “if it feels good in the band, you can keep playing all night, and it’s a pleasure to go to work. If things are poppin’ with the other musicians, and if they’re really tight, we’ll take chances on doing a lot of different things. But if somebody’s lagging, we’ll just stick to a routine to get through the job. It’s just not right to try anything adventuresome under those conditions. You have to concentrate on the chords and make sure everything sounds right—and you’re tired at the end of an evening.”
Powerful performances by renowned groups keep the standard before artists, causing them to reflect upon their own experiences. “Sometimes,” Chuck Israels recounts, “I remember the way Miles Davis interpreted ‘Autumn Leaves’ in his band with Cannonball Adderley, milking that song for everything it meant to him—autumn time, the falling of leaves, the ending of something, remembrance, and pathos. It makes me think of all the nondescript performances I have been involved in with other musicians playing that tune over the years.”
Realizations of this nature highlight the enormity of the jazz musician’s tasks and challenges. The thoughtful analysis of one player represents the attitude of many fine artists:
It’s difficult because it’s a real intimate relationship to play music with people. It’s very intuitive and visceral, very sensual. There are certain things you know right away about people by how they respond and how they feel in the music. The sensitivities involved are very much like sexual intuition, although I don’t want to make too much of that comparison. But just as I don’t need to make love for the sake of making love, anymore, I don’t need to play for the sake of playing, anymore. Just as I’ve had all the empty sexual experiences when I was younger, finding myself just out of desperation with someone that I didn’t want to be intimate with, I’ve had all the empty experiences playing music that I needed in the past. Today, I have a wonderful relationship with a wonderful woman, and a family, and I’m not desperate anymore. The fact is, I’m not desperate to play, either. I’ve played in situations where music has really been made, and I’m not interested in anything else but that.
Such remarks reveal the intensely personal nature and complexities of collective improvisation. It puts into relief, as well, the occasional vulnerability of artists immersed in jazz performance.
FIFTEEN
The Lives of Bands
Conflict Resolution and Artistic Development
You really learn a lot about yourself on the road, and you get hurt a lot. You learn about how you react emotionally to different people telling you things that they feel aren’t right about your playing, because you may have a different idea about what’s right musically. You can reject what the other person said, or you can try to adjust according to the criticism you got. But in some cases you find yourself trying to adjust so much to accommodate another performer, it gets very confusing in terms of your own m
usical identity. You begin to wonder, “Well, exactly who am I?”—Akira Tana
The configuration of musical personalities and talents within each band establishes its fundamental framework and determines its unique possibilities for invention. For those reasons, the leader’s initial selection of personnel is itself a compositional act, requiring a special kind of sensitivity. Precise musical vision, knowledge of performance styles of prospective players, and prescient judgment of their potential as interacting improvisers profoundly affect the group’s chances for success as an artistic enterprise.
As described earlier, despite the best intentions of their leaders, jazz groups may inadvertently include musicians with opposing tastes and incompatible skills. “When I hire the musicians, it’s no problem,” Gary Bartz says, “but when I work with other groups, I have no choice about who the other musicians are. When serious problems arise, it always amazes me why leaders of groups hire people who can’t fit in.” The obvious fault may rest with a leader’s poor judgment or with misguided recommendations from other players, but given improvisation’s demanding, capricious nature, even the most well informed employer may fail to anticipate subtle problems. For example, artists who, by individual reputation, share the same predisposition toward interpreting the beat sometimes discover significant disparity in their rhythmic concepts when they first perform together.
Identification and resolution of musical conflict remains a central issue over the careers of improvisers, an issue having immediate consequences for their groups’ inventions and ongoing implications for personal artistic growth. ‘Typically, handling problems depends not only on the specific problems a band encounters, but also on the group’s political organization. Some bands are effectively leaderless, with all decisions about music potentially the result of more or less equal collaboration. Characteristically, however, band leaders exercise the greatest authority. Among supporting artists, veterans have more influence than newcomers; and composers, arrangers, or musical directors have greater power than do the other players. At the same time, these general power relationships are subject to myriad nuances and are constantly renegotiated and redefined by artists. Among the factors that determine the outcome of negotiation are the individual’s sense of artistic identity and the values he or she attaches to collective improvisation as a form of social and musical interaction. Two common ideological positions represent opposite poles in this matter, the first focusing on the rights of the individual, the second on the welfare of the group.
Thinking in Jazz Page 62