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The Story
I love it when unrelated sounds are forced to share the same space. To most people’s ears I imagine moments like those in this short recording sound abrasive and chaotic, but to me it’s a sort of magic. It’s only recently that I’ve fully identified the precise nature of this eccentric pleasure. It came together during my trip to New Orleans last March, where I found myself drawn back to Bourbon Street, again and again, especially at night, when it was the crowds were largest and the noise was intense. I was puzzled by the attraction, since, on the surface at least, the Bourbon Street scene is complete anathema to me. I don’t like crowds in general, and a crowd of drunken college students howling around…that’s really not my sort of scene. Still, I kept confusing myself by going back. And eventually I figured it out. It was all about the sound. The bars on either side of that narrow street blast out music so loud that it sometimes hurts your ears even from the street. Some of the music is recorded, some of it is live, and it’s mixed with the sounds of shouts and screams from both inside the clubs and out on the street. At one point I found myself just standing still in the middle of the street, listening. Four or five different songs were audible all at once and the music blended together like minerals in a volcanic eruption. It was an aleatory sound collage…simultaneously obnoxious and eerily beautiful.
The short recording here is not nearly as intense as that, but I was drawn to it for precisely the same reasons. I made it in San Francisco when I was there recently for a medical appointment. As I came up to the BART station at 24th and Mission, I heard a chaotic mixture of music that I couldn’t easily sort out into its component parts. Coming into the plaza saw a dozen or so people standing in a circle singing what seemed to be a political song. Several members of the group were beating tambourines. A few feet away from them a middle-aged man and woman were sitting at a table with a sign offering free meditation classes. The man was playing guitar and they were both singing an off-key chant of some sort. (It sounds like they’re singing “Hidey-Ho,” but I’m pretty sure that they’re actually sort of Hindi or Sanskrit mantras.) At first it seemed like the two songs were competing with one another. But as I stood watching and listening it became apparent that they were simply co-existing. Each song proceeded as if the other weren’t happening. When the Spanish song ended, the meditation promoters continued their chanting.
I pulled out my recorder and was able to capture the last few minutes of the chaos. What you hear in these thirty seconds is the end of the Spanish song, after which the chanting continues.
The Recording
The recording is pretty dirty, so I’ve applied some processing to clean it up a little. It was a windy day in San Francisco and since my hand-held recorder doesn’t have much of a wind screen, the recording picked up some loud low-frequency gusts. I used an EQ plug-in aggressively to filter out these sounds as best I could. You’ll be able to hear some of the artifacts of that filtering on the recording. I also applied a bit of stereo field spreading in order isolate the different elements of the recording. Still, it’s a messy recording. Which is precisely what I like about it.
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The Story
Unlike past sounds in this series, the source material for this sample has been altered…heavily. Although nothing has been added, the raw material has been sculpted to significantly transform it. Because of this, I invite you to listen to it before reading on to the description that follows.
Now I know that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, to many (maybe most) people this will feel like an unpleasant sonic assault. But I was drawn to the material because of the irregular rhythms of the various elements within the sound, and the tonal qualities that lay beneath the abrasive noises that give shape to the piece. And in fact the key components of this piece are literally abrasive – the high-pitched tones are the sounds of sneakers scraping against the floor in a high school gym. The underlying recording was made during my son’s recent lacrosse practice. As I sat in the bleachers listening, I became captivated by the odd and aleatoric punctuation that the sound of squeaking sneakers created. After I recorded it, I wanted to enhance this effect, so I applied some extreme filtering to the recording in order to amplify the squeaking (and also the frequency range of the occasional voice calling out), while severely damping out the lower frequencies. Then I stretched the sample to slow the whole thing down and threw in a bit of extra reverb, which had the effect of transforming the gym into something that sounded more like a factory floor. The first half of the piece consists of this modified but still “raw” sound. Then over the second half I apply several sound mangling processes, which increase gradually in intensity. These processes don’t add anything new to the sound, but they pull out various elements of the sound, manipulate them and add them back in, which slowly transforms the comparative clarity of the earlier sound into a murky sonic cloud.
Last Saturday my family and I were fortunate to be able to attend the Hmong new year celebration here in Missoula. Those who have followed my Being Undiagnosable series will know that while I was in the two-year process of searching for a diagnosis for symptoms which eventually turned out to be Lyme disease, a local Hmong healer offered to perform several healing ceremonies on my behalf. (You can read my account of that experience here.) since that time I’ve kept in periodic touch with Ia, the healer, and her husband Kou. I was thrilled when Kou called to invite me to the celebration and I wanted to post a brief description of the event along with a few pictures and videos.
