George Russell likens the approaches described above to taking different kinds of trips along a river where every small town represents a chord and larger towns represent “tonic stations;” points at which two or more chords resolve—as in the case of ii–V chords resolving to I. In terms of emphasis, to continue this metaphor, Hawkins solos are like the trips of a local steamer with stops at each town along the way, whereas Young solos are like the trips of an express steamer that stops primarily at the larger towns. Like Hawkins solos, Coltrane solos follow the local steamer’s route, but between each town Coltrane jets off to visit neighboring towns; his side excursions ascend into the “chromatic sphere of each chord, [whereas] Hawkins stays on the ground close to the sound of” the chords on the primary route11
Additionally, artists discriminate among players on the basis of the emphasis each places on common elemental figures for solo construction. Drummers, for example, make different uses of the “rudiments: twenty-six elemental rhythmic patterns,” including different kinds of drum rolls and paradiddles derived from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “European military percussion techniques;” which have become a standard feature of drum pedagogy.12 Many jazz drummers like “Philly” Joe Jones and Alan Dawson draw their fundamental phrase components from the rudimental figures they feature in their teaching methods (KC). Others have “studied drum rolls and things;” but are not “paradiddle persons” to the same degree (LW). In fact, some “didn’t have the same kind of technical training” as their counterparts, who, in turn, regard them as never having “played anything that sounded like it came out of a book” (AT). Players have mixed rudiments with patterns of their own invention, and those specific to African American musical traditions, since the early days of New Orleans jazz.13
Their application of other melodic and rhythmic components of their vocabulary stores also distinguishes players.14 Gestures such as common chromatic blues figures in Kenny Dorham solos (ex. 5.3a), rhythmic tremolo patterns in Lee Morgan solos (ex. 5.3bb), and recurring cadential figures in Dorham and Parker solos (exx. 5.3c-d) are almost entirely absent from Booker Little solos. On the other hand, many of Little’s patterns are distinctive (exx. 5.3el-e2); and one in particular, although used by various improvisers, assumes a signature function in Little solos because he performs it so frequently (ex. 5.3f). Improvisers also differ in their pointed references to the signature patterns and compositions of other artists. Some exploit the practice minimally, others routinely. Charlie Parker is renowned for his quotations from a vast musical literature.15 Similarly, during a single performance of “Take the ‘A’ Train;” Betty Roché devotes different segments of her vocal improvisation to the scat styles of Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald, and whimsically quotes such tunes as “Pop Goes the Weasel.”16
These and the other features of language use described above pertain to improvisers generally. Dramatically shaping their precise application in some instances, however, are the particular characteristics of instruments and the instruments’ changing performance conventions. Developments within string bass solos in jazz provide a case in point. The late twenties trend toward larger groups coincided with replacing the tuba with the bass as the focal point of the rhythm section, causing many tuba players to switch instruments.17 As George Duvivier conjectures, however, few early tuba players “made a successful transition to the bass, because they had nothing to guide them from a wind instrument to a string instrument.” Consequently,
they made up for their deficiencies by slapping the bass, twirling it, and being active. Also, in the old days, the [bridge and therefore the] playing action of the strings on those basses was high, and the strings were a heavier gauge, so you worked harder when you played. This meant you also had less facility. If the action was high, you couldn’t play a lot of notes easily. You had to allow for the strings’ reactions after you played them. So, in the late thirties, you could almost count all the bass players on one hand that could influence anybody: [Jimmy] Blanton, [Milt] Hinton, Billy Taylor Sr., Wellman Braud. Bob Haggart was interesting.
As implied above, these developments reflect the musical background and training of early bass players and the design or set-up of the instrument itself. Musicians like John Lindsay used bowing techniques at times, but typically they plucked bass strings with the right index finger, cultivating a percussive style that was generally suited to the rhythmic aspects of jazz.18 Among the methods they favored were slap-bass techniques, whose combined percussive and tonal effects increased their instrument’s volume and complexity of sound. The slow playing action of the basses of that period meant also that bass solos were relatively spare. Contemporary bass players, when reflecting on the style of their New Orleans and early swing predecessors, characterize their articulation of pitches as “short, frumpy, and tuba-like” and their musical conceptions as “more rhythmic than melodic.”
Few bass players during the swing era were featured often as soloists, not even the noted artist Walter Page of Count Basie’s band. The first jazz bass virtuoso soloist was Jimmy Blanton of Duke Ellington’s band; he had cultivated a remarkable facility both with bowed (arco) and plucked (pizzicato) playing techniques, and his prowess overcame the difficulties of playing an instrument with high string action.19 George Duvivier recalls especially Blanton’s 1940 solo on “Jack the Bear.”20 At a time when many bass solos consisted largely of regular stepwise walking bass lines, Blanton agilely manipulated “bass note exercise-type figures” so that they “came out melodically.” The solo had a great impact on jazz bass players because no one had ever done anything comparable on the bass before. Duvivier, who had formerly patterned his improvisations after Slam Stewart, learned Blanton’s solo and performed it periodically as a “bass feature.”
