Thinking in Jazz

When you’re just learning jazz, everything is mystical.

the marginal existence of jazz musicians and the negative feedback to their community from some of the writings about jazz leave many of its practitioners with the perception that their skills are poorly understood, even downright misunderstood, and their knowledge undervalued by outsiders.

When did they first encounter jazz, and how did they go about learning it? Jazz players, even the great masters, knew nothing about their subject at one time;

Most of the performers developed

Most of the performers developed their skills between the late thirties and early sixties

A trumpet player who once accepted me as student gave me a series of musical exercises to practice. Each time we met, he encouraged me to learn them more thoroughly. When I had finally developed the technical control to repeat them unerringly, he praised my efforts in a manner that seemed to say, “That’s fine and that’s what I have to teach you.” The problem was that what I had learned did not sound like jazz to me. When he first sensed my disappointment, he seemed surprised. Then he picked up his instrument and added modestly, “Well, of course, you have to throw in a little of this here and there,” To my ears, the lifeless exercises I had been practicing were transformed into a vibrant stream of imaginative variations that became progressively more ornate until I could barely recognize their relationship to the original models. This experience awakened me to my responsibility for effecting meaningful exchange between us as teacher and student.

I had been concerned that, although every interview had been valuable, the relative length of artists’ sessions and the particular issues on which the work had ultimately focused had resulted in some artists being represented more frequently than others. “What difference does that make?” one musician-reviewer asked. “We’re not just speaking for ourselves in this book. It’s like we’re all speaking for each other.” Said another, “You know what this book’s really about? It’s about all the things that we share in common—the things that we know and care about but we don’t necessarily ever say to one another.”

a white, classically trained pianist substituted for her gospel choir’s accompanist. After an introduction to the choir, the pianist asked the director for her “music.” The director explained that they did not use “sheet music” and that the pianist should take the liberty to improvise her part in relation to the choir’s. Taken aback, she replied apologetically that, “[without] music,” she was unable to accompany them. She had never before faced such artistic demands. The choir members were equally astonished by the pianist’s remark, never having met a musician who was dependent upon written music.

Though aspiring artists may follow different paths initially, arriving at a commitment to jazz along direct or circuitous routes, they ultimately face the same basic challenge: to acquire the specialized knowledge upon which advanced jazz performance depends. Precisely how to pursue such knowledge is not always apparent to new enthusiasts. Traditionally, jazz musicians have learned without the kind of support provided by formal educational systems. There have been no schools or universities to teach improvisers their skills; few textbooks to aid them. Master musicians, however, did not develop their skills in a vacuum. They learned within their own professional community—the jazz community.

aspiring players form relationships through a complex network of interrelated music centers that form the institutional infrastructure of the jazz community. Record shops, music stores, musicians’ union halls, social clubs for the promotion of jazz, musicians’ homes, booking agencies, practice studios, recording studios, and nightclubs all provide places where musicians interrelate with one another

With respect to the technical aspects of jazz, mentors typically create a congenial atmosphere for learning by conveying the view that student and teacher alike are involved in an ongoing process of artistic development and that the exchange of knowledge is a mutual affair.

Learners grappling with the hardships of mastering jazz often derive as much inspiration from their personal interaction with idols as from the information they acquire.

Likewise in Chicago, musicians knew that the session “at a certain club down the comer was for the very heavy cats and would not dare to participate until they knew that they were ready,” Rufus Reid recalls. As a matter of respect, “you didn’t even think about playing unless you knew that you could cut the mustard. You didn’t even take your horn out of your case unless you knew the repertoire.” At the same time, naive learners did periodically perform with artists who were a league apart from them. David Baker used to go to sessions including Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray “when they came to Indianapolis.” He adds with amusement, “I didn’t have the sense not to play with them.”

From the newcomers’ perspective, the respect that veterans offer them as artists, simply by consenting to perform with them in public, provides invaluable encouragement. “Don’t be apologizing for yourself,” a band leader once advised Leroy Williams when he began his request to sit in with a self-deprecating remark about his abilities. “Anytime you have heart enough to come on this bandstand, it’s okay for you to be here. You have to believe you can play in order to play.”

Farmer did not hesitate to approach the artists because he “always had it in my mind that these people loved music, and the only thing we were trying to do was learn how to play from them. And that’s the way they were. No one ever said, ‘Ah, get away, kid!’​”

Farmer did not hesitate to approach the artists because he “always had it in my mind that these people loved music, and the only thing we were trying to do was learn how to play from them. And that’s the way they were. No one ever said, ‘Ah, get away, kid!’​” One unforgettable night, Farmer was performing at “some little club” when Roy Eldridge, who was in town with the Artie Shaw Band,

Farmer did not hesitate to approach the artists because he “always had it in my mind that these people loved music, and the only thing we were trying to do was learn how to play from them. And that’s the way they were. No one ever said, ‘Ah, get away, kid!’​”

One unforgettable night, Farmer was performing at “some little club” when Roy Eldridge, who was in town with the Artie Shaw Band, walked through the door. First of all, he sat down and played the drums with us. And then, since he was on his night off, he went back to his hotel and got his trumpet and brought that back and played it with us. It was just wonderful because he was at one of his peaks of popularity. For him just to spend his night off with some dumb kids was really marvelous.

there was a dance at the club where we played. The Artie Shaw Band played the first part of the dance from nine to one. Then we played from one to five, and they just stood around and listened to us. So we thought that we were pretty hot [he laughs]. We were very flattered by their attention.

Stan Getz maintains that “the reason I got the job [with the Jack Teagarden band] after playing horn for two years was because it was wartime and all the good musicians were drafted.”

Newcomers without contacts often struggle to establish a reputation.

“Longevity plays a large role in letting people know you’re around. You have to go around to sessions and sit in with different people, letting them hear you.”

“Anytime something like this happens, it’s time for you to leave Boston!” Jackson shouted, oblivious of the class. “I’m telling you right now that this is April eighth, and I’m giving you a gig at the Village Vanguard on May twenty-third. I’ve got Harold Mabern and Sam Jones. Now, write it down and make sure you have your bags with you when you come. I don’t care whether your wife divorces you and your family breaks up, you bring your bags. I’m not giving you this gig to come to New York for the week and then run on back to Boston. I’m expecting you to stay. It’s time for you to come back home now.” Copeland resigned his teaching post shortly after the confrontation.

Performing with renowned bands, newcomers hone their skills and expand their initial store of information about jazz. Generations of jazz musicians have described their training in bands by using metaphors of formal education.

What band members learned from one another “depended on what they wanted to know,” Duvivier explains. “Sometimes, it was a simple thing like ‘How do you play this figure?’ or ‘What was the chord that this was based on?’ Whatever it was, they always ended up learning more than they asked because the fellows were so enthusiastic about helping people.”

In similar spirit, experts guide younger members in applying their technical knowledge by constantly rehearsing and performing with them, thereby transmitting their deep sense of responsibility for the music.

The jazz community’s traditional educational system places its emphasis on learning rather than on teaching, shifting to students the responsibility for determining what they need to learn, how they will go about learning, and from whom.12 Consequently, aspiring jazz musicians whose educational background has fostered a fundamental dependence on teachers must adopt new approaches to learning. Veterans describe the trials and tribulations that accompany the learner’s efforts to absorb and sort out musical knowledge as examples of “paying dues.”

“many well-known musicians were cold and critical,” and when a newcomer approached the bandstand, they would play “some very difficult song or take a fast tempo that they thought you would sound bad on, so that they could laugh at you or show you up” (HO). Similarly, the house band at a nightclub in San Francisco developed a reputation for capriciously changing the key of a piece during performances; whenever a soloist failed to follow them, they would stop playing and leave the stage in contempt.

Barry Harris and his peers “could be pretty hard on musicians in those days by chasing them away from sessions, but we never refused them when they came back and wanted to try again.” Correspondingly, students attempting to regain the respect of the performers who challenged them eventually learn to turn failure and humiliation into the resolve to overcome weaknesses in their musicianship.

Max Roach’s early circle worked hard; music was a “twenty-four-hour situation for us. We practiced all day, and if we were fortunate enough to be working, we’d gig all night.” Afterwards, perhaps at three o’clock in the morning, “we went looking for jam sessions.”

“When I was learning, you heard people play things that sounded nice and you thought about what you were playing,” Art Farmer recalls. “You thought about how you sounded and how you would like to sound, and you went home, and you worked on it. If you couldn’t learn by what you heard, well then, it was your own fault.”

