Also affecting decisions about repertory are legal considerations, a subject that has peppered artists’ public and private accounts from the time they first began their associations with the industry to this very day. American copyright law requires record companies to pay royalties, on the basis of ongoing record sales, to the copyright claimants, typically the composers and the music publishing houses associated with the pieces the record companies use.28 For the most part, the copyright law does not distinguish between a fully arranged performance of a piece, in which, for example, a dance band treats the piece’s melody as an end in itself, and a performance in which a jazz group uses the piece as a vehicle for its own invention. Correspondingly, the law fails to recognize as composition improvised solos and accompaniment, which characterize the greater part of a jazz group’s performance. Recording companies are not compelled to make the same financial arrangements with improvisers that they must with other composers.
As suggested earlier, small companies typically pay improvisers—band leaders and supporting players—only once for their participation in the album’s recording session, just as for dance band musicians. Precise practices vary considerably from company to company, of course, and depend as well on the reputation of artists. During the forties, “performance royalty payments [were] a standard provision with the name bandleaders on the major labels.”29 There have also been more recent cases of” ‘star’ sidemen . . . insisting on a royalty payment.” According to Rachied Ali, John Coltrane was among the first leaders to make such arrangements with companies on behalf of other band members.30
Their increasing awareness of the implications of recording company practices provided the impetus in the forties for many improvisers to begin composing and recording original pieces31 Some, with legal assistance, formed their own publishing companies to receive royalties from record companies. Many record companies also established their own publishing affiliates, subsequently requiring improvisers to sign over the publication rights of their original pieces as part of the terms of recording contracts. This practice, which continues today, includes the materials that a company sometimes encourages musicians to create extemporaneously and treats, for the purposes of the recording, as original compositions: simple blues riff tunes, elaborate improvised melodies, and transformed versions of popular songs falling within the copyright law’s permissible usage guidelines.32 With publication rights to a piece, a company can, in effect, pay itself royalties for the use of a piece, as well as gain profit from its use by other recording companies.33
Companies implement various repertory strategies in accord with their interests. At times, they may prefer to re-record new versions of pieces whose publication rights they already own and release them on different albums rather than record new pieces that obligate them to pay royalties. At other times, a company’s interest in increasing its inventory of different title offerings for prospective listeners may lead it to select popular tunes that other musicians on its label have not yet recorded. Whatever the rationale behind such repertorial choices, decisions that defy the artist’s sense of musical value can become the basis for contention and even legal action on the part of musicians attempting to break: their contracts (AT).
On the other hand, ideas originating with the production staff, even over an artist’s initial objections, may produce positive results leaving a significant imprint on the jazz tradition. Incidents involving Coleman Hawkins bear this out. He related that he was not interested initially in either playing or recording “Body and Soul,” an eventual jazz classic, and the idea for his innovative saxophone solo rendition of “Picasso” was greatly influenced by the record’s producer. Also contributing to the jazz tradition are unexpected musical saves brought about by the pressures of studio recording that subsequently serve as influential models for other artists. There are accounts that attribute Louis Armstrong’s invention of scat singing to his instantaneous improvisation of vocables when he forgot the words to a song during a recording session.34
As in the choice of repertory, studios differ in policy as to whether they encourage a group to arrange its own material or rely upon their own production staff to perform this function, factors that help define a group’s sound and musical identity. Economic pressures on a company, such as a low operating budget, a narrow profit margin, or “small sales and limited distribution,” can suggest a policy of simple, uniform arrangements requiring “little planning or rehearsal.”35
When performers share the taste, and admire the skills, of staff arrangers who provide assistance, they benefit from the company’s practices. So, too, do performers who have yet to develop strong musical personalities or who lack expertise sufficient for arranging music themselves. Others are less happy with this partnership. Should company producers insist upon arrangements that artists regard as displeasing, unaesthetic environments of sound, the situation undermines their ability to operate as creative inventors. Less damaging, perhaps, but disconcerting nonetheless, are such practices as studio personnel apportioning the events of arrangements to comply with management’s emphasis upon tunes in relation to improvisation, dictating the number of pieces on an album, and restricting the time allotted for solos.
