At the point when the group’s interplay became cohesive, the bass player withdrew from the performance a second time, uttering a derisive remark. Ignoring him, the saxophonist continued and eventually strove to bring his fluent improvisation to a climax. At the solo’s peak, however, the bass player plunged into the music with his powerful metered beat again. Within an instant, the bass hit the floor and the saxophone sailed into the air, as the two musicians went after each other, fists flying, before an astonished audience. Although this unfortunate occurrence prematurely terminated the engagement of the band, the instruments were repaired, in time, as was the mutual friendship of the two musicians. Nevertheless, the incident underscores the impassioned differences improvisers sometimes develop regarding the aesthetic values of particular jazz idioms and the personal violation players may experience when others respond insensitively to intimate thoughts and feelings exposed through musical performance.
The varied machinations of conflict resolution described above illuminate an aspect of the adage common among jazz musicians that they “play the way they are,” in other words, that the individual artists’ personalities and their “ways of being” form an inextricable part of their musical personalities. Correspondingly, collective improvisations are not only products of purely musical concepts, tastes, and technical skills but also products of the group’s distinct modes of social interaction, power relations, and predispositions toward collegiality and compromise.3 Within the social atmosphere of different bands, musicians sometimes finesse, sometimes hammer out, their differences. They must acquiesce, at times, to another’s demands or wishes, or hold on to their own. Every outcome produces musical consequences. A supporting artist who agrees in one group to interpret an arranged part as written may, in another group, vary the part within limits tolerated by the leader and, in yet another group, ignore the composed part altogether, replacing it with improvised figures. This mix of options, deliberately and artfully taken, is typical. It sums up a unique and complex history of decision making and negotiation that underlies each player’s offering within a group, contributing singularity to its creations.
Musical Conflict and Economic Realities
Over the past few decades, the economic realities of the music business and the changing base of support for jazz have increased the potential for conflicts within bands. Although jazz maintained a substantial following as popular dance music into the early forties and commanded a serious listenership during the bebop and early hard bop periods, two developments subsequently challenged its position. During the sixties, the free jazz movement divided sentiment within the jazz community, alienating conservative listeners and sharpening competition for employment between mainstream and free jazz performers. Meanwhile, the sweeping success of rock captivated a generation of young listeners, drawing support away from jazz. Many nightclub owners who had previously hired jazz groups shifted their allegiances to cater to audiences for the new popular music.
In the aftermath of these developments, as rock has come to dominate the American commercial music market, jazz musicians have struggled increasingly to maintain their art in the face of chronic unemployment. Caught in the vise of a tightened market, performers find that seeking employment leads them in a vicious cycle. When initially organizing a group, it helps for leaders to be able to offer members the ready prospect of work, justifying the time required for rehearsals. Moreover, keeping a group together so that it can develop a reputation requires its steady employment. From the club owner’s perspective, however, bands are in the strongest positions to secure work at an established nightclub after they have cultivated an identity and can draw patrons.
The recording industry, important in promoting musicians and ensuring their survival, represents another vexing dilemma for artists. As part of good business practices, some major labels, before offering a recording contract to new bands, require that they have established employment histories and can demonstrate their intention to retain their personnel status for their albums’ promotion. Meanwhile, for equally sound business considerations, club owners prefer to hire bands who have already recorded albums that have radio airplay and visibility in record stores to assist in advertising club dates. In the face of this circularity, performers endeavor to break into the cycle of frustration at whatever point they can, pursuing those opportunities that first present themselves.
Some renowned bands manage to find regular or semi-regular work by touring within the national network of jazz clubs, participating in college and professional concert hall entertainment programs, and traveling on the international jazz festival circuit. Typically, new groups succeed in finding employment only sporadically. Some form to play a single engagement. Others disband between gigs, recombining several times a year when jobs materialize or for a few weeks of steady bookings. Musicians normally pursue simultaneous affiliations with different groups, trying to cobble together a living from a mix of opportunities while hoping that steady work eventually arises for a favored group, thereby enabling them to drop less satisfactory associations.
Unpredictable factors in the trials and tribulations of the music business sometimes thwart a musician’s aspirations. Chance often determines which musician is to replace a major figure within a renowned band; for example, who is sitting by the telephone at the precise moment a leader, proceeding down a list of recommended prospects, calls? Chance likewise determines whether musicians are free to accept the most exciting job offers or whether, dishearteningly, they must decline them to meet other contractual agreements made recently with other groups. An older piano player once poignantly observed to Don Pate, “It’s a strange life that we lead. Some of the people who we play the best with and that we love to play with the most, we may only get to play with them once, once every few years, or maybe once in a lifetime.” Echoes of this come from Pate’s own experience. “There are certain people that you have a special musical thing with, but it just isn’t designed for you to hit together,” he rues.
