Part I: The Craft of Improvisation
Chapter 1: Improvisation as Problem-Solving
! The act of improvising a solo and the act of learning how to improvise a solo are two very different tasks. Like many activities, learning to craft a successful jazz
improvisation takes much more time than the time one has to improvise it. Jazz pianist Bill Evans claimed to have learned to solo by using analytical rigor and by solving problems one at a time, and advocated just such an approach when advising others.1 And although Evans left little in the way of pedagogical works, his comments in interviews, coupled with the results of his mental processes as encapsulated in his recorded output, provide a body of work by which to study his improvisational process.
! Understanding Evans’s working process and examining the resulting musical products can provide valuable insights into how successful jazz solos can be structured. This knowledge can then inform the way others learn the process of jazz improvisation. But specifying what knowledge a jazz player is utilizing while improvising can be an elusive task, in part because the very idea of learned improvisation presents a paradox. On the one hand, an improvisation exists as a creation of the moment, where the performer forges a new work different from any previously heard work. On the other hand, since no performer is free from the effects of previous training and study, each “new” performance would arise in part by the performer reassembling or modifying previously composed material, or by using procedures learned prior to the performance.2 Because of this, an improvisation would most likely contain some previously composed material.
1 See especially Evans 1966.
! Since some of the musical material of an improvisation predates the improvised performance, discerning the improvised from the composed can become quite difficult. But such difficulties should not preclude investigation. In seeking a better understanding of the improvisational process, two areas must be considered. First, how does the
performer adapt or create the material that exists prior to the performance? Second, how does the performer combine, embellish, alter, and supplement this pre-performance material during the performance? A consideration of these two areas can help to determine what kinds of knowledge is required for the task of improvisation in jazz, as well as how this knowledge is acquired and cultivated.3
! Compounding the issue is the fact that there are multiple layers to each of these domains. The previously composed material may exist at different levels of organization in the piece depending upon the musical tradition. In addition, it may or may not have been composed by the performer. For instance, jazz musicians often utilize the large- scale harmonic plan of the “standard” tunes of the Great American Songbook, which are written not by the performers but by earlier composers. The jazz player adapts the harmonic plan to use as a framework for the solo sections of the piece. On a more local level, the licks, or formulas, that recur throughout the jazz repertoire may have been created by other performing musicians, eventually reaching a point of common currency. Thus, other players use them during performance simply as elements of the style.
! Yet the gulf that exists between the large-scale level of the harmonic plan of the standard and the local licks can seem vast to a beginning improviser. How are the licks to
3 In his study of improvisation in the classical tradition, Aaron Berkowitz poses the questions of what
knowledge is required, how it is acquired, and how it is cultivated. In doing so, he models his own inquiry of knowledge in improvisation on Chomsky’s inquiry of knowledge in language. Berkowitz 2010: xv.
be arranged? How are the chord changes to be navigated? While the common approach of using guide tones, or voice-leading strands, as a skeleton for a solo may be a start, its usefulness decreases as the harmonic rhythm slows, since the notes of the voice-leading strands move only as each chord moves to the next.
! Ultimately, I will suggest that one of the problems that Evans solved was how to bridge this gap between global structures and local figures.4 Specifically, many of Evans’s solos exhibit consistently used melodic frameworks at the length of the phrase. These melodic frameworks are embellished in different ways, resulting in his improvised lines. While it would be difficult to ascertain the degree to which these models were or were not conscious for Evans, his years of practice and performance resulted in their repeated use; indeed, they may well have been the byproduct of other processes in his work in trying to find fruitful ways to construct a phrase while navigating the tonal syntax. These melodic frameworks acted as specific guides by which to create new melodic material, thereby freeing Evans from the task of having to create large-scale structures during performance and allowing him instead to focus on the precise melodic content.
Hints of Evans’s Solo-Building Process
! Although Evans spoke many times about the type of learning approach he advocated, he rarely offered specific information about the actual musical decisions he made and why he made them. Evans’s brother, Harry, noted that Bill was reluctant to
4 When speaking of the task before someone learning to improvise, Evans paraphrased the famous maxim
of knowing one’s problem as the first step in solving it, saying that students should recognize at the beginning that “knowing the problem is 90% of solving it,” and that “the problem is to be clear and get down to basic structure.” McPartland 1978: Track 10 (0:00-0:49).
show him a particular set of chord voicings because Bill didn’t want to deprive him of the enjoyment of finding his own solution.5 Thus, while Evans’s comments provide a general idea of the way in which he approached musical problems, one rarely hears him
divulging his solutions and how he arrived at them.
! Fortunately, evidence for some of Evans’s solutions can be found by examining his recorded performances. The few comments that he does provide when demonstrating at the piano in interviews can then help to frame these analytical endeavors. For instance, Steve Larson has shown how Evans’s comments and demonstrations at the piano from a 1978 interview with Marian McPartland demonstrate some of his techniques of tonal construction and phrase displacement.6 Since this interview occurred near the end of his career, and since Evans claimed that he was showing what he would be thinking about while playing, this performance can be understood as demonstrating aspects of his idea of the goal state of a jazz performance. But while Evans offered information in these
discussions about the knowledge that he found essential for jazz performance, he provided less commentary about how he acquired and cultivated this knowledge.
