College students majoring in jazz typically participate in jazz ensembles and take courses devoted to jazz history, theoretical aspects of improvisation, and composition and arranging in the styles of great masters like Count Basie and Duke Ellington. Students also enroll in a basic core of Western classical music courses that commonly include music history, education, and theory and composition. Beyond their jazz ensemble experience, collegians perform Western classical music in bands, choirs, and orchestras. There have been pedagogical developments in American colleges, such as jazz correspondence courses, that have influence abroad. Scholarships enabling international students to study at American institutions likewise strengthen the jazz community’s global ties. So, too, do jazz programs at institutions abroad and organizations like the International Association of Schools of Jazz, founded by David Liebman in 1989.
Musicians describe their classes as useful forums for reinforcing or supplementing the knowledge about jazz that many had acquired as youngsters. At the same time, most stress the importance of jazz performance in college. In the face of the jam session’s decline and of decreasing employment opportunities with road bands, colleges provide an environment where students can interact with peers who share their concerns. At Lincoln University, Ronald Shannon Jackson occupied a dormitory room with John Hicks, and he formed close friendships with other serious jazz musicians in the student body, students like Oliver Lake. Throughout their undergraduate days, the friends “spent as much time performing together as studying.”
Universities also serve as a base for exploring neighboring jazz communities. Jackson initially chose to attend Lincoln because he would have access in St. Louis to great musicians who toured through the Midwest. Similarly, while Don Pate was a graduate student, first at the Berklee College of Music and afterwards at the New England Conservatory of Music, he performed jazz “nonstop” in the greater Boston area, establishing many important professional contacts for his career. Such features of college life are particularly compelling for students who have already benefited from the jazz community’s traditional training and attained fluency as improvisers before leaving high school.
Also reflecting the trend toward more formal jazz education since the sixties are private organizations such as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago (1961), whose first president was Muhal Richard Abrams; Jazzmobile in New York City (1965), whose first president was Billy Taylor; Karl Berger’s Creative Music Studio in Woodstock (1972), founded by Berger together with Ornette Coleman; and Barry Harris’s former program at the Jazz Cultural Theatre (1982-87), all providing master classes in jazz for their surrounding populations.19 Traveling jazz workshops by Jamey Aebersold, also have found national and international followings. Within regional jazz communities, musicians increasingly offer private improvisation lessons, formalizing the dissemination of information acquired themselves through traditional learning practices.
Developing Extraordinary Skill
To account for the remarkable skills that many develop as youngsters within the jazz community’s educational system, improvisers acknowledge the early onset of a sense of professional identity.20 “We started young when our minds were open, and we had no obligations—no wives, no babies, no rent to pay” (LH). Unencumbered by adult responsibilities and enjoying support at home for their disciplined study, teenagers pursue jazz with the single-mindedness and unbounded energy that typify their impassioned involvement with other interests. When Bobby Rogovin first discovered baseball, he “would go to the library and get all the statistics of all the guys and memorize anything that could be memorized.” In like manner, he later became a “storehouse of information about jazz” by reading all the Down Beat magazines he could get hold of and “memorizing all the liner notes of records.” If anyone asked him, “Who was in the trumpet section on such and such Woody Herman album?” he knew the answer immediately. It was not so much a matter of design that he “developed total recall for the lineage of trumpet players. I just ended up knowing all those things because I loved to read about them so much.”
Unwavering devotion to music listening also characterizes the learning programs of students. Many recall years in which turning on the radio or the record player was their first act in the morning and turning it off their last at night. Lee Konitz often lay awake far beyond his official bedtime with a radio hidden beneath his pillow excitedly awaiting jazz broadcasts from different parts of the country. Time did not weaken these attachments. Don Pate maintained so constant an environment of recorded jazz around him as an undergraduate at Central State College that his roommate moved out and the college administration offered him the only single room in the dormitory.
Beyond the pleasure that they derive from listening, students also treat recordings as formal educational tools. Since 1917, this fixed representation of the historical literature of jazz on commercial recordings has, in effect, served as the aural musical score, well suited to scrutiny and analysis.21 In part, recordings enable young musicians to apprentice unilaterally with artists they may never actually meet. As Lonnie Hillyer puts it, “All the great jazz musicians have also been great teachers. Their lessons are preserved for students on every recording they made.”
During their formative years, musicians display similar fervor toward live performance, at times exercising great ingenuity in overcoming obstacles posed by their youthful ages in relation to the music’s adult nightlife. Melba Liston’s aunts “sneaked off” to jam sessions at neighborhood rent parties when Liston’s grandparents were not present to stop them. Leroy Williams and his young friends falsified their identification cards to gain entry to Chicago’s nightclubs and soon became “hooked on going out and watching musicians.” Club owners saw through their ploys but tolerated the presence of the youngsters as long as they were quiet and occupied a table not needed for paying customers. Other owners gained permission from licensing authorities to maintain special galleries for underage audiences, including, of course, aspiring musicians.
