18. Walter Bishop Jr. demonstrates this process with regard to “fourths” and other materials on Bishop, video 1987. Jazz musicians with classical music training liken some of their methods for transforming and embellishing chords—such as appoggiatura and échappée—to those used by Baroque musicians and composers. Barron 1975.
19. Robert Lowery, Clifford Browns teacher, provides insight into the theory and instruction that lay behind the practices Cheatham observes. According to Lowery’s pedagogical theory of “‘active and inactive notes, ... active [notes] are notes that are played around the principal notes that you want to get to.... Inactive notes are notes that are like a solid foundation. And the active notes are the notes that you use to color those inactive notes. You play around those notes to make them sound like you want them to sound.” Quoted in Fraser 1983, 109.
20. Similarly, analysis of Charlie Parker solos shows that “in many cases, the distinguishing motives [i.e., vocabulary patterns] for each group occur only when the harmonic context is unique to that group, and... there is a high degree of motive crossover from one group to another whenever the harmonic context is the same.” Owens 1974, 1:113, 119.
21. The categorizations that follow are based, in part, on such complementary methods as interview data, my own experiences improvising during formal performances, and reflective experiments recalling, altering, and developing musical ideas from a set of known models in the practice room—training myself according to the methods described by interviewees. In turn, this data has influenced my interpretation, as an analyst, of the musical models and transformational processes underlying solos by other artists. When interpreting another player’s improvisation, of course, the researcher can only infer the artist’s unvoiced models and transformational procedures from a comparison of related, recurring ideas in different parts of a solo and in different solos.
Moreover, because of the interrelated nature of the processes discussed in this section, multiple interpretations are possible concerning the actual processes at work. When one is interpreting an observed pattern in a solo, for example, one is aware that it may have been conceived as an entity, produced by contracting a larger related idea, or it may be an interpolation of a smaller related idea. The process behind the conception and performance of the same idea may differ from player to player, just as players may conceive of the basic components of the language of jazz differently. Moreover, in my experience, the processes can differ from an individual’s standpoint from performance to performance. As mentioned earlier, “the” model for a particular idea that the improviser performs or transforms is the version of it that the improviser calls up at the time of the performance.
22. These processes are partially responsible for the complex interrelationships among improvised figures noticed by jazz scholars, who have shown that related musical ideas appearing in the solos of individual jazz artists form dense, overlapping networks of melodic cells and patterns. Owens 1974; Kernfeld 1981, 1983.
23. Concerning Bill Evans’s extensive practice of rephrasing ideas in his solos, Smith (1983, 199) mentions that “the number of patterns repeated verbatim, with the same rhythmic profile ... is very small.”
24. Whereas the distinction between phrase expansion and its opposite, phrase contraction (described earlier), is an obvious one from the operational and experiential standpoint of one’s own performance, it remains a matter of conjecture when one is interpreting another artist’s improvisation.
25. Described in Sawyer 1991, 8.
26. Balliett 1977, 13.
27. Other scholars have also noted this capacity. With respect to lute performance in Afghanistan, “the spatiomotor mode can be regarded as a legitimate and commonly used mode of thought, used to instigate and to control musical performances, and just as creative as the auditory mode, for creativity in music may often consist of deliberately finding new ways to move on the instrument, which are then ... assessed, and further creative acts, guided by the aesthetic evaluation of the resultant novel sonic patterns.” Baily 1985, 257–58. Similarly, from his own theoretical standpoint, Pressing (1988, 161) views “the motor enactment of novel combinations of values of array components” as a “common source of behavioral novelty.” Analogous features of dance improvisation have relevance for the physical dimensions of thought in improvised music. For discussion of “kinetic intelligence,” “thinking in movement,” and a “fundamental creativity founded upon a body logos, that is, upon a mindful body, a thinking body,” see Sheets-Johnstone 1981, 406, and for a larger study of dance improvisation, see Blom and Chaplin 1988.