There are companies that allow musicians to determine such matters for themselves. “Even by today’s standards, the albums we made with the Benny Golson—Art Farmer Jazztet would be great music,” Curtis Fuller asserts in recognition of the appropriate conditions for recording that the management fostered. “The record company gave us a month to prepare that album and paid us a salary so that we could just work on it.” Some of Fuller’s other recording experiences, however, provide a marked contrast:
In many companies today, you’re pushed right into the studio, playing material that you may have never seen before, with musicians you have never played with before and no time to do anything. They say, “You’re a professional, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you be able to do that?” These guys just don’t understand the music. They’ll take the lamest rock group and pay them for a year just to rehearse and work on things, to come up with one lead tune. Our music is much more complex than that, and they push us into the studio to record on the spot. They’re always telling me, “That was great, Curtis,” even though I may not have even liked the track. They just don’t care. They just want to get you in and out of the studio. Give us the time and backing, and we can come up with things as beautiful as we did with Benny Golson’s group.
As Fuller attests, studio work can require improvisers who have never performed together to create music within the structure of unfamiliar, difficult pieces under the pressures of limited time. Because recordings reflect the conditions under which they are made, from the artist’s viewpoint the results are predictable. “It takes a while [to develop] a sympathetic interplay between the members of the rhythm section to get the best out of everybody. It doesn’t always happen right away,” Tommy Flanagan observes. “I’ve made an awful lot of dates where I played with people for the first time or just a few times. . . . You’re lucky when something like that comes out good. It would be interesting, but it might not the best thing that could happen.”
Under more favorable conditions, groups gain extensive experience performing together, deepening their grasp over repertory before recording. “I have some prospects for recording my new band, but I don’t feel that we’re ready yet. I don’t want to rush it,” Melba Liston explains.
We have two months ahead playing every Monday night at Sweet Basil’s, and that should help tighten us up. You know, there’s tight, and then there’s TIGHT. We’re alright as far as reading and playing together, but there is a spiritual thing that isn’t there. And that’s what I want to work on now. I’ll have to see how I can get this thing developed in my band before I go into the recording studio. For my music, it’s necessary. Sometimes, a steady tour on the road will bring that about in a group. It seems a shame that it takes that, but for all the steady series of hardships when
I was on the road with Dizzy, when you come out of an experience like that, your band is together.36
Involvement with record production after the initial recording session can be an equally critical matter for artists. Some worry about the consequences of subsequent editing decisions by studio personnel whose expertise may lie primarily with recording technology, rather than music, or who may not share their personal artistic values. Within the jazz community, stories of negative studio experiences reinforce the artist’s concern. One performer was dismayed when the engineers who produced his album removed his “best solo. The piece sounded lopsided with the solo cut out. If they had only consulted me and said there was too much material for that side of the record, there were all kinds of other places where it would have been more natural to cut.” Another expressed frustration that a company had deleted the final chorus of his solo, inadvertently removing its “climax,” thereby rendering the solo “nonsensical.” Yet another objected to a company’s practice of speeding up or slowing down slightly the original tempo of taped performances, thus shortening or lengthening them for a neater fit on the recording. In the process, however, the pitch was altered; by extension, so was the very mood of the performances. At one studio, an engineer whose aesthetic values were shaped by his specialization in rock added his equipment’s maximum reverberation to the initial recording, depriving the music of its appropriate transparency.
Despite the possibility of such occurrences, other artists are content, after the initial recording session, to leave the remainder of the job to the recording company. Lacking an interest in the technical aspects of record production or simply accepting the limitations of their power in the studio, they take the subject of recording more lightly than their counterparts. Moreover, some hold different attitudes toward the goal of studio work and are less concerned with how faithfully the final product represents the original performance.37 As suggested earlier, individuals may themselves adopt conservative improvisation practices under pressures of recording—or when concerned about others copying their material—that render albums, to varying degrees, unrepresentative of live performances. In fact, there is an example of one recording in release that is a deliberate musical put-on by artists, pointing up the deficient taste of the “recording manager.”38 Still other musicians appreciate the unique features of a recording studio as providing them a compositional medium distinct from live performance. Consequently, they work willingly with record producers to reshape the content and structure of recorded material for albums, in effect treating their group’s improvisations as the “raw material for composition.” Miles Davis’s collaboration with producer Teo Macero at Columbia Records is such a case.39
From company to company, budgetary considerations can affect the characteristic sound quality of records. To economize on production costs, companies may contract with a second-rate record-pressing plant or select the lowest grade vinyl, resulting in a high ratio of noise to musical signal on the final product. Ultimately, decisions at every step of album production, from the preparation of the master tape to the cutting of the master disk to the actual pressing of the vinyl disks, can have major consequences. “On one recording date I did with a [vocal] chorus, [the recording engineer] got uptight when I asked him to allow me to be in the cutting room when they were doing the master,” Max Roach recalls. “He said, ‘Do I tell you how to do your business?’ When the actual album was pressed, I was not even given a chance to hear it before it hit the stands. I was heartbroken when I heard it. The sound was so bad, so muddy. They undid all the careful work I had put into the music.”
