a. Triplet exchanges
b. Near simultaneous conceptualizing of figure
Miles Davis and Ron Carter, “I Thought about You”
Example 13.15 Intensified conversation across all the parts
Miles Davis, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and “Philly” Joe Jones,
“Blues by Five” (all excerpts =176)
In a, intensified conversation takes the form of imitative responses to a single idea, the soloist’s emphatic on-beat accent. In b, it involves a concentration of different kinds of exchanges: the near-simultaneous conceptualization of a melodic idea between the soloist and bass player, and the sharing of identical or otherwise complementary pitches among soloist and accompanists as the players alter the progression. In contrast to choruses in which performers create relatively independent complementary lines or in which exchanges are fleeting, some choruses, as illustrated in c, are deeply embedded with responsive exchanges among different combinations of players. From the onset of the chorus, a recurring rhythmic component of the soloist’s motive invites the pianist and drummer to perform a related, ongoing fill together. Meanwhile, the bass player sets up a blues figure in bar 90, then plays a variant of it in bar 93, prompting the pianist to absorb a prominent component of the figure into the lower voice of the piano part, rephrasing and harmonizing it. Subsequently, the soloist adopts the rhythm and gestural shape of the pianist’s figure to create a variation on the cadential portion of his previous solo phrase. Finally, the pianist responds by combining the rhythm and tonal center of the soloist’s idea (in the outer voices of the piano part) with a slight variant of the bass player’s previous blues figure (in the inner voice of the piano part) to produce a fitting chorus cadence.
Example 13.16 Responding to ideas introduced in the previous solo prior to its
final phrase
a. Adoption of previous soloist’s recurring gesture
Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins consecutive solos, “My Old Flame”
b. Adoption of previous soloist’s tune quotation
Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis consecutive solos, “Somethin’ Else”
Example 13.17 Responding to the previous soloist’s final phrase
In a, Rollins adopts Brown’s final gesture as a model, rephrasing it radically and extending it with a cadential figure. In b, Golson adopts Morgan’s figure as a model, rephrasing it slightly and altering its concluding interval, then answering it briefly in call and response fashion. In c, reacting in rapid succession to the last element of Davis’s solo, Garland harmonizes it, and Coltrane expands it melodically and rhythmically, before using his variant’s concluding pitch to begin his next phrase. In d, Adderley adopts Davis’s concluding gesture as a skeletal frame, instantly filling it in with scale degrees, then developing it sequentially and extending it with an elaborate cadential improvisation. As in such instances, musicians commonly use the last component of the previous soloist’s phrase as the initial component for their own ideas. Alternatively, they can improvise a gesture that leads into a restatement of the previous soloist’s idea. In e, Rollins plays an extended blues figure that concludes with a rephrased version of Davis’s idea. Similarly, in f, Coleman improvises a short introductory figure to a variant of the final component of Davis’s phrase, then develops the idea motivically before going on to others.
Example 13.18 Soloists trading fours and other short phrases
a. Exchanges of simple one-bar ideas at moderate tempo
Miles Davis and “Cannonball” Adderley, “Somethin’ Else”
b. Exchanges of complex four-bar ideas at fast tempo
Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro, “The Street Beat”
c. Exchanges combining independent motive development with absorption of ideas across
parts Clifford Brown and Harold Land, “The Blues Walk” (=ca. 138)
Example 13.19 Range, voicing, and contour during group interplay
In a1, the pianist extends his part into the piano’s upper register when performing the melody, doubling it with octaves and harmonizing it with wide intervals and distinctive mixtures of chord tones and non-chord tones. With the soloist’s entrance in a2, however, the pianist moves the accompaniment to a lower octave and creates less dissonant voicings emphasizing thirds and other close intervals. In b, the pianist responds instantly to the soloist’s octave leap by harmonizing a comparable gesture in the accompaniment. Subsequently, the pianist moves dramatically into a high octave, prompting the soloist to improvise a figure that probes the high trumpet register, creating one of the solo’s peaks. In tum, the accompanist absorbs the soloist’s concluding pitch into the voicing of his responsive chord. In c1, the pianist follows the contour of the solo closely, reinforcing its shape, while the bass player improvises a line in contrary motion. Subsequently, in c2, the bass player shifts approaches to match the general contour of the solo.
