Thinking in Jazz - "A Very Structured Thing: Jazz Compositions as Vehicles for Improvisation" [From the Archives]

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Jazz is not just, "Well, man, this is what I feel like playing." It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.”

—Wynton Marsalis

“Jazz tunes are great vehicles. They are forms that can be used and reused. Their implications are infinite.”

—Lee Konitz

Have you ever noticed that Jazz musicians rarely look at the audience while they are performing?

Unless they are reading music, they’re usually staring at something, looking fixedly or vacantly away with their eyes wide open.

As a drummer, my vantage point was to be seated with the audience directly ahead, except I was usually staring over my left shoulder. A front line Jazz musician in a combo often looks down at the floor while the other horns are soloing or stands to the side and looks directly at the soloist. The bassist is looking at the pianist’s left hand [to follow the chord changes] and then away to gaze at the floor [to think about how to frame the changes with the best choice of “bottom notes”]; the pianist is looking up at the soloist while comping the chords [to better lead the soloist with the next chord]. And to top it all off, the soloist is usually playing with eyes that are tightly shut.

As legendary alto saxophonist Bud Shank once said: “The most important thing you need for this music is concentration.”

The reason all of these musicians are focused away from the audience is because they do not want to be distracted from thinking about what’s being played or about what they are going to play next. There’s an immense amount of listening going on all the time.

One night while digging Howard Rumsey’s All-Stars at the Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach, CA, I asked trombonist Frank Rosolino why he was looking down and away while Bob Cooper played his tenor saxophone solo he said: “I’m listening to what he’s doing with the melody and the chord progressions during his solo. But I gotta use a slide and a mouthpiece instead of a reed and keypads and I play in bass clef and not in treble clef! It all goes by so fast and there’s a lot to pay attention to and to think about.”

The iconic pianist George Shearing once explained that: “The hardest thing about this music is getting from the head to the hands.”

Although he meant it metaphorically, the masterful John Coltrane once likened not paying attention and losing one’s way in Thelonious Monk’s music “... to stepping into an empty elevator shaft.”

Why all the concentration?

What’s all this thinking about?

Perhaps the following excerpts from Paul F. Berliner’s book very aptly named Thing in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation can offer some explanation as to what’s going on in the musician’s mind while Jazz is in the making.

“Composed pieces or tunes, consisting of a melody and an accompanying harmonic progression, have provided the structure for improvisations throughout most of the history of jazz. Enjoying favor to varying degrees from one period to the next, spirituals, marches, rags, and popular songs have all contributed to the artists' repertory of established compositions or standards. Performers commonly refer to the melody or theme as the head, and to the progression as chord changes or simply changes. It has become the convention for musicians to perform the melody and its accompaniment at the opening and closing of a piece's performance. In between, they take turns improvising solos within the piece's cyclical rhythmic form.

A solo can comprise a single pass through the cycle, known as a chorus, or it can be extended to include multiple choruses. Just as the progression's varied timbral colors provide a rich setting for the head, they also highlight the features of solos. Moreover, the chords' pattern of change and its undulating scheme of harmonic tension and release create constant rhythmic motion, adding momentum to the performance.

The artist's repertory of jazz standards includes many "popular tunes that were originally used in musical theater," Lee Konitz explains. "For example, there are jazz standards from the thirties and the forties that have great melodies and harmonic sequences. Even the lyrics are great. There are also other good vehicles. More and more, musicians have been getting away from the standards and writing their own songs." Konitz's emphasis on form is appropriate within the discipline of jazz, for learners must, as he concludes, "become familiar with these tunes and their frameworks before taking any liberties in playing variations or in improvising."

Building Up a Jazz Repertory

Novices develop a storehouse of music from recordings and from demonstrations. When Tommy Flanagan and his high school peers got together at one another's homes, "one guy would try to play a tune from a new Bird record, and someone else would say, 'No, that's not right,' and we'd hash it out together. Then we'd all go home and work on it and come back and see who had advanced the most." As the house bass player at the Jazz Showcase, Rufus Reid routinely borrowed or purchased records made by the featured artists so that he could learn their compositions before engagements. The repertories that students acquire from recordings enable them to perform jazz at a fundamental level and to prove themselves worthy of the assistance of experienced musicians who teach them through painstaking demonstrations.

Although youngsters rely heavily on aural means of learning, most eventually learn to read music in order to gain access to additional material. Written sources of repertory include printed renditions, or lead sheets, that provide a piece's notated melody and accompanying chord symbols; fake books, roughly drawn compilations of lead sheets—in many instances, technically illegal; and written musical arrangements or orchestrated versions of pieces providing specialized parts for each band member through representations of melody and accompaniment.

The degree to which performers can succeed in their community without reading skills depends both on their aural abilities and the specific demands that bands make upon them. Groups tend to strike different balances between the proportion of material that they compose and arrange in rehearsals and that which they improvise during performances. Moreover, some expect band members to read elaborate, written scores, or charts, while others rely upon relatively spare aural scores, or head arrangements, whose parts are transmitted through demonstration and memorized on the spot.

A band leader once fired young Charli Persip in front of the other musicians upon discovering that he could not read the drum parts. The incident ranks among the most terrible in Persip's childhood; he compares it to being disciplined by his father "thumping" him painfully on the head. Persip decided then and there that he would learn to read music so that no one could ever humiliate him like that again. Similarly, it was a "big breakthrough" for Walter Bishop Jr. when he "decided to take private lessons and learn seriously how to read and write music." Despite twenty-eight years of professional experience before he became a proficient reader, he "still felt like just half a musician."