The economic instability of the jazz community makes it difficult for leaders to maintain bands long enough for players to become sufficiently acquainted with their band’s material and each other’s styles to realize their group’s potential. Melba Liston’s band was several months old when she first made the uncompromising appraisal that “the spirituality part of performing [had] only happened with my group a few times.” She was aware, even then, that “to get more of it, more consistently,” she explains, “you need lots of practice and lots of playing together:”
The split affiliations of improvisers commonly undermine this goal, however. Many groups are limited to performing with scant musical arrangements and too little opportunity to reconcile differences outside of public concerts. Roberta Baum recalls working with a group that could only rehearse once or twice before an engagement. “That was just enough time to go through the charts and to make sure that the changes I had were the right ones. It was very sketchy in terms of what the intro and the endings were going to be like. We worked weekends in a club for a month together, and I felt we were fighting each other most of the time. It wasn’t till the very end of the date that there was really a homogeneous thing happening, and after that;” she says regretfully, “we never performed together again:”
In Jimmy Robinson’s experience, as well, “when you don’t play together with the same group a lot, and you’re playing with different musicians all the time, you don’t develop the right feeling for one another. Each one goes his own way. When the musicians are out there just to play the gig and not to accomplish anything special, musically, you can’t get that closeness that you need, that feeling for one another when you’re playing. You just can’t create, now, like you used to be able to:” Curtis Fuller is only too aware of the multifaceted problems associated with inconsistent performance opportunities and their effect upon musicians across the board. “When you’re not working regularly, inactivity makes you lose the inspiration to practice,” Fuller lam
ents.
When people say to you, “You can play in this club this week only, not for the next six months;” it’s difficult. It’s like, preparing for this gig that is coming up, there’s not enough inspiration to really practice. Because when the gig is over, that’s the end of the group. So, the musician’s attitude is just, “All right, we’ll play this gig, but it’s just to get through it.” It’s frustrating to play under those conditions and with those attitudes.
If we could only get back to the cohesiveness that I would really like to see come about. It’s one of the injustices in jazz that, with only two rehearsals or so, we’re supposed to walk out on the stage and sound like we’ve been playing together for five years. Like, “Hey, wait a minute! What do you want from me?” Somehow, it works because we make it work. And that, to me, is a blessing in disguise. But just think what the music would be like if a group could actually play together for any length of time.
As Fuller points out, the absence of steady work erodes morale and reduces incentive for performers to keep up the rigorous private practice routines that their roles within jazz groups require. Moreover, there are essential skills that performers can only cultivate and maintain in the context of bands. “You can’t develop just by sitting at home and practicing so that you can gig once a month. You need to play with other musicians all the time in order to play well” (LH). Lack of work jeopardizes the physical endurance required to project an instrument’s sound to audiences in club and concert hall settings. “Performing chops are a particular kind of chops;” Lee Konitz asserts, “and sometimes you don’t experience that until you’re out on the stand, and then it’s too late. I realized once that the only time I play at full volume was when I played on the job, and that’s not the way it should be. That’s when I get sore lips.”
Similarly, in the practice room, improvisers can only partially contrive the strict mental discipline that they apply to public music creation, where, composing under the constant pressure of a passing beat, there is no stopping to revise ideas or correct errors. “Playing a gig is like running a marathon;” Calvin Hill explains. “You can prepare for a marathon by training up to eighteen or twenty hours, but the final push is all psychological in the race itself. You can’t really train for that. It’s the same in playing a gig. The intensity with which you play is something that you can’t practice by yourself. You wouldn’t put yourself through that unless you had to;” he says, laughing.
Finally, improvisers depend upon regular performance to remain sensitive to the conversational aspects of group interplay. “At first, I thought that the problem was the musicians I chose for the rhythm section;” recalls a distressed artist following a disappointing recording session. “But then I realized that I was the one who had gotten out of shape. I just wasn’t used to performing with top-notch rhythm section players and having them respond to me.” Such situations reveal one limitation of practicing improvisation with recordings, however useful the exercise for learners. “Once musicians have played with a record a few times, they already know in advance what’s happening;” Lonnie Hillyer points out, “and it can’t test their abilities the same way a live performance can.” Although there are cases when an exceptional soloist’s contributions compensate for conversationless interplay, effective conversation is so valued in the aesthetic system of jazz that artists typically strive to embody it in their performances, lest their playing be unworthy of the standards of their tradition.
