With repeated listening, fragmentary harmonic movements embedded within the new version gradually became familiar. I could also recognize that, at various pivotal points of harmony, the alternate progression momentarily incorporated a chord from the first version, then departed from it. As my ear grasped these familiar aural landmarks and fixed their positions within my original map of the piece, I began to appreciate the chord substitutions as embellishing, rather than obscuring, the basic structure. Only after weeks of concentrated study did the second take of “Oleo” become as familiar to me as the first, and both assumed clearly related identities as two versions of the same piece.
Deepening Knowledge of Repertory and Original Composition
With a growing appreciation for the malleability of melody and form in the jazz tradition, learners become less bewildered in the face of a piece’s disparate written and oral/aural renditions. Collectively, the versions are models for realizing the piece’s infinite possibilities surrounding the core of features that comprise its essence. Just as musicians infer the core from the patterns shared by many performances, they also note the varying subtleties of melodic embellishment, rhythmic phrasing, and chord movement that distinguish each rendition. Artists acquire options for their own performances by cataloguing the variants at corresponding positions within their flexible conceptual maps of pieces.
In part, new versions represent a unique fusion of attractive traits borrowed from other versions. For a period of time when John Hicks played with Pharoah Sanders, the band “used Benny Carter’s bridge for the composition ‘When Lights Are Low.’” Subsequently, they “cornered” Tommy Flanagan in Stockholm one summer and “ran the changes down, and we all messed around and played it in a few different keys and whatnot and got comfortable with it.” Another well-known example is “’Round Midnight,” composed by Thelonious Monk in 1944 and first recorded by Cootie Williams. According to some accounts, Williams added embellishments to the melody during the recording session. Consequently, his embellishments were incorporated as formal features of the melody when sheet music renditions were produced based on the recorded version. Subsequently, when Dizzy Gillespie recorded the piece in 1946, he added to its form an eight-measure introduction and coda that he had originally used as the coda of his version of “I Can’t Get Started.” By 1955, after the “imported introduction” had itself become a standard feature among renditions by various artists—including Monk himself—Miles Davis personalized the composition further by adding a three-measure interlude to the end of the first chorus, which other artists subsequently adopted as a formal part of the composition. 36
As implied above, cross-fertilization within the larger jazz repertory contributes additional features to new renditions. Musicians can alter a piece by applying the general principles learned from analyzing a variety of pieces or substituting the precise features of another. One version of “Honeysuckle Rose” has replaced its standard bridge with the bridge to “I Got Rhythm.”
Finally, aspiring musicians replenish their models by experimenting, sometimes at the urging of mentors. Although veterans can be generous initially, they expect their demonstrations to be but a point of departure for learners’ independent initiatives in pursuit of a personal style. One novice was rebuffed when he resisted such work and pressed an expert for more material. “My voicings are my voicings,” his friend replied roughly, “and I’ve already shown you enough to get you started. Go off and find your own voicings the same way I did, just by sitting at the piano and trying them all kinds of ways until you find the ones you like” (HL). Similarly, when a youngster once attempted to please an early teacher by patterning faithfully upon his interpretation of a ballad’s melody, taped at the preceding lesson, his teacher responded with annoyance: “That’s my way of playing it. You were supposed to find your way of playing it.”
Once students experience the excitement and satisfaction that accompanies their own discoveries, they are less willing to depend on other oral or written sources or to be bound strictly by the conventional rules that had assisted them initially. The more Fred Hersch “learned tunes from sheet music,” the more compelled he felt to make up his own voicings. “You have to be able to hear chords your own way,” he insists. “It’s better than someone else telling you what to do and just formulaically filling in the chord symbols when reading charts.” Benny Bailey also remembers his satisfaction in discovering the “secrets of how to add or take away chords from a standard tune and put in your own to make the thing flow. Once you’d learn the principle of it, you could apply it to any other tune, actually.”