Record companies potentially wield additional power if they delineate idiomatic bounds within which improvisers work. The company’s influence can guide artists along a conservative route, as when, in order to build on past success by promoting a consistent musical product, it persuades performers to continue creating music that has proved itself commercially. Artists can become “prisoners of their own success” in this regard (PW). “The problem,” Curtis Fuller observes, “is that a lot of people get branded as doing only one thing when they really have talents in many different areas. Some people get caught up in the labels they’re given by the record companies, and they get trapped there.” Similarly, Lee Konitz recognizes that “I happen to have an identification from the time I played with Miles and a lot of people don’t want to hear me playing differently. They just want a particular sound.” Ironically, the same medium that helps to create the popularity of improvisers may also constrain their creative activities.40 “Once I was standing next to Coltrane after he finished playing ‘My Favorite Things’ in a club,” a renowned singer recalls. “He told me that he was so tired of audiences requesting the tune, he was sorry he ever recorded it in the first place.”
On the other hand, record companies can provide the impetus for artists to explore a fuller range of expression. “My music has always evolved,” Walter Bishop Jr. reflects.
When the record companies told me that they wouldn’t record bebop anymore and I was old hat, I found other areas to express myself in. If you’ve heard my albums on the Muse label, I have five albums which document my work through all the stages I went through, from bebop to avant-garde to fusion and back to bebop. The avant-garde affects everybody. Even if they’re not playing free, they become more free in their playing. On my record Call Keith, I did a track which was sort of free, with a tonal center. I wanted to see what it felt like playing that music, and I learned a lot about playing free from that. You have to go on instinct, and everybody has to listen. With my fusion album, I was out to prove that I could be just as creative in the fusion area as I could in the bebop area. Since I get off on dancing myself, I could relate to this different beat. It was different from all my other albums. The challenge was to do it without losing my artistry.
Artists perceive adjustment in performances at the behest of recording company demands in various ways from creative challenge to inappropriate compromise. Idealists defer only minimally, or not at all, to such intrusions on their musical decision making. To pursue new interests, they risk disappointing fans whose tastes and expectations have been shaped by recordings and proceed with the hope that they can educate their former fans and develop a new base of support for their art. Similarly, they accept that their stance may force them to support themselves by other means than music or even impoverish them. “I can’t get involved with music and the whole money thing,” one artist explains, “people running around trying to get a hit. To me, this music is above all that. People need something beautiful in their lives that they can believe in, that’s outside all the pressures of making money. If people want to make money, they should go into something other than jazz.”
Betty Carter’s position has a similar moral edge to it, winning her great admiration in the jazz community. When I asked her whether she had ever considered leaving bebop to perform more commercial music during the years in which she struggled with little recognition or financial success, she replied succinctly, “No.1 like to sleep well at night.” Recognizing that the pressures of pursuing materialistic values distract improvisers, sometimes fatally, from their artistic goals, Barry Harris advises students to avoid disruptive temptations and endure adversity. “Sometimes,” he says, “it pays to scuffle, if you can.”
Unless artists encounter individuals with a strong commitment to jazz and a personal interest in the music within recording companies that appeal to a mass market, such companies are the most precarious for improvisers. Of course, individual performers may enjoy increased power within a major company as their albums become financially successful and their reputations grow. The minority of musicians who attain superstar status commonly have considerable freedom and control in the recording industry’s production laboratories.41
For many, the discouragement of collaboration with commercial companies leads them to work with smaller, independent labels with a specialized devotion to jazz and an eye on the connoisseur’s
market. Despite their restricted capacity for record production, distribution, and sales, such companies ordinarily provide the most sympathetic settings for jazz recording. Some improvisers learn enough about recording technology to develop their own recording studios, where they maintain complete control over their music’s production and assist other musicians or groups in producing albums according to their satisfaction. Aspiring recording artists can rent studio time to produce their own master tapes and make independent agreements with small plants for limited pressings.42 Following the lead of many small record companies and distributors, artist-producers generally advertise their records in trade magazines. They also sell them at performances and use them for promotion purposes when looking for performance work or other business opportunities. Today, more established independent companies find distributors in the mainstream of the record industry.
Like the bundle of variables, from a venue’s general atmosphere to the character of the audience, that shape improvisations at live performances, the circumstances surrounding every recording session impose diverse conditions upon invention. Taken together, they contribute variety to the experience of improvising and increase the challenge of a jazz artist’s career.
Thinking in Jazz Page 72