Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  The flexible programs of some bands encourage different players to try composing and arranging pieces. Kenny Barron remembers the excitement of having his first musical arrangement of a composition performed and recorded by Yusef Lateef’s band.

  Groups also place different emphases upon solo work. Whereas small bands feature artists as soloists, large bands tend to restrict individual soloing opportunity by distributing solo slots among many performers and by emphasizing ensemble work. Important distinctions do exist within small groups, however. Many limit the activity of drummers and bass players as soloists. From this perspective, Max Roach’s group represented “a drastic change” for Calvin Hill because “the band was really into solos.” It forced him to use all the knowledge formerly acquired with Betty Carter, Pharoah Sanders, and McCoy Tyner. “Suddenly I had to be an integral part of a group as a soloist,” he recounts,

  and I wasn’t playing in the background anymore. There was no piano, and Max put the four of us in a line on the stage. There was nobody in front and nobody in back, just four individuals. Max said, “I want everybody in this band to be long-winded,” so we could play a tune for an hour and fifteen minutes. Soloing with Max was not a problem, because Max is a master accompanist.

  When I first joined the band, I was concerned about this, and he said, “Look, don’t worry about anything. I’ve got the time covered, so you just play whatever you want. Just be free.” He just lays everything down beautifully for you. You just go ahead and play. There is a lot of mutual feeling in the band. Everybody was on an equal level, and that’s why it was so easy to solo in his band. You’re not really out there by yourself.

  The idiomatic conventions and instrumentation of different bands present unique challenges. To participate in every musical situation, players must negotiate within the group’s timbral atmosphere and make the most of the aural palette at their disposal. In absorbing the blend of timbral colors, they derive a distinctive experience that stimulates their conception of ideas. Art Davis’s professional affiliations depict the wide-ranging musical environments of jazz improvisers. When Davis joined Max Roach’s band, the group comprised a pianoless hard bop quintet in which the unusual mix of bass and tuba accompanied the standard voices of trumpet and saxophone. Later, when performing with John Coltrane’s Ascension band, Davis encountered an equally unusual combination of two basses. There, in the environment of a free jazz group whose eleven members included five saxophones and two trumpets, he intertwined his bass part with Jimmy Garrison.

  Providing further contrast to these earlier experiences are the rhythm sections of some big bands. Count Basie’s rhythm section of bass, drums, piano, and guitar embodied a classic swing feeling, whereas Dizzy Gillespie’s rhythm section featured conga drums and an array of Latin percussion instruments, combining traditional Latin rhythms with those of jazz. Subsequently, Davis’s tenure with saxophonist Arthur Blythe sometimes involved a standard quartet with piano, drums, and bass; at other times, an unconventional saxophone and bass duo. Other situations found Davis in the rhythm section of singers like Lena Home and jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong. Altogether, Davis’s affiliations spanned style periods from New Orleans jazz to the avant-garde. Another versatile artist, Don Pate, is “known as being open-minded by other musicians because,” he asserts, “I feel there’s a need for every kind of jazz: swing, bebop, free jazz, fusion. Each requires you to create different things. To me, playing with a different kind of jazz group is like going to a new city or a new country. I’ll try anything once, for the experience.”

  Expounding on the incalculable value of such varied training, Benny Bailey tells of learning “how to develop a big sound in swing bands, how to phrase and blend with other musicians in a section.” Sometimes, the precise conditions of each band’s musical environment necessitate creative adaptation, inspiring new approaches to invention on an individual’s part. Before the days of amplified music, Earl Hines developed the unusual stylistic trait of playing patterns in octaves in order to project his part better, “cut[ting] through the sound of the band,” which had been, he felt, “drowning me out.”10 Similarly, Coleman Hawkins cultivated his dynamic range and characteristic “fullness of sound” in the context of groups that found him playing solos over “seven or eight other horns all the time.”11

  Kenny Barron describes Ron Carter’s quintet, which, by contrast, featured the string bass as a solo instrument. “From that experience, we all learned to use dynamics and shading. I don’t think that there was a band in the world that could play softer than us. Ron’s music was also a lot more structured than some, and that accounted for the overall sound the band had.” Art Farmer recollects his initial discomfort as a member of the group when “Gerry Mulligan’s quartet was pianoless. It just had a baritone, trumpet, a bass, and drums. Basically, I missed the piano,” he reveals.

  We had a few rehearsals, and then we went to work. The first night, I just felt like I didn’t have any clothes on. I felt really exposed because you didn’t have any piano playing the chords to make what you’re playing sound good. That was something that I had to learn to handle. It was a matter of being more careful. I learned to play lines that had musical value by themselves. Also, I learned to make an adjustment in volume because Gerry’s style was much softer than others. The drummer was playing a lot with brushes, instead of bearing down with sticks, and so you couldn’t go out there with your horn and start hollering and screaming.