28. Porter (1985b, 75) speculates that physical comfort lay behind particular Lester Young triplet eighths and sixteenth-note patterns that Gottlieb (1959, 194) describes Young favoring in solos regardless of their key. At the same time, physical ease in negotiating musical ideas with respect to an instrument is itself only one variable contributing to the shape of artist’s conceptions. Owens (1974, 1:18, 23) maintains that Charlie Parker often emphasized particular patterns over others of comparable difficulty and, at times, emphasized gestures that were more difficult than their counterparts in alternative keys. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, musicians commonly pursue ideas they find attractive in the solos of other instrumentalists, despite the technical difficulties they encounter adapting them to their own instruments.
8. Composing in the Moment
1. Perlman and Greenblatt (1981, 169) have also been intrigued by this notion and state that the improviser’s “specific harmonic and melodic constraints ... are in many ways analogous to the syntactic and semantic constraints of natural language and that playing an improvised solo is very much like speaking sentences.”
2. Players often use motivic and thematic interchangeably, rather than reserving the latter, as some analysts do, for the manipulation of material from the melody of the piece. Kernfeld (1988b, 559–61) provides a useful discussion of the motivic improvisation approach, distinguishing it from others and clarifying some of the confusion created in the jazz literature as a result of the inconsistent application of analytical terms borrowed from Western classical music scholarship. For an analysis of various techniques of motivic development in the solos of markedly different improvisers whose styles range from early jazz to free jazz, see Byrnside 1975, 238–43; Schuller 1962; Gottlieb 1959, 189; Koch 1974–75, part 2, 73–77; Stewart 1979, 141; Porter 1985b, 82–86; and Jost 1975, 48–50, 59.
3. Study of Western classical music reinforces the understanding of some jazz musicians. “It’s the same way that Bach started out with a melody and did variations on a theme. You can take a two-or three-note phrase, maybe a phrase from the melody, and develop it rhythmically, or you can depart from the original phrase and go back to it later and take it in another direction” (CL). Bach’s “Inventions,” in particular, illustrate “how you can change around a phrase in many ways, maybe repeating it and inverting certain parts of the structure” (PB). At the same time, jazz musicians define motivic development according to their own conventions, typically avoiding “the kind of systematic repetition and transposition heard in classical music.” Exceptions to this are in such works as Coltrane’s suite “A Love Supreme,” whose first movement is built upon the constant repetition of a motive, “eventually transposing it into a1112 keys.” Kernfeld 1988b, 559.
4. Although some improvisers derive such compositional methods from their own interpretations of classical music, they may face challenges in applying the methods that differ in degree from those confronting classical music composers. Scholars such as Sloboda (1985, 138–39, 148), Johnson-Laird (1988, 209), and Alperson (1984, 22) speculate that whereas composers who fix their ideas in writing can subsequently review musical scores and revise them, by considering their ideas’ possibilities for variation and development at leisure, real-time composition greatly constrains the improviser’s possibilities for conceiving and processing new ideas, that is, reflecting on, revising, and developing them over the l
arger performance. At the same time, as this work shows, the imaginative field of improvisers is far richer, and their processing capabilities far greater (both in terms of developing their own ideas and in responding to those of other artists within the group), than scholars have allowed. During practice routines, jazz musicians routinely subject their ideas to procedures comparable to those of written composition without the use of musical scores. Furthermore, with respect to revision in particular, they may revise ideas from one improvisation to another, as well as over the duration of a single performance.
5. One insightful phenomenological account describes the improviser’s “perceptual field ... [which] includes not only perception of external tonal events, but the perception of internal images, as well as states of consciousness aroused by these images.” The field “contains within itself the potential structure of future fields,” and the artist may at times “immediately glimpse the future horizons of the embryonic jazz idea.” Ultimately an “original image can be repeated, or permuted in various ways.” Pike 1974, 89–90. An elaboration upon these ways under the rubric of “a generalized caretaking throughout play, to do things with things formerly done” is in Sudnow (1978, 145–46), who views the processes as an inherent aspect of formulating melodies, or “melodying.”
