What We Do and Why We Do It

8/3/2019 What We Do and Why We Do It

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What We Do and Why We Do Itby Jim McNeely

(Adapted from keynote speech delivered 6/12/08 at the

2008 International Jazz Composers’ Symposium

University of South Florida, Tampa, FL)

Thank you, Chuck Owen, for inviting me to be a part of this terrific event. I look out andrecognize a good number of you. It’s good to see both faces that I know and faces that are newto me. We’ve all come together for these three days, driven by our love of jazz and our love of composing. We’re here to talk, to listen, and to hear music; to let our colleagues know whatwe’re doing, and to find out what they are up to. We’re here to learn, and to be inspired.

I would guess that most of us have beginnings as performers, playing in groups rangingin size from duos to big bands. We know that performing has a social aspect: you work together to achieve a group sound; you hang out after the gig; you travel together on the road.

Composition, on the other hand, is typically a solitary activity; it’s easy for all of us to get holedup in our individual studios, in our individual heads, with our pencils and erasers, with our keyboards and computers. And I dare say that this has always been one of the big attractions for me about composition. It’s 2 am, I’m alone in my music room, there’s paper all over the place;the ideas are flowing, I’ve found a little countermelody that is so unbelievably slick; I’ve got mylittle universe where I am God, and this note will be a Bb, I don’t care what the rules say; and Ismell the eraser, and I’m in the zone, and that glass of whatever that I poured 3 hours agoremains untouched because I’m so into this piece! I’m completely one with my inner geek, I’vehit that point where the little fire in my gut has been lit, and I say, “Damn, I can’t wait to hear this! This is gonna be great”; and there’s no one else there, and I don’t have to talk to anybody!

Paradise! But before I start to sound I live like the Unibomber—I do have a wife andthree kids, and we’re all normal enough—let me also say that it is important for composers to gettogether and talk to one another, whether in individual settings of teacher/student or mentor/protégé, or a workshop (such as the one I direct at BMI in New York), or a salon, or informal “hangs”. We discover how others may have solved problems that we grapple with; wecan get inspired to try some new direction; we might discover new music to listen to, or toanalyze, that might open new doors for us; and sometimes, articulating your own point of view tosomeone else simply helps to clarify it in your own mind. So with this symposium we have themother of all “hangs” for jazz composers!

Many Questions, a Few Answers

In preparing these remarks I started to articulate questions that I might try to answer. Ifound that certain questions led to more questions, and sometimes the answers are hard to naildown.

What is jazz composition? Is it composing jazz, or jazzing (jassing) the compositional process?

In its early days, “jazz” was a verb; it was primarily a process applied to existing forms of music. You played a song/rag/blues and you jassed it, with improvisation and a new kind of



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rhythmic feel. So maybe as jazz composers we’re jassing more established compositionaltechnique? Or, maybe we are composing frameworks that allow jazz to happen?

Jazz is largely improvised, right? How do you compose improvisation? Is that even whatwe do when we compose jazz? What is composition, anyway? And what’s the difference between composition and improvisation? Between composition and arranging?

When I was in music school at the University of Illinois back in the late ‘60’s and early

‘70’s, one of the never-ending debates that raged was whether improvisation and compositionwere the same, or two facets of the same process, or different processes; or was one better thanthe other, or more legitimate? No one really won this debate, of course; a proponent of any oneviewpoint simply proceeded as if he or she were correct, and dismissed the others. One of thewiser souls I encountered back then was the ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl. He proposed that,instead of arguing about the relative merits of composition and improvisation, we regard a pieceof music as a model . This model contains certain elements that are created ahead of time, andother elements that are created during the performance. When you think about it, every piece of music has a balance between the two. An Indian raga, a Brahms symphony, and a jazz performance of “I’ve Got Rhythm” all have certain pre-determined elements that must be therein order for the result to be called that particular piece, and not something else. Other elements

are determined in performance, by the performer. With the Brahms symphony, almost everyelement was determined years ago by Brahms himself; the spontaneous elements may be theconductor’s choice of tempo, or the length of a fermata, or an issue of balance; with “I’ve GotRhythm”, certain of Gershwin’s original elements must be there. But the jazz esthetic allows for most of the musical details to be created in the act of performance.

