by David Schiff
A different way of looking at the experiential dualism of improvising would be to see it as a mixture of two cultural forms. Jazz improvisers are simultaneously playing the blues, even when the chord changes are by Richard Rodgers, and employing a technique that Renaissance and baroque musicians termed “divisions,” using shorter, faster subdivisions of the beat and thereby doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the speed of the original melody. They are, as the saying goes, telling a story (that's the blues side), and at the same time they have to play the right notes. Blues playing, stemming from the call-and-response of the bluesman and his guitar, is itself dualistic; improvising, according to Lonnie Hillyer, “is really like a guy having a conversation with him-self.”34 The dialogue can appear in phrasing, in contrasts in register that simulate polyphony within a single line, and also through intertextual quotations.
At the same time, though, most jazz performers conceptualize a piece in terms of its harmonic progression, the essential framework for improvisation. In the blues, and in most popular tunes, the harmony changes once or twice per bar. In many places in “Koko,” Parker plays eighth notes against a single harmony from “Cherokee.” This kind of melodic line resembles the nonstop arabesque of the D major prelude from Book I of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, where the right hand plays sixteenth notes and the harmony changes every two beats. Organists of Bach's time, and even today, were taught to improvise pieces like this following the principles of Renaissance polyphony (called either sixteenth-century or species counterpoint today) and the baroque basso continuo. The first approach, which emphasizes stepwise motion, might be termed horizontal, the second, which emphasizes clear definition of the harmony, is more vertical. Both concepts taught musicians how to combine consonant and dissonant notes, notes that were part of the harmony and certain notes that were not, into a fluent melodic line.35
In the opening bars of Parker's solo the continuous eighth notes outline a melodic curve down an octave from B and then jump back up. Parker placed a dissonance on the downbeat of each bar, and in the first two bars he resolved the dissonance on the third beat, connecting dissonance and resolution by playing a “double neighbor” figure, playing the notes just above and below the resolution. Bach more likely would have put the consonances on the strongest beat, but the pattern of tension and release is the same. In the third bar, though, Parker begins on a dissonant note, the same B now sounded against an f minor harmony, and then jumps up an octave and then ascends to an even more dissonant note, G. Bach might not have approved at first, but Parker was using a sanctioned technique, anticipating the next harmony, B7, in which the pitch B is perfectly consonant by Bach standards and the G sounds like an augmented fifth, legitimate by bop standards.
I'm pointing out the theoretical basis of jazz improvisation because it offers a way of analyzing not just the notes of a solo but its style and strategies, and also to demystify the lines between jazz and classical musicians. Jazz theory differs from classical theory in vocabulary but not in grammar. Classically trained musicians, especially keyboard players, can learn all they need to know about choosing notes for an improvisation from the repertory they play (from Bach and Chopin in particular) as well as from theory courses. If they can't jam it's not a problem of theory illiteracy or not being able to make music in the moment. It's a question, rather, of cultural illiteracy; they just need to spend some serious time, as jazz players do, with the blues. They need to study Sonny Rollins as closely as they study Mozart.
When classical players ask me where to begin, though, I usually suggest Kind of Blue. With more than five million copies sold, Kind of Blue is probably in your collection, and there is a published transcription of the entire album.36 I have been listening to it (on at least seven different well-worn copies) with undiminished pleasure for fifty years. Let's concentrate on the second track, “Freddie Freeloader.”
Bill Evans (the pianist on all the tracks aside from “Freddie”) compared the premise of the album to “a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous.”37 Davis and Evans seem to have shaped the “Japanese” sensibility of the album together in advance and without much warning to the others. Conditions, therefore, mixed the familiar and the unexpected. None of the solos paraphrases a familiar melody. They are all supermelodies.