The celebration took place in the gymnasium of a local elementary school. As we walked in we were immediately engulfed in the spectacularly colorful traditional costumes and the bright sounds coming from the men’s vests, decorated with rows of old French coins which jangled with every movement.
Before the ceremony we were led into the cafeteria, where giant pots of food awaited us. As soon as we walked in, Kou spotted us and welcomed us in.
“Thanks so much for inviting us,” my wife said.
“Of course,” he said simply, “you are family.”
And that’s exactly the way it felt throughout the evening. First we were fed, then we were led into the gymnasium where we watched a wonderful series of musicians and dancers perform. We were told that the dancing would keep going on until at least midnight. We didn’t have the stamina to last that long, but here are some scenes from the time we were there.
Kou and Ia, dancing
Musical performance using a banana leaf
Hmong flute performance
A dance done with a traditional musical instrument
I feel so fortunate to have Kou and Ia consider me a part of their family. I’m so grateful for the support they’ve given me in my illness. I feel held by their entire community.
If you’re interested in knowing more about Hmong culture, here are couple of wonderful books that talk about the Hmong in America. The first, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, will resonate especially with those who have struggled with our fractured healthcare system. The second, The Late Homecomer, is a broader, beautifully poetic portrait of the Hmong experience.
This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of the ideas behind the exercise “Go Into Another Room.”
Introduction: acoustics and mindfulness
The exercise Go Into Another Room combines mindfulness practice with a simple psychotherapeutic technique with the goal of bringing us into a present moment awareness of the space we are currently inhabiting.
The mindfulness aspect of the exercise involves focusing our awareness on the spatial and acoustic aspects of the physical rooms we inhabit. The therapeutic technique involves mindfully making a very small change in our behavior and using the experience of change as leverage for a larger shift in our state of mind. I talk about the therapeutic technique in several different parts of the book, so in this post I’ll be exploring our experience of acoustic space and the ways in which acoustic awareness can be a vehicle for greater mindfulness. Because I believe that sound is a particularly effective vehicle with which to access mindfulness. Like the breath, it’s always there. Even in the quietest room there is sound. Even in the absence of external noise, our own bodies create sound. And focusing our attention on the qualities of the sounds around us brings us into a fuller awareness of the present moment.
Acoustic literacy
I am nothing of an acoustician. I don’t begin to be able to comprehend the mathematics and physics that regulate the way sound behaves in different physical spaces. Nonetheless, hearing is by far my dominant sense and as a result I find that I have an intense intuitive awareness of the acoustic properties of physical spaces.
It’s not an intentional awareness and often it’s not even conscious. I find that it’s a difficult experience to put into words. Part of what makes it difficult is that I’m talking not about the experience of sound itself, but rather about an awareness of the behavior of sound within a given space. The sound of a hand clap in an empty room, to give a simple example, is very different than a hand clap in a fully furnished room. The sound of a footstep is different in a bathroom and in a gymnasium. Even if the original source of the sound is identical, the behavior of that sound in different rooms transforms our experience of it.
The reason for this is reverberation. When sound waves move out from their source, they eventually make contact with the surfaces around them. When they bounce off of those surfaces we hear, in addition to the initial sound, its reflection.
Different surfaces behave differently when sounds hit them. Some tend to absorb sound, some reflect them back. Surfaces at different distances reflect the sound at different time intervals. Different materials absorb or reflect particular frequencies of sound. As I say, the mathematical formulas describing the acoustic behavior of different spaces is extremely complex and beyond my understanding. But those who do understand it have created software which can model many different spaces, as in the examples below, which I created by taking a single sound source then running it through different settings on the reverb plug-in on my computer.
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In this example I’ve taken a simple drum beat and repeated it eight times. The difference should be fairly clear even on the worst speakers. The first version is “dry” – no additional reverb has been applied. In the second reverb is applied to create the effect of hearing the sound from a great distance. The third replicates the acoustics of a kitchen. The fourth is a large room. The fifth is a tunnel, the sixth a cathedral, the seventh and exhibition hall and the eighth mimics a martial arts stadium. (For those who are interested, I did this using two of the reverb plug-ins that come with Cubase 5 – Reverence and RoomWorks. I didn’t do anything fancy with the settings, just used the presets that come with these programs.)
Echoic, Anechoic
As I say, my understanding of what’s happening here is primarily intuitive. My ears pick up on these differences and I respond to them. We all perform some version of this extraordinarily complex process. Sort of like bats using echolocation, our minds are constantly making subtle assessments of the relationship between the sources of sounds and the reflections those sounds are creating.
As Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter in the introduction to their wonderful book Spaces Speak, Are You Listening, the ability to sense spatial attributes is not unique to bats and dolphins. It’s hard-wired into our brains. “For example,” they write, “when blindfolded, nearly all of us can approach a wall without touching it just by attending to the way the wall changes the frequency balance of the background noise.” We’re not ordinarily conscious of doing this. But if I blindfolded you and teleported you to the inside of a cathedral, you’d know instantly what sort of space you were in. And if I then teleported you into a bathroom, you’d automatically feel the difference.
Personally, I find that I’m very sensitive to these differences. There are rooms that I can barely stand to be in because of their acoustic properties. And there are other spaces that I completely love. One of the rooms I like the most acoustically
is the music studio that I have created in the basement of my house. It’s a narrow room and before I began using it for music it was acoustically unpleasant…boomy and tight. I treated the walls with a great deal of acoustical foam, which absorbs much of the sound in the room before it reverberates off of the walls (particularly lower, bass frequencies). The effect is a room that, when you walk into it, feels soft and hushed, gently contained. The acoustical treatment has shaped the behavior of sound within the room in a way that makes it much more pleasant. At least to me.
This can be taken to extremes. Blesser and Salter describe the effects of “anechoic chambers,” rooms which have been specially designed so that all surfaces absorb rather than reflect sound waves. “From an aural perspective,” they write, “an ideal anechoic chamber is completely silent and entirely ‘spaceless.’” They describe the sensations of pressure, discomfort, disorientation, even nausea that are created by the absence of sonic reverberation. “The combination of sound isolation and absorption reduces background sound to a level that no longer masks the sound of a listener’s breathing heart or flowing blood.” Indeed, when John Cage entered the Harvard anechoic chamber in 1948 he reported that rather than hearing silence he heard two distinct sounds which he was told were the sounds of his nervous system and his circulatory system. There is no such thing, he concluded, as perfect silence.
I am Standing in a Room
The theme song for this exercise is not a song at all. It is a classic piece of sound art by Alvin Lucier called I am Standing in a Room. (It’s a piece which I’ve listed, along with other minimalist classics, in the “further listening” at the end of the exercise Repeat Yourself.) In this piece, Lucier takes a simple piece of audio (a spoken paragraph) and plays it in a room then re-records the sound as it sounds in the room. He repeats this process over and over until the original sound is transformed by the reverberant properties of the room itself. It’s an extraordinary exploration of the sonic and acoustic principles I’ve been discussing in this post. An illustration of the technique can be found in the video below. If you’d like to get the entire mesmerizing and surprisingly poignant 45 minute piece, you can find it here.
As always, I welcome suggestions for other pieces of music which capture the essence of the exercise.
Further reading
I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:
As always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.
Further, further reading
More detailed reading on spatial acoustics, borrowed from Blesser and Salter’s website:
I’ve been hard at work lately on a short video trailer for The Next Ten Minutes. As a composer, one of the most important aspects of this has been creating the soundtrack for the video. I wanted to create a piece of music that worked harmoniously with the spoken word but which could also stand on its own as a sort of soundtrack to the book itself. So, while the evolution of this cyclic, meditative piece is driven by the rhythms of the text it accompanies, my hope is that it also has an internal coherence of its own.
And yes, I acknowledge the influence of Steve Reich.
The full video will be available nearer the publication date for the book (10/26).
To hear the music, use this player:
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The Story
While travelling in China last year, our group visited Shangli Ancient Town, a small village in western Sichuan Province in which many of the village’s beautiful old structures remain intact. The narrow streets were thronged with tourists – very few of them non-Chinese – and the town was ringed by rivers, over which stood beautiful stone foot bridges. (You can find another nice description of the town here.) As we approached the central plaza of the town, I was transfixed by a repetitive chanting song. I scouted around and found its source – a clutch of young boys sitting on the ground in the middle of the crowd, playing some sort of card game which involved slapping their cards on the ground at certain moments of the chant. I was able to capture a bit of it, which is what you hear here. I don’t have enough Chinese to make out the words they’re singing (which may well be in Sichuanese dialect anyway). One of the things I love about this recording is that at first it sounds like the boys are doing just a simple monotone chant…but as it continues a lovely melody emerges. And at least one of the group of boys seems to be a pretty good singer. I’ve cleaned up the recording just a bit, filtering it so as to bring out the voices and reduce the background noise.
Composer: Wayne Shorter. Recorded on 6/7/1967 by the Miles Davis Quintet: Miles Davistrumpet, Wayne Shortertenor saxophone, Herbie Hancockpiano, Ron Carterbass, Tony Williamsdrums. Released on the album Nefertiti (Columbia, CS 9594, 1968).
For the second piece in this series I have deliberately presented myself with a dilemma. When evaluating jazz, what is our subject – the song or the performance, the performers or a particular recording? It’s not a simple question. Examining “Take the A Train” as performed by the Duke Ellington, Glen Miller and Sun Ra orchestras
is quite a different thing than looking at the song as performed over the years by various incarnations of the Ellington orchestra. Which is different than focusing on the piano solos performed over the song’s changes by, say, Duke, Oscar Peterson and Dave Brubeck.
