Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  6. My discussion of Konitz’s views here combines features of my interview and Balliett’s interview with Konitz (Balliett 1982).

  7. Davis’s ghosted note technique in McNeil 1993, 42.

  8. In an early account of techniques for achieving myriad tonal effects, Lieutenant James Reese Europe says: “This ‘jazzing’ appeals to [the African American] strongly. It is accomplished in several ways. With brass instruments we put in mutes and make a whirling motion with the tongue [growling technique], at the same time blowing full pressure. With wind instruments, we pinch the mouthpiece and blow hard. This produces the peculiar sound which you all know.” He went on to describe the ‘jazz effects” produced by his musicians as exotic and remarkable to the ears of French musicians, so much so that, until they “examined” the musicians’ instruments for themselves, they thought “special instruments” had produced them. Anon. 1919, 28. The value attached to timbral variety has remained an essential part of the jazz tradition. Features of Lester Young’s style include playing saxophone with a “pinched sound,” a “fuzzy tone quality,” and swallowed notes after their articulation. Byrnside 1975, 232–34. One source characterizes Omette Coleman’s notion of “human pitch” and sound “vocalization” as a commitment to the idea that sounds of the same pitch should be richly varied from performance to performance. Jost 1975, 53.

  9. Various techniques are discussed in Maxwell 1982, 18–27. These wide-ranging techniques have sometimes formed the basis for misunderstanding in the classical music world. For example, I often hear classical musicians misinterpret the expressive jazz improvisers’ deliberate avoidance of uniform tonal quality and articulation as indicating that improvisers lack the control necessary to achieve such uniformity.

  10. Lomax 1950, 92–93.

  11. I include this brief sample of Africanisms merely to indicate the larger historical context in which American musics operate, a vast subject in and of itself. Within a large body of scholarship that concerns itself with questions of origins, influences, and family resemblances among musics within the African diaspora, see Courlander 1963; Epstein 1973, 1975, 1977; Evans 1978, 1987; Kubik 1993; Logan 1984; Oliver 1970; John Storm Roberts 1972; Stuckey 1987; and Waterman 1948, 1963, 1967. For a broader discussion of these influences within the complex matrix of Western art music, Anglo-American folk music, and other musical genres in America, see Van Der Merwe 1989.

  12. On instruments functioning as surrogate speech, see Nketia 1974, 90, and Nketia 1971.

  13. Southern (1971, 311–12) writes about African Americans developing their own “institutions and culture.” For reference to preservation and adaptation of African elements in African American religious music, see discussion of such Africanisms as the ring shout—the “fertile seed for the bloom of new forms” in Stuckey 1987, 16. For an interpretation of the shout’s rich characteristics as embodying “all the defining elements of black music...,” and discussion of how “call-and-response, blue notes and elisions, pendular thirds, etc.” came to be “part of the black-idiom-informed musical genres that emerged from the shout, so that all Afro-American musical products become models to be revised through a continuing Signifyin(g) process,” see Floyd 1991, 268, 8–9.

  14. One scholar details the interrelationship of religious music and jazz in the African American community. “Rhythmic syncopation, polyphony, and shifted accents, as well as the altered timbral qualities and diverse vibrato effects of African music were all used by the Negro to transform most of the ‘white hyms’ into Negro spirituals.... The first instrumental voicings of New Orleans jazz seem to have come from the arrangement of the singing voices in the early Negro churches, as well as the models for the ‘riffs’ and ‘breaks’ of later jazz music. The Negro’s religious music contained the same ‘rags,’ ‘blue notes,’ and ‘stop times’ as were emphasized later and to a much greater extent in jazz.” Baraka 1963, 47. Mutt Carey recalls that “Joe Oliver was very strong. He was the greatest freak trumpet player I ever knew. He did most of his playing with cups, glasses, buckets, and mutes. He was the best gut-bucket man I ever heard. I called him freak because the sounds he made were not made by the valves, but through these artificial devices.... Joe could make his horn sound like a holy-roller meeting; God, what that man could do with his horn!” Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 42. For an elaboration of such themes as the flexible boundary between speech and song in African American church services and its implications for jazz performance, see Daniels 1985, 317–18, and Porter 1985a, 613–19.

