About Jazz Solos

Since I started playing again, it has struck me frequently that "Things Ain’t What They Used to Be." People are not as exposed to jazz as they once were, so it can seem mysterious and exotic. Audiences like what we are doing but at the same time many are a little bewildered by what we are doing. Old and new friends have asked whether there is any plan to what we play. Or do we just play whatever we want and it somehow magically sounds good. I was even asked once to talk to a Rotary meeting and explain how what I am doing is possible.

This puzzlement is not a friend to the art and it does not help us attract audiences. So here is a quick and simple summary of what we are doing.

Each song has a form. It has a defined length (so many measures). As we go through those measure we also move through a sequence of chord changes. If we go through the song again, we are going through the same measures and the same chord sequence. When we come to the solos in jazz, each soloist is improvising on the same sequence of chords.

I certainly do not mean that musicians are thinking as mechanically as that sounds. Those are the givens. They are internalized, more felt than thought about.

What each soloist does with those givens and how others respond–that will vary every night. And in that variation, that controlled freedom, is the beauty and the wonder of the art. The solo may be shaped by what the preceding soloist just played, by how the song feels at the moment, by how the musician feels, by how life is going, by any number of things. Sometimes I will improvise a melodic phrase at the end of my chorus and hear Eddie pick up that phrase to start his own solo.

Enough talk. Here is the art itself in one of television’s finest moments. The song "Fine and Mellow" is a twelve bar blues (that is, there are twelve "bars" or measures in each chorus, four beats to each measure). In this performance (from 1957) the singer is Billie Holiday, and she is working with some of the greatest people in jazz history. The trumpet playing in the background is Doc Cheatham. The soloists in order are

Ben Webster, tenor sax
Lester Young, tenor sax
Vic Dickenson, trombone
Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax
Coleman Hawkins, tenor sax
Roy Eldridge, trumpet

Notice how individual each solo is and how each contributes to the over-all feeling of the performance. I hope you all enjoy this as much as I do: "Fine and Mellow."