 Howard Mandel Photo by Melissa Richard |
Improvisation and composition are two sides of one coin alloyed in the medium of form. At least it’s how it is in jazz — though maybe a coin is too static an image for anything so dynamic as music or so fluid as the relationship of improvisation and composition. Not to mention there’s typically more music than coin to go around.
The correspondence of composition and improvisation though are arguably the same way in every performing art form. It’s hard to conceive any creative construction that doesn’t involve some degree of improvisation once substance has been chosen and intent begins to manifest. To start you scratch around, try one idea, tinker with it, put it off, dream up another, scrap the second, try a third, pick one thing out you’d tried before to mix or match with the first part, come up finally with something unexpected: a poem with a twist, a dance to challenge the body, a puzzle with a key, music that retains an ability to fascinate. That’s composition. Then in the performing arts the thing is to make it come alive in the moment. Which likely means adjusting, adapting, changing what you started with — expanding on it, cutting it short, recasting what you had, understanding and trying to put across even more than that, enlivening if not remaking in the process everything surrounding what you do — resulting in a composition transformed through individual and/or individuals’ efforts.
Composition was partner to improvisation at the beginning of jazz if we can believe Jazzmen published in 1939. Buddy Bolden’s band and other New Orleans ensembles are reported to have played ragtime compositions — pieces that were published and distributed broadly as sheet music — though in performance they “jazzed ’em up” meaning the rhythms were loosened and the themes liberated from any necessity of strict adherence. Bolden’s posse was also reported to have expanded at length on slow blues. True the ability to read music wasn’t universal among jazz musicians at the turn of the last century though some leading players were indeed legitimately trained. Early jazz bands like many jazz, pop, rock and traditional bands today worked by ear rather by eye. But musical literacy seems beside the point; being unable to read a score doesn’t mean that a musician cannot craft, remember and perform his or her part of a composition communicated orally. Consequently non-readers can’t always be assumed to be “improvising.” They may be playing what’s been composed prior to performance committed to memory and repeated with such verve as to make it breathe like new.
Jazz from its New Orleans’ conception through its world-wide dissemination — by virtue of its distinct character co-mingling sources like ragtime minstrelsy, spirituals, marching bands, vaudeville, opera and concert music, Caribbean and Creole culture, all in the context of fast-changing social circumstances — surely has raised improvisation to a high art but not really at composition’s expense however the spotlight has fallen. Jazz has justly celebrated the great spontaneously inspired soloists: Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and many others. But it’s also hailed the writers of striking themes and dazzling passages, the arrangers of small and large instrumental forces into previously unimagined sounds, those orchestrators and producers whose art is in the creation of context. Jelly Roll Morton, George Gershwin, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, George Russell, Charles Mingus, and so on to Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and the later electric Miles demand attention as composers — again with stress that, in practice, jazz composition and improvisation are seldom mutually exclusive.
We need the word “composition” to refer to the ordering of things the placing of disparate parts together whether those “things” are specific notes to be sounded as they’re represented on a grid or opportunities that are carefully set up for the launch of such superb spontaneous creators as Lester Young. And we need “improvisation” to mean more than “Ready set blow!”
There’s no good or bad about one or the other and perhaps the two forms of musical generation are in their purest forms just opposite ends of a time-related continuum. Improvisation is more-or-less spontaneous creation while composition is assumed to be accomplished any time prior to performance: thought through, crafted, reflected upon and revised, the result brought to musicians and listeners at a decent remove from the circumstances of its birth.
In jazz there are many secret exceptions to this rule: Louis Armstrong had already worked out several of the motifs that jell in the brilliant opening cadenza of “West End Blues” for instance, and what are we to make of Charles Mingus grabbing scores from his copyists and thrusting them upon the musicians enlisted to play his Town Hall concert of October 1962? Does Pop’s classic represent the spur-of-the-moment flash of light that signals “genius at work!” or a pre-planned nailing of ideas sweated over and practiced? Does the recording of Mingus’s over-ambitious effort capture a big band in disarray or improvising?
If jazz is a players’ music and so has characteristically been more improvised than the music we sloppily call classical might that change as today’s conservatory-trained instrumentalists and highly schooled composers raised in a pop/rock/jazz/rap milieu are asked to grab the moment, expand on their instructions, stretch interpretation all the way into making something new?
