Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  EPILOGUE

  Jazz as a Way of Life

  The music is what sustains the player from beginning to end. That’s where you get your life from. That’s why you play jazz.—Art Farmer

  You keep playing, keep studying, keep listening, keep learning, and you keep developing. Jazz is not a nine to one [A.M.] job, once or twice a week. It’s a way of life. Some people develop in their twenties. Some people mature in their thirties. It took me to reach my fifties before I matured. It finally happened when a situation took place where I became more secure and much happier with myself. I wasn’t satisfied then, but I was satisfied that I was finally heading in the direction that I really should have been heading in all along.—Red Rodney

  An unwavering commitment to learning and creativity characterizes the interrelated music specialties of jazz improvisers, their passionate pursuits. Jazz activities blend the composer’s imaginative exploration of musical ideas with the performer’s mastery of musical instruments, the theorist’s penchant for analysis with the historian’s curiosity about the development of musical tradition, the educator’s concern for making musical language accessible to the nonspecialist with the concern all share with “passing it on.”

  The vastness of this field of study is not always apparent to observers outside the jazz community, nor to jazz learners, who themselves view improvisation initially as a finite ability. Lonnie Hillyer laughs as he recalls the most common question put to him by students. “‘How long before I will be a player?’ I tell them, ‘How can I say how long it will take? Why, I’m still learning myself.’“ Similarly, when Rufus Reid was a young player stationed with the air force in Japan, he once went to a nightclub to hear Ray Brown, who invited him to stop by his hotel. “When I got there, I was so surprised to see him practicing. At the time, I thought, ‘A cat as great as he is, still practicing just like everyone else? Still trying to get better?’”

  Because many learners first discover jazz through recordings, they also tend to venerate recordings as ends in themselves, attaching more significance to the products of improvisation than to its processes. Students modify such views as they gain experience. Eventually, like artists in other fields, they come to appreciate artworks as landmarks of personal development, as representations of ideas that occupy their creators over the course of particular projects at different periods, in some instances over their careers.

  Literary and visual arts provide analogies. An author once quipped that he never completes a novel so much as abandons it when it is sufficiently rewritten for him to begin another. Similarly, a painter once told me that she does not regard any single painting as finished or finite in the sense that her buyers do. Rather, she views her cumulative paintings as a film’s successive frames, each work representing a continuation of the preceding one. In totality, her paintings document her life’s evolving artistic vision. Similarly, in the face of their own developing ideas and skills, many jazz improvisers maintain, with self-reflective humor, that they “can barely stand listening” to the last record they have produced (JH).

  In this light, jazz improvisation is not merely a process by which musicians create a record album or an evening’s performance. It is a particular artistic way of going through life. Seasoned improvisers commonly emphasize this point by advising learners that they must “live the life of a jazz musician” in order to perform jazz. Outsiders sometimes mistake such remarks as references to the night life of performers or to damaging social fads that have prevailed within the jazz community from time to time.1

  In fact, when musicians speak of jazz as a way of life, they refer primarily to the unrelenting artistic demands of a jazz career and to a particular orientation to the world of musical imagination characteristic of jazz community members. They refer to the total immersion in the music’s language that its rigors demand if players are to attain fluency as improvisers and enjoy continued artistic growth. Self-directed studies of jazz history, analyses of works by master improvisers, rigorous private practice routines, and interaction with other players in numerous bands continually sharpen abilities and replenish the artist’s store of knowledge.

  When performers speak of jazz as a way of life, they refer to the performer’s constant preoccupation with musical ideas and notions of creativity, not only in the settings of practice rooms and concert halls, but outside of them, as well. They refer to Barry Harris’s students continually reviewing music theory lessons while riding on the subway, envisioning the lettered names of chords and humming their pitches aloud amid surprised onlookers. They refer to Lee Konitz whistling new melodies to the beat of his footsteps as he walks his dog in the evening and to Calvin Hill jogging in Central Park, accompanied by the mental image of Max Roach’s hard-driving cymbal pattern. They refer to musicians away from instruments thinking through the structures of new pieces and reflecting on their relationships to the historical literature of jazz.

  When artists speak of jazz as a way of life, they also refer to the improviser’s sensitivity to the soundscape, which can inspire composition in much the same way as the visual world inspires painters. Just as a painter finds material in an abandoned field, extrapolating images from its littered formations and borrowing features of their varied textures, shapes, colors, and qualities of light and shadow, flugelhornist Julius Ellerby ventures early in the morning to Golden Gate Park to perform with bird songs, copying elements of their rhythmic phrasing and crisply articulated melodies; saxophonists Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Paul Winter have intertwined improvisations with the songs of wolves. Additionally, Winter and his band once traveled to the floor of the Grand Canyon to explore its natural acoustics. On like searches, artists in New York City sometimes practice outside in deserted areas or near bridges where their performance is partially masked by late-night traffic, adopting the city’s collective sounds—the rhythmic clatter of cars and trains, the mix of honking horns and sirens—as their accompaniment to improvisations. Regardless of the route of their arrival, such sounds sometimes find their way into formal arrangements, as when Max Roach’s horn players mimic traffic in the group’s rendition of “Parisian Thoroughfare.”2