And arrangement vs. composition. The processes exhibit many similarities, yet are quitedifferent. An arrangement is a process applied to an existing song; the song is the maincharacter of the drama; the piece is all about the song. A composition may or may not have arecognizable song. Characters might be a melody, a phrase, a player in the ensemble, or atexture. A character might be developed beyond recognition; may enter into conflict with another character; may well die before the piece ends. An arrangement is a portrait of a character; acomposition is the dramatic development of one or more characters. Still, the line between thetwo can be very vague, especially in the hands of a master. Billy Strayhorn’s arrangement of “Artistry in Rhythm”, or Gil Evans’ arrangement of Kurt Weill’s “The Barbara Song”; BobBrookmeyer’s “My Funny Valentine”, or Bill Holman’s “Just Friends”; these all straddle theline. The song to be arranged has become the main character of the drama; all are tremendous pieces of music.

As jazz composers, are we therefore creating pre-determined structures that contain points-of-departure for improvisation? Does this, by itself, mean that a piece could be called a“jazz composition”? And what makes a piece a “jazz composition” anyway?

We’d most likely not call Brahms’ Symphony #2 a jazz piece. Why not? And what about“I’ve Got Rhythm”? Or “Dolphin Dance”? Is jazz composition simply music that is written by jazz musicians? Or played by jazz musicians? When Sonny Rollins played “I’m an OldCowhand”, did it become a jazz composition? Is “Lush Life” a jazz composition? If you play itnote-for-note just as Billy Strayhorn wrote it--verse and chorus--and don’t improvise a singlenote, is it still a jazz composition? Is a piece’s jazz nature determined more by the perfomancethan any intrinsic quality? Is Thad Jones’ “Don’t Get Sassy” jazz as played by the VanguardJazz Orchestra? As played by a horrible junior high school band? Or if it were to ever be played by Marilyn Manson?

And all of this leads us both forward to and back to that most fundamental question:“What is Jazz?” No, I’m not going there today!



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So, what is it that we all do that makes us jazz composers? I would propose severalthings. We generally—although not always—employ rhythmic language developed through jazz performance. This applies not only to “swing”, but to melodic phrasing, accents and articulation.We generally—although not always—use drums and bass in the way that they function in a jazzgroup: laying down a rhythmic and harmonic foundation over which everything else happens.We generally allow room in our music for improvisation—mostly by individuals, sometimes by

groups. We consider the balance between the pre-composed and improvised to be a central issueof what we write. Finally, we write music that sounds like we have listened to jazz, and have played jazz, and heard a jazz piece at one time and said, “I want to write like that!” That’s veryvague and personal, I know, but the boundaries between what is jazz and “non-jazz” are vagueand personal. And, frankly, the more we venture beyond those boundaries, the stronger we arewhen we return to the jazz center.

We also speculate. Stravinsky said that one of the main jobs of a composer isspeculation. We ask “What if?” and follow our instincts searching for an answer. I think thatthis is important, especially in an era in which many people seem to be asking “May I?” or “Is itin the tradition to…?” I’m certainly not advocating weirdness or rebellion for its own sake. But jazz, like any art form, is fluid, and it grows and enriches itself through the efforts of speculators,

both performing and composing, whose inner voices demand that they try a different path.Sometimes that speculation leads you outside of other people’s boundaries, where you go at your own risk. It takes courage to follow your speculation. Sometimes the speculation takes youdown a dead end road, sometimes it succeeds. But the alternative is stagnation.

My Own History

I started my own speculations around the age of 15. I suppose my first big question was“What if I wrote a big band arrangement?” I was in my second year at Notre Dame High Schoolfor Boys, just outside of Chicago. I’d chosen that particular school because they had a “stage band”. The director was a priest named George Wiskirchen, and he is one of the main reasonsthat I stand up here today. He was a Basie fanatic; he’d gotten to know Frank Wess, and wasable to get a few charts from the Basie book into our library. I must have indicated my desire towrite an arrangement to my father; he bought me a copy of the Russ Garcia book. I devoured it!Then I found the lead sheet to an Ernie Wilkens blues, and decided that I’d arrange it for theschool band. Fr. George was very encouraging about the whole endeavor. I finished thearrangement, copied out the parts and brought it in to a rehearsal. They started to play it. Wow,those sax voicings sounded great! Russ was right, you don’t have to put the root at the bottom.Hmm, it’s hard to hear the melody in the tutti. Maybe I screwed up. Hmm, that shout choruswith those slick eighth-notes-inside-quarter-note-triplets never seems to come together. Inlistening to the rehearsal I realized that some of the chart sounded good, and some of it didn’t. Iresolved to continue doing the good stuff, and to find different approaches to the parts that didn’twork. This is essentially the process that has driven me to this day. Put it on paper, listenhonestly; pat yourself on the back for the good stuff, fix or get rid of the bad; then go on to thenext piece.

