TT 516: School's Out

"What Should I Practice Over the Summer?"

Farewell for now to my students at NEC, and enjoy the break. If you have time and a piano, here are three things to consider:

1. Arnold Schoenberg, Op. 11 and (especially) Op. 19

   Jazz students are frequently enamored of expressionist gestures and atonality. But how many have actually played through the actual repertoire that generated this sort of language? Op. 19 is easy, and the middle movement of Op. 11 is not much harder. While these pieces work in concert, I believe that Schoenberg was really intending them to be for private performance in a practice room: a pianist or composer exploring extreme possibility. This music is over 100 years old, yet it is still as fresh as tomorrow.

2. Bebop

   True bebop only existed for a moment, because it is only certain melodies, like a super-advanced folk music. If any of the melodies are incorrect, then the style is undone.
   
   Scale theory, an approach that makes any note “OK” in the improvised line, is totally wrong for bebop. It always was wrong and will always be wrong. Tellingly, on his chart of how to get through “All the Things You Are,” George Russell does not include a bebop soloist. He has Hawkins, Pres, Coltrane, and Ornette, but no Bird or Rollins. (This chart is from Russell’s important theoretical volume The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization; Russell is in the background of the Miles Davis/Bill Evans LP Kind of Blue.) There is no way to write “how to get through 8 bars of ‘All the Things You Are’ using a bebop formula” because there is no bebop formula. Each melody simply has to be a bebop melody for the music to be true bebop. There are no shortcuts.

   

   Bebop isn’t just a super-advanced folk music, though. Dexter Gordon said, “Bebop is the music of the future.” I absolutely believe Dexter Gordon. Basic bebop is to all future jazz what basic counterpoint is to all future European composition. The more you know, the more you know.

3. Harmonizing a fast-moving melody
   Chords, chords, chords, chords! One fun way to work on harmonization is to take something that absolutely does not “suit” and figure it out at a slow tempo.
   
   Jimmy Jones was a favorite pianist of singers like Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald because he knew chords, chords, chords, chords. The last thing Jones recorded was a solo piano version of “Take The A Train” in 1975 as part of an Ellington tribute project helmed by Kenny Burrell.
   
   Jones takes over two minutes to meander through one chorus of Strayhorn’s iconic theme. Each chord is perfect.