Subsequently, bebop bass players like Oscar Pettiford cultivated this approach further by occasionally infusing the walking bass lines with more complex melodic phrases, akin to the approach of horn players (AD). In the forties, the technology of amplification and the replacement of the bass’s gut strings with steel strings reinforced the trend by allowing the production of instruments with lower bridges and faster action. This enabled Ray Brown and other great artists to improvise with ease and facility.
Over the past few decades, an increasing number of bass players have studied with classically trained teachers, developing great technical mastery over the bass and learning conventional bowing techniques. Moreover, in order to meet the considerable demands that jazz performance places upon endurance and flexibility, many have adopted the multiple-finger techniques of classical guitarists. Not surprisingly, they also invent their own.
Chance encounters among bass players produce revelations in this regard. At the recording session where they first met, George Duvivier and Scott LaFaro, who was “more or less the pioneer of facility on the bass;” expressed surprise at each other’s playing technique. LaFaro had thought that Duvivier played with two fingers, as did LaFaro himself. In fact, Duvivier was using one finger like Ray Brown, who managed “a lot of speed with it.” Never having observed two-finger playing before, Duvivier was equally fascinated by LaFaro. Over the years, players like Scott LaFaro, Charles Mingus, Paul Chambers, Eddie Gomez, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Richard Davis, and many others ultimately attained a level of virtuosity as improvisers comparable to that of other exemplary jazz instrumentalists.
Moreover, since the sixties, free jazz players like Charlie Haden, Jimmy Garrison, and Dave Holland have extended the expressive capacity of the bass by improvising simultaneous independent lines, making use of unconventional parts of the instrument’s body and strings to create new sounds, and exploring the possibilities of playing both high harmonics and double stopS.21 “The technique of bass players today is one hundred times what it was when I started out playing;” Art Farmer says. “Instead of playing walking bass, they can play all kinds of pitch clusters—millions of notes. It’s called the guitar style on bass.”
; For soloists whose instruments have the capacity for multipart invention, such as pianists, the relative activity produced at different levels of their performance’s general musical texture is an important trait of personal style. As mentioned earlier, in creating personal chord voicings, pianists combine decisions about pitch selection with decisions about such matters as utilizing the keyboard’s range, emphasizing right- or left-hand playing, and determining the relative lightness or heaviness of their parts. Individual considerations reflect alternative concepts associated with the lineage of the artist’s instrument. Early pianists like Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller “exploited the piano’s full potential” by utilizing the whole keyboard and giving equal weight to patterns played by both hands. Their improvisations invite descriptions like “dense, lush, polyphonic, and orchestral” (FH).
In much the same way, one can discern a variety of concepts within the general orchestral approach. In the early twentieth century, Scott Joplin and other individuals influenced by ragtime—and later, great stride pianists like James P. Johnson—maintained strict time with the left hand by “alternating pedal notes with chords in the ‘oompah’ manner of the marching band” and, with the right hand, overlaid this pattern with “syncopated ‘raggy’ figures, often derived from chordal hand positions, in the treble.”22 In the style of boogie-woogie, which developed in the twenties and enjoyed subsequent periods of resurgence, pianists like Pete Johnson commonly played eighth-note rhythmic ostinatos in the left hand, outlining a simple blues progression. The right hand improvised high repeating riffs, “single-line melodies and punctuated chords” performed tremolos or played adjacent pitches, creating dissonances and simulating blue notes.23
With the innovations of New Orleans jazz pianists like Jelly Roll Morton, the right-hand part took greater liberties in improvising around the piece’s theme and changing its phrasing in relation to the left hand’s beat, playing rhythms slightly ahead of or behind it. Of special importance was the increase in the music’s rhythmic swing achieved by subtly varying the long-short relationships among successive eighth notes. At the same time, the left-hand part became ever more linear, producing “walking tenths and octaves, and melodic runs.” During the transition from ragtime to early jazz piano, the trend toward a less heavy and more independent right-hand voice reflected in part the influence of the horn player’s formulation of solos and gradually provided the basis for an alternative concept to that of orchestral piano. Earl Hines developed a trumpet style of performance “in which he played octaves instead of full chords in the right hand;” employing crisp hornlike attacks and using “tremolos on long notes to simulate vibrato and/or a breath crescendo;”24
Continuing along this course, players like Teddy Wilson and Count Basie strove for a lighter sound in the right hand and commonly improvised single-note melodic runs. In response to the faster tempos of the swing period, many also adopted “single bass notes and simple chords” to lighten the left-hand part. Sometimes they would perform “broken tenths or seventh chords” in the earlier ragtime manner; at other times, they would use “walking tenths” as a technique “for connecting chord progressions.” Basie varied his accompaniment to include four-beat time-keeping patterns, as well as “quietly jabbed ... left-hand chords,” whose unpredictable rhythmic patterns anticipated later developments by bebop pianists. His spare improvised right hand and minimal use of his left hand also allowed a more prominent accompaniment to his solos by bassist Walter Page and drummer Jo Jones.