Irreconcilable Differences within Bands: Short-term Accommodation
and Personnel Changes
When such imponderables as the artists’ variable state of readiness for improvisation and circumstantial factors of hiring inadvertently produce groups whose members have fundamental problems, leaders can pursue various short-term solutions. Typically, they adapt their repertory and arrangements to accommodate the weaknesses of particular players. “We had a bass player who played great time and could play great groove tunes;” a pianist recalls, “but he was not flexible in other ways. As long as he was in the band, there were certain things we couldn’t play, such as real subtle, mood-oriented pieces like ‘Nardis.’” In one of Cannonball Adderley’s early groups, a bassist’s inability to maintain a steady beat at fast tempos restricted the group to works well suited to medium and slow tempos until the bass player was replaced.4 In yet another case, the limitations of a bass player restricted one band’s repertory almost entirely to pieces with patterned bass parts. “He could play things like that because the same figures repeated over and over and the accents were written into the arrangement,” the leader relates. “We almost never played a tune that had any walking in it, and when we did, we were restricted to medium tempos where he’d be more apt to put accents in. As soon as the tempos picked up, he’d lapse back into his drone of quarter notes.”
If a player tends to overwhelm the performances of others and seems incapable of self-restraint, leaders adopt various strategies to offset the unwelcome consequences. They may restructure arrangements so that the incompatible individual periodically lays out during certain musical episodes or even through an entire piece. A saxophonist once requested the leader of a renowned group to “tell the piano player not to play behind me, because he would never really listen to what I was playing. I feel that what the piano player is doing now, playing solo concerts, is what he should be doing, because he doesn’t listen to other people.” Some artists are simply not very good group players. In other instances, improvisers may restrain themselves, adapting their playing to avoid dominating a cohort. One drummer recounts that “the bass player and I can take certain liberties up to the point at which we know it won’t get in the way of the piano player. Also, he’ll stroll every once in a while, and that will give us ample time to take things as far as we want to take them.”
Ultimately, leaders change personnel when unabating problems permeate the group effort. “I wasn’t with Miles for long,” a musician recalls. “He kept the same bass player, but the piano chair and the drum chair kept changing:” Another band leader once hired “a trumpet player who was not sensitive to the group’s rhythmic or dynamic nuances. This very dominant voice didn’t fit the way any of us felt it should.” In yet another organization, “the piano player always made the tunes rush. Performing was like replacing a flat tire on a car with a tractor wheel and trying to drive. I knew it was the piano player because when another piano player came into the group, everything was all right.”
Leaders may even alter a group’s instrumentation when they are unable to fill every chair with suitable artists. “That’s why Omette never used a piano player,” Wynton Marsalis asserts. “Nobody could play harmonically hip enough for what he was playing:” At the extreme, they disband their entire organization and begin the effort to create, once again, a complementary union of artists. Leaders typically handle personnel changes discreetly, often indirectly. “A lot of people won’t really tell you how they feel about your playing. Either they like it or they don’t. And if they don’t like the way you play, they just won’t call you for another gig” (AT).
At the same time, supporting artists also switch group affiliations voluntarily as a result of their own grievances. Drawing attention to conversation within the music, a basic value of group coherence, an older musician once advised Fred Hersch, “You should be able to talk to other musicians in [the language of] this music. There are some people you can talk to and some people you can’t.” The oldtimer considered it better for musicians not to play at all than to play with people they “can’t talk to” through the music. Musicians sometimes quit bands when they find that poor musical communication reflects a fundamental disparity between their own abilities and those of other players. “Compatibility is the name of the game. There are jobs that pay well that I’ll turn down because I know who’s in the rhythm section, and I’ll take certain jobs for less money because I know who’s in the rhythm section” (GD).
Lee Konitz has grappled with the dilemma
s surrounding compatibility and appropriate conversation within the group. “When you play with a group of people, you’re influenced by where they’re at and you try to match where they’re at.” He adds good-humoredly: “Sometimes, when I would play with a certain band, someone would come up to me and say, ‘How come you don’t sound like you did when you played with Tristano? I’d say, ‘Because I’m not playing with Tristano, schmuck!’ [he laughs].” His elaboration portrays the experience of a young player being drawn into more sophisticated communication than he had encountered previously.
Basically, I tended to play simpler with this particular group than I would with Tristano. Playing with Tristano’s band got me to try to playas intricately and as intensely as possible. I didn’t have to be that intricate, but after Lennie and Warne Marsh got through with their solos, I felt a little funny playing simply. I would want to play my eighth notes and make them as intricate as theirs. And believe me, they really got intricate. When I was with Tristano, it became clear to me that I had to find a situation where I was really able to function best, because I felt that the music was way over my head.
There are instances when musicians simply tire of a band’s repertory. “I liked one band’s music, but I couldn’t have spent five years playing it,” a bass player maintains. “It was a lot simpler than other bands, that is, the rhythms and chord progressions.” A pianist complains in a similar vein, “I’ve been in situations in which I’ve been terribly bored. I did one month on the road with a band where the music was all in C minor, and it was all modal, loud, and intense. Sometimes, you feel like that. But other times, it’s nice to play something simple or something pretty or something with variety in it. I learned from that, that you don’t put yourself in that kind of situation unless you really know that it’s right for you, especially on the road. When the music is the only thing that you have to look forward to during the day and you don’t look forward to it, it’s really treacherous.”
Thinking in Jazz Page 65