Sudnow Ways of the Hand a Rewritten Account

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Ways of the Hand


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Ways of the HandA Rewritten Account

David Sudnow

foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus

The MIT PressCambridge, Massachusetts

London, England


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1978, 1993, 2001 David Sudnow

All rights reserved.

This book was set in Sabon by The MIT Press and was printed andbound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sudnow, David.Ways of the hand : a rewritten account / David Sudnow ; forewordby Hubert L. Dreyfus.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references (p. )ISBN 0-262-19467-8 (hc. : alk. paper)1. Improvisation (Music). 2. Hand. 3. JazzInstruction and

study. 4. Phenomenology. I. Dreyfus, Hubert L. II. Title.MT68 .S89 2001786.2'16593dc21 2001044330


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To my extraordinary wife, Cathryn


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The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomesand not justthings: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in thehands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designsand signs, presumably because man is a sign . . . the hands gestures

run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity preciselywhen man speaks by being silent. And only when man speaks, does hethinknot the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Everymotion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself throughthe element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in thatelement.Martin Heidegger

The meaning of a sentence appears intelligible throughout, detachablefrom the sentence and finitely self-subsistent in an intelligible world,because we presuppose as given all those exchanges, owed to thehistory of the language, which contribute to determining its sense. Inmusic, on the other hand, no vocabulary is presupposed, the meaningappears as linked to the empirical presence of the sounds, and that is

why music strikes us as dumb. But in fact . . . the clearness of languagestands out from an obscure background, and if we carry our researchfar enough we shall eventually find that language is equally uncommu-nicative of anything other than itself, that its meaning is inseparablefrom it.Maurice Merleau-Ponty


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Contents

Foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus ixA Rewritten Account xvAcknowledgments xxi

Preface 1

Beginnings 5

Going for the Sounds 37

Going for the Jazz 73

Notes 131


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Foreword

This unique, challenging, and rewarding book speaks to manydifferent constituencies of readers: sociologists, linguists, cog-nitive scientists, musicologists, teachers, and philosophers, to

name a few. It has something to say to all these disciplinesbecause it is not a theoretical book. Rather, it grapples with thetask of articulating the relevant details of a paradigm case ofthe phenomena to which all these disciplines are ultimatelyresponsible: the ways embodied beings acquire the skills ofgiving order to, or, better, finding order in, our temporally

unfolding experience. It is a phenomenology of how we cometo find our way about in the world, whether it be the world ofjazz, discourse, typing, tennis, or getting on and off the bus.

As a study of how our bodies gain their grasp of the world,Ways of the Hand is in the tradition of Merleau-Pontys Phe-nomenology of Perception. Sudnow writes:

Sitting at the piano, trying to make sense of what was happening, andstudying Merleau-Pontys discussions of embodiment, I found myself, inhis own terms, not so much encountering a new philosophy as recog-nizing what [one] had been waiting for. A copy of his Phenomenologyalways remains close at hand.

Like Phenomenology of Perception, Sudnows work has impor-tant implications for those who want to understand the nature

of skillful performance. Sudnows detailed description of his


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x Foreword

acquisition of the skilled hands of a jazz pianist shows the limi-

tations of a cognitivism that thinks that having a skill consists ininteriorizing the theory of a domain.

Sudnow starts, in Beginnings, by hunting for particularfeatures, in his case the notes on the piano keyboard, and prac-ticing following rules, such as the typical jazz scales, until theybecome second nature.

After much experience such a novice progresses to the stagewhere he finds himself able to reach for gestalts, like chords orscales as a whole, without having to think about them, andthen to begin to apply maxims, such as repeat this melodiccluster, as in his Going for the Sounds. Next, at a level onemight call intermittent competence, the student has to form a

strategy to get from one situation to the next, as Sudnowbegins to do in the first part of Going for the Jazz. Finally,this too becomes something the hand can do, so that now thereis a strategy without a strategist, although such proficiency isstill interrupted by the occasional need to thematize aspects ofthe performance. After years of accumulating specific experi-ences of many thousands of ways to move, he gradually mas-ters the essence of improvisational play with the developmentof a finely shaped (and herein closely described) rhythmic coor-dination that synthesizes such movements into true jazz sen-tences. As Going for the Jazz reaches its climax, there isfinally no longer an I that plans, not even a mind that aimsahead, but a jazz hand that knows at each moment how to

reach for the music.1

1. In the course of his detailed phenomenology, Sudnow implicitlycorrects a subtle but surprising error in Phenomenology of Perception.Merleau-Ponty occasionally characterizes the lived body as an I can,whereas Sudnow is clear that it is not he but his hand that reaches forthe jazz, as, in the Odyssey, Homer says of his heroes that, when theysat down to a banquet, their hands went out to the food in front of


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Foreword xi

Sudnows detailed description suggests that the cognitivist

theory of skill acquisition, taken for granted from Socrates toDescartes to Kant to Husserl to Piaget, has the phenomenonupside down. Rather than moving from specific cases toabstract principles, skill acquisition seems to move in the oppo-site direction, from principles followed until they are interior-ized, to the possession of so many types of concrete cases paired

with types of responses that each situation leads fluidly to thenext. This doesnt prove that the cognitivist is mistaken, but itshifts the burden of proof to those who think of skill acquisi-tion as the acquisition of more and more refined rules.

Likewise, empiricists, who think of skills in terms of associ-ations of experiences or the formation of linear neural connec-

tions (what Merleau-Pontys contemporaries called the reflexarc), would have to defend their view in the face of the phe-nomenon noted by both Merleau-Ponty and Sudnow that onecan transfer ones skills from what one hand has learned to theother hand, or, as Sudnow notes, from playing on an adults toa childs keyboard.

But Sudnows work moves in the opposite direction fromMerleau-Pontys. Like any philosopher, Merleau-Ponty pro-vides only enough detail in his description of action and per-ception to motivate his move to generality and ultimately toontology, whereas Sudnow purposefully restricts himself, inwhat he calls a production account, to reveal only the con-creteness of situated relevant detail. And in articulating one of

the most subtle, rich, intricate, and inarticulate skills humanbeings have developed, Sudnow provides new insights into

them. The only way to account for Merleau-Pontys misleading char-acterization of the egoless agency of the skilled body involved in a taskis that, for reasons we cannot explore here, he took over the expres-sion I can from Husserl, who did think of all action as produced by

an egos aiming at a goal.


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xii Foreword

how the body takes over a domain and, most particularly, how

it uses varying styles of pulsation to coordinate the temporalunfolding of skilled activity, whether it be music or speech.This adds flesh to Merleau-Pontys analysis and implicitlydevelops further Merleau-Pontys critique of the subject/objectaccount of being-in-the-world.2

Sudnow is able to describe how complex temporal skills are

organized because he is a unique hybrid. By the time we areable to reflect, we are already living in our language, and aslinguistic beings we are in a poor position to offer a phenom-enology of how speaking works. Sudnow, however, began tolearn jazz improvisation at the age of thirty, before which timehe had been trained as a social anthropologist. Thus he is a

unique combination of skilled observer and professional musi-cian. His pathbreaking work in this book not only gives us aninsight into all skill acquisition by following the developmentof a particularly subtle skill; it puts him, as such an experi-enced hybrid, in a special position to attempt to articulate thehidden achievements of a mature speaker, as he is now aimingto accomplish with studies of his own experiences in learninga second language. We can look forward to his report.

Meanwhile, this new and improved version ofWays of theHand will continue to reward readers who want to catch a

2. Research that comes from another directionfrom such broad detailsas that the body moves forward more easily than backward and has tobalance in a gravitational fieldcan also lead to new understanding of

what Merleau-Ponty calls motor intentionality and thus of the bodyas a way of being that is neither subject nor object, but the discloser ofthe spatiotemporal world. See Samuel Todess Body and World (MITPress, 2001). Sudnows and Todess work carry forward and go beyondMerleau-Pontys phenomenology of the active body. Together they areuniquely at the forefront in doing Merleau-Ponty-inspired research onembodiment, and not, as so many others do, merely interpretingMerleau-Pontys philosophy.


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Foreword xiii

glimpse of the magic their body performs every moment as they

find their way about in the world.

