Ways of the Hand.pdf

Ways of the Hand

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Ways of the HandA Rewritten Account

David Sudnow

foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus

The MIT PressCambridge, MassachusettsLondon, England

© 1978, 1993, 2001 David Sudnow

All rights reserved.

This book was set in Sabon by The MIT Press and was printed andbound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sudnow, David.Ways of the hand : a rewritten account / David Sudnow ; foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references (p. )ISBN 0-262-19467-8 (hc. : alk. paper)1. Improvisation (Music). 2. Hand. 3. Jazz—Instruction and

study. 4. Phenomenology. I. Dreyfus, Hubert L. II. Title.MT68 .S89 2001786.2'16593—dc21 2001044330

To my extraordinary wife, Cathryn

The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes—and not justthings: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in thehands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designsand signs, presumably because man is a sign . . . the hand’s gesturesrun everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity preciselywhen man speaks by being silent. And only when man speaks, does hethink—not the other way around, as metaphysics still believes. Everymotion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself throughthe element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in thatelement.Martin Heidegger

The meaning of a sentence appears intelligible throughout, detachablefrom the sentence and finitely self-subsistent in an intelligible world,because we presuppose as given all those exchanges, owed to thehistory of the language, which contribute to determining its sense. Inmusic, on the other hand, no vocabulary is presupposed, the meaningappears as linked to the empirical presence of the sounds, and that iswhy music strikes us as dumb. But in fact . . . the clearness of languagestands out from an obscure background, and if we carry our researchfar enough we shall eventually find that language is equally uncommu-nicative of anything other than itself, that its meaning is inseparablefrom it.Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Contents

Foreword by Hubert L. Dreyfus ixA Rewritten Account xvAcknowledgments xxi

Preface 1

Beginnings 5

Going for the Sounds 37

Going for the Jazz 73

Notes 131


Foreword

This unique, challenging, and rewarding book speaks to manydifferent constituencies of readers: sociologists, linguists, cog-nitive scientists, musicologists, teachers, and philosophers, toname a few. It has something to say to all these disciplinesbecause it is not a theoretical book. Rather, it grapples with thetask of articulating the relevant details of a paradigm case ofthe phenomena to which all these disciplines are ultimatelyresponsible: the ways embodied beings acquire the skills ofgiving order to, or, better, finding order in, our temporallyunfolding experience. It is a phenomenology of how we cometo find our way about in the world, whether it be the world ofjazz, discourse, typing, tennis, or getting on and off the bus.

As a study of how our bodies gain their grasp of the world,Ways of the Hand is in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty’s Phe-nomenology of Perception. Sudnow writes:

Sitting at the piano, trying to make sense of what was happening, andstudying Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of embodiment, I found myself, inhis own terms, “not so much encountering a new philosophy as recog-nizing what [one] had been waiting for.” A copy of his Phenomenologyalways remains close at hand.

Like Phenomenology of Perception, Sudnow’s work has impor-tant implications for those who want to understand the natureof skillful performance. Sudnow’s detailed description of his

x Foreword

acquisition of the skilled hands of a jazz pianist shows the limi-tations of a cognitivism that thinks that having a skill consists ininteriorizing the theory of a domain.

Sudnow starts, in “Beginnings,” by hunting for particularfeatures, in his case the notes on the piano keyboard, and prac-ticing following rules, such as the typical jazz scales, until theybecome second nature.

After much experience such a novice progresses to the stagewhere he finds himself able to reach for gestalts, like chords orscales as a whole, without having to think about them, andthen to begin to apply maxims, such as “repeat this melodiccluster,” as in his “Going for the Sounds.” Next, at a level onemight call intermittent competence, the student has to form astrategy to get from one situation to the next, as Sudnowbegins to do in the first part of “Going for the Jazz.” Finally,this too becomes something the hand can do, so that now thereis a strategy without a strategist, although such proficiency isstill interrupted by the occasional need to thematize aspects ofthe performance. After years of accumulating specific experi-ences of many thousands of ways to move, he gradually mas-ters the essence of improvisational play with the developmentof a finely shaped (and herein closely described) rhythmic coor-dination that synthesizes such movements into true jazz sen-tences. As “Going for the Jazz” reaches its climax, there isfinally no longer an I that plans, not even a mind that aimsahead, but a jazz hand that knows at each moment how toreach for the music.1