The real question isn’t if music is improvised or composed, etched with a quill pen or Pentium processor, written for or recorded by someone playing viola da gamba or alto sax. Players and listeners judge if music’s inspired or complacent, innovative or conventional, iconoclastic or conservative. Turn it over: is what you hear committed or indifferent? Communicative or irrelevant? What we want is a coin that rings true, that we can use — a sound we want to hear again.
“In jazz the dividing line between composer and performer is a fine one subject to considerable overlapping in the sense that all jazz players can be considered composers since they are in effect composing extempore.”
Louis Armstrong has long been hailed as the George Washington of jazz, the first giant to emerge from the coterie of jazz’s founders to give focus to the new world of improvisation and swing. This image of Armstrong, a.k.a. Satchmo and Pops, has been polished anew by Ken Burns‘ video-documentary Jazz, which kicks off its second episode and ends, as a benediction with the trumpeter-vocalist’s indelible performances of “Tiger Rag” and “Dinah” — numbers he calls “good ol’ good ones” in dazzling appearance in an early talky, circa 1930. Standing before the game but over
shadowed Mills Blue Rhythm Band, Armstrong sings two brilliant choruses, finishing with a completely self-assured scat phrase, elaborating on the simple, catchy melody with rhythmically-charged syllables that seem to beam from his bright eyes, knowing smile, and glowing being without mindful mediation. Then he plays a scorching out-chorus on his horn. The performance is so brimming with immediacy that audiences are easily persuaded it just happened.
The Roaring ’20s, the Jazz Age, was evidently an era in revolt against civilization’s old order, overwhelmed with its own spontaneous high spirits and in denial that an organized criminal enterprise was supplying the life of the party. It’s little wonder that a figure of fun representing the new style was elevated to a godlike level. But that’s not to deny Armstrong’s real powers.
He was said to be the loudest trumpeter of the time, required to play from the recording studio’s hall so as to let those musicians grouped around the microphone to be heard in the mono balance. His great chops, resulting from many hours since childhood of practice, enabled him to play higher and longer than other trumpeters of the time — indeed Pops made it his habit to conclude every song by reaching for an almost unattainable note and some of his most memorable solos climax with artfully paced repetitions of one blasted upper register tone.
Also, Armstrong absolutely did re-invent upon the melodies of many of the popular songs he embraced in the ’30s particularly using subtle pitch substitutions unprecedented accents and rhythmic displacements, startling hip details that refreshed stale conventions. He also kidded the simple tunes then expanded on them, identifying their most distinctive elements and reshaping them to new conclusions prompted by his own lyrical imagination.
It’s tempting to attribute his abilities to sheer force of personality as the young Armstrong was irresistibly charming and his musicality was evident in his speech, his lifestyle and his fashion sense. He was a denizen of the street, not a scholar or businessman; his message was enjoy the moment because the blues may be just around the corner. That he’d known hard times was evident in the moan and cry in his voice and his horn; that he’d triumphed over them, and could teach listeners to do the same, was clear from the adaptations, inventions and revelations he delivered that seemed to spring from him alone though they might be echoed or emulated in the music others made in his wake.
The actual process of his creativity being undocumented, it’s hard to say exactly how he turned other peoples’ tunes into his own, raising the matter of interpretation to auteur-ship, but it’s clear he did it again and again, even late in his career remaking Porgy and Bess with Ella Fitzgerald, assuming ownership of Cole Porter songs, in company with Oscar Peterson‘s trio, as well as themes from Walt Disney movies. On all these recordings, Pops’ gravelly vocal timbre stamps the song as his immediately as does the recognizable bite, heft and phrasing of his trumpet. Although many jazz experts insist Armstrong’s creative innovations were finished by the ’40s, that his repertoire, arrangements and style remained the same over the last three decades of his life, we continue to believe in Armstrong as a beacon of improvisation and spontaneity by virtue of the icons he broke in the ’20s and his desire to please the listeners before him always in the here and now.
Long before Armstrong’s routines became fixed, he modeled for jazz soloists ways they could distinguish their own improvisations. Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, even Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor — all the great improvisers — learned Pops’ lessons.
A) Be virtuosic; do all you can with your instrument.
B) Develop your own sound based on your tastes and apply it whatever you play.
C) Know what’s going on and use it for your own purposes.
With those skills presupposed, the challenge of what to play is conquerable by the musician who tries. Armed with self-knowledge and technical mastery, an individual can address improvisation on songs, chord progressions, modes, attitudes or specifics of time and place. Assuming one is never “free” of one’s own character the musician who’s open to immediate experience can yet be liberated by what they already know to arrive where they’ve never been before.
