Among the characteristics of a composition that can distinguish one artist’s version from another is the choice of tonic. Awareness of this characteristic can itself come as a “shocking revelation” to beginners who assume that all music is composed in the key of the first scale they learn or that pieces are played only in the key of the first printed version they encounter. John McNeil went into a panic during an early jam session in which saxophonist John Handy “called the tunes in different keys.” Afterwards, McNeil says, he “hid from other musicians for months,” until he had made up his deficiency by relearning his repertory “in all twelve keys.”
To meet the challenges of key transposition, students must train themselves to hear a piece’s intervals, that is, to imagine their precise sounds, at differing pitch levels. Many experts advise learners to practice singing tunes initially with nonverbal or scat syllables—to master the melodies aurally without relying on physical impressions such as fingering patterns or the visualization of an instrument’s layout. Learning to sing the letter names of the pitches or words of a piece is another method. To introduce students to rudimentary music theory, some players like Julius Ellerby vary these approaches by numbering each pitch in relation to the piece’s tonic and suggesting that pupils sing the numbers instead of scat syllables in every key (ex. 3.1). After thoroughly absorbing a tune through these exercises, students work on reproducing it on their instruments to develop control over each version’s unique fingering patterns—including their distinguishing points of ease or awkwardness.
The relative hardships associated with this practice vary, of course, with the complexity of each melody and the nature of its form. Some blues pieces comprise a single repeating figure (ex. 3.2a) or simple phrases based on AA′B melodic prototype-sometimes at multiple structural levels (ex. 3.2b)—and present little difficulty. More elaborate pieces rely on ABAC or AABA melodic prototypes. The interval patterns of intricate ballads extending over thirty-two-bar progressions (ex. 3.2c) can be demanding, as can ornate, highly syncopated melodies of pieces that require seemingly endless repetition to master. Rapid, intricate bebop pieces such as “Donna Lee” and “Anthropology” (ex. 3.2d) are formidable “musical etudes” and keep improvisers in top form technically by providing challenges as great as any presented in “method books for classical musicians” (LH).
Beyond its variable key, a piece’s precise melodic features can differ from version to version. Within an arrangement, singers or instrumentalists who carry the melody can transform it to varying degrees, engaging in compositional activities of increasing “levels of intensity” that Lee Konitz distinguishes along a continuum from interpretation to improvisation.6 Success at one level provides the conceptual grounding and “license” musicians need to graduate to successive levels, each increasing its demands upon imagination and concentration.
At the outset of a performance, players commonly restrict themselves to interpretation. They reenter the piece’s circumscribed musical world along the rising and falling path of a particular model of the melody, focusing firmly on its elements and reacquainting themselves with the subject of their artistic ventures. Musicians take minor liberties when orienting themselves to a piece at this level of intensity, coloring it in numerous ways. They vary such subtleties as accentuation, vibrato, dynamics, rhythmic phrasing, and articulation or tonguing, “striving to interpret the melody freshly, as if performing it for the first time” (LK).
With masterful control, players maintain uniform tonal quality and even articulation at times. At other times, they create interest along a melody’s contour by coloring it with myriad tonal effects (ex. 1.1). They may forcefully exaggerate or repress the use of vibrato and dramatically change articulation patterns. At one moment, they may emphasize slurring, at another, tonguing. Moreover, they employ different tonguing syllables to create varied mixtures of light and heavy accents, sometimes swallowing or “ghosting” pitches so that they are, by gradations, more felt than heard. Wind players can vary the tonguing positions associated with such syllables as tu, ta, to, go, ku, or vu to produce different tone colors. Miles Davis appears to emphasize vu articulation if seeking to give his sound a soft, airy diffuseness, and to produce a ghosting effect on a grace note by using lah-dah syllables.7 Alternatively, to increase the complexity of tone, improvisers can sing or growl through instruments, tinting and thickening their sounds.8 Other techniques include scooping into a pitch, bending within a pitch or between pitches, and falling off, or concluding a pitch with a short, downward glissando. Yet others are the shake, a rapid lip trill between pitches a whole step or larger interval apart; the flare or rip-up, a rough, rapid gliss that lightly touches all the harmonics between the initial pitch and target pitch; and the doit, an extended rip whose sound trails off toward an indefinite pitch.9
Artists describe subtle bends and other microtonal melodic inflections—pitches sharpened or flattened for expressive effect—as blue notes. Charles Mingus once underscored this technique at a workshop by drawing a vertical column of overlapping notes on a large staff, indicating that each note had potential for stretching into the domain of the others just above or below it (CI). Lou Donaldson, too, emphasizes the importance of learning to play “quarter-tones . . . to bend a note . . . to make a horn talk, to make it cry. Johnny Hodges would actually make it cry,” pulling pitches “ever so slowly in and out of tune with the band,” so that other band members were “on the edge of their seats hoping he’d get back in there.” And, of course, “he always did.” As a model for such practices, Donaldson recommends that aspiring jazz musicians “concentrate on the blues,” absorbing its special “feeling” so they can project it into their improvisations. Without cultivating “that type of sound.” he cautions, “you never can play jazz.”