Hubert L. DreyfusProfessor of Philosophyin the Graduate SchoolUniversity of California, Berkeley


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A Rewritten Account

The constant rereading of a manuscript before publication mayyield a discomfiting sense that theres not that much at all to thetome on which youve worked for so long. And when in 1977 I

could read every word of this report in a half hour, I had toforce myself to turn it in to the publisher quickly and forgetabout it as best I could.

Nearly twenty-five years later I decided to wrap up thenationwide music teaching program Id developed over most ofthe time since this books completion, and return to full-time

writing. My first goal was to be a volume on the basis andimplementation of my keyboard learning philosophy, a musictraining method that gradually evolved out of some findingsfirst reported here.1 That would bring closure to a long chapterof my life. The chance arose for an extended stay in Europe,and I decided to work on this project there.

With the exception of a few yearlong visiting professorships,Id had very little contact with the academic world I left in 1975to write about and then teach music. So on little more than alark, I posted a notice on a bulletin board I came upon bychance on the Web, a couple of weeks before leaving the States.It was an international site for a specialty within social sciencethat studies ordinary commonsense thinking, a group with


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xvi A Rewritten Account

which I was associated during its formative years in the sixties,

and from which some of my early thoughts for studying musicderived.2 My posting simply said I was coming to Europe andwould be happy to give some talks at universities if there wasany interest in that.

After such a long hiatus, only a few contributors to this sitewere familiar to me, but apparently many knew early sociolog-

ical research Id done,3

and this book itself had gained theambiguous reputation of being some sort of a classic. Theresponse to my posting was unexpected. Over a dozen invita-tions were emailed within a few days from universities through-out Europe. By the time my flight left, I had a tight speakingschedule up ahead.

As time neared for my first talks, after about two monthsabroad, Id been busy outlining my intended report on training.But it would still take much more thinking to firm up a fullybookworthy plan from the collection of notes and incompleteessays written in my scarce spare time over the past decades, asI was developing a philosophy of education while needing tomake a living with it.

At the last moment I decided to talk about Ways of the Hand,instead of my efforts with pedagogy just yet. I figured Id be onfirmer footing, and that my audiences would as readily wel-come a discussion of this book.

At the first two lectures, in Oxford and Wales, I had such anawkward time summarizing a thesis I assumed Id recall in

close detail, despite the passage of so many years, that I knewId need to reread this book for the first time since its publica-tion, and do so soon, in a five-day break before my next talk.I found a paperback copy in an Oxford bookstore and spentthose full days trying to decipher what in the world it wasabout in detail.


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A Rewritten Account xvii

At the next presentation I was only slightly better prepared.

It was a difficult description to thematize briefly. As the lecturetour progressed I got a bit better at speaking about it, but therewere still some critical places in the study that I couldnt easilysummarize because I couldnt easily follow them. My last expe-rience with the book, that half hour of reading when it wasdone in the seventies, had been clearly artifactual. Then, I knew

its details like the palm of my hand, and it wasnt so much amatter of reading a book as scanning the score for some musicor the script for a part thats already been well memorized.

There had been differences of opinion about the study. Somereviewers called it poetic, and there were universities where itwas assigned as an example of especially intricate description.

But it also captured other imaginations as the most convolutedwriting in print, and some professors assigned it for students tosee just that. In any event, it was a dense dissertation to digest.The book had become one of those works that are widely pur-chased because of certain mass media reviews, but so esotericthat theyre seldom read closely enough to yield aneven approx-imately accurate synopsis.

In a phone call with my editor at the MIT Press, the bookspaperback publisher, I mentioned the idea of a rewrite, and myreservations about such an odd notion. His quick enthusiasmwas startling, exciting, and a bit disconcerting. It would meanpostponing my intended project for some months, but moreimportantly, I now worried whether I could really justify rewri-

ting an earlier published work simply because it was hard toread.

I knew I couldnt alter its form because the developmentalnarrative was essential, and a reorganization at that level ranthe high risk of a total unraveling that might be impossible toreweave. If I augmented the account in other than an arbitrary


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xviii A Rewritten Account

waytaking this or that occasion to say moreit would evolve

into a different book. A revision being out of the question, somesort of an edit seemed the sole sensible solution.

I put out the request to friends for any cases they might rec-ollect of an author essentially rewriting his own publishedwork, citations I could at least invoke to help somehow warrantthe effort, if only to myself. I got nothing back of any relevance.

Of course the decision came down to one issue: did the bookoffer a perspective and findings of sufficient import that pro-viding for their greater accessibility might amount to more thana possibly pleasant yet rather self-indulgent and potentiallyembarrassing enterprise?

I obviously decided that the gains are worth the risks. So,

alaswhile Id have preferred it if another could have done thejobIve reedited my own book, and the MIT Press has beenbold enough to publish it.

Some small sections have been eliminated and others added,many pages touched up, and many left almost as they were. Butin some places, particularly, the original descriptions were sointricate that I clearly hadnt rights to fret over a lack of seriousreaders.

As I recovered the detailed sense of it all by starting to rewritethe book, I felt I could trim down and clean up these more dif-ficult sections with some success, and that minor changes wouldincrease the clarity throughout. Trying to avoid gratuitous

remarks that might take on a diversionary life of their own, Ifound it essential not so much to translate the language into adifferent one, as to try to clarify it on its own terms at its ownpace.

Surprised to find myself as engrossed in the findings as whenthey were first reportedwell, that convinced me it was worth

the effort. The book proposes some possible discoveries about


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A Rewritten Account xix

how certain detailed aspects of improvised conduct are orga-

nized. I intended it as nothing more or less than a descriptivelyclose account of some essential problematic tasks faced in theproduction of a three- or four-second spate of sensible linguis-tic gesturing. Twenty-odd years of extensive piano playing later,I find that its descriptions of key aspects of musical-linguisticskill remain sufficiently valid, and so far as I know not chal-

lenged, that I can simply restate them. And perhaps moreclearly.The report is about jazz piano playing, and most particu-

larly so. But by the time it was done, I also saw it as a sort ofprolegomenon to the study of talking. There is so much incommon between ordinary speaking and musical improvisa-

tion that, at the least, not to expect descriptions of experienceat producing one to inform approaches to the other is plainlyunreasonable:

The body makes rapid and finely articulated moves from oneplace to the next on time, proper places and timings very closelydefined by cohorts of fellow speakers. The body finds its wayfrom place to place in the course of moving, and, certainly ingeneral, not by figuring out places to go in advance. It takesyears to become a mature speaker and listener in each domain.

I came to see my passable first phenomenology of aspects ofjazz piano performance as a suggestive preface for the phenom-enological description of articulated gestures of all sorts, talk-ing included.4

But now its your book, not mine, a study of speaking jazz ata piano, and Im gratified if there are any other useful meaningsyou might find in it for yourselves.

In light of its form, I think youll gain a best first access to thephenomena it reports if its read in full sections, with chaptersor numbered section headings as pause markers. Occasional

double spaces within sections might best first warrant little


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more than a coffee break. For what its worth, the book was

written with a good deal of reading aloud.Im sorry that its stilldifficult, yet hopefully enough less so

than before.

David SudnowJuly 4, 2001

Tbingen, Germany

xx A Rewritten Account


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Acknowledgments

First Id like to thank Larry Cohen of the MIT Press, for havingthe boldness to support this unusual enterprise. Second, myappreciation goes out to Matthew Abbate, my editor at the MIT

Press, who undertook a major task with a difficult book. He dis-played great diligence in dealing with its complexities, graspingevery last detail carefully, and exhibited truly remarkable edito-rial skill at every turn. Third, Im grateful to all of those whoinvited me to speak of my work at universities in Great Britainand throughout the continent, a lecture series that set in motion

my decision to redo the book. Fourth, I thank the many thou-sands of students of my piano course who contributed in innu-merable ways to my continued studies of piano skill over thepast decades. I trust that the many students, from all walks oflife, who were especially important to me know who they are.

Last, and most of all, is my profound indebtedness to Jack

Kroll of Newsweek, who first reviewed the original HarvardUniversity Press edition of the book in such glowing terms. Iwas most fortunate to have been his friend over the many yearssince we met after the books publication in 1978, and hisrecent death not only occasions my continuing grief but is agigantic loss to quality journalism. Newsweek will search farand wide to match the contributions Jack made to its magazineand the public it serves.