Bringing different tools to the task, young musicians develop their repertories largely by performing in various bands. Seasoned members of John Hicks's early groups urged him to "learn some new tunes" so that they could play "something else together besides the blues." A leader recognized similar limitations on Rufus Reid's part and taught him how to compile his own fake book that included all the pieces for their duo. Newcomers also feel the pressure to increase their knowledge so that they are not left behind in other settings. At some jam sessions "the guys didn't even call the tunes' names. They just counted off the tempos and played. They expected you to recognize the tunes and to play along" (Calvin Hill).

Musicians faced with the prospect of enlarging their repertories proceed by tackling representative examples of forms that present unique challenges. In the late forties, "the older guys" advised, "if you could play a blues, 'I Got Rhythm' changes, and a ballad, you were well on your way" (Lonnie Hillyer). Youngsters also study specific genres and pieces by certain composers fashionable within the intersecting worlds of jazz and popular music. "For a while Latin things were in," so Keith Copeland and his peers learned "Tito Puente's, Machito's, and Cal Tjader's tunes." He also discovered Horace Silver and "tried to do his songs." Later, when Barry Harris came to New York, Copeland studied "all those Charlie Parker heads," practicing along with records so that "I could go out and sit in with Barry."

Kenny Barron also noticed the particular pieces "being played on the scene by different groups" and shifted his own focus accordingly, absorbing compositions by Benny Golson, Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Morgan, and Donald Byrd. Because some of the bands he played with performed for dances, he "also had to know 'Night Train,' 'You Go to My Head,' and standard rhythm and blues tunes."

Other groups exposed learners to a stock of pieces reflecting the personal tastes and compositional skills of their band leaders and members. "Betty Carter always picked tunes that nobody else did; she never wanted to be like anybody else" (KW). As a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, John Hicks "had to learn the old tunes like Wayne Shorter's tunes and the Messengers' standards like 'Moanin.’ Some went back two, three, four generations of Messengers" and created a sense of tradition in the band which Hicks "really loved."

Rendering Composed Melodies

As youngsters study repertory from disparate sources, they find considerable variation among versions of the same compositions. Lonnie Hillyer would "learn a tune from records and then go out and play it with different people, and they'd have their own little ways of doing it." Artists may make decisions about particular features of their renditions outside of performance, but they reserve other decisions for the actual performance. Composers like Thelonious Monk vary their own pieces "each time they play them." Ironically, artistic creativity sometimes seeds new inventions as a result of the monotony of repeated performance routines. 'After you have sung a song one hundred and fifty times," Carmen Lundy observes wryly, "the chances are that you are going to begin doing little, different things with it." Finally, the initial learning process itself may contribute variants to the pool. Tommy Flanagan and his friends found some pieces on records to be "really tricky, like 'Ko Ko.' You can still listen to the intro and wonder exactly what Bird played there—both the notes and the phrasing. We might have three or four different versions of a tune among the players." Flanagan remembers that they would write them all out periodically and compare them.

Among the characteristics of a composition that can distinguish one artist's version from another is the choice of tonic. Awareness of this characteristic can itself come as a "shocking revelation" to beginners who assume that all music is composed in the key of the first scale they learn or that pieces are played only in the key of the first printed version they encounter. John McNeil went into a panic during an early jam session in which saxophonist John Handy "called the tunes in different keys." Afterwards, McNeil says, he "hid from other musicians for months," until he had made up his deficiency by relearning his repertory "in all twelve keys."

To meet the challenges of key transposition, students must train themselves to hear a piece's intervals, that is, to imagine their precise sounds, at differing pitch levels. Many experts advise learners to practice singing tunes initially with nonverbal or scat syllables—to master the melodies aurally without relying on physical impressions such as fingering patterns or the visualization of an instrument's layout. Learning to sing the letter names of the pitches or words of a piece is another method. To introduce students to rudimentary music theory, some players like Julius Ellerby vary these approaches by numbering each pitch in relation to the piece's tonic and suggesting that pupils sing the numbers instead of scat syllables in every key. After thoroughly absorbing a tune through these exercises, students work on reproducing it on their instruments to develop control over each version's unique fingering patterns—including their distinguishing points of ease or awkwardness.

The relative hardships associated with this practice vary, of course, with the complexity of each melody and the nature of its form. Some blues pieces comprise a single repeating figure or simple phrases based on AA'B melodic prototype — sometimes at multiple structural levels — and present little difficulty. More elaborate pieces rely on ABAC or AABA melody prototypes. The interval patterns of intricate ballads extending over thirty-two-bar progressions can be demanding, as can ornate, highly syncopated melodies of pieces that require seemingly endless repetition to master. Rapid, intricate bebop pieces such as "Donna Lee" and "Anthropology" are formidable "musical etudes" and keep improvisers in top form technically by providing challenges as great as any presented in "method books for classical musicians" (Lonnie Hillyer).

Beyond its variable key, a piece's precise melodic features can differ from version to version. Within an arrangement, singers or instrumentalists who carry the melody can transform it to varying degrees, engaging in compositional activities of increasing "levels of intensity" that Lee Konitz distinguishes along a continuum from interpretation to improvisation. Success at one level provides the conceptual grounding and "license" musicians need to graduate to successive levels, each increasing its demands upon imagination and concentration.

