John Hasse.: Earlier you mentioned composing at the exact moment you're improvising. Could you elaborate a little?
Roland Hanna.: When you write the printed note on a page, that note is there. It is supposed to be there as long as the paper lasts, you know? It's supposed to be just so, just right. If you play a C7 chord on the piano, C E G B-flat, you hear the notes and they sound — ping. If a band plays a C7 chord, it's got to be voiced a certain way. If it's not voiced a certain way, it's not going to get a quality. And in order to learn what quality you want, you have to work a long time listening, trying to understand how the instruments play the notes, what kind of overtones they give, and how the notes work together. So it's the same thing when you're playing spontaneously at the moment, when you're actually performing; you have to hear in your mind the notes that you want to perform. You have to know exactly what sounds you want in a given structural composition or song. The notes develop—your mind is constantly working, thinking of how you want these notes to move—and the notes develop and you begin to hear things that actually create mental images or pictures or whatever. And if you have developed yourself to the point where you are playing everything you hear, then the music starts to flow and your playing makes logical sense to someone listening. The tradition I was talking about is that with Charlie Parker you sense and you hear and you know—after many repeated listenings, of course, because everyone who plays music doesn't hear it the same way but develop so that it all goes in the same direction—you hear in listening to someone like Charlie Parker that the sounds he makes have been well-coordinated in his mind before he's produced them. And having as many avenues of movement as he has through all the years of practicing and working and listening to himself, he's able to move through all the channels of music that he makes. This tradition, again, that I'm talking about is in the sense of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms— any of the great classical, romantic, baroque, impressionistic, or modern composers. It's in that tradition because the composer who sits down to write music has to hear in his mind before he puts it on the paper exactly what he wants. He has an advantage over the musician who's improvising because he has time to correct the notes if they aren't exactly what he hears in his mind. You see—he's got all the time in the world to put the notes down and then change them. If it's an F he hears, and then he reworks the chord or the sound of the whatever and the F isn't right for that instrument, he can change it to make it right. Whereas the improviser must be able to hear that right then and there, and strive to reach the same point that the composer or arranger or orchestrator is working for and has the time to work for.
J.H.: So it's a lot more than having a good ear; it's being able to hear it in your mind—hear it ahead of time. It's kind of a good ear in advance.
R.H.: Much more. It's like having a thought or an idea, having no words for the idea, and then taking your time and letting the thought come through, evolve, so that it comes through coherently.