Power Relations and Musical Values: The Individual versus the Group
Characteristically, the jazz community emphasizes freedom of expression in music making. “Jazz is a democratic form of music,” Max Roach declares.
When a piece is performed, everybody in the group has the opportunity to speak on it, to comment on it through their performance. It’s a democratic process, as opposed to most European classical music in which the two most important people are the composer and the conductor. They are like the king and the queen. In a sense, the conductor is also the military official who’s there to see that the wishes of the masters—the composers—are adhered to, and as a musician your job may depend on how you conform to the conductor’s interpretation of the composer’s wishes. However, in a jazz performance, everyone has an opportunity to create a thing of beauty collectively, based on their own musical personalities.
Roach’s hiring practices reflect these convictions, as does the way he delegates musical responsibility to showcase each player’s unique talents. “For my bands, I look for musicians who have spent the time really developing themselves, trying to find their own individuality,” he explains. “It always helps if a person knows his instrument as well as or better than anyone else around, but I also look for other qualities. Are the musicians as well rounded as possible?Do they compose? Is their writing, the way they voice chords, as unique to them as their instrumental performance?”
Those who believe jazz should be democratic music maintain that they should always have the freedom to express themselves according to their own tastes, even as their professional affiliations change. In fact, this is often the experience of supporting players. “With Pharoah Sanders’s group, the music is what you make of it. If he likes you, he gives you complete freedom to make up whatever you want and add it to the music” (CH). Walter Bishop Jr. has observed this repeatedly over his career. “When a person like Art Blakey, Miles Davis, or Charlie Parker hires you, that means one thing: you have what they want already. They have heard you with other bands, and they have heard you play on records. Bird never said, ‘Comp this way or comp that way,’ because he hired me to play the way I play. It’s the same when I hire somebody. When I hire a drummer, it’s because I have seen what he does with someone else. He knows that I know what he can do, and he can do the kinds of things I like a drummer to do behind me.”
At the same time, the jazz community espouses a second view on freedom of expression, stressing the mutual interdependence of players and somewhat limiting individual freedom. For Leroy Williams, “playing jazz is like a team effort, the kind you find in basketball or baseball. Everybody has to do their specific job. That’s the only way you’re going to score. One guy can’t take all the shots in basketball, for instance. He has to lay back at times. You have to give the ball to whichever player has the best shot. It’s one big group effort, and when everybody’s in harmony, that’s when the best things happen. You have to sacrifice your own ideas at times;”
In some organizations, a strong leader takes responsibility for regulating such interaction. “Whenever you have a group of people playing together, somebody has to lead and somebody has to follow,” Wynton Marsalis explains. “If you get five people on the stand and they all play the way they want to, it sounds terrible. But if you get one person to show those five people what to play, they can sound great. . . . Everybody has to follow the leader’s concept, but add everything they can to it.” From the perspective of some artists, however, the leader’s exercise of power brings the ideals of self-expression and group welfare into conflict and belies commitment to equality and the democratic process. “There are people who want you to do the robot thing. They’re interested in controlling every note you play,” Don Pate attests. John McNeil supports this observation. “I’ve played with some leaders that want what they want when they want it or bang, you’re fired,” he says. Comparable distinctions among leaders have shaped the nature of music making in jazz groups from its beginnings.1
Over the lives of bands, power relations are not necessarily static. Issue by issue, leaders differ in the limitations on expressive freedom that they impose upon supporting artists, just as the artists themselves differ in their compliance with authority. Eager apprentices who have yet to define their own musical values may readily conform to a leader’s wishes. Experience and the maturation of their own styles increase assertiveness. One career drummer, for example, asserts his dislike for “musicians telling me how to play. It makes me hate myself,” he claims, “because I feel that I’ve evolved to the point as a performer where they shouldn’t have to tell me. It hurts a bit because I feel either they aren’t really listening to me or I am still not as good as I should be. Of course, I will accept criticism from someone I respect, but it also depends how you lay it on me.”
Calvin Hill reflects on the challenges he faced in the development of his individuality:
Earlier in my career, when I was playing with Pharoah and McCoy and others, I played a certain way according to whoever I was playing with. I used to do this even more than the particular situation required. It was almost like not being Calvin Hill. If I played with, say, Joe Schmo on the piano, then I was playing more like Fred Schmo on the bass than Calvin Hill. I felt like I didn’t have a personality of my own. Recently, I’ve been really starting to feel that I have an identity of my own, a sound of my own, and a personality of my own. I can play in any situation now and fulfill the requirements of the situation and still maintain my identity. I carry that wherever I go.
For example, one of the things I’ve been interested in approaching in my playing is trying to bring more of an African influence into jazz. I got interested in this a few years ago when I heard an album of a guy from Burundi playing the bass zither. Since then, I’ve been trying to incorporate the feeling of what he was doing in my playing. I’ve been trying to have this influence come through in my playing with different groups, transcending the differences in their styles. With Max Roach, it’s easy to do because he gives you so much freedom. It’s a bit more difficult to do with [a certain bebop pianist], but there are ways of connecting some of the rhythmic patterns and little techniques I learned from the zither player with the bebop tradition’s rhythmic patterns.