  Patterns with musical implications, from the heartbeat to the rhythm of physical motion, are inherent in all aspects of the lives of improvisers. “Rhythm is all around us. You know?” Miles Davis conjectures. “If Tony [Williams] was walking down the street and stumbled, he might want to play that [rhythm].”3

  Equally potent sources of musical material are human relationships and their varied traces within the soundscape. Duke Ellington’s “Harlem Air Shaft” captures the cacophonous interweaving of the collective sounds of an apartment building’s tenants—their “making love . . . intimate gossip . . . the radio . . . the janitor’s dogs . . . people praying, fighting, snoring,” the accidental breaking of a window, the emphatic rhythms of dancers in the apartment above, “every contrast” amplified by an air shaft.4 John Coltrane’s somber piece ‘Alabama,” composed shortly after the infamous Klan bombing of 15 September 1963, at the height of the campaign for civil rights in the South, carries the full emotional weight of the incident. On that Sunday, a bomb exploded in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church during a children’s Bible class, killing four girls ranging in age from eleven to fourteen and injuring many other innocent children.5

  If in some instances the improviser’s search for sounds with musical value steps over the boundary that conventionally distinguishes music and non-music, in others their search leads over the boundaries that normally distinguish jazz from other music systems and art forms to commingle their elements. Walter Bishop Jr. describes the influences of a diverse background characteristic in the jazz community. When Bishop studied canons at Juilliard, he wrote “jazz canons”; when he studied soifeggio, he selected melodies from its exercises for his composition of jazz pieces. ‘At one point, I learned to analyze and compose music like Gershwin’S, seeing why it sounded so great;’ he recalls. Each of these activi
ties provided Bishop with additional tools. “The more tools you have as an improviser, the better you can express yourself,” he acknowledges.

  Artists also constantly draw inspiration from the larger milieu where they grow up and earn a living. “We are called jazz musicians,” Patti Bown says, “but, like other composers, we are influenced by everything we hear all around us. How could it be otherwise? We all listen to the radio. We all hear music on records, on television and on films, in the street and in concert halls.” During the twenties, Louis Armstrong and his friends listened with relish to the latest musical theater songs, then went home immediately afterwards to work out jazz arrangements of the material.6

  Jazz players commonly hold professional positions in different types of bands and orchestras. They perform in a large variety of settings, including concert halls, dance halls, churches, nightclubs, restaurants, and circuses, and in the venues of “general business jobs” like receptions for weddings and bar mitzvahs. The resulting experience introduces them to musical genres as diverse as classical, popular, and rock, and those of America’s varied ethnic groups and religious congregations.

  Correspondingly, the value that jazz musicians attach to innovation leads many to embrace a view of composition and music history that is global in its scope. “Music from many parts of the world” whets Patti Bown’s “appetite, and I find myself drawing something from it,” she explains. “I like Eastern music, Arabic music. Over the years, I’ve been in many different musical situations, and I feel it’s all kind of universal.” Max Roach elaborates on the extraordinary usefulness of such a perspective:

  In America, we haven’t formulated so much of a musical tradition as in Europe, and we’re still free to do different things. For example, I think Gunther Schuller is working on an opera with a jazz band in it. Before Charlie Parker died, he was talking about doing a double concerto with Yehudi Menuhin. It’s not like India here, where traditionally you couldn’t play an afternoon raga in the evening, or Africa, where a certain drum can only be played on a certain occasion. We have the freedom to try out a lot of things, and we’re not set in our ways.

  Artists’ most expansive views and practices reflect an appreciation for the uniqueness of jazz within the broad sweep of the evolution of music. It is as if the world is seen rotating on its axis, holding an atmosphere close to its surface whose protective shield consists not simply of vapors but of the sounds of nature, which have nurtured the aesthetic side of humanity, offering since its earliest existence an inspiration for music making. Over the millennia, within the open arena of the world’s soundscape, the cries of animals, the rhythm of thunder, the wind’s play upon reeds, and the water’s rippling over stone interact with the expressive human inventions they inspire. Language, song, and musical instruments, each with its own implications for composition, give rise to a diverse web of music systems and technological tools for their development.

  From one part of the world to the next, such systems are rarely isolated or static. Like other elements of the earth’s atmosphere, those comprising its soundscape have changed over time, sometimes subtly, at other times drastically. In every country, village, and household, individuals historically perform music inherited from their ancestors. Preserving many of its features and alter” ing others, artists of each generation create new performance practices and repertory, eventually placing their cumulative tradition into the hands of the next generation. It is as if, within each society, its selected ancestral voices assume lives of their own, maintaining featured positions within the society’s musical tradition as generations of singers, instrumentalists, and composers carry the ancient voices forward, even as they themselves join them.