At the outset of a performance, players commonly restrict themselves to interpretation. They reenter the piece's circumscribed musical world along the rising and falling path of a particular model of the melody, focusing firmly on its elements and reacquainting themselves with the subject of their artistic ventures. Musicians take minor liberties when orienting themselves to a piece at this level of intensity, coloring it in numerous ways. They vary such subtleties as accentuation, vibrato, dynamics, rhythmic phrasing, and articulation or tonguing, "striving to interpret the melody freshly, as if performing it for the first time" (Lee Konitz).

With masterful control, players maintain uniform tonal quality and even articulation at times. At other times, they create interest along a melody's contour by coloring it with myriad tonal effects . They may forcefully exaggerate or repress the use of vibrato and dramatically change articulation patterns. At one moment, they may emphasize slurring, at another, tonguing. Moreover, they employ different tonguing syllables to create varied mixtures of light and heavy accents, sometimes swallowing or "ghosting" pitches so that they are, by gradations, more felt than heard. Wind players can vary the tonguing positions associated with such syllables as tu, ta, to, go, ku, or vu to produce different tone colors. Miles Davis appears to emphasize vu articulation if seeking to give his sound a soft, airy diffuseness, and to produce a ghosting effect on a grace note by using lah-dah syllables.

Alternatively, to increase the complexity of tone, improvisers can sing or growl through instruments, tinting and thickening their sounds. Other techniques include scooping into a pitch, bending within a pitch or between pitches, and falling off, or concluding a pitch with a short, downward glissando. Yet others are the shake, a rapid lip trill between pitches a whole step or larger interval apart; the flare or rip-up, a rough, rapid gliss that lightly touches all the harmonics between the initial pitch and target pitch; and the doit, an extended rip whose sound trails off toward an indefinite pitch.

Artists describe subtle bends and other microtonal melodic inflections — pitches sharpened or flattened for expressive effect — as blue notes. Charles Mingus once underscored this technique at a workshop by drawing a vertical column of overlapping notes on a large staff, indicating that each note had potential for stretching into the domain of the others just above or below it (Chuck Israels). Lou Donaldson, too, emphasizes the importance of learning to play 4 'quarter- tones ... to bend a note ... to make a horn talk, to make it cry. Johnny Hodges would actually make it cry," pulling pitches "ever so slowly in and out of tune with the band," so that other band members were "on the edge of their seats hoping he'd get back in there." And, of course, "he always did." As a model for such practices, Donaldson recommends that aspiring jazz musicians "concentrate on the blues," absorbing its special "feeling" so they can project it into their improvisations. Without cultivating "that type of sound," he cautions, "you never can play jazz."

Along similar lines, early New Orleans jazz clarinetist Louis Delisle Nelson insists that "you must handle your tone. . . . You can put some whining in the blowing of your instrument. There are a whole lot of different sounds you can shove in — such as crying — everywhere you get the chance. But . . . with a certain measurement and not opposed to the harmony."  When pitch inflections are combined with speechlike rhythmic cadences, soloists sometimes actually "sound like they're speaking words. It's like you're talking when you play. That's what it's about" (Doc Cheatham).

In part, the aesthetic values and procedures described above  reflect the African side of the dual heritage of African American music.11 In many parts of Africa, tuning systems use pitches outside the Western system of equal temperament; human voice and instruments assume a kind of musical parity.  Voices and instruments are at times so close in timbre and so inextricably interwoven within the music's fabric as to be nearly indistinguishable. Furthermore, some drums, marimbas, horns, and flutes can actually function as surrogate speech by impeccably reproducing the melodic-rhythmic patterns of the tonal language of their respective culture.

As early African American composers forged their musics from the diverse African and European musical elements around them, they preserved different African elements to varying degrees, adapting them to their own evolving social and musical tradition, much of which centered on the African American church. Sacred genres like the ring shout embodied many of the fundamental values that defined later black musical forms. Carrying sacred musical practices over into the jazz tradition, early improvisers included spirituals within their repertories and created instrumental arrangements from the different parts that they sang at religious services. Joe Oliver and other New Orleans musicians were renowned for their ability to use mutes to imitate the timbre and cadence of the stylized speech of sermonizing preachers and to recreate the spirit and sounds of holy-roller meetings.

Within the jazz tradition, instrumentalists and vocalists continue to influence one another. A reflection of this is instrumentalists' predilection for copying the pitch colorations and inflections of blues and jazz singers, and their phrasing of song texts. To this day, Barry Harris reminds instrumentalists at his workshops to "play legato" and to allow their vibratos greater prominence "like singers do." He elaborates: "Vibrato is what gives your sound individuality, because everyone's got a different natural vibrato."

Besides their use of such interpretative devices, jazz musicians can individualize the piece further, moving along Konitz's scale to embellishment. Even at the level of subtle embellishment, unique patterns of imagination lend a distinctive character to each artist's practices. A player can append grace notes to the melody's important pitches, articulating both pitches clearly, or, for variety, draw them out to produce a smear or dwa-oo effect. Some routinely favor the use of a single ascending chromatic grace note at the beginnings of phrases, but others use the same embellishment only sparingly or favor descending grace notes. As a matter of taste or due to idiosyncratic, physical features of performance, individual artists may consistently embellish particular pitches. Many players use an eighth-note upper mordent between a pitch and the adjacent scale degree; some tend to phrase this as a triplet, and others as an eighth note and two sixteenths. Inventive pitch substitutions, and occasional chromatic fills added between consecutive melody pitches, are also common. Additionally, soloists can rephrase the melody subtly by anticipating or delaying the entrances of phrases or by lengthening or shortening particular pitches within them.