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Ways of the Hand


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Preface

From an upright posture Ive looked down at my hands on apiano for some years while learning to play jazz, and when Ilook at them now my look is deeply informed by its history.

When I watch my hands on a typewriter I dont recognizetheir movements, startled by their looks as Im surprised by myprofile in the mirrors of a clothing stores dressing room. Its asthough I were watching an interior part of my body do its busi-ness. But my piano hands are familiar indeed. I not only knowtheir looks in the intimate ways we all know our hands looks,

but Ive also come to see jazz-making ways of the hand.When learning to play, for quite a while I was busy watchingmy hands and the keyboard to avoid trouble and find places togo. Jazz students spend a good deal of time practicing move-ments along rule-governed paths on the piano, like variousscales, to have ways to keep on going with the music. Such

pathways can be vital when youre first trying to improvise andnot follow a musical score. Youve got to know just whereyoure headed in order to get there correctly, not tripping upalong the way, not hitting two keys together out of uncertainty,for instance. In most playing situations you must keep theaction moving, cant stop and think about good next places togo. These routes, ordered sequences of keys one may describewith simple arithmeticlike go up 1 note, come down 2, now


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2 Preface

up 2 and down 3, then up 3 and down 4, to create one

sequence from an infinite pilesuch paths become clearlystaked out keyboard places that are eventually seen at a glance,paths along which you can sustain your movements and keepup a more or less continuing flow of articulations. Without ascore, when faced with the task of making up melodies suchpaths are invaluable.

For a long time I guided my hands on the keyboard by movingalong all kinds of routes and scales that I conceived in myminds eye, and, when I did look at the piano, I was so involvedin an analytic mode of travel that I didnt see the hands affairsas I now do. Their affairs and my looking were different.

Now I dont expressly use pathways to make melodies, but

discover good-sounding places to go, from each note to the next,in the course of getting there, singing improvised jazz. And frommy upright posture I look down and see what I never sawbefore. At last I see jazz pianists hands, and there was a criticaltime, not long ago, when I had the most vivid impression thatmy fingers seemed to be making the music by themselves.

As I watch letters coming up on the page when I rapidly typeout a note to myself, watch them lay down as smoothly as acompetent flycaster places his lure on a trout stream, I wonder:had I a similar history of looking at my hands at this keyboard,would I now see fingers thinking?

I intend my descriptions as indications for how one mighteventually speak methodically and rationally, if only crudely for

now, when saying things like: the handin music, eating, weav-ing, carving, cooking, drawing, writing, surgery, dialing, typing,signing, whereverthis hand chooses where to go as much asI do.

I offer a first portrait of the handicraft of jazz piano impro-visation, an extraordinary domain of action for the closer study

of the body and its works in general. In jazz piano play we have


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Preface 3

an arena of conduct of the most elaborate dimensions, an espe-

cially apt place for portraying one of our distinctive organsways of assembling orderly activity.

The aim isnt explanatory but descriptive, a phenomenologi-cal account of handwork as its known to a performing musi-cian, without consulting the expert opinions of otherpractitioners, analysts of practitioners, or other professional

students of conduct. The goal is to describe jazz from a playersperspective (without which it wouldnt exist), the player reflect-ing on his skills with no one but himself to consult, to quotephilosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.5

Ive found that thus far unanalyzed aspects of the bodys wayscan be closely depicted, for all to see, by the performer, and per-

haps no one but the performer, especially one who self-con-sciously takes up a complex activity with as strong an intentionto master its accomplishment as to try to reflect rigorously uponthe experiences of doing so. Guided by neither an introspective,mentalistically inclined consciousness nor the methods of ana-lytic science but only by the concrete particular problems facedin the course of learning jazz piano, Ive pointed to various crit-ical tasks faced when sustaining orderly articulated movements.

Such a production account might lead to the precise looks ofthings, eventually contributing to a differently grounded modal-ity of rigorous inquiry, only if the finest of details are sought.6

Ive tried to make the account both accessible and minute,building a specialized language, where needed, to bring into

relief some features for mapping an uncharted territory.Following the report will be substantially easier if the reader

is willing to take just a bit of time to roughly emulate theessence of critical keyboard examples by, say, using ones handson a tabletop. This will quite sufficiently concretize the account,and one with no formal or other musical background will thus

find it all manageable.


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Beginnings

When I went for piano lessons this time around, I was fully deter-mined to learn jazz. About fifteen years earlier, some lessons hadamounted to pretty nearly nothing. An exceptional blind jazz

pianist had me watch him play a ballad, pausing as he struck eachchord; with a notational system that I worked out for myself, Iwrote down the names of the notes depressed by each of his fin-gers, went home, and duplicated the song. I gained a repertoire ofa dozen tunes in my last term of high school this way, but I didntknow what I was doing. I couldnt improvise, play other songs or

those Id learned in another way, teach another without usingexactly the same method. Still, I played the songs well.My new teacher had me show him what I could do. I pro-

duced some remembered bits and pieces of these rote-learnedtunes, the only music Id played, most infrequently, throughoutcollege, graduate school, and the years of university teaching

that followed. I explained how theyd been acquired, and hereadily saw that I negotiated a keyboard fluently. I knew howto place and move my fingers, how to engage in some maneu-ver once it was pointed out to me, and do so more or lesssmoothly. Skills acquired with a year and a half of classicallessons at age nine, which were taken very seriously, hadntbeen lost, perhaps even somewhat solidified by the high schoolsong experience that may have kept the keyboards spaces more


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6 Beginnings

alive for me. So the little my hands could do looked as if done

by a real pianist. Not doing much, they looked the part, a wide-spread possibility because of extraordinarily ubiquitous pianolessons, and a massive failure to get far with them that nonethe-less may produce easily reactivated potentials for those whoonce upon a time practiced diligently, if only briefly.

My instruction went rapidly. After seven or eight months of

three or so hours of daily practice, I briefly held an afternoon jobwith a bassist in a yacht club bar, just playing standard songsstandardly. Doing improvisation was an entirely different matter.

My first lessons had me gain working ability with a simplenomenclature. To play jazz I had to learn again what scales were,and about chordsclusters of certain scale notes sounded simul-

taneouslyand how such chords are best spaced and arrangedon the keyboard for jazz play. Then there were simple facts aboutsong structure. I was told that once chords were well handled intheir progressions in songs, improvisation could start.

For the jazz musician, a song is regarded as a sequence ofchords with an originally written melody thats only performedthe first time through; the same chord progression is then cycli-cally repeated as improvised melodies are substituted for theoriginal one. When jazz players improvise, they play on thechanges (chords), generating melodies laid over their underlyingprogression. When several musicians perform together, they geartheir respective actions by using the same tune, this successivelyrepeated cycle of chords and metrical structure that defines the

song for them, to stay on track together. And when musicianstake turns soloing, each managing a bit of play and giving a nextsection over to his fellows, a songs required chord changes fur-nish a continuing format, a series of benchmarks delineatingturn-taking places and unifying the ensembles progress.

Please read the next few pages that sketch relevant basic facts

about music. Dont think of memorizing anything. One reading


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Beginnings 7

straight through will suffice, even for one with no keyboard or

other instrumental experience. And dont be at all concernedabout what the places sound like; the goal is only to gain a roughfirst visual grasp of a keyboard. Imagine casually perusing a mapto sense just the overall lay of the land for an upcoming trip.

ScalesA keyboard has black and white notes, the blacks arranged in alter-

nating groups of twos and threes:7

The distance from a note to the immediately adjacenthigher one (tothe right, of higher pitch), or lower one (to the left, of lower pitch),treating blacks and whites equivalently, is called a half step. Two half

steps make a whole step:

The major scale, the only scale needed to understand song and jazzbasics, is a path of eight notes, described by this formula:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 81 1 1/2 1 1 1 1/2

!"#$ &'()* +,-#( &'()*


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8 Beginnings

Starting on any note at all, a major scale is formed by moving one

whole step up from this starting place to a second note, then a wholestep up to a third note, a half step to the fourth note of the scale, and soon. The eighth note of the scale takes the same name as its starting note,an octaveeight noteshigher. Within the scope of a one-octave range,there are twelve different places, counting blacks and whites equally aswe do. And this half step/whole step rule yields twelve unique majorscales, many quite similar, yet no two identical (hardly a coincidence,since the layout of the keyboard and this scale evolved hand in hand).

