Thinking in Jazz

by Berliner, Paul F.

  With regard to instrumental section re-creations, Henry “Red” Allen recalls Horace Henderson writing out his successful improvisations on “Yeah Man” for the Fletcher Henderson brass section to perform. Balliett 1977, 10. Recordings of “Singin’ the Blues” by the Fletcher Henderson orchestra in which the saxophone section recreated Frankie Trumbauer’s original solo recorded in 1927 are described in Porter 1985b, 34. The citation of a Henderson arrangement of “Singin’ the Blues” featuring the Bix Beiderbecke recorded solo is in Feather 1960, 76. He also recalls the Lionel Hampton band’s arrangement of “Flyin’ Home,” in which the entire saxophone section performed lllinois Jacquet’s renowned two-chorus solo, and Quincy Jones’s elaborate orchestration of the Clifford Brown solo on “Stockholm Sweetenin’ “; Feather cites, as well, Jones’s regard for it as “a stimulating, inspired composition.” Tommy Turrentine mentions the current group Super Sax, whose performances include harmonized renditions of Charlie Parker solos, as a contemporary example of these practices in the jazz community. See Jacquet, video 1993, and Konitz, video 1990, for discussion and recreation of famous solos including “Flyin’ Home.”

  10. Jimmy McPartland expresses the same view; his young friends copied every feature but the solos of recorded arrangements of Wolverines records. Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 144.

  11. Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock had different approaches to copying their idols, as revealed by a portion of the program notes for a 1978 concert featuring the two artists. Corea describes “taking the creators I got attracted to, and just duplicating their art form as much as I desired—their techniques. I would consciously try to sound like them for a period.... I’d become McCoy. I’d become Herbie [Hancock].... I used to sit down with Bud Powell records and copy his solos.... [Afterwards] I used to play along with the record for hours until 1 couldn’t hear the difference between [myself and] the way he did it. And then I’d say, ‘Okay, I’ve got that now’ [laughs].” Hancock responds, “I never did it quite that far, not the whole solo. I’d take some little thing 1 liked, and work on that for hours, or even days, in the beginning.” Silvert 1978. 1 am indebted to Thomas Owens for sharing this data from his collection of concert program notes.

  12. This can be as problematic for the scholar as analyst, as for the learner. From the improviser’s operational standpoint, the model for a musical idea or any of its components is the particular version of it that the improviser happens to call up in performance at the time. For a discussion of the usefulness for jazz analysis of the concept of musical formulae, as well as the problems surrounding its application to jazz, see Kernfeld 1983, 10–18, and Smith 1983, 142–215, 1991. The concept is borrowed from the influential study of Lord (1970).

  13. As Pee Wee Russell explains: “What notes to make and when to hit them—that’s the secret. You can make a particular phrase with just one note.... It’s like a little pattern.” Balliett 1977, 89. A simple three-quarter-note idea, comparable to that in ex. 4.2a with which Davis opens his solo, is also used by Gerry Mulligan to initiate his “Sunday” solo (see Byrnside 1975, 239, 241) and by the first tenor saxophone soloist (AI Cohn or Zoot Sims) to initiate his “For Adults Only” solo (Davis, rec. 1953b). See also the discussion of musical ideas or licks in Kernfeld 1988b, 558. The term lick is also used by artists to refer to new ideas improvised during a performance, as in “That’s a nice lick.”

  14. “Stereotyped phrases are always to be found, as every mature musical language has its idioms. These idioms playa particularly important part in jazz improvisation, in playing of an ad hoc nature.” Gonda 1971–72, 198. A sample of a “common stockpile of [jazz] figures used over a period of years, sometimes decades, and on almost all melody instruments” is presented in Robert Brown 1981, 25–26.

  15. For a description of Parker’s practice of quoting from the arrangements of jazz compositions, including the “beginning of the clarinet obligato from the trio section of the well-known Dixieland piece ‘High Society’” and Louis Armstrong’s “famous introduction to ‘West End Blues,’ which dates from 1928,” see Owens 1974, 1:29–30.

