Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  In carrying forth the jazz tradition’s early voices within their improvisations, engaging their predecessors’ ideas and uniting them with their own, contemporary performers sometimes have the sense of escaping the normal experience of time. Such performances can assume a spiritual quality in which improvisers draw strength from a symbolic link to the past, as if becoming joined to a long chain of expressive human history. Similarly, as music systems around the world provide jazz performances with additional sources of inspiration, improvisers may have the sense of participating in a global discourse among music thinkers, negotiating musical ideas that transcend cultural and historical boundaries.

  Reinforcing such perspectives are yet other transcendental aspects of improvisation, the occasional out-of-the-body impressions and the sense of being part of a universal life force much larger than oneself. This occurs during moments when the conceptual boundaries between players disappear as they experience musical invention collectively, receiving ideas from outside themselves. The humility that envelops artists in the grip of such awe-inspiring aspects of creativity continually renews their sensitivity to life’s spiritual qualities and great mysteries. They ask: What is the human imagination? Where do ideas actually come from?

  Improvisation as Composition

  As their personal goals compel them to deepen their genetal understanding of music and to establish original voices within their own tradition, jazz improvisers fundamentally devote their lives to music composition. This remains true whether they store, edit, and revise musical ideas by ear, visual imagery, and instrument, or carry out similar procedures with the aid of writing or recording. It remains true whether the object of an artist’s activity is to assemble ideas into a fixed composition, or to continually rework them into transient artworks with but fleeting identities. It remains true whether they confine their operations to inventing their own musical parts within groups, or also become involved with arranging parts for other instruments. It remains true whether they improvise within the conventional frameworks of standards or within the extended forms of original large-scale productions. It remains true whether they create music in the quiet of their studios or in the context of live audiences and halls. For jazz musicians, each situation simply imposes different kinds of compositional conditions on musical invention.

  In this regard, the popular definitions of improvisation that emphasize only its spontaneous, intuitive nature—characterizing it as the “making of something out of nothing” —are astonishingly incomplete. This simplistic understanding of improvisation belies the discipline and experience on which improvisers depend, and it obscures the actual practices and processes that engage them. Improvisation depends, in fact, on thinkers having absorbed a broad base of musical knowledge, including myriad conventions that contribute to formulating ideas logically, cogently, and expressively. It is not surprising, therefore, that improvisers use metaphors of language in discussing their art form. The same complex mix of elements and processes coexists for improvisers as for skilled language practitioners; the learning, the absorption, and utilization of linguistic conventions conspire in the mind of the writer or speaker—or, in the case of jazz improvisation, the player—to create a living work.

  Just as creative handling of jazz vocabulary bears analogy to language use, the methods by which improvisers cultivate their abilities bear analogy to language acquisition. Participants in renowned foreign language programs agree to confine discourse exclusively to the language under study and then immerse themselves in their subject, its vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, analyzing literature and practicing conversation during every social interaction. Each activity reinforces the others, and as students work incessantly on their burgeoning skills, they gradually become more facile in manipulating the second language. Moments of natural usage—imagined, dreamed, or real—signal breakthroughs in their struggle toward fluency.

  In study of comparable intensity, aspiring jazz performers peruse their music’s multifaceted oral literature, acquiring and analyzing a repertory of compositions, classic solos, and discrete phrases, which embody the aesthetic values of jazz tradition and bring to light the underlying principles of improvisation. By contemplation of this repertory, students absorb the harmonic and melodic forms that guide invention and develop a storehouse of basic musical components from which they fashion their individual contributions to the group. The components include not only fully formed vocabulary patterns, but melodic and rhythmic cells, templates for rhythmic phrasing, fragments of theoretical materials, and the like.

  Eager to use their knowledge, aspiring players privately practice creating their own solos by training themselves to conceive ideas in jazz phrases and to express them through their instruments. They put into effect the conventional principles they have absorbed for interpreting and transfiguring musical models, imagining and performing versions that are inflected and rephrased, slightly ornamented, more substantially varied, or radically altered. They practice combining musical components into credible statements and developing their elements motivically to create musical episodes. On a larger scale, players eventually acquire the ability to tell stories, shaping ideas into a structure that conveys, in the language of jazz, a beginning, middle, and end.

  Amid practice sessions devoted to technical and theoretical studies, developing personal sounds, expanding repertories, creating melodic ideas, and experimenting with varied applications in solo construction, improvisers live at the threshold of new possibilities for invention, possibilities that expand dramatically with every discovery. Each requires disciplined drilling to ensure mastery over its use. “Just think of it this way,” John Coltrane once advised Curtis Fuller when Fuller felt at a loss for new material. “If, every day, you come up with a new idea—whether it’s just one new phrase or one new way of embellishing an old phrase—at the end of the year you’ll have three hundred and sixty-five new things to deal with. After two years, you’ll have over seven hundred new things to deal with, and so on.” The implication of Coltrane’s observation is that “new things” reach infinity when they are explored in relation to one another and a host of formerly mastered patterns.