Performers also develop increased confidence in judging alternative versions of progressions. During the forties, musicians who regarded the progressions of sheet music publications and big band stock arrangements as “too sparse” or “awkward” designed “more musical, more sophisticated” personal versions (BB). As Howard Levy explains, contemporary written sources can be problematic for other reasons. “Some modern fake books have really raw or incorrect changes which aren’t in the spirit of the music. Also, they will put in their own idea of the substitutions instead of the basic changes, which distracts you from the main thing that’s going on, taking you one step away from where the tune is and getting you away from the root from which you should be able to substitute.”
Over the life of a composition, as a musician tries out various renditions, integrates their elements with his or her own inventions, and evaluates the results, the composition’s model enjoys periods of relative flux and relative stability. In the latter instance, musicians sometimes consolidate their favorite features into a formally arranged rendition. John Hicks performs a ballad in different meters and keys; he also alters its harmony in conjunction with the melody melody until he finds his “own interpretation.” Fred Hersch similarly works on a new composition “by playing it and playing it and playing it.” Initially, he adds his “own chord changes to the original sheet music, looking for nice chords which are strong without being obtuse, which are fun to play and make the melody sound good, and which pay attention to the lyrics, preserving the character of the piece. After I’ve played a tune in public once or twice,” Hersch explains, “a way to do it usually comes to me, and then I’ll do it that way. The tune kind of arranges itself.”
As indicated earlier, artists designing an arrangement’s progression consider not only the vertical blends of successive chords, but the nature of their resultant lines as well. To ensure the continuity of the individual inner voices, they may create predominantly stepwise motion and keep registral placement constant throughout. 37
A musician’s ongoing experimentation with the jazz repertory ultimately provides the basis for original pieces. As already mentioned, many fashion new melodies according to conventional harmonic structures. Some creations emerge as countermelodies to the original compositions. 38 Tommy Flanagan’s peers routinely “composed new songs based on Bird’s progressions and played them for one another.” Other pieces contain original harmonic forms. Improvisers of different eras have challenged themselves by designing compositions with dense chord movements and performing them at extremely fast tempos. In the sixties and seventies, musicians considered John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” to be “the tour de force.” In its harmonic setting, they would have to negotiate through tonalities with unusual relationships at a tempo of approximately 285 quarter-note beats per minute and a rate of harmonic change exceeding one hundred chords per minute. 39 During the forties and fifties, the jazz community’s adoption of the show tune “Cherokee” served the same function at jam sessions.
Additional trends include modal or vamp tunes that are harmonically static—that is, comprised of a repeating single chord or pair of chords—and accompanied by a short repeating bass melody. Eddie Harris’s “Jazz Freedom Dance” is based solely on a B7 chord. 40 Other examples of modal pieces are Miles Davis’s “So What” and “Flamenco Sketches.” “So What” has an AABA structure that mi
nimizes harmonic movement by alternating between tonalities suggestive of the D Dorian mode (for sixteen bars) and the E Dorian mode (for eight bars), then returning again to the D Dorian mode (for eight bars); in “Flamenco Sketches,” artists proceed through a series of different tonalities in ABCDE format, but have the option of remaining within each section for either four or eight bars before moving on to the next. Horace Silver’s “The Outlaw” deviates from standard structures by providing a fifty-four-bar progression divided into phrases of thirteen bars, thirteen bars, ten bars, and eighteen bars. In Ornette Coleman’s “Bird’s Food,” within an overall AABA format, “each A is a blues variant. After an introduction of two measures, the first A uses the first nine and a half measures of a blues chorus; the second A uses eleven measures; and the last uses ten.” Jaki Byard’s ballad “Ode to Charlie Parker” gradually unfolds a twenty-four-bar progression with harmonic components bearing little similarity to one another.41
