Intersecting matters of taste are such other repertory issues as the relative difficulty of pieces and the appropriateness of specific pieces to individual artists. Musicians desiring to present their own musical ideas in a flattering light are interested in the pieces’ effectiveness as vehicles for their own improvisations. Dissatisfaction can also arise over features of arrangements. One saxophonist whose pieces contained extraordinarily elaborate bass parts could not convince local bass players that the value of his music warranted the time and effort required for its mastery. Eventually, he gave up the notion of maintaining a group to perform his compositions. Another saxophonist left a group because its tempos were uniformly fast, rendering the music uniformly “boring.” A third player objected to his former group’s dynamic level: “I wish that Miles had called me for one of his earlier bands because, during that period, everything in the band was electric. At first, I couldn’t hear myself at all, and I’d come away some nights with my neck sore from trying to open up and get up over all the loud, electronic music.” Other complaints portray the unsympathetic character of a leader who features his own protracted solos on every tune, “bogging the music down” and minimizing the opportunity for other players to solo. Also resented is the leader who features only sidemen as soloists when the group performs for unknowing audiences in small towns, thus preventing the other artists from gaining professional exposure for their own careers.
Improvisers also appraise the idiomatic bounds that bands adopt for collective interplay. “I sometimes get tired of groups using the old bebop school format,” a pianist confesses. “A solo goes this way, a drummer plays brushes on one chorus, sticks on the next, the soloists trade fours, the group plays the head then tags out three times. Sometimes, it’s musical to play that way, but sometimes, I want to play other ways.” On the other hand, he admits, “I admire structural Western composers too much to get into jazz that’s nonstructural embellishment, unless the music has the power of a John Coltrane or maybe a McCoy Tyner. Music needs something to compensate for the lack of form.”
Finding a satisfying balance between these poles is not always a simple matter, as Roberta Baum’s reflections on this problem indicate:
One group was too conventional. The players weren’t responding to me, and it really dragged me emotionally. The second group I sang with came a lot closer to having the kind of freedom that I wanted to have, since that was what they were doing in their own music. They were willing to take chances, creating a kind of anarchistic climax within the structure of the piece. But after a year of playing with the second group, I began to feel that playing outside was also a limitation. Sometimes, the other players didn’t know where they were going. Other times, they became so busy that I couldn’t get my ideas off. When things become too anarchistic, you can be overwhelmed by the sound. So, there can be different problems at each end.
Finally, conflicts within the overlapping domains of musical and interpersonal relationships require creative approaches to their resolution. Billing, salary, and status, for example, may become contested issues within groups. Other grievances are unfair compensation for, or lack of acknowledgment of, individual members’ participation in and contributions to such collaborative music-making ventures as composing and arranging pieces.5
A musician’s personality is another of the variables within the larger mix of conditions that can affect collective musicianship. “You have to be prepared to deal with the different musicians you come in contact with, because they’re all different;” Kenny Washington says. “So, you have to bend to be able to play with them, personality-wise, on and off the bandstand. Betty Carter would really be tough on the young musicians because she didn’t want them to get into anything bad. Sometimes, she wanted to mother the band. Johnny Griffin was more or less a freestyle person. He used to say, ‘If you don’t have some fun, you can go out of your mind on the road.’ ”
Artists differ, indeed, in the kind of social relationships they cultivate within bands. Some confine their interaction with band members to the settings in which they rehearse and perform together. Others hold the ideal that a band should function much like an extended family. Curtis Fuller represents this view: “With the Messengers, we hung out together. It’s like the group that hangs together, plays together. We didn’t just meet on the bandstand. It was nothing to see Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter and myself together all day long.”
Such close relationships can work only among players who have compatible personalities and lifestyles. At the very least, there must be tolerance for each other’s differences and mutual admiration for one another’s musicianship. “Working with Max Roach,” Calvin Hill recalls, “was not only important to me because of his music, but because of the tremendous dignity that he brought to the music, the respect with which he treated other people, and the respect they had for him.” In contrast, a musician recalls his brief tenure with a group in which players did not share the same values: “I didn’t go out with the others and hang out and get high. I remember the drummer once saying to me, ‘Man. Why don’t you ever hang out? You hold yourself apart.’ I said, ‘I have to play with you. That’s my job. It doesn’t mean I have to marry you and do what you do.’ It’s nice when everybody likes everybody in a group, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to smoke dope and drink just so other people will think I’m nice.”
Sometimes, the overlapping realms of music making and interpersonal relations combine in experiences that have musical ramifications for artists beyond the life of a band. When the intimate relationship between one member of a band and its singer went awry, the singer formed her own group, featuring a new repertory of original love songs. The- texts were veiled commentaries, each dealing with different aspects of the soured affair. Gradually, as the performance of the new repertory assuaged her hurt, those songs assumed less prominence in her performances.