Marsalis is equally adamant. “There is so much information out there for you to get access to, if somebody has to tell you how to get it, you don’t deserve it.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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”

In the late forties, “the older guys” advised, “if you could playa blues, ‘I Got Rhythm’ changes, and a ballad, you were well on your way”

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 (ex. 3.1). 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.

Rapid, intricate bebop pieces such as “Donna Lee” and “Anthropology” (ex. 3.2d) 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

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.15 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.

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 (LK). Such situations underscore the extent to which pieces serve jazz musicians not simply as ends in themselves but as vehicles for invention.

“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.”

Students with natural gifts and special musical backgrounds have a great advantage in learning the harmonic basis of pieces.

Pianists and guitarists commonly learn about chords as part of their early instruction. They become well practiced in apprehending harmony because even the simplest repertory exploits the capacity of their respective instruments to combine melody and accompaniment. Youngsters whose melody instruments lack the capacity to perform multiple pitches simultaneously sometimes lag behind their friends in harmonic development. Those who have difficulty hearing chords commonly adopt piano as a second instrument, providing them with the key to harmonic understanding.

Improvisers also grasp basic harmonic principles from college textbooks about Western classical music theory and commercial manuals recommended by jazz community members.

Tommy Turrentine remembers that in the forties a textbook by Percy Goetschius was known among some jazz musicians as the “Bible of Harmony.”

Turrentine adds the important caveat that “the rules of harmony are meant to be broken, and these guys did it. They learned the theory of Western harmony, and then they went for themselves

Over the years Western music theory books such as those by Paul Hindemith and Walter Piston have also served as learning aids, supplemented by theory texts specifically devoted to jazz.

Although Turrentine did not recall the title, it was probably Goetschius 1889.

One of the benefits of theory is the shorthand it provides musicians for talking about harmony and for representing the structure of compositions in written form.

In their most fundamental function, chords create tension or provide release.

Artists commonly view the tonic chord (I) as being the most stable, and the dominant (V7) as the most unstable.

Yet other movements are indirect, delaying resolution with a fleeting scheme of passage through different tonal centers before returning to the piece’s tonic key. When dominant chords built on scale degrees other than the fifth resolve up by a fourth to major or minor chords, for example, they create new areas of relative stability away from the tonic and perform a “tonic or resolution function.” When dominant chords move to other dominant chords, they perform a “dominant or tension function” and sustain or redirect harmonic tension to further points of resolution. In fact, transient tonalities at times may lead far away from the fundamental key without ever actually establishing a new one.

Whereas theory simply reinforces aural understanding of such features for some performers, it assists others to enter the world of musical forms. At one of his workshops, saxophonist Billy Mitchell distributed copies of a lead sheet and suggested that students tap to the beat of his band’s performance to follow the chords from measure to measure over the progression. With each pass through the piece’s cycle, the class endeavored to memorize the individual sounds of the chords together with their symbols. Eventually, they could follow the progression’s features, as interpreted by the band, without referring to the lead sheet.

“In the beginning I couldn’t hear the chords,” a participant recalled. “I couldn’t feel where the chords changed in a piece. Today, I might not be able to identify all the chords in the tunes I hear, but I can hear it when they do change, and that’s a big step from where I started”

Once students develop the capability of distinguishing and naming chords, they can more readily augment their understanding of compositional form on their own.

During the twenties, some artists routinely requested performances of popular pieces from the pianists who worked as sheet music demonstrators at music stores.

Pops Foster “used to pick up ideas from everybody. Sometimes I would find an alley guitar player, playing only blues, and give him a quarter to play all those pretty chords they used to go through.”

In the forties, Jimmy Robinson sat by the household radio with trumpet in hand waiting to catch a few additional pitches from the periodic replay of new pieces on jazz programs.

The succession of forms that students learn commonly begins with the blues, one of the most venerable vehicles in the jazz repertory.

Having learned the blues, young musicians study more expansive pieces like “I Got Rhythm,” in which two eight-bar chord sequences—an A section and a B section—are arranged to produce a thirty-two bar progression in the AABA format typical of many American popular songs.

David Baker remembers how “ecstatic” he and Slide Hampton were, as youngsters, the day they “found out that a tune could have a bridge. For the next month or so, we played thinking they all had the same bridge.”

As students become more familiar with jazz repertory, they develop a comparative perspective on its forms. In Chuck Israels’s experience, an “essential ingredient in learning to be a musician is the ability to recognize a parallel case when you’re confronted with one.

Israels’s high school peers cultivated their skills by playing “musical games” with recordings in which they tested one another’s abilities to identify pieces from their progressions alone and “relate them” to other pieces.

Such activities teach students that, despite the unique melodies of compositions, some pieces share their entire underlying structure in common. Sonny Rollins’s “Oleo” and Charlie Parker’s “Anthropology” are based on “I Got Rhythm.” Parker’s “Donna Lee” is based on “Indiana”; his “Bird Gets the Worm” is based on “Lover Come Back to Me”; “Warming Up a Riff” on “Cherokee”; “Marmaduke” on “Honeysuckle Rose.”

Recognizing comparable relationships between and among compositions commonly suggests directions for the expansion of repertories. John Hicks initially gravitated toward Horace Silver compositions based on the blues and on popular pieces like “I Got Rhythm” and “There Will Never Be Another You,” whose “moving patterns of seventh chords” he had little difficulty recognizing.

Josh Schneider first learned “simple blues changes,” then “jazz blues changes” that he describes as “the same as the basic blues, but with a few additional chords thrown in. I now think of everything as a blues pretty much. Every tune is just made up of different turnarounds [harmonic cadences] that resolve to different places.”

For many youngsters, newly acquired theoretical concepts constitute “exciting breakthroughs,” which assist them in generalizing about such features of pieces.

Not only do they learn to recognize chords of the same quality as they recur in different parts of the composition, but they begin to appreciate their relationships to adjacent chords, apprehending them as discrete groupings or movements—the component chunks of the composition’s larger A, B, and C sections.

Among the most common movements found in compositions are short diatonic patterns like the ii7–V7–17 progression (in the key of C: Dm7–G7–CM7) and its components ii7–V7 and V7–17, whose root motion descends partly around the circle of fifths. Larger recurring harmonic gestures embodying comparable elements include the “I Got Rhythm” turnaround, 17–VI7–ii7–V7, and such progressions as III7–VI7–II7–V7, v7–I7–IV–IV (altered), and many others.28

Fred Hersch eventually concluded that “there were as few as ten or so different harmonic patterns” whose combinations and variations formed the basis for much of the repertory of jazz standards.

Many even have the courage to sit in with bands during unfamiliar numbers, learning new pieces, in effect, by performing them. This involves the potentially dizzying activity of analyzing the surrounding parts to formulate a map of the progression’s fundamental features at the very time they are inventing an appropriate part for themselves.

Toward such ends, Rufus Reid strove to improvise a bass line to complement the pianist’s chord movements, which he anticipated on the basis of his “general knowledge of harmony.” Whenever Reid’s pitch choices clashed with the piano part, or whenever he lost his place within the progression, he would “[lay] out for a moment,” put the bass to his ear, and softly experiment with different pitches, looking perhaps for the elusive key of the bridge.

Reid then continued his bass line until stumped by another “questionable part of the progression.” Each time through the piece, he would figure out additional details that had eluded him and fix their positions within his evolving map. After initially roughing out the placement of major and minor triads, “the main pivot points of things,” Reid eventually filled in the piece’s complete form. In this regard, the first challenge he encountered in his early development was learning to distinguish aurally major and minor triads, the “big letters,” he called them at the time. Having mastered them, Reid could turn his attention to more complex structures. “I even think it took a long time before I could really understand a major-seven function [as distinct] from a dominant-seven function,” he admits.

Some musicians infer the structure during performances from the bass pitches in the pianist’s own bass lines or chord voicings—either identifying the pitches aurally or reading the keys depressed by the fingers of the

Some musicians infer the structure during performances from the bass pitches in the pianist’s own bass lines or chord voicings—either identifying the pitches aurally or reading the keys depressed by the fingers of the pianist’s left hand.

“You start with a simple blues and keep doing it over, memorizing the basic chords, getting them into your psyche. Eventually, you get into the habit of hearing the chords inside your head, in the inner ear” (PB). Certain jazz compositions are “so ingrained” in Gary Bartz’s memory, he says, that even after a lapse of ten years, “I only need to hear a tune once and its harmonic structure comes back to me.”

Because the operations of seasoned musicians include the melodic transposition of compositions, youngsters embark on the correspondingly arduous course of learning to reproduce the relative movements of a composition’s progression in every key.

