Jazz: the Basics

Christopher Meeder

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135887124
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Music

Jazz: The Basics gives a brief introduction to a century of jazz, ideal for students and interested listeners who want to learn more about this important musical style. The heart of the book traces jazz's growth from its folk origins through early recordings and New Orleans stars; the big-band and swing era; bebop; cool jazz and third stream; avant-garde; jazz-rock; and the neo-conservative movement of the 1980s and 1990s.

Key figures from each era including: Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Wynton Marsalis are highlighted along with classic works. The book concludes with a list of the 100 essential recordings to own, along with a timeline and glossary. Jazz: The Basics serves as an excellent introduction to the players, the music, and the styles that make jazz 'America's classical music.'

FUNDAMENTALS

As a precursor to dealing directly with the history and repertoire of jazz, it is important to be familiar with some of the concepts and ideas that will come up again and again in this book. As the Introduction indicates, a one sentence, or even one chapter long definition of the music is impossible, or at least narrow-minded. However, it is, more or less, a single tradition that is under discussion, and as such, most of the following will be a part of most of the music in the following chapters. Some of the ideas presented in this text generally apply to all music from the West, and some of it is specific to jazz. All of it is subject to different opinions, definitions and interpretations.

IMPROVISATION

Improvisation is one of the most frequently mentioned and heavily emphasized aspects of jazz performance practice in discussions of the music, and for good reason. With only rare exceptions, jazz musicians do much of their work spontaneously, allowing their environment to have an influence on what they play. Details about timbre, rhythm, even what notes to play and when are left to the discretion of the individual performer, and vary from performance to performance, to a degree far greater than is found in classical music, rock, and just about any other Western musical tradition.

Of course, it would be incorrect to assume that John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, for instance, sprang fully formed from the imaginations of the players at the moment the record button was pushed. What is left undetermined until the time of performance is far from the full story of what makes jazz sound like jazz. A great deal of time is spent by jazz musicians preparing for a performance, both in individual practicing and rehearsal. Compositions are chosen or written, arranged and rehearsed to varying degrees before the performance. Furthermore, different players rely on their improvisational skills to different degrees, and it is difficult to tell from the way they play how much time has passed between coming up with a phrase and playing it. It has been a problematic issue for jazz scholars in the past—the 1925 recording of Louis Armstrong's “Cornet Chop Suey,” for instance, was lauded as a particularly fiery and well-formed improvisation on Armstrong's part until it was discovered that he had applied for copyright for the solo, written out note for note, some two years earlier.

The only surefire way to determine the degree to which a performance involves improvisation is to compare multiple performances of the same tune by the same musicians. When the advent of the compact disc expanded the standard duration of recordings (previously, LPs would contain around thirty-five to fifty minutes of music; now CDs can be 80 minutes or longer), the inclusion of “alternate takes,” or previously unreleased renditions of a work, became the standard for filling out older recordings to make them worth the money.

With all of this in mind, the fact remains that a B-flat is a B-flat whether a musician decides to play the note at the performance or twenty years earlier. Although improvisation is a very important part of jazz from the player's perspective (and fun and interesting to explore through comparing takes), it does little to add to the experience of the audience to know when someone is playing prepared music and when s/he is improvising. Over the course of this book, little attention will be paid to this aspect of performance practice.

INSTRUMENTATION AND ITS ROLE WITHIN FORM

Jazz can be and has been played on just about any musical instrument, from egg shaker to bagpipes. It can be performed solo, or by a large orchestra, or any size group between. While some instruments, like clarinet and tuba, go into and out of fashion, the most common instruments in jazz are trumpet, trombone, saxophone, piano, double bass and drum set. Slightly less used, but still quite common, are guitar (electric guitar was commonplace as soon as it was invented), violin, vibraphone, clarinet, and tuba.

While there is a great deal of variance with the roles of each instrument over history and among different playing styles, a few general descriptions can be made here. Since jazz is more or less homophonic music (in which a melody is supported by harmonic accompaniment), it is an easy task to differentiate between melodic instruments (often simply called “horns,” but to avoid confusion with the instrument commonly called French horn but more properly called simply horn, this book will refer to “winds”) and accompanying instruments, collectively called the “rhythm section.” The work of the winds in jazz is, at its base, to play the tunes and solos.

The rhythm section generally contains piano, bass and drums. Often, guitar will join in as well, and in early jazz recordings, tuba and banjo were common substitutes for bass and guitar. The instruments in the rhythm section work together to provide accompaniment for the horns, and each instrument tends towards a specific role. Like rock, but unlike the classical tradition, percussion serves a structural role in the jazz performance, driving the ensemble and articulating important structural moments. The bass serves as timekeeper in most performances, providing a steady articulation of the beat, while the pianist provides harmony. The piano's traditional role of providing harmonic background to a soloist is often called “comping.”

