"Don't do that again"
Notes on jazz improv, tradition, and artistic expression.
If you know nothing else about jazz music, you probably know it’s a genre of improvisation.
Unlike any other form of modern music, jazz has gained a reputation for extemporaneous artistic expression—with trumpet, saxophone, and piano players lining up, song after song, to take impromptu solos. Taking solos is not unique to jazz, of course, but when you attend a live performance by your favorite rock or pop band, you can pretty much expect any instrumental solos to sound like the recorded version. With jazz, we expect a good deal of the song to be composed right there on the spot, in real time, improvised.
I used to find jazz improv a bit mystifying. You mean… they’re just making it up as they go? Improv seemed chaotic and thus hard to follow, the musical equivalent of stream of consciousness writing. This partly explains why I took little interest in the music for the first twenty years of my life. However, when I finally got hooked on jazz in college (largely thanks to the mellow trumpet work of Chet Baker and a local café that played Django Reinhardt on Saturday mornings), I began to slowly hear the rhyme and reason in the idioms that once sounded merely haphazard.
I’m now convinced that jazz improv—in the hands of a competent musician, at least—serves as a supreme model of artistic excellence. Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how jazz might inform my own creative work in poetry. This essay is my first attempt at tracing out the possibilities, and I want to begin with a closer look at the true character of musical improvisation.
The first and most obvious point is that improvising a solo takes skill. It assumes a high level of proficiency with musical theory, technique, and, in the context of a band, listening. I used to think jazz improv was the display of more or less random musical rule-breaking; now it seems that, while a soloist may indeed flout traditional rules or expectations, he must simultaneously internalize a great deal of musical theory for his performance to work. Thus the oft-quoted words of Picasso: “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
The fastest way to grasp the skill demanded by improvisation is to pick up an instrument and try it yourself. I’ve been playing guitar for fifteen years and have a decent ear for catching on to songs. Still, I panic when I’m asked to take a solo in the middle of a jam. Nothing else so reveals one’s command of an instrument, or lack thereof. Novice soloists (myself included) will resort to any number of back-pocket riffs, licks, or runs to fill the space, save-face techniques rehearsed in advance. Great musicians, by contrast, though not without tricks or stylistic tendencies, possess the musical freedom to compose new phrases that respond to the unique dynamics of the moment.
Jazz historian Ted Gioia tells the story of how bassist Charles Mingus used to discourage his band members from performing a song the same way twice. If, on any given night, a musician managed to dazzle the audience with his solo, Mingus would yell at him: “Don’t do that again!” Why not? Gioia explains the dangers of playing to the crowd:
When you play a crowd-pleasing solo, the temptation is to try to re-create the same phrases at the next performance, and the next one after that, and so on. But a kind of rigor mortis sets into jazz when improvisers start down that enticing path. Instead of capturing the heat of the moment, they are left trying to rekindle the embers of gigs long departed. “Don’t do that again” may well be the most potent jazz mantra, a guidepost for the musician who seeks the highest peaks of artistic transcendence. (Ted Gioia. How to Listen to Jazz, Basic Books, 2016, p. 48.)
This story highlights the basic difference between performing and composing a piece of music. Jazz, much like bluegrass, is built on a rich tradition of “standards,” with which all self-respecting musicians of the genre are expected to be acquainted. This unofficial repertoire of classic tunes provides musicians with an authority to study. Renditions of songs like “Autumn Leaves” or “Body and Soul” have appeared on hundreds of jazz set lists and albums in the last hundred years. But here’s the thing: no two performances are identical. We search in vain for one authoritative version of “Autumn Leaves,” as far as I know, because jazz musicians don’t only perform the standards; they add to them.
Enter: improv!
Ultimately, musical improvisation is a form of spontaneous composition. It is creating during a performance, writing something new (a solo) within something given (a song, written in the past). If the soloist resorts to repeating what he played last time, his performance becomes a recital. “Don’t do that again!” But when he listens and responds to the music in real time—the tempo, time signature, key, dynamics, mood of the other musicians, etc.—he has begun to ascend the peaks of artistic transcendence.
Note how far we’ve come from my initial understanding of improv as a free-for-all. In truth, the improvising musician is almost always limited by his own skill level (since no musician has total mastery) and the demands of the song in time. Paradoxically, though, these limitations establish the very parameters within which creative freedom finds meaningful expression.
A child of the 20th century, jazz music has always been obsessed with novelty. Ezra Pound’s modernist injunction to make it new permeates the spirited trumpet solos of Miles Davis, the outlandish saxophone phrasings of John Coltrane, and—not to be outdone—the whimsical, sonorous piano plodding of Thelonious Monk. Yet, unlike some expressions of modern art (e.g., poetry, painting), jazz has never seemed determined to untether itself from its own tradition. Perhaps this is because the genre is hardly 100-years-old. But I wonder if it has more to do with the formative role of jazz standards, which function both as initiation rites and vehicles of innovation.
I doubt T.S. Eliot listened to much jazz,1 but I think he would have appreciated the way standards have shaped the genre. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Eliot argues, first, that artists (this case poets) must submit themselves to an external tradition before attempting to create and, second, that their new work can alter the entire tradition. This lengthy passage is worth your time:
What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order … will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
Now, let’s imagine that the members of Charles Mingus’s band took to heart his injunction: “Don’t do that again!” Night after night, though performing many of the same songs, each soloist resolved to embrace the moment and play something new, to compose spontaneously. With each performance, the songs took on fresh characteristics; they expanded. The music of the past was altered by the music of the present, in the present. This is the magic of improvisation.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that spontaneous composition is the only virtuosic form of artistic expression. Learning and reciting a classical piece of music, for instance, can demand impressive degrees of discipline and fluency. But when it comes to embracing the heat of the moment, I believe jazz improv stands alone.
What can poets, painters, and other artists learn from jazz giants like Mingus? Three points come to mind:
Know your craft. Remember that the freedom of improv is only attained through the disciplines of theory, technique, and time, time, time.
Study the tradition. Submit yourself to the canon of your art. Make the “standards” your own. Be so directed by the past that you can alter it.
Resist the temptation to rekindle the embers of past success. (Unless you wish to become a cover band.) Art is not a repeatable experience. Instead, attend to the moment and respond when your time is right. When this seems impossible, return to #1 and #2.
A great jazz solo captures all three of these points in a majestic 60-second window. Composing a poem or painting or novel will rarely feel so spontaneous. But that doesn’t mean we can’t approach our creative work with a spirit of improv. Just bear in mind—anything could happen.
Here’s a jazz playlist I’ve been building since 2017. Hit shuffle and bop!
Although, he was originally from St. Louis, MO, one of the Midwest’s few jazz hubs during Eliot’s lifetime.