34. See McNeil (1993, 26–27) for a discussion of the relationships depicted in fig. 5. An excellent portrayal of this lineage is shown on Trumpet Kings (video compilation, 1985).
35. Lawrence, video 1986.
36. On avoiding players of his own instrument as models, Odean Pope realized at one point “that you never get any recognition if you played too much like someone else. I became very frustrated and my solution to this was just to take all the saxophone records out of the house and stop buying saxophone records. I tried to come up with some other concept, so I started to listen to piano players. I wondered what it would be like if I could play my horn like Hassan or Art Tatum or Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, or Bill Evans. I’m pretty happy with the results because dynamically, harmonically, and melodically, I think I got a tremendous amount of knowledge from that experience.” Woessner 1983, 46.
Mention of Young’s interest in different instrumentalists is in Young interview with Hentoff (1956, 9); see also Porter 1985b, 35.
37. For this interpretation, I am indebted to saxophonist Aaron Home, lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, spring 1990. According to Jimmy Heath, Young also used alternate fingerings as a technique for imitating speech. Daniels 1985, 317. One scholar suggested that Jimmy Dorsey’s special effects—created by alternate fingerings—may have also provided a model for Young’s experimentation. Like many others, Young constantly sought to expand his expressive horizons by drawing inspiration across instrumental lines, “develop[ing] my saxophone ... make it sound like a alto, make it sound like a tenor, make it sound like a bass, and everything, and I’m not through working on it yet.” Porter 1985b, 35, 45.
38. For Coltrane’s observation, see Kofsky 1973, 237–38.
39. Hines recalls, “After I learned the piano and got into jazz, the idea came to me to do on the piano what I’d wanted to do on comet. That went into my style, too, [together] with this [pianist’s] left hand and that [pianist’s] right hand, until I got to the stage where I began to feel myself.” Hines also “marveled at [Louis Smith’s] style, and wanted to play [on piano] what he played on trumpet. It gave me a lot of new ideas.” Dance 1977, 20.
40. Smith interview with Fraser (1983, 218).
41. One trumpet student who wished to imitate Miles Davis bemoaned the fact that after years of effort he still could not figure out the subtle ways in which Davis manipulated his tongue, jaw, and oral cavity when performing to produce particular timbral effects on the trumpet, nor approximate the emotions Davis engendered through them.
42. Rose 1979, 146–47.
6. The More Ways You Have of Thinking.
1. Hardin performs his solo on Lateef, rec. 1957. This technique has been described as “one-noting” in Lester Young solos. It is a device that also featured prominently in the earlier improvisations by Louis Armstrong, Joe Oliver, and others. Porter 1985b, 36, 87.
2. For a description of these and other features of African music throughout the African Diaspora, see Watennan 1967.
3. Elaborations of the complexity of African music are in Jones 1959, Chernoff 1979, Locke 1987, and Kubik 1962.
4. Anon. 1919, 28.
5. For the characterization of the dual accentuation scheme, I am indebted in part to the discussion concerning the equality of strong and weak beats in jazz and its” ‘democratization’ of rhythmic values” in Schuller 1968, 6–8.
6. Coltrane 1960, 27.
7. Bud Scott remembers: “Each Sunday, Bolden went to church and that’s where he got his idea of jazz music. They would keep perfect rhythm there by clapping their hands. I think I am the first one who started four-beat for guitar, and that’s where I heard it.” Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 37. Bud Freeman also describes going “to the black churches to hear the singing and to hear the most wonderful beat in music, the most inspired jazz I’ve ever heard.” Freeman 1989, 17.
8. Gillespie 1979, 31.
9. Jazz pianist and composer Joan Wildman, Music Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, personal conversation, summer 1991.
10. Wynton Marsalis recalls Tony Williams cautioning him against keeping time with his foot when performing with other musicians, because it amounted to “setting up” a potentially conflicting rhythm section of his own. Goodman 1983, 36.
11. Gillespie explains that because “the body keeps the tempo ... it helps to be able to dance ... any little simple step; it helps your rhythm.” Fraser 1983, 203–4. The association of rhythm and dance expresses itself most dramatically in the context of African American tap dancing, which made strong impressions on learners from Bud Freeman (1989, 18) to Miles Davis (1990, 132); the latter likens tap dancers to drummers and recalls watching “tap dancers dueling each other ... You can learn a lot from just listening to the rhythms they get from their taps.” An excerpt of “jazz tap percussionist” Baby Lawrence trading improvisations with a drummer is presented on Lawrence, video 1986.
