Copying choreography integral to a performance also facilitates the assimilation of an artist’s precise style. Only after imitating his teacher’s posture and movement at the piano could David Sudnow re-create such salient elements of his improvisations as their breathing and singing qualities.25 Similarly, a young saxophonist “started watching Von Freeman play and tried to imitate his dance, the way he moved and swayed, the way he moved his horn up and down when his phrases went up and down.” By doing this, the student felt, he could play “much more” in Freeman’s manner and style, and he felt more like a “real jazz player” himself. “I was surprised at how much easier playing became when I began to move more correctly. Now, I try to image great jazz saxophone players before I take a solo. That’s one thing that’s made a big difference in my playing.”26
Many expand their knowledge by learning directly from experts outside of performances. Leora Henderson recalls Louis Armstrong teaching her “how to make riffs,” a prelude to her learning to play “hot trumpet” inner own right. Just as Red Nichols showed Armstrong the alternate fingering patterns he had worked out for jazz trumpet figures in the twenties, two music generations later Freddie Hubbard learned Dizzy Gillespie’s system of “auxiliary fingerings” from his demonstration. Similarly, after joining Gillespie’s big band in New York in 1949, Melba Liston asked a friend in the trumpet section to sing slowly the characteristic phrases of the new and bewildering idiom of bebop so that she could transcribe and study them. “I didn’t understand their language,”ishe recalls, “because bebop hadn’t come to California yet, really.” Kenny Washington expanded his repertory with rhythmic patterns that Gillespie’s drummer Rudy Collins demonstrated for him during private sessions.27
Others absorb new material by attending formal master classes or by hanging out with peers and mentors in informal settings. Returning from a concert, a drummer and his disciple once responded with great animation to a renowned percussionist’s solos they were listening to on a cassette player in the back of the car. When an interesting pattern appeared, the expert smiled and nudged his student, then vocalized the figure with scat syllables and mimed its drum strokes until the younger musician began to copy them. Turning to the tape again, the musicians repeated their interplay in response to every inspired phrase. Occasionally, the expert performed minor variations on a phrase after seizing it. Grinning with delight, the student attempted his own variations, raising affectionate laughter from his mentor. Throughout the ride home, the drummers continued their lively discourse, evaluating, absorbing, and sharing musical ideas from the recording and exploring their implications for invention. Not so much as a word passed between them.
Barry Harris adopts a similarly varied pedagogical approach in workshops. One of his techniques for teaching improvisation is to compose exemplary phrases and solos for participants. Standing away from the piano, Harris initially dictates s in a theoretical language that he has suited to jazz. Typically, he creates a phrase through the elision of a few discrete gestures. “The chord is C7,” he would alert the class. “Triplet chord up from the second with a half step below and run [a scale] down to the third with a half step between the I and the 7. Diminish up from the third, skip a note, and chromatic back to the tonic” (fig. 4.1). In response, students scramble to transpose the numbers into letters in their respective instrument’s key, then translate the letters into sounds. Musicians who have learned Barry Harris’s theoretical system become so adept at interpreting the streams of numbers Harris dictates to them for model phrases that they can perform the phrases in unison almost immediately.
Harris also directs musicians to master vocabulary in physical terms. He suggests that horn players finger each phrase repeatedly without blowing into their instruments, encoding it in muscular and visual memory as sequential movement among discrete places on an instrument’s terrain and as an accompanying patter of valves. This isolates the rhythmic features of the phrase for practice, as well. “Your fingers should articulate phrases like tap dancers,” Harris asserts. Likewise, Harris requires his class to master figures “on sound alone,” and, like many improvisers, he suggests that students cultivate this knowledge by singing or whistling the figures at various pitch levels.
Another teacher, Alan Swain, stresses visual and spatial impressions derived from the physical layout of an instrument, instructing pianists to learn phrases as patterned configurations of white and black keys. Swain formalizes this practice by printing a pictorial keyboard on index cards, labeling each with a chord symbol, and having pupils ink in the appropriate arrangements of keys. Students drill with the cards until they can visualize precise key clusters for every chord symbol. Such varied forms of representation provide artists with alternative, complementary ways of apprehending and remembering musical figures.
Increasing Apprehension and Recall of Vocabulary Phrases
Over time, musicians strengthen their abilities to learn new vocabulary. Concentrating on recorded solos with increased understanding, they can apprehend faster, more intricate patterns from fewer replays and without slowing the recordings. Many can absorb new material under circumstances in which little or no replay is possible. Eventually, live performance itself serves as a vehicle for the absorption and transmission of music. “Some things just seeped into my system and style when I sat in with guys like Jonah Jones, Rex Stewart, and Joe Smith,” Doc Cheatham recalls. Similarly, Red Nichols would sit in with Pops Foster’s bands “all night . . . picking up ideas. You’d hear him later doing the same thing you did.”28
Moreover, various conventions guiding group interplay depend upon the artist’s skill to assimilate patterns immediately after their performance. Bass players sometimes learn pieces by copying a pianist’s bass lines. Horn players, when alternating four-bar improvisations—trading fours—may pattern their melodies upon one another with impeccable precision. Similarly, horn players may improvise the melody for a new tune with one player echoing the short phrases of the other in call and response fashion throughout.29 Epitomizing such extraordinary abilities of near-simultaneous copying is the practice of shadowing, in which one performer can nearly cover another’s solo as it is being improvised (BH). “My teacher would have you improvise over a song,” a student reports, “and when you tried, he’d sit at another piano and play your improvised lines a fraction of a second behind you. It could drive you nuts.”
