Although distinguishing their more gradual development from that of prodigies, many other players also describe learning chords and the structures of compositions by ear, before receiving formal musical training. Doc Cheatham absorbed structural elements in a piece “step by step” as he “went along, playing in carnival bands and other groups.” Under his high school band leader’s guidance, David Baker gained experience singing the root movements of chord progressions and imitating the sounds of chord patterns with his instrument. As discussed earlier, learning by ear commonly entails more complex impressions. Students conceptualize the successive sound clusters of harmonic forms as mapped out in particular positions on instruments, and as visual images of abstract designs whose colors and tints may represent different shadings of harmonic tension. These kinetic and visual conceptualizations serve as mnemonics for harmony for musicians at whatever level of knowledge (ex. 3.4).
Although some artists remain ear and hand players, many others eventually supplement their knowledge with a theoretical understanding of harmony. After Kenny Barron had been “playing tunes by ear for a while,” his older brother Bill “worked through them” with him methodically, going over all the chord changes and teaching him their symbols and names. Melba Liston learned theory in her junior high school music youth group, whereas Arthur Rhames studied harmony directly with jazz musician Gigi Gryce, who worked periodically as a substitute teacher at Rhames’s high school. Benny Bailey recalls pianist John Lewis’s daily theory seminars for members of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band aboard a ship bound for their European tour in 1947.
Improvisers also grasp basic harmonic principles from college textbooks about Western classical music theory and commercial manuals recommended by jazz community members. When Lonnie Hillyer failed in his early efforts to sit in with Miles Davis’s band, Davis directed him to “a chord book.” Tommy Turrentine remembers that in the forties a textbook by Percy Goetschius was known among some jazz musicians as the “Bible of Harmony.” Turrentine adds the important caveat that “the rules of harmony are meant to be broken, and these guys did it. They learned the theory of Western harmony, and then they went for themselves!” Musicians accomplished this by adapting the language and symbols of Western harmony to the harmonic conventions of the tradition of jazz and to their own musical styles. Over the years Western music theory books such as those by Paul Hindemith and Walter Piston have also served as learning aids, supplemented by theory texts specifically devoted to jazz.22
One of the benefits of theory is the shorthand it provides musicians for talking about harmony and for representing the structure of compositions in written form. J. J. Johnson used to “write out a couple of new chord progressions” for Curtis Fuller whenever Johnson performed in Fuller’s locale and they could “hang out together.” Lou Donaldson routinely “pulled the coat of the pianists” with whom he performed at nightclubs to obtain the chords to the complicated sections of particular compositions. “There were some jam sessions with Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, in which he played so much stuff, it was terrible,” he recalls with mock horror. “If Lockjaw was playing tunes I wasn’t familiar with, there was no way in the world you could get me up on the bandstand with him. I wouldn’t ask him anything because, at the time, I didn’t want him to know that I didn’t know the tune. But when the gig was over, I would catch the piano players like Walter Bishop and Red Garland, and they would tell me. It was a great learning experience.”
One system of theory classification and terminology commonly used in Western music provides a language for naming the constituent elements that give different types of chords (major triads, minor triads, major seventh chords, seventh chords, etc.) their particular qualities. Musicians commonly identify each chord with a capital letter describing the pitch that serves as its root. In addition, roman numerals serve as a form of chord identification and analysis, describing a chord’s relationship to the tonic; upper case signifies a major quality, and lower case a minor quality. Finally, beside the letter of each chord or its roman numeral are arabic numbers describing additional elements or tensions that supplement the basic triad. Artists name them in terms of their numerical positions in a stack of thirds build up from the chord’s root, either diatonically (in the initial key) or with chromatic alterations. Reflecting the conventions of the past several decades, chords typically include selective mixtures of the pitches of a major or minor triad (the first, third, and fifth degrees of its related scale), the triad’s diatonic upper extensions or tensions (its seventh, ninth, eleventh and thirteenth degrees), and the triad’s altered extensions (its flatted-ninth, raised-ninth,23 raised-eleventh, and flatted-thirteenth degrees).