At sessions, moreover, musicians commonly test one another’s skills by performing pieces “through all the keys,” modulating by descending half steps or by ascending fourths with each chorus.

“Every day, I would get hung up on something else,” says Walter Bishop Jr., recounting the anguish of such computations, “but I always left those sessions resolving that I wouldn’t return until I really knew the tune so that I would never be embarrassed like that again. That’s how I built up my repertory.”

Selecting from their varied options, artists pursue the goal of designing an imaginative, graceful version of the progression that clearly delineates the piece.

Enumerable conventions within the jazz tradition guide players. Pianists endeavor to formulate successive structures that involve minimal movement in the left hand and create a sense of melodic shape and flow in the upper voice of the changing chords. They commonly resolve chord extensions and chromatic alterations, and the like, by leading them through descending steps to the triadic pitches of subsequent chords.

As is implicit in the discussion of harmonic practice above, the jazz community also values the formulation of a strong, smooth root movement. Moreover, the appropriateness of the bass line “as a counterpoint to the original melody” is of special importance to artists like Bill Evans, inspiring them to create unique harmonic designs for compositions, even those sharing the same basic progression

Joe Giudice, too, considers “the melody and the bass line to be the most important features of my arrangements of pieces. After putting the melody note on top of a chord, I’ll spend months working on a small harmonic section of the progression—trying out different chord substitutions until I’ve found the ones that produce the most beautiful bass lines and the most intricate inner voices.”

To achieve this through chord insertions, players may choose to precede a major, minor, dominant, or half-diminished chord in a progression by a dominant chord whose root is either a fifth or a half step above that of the structural chord or by a diminished chord whose root is a half step below it.

Connecting chords generally create such desirable root motion as descending fifths or major thirds or ascending diatonic scale steps or minor thirds. Other popular movements feature a series of descending half steps or whole steps, or alternating half steps and whole steps.

whenever I did anything wrong on the bandstand, he’d look at me and wink. And when the gig was over, he’d say, “Come by the house tomorrow afternoon.” . . . He’d sit down and play the piano and explain this and that . . . [and] would say, “Tomorrow night, let’s do this here [in the progression]. . . . For example, say you’re going from an A[m]7 to a D. Assuming that he had time, he would run cycles like Bm [to] E[7], A[m] to D[7], A[m] to D. And no one was doing that then. They’d say A[m] for four beats: ding, ding, ding, ding; D[7] for four beats. . . . [In three months with Hawkins’s band] I learned to play jazz in all keys. I learned all the tempos and a lot of harmonic things I’d never come across before.

With repeated listening, fragmentary harmonic movements embedded within the new version gradually became familiar. I could also recognize that, at various pivotal points of harmony, the alternate progression momentarily incorporated a chord from the first version, then departed from it.

Artists acquire options for their own performances by cataloguing the variants at corresponding positions within their flexible conceptual maps of pieces.

cross-fertilization within the larger jazz repertory contributes additional features to new renditions. Musicians can alter a piece by applying the general principles learned from analyzing a variety of pieces or substituting the precise features of another.

One novice was rebuffed when he resisted such work and pressed an expert for more material. “My voicings are my voicings,” his friend replied roughly, “and I’ve already shown you enough to get you started. Go off and find your own voicings the same way I did, just by sitting at the piano and trying them all kinds of ways until you find the ones you like”

when a youngster once attempted to please an early teacher by patterning faithfully upon his interpretation of a ballad’s melody, taped at the preceding lesson, his teacher responded with annoyance: “That’s my way of playing it. You were supposed to find your way of playing it.”

Once students experience the excitement and satisfaction that accompanies their own discoveries, they are less willing to depend on other oral or written sources or to be bound strictly by the conventional rules that had assisted them initially.

The more Fred Hersch “learned tunes from sheet music,” the more compelled he felt to make up his own voicings. “You have to be able to hear chords your own way,” he insists. “It’s better than someone else telling you what to do and just formulaically filling in the chord symbols when reading charts.”

Benny Bailey also remembers his satisfaction in discovering the “secrets of how to add or take away chords from a standard tune and put in your own to make the thing flow. Once you’d learn the principle of it, you could apply it to any other tune, actually.”

Some musicians conceptualize the structure of a piece primarily in aural and physical terms—as a winding melodic course through successive fields of distinctive harmonic color and as a corresponding sweep of movement over an instrument’s terrain. Others find it useful to reinforce such images with notational and theoretical symbols. Before Carmen Lundy learned theory, she “always had to wait for the pianist to play the chords” so she could react to them. Now, however, visualizing the structure of a piece helps her “know where the tune is going,” and she no longer has to depend on the pianist.

others find theoretical representations helpful initially when studying a piece’s form, but unnecessary afterwards. They quickly reach the point where, as George Duvivier put it, “my fingers can pick out the chords without my always thinking of them.”

Improvisers liken this transition to learning a new route in the physical world—for walking between home and work, for example. Initially, the walker gives full attention to reading street signs, memorizing turns of direction, and gaining a sense of characteristic pacing between identifiable landmarks. Eventually, taking in such features becomes so routine that it happens instantaneously, almost unconsciously, as the legs alone seem to take over the walk’s direction. Subsequently,

Improvisers liken this transition to learning a new route in the physical world—for walking between home and work, for example. Initially, the walker gives full attention to reading street signs, memorizing turns of direction, and gaining a sense of characteristic pacing between identifiable landmarks. Eventually, taking in such features becomes so routine that it happens instantaneously, almost unconsciously, as the legs alone seem to take over the walk’s direction.

Subsequently, the walker can concentrate on other things—noticing obscure details in the surroundings or thinking of unrelated matters—without becoming lost along the way. Similarly, once improvisers fix in their memories the features of a piece’s road map, they need no longer mark their changing positions within its piece’s form by consciously imaging chord symbols. Rather, they can instantaneously gauge their progress by the band’s collage of sounds and the relative positions of the sounds on their instruments. This frees their full attention for the precise details of their own parts as they move confidently, creatively, and in tempo through the piece’s harmonic course.

Such learning practices as requiring students to sing tunes in every key before performing them reflect this priority. Acting upon a related expectation, a band leader once inquired casually from a newcomer whether she had heard “the head” to a particular piece before. When she answered that she had, he turned directly to the band and counted off a tempo for its performance. In immediate protest, she explained that she had only heard the tune once and had never performed it. “If you heard it,” he replied crisply, “you ought to be able to play it.”

Recommendations about learning the structures of a piece reflect similar values. “Fake books can really stultify your development if you have the wrong attitude toward them,” Howard Levy says. “Really, the best way to learn,” he continues, is to take tunes off records, because you’re utilizing your ear. It takes a lot of know ledge and experience to be able to do this, but it becomes so easy to hear pieces in their component parts if you actually do the work yourself. Then you start trying to write the changes out by ear. In the beginning, you’re going to write out things wrong. You’re not going to know what’s right for the first few years that you do this. But in the end, you see your mistakes and you really learn it.

The ideals and discipline embodied by these methods prepare students directly for the challenges that they face as artists. Improvisers must depend greatly upon their ears for repertory because there is frequently a lag between the introduction of new pieces to the jazz scene and their availability in printed form. In fact, much of the jazz repertory remains part of the community’s oral tradition and is not published as single sheet music items or in fake books. Moreover, musicians must be able to apprehend the unique features of each rendition as they unfold during a performance, instantly adapting their parts to those of other players. If the band takes exceptional liberties, individual players must continually alter their formal models of the piece as well. In the final analysis, a jazz piece is not a single model appearing in a fake book or on a recording. Rather, it is the precise version of a piece created by musicians at each performance event.

Eventually, students anticipate and re-create the solo’s every nuance, blending their performance of the solo inextricably with all the other parts emanating from the recording. Breathing together, following the same line of musical thought, and experiencing the same sense of urgency and shades of feeling that motivated the soloist’s initial expression, young performers become engaged in an intimate union with their idols. This thrilling experience assured one student that, because he had acquired “the understanding and the technique to perform some of the greatest musicians’ ideas,” it would not be “too long” before he would be able to improvise his own solos.

if students rely upon publications rather than recordings as sources, they deprive themselves of the rigorous ear training that traditionally has been integral to the improviser’s development

Typically, musicians learn a repertory of complete recorded solos that they practice as musical etudes and perform periodically for friends during informal sessions.

Among the various improvisations that Wynton Marsalis learned was John Coltrane’s famous solo on “Giant Steps,” which he “practiced every morning” at a particular stage in his development.