I remember that at some point in my late teens DownBeat would print reproductions of pencil big band scores in the middle of the magazine. I don’t remember whose charts they were, but I remember that the ledger lines excited me. And they looked like a lot of work went intothem. That excited me, too. I was such a geek, that while my school friends were checking outother kinds of centerfolds, my big turn-on was the ledger lines in a lead trombone part!

So I wrote a lot more for my high school band. By my senior year, my best friend Nick Talarico and I were writing marching band shows. Wiskirchen had a 6-line template that we





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time I was writing a lot. I remember in 1998 I was in the middle of two projects: a GeorgeGershwin retrospective for the Danish Radio, and a Chick Corea concert with the Carnegie HallJazz Band. In one month I wrote 270 pages of big band score. It was an exciting, exhausting,exhilarating time. Someone later asked me, “What did you do when you got stuck?” I thoughtabout it and realized that I never got stuck; I simply didn’t have time! Composition andarranging are essentially decision-making processes. We can get stuck when we have the luxury

to put off making a decision. If the deadline is imminent, we make a decision, living with itsconsequences, and move on.

The Process

Much of the music I write begins with a question. Sometimes it’s about a musical detail:“What if a unison “E” grew into a chromatic explosion?” “What if I constructed lines in whicheach successive interval was a half-step larger or smaller?” “What if a song repeats over andover, getting more chromatic and intense each time?” More, though, it begins with an image:“What if a big band started to melt in the middle of a line?” “How would a tenor player react if he felt lost in the middle of a solo?” “What if Mel Lewis came back?” “What would it sound

like if a band fell down a flight of stairs?” “What would loud sandpaper sound like?” If not aquestion, there might be a one- or two-word description of the piece: “moving rondo”, “burn”,“exhaustion”, “exuberance”, “chewy”, “ahhhhhh”, “glow”, “vulnerable”, “help me”.

The speculation is the first step in what I call the “high level”, conceptual issues. If I amwriting for a specific group I keep them in mind. Each group with whom I work a lot has itsstrengths and weaknesses; time feel and timbre; lead trumpet sound and collection of soloists. If I’m not familiar with the sound of the group I write for, I create one in my head. It’s better toconnect the piece to some kind of “virtual” ensemble, rather than none at all.

I decide how long the piece will be, if only in a general sense. I decide on the “surfacesound” of the music—this is more or less “what a dog hears”—high, low, loud, soft, rough,smooth, dense, open, screechy, woofy. I also decide on issues like the harmonic palette, andtimbral palette (open brass, flutes and mutes). I decide on who will play solos, and where theywill occur in the piece. For larger pieces I make a time line to indicate the length of the piece,and indicate certain events along the line. I also decide on the general shape of the piece. I willadmit that much of what I have written conforms to the ideal defined by Ray Wright in “Insidethe Score”—that a piece usually peaks at somewhere around 80-something % through the piece.But it doesn’t have to be that way.

At the same time I start to work with the “low” level issues: specific musical ideas.These might be a motive; a vamp; four bars of a progression; a three-note group, a chord voicing;or anything else that might occur to me. Sometimes I walk into my studio, thinking about thesandwich that I just ate, or the conversation I just had with my wife; anything but music. Then Isit at the piano, put my hands on the keys and hear what comes out. I try to hear the result withthe same un-connected ears that the other six billion people on earth have, not my own ears.

At this point there is a list of “don’ts” I refer to:

• Don’t judge your idea as good or bad. It is neutral; a gift. Write it down.• Don’t start by telling yourself that you are going to write the greatest piece of your career. This is one of the best and quickest ways to kill the music.• Don’t worry about who might be playing this idea. If there is an instrumental or ensemble sound associated with it, great. If not, great. Either way, you’ve gotsomething happening.



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• Don’t worry about whether this idea will fit into the piece. It either will or it won’t.Right now you need to see how to develop the idea, and see where it leads you.• Don’t worry about where this idea will fit into the piece. As you work with it, you mayfind where it goes. If you don’t, put it aside.• Don’t think that every idea must be put into the piece.• Don’t take your original ideas at face value. Work with them. I think if them as

physical objects, like pieces of clay. They can be stretched, cut up and recombined,rolled into different shapes, flattened, thinned, and replicated. Imagine being a kid playing in a sandbox. If, after all of that, you decide to go with your original idea, at leastyou do it knowing what some of the other possibilities are.• Don’t get wrapped up trying to obey all the rules. If a rule doesn’t serve you anymore,make up a new rule.

