The Ellington Century (25 page)

This melodic high-wire act seems to rely on the safety net of a predictable tonal progression until we notice that the opening phrase never settles on a tonic chord. Here Strayhorn employed a Brahmsian technique that Schoenberg dubbed
“schwebende Tonalität,”
or “suspended harmony.” The tonal balance wavers between D
major and G
major without settling on either one until the end, when it just melts into D
. If you played the melody slowly and began with a consonant G
major triad instead of that provocative
Tristan
chord, the tune would sound dolefully Brahmsian. Counterintuitively, though, Strayhorn propelled this weighty harmonic material with a suave, nonchalant Porteresque bounce. Such nonchalance is no easier to achieve on Sugar Hill than at the Waldorf.

THE ART OF THE SUFERTUNE: IMPROVISED MELODIES

For many listeners the ne plus ultra of jazz is not Ellington's “Ko-Ko,” as
ultra
as that work may be, but the unrelated Charlie Parker composition “Koko,” which is erected on the chord changes of “Cherokee” (a sturdy pop tune by the non-Cherokee English band leader Ray Noble.) Parker's “Koko” can serve us here as an exemplary “supermelody,” a neologism I define in three ways. First a supermelody is composed on top of a preexisting melody. Second, it sounds not like a substitute melody but like melody raised to a higher power. Third, like Superman, a supermelody flies. It may be preplanned, and its components may be a set of preexisting melodic figures and phrases, but the actual assemblage happens as it is performed.

The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz
and most overviews of jazz history map the subject as a mountain range of daunting, dizzying peaks, the great improvised solos from Bechet to Rollins and from Armstrong to Marsalis, with either Parker or Coltrane as Mount Everest. You can find answers to the question of how jazz performers improvise in many how-to textbooks and in Paul Berliner's monumental and revelatory
Thinking in Jazz.
One recurring theme in all these studies is the mixture of preparation and spontaneity. To a greater or lesser extent, jazz improvisers are not just doing what comes naturally. Most jazz players live up to the old title “professor” that once designated the resident pianist at a bordello. They know more about music theory than anyone else in the business, and they practice as systematically as the most competitive concert violinists. The cult of technique goes back to the earliest days of cutting contests between the great Harlem
pianists. John Coltrane owned a copy of Nicolas Slonimsky's
Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns
,
³²
and it remains a jazz bible to this day, even though it was not intended for this purpose but as an aide for avant-garde atonalists.
³³
But at a certain point all that erudition and woodshedding has to be put aside.

A different way of looking at the experiential dualism of improvising would be to see it as a mixture of two cultural forms. Jazz improvisers are simultaneously playing the blues, even when the chord changes are by Richard Rodgers, and employing a technique that Renaissance and baroque musicians termed “divisions,” using shorter, faster subdivisions of the beat and thereby doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the speed of the original melody. They are, as the saying goes, telling a story (that's the blues side), and at the same time they have to play the right notes. Blues playing, stemming from the call-and-response of the bluesman and his guitar, is itself dualistic; improvising, according to Lonnie Hillyer, “is really like a guy having a conversation with him-self.”
³⁴
The dialogue can appear in phrasing, in contrasts in register that simulate polyphony within a single line, and also through intertextual quotations.

At the same time, though, most jazz performers conceptualize a piece in terms of its harmonic progression, the essential framework for improvisation. In the blues, and in most popular tunes, the harmony changes once or twice per bar. In many places in “Koko,” Parker plays eighth notes against a single harmony from “Cherokee.” This kind of melodic line resembles the nonstop arabesque of the D major prelude from Book I of Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier
, where the right hand plays sixteenth notes and the harmony changes every two beats. Organists of Bach's time, and even today, were taught to improvise pieces like this following the principles of Renaissance polyphony (called either sixteenth-century or species counterpoint today) and the baroque basso continuo. The first approach, which emphasizes stepwise motion, might be termed horizontal, the second, which emphasizes clear definition of the harmony, is more vertical. Both concepts taught musicians how to combine consonant and dissonant notes, notes that were part of the harmony and certain notes that were not, into a fluent melodic line.
³⁵

In the opening bars of Parker's solo the continuous eighth notes outline a melodic curve down an octave from B
and then jump back up. Parker placed a dissonance on the downbeat of each bar, and in the first two bars he resolved the dissonance on the third beat, connecting dissonance and resolution by playing a “double neighbor” figure, playing the
notes just above and below the resolution. Bach more likely would have put the consonances on the strongest beat, but the pattern of tension and release is the same. In the third bar, though, Parker
begins
on a dissonant note, the same B
now sounded against an f minor harmony, and then jumps up an octave and then ascends to an even more dissonant note, G
. Bach might not have approved at first, but Parker was using a sanctioned technique, anticipating the next harmony, B
7, in which the pitch B
is perfectly consonant by Bach standards and the G
sounds like an augmented fifth, legitimate by bop standards.