12. Watennan 1967, 211.
13. Coltrane adopted this approach in part as a function of his experimental efforts with harmony that involved playing the scales of three chords superimposed over each one in the progression. “I found that there were a certain number of chord progressions to play in a given time, and sometimes what I played didn’t work out in eighth notes, sixteenth notes, or triplets.” Asymmetrical patterns “like five and seven” provided a means to “get them all in.” Coltrane 1960, 27.
14. A description of Annstrong’s tapping twice the tempo, then, in his singing and playing, “stress[ing] accents around and between the taps of his foot” is in Stearns 1972, 5.
15. For an account of such events “operat[ing] at the rhythmic level of the eighth note or the quarter note,” see Porter 1985b, 81.
16. Miles Davis praises Lee Konitz for his ability to “break [up] phrases” in different ways, to “play 7–or ll–note phrases ... and they swing” in Hentoff 1955, 14.
17. Herb Pomeroy shared this memory with me in a private improvisation lesson, Summer 1968.
18. Davis describes Charlie Parker’s finely honed practice of eliding the forms of compositions, in this case “start[ing] on the 11th bar” of the blues, in Hentoff 1955, 14.
19. Regarding comparable features of the rhythmic life of Ghanaian music, Chernoff (1979, 56, 98) describes musicians “not so much moving along with a pulsation as ... pushing the beat to make it more dynamic”; he also praises Richard Waterman’s insights into the “notion of [the artist’s] deliberate pressure on the continuity of time.”
20. Fraser 1983, 182. Regarding the varied sources of Gillespie’s ideas, Billy Eckstine describes his borrowing some patterns from Kenny Clarke’s drum licks. Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 349. In a discussion I had with Gillespie, he described rhythmic vocabulary patterns he learned from Cuban drummer Chano Pozo’s performances, New York City, winter 1984.
21. Although this is the experience of all the interviewees in my study, some recall periodically encountering exceptional players on the bandstand who, they had the impression, had never learned theory.
22. Typically, Gillespie recalls that from experimentation with the flatted fifth, “I found out that there were a lot of pretty notes in a chord that were well to hold, instead of running over them ... and that has governed my playing ever since. And that’s one of the things that’s distinctive about Miles Davis, that he learned form me, I’m sure. Because I showed him on the piano the pretty notes in our music. There are a lot of pretty notes in a chord, and if you hold them for an extended time, it adds a hue ... to your solos. He really went for that.” Gillespie 1979, 92.
23. Elaborating on inventive harmonic mixtures, Coltrane (1960, 27) describes his development of a “three-on-one chord approach,” and Kernfeld (1983, 14) notes that Coltrane “consistently introduces a further embellishment ... [by] accentuat[ing] the change from the tonic to subdominant [in the blues, bars 4–5] by using pitches from extreme flat keys.” Porter (1985b, 70) describes Coleman Hawki
ns as “often insert[ing] connecting arpeggios between chords that were not in the original progression.” Similarly, Parker “sometimes superimposed one familiar harmonic sequence (implying it in his melodic line) on another familiar harmonic base,” while at other times he abruptly shifted “harmonic accents” within a designated harmonic area, for example, reinterpreting the progression Am7–D7 as Am7–D7–Am7–D7 or D7–Am7–Am7–D7. Koch 1974–75, part 1, 79, 85.
24. Gillespie (1979, 92) recalls his initial discovery of such concepts when playing a ballad arrangement by Rudy Powell for Edgar Hayes’s band that included “this weird change, an E-flat chord built on an A.... I heard this A Concert going up a scale, and I played it, and I played it again.... I said, “Damn! Listen at this shit! ... That’s when I first became aware that there was a ‘flatted fifth.’ “ Gillespie says that he then “started using it in my solos. My solos started taking on a quality where there were long runs and points where the playing was sort of behind the beat.” To this day, artists like Jimmy Rowles pass on comparable scalar approaches to students directly, advising at times that “with this particular chord you can get a characteristic sound by playing this particular scale.” Sudnow 1978, 18.
