Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  During sound checks, you must listen to how the various textures of your instrument sound in the hall. You have to try out each part of your drum set with all the equipment that you use—brushes, mallets, and sticks. Its sound has to be checked by itself, and it has to be checked together with all the other instruments to see how they balance one another. And when everybody on stage is miked and you have monitors, you have to check thoroughly to see that what the audience hears is what you hear on the stage. A sound check shouldn’t be taken lightly. As most professional musicians know, this can either make or break a performance.

  Experimentation with sound in empty rooms requires musicians to anticipate a number of variables that subsequently affect the band’s sound and to compensate for them by adjustment either prior to or during the performance. The actual size and seating arrangement of the audience can change the acoustical properties of a hall, altering its capacity for sound absorption and reverberation, in some instances throwing off the prepared mix. For this reason, individual players take periodic breaks during performances to appraise the sound from different parts of the room, and they adjust the sound system to suit the changing character of the room.

  Room Design, Audience Capacity, and Management Policy

  The architectural design and management policy of venues also contribute to the distinct atmosphere, or vibes, of a performance space. Concert halls and nightclubs generally represent opposite poles in an improviser’s experience; each has advantages and disadvantages. The concert hall, on the one hand, presents jazz in its the most formal setting as art music. Musicians expect a high standard of management. Engagements begin and end on time. Pianos are in tune. Typically, a band’s concert hall performance of two to three hours begins at about eight in the evening and includes one short intermission. This format enables artists to build momentum from piece to piece throughout the event.

  The size of different concert settings and audiences also influences improvisers. A large room with a small audience discourages, whereas a small room packed with listeners encourages. Of course, for improvisers, large concert halls can be as exciting as a festival’s open arena when filled to capacity. With Miles Davis’s group, Gary Bartz found it a moving experience “spiritually” merely to play for crowds of thousands, “people as far as you could see,” he explains. Bartz had never played for audiences that large. Nevertheless, halls and arenas have the drawback of physically separating improvisers from their audience. The distance makes it difficult for artists to hear the nature of, and indeed may inhibit, audience response.

  By contrast, nightclubs have the greatest potential for an intimate performer-audience relationship. Wynton Marsalis would “rather play in a great room with atmosphere than in Carnegie Hall. The shabbiest little room can be great,” he continues, “if the people, the vibes, the feeling, the love is there.” Another holds the view that “for this kind of music, we need the club so that we are close enough to one another to hear well and close enough to the audience to feel the energy going out and coming back.” Nevertheless, for each club, there is the question of whether its particular features support or undermine the realization of these ideals. One club’s excessively bright stage lights may prevent improvisers from viewing their audience, whereas another’s diffused lighting may enable them to observe listeners clearly. One nightclub was “fixed up so formally, like a wedding reception, that it didn’t allow the audience to be relaxed.” Consequently, musicians found it difficult to establish audience rapport (BB). Another club’s informal furnishings and spare, jazz-related decorations, consisting of album covers and enlarged photographs of great artists, present a more sympathetic atmosphere.

  The general policies and attitudes of management in presenting jazz also differentiate clubs. In some establishments, the music’s primary function is as entertaining background music. Its presence contributes an ambience for customers, justifying inflated costs for food and liquor, thus ensuring the club’s economic survival. In such settings, performances typically begin at about nine in the evening and continue until one or two in the morning, up to seven days a week. Over an evening’s course, clubs restrict performance sets to about forty-five minutes, alternating them with intermissions of similar duration. Often, especially for famous musicians, clubs clear the room at intermission, collecting door charges from each new audience.

  Because few clubs provide dressing rooms for musicians where they can rest in seclusion, between sets musicians commonly visit other clubs or linger at the bar, fending off boredom. Periodically, patrons draw artists into socializing between sets, an activity that some artists may encourage, but others find tiring and distracting. Some performers partake of alcohol or drugs, rationalizing these practices in various ways: “It gives me something to do,” or “helps me relax,” or “gives me energy to play at one in the morning when I’m physically exhausted.” or “helps me to concentrate on the music,” In recent years, with increasing health awareness and other attitudinal changes, more and more artists have become “straight lifers” who avoid either or both of these substances.

  As implied above, the conventional organization of performance sets at nightclubs can itself be troubling to improvisers. “It’s hard to get the energy up to play when it’s forty-five minutes on and forty-five minutes off. You know that as soon as you get cooking, you have to break. Then you lose the feeling and have to start up allover again” (BB). A common consequence of the evening’s starts and stops is that artists devote the first few pieces of each set to unwinding physically and mentally to replicate an appropriate state of mind for creative interplay. In fact, bands sometimes take one or even two sets “to hit their stride.” For this reason, musicians may wait until late at night before making the rounds of nightclubs as listeners, preferring to hear the second- or third-set performances of favored artists or friends.