Notes on the piano are given alphabet names. White notes arenamed A through G in series, then duplicated through each successiveoctave, with A designated as the white note between the second andthird blacks in each black threesome. Black notes are named in refer-ence to adjacent white notes. A black note is termed a flat ( ) when seenfrom the perspective of a white note a half step above it, or a sharp ()when seen relative to a white note a half step below it. Black notes thustake either of two names (this is also true of white notes, in certain con-

texts, which we neednt consider):

Scales are spelled by a convention minimizing awkward names (usu-ally calling black startingnotes by their flat names and adhering to analphabetic order). There are twelve major scales, one beginning on

each of the twelve notes in the scope of a one-octave range, usuallynamed and always comprised as follows:

A B C D E F G AB C D E F G A B

B C D E F G A BC D E F G A B C

D E F G A B C D

. / .01 2 3 4

10

//

..

24

43


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Beginnings 9

D E F G A B C D

E F G A B C D EE F G A B C D EF G A B C D E FG A B C D E F G

G A B C D E F GA B C D E F G A

Some of the major scales:

ChordsA chord is a group of notes struck, and thus sounded, simultaneously.Three basic chord types are most prevalent in jazz (and nearly all mod-ern western music): major, minor seventh, and dominantchords, each

built in reference to a major scale. A major chord is comprised of the

!

"

#


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10 Beginnings

1, 3, and 5 notes of any scale. We say One three five is major. For

example, a C major chord (symbol C) has the notes C, E, and G:

A minor seventh chord(symbol Cm7) contains the 1, flatted 3 (thirdnote lowered a half step), 5, and flatted 7 (seventh note lowered a halfstep) of a major scale. We say One, flat three, five, flat seven is minorseventh. C minor seventh is C, E, G, B:

A dominant chord (symbol C7) is made by adding, to a majorchord, only the flatted seventh note of a scale. We say One, three,five, flat seven is dominant. C dominant is C, E, G, B :

! $ # %

! $ # %

! $ #


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Beginnings 11

There are twelve major, twelve minor seventh, and twelve dominant

chords, each named in reference to some first note and the major scalestarting there.Chords may be produced in various ways. They may be played in

different positions on the keyboard (C, E, G, left to right; or E, G, C;or G, C, E, for instance), and, as is common in most modern music,numerous additional tones are added to the basic chord tones to pro-vide a fuller sound. Jazz musicians seldom play chords using the defin-ing notes alone, closely spaced on the piano, but spread chord tones

between both hands, or play them all in one hand with various othernotes added to each chord type to enrich its texture. The particularway a chord is executed and colored is referred to as chord voicing.Such considerations neednt be musicologically reviewed here.8

SongsIn most jazz play, the song is used as a basic formatting device. A songis a more or less fixed pattern of chords, with a written melody laid out

in a metrical structure, with so many beats, in an evenly articulatedpulse, organized into a set of measures, or barsgroups of accentedpulses: 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3, or far more commonly, 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 34 1 2 3 4, etc. Most popular songs have standard formats, and tuneswith 12, 16, 24, 32, and 36 measures are most common. Heres thefirst half of a typical 32-measure standard:

Tenderly

| E | A7 | Em7 | A7 || Fm7 | D7 | E | E || Am7 | Fm7 | Am7 | Dm7 G7 || Cm7 | F7 | Fm7 | B7 |

This chord chart, without a notated melody, furnishes a diagram of thestructure of the song Tenderly, in the key of E. (A key essentiallymeans that most melody notes fall on a certain major scale, here E , andthat the songs harmonic movement usually heads to a final rest on anE major chord, the group hum if you will. Any song may be playedin any of the twelve keys.)

Nearly every song has a more or less unique harmony (chordsequence), but progressions from one chord to the next follow nar-rowly defined rules, so that most tunes share many common chord


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12 Beginnings

sequences. Gaining experience in playing many songs, one learns such

common patterns, and eventually comes to find good chords to har-monize a melody without a chord chart. There are various ways ofspeaking of relations between a melody and its appropriate harmo-nization, musicological ways that neednt concern us now. I will dis-cuss such relations in quite different terms.

In early lessons with my new teacher the topic was chord

construction, or voicing, playing a chords tones in nicely dis-tributed ways. However a chord may be described as a groupof named notes on a keyboard with geometrically measuredproperties, during play a chord is a grabbed place. Whatsinvolved in such grabbing?

Anyone whos witnessed or been a beginning pianist or gui-tarist learning chords notices substantial initial awkwardness.Lots of searching and looking are first required. The chord mustbe detected as a sequence of named notes with a look thatreviews the terrain up and down, finding the chord as a serialordering of these and those particularly identified tones, goingleft to right or right to left, consulting the rules to locate theplaces. Then some missing ones in the middle are found. Andalong with such looking are hands that behave correspondingly.

I would find a particular chord, groping to put each fingerinto a good spot, arranging the individual fingers a bit to finda way for the hand to feel comfortable, and, having gained ahold on the chord, getting a good grasp, Id let it go, then lookback to the keyboardonly to find the visual and manual hold

hadnt yet been well established. I had to take up the chord againin terms ofits constitution, find the individual notes again, buildit up from the scratch of its spoken parts.

Over the course of my first days, much time was spent doinginitial grabbing, trying to get a hold on chords properly, goingback and looking at them as named notes, grabbing again,


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Beginnings 13

repositioning the hand to get into a chord with a comfortable

hold so it could be grasped as a whole; finding ways of sinkinginto a chord that didnt involve the sounding of neighboringtones; arching the hand appropriately so the fingers camedown with a correct spacing and trajectory relative to theshape of the chording hand; balancing the different intensitiesof pressure so as not to lose balance, the edges of neighboring

notes not extraneous spots to be avoided but edges whose tac-tile appreciation became part of a natural hold on a settled-intochord; arching the hand and arraying its fingers with the sortof proportional spread that, when the chord was grasped, letthe fingers not only come into the right spots but with equalintensity, so its tones sounded simultaneously, and not clumsily

serialized (the way the high school band often slightly serializesthe voices of the opening chord of a marching tune).As my hands began to form constellations, the scope of my

looking correspondingly grasped the chord as a whole, seeingnot its note-for-noteness but its configuration against thebroader visual field of the terrain.

Its not enough to get into a chord. It was essential to getfrom one to the next, playing progressions smoothly. And ahost of expanding skills, ways of looking, moving, and think-ing were needed to execute such successions. It took a shortwhile for individual chords to be properly grabbed, and in acouple of weeks I could smoothly produce all dominants,majors, and minor sevenths. Turning to chords, to songs, pro-

ducing successions of clusters with a melodythat was nowthe task.

Theres chord A and B, separated from one another, this onea way down the keyboard from the other:


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14 Beginnings

A

B

As production entails a tightly compressed hand, Bs an openlyextended spread. As involves coming at the keyboard straightahead, as one comes at a typewriter to make contact with thehome position, while Bs involves a shift in the axis of the handrelative to the keyboard, the little finger moving much fartherfrom the bodys center than the thumb. And A is played forcounts 1 2 3 4, and when the next 1 arrives, B must beannounced.

Beginners get from A to B disjointedly. The grasp of A maybe at hand, and B too, but theres a distance to be traveled, andwhat happens, at first, is that after doing A, a novice sets outfor B without going for it in the right way from the start. Onemoves to the left for B, but doesnt reach for allof B. Headingout for Bs rough place in the keyboard, one still has to reshapethe hand upon reaching its vicinity. To go correctly from A toB, grabbing for the whole of B, is to be directed from the start

not just to where B is, but in shape to play it on arrival. And


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Beginnings 15

doing that means preparing all along the course to reach the

goal in productional form.The experienced hand lifts off of A, and as it moves toward

B it changes its configuration as a smooth and not jerky unfold-ing. No sooner does a liftoff from A occur than the movementis already toward allof B, a proper transition requiring thatmanifold realignments of the hand occur simultaneously.

Adherence to a steady pulse is a critical resource. With anupcoming time of arrival preestablished by former beats, oneknows just when to reach B, having lifted off from A.

