Vocabulary: Part II

While it may be the easiest to learn and the most important for a beginning improvisor, the system of vocabulary pioneered by Charlie Parker, with its catalog of stock licks, is only one of the improvisatory methods found in jazz. As the harmonic character of the music progressed, the methods used in melodic improvisation changed to suit the new styles of music. For the quick chord changes found throughout bebop, Parker's collage method functions extraordinarily well, but it seems almost out of place in the modal world of the 60's. On the other hand, starting in the early 40's, a group of improvisors known as the Tristano school promoted a improvisational method that seemed to ignore vocabulary entirely. When taken as a whole, these contrasting approaches show that the issue of vocabulary transcends short motivic ideas and is better described as a malleable set rules that govern improvisation.

Early jazz players constructed their solos by playing variations of the melody of whatever song they were playing. On the surface level, the virtuosic music of the bebop period did away with this practice, favoring intricate chromatic lines that referred only to the chord progression that the original melody was built on; but the idea of variation remained part of the improvisatory process and increased in importance as the technical fireworks of Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown came to a tragic early end. Beginning most notably in the solos of John Coltrane in the early 60's – more in his own quartet recordings than his work with Miles Davis – a method that combined stock vocabulary with variation began to appear. Transcriptions of Coltrane's solos on songs like “Impressions” will show that he works with only a handful of small melodic cells to create long passages of music; he frequently even begins each phrase with the same basic idea, tagging on new endings or changing the rhythmic character of the motive. To put this into practice in your own playing, simply pick your favorite D minor lick and play it over and over on “So What” and “Impressions”. Find out ways to make repetition of a small amount of material musically interesting: alter the rhythms of the phrase, play with longer or shorter notes, add notes in between the notes, play with a different volume level or in a different register of your instrument, etc. This technique works best in modal jazz, as the music provides you with long stretches of time to experiment in. Unsurprisingly, interviews with Coltrane at the time show that this was his primary reason for his movement into modal jazz.

While this style of improvisation was maturing from the 40's to the 60's, an entirely separate school flourished almost literally right beside it, but would become largely ignored due to its association with the less technical Cool Jazz movement. Recordings of the blind pianist Lennie Tristano are difficult to acquire these days, but his theory of improvisation, propagated by his two most well-known students Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz, provided a radically different approach to playing jazz. Though his style would become almost synonymous with pure improvisation, his teaching ironically reached back to the European classical tradition; students of Tristano studied the music of Baroque era and sight-singing, hoping to acquire a natural sense of melody that they could tap into in their solos. The resultant music drew equally from J.S. Bach and Charlie Parker.

As voiced through Lee Konitz, the Tristano school strayed from a strict vocabulary method, hoping to improvise as spontaneously as possible when on the bandstand: that is, if you were to transcribe multiple Konitz solos, no greater body of melodic patterns could be found. But Konitz still manages to sound like Konitz on all of his work, revealing that there was some system he used to create his solos. What is at work here is probably a systematic use of basic musical techniques. Simple concepts such as suspensions, chromatic leading tones, appogiaturas, and trills can go a long way in transforming basic melodic material into a finished musical product. The melodies of Frederic Chopin achieve there signature parlor-room sound by applying these techniques to what would otherwise be a old-fashioned melody. In some ways, this approach is easier to learn and to apply: memorizing the effect of a handful of choices is easy and ultimately based upon personal feeling, while the memorization of bebop vocabulary is highly mechanical and takes hours of practice. On the other hand, creating long, flowing lines with this system is incredibly challenging and requires the soloist to devote almost 100% of their attention to the moment at hand; similarly, playing a song with a lot of quick chord changes – all of the songs that the Tristano school played – becomes more difficult, as you have no prepared material to navigate tough passages. If you begin to investigate this method, you'll quickly gain an appreciation for the music that Marsh and Konitz made and learn to overlook their comparatively small repertoire.

In the end, the establishment of a personal vocabulary comes down to finding a concrete set of rules by which you'll guide yourself in solos. Coherence is key, and until you can achieve it in your music, you'll be stuck as a beginner. Any of these techniques will help you in achieving that goal. If these ideas seem restrictive to you, consider the work of avant-garde saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton: while he started as a free jazz musician, he quickly developed a compositional style with which to frame his work. Braxton's work is in no way simple, but it achieves unity by his own rules, and the adept listener can connect the dots presented by Braxton's music in his head. Remember, true freedom is found in restrictions, and everything is chaos.