It ought to. After all, I am a dedicated amateur saxophone player and I usually practice for at least an hour a day, except on the two or three days a week when I play with groups. Playing music on an instrument seems to be “doing something.” For three years I took university courses in musicology. Listening to music for my courses was “doing something.” For that matter, attending a concert also enjoys the status of “doing something.” I would never think of bringing a book to a concert and reading it, even if there were enough light to do that. So why is it that when I hear a live orchestra play a Brahms symphony in a concert hall, I listen attentively, but if I put a disk of that Brahms symphony on the stereo in my living room, I will reach for a book or magazine to read instead of closing my eyes and giving my full attention to the music? If I had the score to follow while the disk was playing, I would be pleased to do that, and it would also count as “doing something.” Anyway, that's my hangup.
If I were a better listener, I would be a better musician. It's obvious that I've taught myself to ignore music when it interferes with work I'm doing, a book I'm reading, or a tricky exit from a highway (the latter is a highly adaptive lapse of musical attention). Music isn't upward in my consciousness. I'm not talking about finding that my attention has wandered from the music while I'm at a concert. I'm talking about hearing music without listening to it, about relegating it to the background.
When I said that I would be a better musician if I were a better listener, I was thinking mainly about my efforts to play jazz and improvise, but it also goes for playing classical music or any music from written notes – alone, but more importantly when playing with other people. For many years I played alto saxophone in a community wind band. To play properly in a large ensemble like that, as many as thirty-five musicians in our case, you have to watch the conductor all the time, you have to read your notes, and you have to hear what the other musicians are doing so you'll stay in tune, stay in tempo, and match the dynamics and phrasing of the band. Usually that doesn't happen, which is why community wind bands can sound so dreadful – aside from the trite music they play. Recently I've been playing baritone saxophone in a big band, and that's even harder, because the rhythms are tricky and the playing is much more intense. If you don't listen to what the rhythm section is playing – the bass, the drums, the piano, and the guitar – you can't stay together with the band. And if each musician fails to listen to what the other saxophones, trombones, and trumpets are playing, the ensemble playing will be an ensemble in name only.
Listening is even more crucial and difficult when you're trying to improvise. You have to hear the song you're playing in you mind, including the harmonies, you have to hear what you're playing, and you have to hear what the rhythm section is playing. If you're playing with a good rhythm section, they will respond to you and vice versa. That means that everybody has to be listening to everybody else. You also have to listen to the other soloists when you're not playing, so that you'll know where to come in when they stop playing, or so that you can add a response to what they're playing, if that's the right thing to do. Or to be inspired by a great solo that might just be happening in front of you.
The only reason why it's possible to do this is the relative simplicity of most of the songs that jazz musicians improvise on. They tend to be thirty-two measures long, divided up into four eight-measure sections, three of which are essentially identical. The rhythm section (drum set, bass, guitar and/or piano) has the responsibility of maintaining that form, and if you're a good listener, you can tell where you are in the song by hearing the chords the rhythm section is playing. Though I've been improving steadily, I'm far from mastering the listening and playing skills you need to be a good improviser, and I usually find myself playing with rhythm sections on my own level – which means they get lost – so I have to know where they should be, even if they aren't actually there.
So how can I improve my listening? Here's my project. I'm going to pick a relatively short jazz piece that I really like – say a five-minute piece featuring by Sonny Rollins, one of my favorite musicians – and I'm going to listen to it systematically. First I'm going to play it and get a general impression. Then I'll focus on the drums, the bass, and the piano in turn. Finally, I'm going to listen to the horns – and I'm going to report on what I hear.
But wait a minute. What's this obsession with “doing something”? It's a superego trip, no question about that. The compulsion to feel that I'm doing something is a legacy from my Lithuanian Jewish forbears in combination with the American work-ethic that I imbibed while growing up. “Don't waste time” was the major imperative. There's a book out, which I haven't read, called Don't Just Do Something, Sit There, by a Jewish-Buddhist teacher with a sense of humor named Sylvia Boorstein. (She also wrote, That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist, which I did read.) I've attended several Buddhist silent meditation retreats, where “sitting there” is valued as “doing something,” and, in fact, it truly is doing something very powerful.