And of course all of these things are different than a formal study of the melody and harmonic structure of the song itself. Which, in case you’re interested, looks like this.
Of course in any musical form, composition and performance are separate things. But the degree of the gap between them varies. In popular music, there is often very little difference between the recorded version of a song and subsequent performances. If you look at the sheet music to the Eagles song “Take it Easy” you’re going to get a pretty accurate representation of what you hear on the recorded version of the song, which in turn will be pretty close to what you hear when you listen to the song performed in concert.
That is of course why live recordings of popular music are rarely very interesting: the relationship between the song, the performers and the performance is so close that very little new information is conveyed.
In the great majority of classical music, the relationship between the composition and the performer has been severed. The performer interprets the composition. Which is why it’s possible to listen with interest to multiple recordings of the same piece. In this case, a discussion of the composition will most likely be based on the score itself, independent of any particular performance, while a discussion of a particular performance will almost inevitably revolve around the performer’s relationship with, fidelity to and understanding of what is understood to be the composer’s intention.
Where does an improvisatory art form like jazz fit in to this scenario? Let’s start with the question of what constitutes a jazz composition. Here is the “chart” for Wayne Shorter’s composition “Nefertiti,” as performed by Miles Davis’ great mid-Sixties quintet.
(Note: this the transcription of the song that I’ve played off of for years, which incorrectly attributes the composition to Miles. I’ve seen variations of this transcript, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll use the one with which I’m familiar.) As I discussed in a previous post, this is the format in which most jazz compositions are written. It consists essentially of two elements: the melody, and chord symbols which describe the song’s harmonic structure. Obviously there is a great deal of freedom in how the song is interpreted. Typically in a jazz performance, the melody will be performed once or twice, then the individual or members of the ensemble will take turns soloing over the song’s harmonic structure. (For the purposes of simplicity, I’m intentionally setting aside a discussion of those “freer” jazz forms which jettison harmonic structure altogether.)
So: how much of a given performance is truly improvised? Typically (although by no means always), solos take place mostly within the limits of the harmonic structure of the song. The accompaniment (which typically consists, as it does in Nefertiti, of drums, bass and piano) is also usually confined by the chord changes. However, the variation that can occur within these confines is extensive. Listen to the different ways that Jack DeJohnette, Elvin Jones and Buddy Rich handle the task of basic 4/4 drumming, and you can get an idea of how much room there is for improvisation even within the “background” of a performance..
I describe all of this in detail in order to be able to discuss the particular perfection of Nefertiti…which I find that I need to look at from several different angles. First, I’ll look at the composition itself. Then I’ll look at the uniquely powerful interpretation of the song in its original recording.
Composition
Shorter was a prolific composer during this period and there are certain ways in which Nefertiti feels of a piece with his other work at that time. At the same time, there are ways in which it feels utterly distinct. The 16-bar song begins with a simple falling seven-note phrase which initiates the visceral sense of a circular fall which domintates the entire song. The melody, which consists of three simple phrases, creates the illusion that it is perpetually falling. In fact it’s not. While the latter two phrases are simple falling melodies, the first one starts with a falling motion, then contains a slow, stutter-step rise. But these rising notes are gradual and painstakingly paced. They are often placed slightly in advance of the downbeat and the accompanying chord change, which creates a sort of lurching effect. The end result is that rather than feeling the melody rise, you find yourself simply anticipating its inevitable Sisyphean fall. This effect is heightened as the song is repeated. The final phrase leads irresistibly back to the beginning. This circular quality of the melody makes the concept of a “beginning” to the song seem almost irrelevant.
An interesting effect of this unusual musical structure (I really can’t think of another song that I would compare it to) is that as the song is repeated it creates the illusion that the pitch is constantly descending. This is a mirror image of a trick used by innumerable pop songs, which “modulate” the key a song is performed, usually in the final portion of the song, and almost always upward. It’s sometimes called the Truck Driver’s Gear Change.
It’s a cheap trick but it’s an easy way to create the sense of swelling emotion in a song. An extreme version of this effect is used in Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy,” in which the key the song is performed in is constantly modulating upward from the opening moments of the song. This creates a, yes, dizzying effect, but to my ear it’s an absolutely maddening effect.
