Sudnow Ways of the Hand a Rewritten Account
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Ways of the Hand
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Ways of the Hand A Rewritten Account
David Sudnow foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 1978, 1993, 2001 David Sudnow All rights reserved. This book was set in Sabon by The MIT Press and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sudnow, David. Ways of the hand : a rewritten account / David Sudnow ; foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) ISBN 0-262-19467-8 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Improvisation (Music). 2. Hand. 3. Jazz—Instruction and study. 4. Phenomenology. I. Dreyfus, Hubert L. II. Title. MT68 .S89 2001 786.2'16593—dc21 2001044330
To my extraordinary wife, Cathryn
The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign . . . the hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent. And only when man speaks, does he think—not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. Martin Heidegger
The meaning of a sentence appears intelligible throughout, detachable from the sentence and finitely self-subsistent in an intelligible world, because we presuppose as given all those exchanges, owed to the history of the language, which contribute to determining its sense. In music, on the other hand, no vocabulary is presupposed, the meaning appears as linked to the empirical presence of the sounds, and that is why music strikes us as dumb. But in fact . . . the clearness of language stands out from an obscure background, and if we carry our research far enough we shall eventually find that language is equally uncommunicative of anything other than itself, that its meaning is inseparable from it. Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Contents
Foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus A Rewritten Account xv Acknowledgments xxi Preface
1
Beginnings
5
Going for the Sounds Going for the Jazz Notes
131
37 73
ix
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Foreword
This unique, challenging, and rewarding book speaks to many different constituencies of readers: sociologists, linguists, cognitive scientists, musicologists, teachers, and philosophers, to name a few. It has something to say to all these disciplines because it is not a theoretical book. Rather, it grapples with the task of articulating the relevant details of a paradigm case of the phenomena to which all these disciplines are ultimately responsible: the ways embodied beings acquire the skills of giving order to, or, better, finding order in, our temporally unfolding experience. It is a phenomenology of how we come to find our way about in the world, whether it be the world of jazz, discourse, typing, tennis, or getting on and off the bus. As a study of how our bodies gain their grasp of the world, Ways of the Hand is in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Sudnow writes: Sitting at the piano, trying to make sense of what was happening, and studying Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of embodiment, I found myself, in his own terms, “not so much encountering a new philosophy as recognizing what [one] had been waiting for.” A copy of his Phenomenology always remains close at hand.
Like Phenomenology of Perception, Sudnow’s work has important implications for those who want to understand the nature of skillful performance. Sudnow’s detailed description of his
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acquisition of the skilled hands of a jazz pianist shows the limitations of a cognitivism that thinks that having a skill consists in interiorizing the theory of a domain. Sudnow starts, in “Beginnings,” by hunting for particular features, in his case the notes on the piano keyboard, and practicing following rules, such as the typical jazz scales, until they become second nature. After much experience such a novice progresses to the stage where he finds himself able to reach for gestalts, like chords or scales as a whole, without having to think about them, and then to begin to apply maxims, such as “repeat this melodic cluster,” as in his “Going for the Sounds.” Next, at a level one might call intermittent competence, the student has to form a strategy to get from one situation to the next, as Sudnow begins to do in the first part of “Going for the Jazz.” Finally, this too becomes something the hand can do, so that now there is a strategy without a strategist, although such proficiency is still interrupted by the occasional need to thematize aspects of the performance. After years of accumulating specific experiences of many thousands of ways to move, he gradually masters the essence of improvisational play with the development of a finely shaped (and herein closely described) rhythmic coordination that synthesizes such movements into true jazz sentences. As “Going for the Jazz” reaches its climax, there is finally no longer an I that plans, not even a mind that aims ahead, but a jazz hand that knows at each moment how to reach for the music.1 1. In the course of his detailed phenomenology, Sudnow implicitly corrects a subtle but surprising error in Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty occasionally characterizes the lived body as an “I can,” whereas Sudnow is clear that it is not he but his hand that reaches for the jazz, as, in the Odyssey, Homer says of his heroes that, when they sat down to a banquet, “their hands went out to the food in front of
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Sudnow’s detailed description suggests that the cognitivist theory of skill acquisition, taken for granted from Socrates to Descartes to Kant to Husserl to Piaget, has the phenomenon upside down. Rather than moving from specific cases to abstract principles, skill acquisition seems to move in the opposite direction, from principles followed until they are interiorized, to the possession of so many types of concrete cases paired with types of responses that each situation leads fluidly to the next. This doesn’t prove that the cognitivist is mistaken, but it shifts the burden of proof to those who think of skill acquisition as the acquisition of more and more refined rules. Likewise, empiricists, who think of skills in terms of associations of experiences or the formation of linear neural connections (what Merleau-Ponty’s contemporaries called the “reflex arc”), would have to defend their view in the face of the phenomenon noted by both Merleau-Ponty and Sudnow that one can transfer one’s skills from what one hand has learned to the other hand, or, as Sudnow notes, from playing on an adult’s to a child’s keyboard. But Sudnow’s work moves in the opposite direction from Merleau-Ponty’s. Like any philosopher, Merleau-Ponty provides only enough detail in his description of action and perception to motivate his move to generality and ultimately to ontology, whereas Sudnow purposefully restricts himself, in what he calls a “production account,” to reveal only the concreteness of situated relevant detail. And in articulating one of the most subtle, rich, intricate, and inarticulate skills human beings have developed, Sudnow provides new insights into them.” The only way to account for Merleau-Ponty’s misleading characterization of the egoless agency of the skilled body involved in a task is that, for reasons we cannot explore here, he took over the expression “I can” from Husserl, who did think of all action as produced by an ego’s aiming at a goal.
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how the body takes over a domain and, most particularly, how it uses varying styles of pulsation to coordinate the temporal unfolding of skilled activity, whether it be music or speech. This adds flesh to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis and implicitly develops further Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the subject/object account of being-in-the-world.2 Sudnow is able to describe how complex temporal skills are organized because he is a unique hybrid. By the time we are able to reflect, we are already living in our language, and as linguistic beings we are in a poor position to offer a phenomenology of how speaking works. Sudnow, however, began to learn jazz improvisation at the age of thirty, before which time he had been trained as a social anthropologist. Thus he is a unique combination of skilled observer and professional musician. His pathbreaking work in this book not only gives us an insight into all skill acquisition by following the development of a particularly subtle skill; it puts him, as such an experienced hybrid, in a special position to attempt to articulate the hidden achievements of a mature speaker, as he is now aiming to accomplish with studies of his own experiences in learning a second language. We can look forward to his report. Meanwhile, this new and improved version of Ways of the Hand will continue to reward readers who want to catch a 2. Research that comes from another direction—from such broad details as that the body moves forward more easily than backward and has to balance in a gravitational field—can also lead to new understanding of what Merleau-Ponty calls “motor intentionality” and thus of the body as a way of being that is neither subject nor object, but the discloser of the spatiotemporal world. See Samuel Todes’s Body and World (MIT Press, 2001). Sudnow’s and Todes’s work carry forward and go beyond Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the active body. Together they are uniquely at the forefront in doing Merleau-Ponty-inspired research on embodiment, and not, as so many others do, merely interpreting Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.
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glimpse of the magic their body performs every moment as they find their way about in the world. Hubert L. Dreyfus Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate School University of California, Berkeley
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A Rewritten Account
The constant rereading of a manuscript before publication may yield a discomfiting sense that there’s not that much at all to the tome on which you’ve worked for so long. And when in 1977 I could read every word of this report in a half hour, I had to force myself to turn it in to the publisher quickly and forget about it as best I could. Nearly twenty-five years later I decided to wrap up the nationwide music teaching program I’d developed over most of the time since this book’s completion, and return to full-time writing. My first goal was to be a volume on the basis and implementation of my keyboard learning philosophy, a music training method that gradually evolved out of some findings first reported here.1 That would bring closure to a long chapter of my life. The chance arose for an extended stay in Europe, and I decided to work on this project there. With the exception of a few yearlong visiting professorships, I’d had very little contact with the academic world I left in 1975 to write about and then teach music. So on little more than a lark, I posted a notice on a bulletin board I came upon by chance on the Web, a couple of weeks before leaving the States. It was an international site for a specialty within social science that studies ordinary commonsense thinking, a group with
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which I was associated during its formative years in the sixties, and from which some of my early thoughts for studying music derived.2 My posting simply said I was coming to Europe and would be happy to give some talks at universities if there was any interest in that. After such a long hiatus, only a few contributors to this site were familiar to me, but apparently many knew early sociological research I’d done,3 and this book itself had gained the ambiguous reputation of being some sort of a classic. The response to my posting was unexpected. Over a dozen invitations were emailed within a few days from universities throughout Europe. By the time my flight left, I had a tight speaking schedule up ahead. As time neared for my first talks, after about two months abroad, I’d been busy outlining my intended report on training. But it would still take much more thinking to firm up a fully bookworthy plan from the collection of notes and incomplete essays written in my scarce spare time over the past decades, as I was developing a philosophy of education while needing to make a living with it. At the last moment I decided to talk about Ways of the Hand, instead of my efforts with pedagogy just yet. I figured I’d be on firmer footing, and that my audiences would as readily welcome a discussion of this book. At the first two lectures, in Oxford and Wales, I had such an awkward time summarizing a thesis I assumed I’d recall in close detail, despite the passage of so many years, that I knew I’d need to reread this book for the first time since its publication, and do so soon, in a five-day break before my next talk. I found a paperback copy in an Oxford bookstore and spent those full days trying to decipher what in the world it was about in detail.
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At the next presentation I was only slightly better prepared. It was a difficult description to thematize briefly. As the lecture tour progressed I got a bit better at speaking about it, but there were still some critical places in the study that I couldn’t easily summarize because I couldn’t easily follow them. My last experience with the book, that half hour of reading when it was done in the seventies, had been clearly artifactual. Then, I knew its details like the palm of my hand, and it wasn’t so much a matter of reading a book as scanning the score for some music or the script for a part that’s already been well memorized. There had been differences of opinion about the study. Some reviewers called it poetic, and there were universities where it was assigned as an example of especially intricate description. But it also captured other imaginations as the most convoluted writing in print, and some professors assigned it for students to see just that. In any event, it was a dense dissertation to digest. The book had become one of those works that are widely purchased because of certain mass media reviews, but so esoteric that they’re seldom read closely enough to yield an even approximately accurate synopsis. In a phone call with my editor at the MIT Press, the book’s paperback publisher, I mentioned the idea of a rewrite, and my reservations about such an odd notion. His quick enthusiasm was startling, exciting, and a bit disconcerting. It would mean postponing my intended project for some months, but more importantly, I now worried whether I could really justify rewriting an earlier published work simply because it was hard to read. I knew I couldn’t alter its form because the developmental narrative was essential, and a reorganization at that level ran the high risk of a total unraveling that might be impossible to reweave. If I augmented the account in other than an arbitrary
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way—taking this or that occasion to say more—it would evolve into a different book. A revision being out of the question, some sort of an edit seemed the sole sensible solution. I put out the request to friends for any cases they might recollect of an author essentially rewriting his own published work, citations I could at least invoke to help somehow warrant the effort, if only to myself. I got nothing back of any relevance. Of course the decision came down to one issue: did the book offer a perspective and findings of sufficient import that providing for their greater accessibility might amount to more than a possibly pleasant yet rather self-indulgent and potentially embarrassing enterprise? I obviously decided that the gains are worth the risks. So, alas—while I’d have preferred it if another could have done the job—I’ve reedited my own book, and the MIT Press has been bold enough to publish it. Some small sections have been eliminated and others added, many pages touched up, and many left almost as they were. But in some places, particularly, the original descriptions were so intricate that I clearly hadn’t rights to fret over a lack of serious readers. As I recovered the detailed sense of it all by starting to rewrite the book, I felt I could trim down and clean up these more difficult sections with some success, and that minor changes would increase the clarity throughout. Trying to avoid gratuitous remarks that might take on a diversionary life of their own, I found it essential not so much to translate the language into a different one, as to try to clarify it on its own terms at its own pace. Surprised to find myself as engrossed in the findings as when they were first reported—well, that convinced me it was worth the effort. The book proposes some possible discoveries about
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how certain detailed aspects of improvised conduct are organized. I intended it as nothing more or less than a descriptively close account of some essential problematic tasks faced in the production of a three- or four-second spate of sensible linguistic gesturing. Twenty-odd years of extensive piano playing later, I find that its descriptions of key aspects of musical-linguistic skill remain sufficiently valid, and so far as I know not challenged, that I can simply restate them. And perhaps more clearly. The report is about jazz piano playing, and most particularly so. But by the time it was done, I also saw it as a sort of prolegomenon to the study of talking. There is so much in common between ordinary speaking and musical improvisation that, at the least, not to expect descriptions of experience at producing one to inform approaches to the other is plainly unreasonable: The body makes rapid and finely articulated moves from one place to the next on time, proper places and timings very closely defined by cohorts of fellow speakers. The body finds its way from place to place in the course of moving, and, certainly in general, not by figuring out places to go in advance. It takes years to become a mature speaker and listener in each domain. I came to see my passable first phenomenology of aspects of jazz piano performance as a suggestive preface for the phenomenological description of articulated gestures of all sorts, talking included.4 But now it’s your book, not mine, a study of speaking jazz at a piano, and I’m gratified if there are any other useful meanings you might find in it for yourselves. In light of its form, I think you’ll gain a best first access to the phenomena it reports if it’s read in full sections, with chapters or numbered section headings as pause markers. Occasional double spaces within sections might best first warrant little
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more than a coffee break. For what it’s worth, the book was written with a good deal of reading aloud. I’m sorry that it’s still difficult, yet hopefully enough less so than before. David Sudnow July 4, 2001 Tübingen, Germany
Acknowledgments
First I’d like to thank Larry Cohen of the MIT Press, for having the boldness to support this unusual enterprise. Second, my appreciation goes out to Matthew Abbate, my editor at the MIT Press, who undertook a major task with a difficult book. He displayed great diligence in dealing with its complexities, grasping every last detail carefully, and exhibited truly remarkable editorial skill at every turn. Third, I’m grateful to all of those who invited me to speak of my work at universities in Great Britain and throughout the continent, a lecture series that set in motion my decision to redo the book. Fourth, I thank the many thousands of students of my piano course who contributed in innumerable ways to my continued studies of piano skill over the past decades. I trust that the many students, from all walks of life, who were especially important to me know who they are. Last, and most of all, is my profound indebtedness to Jack Kroll of Newsweek, who first reviewed the original Harvard University Press edition of the book in such glowing terms. I was most fortunate to have been his friend over the many years since we met after the book’s publication in 1978, and his recent death not only occasions my continuing grief but is a gigantic loss to quality journalism. Newsweek will search far and wide to match the contributions Jack made to its magazine and the public it serves.
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Ways of the Hand
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Preface
From an upright posture I’ve looked down at my hands on a piano for some years while learning to play jazz, and when I look at them now my look is deeply informed by its history. When I watch my hands on a typewriter I don’t recognize their movements, startled by their looks as I’m surprised by my profile in the mirrors of a clothing store’s dressing room. It’s as though I were watching an interior part of my body do its business. But my piano hands are familiar indeed. I not only know their looks in the intimate ways we all know our hands’ looks, but I’ve also come to see jazz-making ways of the hand. When learning to play, for quite a while I was busy watching my hands and the keyboard to avoid trouble and find places to go. Jazz students spend a good deal of time practicing movements along rule-governed paths on the piano, like various scales, to have ways to keep on going with the music. Such pathways can be vital when you’re first trying to improvise and not follow a musical score. You’ve got to know just where you’re headed in order to get there correctly, not tripping up along the way, not hitting two keys together out of uncertainty, for instance. In most playing situations you must keep the action moving, can’t stop and think about good next places to go. These routes, ordered sequences of keys one may describe with simple arithmetic—like “go up 1 note, come down 2, now
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Preface
up 2 and down 3, then up 3 and down 4,” to create one sequence from an infinite pile—such paths become clearly staked out keyboard places that are eventually seen at a glance, paths along which you can sustain your movements and keep up a more or less continuing flow of articulations. Without a score, when faced with the task of making up melodies such paths are invaluable. For a long time I guided my hands on the keyboard by moving along all kinds of routes and scales that I conceived in my mind’s eye, and, when I did look at the piano, I was so involved in an analytic mode of travel that I didn’t see the hands’ affairs as I now do. Their affairs and my looking were different. Now I don’t expressly “use” pathways to make melodies, but discover good-sounding places to go, from each note to the next, in the course of getting there, singing improvised jazz. And from my upright posture I look down and see what I never saw before. At last I see jazz pianist’s hands, and there was a critical time, not long ago, when I had the most vivid impression that my fingers seemed to be making the music by themselves. As I watch letters coming up on the page when I rapidly type out a note to myself, watch them lay down as smoothly as a competent flycaster places his lure on a trout stream, I wonder: had I a similar history of looking at my hands at this keyboard, would I now see fingers thinking? I intend my descriptions as indications for how one might eventually speak methodically and rationally, if only crudely for now, when saying things like: the hand—in music, eating, weaving, carving, cooking, drawing, writing, surgery, dialing, typing, signing, wherever—this hand chooses where to go as much as “I” do. I offer a first portrait of the handicraft of jazz piano improvisation, an extraordinary domain of action for the closer study of the body and its works in general. In jazz piano play we have
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an arena of conduct of the most elaborate dimensions, an especially apt place for portraying one of our distinctive organs’ ways of assembling orderly activity. The aim isn’t explanatory but descriptive, a phenomenological account of handwork as it’s known to a performing musician, without consulting the expert opinions of other practitioners, analysts of practitioners, or other professional students of conduct. The goal is to describe jazz from a player’s perspective (without which it wouldn’t exist), the player reflecting on his skills with “no one but himself to consult,” to quote philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.5 I’ve found that thus far unanalyzed aspects of the body’s ways can be closely depicted, for all to see, by the performer, and perhaps no one but the performer, especially one who self-consciously takes up a complex activity with as strong an intention to master its accomplishment as to try to reflect rigorously upon the experiences of doing so. Guided by neither an introspective, mentalistically inclined consciousness nor the methods of analytic science but only by the concrete particular problems faced in the course of learning jazz piano, I’ve pointed to various critical tasks faced when sustaining orderly articulated movements. Such a production account might lead to the precise looks of things, eventually contributing to a differently grounded modality of rigorous inquiry, only if the finest of details are sought.6 I’ve tried to make the account both accessible and minute, building a specialized language, where needed, to bring into relief some features for mapping an uncharted territory. Following the report will be substantially easier if the reader is willing to take just a bit of time to roughly emulate the essence of critical keyboard examples by, say, using one’s hands on a tabletop. This will quite sufficiently concretize the account, and one with no formal or other musical background will thus find it all manageable.
