Of course, even among members of the same generation, students form different views of their tradition. Some, in especially diverse jazz communities, are exposed to a wide range of styles at sessions attended sometimes by artists of four music generations. But the experience of others is more limited. Growing up in Nashville with minimal exposure to jazz musicians, Doc Cheatham first learned about jazz through Paul Whiteman and Ted Lewis recordings. He expanded his horizon through hearing such traveling artists as Johnny Dunn and Louis Smith, but it was with his move to Chicago in the mid-twenties that the greatest revelation came to him. There, he heard all the important musicians from New Orleans and understood “how corny” some of his own early influences—like Whiteman—had been. Cheatham subsequently adopted Louis Armstrong as his principal mentor.
Similarly, Melba Liston only became aware of bebop after she joined Dizzy Gillespie’s band in New York City in 1949. The first inkling Fred Hersch had that there were, in fact, different jazz idioms was during his college years when, at another musician’s recommendation, he “read LeRoi Jones’s [Amiri Baraka’s] Black Music.” The book introduced him to “free jazz and the spirituality aspect of the music” and led him to performers such as Pharaoh Sanders, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, and Cecil Taylor.
Artists grounded in the jazz mainstream can find new styles to be bewildering at first. Raised in a little town in California, the very young John McNeil stumbled upon jazz through a chance viewing of a televised performance by Louis Armstrong. The program so inspired him that he decided to become a jazz trumpeter and began learning to play by listening to Armstrong recordings. At sixteen, McNeil joined a territory band in northern California, where he was immediately confronted by a trumpet player in his twenties who urged him to consider “Miles Davis or someone more hip.”
Although McNeil had never heard of Davis, he followed the trumpeter’s advice and sought out Davis recordings. It was by chance that he bought the album E.S.P’, featuring especially adventurous performances by Davis. With Louis Armstrong as his chief point of reference, McNeil judged E.S.P’ to be “Martian music!” Because the older player had said it would be good for him, and despite the little sense he could make of it, he listened to the record “once or twice every day after schoo!:” One thing led to another. McNeil asked for other suggestions and “borrowed somebody’s Down Beat.” After reading about different trumpet players, he bought albums he found to be more accessible—those by such players as Clark Terry, Freddie Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Chet Baker, and Nat Adderley. McNeil recollects that he expanded his “knowledge of jazz three thousand percent” in the space of a single year.
Other students find that the reorientation required by encountering new idioms is as “natural” as it is exciting. Tommy Flanagan had been listening to Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum when he first heard Coleman Hawkins records with such pianists as Hank Jones and Thelonious Monk and started building his interest in “more modem things.” In a sense, Tatum had prepared Flanagan for the “big difference” that distinguished one style from another. “It was good to hear someone else like Bud [Powell] playing logically but on another scale. Bud had his own kind of energy going that matched Bird and Diz.” Under the influence of peers like Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris similarly copied boogie-woogie and swing masters until he discovered bebop innovators Parker, Powell, and Monk and turned his attention to their styles.
As in cases cited above, many learners complete a successful apprenticeship with a proponent of an established idiom, then become enticed by the performance practices introduced by emerging personalities. “Young kids are usually anxious to learn whatever is happening now, whatever the latest thing is;” and to spread the word within their early circles (AF). Conversely, students who cultivate their skills during a new performance movement eventually become interested in earlier styles. Years after Art Farmer learned the language of bebop from Gillespie and Parker, whose “ideas seemed more interesting and fantastic than any I had heard up to that time,” Farmer realized that he “had not given the older players the respect that was due them” and began seriously studying Louis Armstrong’s records. He came to appreciate that “Louis was the master. In all the years since Armstrong;” Farmer maintains, “there has not been anybody who has played any more or any better than him.”