Like most people, I imagine, I waste a lot of time looking for keys and glasses, playing stupid games on the computer, waiting on lines, at traffic lights, and in other situations where precious time just seeps out onto the floor like coffee from a cracked cup. It makes me feel either guilty for spending my time pointlessly or angry because I am constrained to do something pointless. Then I try to use the wisdom I heard from a teacher at the first meditation retreat I attended. She said, “Suppose you do have to wait for twenty minutes on line at the post office. You're still with yourself.” She was right. Sometimes I deal with my own impatience by observing it and that of the other people on line. That's always instructive. Anyway, then I'm “doing something.” I'm observing human behavior, including my own.
The compulsion not to waste time is related with a pervasive feeling of dissatisfaction with myself, the constant obligation to improve myself (another legacy from Jewish Lithuania). So, I wonder about my project of listening carefully to a single jazz piece (at this very moment Sonny Rollins is playing “Just Friends” in the background) until I've really heard as much as I can of what all the musicians are doing separately and together on it. Is it just another obsessive self-improvement project, like remembering to put moisturizing lotion on my feet every morning, a sop to my superego? It certainly won't earn money for me, and that is definitely another criterion for “doing something”: if I'm paid for it, it counts.
At the 2006 international film festival in Jerusalem I saw a film called “The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema,” which was essentially a two hour interview with Slavoj Žižek, an energetic, engaging, and provocative philosopher, psychoanalyst, and cultural critic. In that interview, among a million other things, he spoke of the superego as a demonic presence in the psyche, which was something that I'd never grasped before. As Žižek pointed out, the superego can never be satisfied. It's always posing new demands (I always thought of the superego as a benign supervisor, telling me to do the right thing – which shows how much insight I have into myself!). So, thanks to Žižek, I recognize the voice in me, that's always telling me to “do something” as a demonic presence, not a rational call to organize my life better, to channel my emotions and instincts, to be good to myself (and others).
Perhaps I should be satisfied with the way I hear music now. I enjoy it.
But that's not true. The better I listen to music, the more I enjoy it. If I actually do this listening project and hear a piece a dozen or more times, taking note of what each of the musicians is doing, I'm sure it'll carry over to my less directed listening.
Choosing the Piece – Session One
I have been thinking about this project for months, and I have kept putting off the choice of the piece to work with – my analyst, if I had one, would tell me this was a sign of resistance, that this benign project is threatening to me in some way. The piece has to be short enough to be manageable – I'm not going to listen to a twenty-minute piece for as many times as it takes to hear it all – and it has to be great – if I'm going to devote time to this, the piece has to warrant it. But it also has to be fairly traditional, with a recognizable form and harmonic progression. Right now I'm leaning toward the pieces on a Sonny Rollins compilation called Airegin.
I finally settle on a tune called The Stopper, written by Rollins and originally released in an album called Sonny Rollins with the Modern Jazz Quartet, recorded by Prestige in 1951, when Sonny Rollins was just twenty-one years old and already an unbelievably brilliant, creative musician. On my first listening, I just try to get a general impression. I identify the instruments being played: tenor saxophone, vibraphone, piano, bass, and drums. I notice the tempo (rather fast but not blazing), and I see that the piece is based on the interplay between a quick melody, introduced by the saxophone, and a slower, syncopated, four note break played by the bass and the vibraphone (and maybe by the piano and drums, too – I have to check that out), which comes in frequently. I also notice that it is organized the way jazz performances for small ensembles are usually organized: the theme is introduced, the players improvise on the theme in turn, and then the theme is played again. The saxophone plays the theme and the first solo. Then the vibraphone plays a shorter solo, and finally the pianist solos before the theme is played for the last time. Finally, I cannot help noticing what is essentially the main point: Sonny Rollins' astounding virtuosity on his instrument, matched by both the vibraphone player (Milt Jackson) and the pianist (John Lewis).
The second time around, I decide to try to count out the length of the theme and, if I can, the length of the solos. Generally people talk about “choruses” in this context. A chorus is one full cycle in the piece, initially the melody from beginning to end, and then the improvisations, which are usually the same length as the melody or multiples of that length. I have to stop the playback after the first chorus, because I'm not sure whether there's an introduction before the song begins or whether they just leap right into the melody. In fact, after repeated listenings, I still am not sure I can hear where the first chorus begins and ends, and I am sorely tempted to look up the written music – but I resist that temptation. This exercise is about listening. (Anyway, later on, when I did succumb to the temptation, I couldn't find “The Stopper” in any of the numerous fakebooks I own).
Obviously the name of the piece, “The Stopper,” has something to do with the difficulty I'm having in hearing how it's structured: it stops and starts in surprising places. I'll give it one more listen before I call it a day.