  15. Comment on appending grace notes, etc., in LaPorta 1968, 13.

  16. Dorham, rec. 1959. In notes, citations to this and all future recordings use the abbreviation rec., referring readers to items listed in the discography at the back of the book.

  17. By placing improvisation at the end of his continuum, Konitz reveals common features of the jazz community’s definition of the term. In the context of a tune’s delivery, improvisation is the process by which players radically alter portions of the melody or replace its segments with new creations bearing little, if any, relationship to the melody’s shape. Many artists make distinctions comparable to those along Konitz’s continuum, describing varied degrees of transformation of musical models. The precise terms used by musicians (e.g., ornamentation in place of embellishment) may differ. Artists also may differ as to where they draw the precise boundary between categories, such as where increasingly elaborate variation becomes improvisation.

  Providing space for improvisation during melodic form is commonly the case for AABA pieces like “Oleo” in which the bridge remains open for the improvisation of a melody with each rendition. See also chapter 16, notes 32 and 35.

  A claim by Sadik Hakim to have improvised the theme to “Jumpin’,” generally attributed to Young, is cited in Porter 1985b, 110; for Parker’s improvisation of themes, see Patrick 1975, 13–15.

  18. The artist’s variable exploitation of the wide-ranging possibilities described here has been noted by a number of analysts. Kemfeld (1983, 60) describes two John Coltrane versions of the ballad “‘Round Midnight” in which “an embellished paraphrase of Thelonious Monk’s theme is recognizable at times, but at other times, notes extracted from it serve only as signposts for complex elaborations.” Porter (1985b, 41–42) reports a similar range of Lester Young’s treatments of tunes. Moreover, in handling the material of a melody, jazz musicians’ practices range from (as observable in an analysis of Coleman Hawkins, Hodeir 1961, 144) the “consistent melodic variation of a theme as a whole” (Kemfeld 1983, 8) to the motivic treatment of quoted ideas from the tune or from its introduction (as in analyses of Sonny Rollins, Fats Waller, and Louis Armstrong, respectively, in Schuller 1962, 243–48; Hodeir 1961, 169–76; and Austin 1966, 281–83).

  19. Warren Kime, personal conversation, fall 1989. Additional transcriptions demonstrating the treatment of tunes by such artists as Lester Young, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, and Chu Berry are in Byrnside 1975, 232–34, and Kernfeld 1988b, 556–57.

  20. Gushee (1981, 151) aptly observes that it is the rhythm section’s expression of the underlying harmony of the piece that serves as a “timing cycle which guides, stimulates and limits jazz solo playing.”

  21. Miles Davis describes Dizzy Gillespie’s role in guiding his education in this regard; in an independent interview, Gillespie likewise recalls his advice to Davis, explaining that the keyboard can assist single note players in visualizing “all the possibilities” for chord arrangements and pitch choices. Davis, video 1986.

  22. Mid–1920s manuals for ragtime and stride piano styles provided basic chord theory instruction and directions for inventing stride bass lines and breaks, “broken chord patterns used to fill in static points in popular songs.” Smith 1983, 68. Western classical music theory books have been available to jazz musicians since the late nineteenth century. Although Turrentine did not recall the title, it was probably Goetschius 1889.

  Because of the differences that
distinguish jazz and Western classical music, analyists and musicians alike find Western concepts of functional harmony limited in their helpfulness to artists seeking an understanding of all the harmonic features of jazz, features which have themselves changed from one period to another. Among the music’s features that pose challenges to outside analysts is the blurring of the distinctions between consonance and dissonance, since sometimes non-chord tones are treated by improvisers as chord tones. Others are the emphasis placed upon flatted-seventh chords, which may substitute for major seventh chords and play dual roles within progressions as chords of either instability or resolution; the appreciation for parallel motion; and the formal design of pieces that mix diatonic movements with those following “another, usually contrapuntal, logic.” Strunk 1988, 485–92. See also Kernfeld 1983, 12–16.

  For an excellent critical analysis of more recent jazz method books, see Witmer and Robbins 1988, 7–29.