Once I’ve learned a solo, I put my words to it. It’s like telling a story. It’s like talking, carrying on a conversation. I love to talk about things.

There is no objection to musicians borrowing discrete patterns or phrase fragments from other improvisers, however; indeed, it is expected.

Many students begin acquiring an expansive collection of improvisational building blocks by extracting those shapes they perceive as discrete components from the larger solos they have already mastered and practicing them as independent figures

Securing a repertory of discrete patterns offers a clear advantage to young performers whose mastery over their instruments is insufficient for copying solos in their entirety. Correspondingly, “a whole solo can be just too much to take in at once. Little sections or melodic fragments” are more easily absorbed

As youngsters cultivate their tastes and become more discriminating, they also find that the phrases of solos differ in quality, some not warranting the time and effort involved in acquiring them.

whereas analysis of complete solos teaches students about matters of musical development and design, analysis of discrete patterns and melodic cells elucidates the building blocks of improvisations and reveals commonalities among improvisations that are not necessarily apparent in the context of larger performances.

this approach involves its own distinct challenges, some akin to learning a second language. Just as the beginning foreign language student finds that the cadences of fluent native speakers frequently blur the audible boundaries between and among words, phrases, and sentences—confounding the student’s ability to understand them—rapid, dazzling jazz improvisations may also initially sound seamless to beginners. As elaborated later, the fact that improvisers subject the components of their improvisations to different interpretations and transformations in performance compounds the already challenging task of identifying the components and their precise distinguishing boundaries. Only immersion in the music’s oral literature and the assistance of fluent speakers of jazz enable learners to grasp the actual components and their variants that improvisers use to construct complex musical statements.

Veterans refer to the discrete patterns in their repertory storehouses as vocabulary, ideas, licks, tricks, pet patterns, crips, cliches, and, in the most functional language, things you can do.

Harold Ousley says, the “set phrases that musicians practice and perfect” provide readily accessible material that meets the demands of composing music in performance. “The old guys used to call those things crips. That’s from crippled,” Turrentine elaborates with characteristic wit. “In other words, when you’re playing a solo and your mind is crippled and you can’t think of anything different to play, you go back into one of your old bags and play one of your crips. You better have something to play when you can’t think of nothing new or you’ll feel funny laying out there all the time [he laughs]. That’s all I play is crips [laughs again].”

as Tommy Turrentine describes them, will always play some kind of recognizable lick and right away you can say, “Oh, that’s so and so.” Everybody uses them in jazz. Like Charlie Rouse. He’s a very unique tenor player. I have heard him play some licks that nobody else plays, and he’s been playing them for years. They sound good and they fit. It’s the same with Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis or Sonny Rollins or anybody. They all have their things that they play. I can tell by the fourth bar of a solo who it is that’s playing.

Arthur Rhames speaks eloquently of this: “The great players always give homage to their predecessors by recalling certain things that they did. They give it in appreciation and in understanding of the validity of their predecessors. Being able to quote from songs and solos is always part of a mature artist because he’s aware of the contribution of others and its impact, how valid it is. Something that is really valid is timeless.”

Over years of study, Lundy found that she could “discriminate increasingly finer things” in her listening. Initially all she could identify were “jazz licks.” Later she learned to distinguish “bebop licks,” and finally “Charlie Parker licks and Sonny Rollins licks.”

Many complement their aural understanding of the relationship between harmony and melody by theoretical analysis of patterns, a practice whose value for improvisers is implicit in their criticism of standard publications of solos. “It may be helpful just to see what someone like Miles played, but the books don’t really teach you anything about why Miles did what he did, what his thinking was. That’s what’s needed” (BB). Art Tatum assessed one of his imitators accordingly. “Well, he knows what I did on record, but he doesn’t know why I did it.”

Artists are on a continuous search for illuminating the what and why of great improvisations

There’s value in learning the licks just to see what people did, how a solo was constructed, and to see what you could do with chords.”

Sometimes, you would try to duplicate something the soloists did. It was almost like they put it down there for you, like they were showing you something. So, you might try to duplicate a run or buy a transcription book to see how it looked on paper and then apply it, use it yourself from there. Mostly, they showed you a general way of thinking about playing a song or a phrase. Or they showed you another way of looking at a chord, how it related to other things—like the way you can make one little phrase cover three or four chords. It was very interesting and a good study for the ear.

some performers hold back their best material during recording sessions, keeping their ideas less accessible to imitators.

Early ragtime pianists who could not read music learned their art partially by observing the patterns made by the depressed keys of scroll-driver player pianos, then recreating the patterns on standard pianos.

a young saxophonist “started watching Von Freeman play and tried to imitate his dance, the way he moved and swayed, the way he moved his horn up and down when his phrases went up and down.” By doing this, the student felt, he could play “much more” in Freeman’s manner and style, and he felt more like a “real jazz player” himself. “I was surprised at how much easier playing became when I began to move more correctly. Now, I try to imagine great jazz saxophone players before I take a solo. That’s one thing that’s made a big difference in my playing.”

Standing away from the piano, Harris initially dictates examples in a theoretical language that he has suited to jazz. Typically, he creates a phrase through the elision of a few discrete gestures. “The chord is C7,” he would alert the class. “Triplet chord up from the second with a half step below and run [a scale] down to the third with a half step between the I and the 7. Diminish up from the third, skip a note, and chromatic back to the tonic” (fig. 4.1). In response, students scramble to transpose the numbers into letters in their respective instrument’s key, then translate the letters into sounds. Musicians who have learned Barry Harris’s theoretical system become so adept at interpreting the streams of numbers Harris dictates to them for model phrases that they can perform the phrases in unison almost immediately.

Over time, musicians strengthen their abilities to learn new vocabulary. Concentrating on recorded solos with increased understanding, they can apprehend faster, more intricate patterns from fewer replays and without slowing the recordings. Many can absorb new material under circumstances in which little or no replay is possible

Epitomizing such extraordinary abilities of near-simultaneous copying is the practice of shadowing, in which one performer can nearly cover another’s solo as it is being improvised (BH). “My teacher would have you improvise over a song,” a student reports, “and when you tried, he’d sit at another piano and play your improvised lines a fraction of a second behind you. It could drive you nuts.”

If one of the developmental issues for learners cultivating a vocabulary is grasping ornate phrases, a related challenge is simply remembering them. In general, the development of ability in jazz depends upon honing the memory.

Without even needing to consult the original recording, a friend once corrected pitches and added subtle embellishments to my transcription of a Miles Davis solo that he himself had learned in childhood.

For young players, a common method of memory training is the simple but rigorous repetitive act of checking the accuracy of learned solos against their original models, constantly reinforcing the proper interpretation. Over time, learning and retaining solos in this fashion creates the strong and flexible aurality that the jazz world expects of its accomplished artists.

One older jazz student, upon recognizing the importance of this skill, realized that his early training in Western classical music had emphasized the supremacy of reading skills. It had never occurred to him, and certainly had never been pointed out, that a recording could serve as a viable alternative to a written score.

It was not until he was immersed in his jazz training that he discovered that his exclusive dependence on written music had, in fact, undermined the development of his aural skills. As a result, his retention of material learned from recordings greatly lagged behind that of musicians who had grown up in the jazz tradition. It required years of experience with the jazz community’s methods for him to close the gap.

Harris expects students to add successive patterns to their mental stockpile as he demonstrates them. “If you’ve played a phrase once correctly, there is no reason for you ever to play it incorrectly,”

As Harris’s students begin to cope with the pressure of memorization, and as they become more familiar with jazz conventions generally, many experience considerable improvement in their retentive powers. After a year of attendance, a saxophonist suddenly realized that she could later remember new phrases learned in the workshop and could practice them without having to refer to her notation.

although improvisers caution students about becoming too reliant upon written notation—“anything you have to read in order to play will not help you in this tradition”—they acknowledge the usefulness of the musical symbols for fortifying ideas, and ultimately for interpreting or reading ideas in their own imaginations.

In a related application, experienced artists can analyze other players’ patterns without having to transcribe them. After copying a soloist’s phrase with their instruments, they translate its finger patterns into notes that they hold in memory while envisioning the phrase’s position within its progression and determining the tonic pitch of the underlying chord. This enables them to convert the notes into numbers, identifying the phrase’s harmonic elements.