At last I think I'm hearing it right: I'm quite sure it's a twelve-bar blues.
The vast majority of jazz songs are either twelve-bar blues or thirty-two bar standards. When I use the word “bar,” I'm referring to the graphic convention of dividing lines of written music with vertical lines, bar-lines. I must apologize for mentioning such elementary things, but often, when I try to write an explanation of something I know, I find I really don't know it all that well – I can't explain it clearly. So I'll try to explain this to myself. The other word we use for what the bar lines signifies is “measure.” Between every pair of bar lines in written music is a measure, which may contain any number of beats, from one to twelve or more. In most music I know of (with the exception of Gregorian chants) the written measure truly measures something – it makes sense to divide pieces up into measures, and the listener hears the division, even though melodies and phrases usually don't fit into them all that neatly. Gavottes, for example, a common baroque genre, always begin in the middle of the first measure.
So when I talk about a twelve-bar blues form or a thirty-two bar standard form, this generally refers to the number of (usually) four-beat measures there are in the whole tune. To figure out the form of “The Stopper,” I listened to it, counted out four beats, and marked the measures on my fingers. It didn't exactly sound like a blues to me when I was trying to parse it, so I tried to fit it into a thirty-two bar pattern first, and it wouldn't go. I would count as far as twenty-four measures, and then it started over again.
I began to feel frustrated. Why am I having so much trouble in the very first, the simplest stage? The listener encounters two problems in trying to hear the structure of any piece: (1) identifying the meter (two, three, four, or six beats per measure, usually) and (2) hearing what beat the piece starts on. In “The Stopper” the musicians play fast, and it's hard for me to decide whether to think of the basic beat as a quarter note (four beats to a measure) or a half note (two beats to a measure). I'm almost ashamed as I admit this – this sort of thing should be absolutely obvious on the first hearing, but it isn't always for me. That's why I'm doing this exercise with myself.
Session Two - Drummer
Although the form of the piece still eludes me – I'm not quite sure what's happening right at the beginning of it, and that throws me off until Sonny Rollins launches into his first solo – I decide to go on and do what I had planned to do, not get stuck. So I listen to the drummer, Kenny Clarke, of whom it says, on the web site called “Drummerworld”:
“[He] was a highly influential if subtle drummer who helped to define bebop drumming. He was the first to shift the time-keeping rhythm from the bass drum to the ride cymbal.” This means that instead of a steady thump-thump on every beat of the measure, or on the second and fourth beat, you hear a much more subtle, lighter “chang-changa-chang,” with a lot of hissing. It also means that the bass drum, operated by the drummer's foot, is now free to accentuate beats that the drummer wants to hit hard, giving him a lot more flexibility to vary the rhythm and make it more complex.
Why start with the drummer? Partly because I'm not in the habit of listening carefully to drummers, even though I know how important they are. I've played with reasonably good drummers and mediocre drummers, and I know that a good drummer can put your playing over the top, and a bad one can screw you up. The drummer does so much more than keep time, but if he doesn't do that, he can't do all the rest. He may not set the tempo, but he's got to keep it. He plays what are called “kicks,” accentuating places in the melody or filling in when the soloist is holding a long note. Mainly he gives energy and drive to the other musicians, pushing the music along. When the music is slow, he keeps it from falling asleep, and when it's a complex, active Latin polyrhythm, he's the busiest person in the ensemble. In fact drummers are always amazingly active, and I can't imagine how they keep going. Their job demands great physical stamina, speed, and incredible coordination along with fine musicianship. To appreciate the role of drumming in jazz, you don't have to get into the importance of the drum in African culture and the fact that plantation owners deprived their slaves of drums, to prevent them from communicating over long distances, but you do have to remember that rhythm is essential to African-American music, the father and mother of the now international and multi-racial genre known as jazz.
I listen to the piece twice, trying to hear what Clarke was doing, which isn't always easy, because he plays softly, and much of the time the other instruments drown out his sound – which doesn't mean that the other musicians aren't hearing him. He is definitely hearing them, and his drumming always supports what they do. There is a repeated pattern of accented notes in the piece. The drums reinforce the accents, and the rest of the time, when the musicians are playing fast passages, the ride cymbal whizzes along under them, not with separate beats so much as a shimmer of rhythm, like a wave they're riding, with occasional quick smacks on the snare drum. You hear him most strongly when he's most needed, under the piano solo that comes before Sonny Rollins plays the melody again at the end. He doesn't get to play a solo on this tune. After listening to Kenny Clarke here, I find myself paying much more attention to the drummers when I listen to other things during the day.