a. Adopting different strategies for melody harmonization and solo accompaniment (all excerpts =176)
b. Responding to changes in range
Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, “I Thought about You”
c. Creating contrapuntal schemes
John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, and Reggie Workman, “Softly, as in a Morning
Sunrise” (all excerpts =104–108)
Example 13.20 Accompaniments defining structural cadences through
increased activity
a. Concluding a four-bar phrase
Miles Davis, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and “Philly” Joe Jones, “Bye Bye, Blackbird”
b. Concluding an eight-bar phrase
John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman, and Elvin Jones, “Softly, as in a
Morning Sunrise”
c. Concluding a chorus
Miles Davis, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and “Philly” Joe Jones, “Blues by Five”
Example 13.21 Collaborative changes in mood, texture, and time-feeling
Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams,
“I Thought about You”
While the drummer rests, the pianist initiates exchanges with the bass player in bar 17. Meanwhile, amplifying the dynamic swell of the pianist’s figure, the soloist creates a gesture whose sustained pitch creates tension in relation to the active accompaniment, then resolves through rapid motion, reinforced by the bass player, that hints of the change to come. Responding to his counterparts, the pianist accelerates toward the downbeat of bar 19, which the soloist accentuates by leaping into the high trumpet register—dramatizing the group’s formal shift into double time. With this change, the bass player and pianist modify their former melodic-rhythmic activity and settle into a more conventional accompaniment style, the pianist initially imitating the soloist’s leap and descent. Compelled by events to rejoin the performance, the drummer also imitates the soloist’s dramatic gesture, creating analogous leaps between drum set components and intensifying the music’s new swing groove through backbeat accentuation.
Example 13.22 Musical save
Booker Little solo, “If I Should Lose You”
Example 13.23 Miles Davis Quintet large score segment: “Bye Bye,
Blackbird”; Miles Davis, trumpet; Red Garland, piano; Paul Chambers, bass;
“Philly” Joe Jones, drum set
General solo accompaniment characteristics. At the performance’s medium tempo, the bass player improvises a steady walking bass line, while the drummer improvises spare, tasteful drum punches around a time-keeping pattern characterized by regular hi-hat kicks on beats two and four and a constant, lightly textured, wash of ride cymbal color. The piano player performs characteristically short, drum-like, off-beat punctuations, including a recurring rhythmic structural marker at the end of four-bar harmonic phrases (first introduced in bar 8), and he embellishes the composition’s spare conventional progression throughout.
Conclusion of head (bars 29–32). As the soloist departs from the melody to improvise a segue to his solo, the rhythm sect
ion concludes its two-beat melody accompaniment with an arranged break. The drummer switches from brushes to drumsticks and punctuates the soloist’s figure, setting up the subsequent change to a four-beat solo accompaniment.
Bars 1–4 (solo chorus 1). The pianist embellishes the progression with repeated ii–V chord substitutions (see also bars 15–16). Meanwhile, in the following bar, the drummer reinforces the off-beat piano punch with a combined ride cymbal and snare drum kick. In bar 3, the soloist creates a phrase developing the off-beat emphasis, which the pianist reinforces with off-beat and double eighth-note punches.
Bars 5–8. Between the soloist’s phrases, the pianist adds a short punctuating kick, and the drummer immediately responds with Ii colorful cymbal accent. The pianist then develops his former double eighth-note figure. This elicits an imitative response, first from the bass player, next from the drummer, who includes it in the cadential fill with which he punctuates the pianist’s structural marker, signaling the A section’s close. At the same time, the group creates an interesting scheme of tension and release, beginning with the bass player’s dissonant pitches in bar 6 and resolving with the musicians’ harmonic convergence on the downbeat of bar 9.