COMMON JAZZ WIND INSTRUMENTS

Trumpet and trombone are both brass instruments, meaning that they are essentially brass tubes, played by buzzing the lips together into a cup- or funnel-shaped mouthpiece on one end of the instrument. Pitch is partly determined by the length of the tube: on trombone, the length is changed by extending a sliding portion of the instrument, while a trumpet player opens and closes valves that divert the air to different lengths of extra tubing. Important trumpeters include Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis. Trombone soloists are somewhat more rare than trumpeters, but include Jack Teagarden, J.J. Johnson, and Roswell Rudd.

The saxophone is a reed instrument, played by passing air over a thin reed strapped to a mouthpiece. Saxophones are actually a family of related instruments specified by pitch, but all usually made of brass, roughly conical, and pitched by opening and closing holes in the side of the instrument controlled by keys. From highest to lowest, the most common saxophones are the soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophonists. Many saxophonists play two or more different instruments from the saxophone family, and a few also play clarinet, which is another reed instrument – older than the saxophone, and usually made of wood and more cylindrical in shape than the saxophone. Grouped by instrument, some important saxophonists include: soprano – Sidney Bechet, Steve Lacy, and John Coltrane (on occasion); alto – Johnny Hodges, Charlie Parker, and Paul Desmond; tenor – Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and John Coltrane (most of the time); baritone is generally secondary, background instrument, and Gerry Mulligan was a rare example of a baritone specialist in a solo context.

Of course, these are the broadest generalizations. It is absolutely common for any of the rhythm instruments to take solos, and some drummers, such as Max Roach, Shelly Manne and Joey Baron, have been known to carry the tune themselves. In fact, among common performing groups, the trio of piano, bass and drums has a lauded position somewhat akin to the string quartet in classical music. And the converse of the traditional horns/rhythm relationship is an occasional occurrence—Lee Konitz's alto saxophone comping behind Sonny Dallas's bass solos on his 1961 album Motion is one clear example.

Jazz is primarily an instrumental music, or at least it has always had a peculiar relationship with singing. Singers have always played an active role in jazz. In the 1930s, when jazz was pop music, every self-respecting big band had a full-time vocalist or two among its ranks. But with only a few exceptions, jazz singers have been stylistically, socially and otherwise separate from the mainstream jazz tradition. To date, scholars still tend to specialize in either instrumental or vocal jazz, at the expense of a full understanding of the other. The present author is not excluded, and jazz singers and singing styles will be only briefly and occasionally addressed in this book.

RHYTHM AND MELODY

One extremely simplified definition of jazz is the synthesis of African melody and rhythm with European harmony and instrumentation. Like any aspect of American culture, jazz is much more complicated in its origins and materials than that, but it is a fairly good starting position. A working knowledge of some basic ideas of western music theory and common ways in which jazz deviates from the classical tradition is necessary to facilitate any kind of detailed discussion of jazz. The reader is strongly encouraged to consult a basic text on music theory, which is not nearly as difficult to grasp as it seems, but some basic concepts of harmony, melody and rhythm follow for now.

Jazz is essentially tonal music, which is to say that one note is more important than the other notes. As a result of repetition and emphasis, this important note, called the tonic, feels like home in the context of a specific work of music. Just about any simple song you can think of to sing—“Happy Birthday,” “Home on the Range,” “Anarchy in the U.K.,” etc.—ends on the tonic, and ending on any other pitch feels uncomfortable to the listener. The tonic is just one of many notes, usually seven, that contextualize the tonic into the tonality, or key, of a piece of music.

The notes are named after the first seven letters of the alphabet, and the key is named after the tonic. Since there are twelve notes to the octave in Western music (an octave being the name for the distance of a note and the next higher note that sounds the same—more easily heard than described, but, for instance, women and children tend to sing an octave higher than men when groups sing together), pitches between C and D, for example, are indicated with the modifier “flat,” meaning lower, or “sharp,” meaning higher. So between C and D lies a pitch that is called either “C sharp” or “D flat.” They are the same pitch. For example, if you sing “Happy Birthday” so that the last note is F, you would be singing in the key of F, or more simply in F.

The distance between two different pitches is called an “interval” and is named for the number of notes in the scale that must be traveled from one note to the next, counting the first note as “one”—so the interval between C and D is a “second,” between C and E a “third,” and so on.

Playing three or more notes at the same time results in a chord. A chord, at its simplest, is described in different ways by classical and jazz musicians. In classical music, a chord might be tonic, reinforced by the fifth scale degree, and colored by the third scale degree, which would be either major or minor. In jazz, chords are usually conceived and described as stacked thirds. In both cases, the chord would be the first, third and fifth scales degrees played at the same time, but in jazz, it is much more common to continue the pattern to include the seventh, ninth, eleventh and so on, without changing the function of that chord. A chord can be built on any scale degree, and is named by the roman numeral that represents that degree in the scale. I, ii, iii and IV, in the key of C Major, represent chords built on C, D, E and F respectively. The use of upper and lower case roman numerals indicates whether the third of the chord is major (upper case) or minor. It is the chords, their durations and relationships that are held constant in a jazz performance and upon which solos are built.

The “blue note” originates from the blues. This is a note, usually the third, fifth or seventh, which is lower than it usually occurs in the scale. In most instances, a blue note moves in pitch and cannot be played on the piano. Pianists, who cannot bend notes, will frequently play “crush tones,” the notes on either side of where a blue note usually lies, in order to simulate the effect.

RHYTHM

Rhythm refers to the way music deals with the passing of time. We can use the term to describe any aspect of this—the frequency with which chords change, for instance, is called harmonic rhythm—but most frequently, we use the term to describe the smallest level on which music marks and measures time: the points in time at which a sound occurs, and its relationship to other such points in time. As a concept, this is fairly abstract and difficult to grasp, but in practice, musicians need to be organized in order to play together, and certain conventions apply that are easily understood.

Most music, and especially most jazz, is played in relation to a steady beat. We can define a beat as a regularly occurring moment of emphasis—the moment that you tap your foot. The rate at which beats occur is called the tempo, and we measure that in beats per minute. In jazz, tempos can have quite a range, from forty beats per minute in a ballad to over 300 beats per minute in a heated post-bop performance.

Beats are grouped, as in poetry, in small groups of repeating patterns of emphasis. In jazz (as well as rock, European art music, and all other western music), it is most often a pattern of four beats, with the second and fourth beats weakest, and the first the strongest. Each group of beats is called a measure, or a bar, referring to the use of a vertical bar drawn between measures in musical notation. The first, strongest beat of a measure is called the “downbeat,” or the “one.”

We describe the duration of a note by the amount of a measure of four beats that it would occupy, regardless of the actual meter. Thus, a note that is one beat long is a quarter note, one that takes half a beat is an eighth note, one that is four beats long is a whole note, etc. There are two important caveats. In notation, a dot following a note increases the length of that note by half, so a dotted quarter note occupies as much time as three eighth notes, and so on. Also, since most western music is in duple meter (which is to say, the beat is subdivided by two—a common alternative is triple meter, in which it is subdivided by three), durations are always described this way. In other words, there are no “12th” notes. We would refer to such as notes as eighth notes, and in that case, a note that is one beat long is a dotted quarter note. This system of nomenclature greatly simplifies musical notation, but it can sometimes be confusing in other cases. Generally, I will refer to a note that takes up one beat as a “quarter note,” and if a beat is divided by three instead of two, I might refer to three notes that occupy one beat as “triplets,” which name is also common and conventional.

Jazz frequently makes use of syncopation, in which an unexpected emphasized note played on a weak beat or off the beat altogether. For those unfamiliar with the term, it is quite helpful to hear a melody played squarely on the beat, followed by a syncopated version to get a clear understanding of the feel; most musicians could do this without practice. Another common rhythmic technique in jazz is called “double time,” in which the rhythm section suddenly behaves as if there were two beats where one previously prevailed, although the harmonic rhythm in most cases remains what it was.

FORM

In jazz, the emphasis for the listener is not on large scale structure, but on moment-to-moment detail. Because of this, the vast majority of jazz follows the same form on the largest scale. In the European art music tradition, where the structure of an entire work is more varied, most jazz works would be said to follow a Theme and Variations form, in which a short and memorable tune (the theme) is played repeatedly, each successive repetition somehow embellished or transformed (the variations).

In jazz, things are a bit more specific, and the language is a bit different. The Theme is called the head, and is generally played by the entire ensemble (sometimes after an introduction). The variations are called solos, and are usually played by one person with accompaniment from the rhythm section. The variations are almost always melodic in nature. This means that the harmony, duration, tempo, etc. of the head is repeated basically unchanged, while the soloist plays a melody of his/her own invention that fits. Each repetition of the cycle is called a chorus, and a solo might be one chorus, or two, or eight, or fifty-eight. It might even be half a chorus in a ballad. Often, during the last chorus or two, the soloist will “trade” with the drummer or bassist, playing four or eight measures and then allowing the drummer to solo in response for the same amount of time. The last chorus of the performance is most often a direct repetition of the head.

A typical jazz performance might be as follows: The pianist plays a short introduction. The rest of the grou...