Harmonically, Nefertiti doesn’t resemble any other song that I can think of. It starts with what seems to be a pretty standard I-IV progression (A flat to D flat), although both of these chords are altered major sevenths (with an added sharp fourth tone). I understand that this terminology may not make sense to non-musicians – I would subjectively describe these chords as having an open, soft, “shiny” quality. The next two bars shift down a half step to play the same I-IV progression on G and C. This time the chords are dominant sevenths with alterations, which to my ear this gives them a harder-edged sound. The piece then does an interesting thing, moving downward chromatically from C to C flat, B flat and A before landing on an E flat dominant seventh. This fall in the tonal center of the song is set against the melody’s struggle to rise. I believe that it’s this tension between rising and falling elements of the song which give it it’s peculiar energy. The song embodies a conflict which it never lets resolve. The second eight bars begin with another I-IV progression, starting a half step down from the previous chord. This progression (E major to A minor), then moves up a half step to B flat minor and from there to E major – a sequence that logically seems almost random, but which is absolutely beautiful. Starting from that E major chord the song then makes another chromatic fall to E minor, E flat, then to D major. From D major the piece ends with another I-IV progression to A. The song ends a half step below the A flat on which it began. And it’s that unexpected half step rise at the beginning of each new verse which is largely responsible for the hypnotic effect of the song.
Performance
My chart for Nefertiti comes with an instruction that I have never seen in another jazz piece: no solos. I don’t know whether this instruction was included in the original composition – whether it was intended as the way the piece should be performed, or whether that was just something that naturally evolved as the quintet played it. Either way, it’s highly unusual. The performer is meant simply to repeat the melody, an instruction which seemingly violates the very nature of the medium. Personally (although my knowledge is far from exhaustive), aside from jazz vocal performances (which for this very reason I have a hard time even considering as truly jazz…but that’s another subject), I can only think of one similar jazz recording, and that is Bill Evans performance of “Danny Boy.”
Evans has described (if I remember correctly, this was on Marian McPartland’s piano jazz), being so completely compelled by the melody and structure of that song that he found himself simply playing the melody over and over again. That’s a fascinating performance in its own right. Evans does a little soloing on the piece, but the melody just seems to keep pulling him back. Then he almost ends the piece and once again he’s drawn back into another few cycles through the melody.
But how do we make sense of the quintets solo-less performance of Nefertiti? More specifically, how is it that as the group cycles through the song 14 times, it remains compelling?
As the song opens it’s just Shorter’s plaintive tenor saxophone playing the melody. From the first notes his performance embodies two defining qualities of the piece. First, he’s not playing precisely on the beat. His timing is slippery, sometimes landing on a note a fraction of a second before the beat, sometimes a little late – never consistently one way or the other. Second, his notes lack a solid tonal center. They rise and fall slightly above and below the pitch, not in a way that sounds out of tune, but in a way that creates a slippery, perpetually slurred quality to the melody – as if gravity itself was rising and falling in intensity, pulling him with it.
Shorter plays the melody through once. Then, mid-way through the second time through Miles joins in unison. And for my money that first phrase on which they play together is one of the most beautiful moments in jazz. The note is a dotted half note, held for a long three beats, and Miles swells into it bringing an element of heightened dynamic complexity to the overall tension between rising and falling elements in the song. The two horns blend beautifully. At times the line between them is imperceptible, then they will shift out of phase (in terms of timing, tuning or volume) and the distinction re-emerges.
The rich variability within the melody is set against the backdrop of the rhythm section, which evolves throughout the piece, sometimes acting as more or less traditional backing group, sometimes rising into storms of rhythmic activity that contrast sharply with the cool, steady pulse of the melody. Ron Carter alternates between a standard walking bass line and subtle, lovely melodic fills, sometimes bending his notes to match the slippery tonality of the melody.
The interplay between Herbie Hancock’s piano (who often plays uses rising phrases against the constant fall of the melodic line) and Tony Williams occasionally frenetic drumming is especially complex and gratifying. We tend to think of improvisation as being equivalent to soloing, but what we hear here are a series of bass, drum and piano “solos” which are embedded into the fabric of the piece so that they simultaneously fill the role of accompaniment. It’s a fascinating glimpse into what lay ahead in freer forms of jazz. When background and foreground come to have an equivalent weight and the very definition of the form shifts.