Complementing experimentation with harmonic rhythm are experiments with unconventional meters for jazz pieces. With some precedent in Benny Carter’s innovative “Waltzing the Blues” in 1936 and Bobby Hackett’s recording of “Jammin’ the Waltz” in 1938, Sonny Rollins and Max Roach, in 1956, devoted an entire album to improvising on pieces in 3/4. Additional experiments since the bebop era include Thelonious Monk’s 1952 version of “Carolina Moon,” in 6/4 time, and compositions in 5/4 by Dave Brubeck, Booker Little, and others. In some cases, composers alternated these meters with 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4. The wealth of possibilities seems endless, encompassing compositions with extended forms and experiments in free jazz, the structure of which is to be described later.42
Pieces with unconventional forms can be “really challenging,” requiring exceptional concentration. Such was Rufus Reid’s experience with the music of Bobby Hutcherson and Harold Land. Instead of constructing progressions with symmetrical four- and eight-bar phrases, they “might have a five-bar phrase going to a seven-bar phrase and then to a three-bar phrase,” Reid explains. “The music was also more advanced harmonically than what I was used to. They didn’t necessarily use tertian harmony, voicing chords in thirds. Instead, they often voiced the chords in fourths. The harmony of Joe Henderson’s music was even harsher,” he asserts. “There were lots of major seventh augmented chords, plus augmented ninths and elevenths.”
Whether composing new pieces or adding original detail to standards, jazz artists are guided not only by purely musical concepts but by wide-ranging experiences that shape the artists’ need for self-expression and infuse their creations with distinctive attributes. Booker Little’s wonder at the abruptly changing moods of children inspired his unusual use of tempo changes and alternating meters in the piece “Quiet Please”; the falling, staggered melody and scat syllables of a Jabbo Smith piece recapture the delighted laughter of Smith’s granddaughter the day she accompanied him on her first trip to the ZOO.43 In Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear,” the cadence of the title’s affectionate address serves a melodic-rhythmic theme, empowering subsequent phrases with the import of love poetry, its aural effect as much speech as music.
The rhapsodic melodies and harmonies of Jaki Byard’s “Ode to Charlie Parker” and Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford” reflect tender feelings of nostalgia for their renowned friends who died tragically and too young.44 Max Roach’s intense rhythmic interplay with Nigerian drummer Michael Olitunji and Abbey Lincoln’s heartrending cries on their “Freedom Now Suite,” composed by Roach and singer-writer Oscar Brown Jr., present the symbolic portrayal of hardships endured by early African Americans and the struggle for independence by African nations under the grip of colonialism.45 The project, revealing the artists’ strong concern with cultural identity, represents a union of their musical and political preoccupations. From the most basic to the most complex human dimensions, such varied practices demonstrate the dynamic interplay between tradition and innovation within the jazz community as improvisers transform its musical conventions and imbue them with deep personal meaning.
Jazz as Ear Music
As indicated throughout this chapter, the improviser’s knowledge includes not only differing ways of rendering pieces but differing ways of thinking about and conceptualizing them. These are central issues for jazz musicians, who, despite their varying use of arrangements, often perform without written scores, creating much of the detail of their music in performance. Some musicians conceptualize the structure of a piece primarily in aural and physical terms—as a winding melodic course through successive fields of distinctive harmonic color and as a corresponding sweep of movement over an instrument’s terrain. Others find it useful to reinforce such images with notational and theoretical symbols. Before Carmen Lundy learned theory, she “always had to wait for the pianist to play the chords” so she could react to them. Now, however, visualizing the structure of a piece helps her “know where the tune is going,’ and she no longer has to depend on the pianist.
