As this takes place, interplay within the band projects another kind of conversation, a group conversation. On another level, so does the interaction between players and audience. Finally, at the highest level are extraordinary transcendental experiences in which players feel, if only momentarily, “in touch with the big picture.” Entering into another world of awareness and sensitivity, they feel a deep sense of reverence for “all living things.” In spiritual communion, they merge together in the shine of a universal life force—timeless, peaceful, yet energizing and euphoric.
The Musician’s Odyssey
In the music culture of some Sufi groups, it is said that each ceremonial performance is a musical pilgrimage, a symbolic miniature version of the performer’s larger goal of traveling to Mecca to attain spiritual revelation.15 Although this metaphor has its own subtle religious meanings within the context of North African culture, it embraces, in agreeable comparison to a broader landscape, universal images of life’s journey that are similar to those invoked by jazz musicians. For jazz players, a performance can also be likened to a symbolic miniature version of their life’s pilgrimage: their overriding musical activities, creative processes, and life goals. Embarking on each musical journey, band members support each other, while striving to make a significant personal contribution to the event. Periodically, individual players rest to reflect on their musical relationships and assess their inventions. Almost immediately, they isolate particular options from among the vast possibilities and determine where next to go in their development of ideas. At times, amid the larger performance’s fluid events, the travelers encounter turbulence. Differences arise over the precise course to take; major discrepancies develop in interpretation of the beat or harmony. Improvisers may conceive new ideas only with great difficulty or, once airborne, derive too little satisfaction from them. At other times, the voyage is smooth. Travelers locked into a groove receive exciting flashes of musical inspiration.
Similarly, over the longer course and with their larger community’s support, improvisers spend their lives constantly probing more deeply into aural, theoretical, physical, and emotional aspects of their understanding to discover new ways of thinking about music and new ways of thinking in the language of music. Ultimately, they strive to make a unique personal contribution to their tradition. From one period to the next, musicians shift their precise routes through all the possibilities. They may primarily devote some years to practicing, others to performing; some to learning from idols, others to developing their own material. To refine their abilities, in the meantime, artists may continue to make occasional studies of different playing styles, learning how to handle specific technical matters or probing musical concepts that are currently of interest to them. In addition, artists may immerse themselves for a period in such other systems as Latin American or Western classical music, adapting desirable features to their own use.
Throughout a jazz player’s career, economic pressures and professional opportunities affect individuals’ artistic pathways, continually marking their odyssey in often unpredictable ways. Intensely working within particular bands, repertory, and idioms, improvisers increase technical control over musical concepts favored by their current collaborators. Jazz musicians struggle to preserve time for practice amid the constant demands of extramusical jobs, band rehearsals, recording sessions, private students, road travel, and the ceaseless demand of marketing associated with music employment. Family life adds to an artist’s responsibilities.
At times, tribulation throws performers off their route. Financial necessity may require them to divide their energies unfavorably between commercial music and jazz or devote themselves exclusively to the former for years at a time. Some eventually make a successful comeback within the jazz community, but others, discouraged by the prospects of economic hardship and little recognition, leave the music forever. “It can be depressing sometimes,” confesses an advanced saxophonist in Barry Harris’s workshop, “especially around holiday time when old friends that I went to school with return to the area to visit. After ten years, they’ve become successful lawyers and doctors. They have families and homes and respect and security. But I’m still in the same situation I’ve been in all along—still scuffling to pay the rent, still without any savings or health insurance, still trying to keep a band together, still trying to find places to play, still without any sense of the future.”
Improvisers may experience periodic dry spells of imagination and drop out of the music world to recoup their creative energies. When asked about the several-year hiatus in his recording and performing career, Miles Davis remarked that, at one point, he found that he could no longer hear the music. “It just stopped and all of a sudden, I couldn’t play anything.”16 In other instances, musicians may tire of invention within particular idiomatic frameworks, and take time off from performing to determine a new musical direction that has value for them. Subsequently, they reenter the field with renewed enthusiasm. Indeed, some careers are made up of successive periods of uniquely focused interest, each ultimately representing another leg of a restless artistic journey. “How many times in my life have I said to myself, ‘If only?’” Walter Bishop Jr. muses. “If only I could play this passage? If only I could play that tune? If only I had the technique to do that? If only I could play with these musicians or those musicians? Only to discover that by the time I reached those goals, they had been replaced by other goals.”
Over the years, vaguely imagined youthful prospects of unlimited possibilities and dreamlike aspirations give way to a history of finite accomplishments. With age and maturity, many learn to assess their talents in the context of the jazz tradition as they understand it, to make peace with themselves as career artists. “I have felt quite deficient a number of times over the years, and it’s been quite embarrassing.” Lee Konitz offers with characteristic candor.