Bars 9–12. While the pianist provides a spare accompaniment that remains close to the static harmony of this segment of the piece, the bass player walks a steep four-bar phrase implying an alternating ii–V cadence, and the soloist suddenly increases his part’s range through a rhythmically embellished version of his opening segue figure. In bar 12, the pianist and drummer respond with interlocking figures of increased range and rhythmic density, marking the close of the four-bar harmonic section, and recalling in the drum part the rhythm section’s previous double eighth-note comping figure.
Bars 13–16. Following the drummer’s on-beat accents in bar 12, the soloist develops an ornamented on-beat quarter-note idea, building tension through repetition and anticipation of the chord change in bar 15. Meanwhile, as the drummer increases his activity, inserting punches between those of the spare piano accompaniment, the bass player, in bar 14, responds to the pianist’s voicing of a C9 chord by absorbing its chromatic alteration into the bass line.
Bars 17–20. The soloist formulates call and response phrases with an increasing off-beat emphasis (reminiscent of earlier descending gestures), which the pianist and drummer reinforce with punches. Meanwhile, the pianist and bass player reinforce each other’s alteration of the progression in bar 17. In bars 18–19, however, they take divergent courses. The pianist anticipates the D7 chord, while the bass player presents a subtle surprise by leading an ascending chromatic gesture to the pitch F instead of D on the downbeat, before outlining the Cm6 chord. The F reinforces the soloist’s pitch, a blue third in relation to the preceding piano chord. Subsequently, the soloist colors his descending figure with an E pitch, derived, perhaps, from the underlying chord in the conventional progression, or from the preceding piano voicings that feature the pitch as a common tone. The players converge on the same harmonic area in bar 20.
Bars 21–24. The soloist paraphrases the melody, then, after resting, creates an exciting high point through the most rapid commentary of the chorus. Responding to the soloist and highlighting the close of the bridge, the drummer plays his accompaniment’s most active fill and the pianist performs his structural marker. In bar 23, the group’s mutual transformation of the conventional progression (repeated during subsequent choruses on the original recording) suggests that the D7 sonority was an arranged chord substitution. In bar 24, the pianist, developing the harmonic motion he created in the preceding bar, embellishes the progression with a tritone chord substitution that resolves to the subsequent chord by a half step.
Bars 25–28. Initiating his longest, most elaborate eighth-note phrase, the soloist leaps again to the highest pitch of his improvisation, then ornaments his descending gesture with a prominent blue-third grace note, which prompts the pianist to interject a bluesy chord containing the flatted third into the progression. Meanwhile, as the bass player walks into the upper register, the soloist, in bar 26, absorbs and expands upon an ascending chromatic fragment of the bass line initiated on beat three of the previous bar. Throughout, the drummer and pianist create largely interlocking figures that sometimes simultaneously reinforce an element within the solo part. The pianist initially plays sparingly while the drummer plays dense rhythmic punches. Then, in bar 27, the two players switch strategies, the drummer withholding drum kicks but performing a unique variation on the ride cymbal and hi-hat time-keeping pattern.
Bars 29–32. The soloist concludes the chorus with a variant of his opening segue figure, and the rhythm section alters its accompaniment dramatically to highlight the chorus ending. The bass player increases his rhythmic embellishment of the walking bass line and, with striking leaps and flamboyant flat-ninth dissonance (bar 30), follows the soloist’s general contour. Previously, he has often created contrary motion (bars 1–4, 7–8, for example). The pianist instantly seizes the flat ninth for his voicing, while also imitating the soloist’s gesture—leaping, then creating a descending line in the upper voice of his distinctive C pedal cadence. In bar 32, the pianist creates a blues effect by inserting augmented chords between the preceding and following major chords, as the soloist extends his phrase over the chorus boundary.