Take Charlie Parker as one archtypal example, an improviser who etched most remarkable spontaneous composition with his almost every musical breath. Mythologized as an achingly brilliant, life-long impoverished and culturally oppressed romantic hero — with an overlay of black American urban junkie genius stereotype — Parker’s flights of expression are much more ambitious, far-reaching and sustained than those of the mere Yardbird for which he’d been nicknamed as a hungry teen in Kansas City. When we listen, we are over and over lifted on Bird’s wings through his unanticipated course — dazzling trajectories of pure melody, seldom more than two choruses long, spilling at a flight-like speed out of the swing era’s rhythms and harmonies into the more intricate and intoxicating ether of bebop.
Parker was a virtuosic instrumentalist by any account, easily comparable to Paganini, in mastery of his medium. His attainment of his remarkable breath and finger coordination is legendary. Story has it that after being humiliatingly “gonged” for the amateurism of his alto playing by ramrod drummer Jo Jones of the Basie band during an audition jam, Parker retreated to an available mountain cabin, where he spent weeks obsessively running scales and intervals on his horn, compounding his own understanding of chords’ implications and conne
ctions, and perfecting his physical technique. It was about this time, too, that he committed himself to heroin dependency.
Parker was not just a heroin addict — he was a devout poly-hedonist, enjoying wine and women as well as smack and song. If we accuse (or simply depict) this self-realized musician of indulging certain compulsions, though, well, that backs us into a corner. Just what is it that drives an artist’s unprecedented accomplishment? Same demons that drive one to less flattering brinks? Bird indulged depths of personal behavior that were ultimately self-destructive, but he was not reputedly evil. We hear the world of an overwhelmingly gifted soul in his saxophone — including easily assumed strength, streaming lyricism, leaps of faith. Critical wit is another element of Bird’s story-telling, evident especially in the one existing film clip of him playing live, with Dizzy Gillespie and a rhythm trio after accepting Down Beat magazine awards on Broadway columnist Earl Wilson’s early ’50s television show.
Wilson is not the most elegant host of this rare event, bebop broadcast live — but jazz critic Leonard Feather convinces him to present the Down Beat plaques honoring Bird and Diz as players of the year. Wilson is mildly, thoughtlessly offensive, bungling the sense of the honors and referring to the musicians as “you boys” — at which Parker blinks. Asked if he has anything to say, Bird answers, “Well, Earl, they say music speaks louder than words.”
He and Gillespie, with pianist Dick Hyman (who’s face is not shown, only his hands) and an obscure bassist and left-handed drummer then kick off “Hot House,” a bebop anthem credited to Tadd Dameron, related to chord changes Cole Porter used on “What Is This Thing Called Love?” Effortlessly commanding the screen, the saxist and trumpeter bite directly into the finger-busting variation of the three-phrase from which their improvisations will follow. Bird’s eyes are intense, and his hand jumps briefly from the sax’s keys to tweak the octave ring on his horn’s neck — it seems to have stuck.
Nevertheless, he takes the first improvised break — firmly setting four quarter notes right on top of the rhythm, inarguably announcing his name: “CHAR-LIE-PAR-KER!” There’s a grace note pause, then Bird unfurls one of those breath-taking, faster-than-light-or-sound trajectories of melodic rapture and grace-of-God rhythmic articulation that characterize this man’s music. I sometimes ask students to count the number of notes in this second phrase of his chorus, and no one can. After that marvel’s untraceable ups-downs-in-outs, Parker lays forth another, more relaxed distillation of the motif at hand, playing with it happily through the song’s second eight-measure section, resolving its particular puzzle before a final comment: an improbably faster repeat of the unrepeatably fast and complicated phrase he’d earlier blown, and a braying haw-he-haw (earl-wil-son) Bronx cheer, which dribbles off as Gillespie launches from Bird’s conclusion.
Very few artists in any discipline have proved able to throw together such riotiously rich, whether acidic or lush always beautiful statements as Charlie Parker could in an eyeblink, with spontaneous impulses triggering subtle, practiced movements of his fingers, mouth and lungs at the whim of his devastingly quick mind. Yet his efforts, and those of his acolytes, will likely inspire generations to come of musicians, dancers, visual artists — anyone wringing raw materials for the enduring truth of their moment, maybe even writer — to try.