So, there are a set of factors then which give the cyclic repetition of the melody a quality of constant improvisatory change: the structure of the song itself, the subtle shifts in the performers in terms of tone, volume and timing, and then the degree of alignment between the two lead instruments. For the first five or so times through the melody, the degree of alignment between tenor and trumpet is mostly subtle. Then the melody line starts to get smeared and blurry, as both players start extending notes and letting the tone of a given note vary more widely. Then they start shifting even further against one another, as if one is on a half second delay from the other. The effect is haunting and strange, more so as the distance of the delay increases. On the eleventh time through the melody they’re playing so far apart that the melody seems about to break down. The next time through the changes the horns drop out and the rhythm section plays a rather odd, solo-less and melody-less version of the changes. When the horns come back in for the final cycle through the melody, they are aligned again. The song ends in such an odd manner, almost haphazardly, with the rhythm section playing the first few bars of the song, fading away until we’re left with a few drum beats, then silence. The end, in other words, is no ending at all. As it couldn’t be with a song of this nature, so circular and organic in structure. It’s not unlike a Steve Reich piece in this regard, at least in the way that Tim Page described Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” (to my mind, another perfect piece of music): “imagine…trying to impose a frame on a running river—making it a finite, enclosed work of art yet leaving its kinetic quality unsullied, leaving it flowing freely on all sides.” In such a piece, the beginning and the end, the “frames,” become arbitrary, both powerfully meaningful and utterly meaningless at once. It’s a rarely-achieved effect, but Nefertiti captures it fully and beautifully. And the result is profoundly moving.
My son is designing a video game and he asked me if I would compose some “combat music” for the project. I’ve never created anything like that before and I thought it would be an interesting challenge. This is the piece that I threw together for him:
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I thought it was pretty decent, but he told me that it wasn’t quite what he was looking for (although he did say that he might be able to use it in a different part of the game). I told him that I was considering shopping it to “24.”
A friend of mine who is learning to play jazz guitar recently asked me (as a jazz pianist) to help him make sense the art of improvisation. It’s a subject that I feel I understand quite deeply, but which I have never really tried to articulate in words. When he posed this question I was in the process of preparing a post for this space which, among other things, will examine some of the complexities of evaluating jazz composition and performance. As I considered his request, it occurred to me that a discussion of improvisation would be a nice way to get introduce the post which will follow.
The query came in two parts. First:
Suppose you — or another good jazz pianist — walked into a song they never heard before, just as the first solo began. Would this pianist be able to take a solo, knowing only what the first solo sounded like and the chord changes? Or would it be important to know the original melody?
And second:
If you or another good pianist sat in with a house band, and they struck up a tune you knew, but had never played, would your solo be
— entirely invented?
— comprised of riffs you have done many times before, but perhaps combined in innovative ways?
— mainly drawn from other solos of sequences you had practiced extensively?
I guess the heart of this question has to do with how much you are making up a new tune on the spot, and how much you are working with tools and building blocks that are familiar.
In order to address these questions, I need to start with a few general principles. A jazz compositions is usually written in the form of a “fake sheet” or a “lead sheet,” which is essentially an outline of the song containing the melody and the harmonic structure (the chord changes), as in this sample chart of Kern and Hammerstein’s “Why Do I Love You.”
In a typical jazz performance, the ensemble (or individual) would play the melody one or two times through, then individuals would take turns improvising solos over the chord changes, while the rhythm section (typically comprised of piano, bass and guitar) laid down the rhythm and harmony. So on one level, everything in a jazz performance except the melody is improvised…within (to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the style of the performers) the harmonic structure of the song. For instance, the specific voicings that a pianist uses to play a given chord when he’s “comping” behind a solo are infinitely variable. But while this accompaniment is “improvised,” it bears little relationship to an improvised solo. And this brings us to the heart of the question: what is it that a jazz musician is doing when he or she improvises a solo?
That question always takes me back to my memory of learning to improvise for the first time. It’s a uniquely complex experience. Performing an improvised solo is radically different than performing a traditional composition (i.e., one in which the notes that the musician plays are all written out). You might liken the experience of performing a piece of classical music (although the comparison is probably a bit unfair), to the task of a skilled orator delivering a pre-written speech. But with improvising, the music has to come from within you, in the present moment. It’s the equivalent of standing before an audience and reciting a poem which you are making up as you speak.
You’re not completely without guidance, of course. There’s the song’s harmonic structure which (again, to a greater or lesser degree) constrains the notes you choose to play. That’s why typically a person begins learning to improvise by simply noodling around on the notes that go with a particular chord. This is something that anyone with basic understanding of their instrument can do. In fact I have my nine-year old son do it sometimes during his piano practice. Using whatever scale he has been practicing, I’ll start playing some chords that go nicely with the notes of that scale. “Just use those notes,” I tell him. “Play them in any order or in any rhythm you want, skipping around, pausing, whatever you want to try. See what sounds good to you.”
After he gets over his initial hesitation, he usually discovers a riff or two that he likes. Then he starts playing those over and over again.
But it’s almost impossible to talk about this without listening to an example. So let’s take one of the easiest jazz forms to comprehend: a 12-bar blues progression. Even if you aren’t a musician and don’t know how to make sense of the harmonic structure of this progression (I – IV – I – V – IV – I), your ear will recognize the pattern, which forms the basis for countless familiar songs. Here, for purposes of illustration, is a classic recording of Duke Ellington’s C-Jam Blues.