Along similar lines, early New Orleans jazz clarinetist Louis deLisle Nelson insists that “you must handle your tone. . . . You can put some whining in the blowing of your instrument. There are a whole lot of different sounds you can shove in—such as crying—everywhere you get the chance. But . . . with a certain measurement and not opposed to the harmony.”10 When pitch inflections are combined with speechlike rhythmic cadences, soloists sometimes actually “sound like they’re speaking words. It’s like you’re talking when you play. That’s what it’s about” (DC).
In part, the aesthetic values and procedures described above (ex. 3.3a) reflect the African side of the dual heritage of African American music.11 In many parts of Africa, tuning systems use pitches outside the Western system of equal temperament; human voice and instruments assume a kind of musical parity. Voices and instruments are at times so close in timbre and so inextricably interwoven within the music’s fabric as to be nearly indistinguishable. Furthermore, some drums, marimbas, horns, and flutes can actually function as surrogate speech by impeccably reproducing the melodic-rhythmic patterns of the tonal language of their respective culture.12
As early African American composers forged their musics from the diverse African and European musical elements around them, they preserved different African elements to varying degrees, adapting them to their own evolving social and musical tradition, much of which centered on the African American church. Sacred genres like the ring shout embodied many of the fundamental values that defined later black musical forms.13 Carrying sacred musical practices over into the jazz tradition, early improvisers included spirituals within their repertories and created instrumental arrangements from the different parts that they sang at religious services. Joe Oliver and other New Orleans musicians were renowned for their ability to use mutes to imitate the timbre and cadence of the stylized speech of sermonizing preachers and to recreate the spirit and sounds of holy-roller meetings.14
Within the jazz tradition, instrumentalists and vocalists continue to influence one another. A reflection of this is instrumentalists’ predilection for copying the pitch colorations and inflections of blues and jazz singers, and their phrasing of song texts. To this day,
Barry Harris reminds instrumentalists at his workshops to “play legato” and to allow their vibratos greater prominence “like singers do.” He elaborates: “Vibrato is what gives your sound individuality, because everyone’s got a different natural vibrato.”
Besides their use of such interpretative devices, jazz musicians can individualize the piece further, moving along Konitz’s scale to embellishment. Even at the level of subtle embellishment, unique patterns of imagination lend a distinctive character to each artist’s practices. A player can append grace notes to the melody’s important pitches, articulating both pitches clearly, or, for variety, draw them out to produce a smear or dwa-oo effect.15 Some routinely favor the use of a single ascending chromatic grace note at the beginnings of phrases, but others use the same embellishment only sparingly or favor descending grace notes. As a matter of taste or due to idiosyncratic, physical features of performance, individual artists may consistently embellish particular pitches. Many players use an eighth-note upper mordent between a pitch and the adjacent scale degree; some tend to phrase this as a triplet, and others as an eighth note and two sixteenths. Inventive pitch substitutions, and occasional chromatic fills added between consecutive melody pitches, are also common. Additionally, soloists can rephrase the melody subtly by anticipating or delaying the entrances of phrases or by lengthening or shortening particular pitches within them.
Lonnie Hillyer once commented on the combined effect of these practices after hearing a recorded rendition of the ballad “Alone Together” by his late friend, trumpeter Kenny Dorham.16 Rendering the piece with his warm, intimate tone, Dorham embellished the melody with spare grace notes and varied its phrasing with subtle anticipations and delays. He articulated sustained pitches with soft unaccented attacks before bending them down and drawing them quickly back again, then allowing them to sing with an increasingly wide vibrato. Only once did he interject into the performance a phrase of his own by filling a rest with melodic motion. Seated beside the speakers, Hillyer responded immediately to Dorham. He leaned forward, covered his eyes with his hands, and remained perfectly still until the performance’s close. Then, sighing, he shook his head, as if waking from a dream, and softly marveled, “K. D.! To think he could say all that, just by playing the melody.”
When rendering ballads or slow expressive blues, musicians sometimes confine performances to the subtleties described above. Alternatively, they may venture into the arena of variation, transfiguring the melody more substantially by creating shapes that have greater personality but whose relationship to the original model remains clear. The liberal application of some of the techniques associated with embellishment can accomplish this goal. Lee Konitz “displaces certain pitches in the melody” with pitches of his own, and saxophonist Lou Donaldson inserts “different clusters of notes at different places” along its contour. Joe Giudice creates “extensions of the melody by reaching out and grabbing neighboring pitches or by leaping to important chord tones and painting a picture of the harmonic segment of the piece,” procedures he describes as “natural ornamentation.” Common practices also include prefacing a phrase from the melody with a short introductory figure or extending it with a short cadential figure.