25. Although older musicians spoke to me about “blue notes” and “blues licks,” some question the notion that there is a particular “blues scale.” To the extent that younger musicians speak about “the blues scale,” their concept may represent a construction of more recent jazz pedagogy, which, in turn, reflects the terminology of analytical writing about jazz. As early as 1938, there is a discussion of a “purely Negroid musical scale” that may be inferred from “the system of intonations to which these passages of hot jazz respond” and for which “there is no European precedent.... For convenience, and because it is associated with the performance of the blues as well as with hot jazz proper, we will call it the blues scale.” The same author likens it to a major scale in which the third and seventh can function as blue notes whose intonation may “range through an infinite number of gradations in pitch,” typically “sliding up and down” between the third and the flatted-third or the seventh and the flatted-seventh degrees. Other pitches are also “frequently subject to distortions of intonation, particularly by jazz trumpeters.” Sargeant 1976, 158, 160–61, 169. More recently, one scholar describes various heptatonic, hexatonic, and pentatonic blues scales, concluding, “There is no single ‘blues scale’ but many blues scales.” Additionally, he describes singers regularly using pitches between the major-sixth and minor-seventh degrees. Evans 1982, 24. Beyond describing blues tonalities in terms of the inflected pitches and interval configurations of particular scales, artists discuss the importance of their harmonic context. It is when played in relation to chords containing the raised counter-parts of the flatted tonalities of blue notes that their effects become especially pronounced.
26. Russell 1959.
27. Stephen Ramsdell told me of Cheatham’s instruction in a personal conversation, summer 1991.
28. For Miles Davis’s early bebop training, see Stearns 1972, 229.
29. It is with Harris’s kind approval that this discussion is presented for illustrative purposes. Although Harris continues to make his ideas public through workshops, I am hopeful that one day he will publish an elaborate work devoted to his method. In the meantime, the reader can glimpse comparable approaches in the method of his student and collaborator in his early study groups, Yusef Lateef. See Lateef 1979.
30. For illustrations of these practices, see exx. 5.3d, 6.8, 6.9, 8.4b–c, and 8.23b.
31. Suber 1976, 367; Carter 1986, 12.
32. Slonimsky 1947, i. Donald Byrd, personal conversation, New York City, summer 1986. Several different jazz musicians recommended Slonimsky’s book to me during my travels to both coasts in 1967. All artists were not equally enthusiastic about the work, however. Walter Bishop Jr. found it to be overrated. Apart from its catalogue of theoretical materials, the transformational techniques it describes were already well known within the jazz community, Bishop contends.
33. Stephen Ramsdell, a student in Cheatham’s workshops, personal conversation, summer 1991.
34. In addition to others cited in the text, popular published examples of method books include Coker 1964; Cheatham 1960; Russell 1959; Nelson 1966; Bishop 1976; Lateef 1979; Fanner 1984; Ricker 1976; Baker 1969. Multifaceted resources include Aebersold’s “Jazz Aids” catalogue, available at P.O. Box 1244, New Albany, IN 47150, and the Advance Music catalogue, available from Caris Music Services, RD7–Box 7621G, Stroudsburg, PA 18360. An example of a teaching videorecording is Bishop, video 1987, in which he demonstrates numerous applications of his theory of fourths to jazz improvisation.
7. Conversing with the Piece
1. Balliett 1977, 10.
2. According to Robert O’Meally (1991, 13), Holiday trained in Baltimore’s “good-time houses” during the Depression by singing along with records or “trading choruses” with the piano player.
3. Mingus (1971, 69) recalls early advice on practicing with the radio in this fashion.
4. Gillespie (1979, 21, 29) received direct instruction in such practices from his first teacher, who would ‘jazz” up popular tunes on the piano—demonstrating how to “put that jazzing part in there,” so that Gillespie could follow, imitating her patterns with the trumpet.
5. Some of the varied improvisation practices elaborated over the next two chapters are discussed in Bymside 1975 and Kernfeld 1988b. See also Bill Evans’s discussion and demonstration of improvising in relation to form in Evans, video 1991.