The melody consists an extremely simple eight-note phrase which is repeated three times over the 12-bar progression. It’s played one time through by Duke on the piano, then once by the band, after which members of the orchestra take a series of solos over the song’s chord structure. (Actually you might notice that each solo begins with four bars of unaccompanied soloing, before the 12-bar structure of the song repeats). On the fifth solo (Barney Bigard on clarinet), the orchestra begins playing an accompaniment for the solo, which swells into a variation of the main melody for the final cycle through the changes.
The task while listening to this, for someone who’s trying to learn how to improvise, is to figure out what the soloists are doing as they improvise. And the most important thing here, I think, is that they are creating their solos based on the harmonic structure of the song. That’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen this particular piece. In general, the solos you hear here are in keeping with the style and the time. They’re “inside” the chord changes (i.e., they’re not atonal) and they tend toward a more melodic style. Nonetheless, these guys aren’t simply repeating their scales and arpeggios. There are a lot of “blue” notes – notes that aren’t exactly part of the harmonic structure at that moment but that sound wrong in a satisfying way (listen for instance to the note that Rex Stewart lands on and plays twice at 1:04-05). So the question remains: what are they actually doing? What’s the intention that drives the notes they choose to play?
There are several ways to conceptualizes this. One is to think of the soloists creating their own melody over the chord structure. Some musicians are particularly melodic improvisers – Keith Jarrett often plays that way on the piano. (See the three clips below for examples of each of the styles I will describe here.) On the other end of the spectrum is what I would call more “structural” improvising, in which, rather than creating something that sounds melodic, the performer is creating interesting musical patterns using the harmonic structure of the song. That’s the direction Charlie Parker moved in with the development of be-bop. You can often hear the shreds of melodic lines within his solos, but the overall impression those phrases leave (to my ear at least) is not especially melodic – he’s creating extended linear structures, often using little more than scales related to chords of the song (although he does it so fast that it’s hard to take it in). Taking it a step further, John Coltrane (especially in his later years) was extremely “structural” in how he improvised, but in a more abstract sort of way that could depart further and further from the song’s underlying harmonic structure.
So, to make sense of improvisation, you have to try to put yourself into the mind of the great improvisers. A way of listening that I have found that helps me to do this is to listen to a solo as if I were playing it myself. When there’s a pause in the solo, I ask myself what I would play next. Then I listen to what is actually played. I ask myself: what was the state of mind of the performer that led him in that direction rather than in mine?
This is to say that learning to improvise requires a bit of cognitive reverse-engineering. In fact, one of the things that helped me most when I was learning to improvise was analyzing the improvisation of musicians I admired. My high school jazz band teacher made transcribing solos a regular assignment. It’s a fascinating exercise which is not unlike what I experienced later in my professional life as a psychotherapist when I learned to analyze videotapes of parent-child interactions. You take an experience which is the essence of present moment spontaneity and pin it down in time and analyze it. It is always extraordinary to me to realize how much complexity is contained within a single moment of a jazz performance.
So, getting around to my friend’s first question: what would happen if I walked into a song just as the solos began? For me, that question depends largely upon whether or not there was a fake sheet that I could look at. If there were, then I’d be fine. The original melody would actually be completely irrelevant to me. All I’d need to know would be the key changes. But if I didn’t have a chart and the key changes were complex, I’d be in trouble. While I’m sure that other musicians wouldn’t have so much of a problem with this, I learned my lesson the hard way years ago when I tried to sit in at an open jam session in New York. My turn to play came and the group started in on some song that I didn’t know and couldn’t quickly pick up. After a few moments I was tapped on the shoulder and someone who knew the song stepped in.
That was harsh. But the important thing is that it’s a matter of knowing the chord changes. If I had known them, I would have been okay.
My friend’s second question goes to the deeper nature of improvisation itself, which is in many ways a function of the style and personality of the individual musician. When I was younger I spent hours and hours practicing scales and arpeggios so that my fingers would be able to fluidly play those patterns. What that meant was that even if I weren’t feeling particularly inspired, I could play a passable solo on most any song just using the patterns that I had trained my fingers to play.
Not that I was interested in doing this. Looking back, I can see that I was interested in jazz as a sort of means to an end. Although I didn’t always have the concept of “mindfulness” back then, I believe that playing music has always been essentially a form of mindfulness meditation for me. Usually when I play I am simultaneously performing and observed my own attentional state as I play. Because of this, over time I came to understand more deeply the distinction I outlined earlier, between what I call melodic and structural improvisation. There’s a fundamental difference of awareness and intention between the two.