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Beginnings
When I went for piano lessons this time around, I was fully determined to learn jazz. About fifteen years earlier, some lessons had amounted to pretty nearly nothing. An exceptional blind jazz pianist had me watch him play a ballad, pausing as he struck each chord; with a notational system that I worked out for myself, I wrote down the names of the notes depressed by each of his fingers, went home, and duplicated the song. I gained a repertoire of a dozen tunes in my last term of high school this way, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t improvise, play other songs or those I’d learned in another way, teach another without using exactly the same method. Still, I played the songs well. My new teacher had me show him what I could do. I produced some remembered bits and pieces of these rote-learned tunes, the only music I’d played, most infrequently, throughout college, graduate school, and the years of university teaching that followed. I explained how they’d been acquired, and he readily saw that I negotiated a keyboard fluently. I knew how to place and move my fingers, how to engage in some maneuver once it was pointed out to me, and do so more or less smoothly. Skills acquired with a year and a half of classical lessons at age nine, which were taken very seriously, hadn’t been lost, perhaps even somewhat solidified by the high school song experience that may have kept the keyboard’s spaces more
6
Beginnings
alive for me. So the little my hands could do looked as if done by a real pianist. Not doing much, they looked the part, a widespread possibility because of extraordinarily ubiquitous piano lessons, and a massive failure to get far with them that nonetheless may produce easily reactivated potentials for those who once upon a time practiced diligently, if only briefly. My instruction went rapidly. After seven or eight months of three or so hours of daily practice, I briefly held an afternoon job with a bassist in a yacht club bar, just playing standard songs standardly. Doing improvisation was an entirely different matter. My first lessons had me gain working ability with a simple nomenclature. To play jazz I had to learn again what scales were, and about chords—clusters of certain scale notes sounded simultaneously—and how such chords are best spaced and arranged on the keyboard for jazz play. Then there were simple facts about song structure. I was told that once chords were well handled in their progressions in songs, improvisation could start. For the jazz musician, a song is regarded as a sequence of chords with an originally written melody that’s only performed the first time through; the same chord progression is then cyclically repeated as improvised melodies are substituted for the original one. When jazz players improvise, they play on the changes (chords), generating melodies laid over their underlying progression. When several musicians perform together, they gear their respective actions by using the same tune, this successively repeated cycle of chords and metrical structure that defines the song for them, to stay on track together. And when musicians take turns soloing, each managing a bit of play and giving a next section over to his fellows, a song’s required chord changes furnish a continuing format, a series of benchmarks delineating turn-taking places and unifying the ensemble’s progress. Please read the next few pages that sketch relevant basic facts about music. Don’t think of memorizing anything. One reading
Beginnings
7
straight through will suffice, even for one with no keyboard or other instrumental experience. And don’t be at all concerned about what the places sound like; the goal is only to gain a rough first visual grasp of a keyboard. Imagine casually perusing a map to sense just the overall lay of the land for an upcoming trip. Scales A keyboard has black and white notes, the blacks arranged in alternating groups of twos and threes:7
The distance from a note to the immediately adjacent higher one (to the right, of higher pitch), or lower one (to the left, of lower pitch), treating blacks and whites equivalently, is called a half step. Two half steps make a whole step:
!"#$%&'()*
+,-#(%&'()*
The major scale, the only scale needed to understand song and jazz basics, is a path of eight notes, described by this formula: 1
2 1
3 1
4 1/2
5 1
6 1
7 1
8 1/2
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Starting on any note at all, a major scale is formed by moving one whole step up from this starting place to a second note, then a whole step up to a third note, a half step to the fourth note of the scale, and so on. The eighth note of the scale takes the same name as its starting note, an octave—eight notes—higher. Within the scope of a one-octave range, there are twelve different places, counting blacks and whites equally as we do. And this half step/whole step rule yields twelve unique major scales, many quite similar, yet no two identical (hardly a coincidence, since the layout of the keyboard and this scale evolved hand in hand). Notes on the piano are given alphabet names. White notes are named A through G in series, then duplicated through each successive octave, with A designated as the white note between the second and third blacks in each black threesome. Black notes are named in reference to adjacent white notes. A black note is termed a flat ( ) when seen from the perspective of a white note a half step above it, or a sharp () when seen relative to a white note a half step below it. Black notes thus take either of two names (this is also true of white notes, in certain contexts, which we needn’t consider): . 0 / 3 4 1 / 2 4 .
. 1 0 /2 3 4 .
Scales are spelled by a convention minimizing awkward names (usually calling black starting notes by their flat names and adhering to an alphabetic order). There are twelve major scales, one beginning on each of the twelve notes in the scope of a one-octave range, usually named and always comprised as follows: A B B C D
B C C
C D D
D E
E F
D E E F G
E F F
F G G
G A A
G A
A B
B C
A B B C D
Beginnings D E E F G
E F F G A
F G G A B
G A A B C
A B B C D
B C C D E
G A
A B
B C
C D
D E
E F
C D D E F F G
9 D E E F G G A
Some of the major scales:
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Chords A chord is a group of notes struck, and thus sounded, simultaneously. Three basic chord types are most prevalent in jazz (and nearly all modern western music): major, minor seventh, and dominant chords, each built in reference to a major scale. A major chord is comprised of the
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1, 3, and 5 notes of any scale. We say “One three five is major.” For example, a C major chord (symbol “C”) has the notes C, E, and G:
!
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#
A minor seventh chord (symbol “Cm7”) contains the 1, flatted 3 (third note lowered a half step), 5, and flatted 7 (seventh note lowered a half step) of a major scale. We say “One, flat three, five, flat seven is minor seventh.” C minor seventh is C, E , G, B :
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%
A dominant chord (symbol “C7”) is made by adding, to a major chord, only the flatted seventh note of a scale. We say “One, three, five, flat seven is dominant.” C dominant is C, E, G, B :
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11
There are twelve major, twelve minor seventh, and twelve dominant chords, each named in reference to some first note and the major scale starting there. Chords may be produced in various ways. They may be played in different positions on the keyboard (C, E, G, left to right; or E, G, C; or G, C, E, for instance), and, as is common in most modern music, numerous additional tones are added to the basic chord tones to provide a fuller sound. Jazz musicians seldom play chords using the defining notes alone, closely spaced on the piano, but spread chord tones between both hands, or play them all in one hand with various other notes added to each chord type to enrich its texture. The particular way a chord is executed and colored is referred to as chord voicing. Such considerations needn’t be musicologically reviewed here.8 Songs In most jazz play, the song is used as a basic formatting device. A song is a more or less fixed pattern of chords, with a written melody laid out in a metrical structure, with so many beats, in an evenly articulated pulse, organized into a set of measures, or “bars”—groups of accented pulses: 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3, or far more commonly, 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4, etc. Most popular songs have standard formats, and tunes with 12, 16, 24, 32, and 36 measures are most common. Here’s the first half of a typical 32-measure standard: Tenderly | | | |
E Fm7 A m7 Cm7
| | | |
A 7 D 7 Fm7 F7
| | | |
E m7 E A m7 Fm7
| | | |
A 7 E Dm7 B 7
G7
| | | |
This chord chart, without a notated melody, furnishes a diagram of the structure of the song Tenderly, in the key of E . (A “key” essentially means that most melody notes fall on a certain major scale, here E , and that the song’s harmonic movement usually heads to a final rest on an E major chord, the group “hum” if you will. Any song may be played in any of the twelve keys.) Nearly every song has a more or less unique harmony (chord sequence), but progressions from one chord to the next follow narrowly defined rules, so that most tunes share many common chord
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sequences. Gaining experience in playing many songs, one learns such common patterns, and eventually comes to find good chords to harmonize a melody without a chord chart. There are various ways of speaking of relations between a melody and its appropriate harmonization, musicological ways that needn’t concern us now. I will discuss such relations in quite different terms.
In early lessons with my new teacher the topic was chord construction, or voicing, playing a chord’s tones in nicely distributed ways. However a chord may be described as a group of named notes on a keyboard with geometrically measured properties, during play a chord is a grabbed place. What’s involved in such grabbing? Anyone who’s witnessed or been a beginning pianist or guitarist learning chords notices substantial initial awkwardness. Lots of searching and looking are first required. The chord must be detected as a sequence of named notes with a look that reviews the terrain up and down, finding the chord as a serial ordering of these and those particularly identified tones, going left to right or right to left, consulting the rules to locate the places. Then some missing ones in the middle are found. And along with such looking are hands that behave correspondingly. I would find a particular chord, groping to put each finger into a good spot, arranging the individual fingers a bit to find a way for the hand to feel comfortable, and, having gained a hold on the chord, getting a good grasp, I’d let it go, then look back to the keyboard—only to find the visual and manual hold hadn’t yet been well established. I had to take up the chord again in terms ofits constitution, find the individual notes again, build it up from the scratch of its spoken parts. Over the course of my first days, much time was spent doing initial grabbing, trying to get a hold on chords properly, going back and looking at them as named notes, grabbing again,
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repositioning the hand to get into a chord with a comfortable hold so it could be grasped as a whole; finding ways of sinking into a chord that didn’t involve the sounding of neighboring tones; arching the hand appropriately so the fingers came down with a correct spacing and trajectory relative to the shape of the chording hand; balancing the different intensities of pressure so as not to lose balance, the edges of neighboring notes not extraneous spots to be avoided but edges whose tactile appreciation became part of a natural hold on a settled-into chord; arching the hand and arraying its fingers with the sort of proportional spread that, when the chord was grasped, let the fingers not only come into the right spots but with equal intensity, so its tones sounded simultaneously, and not clumsily serialized (the way the high school band often slightly serializes the voices of the opening chord of a marching tune). As my hands began to form constellations, the scope of my looking correspondingly grasped the chord as a whole, seeing not its note-for-noteness but its configuration against the broader visual field of the terrain. It’s not enough to get into a chord. It was essential to get from one to the next, playing progressions smoothly. And a host of expanding skills, ways of looking, moving, and thinking were needed to execute such successions. It took a short while for individual chords to be properly grabbed, and in a couple of weeks I could smoothly produce all dominants, majors, and minor sevenths. Turning to chords, to songs, producing successions of clusters with a melody—that was now the task. There’s chord A and B, separated from one another, this one a way down the keyboard from the other:
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A
B
A’s production entails a tightly compressed hand, B’s an openly extended spread. A’s involves coming at the keyboard straight ahead, as one comes at a typewriter to make contact with the home position, while B’s involves a shift in the axis of the hand relative to the keyboard, the little finger moving much farther from the body’s center than the thumb. And A is played for counts 1 2 3 4, and when the next 1 arrives, B must be announced. Beginners get from A to B disjointedly. The grasp of A may be at hand, and B too, but there’s a distance to be traveled, and what happens, at first, is that after doing A, a novice sets out for B without going for it in the right way from the start. One moves to the left for B, but doesn’t reach for all of B. Heading out for B’s rough place in the keyboard, one still has to reshape the hand upon reaching its vicinity. To go correctly from A to B, grabbing for the whole of B, is to be directed from the start not just to where B is, but in shape to play it on arrival. And
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doing that means preparing all along the course to reach the goal in productional form. The experienced hand lifts off of A, and as it moves toward B it changes its configuration as a smooth and not jerky unfolding. No sooner does a liftoff from A occur than the movement is already toward all of B, a proper transition requiring that manifold realignments of the hand occur simultaneously. Adherence to a steady pulse is a critical resource. With an upcoming time of arrival preestablished by former beats, one knows just when to reach B, having lifted off from A. Fluent chord production for song play must meet other requirements, for it’s not enough to grab chords cleanly, or only to move smoothly in tempo from one to the next. To play a song well, one can’t do more than peripherally monitor the keyboard, if at all, to handle chord transactions. At the outset, and for some while for beginners—the more so the more complex the sequence and rapidly changing the chords—one must fairly closely survey the left side in order to move from place to place. But before songs are well played, and surely before one can try improvised melodies, one must transcend this tilted viewing. Looking’s work load progressively lightens for finding distances, the gaze at the keyboard progressively diffuses in function, as places gradually become places toward which the appreciative fingers, hand, and arm are aimed. As I reached for chords (and reaching for chords in song contexts always involves reaching for recurring patterns of them), I was gaining a sense of their locations by going to them, experiencing a rate of movement and distance required at varying tempos, thereby developing an embodied way of accomplishing distance. Our symmetrical stance toward settings is striking. Sit down at a dinner table and, without thinking about it at all, pull your chair up to eat. Your nose is most likely exactly over the center of the dinner plate. Go before a bathroom sink to wash your
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face and find that nose smack in the vertical middle of the mirror. Sit down at the bench of a piano and position yourself as if to play, even if you never have. Chances are high that your navel (and nose, assuming the usual alignment) is facing the D that’s one note above the C closest to the middle of the keyboard (middle C), this D nearly the true center of a piano, where all navels end up, halving beings that we are. From this middle of the piano, the beginner gradually acquires an incorporated sense of places and distances, incorporated, for example, in that finding the named, visually grasped place-outthere by theoretic looking becomes unnecessary. The body’s own appreciative structures serve to find places. A grasp develops of the setting of the keyboard and its dimensions relative to the hand’s and arm’s moving extension from the body’s center, and in time this skill becomes so refined and generalized that precise alignment at the center isn’t even needed. Only after years of play do beginners attain the sort of competence at place finding that a jazz pianist’s left hand displays in chord execution. Reaching the point where, with eyes closed, I may now sit down at the piano, gain an initial orientation with the merest touch anywhere on the field, if at all, and then reach out to bring my finger precisely into a spot two feet off to the left, where a half-inch off is a very big mistake, come back up seventeen inches and hit another one, go down twenty-three and a quarter inches and get there at a fast clip—a skill a great many competent players have—this takes a lengthy course of gradual incorporation. After three or four months of practice I was no longer doing too much looking to make chord changes on time, and soon was able to perform a growing repertoire of songs without watching the left side especially. Once chord progressions were preliminarily at hand, the full song was relatively easy for me, since I had no trouble finding melodies without a notation. (I’d
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picked out melodies at a piano since I was a young child.) And I had no special difficulty coordinating both hands’ use, playing one chord every two or four beats say, with more events of varying time values articulated by the right hand. Fresh beginners struggle over this coordination. In six months I could read a chord chart and play the melody of a new song after a few moments of review, gaining an increasing number of standard tunes with nicely voiced, jazzsounding chords, played at a relatively steady tempo and with more or less appropriate feeling. When my teacher said, “now that you can play tunes, try improvising melodies with the right hand,” and when I went home and listened to my jazz records, it was as if the assignment was to go home and start speaking French. There was this French going on, streams of fast-flowing strange sounds, rapidly articulated and crisscrossing, an enormous amount of intricate windings, styles within styles in the course of any player’s music. There were rising and falling intonations, constantly shifting accents, and I started listening in a new way— for answers to the question, how are they doing that? I didn’t need an analysis. I needed advice. How could I now learn to do it? That it was certainly first done mostly by black men? That was beside the point. That it was done in a musical tradition with a particular history and the evolution of various devices for constructing chords and melodies? That mattered only if I had to become involved in this history. That the history entailed increasing demands for technical expertise, corresponding to an increasingly refined instrument for which such technique was geared and from whose aspirations it was fashioned, as well as an increasingly professional position for the musician, a growing gap between amateur and pro and the development of an orientation toward the definitive performance—however interesting the sociology, this all mattered
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only if I had to take up with the technical training much jazz now seems to require. These jazz musicians were doing things very quickly. Were my fingers agile enough? Any theory’s relevance depended on its possible bearing for my practice. However one might describe what may be heard on the records, the first relevant question about this music for me was: what notes are they playing? The music had a rhythm, an assortment of intensities, an intonational structure, subtleties of shading, and much more. But when it came to sitting down at my piano it was a rhythm of something, intensity of something, intonational structure of something, subtlety of something, and the something that first mattered was: these and those particular notes being played. I could bring my hands to a piano and do things in a jazz rhythm, as I’d clapped hands to this music for years. I could subtly shade a contact with the keyboard, touching keys very softly or loudly, with nuances in between. Given a handful of notes I could’ve moved my fingers quite fast or slow. I could do all this as many can, but sitting at my piano, playing a song’s sequence of chords, and trying to follow my teacher’s instruction to make up melodies with the right hand, the main question was: where? Not everything the melodic right hand was doing in playing these notes seemed relevant. I didn’t figure the looks of players’ hands could be consulted as a guide for learning what I needed to know. When I looked at my teacher’s hands, I looked past them to the places they went, not how they were going about, but where. I sat at my piano and had to bring my fingers to particular notes. I could more or less get them to any particular notes I wanted to, given my well-trained hands, but I didn’t know where to go. It seemed impossible to approach this jazz except by finding particular places to take my fingers. And my teacher encouraged that approach.
