Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  Lee was also the first cat to turn me on to Mel Lewis. Lee called Mel up and said, “Listen, I’ve got this new drummer that’s playing with my band, and I want you to come down and talk to him” —because at that point, I hadn’t begun to think about fitting into different situations. I didn’t know anything about that until Mel started talking to me about it. He told me that you have to play according to whatever situation you’re in. Like if it calls for playing loud, you go right ahead. But Lee is not into that kind of thing. Mel was very beautiful about that. He brought me up to his house and played me different records that he had done. Mel can fit into any situation.

  As implied above, the criticism that performers receive within particular bands is commonly echoed within the jazz community’s larger network, sensitizing performers to general weaknesses in their musicianship and to the requirements of different situations. After returning from a solo performance tour and participating in a few local sessions, one pianist was puzzled to find that his former friends were “always busy with other gigs” whenever he attempted to hire them. One evening when their wives were socializing with the pianist’s girlfriend, the women diplomatically shared the view of their husbands that the pianist’s “playing had gone down” during his tour. As a solo artist, he had become accustomed to taking unusual rhythmic liberties. Drummers subsequently regarded his time as unsteady. He experienced additional difficulties with bass players upon returning to ensemble work. Because he failed to readjust the densely textured style that he had developed to fill out his solo performance, bass players regarded him as “in their way.” Upon receiving the women’s kindly intentioned message, the pianist began practicing with a metronome and studying recordings of various bands’ rhythm sections to reacquaint himself with the interaction of his favorite pianists. Achieving his former strength after several months, he regained the admiration of his friends.

  When problems are elusive, improvisers sometimes require repeated trial and error before overcoming criticism they have received. Rufus Reid remembers the bass player who replaced him in Dexter Gordon’s band telling a story that “just had me on the floor laughing:” The bass player had previously performed with an artist who “liked things way up on the beat,” and when he first joined the band,

  Gordon would say, “Now, look, you sound real good, man, but just relax, lay back.” Then, the next night, he would play more laid back, or what felt to him like more laid back, and Dexter would say, “Relax, man. Just let it flow.” That kept happening until, one day, the bass player got sick of Dexter coming to him with this and decided he was really going to lay back to the point where there was going to be no doubt about his laying back. So, that night they were playing ballads, and he laid back so far that he knew [that] when he got off the bandstand and got into the dressing room they were going to say that it was too far back. He laid back so far that it hurt to do it, like he was becoming completely unglued with it. He knew they were going to have to say, “Not that much.” So, he goes into the dressing room after the set, and everyone came into the room grinning from ear to ear. “That’s it!” they said. “You got it now!” [Reid laughs.] He couldn’t believe it.

  In some instances, moreover, subtleties distinguishing different notions of tasteful interaction or the vague ways in which performers express disfavor make it difficult for performers to fathom their differences. A trumpeter remembers a group in which the pianist would set up an unvarying comping pattern, while insisting that the soloist

  not play anything off of it. You weren’t supposed to play with it or even be inspired by it. If you started playing off his pattern, he’d change it and he’d tell you about it. That was a very weird concept to me because, in the first place, piano players rarely stick with one pattern long enough, and in the second place, when I go into a playing situation, I try to have an open mind to everything. And if I play off something that someone else is playing, I don’t even think about it. I don’t always specifically think about what the piano player is playing. I just try to hear all the stuff that the whole group is playing, and what the piano is playing is just part of that.

  Also, the piano player was always saying to me, “You’ve got to dig in more. You’ve got to play with fire. You’ve just got to try to dig in more and play with more fire.” I wasn’t about to tell him that that was what I thought I was doing already. He used to tell me about how much fire the former trumpet players with the group had. So, one day, I decided to get ahold of one of the group’s earlier records, and I copped the trumpet player’s solo on one of the tunes that had become a big hit. I changed it slightly, but I played the same thing basically when it came time for me to solo, and I just waited to hear the leader’s reaction. He didn’t know what I had done, and he came back saying, “Man, you’ve got to learn to play with more fire,” After that point, I knew I’d never know what he was talking about, and I didn’t take it so seriously because I considered the trumpet player whose solo I copped to be great.

  Such points of contention may be fleeting in the relationship between players as they turn their attention to other issues, or they may remain nagging difficulties in their efforts to establish musical rapport.

  Negotiating Differences during Performances

  Complementing the feedback artists receive off the bandstand is that which comes during actual performances, requiring them to make immediate adjustments in their playing. Due to the difficulties inherent in translating musical concepts into words and the awkwardness of confronting problems, some artists provide indirect or minimal commentary. “I hear you listening to me again tonight,” a pianist once quipped at me in subtle derision in the course of an engagement. In his view, I had borrowed too much material from his accompaniment when formulating my solos. Leroy Williams recalls the reaction of Thelonious Monk to one of his performances when anxiety caused Williams to rush the music’s tempo. “One thing that made a lasting impression on me took place during the first tune I played with Monk. We’d only gotten a few bars into it when Monk gets up from the piano and comes over to me and says, ‘We have all night to play.’ That’s all he said, and then he went back to the piano. Wilbur Ware was playing bass, and he looked over at me and laughed. Monk was just telling me to relax.”