  Armed with this extraordinary sufficiency, within any twenty-four-hour day performers constantly make selective judgments about materials for study, pursuing those that seem most compelling at the time. They work on some pieces and not others, absorb some new phrases and not others, experiment with their use in some roles and not others, explore the cross-relationships among some theoretical materials and not others. Each decision, even on the most simple matter, has a direct impact on the performer’s developing style of improvisation, further delineating the player’s personal voice. It is in this sense that Walter Bishop Jr. regards improvisation as “the product of all that players have experienced, all the music they’ve studied, absorbed, deleted and refined. . . . This music is an evolutionary thing. You study and apply. Study and apply. It involves the intuitive and the intellectual—learning from within and from without.” Analyzing the phenomenon, Chuck Israels explains that “the musical decisions that take place during improvisations are made instantly, but the work behind those decisions takes place over long periods of time—hours, days, weeks, months, and years spent considering all of the musical possibilities.”

  The perpetual pressure to increase understanding causes many an improviser to become a highly disciplined practicer. Each morning during Barry Harris’s early years in New York City, he would “go to the studio, sit down at the piano, and play.” When he raised his eyes again, “it was dark all around me and time to go home to bed. Every day was like that.” It is not uncommon, moreover, while an artist sleeps, for aural dreams in the jazz idiom to reflect the player’s waking passions. In John Coltrane’s life, powerful dreams sometimes provided the inspiration for new ideas or encouraged his pursuit of innovative musical courses.9 For learners, the dreams establish early landmarks in the absorption of their adopted language.

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bsp; After seven to ten years of attention to the stringent routines typically required for basic competency in jazz improvisation, some musicians maintain their skills largely by performing.10 “It’s like after you’ve learned a new language,” Charlie Mariano once explained to me. “You can basically keep it up by speaking it.” At the same time, performers driven by ever-changing artistic goals retain their early discipline. Despite the demands of other personal and professional obligations, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy practiced relentlessly during their waking hours—in their homes, in commercial studios, even in the back of touring band buses on the road and backstage at nightclubs and concert halls during intermissions. Not only does such intensive activity keep jazz vocabulary at the fingertips of improvisers, but it provides an ongoing forum in which they can “push the cutting edge of their interests and abilities.”11 In addition, their constancy accommodates the capricious nature of creativity. “There are drought periods,” Barry Harris explains, “and then, all of a sudden, there’s the oasis. Because you never know when the revelations will come to you,” he cautions, “you have to practice every day, even when you’re not inspired, so that you’re at your instrument to receive the revelations when they do come.”

  Training in the collective aspects of jazz is equally essential. Students absorb a set of musical models associated with the arrangements of pieces, the roles of different instruments, and the conventions for player interaction. Aspirants seize every opportunity to converse with others through improvised interplay, whether at afternoon rehearsals or late-night jam sessions. As the practice routines and informal get-togethers of jazz musicians indicate, outside of formal events they work on perfecting every technical skill and compositional procedure that improvisation encompasses.

  The pressures of professional engagements further test players’ versatility with the operations of improvisation and finely hone their skills. Over the course of each piece’s performance, they engage selectively in various “levels” or “intensities” of imaginative play, transforming to different degrees their melodic and harmonic models (LK). The design of the band’s arrangement of a piece commonly dictates changes in each artist’s selection of models and approach to invention. It may initially require a horn player to interpret the tune’s melody with minor embellishments, while the rhythm section, guided only by a general prescription concerning the progression, improvises an accompaniment. Subsequently, the rhythm section may confine its action to embellishing a composed accompaniment, while the horn player improvises a solo melody.12

  Within the realm of solo formulation, individuals may also, as a matter of personal taste, shift their focus among different kinds of models, changing their reliance on prefigured ideas and varying the intensity of their inventiveness. This adds variety to a musical creation and, at times, pushes out the boundaries of artistic daring, freeing the imagination. In certain segments of the progression, they may restrict themselves to ornamenting planned quotations from the tune, and in other segments radically transfigure prearranged vocabulary patterns. Alternatively, the players may choose to avoid the use of specific performance strategies or detailed melodic blueprints altogether. They commit themselves to pursuing the melodic ideas that occur to them in the heat of performance, whether formerly mastered phrases or unique conceptions unrelated to the tune or vocabulary store.

  Characteristically, improvisation perpetually shifts between precomposed musical ideas and those conceived in the moment. Virtually every feature of the music models that players bring to a performance—comprising, at its outset, composed, prefigured, fixed, or known elements—can serve during the performance as a springboard for the conception of an altered version of the model or a new one that meets the same requirements. In either case, the invention may instantly join the artist’s general storehouse of knowledge, where, in relatively fixed form, it awaits further use and transformation during the performance or at some later opportunity.