1. In the course of his detailed phenomenology, Sudnow implicitlycorrects a subtle but surprising error in Phenomenology of Perception.Merleau-Ponty occasionally characterizes the lived body as an “I can,”whereas Sudnow is clear that it is not he but his hand that reaches forthe jazz, as, in the Odyssey, Homer says of his heroes that, when theysat down to a banquet, “their hands went out to the food in front of

Foreword xi

Sudnow’s detailed description suggests that the cognitivisttheory of skill acquisition, taken for granted from Socrates toDescartes to Kant to Husserl to Piaget, has the phenomenonupside down. Rather than moving from specific cases toabstract principles, skill acquisition seems to move in the oppo-site direction, from principles followed until they are interior-ized, to the possession of so many types of concrete cases pairedwith types of responses that each situation leads fluidly to thenext. This doesn’t prove that the cognitivist is mistaken, but itshifts the burden of proof to those who think of skill acquisi-tion as the acquisition of more and more refined rules.

Likewise, empiricists, who think of skills in terms of associ-ations of experiences or the formation of linear neural connec-tions (what Merleau-Ponty’s contemporaries called the “reflexarc”), would have to defend their view in the face of the phe-nomenon noted by both Merleau-Ponty and Sudnow that onecan transfer one’s skills from what one hand has learned to theother hand, or, as Sudnow notes, from playing on an adult’s toa child’s keyboard.

But Sudnow’s work moves in the opposite direction fromMerleau-Ponty’s. Like any philosopher, Merleau-Ponty pro-vides only enough detail in his description of action and per-ception to motivate his move to generality and ultimately toontology, whereas Sudnow purposefully restricts himself, inwhat he calls a “production account,” to reveal only the con-creteness of situated relevant detail. And in articulating one ofthe most subtle, rich, intricate, and inarticulate skills humanbeings have developed, Sudnow provides new insights into

them.” The only way to account for Merleau-Ponty’s misleading char-acterization of the egoless agency of the skilled body involved in a taskis that, for reasons we cannot explore here, he took over the expres-sion “I can” from Husserl, who did think of all action as produced byan ego’s aiming at a goal.

xii Foreword

how the body takes over a domain and, most particularly, howit uses varying styles of pulsation to coordinate the temporalunfolding of skilled activity, whether it be music or speech.This adds flesh to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis and implicitlydevelops further Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the subject/objectaccount of being-in-the-world.2

Sudnow is able to describe how complex temporal skills areorganized because he is a unique hybrid. By the time we areable to reflect, we are already living in our language, and aslinguistic beings we are in a poor position to offer a phenom-enology of how speaking works. Sudnow, however, began tolearn jazz improvisation at the age of thirty, before which timehe had been trained as a social anthropologist. Thus he is aunique combination of skilled observer and professional musi-cian. His pathbreaking work in this book not only gives us aninsight into all skill acquisition by following the developmentof a particularly subtle skill; it puts him, as such an experi-enced hybrid, in a special position to attempt to articulate thehidden achievements of a mature speaker, as he is now aimingto accomplish with studies of his own experiences in learninga second language. We can look forward to his report.

Meanwhile, this new and improved version of Ways of theHand will continue to reward readers who want to catch a

2. Research that comes from another direction—from such broad detailsas that the body moves forward more easily than backward and has tobalance in a gravitational field—can also lead to new understanding ofwhat Merleau-Ponty calls “motor intentionality” and thus of the bodyas a way of being that is neither subject nor object, but the discloser ofthe spatiotemporal world. See Samuel Todes’s Body and World (MITPress, 2001). Sudnow’s and Todes’s work carry forward and go beyondMerleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the active body. Together they areuniquely at the forefront in doing Merleau-Ponty-inspired research onembodiment, and not, as so many others do, merely interpretingMerleau-Ponty’s philosophy.

Foreword xiii

glimpse of the magic their body performs every moment as theyfind their way about in the world.