If one of the developmental issues for learners cultivating a vocabulary is grasping ornate phrases, a related challenge is simply remembering them. In general, the development of ability in jazz depends upon honing the memory. Some veterans with phenomenal long-term memories can remember their favorite solos after twenty, even thirty, years. When listening to recordings, they can sing along not only with featured tunes but with every pitch of the improvisations. Additionally, when entertaining their friends, they routinely place the record needle in the precise groove of cleverly improvised phrases, illustrating the virtues of particular soloists with the infallibility of poets turning to a favored line of verse in an anthology or music theorists to an exemplary passage in a printed musical score. Without even needing to consult the original recording, a friend once corrected pitches and added subtle embellishments to my transcription of a Miles Davis solo that he himself had learned in childhood.
For young players, a common method of memory training is the simple but rigorous repetitive act of checking the accuracy of learned solos against their original models, constantly reinforcing the proper interpretation. Over time, learning and retaining solos in this fashion creates the strong and flexible aurality that the jazz world expects of its accomplished artists. One older jazz student, upon recognizing the importance of this skill, realized that his early training in Western classical music had emphasized the supremacy of reading skills. It had never occurred to him, and certainly had never been pointed out, that a recording could serve as a viable alternative to a written score. It was not until he was immersed in his jazz trainin
g that he discovered that his exclusive dependence on written music had, in fact, undermined the development of his aural skills. As a result, his retention of material learned from recordings greatly lagged behind that of musicians who had grown up in the jazz tradition. It required years of experience with the jazz community’s methods for him to close the gap.
This also proved a point of frustration for those of Harris’s workshop participants with poor short-term memories. Harris expects students to add successive patterns to their mental stockpile as he demonstrates them. “If you’ve played a phrase once correctly, there is no reason for you ever to play it incorrectly,” he insists. For many, however, the concentration required to transpose each new phrase for their own instruments and to memorize its finger patterns drives all preceding phrases away. Some compensate by notating and reading sketches of phrases in class or by tape recording the demonstrations for later study. Although Harris does not disallow such practices, he frowns upon them because they appear to weaken the session’s rigor and prevent students from developing retentive powers. Harris’s own abilities are exemplary. After grueling evening meetings that leave his followers mentally exhausted, he commonly invites them to work again on an entire solo learned four or five hours earlier or even on one from a previous workshop.
As Harris’s students begin to cope with the pressure of memorization, and as they become more familiar with jazz conventions generally, many experience considerable improvement in their retentive powers. After a year of attendance, a saxophonist suddenly realized that she could later remember new phrases learned in the workshop and could practice them without having to refer to her notation. Another student reported an increased absorption of patterns from recordings. He found that whenever his job required less than his full concentration, especially effective passages that hung perpetually on the fringe of his consciousness intruded as musical daydreams and consumed his imagination. The same thing happened at social gatherings, where the patterns periodically overtook him, insulating him from the surrounding conversation. When thus preoccupied, he could maintain but a semblance of social grace as he withdrew into the repeating images, retracing their melodic contours and subtle inflections, envisioning their finger movements, and allowing his emotions to be infused with their evocative moods.
Listeners with the capacity to assimilate phrases so thoroughly can eventually treat live performances themselves as musical scores, gleaning vocabulary patterns that they can subsequently review outside of their performance contexts. Musicians describe returning home after exciting late-night jam sessions to lie in bed, their heads virtually “swimming” with sounds. Like flickering flames, tantalizing musical ideas remain suspended in their thoughts, seeming at one moment to fade away with the incursion of sleep, at the next to intensify their luminescence, driving sleep away. “Oh, it’s getting to you now!” playfully joked a veteran when an exhausted novice complained of the tenacious passages that occupied his mind through the entire night. “The next thing you know, you won’t think of anything else during the day either, and you’ll find yourself forgetting about eating too.”
A dramatic breakthrough in the retention of musical ideas occurred for another young musician when a repeating fragment of a solo he had studied several weeks earlier actually entered his dreams, dancing as fleeting note heads and as sounds, finally rousing him in the early hours of the morning. The impressions of the patterns, in which Wayne Shorter’s variations on a blues riff acquired tremendous rhythmic momentum, were so clear that he could sing them aloud. Never before had the student experienced anything like it.
As implied by similar accounts of jazz dreams, improvisers gradually increase their conscious command over vocabulary and become fluent in converting images from one form of representation to another. In this regard, although improvisers caution students about becoming too reliant upon written notation—”anything you have to read in order to play will not help you in this tradition”—they acknowledge the usefulness of the musical symbols for fortifying ideas, and ultimately for interpreting or reading ideas in their own imaginations. In a related application, experienced artists can analyze other players’ patterns without having to transcribe them. After copying a soloist’s phrase with their instruments, they translate its finger patterns into notes that they hold in memory while envisioning the phrase’s position within its progression and determining the tonic pitch of the underlying chord. This enables them to convert the notes into numbers, identifying the phrase’s harmonic elements.