Finally, musicians periodically raise performances to improvisation, the highest level of intensity, transforming the melody into patterns bearing little or no resemblance to the original model or using models altogether alternative to the melody as the basis for inventing new phrases. These artistic episodes can occur at various points in a performance, as when players add short melodic figures in such static areas of tunes as rests or sustained pitches at the ends of phrases. Additionally, if the player carrying the melody is the first solo-ist in the group, he or she may depart from the melody before its completion to improvise a musical segue to the solo. In other instances, an individual improvises an introduction to the piece before the group’s entrance, or a cadenza at the piece’s conclusion, or a short “break” passage, during which the other players suspend their performance. Jazz compositions like “Oleo,” having chord progressions with only partial melodies, provide space for the player to improvise passages for either a couple of measures or a major harmonic segment of the piece during the melody’s presentation. Moreover, some compositions consist of chord progressions alone at the time they are recorded. Pieces like Lester Young’s “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid” and Charlie Parker’s “Meandering” and “Bird Gets the Worm” required the extemporaneous invention of an entire melody in performance. Typically, however, players restrain themselves during the melody’s formal presentation, reserving their most extensive compositional activity for improvised solos.17
At the same time, the combined operations from interpretation to improvisation have the potential to “carry musicians more than halfway to creating a new song” within the framework of another melody (LK). Such situations underscore the extent to which pieces serve jazz musicians not simply as ends in themselves but as vehicles for invention.18 Just as these procedures, taken in sequence, provide artists with a routine for practicing pieces, their sequential mastery corresponds, for some artists, to the progressive stages of their development. As a youngster, trumpeter Warren Kime first learned the “melodies of a lot of tunes” from his father, a professional musician. “After I had been playing the melodies straight for awhile,” Kime recalls, “I started making little embellishments around them. Gradually, my embellishments became more extensive, and eventually I learned how to improvise.” Excerpts from transcribed performances of jazz compositions illustrate the differing emphases that artists place on these practices, accounting for the distinguishing features of renditions and, in turn, providing students with alternative models for their own versions (exx. 3.3b–d). Gary Bartz would routinely purchase records “of the same song by many different artists” and analyze their different approaches.19
Learning the Harmonic Basis for Tunes
Learners must also master the chord progression of each piece as a fundamental guideline because of its roles in suggesting tonal material for the melody’s treatment and in shaping invention to its harmonic-rhythmic scheme.20 Players liken a progression to a road map for charting the precise melodic course of a rendition. The importance of such a consideration, however, is not always clear to beginners who have yet to confront their naive notions about improvisation. When Lonnie Hillyer was a young teenager, he imagined that if he could only muster the courage to join a renowned musician on the bandstand, inspiration would carry him through the event. Pursuing his family’s acquaintanceship with Miles Davis, Hillyer obtained an invitation to sit in with Davis’s band. He laughs ruefully as he recalls losing his place after the first eight bars and how brutally thereafter each pitch of his impassioned performance clashed with the band. When the dismal solo finally aborted, Davis pulled him off the stage and grumbled hoarsely, “You don’t know your chords, do you?” When Hillyer confessed to this, Davis told him not to return to the club until he had mastered harmony.
Students with natural gifts and special musical backgrounds have a great advantage in learning the harmonic basis of pieces. By the age of three or four, prodigies with perfect pitch can already comprehend the precise mixture of elements that make up the distinct structures of chords, and they can anticipate their place within a piece’s larger repeating progression. Roberta Baum used to “wait excitedly for the key changes in music performances”; the alternating chords thrilled her. In part, she remembered the piece’s events through visual and emotional imagery so lively that they entered her mind’s eye as cartoon dancers stretching and spinning in space, “doing incredible things.” Long before Patti Bown acquired a technical knowledge of music she amazed family members, friends, and local band leaders by her ability to remember the composite sounds of chords on jazz and classical music recordings and reproduce their movements at the piano.
Carmen Lundy cultivated her harmonic sensibilities at rehearsals of her mother’s gospel choir. Immersed in exub
erant performances of hymns, she assimilated the music’s inner and outer voices, learning to appreciate their vertical blends as well as their independent horizontal attributes as lines. Eventually, singing the harmonizing alto lines held more appeal for her than did singing the soprano melodies, “which seemed so obvious.” Later, Lundy found jazz equally intriguing. Its melodies and harmonies seemed to her to be extensions of the church music she had already learned. Lundy also recalls the revelation that certain jazz pieces were “the same structurally” as blues pieces by artists like Leadbelly, Big Mama Thornton, and Lightnin’ Hopkins, artists whom her mother “always listened to at home:”
Pianists and guitarists commonly learn about chords as part of their early instruction. They become well practiced in apprehending harmony because even the simplest repertory exploits the capacity of their respective instruments to combine melody and accompaniment. Youngsters whose melody instruments lack the capacity to perform multiple pitches simultaneously sometimes lag behind their friends in harmonic development. Those who have difficulty hearing chords commonly adopt piano as a second instrument, providing them with the key to harmonic understanding.21
The accompanying role that some single-note instruments play in jazz groups, of outlining the forms of compositions with linear arrangements of pitches derived from the underlying chords, compensates students for their early deficiencies. ‘All the time I was playing the trumpet in high school, I could never really relate my knowledge about chords to improvising a melody line:’ says Rufus Reid. “The association never clicked for me until I learned the string bass and had to deal directly with playing chord progressions.” Curtis Fuller adds that because the trombone was a “tailgate instrument that played a moving bass line in groups, I had to deal with chord progressions from the start.”
Thinking in Jazz Page 11