From:
More Than a Coin Toss: Facing the Flip Sides – Improvisation/Composition – of Jazz
By Howard Mandel
© 2001 NewMusicBox
There’s a tendency to ignore “composition” as much of a jazz matter after solemnly acknowledging the career of Duke Ellington who has been widely hailed, especially during the centenary of his birth in 1999, as “the greatest American composer.” Problematic though that title is, Ellington’s musical accomplishments are many, and outlive the 20th Century. His dozens of memorable songs — “C-Jam Blues,” “Mood Indigo,” “Satin Doll” just to name three off the top — remain essentials of American culture. His suites, starting with Black, Brown and Beige in 1942, are among the most serious accomplishments in the quest that Paul Whiteman announced in 1924 to lift jazz from its funkier surroundings to the concert stage and hence “make jazz a lady.”
Ellington himself would never have been so dismissive of his music’s context. His big break was in the Cotton Club, a gangster-run Harlem nightspot patronized by slumming white swells. Ellington was also a practical improvisatory bandleader who from 1928 until his death in 1972 maintained a touring ensemble of notable soloists. He and his co-composer Billy Strayhorn often created compositions from the warm-up exercises, personal vocabulary or fragmentary ideas of his band’s members. Hence “Come Sunday,” “Cotton Tail,” “Caravan,” and “Portrait of Cootie.” Like a tailor, Ellington could take materials his men brought him — Bubber Miley‘s way with a cup mute for instance — and compose a classic like “Creole Love Call” that allowed the player to show off a solo routine by playing to strengths and avoiding weaknesses. Ellington also wrote out some pieces for his Orchestra or small groups drawn from it completely — for instance Reminiscin’ in Tempo or his charts for the ballet The River or his Per Gynt Suite. But what we most cherish are Duke’s songs as if made to order for his men and occasional women to strut their stuff. The personal sounds and characteristic improvisations of Johnny Hodges, Juan Tizol, Ben Webster, Jimmy Blanton, Cat Anderson, Paul Gonsalves, Joya Sherrill, Adelaide Hall, and many others gleamed in the context of Duke’s settings.
Ken Burns in his recent PBS video-documentary series Jazz succumbs to the aforementioned temptation: after singli
ng out Ellington as the greatest, he cites few other jazzmen composers. In this his attitude lags behind that of his senior consultant Wynton Marsalis, who was himself awarded a Pulitzer Prize in composition, copped for his 1995 oratorio Blood On The Fields.
Granted Burns was challenged by the necessity of selection in his 10 part, 19-hour series, and the notion of a dramatic long jazz instrumentalist ready at the drop of a downbeat to create a perfectly balanced complex statement is catnip to filmmakers compared to the sedate shot of a composer laboring over blank score paper at a desk. But to fail to cite the compositional efforts even of such an evident minimalist as Count Basie, obvious maximalist as Sun Ra, or collectively composing-and-improvising troupe such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago is to lapse into cliché regarding what composition is all about.
And even Ellington is foreshadowed by Ferdinand Joseph “Jelly Roll Morton” Lemott (accurately acknowleged). With considerably more finesse, complexity and accomplishment than Armstrong, Bechet, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or whoever, Morton enacted highly specific dramas for particular instrumentation with his Red Hot Peppers, a septet or octet of musicians familiar with the New Orleans idiom and Jelly Roll’s ways in particular.
Morton first convened the Peppers to cut studio recordings in 1926 and three quarters of a century later, the results remain a shining bright entanglement of composition and improvisation.
The core instrumentation of Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers was piano, a brass cohort, two or three reeds, banjo or guitar, and percussion. Morton depended on his own and his players’ improvisations to flesh out his piano introductions and interludes, cornet breaks and reed obbligatos, but these spontaneous inventions were set amid multiple themes, rhythmic stop times, specific timbral effects and individually contrived parts deployed within the compositional format that was his New Orleans hallmark — fearless polyphony.
Among the Red Hot Peppers’ masterpieces are “Black Bottom Stomp,” “Milenburg Joys” and “The Pearls.” Another, “King Porter Stomp,” was re-arranged for
12-piece jazz band by Fletcher Henderson in the early ’30s, recorded and performed widely as a mid Swing Era hit by clarinetist Benny Goodman with his big band, and reconfigured in 1987 by Gil Evans for a jazz orchestra featuring electric bass, piano and guitars, conga drums, synthesizers and an alto sax solo by David Sanborn. (An orchestrator in the ’40s for Bob Hope‘s radio show, later for Claude Thornhill‘s classical-jazz orchestra, the host of the informal “birth of the cool” composers’ colloquoy and Miles Davis‘s closest collaborator, Gil Evans was never put off by polyphony.)