It’s possible to create a solo based on the melodic pattern you hear in your mind…to use a sort of “melodic intention” as your guide. That’s what I hear for instance when I listen to Keith Jarrett improvise (although I have no idea whether he himself would describe it in these terms). On the other hand, It’s also possible to direct your creative intention in a more abstract and structural manner, to focus your mental state on the creation of sonic patterns within the harmonic structure of the song. That becomes more of a mathematical exercise, which can have a beauty all it’s own. And that’s what I hear in Coltrane’s playing.
There are undoubtedly other ways to conceptualize improvisation, but this is how my mind breaks it down. And what’s important here is that I’m talking not so much about musical technique but rather about a musician’s state of mind with regard to improvisation. The fact is, it’s very difficult to improvise without mindfulness. It’s an activity which forces your brain into a heightened state of awareness of the present moment. That’s why it’s so difficult to describe in words: it’s a subjective aesthetic experience. There’s no easy way to measure or quantify or even to describe such a thing.
I believe that this is why there is often an edge of emotional struggle in both the music and the lives of great jazz musicians. Because while this sort of mindfulness creates the potential for deep joy, it also requires a performer to open to the truth of whatever fears and anxiety and grief he or she may hold within them. When you make yourself fully mindful of yourself in the present moment, you don’t get to pick which aspects of your experience you get to be mindful of…it’s all there.
That said, I do think that certain jazz musicians manage to play it safe. I won’t name names. But to my mind, no matter how technically accomplished such performers are, listening to them is an aggravating experience. All I can hear is the missed opportunity. What I love about playing jazz is the sense of infinite possibility I experience every single time I start to play a solo. There is, every time, a vivid and heightened sensation of delight and terror…the awareness that I have the opportunity to create something utterly new. As a listener, therefore, I’m drawn to performers who exhibit novelty and complexity, to the quality of deep and authentic self-revelation in the moment of performance. I love the raw and powerful present-moment energy that band leaders like Charles Mingus and Miles Davis were able to draw from their musicians. I love the weird power of Sun Ra and Carla Bley. And lately I’ve been particularly mesmerized by pianist Vijay Iyer. His compositions and solos are so clearly structured, yet so densely complex that often I can barely figure out what he’s doing.
It’s utterly exhilarating to open yourself to something that is goes beyond your capacity for comprehension.
As I described in the previous post, when I settle down and attend to my mind what I discover beneath the level of my conscious thoughts is a murky soup of white noise, inchoate sounds blended together, out of which my conscious thoughts arise. This piece is my effort to capture that experience in sound. I call it a sound sculpture because of the process I used to create the piece: I began by combining a number of different ambient recordings, then I carved away various sonic elements until I arrived at an approximation of what it is that I hear when I quiet my conscious thoughts and listen to the background noise in my own head.
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I love it when unrelated sounds are forced to share the same space. To most people’s ears I imagine moments like those in this short recording sound abrasive and chaotic, but to me it’s a sort of magic. It’s only recently that I’ve fully identified the precise nature of this eccentric pleasure. It came together during my trip to New Orleans last March, where I found myself drawn back to Bourbon Street, again and again, especially at night, when it was the crowds were largest and the noise was intense. I was puzzled by the attraction, since, on the surface at least, the Bourbon Street scene is complete anathema to me. I don’t like crowds in general, and a crowd of drunken college students howling around…that’s really not my sort of scene. Still, I kept confusing myself by going back. And eventually I figured it out. It was all about the sound. The bars on either side of that narrow street blast out music so loud that it sometimes hurts your ears even from the street. Some of the music is recorded, some of it is live, and it’s mixed with the sounds of shouts and screams from both inside the clubs and out on the street. At one point I found myself just standing still in the middle of the street, listening. Four or five different songs were audible all at once and the music blended together like minerals in a volcanic eruption. It was an aleatory sound collage…simultaneously obnoxious and eerily beautiful.
The short recording here is not nearly as intense as that, but I was drawn to it for precisely the same reasons. I made it in San Francisco when I was there recently for a medical appointment. As I came up to the BART station at 24th and Mission, I heard a chaotic mixture of music that I couldn’t easily sort out into its component parts. Coming into the plaza saw a dozen or so people standing in a circle singing what seemed to be a political song. Several members of the group were beating tambourines. A few feet away from them a middle-aged man and woman were sitting at a table with a sign offering free meditation classes. The man was playing guitar and they were both singing an off-key chant of some sort. (It sounds like they’re singing “Hidey-Ho,” but I’m pretty sure that they’re actually sort of Hindi or Sanskrit mantras.) At first it seemed like the two songs were competing with one another. But as I stood watching and listening it became apparent that they were simply co-existing. Each song proceeded as if the other weren’t happening. When the Spanish song ended, the meditation promoters continued their chanting.