Familiarizing themselves with theory, students also learn to distinguish the functions of different chords and their harmonic activity within progressions. In their most fundamental function, chords create tension or provide release. Artists commonly view the tonic chord (I) as being the most stable, and the dominant (V7) as the most unstable. Every kind of movement between and among chords creates its own effect and contributes to the music’s flow. Radical departures from the progression’s initial key dramatically increase harmonic tension; direct returns unequivocally resolve the tension. Other patterns created by diminished and augmented chords are more ambiguous in their temporary suspension of harmonic motion.
Yet other movements are indirect, delaying resolution with a fleeting scheme of passage through different tonal centers before returning to the piece’s tonic key. When dominant chords built on scale degrees other than the fifth resolve up by a fourth to major or minor chords, for example, they create new areas of relative stability away from the tonic and perform a “tonic or resolution function.” When dominant chords move to other dominant chords, they perform a “dominant or tension function” and sustain or redirect harmonic tension to further points of resolution. In fact, transient tonalities at times may lead far away from the fundamental key without ever actually establishing a new one. They are simply elaborations upon basic diatonic progressions.24 The unique character of a composition’s overall progression derives from its length and arrangement of successive harmonic areas, each defined, in turn, by its tonal center, its relative duration, and the qualities and precise root movement of its chords.
Whereas theory simply reinforces aural understanding of such features for some performers, it assists others to enter the world of musical forms. At one of his workshops, saxophonist Billy Mitchell distributed copies of a lead sheet and suggested that students tap to the beat of his band’s performance to follow the chords from measure to measure over the progression. With each pass through the piece’s cycle, the class endeavored to memorize the individual sounds of the chords together with their symbols. Eventually, they could follow the progression’s features, as interpreted by the band, without referring to the lead sheet. “In the beginning I couldn’t hear the chords,” a participant recalled. “I couldn’t feel where the chords changed in a piece. Today, I might not be able to identify all the chords in the tunes I hear, but I can hear it when they do change, and that’s a big step from where I started” (GL).
Once students develop the capability of distinguishing and naming chords, they can more readily augment their understanding of compositional form on their own. When listening to a live performance, they strive to apprehend the piano and bass accompaniment in relation to the melody, creating a mental picture or representational map of the structure of each piece from its combined parts. Similarly, when learning a composition from records, John Hicks initially memorizes its melody and reproduces it at the piano; then he copies the bass line’s “counterpoint to the melody.” After learning to play the two outer voices together, he works on the pitches in between them in an effort to match the music’s precise blend. For many, the process is largely “a matter of trial and error, trying out different pitches until you get as close as you can to the quality of the chords” (KB).
Over the years, various methods have prev
ailed. Just as Bix Beiderbecke slowed the speed of his record player, “a wind-up Columbia graphophone,” to learn compositions by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Duke Ellington slowed the play of piano rolls so that he could copy renditions like those James P. Johnson made of “Carolina Shout:”25 So painstaking is the nature of this practice that Lou Donaldson and his band members once “scuffled around for about six months” learning pieces like “Sepian Bounce” and “Jumpin’ the Blues” from Jay McShann recordings. They played them repeatedly and “wore them right down to their aluminum bases.” A few generations later, Wynton Marsalis participated in comparable sessions with his brother, saxophonist Branford Marsalis, to analyze the structure of recorded compositions of Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter. Within Tommy Flanagan’s early study groups, when he and his friends encountered complex compositions that eluded their powers of aural analysis, “whoever had enough money to buy the sheet music” would do so and share it with the others.