Hubert L. DreyfusProfessor of Philosophyin the Graduate SchoolUniversity of California, Berkeley


A Rewritten Account

The constant rereading of a manuscript before publication mayyield a discomfiting sense that there’s not that much at all to thetome on which you’ve worked for so long. And when in 1977 Icould read every word of this report in a half hour, I had toforce myself to turn it in to the publisher quickly and forgetabout it as best I could.

Nearly twenty-five years later I decided to wrap up thenationwide music teaching program I’d developed over most ofthe time since this book’s completion, and return to full-timewriting. My first goal was to be a volume on the basis andimplementation of my keyboard learning philosophy, a musictraining method that gradually evolved out of some findingsfirst reported here.1 That would bring closure to a long chapterof my life. The chance arose for an extended stay in Europe,and I decided to work on this project there.

With the exception of a few yearlong visiting professorships,I’d had very little contact with the academic world I left in 1975to write about and then teach music. So on little more than alark, I posted a notice on a bulletin board I came upon bychance on the Web, a couple of weeks before leaving the States.It was an international site for a specialty within social sciencethat studies ordinary commonsense thinking, a group with

xvi A Rewritten Account

which I was associated during its formative years in the sixties,and from which some of my early thoughts for studying musicderived.2 My posting simply said I was coming to Europe andwould be happy to give some talks at universities if there wasany interest in that.

After such a long hiatus, only a few contributors to this sitewere familiar to me, but apparently many knew early sociolog-ical research I’d done,3 and this book itself had gained theambiguous reputation of being some sort of a classic. Theresponse to my posting was unexpected. Over a dozen invita-tions were emailed within a few days from universities through-out Europe. By the time my flight left, I had a tight speakingschedule up ahead.

As time neared for my first talks, after about two monthsabroad, I’d been busy outlining my intended report on training.But it would still take much more thinking to firm up a fullybookworthy plan from the collection of notes and incompleteessays written in my scarce spare time over the past decades, asI was developing a philosophy of education while needing tomake a living with it.

At the last moment I decided to talk about Ways of the Hand,instead of my efforts with pedagogy just yet. I figured I’d be onfirmer footing, and that my audiences would as readily wel-come a discussion of this book.

At the first two lectures, in Oxford and Wales, I had such anawkward time summarizing a thesis I assumed I’d recall inclose detail, despite the passage of so many years, that I knewI’d need to reread this book for the first time since its publica-tion, and do so soon, in a five-day break before my next talk.I found a paperback copy in an Oxford bookstore and spentthose full days trying to decipher what in the world it wasabout in detail.

A Rewritten Account xvii

At the next presentation I was only slightly better prepared.It was a difficult description to thematize briefly. As the lecturetour progressed I got a bit better at speaking about it, but therewere still some critical places in the study that I couldn’t easilysummarize because I couldn’t easily follow them. My last expe-rience with the book, that half hour of reading when it wasdone in the seventies, had been clearly artifactual. Then, I knewits details like the palm of my hand, and it wasn’t so much amatter of reading a book as scanning the score for some musicor the script for a part that’s already been well memorized.

There had been differences of opinion about the study. Somereviewers called it poetic, and there were universities where itwas assigned as an example of especially intricate description.But it also captured other imaginations as the most convolutedwriting in print, and some professors assigned it for students tosee just that. In any event, it was a dense dissertation to digest.The book had become one of those works that are widely pur-chased because of certain mass media reviews, but so esotericthat they’re seldom read closely enough to yield an even approx-imately accurate synopsis.

In a phone call with my editor at the MIT Press, the book’spaperback publisher, I mentioned the idea of a rewrite, and myreservations about such an odd notion. His quick enthusiasmwas startling, exciting, and a bit disconcerting. It would meanpostponing my intended project for some months, but moreimportantly, I now worried whether I could really justify rewri-ting an earlier published work simply because it was hard toread.

I knew I couldn’t alter its form because the developmentalnarrative was essential, and a reorganization at that level ranthe high risk of a total unraveling that might be impossible toreweave. If I augmented the account in other than an arbitrary

xviii A Rewritten Account

way—taking this or that occasion to say more—it would evolveinto a different book. A revision being out of the question, somesort of an edit seemed the sole sensible solution.