  In large part, the compromise that nightclubs strike between commercial concerns and artistic needs of musicians determines a club’s atmosphere. Owners with a special affection for jazz—like the late Max Gordon of New York’s Village Vanguard and Joe Segal of Chicago’s Jazz Showcase—conduct business with minimal disruption to the music making and gain the reputation of “listening clubs” for their establishments. Many monitor audience behavior, requesting, when necessary, that audience members remain quiet during performances. In contrast, a musician describes the “terrible vibes” of a commercial club in which “the owner stands at the door, uptight about the door fee, and the waitresses hustle drinks like mad, constantly walking between the tables and the stage, blocking the audience’s view of the musicians”(BR).

  Management can also exercise power over a group’s membership and musical arrangements. Sometimes, owners require that a group pare down its size to suit the capacity of a room or budgetary constraints. In other instances, to lessen the music’s volume or to comply with local zoning regulations or outmoded “blue laws,” they limit a band’s instrumentation. Some laws prohibit drums or horns specifically because of their volume and potential for exciting the crowd, which, when combined with customer drinking, may become rowdy, disturbing the neighborhood. In other instances, management actually creates the groups that perform at its establishments, either unilaterally selecting musicians, or hiring headliners and inviting them to suggest supporting musicians from the area. Others maintain house rhythm sections, hiring renowned figures from the national, or even international, jazz community to be featured from week to week.

  Management’s role in combining the talents of local musicians with those of touring artists sometimes produces excellent musical groups whose members might not have performed together otherwise. Predictably, less sympathetic matches also result. Festivals can be problematic for the same reason. “Playing at a jazz festival is like an all-star baseball game,” Red Rodney says. “When you put all stars together who haven’t played together, it’s never really that good. That’s what I wish concert promoters would learn. For instance, the pro
moter at a major East Coast jazz festival is taking Ira [Sullivan] and me by ourselves this year, and we’re going to have to use one of the festival’s rhythm sections. I don’t know who they are yet. They’re all going to be stars with big names, but it’s not going to be the same as playing with our own group.”

  Finally, the quality of the sound systems and musical instruments provided by management also impinges upon the experiences of improvising artists. Given the expense and the trouble of transporting large instruments, rhythm section players sometimes rely on those owned by nightclubs and concert halls or those that they themselves rent or borrow at different performance sites. Pianists must adapt to instruments in various states of repair with unfamiliar and sometimes undesirable playing action or sound quality. Even such apparently minute differences as the spacing of keys can be vexing initially. Bass players must adapt to instruments of different sizes with strings of varying gauge and tension, and drummers to combinations and physical arrangements of drum components that may differ significantly from what they regularly use. Such changes potentially alter both the motor aspects of musical conception and the artist’s pitch and timbral palettes.

  As discussed earlier, one measure of the prowess of great improvisers is their masterful exploitation of the idiosyncracies of instruments. In a legendary confrontation with a club owner, several musicians refused to begin their performance until he had tuned his piano. Bud Powell arrived at the club in the heat of the dispute and ran his fingers up and down the keyboard to identify the offending keys. He then proceeded to give a virtuoso performance in which he treated “the bad notes” as dissonances or special effects—like blue notes—integrating them perfectly with his solo. Dazzled by Powell’s improvisation, the club owner refused to believe that there was anything wrong with the instrument, and the protestors lost their argument.1

  Pianists who value acoustic qualities of sound may prefer, on tour, to use instruments provided by management, despite the instruments’ shortcomings. Others, however, opt to own portable electric pianos, thus assuring themselves greater consistency from performance to performance. Similarly, bass players who travel without their own acoustic instruments, and who wish to avoid the risk of renting them on the road, commonly find that smaller, more durable electric instruments provide a practical solution to the problem. Like other circumstantial constraints artists face within their professional lives, those associated with travel can at times become the mother of invention, leading drummers, for example, to devise new equipment set-ups and fresh approaches to music making.2

  Myriad conditional factors connected with a performance setting affect improvised performance. A cold room stiffens fingers, limiting rhythmic agility and, at times, the tempos at which bands interpret pieces. Conversely, in an excessively hot room or under the heat of stage lights, improvisers who perspire profusely must be alert to unanticipated musical events caused by a trumpet mouthpiece sliding from its embouchure or a drumstick slipping through fingers. The physical demands of extended programs also take a toll on improvisers, altering the motor aspects of performance. From touring with Pat Metheny’s band, drummer Paul Wertico learned to adapt his musical ideas to a familiar progression of physical changes in his body. “At the beginning of a tour, my body is always fresh; it feels loose and flexible when I perform. But after a few months of steady playing, night after night, my muscles begin to get stiff and sore, and I’m not as flexible,” he explains. By stretching exercises and massage, Wertico endeavors to mitigate such adverse effects of road life.

  Interacting with Different Audiences

  The presence of an audience increases both the pressure and reward of performances, reminding improvisers of the irretrievability of their musical inventions and heightening their sense of being in the moment. At the same time, the artist-audience relationship is a dynamic and variable one, in part because, as improvisers well know, every audience is different. The composition of each audience depends, in turn, on many factors, including the performance center’s location, admission fees, hours of business, taste in booking, and general management policy.