6. Other musicians confirm the importance of this approach. Milt Jackson keeps “the melody in mind. I always remember the melody and then I have something to fall back on when I get lost, and with the human element I do get lost, but I’ve always been able to find my way back.” Similarly, when Connie Kay performs a drum solo, he “think[s] of the tune I’m playing. I try to fit what I’m playing into the composition rather than do just twelve bars of rudiments. The melody goes through your mind and you go along with it, fitting yourself to it.” Balliett 1971, 167.
7. For many instrumentalists, such feeling for phrasing reflects a deep understanding of a piece’s words. Young himself once explained, “A musician should know the lyrics of the songs he plays, too.... Then you can go for yourself and you know what you’re doing. A lot of musicians that play nowadays don’t know [them].... They’re just playing the changes. That’s why I like records by singers when I’m listening at home.’” Hentoff 1956, 10.
8. See ex. 8.19 for the elaborate third chorus of Morgan’s solo.
9. Drawing cleverly on various conventions for producing and resolving harmonic tension, Lester Young sometimes played the same figure repeatedly over the changing chords, whereas at other times, when the harmony was static, he transposed the figure with each repetition, producing chromatic sequences. Porter 1985b, 66, 71–72. Based on a similar observation in Bill Evans’s improvisations that “an identical series of pitches can be harmonized in different ways,” Smith (1983, 210) questions whether “the repetition of a given series of tones has more to do with its particular keyboard configuration, or the interval it outlines, than with its harmonic setting.” See also Gushee’s reflections on Young in note 10, chapter 5, of this work.
10. The importance of practicing away from the instrument for improvisers appears to be missing from the literature on improvisation, although as Pressing (1988, 140) mentions, the method is widely recognized as a part of skill development among performers of written music.
11. Parker, video 1987.
12. In light of the changing formal conventions of jazz, even accomplished artists must at times retrain their perceptions along such fundamental lines. Drummer Dave Tough, a newcomer to bebop, described his initial reaction to the Gillespie-Pettiford quintet: “These cats snatched up their horns and blew crazy stuff. One would stop all of a sudden and another would start for no reason at all. We never could tell
when a solo was supposed to begin or end. Then they all quit at once and walked off the stand. It scared us.” Steams 1972, 224–25.
13. Reflecting on his own five-year development, Sudnow (1978, 146) describes learning the language of jazz “as my instructable hands’ ways—in a terrain nexus of hands and keyboard whose respective surfaces had become known as the respective surfaces of my tongue and teeth and palate are known to each other.”
14. It is appropriate to maintain that “the performer’s own knowledge of the structure allows him to plan excursions whilst retaining markers which tell him exactly when he must arrive at a particular musical event.” Sloboda 1989, 141.
15. Shapiro and Hentoff 1966, 47.
16. Ibid., Mutt Carey interview. Sudnow (1978, 95–6, 149–50) describes his appreciation of comparable advice: after eventual breakthroughs in linking his “head’s aimings for sung sounds” with an evolving “partnership” between his hands and the keyboard’s terrain, he experiences “the awesomeness of an altogether new coupling ... between my vocalizations and my fingerings.” Scenes of Charles Mingus composing phrases vocally at the piano are in Mingus, video 1987.
17. A review of contemporary jazz method books aptly notes that, beyond introductory lessons on traditional devices such as “repetition, transposition, sequence, inversion, and so forth,” little insight is provided on how to turn theoretical materials “into melodic gold.” Smith 1983, 79–80.
Along similar lines, many veterans are critical of graduates of university jazz programs that emphasize theoretical approaches to improvisation. While acknowledging the impressive instrumental virtuosity of the graduates, Melba Liston remarks, “They don’t know a thing about jazz really ... no style in the traditional way. You don’t feel the jazz thing, you feel the mechanical thing. Jazz is feeling, and I worry about this. I really advise them to study as much of the history of jazz as possible-not by book or by transcription—but by ear.... If they listened back to Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, the swing days, the forties, early Trane and Miles, and loved it, it would influence the way they play.” Gary Bartz adds, “I’ve never been able, for myself, to get anything out of trying to apply this scale to this chord. I’ve never been able to get anything that’s really musical that way, even if it sounds right. The young players don’t know what to do with their [unbelievable technique]. Sounds like they’re playing computer music; it doesn’t sound like ideas. It’s all fast and furious.” George Duvivier’s critique of the contemporary jazz scene is, perhaps, the most most poignant of all. “The music’s still here,” he remarked to an associate, “but the voices are gone.”
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