  16. Early references to salient ingredients of characteristic patterns in the styles of great improvisers appear in Hodeir 1961, 106–7; and Schuller 1968, 90; subsequent scholarship offers extensive treatment of the language of individual artists. See studies of Charlie Parker by Owens (1974) and Koch (1974–75); of Lester Young by Gushee (1981), Porter (1985b), and Gottlieb (1959); of John Coltrane by Kernfeld (1981), Porter (1983), and White (1973–78); of Bill Evans by Smith (1983); of Sonny Rollins by Blanq (1977); of Charlie Christian by Spring (1980); of Wes Montgomery by Van Der Bliek (1987); of Miles Davis by Kerschbaumer (1978).

  Free jazz players like Albert Ayler, too, draw upon their own distinct vocabulary as the construction components for solos, including such “recurring formulas [as] leaps over wide intervals, rapid, unmeasured, sweeping lines of undistinguished pitches, freely placed vocalistic exclamations in extreme high or low registers.” Kernfeld 1988b, 558.

  17. Borrowed patterns have been passed from player to player over the history of jazz. Some derive from complete solos that artists master for their own practice and study, complementing those mastered for performance (see note 9, chapter 4). Just as Lester Young and many of his contemporaries memorized Frankie Trumbauer solos, Charlie Parker subsequently memorized Lester Young solos. Hentoff 1956, 9; Zwerin 1968, 19; Gottlieb 1959, 190; Owens 1974, 1:24. According to Lee Konitz, “at one time, Charlie Parker played exactly like Lester Young,” He also recalls hearing Parker play Young’s famous “Shoe Shine [Boy]” solo “about twice as fast as the record.” Katz 1958, 47–48. Similarly, one scholar attributes several of Lester Young’s favored vocabulary patterns, describing them as musical formulas, to Louis Armstrong, whose records Young apparently “owned and admired.” Among them is an ascending blues pattern. Porter 1985b, 36, 62. The ascending blues pattern is a variant of what became an “ultimate swing era cliche” (Schuller 1989, 347) and subsequently featured prominently a music generation later in solos by Parker and his friends (Owens 1974, 1:20). Kenny Dorham, for example, used the same pattern repeatedly in performance as is discernible in my transcription, ex. 5.3a.

  18. For an interpretation of musical quotations in jazz in light of current theories regarding “intertextuality” and “metanarrative,” see Beeson 1990.

  19. Taylor 1982, 13.

  20. Tony Scott reports, “When Bird and Diz hit The Street regularly ... everybody was astounded and nobody could get near their way of playing music. Finally, Bird and Diz made records, and then guys could imitate it and go from there.” Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 360. According to Mutt Carey, “Freddie [Keppard] really used to play good. He could have been as big as Louis [Armstrong], since he had the first chance to make records, but he didn’t want to do it because he was afraid that other musicians would steal his stuff,” Ibid., 45.

  Rudi Blesh notices that recordings rarely captured bassist Pops Foster building inventive countermelodies to those of horn players—a common practice of his in live performances. Foster 1971, xix. Similarly, there are no recordings portraying Dizzy Gillespie’s early experimental work with bebop in the Earl Hines band of 1943. DeVeaux 1988, 137.

  21. Drums in Sheridan 1988, 358; performance alterations in Tallmadge 1979, 68. For an opposing view of recording limitations, see chapter 16, note 23. See also Tirro 1977, 80–81, and Porter 1985b, 110–11, n. 4.

  22. Lester Young commonly used alternate fingerings to muffle the tone and lower the pitch of approach notes leading to their targets, producing a “wah-wah” effect, which he sometimes exaggerated by manipulating his embouchure. Porter 1985b, 52–53.

  23. It is an important asset for learners when they develop the ability to apprehend sophisticated jazz phrases in terms of an instrument’s layout. With respect to the piano keyboard, for example, they learn to interpret each phrase “not in its note-for-noteness, but [in] the pattern of its location as a configuration eme
rging out of the broader visual field of the terrain.” Subsequently, a mentor’s improvised lines reveal “gestalt looking courses.” Sudnow 1978, 9, 25.

  24. Sheridan 1988, 359.

  25. “I found over the course of several months of listening to and watching Jimmy Rowles ... that in order to get the sound of a song to happen like his, his observable bodily idiom, his style of articulating a beat, served as a guide. In the very act of swaying gently and with elongated movements through the course of playing a song, the lilting, stretching, almost oozing quality of his interpretations could be evoked. It was not that 1 could imitate his intonations and phrasing with fine success, capture the full richness of his way of moving and pacing and caretaking ... but 1 found that 1 could get much of his breathing quality into a song’s presentation by trying to copy his ways,” Sudnow 1978, 83; for his elaboration, providing rich detail on this point, see also 86–89, 115, 118–19, 139–40.

  Equally instructive concerning the integral relationship between body movement and performance is Chick Corea’s experience: “When 1 was doing Bud Powell [recreating his recorded solos], 1 found myself with my body at a certain angle at the piano, and having my emotions and attitude be a certain way.” Corea later had the opportunity to observe Powell in performance, and he recalls his reaction: “I was amazed, because the guy looked just like 1 would look at the piano when 1’d be playing his shit. It wiped me out,” Silvert 1978.

  26. David Bomberg, personal conversation, 1986.

  27. Henderson and Nichols in Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 219, 275; Hubbard in Gillespie, video 1988.

  28. Foster 1971, 142. See also chapter 13, note 20.

  29. Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis trading phrases throughout the blues head of “Somethin’ Else” is heard on Adderley, rec. 1958.

  30. Leo Vauchant recalls that in the twenties, he “analyz[ed] a bit what the guys [in Louis Mitchell’s band] were doing—just by hearing them play ... 1 knew the tunes they were playing. 1 could hear the phrases and I was trained. 1 knew the names of the intervals and the degrees of the scale. If you look at a chord as a question they were giving the answers by playing a certain phrase.” Goddard 1979, 261–62. At performances of Joe Oliver, and years later at the famous jam sessions at Minton’s, neophytes whose recall was perhaps not as developed as Vauchant’s transcribed bits and pieces of music “on their cuffs” or “on the tablecloth” to aid them. Preston Jackson and Mary Lou Williams in Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 99, 350.

  31. Coker 1975, 17.

  32. One cognitive scientist discusses the wisdom of this “redundancy of description.” Ultimately, it allows the player “maximal flexibility of path selection, so that whatever creative impulse presents itself as an intention, and whatever attentional loadings may be set up, some means of cognitive organization and corresponding motor realization will be available within the limiting constraints of real-time processing.... Control of event production is heterarchical, and may potentially shift rapidly from one cognitive control area to another. Indeed this must be considered the most effective strategy for improvisation.” Pressing 1988, 159, 161.

  33. Davis 1990, 70.

  34. Dance 1977, 18.

  35. Joan Wildman, School of Music, University of Wisconsin, Madison, private conversation, summer 1991.

  36. W. C. Handy (1941, 150) praises in his characteristic way the contribution of “new technique[s] ... acquired by outstanding composers and instrumentalists” in the African American tradition. According to one account, these techniques had their origin in the “clown[ing]” of self-taught musicians who produced “notes ... by false fingering and incorrect lipping [with the clarinet].” Jess Stacy in Balliett 1977, 108. Like the techniques of many great artists from Dizzy Gillespie to Thelonious Monk, Bix Beiderbecke’s technique (his comet and piano fingerings) was said to be “unorthodox.” Sudhalter and Evans 1974, 36.

  37. For reflections on the role of such specialists, I am indebted to my former trumpet teacher, Natalo A. Paella, Music Department, University of Lowell (Lowell, MA).

  5. Seeing Out a Bit

  1. Milt Hinton tells the story in Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 405.

  2. Louis Armstrong reports that when Joe Oliver arrived in New York City from Chicago, having been preceded by other trumpeters who “were playing him,” Oliver found that there were no professional opportunities left for him. Stories abound regarding the artist’s ambivalence over related issues. According to Mutt Carey, fear “that other musicians would steal his stuff” was behind Freddie Keppard’s turning down the opportunity to make the first jazz recording. Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 187, 45. Equally poignant are accounts of Joe Oliver’s and Lester Young’s responses to stylistic imitators. Buster Bailey recounts that Oliver “was a jealous guy.... Some of the musicians ... [would] write down the solos, steal like mad, and then those ideas would come out on their records.... We’d call them alligators.” Young, too, sometimes viewed such musicians as “picking [my] bones while the body is still warm.” Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 96–97; Porter 1985b, 29. On one occasion, Young remarked ironically that he did not “know whether to play like me or like Lady Q [Paul Quinichette], because he’s playing so much like me,” and on another occasion responded to an imitator’s recording, “He’s trying to be me. If he’s going to be me, then who can I be?” Hentoff 1956, 9–10; Kessel 1979, 22.