Fluent chord production for song play must meet otherrequirements, for its not enough to grab chords cleanly, or onlyto move smoothly in tempo from one to the next. To play a

song well, one cant do more than peripherally monitor the key-board, if at all, to handle chord transactions. At the outset, andfor some while for beginnersthe more so the more complexthe sequence and rapidly changing the chordsone must fairlyclosely survey the left side in order to move from place to place.But before songs are well played, and surely before one can tryimprovised melodies, one must transcend this tilted viewing.

Lookings work load progressively lightens for finding dis-tances, the gaze at the keyboard progressively diffuses in func-tion, as places gradually become places toward which theappreciative fingers, hand, and arm are aimed. As I reached forchords (and reaching for chords in song contexts alwaysinvolves reaching for recurring patterns of them), I was gaining

a sense of their locations by going to them, experiencing a rateof movement and distance required at varying tempos, therebydeveloping an embodied way of accomplishing distance.

Our symmetrical stance toward settings is striking. Sit downat a dinner table and, without thinking about it at all, pull yourchair up to eat. Your nose is most likely exactly over the center

of the dinner plate. Go before a bathroom sink to wash your


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16 Beginnings

face and find that nose smack in the vertical middle of the mir-

ror. Sit down at the bench of a piano and position yourself as ifto play, even if you never have. Chances are high that yournavel (and nose, assuming the usual alignment) is facing the Dthats one note above the C closest to the middle of the key-board (middle C), this D nearly the true center of a piano,where all navels end up, halving beings that we are.

From this middle of the piano, the beginner gradually acquiresan incorporated sense of places and distances, incorporated, forexample, in that finding the named, visually grasped place-out-there by theoretic looking becomes unnecessary. The bodys ownappreciative structures serve to find places. A grasp develops ofthe setting of the keyboard and its dimensions relative to the

hands and arms moving extension from the bodys center, andin time this skill becomes so refined and generalized that precisealignment at the center isnt even needed.

Only after years of play do beginners attain the sort of com-petence at place finding that a jazz pianists left hand displays inchord execution. Reaching the point where, with eyes closed, Imay now sit down at the piano, gain an initial orientation withthe merest touch anywhere on the field, if at all, and then reachout to bring my finger precisely into a spot two feet off to theleft, where a half-inch off is a very big mistake, come back upseventeen inches and hit another one, go down twenty-threeand a quarter inches and get there at a fast clipa skill a greatmany competent players havethis takes a lengthy course of

gradual incorporation.After three or four months of practice I was no longer doing

too much looking to make chord changes on time, and soonwas able to perform a growing repertoire of songs withoutwatching the left side especially. Once chord progressions werepreliminarily at hand, the full song was relatively easy for me,

since I had no trouble finding melodies without a notation. (Id


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Beginnings 17

picked out melodies at a piano since I was a young child.) And

I had no special difficulty coordinating both hands use, playingone chord every two or four beats say, with more events ofvarying time values articulated by the right hand. Fresh begin-ners struggle over this coordination.

In six months I could read a chord chart and play the melodyof a new song after a few moments of review, gaining an

increasing number of standard tunes with nicely voiced, jazz-sounding chords, played at a relatively steady tempo and withmore or less appropriate feeling.

When my teacher said, now that you can play tunes, tryimprovising melodies with the right hand, and when I wenthome and listened to my jazz records, it was as if the assign-

ment was to go home and start speaking French. There was thisFrench going on, streams of fast-flowing strange sounds,rapidly articulated and crisscrossing, an enormous amount ofintricate windings, styles within styles in the course of anyplayers music. There were rising and falling intonations, con-stantly shifting accents, and I started listening in a new wayfor answers to the question, how are they doing that?

I didnt need an analysis. I needed advice. How could I nowlearn to do it? That it was certainly first done mostly by blackmen? That was beside the point. That it was done in a musicaltradition with a particular history and the evolution of variousdevices for constructing chords and melodies? That matteredonly if I had to become involved in this history. That the history

entailed increasing demands for technical expertise, corre-sponding to an increasingly refined instrument for which suchtechnique was geared and from whose aspirations it was fash-ioned, as well as an increasingly professional position for themusician, a growing gap between amateur and pro and thedevelopment of an orientation toward the definitive perfor-

mancehowever interesting the sociology, this all mattered


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18 Beginnings

only if I had to take up with the technical training much jazz

now seems to require. These jazz musicians were doing thingsvery quickly. Were my fingers agile enough? Any theorys rele-vance depended on its possible bearing for my practice.

However one might describe what may be heard on therecords, the first relevant question about this music for me was:what notes are they playing? The music had a rhythm, an

assortment of intensities, an intonational structure, subtleties ofshading, and much more. But when it came to sitting down atmy piano it was a rhythm ofsomething, intensity ofsomething,intonational structure ofsomething, subtlety ofsomething, andthe something that first mattered was: these and those particu-lar notes being played.

I could bring my hands to a piano and do things in a jazzrhythm, as Id clapped hands to this music for years. I could sub-tly shade a contact with the keyboard, touching keys very softlyor loudly, with nuances in between. Given a handful of notes Icouldve moved my fingers quite fast or slow. I could do all thisas many can, but sitting at my piano, playing a songs sequenceof chords, and trying to follow my teachers instruction to makeup melodies with the right hand, the main question was: where?

Not everything the melodic right hand was doing in playingthese notes seemed relevant. I didnt figure the looks of playershands could be consulted as a guide for learning what I neededto know. When I looked at my teachers hands, I looked pastthem to the places they went, not how they were going about,

but where. I sat at my piano and had to bring my fingers to par-ticular notes. I could more or less get them to any particularnotes I wanted to, given my well-trained hands, but I didntknow where to go. It seemed impossible to approach this jazzexcept by finding particular places to take my fingers. And myteacher encouraged that approach.


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Beginnings 19

I got a first taste of the magnitude of problems I was in for

when I tried to listen to a piece of jazz melody on a record andgo to the piano to play it. While I could perfectly well hear asimple melody a few times over and attain it as a singableaccomplishment with voice and hands, these jazz melodies wereby no means simple. A three-second stretch of play within acourse of improvisation Id listened to for years now engaged

me for several hours, unsuccessfully trying to grab the realdetails so as to bring each of its tones to singability and then getthe strip down at the keyboard. The sheer looks of several sec-onds of transcribed jazz are suggestive:

(Charlie Parker, My Little Suede Shoes)

When taking a melody from a record whose improvisations Ifigured I knewand recording gives improvised melodies a rad-

ically new status they didnt formerly have, as they can now belearned at a level of detail that a one-time hearing cant achieveI discovered a symptomatic vagueness in my grasp of these famil-iar improvisations. I apparently only knew the melodies incertain broad outlines. Particularly with respect to the rapid pas-sages, I found that when singing along with a Charlie Parker

recording, for instance, Id been completely glossing the detailedparticularities of the pitches of melodies that I figured I knewwell, since my introduction to this jazz as a young teenager. Igrasped their essential shape perhaps, but hadnt ever really sungthem with a refined note-to-note precision. And it was very par-ticular notes that needed to be at hand now, at the piano, if I was


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20 Beginnings

to reproduce this music in its particularity. I wondered: what had

I been listening to as a jazz fan all these years?The extraordinary difficulties of a first solo-copying attempt,

trying to find the tiny spot on the record again and again, end-lessly rehearing the same minuscule passage to narrow in on itsnotes, finding those places on the piano, working out a finger-ing solution that didnt just play the right notes but with the

right time valuesafter a major struggle I sensed this wasnt theway to go, at least for me. And, as I thought of it at the time,perhaps because of frustration with the difficulty of such copy-ing, I wanted to improvise my own melodies, not the recordedor transcribed ones of others.

I told my teacher I didnt know where to go, how to even

begin to make up melodies as one plays. There was no problemstriking several notes over and over again and keeping that upthroughout the course of a song cycle, but this was no more jazzthan noinoinoinoinoinoinoinoinoinoino is writing, which I cando forever and in various tempos.

Here was the problem. There is this song, its melody has beenplayed, and now the tune is to be sustained as a continuingcycle of chords. If I was to do jazz it would mean playingmelodies over these song chords, not just this little snatch ofmelody notes and that, but playing on the changes for sustainedperiods. The changes keep changing, say one chord a second forabout a minute through one complete cycle of a typicalmedium-tempo ballad. And one must continue playing

melodies while handling the chords at the right times, cycleafter cycle of the song.