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I got a first taste of the magnitude of problems I was in for when I tried to listen to a piece of jazz melody on a record and go to the piano to play it. While I could perfectly well hear a simple melody a few times over and attain it as a singable accomplishment with voice and hands, these jazz melodies were by no means simple. A three-second stretch of play within a course of improvisation I’d listened to for years now engaged me for several hours, unsuccessfully trying to grab the real details so as to bring each of its tones to singability and then get the strip down at the keyboard. The sheer looks of several seconds of transcribed jazz are suggestive:
(Charlie Parker, My Little Suede Shoes)
When taking a melody from a record whose improvisations I figured I knew—and recording gives improvised melodies a radically new status they didn’t formerly have, as they can now be learned at a level of detail that a one-time hearing can’t achieve— I discovered a symptomatic vagueness in my grasp of these familiar improvisations. I apparently only knew the melodies in certain broad outlines. Particularly with respect to the rapid passages, I found that when singing along with a Charlie Parker recording, for instance, I’d been completely glossing the detailed particularities of the pitches of melodies that I figured I knew well, since my introduction to this jazz as a young teenager. I grasped their essential shape perhaps, but hadn’t ever really sung them with a refined note-to-note precision. And it was very particular notes that needed to be at hand now, at the piano, if I was
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to reproduce this music in its particularity. I wondered: what had I been listening to as a jazz fan all these years? The extraordinary difficulties of a first solo-copying attempt, trying to find the tiny spot on the record again and again, endlessly rehearing the same minuscule passage to narrow in on its notes, finding those places on the piano, working out a fingering solution that didn’t just play the right notes but with the right time values—after a major struggle I sensed this wasn’t the way to go, at least for me. And, as I thought of it at the time, perhaps because of frustration with the difficulty of such copying, I wanted to improvise my own melodies, not the recorded or transcribed ones of others. I told my teacher I didn’t know where to go, how to even begin to make up melodies as one plays. There was no problem striking several notes over and over again and keeping that up throughout the course of a song cycle, but this was no more jazz than noinoinoinoinoinoinoinoinoinoino is writing, which I can do forever and in various tempos. Here was the problem. There is this song, its melody has been played, and now the tune is to be sustained as a continuing cycle of chords. If I was to do jazz it would mean playing melodies over these song chords, not just this little snatch of melody notes and that, but playing on the changes for sustained periods. The changes keep changing, say one chord a second for about a minute through one complete cycle of a typical medium-tempo ballad. And one must continue playing melodies while handling the chords at the right times, cycle after cycle of the song. But my right hand had nothing to say in this language. It might as well have gone anywhere, but once it did there was nothing next to do. And if you don’t know where you’re going you can’t go anywhere correctly. The hand has to be motivated
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to very definite next keys to depress, and when there’s nowhere for it to go you’re immobilized. My teacher dealt with my problem by giving me routes to take. He started by noting that with this particular chord you can get a characteristic jazz sound by playing this particular scale. We looked at a particular chord and particular scale, examining their respective constructions. Here’s how he spoke of it: Take a dominant seventh chord, for example. Say F dominant:
With it you can play a so-called diminished scale, a scale consisting of alternating half and whole steps:
And, he pointed out, you get a characteristic jazz sound because of various dissonances when the sustained chord’s sound is heard alongside various notes of the scale. The second note of this scale is a half step above F of the chord; the scale’s third note, A , is a half step below the chord’s A. The B, fifth note of the scale, is a half step below the C of the
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chord, and the seventh note of the scale is a half step below the E of the chord. These half step dissonant concurrences, in particular, have a slightly grating sound, a husky, bluesy quality very common in jazz melodies. Of course to talk of this characteristic jazz sound is like saying a certain r is characteristic of French. Learning that sound is one thing, and having a native-sounding chat in Paris another. In the case of a diminished scale which he furnished at first, feeling it was a particularly good starting place for jazz, there isn’t one path but three, depending on the opening note, and whether you count your first move as a whole or half step (prove that to yourself: choose any note; go up a half step, then a whole, then a half—or a whole, half, whole—alternating like this, and write down each spot you reach; no matter where you start, you’ll find only three unique arrays). Because of these dissonant relationships and rather simple parallels between all chords, the three different diminished scales, he explained, each go well with four of the twelve dominants (each scale produces precisely the same dissonant half steps with a different four of the twelve dominants). Given a need to do melodies that accorded with a song’s harmony, having these three scales was thus to have jazzy-sounding places to be going for a full third of all the thirty-six chords! It was a great-sounding path. I excitedly went home with the step rule written in my notebook, identified the three diminished routes, and then did what having a linear array almost asks for: I learned to play them fluently as scales, as rising and descending successions. Though he furnished a route without directions, with no beginning and end but only a collection of what could be regarded as arrayed places, I first took up with it as a left-to-right and right-to-left path. Having such places to go, I had to pick some means to go there, and doing scales as
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scales was a useful means of travel. I’d learn to do them fast, and since they duplicated themselves at each octave, there was a long string of action at hand, starting low and going way up or the other way around. He’d in fact displayed these characteristic sounds by doing just that, demonstratively playing the scales fast, as up and down paths. It was very jazzy. Using the paths involved working out fingering solutions. Here’s the solution I found best suited to a smooth rapid production from low to high over the range of several octaves along this particular diminished scale (1 = thumb, 2 = index, 3 = middle): '
&
(
& ' ( &
'
&
I worked out comfortable fingerings for the three routes, practiced their fluent production as scales, and soon it wasn’t necessary to consider their theoretic constitution. I could produce them rapidly without looking, and then set about practicing each with its corresponding dominant chords, type X fitting these four, type Y those, and Z the others. In my first weeks of improvisation, whenever a dominant chord arose (and nearly half the chords in most songs are dominants) I now had places to go. I’d play one of my diminished scales, characteristically beginning it in a region where I could sustain a long run. I’d have two beats of time to fill, for instance, a second or so in a moderate-tempo song, and these jazz melodies were fast. So I had a long stretch of swift notes.
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When I first learned a scale, I consulted the rule and regarded the scale’s individual notes by way of it, seeing an arrayed course of keys. Soon a gestalt of the route as a whole was detected, and I saw the path as a figure against the background of the terrain. But the scale wasn’t seen apart from how I’d first played it, and when I looked at a scale I especially attended to the leftmost starting note, from which the scale takes its name. This scale seemed to be arrayed specifically from one F up to the next. Practicing the scale from bottom to top had focused my look, and now, during play, the ways I looked often directed my hands. Analytic inspection had evolved into a usable instruction. When I first learned scales, I gave attention to each note and the finger whose use on each produced the most fluent production. But once a course was mastered, it became a way of my scale-playing hand, as chords had passed from being individually fingered to handfully grabbed places. I went for each scale at a particular place, a finger-by-finger orientation now supplanted by a whole-handed entry. Having scales available this way made it difficult at first to start the scale in the course of play on a note other than the starting note from which it was learned. Only after much practice at upward and downward movement did I get decent at entering other points. Consider the same scale again: '
&
(
& ' ( &
'
&
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At first I started on the F with my thumb and went up. But then I came to play the scale by starting with my fourth finger on A, ' (
&
)
coming down with a 3, 2, 1 fingering over its first three notes, then going back up, as shown above (on a tabletop, try moving 4, 3, 2, 1 from right to left with your right hand, or left to right with your left if you’re left-handed, 1 being a thumb; that can be done extremely quickly by everyone, while moving the other way—1, 2, 3, 4—is somewhat less fluently fast, for everyone). Using the fourth finger on A allowed for a very rapid downward course and quick turnaround into an upward run. Using a thumb on the A, as in a bottom-to-top fingering, was a much less fluent way to start a fast downward course. Going for this particular diminished scale seldom involved me starting on B with the second finger, say, not because I can’t move around fast when starting there, but because (as the scale was known as a handful and not an individual note/individual finger affair) I “didn’t know” that, for this scale’s production, my second finger was used for a B. It was initially learned that way; once learned, just as the finger-character responsibilities on a typewriter are forgotten as conceptually available facts for the touch typist, so which finger played the B in the course of this particular diminished scale was unknown to me (when teaching scale fingerings to students today I must play scales slowly to rediscover best fingers; if you’re a decent touch typist
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try calling out the names of letters on the second bank of characters without looking down). My maneuvers with the diminished scales (one of many similarly jazz-sounding structures) were initially most limited. Over the course of the first year of play, nearly every time I played this one of the three scales, I either started it on F with the thumb or on A with the fourth finger, moving quickly down to F and then back up, this move to become my most common early variation on that particular route. In years to come there were many sorts of orderings with which I’d experiment in using such scales. Consider the numerical typewriter characters. One may go directly up, 1234567890; one can go up 123 234 345 456 567 678 789, or 132 243 354 465 576 687 798, ad infinitum. The teacher afforded me only a pathway, not particular instructions for its use, and manipulations like these are common in melody making. There are far more intricate possibilities, of course: 1354 2465 3576 4687 . . . 13423 24534 35645 46756 57867 . . . all sorts of series achieved by maneuvers that employ some order of interdigitation and intervallic transposition. I didn’t work over these scales this way at the start, because what I needed wasn’t merely one path to use with a given dominant chord, but a host of them. Having learned diminished scales, I usually played each in one or two first-acquired ways, gaining facility at matching them with their corresponding dominant chords. My attention was mostly given over to gaining numerous places to go, practicing different pathways with the chords, engaging in an analysis of the keyboard in search of ever-new routes. No matter how many manipulations I performed with a given scale, the use of such a scale was something I heard as a constant repetitiveness in my play, but at the same time, and
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more importantly, I was being encouraged to find other solutions to the various chords. My teacher was preparing me to play jazz of a particular sort, the song-based bebop tradition with melodies winding through fast-changing chords, rather than styles of modal jazz where sustained improvisations can be made for an extended period on a single route and one chord. I went to my lesson each week, my teacher would have me improvise on the chords, and I played little pieces of melody using such first-acquired scales: up would come this chord and down would go this melody, then a next chord and a scalelike device used for it, then on to the next. It was terribly awkward at first, for it took some time before I could easily and rapidly pick a run to use with any next chord. Although my teacher provided readily accessible instruction on chord production, voicing, and song play, offering constructional rules that were easily followed and quickly produced quite wonderful-sounding results for just playing and arranging those standards I loved so much, when it came to assistance with improvisation the lessons became increasingly unsatisfying. I’d play for a while, and he’d offer some advice that struck me at the time as altogether vague, hardly affording clear guidelines for the week’s practice, like “try to get the phrasing more syncopated.” But then, after I did some playing, producing my halting little melodies, chord by chord and run by run, each starting at the same points, each going more or less fast because going more or less fast made them sound jazzy at least, he’d attempt to demonstrate a way of phrasing by doing improvisations himself. As he was winding all over the keyboard, producing the music I so much wanted to make, all I could see was that whatever he meant by phrasing, he wasn’t simply using the few scale devices I’d used for each chord. He was going many more places and
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producing all sorts of melodies which, looking past his hands’ ways to where they headed, revealed other patterned courses. I’d spot him going over what I could detect was an orderly path. Here was a little downward run I could vaguely see to involve some sort of a regular intervallic array of notes, as the diminished scale does. He’d go many places where this couldn’t be seen, involving interweaving intricacies that seemed puzzling, but I figured they were constituted as all the rest, and within his play many little spates of seemingly orderly passage could nonetheless be spotted. I’d ask “what was that?” He’d ask “what was what?” “That little figure you just did over the G minor seventh right there.” And he’d have a hard time finding what he’d just done. He’d at times remark, “I’m not following rules so I don’t know what I just did,” and, on occasion, “I just improvise and can’t tell you how; you’ll develop a feel for it.” I’d ask him to play some more, or I’d try to produce some portion of a happening I’d been able to spot in his play. Given a piece of some possibly orderly array, he’d accommodatingly do a jazz-sounding figure with it, but it wasn’t what he’d originally done. He found that almost impossible to reproduce. Only if an express intention to do some play for its reproduction was sustained in the course of a first production was it possible for one to play it again. But the new little thing he’d do when I indicated a course I wanted him to recover was good enough for me, and I’d write it down, not necessarily in its details as notated pitches, but extracting a principle that could be generatively used. For example, he’d do some line and, to offer it as an instructable maneuver, we’d together speak of its constitution in theoretic terms. I’d spot some possibility, he’d take what it seemed I might’ve seen and do a quick melody which he’d then analyze as an arrayed, frozen pathway:
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“Well, here, on a dominant chord, you can get a nice sound by playing the notes of a major chord built on the second note of the dominant chord’s root scale.” Having another characteristic jazz-sounding piece of melody, my stockpile increased. And so it went for a course of some months. I’d practice a growing collection of runs, things to do fast jazz melodies with, spend a short while nervously playing for him at the start of each lesson, and he’d then do lots of playing as I spotted things he tried to recreate. A negotiation took place over the sorts of structures he could extract and state as principles. At times I felt he was keeping secrets. He’d beg off the procedure while offering little in its place, as I’d request access to this and that pathway, seeing he was after all taking more routes than I was. Reluctantly he’d come up with yet another analysis, giving me an ever-expanding vocabulary of possible words. I acquired an increasing mass of principled solutions for knowing where to go with the various chord types: arpeggios (serially rather than simultaneously struck chords) to be taken, scales to be linearly played, various melody fragments constituted by certain orderly intervallic relationships. Here’s a dominant chord:
!
$
#
%
and, just for the sake of a visual appreciation, here are only some of the innumerable routes that, articulated more or less
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evenly and quickly, yield a characteristic jazz sound with this dominant:
At first the problem of finding places to go was posed as “which notes go well with which chords?” It became apparent that any of the notes may be played with any of the chords (this true not only for dominants but for majors and minor sevenths too):
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This chromatic scale, traversing every adjacent note on the keyboard, could itself be made to yield a characteristic jazz sound. But finding that any note might do was tantamount to having no paths to take save the above one, whose extensive use amounted to little more than baby talk from me. After about six months of instruction I had a host of places to go, melodic resources of named notes, a vocabulary of silent, still sights to be seen, places to go in a theory’s terminology on the surface skin of an untouched piano, ways of looking and talking that could be remembered, hosts of licks, written down, told by teachers to students, traded off between students, professional shoptalk, routes without speed limits from no one place to no other place in particular, melodies to be seen at a glance, wheres without hows, places you can make music with on a soundless, practice keyboard. And there was their use in learning: arrayed places to go, elaborate ranges of possibilities for lending organization to manipulations they themselves told me nothing about, visually detected and then tactilely found fields and crisscrossing vectors for practicing maneuverability, instantly available potential courses to be seen at a glance while trying to keep up the play as the changes went by. And their use in pathway playing, contrasted with ways of negotiation which in fact make jazz happen: their utility as an architect’s drawing fully serves a worker in actually hammering up a framing; as the map of a city shows you just how to
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browse, hurry, avoid bad neighborhoods, or ride subways whose entrances are depicted on its intersections; as a book on how to play chess can teach you to win; as your attempt to say “Vil du ud mig mi i aften?” will achieve its intended result in Århus. After around six months of instruction and practice on many chord charts with my corpus of melody-making routes, I found some chances to play with other musicians. I frequented local jazz clubs and became well acquainted with many players in the community, both accomplished musicians with long professional experience and other students in various stages of progress. I wanted to play in a group, and on occasion was invited to sit in. In one nightclub in particular there was a weekly jam session, when musicians from the area took turns throughout the evening. There were a bassist and drummer, often several horn players, and aspirants would literally line up, preferential rights distributed to better ones. Novices like myself were eventually given a chance to play a tune or two, and then quickly shuffled off the stand. Accomplished players wanted to play with those of their own caliber, and the club owner needed to keep real music happening. But beginners were given a chance. I’d learned the chord charts for many jazz standards, quite anxiously took the stand when invited up for a turn, called a tune to be played—prerogative of a pianist in the trio situation— establishing a tempo for the song with that “one, two, three, four” I’d seen done by others, and we were off and running. I was in a rodeo when the gate opens and a steer takes over. Recall Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line in Modern Times: the conveyor belt continuously carrying a moving collection of nuts and bolts to be tightened, their placement at regular intervals on the belt, Chaplin holding these two wrenches, falling behind the time, rushing to catch up, screwing bolts faster to
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stay ahead of the work, missing one or two along the way because the upcoming flow seems to gain speed and he gets frantic, or because it actually does speed up, eventually caught up in the machine and ejected onto the factory floor in his hysterical epileptic dance. The music wasn’t mine. It was going on all around me. I was in the midst of the music the way a lost newcomer finds himself suddenlyin the midstof a Mexico City traffic circle, with no humor in the situation, for I was up there trying to do this jazz I’d practiced nearly all day, there were friends I’d invited to join me, and the musicians I’d begun to know. I was on a bucking bronco of my own body’s doings, situated in the midst of these surrounding affairs. Between the chord-changing beat of my left hand at more or less regular intervals according to the chart, the melodic movements of the right, and the rather more smoothly managed and securely pulsing background of the bass player and drummer, there obtained the most alienative relations. I got through the opening section reasonably well, playing the tune with its originally written melody. Then came the solo portion. For each of the now passing chords there’d be a pathway selection, and though at home I’d executed these runs smoothly, under pressure of the situation they were very sloppily produced, and there were many errors. A chord lasts for two beats, a second say, and the melody is played rapidly, with four or more notes for every beat in a fourbeat measure. Now a run for chord A was started near the middle of the keyboard and rose up, while the path I knew best for chord B started at the middle also. So I began going up with a fast, sputtering, and nervous scale course, and the next chord came up and I had to shoot back down to the middle of the keyboard to get the thing I knew how to do well done for it, and then came the next chord.
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My hand jumped around from place to place like Chaplin stabbing with his wrenches. Chords would be missed altogether. I’d draw a blank. An upward-moving line would more or less end when the chord had to be terminated, no matter where it was. Or, in order to get to the next starting place, I’d play the first chord just a bit sooner to give myself time to relocate, feeling the upcoming chord as an encroaching presence whose necessity was fixed by adherence to the chord chart of the song we were after all playing together, so what the left hand was doing in its preset ways was guiding what the right was obliged to do. The pacing of the chord productions would become jagged as well, and I tended to rush the time, changing chords a trifle before they were due, missing a beat here and there, occasionally having one too many, and really sweating it out all the way, trying to get some lines down nicely, checking out the faces in the crowd and trying not to seem too besieged, attempting all the while to produce the most intricate maneuvers I’d learned, to make the full-blown complex jazz those before and after me in line would do, charging around in the swarm of the music, trying to hold on to the time, wishing things would stop for a moment so I could catch a breath. My right hand became enormously tired and stiff and would almost freeze up, so while I’d struggle not to let errors occur, where an error meant playing wrong notes in the course of a path’s traverse, there’d be moments when I was simply immobilized and nothing would come out. Then I’d stab for something else that had gone well at home but now couldn’t be smoothly taken up the line, so it disintegrated. My improvising hand went not so much for a sequence of individual tones as for a sight all at once. The notes of the run were notes to be gotten over with, the hand setting out on a familiar course that wouldn’t end particularly here or there, but would start out and keep going up along the route to wherever it happened to
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get before the next chord arrived. The hand set straight out into a course, going for the whole of it, once committed to its onset committed to its unaltered continuance as that course in particular, so that the selection occurred at the outset, and for a while all further matters were predetermined. Each of the runs I tried had been more or less smoothly mastered at home yet were much less fluently done now, and while I could do lots of playing without watching the execution in detail, I’d scrutinize the field anyhow, and my looking, an appeal to the keyboard for answers, was party to a theoretic incourse analysis I did over the keyboard’s sights, trying to keep the terrain under regard to aid large leaps and get from one path to another, a looking that was altogether frantic, like searching for a parking place in a very big hurry. The music was literally out of hand.
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Going for the Sounds
I Over the next several years, committed to learning jazz but fortunately not needing to make any money at it, I played for the most part at home and alone, seldom looking for settings where I could’ve joined in with musicians. Whenever I did, perhaps four or five times a year, the results weren’t substantially better than at first, and I’d come away sadly feeling that my inadequacy resulted from nervousness and a lack of experience. I was now and then advised to start working as a musician, that getting a steady job would help my playing come together. Too vaguely formulating that as possibly useful for learning to relax, I frankly wasn’t attracted to work situations where one of my level would be first compelled to play. I saw no real point performing on bad pianos in noisy bars where no one listened to the music, when I could practice alone, on a good one at home, and all at my own schedule. I’d been making what I thought was real progress on many fronts, sensed I had a decent grasp of the shape and feelings of jazz, and, with lessons that gave me a good understanding of the keyboard, I figured I was in position to learn the rest in solitary practice.