Example 13.24 John Coltrane Quartet large score segment: “Softly, as in a
Morning Sunrise”; John Coltrane, soprano saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano;
Reggie Workman, bass; Elvin Jones, drum set
General accompaniment characteristics. At the performance’s fast tempo, the rhythm section creates a powerful, densely textured accompaniment that reflects innovative musical practices of the sixties. The drummer does not restrict cymbals to an ostinato time-keeping role. Sometimes, he withholds hi-hat performance on beat two or four (bars 1, 9); other times, he withholds its performance for a measure or more (bars 20–21). Yet other times, he accents beat three (bar 64) or accents the second half of beats (bars 31–32, 41). He frequently plays syncopated ride cymbal patterns, sometimes eliding them with other patterns over the barline or combining them with complex drum figures. At one point, he leaves a beat silent in the accompaniment (bar 7). Additionally, he does not limit drum figures to brief punctuations but offers a relatively constant commentary on the performance through extended fills created from diverse elements. Some fills serve as structural markers delineating four- and eight-bar phrases, but they commonly extend slightly over harmonic section boundaries or merge with subsequent passages of intense drum expression.
Throughout, the bass player and pianist transform the piece’s conventional structure to provide a varied harmonic setting for the solo, which is based largely on the intervallic structure of the Dorian mode. The pianist adopts two general approaches to differentiate components of the piece’s AABA form. He tends to simplify the A section’s progression, featuring quartal Cm69 or Cm11 chord voicings as a kind of harmonic drone, with occasional embellishing V or ii–V chord substitutions. He adopts a more conservative approach to the B section, mixing or alternating tertian voicings with quartal voicings and elaborating the progression with various chord substitutions. The rhythm section’s accompaniment scheme also includes a few recurring figures. Generally, at the beginning of four-bar phrases, the pianist plays a rhythmic structural marker pattern (bar 1, beats one and two) or its syncopated variant (bars 4–5). At the beginning of four-bar phrases in the A section, the bass player commonly performs an inverted arch gesture alternating tonic to dominant root movement (bars 1–2), which represents a slightly simplified version of the conventional progression. Sometimes, he varies and displaces the gesture (bars 6–7).
Bars 1–8 (chorus 1). The soloist initiates his performance with a pair of call and response gestures, followed by a contrasting gesture. The first and third of these figures begin and end with prominent melody pitches. At the same time, in bar 1, the bass player performs his inverted arch gesture
and the pianist introduces his rhythmic structural marker, accentuated by the drummer. Subsequently, the drummer places drum kicks primarily between the piano kicks until bar 4, where his final accent reinforces the start of the pianist’s variant marker. In bars 5–6, repeated elements in the soloist’s descent invite rhythmic reinforcement across the rhythm section. During the first eight bars, the upper voice of the piano part complements the general contour of the first and third solo gestures, while the bass line begins with contrary motion, then matches the soloist’s general ascent and descent. The pianist and bass player simplify the progression, with the bass part initially alternating tonic to dominant movement in relation to the form, then displacing the gesture in bar 6. Shortly after; the soloist’s rest, a comparatively high, sustained piano voicing, and a drum fill mark tie end of the first” A section.
Bars 9–16. As the soloist creates a series of climbing figures that land on a beat-three rhythmic target, the pianist and drummer leave the third beat relatively open in their accompaniment. The soloist answers his third figure with a short staccato punch as if accompanying himself. Meanwhile, in bar 9, an unusual, coordinated bass and drum punch reinforces the initial component of the soloist’s figure, and in the next bar, the syncopated bass kick inspires the drummer to feature syncopation in his ongoing ride cymbal part. In bars 11–12, the pianist substitutes altered ii–V chords for the conventional progression’s Fm7 chord, and the soloist begins an extended, highly embellished phrase, whose cadential gesture creates polychordal effects with the pianist’s altered voicings. The soloist subsequently resolves the tension in his part by reducing the range of his figures markedly and coming to rest on a low sustained pitch, the tonic of the chord in bar 16.
Thinking in Jazz Page 81