But my right hand had nothing to say in this language. Itmight as well have gone anywhere, but once it did there wasnothing next to do. And if you dont know where youre goingyou cant go anywhere correctly. The hand has to be motivated


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Beginnings 21

to very definite next keys to depress, and when theres nowhere

for it to go youre immobilized.My teacher dealt with my problem by giving me routes to take.

He started by noting that with this particular chord you can geta characteristic jazz sound by playing this particular scale. Welooked at a particular chord and particular scale, examining theirrespective constructions. Heres how he spoke of it:

Take a dominant seventh chord, for example. Say F dominant:

With it you can play a so-called diminished scale, a scale con-sisting of alternating half and whole steps:

And, he pointed out, you get a characteristic jazz sound becauseof various dissonances when the sustained chords sound isheard alongside various notes of the scale.

The second note of this scale is a half step above F of thechord; the scales third note, A, is a half step below the chordsA. The B, fifth note of the scale, is a half step below the C of the


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22 Beginnings

chord, and the seventh note of the scale is a half step below the

E of the chord.These half step dissonant concurrences, in particular, have a

slightly grating sound, a husky, bluesy quality very common injazz melodies. Of course to talk of this characteristic jazz soundis like saying a certain r is characteristic of French. Learningthat sound is one thing, and having a native-sounding chat in

Paris another.In the case of a diminished scale which he furnished at first,feeling it was a particularly good starting place for jazz, thereisnt one path but three, depending on the opening note, andwhether you count your first move as a whole or half step(prove that to yourself: choose any note; go up a half step, then

a whole, then a halfor a whole, half, wholealternating likethis, and write down each spot you reach; no matter where youstart, youll find only three unique arrays).

Because of these dissonant relationships and rather simpleparallels between all chords, the three different diminishedscales, he explained, each go well with four of the twelve dom-inants (each scale produces precisely the same dissonant halfsteps with a different four of the twelve dominants). Given aneed to do melodies that accorded with a songs harmony, hav-ing these three scales was thus to have jazzy-sounding places tobe going for a full third of all the thirty-six chords!

It was a great-sounding path. I excitedly went home with thestep rule written in my notebook, identified the three dimin-

ished routes, and then did what having a linear array almostasks for: I learned to play them fluently as scales, as rising anddescending successions. Though he furnished a route withoutdirections, with no beginning and end but only a collection ofwhat could be regarded as arrayed places, I first took up with itas a left-to-right and right-to-left path. Having such places to

go, I had to pick some means to go there, and doing scales as


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Beginnings 23

scales was a useful means of travel. Id learn to do them fast,

and since they duplicated themselves at each octave, there wasa long string of action at hand, starting low and going way upor the other way around. Hed in fact displayed these charac-teristic sounds by doing just that, demonstratively playing thescales fast, as up and down paths. It was very jazzy.

Using the paths involved working out fingering solutions.

Heres the solution I found best suited to a smooth rapid pro-duction from low to high over the range of several octavesalong this particular diminished scale (1 = thumb, 2 = index,3 = middle):

I worked out comfortable fingerings for the three routes, prac-ticed their fluent production as scales, and soon it wasnt nec-essary to consider their theoretic constitution. I could producethem rapidly without looking, and then set about practicingeach with its corresponding dominant chords, type X fittingthese four, type Y those, and Z the others.

In my first weeks of improvisation, whenever a dominantchord arose (and nearly half the chords in most songs are dom-inants) I now had places to go. Id play one of my diminishedscales, characteristically beginning it in a region where I couldsustain a long run. Id have two beats of time to fill, forinstance, a second or so in a moderate-tempo song, and these

jazz melodies were fast. So I had a long stretch of swift notes.

&

' (

& ' ( &

'

&


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24 Beginnings

When I first learned a scale, I consulted the rule and regarded

the scales individual notes by way of it, seeing an arrayedcourse of keys. Soon a gestalt of the route as a whole wasdetected, and I saw the path as a figure against the backgroundof the terrain.

But the scale wasnt seen apart from how Id first played it,and when I looked at a scale I especially attended to the left-

most starting note, from which the scale takes its name. Thisscale seemed to be arrayed specifically from one F up to thenext. Practicing the scale from bottom to top had focused mylook, and now, during play, the ways I looked often directedmy hands. Analytic inspection had evolved into a usableinstruction.

When I first learned scales, I gave attention to each note andthe finger whose use on each produced the most fluent produc-tion. But once a course was mastered, it became a way of myscale-playing hand, as chords had passed from being individu-ally fingered to handfully grabbed places. I went for each scaleat a particular place, a finger-by-finger orientation now sup-planted by a whole-handed entry. Having scales available thisway made it difficult at first to start the scale in the course ofplay on a note other than the starting note from which it waslearned. Only after much practice at upward and downwardmovement did I get decent at entering other points. Considerthe same scale again:

&

' (

& ' ( &

'

&


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Beginnings 25

At first I started on the F with my thumb and went up. But then

I came to play the scale by starting with my fourth finger on A,

coming down with a 3, 2, 1 fingering over its first three notes,then going back up, as shown above (on a tabletop, try moving4, 3, 2, 1 from right to left with your right hand, or left to rightwith your left if youre left-handed, 1 being a thumb; that canbe done extremely quickly by everyone, while moving the otherway1, 2, 3, 4is somewhat less fluently fast, for everyone).

Using the fourth finger on A allowed for a very rapid down-ward course and quick turnaround into an upward run. Usinga thumb on the A, as in a bottom-to-top fingering, was a muchless fluent way to start a fast downward course.

Going for this particular diminished scale seldom involvedme starting on B with the second finger, say, not because I cantmove around fast when starting there, but because (as the scalewas known as a handful and not an individual note/individualfinger affair) I didnt know that, for this scales production,

my second finger was used for a B. It was initially learned thatway; once learned, just as the finger-character responsibilitieson a typewriter are forgotten as conceptually available facts forthe touch typist, so which finger played the B in the course ofthis particular diminished scale was unknown to me (whenteaching scale fingerings to students today I must play scales

slowly to rediscover best fingers; if youre a decent touch typist

&

' (

)


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26 Beginnings

try calling out the names of letters on the second bank of char-

acters without looking down).My maneuvers with the diminished scales (one of many sim-

ilarly jazz-sounding structures) were initially most limited. Overthe course of the first year of play, nearly every time I playedthis one of the three scales, I either started it on F with thethumb or on A with the fourth finger, moving quickly down to

F and then back up, this move to become my most commonearly variation on that particular route.In years to come there were many sorts of orderings with

which Id experiment in using such scales. Consider the nu-merical typewriter characters. One may go directly up,1234567890; one can go up 123 234 345 456 567 678 789, or

132 243 354 465 576 687 798, ad infinitum. The teacherafforded me only a pathway, not particular instructions for itsuse, and manipulations like these are common in melody mak-ing. There are far more intricate possibilities, of course: 13542465 3576 4687 . . . 13423 24534 35645 46756 57867 . . . allsorts of series achieved by maneuvers that employ some orderof interdigitation and intervallic transposition.

I didnt work over these scales this way at the start, becausewhat I needed wasnt merely one path to use with a given dom-inant chord, but a host of them. Having learned diminishedscales, I usually played each in one or two first-acquired ways,gaining facility at matching them with their correspondingdominant chords. My attention was mostly given over to gain-

ing numerous places to go, practicing different pathways withthe chords, engaging in an analysis of the keyboard in search ofever-new routes.

No matter how many manipulations I performed with agiven scale, the use of such a scale was something I heard as aconstant repetitiveness in my play, but at the same time, and


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Beginnings 27

more importantly, I was being encouraged to find other solu-

tions to the various chords. My teacher was preparing me toplay jazz of a particular sort, the song-based bebop traditionwith melodies winding through fast-changing chords, ratherthan styles of modal jazz where sustained improvisations can bemade for an extended period on a single route and one chord.

I went to my lesson each week, my teacher would have me

improvise on the chords, and I played little pieces of melodyusing such first-acquired scales: up would come this chord anddown would go this melody, then a next chord and a scalelikedevice used for it, then on to the next. It was terribly awkwardat first, for it took some time before I could easily and rapidlypick a run to use with any next chord.