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Going for the Sounds
I did things for two or three hours a day that seemed more or less reasonable. I practiced certain well-known technical exercises that I heard many musicians had used, spent lots of time investigating the keyboard to discover new sorts of melodic configurations, found ever-new intervallic relationships, evolved more pathways constructed on principles similar to those I’d been told about, with their characteristic jazz sounds, listened to a growing collection of records, seldom trying and always quickly abandoning the horrendous task of solo copying, and aimed for what I felt to be the most sophisticated and intricate examples of contemporary jazz piano. For the most part, my playing sessions were devoted to a handful of songs, doing improvisations, the particular handful’s contents changing entirely every several months, as some tunes became more enticing and others a bit less so. Fluent manipulation on these paths produced a semblance of competence, and I was able to sustain long playing sessions, going for this rapidly articulated music, sensing I was on target. I knew my play left qualities to be desired. When I recorded myself it sounded disjointed, frantic, and wanting in other respects. I knew I wasn’t making music like what I heard. But by virtue of the sheer extent of what I could do at the piano, the large collection of songs at my command, and what I felt to be increasingly an insider’s perspective on the music I listened to, after a couple of years I thought of myself as one with nearly competent basic jazz skills. In some respects that was warranted, in others pretentiously premature. I was in some ways as far from the mark as could be. Of course this was only clear in retrospect, as deficiencies in earlier efforts were made transparent by acquisitions gained later. But this delayed appraisal allowed me to sustain motivation to play a good deal without feeling too far off base. I was learning to play in what can be loosely termed a backward direction. In first language acquisition, one initially gains
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facility with restricted little movements, then heads for ever more extensive gestural trajectories. But I was aimed from the outset, and nearly always, for the most complex of doings, as though trying to speak a new language by ridiculously plunging into a serious conversation at the usual adult pace. This without really knowing how to say any “words” properly, only making little bits of sound that could here and there be heard to fall within the language. All this without regularly interacting with other speakers, where a give-and-take provides ongoing encouragement and a need to speak properly. These pathways allowed for this peculiar possibility, as if a typewriter keyboard and corresponding language were arranged so that by following a rule like “go up every other key” you’d produce numerous sights characteristic of some actual adult text. Having a visual/conceptual means for going to reasonably acceptable places, now incorporated into a tactilely managed set of maneuvers with varieties of dexterities at the keyboard, I could at least sustain large streams of conduct at a fast clip from early into my training. Moving along paths, going repeatedly through a chord cycle, I produced enough overall jazzness in my play that I felt I was basically doing what jazz players do. In the first years there were very few moves like this: the book, the book, the book book book the book, the book, the book book book
I was, instead, in pursuit of the most magniloquently organized affairs, each day the bulk of my practicing spent roaming all over the keyboard, rather than lingering in a delimited territory and mastering ways to deal with a sparse course of melodic movements. My isolated situation was so skewed in this backward direction that it was nearly two full years before I had an experience
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Going for the Sounds
with the keyboard that would seem altogether essential to making music from the outset. It wasn’t until the start of my third year that I thought of myself as “going for the sounds.” I specifically recall playing one day and finding, as I set out into a next course of notes after a liftoff had occurred, that I’d expressly aimed for the sounds of these next particular notes, that their sounds seemed to creep up into my fingers, that the depression of the keys realized a specific sound I’d gone there to make, as if when walking one brought intentional regard to the sounds of one’s steps, expressly then doing each and every one of their successive sounds, as in a march. I wasn’t only going for good places. I was aiming for sounding spots. Of course I hadn’t really been going only for good places for two years, playing some game at the keyboard, cultivating skills at rapid visual detection or merely gaining manual dexterities. I was going for music. I listened to my records and aimed for that jazz, intentionally directed to a course of sounds. It wouldn’t have done in the least to have only played an electric piano with the amplifier off. I filled the room with sounds. But these so-called sounds had various qualities for me, and I couldn’t form a practically usable description of sound that would help seize hold of this new acquisition, and describe it in detail as well, without considering just how these sounds were being produced. I knew what these paths sounded like, wasn’t surprised by them as one is startled by accidentally leaning on an open keyboard. Hardly! But how the paths sounded to me was deeply linked to how I was making them. There wasn’t one me listening, and another one playing along paths. I listened-in-order-to-make-my-way, to find that as I played each day I was doing this jazz. I recognized the pathways’ sounds, to put it way too mildly. But it’s one thing to recognize familiar sounds that you’re making, and another to aim success-
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fully for these and those very particular ones to occur, and just when you want them to, especially if you’re trying to find new notes in course and not following a score. Very different directionalities of purpose and potentials for action are involved when you set out to make these and those sounds in particular. I first felt myself going for the sounds when I now sensed I was making up a melody. I’d been striving for these fastflowing, characteristic jazzlike runs, with quickly articulated streams of broad-ranging highs and lows. Armed with devices that of their own accord furnished a high frequency of jazz phonemes, one would hear some jazzness to a sequence in their recurrent use—as, when one mimics another language, some characteristic quality of the sounds might create a certain vague resemblance to the real thing. And my listening also discovered other qualities. One doesn’t stay in a territory for too long, but moves up and down the keyboard. One doesn’t often go fast and suddenly make an extreme change in the pace of a melody line, but for reasonable stretches of play maintains a more or less constant rate of articulation. One doesn’t often play the same note over and again, but many different ones. And there were a host of attack and decay qualities and rhythmic features of jazz phrases that I’d gradually incorporated into my play. Jazz, I’d long heard, was comprised of melodies with shifting metrical patterns. So it wasn’t a matter of playing series of evenly spaced notes—1 1 1 1 1 1 1. Some characteristic pacing variations had become almost a stock approach to certain runs. A long sequence would very often be preceded by a spate of three or four notes taken quite rapidly, for instance—111 1 1 1 1 (“did-di-ly bop bop bop bop”; “why-don’t-you come with me now”). The melodic turnaround referred to when I described how I’d played an F diminished scale, coming down very fast on a bit of it and then going up it more slowly—it was usually paced this way.
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But, as regards the finely textured note-to-note nature of my statements, an order was mostly guaranteed by the path’s formal construction, like the diminished scale’s alternating half steps and whole steps, or a superimposed arpeggio. I wasn’t really doing much note-to-note selectional work at all. I decided where to start every run, which to choose, how fast to play it. But, we’d say, no intended aim was given to each and every particular next pitch. I began to enter melodically into the play when I started trying to do something that related back to something I’d just done, and/or play something that I’d then try to restate, in relation to a new next chord. Such successively shifted replications make up a family of practices that generate a large percentage of melodic gesturing in all music. Imagine that a course of several notes is played during the tenure of a particular chord and, when a next chord comes up in a couple of beats, say one second, a new sequence is done that relates to this new chord just as the first fragment related to the first. Such a practice helps characterize essential features of this interim stage in my development. In my earliest pathway play, what I did on any chord was decided by the choice of an appropriate fitting run de novo, one chord at a time. Now there was a change. I first did things like this, playing notes from here:
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to here:
Regard the dotted notes on melodic right sides (dark verticals divide the hands) as if played in sequence, left to right say, not simultaneously. The melodic fragments are identical: notes of major chords built on the second note of the scale starting on each chord’s root, i.e., on the lowest note in the left hand. (G, lowest right-hand note in the first picture, is the second note of the F scale, F being the root of the chord played in the left hand. In the second picture, C is the second note of the B root’s scale. So we have G major chord notes over F, and C major chord tones over B . The chords are skeletally played, using just the root and the flatted seventh while omitting the third and the fifth, a common left-hand form used when improvising.)
As a melodic intentionality emerged, as I began taking up with a course of notes as I proceeded, notes whose relations I aimed now to repeat, I had gained much experience that enabled me to try to do something congruous with what went before. At first, and for some time, this was a largely conceptual process. I’d think: “major triad on the second note of the scale, now again,” then “diminished on the third and a repeat for the next,” doing hosts of calculating and guidance operations of this sort in the course of play. A small sequence of notes was played, then a next followed. As the abilities of my hand developed, I found myself for the first time coming into position to begin to do such melodic work with respect to these courses. I had been able to pick out
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Going for the Sounds
song melodies before, but for a long time I couldn’t grasp the details of a pathway course I was doing and then do something further with this course of sounds, operate upon the arrangement of particular note-to-note series of which it was formed, especially with more complex figures. The notes of the path seemed to go by too fast to take hold of them; my hand hadn’t developed the sort of grasp over their working constitution that permitted taking up with them in ways such repetitional melodying required. The emergence of a melodic intentionality, an express aiming for sounds, was dependent in my experience upon the acquisition of facilities that made it possible, and it wasn’t as though in my prior work I had been trying and failing to make coherent note-to-note melodies. Motivated so predominantly toward the rapid course, frustrated in my attempts to reproduce recorded passages, I had left dormant whatever skills for melodic construction I may have had. The simplest sorts of melody-making work entailed a note-to-note intentionality that had been extraordinarily deemphasized by virtue of the isolated ways in which I’d been learning. The new experience with sound illuminates one difficulty among many I’d formerly had. Compounding the general desperateness of my first session-playing attempts, there was a frustrating inability to hear myself. On a small bandstand with a small spinet piano, a bass player over one shoulder and drummer over the other, I continually felt I was being drowned out and often played with excessive force in the attempt to hear myself (my complaints about the acoustics were probably ignored by other musicians, since they sounded like a weak excuse for a poor showing). Yet it wasn’t a question of simple concentration on the sounds, of their loudness as that might be measured on an oscil-
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loscope, of a deficiency of my hearing. Other players seemed to have no trouble in this respect. What was really involved in my inability to hear, in these earliest sessions, was that there was so little courseness to my play, so little developmental unfolding with which I could be prospectively and retrospectively engaged. A symphony orchestra in an outdoor amphitheater may sound disappointingly faint from far away, until one’s participation with the unfolding course of the melody is heightened; then the volume seems to increase, so much so that the very notion of volume becomes problematic. Or listening to a conversation at a nearby table you can’t clearly hear what’s being said; but if you grasp a phrase or two, some details of the continuing talk may then come within range. One Saturday morning I used a tuning hammer to totally untune my grand piano, and then spent among my most aggravating weekends, with a few necessary tools and a manual on How to Tune Pianos, trying to put it back into a shape that a tuner accomplished in about an hour on Monday morning. The manual described a procedure for tuning that involves a systematic course of adjustments to make, regulating tensions on the tuning pins around which the strings are wrapped, using this hammer-sized tool with a socket for these pins at its end. Two strings are brought into desired alignment by so tightening or loosening one relative to the other that a certain wah wah wah wah sound, a pulsation said to be perceptible as a result of differing vibrational frequencies, is brought to a proper rate. When two notes, say a fourth apart (from C to F for example), are sounded together, there’s to be a pulsation of approximately one beat for every two seconds. The two notes are simultaneously and continuously sounded, one listens to this beat, and adjusts the rate by turning one of the pins with this tuning hammer. Then there’s a three-century-old method for proceeding
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Going for the Sounds
through a cycle of strings, tuning each to the others with elaborate checks along the way, since minor errors quickly become terribly cumulative. I never made it past the first page of the manual. I spent literally all day Saturday banging away at two notes and trying to find a beat. I put my head in between the location of the two strings, figuring that since the beat was a function of some sort of distance between the two, it might be found in the middle. I hit the notes hard and soft. I tried to listen at the very decaying end of the sound. I pretended to listen to something else. No wah wahs wahs to be heard, let alone one every two seconds!9 I later learned that piano tuners first spend months of apprenticeship working with limited pairs of strings, practicing hearing beats. This consists in gaining such a delicacy in the employment of the tuning hammer that a style of movement is acquired with it—strings under very great tension requiring very refined pressure, for example—that elucidates a beat by ever so delicately varying the tautness of the strings. The piano tuner doesn’t hear the beats between vibrating strings by developing a finer ear, not at all, and these pulsations are detectably present to an oscilloscope whether I strike the keys or he does. He learns to hear beats by learning to ride on the sound waves of a pair of pulsating strings with shoulder, arm, and hand artfully engaged with a hammer and this firmly entrenched pin. I couldn’t hear a beat because I so clumsily used the hammer as to never elucidate it by my movements, substantially over- or undershooting it all the time. It wasn’t really oscilloscopic sound about which the manual was practically speaking. It was the sound of piano tuning as a skillful armand-hammer enterprise. As attempting to pay attention, to concentrate, didn’t bring the sounds of the small spinet piano into relief in my earliest
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group play, so hearing a beat between two sounding notes wasn’t achieved by focusing my listening, as that’s colloquially and otherwise conceived. In both cases, a manner of bodily engagement describes how listening and sounds must be first described in the context of an activity at hand. For an improviser, it’s melody making that’s done, and if I engage myself with such sounds of the piano as the tuner’s tasks require, which would take a third arm to move a hammer, I can’t take up with a course of notes to do jazz. Melody sounds are different from the sounds of vibrating strings, which is to say that making melodies is a different business from designing pianos, tuning them, or teaching a course in physics. Look to what my hands were learning. As I found next sounds coming up, it wasn’t as though I’d so learned about the keyboard that by looking down I could tell what a regarded note would sound like. I don’t have that skill, nor do many other musicians. I could tell what a note would sound like because it was a next sound, because my hand was so engaged with the keyboard that through its own configurations and potentialities it laid out a setting of sounding places right up ahead of itself. To clarify this way of being engaged, consider the instance of playing a series of notes over one chord’s duration, and then traversing a similarly constituted path in the next’s. There are obviously innumerable variations possible. A second run could duplicate the first one exactly, starting on a tone standing in the same relation to a new chord as the first run of melody did to its chord, then following precisely similar continuing pitches. Or a second run might only repeat certain essential shapes of the first, glossing over specific intervallic distances. Still again, a second run might duplicate the first in terms of its pitches,
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while articulating the individual notes with an altered time spacing between some or all of them. Corresponding to such varied continuity practices, I cultivated ways of the hand that were more or less suited to manage such maneuvers. My hand had experience with the keyboard that allowed repetitions of all sorts to be sustained without errors, but at the same time there were sorts of courses whose intact or even essentialized replication was something I wasn’t able to handle. Here’s the hand frozen in three different configurations over places with the same internal relations in each locale. Imagine the fingers moving left to right over the notes on which they’re posed for the camera, from one note to the next to the next:
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To aim for swift repeats of this sort required rapidly shifting configurations and realignments. My earliest melodic efforts often attempted exact repetitions, bringing a particular course into another sector with notes in precise correspondence. Here a wrong note stood out like a sore thumb. When an equivalently pitched and paced transposition was clearly what a next run started to look like, so that one heard the attempt at a repeat, there was the clear possibility of wrong notes. The keyboard had come under the sort of control where I could try such moves in ongoing rapid play, and I did, with some confidence. But many errors occurred. I had become quite fluent in the pathway playing described above, a mistake having a different status in that way of negotiating. My beginning melodying was filled with errors, now defined by a heard grasp for an exactly pitched-spaced repetition. I would play a rapid and intricately winding passage and seek its reiterated production in an upcoming chordal context; and while many such attempts would come close, a good number fell enough off the mark that there was a distinct sense of struggling to make it happen. I began to sound like someone trying hard to say something.
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In a setting of movable parts so easily having a voice of their own with only the slightest slip of the hand, I made quite sophisticated lunges for melody, aiming for highfalutin’ sayings. Rather jazzlike strips would be played, asking for longevity. As I reached for one of them, I knew more or less where it lay. Spatial capabilities had developed to the point that I was able to move up to a good next position for a repeat. And pathway playing made the terrain available as a setting of places known in terms of a shifting course of chords. As I played a chord and then a next, the new one furnished an overall field of engagement, an overlapping and crisscrossing range of axes, in which the hand going for a saying could locate itself. And between the chordal hand’s pose and the melodic stretch for reiterative action, there was no longer just a strict relationship of theoretic correctness. I’d get to a good place to begin a next statement, and at first go for a precisely corresponding pitched duplication. With one class of places there was no trouble. With others there was plenty. I was often close to where a correct repeat would be, but at a rapid tempo there was no time for checking things out, and I’d try to make the restatement happen even while making mistakes, mistakes that stood out as errors in the very attempt at least to get the rest of it right. There was an ambitiousness of the aim unmindful of the difficulties, a reliance upon locational facilities and configurational shifts that would suffice for much of the replication, but an imprudence at the same time with respect to fine details of the new locale with which the intended passage had to continuously cope. My hand was able to get to a good next arena, finding harmonically consonant nodes for arrival and orientation along the way, established by an acquired togetherness of the chordalmelodic engagement. Much of the replication got done. Shifting
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lumps on the surface were under a general mobile and repositional control. But my efforts to reiterate the fully intact fragment at a never-changing tempo, especially with more complex forms than the major chord arpeggio, met resistance. Nonetheless, the hand came into the new territory for a repetition, found a concordant locale for its sensible restatement there, found the doing could be well done there, and came into the sector ready to play there. Putting down there, knowing what “there” would be like as a setting for it in its axial relation to the topography, it came in as a hand only partially in trouble. Moving up to a space, the breadth of the place being aimed at, its extensiveness or compactness, the edges to be contended with there, the layout of highs and lows—these had been placed in operational scale by a hand that had its bearings. It was a hand that had a bearing with respect to the contours and their respective distances, for in its very constitution as a hand at home on the keyboard, it appreciated what keys were like anywhere. From high off the keyboard, a field of keys lay present beneath the fingers, to be engaged by a spread and arched, pointed configuration. It was a field of keys whose stability and horizontality relative to the body was assured in the hand’s relationship to the arm’s and shoulder’s angularities. It was a field of keys whose straight, rather than encircling, horizontality was found by arms and hands that extended outward from the body’s center at the same time as they managed a proportionally proper extension away from the trunk. It was a field of keys whose dimensions throughout were stable, so that, however the hand was spaced over some part of it, a precisely corresponding relative spatial configuration had to be sustained through extensions and contractions of the arm’s lateral movements. The arm moved far off to a side, while the hand retained that keyboard as its field for engagement.
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In an appraisal of the space, the thumb takes a bearing, as in this photo,
appraising the crack between two keys as a crack occupying so much space against that thumb; appreciating the magnitude of the crack as a breadth of contact along its surface, a presence is gained to the size of things at hand throughout the territory as an extending field. And more than this, the thumb is capable of participating in a rescaling for the hand (as each of its parts can do for the rest), should the crack be somewhat tighter, as in the small scale of a child’s toy piano, which in a moment of adjustment becomes a familiar keyboard again to hands with generative ways of knowing how to be at home in a setting of keys. Striving so intently to make a saying happen, I’d often go for a reiteration by lunging for the general shape and ordering of a prior figure. The first course had a particular intervallic construction, with highs and lows within the gesture, and a manner of pacing. Sometimes the second course would not aim for a precise pitch duplication in terms of whole and half step distances, but would move up and down more or less where the first did, retaining various essential nodes of the fragment. And a hand had been fashioned that could come into the chordally
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implicated sector and get itself into particular notes so as to possibly realize these essential similarities. Through extensive pathway play, as the hand developed ways of being in a sensible scope without a strictly duplicating aim, I gradually grew able to do such work because my hand could find, in how it could now enter a sector, actual, real live keysat-hand there. Keys were at hand in a sector for me in ways that displayed my hand’s growing improvisationality in its overall approach. The classical artist operates under constraints of a score to be articulated just so. He operates within a social organization of professional certification, excellence, and competitiveness differing from mine as an avocational jazz aspirant, his situation placing great demands on faithfulness to the score. For jazz, note-to-note selections were what I wanted. Having the hand touch the surface with a broad-palmed appraisal, say—not now as a means of groping for notes as a beginner with closed eyes might employ such a contact—this was, at first, a way of securing sorts of places in which sorts of action could be taken.
A broad-palmed appraisal may be part of the hand’s sense of a territory for variously shaped maneuvers, which would have to
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proceed through particular keys. And this extended, sector-surveying hand not only finds particular keys, the placement of distances of actual depressable spots, but broad contours of the territory whose relevance fits within the conduct of classes of gestural maneuvering. Consider extended fingers appreciating the twosome-threesome layout of black keys. As I was now aiming for continuities, the hand moving for sequences of action essentially implicated by a preceding figure, abilities with the twoness-threeness aspect of the terrain entered into newly organized activities. The hand would appraise the twoness-threeness layout in order to find, for instance, how much space was available for doing noted work in a sector, how the sort of crossover pivoting needed to be essentially true to a prior remark could be managed with respect to available space at hand in a new locale. I was now beginning to appreciate more than a number of particular notes for particular fingers, grasping for where some named note should be. Under a melodic guidance toward the essential reiteration of a prior gesture, the hand needed to find, in an amount of space, that there was the sort of room to be moved about in, to carry out a desired course; a sort of space into which a thumb could be taken, say, so you could get up higher in getting a thumb down around there; a sort of space beyond which there might be a path to fall back on; a sort of space to be avoided were I only going slow enough to avoid it; a sort of space somewhere in which was probably a usable note. The twoness-threeness appraisal had differing significances within these classes of actions; and in much of my melodying efforts, along with good things I was finding to do beneath the hand, there was the discovery of a stretch of rapids coming up, as it were, too fast. It wasn’t any longer a simple matter of taking up something and precisely repeating it in an upcoming sector. There was a
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way of entering the topography with both key places and general arenas for classes of improvisational action accessibly there. A hand was developing that was possessed of mobile ways with the topography that allowed a reasonably hopeful attempt, at least, to make the best of things. But, still, at this phase of my studies there was a struggle to achieve an expressly determined melody, with an adherence to chord-specific prior shapes. As the hand moved to a next sector, shapes were given their historical integrity (and the complexity of continuity practices increased) with a working-to-make-ithappen. Only later would there emerge a sort of making the best of things, a way of being with the keyboard that would be continuously prudent rather than struggling to get about sensibly. Here I was very much backward-looking and reparatively forward-going, still engrossed in continuous analytic thinking, looking back at that passage I’d just done and striving to repeat it. My hands didn’t know how to stay more involved within the shorter and steadily moving framework of only several particular next notes at a time. I’d head into a new territory for a next chord, do a gesture that replicated the prior sequentially intricate move, and find I could preserve some of its features, sometimes exactly, sometimes glossingly. And I’d find that a bit of this got done in the next chordal context and there’d still remain a period of tenure for the chord’s duration to be filled with melody. The hand finished parts of the preceding that it could melodically manage, some of whose sounds it could prehear on the way down because there was an assured path-implicated note target for its aim in the new sector. The hand then—this fast jazzy player I always sought to be—had more to do. Not playing seemed to make the music stop. As the hand did things it was seeking to do singingly, it had all the while been becoming a hand able to do all sorts of things
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everywhere. I’d play a figure, go for its repetition, get some way into it, and stumble. To fill what I felt to be the remaining empty space and keep the jazz going, I’d do something quite unrelated to the explicit continuity I’d partially achieved. I’d accomplish the beginning of a reiteration (transposition, inversion, exact or approximate repeat, etc.), and then, for example, use up a remaining allotted chord time by taking on any notes that were thereabout to take. There were the familiar pathways, and these could at times be gotten onto, but with respect to the integrity of the sought continuity of the statement they were “any notes thereabout” that would keep the action under way. Not quite that, however, for they were often filled with their characteristic jazz sounds. The originally sought replication had its characteristic jazz sounds here and there within it. And there was a melodying being done with them, aimed-for continuities so that strips were being brought together into statements of a sort. There were, as well, particular chordal sounds, and these other characteristicsounding little afterthoughts stuck on the end of a gradually evolving coherence. From a virtual hodgepodge of phonemes and approximate paralinguistics, a sentence structure was slowly taking form, sayings now being attempted, themes starting to achieve some cogent management. But at the same time, courses of action were being sustained that faded and disintegrated into stammerings and stutterings, connectives yet to become integrally part of the process. These “any notes thereabout” weren’t only places on actual pathways that I tried to stick at the end of a gesturally guided continuity, for there’d developed ways of moving around that couldn’t, at this point, any longer be described in terms of a path’s traverse. There’s a chromatic scale in its theoretical organization, to take just one example. The scale contains every note on the key-
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board. It can be played in a strictly orderly progression, expressly as a chromatic run, from bottom to top or downward. But then there was a manner of proceeding that had been gained through manipulations along it and paths like it, a way that involved a general style. Take the index and the fourth fingers, touching two black notes, the hand in that sort of posture adopted when chromatically situated and engaged:
Or, for instance, there was this way, with the hand broadly spread:
where distances required to move about between the second and third fingers may be known since a known kind of course is taken.
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There’s a globalized appreciation for the fourthness of a course (a possibility in this second photo), or for a course’s general chromaticality, and now my hand didn’t always come into the keyboard for a first note and then a second one in particular, but would, as well, enter the terrain to take a certain essential sort of stride. Two years of pathway manipulation taught me a chromatic style of engaging the terrain, and coming into this chromatic run the hand assumes a unique posture, with the fingers bunched up into a preparatory shape. Where notes lay along the chromatic path was anticipated in the hand’s posturing for a sector to be chromatically taken. The second finger finds a place relative to the fourth and the fourth relative to the second, as they together find themselves spaced within a chromatically configuring hand. In a chromatic pose, my hand could be aimed toward any sector in sufficiently prepared shape, precisions then to be toned up as the contact is made. As one finger in this chromatically poised hand makes contact, it finds where in the depth and width of a key it is, and the hand’s chromaticality becomes correspondingly toned for the sector’s dimensions running off in both directions from the point of appraised contact. In such a chromatic approach, the thumb stays back away from the black notes, so that a directed course can be taken regardless of where the starting point of a setdown happens to be. I gained a host of such strategies for entering into the keyboard, postures like the chromatic one. And when I got into trouble with specifically sought, soundful melodying, it was through the availability of such general styles that any notes thereabout could begin to be errorlessly handled, at least in the sense that no tripping occurred, for instance, when a reiterative attempt ended with time still left to be filled up with activity. Styles of being had developed, becoming more generalized, done everywhere, modes of moving first gained from pathway
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play yet now freed from the specific routes on whose travel they were acquired, freed by a striving toward melodicality. There were scaling ways, and up-a-little-down-a-little ways, rocking ways and every-other-finger ways, and skipping ways, hopping ways, rippling ways, ways to go a long way with, and more. In the availability of such shaped means of approach, I had a capacity to keep the action going in a sector, making streams of notes, while still doing a great deal of unthoughtful, weakly gearing aiming for sounds. Nonetheless, these general styles of moving were gradually evolving into a connective tissue of action, with attempts to tie up courses taken with one chord to those played with the next; and, more importantly, facilities were emerging that would enable maneuvering about in a quite different manner over my next year of studies, a way of making the best of things continuously. II In this phase of play I aimed for sounds with great inconsistency. If that note shown beneath the thumb (B) here is played, I might know what the note beneath the first finger, E , will sound like:
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if the finger is aimed to that place along with a quiet or loudly singing me also directed to it as a place that will sound just so. Sing a small sequence of notes, exaggerating your expressiveness for the sake of illustration. Your head, torso, and the inner structures of the mouth noticeably rise and fall. Face a mirror and sing some tones. Mark the opening position of your nose vis-à-vis the mirror with a chalk. As you then pass through several sung steps of a well-known song, similarly mark your nose’s location at the arrival vicinity of each tone. With an insignificant degree of exaggeration that easily feels natural, several conscientious passes over a five- or six-note melody will yield a vertical array of resultant chalk marks isomorphically corresponding to the vertically spaced arrangement of discrete pitches in a musical score, or the horizontal array of spots on a keyboard. There’s a system of concordantly pitched and shaped movements, most crudely put here, between vertical movements of the head and the horizontal spread of fingers on the terrain. To know what a next place will sound like is to be somehow synchronously directed along these dimensions. A sustained orientation to a melodic course of sounds consists in a togetherness of such aiming. Voice and fingers seek the selfsame and thus known sounding spots. And this is most intricate indeed. The contours of a sung progression can outline its shapes with a very miniaturized line of action, while the synchronously linked hand is moving across a fixed-sized grid, possibly akin to the accomplished pianist’s ability to adjust his hands’ sense of the scale of a terrain so as to actually play well on a considerably shrunken child’s keyboard. Akin too, perhaps, to the fact that the selfsame handwriting, with very particular details, can be seen whether one writes with large arm and shoulder strokes on a blackboard or tiny fingered ones on a small piece of paper.
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Further, there may be an absence of any sense of motion in the mouth and its parts, the rising and falling pitches that singing entails readily transferred into a lateral head movement, as if the very head and shoulder were doing high and low when moving sideways. This coupling of aim—the sort of coordinational, rescaling, gestural shrinking, transferring (from one place to another) capabilities of a synchronously aimed body—was variously refined and ragged at this point of my play. It’s not that, being with a thumb, in particular, on this B, I’d know the E was a place to melodically go. In a reiterative attempt, let us suppose, such an interval had been previously played and I was now heading for this distance again. In a new mini-landscape this distance resided in a new contour, and these two fingers were part of a hand that was establishing its overall shape, by, for example, the other fingers’ appraisal of my general location within the keyboard where this particular desired interval would be. The pinkie, in the above photograph, may anchor a hand’s spread, feeling an open space, finding the significance of this open space by reference as well to the fourth finger’s appreciation of the outer edge of those three black-note mounds. The feel of how much key is under an extended finger likewise aids in the hand’s sense of the E ’s place, not only along a horizontal axis but as a spot whose depth and size are present as well. For many actions, such appraisals may not be necessary, however, and indeed only the beginner’s hand regularly makes contact to aid in place finding. But when shifts of ranges occur, when a broad leap is taken, a slight touch may tone up the places. But if it wasn’t a matter of finding a single intervallic transposition, the repetition of a third, as with these fingers, but one of winding with the hand into a new arena for continuing
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melody making, where transactions entailed much more than keeping the terrain and its contours in tactile regard, many possibilities arose for imprecisions in the manual-vocallic unity of the gesture. I’d go for a reiteration, beginning with an interval like this B-E pair, its location assuredly sought and known, prehearing its forthcomingness with a definitely known distance as a (possibly repeated) third, for instance, allowing a meshing of voice and fingers. But with respect to a continuing course, I couldn’t manage to preserve a pitched-spaced duplication because of how I was moving. Essential contours of the gesture—highs where high, lows where low, the same number of notes, a bunch of notes that sounded as dense, a similar relative pitch—might come off reasonably fluently. But notes beyond a two-note opening, I may accurately say of myself, weren’t often definitely implicated next spots. And instead of really knowing what they would sound like in detail, I’d be saying some of them particularly and definitely, and others would, as it were, be speaking back to me. Making melodies, going for certain pitched transactions in this phase of play thus had a characteristic unevenness, me trying to have the hands say this in particular, the hands saying some of what I took them to say, but not all, then saying things of our own jointly inappropriate choosing. There was a recurrent piece of advice in the jazz subculture when the discussion was of ways to develop skill at improvisation: “sing while you’re playing.” In pathway playing I was singing what I played only after the fact, and felt foolish, like trying to speak in unison with another’s talk. I was only very intermittently playing what I was singing. My singing had something of a life of its own. Sometimes its aims were realized, often only their essential shapes, and at other times a much greater discrepancy arose, with a total lack of synchrony between moves toward good next sounds that “I” would
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project and those moves the hands had to be making toward good next spots. It was as though the enterprise of melody making now too often came under the jurisdiction of an artful listener, and had I been able to jump into the keyboard with my tongue, things would’ve been smoothed out. By now I had developed a capacity for melody in jazz ways. It wasn’t really that I needed more practice to gain still more complex scale-shifting skills (though much more would be had). It was, instead, that I had yet to develop ways of melody making where the sorts of well-intentioned reachings that were now getting me into trouble would be replaced by an altogether different way of moving. If I strike a first note and reach for a second, I may or may not know what it’ll sound like. In manifest or minute bodily movements accompanying the finger’s journey, I may find I vocally appreciate only the vicinity of places where a finger will settle. If someone plays a note on the keyboard and I’m asked to sing another that’s pointed to nearby, I can generally do it, but often most easily by singing some orderly path (like a major scale) that links the two notes, and whose steps I count until I reach the indicated target. I haven’t had that sort of very specialized music-dictational training that prepares one to make such visual-aural identifications. If someone calls out a note’s name, I can’t sing it, nor can I name a note that’s played, a skill much too loosely termed perfect pitch. But if I sing a tone, or listen to one on a record, I can then go to the piano and play it on my very first touch of the instrument about eighty percent of the time. So my hands, arms, and shoulders (for, like other pianists, I can do this while standing up, off center from the middle, reaching down to the keyboard with one finger, and often without looking)—they have almost perfect pitch. My thoughts don’t.
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When I say I know what an upcoming note will sound like, I mean that I’m moving along a course that will provide for that note’s sound, in providing for precisely targeted next moves. I would, for instance, make a statement and then go for its exact repetition, and there’d be notes in addition to the ones I’d played that might be soundfully attained, if I’d managed to do more notes in the transformation while going fast. When I played a figure like this, to use the simple example of superimposed major chords discussed above,
and aimed for its replication on a new chord, the fourth note below (the higher F),
) 3
.
0
for instance, might be soundfully approachable. The major triad (a three-note chord, here F major: F, A, C) establishes a territory of related sounds. If I play a major triad I can aimfully attain the octave, the fourth note in the picture, and know what
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it’ll sound like. This is because I’ve learned a soundful way of moving around all the positions of a major triad: I can always precisely aim for any of its tones from any of its others, fingers and voice together. Its tones are soundfully given in having very specifically known distances from any finger to any finger, in every sort of mutual relation to one other, because, for example, I’ve done all sorts of arpeggios, with all manners of ordering throughout the keyboard with these major chord triads, using all kinds of fingerings, many thousands of times; because the distances to get to and from any of the notes in a triad to and from any others have become known in the most thoroughly intimate way. I can play a major triad’s notes (here shown simultaneously depressed for the sake of illustration) with these fingers:
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And the reach from the C (the third depressed key from the left) to the higher F can be securely aimed for, as that sounding place in particular. I don’t know “distances between keys” in general, but always in a context of unfoldingly handled moves. I don’t know the distance from this C to F:
because I specifically know how to move up in fourths (this interval), with that sort of turnunder. Abstractly speaking, as a matter of anatomy and the corresponding geometry of a keyboard, it’s actually an awkward maneuver. But, in the context of a hand engaged with an F major triad, such turnunders can be quite securely targeted because that triad is part of an intended presence at the keyboard: an F major triad way, within which C has been enunciated, and from which C can be a launching pad.