  23. One scholar views the jazz community’s preference for naming this tension as a raised ninth, rather than a flatted tenth—as would be more common with conventional analysis—as reflecting the jazz community’s preference for describing upper chord tensions as odd numbers. Witmer 1988b. Furthermore, thinking in terms of flatting and sharping a single element like the ninth is simply more efficient for improvisers than thinking of manipulating two tensions. James Dossa suggests that this practice may also reflect the jazz musician’s adoption of the shorthand methods of arrangers and sheet music copyists who worked speedily to produce written arrangements and fake book lead sheets. Personal conversation, summer 1992.

  24. Strunk 1988, 491–92. For harmonically sensitive jazz musicians, the concept of key change encompasses a wide range of possible emphases, including not only sustained ventures from the tonic into another key with a firm emphasis on the new tonality, but fleeting allusions to change created by subtle movements such as ii–V chord patterns borrowed from other keys, commonly known as secondary dominants.

  25. Sudhalter and Evans 1974, 35; Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 228.

  26. Demonstrating tunes at a music store was one of Lil Armstrong’s first professional jobs as a young pianist when she came to Chicago from Memphis. Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 92; Foster 1971, xii, 92.

  27. Tirro 1976. See also reference to the jazz musician’s “borrowed-harmony” technique in Patrick 1975 and Patrick’s liner notes to Parker, rec. 1948.

  28. Dobbins (1984, 1:24) describes such gestures as 17–vi7–IV7 (in C: CM7–Am7–FM7), whose roots descend in thirds; and iii7–IV7–V7 (in C: Em7–FM7–G7), whose roots ascend in scale steps. This and the discussion that follows owes much to Dobbins’s excellent overview of the rules guiding the jazz artist’s formulation of chords and transformation of progressions. For an elaboration of the conventions sampled in this chapter, see Dobbins 1984, vols. 1 and 2. See also demonstrations in Bishop, video 1987, and Evans, video 1991.

  29. Ross (1989, 31–35) elaborates upon the interrelationships of the constituent elements of chord progressions associated with different jazz compositions.

  30. Dobbins 1984, 1:20.

  31. For an elaboration of the generative principles underlying jazz harmony and its transformation, see Steedman 1984; Martin 1980, 1988; Strunk 1979, 1988; and Winkler 1978.

  32. Strunk 1988, 490.

  33. Dobbins 1984, 1:24.

  34. Ibid., 46–47.

  35. Sample alternative bridges for “Rhythm” and richly embellished versions of blues progressions are in, respectively, ibid., 2:50–51; and 1:49 and 2:41.

  36. Bowen 1990; for a description of his composition and flexible use of such structures for renditions of different tunes mentioning other artists who have borrowed and expanded upon his inventions, see Gillespie 1979, 489–90.

  37. This is apparent in published versions of Kenny Dorham’s compositions arranged for piano (Walter Davis Jr. 1983).

  38. For his argument that the original melody associated with a chord progression subsequently adopted by other tunes can continue to suggest material to improvising soloists within the frameworks of the other tunes or serve as basis for their conception of new tunes as countermelodies, see Tirro 1967, 326–27, 329; for his description of Benny Harris writing a countermelody to “How High the Moon,” which “became quite a thing with bebop musicians,” see Gillespie 1979, 207.

  39. Experimentation with the fundamental design of compositions has blossomed since the early days of jazz. In contrast to the diverse structures described in this section, about half of the Basie band’s repertory in the late 1930s consisted of thirty-two-bar AABA popular song forms, a quarter comprised other thirty-two-bar forms, and the remaining quarter, twelve-bar blues. Porter 1985b, 38; discussion of “Giant Steps” is in Strunk 1988, 494.

  40. Discussion of the merits of the term vamp over modal in connection with Miles Davis’s performance style of the sixties is in Kernfeld 1981, 158–60; elaborating upon various repertorial trends sampled below in useful overviews are Owens 1988, Strunk 1988, and Gridley 1985, 377–86, 421–23.

  41. Reference to Coleman in Tirro 1974, 292; “Ode to Charlie Parker” is on Dolphy, rec. 1960.

  42. For information on “Carolina Moon,” see Feather 1960, 64; for listening to his unique compositions and arrangements, see Little, rec. 1961a; the Roach and Rollins album is cited in Blanq 1977, 51–52.