Although my teacher provided readily accessible instructionon chord production, voicing, and song play, offering construc-tional rules that were easily followed and quickly producedquite wonderful-sounding results for just playing and arrangingthose standards I loved so much, when it came to assistancewith improvisation the lessons became increasingly unsatisfy-ing. Id play for a while, and hed offer some advice that struckme at the time as altogether vague, hardly affording clear guide-lines for the weeks practice, like try to get the phrasing moresyncopated. But then, after I did some playing, producing myhalting little melodies, chord by chord and run by run, eachstarting at the same points, each going more or less fast becausegoing more or less fast made them sound jazzy at least, hed

attempt to demonstrate a way of phrasing by doing improvisa-tions himself.

As he was winding all over the keyboard, producing the musicI so much wanted to make, all I could see was that whatever hemeant by phrasing, he wasnt simply using the few scale devicesId used for each chord. He was going many more places and


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28 Beginnings

producing all sorts of melodies which, looking past his hands

ways to where they headed, revealed other patterned courses.Id spot him going over what I could detect was an orderly

path. Here was a little downward run I could vaguely see toinvolve some sort of a regular intervallic array of notes, as thediminished scale does. Hed go many places where this couldntbe seen, involving interweaving intricacies that seemed puz-

zling, but I figured they were constituted as all the rest, andwithin his play many little spates of seemingly orderly passagecould nonetheless be spotted.

Id ask what was that? Hed ask what was what? Thatlittle figure you just did over the G minor seventh right there.And hed have a hard time finding what hed just done. Hed at

times remark, Im not following rules so I dont know what Ijust did, and, on occasion, I just improvise and cant tell youhow; youll develop a feel for it. Id ask him to play somemore, or Id try to produce some portion of a happening Idbeen able to spot in his play. Given a piece of some possiblyorderly array, hed accommodatingly do a jazz-sounding figurewith it, but it wasnt what hed originally done. He found thatalmost impossible to reproduce. Only if an express intention todo some play for its reproduction was sustained in the course ofa first production was it possible for one to play it again.

But the new little thing hed do when I indicated a course Iwanted him to recover was good enough for me, and Id writeit down, not necessarily in its details as notated pitches, but

extracting a principle that could be generatively used. Forexample, hed do some line and, to offer it as an instructablemaneuver, wed together speak of its constitution in theoreticterms. Id spot some possibility, hed take what it seemed Imightve seen and do a quick melody which hed then analyzeas an arrayed, frozen pathway:


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Beginnings 29

Well, here, on a dominant chord, you can get a nice sound

by playing the notes of a major chord built on the second noteof the dominant chords root scale. Having another character-istic jazz-sounding piece of melody, my stockpile increased.

And so it went for a course of some months. Id practice agrowing collection of runs, things to do fast jazz melodies with,spend a short while nervously playing for him at the start of

each lesson, and hed then do lots of playing as I spotted thingshe tried to recreate. A negotiation took place over the sorts ofstructures he could extract and state as principles. At times I felthe was keeping secrets. Hed beg off the procedure while offer-ing little in its place, as Id request access to this and that path-way, seeing he was after all taking more routes than I was.

Reluctantly hed come up with yet another analysis, giving mean ever-expanding vocabulary of possible words. I acquired anincreasing mass of principled solutions for knowing where to gowith the various chord types: arpeggios (serially rather thansimultaneously struck chords) to be taken, scales to be linearlyplayed, various melody fragments constituted by certain orderlyintervallic relationships.

Heres a dominant chord:

and, just for the sake of a visual appreciation, here are onlysome of the innumerable routes that, articulated more or less

! $ # %


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30 Beginnings

evenly and quickly, yield a characteristic jazz sound with this

dominant:

At first the problem of finding places to go was posed aswhich notes go well with which chords? It became apparentthat any of the notes may be played with any of the chords(this true not only for dominants but for majors and minorsevenths too):


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Beginnings 31

This chromatic scale, traversing every adjacent note on the

keyboard, could itself be made to yield a characteristic jazzsound. But finding that any note might do was tantamount tohaving no paths to take save the above one, whose extensive useamounted to little more than baby talk from me.

After about six months of instruction I had a host of placesto go, melodic resources of named notes, a vocabulary of silent,

still sights to be seen, places to go in a theorys terminology onthe surface skin of an untouched piano, ways of looking andtalking that could be remembered, hosts of licks, written down,told by teachers to students, traded off between students, pro-fessional shoptalk, routes without speed limits from no oneplace to no other place in particular, melodies to be seen at a

glance, wheres without hows, places you can make music withon a soundless, practice keyboard.

And there was their use in learning: arrayed places to go,elaborate ranges of possibilities for lending organization tomanipulations they themselves told me nothing about, visuallydetected and then tactilely found fields and crisscrossing vectors

for practicing maneuverability, instantly available potentialcourses to be seen at a glance while trying to keep up the playas the changes went by.

And their use in pathway playing, contrasted with ways ofnegotiation which in fact make jazz happen: their utility as anarchitects drawing fully serves a worker in actually hammering

up a framing; as the map of a city shows you just how to


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34 Beginnings

My hand jumped around from place to place like Chaplin

stabbing with his wrenches. Chords would be missed altogether.Id draw a blank. An upward-moving line would more or lessend when the chord had to be terminated, no matter where itwas. Or, in order to get to the next starting place, Id play thefirst chord just a bit sooner to give myself time to relocate, feel-ing the upcoming chord as an encroaching presence whose

necessity was fixed by adherence to the chord chart of the songwe were after all playing together, so what the left hand wasdoing in its preset ways was guiding what the right was obligedto do. The pacing of the chord productions would becomejagged as well, and I tended to rush the time, changing chordsa trifle before they were due, missing a beat here and there,

occasionally having one too many, and really sweating it out allthe way, trying to get some lines down nicely, checking out thefaces in the crowd and trying not to seem too besieged, attempt-ing all the while to produce the most intricate maneuvers Idlearned, to make the full-blown complex jazz those before andafter me in line would do, charging around in the swarm of themusic, trying to hold on to the time, wishing things would stopfor a moment so I could catch a breath.

My right hand became enormously tired and stiff and wouldalmost freeze up, so while Id struggle not to let errors occur,where an error meant playing wrong notes in the course of apaths traverse, thered be moments when I was simply immo-bilized and nothing would come out. Then Id stab for some-

thing else that had gone well at home but now couldnt besmoothly taken up the line, so it disintegrated. My improvisinghand went not so much for a sequence of individual tones asfor a sight all at once. The notes of the run were notes to begotten over with, the hand setting out on a familiar course thatwouldnt end particularly here or there, but would start out

and keep going up along the route to wherever it happened to


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Beginnings 35

get before the next chord arrived. The hand set straight out

into a course, going for the whole of it, once committed to itsonset committed to its unaltered continuance as that course inparticular, so that the selection occurred at the outset, and fora while all further matters were predetermined.

Each of the runs I tried had been more or less smoothly mas-tered at home yet were much less fluently done now, and while

I could do lots of playing without watching the execution indetail, Id scrutinize the field anyhow, and my looking, anappeal to the keyboard for answers, was party to a theoretic in-course analysis I did over the keyboards sights, trying to keepthe terrain under regard to aid large leaps and get from onepath to another, a looking that was altogether frantic, like

searching for a parking place in a very big hurry. The music wasliterally out of hand.


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Going for the Sounds

I

Over the next several years, committed to learning jazz but for-

tunately not needing to make any money at it, I played for themost part at home and alone, seldom looking for settings whereI couldve joined in with musicians. Whenever I did, perhapsfour or five times a year, the results werent substantially betterthan at first, and Id come away sadly feeling that my inade-quacy resulted from nervousness and a lack of experience.

I was now and then advised to start working as a musician,that getting a steady job would help my playing come together.Too vaguely formulating that as possibly useful for learning torelax, I frankly wasnt attracted to work situations where oneof my level would be first compelled to play. I saw no real pointperforming on bad pianos in noisy bars where no one listened

to the music, when I could practice alone, on a good one athome, and all at my own schedule.Id been making what I thought was real progress on many

fronts, sensed I had a decent grasp of the shape and feelings ofjazz, and, with lessons that gave me a good understanding ofthe keyboard, I figured I was in position to learn the rest in soli-tary practice.