Session Three – Bass
The double bass plays a role in jazz quite different from the role it plays in a symphony orchestra, where it is typically bowed and reinforces the cellos. In jazz it's usually plucked, and it's one of the three pillars of what's known as the rhythm section – which, in fact, could also be called the harmony section. In early jazz recordings you won't hear a string bass for that very reason: the recording techniques weren't adequate to catch their sound. So you'll hear tubas. Today they're usually amplified, so you can really hear them, and sometimes musicians play bass guitars – but to my ear there's nothing like the acoustic sound of a bass viol.
Percy Heath, the bass player of the Modern Jazz Quartet, doesn't do anything that sounds very special in “The Stopper” – he just plays in fine synchronization with Kenny Clark's drumming, emphasizing the slow notes when “The Stopper” stops and then steaming along with rapid eighth notes, laying down the harmonic structure of the piece while keeping the rhythm going. This performance many not sound special, but Heath's technique is superb. He maintains the energy level and keeps the music together. The term usually used for what he does here is “walking,” but in “The Stopper” it's a lot more like trotting.
The exercise of listening to the music and concentrating on the two least conspicuous performers (in this case), the drummer and the bass player, who don't take solos here and whose playing is mainly supportive of the other musicians, creating the musical texture on which the melodies are embroidered is not easy. My attention is constantly seized by the more dominant musicians, who play melodies. But when I force myself to hear the bass, I hear what the melodists are building on.
Session Three – Piano
Technically, the piano is a percussion instrument: felt hammers hit the keys to make them sound. Thus the piano belongs in the rhythm section of a jazz ensemble. Of course the piano is also one of the most versatile musical instruments ever invented, and that versatility is fully expressed in work of outstanding jazz pianists, including John Lewis. In “The Stopper,” Lewis stays mainly in the background. He contributes to accenting the four note theme that keeps recurring in the piece, playing along with the vibraphone, bass, and drums, and in the passages of fast runs played by the two other soloists, he plays short, soft, syncopated chords – no arpeggios, runs, or ornamentation. Then, after the tenor sax and vibraphone have soloed, the piano plays a short solo, just one twelve-measure chorus – showing what it can do when it feels like it.
I have played in ensembles with a lot of amateur pianists, and they have an almost universal problem when it comes to playing by ear with other musicians: they play too much. When a pianist plays alone, she has to do everything, providing melody, harmony, rhythm, and ornamentation. When the pianist who's used to doing that faces the task of accompanying a soloist in an ensemble where there are already musicians playing the bass line and the rhythm, she doesn't know what to do, and she duplicates what's already being done, making the background heavy and crowded, not leaving the soloist room. But John Lewis, who could play any way he wanted, full or spare, loud or soft, with virtuosity or simplicity, doesn't play a single superfluous note here. His chords guide the listeners' ears – including the soloists' ears – only occasionally standing out with some big and dissonant sound, usually signaling what is known as the “turnaround,” the end of the twelve-bar structure, which, instead of resolving in a cadence, throws the melody back to the beginning.
Meanwhile, after listening to it a dozen times or more, concentrating on the background, I've finally figured out the form of the piece, the connection of the recurring theme made up of four slow notes and the intervening fast sections – it's definitely in the form of a blues, and the four note theme appears both at the beginning and the end of the twelve-measure form.
Because I have some experience as a musician and have taken classes in ear training, it isn't too hard for me to recognize the four note theme as a pattern very common in the movement of bass notes – in both jazz and classical music – one, six, two, five. By playing another instrument along with the record, I quickly figure out that these notes are Bb, G, C, and F. In the first two measures, each note is given two beats: Bb, G; C,F. Then in the next two measures, each note gets one beat, and the pattern is repeated: Bb, G, C,F; Bb, G, C, F. Importantly, those four notes, which themselves are quite ordinary and repeated any number of times, are mainly not played directly on the beat, so instead of creating a static, boring, predictable pattern, they give energy and drive to the piece. As I said, in other jazz standards, those notes are usually given to low instruments to play, and the listener mainly hears the chords and melodies built on top of them – but in “The Stopper” they are so prominent that it's hard to decide whether they, in fact, are the tune, and what Sonny Rollins plays is ornamentation.