Kenny Washington’s study of drummers was also “backwards historically.” He began by imitating Max Roach, “Philly” Joe Jones, and Arthur Taylor, artists who were in the public eye when he was learning. Later, he methodically perused recordings by early drummers like Shadow Wilson and Big Sid Catlett. “I learned something new from everybody,” Washington says. The quest to understand their successive heroes commonly leads learners through a series of formal study binges. Keith Copeland remembers an “Art Blakey period” when he focused on Blakey’s albums with the Jazz Messengers, a “Max Roach period” when he collected every album by Roach’s groups, and an “Elvin Jones period” when he reviewed all the albums on which Jones had performed as a member of John Coltrane’s historic quartet. Implementing comparable programs, youngsters not only sample the precise vocabulary patterns of each idol, but they isolate and analyze the wide-ranging performance traits and musical concepts that make up an idol’s improvisational style.
As their level of sophistication advances, students grasp the multitude of attributes comprising each artist’s “musical personality,” from the most specific features of timbre and melody construction to the most general issues concerning musical texture and tune treatment. They learn, moreover, to interpret such matters within the changing stream of their music’s historical conventions and come to value the processes by which individuals establish their own identities through interacting with peers and predecessors alike. “It helps your playing to have some tradition behind you;” Washington states. “To understand Tony Williams, you ought to know ‘Philly’ Joe Jones and Sid Catlett. It’s the same with drummers as with other instrumentalists. Unless you understand James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, you don’t really understand Ahmad Jamal, or Bud Powell, or Herbie Hancock;”
Features of Musical Personality as Models
An idol’s personal sound is commonly the precise object of imitation for learners. It is a clearly discernible, all-encompassing marker of an individual artist’s identity. Tommy Turrentine considers it to be the “one way you can tell an instrumentalist right away when he solos:” Chuck Israels and his high school friends tested each other’s sensitivity to these matters through musical games. Although Steve Kuhn had a more “highly developed ear for recognizing different jazz tunes from records, I had a good ear for timbre and inflection and the personal marks of the player,” Israels observes, “and I could always recognize the soloists.”
Various elements contribute to an artist’s sound profile, timbre being the most obvious. Charlie Parker’s tone quality had a “hard, brittle edge, rich in upper partials,” which was very different from the “sweetness produced by older alto saxophone players like Johnny Hodges or Benny Carter.” Vibrato is another essential characteristic of style. Parker’s vibrato was “narrow and slow” compared to that of Lester Young.4 Representing similar distinctions, Coleman Hawkins performed tenor saxophone with a “rich, guttural tone” and a “wide, fast vibrato,” whereas Young performed the same instrument with “a light tone and a slower vibrato.”5 Musical texture comprises an integral part of the timbre of players whose instruments have the capacity for multipart performance, a subject discussed later in this section.
An artist’s articulation of pitches with various qualities of hardness or softness to produce alternately focused or diffused sounds similarly personalizes timbre. Clifford Brown periodically compresses the air stream behind his tongue, bottling up his sound to create dramatic tension and unique timbral effects, before releasing the air into the mouthpiece with a “slap-tongue” attack of varied intensity.6 For some instrumentalists, the development of what musicians call touch is a pertinent issue
. The “very personal sound that drummers produce” rests not only in the “choice of sticks and choice of tips, but also in the hands, in the execution, and in the amount of force used” (KC). Pianists like Thelonious Monk express their “immediately recognizable sound [and] their whole attitude about their music just through the way they touch the keyboard” (JH).
Concern for comparable issues leads aspiring singers to copy the individual diction and the “shaping” of words they notice in their idols. “Some people sing love so differently—luuv or lahv,” Carmen Lundy observes. “There are different ways of saying words like cry. You can say cryie or crahy. Also, singers may place their emphasis on different words in the same song;” shaping them, at times, to their own improvised melodies. Lundy has noticed that individuals exploit their vocal range differently in this respect. Virtuosos like Sarah Vaughan can create phrases that leap over their entire range “in only two bars:” Freeing themselves from the constraints of delivering song texts, singers turn to scat performance to create abstract improvisations as complex as those of instrumentalists. Choice of scat syllables is yet “another thing you can get from singers;” Lundy points out. Scat vocables serve as devices for manipulating the voice as an instrument and molding sounds, allowing -singers to explore diverse features of pitch articulation, coloration, and resonance. Some syllables enable them to imitate singular qualities of different instruments, whereas other syllables bring out the unique sounds that the individual vocalist develops as signature traits. “Everybody has their little things;” Lundy continues.