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38 Going for the Sounds

I did things for two or three hours a day that seemed more or

less reasonable. I practiced certain well-known technical exercisesthat I heard many musicians had used, spent lots of time investi-gating the keyboard to discover new sorts of melodic configura-tions, found ever-new intervallic relationships, evolved morepathways constructed on principles similar to those Id been toldabout, with their characteristic jazz sounds, listened to a growing

collection of records, seldom trying and always quickly abandon-ing the horrendous task of solo copying, and aimed for what I feltto be the most sophisticated and intricate examples of contempo-rary jazz piano. For the most part, my playing sessions weredevoted to a handful of songs, doing improvisations, the particu-lar handfuls contents changing entirely every several months, as

some tunes became more enticing and others a bit less so.Fluent manipulation on these paths produced a semblance ofcompetence, and I was able to sustain long playing sessions,going for this rapidly articulated music, sensing I was on target.I knew my play left qualities to be desired. When I recordedmyself it sounded disjointed, frantic, and wanting in otherrespects. I knew I wasnt making music like what I heard. Butby virtue of the sheer extent of what I could do at the piano, thelarge collection of songs at my command, and what I felt to beincreasingly an insiders perspective on the music I listened to,after a couple of years I thought of myself as one with nearlycompetent basic jazz skills.

In some respects that was warranted, in others pretentiously

premature. I was in some ways as far from the mark as couldbe. Of course this was only clear in retrospect, as deficiencies inearlier efforts were made transparent by acquisitions gainedlater. But this delayed appraisal allowed me to sustain motiva-tion to play a good deal without feeling too far off base.

I was learning to play in what can be loosely termed a back-

ward direction. In first language acquisition, one initially gains


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facility with restricted little movements, then heads for ever

more extensive gestural trajectories. But I was aimed from theoutset, and nearly always, for the most complex of doings, asthough trying to speak a new language by ridiculously plunginginto a serious conversation at the usual adult pace. This with-out really knowing how to say any words properly, onlymaking little bits of sound that could here and there be heard

to fall within the language. All this without regularly interact-ing with other speakers, where a give-and-take provides ongo-ing encouragement and a need to speak properly.

These pathways allowed for this peculiar possibility, as if atypewriter keyboard and corresponding language were arrangedso that by following a rule like go up every other key youd

produce numerous sights characteristic of some actual adulttext. Having a visual/conceptual means for going to reasonablyacceptable places, now incorporated into a tactilely managed setof maneuvers with varieties of dexterities at the keyboard, Icould at least sustain large streams of conduct at a fast clip fromearly into my training. Moving along paths, going repeatedlythrough a chord cycle, I produced enough overall jazzness in myplay that I felt I was basically doing what jazz players do.

In the first years there were very few moves like this:

the book, the book, the book book bookthe book, the book, the book book book

I was, instead, in pursuit of the most magniloquently organized

affairs, each day the bulk of my practicing spent roaming allover the keyboard, rather than lingering in a delimited territoryand mastering ways to deal with a sparse course of melodicmovements.

My isolated situation was so skewed in this backward direc-tion that it was nearly two full years before I had an experience


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with the keyboard that would seem altogether essential to mak-

ing music from the outset. It wasnt until the start of my thirdyear that I thought of myself as going for the sounds.

I specifically recall playing one day and finding, as I set outinto a next course of notes after a liftoff had occurred, that Idexpressly aimed for the sounds of these next particular notes,that their sounds seemed to creep up into my fingers, that the

depression of the keys realized a specific sound Id gone there tomake, as if when walking one brought intentional regard to thesounds of ones steps, expressly then doing each and every oneof their successive sounds, as in a march. I wasnt only going forgood places. I was aiming for sounding spots.

Of course I hadnt really been going only for good places for

two years, playing some game at the keyboard, cultivating skillsat rapid visual detection or merely gaining manual dexterities. Iwas going for music. I listened to my records and aimed for thatjazz, intentionally directed to a course of sounds. It wouldnthave done in the least to have only played an electric piano withthe amplifier off. I filled the room with sounds.

But these so-called sounds had various qualities for me, andI couldnt form a practically usable description of sound thatwould help seize hold of this new acquisition, and describe it indetail as well, without considering just how these sounds werebeing produced.

I knew what these paths sounded like, wasnt surprised bythem as one is startled by accidentally leaning on an open key-

board. Hardly! But how the paths sounded to me was deeplylinked to how I was making them. There wasnt one me listen-ing, and another one playing along paths.

I listened-in-order-to-make-my-way, to find that as I playedeach day I was doing this jazz. I recognized the pathwayssounds, to put it way too mildly. But its one thing to recognize

familiar sounds that youre making, and another to aim success-


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fully for these and those very particular ones to occur, and just

when you want them to, especially if youre trying to find newnotes in course and not following a score. Very different direc-tionalities of purpose and potentials for action are involvedwhen you set out to make these and those sounds in particular.

I first felt myself going for the sounds when I now sensed Iwas making up a melody. Id been striving for these fast-

flowing, characteristic jazzlike runs, with quickly articulatedstreams of broad-ranging highs and lows. Armed with devicesthat of their own accord furnished a high frequency of jazzphonemes, one would hear some jazzness to a sequence in theirrecurrent useas, when one mimics another language, somecharacteristic quality of the sounds might create a certain vague

resemblance to the real thing.And my listening also discovered other qualities. One doesntstay in a territory for too long, but moves up and down the key-board. One doesnt often go fast and suddenly make an extremechange in the pace of a melody line, but for reasonable stretchesof play maintains a more or less constant rate of articulation.One doesnt often play the same note over and again, but manydifferent ones. And there were a host of attack and decay qual-ities and rhythmic features of jazz phrases that Id graduallyincorporated into my play. Jazz, Id long heard, was comprisedof melodies with shifting metrical patterns. So it wasnt a mat-ter of playing series of evenly spaced notes1 1 1 1 1 1 1. Somecharacteristic pacing variations had become almost a stock

approach to certain runs. A long sequence would very often bepreceded by a spate of three or four notes taken quite rapidly,for instance111 1 1 1 1 (did-di-ly bop bop bop bop;why-dont-you come with me now). The melodic turnaroundreferred to when I described how Id played an F diminishedscale, coming down very fast on a bit of it and then going up it

more slowlyit was usually paced this way.


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But, as regards the finely textured note-to-note nature of my

statements, an order was mostly guaranteed by the paths for-mal construction, like the diminished scales alternating halfsteps and whole steps, or a superimposed arpeggio.

I wasnt really doingmuch note-to-note selectional work atall. I decided where to start every run, which to choose, howfast to play it. But, wed say, no intended aim was given to each

and every particular next pitch.I began to enter melodically into the play when I started try-ing to do something that related back to something Id justdone, and/or play something that Id then try to restate, in rela-tion to a new next chord. Such successively shifted replicationsmake up a family of practices that generate a large percentage

of melodic gesturing in all music.Imagine that a course of several notes is played during thetenure of a particular chord and, when a next chord comes upin a couple of beats, say one second, a new sequence is donethat relates to this new chord just as the first fragment relatedto the first. Such a practice helps characterize essential featuresof this interim stage in my development.

In my earliest pathway play, what I did on any chord wasdecided by the choice of an appropriate fitting run de novo, onechord at a time. Now there was a change. I first did things likethis, playing notes from here:


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to here:

Regard the dotted notes on melodic right sides (dark verticals dividethe hands) as if played in sequence, left to right say, not simultaneously.The melodic fragments are identical: notes of major chords built on thesecond note of the scale starting on each chords root, i.e., on the low-est note in the left hand. (G, lowest right-hand note in the first picture,is the second note of the F scale, F being the root of the chord playedin the left hand. In the second picture, C is the second note of the Broots scale. So we have G major chord notes over F, and C majorchord tones over B. The chords are skeletally played, using just theroot and the flatted seventh while omitting the third and the fifth, acommon left-hand form used when improvising.)

As a melodic intentionality emerged, as I began taking upwith a course of notes as I proceeded, notes whose relations Iaimed now to repeat, I had gained much experience thatenabled me to try to do something congruous with what wentbefore. At first, and for some time, this was a largely conceptualprocess. Id think: major triad on the second note of the scale,

now again, then diminished on the third and a repeat for thenext, doing hosts of calculating and guidance operations oft

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