I start to work with my ideas, and develop them. Make some melodic lines; extend progressions; transpose vamps. Whatever I can think of. I never say “no” to a possible variationor development or re-working of an idea. I just write it down. My goal is to create enoughmaterial so that I can throw most of it away. What remains is something that I absolutely believe

in. It’s not perfect, not “amazing”. But Ibelieve

it.As the low level starts to develop, the high level starts to get more defined. Details of theform and shape begin to emerge. One of my big concerns is to take my time getting to the firstsolo. When you are young and starting out, it is a laborious process just to score the “head” of the arrangement. So, BAM, next thing is a tenor solo; after the painstaking task of writingvoicings and making orchestrational decisions, it’s such a relief to just write some slashes! But I believe that the first solo should start only when the music is ready for it. As writers we areexercising a lot of control over all elements of a piece, and with the first solo we relax some of that control. Wait until the time is right. It might occur before there’s any written music; itmight not occur until five minutes into the piece. But make sure that the time is right.

At this point I also begin to think of myself as a kind of playwright. I’m creatingcharacters, and thinking about how they might develop through the course of the piece. Besidesthe many jazz and classical composers who have inspired me, I would also have to pay tribute towriters like William Shakespeare, August Strindberg and Tennessee Williams. So many of Williams’s plays are set in the south—“Orpheus Descending”, for example. You can feel thehumidity dripping off the willow trees. The men drink a lot and don’t work much, and thewomen, at the primes of their lives, have resigned themselves to their lot. Halfway through thefirst act enters Val, “The Young Stud”, from some far-off place. Said stud upsets the balancethat has been agreed upon by the local folks; the women shoot him surreptitious glances andhave vapors, and the men start looking for their shotguns. The resulting tension and resolutiondrives the rest of the play. When tickets to a Broadway play hover around $100 a head, youdon’t pay that kind of money to see people sitting around a table having a pleasant conversationabout the weather. Give us conflict! And so it may go in music. Let the piece go on for a while,then introduce a new, unexpected character into the mix, and see what happens!

So as the high level becomes more defined, and the low level develops, I’m usually readyto start sketching, which is where I make most of my decisions about voicings and orchestration.I still use pencil and paper. I’ve tried “real composing” on the computer, but feel that it gets inthe way. I end up looking at a picture of the music. Pencil and paper are physical, tactilesubstances that give me more of a feeling of being connected. Besides, for me it’s more fun toerase than to hit “delete”.

Technology and Computers



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I use Finale for writing my scores now, mostly for the incredible convenience of editing,archiving, and sending via e-mail. But I still have some reservations about it. As with any tool,we have a tendency to adapt our behavior in order to use the tool more easily. With pencil and paper, we can draw almost any shape imaginable. Yet certain shapes are still difficult on thecomputer. With pencil and paper, all of us older folks learned how to make a good drum part,

with relative ease. Those of you who know me, know that I could spend the next half hour kvetching about the drum parts I see in students using Finale or Sibelius. One of the problems isthat we use these programs to tell the players what is easiest to say via the software, and not whatreally needs to be said in the score or in the part.

There’s also a bigger issue, and I’d like to share with you an excerpt from an article Iread on the plane flying down here. It’s from the latest Atlantic Monthly, in an article by Nicholas Carr entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

“Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen WritingBall, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had becomeexhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail hiswriting, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least

for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, usingonly the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a

composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become eventighter, more telegraphic. ‘Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,’the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his ‘”thoughts” in music and languageoften depend on the quality of pen and paper.’

‘You are right,’ Nietzsche replied, ’our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.’ Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzche’s prose ‘changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric totelegram style.’”

And I’m sure that Nietzche wasn’t the first person to notice that the new technologyfostered a difference, not only in his output, but also in his thinking. This is, in itself, notnecessarily a bad thing. But therein lies a problem. A tool may make certain things easier; makeus more productive; give us greater insight and flexibility. On the other hand, that same tool,especially if not used properly, can hinder us from expressing well many of those creative thingswe might do better without the tool, and ultimately limit us. A chain saw, when used properly,can be a useful, powerful tool. In untrained hands, however, it can cause horrible damage. Inother words: if you, as a professional composer, are going to use Finale or Sibelius, learn how touse the program, and learn it well. Look at the user manual. Seek help from more experiencedusers. Apply the same standards to software as you would to your musical instrument. It is your musical instrument! Would you show up at a gig not knowing how to finger an F#? It’s simplynot enough to say, “Gee, this trumpet doesn’t let me do that!”

