[Dixielandjazz] Improvisation, was Roy Eldridge followed Louis Armstrong?

[Charles Suhor]

I went back to Steve’s short posting below but several others raised similar questions that prompted me to try out some thoughts….What’s improvisation, and what’s something else? I heard one common-sense distinction from my reedman brother, Don, when he was a teenager. He announced that he was going to learn to “fake” and “jam.” That’s a covenient starting point.

—To “fake a melody” is not just to play it from memory but to play it “by ear,” hear it in your head and play it when someone requests it or a bandleader calls it up. Memory is essential but the process isn’t rote.  (Don already knew how to memorize music he had read from sheet music or woodshedded with the phonograph. No doubt, other things helped him more when learning to “fake” melodies—he had learned intervals from extensive study of solfeggio as a beginner and had learned the fingerings associated with intervals from memorizing Artie Shaw solos and from his good sightreading reading.)

—Once able to fake a melody, you can with a little additional skill embellish it with, say, a tag phrase at the end of a line, a couple of pickup notes addd before a phrase, modifying the length of notes without violating the meter, etc.  (Many writers have made the distinction between embellishing a melody and improvising a complete solo. It’s lily that jazz began that way. But the embellishments are themselves improvised. I’ve gigged with innumerable musicians, as many of you surely have, who could embellish nicely but couldn’t “take a ride.”)

—Jamming is THE jazz solo improvisation experience—taking a ride on a song without being highly referential to the melody, although the melody’s harmonic structure underlies the improvisation.
(Arguably, jazz improvisation can be considered as an on-the-spot composing of new melody lines, though they’re indebted to, ‘laid over,” a previously composed song-structure.)

—What about when someone plays (without music) Brunis’ solo on “Tin Roof,”  Oliver’s on “Dippermouth.” Hackett’s on “String of Pearls,’ Fazola’s on “Bobcats,” etc.?  Chances are they’re doing some slight embellishments to keep it interesting. And of course, their individual tone and vibrato will personalize the performance. This is also true of a players’ own solos that they’ve decided to repeat on the same tune.
  (This process seems similar though not identical to a classical musician’s interpretation of a composition. But in jazz, far greater departures from the original are permitted, e.g., in versions of the “High Society” clarinet solo as compared an interpretation of a Bach fugue.)

—What about whole group improvisation, which is standard in early jazz and in beginning and out choruses in Dixieland/trad jazz? To me, this is a special joy of jazz. When well done, it shows a fine sensitivity as the players listen to each other in ensemble. (Some bands don’t, sadly). The role of  trumpeters is more akin to embellishing the melody in the first chorus. If they start out jamming, as if soloing, the performance isn;t anchored.

Other stuff….
The interplay of the rhythm section and the soloist is, more or less, a form of group improvisation. Much moreso, in modern jazz when the pianist is comping and the drummer is interacting with left-hand/bass drum patterns. Risky business, but good players do it integrally. Pre-modern jazz drummers who are colorists as well as good timekeepers (Dodds, Wettling, Bauduc) also enter strongly into musical dialogue.
The charge that some modern jazz players are just “running  chords” rather than working from a sense of the melodic potential of a song’s harmonic structure is beyond my scope. Some modern performances leave me cold, and maybe that’s why. Back to the old tongue-in-cheek comparison of art  to pornography: :”I don’t know if it’s art, but I know what I like."
In classical music, sections devoted to improvisation weren’t closely song/meter/chord derived as in jazz but intended to expound on the theme of the piece. I’d like to think that “free jazz” approaches this, but it’s most often too amorphous to be persuasively an elaboration of anything at all. I’d give a couple of years of my life to hear Bach improvise on organ.

Charlie

> On Apr 14, 2017, at 1:02 PM, Steve Voce <stevevoce at virginmedia.com> wrote:
> 
> Last night I played a dozen Bunk Johnson tracks (honest!) with alternate takes. I was surprised to find that George Lewis played virtually the same solo on each take.Improvisation?
> 
> (Incidentally, he played a cracking version of High Society).
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Steve Voce