Typically, young learners cultivate their own performance skills with dedication and determination. Wynton Marsalis was “a really intense practicer around school and at home at night, constantly trying to get better. That was all I could think about.” Pursuing “every musical challenge” that presented itself, Marsalis played in jazz bands and in the civic orchestra, and occasionally substituted for various New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra trumpeters. He adds: “If a cat called me for a gig to play kazoo, I’d do it too.” Similarly, everyone in Max Roach’s early circle worked hard; music was a “twenty-four-hour situation for us. We practiced all day, and if we were fortunate enough to be working, we’d gig all night.” Afterwards, perhaps at three o’clock in the morning, “we went looking for jam sessions.” Employees at nightclubs sometimes helped to facilitate these arrangements. Before Barry Harris was of legal age, he made friends with a club’s pianist who allowed him once each night “to run in from the street, play one number at the piano, and run back out again.” Harris celebrated his twenty-first birthday at the club “to make sure they knew I was twenty-one!”
As discussed earlier, budding artists take control of their own music education with what must seem to them to be daring assertiveness. Equally impressive is the self-possession that characterizes their behavior. “When I was learning, you heard people play things that sounded nice and you thought about what you were playing,” Art Farmer recalls. “You thought about how you sounded and how you would like to sound, and you went home, and you worked on it. If you couldn’t learn by what you heard, well then, it was your own fault.” Marsalis is equally adamant. “There is so much information out there for you to get access to, if somebody has to tell you how to get it, you don’t deserve it. You know what it is; you’ve got to get it. If you hear somebody say, ‘Man, I think so and so is really great,’ then you listen to that person and decide for yourself. You don’t take anything for granted.”
The value that t
he jazz community places on personal responsibility is especially appropriate for the artistic growth of initiates. Self-reliance requires them to select their own models for excellence and to measure their abilities against them. It enhances their powers of critical evaluation, cultivates their tastes, and provides them with an early sense of their own individuality. Overall, the jazz community’s educational system sets the students on paths of development directly related to their goal: the creation of a unique improvisational voice within the jazz tradition.
These aspects of the young artists’ self-awareness illuminate fundamental areas of the jazz community’s musical life and artistry. Emerging improvisers, in corning to terms with jazz’s varied conventions, do not simply absorb them. Rather, they interpret and select them according to personal abilities and values, formative musical experience and training, and dynamic interaction with other artists. Ultimately, each player cultivates a unique vision that accommodates change from within and without. It is clear, then, that from the outset an artist’s ongoing personal performance history entwines with jazz’s artistic tradition, allowing for a mutual absorption and exchange of ideas. These processes—and the complementary themes of shared community values and idiosyncratic musical perspectives—are already evident in the lives of learners soon after they begin to acquire knowledge of those formal structures of jazz on which their own performances will depend.
PART II
Cultivating the Soloist’s Skills
THREE
A Very Structured Thing
Jazz Compositions as Vehicles for Improvisation
Jazz is not just, “Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.” It’s a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.—Wynton Marsalis
Jazz tunes are great vehicles. They are forms that can be used and reused. Their implications are infinite.—Lee Konitz
Composed pieces or tunes, consisting of a melody and an accompanying harmonic progression, have provided the structure for improvisations throughout most of the history of jazz. Enjoying favor to varying degrees from one period to the next, spirituals, marches, rags, and popular songs have all contributed to the artists’ repertory of established compositions or standards.1 Performers commonly refer to the melody or theme as the head, and to the progression as chord changes or simply changes. It has become the convention for musicians to perform the melody and its accompaniment at the opening and closing of a piece’s performance. In between, they take turns improvising solos within the piece’s cyclical rhythmic form.2 A solo can comprise a single pass through the cycle, known as a chorus, or it can be extended to include multiple choruses. Just as the progression’s varied timbral colors provide a rich setting for the head, they also highlight the features of solos. Moreover, the chords’ pattern of change and its undulating scheme of harmonic tension and release create constant rhythmic motion, adding momentum to the performance.
The artist’s repertory of jazz standards includes many “popular tunes that were originally used in musical theater,” Lee Konitz explains. “For example, there are jazz standards from the thirties and the forties that have great melodies and harmonic sequences. Even the lyrics are great.3 There are also other good vehicles. More and more, musicians have been getting away from the standards and writing their own songs.” Konitz’s emphasis on form is appropriate within the discipline of jazz, for learners must, as he concludes, “become familiar with these tunes and their frameworks before taking any liberties in playing variations or in improvising.”