  Physical signs are also effective. Sonny Stitt once realized during a tour that young Buster Williams never took his eyes off the drummer’s hi-hat cymbal, relying upon it as a visual prop to steady his performance. For the remainder of the engagement and during subsequent performances, he stood between the two musicians on the bandstand, deliberately blocking the view. As contrary as this may seem, the tactic eventually paid off. Williams agrees that, forced to depend on his own ears and cultivate his own sense of the beat, his “tempo started getting together from that time on.” In another case, a bass player describes a renowned singer’s stylized stroll to his part of the bandstand whenever she found fault with him and the trepidation he felt at the manner in which she “gaped” at him, until, heeding her stare, he altered his performance. It was similar for Keith Copeland when, as a teenager, he sat in with Barry Harris’s group:

  If you tried some stuff on the gig that didn’t work, like accents that didn’t fit the head, or if you broke the flow, you’d get a dirty look from Barry. He had a way of looking at you that could scare you to death. He didn’t have to say anything. Also, by the time I had a chance to play with Barry, I was listening a lot to “Philly” Joe Jones and a few other drummers from the hard bop period, and I was trying to do a lot of the things that they did. I wanted to drop all the bombs I had been practicing. But Barry would give me this funny look and say, “I need more bass drum. Give me some more foundation;” It meant using the loud/soft technique, playing the bass drum on every beat and varying the dynamics and accents.

  As described earlier, some leaders altogether eschew discussion about musical problems, leaving players to work out their differences through musical discourse in performance. “Whether people want less accompan
iment or want you to play right along with them isn’t necessarily discussed:” Tommy Flanagan states. “With Sonny Rollins, it didn’t need to be. You know when you feel like you’re being crowded out [he laughs]. There’s less room for you to play.” With respect to the conversational aspects of jazz, Calvin Hill disdains “drummers who are like tape recorders. You play something, and then they imitate it;” he bemoans. “Sometimes, I’ll mess with cats like that. I’ll just stop and wait for them to play the next thing. That forces them to play something of their own.” Paul Wertico adopts the same tactic when uninspired soloists improvise continuously to the point of “self-indulgence, using you like Aebersold playalong records.” Whereas poor soloists usually fall apart without the drummer’s support, he adds, “heavy” players can take the music “to another level” by themselves, preparing the way for an even greater climax when the drums subsequently come back in.

  Clever strategies come to their assistance when players strive to improve the level of conversation. In Fred Hersch’s experience, “if you don’t like what someone else is doing, there are little, polite musical ways of saying, ‘I don’t really want you to do that. It’s lovely, but I would rather you did this.’ I might do something musical with my left hand, the certain way I play a line,” he explains. “Or, if Art Farmer plays some real unexpected stuff which makes what I’m playing behind him sound wrong, it means, ‘Layout!’ You have to be able to communicate this way with the people you’re playing with if you’re going to play jazz:” Sometimes, the titles of compositions serve as codes, as when soloists quote tunes like “I Got Rhythm” or “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” when the rhythm section begins to lose its coordination, destabilizing the beat.2

  Of course, conveying through the language of music that you think other players have created a problem is one thing; convincing them of it and bringing it to resolution can be a complicated process. Various factors with consequences for collective invention affect this process, as the experiences of several artists attest.

  The first time George Duvivier performed with one renowned singer, for example, he was initially very excited about the prospects “because I knew his band had some swinging arrangements. But unfortunately,” he continues, “I discovered that some of the bass lines were terrible:” From his point of view, “bass lines are generally a throwaway for many arrangers, who don’t give them the same care they do horn voicings. I prefer to have them write out the chord changes and leave the bass lines to me.”

  Consequently, after reviewing the bass parts in the singer’s arrangements, Duvivier started changing them. The singer was used to hearing the other lines, however, and he did not want bass players “to take too many liberties, because he felt it detracted from his own performance:” Although not chastized directly, Duvivier eventually realized that the discrepancies were annoying the singer, and he returned to the original arranged bass parts. “Then everything was fine,” Duvivier says, “except that I wasn’t happy.” When asked how he resolved the conflict, he replied simply, “Well, the gig ended and that was that:” As in such instances, band leaders can constrain, if not stifle, the contributions of supporting artists, leaving them dissatisfied with their own role in the music.