  Within the global network of music systems, contact among different societies stimulates change in the evolution of their respective traditions. In some instances, varied music systems born on two disparate continents join on yet a third continent, where they cross-fertilize one another, producing new stylistic fusions that eventually assert their independence from their parent traditions. The stage was set for such dramatic events in the birth of a new constellation of musical languages a few hundred years ago, when European expansionism and an African diaspora removed many European and African ancestral voices from their homelands. In the wake of patterns of trade, colonial domination, religious proselytism, and slavery, these voices dispersed to many parts of the world. In America, where European, African, and Native American ancestral voices mixed in the soundscape, African composers and their descendants created a unique family of musical traditions drawing from their heritage and the diverse elements of the international music culture around them. Jazz came forth from this family with its own affiliated conventions to develop through generations of creators, preserving and expanding upon contributions of the tradition’s most significant composers and performers.

  Just as jazz was born from an amalgam of African, European, and African American musical elements, it has continued the practice of absorbing different musical influences. Jazz remains a characteristically open music system capable of absorbing new traits without sacrificing its identity. Jelly Roll Morton incorporates the rhythms of popular Spanish and French dance music into his early compositions and improvisations in the twenties; Dizzy Gillespie incorporates Latin and African Caribbean rhythms into his music in the forties. John Coltrane and others experiment with blending elements of African rhythmic practices and Indian modal practices with jazz during the sixties. In the seventies, a recording of bass zither music from Burundi, Africa, inspires Calvin Hill, who adapts the zither’s variation techniques to his own improvisations, and some of Roberta Baum’s vocal mannerisms find their source in Middle Eastern women’s ululation.

  Reinforcing such trends, an increasing number of musicians outside of the United States, in an exercise of fusion, have learned the language of jazz, interpreting and reshaping its conventions according to the values of their own musical traditions. A Ghanaian highlife guitarist, Koo Nimo, pursues his goal to create an “Afro-jazz” by combining Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery’s chord voicings “with traditional [Ghanaian] rhythms.” A British saxophonist applies John Coltrane’s improvisational method within the framework of traditional English tunes. A Bulgarian group shapes its use of conventional jazz vocabulary to the asymmetrical meters of traditional Bulgarian music, and in St. Petersburg a group creates Dixieland-style polyphonic arrangements of Russian folk melodies. In ‘the aftermath of the collaboration between Shankar and John McLaughlin in the group Shakti, other Indian artists adapt jazz to the complex classical system of rhythm and place raga improvisations in the setting of jazz piano accompaniment. In Puerto Rico artists present modal jazz improvisation within the conventional 2/4 rhythmic frameworks of folk music genres like plena and amid its reponsorial vocal exchanges. Haitian fusions of “big-band swing, mereng, and Vodou[n] rhythms” profit from the exciting interlocking patterns of three drums and other percussion instruments. In experiments of this nature, artists like Toshiko Akiyoshi of Japan, Gato Barbieri of Argentina, and Abdullah Ibrahim of South Africa, and others across the world, in endless variations, combine jazz elements with the timbral colors of indigenous instruments, traditional tuning systems, scales, melodies, rhythms, compositional forms.7

  Within the jazz community’s international network, direct exchanges among artists of different backgrounds replenish the pool of ideas favored by local communities. Students from Canada, Japan, Egypt, Israel, France, Italy, Holland, and Sweden attend Barry Harris’s workshops in New York City. In their homelands, they subsequently share their recently acquired knowledge with other artists. Harris himself has given workshops in many of these countries, as well as in Spain and Denmark. In Harare, Zimbabwe, a small but impressive jazz community includes performers from different parts of Africa, some of whom have received training at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.8 At Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria, Yusef Lateef has occupied the position of Senior Research Fel
low, studying traditional Nigerian music and interacting with local musicians. Ghananian master drummer Gideon Alorwoyie has taken up permanent residence in Chicago, where he teaches traditional Ghanaian drumming to one group of American jazz musicians and collaborates with another group to create a fusion of pan-African musical styles with artists whose varied backgrounds include African American and African Caribbean musics. Patti Bown has “jammed with drummers from the Caribbean” and played with “Arabic highlife type groups” in Africa. “Everything is overlapping with everything else today,” she observes.

  As a result of diverse influences contributing to its tradition, jazz in performance reveals layered patterns of cultural history, which are as textured in meaning for the improviser as they are for the educated listener who interprets them. A soloist may, at one moment, adopt a personalized contemporary improvisation approach, using large intervals like fourths as the basis for a solo’s melody, but fashion them in relation to the harmonic structure of the blues, one of the jazz tradition’s most venerable vehicles. Further along the same evolving melodic line, the improviser may quote from a Louis Armstrong solo, paying momentary tribute to his genius and to the values of New Orleans jazz, then double up on the rhythm, improvising extended asymmetrical phrases that embody the conventions of the bebop period, or infuse an original pattern with the timbral marks of a particular idol from the swing period. Subsequently, the soloist may resolve the flight of fancy with a series of sustained pitches chosen from various chord substitutions—the legacy of nineteenth-century European harmonic practices—imbuing the pitches with microtonal bends that reveal the formative influence of traditional African musics. After a short rest, the performer may adopt an intricate phrase from the drummer’s accompaniment as the template for the next melodic episode, utilizing Latin American rhythmic patterns that are the historical product of yet another fusion of African and European musical languages.