Lonnie Hillyer once commented on the combined effect of these practices after hearing a recorded rendition of the ballad "Alone Together" by his late friend, trumpeter Kenny Dorham. Rendering the piece with his warm, intimate tone, Dorham embellished the melody with spare grace notes and varied its phrasing with subtle anticipations and delays. He articulated sustained pitches with soft unaccented attacks before bending them down and drawing them quickly back again, then allowing them to sing with an increasingly wide vibrato. Only once did he interject into the performance a phrase of his own by filling a rest with melodic motion. Seated beside the speakers, Hillyer responded immediately to Dorham. He leaned forward, covered his eyes with his hands, and remained perfectly still until the performance's close. Then, sighing, he shook his head, as if waking from a dream, and softly marveled, "K. D.! To think he could say all that, just by playing the melody."

When rendering ballads or slow expressive blues, musicians sometimes confine performances to the subtleties described above. Alternatively, they may venture into the arena of variation, transfiguring the melody more substantially by creating shapes that have greater personality but whose relationship to the original model remains clear. The liberal application of some of the techniques associated with embellishment can accomplish this goal. Lee Konitz "displaces certain pitches in the melody" with pitches of his own, and saxophonist Lou Donaldson inserts "different clusters of notes at different places" along its contour. Joe Giudice creates "extensions of the melody by reaching out and grabbing neighboring pitches or by leaping to important chord tones and painting a picture of the harmonic segment of the piece," procedures he describes as "natural ornamentation." Common practices also include prefacing a phrase from the melody with a short introductory figure or extending it with a short cadential figure.

Finally, musicians periodically raise performances to improvisation, the highest level of intensity, transforming the melody into patterns bearing little or no resemblance to the original model or using models altogether alternative to the melody as the basis for inventing new phrases. These artistic episodes can occur at various points in a performance, as when players add short melodic figures in such static areas of tunes as rests or sustained pitches at the ends of phrases. Additionally, if the player carrying the melody is the first soloist in the group, he or she may depart from the melody before its completion to improvise a musical segue to the solo. In other instances, an individual improvises an introduction to the piece before the group's entrance, or a cadenza at the piece's conclusion, or a short "break" passage, during which the other players suspend their performance. Jazz compositions like "Oleo," having chord progressions with only partial melodies, provide space for the player to improvise passages for either a couple of measures or a major harmonic segment of the piece during the melody's presentation. Moreover, some compositions consist of chord progressions alone at the time they are recorded. Pieces like Lester Young's "Jumpin' with Symphony Sid" and Charlie Parker's "Meandering" and "Bird Gets the Worm" required the extemporaneous invention of an entire melody in performance. Typically, however, players restrain themselves during the melody's formal presentation, reserving their most extensive compositional activity for improvised solos.

At the same time, the combined operations from interpretation to improvisation have the potential to "carry musicians more than halfway to creating a new song" within the framework of another melody (Lee Konitz). Such situations underscore the extent to which pieces serve jazz musicians not simply as ends in themselves but as vehicles for invention. Just as these procedures, taken in sequence, provide artists with a routine for practicing pieces, their sequential mastery corresponds, for some artists, to the progressive stages of their development. As a youngster, trumpeter Warren Kime first learned the "melodies of a lot of tunes" from his father, a professional musician. "After I had been playing the melodies straight for awhile," Kime recalls, "I started making little embellishments around them. Gradually, my embellishments became more extensive, and eventually I learned how to improvise." Excerpts from transcribed performances of jazz compositions illustrate the differing emphases that artists place on these practices, accounting for the distinguishing features of renditions and, in turn, providing students with alternative models for their own versions . Gary Bartz would routinely purchase records "of the same song by many different artists" and analyze their different approaches.”

Thinking in Jazz - "Learning Jazz Through Osmosis - Early Performance Models" [From the Archives]

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Musically, Jazz can’t be taught, but it can be learned

We all learn differently.

When it came to Jazz, learning more about it became a burning desire for me - a passion.

My first learning experience with Jazz came as I absorbed it through listening to as many recordings of it as I could lay my hands on.

And did I listen; over and over again until I had every tune, arrangement and solo memorized note-for-note.

It’s almost as though I was assimilating knowledge and awareness about the music through a form of audio osmosis.

Judging from the following excerpt from Paul F. Berliner’s constantly enlightening and instructive Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, it looks like I was not alone in this regard.

Early Performance Models

“In reflecting on their early childhoods, many jazz artists describe the process by which they acquired an initial base of musical knowledge as one of osmosis. They cultivated skills during activities as much social as musical, absorbing models from varied performances — some dramatic, others incidental yet profoundly effective — that attuned them to the fundamental values of African American music. Ronald Shannon Jackson remembers his father's infectious habit of humming the blues "around the house" while carrying out daily routines. Vea Williams's mother sang jazz "all the time" at home; she possessed a beautiful, powerful voice that passed easily through the apartment's screens and resonated throughout the courtyard.

The children of professional musicians receive a particularly intense exposure to performance. Tommy Turrentine fondly recollects his father's "saxophone section" that practiced regularly in their living room. Music literally "surrounded" Turrentine as a child. Lonnie Hillyer also describes much of his early musical education as "environmental"; his older brother "played jazz, and he always had guys in the house fooling around with their instruments."