  The most sophisticated audience members are, of course, other jazz musicians. Performers on stage commonly show appreciation for their attendance by introducing them to the larger audience and praising their abilities. Musician friends of featured artists may also bolster morale. Once, just before James Moody began a performance set at the Village Vanguard, a bass player in the audience offered warm greetings and added, “I heard that you were really burning on this gig. So, I thought I’d better come out and hear you before you burned the whole house down!” Pleased, Moody laughed, then graciously, as if shrugging off the compliment, said that he was just playing the “same old thing as always.”

  Other audience members are serious fans with ties to the jazz community. Regardless of their professions, many are inveterate record collectors, knowledgeable concerning such aspects of jazz as its history, its repertory, and the membership of different bands. Such enthusiasts do not necessarily share a technical knowledge of jazz, but they listen discerningly, following its intricate shapes and unfolding moods. Many also display an awareness of the basic conventions of audience behavior, which have their roots, like the music itself, in the African American cultural experience. In black neighborhood clubs, lively vocalized audience responses to performers reflect more general modes of interaction found within such group expressivity as a church congregation’s testimonial responses to an inspired sermon or in the mutual banter between soul singers and their audiences.

  Correspondingly, knowledgeable jazz audience members respond to exceptional improvisations with bursts of applause, shouts of praise, and whistle calls. Some join in the delineation of the beat by swaying, nodding, finger snapping and—when the style of jazz, the occasion, or room permits it—dancing. Others mark its course by singing silently to themselves or envisaging synchronous graphic images of the ongoing pulse. These subtler responses, more sensed by performers than visually observed, add to the spirit of the room, as audience members relax to the groove of the music and resonate sympathetically to the beat’s compelling motion. At the very least, polite audience members listen attentively, typically offering applause after solos and at the conclusion of each piece.

  In contrast to such individuals are assembled listeners who lack a serious interest in jazz but nevertheless appreciate it in nightclub settings. Without the inclination or training to focus on the details of the music, such listeners respond only to the most general features and moods of the music, distinguishing performances in such broad terms as upbeat or mellow. For some other listeners, the presence of jazz in a nightclub is strictly incidental. “Like the wall-paper,” a musician once scoffed.

  Although commonly dealing with mixes of all the different types of listeners described above, improvisers also perform for audiences that are clusters of one or two types. Some after-hours jam sessions are exclusively for musicians. Concert halls commonly attract audiences of dedicated jazz followers, as do renowned nightclubs and loft concert venues, the latter often rented by the artists themselves to promote their own music. “There are a few really special clubs around the country which have a special feeling because of the tradition associated with them,” Keith Copeland explains, “like the Village Vanguard in New York. You know the history of the great players who have played there, and you know that the people who come there really come for the music and they understand it.” For Benny Bailey, as well,

  playing at the Village Vanguard is not like playing at other clubs. It feels like a showcase. People from allover the world are always coming through, and you never know whether someone might hear you and other gigs will come from it. It’s also not like playing in some small club somewhere, because other musicians will come out and sit in with you, like Woody Shaw came to sit in last night. A lot of musicians hang out together evenings and go from club to club. Also, out in the audience there were a lot of young players from the North Te
xas State Jazz Band Program. You’re really exposed under those conditions.

  It’s like that in New York. That’s why the musicians are such nervous wrecks [he laughs].

  With the increasing international appeal of jazz, serious fans abroad also have a special place in the hearts and memories of musicians. “One of the things that can be a pleasure about performing in Europe is that people do the research. They really know who you are, and they want you to play real jazz” (LD). George Duvivier’s experience has been similarly gratifying: “In Europe and Japan, audiences are so conscious of what the artist is doing, their applause is always encouraging. They know your name and what you’ve recorded, and they acknowledge that when you’re introduced. Backstage, you can sit for an hour after performances, just signing albums.”

  At the other extreme, improvisers perform for relatively homogeneous audiences who are ignorant of jazz and oblivious to the music. “Some of the jazz-dinner-drink places are just awful,” Ira Sullivan exclaims. “There was one incident when Stan Getz was touring with our band in which there was a very noisy table right in front of the bandstand. A woman kept talking loudly about the mink coat her friend had just bought. After a while, the waiter came over and told her that she was disturbing another table of listeners. Then, the woman became indignant, ‘What do you mean I should keep it down?’ The waiter said, ‘That’s Stan Getz soloing.’ She yelled back, ‘Who’s Stan Getz?”‘ [Sullivan laughs].

  Preparing for Audiences

  The need to accommodate audiences is a fact of life for musicians that shapes their performances in different ways and in differing degrees. For many, the issue is a crucial one. “My father taught me about the audience a long time ago,” Tommy Turrentine states. “It’s a big factor. They’re the ones who come to hear you, and they’re the ones who buy your records. Without them, you don’t have a living.” Curtis Fuller also regards the audience as being “what it’s all about. No audience, no conversation. If I wasn’t concerned with the audience, I might as well stay in a room alone and practice.”