  This cyclical process of generation, application, and renewal occurs at every level of music making from fashioning subtle details to executing radical changes. It pertains equally to musical ideas, whether simple or complex, short or long. Soloists may conceive new embellishments for a tune, then incorporate them within their maps as semi-permanent features that provide options for the tune’s ongoing interpretation. Should the artist decide to apply the embellishments consistently, as originally conceived, they assume the role of orally composed, arranged elements. Alternatively, the artist may apply them improvisationally, varying their application within the composition or transforming them so that they spawn other embellishments. Similarly, spontaneous variations on a favored scale or vocabulary pattern, or chain of ideas, can produce tasteful new melodic shapes that, treated flexibly as compositional models, can generate additional ideas for the remainder of the event and during subsequent events.

  Identical processes characterize various aspects of collective musical interplay. For example, at the initial stage of the cycle, an imaginative horn player extemporaneously deviates from an arrangement’s unison melody to discover a new parallel harmony. Likewise, an exhausted bass player finds physical relief in a variation on a prescribed bass ostinato, creating a contrast to the overall accompaniment; or a group, with seeming intuition, by simultaneously shifting meters or sufficiently altering the harmony, invents a different. form for the piece. Should musicians regard such unanticipated results of their interaction as successful, they can incorporate them into their formal arrangements as fixed or composed features, gaining new points of departure for their explorations.

  From performance to performance, the particular balance achieved in any part between precomposed and freshly conceived ideas can differ considerably. This balance is affected not only by the dictates of specific arrangements, but by individual inspiration and the current state of each player’s personal system of improvisation, including its latest practices of vocabulary usage. A musician who, at one point, improvises inventively within a certain piece’s framework may begin, as a matter of performance habit, to favor increasingly consistent streams of vocabulary patterns or relatively fixed motivic episodes. Reworking particular linear arrangements of patterns may lead, in turn, to their consolidation into longer phrases with finalized identities, producing an entire accompanying part or a complete model for a solo. It may even produce the melody for a new composition, to serve, in turn, as a vehicle for additional invention.

  Correspondingly, over many performances, a group may choose to preserve a greater number of details from successfully improvised musical exchanges by compiling them into a through-composed, or an almost through-composed, arrangement or suite, which later furnishes the basis for further improvisation. These operations illuminate the wide-ranging processes responsible for the production of jazz, as its composed and spontaneous elements continually stimulate each other within an ongoing cycle of generation, application, and renewal.

  The compositional conditions under which jazz players create music provide insight into the special character of improvisation, distinguishing it by different degrees from composing that makes use of the written score.13 The most obvious is the condition of juggling multiple tasks simultaneously to create art in real time. Improvisers constructing their parts in performance perpetually make split-second decisions about suitable materials and their treatment. As players strive physically to implement their flow of decisions, unexpected visions routinely complicate the artistic challenge to the interaction of mind and body. So do the discrepancies that inevitably arise between conceived and actualized ideas, requiring creative skill on the player’s part to imagine and execute immediate solutions to compositional problems. Because the musical consequences of all actions are irreversible, the improviser must constantly grasp the implications of ideas at hand and work them into the flow of invention.

  By extension, the operations of improvisation involving more than one person require the instant assimilation of ideas across the band’s
membership. Musical materials extemporaneously introduced in any of the parts can influence the others, potentially providing renewed inspiration for all. Consequently, band members endeavor to interact flexibly throughout a performance in order to accommodate one another; at times modifying their own ideas, occasionally even abandoning them for other ideas complementary to the group. The unpredictable quality of the band’s musical negotiations is a fundamental ingredient in every performance, imbuing its creations with uniqueness. When jazz performances take place in public, any number of factors—from the ambience, acoustics, and management policies of a hall to the audience’s response—can affect the course and outcome of an improvisation as a collective artwork. It is the combination of these conditions that typically defines improvisation as a unique creative undertaking.

  To use one of the metaphors favored by musicians, improvisation is a musical conversation that the improviser enters on many different levels simultaneously. While shaping a part in relation to the underlying composition—conversing with its formal features—the player converses with predecessors within the jazz tradition, creating new ideas in relation to established improvisation conventions and previous interpretations of the composition known to the player. The inner dialogue by which individual band members develop the logic of their own specific parts comprises a conversation that they carry on with themselves. To the extent to which expression is shaped by idiomatic features of playing technique, or by idiosyncratic features of an instrument’s responsiveness, the player converses with the instrument as well. Artists’ conversations also have a historical dimension on a personal level: in each performance, the player’s unfolding ideas grow, moment by moment, out of a cumulative lifetime of performance and musical thinking.14