In Barry Harris's Detroit neighborhood, he and his young friends absorbed the intricate rhythms of the "ham bone"; its clever body percussion — slapping movements between the thigh and chest — accompanied improvised texts. Additionally, in the surrounding neighborhood, the "average black family had a piano and at least one family member who could play boogie-woogie."

Kenny Barron used to anticipate eagerly the daily arrival of the neighborhood ice peddler, a blues player who routinely availed himself of the Barrons' piano after delivering the family's ice, fascinating the youngster with his musical prowess. After he left, Barron would try to pick out on the piano "the little melodies and chords" he remembered from the performance.

Within the larger community, hymnody at church services, marches at football games, and soul music at social dances contribute further to the children's education, as do concerts in performance halls and informal presentations in parks and at parades. During the thirties, Charli Persip was especially fascinated by a black orphanage's high-stepping marching band that performed jazz and by the swing bands that accompanied stage shows in the intervals between film showings at New York City's renowned Apollo Theatre. Moreover, in some neighborhoods "every corner bistro had a piano, and the pianists were sometimes joined by a bassist and a drummer and, sometimes, a horn player. There was live music all over the community" (Max Roach).

Sympathetic club owners in Detroit left their back doors open so that passersby and underage audiences who congregated in the alleyways could sample the music of featured artists. Performers in the "bars, weekend storefronts, and neighborhood jazz clubs" in other cities similarly made a deep impression upon youngsters, as did informal get-togethers by musicians. George Johnson Jr. was enticed by weekly jam sessions conducted in the apartment of his building superintendent.

Music provided by record players, radios, and jukeboxes complements live performances within the general soundscape. People "could listen to jazz all day long" on the jukeboxes of Cleveland's neighborhood restaurants, cafes, and nightclubs in the forties: "You heard this music every place you went" (Benny Bailey). Since the fifties, television has sometimes featured jazz as well. Record stores also offered places for young enthusiasts to gather and socialize, particularly when the stores provided listening booths for customers to sample the latest albums before deciding whether to buy them.

Some homes of musicians actually "looked like record stores" because the families owned so many recordings; they listened to music "constantly" (Don Pate). In other instances, children participated in an "extended family" that shared and distributed recordings among adults. Patti Bown remembers private records circulating from house to house in the black community of Seattle. In another musician's neighborhood, few could afford records or record players; however, a neighbor whose generous spirit equaled his enormous collection made others welcome in his home. Evenings, everyone met there to listen to jazz.

Record collections of aficionados typically represented a wide range of popular jazz artists, including Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Ronald Shannon Jackson does not recall hearing the term jazz or such idiomatic designations as New Orleans jazz or swing when he was a youngster. In describing the music of "black dance bands" during the thirties as "jump music," his community simply viewed the music some called jazz as part of the larger family of African American musical traditions.

The record collections of black families typically included examples of spirituals, gospel music, boogie-woogie, blues, and rhythm and blues, as well as selections of Western classical music and light popular classics. This discussion of early jazz musical education reminds us that exposure to their own community's music as well as that of the mainstream is one advantage commonly afforded minority children in America.

Musicians reflecting on their impressionable years tell insightful, touching stories of the importance of recordings in their childhoods. Melba Liston often contended with bouts of loneliness at home, for she had no siblings; early in life "music" became her "very dear friend," with the radio its primary vehicle.

In another case, operating the record player was one of Kenny Washington's first manual skills. He often spent the day by himself listening to recordings while his father was at work. Family anecdotes attest to his emotional attachment to favorite recordings. As a toddler, Washington had learned to associate the designs on record jackets with their respective sounds. One day, he observed his father misfiling one of his albums. "I couldn't really talk yet," he explains, "but I started going through changes, trying to tell him that he'd put the record in the wrong case." His father was baffled, but his mother "insisted that he check it out. Sure enough, he'd put the record in the wrong case."

On another occasion, when Washington was intensely listening to recordings, his father interrupted him by placing a new one on the turntable. Noticing his son's agitation, he promised that he only intended listening to one cut. The younger Washington became increasingly upset as his father extended his promise, cut by cut on the album's first side, ignoring his son's appeals. When his father turned the disk to begin side two, Washington "went through a temper tantrum and ran down the hall," tripped over his pajamas and hit his mouth on a bed with enough force to knock a tooth up into his gums. "This was all over a record," he mused."

Thinking in Jazz - "The Life Cycles of Bands, the Creative Process and the Challenges of Working In Different Bands" [From the Archives]

 © -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“It is, perhaps, in guiding other artists to discover deep within themselves unique facets of their own sensitivities and talents, and in effecting creative inspiration that artists might otherwise never have realized by themselves, that jazz musicians share their greatest gifts as teachers.” …

“Moving from band to band, performers strengthen various facets of their musicianship and deepen their knowledge of jazz, its idioms, conventional musical roles, and aesthetic values.”

- Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation

When I was first learning to play Jazz, I sought out every musical situation that I could participate in whether it was big bands, trio work, Latin Jazz, small combos - I just wanted to play the music.

Over time, I came to the realization that some musical settings worked better for me than others and, as a corollary, I think other musicians may have come to a similar conclusion about working with me.

It’s as hard to explain the reason/s for this feeling now as it was then. Working with some groups of musicians just felt better than working with others.

And then I became aware of another dynamic that was even more puzzling to me: even in groups where the music was “happening,” it, too, began to go stale after a while.