In the most comprehensive psychological model of these processes, one scholar describes “continuous aural and proprioceptive feedback, which allows continuous evaluation, on the basis of which the current ideas are either repeated, developed or discarded. In this way a long-term improvisation can be built up.” In another study the same scholar elaborates on “the cognitive structures of processing and control” involved with the moment-to-moment progression of events in improvised musical behavior, decomposing aspects of musical ideas into “three types of analytical representation” that can be taken up by the improviser as the basis for development or “improvisational continuations.” The analytical representations include specific “objects” such as a set of pitches; their more general “features” or shared properties such as melodic motion; and “processes,” that is, “descriptions of changes of objects or features over time.” Pressing 1984, 353; 1988, 154–66.
6. For a description of the widespread use of ostinatos in jazz and other black improvised musical genres, see Logan 1984.
7. In his solos and compositions, Thelonious Monk often adopted such a motivic approach, repeating a simple figure, while displacing it and subtly compressing or stretching its rhythmic values. See transcription in Kernfeld 1988b, 560. An early discussion of displacement and other rhythmic features of jazz is in Sargeant 1938, 99–102.
8. Such techniques have been observed over the history of jazz. For an interpretation of “Armstrong’s single line ... [as] incorporating fragmentary antiphonal answers to its own leading ideas,” see Austin 1966, 28l A description of Coltrane’s “self-dialogue” procedure, in which he rapidly alternates “related phrases, two, and sometimes three octaves apart,” is in Jost 1975, 100.
9. For an analysis of Coltrane’s piece, see Porter 1985a, 593–621.
10. Perlman and Greenblatt (1981, 180) likewise contend that the “phrases in a jazz solo do have meaning.... The meaning of a phrase is its history, that is, where it comes from.” For an illustration of a gesture recurring in different players’ solos, where it is transformed in various ways—suited to different time signatures, different keys, and different tempos, and adjoined to different material—see exx. 7.7a (entire thirty-second-note figure), 8.14g (last two bars), and 8.19 (end of bar 4 and first half of bar 5).
11. A version of the pattern in a Clifford Brown solo appears in ex. 8.8c; it also provides the basis for a short developmental section during Booker Little’s solo on “Old Folks” in ex. 7.2d.
12. Just as Sudhalter (cited in Porter 1985b, 34) attributes the ending of Lester Young’s composition “Tickle Toe” to a phrase from Bix Beiderbecke’s solo on “When,” Gottlieb (1959, 190) maintains the first phrase of Charlie Parker’s composition “Ornithology” was borrowed from Lester Young’s solo on “Shoe Shine Boy.” Schuller (1968, 163) also identifies a particular phrase not only used by early soloists such as Oliver, Armstrong, and Bechet but appearing as one of the themes in James P. Johnson’s “Yamekraw” and the standard “Copenhagen,”
Patrick (1975, 3–11) elaborates upon the similar melodic materials that comprise jazz compositions, improvised solos, and arranged background riffs, attributing them to both the artist’s self-conscious borrowings and to the common vocabulary with which jazz musicians worked. Gillespie (1979, 489–90) describes some of the composed features of his own arrangements that have been taken up by other arrangers and transformed in various ways.
13. For a description of comparable processes in the free jazz context, where, in John Tchicai solos, the “motive derived from the theme has more the function of an anchor, serving as a fixed point of reference throughout his whole improvisation,” see Jost 1975, 91.
14. Jimmy Knepper interview in Jeske 1981, 67.
15. Quoted material is from Coker 1964, 13.
16. Illustrations of this practice appear in exx. 6.4 and 8.22b (bars 1–4).
17. Additional illustrations of this practice appear in exx. 8.9a and c.
18. Floyd (1991, 273) regards swing as “a dance-related legacy of the ring shout” and appropriately asserts that “the power of swing is such that even in the absence of motivic and thematic ideas, its presence creates a sense of eventful continuity in a work of music.”
