The preceding chapters have given you a lot of information to assimilate and it can seem overwhelming. But, music isn’t a race, it’s a journey. Take your t i m e .
All the book learning in the world can’t give you what you can get from careful and enthusiastic listening to live and recorded Jazz. Each and every one of the great Jazz musicians who moved this style of music from its infancy to the sophisticated art form that it is today have something to teach you.
The massive accumulation of Jazz recordings produced over the course of the twentieth century is a great big gift wrapped up and delivered to you. Each track is full of passion and skill and deep, measured reflection, the end product of years of honing a specialized craft. You can absorb every ounce of their
experience and ingenuity with the artists’ blessing. All you have to do is open your mind and listen.
TRANSCRIPTIONS
A Jazz musician does a lot of transcribing in the course of his or her studies. Transcribing, in the musical sense, is the act of writing out recorded music. The notes are written down on staff paper with the correct rhythmic notation, whether a single melodic line of a horn solo or an entire big band a r r a n g e m e n t .
Every good teacher assigns transcriptions to his or her students and they are an important part of the curriculum of university Jazz Studies programs. Great musicians do them all of their lives, for they know the value of the process to their growth as artists.
There are a lot of commercially available transcriptions, like the Charlie Parker Omnibook, published by Atlantic, that you can purchase in any music store. Using these books as a guide while you learn transcribing can be a
positive thing. But if you use them in place of doing your own work, you won’t be doing yourself any favors. It’s the process that makes you a better musician, not the big pile of transcriptions in your folder.
Transcribing takes a lot of repeated listening and mental conce n t r a t i o n that can be very difficult at first. But the rewards are a finely tuned ear, a well- developed memory, great musical ideas, and an ability to speak the language of Jazz like a native.
Needless to say, you’ll have to be able to read and write musical notes to do transcriptions. But even if you are just learning to read now, you can still learn solos by heart. As a matter of fact, it’s the best way to do them. Jazz is traditionally an aurally transmitted art form and that should be the heart of your studies. You may be a whiz at taking down transcriptions, but if you can’t sing them without reading the music, you haven’t really learned them.
Start small, with a simple Blues line or a vocal rendition of a song that you are already familiar with. Although you know the melody, you may even be performing it at gigs, there is always something to learn from a great artist’s interpretation. An improvised line here, a little rhythmic change there; tone, delivery, and feel, are all subtle aspects of a performance that can be gleaned from countless listenings.
And there will be countless listenings. Make a cassette recording of the solo you wish to transcribe and listen to it everywhere - in the car, at the beach, on your morning jog. Sit at the piano and stop and start the tape until you have figured out each and every note and can sing along with the record like a ghostly double.
The importance of listening to and transcribing Jazz cannot be
overemphasized. And it’s so easy for us compared with the Jazz musicians of the past who didn’t have cassette recording equipment, Walkmans, or the high tech stereo systems available to us today. They did their listening on old
victrolas without stop and start playback, no half speed functions. And they listened to live music nearly every night, going out to the clubs to hear their idols and to make their mark at the jam sessions. They grew ‘big ears’ from all that careful listening and you can, too. And, after all that listening, if someone tells you that you have ‘big ears’ too, say thank you to the compliment, and thank yourself for all the time you put it on your transcriptions.
VOCALESE
Vocalese is a transcribed instrumental solo with original lyrics added and performed by a vocalist. Probably the most well known vocalese is T w i s t e d, based on a C Blues solo by the saxophonist Wardell Gray with lyrics written by Annie Ross. She recorded it with her group, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, but there have also been interesting renditions recorded by Joni Mitchell and Bette Midler. Moody’s Mood For Love, written by King Pleasure and based on a
trumpet solo played on I’m In The Mood For Love, by James Moody, is another popular vocalese.
Eddie Jefferson was one of most prolific jazz vocalists who wrote and sang vocalese. His area was hard bop and his voice, while not traditionally pretty, was fluent, pitch perfect, with a rock solid sense of swing. The vocal group Manhattan Transfer did a number of wonderful vocaleses, most notably Weather Report’s Birdland, in which the vocalists sing all of the instrumental parts, with lyrics.
Vocalese lyrics, due the stricture of setting them to an instrumental solo line, run the gamut from the truly inspired to the simply goofy. The real
attraction is in the skill required to sing lines created by an instrument with its much larger range and percussive abilities.
This special style is arguably the most important vocal contribution to the Jazz repertoire. Every musical genre, be it pop, rock, or classical, has vocalists. But only Jazz has vocalese. It’s fun to sing as well as a challenging venue for a vocalist to express herself creatively as a lyricist. And, because it is performed so rarely, audiences eat it up.