Fortunately for me, maturity brought a bit of wisdom and the realization described in the title of this piece which is drawn from Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation.

The Life Cycles of Bands and the Creative Process

“Bands not only turn over personnel when players discover that they have irreconcilable problems; they also undergo changes when members have drawn what musical value they can from their mutual association. Although it is initially desirable for members of groups to work together extensively to develop the rapport upon which successful improvisation depends, typically there are limits to the ways in which any group of musicians can inspire each other over the longer term.

"If you are working with a group of good players, then you can learn from them," Art Farmer explains. "But still, sometimes you find the music bogging down and you need to find other people. This is not to say that the players you are with are not good, but the whole thing has reached a stalemate as a unit. If you play the same songs night after night and year after year, and you find yourself playing in the same way, people get bored with it because there's no energy there. If you don't find some other way to break it, then you have to get somebody else into the band. You have to find some new songs or some new players."

Like many of his fellow artists, Lonnie Hillyer cannot tolerate the monotony of uninspired musicianship. "When I get bored playing the same old things all the time, as guys will do when they can't figure anything new to play, I like to jump on the bandstand and play with somebody in the band who I'm not familiar with. It forces me to think. That's what this music is all about. It's a thinking kind of music." Similarly, John McNeil [trumpet] extolls the stimulation that new musical components bring into routine playing.

The groups I like to play with are the kind in which, if you changed one person, everything would be completely different. For example, I was playing a blues on my first album when Rufus Reid and Billy Hart got into this weird rhythmic thing that I never heard anybody do on an album before. It would be very hard to describe, but it's the kind of thing that wouldn't happen with any other bass player or any other drummer. It was just great and made me so excited I wanted to try all kinds of new things in my solo.

Such events often have ramifications beyond the performance for the musicians themselves, from group to group and through the enrichment of the pool of musical ideas throughout the jazz community. "I like to play with other people," Kenny Barron reports, "because you can bring some other things back to the guys you normally play with."

Over the lives of bands, then, personnel changes can be a normal consequence of the creative process. In a sense, they reflect, on the largest formal scale, improvisation's cyclical interplay of new and old ideas. Just as successful patterns initially improvised by one player and immediately complemented by the others can join a band's formal arrangement as fixed features for subsequent performances, additional facets of the band's interplay also can evolve gradually into routines, informally arranged over the group's life together. When their modes of interaction become increasingly predictable and artists begin to feel as familiar with the performance styles of other players as with their own, the band's collective ability to conceive new ideas in performance may diminish overall.

Within the chaotic world of the music business, as each group struggles for survival, its collective pattern of artistic growth and achievement, its evolving visibility and commercial success, and the respective needs of its members for creative renewal sometimes reinforce one another, contributing momentum to a unified musical undertaking. At other times, the pressures that such variables create pull players in different directions. One saxophonist describes his group's decision to disband just as their popularity reached its peak: "It was a shame in some ways, because we had just built enough of a following to be invited to record by a major label. But we reached the point where we were all tired of the music, and we wanted to follow different musical interests with other bands."

Similarly, within particular bands attrition commonly reflects the fact that individuals have outgrown their positions. With the leader's encouragement, many resign to join other groups where their responsibilities are greater or to form groups where they can devote full energy to their own ideas and compositions. The successive groups formed by Miles Davis epitomize the restless quest of some artists. Keith Jarrett smiles at his recollection of the difficulties Davis faced when combining the talents of jazz musicians with players whose background in rock had not prepared them for understanding the most basic conventions associated with playing ballads.

He conjectures that Davis would rather have pursued new musical directions with a "bad band . . . playing terrible music" than remain complacent with former groups that had developed maximum cohesion within the bounds of his earlier musical interests. Moreover, Davis once shared with Jarrett the painful admission that the reason he had stopped performing ballads, a genre whose unique and masterful interpretation had gained him great distinction, was that he "loved playing them so much." Jarrett expresses admiration for such remarkable insight into the need to pursue new challenges, even when they go against an artist's "own natural instinct."

Finally, as improvisers continue to define and redefine those musical areas that have the greatest meaning for them, their changing passions are sometimes influenced by matters of cultural and personal identity. Akira Tana's interest in cross-cultural musical matters finds much food for thought in Manhattan's international environment, where there is considerable opportunity for interacting with musicians drawn to the jazz scene from all parts of the world.

“I've spoken with Japanese jazz musicians who are here in New York City searching for their own personal expression. They have worked with black and white musicians here and have come to the conclusion that they are different from them. The identity thing is very complicated. Things can get confusing, and you can have an identity crisis. As a Japanese American, I feel that parts of myself are very American and differ from the Japanese tradition. At times, I wonder if jazz can really express who I am fully. It's not the same for me as it would be if I were black and raised exclusively within that tradition.

My musical vision is a little broader than that of people who just hear and see jazz, because I've tried to learn so many different kinds of roles as a drummer—like studying classical orchestral percussion as well as jazz improvisation. Also, I sometimes feel a little dated playing the swing feeling, because a lot of musicians my age are playing funk and fusion. The funk thing is also very challenging for drummers, but the swing thing seems more conducive for a group playing jazz. Anyway, I believe in jazz, and for now I'm just trying to play meaningful music within the jazz field. But there are so many different ways of expressing yourself which have value. It's just a question of what you like.”