Session Four – Vibraphone (and Saxophone)
In the long career of the Modern Jazz Quartet, the vibraphone, played by Milt Jackson, was the main melodic instrument. Here Jackson defers to the guest artist, the young Sonny Rollins – of course back in 1951, Milt Jackson was also no old man. Here he starts off by playing the one-six-two-four theme with the rhythm section. The twelve bar blues is divided into three four bar sections, as one would expect. In the first two of these, the long notes alternate with swift runs by the saxophone, and in the ninth and tenth measures the saxophone takes off, playing short, fast phrases, which are echoed by the vibraphone. In the eleventh measure, the four note theme reappears, and in the twelfth and final measure of the melody, the saxophone plays a phrase that leads back to the beginning of the piece, since the melody is repeated. After they play the melody through again, Sonny Rollins launches into three choruses of improvisation, during the first of which the rhythm section, including the vibraphone, play the four note theme again as a background to the solo.
Rollins is playing the tenor saxophone about as fast as it is humanly possible to play, and in one or two places, it sounds to me as if his fabulous technique comes close to failing him. Not only is he playing great music, he's also challenging the soloist to follow him: can you keep up with me? After Rollins, Jackson plays a two chorus solo, showing that he can keep up with ease, and then some. He uses some of the melodic ideas that appeared in the saxophone solo, with consummate finesse, and then he and Rollins lay out for the chorus while the piano solos, before the quintet plays the melody again, like the first time, and conclude the piece.
The solos are mainly in fast eighth notes, and they go by too quickly for my ear to catch the individual notes – I mainly hear contours, which is probably what most people hear, rising, falling, and twisting melodic lines. To hear the individual notes of the solos, I use Audacity, a free sound-editing program that I have downloaded. The program enables you to listen to the music at the same pitch, but twice as slowly (or even slower). Though it makes the sound of the saxophone ragged and raspy, it lets you hear what Sonny Rollins is doing during his solos, as well as everything that's going on behind him, and it makes me wonder how they could all think so fast musically. If I listen to his solo often enough, played at half speed, there's some possibility that I might learn to play it (slowly) and be able to write down the notes. I've never done the highly recommended exercise of transcribing solos – maybe this is the time.
The Moral
By now I'm hearing more detail in “The Stopper” every time I play it for myself. It took considerable patience to get there, but I surprised myself. At first I was frustrated. I heard much less than I thought I should be hearing, and I kept wishing I had the written notes – because I'm used to that. But I've clearly hit on a method of listening that works for me, one that I can recommend. It's certainly time intensive. “The Stopper” lasts just three seconds shy of three minutes, and I've probably spent more than two hours listening to it. The issue is: How does one spend so much time listening to one piece without getting bored with it? At a jazz school I attended, I had the good fortune of encountering Chris Batchelor, a British trumpet player, who talked about the huge amount of “information” you can get out of just listening, for example, to what the bass drum is doing in a given piece, if the drummer is good. The more such information you hear when you listen to music, the more exciting the music gets.
Jazz solos like those by Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson, and John Lewis in “The Stopper” give us a chance to hear spontaneous musical creativity. Playing like that is a risky activity, because a lot can go wrong, and you never know exactly what's going to happen. Listening to music like this when it's been recorded, and you can hear it as many times as you want to, is very different from listening to it live, when it's gone as soon as it's over. In this case the musicians were playing in a recording session, knowing that they could discard performances they didn't like, and some of the spontaneity of live jazz improvisation was lost – they must have planned the order and number of solos and decided exactly how they would begin and end it. I doubt very much, however, that the music was ever written down. All the musicians knew the standard chord progression of the blues, and the phrases that Rollins plays would be easy for a man with a phenomenal musical memory like his to play by ear.
As for the piece being a blues, as I said, I doubt that many listeners, hearing it for the first time, would hear it as a blues. It certainly doesn't have the haunting kind of melody we associate with a blues. In that sense, it's like several Charlie Parker tunes (such as “Billie's Bounce,” “Chi Chi,” or “Au Pivave”), which could be interpreted as self-conscious, modernist commentary on the blues form – using it to do something new and different, difficult and sophisticated. Rollins' playing especially, with the shimmering cymbal underneath it, driving it forward, sounds aggressively brilliant: listen to me! He's a young man with great, infectious energy, already at the top of his ability, commanding attention with bravura. He may be playing a blues, but he definitely doesn't have them!
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