The Ellington Century (26 page)

I'm pointing out the theoretical basis of jazz improvisation because it offers a way of analyzing not just the notes of a solo but its style and strategies, and also to demystify the lines between jazz and classical musicians. Jazz theory differs from classical theory in vocabulary but not in grammar. Classically trained musicians, especially keyboard players, can learn all they need to know about choosing notes for an improvisation from the repertory they play (from Bach and Chopin in particular) as well as from theory courses. If they can't jam it's not a problem of theory illiteracy or not being able to make music in the moment. It's a question, rather, of cultural illiteracy; they just need to spend some serious time, as jazz players do, with the blues. They need to study Sonny Rollins as closely as they study Mozart.

When classical players ask me where to begin, though, I usually suggest
Kind of Blue.
With more than five million copies sold,
Kind of Blue
is probably in your collection, and there is a published transcription of the entire album.
³⁶
I have been listening to it (on at least seven different well-worn copies) with undiminished pleasure for fifty years. Let's concentrate on the second track, “Freddie Freeloader.”

Bill Evans (the pianist on all the tracks aside from “Freddie”) compared the premise of the album to “a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous.”
³⁷
Davis and Evans seem to have shaped the “Japanese” sensibility of the album together in advance and without much warning to the others. Conditions, therefore, mixed the familiar and the unexpected. None of the solos paraphrases a familiar melody. They are all supermelodies.

A twelve-bar blues in B
Freddie” was the first track to be recorded for the album and also its most conventional tune, yet it provoked five extraordinary solos by (in order) Wynton Kelly, piano; Miles Davis, trumpet; John Coltrane, tenor saxophone; Cannonball Adderley, alto saxophone; and Paul Chambers, bass. (Drummer Jimmy Cobb did not solo.) The head is a call-and-response blues, a kind of updated
“Stompin' at the Savoy,” with trumpet and saxes playing a simple two-note motive, a descending whole step, and the piano responding more casually. The chord changes are simple, avoiding boppish interpolations of enriched harmonies. The only surprise comes in the last two bars, where an A
7 takes the place of the expected B
or turnaround harmonies. The progression is:

B
7 (four bars);

E
7 (two bars), B
7 (two bars);

F7 (one bar), E
7 (one bar); A
7 (two bars).

The head divides these twelve bars into two unequal sections. In the first eight bars the melodic instruments play the two-note theme in parallel first inversion triads, G minor and F minor over the B
7 harmony; C minor and B
minor over the E
7 harmony. In the last four bars the melody moves in half steps rather than whole steps, and instead of playing mellow triads the trio plays the bare, acidic harmony of a tritone. The head thus divides asymmetrically between passivity and agitation. Despite its laid-back quality, the opening two-note—or, really, two-chord—theme puts the modal side of
Kind of Blue
right on the table by interpreting a B
7 harmony as a six-note scale: F-G-A
-B
-C-D (F Dorian without the seventh). Moreover, the two triads of the theme are deceptively consonant sounding. Heard in terms of the B
7 harmony, each triad contains a dissonant note: the G of the first chord is the thirteenth; the C of the second is the ninth. Each soloist responds to the theme with a precise consideration of its special qualities yet in a distinctive voice: