Improvisation and Arrangement

I asked my good friend, former bandmate and wicked clarinetist Chris Broderick if he'd like to do a guest post, and he was kind enough to do so:

Thanks to Tim for the opportunity to post. Here goes.



Admittedly, this is a generalization, but jazz is a music that uses composition as a framework for improvisation. In the most traditional post-bebop jazz settings, the band will play the melody of a song, AKA the head, and then instrumentalists will solo over the chord changes that are implied by or composed over the melody. In the case of many recordings, including the one above ("You're My Everything," from the album Relaxin' with The Miles Davis Quartet), the sense of arrangement often comes not in something predetermined, but on the fly, a result of impulsive choices or reactions to choices by the other musicians.

This recording is a perfect example. It begins with the musicians warming up, Miles shushing them before he cues pianist Red Garland to start the song. Garland begins with some bebop piano runs before Miles whistles and cuts him off. "Block chords," he says, and the process begins again, with Garland playing a simpler melody backed by lush block chords. And the stage is set for an elegant walk through a lovely tune, with crystalline solos by Davis and John Coltrane, backed up by bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones.

This record was one of a series of four (Cookin', Relaxin', Workin', and Steamin') that were the product of only two days of recording, in May and October of 1956. During that time, the band played dozens of shows, at least, and had developed a pretty strong sense of mutual rapport. That sense of understanding, and knowledge of the material, allows them to take a song in a number of different directions on any given performance.

Maybe that idea is better seen in this performance, by another Miles Davis Quartet, with Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Ron Carter on bass, Herbie Hancock on piano, and Tony Williams on drums. They're performing a tune called "Agitation", composed by Miles, though there's maybe 20 seconds of composition for nearly seven minutes of improvisation.



What gives this seven minutes of music a sense of shape is the band's willingness to change the rhythmic structure of the song on the fly, jumping from blisteringly fast bebop shuffling to loping swing at the drop of a hat. Williams pays close attention to the rhythms that the soloist creates, and changes his drum patterns to reflect that. The rest of the band follows suit. That may not be precisely the order of operations as it happened on the bandstand, and in a way, what makes this ensemble truly remarkable is how quickly they collectively intuit and respond to these changes, which makes it difficult to see who is the catalyst for any given change.

Which is all to say that, yes, Tim, I agree that arrangement is an important part of jazz, but as often as not, that arrangement is not a matter of notes on paper, but is, instead, arrangement on the fly, or in other words, improvisation.

NEEDLE DROP: Django Reinhardt, Belleville

Django Reinhardt is one of my jazz idols, right up there in the pantheon with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. He's a quirky choice, being a gypsy from France and having two fingers on his fretting hand fused together in a fire. But Django was a breathtaking guitarist, playing his solos with such style and verve that I am hooked every time I listen.

More on Django later, but please enjoy "Belleville"...

NEEDLE DROP: Herb Ellis & Ray Brown, The Flintstones Theme

Would you guess that the theme to The Flintstones is a jazz standard?

This version is by an amazing gypsy jazz group called Sinti. Watch how insanely fast these guys can pick:



I've been looking forward to tackling gypsy jazz soon - Django Reinhardt is a personal hero. Soon!

The "Trad" Jazz Revival

In an earlier post, I talked about the tree of jazz history and its different branches. One of the more interesting moments when jazz sprouted off in different directions was the early 50s. Just as bebop was taking off, a movement spread across the country embracing Dixieland, or traditional (now "trad") jazz. Looking back, there's a strange racial aspect to it- this was music created and popularized by black musicians earlier in the century, and in the fifties it was a lily-white crew. It's a tradition that's carried on to this day, where outside of New Orleans its a very white, nostalgic style. This particular branch also seems like it's been pruned; no new Dixieland is ever written.



Nostalgic or not, the trad jazz revival of the late forties/early fifties produced some wonderful music. Edward "Kid" Ory was one of the stars of the genre- just listen to the way his trombone slides around on the outside of the melody. One of the things I love about this kind of music is how the instruments all have a raucous, solo expression of their own, but they overlap sinuously into harmonies. Listen to how the trumpet, clarinet and trombone literally tease and encourage each other. This is the heart of trad jazz.

Jazz and the Classics

When I was a little kid, my mom had both the "Hooked on Classics" and "Hooked on Swing" records. If you weren't a child of the 1970s, you might not be aware of this strange phenomenon. Basically, someone took a disco beat, stole only the hooks from any classical melody you probably learned from watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, and set them to a disco beat. Unfortunately for you, I was able to find it on YouTube (see above.)

I bring it up because of the Jacques Loussier Trio, a jazz group that I happen to enjoy but it could be argued are doing a similar thing. Put crudely, they're "jazzing up the classics," and Johann Sebastian Bach in particular. The difference here is, I think, in the loving treatment of the source material (Loussier seems to play the whole piece and always namechecks the original) and the specific character of Bach. Bach was a highly mathematical composer- his pieces are a study of harmony and precision, almost like a statement on music theory more than a musical expression. And yet somehow, they are so, so beautiful. I think Loussier manages to capture that beauty while still riffing with jazz rhythms and techniques. What do you think?

JAZZ 101: Bebop

As I admitted early on, I'm not a jazz expert. Part of the fun of this blog for me is that it pushes me to learn, to experiment, and challenge myself to go farther. Jazz history, like art history, has a timeline of eras and movements that has been set in stone, so there are markers along the way. But as we know, those markers don't tell the whole story- there are always outliers, branches that veer off in different directions.

I'm working now on the "Bop" branch of the jazz tree. This may be old news for some of you (Don Byrd, I'm looking at you) but here's a quick synopsis pieced together from Wikipedia:

"In the 1940s, the younger generation of jazz musicians forged a new style out of the swing music of the 1930s."

"Swing improvisers commonly emphasized the first and third beats of a measure. But in a bebop composition such as Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts", the rhythmic emphasis switches to the second and fourth beats of the measure. Such new rhythmic phrasing techniques give the typical bop solo a feeling of floating free over the underlying song form, rather than being tied into the song form."

Okay, so listen to Salt Peanuts above. The big band sound is still clearly there, and even if you can't count the 2nd and 4th beat emphasis, it is easy to feel that sense of floating, particularly in comparison to swing music of the era with its persistent, danceable beat. You can feel from this clip how groundbreaking it must have been.

Blue Note Stew

This post is sure to get me in trouble.

Earlier this week, I spent some time cruising iTunes looking for more great jazz. If you've ever browsed iTunes, you know that whenever you look up an artist you get a handful of albums that listeners also bought. I believe I started listening to some Hank Mobley, then I skimmed around listening to a handful of other artists from the same early 60s period like Sonny Stitt, Kenny Dorham, Grant Green, Lou Donaldson, etc., etc. And you know what?

I couldn't tell the difference between any of them.

Obviously there are limitations to what you can get from a 30sec. sound sample, and I'm exaggerating for effect. In particular, Grant Green's grooves are pretty fun listening. But in general, the music of this period has nothing for me to hook into. Melody is tossed aside in favor of improvisation. Everyone seems to be striving for the exact same sound.

And I think this is partly why jazz is where it's at today. This is the era when today's jazz was codified, and while it was probably highly exciting at the time today it is stagnant and deflated.



I used to own a 6-CD Blue Note box set of music from the height of their popularity. Art Blakely's Moanin' jumps out from that collection for me, particularly for a really sweet harmony with the horns at :36, but for the life of me I couldn't tell you who else was on those six CDs or the name of a single tune. Jazz today has to overcome the ego of this era in order to create new tunes and a sound that doesn't disappear into the miasma of jazz history.