I keep thinking, “Jesus, why don’t I have more of a vocabulary at my disposal so that I can just play fast tempos?” But at some point, I decided that that’s the way it’s going to be. I’m not going to get it all in, or be the best, or whatever. When I realized that Charlie Parker died at the age of thirty-four and I was going to be fifty-four, I realized that I probably won’t live long enough to playas brilliantly as he did. But the fact is, I have never played that knockout kind of music that was obviously part of the bebop thing. That music was so intense in those dazzling tempos and lines that they played, that it made its impact that way. I have never been able to make it that way. For people who would like to hear a bit of an improvising attempt—sometimes even a walking on eggshells, if you will—I have a small audience, and it’s enough for me.
Some artists take up new instruments or cultivate areas of musicianship other than improvisation in order to make the most of their abilities and find ways of distinguishing their voices from those of other experts. Such skills may also help artists find commercial work—typically, producing musical scores for television, radio, or film. “These days I am very concerned with developing facility as a writer and an orchestrator,” Konitz continues. “I can write lines very easily, but I’ve not thought orchestrally so much in the past. Also, some of the things which at one time were difficult for me, like the harmonic aspect of jazz, I am much more in tune with now. I can handle the piano keyboard, and I am much more aware of the harmonic aspects of music.”
Some improvisers, for stimulation, change their allegiance from one jazz idiom to another or turn their attention to precise musical fusions. As early jazz groups borrowed elements from spirituals and blues, contemporary experiments include the fusion of jazz with toasts, a genre of narrative poetry some consider “the greatest flowering of [African American] verbal talent.” and with hip-hop.17 Imaginative fusions include the theatrical adaptation of a jailhouse toast, “Honky Tonk Bud,” for videorecording, and hip-hop recordings Jazzmatazz and Doo-Bop by Guru and Miles Davis respectively.18
Other remarkably varied mixtures of elements
that Miles Davis created late in his career also served as new textural settings for his “characteristic articulation, phrasing and melodic figures.” These mixtures encompass “the electrified sounds of psychedelic rock, . . . the complex rhythm-guitar offbeats of funk,” and the “raw sound materials” provided by the “Brazilian and African percussionists and the Indian musicians” with whom he collaborated.19 Additionally, for concepts regarding the use of “rhythm and space” and the juxtaposition of multiple, independent patterns, Davis acknowledges composers as different from each other as Bach, Stockhausen, and Ornette Coleman. Increasingly, he strove in his own group to achieve a “free association of musical ideas” around the rhythmic core provided by bass vamps.20
Ever experimenting with new sounds and new ways of organizing them, Davis sometimes reversed the conventional relationship between the top and the bottom of the ensemble. At times, rather than performing solos, the treble instruments repeated a simple melody or melodic fragment as the rhythm section instruments created “a thick web of simultaneous solos” and a multilayered fabric of ostinatos whose “static or repetitive harmonies” and “uncompromising metric framework” drew inspiration from “African and Brazilian polyrhythms and James Brown—style rhythm and blues.”21
Davis explains his exploration of this fusion of jazz, rock, and world music in terms not only of its musical interest but also of its theatrical performance elements. His use of electric trumpet blends effectively with the band’s other electric and synthesized sounds, allowing him freedom of movement to perform from any part of the stage, rather than having constantly to step out from the group’s ranks as a soloist to play at a fixed microphone. Interweaving dramatic body language into the fabric of performance, Davis, in resplendent dress, poses momentarily at the side of the stage to interject sporadic musical commentary into the music. He continues his performance by stepping gracefully across the stage to the music’s beat, stopping midway to make silent acknowledgment of the audience, then guides their attention from band member to band member as each delivers the subtle changes in performance his directing elicits. Davis’s newfound stage demeanor underscores within the fusion idiom the attraction that extramusical features of performance hold for him.22
Max Roach, too, “is always in a state of experimentation.” In recent years, he has been
working with strings. I hear strings as a percussive brass section, not saccharine. I’ve also been dealing with solo pieces with different forms. I hear pieces for large orchestras, too, not with the conventional string sections, but with banjos, mandolins, and guitars. All these things excite me. I like to deal with voices as well, and all kinds of different instrumental combinations. I’ve done duets with Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, and [Abdullah Ibrahim]. I’m constantly working on new ideas. I’m interested in mixed media, film, dialogue, and dance, all together. These things keep me busy at home, experimenting with them, thinking about them, writing notes about them. And I love performing as well. So, I’m constantly trying to dream up ways to keep myself interested in what I’m doing, challenging myself in different ways and, hopefully, challenging the other musicians I have become involved with.
Whether improvisers choose to apply their skills within the bounds of varied idioms or whether they remain faithful proponents of a single style, the greatest satisfactions remain integrally tied to musical exploration and discovery, to artistic development. “It’s amazing, but lately I’ve been suddenly feeling myself getting better and better each time I play,” Barry Harris observes.
I don’t know why it’s happening now, at this late stage of my career, but it is happening. I still feel like a little kid, a fifty-one-year-old kid, and it’s beautiful. Every fifty-one-year-old should feel like I do about this, because it’s a continual learning process. You can be doing this music till you’re seventy, till you’re one hundred, and just be learning all the time. If you could only do this till you were one hundred fifty or two hundred years old and learn all the time, just imagine the depth you could achieve. I must hope that I live long enough to solve more of the mysteries. I am solving some of the mysteries for myself, but I know that there are many more, and the thing is to keep at it and to solve them.