Eventually, many develop such facility that they can interpret phrases in theoretical terms at the very moment of their performance. “You learn that jazz is composed of certain kinds of phrases, for, minor sevenths, flatted fifths, ninths, thirteenths, and each has its individuality. Then, when you listen to someone play, you begin to know when they are playing a major or minor chord and you say, ‘I hear a thirteenth in there or a seventh.’ Or you’ll hear a musician playa phrase and you’ll say to yourself, ‘That’s just a G7 chord with the notes run up a particular way. That’s one way you can playa G7 chord’​”

With increasing skill at apprehending and remembering music, listeners who once may have depended on transcription and formal analysis to reveal the commonalities among solos suddenly find that they can simply pick out an interesting figure in a solo and bear it in mind as they scrutinize other performances, live or recorded, for related figures. As a result of their training, many artists develop such a fine sense of relative pitch that they greatly reduce the gap between their own abilities and those of other artists with perfect pitch who could take musical dictation with ease from the start.

Another youngster, who yearned to improvise like John Coltrane, described months of concentrated study before he could perform “just a few phrases” from a Coltrane solo. At the peak of his frustration, the student was calmed by a dream in which Coltrane appeared to him and offered gentle encouragement: “You’re doing fine; just keep it up.” The student adds that Coltrane “made the phrases sound so easy on the record.” It was not until he tried to learn them that he realized “how difficult they were to play, let alone to have thought up in the first place.” Naivete occasionally proves to be an asset in negotiating the gulf between student and master. No one had explained to Gary Bartz how difficult Charlie Parker solos were, so he simply copied them along with those of lesser masters.

J. J. Johnson pointedly advised David Baker in his youth, “Any idea that you can’t get out the other end of your horn is of absolutely no value in this music:”

The most fundamental use of jazz vocabulary, then, requires the ability to perform patterns in time and at various tempos. This in turn requires learners to cultivate various technical performance skills tied to physical strength and agility.

Emily Remler recalls going “through just such a frustration. I’d go to a session, not be able to express myself on guitar, and cry afterwards—I was so miserable. My technique was lousy, and my time was bad. My time was bad basically because I couldn’t get to the phrases in time.” Remler’s frustration led to an intensive practicing binge known among musicians as woodshedding. She withdrew temporarily from the jazz community and subjected herself to a musical discipline that necessarily carried over into other aspects of her lifestyle. “I played and practiced the guitar constantly, five hours a day. At one point, I went down to the Jersey shore and locked myself in a room for a month. I lost twenty pounds, stopped smoking, and became a serious guitar player. It took a lot of muscle building to reach the point where I got a really strong and full sound on the guitar. I practiced my tail off trying to play octaves and different things to build up my muscles.” After months of practice, Remler began to overcome her problems. Eventually, she developed a “reservoir of technique” that she was able to “tap” for many years.

Beyond developing the control to use vocabulary patterns instantly and “in time,” artists typically pursue the goal of mastering them in all keys. “Maybe you would work on a phrase to fit one chord, or maybe you would work on something to fit the whole bridge,” James Moody says, “but to use something in playing chorus after chorus, you must learn it in all keys.”

On the other hand, John McNeil initially “couldn’t even play ‘Happy Birthday’ in all the keys to save my life. [I decided] to really work at this, [practicing the] licks I’d learned from records in every key for two or three months or so.”

The period was a very discouraging one for McNeil. “I just couldn’t seem to get on top of it; every time I took a phrase in a new key, I’d make different mistakes.” Although this learning process involves “a very gradual process of getting better for some,” in McNeil’s case, it was just the opposite: “One day, after all the struggling, I suddenly found that the phrases just seemed to fall into place in every key, and I no longer had to work on those things anymore

When Fred Hersch assimilated one teacher’s “choreographic concept” of piano performance, learning to “play up off the keys with loose hands and caressing the keys rather than bearing down on them,” his touch imbued solos with new subtleties of dynamic contrast.

For saxophonist Jeff Morgan, it was not until he adopted a routine of practicing six hours a day that he began to feel that the instrument was truly a part of him and that he could improvise with great freedom. For the first time, he was able to experience what he had often heard Barry Harris describe in his workshops as the expressive feeling of actually “talking” with the patterns he played.

Because of the constraints that improvisers’ abilities as instrumentalists place upon the realization of musical ideas, many advocate formal study with classical musicians who can share with them the most advanced academic methods of musical training. Barry Harris attributes his facility as an improviser in part to his early study of classical music and, in more recent years, to his study of a remarkable technical method for piano developed by master teacher Abby Whiteside.

The physiological requirements of jazz performance occasionally lead improvisers to consult various experts on the fringes of the jazz community. Among them are the “chop doctors,” who, in the years before there was a performance medicine specialty, attended to what is known as the chops, the combination of physiological structures integrally linked to playing technique, which can be strained in musical performance. The chop doctors had “their own different approaches—certain exercises and practice routines to help musicians get their chops back.”

It all goes from imitation to assimilation to innovation. You move from the imitation stage to the assimilation stage when you take little bits of things from different people and weld them into an identifiable style—creating your own style. Once you’ve created your own sound and you have a good sense of the history of the music, then you think of where the music hasn’t gone and where it can go—and that’s innovation. —Walter Bishop Jr.

Many beginners select as their exclusive idol one major figure in jazz. They copy that idol’s precise vocabulary, vocabulary usage, and tune treatment, striving to improvise in the idol’s precise style. Progress toward such a goal is necessarily gradual; at times, it is barely evident to the aspiring performer. In many cases, it is through encounters with veterans that they notice signs of significant advancement.

The more ways you have of thinking about music, the more things you have to play in your solos. —Barry Harris

The more ways you have of thinking about music, the more things you have to play in your solos. —Barry Harris Thinking of rhythm can be very effective; you can just play a few notes and with the right rhythm, it makes them very interesting. Other times, you’re thinking in intervals, or you’re thinking in scales. Actually, the first thing cats did was to play vertically, running chords. They really learned chords from top to bottom. That was the way I learned; I didn’t know about scales until later. Lately, musicians have been playing intervals. It’s a way of getting out of running chords really, because if you play a lot of intervals, you can play them anywhere against the most difficult chords. —Benny Bailey

Pursuing subtle courses, musicians carry over the inflections and ornaments of particular phrases to embellish other phrases. Venturing further, they may extract a figure’s salient characteristic, such as melodic shape or rhythmic configuration, and treat it as the rudiment for new figures.

Gradually, artists come to generalize about the underlying tonal and rhythmic properties of their materials. This is essential if improvisers are to develop the conceptual grounding on which their operations depend. “In improvisation you’ve got to have a melodic concept and a harmonic concept,” Tommy Turrentine maintains, “and a rhythmic concept especially.”

Perhaps the most fundamental approach to improvisation emphasizes rhythm, commonly known in the jazz community as time or time-feel.

Praised for their swing, effective improvisations are “natural, flowing, uncontrived, and spontaneous”; they display strong rhythmic momentum, “rhythmic elasticity, bounce, and vitality.”

Melba Liston’s junior high school music group learned various song and dance routines and the handclapping and dance exercises of “eurhythmics.” Competing in “counting contests,” they pitted their skills against one another to grasp and imitate increasingly complex rhythms.

Aspiring drummers commonly practiced and shared exercises from “syncopation” or “modern drumming” method books by Jim Chapin, Ted Reed, and others.

In Barry Harris’s workshops, students learn a store of patterns with short figures of eighth notes and sixteenth notes occasionally embellished with eighth-note triplets and sixteenth-note triplets, as well as figures including sustained rhythmic values with alternating on-beat and off-beat characters.

the necessity of acquiring a “rhythmic vocabulary”

Meanwhile, learners strive to develop an unwavering sense of the beat to serve as a conceptual anchor for the flexible use of their vocabulary

veterans can assert their interpretation of the beat with minute shifts in emphasis, creating variations in time-feeling. Pianists, for example, can widen the beat by “playing the left hand slightly ahead of the right hand in unison or chordal passages.”

Imagining the beat as an “elliptical figure,” the drummer or bass player can play either “ahead of the beat” (that is, on the front part of the elliptical figure), “behind the beat” (that is, on the very end of the elliptical figure or in varying degrees toward the center of the figure), or “on the beat” (that is, the center of the figure)

in the course of a performance there should be ten, fifteen different kinds of time. There’s a kind of time that has an edge on it for a while and then lays back for a while. Sometimes it rolls over the bar, and sometimes it sits more on the beats. That’s what makes it interesting. You can set a metronome here and, by playing with an edge or playing behind it or right in the center, you can get all kinds of different feelings. That’s what makes it come alive. People are human, and rhythmic energy has an ebb and flow.