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The distance from the C to the F here isn’t known because my fourth and little fingers can span such a distance in general, nor because my third and little fingers know it as well. While these fingers are at home with such spreads, the reach from the C to the F here, doable with various digits, is informed by the course that’s (possibly) being taken by the hand. And it’s by reference to this course possibly at hand—here “major-triadness”—that such distances are known and attained. As another example, with the middle finger on the C below, the amount of spread required for the little finger to reach the F is assessed by reference to how the other fingers are engaged, and by the way the unused fourth finger informs the shaping of the hand:
The reach to get to F here isn’t at all unrelated to how the second finger feels itself situated, the axial position of the right side of the hand being quite different in this pictured minor triad (F A C). Where “F” then lies, relative to C, becomes more than some distance along a strictly linear horizontal scale. In ongoing play, aiming for a next sound within a course, one must reach a note so as to depress it, and without improperly touching any neighboring tones, while going on to and coming from other places. And how high the rest of the hand is, the contours
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the hand as a whole assumes, and the shaping of distances running along every dimension are critical. In the course of doing a major triad, to say I know where notes of that triad definitely are, that I can be aimed to them synchronously with voice and hand, is to say I have a secure way of going to them, and going to them to play them. For an improvising pianist, having a known upcoming sound means being able to aim securely at a very definite location that’s fully implicated by a context of deeply incorporated routes. If I project a sung sound, going upward, and can bring a finger-within-the-routing-hand to that destination, I find a placeful realization of my aim as a concerted manual-vocallic accomplishment. It’s important to note, as we’ll soon see, that in doing competent jazz improvisation now, I never project sung sounds independent of how my hand finds itself situated. But in this phase of play I’d often go for a next place that wasn’t clearly targetable by a hand firmly in command of itself on such a course. My overly self-conscious melody making had me reaching about for places indefinitely, and not just to places whose distances were clearly implicated by a particular handful course that locates the specific whereabouts of thereby soundable places. I wasn’t often wayfully engaged on a path. If I play some notes on a major chord, I know what other notes of the chord sound like. That is, I know how to get to any other chord place soundfully. But it ain’t necessarily so. It’s hardly just a matter of playing notes that happen to lie on a chord which delineates clearly implicated next distances, according them a particular known sound. I must be major chord-oriented with these notes, before its places will lead me to others. These selfsame notes might arise while I was doing some other manipulation, along other routes not necessarily related to a major chord way of moving. From
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the standpoint of play, a major chord way isn’t a collection of isolatable spots with “their sounds.” It’s an intended arena of well-aimed maneuvers. And to be wayfully oriented on a path, it isn’t at all necessary to play every note on it, any more more than a competent driver always has to pass through fourth and third gears to downshift from fifth to second, as a beginner might. Another detailed example. First let’s have two longer arrays of scale paths in view: E :
A :
I’d play a relatively rapid figure like this (here the numbers indicate the sequence of the notes being played):
8
5
/ 9 :
6
7
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and the D would not, we’ll say for purposes of illustration, be soundfully approached. It would, instead, have been among those “any notes thereabout,” tagged on to fill out the remaining time. I’d be involved in a course of struggling maneuvers that didn’t handfully provide for that space having its knownin-advance sound. It wasn’t a wayful place. Note that while this is an empirically likely but perhaps hypothetical example, it’s so typical of my negotiations at the time, involving troubles so vexing, long-standing, and recollected in fine detail, that it can be reconstructed with a plausibility adequate for the needed observations. How might its soundfulness have been assured? I possess a huge number of courses within which it’s a secure there. For it to be securely there isn’t, for example, to say I can move to the first black of a twosome from the second, or that I can come squarely down into the center of a note without slipping. It’s securely there if within a context of places at hand in the intended ways I’m moving. Most simply, D could’ve been aimed at from E , as if on an A major scale way used from the very start. E and D both lie on an A major scale path, and all prior notes in the sequence fall on it too. But I was, we’ll say (here reconstructing my conduct), oriented, instead, on a sequence along one intended E way, an E major scale. I had that scale’s feel “in hand” all along the way until I got to the D . Tones 1–5 are on an E scale. D isn’t. So oriented along an E way from notes one to five, for me to have used D would’ve meant I was switching paths. But at this point in my play it would’ve been most unlikely for me to have smoothly shifted from a figure like this right onto some other way. Such extended continuities had yet to contain a critical missing ingredient, main topic of my next chapter—a manner of timing.
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At this point in my play, such a D would’ve been a mere “sound careless” afterthought, an “any note thereabout without a known sound.” This means that neither an A major scale way nor any other sound-giving course with these places on it would have been intendedly at hand in the move between these notes (and there are a very great number of other paths that can here provide for a soundable location, like a diminished scale, to take just one, where a D could follow an E ). A definiteness of aim, a synchrony of a pianist’s vocal and digital intentions, is never merely a secure aim toward a place. A gesture’s confident aim is assured in its being a movement to a key which at the same time is a movement past that key. And one behaves wayfully singing with the fingers if every key is entered with its future and past wheres securely present in a route-finding hand. The sound-there-routing hand is one that finds places with a definiteness of aim continuously toned up as the articulation unfolds. If, in a path switch, D was intended, from E , as a move then possibly oriented to a C, B , and A to come, successive lower tones on an A major scale (which might now be a likely switch for me), where that D really is, for a hand going to it, is defined by the shaped course that brings the finger into it. A finger taking a D in such a downward A way would be a finger taking a D to be then potentially followed by a thumb and crossover rotation, the usual way D is passed through in descending an A scale. And such prospective orientations of the hand toward upcoming spots provides for the finest detectable details of a particular kind of D landing, where, say, you’d typically see a thumb already well turning under, anticipating movement down along the new way. The way a finger comes into a key is an intrinsic part of how one must speak of where a key is. There’s no single place called the D place (except in analytic thought). Productionally speaking,
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there are many different D s a hand may wayfully achieve. This selfsame locale, objectively speaking, is in fact a spot for actions that define it as many possible places in reference to wayful negotiations. Getting to a D , in the context of this figure, was, at the time for me, to get to a place where I just happened to land. Striving for melodies in the ways I did, merely happening to land on keys was responsible for most of my mistakes. To go for D “definitely” isn’t at all a matter of doing so strongly, or with firm pressure, but with the confidence of an intended-sounding aim. It would be to come at it from within a course of movements that locates a particular D , grounded by the locations and configurational requirements of other places on that course with respect to which it is being wayfully approached. A finely integrated aiming for places, giving soundedness to keys by reference to a wayful series of moves, would only emerge as a continual possibility in the next phase of my studies. And such notions as the definiteness of an aim, a provision of soundedness, and the very idea of a way at hand—these must await fuller clarification as I describe an essential change in my play.10
Going for the Jazz
I More than any other single experience, it was listening to Jimmy Rowles play the piano that marked the crucial turning point in my fourth year of study, when very significant changes began to occur in my path to improvisation. Rowles was known as a musician’s musician, and at the club in Greenwich Village where he often performed, jazzmen from all over New York City would drop by on their off evenings to hear his marvelous presentations of ballads. A renowned accompanist—for Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, et al.—Rowles often also played as a soloist or with a bass player, and here his forte was a most lilting, casual, yet very swinging way of playing standards like Over the Rainbow, Body and Soul, All the Things You Are, The Man I Love. To listen to him was to relish each and every place of a luxuriously lingering song. He was a fine improviser and superb accompanist, but it was especially the way he played ballads that commanded professional respect.11 Rowles had a way with the instrument. He sat rather low down and stretched back, as relaxed with the piano as the very competent driver is nonchalant behind the wheel on an open
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road. Still, there was a supreme caretaking with a melody, a caressing of it, giving each place its due. He was never in a hurry. In fact it was as if he’d fallen behind the beat. But it only seemed that way. It was late-at-night music, and the song would take its time. For months, night after night I’d watch him move from chord to chord with a broadly swaying participation of his shoulders and entire body. I’d sympathetically feel him delineate waves of movement, some broadly encircling, others subdividing the broadly undulating strokes with finer rotational ones, so that as his arm reached out to get from one chord to another it was as if some spot on his back circumscribed a very small figure at the same time, as if at slow tempos this was the way to bolster a steadiness to the beat. At times I’d watch his chordal hand coming in gently for a landing, and even while it stayed depressed for a bit he still always appeared to take a chord in passing, never seeming to reach a totally final rest, as the elbow and arm elliptically rotated around the engaged keyboard hand. Looking very closely, one could see that his fingertips themselves were never really fully stationary, always smoothly gliding over the tiniest of distances to pass from their points of first contact to those of disengagement. And along with his almost strictly linear foot taps, a small head gesture circumscribed the arm’s same accented temporal path. In an anchored heel you’d only see upand-down movements of the foot, but in his slight head rotation and shoulder swaying, you’d see an undulating flow of motion, a pushing, releasing, thrusting, and relaxing. At live performances I often watched fast players whose records served as my models. But their body idioms in no way seemed connected to the detail of their melodies, and adopting the former had absolutely no bearing on the latter. This one, for example, had a little shoulder tic, but mimicking that, as I found
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myself quite unselfconsciously doing after an evening of watching him, didn’t begin to produce his sorts of improvisations. Another sat tightly hunched over the piano, playing furiously fast, but assuming that posture had no apparent consequence for getting my jazz to sound in the least like his. But over the course of several months of watching and listening to Jimmy play, and starting to play many more slow ballads myself, which I’d earlier done mostly when first learning chord voicing, I found that for getting a song to feel like his, his observable bodily idiom served as a roughly useful guide. In the very act of swaying gently and with elongated movements, the lilting, stretching, almost oozing quality of his interpretations could be at least vaguely evoked. I couldn’t emulate his intonations and phrasing with genuine success, capture the richness of his way of moving, pacing, and caretaking. His special skills in handling pulsation, indeed Rowles’s entire manner of looking, walking, talking, or laughing—his way of temporally being in the world—this was distinctive enough to make him a quite difficult player to copy realistically. But I found I could get some of his breathing quality into a song’s presentation by trying to copy his ways. Listening to him, paying special notice to a manner of moving, playing many more ballads myself, bringing attention for the first time (clearly the result of my peculiarly long isolation from the occupation) to a caretaking regard for the overall presentation of a song from front to finish, trying to shape a beat like Jimmy did, I began to develop an entirely new way of being at the piano. And while at first it was particularly in playing slower standards that I found a payoff from these new attentions, progress slowly started to appear in the faster improvisational play at which I’d still spent most of the time.
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Now, within my practice sessions, little spates of that jazz on the records surprisingly showed themselves to me. Then they were gone. No sooner did I try to latch onto a piece of goodsounding jazz that would seem just to come out in the midst of my improvisations, than it would be undermined, as, when one first gets the knack of a complex skill like riding a bicycle or skiing, the very attempt to sustain an easeful management undercuts it. You struggle to stay balanced, keep failing, then several revolutions of the pedals occur, the bicycle seems to go off on its own, you try to keep it up, and it disintegrates. Yet there’s no question but that the hang of it was glimpsed, the bicycle seemed to do the riding by itself, an essence of the experience was tasted with a “this is it” feeling, like a revelation. And a long-term conversation with myself now began to take a particular form. Looking down at these hands of mine, at their ways, at my ways of employing them, seeking practically useful terms for conceiving my relationship to their ways, thinking of the particular things I could do for this music to happen regularly—a thoughtful scrutiny over such matters and over the very consequences of such thinking itself—this became the essence of what practicing now entailed. It was an all-or-nothing affair. I’d see a stretch of melody suddenly appear, unlike others I’d seen, seemingly because of something I was doing, though my fingers went to places to which I didn’t feel I’d specifically taken them. Certain right notes played in certain right ways appeared just to get done, in a little strip of play that’d go by before I got a good look at it. And while I certainly did these notes in these ways, a practically relevant observation, for ways of moving I’d come to develop, was revealed in this odd sort of first observation. Watching from above and seeing a stretch of action occur in a way that almost prompted me to exclaim “some jazz just came out!” prophesied a way of doing these notes so they’d appear just to come out. A sense grew of
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finally being onto something, and I’d search for just the way to proceed. Small indications became targets, glimpses of what the way of being would somehow have to achieve. It wasn’t that a sort of jazz line would appear, somewhat better than another, then one a bit better still, with gradations that revealed readily detectable shifts in a range of isolatable components of my ways. The distinction wasn’t as between a street corner conversation and a passage of Rilke, a typically competent jazz pianist’s solo and the exquisite elegance of a Chick Corea improvisation. It was like the difference between an aphasic’s or stutterer’s or new foreigner’s attempts to put together a smooth sentence, and a competent three-year-old’s flowing “Daddy . . . come see my new doll.” Former ways were lacking at that level of difference, between features of action that all jazz on the records shared and the sorts of struggling amateur efforts that didn’t really count as competent talk at all. This level now becomes my descriptive concern, as it was then an obsessive practical one. What happened, suddenly appearing and disappearing in this way, was dramatically different from what my former practices had achieved. For a brief course of time while I played rapidly along, a line of melody interweavingly flowed over the duration of several chords, fluently winding about in ways I’d not seen my hands move before, a line of melody whose melodicality wasn’t being expressly done, as in my reiterative attempts to sustain continuity. Somehow, a sequence of notes flowing from one chord’s jazz-related ways to the next’s, singing this jazz, was achieved. And it was clear that these ways of interweavingly singing jazz with my fingers, first so difficult to sustain with any satisfying frequency, were the ways of the jazz on the records. There was no mistaking it. No recording was needed to verify my perception. I was quite certain about it without inviting a
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musician’s confirmation. And I was right. I could hear it. I could hear a bit of that language being well spoken, could recognize that I’d done a saying in that language, in fact for the very first time, a saying particularly said in all of its detail: its pitches, intensities, pacing, durations, accentings—a saying said just so. The particularly said jazz saying would get done, and then I’d lapse into the usual lungeful, unsinging path-following ways. My practical theorizing, searching for instructions that would work, now made up a course of several months of almost continuous playing, getting close and not wanting to let the changes recede, trying to nail matters down firmly so I could always do it again. At first, many days of regular playing might not produce a single instance, and many months went by before I could play anything like an entire song-length chorus of this jazz on the records. My protracted struggle kept alive various problematic aspects of the task, making possible their study and description here, a payoff that, I assure you, came only after the fact. I clearly knew when the right appearances were displayed, knew it in the deeply familiar sounds on the records, and in the looks of the hands. I saw my hands as a jazz piano player’s hands, a bit at a time, and would oddly recall the looks of other players’ hands. My hands’ looks looked like theirs had looked. Things passingly seen in the others’ hands were now clarified in hindsight—having been seen but not watched—through looks mine now passingly revealed to me. And this remembrance itself gradually proved most helpful. The puzzling interweavingness of my teacher’s fingers, whose order I couldn’t formerly see, looking beyond their conduct for rules about their destinations—this, for example, I now spotted in mine. I recognized modalities of movement previously witnessed in others’ hands, with noticeably variegated detail, so that regularly emulating such non-note-specific memories generated many new possibilities for my own hands.
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Playing the piano now, by myself, for friends, students, or in a nightclub, within a minute I usually find myself softly singing (though you’d surely prefer to call it middle-aged, hummed grunting). I sing with my fingers. One may sing along with the fingers, one may use the fingers to blurt out a thought, and one may sing with the fingers. Each is a specifically different way of being. Instructions that helped achieve this singing with the fingers began to figure into a mode of guided presence at the terrain, integrating with other helpful practices I could begin to locate, features of my play I could understand and instruct my hands about. Consider using one’s fingers to blurt out a thought, the prominent feature of my earlier repetitional lungings. Finding that problems of improvised writing inform and are informed by problems of improvised piano playing, I did some casual yet revealing studies of typing, involving this, among other practices: I typed rapidly, without a text, striving to make real sayings, sensible ones, expressing “ideas,” as language likes to put it about itself, seeking to sustain a pace that approximates that of rather slow but not too terribly stilted talk (at about 120 wpm). Doing such typing and trying to continue without undue pausing, exploring improvisation in this terrain, it often happened that I’d come to places where I couldn’t reach farther ahead. My movements weren’t broadly aimed forward, lacked ways of going on in certain malleable, improvisationally flexible, accentually targeted thrusts. And at such times I simultaneously found myself sensing that I couldn’t find what to say next. I’d try to keep on typing nonetheless, continuously aiming to produce sensible sayables for a viewing audience, sayables that come and disappear as talking comes and goes, purposefully constraining myself with a video camera focused on a movable typewriter carriage, so that one only saw a few words come up
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and go off a TV screen. And I gave a dozen televised lectures, seated at an old carriage-moving IBM typewriter with a video camera over my shoulder in front of a large class of (bewildered) sociology students, who watched my talks on monitors under instructions to prepare for an exam on their content. In such finger talking, I’d feel myself coming upon a loss for words as my hands began to falter and lack certainty in their forward sweep, and, sensing such difficulty just up ahead, I’d frequently say a group of words to myself, trying to get out of trouble, trying to do this while still typing fast. I felt compelled to prefigure a little stretch of places to aim for, going rather foolishly fast with a continuing aim to stay cogent this way—the better to study it—and, feeling an impasse arising, I’d take an inner course of action to help the outer one out, metaphorically speaking. In such a search, a course of words can be given in a flash, with that sort of rapidity thinking to oneself can have. Doing such thinking while typing along, attempting such prefiguring without pausing as other places were being handled, I’d often lunge for the imagined group of words all at once. Lunging for a group of words all at once, roughly possible in thinking, would only work interactionally in a world where language somehow occurred with the sorts of actions a postal clerk takes when stamping Air Mail Special Delivery on your letter in one blow. But talking, writing, and melodying at least currently require sequential articulations of the body, and to lunge for a group of words all at once is to produce garbled-looking sayables or garbled-sounding sayings. Gestural productions must be serialized. I may think in several words more or less given at once, doing what’s called monothetic thinking (not that it’s without duration itself). But when I move my fingers over the typewriter doing finger talk-
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ing, or move my mouth to speak, I must say each next sound in a progressively unfolding way. Finding myself in a jam, trying to do a thoughtful saying, finding trouble flowing backward through the ill-aimed forward reach of the hands, I’d lunge for a group of words and produce a garbled-looking sayable that often contained bits and pieces of the words that were lunged for scattered around within it over a several-second struggle to get back on track, as the fingers reached to stamp out a thought. Many errors occurred. And in that form of being singingly present when I tried to use my fingers to blurt out an elaborate note sequence, in earlier reiterative attempts to duplicate a prior melodic figure, the consequences of the lunge produced, for the music, an order of disarray equivalent to the disarrayed sights I got in such lunging gestures at the typewriter. Then there’s a way of typing where, for a while, one sustains an ongoing course of thought as the typing, without any inner sayings or imaginings with words apart from the fingers’ movements, when a strict synchrony is sustained between any sayings you may be saying to yourself and the movements of the fingers. That sort of typing can occur with few pauses on occasion, and quite fluently, however slowly; one is then singing with the fingers. The things I formerly had to say weren’t the sorts of sayings to say, for lunging wouldn’t work. Better said, the brand of jazz improvisation on the records that I aimed for isn’t filled with lunges of the sort I made, with so many notes merely landed upon. It’s instead made up of sayings that are particularly articulated, each and every next-sounding note expressly aimed for and arrived at. My play was full of sounds that resulted from a very unevenly sustained singingness.
