Writing Jazz Wrong
Poet and jazz musician Al Basile discusses the creative process
While there’s always something about the peaks of human achievement—by composers, athletes, inventors, explorers, architects, artists, dancers, mathematicians, actors, singers, filmmakers—any field of mortal human endeavor—there’s an extra jolt we get from those who work in real time. A singer or an actor, a baseball or basketball player, alive and in our presence, can move us in the moment of performance. And of that group of real-time performers, the near-miraculous statement of a great jazz improvisor, who’s not only playing something compelling but making it up on the spot, is even more uncanny. How is it done? What does it feel like to be doing it?
In interviews, jazz soloists usually mention that they seek to make their mind a blank, achieving what athletes call the flow state, where you’re not engaged in linear thinking, but an unconscious process. But they don’t go further into what they are aware of as the music flows into them. “What is it like in there?” we wonder.
It turns out that art forms which make it their business to show humans in the midst of acts great and small, like fiction and film and even autobiography, do a fairly lousy job of answering these questions. They fall short for different reasons and in different ways, and we remain on the outside, stupefied by great playing but no closer to sensing the heart of the act. Sometimes we’re even misled by a facile and faulty portrayal. Let’s look at how novels, memoirs, and movies have treated the idea of a great jazz player, and suggest why they are so variously unsatisfying.
Most novels whose protagonist is a jazz player are written in the third person, the better to allow for others to describe the player from the outside, and perhaps to avoid having to capture what’s going on in that mind while it’s at work. That also allows a treatment of how he affects his environment and is affected by it, the better to mythologize him as a powerful, tortured, usually socially maladroit creature burdened, transformed, and punished by a talent it doesn’t have to explain.
Dorothy Baker’s 1938 novel Young Man With a Horn (whose character is based on Bix Beiderbecke), John Clellon Holmes’ 1958 novel The Horn (whose hero is part Lester Young and part Charlie Parker), and James Baldwin’s 1957 long story Sonny’s Blues feature personalities with deep connection to the music and drive for self-expression, but all emphasize the difficulties and self-destructiveness that attend the jazz life more than they address the details of the act of creation. Holmes resorts to metaphor in characterizing his protagonist:
“Edgar Pool blew methodically, eyes beady and open, and he held his tenor saxophone almost horizontally extended from his mouth. This unusual posture gave it the look of some metallic albatross caught insecurely in his two hands, struggling to resume flight.”The tendency to use poetic or impressionistic language to create a parallel to the process of improvisation appears throughout Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, which is in the third person but often moves into third person point of view in the voice of jazz legend Buddy Bolden, speaking about his state of mind while playing—a mind which we know is destined to end in madness:
"He would open the front door and the sounds would slip out into the street, a solo cornet voice, and you could hear the man creating it, the way his mind was slicing up the tune, throwing out the melody, searching, taking it back in, throwing it out again. He played what he wanted to hear, and if he didn’t like it he would stop, shake his head, and begin again."Sometimes it’s in first person:
"There’s a point, a point when you’re playing, when you throw the music up and it doesn’t come down. You’ve hit something. Maybe it’s just a moment, maybe it lasts for two bars, but it’s there and gone and you know you can’t get it back. You chase it the rest of the night."While these passages are poetic depictions of intuition and judgment at work, they don’t attempt anything more than a parallel to the states of awareness involved: juggling listening to a rhythm section creating rhythm and harmony behind you; choosing your own notes as you play; and being aware of their implications for now and the immediate future, as well as their evocation of note patterns from the past and what they can suggest (the source of familiar quotes, with melodic or harmonic transformations from other musical contexts). All of this occurs while you are simultaneously expressing emotion in your playing. Nor is the physical act of playing mentioned, with the breath and the whole body playing fundamental roles.
Well, what about films whose protagonists are jazz soloists, whether based on fiction or non-fictional characters? Here we find that the natural ability of film to present the externals of events, along with a relatively shorter script, makes it less suited to, and leaves less room for, interior psychology. Instead we get an emphasis on personal obsession, social dysfunction, and self-destruction.
In the 1950 film Young Man With a Horn, made from Dorothy Baker’s novel, Kirk Douglas plays a supposedly Bix Beiderbecke-like character placed in a decidedly unreal version of a musician’s life. The tenor guitarist Eddie Condon, who knew and played with Bix, remarked in his memoir We Called It Music that “in the movie, Bix ends up with Doris Day. In real life Bix would have outrun sound to get away from her.” Aside from a portrayal of the character’s need to play something “pure” above all else (as opposed to the commercial opportunities he gets), and discussions of his “gift,” we get even fewer insights into his process than those in the book.
In the 1966 film A Man Called Adam, which was not based on a novel, Sammy Davis Jr. plays Adam Johnson, a trumpet player struggling with personal demons rather than revealing his internal thought processes beyond an embarrassingly simplistic, and misleading, comment: “I got to hit that note. That high note. That’s the one that makes it all right.”
The closest we get to a prescription for the playing process, though it doesn’t address the simultaneous states of mind of the soloist, can be found in Clint Eastwood’s 1988 film Bird, where Forrest Whitaker as Charlie Parker says “You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.” This is a paraphrase of an actual Parker comment; the film is based on Ross Russell’s book Bird Lives!: The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker (1973), which is a collection of real life anecdotes about Parker, but which lacks any extra insight into the genius which lay behind and directed his actions.