  In contemporary fusion bands such as the Pat Metheny Group and the Yellowjackets, musicians must learn to integrate their improvisations with the preprogrammed musical events of sequencers. They must, as well, pit their rhythmic skills against the mathematically precise and mechanical delineation of time provided by drum machines (PW).

  A related characteristic distinguishing bands is their individual emotional atmospheres. It is the leader who usually sets up the feeling or the mood of the overall band, Melba Liston observes, and, as a member of the family, “you have to go that way, because if you don’t, you don’t fit in.” Assessing the notion of a group’s ambience, Liston brings up a virtual catalogue of legendary bands: In Dizzy Gillespie’s band, players have a strong feeling “when you go on the bandstand, you’re ready to bum. With Lady [Billie Holiday], you’ve got a laid-back kind of bluesy, sultry feeling. I mean, you’ve got to swing, but you’re not going to holler, stomp, and carry on like you do with Dizzy’s band. . . . Quincy Jones’s band was sort of in between. It was . . . swinging, but still a little delicate. Not nearly as bluesy, kind of white collar. . . . Dizzy’s hard hat [she laughs]. And Basie’s band has its own different color—tone colors and feeling that’s more organized and routine. You’re going to stay about the same way all night long, whereas with other bands, you reach greater highs and lows.”

  Within the general emotional atmosphere of a band, subtle aspects of individual performance style and unique features of collective interplay further shape the experiences of musicians. “In each group, dealing with different musical personalities on the bandstand—just individual ways people had of expressing themselves—was a lesson in itself” (JH). Buster Williams elaborates on the variability in playing behind several individuals on the bandstand: “When you’re playing with people who have their craft together, if you’re wise enough, you just look and listen and learn. There is a special sensitivity that you learn from singers which is incredible. Sarah Vaughan has got perfect pitch, so you have to play perfectly in tune with her. Betty Carter’s a real jazz stylist. Nobody’s a stylist like her. When she does a ballad, she does a ballad softer and slower than anybody else I’ve ever experienced. So, I had to learn to play with a lot of space. It’s always more difficult to play slow than it is to play fast. These are the kinds of things that really expanded my playing.”

  Close working relationships with the jazz community’s renowned figures are commonly the high points of an artist’s career. Composer/arranger Gil Evans praises Miles Davis’s monumental achievem
ent as a “sound innovator,” recalling the excitement of being in his musical presence during their collaborations. “Like I told him one time, ‘I sure am glad you were born!’ ”12 Similarly, Elvin Jones beams in remembrance of John Coltrane and cites the combined qualities of inner peace, quiet determination, and superhuman control that enabled Coltrane to attain the ever-expanding artistic goals he set for himself. With deep religious conviction, Jones deliberates upon their association. “He was so calm and had such a peaceful attitude, it was soothing to be around him. And John, to me, has that spiritual context that he put into everything he did. It was something that everybody could recognize. . . . To me, he was like an angel on earth. He struck me that deeply. This is not just an ordinary person, and I’m enough of a believer to think very seriously about that. I’ve been touched in some way by something greater than life.”13 The inseparable mixture of Coltrane’s personal and musical qualities had a remarkable effect on the musicians around him, urging them to extraordinary musical heights.

  It is, perhaps, in guiding other artists to discover deep within themselves unique facets of their own sensitivities and talents, and in effecting creative inspiration that artists might otherwise never have realized by themselves, that jazz musicians share their greatest gifts as teachers. Betty Carter is “the kind of person who wants to hear you play to your ultimate,” Buster Williams points out. “She has an incredible sense of swing, and the way she sings shows you who she is. When you see someone else like Betty putting everything that she has into the music, it makes you feel the responsibility to do the same. Like Miles, she has a way of bringing out your full potential:”

  Moving from band to band, performers strengthen various facets of their musicianship and deepen their knowledge of jazz, its idioms, conventional musical roles, and aesthetic values. Even when artists remain for an extended tenure with a band devoted to a particular idiom, the experience of improvising is seldom static. It changes constantly, in fact, with adoption of new repertory and arrangements, with developments in the individual styles of fellow players, and with turnover of personnel that dramatically alters the pool of musical personalities, bringing renewed enthusiasm to rehearsals and performances. Every constellation of musical talents and backgrounds alters the group’s compositional materials as it fashions its collective artworks, and reestablishes its unique territory for invention.

  In meeting the multiple challenges of a shifting mix of groups, artists sharpen technical skills as they continuously assert and evaluate their musical ideas, ultimately defining and refining their personal improvisation concepts. Bands are not simply an economic necessity for performers but are also fundamental forums for training and development. They are educational institutions indispensable to the sustenance and evolution of the jazz tradition.14

  PART IV

  Additional Factors Affecting Improvisation, and Epilogue

  SIXTEEN

  Vibes and Venues

  Interacting with Different Audiences in Different Settings

  Whether I exceed my own expectations in performance depends on a lot of different things—the piano, the sound, the audience. Sometimes, you play in big halls in which only five guys show up. Other times, you play in small clubs where guys are sitting in each other’s laps. Some crowds are responsive and others are not. When you’re on tour, every night presents a different situation: a different piano, a different sound, a different crowd.—Walter Bishop Jr.