19. For a discussion of “syncopation on the level of harmonic rhythm” in jazz and the resolution of dissonance created by conflicts between melody and harmony, see Winkler 1978, 16. Lester Young’s and Sonny Rollins’s performances provide typical examples of the improviser’s practice of anticipating chord changes. Porter 1985b, 72; Schuller 1962, 250. For an elaboration on the “continuous fluctuation of dissonant and consonant events” in Bill Evans’s improvisations that contributes to the music’s “maximum forward propulsion.” see Smith 1983, 212–13.
20. These qualities may include “timbral continuity or a characteristic personal timing with respect to the rhythm section. The piece is already so strongly connected in its rhythmic order that a time-span of four measures may be perceived as linked to a preceding one merely by virtue of a note-group, or even a single pitch, played in the equivalent metrical position. Pitch-centered or motivic analysis will often not take this sufficiently into account. Also, such connections, clearly as they may be heard in performance, lose much of their force when viewed in a transcription.” Gushee 1981, 159.
21. That actually transcribing solos also cultivates these abilities in learners is suggested by Coker (1964, 34–35).
22. The challenges of shaping stories over various spans of time have changed over the history of jazz. Gushee (1981, 159) reports that “the welding of two choruses into a whole may seem a modest achievement by today’s standards, [but] it was not at all usual in 1936, with few players being given that much time on an approximately three-minute recording.”
23. Floyd (1991, 277) elaborates on the concept of the “non-verbal semantic content of musical phrases.” which owes in part to his interpretation of the work of Murray and Gates.
24. Gushee 1981, 168.
25. Armstrong reportedly told Wingy Manone: “The first chorus I plays the melody. The second chorus I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus I routines.” Sudhalter and Evans, 1974, 192. Lawrence Gushee interprets routines, in this case, to mean the formulation of high-note riffing patterns. Personal conversation, 25 January 1992. Sidney Bechet’s advice to Bob Wilber and Lester Young’s praise of Frankie Trumbauer reveal comparable approaches. Balliett 1977, 243; Hentoff 1956, 9.
26. Neil Tesser, Chicago jazz critic, observed this in Gordon’s performances at the Jazz Showcase, personal communication, Fall 1991. The versatility of many instrumentalists as vocalists is demonstrated in Jacquet, video 1993; Kirk, video 1988; and Z
ardis, video 1993.
27. Similarly, Sidney Bechet reports: “All that happens to you makes a feeling out of your life and you play that feeling. But there’s more than that. There’s the feeling inside the music too. And the final thing, it’s the way those two feelings come together.” Bechet 1978, 123.
28. Morgan’s rendition of “I Remember Clifford” is on Blakey, rec. 1958b.
29. A musician explains, “Within the past few months I was listening to Miles, and I remember noticing that I started playing things that sounded like his patterns. But it wasn’t something I was trying to do. But it would be on a song that would sound like something he would play.” Sawyer 1991, 11.
30. A number of works provide additional transcriptions and analyses of such issues as large-scale melodic continuity and coherence in the stories of outstanding soloists. For Louis Armstrong, see Schuller 1968, 102–5; 1989, 161–64; Austin 1966, 281–83. For Lester Young, see Gushee 1981; Porter 1985b, 60, 90, 93–94, 97. For Charlie Parker, see Koch 1974–75, part 2, 77–85. For Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, see Kernfeld 1981, 96–102, 270–77; 1983, 46–59.
31. Pike (1974, 90–91), also portrays the “affective reactions” that accompany the soloist’s musical creations, and astutely reports, “As his improvisation grows successfully, his pleasure flows from the pleasure of its creation, its appropriateness, and the shaping of its destiny. Phenomenally subjective terms (such as expectation, satisfaction, disappointment, tension-release) may be used to describe the various affective phases of his creative jazz experience.” Sudnow (1978, 146) describes his own internal “nudgings.”
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