Musicians who cannot afford sheet music or record players adopt methods even more taxing, striving to memorize compositions as others performed them. During the twenties, some artists routinely requested performances of popular pieces from the pianists who worked as sheet music demonstrators at music stores. Pops Foster “used to pick up ideas from everybody. Sometimes I would find an alley guitar player, playing only blues, and give him a quarter to play all those pretty chords they used to go through.”26
In the forties, Jimmy Robinson sat by the household radio with trumpet in hand waiting to catch a few additional pitches from the periodic replay of new pieces on jazz programs. Kenny Barron learned several Horace Silver compositions during school recesses by running back and forth between his family’s piano and a local diner’s jukebox. With each excursion, Barron extended the previous portion of a melody or altered a chord, eventually figuring out an entire composition. Beyond the immediate rewards of repertory expansion, it is hard to imagine a more rigorous training for cultivating the skills of musical apprehension and musical memory.
Differing Harmonic Prototypes
The succession of forms that students learn commonly begins with the blues, one of the most venerable vehicles in the jazz repertory. Buster Williams and Don Pate learned about the blues from their fathers, bassists Charlie Williams and Johnny Pate. One of the simplest blues forms is a twelve-bar progression in which three triads are arranged in three four-bar phrases or harmonic chunks (fig. 3.1). In its general scheme, the stable tonic or I chord of the blues alternates first with its related subdominant or IV chord, whose root is an interval of a fourth above the tonic, and then with its related dominant or V chord, whose root is an interval of a fifth above the tonic. This highest point of harmonic tension is finally resolved by a return to the tonic at the progression’s close. As discussed further in this chapter, more elaborate jazz blues follows the same basic pattern. Having learned the blues, young musicians study more expansive pieces like “I Got Rhythm,” in which two eight-bar chord sequences—an A section and a B section—are arranged to produce a thirty-two bar progression in the AABA format typical of many American popular songs. Students also discover that other pieces comprise thirty-two-bar progressions whose eight-bar components form such common arrangements as ABAB′ or ABAC (figs. 3.2–3.4).
Some youngsters are initially mystified by the concept of a B section, known as the bridge, channel, release, or inside. Its harmonic design differs markedly from that of the A section and commonly involves fleeting movements through a succession of different tonalities. David Baker remembers how “ecstatic” he and Slide Hampton were, as youngsters, the day they “found out that a tune could have a bridge. For the next month or so, we played thinking they all had the same bridge.” Art Farmer retrospectively imagines Roy Eldridge’s incredulity upon hearing Farmer’s teenage band playa unique version of “Rhythm” before they “knew that it had a [specific] bridge” and performed “any old thing” in its place. A veteran once scolded the young Barry Harris on the opposite count. Although Harris understood the B section of “Rhythm,” he was oblivious to the A section and simply substituted a twelve-bar “chorus of blues changes in its place”—creating an expansive forty-four-bar rendition overall. John Hicks’s first version of “A Night in Tunisia” unwittingly deleted the bridge altogether. He also “couldn’t understand the bridge of some compositions like Bud Powell’s ‘Parisian Thoroughfare,’ so,” he recollects, “I never attempted any solos on it until later. It was a simple thing, a I–vi–ii–V in A major, but I just wasn’t into it at the time.”
As students become more familiar with jazz repertory, they develop a comparative perspective on its forms. In Chuck Israels’s experience, an “essential ingredient in learning to be a musician is the ability to recognize a parallel case when you’re confronted with one. If things remind you of other pieces when you approach a new piece,” he states, “you generally catalogue them very quickly so that you can draw upon your accumulated knowledge.” Israels’s high school peers cultivated their skills by playing “musical games” with recordings in which they tested one another’s abilities to identify pieces from their progressions alone and “relate them” to other pieces. Such activities teach students that, despite the unique melodies of compositions, some pieces share their entire underlying structure in common. Sonny Rollins’s “Oleo” and Charlie Parker’s ‘Anthropology” are based on “I Got Rhythm.” Parker’s “Donna Lee” is based on “Indiana”; his “Bird Gets the Worm” is based on “Lover Come Back to Me”; “Warming Up a Riff” on “Cherokee”; “Marmaduke” on “Honeysuckle Rose.” There are countless examples.27
The progressions of other compositions differ overall, although they share many of the same harmonic chunks or structural building blocks. “The first four bars of ‘Can’t Get Started’ are the same as the first four bars of ‘I Love You, Porgy,’” Walter Bishop Jr. explains, “and the first eight bars of ‘Body and Soul’ are the same as those of ‘Nancy (with the Laughing Face).’” Recognizing comparable relationships between and among compositions commonly suggests directions for the expansion of repertories. John Hicks initially gravitated toward Horace Silver compositions based on the blues and on popular pieces like “I Got Rhythm” and “There Will Never Be Another You,” whose “moving patterns of seventh chords” he had little difficulty recognizing. Hicks found Fats Domino’s boogie-woogie compositions to be especially accessible because their prominent bass lines outlined the blues progression. The oscillating E and B chords of Thelonious Monk’s “Bye-ya” reminded him of the blues as well, although the song was not in a strict blues format. Similarly, Josh Schneider first learned “simple blues changes,” then “jazz blues changes” that he describes as “the same as the basic blues, but with a few additional chords thrown in. I now think of everything as a blues pretty much. Every tune is just made up of different turnarounds [harmonic cadences] that resolve to different places.”
For many youngsters, newly acquired theoretical concepts constitute “exciting breakthroughs,” which assist them in generalizing about such features of pieces. Not only do they learn to recognize chords of the same quality as they recur in different parts of the composition, but they begin to appreciate their relationships to adjacent chords, apprehending them as discrete groupings or movements—the component chunks of the composition’s larger A, B, and C sections. Among the most common movements found in compositions are short diatonic patterns like the ii7–V7–17 progression (in the key of C: Dm7–G7–CM7) and its components ii7–V7 and V7–17, whose root motion descends partly around the circle of fifths. Larger recurring harmonic gestures embodying comparable elements include the “I Got Rhythm” turnaround, 17–VI7–ii7–V7, and such progressions as III7–VI7–II7–V7, v7–I7–IV–IV (altered), and many others.28
Further probing reveals that harmonic gestures like ii–V movements may repeat at the same pitch level in different parts of a piece’s structure, or they may repeat at different pitch levels, forming seq
uences that venture briefly outside the tonic key of the piece to tonicize other keys temporarily. Within the larger progressions of many standards, sequences of this nature are commonly linked by movements of descending fifths or seconds and ascending thirds. Unusual compositions like John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” are comprised entirely of ii–V–I patterns arranged in an unusual scheme of ascending and descending movements of major thirds and augmented fifths (fig. 3.5).
Through analysis, students also come to grasp the building blocks of form on different hierarchical levels. In “I Got Rhythm,” for example, the ii–V pattern, Cm7–F7, comprises a component of the tune’s initial two-bar progression: BM7–G7–Cm7–F7. The recurring motion of this progression surrounds the two-bar Fm7–B7–EM7–E੦7 movement in measures 5 and 6, creating an eight-bar harmonic phrase whose components are arranged as aaba (fig. 3.2). This internal design represents a microcosm of the piece’s larger structure in which the opening eight-bar phrase becomes the A component of the thirty-two-bar AABA progression.
Students familiarizing themselves with the common harmonic building blocks, their root motion, and their organization into larger schemes can reconcile the initially perplexing relationship between various blues progressions and more complex popular song forms by interpreting their different features as variants of one another. Fred Hersch eventually concluded that “there were as few as ten or so different harmonic patterns” whose combinations and variations formed the basis for much of the repertory of jazz standards. 29 Graphic representations portraying the harmonic structure of different compositions illustrate the creation of unique progressions, in part, through various arrangements of common harmonic components (ex. 3.5). From piece to piece, subtle chord alterations add distinctiveness to the components, as does stretching or compressing their harmonic rhythm. Over the course of each progression, movement from the tonic through the circle of fifths creates increasing tension that peaks at the dominant chord and resolves with a return to the tonic.
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