Another computer-related problem is that we now have the ability to play back, and play back, and play back, ad infinitum. You can make the flutes sound as loud as you’d like, and youcan make that fourth trumpet player play his double high “G” at pianississimo. Trombones can play without taking a breath, and everyone is perfectly in tune. Better yet, all of your intricateinterlocking rhythms are performed with no problem at all. The problem is that someinexperienced composers are convinced that this is the way their music must sound at the firstread-through. Worse, a few get really angry when real humans can’t play the music as preciselyand perfectly balanced as their computer. We all must learn how to get through that first read-through. You may have a piece that you have lived with for months, and played back over and



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over on the computer. But the human players see only dots on a page. It’s going to take themtime to assimilate all of the information on the paper, and if it is notated poorly or unclearly, allthe worse.

What Are We Doing, and Why Do We Do It?

So, here we are—all jazz composers. Why do we do it? I’m sure that each of us has our own reasons. But music is a universal human phenomenon. Every culture has music toaccompany religious rites and secular ceremonies. And many cultures have an “art music”:music that may have had utilitarian origins but is now performed for a listening audience.People want to hear music. They are drawn to it. And contrary to the attitudes of many school boards and politicians, music is an important, alternative way in which humans communicate andconnect. And music needs composers. Performing musicians need someone to give them atleast that “point-of-departure”, if not an entire score. Ever since the days of Jelly Roll Morton, jazz musicians have realized that the more players there are in a band, the more important it isfor someone to organize the music and the players’ roles in that music. Sometimes we functionas the ones who say, “Hey, guys! Here’s a melody for you to play together!” Or, “Hey, I’ve got

an idea! First the clarinet plays a solo, then there’s a two-bar drum break!” And so forth. JellyRoll seemed to have the idea that music was better if it was interesting; if it had dramatic twistsand turns. What a concept! “Without breaks you don’t have good jazz”, he said. And so onthrough Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, up totoday.

We composers play a crucial role in human musical culture; and as jazz composers we play a crucial role in the most important musical form to have emerged in the 20th century. At aminimum we help entertain listeners, giving them an artistic pause in their daily lives. And wegive performing musicians “something to play”, so that they can sound good. We may even givethem a little employment. But at our best, we challenge listeners to put aside their preconceptions, and offer them a chance to enter our world and hear something that they haven’theard before. We inspire listeners to feel something that they haven’t felt before. At our best wechallenge performers to stretch; to reach a little deeper for something they haven’t done before,and inspire them to a higher level of performance. I firmly believe that to compose music, and todo it well--jazz or otherwise--is a most noble profession.

We are all blessed to be musicians. We spend a great deal of our time doing somethingthat we love, and that many other people would love to do, but can’t. We earn the bulk of our living from activities that many people consider a hobby, or something they’d love to do oncethey’ve retired. On the other hand, sometimes I wonder about the larger social contexts of our lives. It is one thing to get “in the zone” as a composer; it is something else to hide one’s head inthe sand and avoid living the rest of one’s life. Bob Brookmeyer once said to me, “Societydoesn’t owe you a living just because you have musical talent.” So it’s not enough to just writemusic. You need to think about the larger context: responsibilities to your family, to buildingyour career. Remember, Bach was a musical genius who continues to inspire today. Bach alsoalways made sure he had a gig, and a good one at that. He had a lot of mouths to feed! There isalso a multitude of ways to get involved in the many other aspects of life: charitable, political,social, artistic, and so on. It’s not enough to simply write a tune, call it “George Bush Is AnIdiot”, and think that you’ve done your job. Writing a dynamite big band piece, in itself, will probably not bring peace to the Mideast, justice to Darfur, or reverse global warming. But itcould get some people thinking; might start an argument; and might even spur the composer totake some further action to help the cause. It may take some time, but music can make adifference. We can make a difference (“Yes, we can!”)



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In Closing

We have a lot of music on tap for the next three days. I’m looking forward to the eveningconcerts, of course; but I’m really looking forward to hearing what all of you have brought tothis event. I’m hoping to be surprised, challenged, soothed, and inspired. And by the end of

Saturday I trust that we will all be fueled and fired up to go back to our own studios and take it tothe next step. In the words of Billy Strayhorn: “Ever Onwards and Upwards!”

Thank you!

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What We Do and Why We Do It