I put out the request to friends for any cases they might rec-ollect of an author essentially rewriting his own publishedwork, citations I could at least invoke to help somehow warrantthe effort, if only to myself. I got nothing back of any relevance.Of course the decision came down to one issue: did the bookoffer a perspective and findings of sufficient import that pro-viding for their greater accessibility might amount to more thana possibly pleasant yet rather self-indulgent and potentiallyembarrassing enterprise?

I obviously decided that the gains are worth the risks. So,alas—while I’d have preferred it if another could have done thejob—I’ve reedited my own book, and the MIT Press has beenbold enough to publish it.

Some small sections have been eliminated and others added,many pages touched up, and many left almost as they were. Butin some places, particularly, the original descriptions were sointricate that I clearly hadn’t rights to fret over a lack of seriousreaders.

As I recovered the detailed sense of it all by starting to rewritethe book, I felt I could trim down and clean up these more dif-ficult sections with some success, and that minor changes wouldincrease the clarity throughout. Trying to avoid gratuitousremarks that might take on a diversionary life of their own, Ifound it essential not so much to translate the language into adifferent one, as to try to clarify it on its own terms at its ownpace.

Surprised to find myself as engrossed in the findings as whenthey were first reported—well, that convinced me it was worththe effort. The book proposes some possible discoveries about

A Rewritten Account xix

how certain detailed aspects of improvised conduct are orga-nized. I intended it as nothing more or less than a descriptivelyclose account of some essential problematic tasks faced in theproduction of a three- or four-second spate of sensible linguis-tic gesturing. Twenty-odd years of extensive piano playing later,I find that its descriptions of key aspects of musical-linguisticskill remain sufficiently valid, and so far as I know not chal-lenged, that I can simply restate them. And perhaps moreclearly.

The report is about jazz piano playing, and most particu-larly so. But by the time it was done, I also saw it as a sort ofprolegomenon to the study of talking. There is so much incommon between ordinary speaking and musical improvisa-tion that, at the least, not to expect descriptions of experienceat producing one to inform approaches to the other is plainlyunreasonable:

The body makes rapid and finely articulated moves from oneplace to the next on time, proper places and timings very closelydefined by cohorts of fellow speakers. The body finds its wayfrom place to place in the course of moving, and, certainly ingeneral, not by figuring out places to go in advance. It takesyears to become a mature speaker and listener in each domain.

I came to see my passable first phenomenology of aspects ofjazz piano performance as a suggestive preface for the phenom-enological description of articulated gestures of all sorts, talk-ing included.4

But now it’s your book, not mine, a study of speaking jazz ata piano, and I’m gratified if there are any other useful meaningsyou might find in it for yourselves.

In light of its form, I think you’ll gain a best first access to thephenomena it reports if it’s read in full sections, with chaptersor numbered section headings as pause markers. Occasionaldouble spaces within sections might best first warrant little

more than a coffee break. For what it’s worth, the book waswritten with a good deal of reading aloud.

I’m sorry that it’s still difficult, yet hopefully enough less sothan before.

David SudnowJuly 4, 2001Tübingen, Germany

xx A Rewritten Account

Acknowledgments

First I’d like to thank Larry Cohen of the MIT Press, for havingthe boldness to support this unusual enterprise. Second, myappreciation goes out to Matthew Abbate, my editor at the MITPress, who undertook a major task with a difficult book. He dis-played great diligence in dealing with its complexities, graspingevery last detail carefully, and exhibited truly remarkable edito-rial skill at every turn. Third, I’m grateful to all of those whoinvited me to speak of my work at universities in Great Britainand throughout the continent, a lecture series that set in motionmy decision to redo the book. Fourth, I thank the many thou-sands of students of my piano course who contributed in innu-merable ways to my continued studies of piano skill over thepast decades. I trust that the many students, from all walks oflife, who were especially important to me know who they are.