  43. Jabbo Smith described the story behind his piece at a 1981 midwinter concert I attended in New York City.

  44. Golson describes “want[ing] to write something that would sound similar to or synonymous with [Clifford Brown] and also to serve as a reminder to all of us who knew him and those would come to know of him, of his greatness.” Crawford 1961, 22–23., Jon Henricks subsequently composed lyrics for Golson’s piece. In a similar spirit, Max Roach describes “memorializ[ing)” Brown in his compositions “Tender Warriors” and “Pr ·se for a Martyr.” Gardner 1961, 21.

  45. See Nat Hentoff’s liner notes to Roach, rec. 1960.

  46. The naivete of some contemporary jazz learners surprises veterans in this regard. One saxophonist recalls his astonishment at a young pianist at a jam session who accused him of playing the “wrong chords” to a piece when the saxophonist deviated from its basic fake book model to perform interesting chord substitutions.

  47. In a discussion of Billie Holiday’s artistry, one scholar argues appropriately that “it is not possible to so thoroughly recompose and improvise upon that many songs without knowing them completely. You can only intelligently deviate from some-thing —perform variations on it—if you know it deeply.” Schuller 1989, 541. The same must be said of the improvisers’ mastery over all the musical components of jazz, if artists are to access them instantly in performance and apply them flexibly and creatively. One dissertation refers to this mastery as “internalization.” Smith 1983, 90.

  4. Getting Your Vocabulary Straight

  1. Coker 1975, 3.

  2. “Whenever a new Bix or Louis record came out we would have a party. Some guy would serve wine and food at his parents’ home and we would discuss the record.... We talked about phrases. We would sing a phrase and play it over and over.... This is what we did for years on end,” recalls Freeman (1989, 17).

  3. Disheartening experiences are common for learners who grapple seriously with this process, only to discover suddenly how vague is their grasp over ostensibly familiar material. One scholar-pianist reports, “Particularly with respect to the rapid passages, I found that, when singing along with a Charlie Parker recording, for example, I had been glossing the particularities of the notes in many of my hummings, grasping their essential shape perhaps but not singing them with refined pitch sensitivity.... What had I in fact been listening to as a jazz fan all these years?” Sudnow 1978, 17.

  4. My recollection of a tape-recorded Gillespie anecdote played for Roy Eldridge and conferees at the New York Brass Conference for Scholarships (Charles Colin, organizer) at session honoring Eldridge, March 23, 1981, New York C
ity. Another autobiographical version of the story with a slightly different twist appears in Gillespie 1979, 53–54.

  5. A transcription of this “Body and Soul” solo appears in Tirro 1977, 368–70.

  6. Tucker 1988, 546.

  7. Ibid.

  8. A transcription of Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” solo appears in Tirro 1977, 381–86.

  9. The original “September Song” Clifford Brown solo is on Vaughan, rec. 1954b; the Marsalis performance is on Vaughan, video 1984. According to producer Bill Cosel, the choice of “September Song” for the Pops program was itself the result of Marsalis’s enthusiastic recollection of Brown’s original solo and his interest in paying homage to Brown. Personal conversation, December 19, 1991.

  That there is a significant history behind such practices is suggested by Witmer and Kirkwood’s transcriptions and an analysis of different groups’ recordings of Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong’s “Dippermouth Blues”—recorded also under the names of “Sugarfoot Stomp” and “In De Ruff”—between 1923 and 1937 that Witmer kindly shared with me. (This material samples that of an ongoing research project that Witmer and his student Kirkwood intend to publish in the future.) The recordings reveal that, to varying degrees, Oliver re-created the same solo in performance, as subsequently did many players who wished to pay homage to him, including Louis Armstrong, Sharkey Bonano, Benny Morton, Rex Stewart, Bobby Stark, J. C. Higgenbotham, and Harry James. Moreover, musical allusions to the original 1923 recording appeared decades later in the music of Charles Mingus and fellow band members. Priestly 1982, 119.

  As for Armstrong and Oliver’s relationship, the transmission and performance of solos associated with particular pieces sometimes become part of a band’s performance tradition. The Bubber Miley solo on Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy” was passed “over a period of many decades” among successive Ellington trumpet soloists from Miley to Cootie Williams to Ray Nance to Cat Anderson. Schuller 1989, 95; see also Schuller’s general discussion of such practices during the swing era, 162, 307–8.