A personal tragedy left its mark on the repertory of Max Roach’s bands. Roach recounted the details to me in a story already familiar through retelling within his groups. In the fifties, Roach formed a group together with prodigy Clifford Brown, a trumpeter of originality and virtuosity whose warmth and generosity of spirit matched his talent, winning the universal respect of the jazz world . Brown disarmed even the most ardent of his artistic rivals.
The Brown-Roach quintet was one of the most popular hard bop groups of its day. They frequently toured the country in exhausting bouts of night driving that linked sporadic club dates in a network of viable gigs. With an experienced leader’s savvy, Roach had implemented an unwavering “cardinal rule” for his road bands, insisting that they travel in a “caravan,” rotating shifts within each car: one member to drive, a second to stay awake and keep the driver from “dozing;” the third to sleep in the back seat. With a certain job approaching in Chicago, however, Clifford Brown wanted to leave Philadelphia a day ahead of schedule so that he could stop en route to try out a new trumpet manufactured in Indiana. He pleaded with Roach, who repeatedly denied Brown the request. Worn down, at last, by Brown’s ingenuous style of persistence, Roach relented, despite the vague feeling of uneasiness about the decision that stayed with him.
Brown left Philadelphia with pianist Richie Powell and Powell’s bride, in a new car that had been her wedding gift. Late that night, they encountered a torrential rainstorm. Mrs. Powell, at the wheel, struggled to see clearly through thick glasses, her visual impairment compounded by the rain on the wind-shield. Taking a wrong highway exit, she made an impulsive turn to correct the error and drove the car into a deep ditch beside the lane, carrying all the occupants to instant deaths. Throughout the country, musicians mourned their community’s tragic loss of talent. Clifford Brown was twenty-five years old; Richie Powell, twenty-four.
Roach was grief-stricken and haunted by an irrational sense of responsibility for the accident. The powerful emotion of the event reawakened his anger over related issues of racism in America, particularly the lack of economic support for
African American music that requires jazz musicians to endure the risky life on the road.6 The death of his good friend and colleague ushered in a long period of sadness for Roach. Only gradually did he free himself from his despondency. Ironically, the experience revisited Roach a few years later when Clifford Brown’s replacement, Booker Little, an equally prodigious talent for whom Roach had also developed affection and respect, died of uremia at the unseemly age of twenty-three. The coincidental tragedies left Roach with a somewhat “superstitious” attitude that, as he sought to insulate himself from painful memories, temporarily influenced his hiring practices. For many years, his band’s trumpet chair was often vacant, silencing the trumpet’s voice in their music.7
In the face of wide-ranging personal and artistic factors that affect the inner workings of groups, many bands are fluid units. Some coalesce to enjoy limited success before disbanding, whereas others enjoy long lives by maintaining their identities in the face of continuous personnel changes.
The Life Cycles of Bands and the Creative Process
Bands not only turn over personnel when players discover that they have irreconcilable problems; they also undergo changes when members have drawn what musical value they can from their mutual association. Although it is initially desirable for members of groups to work together extensively to develop the rapport upon which successful improvisation depends, typically there are limits to the ways in which any group of musicians can inspire each other over the longer term. “If you are working with a group of good players, then you can learn from them;” Art Farmer explains. “But still, sometimes you find the music bogging down and you need to find other people. This is not to say that the players you are with are not good, but the whole thing has reached a stalemate as a unit. If you play the same songs night after night and year after year, and you find yourself playing in the same way, people get bored with it because there’s no energy there. If you don’t find some other way to break it, then you have to get somebody else into the band. You have to find some new songs or some new players.”
Like many of his fellow artists, Lonnie Hillyer cannot tolerate the monotony of uninspired musicianship. “When I get bored playing the same old things all the time, as guys will do when they can’t figure anything new to play, I like to jump on the bandstand and play with somebody in the band who I’m not familiar with. It forces me to think. That’s what this music is all about. It’s a thinking kind of music.” Similarly, John McNeil extolls the stimulation that new musical components bring into routine playing.
The groups I like to play with are the kind in which, if you changed one person, everything would be completely different. For example, I was playing a blues on my first album when Rufus Reid and Billy Hart got into this weird rhythmic thing that I never heard anybody do on an album before. It would be very hard to describe, but it’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t happen with any other bass player or any other drummer. It was just great and made me so excited I wanted to try all kinds of new things in my solo.
Such events often have ramifications beyond the performance for the musicians themselves, from group to group and through the enrichment of the pool of musical ideas throughout the jazz community. “I like to play with other people,” Kenny Barron reports, “because you can bring some other things back to the guys you normally play with:”
Over the lives of bands, then, personnel changes can be a normal consequence of the creative process. In a sense, they reflect, on the largest formal scale, improvisation’s cyclical interplay of new and old ideas. Just as successful patterns initially improvised by one player and immediately complemented by the others can join a band’s formal arrangement as fixed features for subsequent performances, additional facets of the band’s interplay also can evolve gradually into routines, informally arranged over the group’s life together. When their modes of interaction become increasingly predictable and artists begin to feel as familiar with the performance styles of other players as with their own, the band’s collective ability to conceive new ideas in performance may diminish overall.