  There are times, however, when accommodating a leader can result in pleasing musical revelations for other players. Rufus Reid recalls occasions when Eddie Harris, in an effort to preserve the character of his own compositions, would instruct Reid “not to improve on” their bass parts. “I just hated them,” Reid exclaims. Some nights, after playing one of the parts, Reid would alter the pattern “rhythmically a bit,” which immediately drew Harris’s attention. When Reid “fooled with the pattern again,” Harris stopped playing the saxophone and gave Reid “a real dirty look. ‘Oh, damn’,” Reid said to himself, and he went back to the original pattern again. Several evenings later, Reid tired of the constant struggle and decided to play the pattern just as it was written in order to prove to Harris that the music would not “get off the ground that way.” But to Reid’s astonishment, “just the opposite thing happened. All of sudden, I got so involved with the pattern that the music just began to grow and grow and grow. The pattern became like a repeated chant.” The music amazed Reid, making him realize that, not having appreciated what “Harris had wanted the music to achieve,” he had inadvertently prevented the music from reaching its zenith. From that point on, the pieces presented “a different kind of challenge” to Reid. He adds that after this experience he approached conflicts with greater humility.

  Fred Hersch recollects his own comprehensive adjustment to another artist’s musicality. When he first played with Sam Jones as a duo at Bradley’s in New York, he thought that of all the players on the music scene the two of them would be the “most mismatched.” Hersch was much younger than Jones, who was, “at fifty-five, a legend. He’s a beautiful cat, but he’s got his opinions, and he’s stubborn. He plays impeccable time and great changes. That’s his thing. He lays it down, but he doesn’t go with you.” Their first performance fed into Hersch’s apprehensions. Having become used to playing with active young bass players, Hersch found it frustrating to play with a bass player who just played steady bass lines and did not interact as, in Hersch’s opinion, an Eddie Gomez would have, for example. However, on the second night of their engagement, he recounts,

  all of a sudden, I really started getting into his groove. And then it all opened up. I started to understand how you can be as free artistically within different parameters. I started realizing that Sam’s playing is so classic and so subtle. Like, all his notes lie right under his fingers, and he always plays the right note for you. He plays the right notes, the right chord substitute, the right line—and the groove is just incredible. He’s a rhythmic player, and it’s just like playing with a whole rhythm section. Within a groove time, or within a standard tune, I started feeling a new sense of freedom playing with Sam. I could go ahead and be melodic and not have to worry about playing all this textural pianistic stuff that people play. I could play bebop and play music just like Tommy Flanagan plays. It’s very musical.

  It was hard for me at first because I wanted to get my other thing off, my other way of playing. But then I really got into working the gig, learning something and satisfying myself. Just playing with Sam and coming to understand that way of playing was an incredible learning experience for me.

  In other cases, direct challenges to another player’s demands ultimately enrich the experiences of improvising. Don Pate recalls having had a conflict with Ahmad Jamal that was similar, initially, to the one between Reid and Harris, but it ran a quite different course. Jamal had composed bass lines for Pate

  to play in certain places. I’d play the line for a while, and then, when it became too repetitive for me, I’d change the line and play something else. Then Ahmad would turn around at the piano, like the strict disciplinarian he is, and say, “Only play the line! Only play the line!” But being rebellious like I am, I would continue what I was doing. I would acknowledge the line and go in and out of it. I’d play the line to a point, but sometimes it’s physically uncomfortable to play the same thing over and over. Eventually, Ahmad would give up his vocalizing, “Play the line!” and if you played something that he liked, he’d play your line back to you on the piano and smile. So, that was his way of compromising or giving. He still wanted you to play the line, but at the same time, if you took the risk and had the creativity to augment it, he was large enough to accept it.

  Resistance to compromise within bands, on the other hand, does not always produce such favorable musical results. A musician describes the experience of being in the recording studio “with four people who were ready to play with one another and one guy who was not. [The trumpeter and saxophonist] were way ahead of me and possibly [the drummer], in terms of their abilities and skills at that point, but that did not prevent us from accompanying the others reasonably well. We had a fairly easy time of finding common ground:” In his
view, the pianist, whose style did not suit the others “harmonically or rhythmically,” was the “odd man out. I don’t think that [the drummer] and I listened to the pianist at all, because if we had, it would have destroyed whatever we did together. Nobody could listen to the pianist. We just blotted him out and went ahead and recorded the album.” Following this event, the artists did not again record or perform together as their own group. In such cases, band members with irreconcilable differences coexist but tenuously, their performances achieving only minimal cohesion.

  An incident involving a bebop quartet in San Francisco during the late sixties epitomizes the problems that can arise when musicians downright refuse to compromise their differences. The dispute arose unexpectedly at a nightclub when, unbeknownst to the group’s conservative bass player, the saxophonist had decided to make his debut in the free jazz idiom during the engagement’s second set. Rather than calling a particular piece’s title, he merely named a key and began improvising cascading modal patterns. In response, the group’s adventurous drummer immediately supported the soloist with free-rhythmic waves of sound, and the trumpeter echoed fragments of the saxophonist’s phrases. The bass player, scowling, seemed reluctant to join in. He listened for the longest time without playing. Then, quite suddenly, he imposed conventional walking bass lines and a strictly metered beat upon the music. Surprised and indignant, the saxophonist shifted the mouthpiece to the far corner of his mouth, crying out, “No, man. Use your bow!” then continued his solo. The bass lines ceased as suddenly as they had begun. Moments later, bowed bass entered, appropriately supplying a sustained drone, ornamented occasionally by melodic figurations of restricted range.