Certain scat singers use the syllable dwee a lot. Ella Fitzgerald doesn’t really use a lot of dwee. She uses a little more bee-bop-bop-bah-ooo-bee-doo-bee. She uses more of the bee and dee sounds. But then I came to listen to Betty Carter, and she would use more of the louie-ooie-la-la-la, like it was more of a tongue thing with her. Sarah Vaughan would be shoo-bee-oo-bee shoo-doo-shoo-bee-ooo-bee. She had more of this shoo-eee-bee-eee sound. Al Jarreau had another thing; he was more rhythmic with his. Also, it would be more a sound than it was a note corning out at times. It was like ooo-ah-ah-ah.
Mastering the subtle qualities of sound associated with different syllables allows singers to perform with new shades of expression just as mastering the subtleties of personal timbre develops the instrumentalist’s sound.
Pitch inflections like scoops and more extensive, embellishing microtonal shapes can be equally distinct. Booker Little tended to scoop up to pitches for nuance, whereas Lee Morgan liked to articulate pitches at their normal level, then flatten their sound slightly as if he were sighing. Miles Davis transformed the character of his instrument with such a variety of inflections that “at times he didn’t even sound like he was playing a trumpet. It was just the sound of his voice” (LH). Musicians ultimately imbue their phrases with varying amounts of vocalized expression. Since the free jazz movement especially, some combine traditional vocabulary with a personalized repertory of extended instrumental techniques such as multiphonics, in which improvisers perform cries made up of complex pitch clusters.
The many components of sound serve both as primary vehicles for affective performance and as signature traits. “Sound itself has a power we’re turned on or off by,” Harold Ousley says, expressing what he learned in the course of emulating Gene Ammons’s ballad style. “A screech like scraping a skillet turns us off; it can get on your nerves. But a fantastic sound, a beautiful sound, so mellow and pleasant, like Gene Ammons’s sound, is something wonderful.”
Finding words to describe musical subtleties like tone color and affect is a challenge that the verbally agile and creative jazz musician meets with the descriptive language of personality and emotion found in poetry. Ella Fitzgerald “sounds so young, having that coquettish, little-girlish quality,” whereas Billie Holiday has “that soulful, worldly quality” (RB). Within the hard bop school, trumpeter Clifford Brown’s “sheer exuberance” distinguishes his performances; Lee Morgan has “sassiness,” and Booker Little a “bittersweet” quality. Clark Terry varies “fiery” passages with others that are as often “playful, witty, and humorous.” Miles Davis’s “tone quality and moods changed constantly—on one note and from note to note—and he sounded almost like a different guy at times” (JMc).
John Coltrane solos, on the other hand, are consistently intense, if not melancholy. To Lonnie Hillyer, Coltrane “sounded a lot like he was crying when he played, and it took some getting used to at first.” Youngsters model their own sounds not only upon those they find attractive but on those whose moods they, too, wish to evoke in performance. “In the beginning;” Arthur Rhames “copied B. B. King” when Rhames’s own music was “simply an expression of my introvertedness and pathetic feelings. I wanted to make people sad, to make them cry from hearing that twangy blues guitar.”
Personal Sound in Relation to Other Traits
In addition to developing a palette of skills that enhance the musician’s sound, artists can develop a myriad of other stylistic traits to reflect their individual visions as interpreters and creators of music. For example, improvisers treat fundamental musical elements of phrase formulation in personal ways. Even if two drummers perform the same time-keeping pattern, experts can identify them by the subtle differences in their “placement of quarter notes in relation to the main beat;” that is, in their rhythmic phrasing (MR). Rhythmic values also matter. Horn players like Sonny Stitt invent relatively uniform phrases, whereas Sonny Rollins favors greater variety. “He likes to play with the time:” Over a fast beat, he may begin by improvising “slow, elongated phrases or [by] sustain[ing] a note over two or three bars before getting into faster playing” (HO).