Last, and most of all, is my profound indebtedness to JackKroll of Newsweek, who first reviewed the original HarvardUniversity Press edition of the book in such glowing terms. Iwas most fortunate to have been his friend over the many yearssince we met after the book’s publication in 1978, and hisrecent death not only occasions my continuing grief but is agigantic loss to quality journalism. Newsweek will search farand wide to match the contributions Jack made to its magazineand the public it serves.


Ways of the Hand


Preface

From an upright posture I’ve looked down at my hands on apiano for some years while learning to play jazz, and when Ilook at them now my look is deeply informed by its history.

When I watch my hands on a typewriter I don’t recognizetheir movements, startled by their looks as I’m surprised by myprofile in the mirrors of a clothing store’s dressing room. It’s asthough I were watching an interior part of my body do its busi-ness. But my piano hands are familiar indeed. I not only knowtheir looks in the intimate ways we all know our hands’ looks,but I’ve also come to see jazz-making ways of the hand.

When learning to play, for quite a while I was busy watchingmy hands and the keyboard to avoid trouble and find places togo. Jazz students spend a good deal of time practicing move-ments along rule-governed paths on the piano, like variousscales, to have ways to keep on going with the music. Suchpathways can be vital when you’re first trying to improvise andnot follow a musical score. You’ve got to know just whereyou’re headed in order to get there correctly, not tripping upalong the way, not hitting two keys together out of uncertainty,for instance. In most playing situations you must keep theaction moving, can’t stop and think about good next places togo. These routes, ordered sequences of keys one may describewith simple arithmetic—like “go up 1 note, come down 2, now

2 Preface

up 2 and down 3, then up 3 and down 4,” to create onesequence from an infinite pile—such paths become clearlystaked out keyboard places that are eventually seen at a glance,paths along which you can sustain your movements and keepup a more or less continuing flow of articulations. Without ascore, when faced with the task of making up melodies suchpaths are invaluable.

For a long time I guided my hands on the keyboard by movingalong all kinds of routes and scales that I conceived in mymind’s eye, and, when I did look at the piano, I was so involvedin an analytic mode of travel that I didn’t see the hands’ affairsas I now do. Their affairs and my looking were different.

Now I don’t expressly “use” pathways to make melodies, butdiscover good-sounding places to go, from each note to the next,in the course of getting there, singing improvised jazz. And frommy upright posture I look down and see what I never sawbefore. At last I see jazz pianist’s hands, and there was a criticaltime, not long ago, when I had the most vivid impression thatmy fingers seemed to be making the music by themselves.

As I watch letters coming up on the page when I rapidly typeout a note to myself, watch them lay down as smoothly as acompetent flycaster places his lure on a trout stream, I wonder:had I a similar history of looking at my hands at this keyboard,would I now see fingers thinking?

I intend my descriptions as indications for how one mighteventually speak methodically and rationally, if only crudely fornow, when saying things like: the hand—in music, eating, weav-ing, carving, cooking, drawing, writing, surgery, dialing, typing,signing, wherever—this hand chooses where to go as much as“I” do.

I offer a first portrait of the handicraft of jazz piano impro-visation, an extraordinary domain of action for the closer studyof the body and its works in general. In jazz piano play we have

Preface 3

an arena of conduct of the most elaborate dimensions, an espe-cially apt place for portraying one of our distinctive organs’ways of assembling orderly activity.

The aim isn’t explanatory but descriptive, a phenomenologi-cal account of handwork as it’s known to a performing musi-cian, without consulting the expert opinions of otherpractitioners, analysts of practitioners, or other professionalstudents of conduct. The goal is to describe jazz from a player’sperspective (without which it wouldn’t exist), the player reflect-ing on his skills with “no one but himself to consult,” to quotephilosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.5

I’ve found that thus far unanalyzed aspects of the body’s wayscan be closely depicted, for all to see, by the performer, and per-haps no one but the performer, especially one who self-con-sciously takes up a complex activity with as strong an intentionto master its accomplishment as to try to reflect rigorously uponthe experiences of doing so. Guided by neither an introspective,mentalistically inclined consciousness nor the methods of ana-lytic science but only by the concrete particular problems facedin the course of learning jazz piano, I’ve pointed to various crit-ical tasks faced when sustaining orderly articulated movements.