Building Up a Jazz Repertory
Novices develop a storehouse of music from recordings and from demonstrations. When Tommy Flanagan and his high school peers got together at one another’s homes, “one guy would try to playa tune from a new Bird record, and someone else would say, ‘No, that’s not right,’ and we’d hash it out together. Then we’d all go home and work on it and come back and see who had advanced the most.” As the house bass player at the Jazz Showcase, Rufus Reid routinely borrowed or purchased records made by the featured artists so that he could learn their compositions before engagements. The repertories that students acquire from recordings enable them to perform jazz at a fundamental level and to prove themselves worthy of the assistance of experienced musicians who teach them through painstaking demonstrations.
Although youngsters rely heavily on aural means of learning, most eventually learn to read music in order to gain access to additional material. Written sources of repertory include printed renditions, or lead sheets, that provide a piece’s notated melody and accompanying chord symbols; fake books, roughly drawn compilations of lead sheets—in many instances, technically illegal; and written musical arrangements or orchestrated versions of pieces providing specialized parts for each band member through representations of melody and accompaniment.4
The degree to which performers can succeed in their community without reading skills depends both on their aural abilities and the specific demands that bands make upon them. Groups tend to strike different balances between the proportion of material that they compose and arrange in rehearsals and that which they improvise during performances. Moreover, some expect band members to read elaborate, written scores, or charts, while others rely upon relatively spare aural scores, or head arrangements, whose parts are transmitted through demonstration and memorized on the spot.
A band leader once fired young Charli Persip in front of the other musicians upon discovering that he could not read the drum parts. The incident ranks among the most terrible in Persip’s childhood; he compares it to being disciplined by his father “thumping” him painfully on the head. Persip decided then and there that he would learn to read music so that no one could ever humiliate him like that again. Similarly, it was a “big breakthrough” for Walter Bishop Jr. when he “decided to take private lessons and learn seriously how to read and write music.” Despite twenty-eight years of professional experience before he became a proficient reader, he “still felt like just half a musician.”5
Bringing different tools to the task, young musicians develop their repertories largely by performing in various bands. Seasoned members of John Hicks’s early groups urged him to “learn some new tunes” so that they could play “something else together besides the blues.” A leader recognized similar limitations on Rufus Reid’s part and taught him how to compile his own fake book that included all the pieces for their duo. Newcomers also feel the pressure to increase their knowledge so that they are not left behind in other settings. At some jam sessions “the guys didn’t even call the tunes’ names. They just counted off the tempos and played. They expected you to recognize the tunes and to play along” (CH).
Musicians faced with the prospect of enlarging their repertories proceed by tackling representative examples of forms that present unique challenges. In the late forties, “the older guys” advised, “if you could playa blues, ‘I Got Rhythm’ changes, and a ballad, you were well on your way” (LH). Youngsters also study specific genres and pieces by certain composers fashionable within the intersecting worlds of jazz and popular music. “For a while Latin things were in,” so Keith Copeland and his peers learned “Tito Puente’s, Machito’s, and Cal Tjader’s tunes.” He also discovered Horace Silver and “tried to do his songs.” Later, when Barry Harris came to New York, Copeland studied “all those Charlie Parker heads,” practicing along with records so that “I could go out and sit in with Barry.”
Kenny Barron also noticed the particular pieces “being played on the scene by different groups” and shifted his own focus accordingly, absorbing compositions by Benny Golson, Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Morgan, and Donald Byrd. Because some of the bands he played with performed for dances, he “also had to know ‘Night Train,’ ‘You Go to My Head,’ and standard rhythm and blues tunes.”
Other groups exposed learners to a stock of pieces reflecting the personal tastes and compositional skills of their band leaders and members. “Betty Carter a
lways picked tunes that nobody else did; she never wanted to be like anybody else” (KW). As a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, John Hicks “had to learn the old tunes like Wayne Shorter’s tunes and the Messengers’ standards like ‘Moanin’.’ Some went back two, three, four generations of Messengers” and created a sense of tradition in the band which Hicks “really loved.”
Rendering Composed Melodies
As youngsters study repertory from disparate sources, they find considerable variation among versions of the same compositions. Lonnie Hillyer would “learn a tune from records and then go out and play it with different people, and they’d have their own little ways of doing it.” Artists may make decisions about particular features of their renditions outside of performance, but they reserve other decisions for the actual performance. Composers like Thelonious Monk vary their own pieces “each time they play them.” Ironically, artistic creativity sometimes seeds new inventions as a result of the monotony of repeated performance routines. Afer you have sung a song one hundred and fifty times,” Carmen Lundy observes wrily, “the chances are that you are going to begin doing little, different things with it.” Finally, the initial learning process itself may contribute variants to the pool. Tommy Flanagan and his friends found some pieces on records to be “really tricky, like ‘Ko Ko.’ You can still listen to the intro and wonder exactly what Bird played there—both the notes and the phrasing. We might have three or four different versions of a tune among the players.” Flanagan remembers that they would write them all out periodically and compare them.
Thinking in Jazz Page 10