! Earlier in his career, though, Evans offered insights about his own development in an interview with his brother, Harry. The two brothers had watched the available
educational films on jazz, yet had found something missing in them.7 Bill stated that he and his brother decided to make a program that would “go into the psychological things you have to go through to master this nebulous craft; not to put it in terms that were so theoretical.”8
5 Evans 1966: 36:56-39:31 (see especially 38:30-39:31).
6 See Larson 1998 and Larson 2006. For the original interview, see McPartland 1978. 7 Pettinger 1998: 178.
! During the interview, Evans spoke about the approach that a beginning improviser might take in moving toward a professional-level performance. In doing so, he provided a more exact sense of the learning process as he understood and practiced it. Specifically, he advocated a focused analytical approach, suggesting that the process of learning to improvise consisted of finding solutions to a body of problems:
! I think the problem is that...[some people] tend to approximate the product rather than attacking it in a realistic, true way, at any elementary level, regardless of how elementary, but it must be entirely true and entirely real and entirely accurate. They would rather approximate the entire problem than to take a small part of it and be real and true about it. And I think this is a very important thing, that you must be satisfied to be very clear and very real and to be very analytical at any level. You can’t take the whole thing. And to approximate the whole thing in a vague way gives one a feeling that...they’ve more or less touched the thing, but in this way you just lead yourself toward confusion..., and ultimately you’re going to get so confused that you’ll never find your way out.
! But it is true of any subject that the person that succeeds in anything has the realistic viewpoint at the beginning in knowing that the problem is large and that he has to take it a step at a time and he has to enjoy the step-by-step learning procedure.9
! Here, Evans suggested that a beginner must begin simply, building on top of basic skills rather than trying to approximate a goal performance from the very beginning. He warned that an approach that approximates the “product” can’t progress because it builds on top of confusion. Thus, locating simple patterns on which one can build would seem to align with Evans’s own approach and advice to others wishing to learn how to
improvise.
! Fortunately for posterity, Evans moved to the piano to demonstrate immediately after making this statement. He played solos that he suggested exhibited different skill levels and different approaches. These included one professional-level performance and two performances that he claimed a beginner might play. Because these performances
exhibit different skill levels, they can provide a more detailed picture of the stages of the learning process than in Evans’s later interview with McPartland.
! After first playing a few measures of the melody of the tune to orient listeners, Evans performed what he claimed would be a professional-level performance, offering this as an exemplar that a beginner might work toward. He then provided two ways that one might attempt to move toward this goal. The first involves working “simply” and “honestly” with the framework, and thus exists as a first step toward the goal, but in his view still stands on its own as a successful solo because of the integrity of the approach. The second performance shows what he thought a beginner should not do: approximate the goal performance from the beginning, without working on the problems involved in soloing in any logical or organized way.
! Before embarking on an examination of his solos, though, it is appropriate to consider Evans’s statement that when improvising he first found “the most fundamental structure” and worked from there.10 An analysis of his improvisations proceeds fruitfully by traversing the same path. In this way, one can work toward finding the basis for some of the steps that Evans took in determining what to play.
Finding “the most fundamental structure”: “How About You?”
! For his demonstration in the interview with his brother, Evans improvised on the framework of “How About You,” a tune that he had recorded three years earlier for the album Conversations with Myself. Like many of the tracks on this album, he had overdubbed two piano tracks onto his initial piano track, creating a three-piano
performance. As his friend, Gene Lees, explained, Evans’s working procedure indicated that he was playing the tune based on an idea of its structure that he had crafted in his own mind, in essence pre-planning a three-performer arrangement of the piece as he intended to perform it.
! Lees, who sat in the control booth at the studio while Evans recorded the multi- track performances for Conversations with Myself, noted that during the recordings it became clear that Evans knew what the whole was going to sound like from the
beginning. As Lees poetically put it, there seemed to be three Bills, which Lees named based on the location of the track in the stereo mix: Bill Left Channel, Bill Right, and Bill Center. “His mind obviously was working in three dimensions of time
simultaneously, because each Bill was anticipating and responding to what the other two were doing.”11 Evans’s ability to record the initial tracks with future tracks in mind indicates that he knew the structure of the tune quite well, and that he had in mind a particular arrangement of the tune as he planned to perform it.