Such a production account might lead to the precise looks ofthings, eventually contributing to a differently grounded modal-ity of rigorous inquiry, only if the finest of details are sought.6

I’ve tried to make the account both accessible and minute,building a specialized language, where needed, to bring intorelief some features for mapping an uncharted territory.

Following the report will be substantially easier if the readeris willing to take just a bit of time to roughly emulate theessence of critical keyboard examples by, say, using one’s handson a tabletop. This will quite sufficiently concretize the account,and one with no formal or other musical background will thusfind it all manageable.


Beginnings

When I went for piano lessons this time around, I was fully deter-mined to learn jazz. About fifteen years earlier, some lessons hadamounted to pretty nearly nothing. An exceptional blind jazzpianist had me watch him play a ballad, pausing as he struck eachchord; with a notational system that I worked out for myself, Iwrote down the names of the notes depressed by each of his fin-gers, went home, and duplicated the song. I gained a repertoire ofa dozen tunes in my last term of high school this way, but I didn’tknow what I was doing. I couldn’t improvise, play other songs orthose I’d learned in another way, teach another without usingexactly the same method. Still, I played the songs well.

My new teacher had me show him what I could do. I pro-duced some remembered bits and pieces of these rote-learnedtunes, the only music I’d played, most infrequently, throughoutcollege, graduate school, and the years of university teachingthat followed. I explained how they’d been acquired, and hereadily saw that I negotiated a keyboard fluently. I knew howto place and move my fingers, how to engage in some maneu-ver once it was pointed out to me, and do so more or lesssmoothly. Skills acquired with a year and a half of classicallessons at age nine, which were taken very seriously, hadn’tbeen lost, perhaps even somewhat solidified by the high schoolsong experience that may have kept the keyboard’s spaces more

6 Beginnings

alive for me. So the little my hands could do looked as if doneby a real pianist. Not doing much, they looked the part, a wide-spread possibility because of extraordinarily ubiquitous pianolessons, and a massive failure to get far with them that nonethe-less may produce easily reactivated potentials for those whoonce upon a time practiced diligently, if only briefly.

My instruction went rapidly. After seven or eight months ofthree or so hours of daily practice, I briefly held an afternoon jobwith a bassist in a yacht club bar, just playing standard songsstandardly. Doing improvisation was an entirely different matter.

My first lessons had me gain working ability with a simplenomenclature. To play jazz I had to learn again what scales were,and about chords—clusters of certain scale notes sounded simul-taneously—and how such chords are best spaced and arrangedon the keyboard for jazz play. Then there were simple facts aboutsong structure. I was told that once chords were well handled intheir progressions in songs, improvisation could start.

For the jazz musician, a song is regarded as a sequence ofchords with an originally written melody that’s only performedthe first time through; the same chord progression is then cycli-cally repeated as improvised melodies are substituted for theoriginal one. When jazz players improvise, they play on thechanges (chords), generating melodies laid over their underlyingprogression. When several musicians perform together, they geartheir respective actions by using the same tune, this successivelyrepeated cycle of chords and metrical structure that defines thesong for them, to stay on track together. And when musicianstake turns soloing, each managing a bit of play and giving a nextsection over to his fellows, a song’s required chord changes fur-nish a continuing format, a series of benchmarks delineatingturn-taking places and unifying the ensemble’s progress.

Please read the next few pages that sketch relevant basic factsabout music. Don’t think of memorizing anything. One reading

Beginnings 7

straight through will suffice, even for one with no keyboard orother instrumental experience. And don’t be at all concernedabout what the places sound like; the goal is only to gain a roughfirst visual grasp of a keyboard. Imagine casually perusing a mapto sense just the overall lay of the land for an upcoming trip.