A twelve-bar blues in B Freddie” was the first track to be recorded for the album and also its most conventional tune, yet it provoked five extraordinary solos by (in order) Wynton Kelly, piano; Miles Davis, trumpet; John Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cannonball Adderley, alto saxophone; and Paul Chambers, bass. (Drummer Jimmy Cobb did not solo.) The head is a call-and-response blues, a kind of updated “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” with trumpet and saxes playing a simple two-note motive, a descending whole step, and the piano responding more casually. The chord changes are simple, avoiding boppish interpolations of enriched harmonies. The only surprise comes in the last two bars, where an A7 takes the place of the expected B or turnaround harmonies. The progression is:
B7 (four bars);
E7 (two bars), B 7 (two bars);
F7 (one bar), E 7 (one bar); A 7 (two bars).
The head divides these twelve bars into two unequal sections. In the first eight bars the melodic instruments play the two-note theme in parallel first inversion triads, G minor and F minor over the B 7 harmony; C minor and B minor over the E 7 harmony. In the last four bars the melody moves in half steps rather than whole steps, and instead of playing mellow triads the trio plays the bare, acidic harmony of a tritone. The head thus divides asymmetrically between passivity and agitation. Despite its laid-back quality, the opening two-note—or, really, two-chord—theme puts the modal side of Kind of Blue right on the table by interpreting a B7 harmony as a six-note scale: F-G-A-B-C-D (F Dorian without the seventh). Moreover, the two triads of the theme are deceptively consonant sounding. Heard in terms of the B 7 harmony, each triad contains a dissonant note: the G of the first chord is the thirteenth; the C of the second is the ninth. Each soloist responds to the theme with a precise consideration of its special qualities yet in a distinctive voice:
Wynton Kelly (four choruses). Kelly's solo emphasizes the blues roots of the head. Its opening bars announce the gospel-tinged style of “hard bop funky regression” it could be played on a Hammond B3, and, gospel-style, it builds to a climactic shout chorus that emphasizes the defining notes of the blues scale, flat third, flat fifth, and flat seventh. Kelly, however, constantly keeps the melodic identity of the head in the foreground even as he leads it into his own stylistic territory. He ornaments the two-note G-F motive with neighbor tones and passing tones and dramatizes the half-step motive of the closing four bars through rhythmic displacement. Kelly also subtly honors the modal concept of the piece. When he first comes to the A 7 chord he plays a B arpeggio over it, turning the tonic triad into a Lydian mode upper extension. In his second chorus he uses a similar Lydian harmony over the E 7 chord and follows up this modernistic touch with an aptly Parkeresque flourish. Kelly's trump card, however, is what classical musicians call a “rocket” figure, a rising arpeggio, first heard here as an upbeat to the last phrase of the first chorus. It recurs in varied form four times more, pushing the spirit of the solo ever higher toward its climactic shout.
Miles Davis (six choruses). With Davis's entrance the style suddenly swerves from Ray Charles to Erik Satie. He plays short Gymnopédie-esque phrases, moving in small intervals that are punctuated with spacious rests. This would simply sound tentative if the pitches were not so carefully chosen to invoke the head. Davis emphasizes the two dissonant pitches of the opening chordal motive, G and C, stretching out the melodic resolution of the G to F over eight bars. Where Kelly brought out the chromatic tension of the last four bars, Davis seems at first to bury it in a chantlike oscillation that ends in a bop-harmony rocket, the first sign of tension beneath the calm surface. Gradually Davis turns Kelly's strategy inside out so that by his last chorus, with its apogee on a high D, he is jus
t as down home as his pianist.
John Coltrane (six choruses). Shifting the emotional balance from passive to active, Coltrane launches his solo with three upward flourishes, each time cresting on the high C, the dissonant element in the second chord of the head motive. This gesture announces a tone of ecstatic celebration magnified through all six choruses. The majority of Coltrane's phrases are two-bar arabesques describing a convex melodic curve or its concave inversion. These long phrases are the temporal equivalent of Coltrane's huge sound; both make his solo the center of gravity of the whole track. Coltrane sets off most of his melodic flights with a rest, springing off the downbeat as if it were a diving board. This mannerism serves to shape the whole solo when its final chorus begins assertively right on the beat. His repeated high Bs here resolve the high Cs that opened the solo.