Still others find theoretical representations helpful initially when studying a piece’s form, but unnecessary afterwards. They quickly reach the point where, as George Duvivier put it, “my fingers can pick out the chords without my always thinking of them.” Improvisers liken this transition to learning a new route in the physical world—for walking between home and work, for example. Initially, the walker gives full attention to reading street signs, memorizing turns of direction, and gaining a sense of characteristic pacing between identifiable landmarks. Eventually, taking in such features becomes so routine that it happens instantaneously, almost unconsciously, as the legs alone seem to take over the walk’s direction. Subsequently, the walker can concentrate on other things—noticing obscure details in the surroundings or thinking of unrelated matters—without becoming lost along the way. Similarly, once improvisers fix in their memories the features of a piece’s road map, they need no longer mark their changing positions within its piece’s form by consciously imaging chord symbols. Rather, they can instantaneously gauge their progress by the band’s collage of sounds and the relative positions of the sounds on their instruments. This frees their full attention for the precise details of their own parts as they move confidently, creatively, and in tempo through the piece’s harmonic course.
The experience of negotiating through the ever-changing patterns around them from the perspective of their personal structural maps is a rich and dynamic one for improvisers. It potentially involves the imaginative play of sounds, physical gestures, colorful shapes, and abstract symbols, whose gestalt creates the impression of perpetual movement through a multidimensional musical realm. Although the emphasis upon distinct imagery can differ from individual to individual and vary within performances, artists commonly describe aural musical representations in their thoughts and perceptions as preeminent. Not surprisingly, then, the jazz tradition generally elevates aural musical knowledge, with its associated powers of apprehension and recall, to the paramount position.
Such learning practices as requiring students to sing tunes in every key before performing them reflect this priority. Acting upon a related expectation, a band leader once inquired casually from a newcomer whether she had heard “the head” to a particular piece before. When she answered that she had, he turned directly to the band and counted off a tempo for its performance. In immediate protest, she explained that she had only heard the tune once and had never performed it. “If you heard it,” he replied crisply, “you ought to be able to play it.”
Recommendations about learning the structures of a piece reflect similar values. “Fake books can really stultify your development if you have the wrong attitude toward them,” Howard Levy says. “Really, the best way to learn,” he continues,
is to take tunes off records, because you’re utilizing your ear. It takes a lot of know ledge and experience to be able to do this, but it becomes so easy to hear pieces in their component parts if you actually do the work yourself. Then you start trying to write the changes out by e
ar. In the beginning, you’re going to write out things wrong. You’re not going to know what’s right for the first few years that you do this. But in the end, you see your mistakes and you really learn it.
The ideals and discipline embodied by these methods prepare students directly for the challenges that they face as artists. Improvisers must depend greatly upon their ears for repertory because there is frequently a lag between the introduction of new pieces to the jazz scene and their availability in printed form. In fact, much of the jazz repertory remains part of the community’s oral tradition and is not published as single sheet music items or in fake books. Moreover, musicians must be able to apprehend the unique features of each rendition as they unfold during a performance, instantly adapting their parts to those of other players. If the band takes exceptional liberties, individual players must continually alter their formal models of the piece as well. In the final analysis, a jazz piece is not a single model appearing in a fake book or on a recording. Rather, it is the precise version of a piece created by musicians at each performance event.46
Ultimately, veterans develop such exquisite skill that many can negotiate even new pieces successfully upon a single hearing. At a recording session, Ricardo Ray once asked Doc Cheatham to add his own solos to a tape of several fast mambos that the band had already recorded, and to “play behind a beautiful ballad that the singer had sung. So there I was,” Cheatham recalls, “sitting out there with earphones on and a microphone before me, and I was supposed to overdub solos on these tunes I hadn’t even heard before. But I could hear the changes. They came to me just like the air that I’m breathing, and I just went through it, and the people were very happy. I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t had the training I’d had, learning all the chords and harmonic things I learned playing over the years.”
Cheatham’s account underscores how comprehensive is the artist’s understanding of the vehicles that inspire and mold jazz creations.47 As the following chapter delineates, the agile performances of soloists depend not merely on mastery of composed melodies and their forms, but equally on being proficient in the conventional improvisational language of jazz tradition.
Thinking in Jazz Page 14