The Challenges of Different Bands

As musicians complete their tenure with particular bands and leave them to join others, they find each group to have contributed different aspects of their musicianship and knowledge. "Playing with each group is a formal education," Walter Bishop Jr. declares. "Each has a different feel and different repertory." Living with the compositions of some bands night after night, improvisers become fluent with complex chord progressions, perhaps, whereas the repertory of other bands may favor vamp tunes that artists use to create music from spare harmonic materials.

Musicians also gain experience playing different musical roles within the structures of various kinds of pieces. "It's true that in Bill Evans's band my function was pretty much to hold Bill's bass line through the duration of the performance," Chuck Israels says. "But I never felt it as a restriction, because the lines were so beautiful in all their detail. In other bands, the demands on me were much less specific and I had greater freedom."

It was while sitting in with Barry Harris, Keith Copeland recalls, that he got his "loud/soft bass drum technique together, because I figured playing with Barry I didn't really have to drop all those bombs. It scared me to have to deal with this technique with Barry, but," he confesses, "it made me a better drummer."

Characteristic features of arrangements also have their influence on band members. "In Max Roach's band, some of the challenges were the tempos and the lengths of the pieces. You had to be able to play faster than you played in most groups, and you needed a lot of endurance" (bassist Art Davis).

Kenny Washington reports a similar result from working with another strong player: "Johnny Griffin is known as the fastest tenor player in the world. One thing that working with Griff has really done for me is, it's made me physically stronger." In fact, before taking the position with Griffin, Washington had approached Louis Hayes, one of his mentors, for advice. Supporting the move and anticipating its demands, Hayes taught him specific technical exercises to strengthen his arms, wrists, and hands so that he could perform his role successfully.

The flexible programs of some bands encourage different players to try composing and arranging pieces. Kenny Barron remembers the excitement of having his first musical arrangement of a composition performed and recorded by Yusef Lateef 's band.

Groups also place different emphases upon solo work. Whereas small bands feature artists as soloists, large bands tend to restrict individual soloing opportunity by distributing solo slots among many performers and by emphasizing ensemble work. Important distinctions do exist within small groups, however. Many limit the activity of drummers and bass players as soloists.

From this perspective, Max Roach's group represented "a drastic change" for Calvin Hill because "the band was really into solos." It forced him to use all the knowledge formerly acquired with Betty Carter, Pharoah Sanders, and McCoy Tyner.

"Suddenly I had to be an integral part of a group as a soloist," he recounts, and I wasn't playing in the background anymore. There was no piano, and Max put the four of us in a line on the stage. There was nobody in front and nobody in back, just four individuals. Max said, "I want everybody in this band to be long-winded," so we could play a tune for an hour and fifteen minutes. Soloing with Max was not a problem, because Max is a master accompanist.

When I first joined the band, I was concerned about this, and he said, "Look, don't worry about anything. I've got the time covered, so you just play whatever you want. Just be free." He just lays everything down beautifully for you. You just go ahead and play. There is a lot of mutual feeling in the band. Everybody was on an equal level, and that's why it was so easy to solo in his band. You're not really out there by yourself.”

The idiomatic conventions and instrumentation of different bands present unique challenges. To participate in every musical situation, players must negotiate within the group's timbral atmosphere and make the most of the aural palette at their disposal. In absorbing the blend of timbral colors, they derive a distinctive experience that stimulates their conception of ideas.

Art Davis's professional affiliations depict the wide-ranging musical environments of jazz improvisers. When Davis joined Max Roach's band, the group comprised a pianoless hard bop quintet in which the unusual mix of bass and tuba accompanied the standard voices of trumpet and saxophone. Later, when performing with John Coltrane's Ascension band, Davis encountered an equally unusual combination of two basses. There, in the environment of a free jazz group whose eleven members included five saxophones and two trumpets, he intertwined his bass part with Jimmy Garrison.

Providing further contrast to these earlier experiences are the rhythm sections of some big bands. Count Basie's rhythm section of bass, drums, piano, and guitar embodied a classic swing feeling, whereas Dizzy Gillespie's rhythm section featured conga drums and an array of Latin percussion instruments, combining traditional Latin rhythms with those of jazz. Subsequently, Davis's tenure with saxophonist Arthur Blythe sometimes involved a standard quartet with piano, drums, and bass; at other times, an unconventional saxophone and bass duo. Other situations found Davis in the rhythm section of singers like Lena Home and jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong.

Altogether, Davis's affiliations spanned style periods from New Orleans jazz to the avant-garde. Another versatile artist, [bassist] Don Pate, is "known as being open-minded by other musicians because," he asserts, "I feel there's a need for every kind of jazz: swing, bebop, free jazz, fusion. Each requires you to create different things. To me, playing with a different kind of jazz group is like going to a new city or a new country. I'll try anything once, for the experience."

Expounding on the incalculable value of such varied training, Benny Bailey[trumpet] tells of learning "how to develop a big sound in swing bands, how to phrase and blend with other musicians in a section." Sometimes, the precise conditions of each band's musical environment necessitate creative adaptation, inspiring new approaches to invention on an individual's part. Before the days of amplified music, Earl Hines developed the unusual stylistic trait of playing patterns in octaves in order to project his part better, "cut[ting] through the sound of the band," which had been, he felt, "drowning me out." Similarly, Coleman Hawkins cultivated his dynamic range and characteristic "fullness of sound" in the context of groups that found him playing solos over "seven or eight other horns all the time."

