The Hot Solo
By ROGER PRYOR DODGE
WHEN the jazz period is over, we shall no doubt go back to old phonograph records and to printed scores, studying them, trying to find out how things got there. Jazz improvisation is a folk music of our own day which reaches its epitome in the “hot solo.” Even those who wish simply to enjoy this music should not take it too much for granted.
To take content from a tune and still not state it explicitly in any part of its variation, the improviser must have the tune safely buried in a substratum of his mind. If it is buried too deep, there is danger of losing the tune and consequently of falling back on harmony alone — as often happens. But when the tune has receded just far enough to allow freedom of thought, the improviser can keep two voices running through his mind at once. This process may be called two-voiced thinking— one voice privately sustained in the head, the other publicly presented.
An ideal state of improvisation is achieved by constant repetition of the tune until it has sunk into the subconscious. Then the musician is free to improvise, and association may work with its full force. The first actual progression, or even the thought of it, immediately recalls the rest of the piece. In this way the improvisation becomes a new tune, its unity built out of the old one.
The act of circling about a succession of tuneful single notes with runs and rhythms does not vary the tune; it merely relieves a monotony of presentation. This weak device has been carried to comparative heights by a few creative pianists of recent times. Men like Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, and Art Tatum have made use of very little else.
Another simple way to improvise is to forget the tune and improvise on the harmony as carried in the head or sustained by the orchestra. Here anything the musician does will be right enough, but lack of a cementing continuity of melodic thought keeps such improvisation from holding together. Unless the improviser can create a new unity of tune, he will end up with much choppy activity and little musical material.
To imply the tune at every stage of the improvised variation, to avoid obbligato and to have variety and originality besides, is musical activity rarely possible for anyone except the experienced jazz or folk musician. Such a musician sees the tune in his mind practically as a whole. This image allows him perfect freedom. The musical line of his improvisation can completely disregard the musical line of the tune.
The late Charles Christians’s guitar solo on Honeysuclde Roue, by Benny Goodman’s orchestra, is an example. Although it is possible, throughout his variation, to trace the melodic line of the original tune, Christians forces us to forget Honeysuckle Rose and listen to Charles Christians. The tune must have floated far back in his mind to permit him such easy motion. One-finger piano playing, at slow tempo, reveals the absolute melodic newness of his piece, and yet, when it is played at tempo, the tune of Honeysuckle Rose can be distinguished.
Very often the improviser will want his new melodic line, his hot solo, to keep going ahead, to extend beyond the limits of a formal section of the original tune. So he obeys the demands of his own melodic line, not the end of the section, by extending it beyond the normal limit of the section of the accepted tune. Having done this for a time, he is naturally far behind the course of the melody, but at any point he joins it with the greatest ease. Like a dog out for a walk with its master, he is running away and continually returning — returning to where the master is, not to where he left the master.
It is the adherence to a tune which gives a not too imaginative variation its significance. To make use of a time’s unity, not merely to follow its melodic outline, requires the faculty Mozart describes: —
. . . and I spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in my head, even when it is a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at a single glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting or a handsome human being; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as a succession — the way it must come later— but all at once, as it were. It is a rare feast! All the invention and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong dream. But the best of all is the hearing of it all at once.
The jazz improviser, playing for dancers, creates with harmony, melody, superimposed harmony, the tune itself and its embellishments, all balanced in his mind. To them he adds his own personality and his mechanical habits of musicianship. A steady beat correlates the diverse elements. That is hot jazz.