Julian “Cannonball” Adderley (five choruses). Where Coltrane's solo was monumental, Adderley's is sly and sinuous. Unpredictable in the length and character of his phrases, Adderley pulls the music back toward classic free-associational bebop with fluent Parker licks and intertextual stylistic allusions.38 Adderley underscores the sense of unrestricted freedom by eliding most of his phrases over the bar lines, anticipating chord changes or building a melodic curve around them rather than rebounding off a new harmony. He saves his most virtuosic passagework for the furious close, which nevertheless highlights the pitches E, D, and D, which imparted a tritonic sting to the cadence of the head.
Paul Chambers (two choruses). Less a solo than a necessary transition back to the mood of the head after such a far-flung journey, Chambers's two choruses reinstate two structural pillars, the simple blues progression and the call-and-response phrase format, through a simple dialogue of walking bass quarter notes and ornamental guitarlike triplet eighths.
Each of these supermelodies shapes thematic, stylistic, expressive, tonal, and rhythmic ideas. Why not just call them melodies? I think they are best thought of as melodies raised to a higher power. They all refer in some way to the original head, so that they are reflective rather than merely assertive, lunar rather than solar. Because they build on an existing structure, though, they are also much less repetitive; the head established its identity by stating the two-note motive five times; none of the solos repeats a single phrase.
Borrowing the terminology of Roland Barthes, we might say that a tune is “readerly” while a supermelody is “writerly.” A tune presents a powerfully compelling statement, while a supermelody mirrors our own strategies for grasping and interpreting that statement. Supermelodies enact listening as spontaneous composition; ruminating in ever-widening circles, they are interpretations caught in the act of becoming texts.
OUTRO: A FEW SIMPLE SONGS
We might divide successful twentieth-century classical melodies between simple songs (like “a Simple Song” from Leonard Bernstein's Mass) and cosmic melodies, not excluding the possibility that the simple can also be cosmic and vice versa. (Ellington proves both points with his simple song “Come Sunday” and his cosmic melody “Heaven.”) The simplifying side of twentieth-century classical music fell into obscurity in the midcentury narrative of ever-increasing complexity. In the past twenty years, though, performers and scholars have shown more respect for the melodic gifts of composers like Prokofiev and Barber and have also paid more attention to the ideology-based simplifications of Hanns Eisler and his American disciples Aaron Copland and Mark Blitzstein, but there is still a tendency to frame any melodic simplicity as retrogressive or commercial. Two of the most powerful musical responses to the Second World War demonstrate the expressive power of a good, simple tune: Kurt Weill's “Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib?” (words by Brecht) and Francis Poulenc's “C” (words by Louis Aragon). The songs are in the cabaret styles, of, respectively, pre-Hitler Berlin and wartime Paris. The Weill song harkens back to “Surabaya Johnny” and even further back to Schumann's “Die beiden Grenadiere,” while stylistically Poulenc's is just a few steps away from “Autumn Leaves” (or “Les feuilles mortes,” music by Joseph Kosma, words by Jacques Prévert, first recorded in 1945).
The Brecht/Weill song, a catalogue of the booty a German soldier has sent his wife from the plundered capitals of Prague, Oslo, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and Bucharest, is strophic, with a repeated three-phrase AAB section in b minor followed by a concluding restatement of A in the major that reports her final gift, a widow's veil sent from the Russian front. The tune follows the Tin Pan Alley principles of melodic writing in terms of range, repetition, and catchiness, but its phrases extend beyond the expected eight bars to a discomfortingly odd eleven, with a subtle alienation effect. The A phrases contain a rising question phrase, harmonized with just two chords, b minor and a bluesy G7, followed by a falling answer where the accented notes of the melody form clichéd appoggiatura dissonances against sentimental secondary dominant harmonies the soldier's wife might have heard on the radio. The final stanza forecasts a Russian victory (the song was probably written in 1943) and celebrates the soldier's death with an ironic turn to major. The grimly reassuring harmony suggests that the widow arrived at the soldier's funeral decked out in all her ill-gotten gifts.