Soloists also differ in their predispositions toward symmetrical or asymmetrical divisions of the beat. Despite the fact that Fats Navarro and Dizzy Gillespie “were working in the same direction,” their approaches to rhythm remained distinct in certain respects (BH). According to Lonnie Hillyer, Navarro “played so cleanly and evenly, with a lot of eighth notes and sixteenth notes, that you can write his things down easily. He was like a painter who proceeds carefully, one stroke at a time.” On the other hand, Hillyer continues, Gillespie is “like a painter who takes a can of paint and just throws the whole thing at a canvas and tries to make something out of it, playing with great daring in between the spaces of time and sound.” Barry Harris adds a humorous twist to his description of a “crammer.” He explains, “Dizzy can take a phrase that you never thought could be played in a certain space, and he’ll just cram it in there and make it work beautifully” (ex. 5.1).
Accentuation and articulation are equally important to phrasing. Charlie Parker had a penchant for accenting the highest pitch within any stream of pitches, creating “a lively, unpredictable syncopated rhythm.” He also was known for grouping “notes into subphrases that move from the weak to strong part of the beat:” His practices during slow pieces were especially varied, ranging from long slurred passages to phrases in which articulation is varied with distinctive finesse.7 Some performers display a predilection for slurring or tonguing pitches. Clifford Brown often tongued pitches individually, at times applying the technique to create complex rhythmic patterns with a single pitch, as if drumming with the trumpet. Lee Morgan absorbed and personalized this tonguing technique, but Booker Little tended to avoid it, preferring to articulate pitches lightly or to tie them together by slurring them. Don Sickler’s observation that the great players with whom he has collaborated as a publisher do not always recognize his transcriptions of their solos until articulation and phrasing marks have been added underscores the importance of these elements of musical style.
Characteristic phrase lengths also distinguish performers. Benny Carter’s innovative melodies reveal a “different way of phrasing stuff” in comparison to the melodic phrasing of other swing players. “He was more like the guys who eventually ended up playing bebop. He flowed. He kept moving all the time” (LD). Since the free jazz period especially, the cultiva
tion of circular breathing techniques has enabled some horn players to perform extraordinarily long phrases without breaking their flow. Singers periodically make use of comparable techniques. It was a gratifying moment for one puzzled student when he finally figured out Al Jarreau’s unusual method “of alternately inhaling and exhaling as he sings” to produce continuous call and response patterns.
Also integral to artists’ personal traits or concepts is their handling of melody and harmony. Although soloists commonly mix vertical and horizontal musical elements in their conceptions, some may favor a vertical concept, emphasizing chord arpeggiations and interpreting a progression’s individual chords faithfully, “articulat[ing] each chord that comes up” with selected pitches.8 Particular features in the solos from the early performances of Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane epitomize such practices within the swing and hard bop idioms respectively (exx. 5.2al-a2). Other performers may favor a horizontal concept, which they view as providing greater “freedom of movement ... rhythmically and in the line.”9 Their creations display a high degree of scale patterning or “especially lyrical” melodies (HO).
Horizontal playing is less concerned with describing each chord and incorporating the features of chord changes in the formulation of melodies, although it does rely on progression as a general guide. Its particular mix of chord and non-chord tones is often harmonically ambiguous or neutral, neither confirming nor opposing the underlying structure.10 Passages from Lester Young’s performances demonstrate the concept. His style “wasn’t a vertical style with a lot of runs, but was more like taking a phrase and laying it across the changes. His phrases just seemed to float on top of the chords, and he might use the same chord for two bars and not even double up on it—maybe just play sustained notes” (HO) (exx. 5.2bl-b2). As part of their trademarks, some performers favor inside or outside playing, designating the degree to which improvised melodies emphasize chord tones or non-chord tones.
Thinking in Jazz Page 19