To experiment with these subtleties and strengthen the ability to supply a steady beat in the imagination, some artists follow the advice of experts to practice faithfully with a metronome, leaving it on even when carrying out other chores to absorb its regular delineation of time

Paul Wertico made his own “time much more secure” by listening to a metronome setting of 200 at the beginning and end of each day. Once having memorized its precise tempo, he acquired the ability to gauge other tempos in relation to it.

Ladnier required Doc Cheatham to imitate him by “patting” his foot when they performed together. Ladnier insisted that it would teach Cheatham “how to play good jazz” and enable him “to really feel what he was doing.”

as jazz tempos increased, some musicians found that tired ankles caused tempos to slow down or become erratic, and they chose to omit every other beat, tapping on the music’s backbeats or, alternatively, on “one” and “three.”

“In order to swing, not just to approximate swing, the rhythm has to come from your body,”

“it’s like dancing; it’s the movement of the body that inspires you to play. You have to pat your foot; you get a different feeling altogether than when you play not patting your foot.”

Once performers can envisage the regular passage of time at different tempos, they acquire in effect an internalized “metronome sense.”12 The beat takes on a tangible quality and serves as a referent for understanding the mathematical relationships among the elemental components of jazz phrases.

Lennie Tristano directed students to formulate new phrases by dividing the beat symmetrically into patterns of eighth notes, sixteenth notes and thirty-second notes, and asymmetrically in any number of ways (LK). These were common practices for John Coltrane, who at times favored “uneven groups like fives and sevens.”

Emily Remler finds that she has “gotten much stronger rhythmically just from doing little tapping exercises that drummers have shown me, playing polyrhythms like two against three or three against four.”

In its most basic form, polymetric invention creates a recurring cycle of rhythmic counterpoint. Within the same time span, the basic beats of different meters cross over one another, creating syncopation and temporarily increasing the music’s rhythmic instability and tension.

In its most basic form, polymetric invention creates a recurring cycle of rhythmic counterpoint. Within the same time span, the basic beats of different meters cross over one another, creating syncopation and temporarily increasing the music’s rhythmic instability and tension. They then coincide with one another, resolving the tension.

While applying these and other fundamental principles to compose varied rhythmic components, improvisers also join the components together to create phrases of different lengths.

As a young player, one trumpeter initially practiced “making up two-bar phrases in all kinds of different ways,” an exercise he “had to work at methodically” because he neither “came from a music background” nor had “an intuitive feeling for phrasing like some players do.”

the effective character of passages of even eighth notes within many solos that initially appear to be on the beat but turn out, on close examination, to position themselves with assurance almost imperceptibly behind or ahead of the beat, thereby acquiring a subtle, floating quality.

The leader of Tommy Turrentine’s teenaged band once explained this general principle on the way home from a rehearsal by instructing Turrentine to walk with a steady pace and observe where the phrases he was carrying in his “head” fell in relation to his footsteps, noticing especially where they “came out on ‘one.’​” Stepping on the horizontal lines, which divided the sidewalk into successive units, and on the invisible lines, which halved them, Turrentine interpreted each pair of units as a measure.

he discovered that the beginnings and endings of some phrases coincided with the sidewalk’s lines, falling on the strong beats, while others fell on the invisible lines or backbeats, and in between them on the off-beats. Along with clarifying the concept of syncopation, this graphic demonstration sensitized Turrentine to each tune’s unique rhythmic counterpoint in relation both to the meter’s regular grouping of beats and to the rocking motion of its dual accentuation scheme.

Articulation is another important device. Ghosting on-beat pitches in an eighth-note sequence creates de facto accents on every off-beat, increasing rhythmic tension. Reversing the procedure relieves rhythmic tension. Ken Mc-Intyre once suggested that I practice patterns of eighth notes by slurring and tonguing them in different groupings so that their accents fell in unpredictable sequences on and off the strong and weak portions of beats. Similarly, the varied application of hard, soft, and ghosted attacks can shift accents within a repeated eighth-note triplet, changing its perceived rhythmic configuration and its relative syncopated quality. Moreover, when articulated as alternating pairs of slurred pitches, the triplet figure assumes a polymetric relationship to the underlying meter

Miles Davis once advised Tommy Turrentine that players could “play simple and sound good,” if they understood how to “phrase.” Turrentine elaborates, explaining that improvising “linear or melodic” ideas is like “writing a sentence. The commas, the periods, and the exclamation points have to be very pronounced.”

Equally important is musical space, accomplished through the use of substantive rests, the unvoiced rhythmic trailers whose irregular time spans offset those of the phrases that precede and follow them. In effect, rests introduce soft accents into the solo line as its sound subsides and the rhythm section temporarily moves to the foreground of the music. Suspended over the passing beats, a rest also invites listeners to reflect upon the soloist’s most recent figure, challenging them to anticipate the entrances of subsequent figures. Musicians commonly cite Miles Davis as an inspired model for the effective use of space, which increases the potency of his phrases and heightens their dramatic quality.

Once aspiring performers have cultivated a rhythmic

Once aspiring performers have cultivated a rhythmic conception and gained the ground for playing off of time, they can generate an ongoing succession of rhythmic patterns around an unfailing sense of the beat and imbue them with the attributes of swing.

seasoned soloists can similarly enter a piece’s progression at a designated tempo and keep track of their metered progress through the form while taking great rhythmic liberties. Playing inside the time, they double up or triple up on the tempo—improvising patterns precisely twice or three times as fast as the beat. In other instances, mathematical calculation guides excursions outside the time. Superimposed metric frames aid in placing pitches with great rhythmic accuracy at finely distinguished, abstract points in relation to the underlying meter, thereby creating subtle patterns of syncopation and polymetric activity.

Moreover, artists attain great freedom in their rhythmic dance when they deliberately superimpose different tempos upon that of the piece, rushing ahead or falling behind, applying different degrees of pressure to the beat before resubmitting to its regulation.

Once improvisers can conceive rhythms clearly and manage them agilely, they can use the figures as rhythmic templates for the underpinning of melodic and harmonic ideas by combining them with pitches derived from various sources. “I hear rhythms, mostly,” Dizzy Gillespie reports, “and then I put notes to them.”

Before soloists learn music theory, they formulate melodies by ear, kinetically (by hand), and through abstract visualizations in relation to the sounds of each piece’s underlying harmony. Their early efforts are commonly “hit and miss,” as Melba Liston says. She and her friends “knew what notes didn’t fit the chords and didn’t sound good,” so they “just tiptoed around them” when they played, “trying to avoid them.”

instead of picturing one chord with six or seven individual elements in it, as, for instance, an eleventh or a thirteenth on top of an F minor triad, Harris pictures an “E-flat triad on top of the F minor triad which,” he says, “automatically gives [him] the seventh, the ninth, and the eleventh.” He could “think real fast that way and superimpose different kinds of harmonic things on the chord,”

John Hicks experienced a “new freedom” in his performances when he first began thinking of “two chords a tritone apart” as a way to mix a triad with its raised-eleventh, flatted-seventh, and flatted-ninth degrees. At these operations, as Reid describes it, Eddie Harris’s facility “was so enormous that he could go in and out of key so fast that you wouldn’t even know that he had put a whole other sound on the chord.

Many liken such controlled harmonic mixtures to the subtle blending of colors by visual artists.22 “Everybody’s approach to chords is different

For learners, the discovery of scales and their theoretical relationship to chords constitutes a major conceptual breakthrough with immediate application. They can construct a scale or mode that is compatible with each chord by filling in the diatonic pitches between its tones, increasing the chord’s associated pitch collection from four to seven, and grouping optional tonal materials together as a string of neighboring notes.

Soloists can produce a common pentatonic scale from a major scale by eliminating its fourth and seventh degrees.

theoretical abstractions for melodic patterns, inherited from the earliest days of jazz, utilize the tonic, third, fifth, and sixth degrees of the major scale in variable combinations, as well as such blue notes as the flatted-third, flatted-seventh, and flatted-fifth degrees. “Listening to different cats” taught Wynton Marsalis that the “blues is the key to playing jazz.”