  3. As a label for this period, the term swing is used in a restricted sense; in a larger sense, it refers to an essential rhythmic aspect of jazz performance that cuts across different jazz idioms.

  4. Owens 1974 1:14–15.

  5. Porter 1985b, 33.

  6. For a reference that distinguishes “at least five” different effects produced by this “slap-tongue style,” ranging from a “violent slap” when the air is finally released into the mouthpiece to “a legato caress,” see the dissertation on Clifford Brown by Stewart (1973, 7).

  7. Owens 1974, 1:11, 13.

  8. Russell 1959, xx.

  9. Ibid. Similarly, a description of improvisation that “glides ... on the outer surface of the harmony ... more concerned with ... the tendencies of the harmonic progression” than with “the individual chords” is in Gonda 1969, 196.

  10. Gushee (1981, 165–66) observes that whereas Lester Young’s performances are “vague from the standpoint of functional analysis,” he finds Young’s system to be “concrete with reference to the instrument,” featuring such idiomatic gestures as particular arpeggios and intervallic chains that are compatible with the piece’s harmony.

  11. Russell 1959, xviii–xix.

  12. T. Dennis Brown 1988, 312. An introduction to teaching basic rudiments is found in Bruce Roberts 1991.

  13. A range of drum patterns is demonstrated and discussed by drummer Baby Dodds, rec. 1946.

  14. For a discussion of the rhythmic patterns that distinguish individual artists, see the analysis of Ornette Coleman by Heckman (1965a, 15; 1965b, 16) and of Charlie Parker by Koch (1974–75, part 1, 81–85).

  15. For description and illustration of Parker’s virtuosic practice of quoting compositions, including such wide-ranging repertory as jazz pieces (“High Society”), popular songs (“I’m in the Mood for Love”), older traditional tunes (“Oh Come, All Ye Faithful”), and classical and semi-classical compositions by such composers as Bizet, Chopin, Stravinsky, Grieg, Rossini, Wagner, and Grofe, see Owens 1974, 1:29–30.

  16. Roché is featured with Duke Ellington and his orchestra on Roché, rec. 1952.

  17. Initially rooted in ragtime orchestra and string band performance in the 1890s, the bass was used by early jazz groups. During the “era of acoustic recording,” however, it was commonly replaced by tuba, possibly because of the tuba’s “great carrying power.” With the introduction of “electrical recording techniques” in the mid-twenties, it became possible to record the bass with greater clarity, contributing to its renewed popularity. Shipton 1988, 301–2.

  18. Ibid, 302. The following historical ske
tch combines the observations of artists in my study with the useful overview of Shipton. (See discussion and demonstration of changing bass performance conventions in Zardis, video 1993.)

  19. Shipton 1988, 302.

  20. Blanton’s solo is on Ellington, rec. 1940.

  21. Shipton 1988, 303.

  22. Koch 1988, 309. For historical information in this section, I am indebted to the helpful synopsis of Koch.

  23. Ibid., 311.

  24. Ibid., 309–10.

  25. Ibid, 311–14.

  26. Rinzler (1983) elaborates upon Tyner’s use of pentatonicism and modality, describing various features of his improvisation’s grammar and syntax.

  27. Koch 1988, 315.

  28. Ibid., 312.

  29. Gene Krupa’s featured improvisation on the 1937 performance of “Sing, Sing, Sing” with Benny Goodman’s band, the first extended drum solo on a recording, inspired many others to exploit comparable practices. T. Dennis Brown 1988, 313. Krupa’s performance is on Goodman, rec. 1937.

  30. Billy Taylor praises Sid Catlett “as the first drummer I’d heard who would play regular choruses—like thirty-two or sixty-four bars ... the way a piano or a horn might. He thought very musically.... He was a really advanced drummer in his concern with a melodic approach to the drums.” Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 363–64. For a description of Max Roach’s use of this approach—rhythmically re-creating the harmonic phrasing of a blues progression during his solo to “Blue Seven” on the Sonny Rollins album Saxophone Colossus—see T. Dennis Brown 1988, 314.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Ibid. Elvin Jones describes vivid color imagery associated with the sounds of individual cymbals and their mixture that influences his use of them in Jones, video 1991.

  33. My own experimentation in performing trumpet with a wider separation between the jaws than is conventional has enabled me to reproduce Fruscella’s sound, but with the consequence of a severely restricted range.