Other films on the same kinds of characters, like 1986’s ‘Round Midnight, where Dexter Gordon’s portrayal of a Lester Young-inspired tenor player is arresting, and Spike Lee’s 1990 Mo’Better Blues, where Denzel Washington’s character is fictional, remain on the outside of the issue of the player’s state of mind, focusing instead on his social context and struggle, such as when Washington’s Bleek Gilliam says “A musician’s only as good as his last solo.”
“You’ve got to go there to know there.” Zora Neale Hurston
It makes sense that an internal process so complex, that is made to appear so simple, will be poorly understood by writers who are not improvisors themselves. The best they can hope to do is to create plausible second-hand parallels to the experience, for a readership which is mostly ignorant of the process themselves. Between that and the additional need for commercial appeal in novels and films, it’s no surprise that we get so little insight from them.
But what of the personal accounts, then—the memoirs and autobiographies of great soloists? There are such things, going back to early pioneers like Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, and continuing to books by latter day boppers like Art Pepper and Hampton Hawes. Modern giants Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus have their autobiographies as well. And here we find that there is more of an emphasis placed on learning to play the instrument in a rich musical environment, the models on whom a soloist’s style is based, and the process of listening and internalizing one’s influences, than on the way such learning happens, and the mental states engaged while improvising.
Both Armstrong, in his Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, and Bechet, in Treat It Gentle, make much of the cooperation among musicians; learning to play and to improvise are described as an interconnected process, without separate details.
In Straight Life, altoist Art Pepper dwells more on band experiences and personal struggles than on methods used to learn, or the interior climate of the player in flight. Pianist Hampton Hawes, in Raise Up Off Me, provides his basic method of listening to records and playing along, but doesn’t diagnose it further than to express it as an organic process. Like Pepper, Hawes spends much time on his battle with heroin addiction – his account of being put in an all-junkie Army unit in Korea, and responding to a Red Chinese human wave assault by returning the assault with a human wave of irritated junkies, is one of the most vivid and effective parts of his book.
Such subjects were not lost on the publishers of these memoirs. Probably the most telling fact about Charles Mingus’ Beneath the Underdog is the cutting of the original manuscript to a third of its length, with the more detailed music material excised, and the accounts of escapades with Tijuana whores left in. Mingus was deeply unsatisfied with the published version.
While Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Herbie Hancock all address how they grew as players and innovators in their respective autobiographies Miles, To Be or Not To Bop, and Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, they all emphasize the product and selected elements of the process, instead of dwelling on the interior state of mind while soloing.
Even Woody Allen, who has spent his adult life learning to improvise on the clarinet, and who could be expected to have some insight on the matter, had his Django Reinhardt-inspired guitarist Emmet Ray say, in Allen’s 1990 film Sweet and Lowdown, when asked what went through his mind while he was playing, “That I'm underpaid, I think about that sometimes."
I would trace the absence of answers to the question about the magic of making the solo “How is it done? What does it feel like to be doing it?” to four main causes. First, them that say don’t really know—they are forced to create a parallel to an internal experience. That’s why there’s much said about the emotional element, which can be described directly, and much said about the psychic states indirectly, using metaphor and impressionistic language. That’s why Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter is so poetic—we don’t have conventional language for the reality expressed. Geoff Dyer’s almost-novel, almost-non-fiction But Beautiful is another example of this approach. It is a remarkable attempt to reimagine the inner point of view of greats like Lester Young, Thelonius Monk, Chet Baker, and others, during important moments in their lives. The dialogue is believable but invented. Dyer does attempt to get into poetic inner monologues—but still from the point of view of an outsider.
Second, books and films exist in the marketplace, and must appeal to an audience which has become accustomed to the tried and true appeal of sensationalism of all kinds. In our age we expect to see cars explode and people scream in panic. We don’t look to Mingus’ Tijuana whores for revelations about their inner states of mind. There are more marketable parts to the lives of jazz musicians, so we get self-destruction, social dysfunction, and alienation instead of the inner workings of spontaneous creation.
Third, language itself is ill suited to describing these inner workings, because it is most often linear, while the mind of the improvisor is balancing many simultaneous states of awareness—time, space in the room, harmony, melody, rhythm, outside sounds, inside ones, the immediate past, the present, the implications for the future, the physical demands of the instrument, the sense of being looked at and listened to… and moving fluidly through them as they change. That’s why poetic prose comes closer than conventional prose—and why a poet could come closer still, because words in poems are structured to perform different simultaneous functions, so the product makes a more naturally close parallel to the jobs done by the notes in the solo. Both activities integrate multiple simultaneous realities.
Finally, we have the problem of those who know first-hand the experience of improvised creation—the musicians themselves, who have devoted their lives to expressing the complexity of their being—but in notes, not in words. They’ve already made their choice of how to be. Even those artists who are most gifted speaking in words have not taken up the task. Duke Ellington, who had a flair for language, used it most often to generate charm and deflect unwanted attention. His book Music is My Mistress is a fascinating mosaic of vignettes which conceal as much as they reveal about their author. His mosaic piece on Coleman Hawkins digresses after a paragraph on Hawk into an account of Ellington meeting the King of Thailand, and a page later ends the story by saying “Coleman Hawkins should have been there that night too.”
If only Paul Desmond, altoist nonpareil, had completed the memoir he said he was writing in the last years of his life. Desmond had considerable command of the language; it was he who, upon seeing a young woman he had chatted up on the break during a club date leave in the middle of the next set with a well-heeled, gray-haired gentleman, remarked, “This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker.”
Ah, what he might have been able to tell us! But then, no memoir manuscript was ever found after his death. It appears he never even began it, preferring to keep his own counsel.
There's not much poetry to be found in them, but Garry L. Hagberg has written persuasively about the experience of jazz improvisation as real-world ethics in various academic papers.