The following contains excerpts from the book, Early Jazz (Its Roots and Musical Development) (Gunther Schuller).
At our music school in Dallas, Texas we believe that music is more than sound, it is relationships. One of the most important relationships a musician can nurture is one with the fabric of history in which he creates.
“Despite the fact that many ‘serious’ composers and performers had indicated their high regard for jazz as early as the 1920s, the academic credentials of jazz were hardly sufficient to produce a serious interest in the analysis of its techniques and actual musical content…In a sense this book is an answer in terms of specific musical detail to a series of interrelated questions: What makes jazz work? What makes jazz different form other music? Why do so many people find jazz exciting? How did it get that way?…In this respect the book is directed particularly to the ‘classically’ trained musician or composer.”
This is quite possibly one of the top five most important books I should know deeply as a musician. It has been regarded in the musical community as of paramount importance in the documentation of the jazz style. It is very dense and goes into a good deal of music theory, so I chose to break it into several sections to ensure that I thoroughly understood what the author was saying.”
I have become aware that many aspects of music that is part of our American culture, which are predominantly Rock-based, originate in Africa. Things such as the strong 2 and 4 beat, syncopated rhythms in our melodies, and cyclical forms, along with ‘call and response’ phrases all have African origins. Rock, after all, is the merging of Country and Jazz, or in other words a merging of the White and Black traditions.
At our music school in Dallas, Texas we teach foundational ‘core’ competencies that have been used for centuries to train successful musicians, which can be applied to any style of music in history and into the future.
Following are the mains points in this book:
- Rhythm
- African Rhythm is based on additive rather than divisive principles
- African music is improvised, but in a special sense of that word
- It is improvised within a most complex and rigorous set of musical disciplines
“When the European thinks of polyrhythm, he general conceives of it as two or more rhythmic strands occurring simultaneously, retaining, however, vertical coincidence at phrase beginnings and endings, at bar lines, and at other focal points. The African, on the other hand, conceives his polyrhythms on a much more extended, more complex, polymetrically organized basis, where phrases rarely, and sometimes never, coincide vertically. In fact, his overriding interest is in cross-rhythms, the more subtle and more complex the better.”
“The basic African ensemble…will produce a minimum of seven musical lines and very often a maximum of eleven lines. What is remarkable, however, is not the number of lines, but that – in the case of a seven-part ensemble – six of the seven lines may operate in different metric patterns which are, moreover, staggered in such a way that the downbeats of these patterns rarely coincide.”
We teach students of our music school in Dallas, Texas about how ‘macro-polyrhythms’ are formed and can be used in modern composition. These are derived from a similar understanding as the African tradition.
- Form
“African formal elements that interest us most in relationship to jazz are: 1) the so-called call-and-response pattern, 2) the repeated refrain concept, and 3) the chorus format of most recreational and cult dances.”
“The call-and-response pattern probably continues in its purest functional form in the religious services of the Baptist churches, especially in those astonishing ‘sermons’ that are more music than oratory…it found its way into the marching jazz of new Orleans, and in this form began to be known as a ‘riff.’ From there it infiltrated the entire spectrum of jazz from the improvised solo to the arranged ensemble.”
There are “seven dances employing the full African instrumental ensemble. These all have a common total structure divided into as many as five or six ‘master patterns,’ which are initiated by the master drummer, and whose length is determined (within certain very strict rules) by him. Within each pattern a certain amount of variation may occur, but this is rare. Instead, each pattern is conceived as a variant of the previous pattern, with the understanding that all variants shall adhere to the basic rhythmic pattern peculiar to that dance.”
We teach students at our music school in Dallas, Texas the value of learning how to both read, as well as notate, rhythmic patterns. This allows them to analyze complex meters and large-scale polyrhythms.
- Harmony
“European harmonic disciplines are totally unknown in traditional
African music…By contrast, African music is unilaterally melodic, that is , not harmonic in structure…predominantly pentatonic…African harmony is sung either in parallel fourths, parallel fifths, parallel octaves or parallel thirds.” This is termed ‘diody.’“it is entirely conceivable that the blues chord progression of I-IV-I-V-I represented a horizontalized form of the primary intervals used by these fourths- and fifths-tribes…elements in the prehistory of jazz were not so much derived from European musical sources as carried over by the Negro from African traditions. Coincidentally, the European and African traditions overlapped enough to offer no profound problems of synthesis.”
- Melody
“The blues scale as used in jazz really divides into two identical tetrachords.” The pattern of the lowest four notes centers around ‘tonic,’ and the pattern of the higher four notes center around ‘dominant.’
“The blues scale…stems directly from 1) the quartal and quintal ‘harmony’ of African singing, and 2) the tendency of African melodies to shift around a central tone.”
When singing a major scale in parallel 4ths and singing that same scale in parallel 5ths, the combination of all notes of both scales produces the notes found in the ‘blues’ scale.
“Literally thousands of examples of blues and riffs substantiate the fact that these melodies revolve around a central tone, usually within the small range of a fourth or fifth. This does not necessarily mean that such a central tone becomes a key center. It is simply regarded as a central pitch around which the other pitches revolve, with none of the implications that a hierarchy of relations exists.”
Here is another example of the early influence of Classical music’s tuning system (Equal Temperament) and common scales as foundational to the origin of Jazz. At our music school in Dallas, Texas we insist on students understanding basic scale patterns in all major, minor, modes and how they relate to the blues scale and Jazz, in general.
- Timbre
“African speech, singing, and playing are all marked by an open tone and natural quality. In this they are closer to European and Western tradition than to the Islamic, which is indeed characterized by a tin, nasal, wavering quality.”
“The typical ensemble has a rich variety of drums carefully tuned prior to each performance according to strictly predetermined pitch associations. An ensemble of four drums…produce(s)…a pantonal low-register pitch polyphony.”
“Jazz’s strength and communicative power lie in this individuality, which comes from inside the man; indeed a jazz musician without this individual quality is not a jazz musician in the strictest sense…The jazz musician…must control his individual approach only in terms of his own conception, not that of another composer.”
- Improvisation
“The improvisation of many lines at the same time is a typically African concept, and is perpetuated in most forms of early jazz, a music marked above all by ‘collective improvisation.’”
“The drummer’s skill as an improviser will be judged by his ability to use with a maximum of variety the essential motivic material of a given pattern, all within, we reiterate, exceedingly strict rules and traditions.”
At our music school in Dallas, Texas we believe that the combination of being able to read music notation, along with the ability to ‘play by ear’ or improvise, gives the student the best training in how to participate in music at multiple levels of involvement.