I listened to some of the piano students who came to my class yesterday. About five of them played the same tune, but played it so differently! This thing we’re involved with is so big that it’s unbelievable what one can learn from so many people. I have such a ball in my classes, and I learn so much from my students. They probably don’t realize that I come to school here, too. I’m just the oldest member of the class. I just wish everyone could experience the blessing of learning new things all the time.
In a similar spirit, octogenarian Doc Cheatham recalls his decision to leave the renowned big bands where he held the lead trumpet chair over most of his career to become the featured soloist and vocalist of a new quartet.
We were well accepted when we opened at Sweet Basil, and I was so surprised, I just couldn’t believe it—especially when I started singing. I started singing a few years ago. At first, I was worried that, at my age, I wouldn’t be able to remember all the lyrics to the tunes. But I found that it wasn’t any problem for me. So I said, “The heck with it, at seventy-five, I can’t lose a darn thing, either people like it or they don’t. If they don’t, they don’t have to hire me.” But they accepted my singing and my soloing and everything, and they just love me. Everything is working out fine. So, instead of retiring, I’m being born into the business again. At a recent jazz festival in France, to be on the bandstand with Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, and Bobby Hackett at the same time was one of the highlights of my whole entire life. I’ll never forget it. I’m doing what I enjoy now. I play my solos and I sing my songs. And I try to learn new things all the time.
Paul Wertico observes an interesting pattern in his own maturation, and that of others, that reveals how musical expression reflects the major stages and landmarks of the artist’s life experience. While in their youth, players bring unlimited energy to their improvisations, but their musical concepts are typically underdeveloped. With age, “your body slows down, but you acquire all this wisdom—all this taste.” It is the blend of their technique and their cumulative “wisdom and experience” that enables jazz musicians to enjoy the continued artistic growth that “is so beautiful.” Rufus Reid remembers a significant “turning point” in his understanding when he first performed on the same program with “early jazz musicians like Major Holley” who were in their sixties and seventies. “I had a great feeling when I saw them. I realized I would also be playing my whole life, and I had twenty or thirty years ahead of me to continue to improve.”
Glimpsing the seasoned artist’s perspective and experiencing the actual challenges and demands of jazz improvisation, newcomers soon lose their early naivete. They are not so much oblivious to the hardships of the career before them as they are optimistic in its opportunities and rewards. “What a satisfying life work as a jazz musician can be,” reflects George Duvivier. “Where else do you have the freedom to play music which really expresses you—to be your own boss? Also, I still love to travel and to see new places. I especially love working in Europe and Japan.”
Finally, for some, the commitment to jazz has a moral and ideological aspect. Improvisers embark on their personal odysseys with the conviction that they must share their talents with others, thus helping to maintain and ensure the survival of a unique, indispensable musical tradition. In so doing, they hope to make their mark on a world plagued by social conflict and preoccupied with materialistic values. Improvisers view performance as a positive force that can redress this imbalance, if only in a small way, by replenishing the earth’s sound-scape with music possessed of beauty and vitality, integrity and soul to remind listeners of these finer universal expressions of human aspiration.23 “Music is a special gift from God to those who have it;’ maintains a performer at the threshold of his career. ‘And it’s
necessary for us to follow it through to the extent of our abilities, whatever they may be. That’s what I live for. A friend of mine saw Kenny Dorham playing somewhere the night before he died. Kenny was playing on crutches,” he recounts with admiration, “but he was playing right to the end. God willing, that’s the way it will also be with me.”
Over the years of this study, the jazz community has seen the passing of many important figures who forged, refined, and diversified the language of jazz, including Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Miles Davis, Billy Eckstine, Roy Eldridge, Bill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, and Sarah Vaughan. Sadly, before the study’s completion, participants George Duvivier, Lonnie Hillyer, Emily Remier, and Red Rodney also joined them.
Within the jazz community, players sometimes assuage feelings of loss with sensitive humor reaffirming their bond with musical ancestors and extending the metaphor of their tradition as an unbroken chain. “[Sarah Vaughan’s] somewhere right now having a ball,” singer Joe Williams muses affectionately. “She’s in good company. . . . Somebody said when she died, ‘Well, Basie needed a vocalist.”‘24
PART V
Music Texts
MUSIC TEXTS
Most of part 5 consists of relatively short musical examples sampling improvised performances from a variety of different sources. Beginning with example 13.23, 1 present four large score segments of collective improvisations based on “Bye Bye, Blackbird,” “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.” “I Thought about You,” and “Blues by Five.” The top line of each large score segment presents a conventional lead sheet of the composition, depicting the kind of skeletal model that typically provides players with a framework for improvising and interpreting each other’s improvisations. Following the first page of the larger selections, italicized abbreviations in the left column identify the lead sheet and instruments (ml for melody; t, trumpet; ss, soprano saxophone; p, piano; b, bass; d, drum set), and measure numbers figured from the beginning of each score segment provide reference points for analysis.
Thinking in Jazz Page 75