“When a dominant seventh chord moves, resolves down a fifth, like it should properly,” Emily Remler explains, “you can use the jazz minor scale up a half step from the root of the dominant seventh.” A case in point is the movement from G7 to C major, which invites the use of the A jazz minor scale. “That gives you all the best tensions to use upon it—sharp eleven, flat nine.”

another theoretical approach to improvisation emphasizing intervals as compositional models. Musicians sometimes use particular interval arrangements derived from chords as threads in their performances, transposing them to complement the piece’s progression. At other times, they favor interval sequences that weave in and out of diatonic harmony. “Today, you can use one interval like a fourth and play it anywhere,” Benny Bailey says. “Even if all the notes don’t fit the chords, the ear accepts them because they’re a complete pattern of fourths. Like on a C7 chord, you can play E, A, D, and Gs, and it won’t sound too far out, even though the notes are not in the chord.

thinking in terms of interval patterns enables musicians to call up alternative sets of pitches having different harmonic relationships to the underlying chords. By pursuing Bailey’s example, the soloist formulates a melody from the flatted-third, flatted-fifth, raised-fifth, and flatted-ninth degrees, deliberately avoiding the chord tones and producing relatively high harmonic tension. If the same interval sequence were built on the chord’s tonic, the resulting phrase would include two chord tones—the tonic and the flatted seventh—and produce comparatively less harmonic tension.

Emphasizing sequences of larger intervals, like fourths, distinguishes melodies from those based on thirds, which more readily derive from chords, and from those based on seconds, which more readily derive from scales.

Learning jazz is like circling a large “globe,” Josh Schneider proposes. Players constantly strive to understand it from different perspectives, different angles. Ultimately, performers make choices among constructs on the basis of their effectiveness as memory devices.

Greg Langdon decided that it was more efficient to think of one of the patterns described above as a “diminished chord with chromatics” because he could recall its pitches “much faster” by picturing stacks of minor thirds and embellishing them with routine chromatic gestures than by “trying to remember all the notes of different double-diminished scales.”

Artists typically design and perform intensive musical exercises based on theoretical models, initially striving to master them outside of the contexts of compositions. Wynton Marsalis rehearsed the blues for an hour each day when he was in school. “Sometimes, I’d skip lunch and I’d just be playing up and down that blues scale in the stairwell every day.” Similarly, Bill Evans practiced scales in “as many different ways as he could,” exploring their varied versions in every key

From one drill to the next, musicians strive to “exhaust all the possibilities” through the “law of permutations,” as a student of Jimmy Cheatham’s recalls him saying in his workshops. How else can improvisers discover what patterns they especially like?

Eventually, the sheer persistence with which learners study theoretical models—absorbing their elements through various mnemonic devices—concretizes the models for learners and embeds them deeply in memory.

One pianist used to sustain a B on the keyboard just before he and Tommy Turrentine left rehearsals, instructing Turrentine to remember it. As they walked home, the pianist hit different iron poles with a hard object to set them ringing, then quizzed Turrentine about their pitches. Turrentine would figure this out by recalling the sound of B and calculating the number of scale degrees that separated it from the pitch of each pole.

The amount of time and practice required to reach such goals is itself a surprise for some learners. Benny Bailey reflects on disciplinary demands of jazz, citing the case of Joe Farrell, “a traditional-type tenor player,” who once reported that it “took him a year of studying those fourth patterns before he could work them into his solos.”

Bailey explains, “It’s one thing studying something every day, and it’s another really using it. That’s difficult. You just have to keep on doing it over and over and over again until it comes automatically.

One surprised beginner recalls his mentor’s counsel: “I can show you the basic theory you need to play jazz in a few hours, but you will spend the next five to seven years studying it before you can make much use of it in your playing.”

As students increase their proficiency, the class designs increasingly varied patterns based on the material. Students “run” from any pitch in a scale to any other pitch.

They repeat pitches, skip pitches, “double back” over scale fragments, and combine them with chords and intervals on scale and their inversions. Harris further stylizes the inventions of students with practices that dictate precise melodic shape.

One practice is “pivoting,” using one pitch as a launching point for leaps to any other chord tones, then arpeggiating the chord in the opposite direction (exx. 6.8a–b).

Combining fragments of diatonic scales with diminished chords or with augmented triads, or alternating the elements of minor chords and diminished chords, can produce melodies with diverse colors.

One common effect of Harris’s system is to weight the use of chord tones. Even when surrounded by neighboring or altered pitches, chord tones commonly emerge as the prominent pitches of melodic shapes and as the target pitches of phrase endings, occurring, in many instances, on the beat.

Harris’s is unique in both its emphasis and detail, for it teaches students precisely how to transform the elements into credible phrases and focuses as much upon the creative processes of improvisation as upon its products, effectively clarifying the relationship between theory and performance practice in the jazz tradition

advice from many other musicians that he needed to know chords to play jazz. The student, however, could never really see the connection. Whenever he played “patterns out of chord books,” as he put it, “they just sounded like patterns out of chord books.”

another pupil used to “hate” scales because his teachers insisted that he play them “like technical exercises—straight up and down the octave.” That, he thought, was “all” scales were. Having learned from Harris what improvisers “can do with scales,” however, he now finds them to be “really interesting,” and he asserts, “I never get tired of practicing them.”

Learners take heart in their own developing skills as they come to recognize the intimate details that characterize stylized treatments. Initially overwhelmed by the complexity of jazz and the gulf that separates their abilities from those of their idols, they eventually gain confidence.

Having lived with the familiar impression “Oh, no. I could never do that!” they begin gradually to indulge a new sense that encroaches upon their awe until they can assert with some cockiness, “I know what that is; I can do that!”

Harris’s theory is an expansive generative method. It encourages musicians to create original phrases based, in part, on the cross-fertilization of rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic models embodied in the rules Harris promulgates.

“Now that Barry’s laid it out for us, I know what I need to work on for the rest of my life.”

Josh Schneider has “often had the experience of working on things” and realizing he has “just rediscovered” a principle that “someone told me about years ago, but I wasn’t ready for it at the time.

What would it sound like if a major scale were substituted for the seventh scale? And so on. Students answer these self-construed questions by performing the different possibilities and selecting for practice those patterns that most appeal to them.

artists like Henry “Red” Allen learned to improvise “in all keys in New Orleans by playing along with records set at every different speed.

Performing with music on the radio provides supplementary practice opportunities, introducing the increased challenge of grasping the forms of new compositions during a single hearing or over the course of unpredictable replays.

Performers of chording instruments may record their own versions of progressions and drill with them.

As often as not, improvisers also practice formulating solos without accompaniment by reading lead sheets or envisioning their personalized representational maps of pieces.

musicians sometimes alter the formal constraints they place upon themselves. Initially, to lessen the pressures associated with thinking in time, they perform in free rhythm. More confident, they perform to a steady beat. Artists also begin and end their drills at whim, isolating discrete portions of a progression for practice, methodically addressing its features.

“I’d set the chords in front of me and play the melody, watching where the chords fall in relation to the melody,”

Successes simply assure them that each section will present minimal difficulty during formal solos. When problems arise in the course of their trials, however, musicians stop to study the piece’s structure again.

Percussionist Alan Dawson cultivates this orientation in students by having them sing jazz tunes while practicing intricate technical exercises and, ultimately, while practicing the formulation of drum solos. They soon become used to hearing the exercises and improvisations in relation to the piece, and vice versa

In performances, pianists, bass players, and guitarists sometimes vocalize the tune softly to themselves as they improvise, thereby supplying a subtle counterpoint to their instrumentalization.

soloists may treat the melody of a composition allusively. In Art Farmer’s early efforts to improvise, he avoided strict imitation of the melody, striving instead to fashion phrases in each piece’s “general style” so that solos were “like an extension of the melody.”

improvisers may adopt its rhythmic phrasing as the entire underpinning of a solo’s design. “Pres could really feel a song,” Lou Donaldson says. “He could make you hear the song just from his phrasing.”7 Common examples are found in blues choruses in which players improvise three four-bar phrases modeled upon the classic AA′B structure of many blues melodies and song texts: introducing a phrase, repeating it

Besides using the melody as the conceptual basis of solos, practicers adopt another fundamental approach in which they conceive ideas largely in terms of the component shapes of formerly mastered vocabulary patterns.

When musicians abandon the melody as a model for invention—whether temporarily in the context of its rendition or during their solos—they depend on the progression’s salient features as signposts for the improvisation’s “progress.” Moreover, the syntactic implications of harmonic structures assist artists in their endeavor. Once they cultivate a “feeling for form, the form will guide you; it will almost play itself”

Analyses of jazz masters’ performances reveal important information to aspiring artists, leading the way for their own trials. After hearing “Bird take things he used at one particular point in a tune and play them in other places,” Lonnie Hillyer “figured that he must have been trying to make them come out differently. That’s all it’s about, just trying to make things come out differently every time you play them.”