  Within the lives of bands, circumstances surrounding each performance introduce a bundle of variables that affect the art of improvisation. From nightclubs to concert halls to recording studios, the design and acoustics of a particular venue contribute to the “vibrations” —the general atmosphere—of music making, influencing the nature of musical invention. At every site, local management imposes unique conditions on the presentation of jazz, and correspondingly upon its formulation. Moreover, band members interact with different audiences whose responses may also guide the course of an improvisation.

  Learning to adapt to changing performance conditions constitutes critical training for improvisers. Composing ideas in the tranquility of a practice room or rehearsal hall may be radically different from composing them before live audiences or live microphones. The unpredictable conditions of life on the road compound these challenges. “I was only nineteen when I went on the road with Dizzy,” Kenny Barron recalls,

  and I had never played that steadily before or under such different circumstances. If we had been traveling all night and hadn’t been to bed, I had to be able to get off the plane and go right to the gig and play. I had to be able to perform well even though I was tired and hungry. Also, I remember we once went to this small club in Cleveland, and when I went to sit at the piano, there were only about five keys that worked [he laughs]. It was one of those pianos! The point was, what was I going to do then? Was I going to feel sorry for myself and hold back, or was I going to go ahead and play? One of the things I learned with Dizzy’s band was how to be consistent in my playing, how to play the best I could every night, no matter what the odds, no matter what the circumstances.

  A Venue’s Acoustics

  Foremost among the circumstances to which musicians must adapt is the acoustics of the performance location. Like an extension of the improviser’s instrument itself, the physical characteristics of a venue have the capacity to mold and shape an artist’s sounds. Improvisers derive great satisfaction from performing in a hall where natural amplification flatters the band’s collective sound. In some settings, moreover, performers can playoff the room with their instruments, imbuing improvisations with singular attributes. Performing on different parts of the stage and projecting sounds in different directions alter pitch colors and patterns of attack and decay. In especially reverberant halls, soloists sometimes create the impression of playing additional instruments. Playing these apparent duets with themselves, they may pause after each phrase just long enough to allow its shadowy echo to serve as its response. Or they may begin a new phrase before the sound of its antecedent has fully decayed, allowing the patterns to overlap. Alternatively, they may play rapid pitch sequences that melt together into chords or complex tonal clusters.

  The success with which musicians exploit a hall’s acoustics also depends on the group’s size. A dry hall that thoroughly absorbs the sound of an individual performer, rendering it dull and lifeless, may provide perfect support for a large group. Conversely, a live hall that flatters a soloist or small group may devastate the sound of a larger one, causing its multitude of patterns to run together without definition. These issues are as critical to the audience as they are to musicians on stage. “It’s the total sound that turns you on or turns you off. If the acoustics are strange and the sound is not right and musicians can’t hear one another well, it creates great problems” (HO).

  To mitigate these problems, musicians on stage try to situate themselves proximately enough to hear fellow players clearly without being overwhelmed by anyone instrument. Recent practices combining acoustic instruments with electric instruments and synthesizers have increased the ordeal of balancing instruments of unequal volume and disparate qualities. As standard equipment, a performer of acoustic bass commonly uses a portable amplifier, a speaker, and pick-up microphone attached directly to the instrument. Many groups also adopt comprehensive sound systems to assist in achieving uniform sound. Some groups purchase their own equipment, whereas others rent what is necessary for each event or rely upon management at performance sites to provide equipment.

  Typically, individual musicians play into one or more microphones connected to a central mixing board in the hall’s seating area. For each instrument, one or more technicians manipulate volume, tonal quality, and presence, striving to produce a particular acoustic sound approximate to the instrument’s. The engineers then blend the sound with those of the other instruments to create a composite blend to be amplified through the room’s speakers. The sound crew also arranges severa
l speakers or monitors that stand on stage in front of improvisers and are connected to independent channels of the mixing board. Access to sophisticated equipment and an adequate number of monitors permits the technician to engineer a unique mix of the band’s sound suited to the taste of an individual musician for that player’s monitor. Sometimes, musicians request that their own instruments be brought into the foreground of sound on their personal monitors so that they can hear themselves more clearly amid the collective sounds on stage. Alternatively, a monitor’s sound emission may favor the instrument whose beat provides the main rhythmic reference for the band, or it may simply duplicate the mix heard by the audience. It is when the acoustics are unfavorable on stage, or when cramped quarters require players to stand too close to one another or to a particular instrument’s amplifier and speaker, that monitors are absolutely essential.

  Engineers and band members experiment with such matters during rehearsals on the day of the engagement or during brief sound checks in the empty room shortly before the entrance of the audience. In the absence of a specialized sound crew, musicians operate the sound system themselves. “There is a whole different approach required in dealing with the electric aspect of music today,” Max Roach explains, emphasizing the importance of attentiveness to the special acoustic characteristics of each instrument.