Eventually, many develop such facility that they can interpret phrases in theoretical terms at the very moment of their performance. “You learn that jazz is composed of certain kinds of phrases, for, minor sevenths, flatted fifths, ninths, thirteenths, and each has its individuality. Then, when you listen to someone play, you begin to know when they are playing a major or minor chord and you say, ‘I hear a thirteenth in there or a seventh.’ Or you’ll hear a musician playa phrase and you’ll say to yourself, ‘That’s just a G7 chord with the notes run up a particular way. That’s one way you can playa G7 chord’” (HO). With increasing skill at apprehending and remembering music, listeners who once may have depended on transcription and formal analysis to reveal the commonalities among solos suddenly find that they can simply pick out an interesting figure in a solo and bear it in mind as they scrutinize other performances, live or recorded, for related figures. As a result of their training, many artists develop such a fine sense of relative pitch that they greatly reduce the gap between their own abilities and those of other artists with perfect pitch who could take musical dictation with ease from the start.30
Seasoned players can also instantly construe phrases as physical movements. When listening to solos, Rufus Reid sometimes visualizes corresponding finger patterns on the neck of the bass, and pianists commonly imagine their hands assuming idiomatic movements on the keyboard. At other times, players move from physical representations to their corresponding sounds. Jerry Coker reported a dream that portrayed his hands at a piano slowly and methodically working through a complex solo that, in fact, had frustrated his earlier efforts at transcription. Waking excitedly, Coker discovered that he could reconstruct the problematic passages by recalling the finger patterns from his dream.31
In many instances, different forms of imaging interact fluidly over the course of an idea’s realization. A musician may initiate an ascending phrase by envisioning its first two notes and playing them, but as their interval sounds, the musician may continue the phrase on sound and feel alone without the necessity for further visualization. Barry Harris’s method trains students in the versatile handling of different forms of music conceptualization. When teaching an extended phrase, he may sing the first component, dictate the second in numerical scale degrees or in the letter names of pitches, and demonstrate the third through sound and finger movement at the piano. Ultimately, control over alternative forms of imaging leads improvisers to master the language of jazz, providing options that facilitate fluid thinking under the pressures of performance. It does not seem an exaggeration to say that jazz musicians achieve this mastery from every conceivable standpoint, including sounds, shapes, musical symbols, and physicality.32
Early Limitations and Physical Mastery over Instruments
As learners endeavor to internalize the language of jazz, matters of physical constitution, relative mastery over instruments, and hearing acuity begin to dictate choices of material. Young pianists are literally able to grasp only those voicings of a mentor that lie within reach on the keyboard, just as young trumpeters are restricted to those patterns of an idol that require only moderate flexibility and strength to execute. When John McNeil discovered that he “didn’t have the technique to copy Miles Davis’s performance on E.S.P’,” he pursued an alternative course, “copping a lot from guys like Nat Adderley who were easier to hear—the stuff he played based on a blues scale especially. Also Chet Baker, when he wasn’t moving fast, since he played real
simple.”
Another youngster, who yearned to improvise like John Coltrane, described months of concentrated study before he could perform ‘Just a few phrases” from a Coltrane solo. At the peak of his frustration, the student was calmed by a dream in which Coltrane appeared to him and offered gentle encouragement: “You’re doing fine; just keep it up.” The student adds that Coltrane “made the phrases sound so easy on the record.” It was not until he tried to learn them that he realized “how difficult they were to play, let alone to have thought up in the first place.” Naivete occasionally proves to be an asset in negotiating the gulf between student and master. No one had explained to Gary Bartz how difficult Charlie Parker solos were, so he simply copied them along with those of lesser masters.
Faced with an idol’s inaccessible vocabulary patterns, learners may adopt various tacks, for, transposing the patterns into keys less difficult for them to perform. In Miles Davis’s case, he played Dizzy Gillespie’s figures in the middle and lower register of the trumpet because initially he could not perform or “hear music”—that is, imagine it precisely—in the trumpet’s highest register as could Gillespie.33 Grappling with these limitations drives home to youngsters that they must gain such physical control over their instruments that their musical knowledge literally lies beneath their fingertips. As J. J. Johnson pointedly advised David Baker in his youth, ‘Any idea that you can’t get out the other end of your horn is of absolutely no value in this music:’
The most fundamental use of jazz vocabulary, then, requires the ability to perform patterns in time and at various tempos. This in turn requires learners to cultivate various technical performance skills tied to physical strength and agility. After George Duvivier trained himself to use two and three fingers for playing bass in his “solo work,” his increased flexibility to reach across wide intervals on the same string and adjacent strings enabled him “to play ridiculous tempos without getting tired” and to play “groups of notes you can’t possibly play with one [finger] because you can’t move the finger back [to the next position] in time.”
Thinking in Jazz Page 17