One essential “secret” is that performers can potentially introduce a particular phrase in their solos wherever its complementary chords occur. This realization immediately creates new possibilities for vocabulary usage within the structures of compositions that had served as initial vehicles for students. Once Bobby Rogovin and his peers had, as he says, “taken a certain amount of licks off records, we would take two that were about the same and switch them around in different parts of the solo.” The same principle applies throughout the jazz repertory. “There may be a certain set of chord progressions that you find in different places in different tunes. If you know a crip that fits that chord progression, you can use it on different tunes.

Improvisation drills emphasizing tunes and vocabulary patterns provide fully formed shapes, that is, detailed melodies, long or short, for the artist’s consideration.

“rhythmic inventiveness.” Ken McIntyre encourages aspiring players to begin by restricting themselves to the roots of a piece’s successive chords or even to the piece’s tonic pitch alone. By severely limiting tonal options, students focus their efforts on creating rhythmic phrases varied in substance and length and spanning different portions of the progression.

Barry Harris encourages students to improvise rhythmic patterns by chanting them in a monotone within the framework of compositions.

Maybe, one time through the tune, you play all the first inversions of the chords, just for their sound; then you play all the second inversions for a different sound. Starting on a certain note and going to another note within the same chords gives a different texture to the solo. You listen to what it sounds like one way, and then you say, “I wonder what it would sound like if I switch it around.” There are so many different ways to switch chords around.

Some musicians routinely alternate approaches to acquaint themselves with a composition, formulating their first solo chorus around the piece’s melody, their second around its chords, and their third around its related chord-scales.

instrument without vocalizing their creations—their ideas

Music has a feeling of space around it; it exists in space, these little mobiles of things. I like to think of music visually like that,” Hersch explains.

Several pianists mention that, having learned versions of a piece’s structure and distinct melodic routes through them as alternative configurations of black and white keys, they can subsequently envision the designs as a matrix of superimposed patterns on their keyboards—a composite tablature-like image whose reading can suggest different pathways for invention.

Roy Haynes fondly recalls an occasion when Charlie Parker improvised a “burning” solo in which he quoted “The Last Time I Saw Paris” repeatedly “in different keys.” Unable to contain his curiosity afterwards, Haynes asked Parker what actually had happened “the last time” Parker saw Paris.

Armed with a basic reserve of musical models, young musicians, once they take the plunge and apply their knowledge, encounter the varied challenges that accompany the task.

for many, it is a revelation itself that their solos must “complement the chords, the progression, the meter and the melody—the whole composition.”

When Tommy Turrentine was learning to play, people would say to him, “Man, why don’t you slow down and think about what you’re doing? Why don’t you think about that chord? Why don’t you think about how you’re going to come out of that phrase and go into another one?”

For all them cats, it was a matter of conception. Lamont Young was the first person to make me aware of that word. One day, when we was walking home from a rehearsal, he said, “Hey, Tom, you have to start thinking about conception, man.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Because you sounded sadder’n seven thousand muthafuckahs on that tune. You didn’t know where you were going.” About which he was right. In improvisation, you’ve got to have a basic conception of whatever you’re playing just to know when to start and stop. If you don’t, something funny’s going to jump off.

Even after students learn to follow other musicians’ solos in formal terms and to interpret them as successive ventures through the piece, many still experience difficulty in their own performances

One fundamental problem for the learner involves conceiving and performing patterns in time.

Barry Harris once dictated a harmonic progression to a group of classical music students at a university workshop and directed them to perform an ascending diminished figure at designated points within the form. The task involved the mental gymnastics of following the progression while quickly transposing the figure to suit the progression’s changing chords.

the students had a good enough understanding of the concept of diminished structures and chords and would have had little trouble recognizing them in a written score, this was their first experience with interpreting and performing them off the page. As a result,

Having been defeated by exercises in musical thinking that for seasoned jazz musicians simply constituted preliminary routines—far down the scale of difficulty from transforming chords into viable melodies—the workshop participants came to appreciate, for the first time, both the intellectual rigor of improvisation and the agility required to translate ideas into sounds instantaneously

Even the experts themselves “really have to practice the coordination between the mind and the fingers, the ideas and the body,” Art Farmer affirms. “You have to practice finding the ideas on your horn, getting there at the same time the idea comes into your head. It’s a matter of developing instant touch.”

Musicians commonly practice this synchronization even when away from an instrument by making up figures and miming their finger patterns simultaneously. The goal is to achieve such close coordination between the body and the conceptualizing mind as to articulate musical patterns with the ease and directness of speech or any expressive gesture.

students must learn to maintain different musical perspectives simultaneously, conceiving patterns for their own evolving part while, in the expert’s terms, engaging in a “conversation” with the piece, regulating their ideas in relation to its formal elements.14 Managing each task is a trial in itself; managing them together is the focus of the learner’s struggles.

He likens the process to a child’s mastering different operations when learning to ride a bicycle. At first, it “wobbles dangerously from side to side,” but after hours of practice, “you find your center of balance, and suddenly you have the power to control it so it won’t fall either way. It’s the same with music,” he suggests. In developmental “breakthroughs,” aspiring musicians may suddenly discover that they have acquired the control to manipulate phrases accurately in tempo in relation to a progression’s changing features.

Youngsters develop comparable ease as soloists only after they have assimilated the conventional harmonic movements of jazz and have become adept at determining the tonal models that provide effective pathways through them.

Harold Ousley is unsure about the portion of the progression he is approaching, whether, for example, an anticipated chord is to be, in his words, “a Gm7 or a G chord, I can play certain phrases when I get there that will enable me to figure it out.” His understanding of how the phrases sound in relation to different chords clarifies the issue for him.

Ultimately, a soloist strives for such mastery over form as to improvise without external support. This became apparent to Patience Higgins during his early study with Barry Harris. “You should be able to outline a song without a rhythm section,” Higgins maintains, “and be able to tell when you’re at the bridge or the last eight bars of the tune.”

Josh Schneider’s goal is to improve his ear so that he can “hear millions of different intervals” in his imagination “before he plays them” and then “play them instantly.”

Improvising is a singing, whistling phenomenon when it’s really happening. It’s the expression of the sound that you can conceptualize on your own steam. It’s a matter of getting intricately and sophisticatedly involved with a melodic line so that it is one with the performer.” New Orleans trumpeter Mutt Carey elaborates, “When I’m improvising, I’m singing in my mind. I sing what I feel and then try to reproduce it on the horn.”

“any jazz player should be able to scat sing his solo.”

“If you can’t sing it, you can’t play it.”

when Emily Remler “uses arpeggios and scales in a solo,” she strives “to make valid melodies out of them, melodies which would be so good that you could make a tune out of each four-bar phrase.”

If you could jump out of a chord, you could always jump back in. That was a trick I learned from listening to Louis Armstrong and many of the New Orleans musicians like Joe Oliver and Jimmie Noone. You hear the same thing if you listen to trumpet players like Clifford Brown play melodies.19 They call what they use grace notes. Theoretically, they call them neighboring tones, and they’re beautiful. So, if you play a solo and you’re smart, you can jump out of those chords and jump back in by using those. You’ve got your half neighbors and your whole neighbors, so you can get three notes out of the way and still come back in there. All those things come to me when I’m playing.

Barry Harris recommends that learners tastefully introduce, as Charlie Parker often did, a diminished or augmented sound into their performances by periodically applying it to major seventh or seventh chords at prominent harmonic pivot points within progressions such as the movement between the eighth and ninth measures of a blues. The mixture of different kinds of musical models vastly expands their applications for creative invention.

the patterns are not ends in themselves, but have ongoing implications for thought.

when a famous saxophonist once asked Walter Bishop Jr. how he played “those long, long lines that just keep going,” Bishop replied that it was “easy really; you just string together lots of smaller melodies.”

It is partly by methodically practicing the formulation of phrases over discrete sets of chord changes that artists discover new cross-routes through the chords’ associated vocabulary patterns, creating new models for larger chains of ideas

As practicers discover the challenges and rewards of formulating musical ideas, they devote less time to applying fixed tonal materials within harmonic forms and more time to interpreting the materials in different ways.

“The phrases you play . . . are your message while you’re playing. [They] should relate to one another,” Tommy Flanagan states, “and they should be logical.” The “vital part” for Lee Konitz, too, “is thinking while you’re moving, and once the momentum has been started, I don’t like to break it. I’m concerned with the continuity in motion. . . . If you’re not affected and influenced by your own notes when you improvise, then you’re missing the whole essential point.”