Logik der Linie
– Strukturkomponenten der Improvisation im modernen Jazz
Connecting theory, technique and vocabulary to improvisations of an artificial level is a never ending task in the musical life of every jazz musician. The immensely demanding implications of that task have brought a tendency of fixation on material skills, which has strongly been reinforced by the success of the chord-scale theory as a very effective tool to organize tonal material for improvisation. The danger of missing the semantic necessities of the Modern Jazz language (which is the idiomatic centre of these efforts) has become too obvious. Here also exists a problem of most jazz teaching programs.
This article asks for the reasons of internal logic, structural strength, and story-telling qualities, which are a sure quality of the master’s improvisations, as well as their skills in technique, rhythm, and harmony.
A sample of five Modern Jazz solos was examined. Too small for final conclusions, this sample nevertheless shows interesting results. Jim Hall organizes the creative flight of ideas in his improvisation on Echo by using in a very stringent manner the possibilities of thematic variation as well as of more open motivic development.
Charlie Parker’s Solo on Now Is The Time is an impressive example for this master’s ability to combine structural and gestural correspondence to spontaneous compositions on the level of real art.
Clifford Brown in his solo on Confirmation also uses strong gestural, but loosened structural (motivic) correspondences, using small interval steps at the changing points of harmony as a means for compensating this course by a degree, as a tool providing the effect of linear consequence. John Coltrane’s famous Giant Steps shows the same principle on a more abstract level by creating lines based on connections of modular eighth note groupings. In his and Brown’s improvisation structural correspondences depend largely on the intervallic vocabulary used in connection with chord changes.
Chet Baker’s solo on Down builds on a concept of “melody behind the melody”, depending on guide tone intervals, and with the strong effect of musical logic.
There is a certain frequency of well-known devices of melodic development in all solos being investigated: inversion, augmentation/fragmentation, sequence, use of motives in a multitude of ways, etc.
The analogies of this to devices in European concert music are very probably the results of a common framework by meter and functional harmony and therefore primarily the expression of musical logic in general, but not borrowings from the European genres.