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A good first instruction was to take directions from the locale and readiness of the hands, when choosing notes to say. With my hand in this position:
I have a host of soundful places to aim my fingers, for all the chords of a song, without venturing. Before, I’d proceeded in little chord-by-chord strips, and while I’d practiced some runs that accorded well with a progression of a couple of customarily adjacent chords, there were only very few of these at hand, few worked-out solutions for continuously and rapidly traveling from one smoothly available and characteristic jazz-sounding path, like the diminished scale, onto another one. Perhaps I’d expressly practiced only three or four such switching routes. Playing along fast on one path and feeling a next chord coming up, I needed to change paths, and while I could by this point employ some of the routes from various starting points—top to bottom, coming in at the middle, playing every other note from the top, bottom, or middle—still, going fast, in the ways I went fast, it always felt essential to prefigure the configuration of a whole route onto which I’d switch, as the next chord’s statement was imminent. It was a while since it’d been a frantic searching ahead, as in my first year, since I’d experienced an explicit conceptual pro-
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cedure of chord route matching as a naming process. But there was still considerable imagining of arrayed routes while I played, and visualizing where I was in the terrain; and these images were, on occasion, up ahead of where my fingers were, to aid in a transition when moving along rapidly and feeling the encroaching arrival of a next chord. Now I can play along rapidly, singing the jazz with my fingers, fully involved in a singing being particularly said, totally caught up in the music. And without looking at the keyboard I can visualize the notes being played, their names and spellings, each next one at a time while I play, just as I can, but only synchronously, conceive of the spellings of the words as I speak running across an imaginary teletype screen, for instance. The same sort of synchrony, it can be suggested, between visualizations and singings occurs here at the typewriter, in relations between what I may say to myself as I type and the movements of my fingers.12 If I say something up ahead of where the fingers are, I’ll surely make an error. And if I speak aloud, typing along with my sayings, I find that the fingers move through just those places on this terrain that correspond to the places my mouth parts traverse in voicing the sayings that are being typed. As I type a long word, speaking aloud at the pe cul iar ly e long at ed pace involved in speaking while typing or writing longhand, I enunciate the various syllables and stretch the course of my mouth’s movements in slow motion right along in strict synchrony with the movements of the hand and fingers. The two go precisely together as two hands together reach for a package, each hand getting to its side of the parcel, however differently distanced the two sides are from the hands’ locations when the move begins, going together toward their destinations and arriving on time together. Looking down at my hands and finding a spate of jazz coming out, I’d find I was looking to the hands themselves, not their
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destinations, now seeing ways of travel over and above those particular notes being chosen. While before I’d looked past the hands’ ways to their destinations, when a spate of that jazz was now spotted my look at times shifted back, the focal plane seemed closer, and I saw a configuring hand, in a certain overall stance with respect to the keys, whose shaping was being watched, whose shaping and moving became gradually instructable. I began to see and find use for further work in the observation that I needn’t lunge, that usable notes with any chord were right there at hand, that there was no need to find a path, to imagine one up ahead, get ready in advance for a blurting out. Indeed, conceiving particular places up ahead seriously undermined the singing I sought to sustain. Good notes were everywhere at hand, right beneath the fingers. While it had before often seemed necessary to reach for a big path for a chord, foreseeing its locale and organizational requirements with a monothetic hand thinking thoughts all at once, a single note would perfectly well suffice to make up a melody over several chords’ duration. Melodies in most western music certainly aren’t only characterized by successions of many different notes, but contain plentiful portions of only one, a couple, or a few of them (an exquisite popular song example is Jobim’s One Note Samba). I could take my time in going for a long run, or linger, finding right beneath a nonventuring hand all sorts of melodic possibilities—if I lingered in the right ways. And when venturing in the right ways, I could move fast and take my time, both together. One note could be played during one chord’s duration and another right next to it for another’s, and melodies could be done that way. Of course I knew that as a child, picking out tunes like Jingle Bells. But jazz had more than anything appeared as a fast-flowing rapidity: to do that was to be a jazz
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player, and in the solos I listened to it was always the hardest passages to which I attended, never those plentiful examples on the records of sparsely textured, nonventuring melodies. I began to employ the melodic hand in ways to let it speak to me, about the sort of shaping it was in, the sort of stance over the sector being adopted. I could take directions from the fingers about ways of moving and where to go, avoiding lunging’s troubles, and at the same time, because of this caretaking and my characteristic sounding routes, jazz melodies began to be seen and heard. I could venture when ready, or not if I wished, making jazz melodies both ways, such variability to my play being part of what using the hands requires for the sounds of this music. A new sort of hookup between the singing me and my hands was developing, as next sounds I’d project began to come under the hands’ jurisdictional review of their own positional readiness, as where we were going together slowly began to integrate into an altogether different way of doing singing at the piano: a new way for intentions to be formed, a more refined synchrony and bidirectionality of linkage being forged between my head’s reach for sounds’ places and my fingers’ reach for singable ones. II Recall my lungings, getting part of a saying definitely said and then merely happening to land on any notes thereabout. In an important sense all was amiss. I’d play a figure and reach for a reiteration, move for restatement in another setting, one I felt was appropriately located for the figure’s moves in concordance with the chord progression. It had been a sequence of articulated movements to be accomplished in a chord-allotted time. Then a new chord came up, with its durational tenure, and the pitching shape of the first sequence was reached for in the next
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place, to be accomplished during this chord’s duration. The chords go by: 1, 2, change, 4, 1, 2, change, 4 . . . The movement traversed thus and so many steps, and I tried to transport it in its entirety to the new place. I’d set out into the reiteration with a very particular number of notes to get done there, often get the beginning well placed, and then feel obliged, transporting the strip in its entirety, to say as many more notes as were required. It had so many notes to it, this number now to be done again. Try tapping six, seven, or ten fingertaps on the table, counting and going up and down with your whole hand; then pause, shift places, and tap out the same number again at the same pace in the new place, with the same internal time relations, each tap to the next: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . . 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I’d go for such a specific number of notes, but, as we know, I was often in shape to get a beginning part successfully reiterated but not singingly aim for all of the rest of it, voice and fingers going together to particular next known, handfully implicated sounds. I lost grasp of its shaping because of configurational changes required to do it equivalently in the new territory, new fingerings that I couldn’t accommodate to in rapid-course, turn-under arrangements posed by the new place. With a moment’s reshifting, I (my hand) might have been able to take account of the new place, had I given myself a moment. But I didn’t. I usually went into the repeat with a paced course of articulations whose successive timings were established by the very pace of the opening two moves, a pace that committed me to the whole of it, with just so many notes in the allotted chordal time. And losing handful grasp over its restatement, having set up that sort of pace that committed me to the whole number of notes of it before the new chord’s tenure expired, I’d often play any notes thereabout to finish up the whole of it, with just so many of them.
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Having set out in pacing ways that would’ve made stopping short of just so many of them often likely to have made me trip, the hand going faster than it could keep its composure in the new sector to get those pitches done, setting out in paced ways that would’ve compounded the experienced loss of grasp over the attempted saying with a stopping-short trip, I’d instead often produce a just-so-many string of unsung notes. I’d get the fingers down somewhere, to preserve at least the whole of it, without tripping up on top of everything else. Often it’d go like this: I’d start into a reiteration just a bit late, perhaps if a lunge was a large one, or involved a slight preparatory reconfiguration to get to a new locale in possibly workable form. Or the prior figure itself, being paced from its beginning to predetermine that a certain number of notes got achieved in its reach, lasted a tiny trifle longer than its chord duration, delaying the transition, or requiring an even faster shifting movement to the new place. I’d often start out just a tad late into a new sector, sometimes speed up the pace to get the whole of it down before the new chord; or, starting late, I’d run a little over into the next chord’s temporal reign. At times a grab for a next chord would be held up ever so slightly, the left hand’s reach trying to accommodate the rate of the right’s articulations, so that the two might participate in stating some beat together, keeping the song tempo’ed. Such an accommodation didn’t often lend an impression of a beat missed altogether, wasn’t pronounced enough to sound like I couldn’t keep time, but was enough to throw the flow of the proceedings out of kilter ever so slightly. And when a flow of articulatory proceedings is ever so slightly out of kilter, what’s said is thrown into a disorganized mess. An ever so slightly illpaced reach may not be at all recognizable as that melody, may produce placed and paced statements so disfigured as to make it unclear that they’re of any particular language at all.
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The joint reachings of my left and right hands were usually out of kilter because of the pacing character of the right’s articulating moves, as I seldom made the left hand accommodate much to the right, feeling the song’s harmonic intactness was to be maintained at a steady beat at all costs. The left hand would reach for its chords, and the right hand’s melodic sequences would start out and end as best they could during the necessary interims. Despite my intentions, the left hand’s reachings were often less than really rhythmically solid, the right hand’s movings having their ways of upsetting the left’s (and vice versa). The out-of-kilter relation between the two hands at times resembled two workers’ moves in lifting a heavy package, where, if they mistime their respective uplifting thrusts, the object comes off the ground tilted down at the heavy end, for instance. The worker at that end, having to heave with more accentual force than the other, perhaps not having assessed the parcel’s weight or the distance to be traversed, is usually the one who shouts: “Hold it a minute. Let’s start over, OK? Get ready . . . get set . . . and go.” Often the trouble occurs in the first instance because their “ready, set, go” lacks the sort of pacing shape, as a course of moves in itself, suited to coordinate the tasks of the respective hands; or because while it has a workable thrusting form for one worker’s task it doesn’t for the other’s; or a “ready, set, go” suited to both is done just a bit too privately by each, and is not adequately concerted. I’d reach for a course of places for each chord at a time, the forward extent of my reach abbreviated as a course of articulations that would come to an end, somehow, somewhere, for each chord. The reaching was toward an ahead that was posted before or upon the next chord’s arrival time, to enable a switch. I reached for interim, ill-defined arrival times, rather than for
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long stretches of melody that would wind through a sequence of characteristic jazz sounds for a succession of chords. I reached for melodies as beginning toddlers get across the room by lunging first for a leg of the coffee table, then mother’s, then to a bottle at the end of the couch. As for the left hand, the chord-grabbing reaches were securely targeted, moves whose places were set by the fixed chord chart of the song. But there wasn’t really a doing something with something already done down there in the left hand; the chords sang only as the sounds of your feet might sing as you walk while talking with another, not as when you walk to expressly make a march happen in the taps of your steps. Only when interconnected right-hand melodying occurred did chord progressions themselves gain a true sounding status. So along with these sometimes ragged chordal walking grabs, rather than marchingly sung steps, I reached with the right hand for hunks of articulations, batch by batch—from the coffee table to mother’s leg, from this intersection only to that one, from this phrase to this one and to this. I reached step by step, rather than the way one moves right through the production of a sentence like the one I am now typing, were you able to see it, very quickly, moving straight ahead as I proceed, finding myself in difficulties but knowing at the pace I am now moving, however little is being said well, however rambling things are going . . . (I lost it). You can lose the thought in very rapid typing or very rapid talking (and in slow typing and talk as well, of course), depending on the kinds of interwoven courses you try to generate. And you may have to take stock. But with the format of a fixed set of chords always coming up, you don’t lose your place in the same ways. There’s always an orderly chord sequence to unite the proceeding, a format that specifies places toward and through which to reach, these chordal landmarking targets.
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Having a chord progression is in certain general respects like having the task of giving a stranger instructions on how to get from here to there in the hometown you know so well: through the course of the instructions there are places you must sayingly lead the other through to get to the end; there’s the destination the instructions must come to, with benchmarks along the way in the best intersectional course you outline to get from here to there. And, in such sayings, you find those actual spoken movements to lead him from this standardly employed intersection to that one, in and through the course of these gestures. But my reaches—aphasically targeted step by step and not broadly moving along through several sounding chordal landmarks, to bring off a course of jazz-ordered, sentential interweavings—my reaches were in their own ways spastic. And articulationally spastic reaches produce coordinational troubles in making any next step go well. They are movements with temporal disarray throughout, akin to that of the workers lifting their package, and they may well arise, as they did in my piano playing, out of an ill-formed shaping of a ready-set-go, of continuously maintained ready-set-goes. So many notes had to be played, and these so many notes lay in a terrain whose shaping and dimensions were known, by the hand’s territorial and distancing commands, as a setting of places-at-hand. So many places-at-hand had to be played in a course whose pace was established at the outset by the attempt to reiterate the preceding melody in time. And the places weren’t at hand in ways they needed to be for a specifically preset number of them to happen by then. Places weren’t approached in the first place with a way of moving that enables reaching just exactly so many places singingly selected in course by then. The problem was that instead of trying to stamp out bunches of melody, I should’ve been getting the then-ness of my reaches together, using ways of managing a pulse that would allow for
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travel to get so many singable notes found in course. I should’ve been moving toward a together-then-ness. The most relevant instruction generated out of my early observations, the single thought most helpful for getting matters under consistent control, was to get the beat into the fingers and not let it merely be the foot and left hand’s work. More broadly conceived: establish a firmly recurrent accentual beat everywhere, not just a somewhat straggling though timekeeping tap of a foot, a course of rather rigidly grabbed reaches with the left hand, while the right hand races around jazz-a-maniacally. I needed a firm sense of upcoming arrival times, just as the workers need a firm pulse, to know just when “go” will happen, when that next node of the pulse being bodily implied in the shaping of a “ready” and a “set” is to be done, so they not only know where they’re going, but exactly when they’ll arrive. Knowing when they must get there enables them to pace a course of the differently distanced movements toward there smoothly, smoothness always defined in terms of the requirements posed by the tasks at hand. To get the time into the fingers, hands, shoulders, everywhere, was to begin to develop such mobile ways that commitments to arrival times could be continuously altered and shifted about while moving along, a steady beat as a whole sustained all the while. It was to aid in having sayings always at hand for any pace, always known to be singingly right up ahead in any move, without having to know a whole bunch of particular upahead-wheres through prefiguring. It was to permit nonstuttering and nontripping disengagements when a saying wasn’t really at hand, disengagements that wouldn’t now seem to make the music stop, but would instead be silences of the music. Watching Jimmy Rowles, I’d come home and begin moving by setting a tempo in new ways. Before, in group play or alone, I’d counted a 1, 2, 3, 4 that was really more suited for counting
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from 1 to 20 than for making music. Now I began to do a 1, and a 2, and a 1 2 3 4, setting a tempo with rotating cyclical movements, with strong forward thrusts. Now, instead of keeping a beat as one may tap with rigid up-and-down finger-confined moves on a tabletop, I began to count off the time with finger-snapping, head-bobbing, arm-and-shoulder rotating moves that had little elliptical shapings: push and push and push and push. More than that, I began to state a beat, as the forward thrusts of my body, with a 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 (bold figures getting greatest emphasis, underlined ones less, plain type less still)—with an accenting and not merely a pulse. I began doing at the piano the sort of accentual moving most listeners do, the sort of accentual thrusting I’d certainly always done in listening to music, be it jazz with its class of ways, Beethoven with his, or the Beatles with theirs: whether a strong thrust or gentle sway, a syncopated or jointly aimed move, an abrupt thumping or gliding flow of ups and downs, the thrusts of marching’s aims or of minuets’, reaches for a very elongated course of melodic sayings all the way up to and through an accentual thrust just now, or for “Daddy, come here”—all with a firm grasp of what would arrive next, and when. For improvisational negotiations, it wasn’t enough that the beat be my foot’s work. It had to come into the hand. I’d see it there when I came home from an evening of watching Rowles and got lazy and low down with the piano, finding my entire right hand beginning to do accentually thrust, pulsating moves. During pauses I sometimes watched the tempo being tapped out with little forward thrusts on the front of very tiny circles at my fingertips, above or even ever so slightly on the keys, never sounding one, eventually, unless I also sang it, with thus and such an accented and paced gesture into the terrain, sprung off those tiny circles at the fingertips; unless I sang it just so, just now, just then.
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It would be found—this accentually multifaceted pulse— coming into the arms and shoulders as well, the shoulders, for example, in light of relations between the hands. The chordgrabbing reach must do its stretch with correspondingly firm accentual thrusts, as the fingers skip an accent, which they’d come to do, heading instead for a longer succession of notes. And the hand now found, without looking ahead, that it was in shape to take a longer reach, for just so many yet largely unknown places singingly up ahead until some further accentual node. Expanding the temporal prospectivity with a deemphasis in one accent, elongating the move toward an accent farther up ahead (1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4—skipping accents in a reach for a longer stretch), the chord-grabbing and now soundful left-hand reach would begin to breathe for the right. And a solidly swaying back and shoulders helped tell it, as the two hands lifted this package together, when and how to take a breath, and where a breath could be taken quickly, without upsetting the right hand’s accentually targeted and elongated achievements of place. Watching Jimmy Rowles doing things like that, pieces of that jazz would appear in my emulations. But before describing in detail what this new mobile hand would do and had become, as an improvisatory organ under my instructions as I was under its; how this strongly established, prospective accentual node would figure into soundful place finding in course; would figure into doing long reaches toward further-ahead accents; would enable systematic ways of skipping and shifting accents about that were firmly there; would figure centrally into singable reaches for long interchordal passages—before completing a first description of the jazz-improvising hand, I offer some observations about pulsing and accenting.
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Trying to get a closer view of the work pulsation did, I did some amateur science.13 I draw two dots:
•
•
and set myself the task of connecting them with a line drawn by my right hand, while at the same time I regularly tap a left-hand finger on the table. The goal is to move smoothly from the first to the second dot, and reach it exactly as the evenly tapping finger touches the table again with a next in its series of already established regular, evenly timed taps. I must set out in one of two ways to achieve simultaneity. I may begin the movement of the line exactly as the finger starts to rise off from a prior beating:
or when the finger is at the top of an upstroke, as it starts back down:
(Here, however, to insure coincidence, “somewhere” in the body one sympathetically first rides with the upstroke, to know when the downstroke starts and its pacing.)
If I begin when the finger is already on its way up, or somewhere in the midst of its downstroke,
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I can’t possibly bring the line to the next dot in conjunction with a finger tap in a smooth way. I don’t know how fast to move, and must hold up one or another hand’s movements and thoughtfully bring the two into temporal alignment. For a coordination to happen unselfconsciously, I must employ a common pulse to unite the two differently distanced moves (the reader may very easily verify this observation). The line starts quickly, as movements from standstills must. It then reaches a nearly constant speed for a short time before it begins decelerating, lest it overshoot its destination. The finger tapping likewise reaches a turnaround from its upbeat to its downbeat phase. Each hand’s gesture has a distance to traverse, a speed to attain, changing rates of acceleration to attain that speed, and of deceleration to reach the next target. And the speeds and rates of change vary from one gesture to the other. But they share a maximum-speed turnaround phase at the same time. Differently distanced reaches arrive at their respective targets together because of a pulse they share, an accelerationdeceleration pattern with a common turnaround phase. I space dots on a piece of paper: A
( • ----------------- • )
B
( • --------------------------------------------- • )
and with two hands set myself the task of connecting those in each pair, going left to right say, a pencil in each hand, starting together and reaching both right-side dots at the same time
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(constraining the moves by adhering to the edges of rulers renders a cleaner description and easier measurement). First I establish and continue a steady tap—1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4—with my foot on the floor. The line drawings start exactly as the foot starts rising from a tap. The two move ahead at different rates of acceleration to attain different speeds to reach the goals together, A going slower than B. Both lines gain their maximum speed and attain a constant speed at the same point in time:
(Each slash represents one unit of time, these produced by filming line drawings with a high-speed motion camera, using a frame-by-frame analyst projector on a blackboard, marking and measuring intervals of time and distance.)