! “How About You?” was one of many tunes that Evans played from the Great American Songbook, which consists of tunes that were written as features for Broadway plays or for movies. Judy Garland introduced the song in the 1941 movie, Babes on Broadway, in which she co-starred with Mickey Rooney. However, as commonly occurs with the adoption of these tunes as vehicles for jazz solos, Evans altered the harmonic framework of the standard version to create a more regular and active harmonic rhythm over which to solo. It would be difficult in many cases to know where Evans learned a particular tune, whether from the movie in which it was featured or from other jazz
performances. In many cases, though, Evans’s performance differed even from standard jazz renditions of the tune. The version of “How About You?” shown in Example 1.1, an adaptation of a fake book version, presents one possible representation of the mental model that jazz performers would have when playing this work.12
EXAMPLE 1.1: Basic Melodic and Harmonic Framework of “How About You”
! The 32-measure form of “How About You?” divides into two halves, creating an AA’ structure (16 measures + 16 measures). Each of these two A sections could then be further broken down into four-measure units. Yet as is common in many AA’ tunes from the Great American Songbook, each A section also exhibits aspects of a sentence, with two four-measure units of a basic idea followed by an eight-measure continuation (4 measures + 4 measures + 8 measures = 16 measures).13
12 This version of “How About You?” is an adaptation of that presented in The World’s Greatest Fakebook.
Warner Bros. Publications, 1994, 1996, 2001. 278.
13 For example, other AA’ standards with sentential structures include “My Romance,” “Alice in
! In the 1966 interview with his brother, Evans played only on the first half of the tune, playing either the first 16-measure A section or only the first eight measures. The frameworks for his phrases in these performances depart from the basic structural models of the phrases outlined above. In the basic model presented above, the overall motion from F major to A major over the span of the first 16 measures can be parsed into local units of tonal motion, where the end of each four-measure unit points toward the beginning of the next four-measure unit. As shown in Example 1.2, the opening four- measure unit begins on tonic and ends on ii-V, which points to the tonic chord that begins the second four-measure unit in m. 5. The second four-measure phrase ends with a gesture that initiates a harmonic departure to ii, which itself functions as the beginning of a motion back to tonic, where a linear 6-b6-5 (D-Db-C) occurs in an upper voice over Gm7-Bbm7-F in the third four-measure phrase. This motion passes through the tonic and continues through a chromatically inflected circle-of-fifths motion to A major: F-
Bm7(b5)-E7-AM7.
EXAMPLE 1.2: Formal Plan of First A Section of “How About You”
Subphrase 1! ! Subphrase 2! Subphrase 3! ! ! Subphrase 4
mm. 1-4! ! mm. 5-8! mm. 9-12! ! ! mm. 13-16
I! ii - V! ! I ( ii - V )! ii - ivb - I - ( ii - V )! III#! ii - V F! Gm7-C7! F Am7(b5) - D7!Gm7 - Bbm - F - Bm7(b5) - E7! A! Gm7-C7
! Utilizing the beginning and end points of these subphrases as points of tonal articulation, the model solos Evans played in his demonstration exhibit linear features
that provide coherence for the entire solo. His improvised lines also connect many of the registral transfers inherent in the tune, as shown in Example 1.3.
EXAMPLE 1.3: Tonal Plan of “How About You”
! As will be shown, Evans’s performances also include reharmonizations of the basic harmonic framework outlined above. While these reharmonizations must work locally, where notes of a given voice-leading structure are resituated in a new harmonic
context, his choices also take into account the surrounding voice-leading. In this way, his reharmonizations actually exist as a linear process, since his harmonic changes arise out of linear motions. Thus, both Evans’s reharmonizations as well as his solo lines operate from a single structural principle in that they both connect or extend local linear segments within the contrapuntal-harmonic syntax of the tune. This process of restringing lines is rooted in the deeper harmonic goals and arrivals noted in Examples 1.2 and 1.3 above.
Evans’s Performances of “How About You?”
! Evans introduced the tune by noting that listeners would already be familiar with the piece.14 He then played the opening measures to call the piece to mind for those watching the program. Yet even in this “reminder” performance, he employed one of his standard opening harmonic gambits, an alteration which fundamentally changes the traditional opening of the piece as shown above in Example 1.1.
EXAMPLE 1.4: Evans’s First Eight Measures of “How About You”
14 Evans began by saying: “We all know this song, ‘I like New York in June. How about you?’” Evans
! Here, Evans utilized his reharmonization of the basic structure of the tune, thus creating a harmonic plan different from that shown above in Example 1.1. His
performance begins not with a tonic chord (F major), but with a series of approach chords beginning with Bm7(b5) that lead into the ii chord in m. 3. This off-tonic opening on #iv7(b5), which here leads to the opening ii of a ii-V motion, is a standard Evans reharmonization technique.15 This opening chord functions not simply as a
reharmonization of the opening F chord, but as a pulling back from the ii-V goal of this first four-measure unit.
! Although “How About You” is a 32-measure AA’ form, in these performances Evans played only over the first A section (16 measures), which ends with a move from I to III# (from F major to A major). He would have been familiar with this key movement from other tunes that he played, such as Cole Porter’s “I Love You” and his own “Waltz for Debby,” both of which he also played in F major and thus move to A major before the bridge (each of these two tunes has an AABA form). In his 1978 interview with Marian McPartland, Evans chose to use the tune “The Touch of Your Lips” to demonstrate how he navigated certain aspects of pitch structure. “The Touch of Your Lips” also utilizes a motion from I to III# across the first A section of an AA’ form, but Evans performed it in C major.16 These tunes, each with a motion to III#, may have constituted a tune family
15 The #IV7 chord may be either a half-diminished seventh chord, as in this excerpt, or a dominant seventh