When disputes arise within bands, the forceful views of supporting players prevail, at times, over those of leaders. “There was one piece in which I wanted the drummer to solo over a melodic figure that the rest of the band played,” John McNeil recalls, “and he just wouldn’t do it. I asked him over and over because I wanted to hear what it sounded like, and he just refused to do it. We argued over it for a while, and when I asked him if he could give me one good reason why he wouldn’t do it, he said, ‘I just think it sounds terrible and I don’t like it.’ I said, ‘Okay. We’ll compromise. Since you think it sounds terrible and you’re not going to want to play it very much, we just won’t do it [laughter].’” McNeil’s clever joking resolved any tension that might have lingered in the wake of a clash of strong views.
Dissenting players can also set limits on a band’s overall concept, or even redefine it. One leader’s enthusiastic attempt to adopt African polyrhythmic settings for his group’s entire repertory was thwarted by a particular member’s threat to resign. The player liked the group’s balance of ‘African-oriented and mainstream jazz” material and was uninterested in devoting more time to the former.
Despite differences in their power, leaders and group members typically strive to appreciate one another’s viewpoints and to interact flexibly. “I have to be open-minded concerning what the other musicians might play,” Fred Hersch concedes. “At times, I have to fight not to tell anyone else how to play. It might not be what I had in mind, but that’s the whole point of playing jazz, to be open enough to accept what someone else has to say.” Similarly, Rufus Reid has learned “through experience how to assess what is needed in different musical settings and how far I can go in my playing before I step beyond t
he boundaries of what people expect. You can see what different people’s concepts are. Then you know how far you can stretch it and still give them what they want.”
Assessing and Accommodating Musical Situations
In a spirit of compromise, newcomers commonly size up the idiomatic requirements of their situations within groups and modify aspects of their personal styles accordingly. “You have to fit into the style of the band you’re playing with;” insists Red Rodney. “That’s just professionalism. You can deviate a little, perhaps, as long as what you do fits in with the form and general style of the band. When a rhythm section is playing older music and older styles, it’s hard to play the newer soloistic patterns and figures. They won’t fit very well. So, I just try to stay in the style that I hear around me.”
Likewise, when performing with the Heath brothers, whose “mainstream swing tradition calls for a straight -ahead mainstream swing beat,” Akira Tana recognizes that “certain kinds of things come to mind that wouldn’t really fit, or be tasteful, like playing with the soloistic concept of Tony Williams or Jack Delohnette,” In Tana’s view, any player who performs with an artist of Percy Heath’s stature should be prepared to “adjust to the era and tradition he’s coming from and respect it. You’re hired by people to make their music sound good and to complement them. The drummers in New York that I admire so much, like Al Foster, Billy Hart, and Ben Riley, are all people who can perform in many different settings. They are the ones who are always working. They can adjust and make other people’s music sound good, and at the same time, they still contribute something of their own.”
Within a group’s idiomatic guidelines, the musical personalities of players dictate further adjustments. Meeting the needs of different individuals simultaneously with fulfilling multiple responsibilities can present dilemmas, however. Rhythm section players may discover that the approach to accompaniment favored by one of their counterparts conflicts with their own, and perhaps with the taste of a soloist, as well. This requires them to choose between adopting the other rhythm section player’s approach as a constraint upon invention or following their own sense of appropriate interplay with soloists.
The situation is intricate, as Keith Copeland attests.
In one group I played with, the bass player was a brilliant player, but he had a more laid-back way of playing that wouldn’t allow me to take the kind of liberties I would with someone else. With that group, I had to play less, so that the bass player and I would lock up more and make the foundation of the band sound good. If I played too much off the bass figures and off the improvisation of the soloist, keeping a dialogue going with the soloist as well as keeping the time, it would be taking things too far. It would confuse the bass player, and he wouldn’t feel as sure of the time as he would if I just tried to play along with him and let him dictate the kinds of embellishments that were going to happen for the rest of the band. If I played solely off of him, then I would play to whatever peak he would play to. If I went beyond that, it became too intense for him. He wasn’t used to playing with that kind of energy level behind him, because the group he had played with for so many years was much more laid-back.
I could have taken many more liberties in my playing if he had been accustomed to playing a different way. It would work if I was playing with a bass player who understood the way in which I like to playoff the soloist, like the way Jimmy Garrison understood how Elvin Jones was playing off John Coltrane, or the way Jymie Merritt understood the way Art Blakey was playing off of Lee Morgan or Freddie Hubbard. But if the bass player doesn’t feel comfortable about the way I’m taking liberties playing off the soloists, then it’s better for me to play just to the level of the bass player, locking up with him, and let the rest of the guys play off of us. When I play with bass players like Sam Jones, it’s very different. Sam plays so melodically and rhythmically that I can play things simultaneously with what he is playing and still enhance the soloist.