During the bebop period, pianists like Al Haig and Bud Powell freed the left hand from its conventional function of keeping time. Bud Powell improvised complex right-hand melodies in the fashion of Charlie Parker. With his left hand he varied his part with “ostinato octave leaps ... spare intervals such as tenths and sevenths; and occasional single notes in the bass moving in half notes.” Bebop pianists made use of other approaches carried over from the big band era as well. One, associated with Phil Moore and Milt Buckner, is the “‘locked hands’ block-chord style,” imitative of the chord voicings of saxophone sections. The pianists produced a thick musical texture by harmonizing each melody note “with a four-note chord in the right hand” and doubling the melody note an octave lower in the left hand. This procedure generates “nonharmonic tones in every voice [producing the effect of] ‘passing chords’ and ‘neighbor chords’ within the basic progression.” Another approach associated with virtuosos like Phineous Newborn consists of playing intricate single-note melodies in both hands simultaneously, one or more octaves apart.25
Jazz pianists of the sixties added a wealth of other techniques to those they inherited. Modal players like McCoy Tyner commonly featured rootless left-hand seventh-chord voicings, as they improvised melodies derived from pentatonic scales in the right hand.26 Free jazz pianists like Cecil Taylor availed themselves of more radical devices, at times creating music without reference to a steady beat. Their solos featured the use of “tone clusters, atonal motivic development, and unusual attacks (with the palm or fist, etc.);” plucking the strings inside the piano and exploiting figures “originating through ... physical gesture[s]” on the instrument.27
The general prototypes of hornlike or orchestral concepts of performance, along with the block chord approach, continue to distinguish the styles of some piano soloists even today (exx. 5.4). Players like Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Cecil Taylor carried orchestral characteristics across the idioms from swing to free jazz. As bass and drum accompaniment within groups increased in complexity during the fifties and sixties, soloists like Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock sometimes favored right-hand improvisations and entirely eliminated the role of the left hand. Of course, many pianists have mixed different concepts to create dynamic contrast. Kenny Kersey of Cootie Williams’s big band mixed elements of stride and swing: sometimes maintaining a steady beat in his left hand; at other times varying his performance with low pedal pitches, block chords, “unison playing with a single note in each hand;” and his own “angular” rhythms.28
Comparable distinctions that have evolved among drummers over time concern the difference between linear and vertical concepts. Drummers employ a linear concept when they play a figure one stroke at a time on the surface of a single drum component, or orchestrate a figure among the various voices of different components, weaving the voices into a linear wash of sound (ex. 5.5a). They favor a vertical concept when they strike various components simultaneously to articulate a complete rhythm figure or to emphasize and color particular portions of the figure, blending selected qualities of cymbals and drums as chording instruments blend pitches (ex. 5.5b).
The application of such concepts in relation to the larger formal considerations of solo construction and the timbral and melodic subtleties of drum set performance is also germane. Learners have had diverse models, from Sid Catlett to Gene Krupa to Max Roach to Elvin Jones to Tony Williams, upon which to pattern their own styles.29 Although some drummers primarily showcase their technical abilities during solos, many, inspired by early players like Sid Catlett, construct solos around the harmonic forms of pieces, creating a “rhythmic analogue to the harmonic progression” by employing different instruments and patterns.30 Or they concentrate on the motivic development of precise melodic or rhythmic figures, quoted, in some cases, from the tune.31
Max Roach elaborates on the skill that enables a drummer “to play the song” with the drum set. “I knew the harmony to ‘How High the Moon,’” he says, “so I would play a solo that had a certain design, using drum techniques such as rolls—single stick, double stick, closed, open, press. I would phrase so it sounded like I was dealing with the piece. If it was a four-bar sequence, I would play within the sequence, pause, then play again. Or, if it was an AABA tune,” he adds, “I would change timbres, dealing with the drum set a different way when I went to the B section so it almost sounded like I was playing the bridge.” This approach was so effective that other band members could follow Roach’s solos wit
hout having to count measures to keep track of the form, and Roach did not have to cue the band at the close of his solos.
Paul Wertico is insightful concerning melodic aspects of drum solos that complement formal considerations. He explains that, although drummers deal with limited tonal possibilities compared with other instrumentalists, they may have at their disposal “four different tuned drums;” whose tonal palette can be expanded by the hardness of the drum stroke (the harder the strike, the higher the pitch) and the placement of the stroke (the closer to the rim, the brighter the sound). Additionally, cymbals can produce different pitches and timbres depending on whether the strike is on the tip or the shoulder, that is, the raised portion, of the instrument. A drummer’s manipulation of such subtleties produces varied emotional effects, which Wertico views as analogous to those produced by the horn player’s manipulation of blue notes. “Like if you hit a higher note and it goes whang! it’s different than if you go boo! Just that whang! has a different cry to it,” Wertico emphasizes. Ultimately, the exploitation of the melodic capacity of the drum set depends on a player’s special control over the instruments and on the equipment itself. The sounds of contemporary drums are “dead” by comparison to the older masters’ instruments, which were, in Wertico’s opinion, “more ringing and tuned higher.” Their cymbals also had a rich, ringing quality. The instruments’ special qualities are discernible on such “masterpieces of melodicism” as Max Roach’s solos on the album Drums Unlimited.
Thinking in Jazz Page 20
