Understanding Jazz: Ways to Listen

Chapter 1 One Foreground and Background Although it is possible to play jazz music solo (especially on the piano, where one can accompany oneself), most jazz music is played by groups of musicians. Jazz is always, as the great pianist Bill Evans once remarked, "a social situation"; it involves a number of musicians speaking a shared language, but with highly individual sensibilities. One of the first questions to ask in trying to understand any social situation is, How is it organized? That is, what are the implicit or explicit ground rules that guide the interactions among the members? If we look at the history of jazz, we see an astonishing variety of answers to this question. But underneath those answers run some common threads. In jazz, or in most music of any type, there is usually some kind of relationship between a lead voice, or voiceswhether instrumental or vocaland an accompaniment, just as in representational painting there is some relationship between the objects that are the main focus of interest and all the elements that populate the space around those objects. Another way of putting this might be to say that there is a relationship between the voice of the individual and the voice(s) of the community in which the individual operates. That relationship, or set of relationships, has taken many forms in jazz. It might exist between a clearly defined lead voice and clearly defined accompanists, such as that between Sonny Rollins's tenor saxophone lead and the accompaniment of the piano, bass, and drums on "Moritat" (track 4 on the accompanying CD); or it might be a somewhat more entwined, symbiotic relationship, like that between Stan Getz's tenor saxophone and Kenny Barron's piano on "I Can't Get Started" (track 5); or it might be a solo horn against a written-out ensemble accompaniment, as in the collaboration between Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet and the Duke Ellington Orchestra on "U.M.M.G." (track 3); or any number of other permutations. Jazz is a music of highly individual sensibilities. A jazz ensemble consists not just of different instruments but of the different, contrasting musical personalities of its players. Much of the craft that jazz musicians acquire is there to help them develop an unmistakable voice. And a jazz group is organized to give those individual voices the greatest possible opportunity to express themselves while still being coordinated as an ensemble. The group effect depends on the tension among its individual sensibilities. In fact, even though much jazz places heavy emphasis on the improvisations of a soloist, it is good to learn how to listen to all the instruments in an ensemble at once, to learn to hear the entire group as an interdependent organism. A soloist doesn't exist in a vacuum; the soloist will be responding to everything that is happening while he or she is improvising, just as the accompanists will be responding not only to the soloist but to one another, in an ongoing conversation. The pianist will respond to the drummer's rhythmic accents, the soloist will hear the chords the pianist plays and react harmonically, and so on. The best jazz will reward one's listening to it as if to a unified field of sound, with shifting foreground and background elements. In jazz's New Orleans beginnings, this fact sits at the center of the music. In classic New Orleans jazz, such as that heard in King Oliver's recording of "Weather Bird Rag" (track 1), there is less made of the distinction between the solo voice and the background than there is in some other types of jazz. Jazz in its earlyPiazza, Tom is the author of 'Understanding Jazz: Ways to Listen' with ISBN 9781400063697 and ISBN 1400063698.