Morton was not an utter iconoclast; he embraced many of his era’s compositional conventions as far more than empty or sketchy shells rather givens to be tampered with — just as did his most successful homeboy-predecessor New Orleans-born European-educated Creole composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Gottschalk’s career may be thought of as derived from the examples of European composer-piano virtuosi as Chopin and Liszt; Morton was well aware of European composers especially those of the operas performed in New Orleans as well as ragtime composers such as Scott Joplin whose scores were published for parlor pianists starting in 1895.
As a composer of the highest order, Morton bent whatever he borrowed to his own vision and purposes as did Duke Ellington. Jelly Roll Morton’s composed polyphony, which seemed radical if not anarchic to many listeners in the ’20s, led to prop up the myth of New Orleans’ jazz as anchored in “collective improvisation.” Don’t be deceived. Even works as rhetorically “improvised” as Ornette Coleman‘s epochal Free Jazz or John Coltrane‘s Ascension follow compositional plans, sketchy though they may be and however much they gave their improvising participants lattitude to develop their own statements. The same method is employed by improvising saxophonist/ composer John Zorn in his game pieces such as Cobra.
Burns’ Jazz also neglects to consider one of the most successful American composers of the Jazz Age perhaps because of his theatrical context. But New York City-born George Gershwin was certainly a jazz baby — renowned for his piano improvisations at house parties who also composed immortal songs. Gershwin’s music has frequently been interpreted by jazz musicians and is favorite repertory of jazz vocalists. Gershwin’s ambitions as a composer went beyond songs of course — however much Paul Whiteman’s arranger Ferde Grofé contributed to the orchestration of Rhapsody in Blue. The chord progression of “I’ve Got Rhythm” has proved infinitely inspiring of artful improvisatory variation and was the basis for roughly half the songs “composed” by bebop saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” Parker. Gershwin incidentally anticipated Ellington’s compositional technique of writing out of the strengths of certain of his players. According to The Gershwin Years, “Ross Gorman Whiteman’s clarinetist was famous for being able to play a glissando upon an instrument supposedly capable of producing only individual tones. George decided that this tricky effect would be a good way to open the Rhapsody; the desired jazzy whoop immediately sets the mood of the piece.”
All this said, it’s worthwhile to understand how Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and George Russell–to name three “jazz composers”– fulfilled that role in their own rights. Mingus was an avowed Ellingtonian taking many of jazz-related generic or folk forms as raw material from which to sculpt personal monuments, often on the bulwarks of his players’ abilities. However rangy his writing, the finest realizations of Mingus’ music depends on the personal contributions of winds and reeds improvisers Eric Dolphy, Roland Kirk and John Handy, the inspirations of trumpeter Ted Curson, encyclopedic pianists Jaki Byard and Don Pullen, and the propulsion of his hand-in-glove drum partner Dannie Richmond. Monk on the other hand never departed from America’s most standard song form — head, solo, solo, head — but the unique idiosyncracy of his melodies variously based on large odd intervals or ingenious simplifications earns him a proud enduring place among 20th century composers. George Russell is an extraordinary composer by virtue of his discovery, exploration, comprehension and application of a set of previously undeveloped modal principles. Several of Russell’s better known works including “Cubana-Be/Cubana Bop” and “All About Rosie” are demonstrations of those principles played out on appropriated themes.
An adequate working definition for the activity of “composition” would nicely cover John Cage‘s innovations, Yoko Ono‘s conceptualizations, Anthony Braxton‘s composition-generating systems and even the improvised conductions or “comprovisations” being advanced by Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris. Cecil Taylor‘s superstructures on such inadequately analyzed albums as Unit Structures and Conquistador, Don Cherry‘s suites Complete Communion and Symphony For Improvisers, Ornette Coleman’s realizations of harmolodic principles through his electrically-amplified ensemble Prime Time, all deserve a glance at least as works weaving improvisation around and through stable compositional elements, an activity that is essential in “improvisation,” too.
From:
More Than a Coin Toss: Facing the Flip Sides – Improvisation/Composition – of Jazz
By Howard Mandel
© 2001 NewMusicBox
It’s a funny thing how our weaknesses work, sometimes. My improvising abilities are pitiful – put something down on paper, I’ll play it, but ask me to make it up, and I’m just reading the inside of my eyeballs. The good aspect of the situation is this: I stand in awe of composer-performers who improvise. I just think it’s the coolest thing. And because of this awe (not unmixed with envy), I listen better.