Within the chaotic world of the music business, as each group struggles for survival, its collective pattern of artistic growth and achievement, its evolving visibility and commercial success, and the respective needs of its members for creative renewal sometimes reinforce one another, contributing momentum to a unified musical undertaking. At other times, the pressures that such variables create pull players in different directions. One saxophonist describes his group’s decision to disband just as their popularity reached its peak: “It was a shame in some ways, because we had just built enough of a following to be invited to record by a major label. But we reached the point where we were all tired of the music, and we wanted to follow different musical interests with other bands.”
Similarly, within particular bands attrition commonly reflects the fact that individuals have outgrown their positions. With the leader’s encouragement, many resign to join other groups where their responsibilities are greater or to form groups where they can devote full energy to their own ideas and compositions. The successive groups formed by Miles Davis epitomize the restless quest of some artists. Keith Jarrett smiles at his recollection of the difficulties Davis faced when combining the talents of jazz musicians with players whose background in rock had not prepared them for understanding the most basic conventions associated with playing ballads. He conjectures that Davis would rather have pursued new musical directions with a “bad band . . . playing terrible music” than remain complacent with former groups that had developed maximum cohesion within the bounds of his earlier musical interests. Moreover, Davis once shared with Jarrett the painful admission that the reason he had stopped performing ballads, a genre whose unique and masterful interpretation had gained him great distinction, was that he “loved playing them so much.” Jarrett expresses admiration for such remarkable insight into the need to pursue new challenges, even when they go against an artist’s “own natural instinct.”8
Finally, as improvisers continue to define and redefine those musical areas that have the greatest meaning for them, their changing passions are sometimes influenced by matters of cultural and personal identity. Akira Tana’s interest in cross-cultural musical matters finds much food for thought in Manhattan’s international environment, where there is considerable opportunity for interacting with musicians drawn to the jazz scene from all parts of the world.
I’ve spoken with Japanese jazz musicians who are here in New York City searching for their own personal expression. They have worked with black and white musicians here and have come to the conclusion that they are different from them. The identity thing is very complicated. Things can get confusing, and you can have an identity crisis. As a Japanese American, I feel that parts of myself are very American and differ from the Japanese tradition. At times, I wonder if jazz can really express who I am fully. It’s not the same for me as it would be if I were black and raised exclusively within that tradition.
My musical vision is a little broader than that of people who just hear and see jazz, because I’ve tried to learn so many different kinds of roles as a drummer—like studying classical orchestral percussion as well as jazz improvisation. Also, I sometimes feel a little dated playing the swing feeling, because a lot of musicians my age are playing funk and fusion. The funk thing is also very challenging for drummers, but the swing thing seems more conducive for a group playing jazz. Anyway, I believe in jazz, and for now I’m just trying to play meaningful music within the jazz field. But there are so many different ways of expressing yourself which have value. It’s just a question of what you like.
The Challenges of Different Bands
As musicians complete their tenure with particular bands and leave them to join others, they find each group to have contributed different aspects of their musicianship and knowledge. “Playing with each group is a formal education,” Walter Bishop Jr. declares. “Each has a different feel and different repertory.” L
iving with the compositions of some bands night after night, improvisers become fluent with complex chord progressions, perhaps, whereas the repertory of other bands may favor vamp tunes that artists use to create music from spare harmonic materials.9 Musicians also gain experience playing different musical roles within the structures of various kinds of pieces. “It’s true that in Bill Evans’s band my function was pretty much to hold Bill’s bass line through the duration of the performance,” Chuck Israels says. “But I never felt it as a restriction, because the lines were so beautiful in all their detail. In other bands, the demands on me were much less specific and I had greater freedom.” It was while sitting in with Barry Harris, Keith Copeland recalls, that he got his “loud/soft bass drum technique together, because I figured playing with Barry I didn’t really have to drop all those bombs. It scared me to have to deal with this technique with Barry, but,” he confesses, “it made me a better drummer.”
Characteristic features of arrangements also have their influence on band members. “In Max Roach’s band, some of the challenges were the tempos and the lengths of the pieces. You had to be able to play faster than you played in most groups, and you needed a lot of endurance” (AD). Kenny Washington reports a similar result from working with another strong player: “Johnny Griffin is known as the fastest tenor player in the world. One thing that working with Griff has really done for me is, it’s made me physically stronger.” In fact, before taking the position with Griffin, Washington had approached Louis Hayes, one of his mentors, for advice. Supporting the move and anticipating its demands, Hayes taught him specific technical exercises to strengthen his arms, wrists, and hands so that he could perform his role successfully.
Thinking in Jazz Page 66