The example of the workers suggests the interbody work of pulsing. Each worker adjusts the thrust of his movements by aiming toward an upcoming time of arrival, established by a preceding count, appraising the speed required to manage the weight and the distance to be traversed, adjusting the force and extent of the move accordingly, holding these variables in a delicate bodily balance. And their joint pulsing joins their respective moves in accord with the same phasing structure that unites the drawing of two lines of differing lengths, although the particular patterns of acceleration and deceleration always vary with respect to the tasks at hand. In one context, for one variety of a move, one accelerates quickly and slows down at the last moment. In another, accel-
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eration is slow at first and increases after a while. But whenever two or more moves are coordinated toward various destinations for simultaneous arrival, turnaround phases from acceleration to deceleration are shared in common by the variously relevant solo and/or multibodied movements. Consider this situation. I play some notes, beginning as my foot comes off the floor and moving until it reaches the floor again, with a pulsing rate established by a series of prior taps, so a time of arrival of the projected next tap is prospectively given. Instead of drawing a line, I enter the keyboard. And the last note in a series of several articulated notes, the hand’s final reach, let us say for the sake of illustration, must coincide with the foot’s arrival at the next beat. A reach is present, with a string of individual articulations situated within it. Look at this last note. A reach will have to be made for it, traversing a distance, and the spot must be attained just as the foot returns to the floor. The same basic organization is present as in the line-drawing suggestion. One can’t start this last reach except by integrating its organization within the flow of the beating. If I begin a reach for a last note after the foot has already started its final downward thrust, for instance, I won’t achieve a simultaneous arrival. If I sustain an even and nonaccented pulse, one that doesn’t stress a downbeat more than an upbeat, I take a course of movement that may be conceived as follows:
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Counting with this beating, I wouldn’t stress the first beat alone but would count 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and . . . , giving equal stress to each swing. My tapping has the regularity of a pendulum. This isn’t a rhythm, with recurring forms of distributive accents, but only a pulse. To accent is to move with some thrust, and when I reach for a note I strive toward a desired intensity of sound, coming in with a strong stroke, or with a letup that will reduce the intensity. Here’s a schematic portrayal of an accenting on the upbeat, and one with a downbeat organization:
Or we may have a trajectory like this:
where a course takes an apparently uniform turnaround (in cases when a change of direction occurs) and the accelerational thrust happens just before contact occurs. There’s a long even stretch . . . with a hurry-up-at-the-end. To say I must begin my reach for the last note of a sequence, articulated between two beats when the downward thrust begins, is to say it must occur right along with the onset of an accelerational thrust, at point A above, for example. Elsewise, destinational coincidence isn’t achieved.
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A sequential course of articulations is paced by reference to a prospective time of arrival at the completion of a phase. All reaches are given their smoothness and internal pacing layouts by reference to prospective arrival times. The ubiquity of rhythmic pulsation for finely organizing gesturing of every variety, perhaps most highly refined in the unfolding articulations that constitute music and speech, is profound. When I say “word,” my mouth parts stretch forward to the end of their movements, establishing an orderly flow of distanced, resonating, breathing reaches toward completion at a foreknown time. And the internal durational spacings of the steps along the paths of moves that “word” is are molded by that temporal prospectivity, set before reaching for “word” by, say, breathing in at a certain pulsed pace before speaking, or ever so slightly nodding back for a ready-set, and then slightly forward for go, with “word.” Perhaps very slightly. But very essentially. In jazz play, when my hand begins a sequence of notes with a certain pacing, it commits itself to a certain specific number of notes to be executed up until some prospective arrival node. If it’s to play six notes, or seven, three, or twelve, a pacing is established for the reach, is determined at the outset with a pace set with the opening two moves, and is internally modifiable only in an orderly fashion. If the first two notes are set for a six-noted passage, with a set termination time, the hand cannot set out fast and then slow down within the course and still reach the destination on time. A course of paced movement is undertaken that implies a number of notes to follow and implicates a manner of forward movement for the hand, a manner of movement that must be brought to the necessary sort of completion if the gesture is to proceed smoothly, without faltering or tripping. There are various qualifications. The hand may begin very rapidly and allow a pause prior to reaching for a final note in conjunction with the beat. But even if a break of this sort occurs,
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a course of notes between one tap and the next therefore not equidistant, which is of course very common, the first notes will be articulationally aimed toward the top of upbeat phases; a virtual standing-still of the foot tapping, for example, will constitute a pause in the succession, perhaps even over several cycles of pulsation, and then a reach may be finally realized. Or a reach forward on a downstroke may be bypassed altogether, the upswing phase providing a prospective segment, and a next course may then be taken in an orderly fashion with respect to a still later cycle. III Every once in a while the time would get into the fingers, as I sat and tried to move like Jimmy Rowles, setting a beat first by getting my shoulders going elliptically around just a bit, as I tapped my foot and snapped my fingers before play, counting off the time with a care I’d never before taken, a care for the jazz and the listener and the others with whom I’d have been coordinating my moves, had I not played in isolation, for that bass player and drummer who were never around. Taking the role of the other with this caretaking beat, every so often the time would get into my fingers. One of the ways I’d try to keep it there was to stay in a place for a while, playing the same few notes over and over again, thrusting moves gaining an ever more stable shape, saying this same thing over and over and over, so all of me would stride into the song together. And the song was already under way, the improvised jazz song, with a handful of notes said again, again, and again, and then a slight bit differently yet again, expanding matters somewhat and getting the time into the hands more thoroughly, gaining a nice grasp of the places, a good jazz tonicity and mobility for the hand established. The hand had so many digits. There was
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so much to the terrain, so fast or slow to go, singing a song as I moved along, and I had to gain a strong sense of the hand’s numerical capabilities, the numbers of upcoming known places, and its own fingeredness, as the typist who digs in for a particularly unfamiliar sight becomes especially attentive to the fingeredness of the hands and field of action. Taking first breaths between phrases, getting the time into the fingers and shoulders, my hand would often find itself positioned on the keyboard in such a posture,
just before entering a passage of play, and were you to view a film of the jazz pianist’s hands, you’d see such poised stances frequently assumed prior to a noted part of the musical action. So, too, this photo could well have been taken at a slow shutter speed during rapid ongoing writing,
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for during the course of a carriage’s return, say, the hands may posturally ready themselves at times to pick up again with a thought under way. And here a word may be known in advance of a renewed entrance into the terrain, as a handful readiness to almost say the word but never quite do so, pursing the lips to say it as I “purse” the fingers to do it, holding onto the thought during this breath and never saying it until it can be articulationally said with sequential movements as a soundful sighting. Or a word’s beginning may be handfully anticipated, a beginning whose opening movements will receive proper gestural development, improvisational writing hands having ways of traverse that produce good-looking sayables through and through. The improvisatory jazz piano hand, alive to ranges of possibilities in its grasp of good ways always present, may hover over such spots as the places shown above, tasting possibilities here and there, doing the jazz that way. Having to keep the action under way, long pauses for reflection being never very judicious in jazz, music gets improvisationally made out of exploratory movements akin to the alternating back and forth between shift keys that I may do here, as I pause for reflection in the course of finger talking, bouncing back and forth with the little fingers from one shift key to another to allow the other hand to reflect in its hoverings for a good next move to get the wayful reaching ready again; feeling a “This” or a “Here” or an “As” to open the sentence; finding in such bouncing back and forth that a ready reach may be just exploratorily hit upon, without prefiguring apart from these hoverings at times, as the basketball player dribbles the ball first with this hand then that, ready to respond to an opening in the line of defense and a course for setting off into the running action. Such explorations as a typing writer may undertake are inaccessible in what you see on the page, of course, the work of
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writing not recoverable from this, the activities of most writing not requiring that the action be kept under way that way. Shift key work isn’t a publicized part of writing, the way a course of individually stated piano notes bounced back and forth between two digits is part of the music, the hand getting itself situated on a good way to move at a certain pace into a longer reach. Now as I found myself taking breaths between phrases, emulating Jimmy Rowles’s shoulder breathing, the hand would find itself situated in such poised positions. And I began to tell it to linger, tasting possibilities, to find ways of traverse singingly available right there at hand: known to be at hand right there as routes for thus and such a pacing course, as routes quickly traversable when at hand this way there, as routes not usable without venturing when at hand this way there, and so on. Staying on a way at all times, remaining singingly aligned with the fingers, I started to expressly appreciate the ways as terrain courses at hand for classes of pacing possibilities. With the hand poised over a passage of notes, a particular digit ready over a particular key, lots of melodying was soundfully possible, going up and down quickly over this course. The hand was able to take an array of notes beneath it with pacing moves from left to right or right to left, or one way then the other then the other, for example, with a rocking course quickly paced to where the mobile hand aimed, reaching for a goodsounding place, for good-sounding and yet not prefigured places ahead. The hand had a safe way for knowing what next notes sounded like, through repetitions over the same places, these first times through establishing sounds for a gearing in with the fingers: a way to stay singingly on that route for variously numbered, paced sayings, without venturing, not a way to be overly used, a way among many for appraising the whereabouts and
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paceable presence of ways, such appraisings making up this strategically accomplished music at the same time. Taking a breath between phrases, I began to assume such safe stances, as emulating Jimmy Rowles’s means of setting a tempo gave me pause for thought. I discovered the jazz happening in the looks of the hands and familiar sounds of the music, in ways I began to use frequently, at first too frequently, for they were so productive. Moving from such a handful:
onto a diminished path, say:
from one chord-specific, jazz-sounding route to another, such safe-stancing-after-shoulder-breathing began to afford handful means for interchordal melodying. And this particular switch,
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characteristic of many such maneuvers, is a particularly productive example for elucidating the essence of the practice. Moving from chord to chord, I would, for instance, undertake a course aimed toward a next downbeat for the second chord. The left hand grabs the first chord (G minor), then reaches toward the next, a C dominant, while a series of individual notes now traverses these paths, from one possible G minor way (the notes D, F, A, C comprising one known G minor way) onto this C dominant way. And I would tell myself quite explicitly, seeing the jazz in the hand’s looks and familiar sounds, to use such safe stances as jumping-off springboards. I started into a left-to-right, or right-to-left (or mixed) reaching, with a rocking movement over these four places beneath the hand on a G way. And I stretched toward a next accent that I could come down upon after a high liftoff, the hand finding a way, through such accenting, to disengage and get up off the keyboard before the downthrust. I would find myself able to now aim toward a C way having its assured rapid availability, and I began using such springboard actions for path switching. Going left to right over four notes for example, my hand would follow an arc, so if I drew a line aimed toward a next dot, tracing the shape of the moves, a pace like this would be portrayed:
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By simply lifting off the keyboard, getting an undulating time into the fingers, I’d find myself coming back down into this (diminished) run in such a way that my hand had that path available for rapid travel; found myself able to do a pathswitching maneuver in ways I’d not previously known. The import was profound. Finally, my blurted, aphasic stabs for hunks of melody would now, in the critical achievement of continuously interchordal articulations, be just like that jazz on the records. A means to get from way to way began to show itself, I learned from it, and I expressly began doing springboarding as an instructable maneuver. How is this diminished scale, one C dominant way, available for rapid traverse? I had the route available for quick movement with a fingering solution long ago worked out as a best way to handle this one quickly:
8 6
5
5
3 8
5 8
6
8
5
Now going up the four-noted Gm7 way, aimed to a next downbeat, in the reach for a next note, as the chordal grab achieved its destination, lifting high off the keyboard there was this C way approachable with a second finger on F, to give one example among many possibilities. Aiming for this way, aiming for a melody opening that started this way, getting the second finger onto F was to get
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onto this path in such a way that I had it available for rapid movement in either direction. It’s not that I can’t play this scale with other fingers, for I later learned to organize more complex articulational moves in a pacing manner that enabled more in-course digital reorganization. But I then had it firmly available as a C way for rapid upward or downward travel with my second finger on an F. And coming up high, after a liftoff, without venturing or lunging, I found a new way of having room to align the hand to start a fast word beginning. The hand rose with a high liftoff, the upward course of four notes started after the G minor chord had been stated, and the chordal hand was already on its way toward the statement of the next beat, its landing on the C dominant chord. The foot rose up after the tap, and a slight configurational alignment was smoothly occurring during the silent music above the keyboard. And the melodic hand would come down into the C way like this:
ready for taking the way rapidly up or down, a melody beginning that’s now anticipated before the engagement, an articulational course back down into a way with an almost chordal stance. Heading into a course of articulations toward a beat the next chord was now part of, being interchordal now this way, the
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hand took room to breathe, its arm and shoulder undulations temporally synchronized with the left hand’s reach and a foot’s participation. Getting somewhat high off the keyboard, at first, became part of an unfolding posture that would have the C way coming into reach through the course of the turnaround and downward accelerational thrust. The C way would be poised for, as in a melody-beginning configuration, with the F and turned-under thumb, prepared for as a C way for continued upward melodying. The melodic reach back down into a C way was now quickly available from this F, among my first (actual) new interchordal accomplishments. I’d then move rapidly up this way but would, at first, run into difficulties as a still next chord was approached. Broader nodes for accentual targeting weren’t well set yet, as a time in the hands, shoulders, everywhere. And I would, getting springboardingly onto the C way there, often proceed quickly up the keyboard without that knowing where you are going that’s continuously modifiable over its course, with a small strip of targetable places moving right along just up ahead of unfoldingly prefiguring sequences. Instead, I’d proceed with an unsinging continuation, the C path’s layout given as a long layout that would bring me to some “any notes thereabout,” as a next chord now came up. So I’d fall out of singing touch with the hands in falling off a wayful aim toward still a farther wayful routing, out of gear with a specifically paced saying said just now and then. The jazz would fade from control on this fragile precipice, the temporal-spatial synchrony of my singings broken, the rest of the passage not that interweaving music on the records. But by taking such breaths, starting “late” into a run of handfully available, rockingly swift moves, over notes digitally present, after the left hand had already settled into its now sounding
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place, swiftly pacing a move toward a firm prospective landing, able to rock up and down or doubly over such a handful, finding I could move from familiar way to familiar way, with a security of aim experienced in that fact, the jazz seen and heard in it too, a singability enabled, at least, in being thoroughly wayful— finding this, I did springboarding in many ways, as here:
Lifting high off after a four (or seven or ten)-noted passage, for instance, in a pacingly smooth move up to a new sector, I was prospectively aligned toward the C way a bit higher up, without thumb turnunders for smooth interchordal transitions. And the hand could configurationally shape toward the C way come upon in this fashion, with new latitudes for routings, a deeper improvisationality present in the ways of its prospective movement toward a variously handleable array. Springboarding up to a higher register, I found myself coming down to the C way for more than just upward-or-downward movement. Coming upon the C way from above, moving down toward this little bunching of good-sounding places, moving from one unfolding posturing to another through the springboarding arc, I would take it as a bunching for manifold directed courses.
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Now not only present for the hand as a C way to go long ways with, but as a segment of a C way to go many short ways with, in the very fact of this after-the-beat sector jump I’d begin to employ such a way as a ready-at-hand cluster for varied articulating use. Not doing lunging but smooth springboarding, I’d find myself moving from poised stance to poised stance, sequentially unfolding on the way down toward the higher little bunching. And I’d find (as a finding smoothly made on the way down, as a sequential readiness pacingly molded toward that arrival time) which of a number of directions and ratings to employ as a noted saying. The hand unfolded from the peak of the turnaround, for this sequentialized preparation:
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for a little upward, or up-then-down, or up-then-down-then-up course; or this way:
for an opposite maneuvering, or these:
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for interdigitating possibilities I’d formerly seldom employed in my pathway practicing. And a more familiar jazz ordering began to be seen and heard here, as my instructions to do springboarding, do interweaving, change directions frequently, change paces frequently, took notice of first happenstance orderings and employably instituted them, each interacting with the other, in my conversation from above. Getting the time into the fingers and hand, coming down for a saying to be said just so, having a soundful way right at hand in these first rather cautious yet increasingly smooth sector shifts, I began to find, in the undulating nature of my entrance and pacingly tuned interdigitations, that I could undertake new shaped and rated courses with well-at-hand route segments. While the C way in such a sector-shifting jump was at first still come on as a C way for rapid traverse, a segment of the way quickly known for the hand digitally ready for its notes, new ways of moving and assessing and pacing and fingering began to emerge. Moving now from way to way without extensively long stretches always in hand, the hand would sequentially come into the way with an unfolding realization of its stance. And this stance might entail the hand over the new sector like this, with a little finger targetable toward an F:
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The little finger is now part of a handful engagement with the C way nonlungefully present, but not just for long scalar melodying. Taking breaths, letting time go by, I did considerable posturing at first, ways became reconstituted as right there at hand, and I’d come upon this C way with a prospective stance ill suited for a long upward rapidity, say, but well suited for opening anchored negotiation. Doing after-the-beat springboarding toward the C way’s places this way, with a little finger coming toward a place in the unfolding encounter that hadn’t been a place for it before, I was coming to freshly appreciate routes with new digital placement possibilities, new directional possibilities, the time in the hands to permit pacings through ways with digital placements appropriate for such fingerings. The hand learned more about fingering-pacing relations. My hand already knew the ways not merely as spatial affairs, but as ways for the digits relative to particular note assignments for classes of action. So the C way under consideration would not be scalefully ascended farther up the line with a little finger on the F, at least not for a rapid and evenly paced course involving a turnunder of the thumb beneath that finger—into a G, A, and B of the C way for a scalar rise—not without appropriate prior measures. I’d come down into the keyboard with prospective sequentialized decision. Starting with a pace entailing so many further notes, I would, for example, go quickly up the course of the way to the F, and quickly back down again. The hand would find the availability of the way present for such a maneuver and find, through the course of a quick rise, the generation of a commitment to a mode of traverse that would involve that F or not. If so, it was involved as the upward boundary of a course, at least a first time through.
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A first time through, at least, because on a second pass I could either do that turnunder that was customary for continued upward travel, getting the thumb down on the preceding E, to bring the second finger to the F; or, quite significant among my new discoveries, I’d now manage a turnunder beneath this new F. In a first pass, the hand could now assess how that scale could be taken in this new way, a sharpening of precise digitational acuity gained by an exploratory pass, securing the places attainable that way, with the time in the fingers, and a strongly set prospectivity from early into the ascent for a longer, under-reaching thumb stretch, to get the hand under the little finger, just there, just then. And starting with a pace that implied so many notes, where whether and how to use this F was decided in the course of a quick rise and not in advance, involved a hand whose many specific finger sequence possibilities were now thoroughly appreciated. It wasn’t that a layout in advance was needed to match the available fingers to the number of notes. It was that the hand was on a way where “it knew” that an order of fastness could be soundfully managed. For the hand knew its ways so that, say, entering this diminished bunching with one sort of unfolding, it could go up or down within one range of speeds. Going with alternating (e.g., 1-3-2-4) rather than left-to-right digitation could be done within some other, perhaps partially overlapping range. But in such a case, for instance, going like this:
6 8 8 6 5 5
7 7
;))(?(
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