“C” describes the flight of Frenchmen southward, out of the path of Nazi occupation, through a series of images of an imagined past (the castle of a mad duke) and the newsreel present (overturned cars and defused weapons), held together by the French sound “C” (say). Like the Weill, it exploits a contrast between minor and major and the power of a refrain. The most memorably café-style phrase, drifting from D major to C major, appears twice, first with the idealized imagery of an eternal fiancée dancing in a meadow, and then with a picture of impotent weaponry and tears that cannot be rubbed away. Poulenc sets the eight-syllable lines with great finesse so that the final syllables, all of them pronounced “C,” toll like bells heard in the distance.
Both the Weill and Poulenc songs subtly camouflage their artistry and their seriousness. They could easily be programmed along with other hits of the war years such as Frank Loesser's “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year” or Ellington's “I'm Beginning to See the Light.” Or they could share the stage with heavier music of the time, like the “Lamentation” from Bernstein's Jeremiah Symphony or Britten's settings of the Holy Sonnets by John Donne. If you played Poulenc's song very, very slowly it would begin to sound like a contemporaneous simple melody that responded to the same events in a less vernacular manner, the final movement from Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, “Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus.” Both composers employed a chordal vocabulary not far from what you can find in Ellington or Cole Porter. But the tempo makes all the difference. In performance Messiaen's thirty-three four-beat bars last just over seven minutes. At that pace (each beat lasting five seconds), the conventional sequential and symmetrical structure of the melody melts into the sublime and an added E major sixth chord, usually associated with elevator music, sounds like the voice of God.
CHAPTER 4
“Satin Doll”: Harmony
I had a kind of harmony inside me, which is part of my race, but I needed harmony that has no race at all but is universal.
—Duke Ellington
The kaleidoscope blending and interchanging of twelve semitones within the three-mirror tube of Taste, Emotion and Intention—the essential feature of the harmony of to-day.
The harmony of to-day, and not for long, for all signs presage a revolution, and a next step toward that “eternal harmony.” Let us again call to mind, that in this latter the gradation of the octave is infinite, and let us strive to draw nearer to infinitude.
—Ferruccio Busoni
We thus no longer find ourselves in the framework of classic tonality in the scholastic sense of the word. It is not we who have created this state of affairs, and it is not our fault if we find ourselves confronted with a new logic of music that would have appeared unthinkable to the masters of the past. And this new logic has opened our eyes to riches whose exist
ence we never suspected.
—Igor Stravinsky
INTRO: HOW JAZZ TAUGHT ME HARMONY (AND EVEN MADE ME LOVE IT): A SHORT CONFESSIONAL
Harmony is the most academically discussed and least generally understood element in twentieth-century music and, so far, twenty-first-century music as well. Despite the persistent myth of harmonic progress, the infinite expansion of harmonic resources forecast by Busoni and others somewhere along the line turned into a contracting black hole. Today most composers, from neotonalists to microtonalists, work in the harmonic dark, and music theorists, still hooked on Brahms, offer little in the way of ideas to elucidate most of the music from Debussy to Radiohead. The dark, I have found, is sometimes the best place to be, but I only began to see the light through a belated discovery of jazz harmony.
In 1965 the Pulitzer Prize board, headed by the president of Columbia University, overturned the recommendation of the music jury and refused to honor Ellington with the prize. In 1967, however, Columbia honored me with a Kellett Fellowship for two years of study at Cambridge, and in 1973 Columbia belatedly granted Ellington an honorary doctorate. At Clare College, as at Columbia, I studied English literature while surrounding myself with musically stimulating friends, in particular the composers Roger Smalley and Tim Souster, who introduced me to the music of Messiaen and Stockhausen. England had suddenly become the hot spot of new music; Boulez was conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Beatles even put Stockhausen's face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. In London I heard Boulez conduct Pelléas and Wozzeck and Stockhausen's Gruppen and also attended the London premiere of Elliott Carter's Piano Concerto. I spent any spare money on buying contemporary scores, which were much cheaper in England than back home. Though I didn't pay much attention to the rising star on the British rock scene, Jimi Hendrix, I did go to see Cecil Taylor play a kind of jazz that emptied the hall in about ten minutes. I loved that power to offend; I was in my hard-core avant-garde phase. In the spring of 1970 Tim, Roger, Peter Britton, and I even gave the Cambridge premiere of Terry Riley's Keyboard Studies.