The sensitivity, understanding, and flexibility evidenced in Copeland’s account are especially critical in musical contexts where arrangements are minimal and leaders offer little guidance in advance of performances. “I would go into the recording studio with Bud Powell and ask him for directions,” Art Taylor recalls, “but he’d just tell me to hit. He’d say, ‘You’ll know what to do.’ I had no choice but to go with it, but it could be very frustrating. I just had to trust my own instincts and musicianship.” Under comparable circumstances, bands that depart from conventional performance practices compound the challenges for newcomers. Buster Williams remembers his experience performing with Miles Davis’s quintet during the period, described earlier, “in which the group was playing way-out things like on the E.S.P. album. They had their own particular brand of stuff at the time, and nobody else had been doing it.”
The group had no formal rehearsal before their first performance. Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Wayne Shorter invited Williams to drop by the hotel where they were staying. They “ran through ‘So What‘” with him and simply pronounced “You got it.” Williams laughs at the memory. It did not appear to concern them that he might face any difficulty with the music. “Because they were so relaxed;” Williams says, “I thought I might as well be relaxed, too. That was the only way I was going to be able to play the music.” He was, nevertheless, uncertain as to “what my precise role was supposed to be,” he recollects, adding, “Nobody told me—and I was afraid to ask, because everybody took it so natural.”
For the first few nights, the performances were unnerving for Williams, who describes the experience as “like trying to find my way through a maze;” Davis consistently “opened up each set with ‘Agitation,’ the only thing that resembled a melody. From then on, it was out there. I listened to Tony, and when I found that I couldn’t figure out anything from Tony, I listened to Herbie. But Herbie was laying out half the time. Wayne seemed to just float on the periphery of everything, and Miles would just make his statement and go to the bar. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, man, except play the bass. So, that’s what I did. I played what I considered to fit in with what they were doing. Also, the guys were so beautiful, they adjusted to me;” he concludes, in tribute to the fact of the group’s inclusiveness and sensitivity: they were all listening to and accommodating him.
Negotiating Musical Differences off the Bandstand
Should successful adjustments fail to occur during performances, musicians sometimes have post mortems, discussing problems afterwards, making requests, or expressing dissatisfaction with their own participation. Lonnie Hillyer had heard that Herbie Hancock “once told Miles, ‘I don’t know what to play behind you sometimes.’ Miles answered, ‘Then don’t play anything’ [laughter]. Guys like that will let a few bars at a time go by without playing.” In Patti Bown’s distant past, a saxophone player was equally direct. “He told me that I was playing too many things behind him. He said, ‘Feed me, but don’t get in the way.’ I thanked him and heard afterwards what he was talking about. It made me stop and think, and I started listening very hard to what the soloists were doing.”
Drummer Keith Copeland has received similar instruction. One pianist “asked me not to play too much because it confused him,” Copeland recounts.
He was talking about volume and playing too many figures. He wanted me to play more simply, to play intensely, but softer because it was a trio. In a horn band, you tend to start soft, but you can build up to much higher levels of intensity and volume than you can with a trio. If I get too exuberant, I can cover the piano player up. So, I had to learn how to keep the intensity there, but to keep the volume down. I can get busy in the latter parts of his solos when I have an idea where he’s going to go, but I can’t start off that way. I have to give him a chance to build his solo and find out which way he wants to go. With other piano players, it’s different. There’s no way I can play too much because they’re playing so much themselves, all kinds of ways rhythmically. I can’t play as freely
with this piano player. I have to play less busily or I’d get in his way, and he’d have to follow me.
Kenny Washington similarly recalls the invaluable counsel he received when performing with groups led by Lee Konitz, whom Washington considers to be “very special and different in terms of what he likes from drummers.” At the time, Washington had been modeling his performance upon Louis Hayes, Art Blakey, and “Philly” Joe Jones. “All the cats in town who were about, bashing. You know, the ‘hit it’ cats.” This approach held him in good stead within Konitz’s nonet, but Washington “used to play too loud” in the settings of Konitz’s quartets and trios. According to Washington, Konitz’s advice was both supportive and specific—helpful at the time and over the long run:
“Listen, man, I love your playing and everything, but I want you to play softer, but with the same kind of intensity.”
He told me that there was this record called Motion that he did with Elvin Jones and wanted to know if I was hip to that. I searched and searched until I finally found that record, and I could see what he was trying to tell me. Around the same time that Lee and Elvin did that album, Elvin was also playing with John Coltrane. When he was playing with Coltrane, he really had to hit it. It was intense. But when he got on the record with Lee, he was just tipping. He was playing the same stuff that he played with Coltrane, but playing much softer. It felt like a whole different way of playing, but the intensity was still there. He was playing the same polyrhythms and everything he played with Trane, but at a much lower level of volume. I heard this record and I couldn’t believe it. Everything was surging ahead, but it was soft, pianissimo. When Lee told me to listen to this, he wasn’t telling me to play like Elvin, but to play my way. But not loud.
Thinking in Jazz Page 63