Kenny Barron describes Ron Carter's quintet, which, by contrast, featured the string bass as a solo instrument. "From that experience, we all learned to use dynamics and shading. I don't think that there was a band in the world that could play softer than us. Ron's music was also a lot more structured than some, and that accounted for the overall sound the band had." Art Farmer recollects his initial discomfort as a member of the group when "Gerry Mulligan's quartet was pianoless. It just had a baritone, trumpet, a bass, and drums. Basically, I missed the piano," he reveals.

“We had a few rehearsals, and then we went to work. The first night, I just felt like I didn't have any clothes on. I felt really exposed because you didn't have any piano playing the chords to make what you're playing sound good. That was something that I had to learn to handle. It was a matter of being more careful. I learned to play lines that had musical value by themselves. Also, I learned to make an adjustment in volume because Gerry's style was much softer than others. The drummer was playing a lot with brushes, instead of bearing down with sticks, and so you couldn't go out there with your horn and start hollering and screaming.”

In contemporary fusion bands such as the Pat Metheny Group and the Yellowjackets, musicians must learn to integrate their improvisations with it preprogrammed musical events of sequencers. They must, as well, pit the rhythmic skills against the mathematically precise and mechanical delineation of time provided by drum machines (drummer Paul Wertico).

A related characteristic distinguishing bands is their individual emotion; atmospheres. It is the leader who usually sets up the feeling or the mood of the overall band, Melba Liston observes, and, as a member of the family, "You have to go that way, because if you don't, you don't fit in." Assessing the notion of a group's ambience, Liston brings up a virtual catalogue of legendary bands.

“In Dizzy Gillespie's band, players have a strong feeling "when you go on the bandstand, you're ready to burn. With Lady [Billie Holiday], you've got a laid back kind of bluesy, sultry feeling. I mean, you've got to swing, but you're not going to holler, stomp, and carry on like you do with Dizzy's band. . . . Quincy Jones's band was sort of in between. It was . . . swinging, but still a little delicate. Not nearly as bluesy, kind of white collar. . . . Dizzy's hard hat [she laughs]. And Basie's band has its own different color — tone colors and feeling that's more organized and routine. You're going to stay about the same way all night long, whereas with other bands, you reach greater highs and lows."

Within the general emotional atmosphere of a band, subtle aspects of individual performance style and unique features of collective interplay further shape the experiences of musicians. "In each group, dealing with different musical personalities on the bandstand — just individual ways people had of expressing themselves — was a lesson in itself" (pianist John Hicks).

[Bassist] Buster Williams elaborates on the variability in playing behind several individuals on the bandstand:

"When you're playing with people who have their craft together, if you're wise enough, you just look and listen and learn. There is a special sensitivity that you learn from singers which is incredible. Sarah Vaughan has got perfect pitch, so you have to play perfectly in tune with her. Betty Carter's a real jazz stylist. Nobody's a stylist like her. When she does a ballad, she does a ballad softer and slower than anybody else I've ever experienced. So, I had to learn to play with a lot of space. It's always more difficult to play slow than it is to play fast. These are the kinds of things that really expanded my playing."

Close working relationships with the jazz community's renowned figures are commonly the high points of an artist's career. Composer/arranger Gil Evans praises Miles Davis's monumental achievement as a "sound innovator," recalling the excitement of being in his musical presence during their collaborations. "Like I told him one time, T sure am glad you were born!'"

Similarly, Elvin Jones beams in remembrance of John Coltrane and cites the combined qualities of inner peace, quiet determination, and superhuman control that enabled Coltrane to attain the ever-expanding artistic goals he set for himself. With deep religious conviction, Jones deliberates upon their association.

"He was so calm and had such a peaceful attitude, it was soothing to be around him. And John, to me, has that spiritual context that he put into everything he did. It was something that everybody could recognize. ... To me, he was like an angel on earth. He struck me that deeply. This is not just an ordinary person, and I'm enough of a believer to think very seriously about that. I've been touched in some way by something greater than life."

The inseparable mixture of Coltrane's personal and musical qualities had a remarkable effect on the musicians around him, urging them to extraordinary musical heights.

It is, perhaps, in guiding other artists to discover deep within themselves unique facets of their own sensitivities and talents, and in effecting creative inspiration that artists might otherwise never have realized by themselves, that jazz musicians share their greatest gifts as teachers.

Betty Carter is "the kind of person who wants to hear you play to your ultimate," Buster Williams points out. "She has an incredible sense of swing, and the way she sings shows you who she is. When you see someone else like Betty putting everything that she has into the music, it makes you feel the responsibility to do the same. Like Miles, she has a way of bringing out your full potential."

Moving from band to band, performers strengthen various facets of their musicianship and deepen their knowledge of jazz, its idioms, conventional musical roles, and aesthetic values. Even when artists remain for an extended tenure with a band devoted to a particular idiom, the experience of improvising is seldom static. It changes constantly, in fact, with adoption of new repertory and arrangements, with developments in the individual styles of fellow players, and with turnover of personnel that dramatically alters the pool of musical personalities, bringing renewed enthusiasm to rehearsals and performances. Every constellation of musical talents and backgrounds alters the group's compositional materials as it fashions its collective artworks, and reestablishes its unique territory for invention.

In meeting the multiple challenges of a shifting mix of groups, artists sharpen technical skills as they continuously assert and evaluate their musical ideas, ultimately defining and refining their personal improvisation concepts. Bands are not simply an economic necessity for performers but are also fundamental forums for training and development. They are educational institutions indispensable to the sustenance and evolution of the jazz tradition.”