ScalesA keyboard has black and white notes, the blacks arranged in alter-nating groups of twos and threes:7

The distance from a note to the immediately adjacent higher one (tothe right, of higher pitch), or lower one (to the left, of lower pitch),treating blacks and whites equivalently, is called a half step. Two halfsteps make a whole step:

The major scale, the only scale needed to understand song and jazzbasics, is a path of eight notes, described by this formula:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 81 1 1/2 1 1 1 1/2

!"#$%&'()* +,-#(%&'()*

8 Beginnings

Starting on any note at all, a major scale is formed by moving onewhole step up from this starting place to a second note, then a wholestep up to a third note, a half step to the fourth note of the scale, and soon. The eighth note of the scale takes the same name as its starting note,an octave—eight notes—higher. Within the scope of a one-octave range,there are twelve different places, counting blacks and whites equally aswe do. And this half step/whole step rule yields twelve unique majorscales, many quite similar, yet no two identical (hardly a coincidence,since the layout of the keyboard and this scale evolved hand in hand).

Notes on the piano are given alphabet names. White notes arenamed A through G in series, then duplicated through each successiveoctave, with A designated as the white note between the second andthird blacks in each black threesome. Black notes are named in refer-ence to adjacent white notes. A black note is termed a flat (�) when seenfrom the perspective of a white note a half step above it, or a sharp (�)when seen relative to a white note a half step below it. Black notes thustake either of two names (this is also true of white notes, in certain con-texts, which we needn’t consider):

Scales are spelled by a convention minimizing awkward names (usu-ally calling black starting notes by their flat names and adhering to analphabetic order). There are twelve major scales, one beginning oneach of the twelve notes in the scope of a one-octave range, usuallynamed and always comprised as follows:

A B C� D E F� G� AB� C D E� F G A B�B C� D� E F� G� A� BC D E F G A B CD� E� F G� A� B� C D�

. / .01 2 3 4

�1 �0 �/ /�.�.�

2� �4�43�

Beginnings 9

D E F� G A B C� DE� F G A� B� C D E�E F� G� A B C� D� EF G A B� C D E FG� A� B� C� D� E� F G�G A B C D E F� GA� B� C D� E� F G A�Some of the major scales:

ChordsA chord is a group of notes struck, and thus sounded, simultaneously.Three basic chord types are most prevalent in jazz (and nearly all mod-ern western music): major, minor seventh, and dominant chords, eachbuilt in reference to a major scale. A major chord is comprised of the

!

"

#

$�

10 Beginnings

1, 3, and 5 notes of any scale. We say “One three five is major.” Forexample, a C major chord (symbol “C”) has the notes C, E, and G:

A minor seventh chord (symbol “Cm7”) contains the 1, flatted 3 (thirdnote lowered a half step), 5, and flatted 7 (seventh note lowered a halfstep) of a major scale. We say “One, flat three, five, flat seven is minorseventh.” C minor seventh is C, E�, G, B�:

A dominant chord (symbol “C7”) is made by adding, to a majorchord, only the flatted seventh note of a scale. We say “One, three,five, flat seven is dominant.” C dominant is C, E, G, B�:

! $ # %�

! $ # %� �

! $ #

Beginnings 11

There are twelve major, twelve minor seventh, and twelve dominantchords, each named in reference to some first note and the major scalestarting there.

Chords may be produced in various ways. They may be played indifferent positions on the keyboard (C, E, G, left to right; or E, G, C;or G, C, E, for instance), and, as is common in most modern music,numerous additional tones are added to the basic chord tones to pro-vide a fuller sound. Jazz musicians seldom play chords using the defin-ing notes alone, closely spaced on the piano, but spread chord tonesbetween both hands, or play them all in one hand with various othernotes added to each chord type to enrich its texture. The particularway a chord is executed and colored is referred to as chord voicing.Such considerations needn’t be musicologically reviewed here.8

SongsIn most jazz play, the song is used as a basic formatting device. A songis a more or less fixed pattern of chords, with a written melody laid outin a metrical structure, with so many beats, in an evenly articulatedpulse, organized into a set of measures, or “bars”—groups of accentedpulses: 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3, or far more commonly, 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 34 1 2 3 4, etc. Most popular songs have standard formats, and tuneswith 12, 16, 24, 32, and 36 measures are most common. Here’s thefirst half of a typical 32-measure standard:

Tenderly

| E� | A�7 | E�m7 | A �7 || Fm7 | D�7 | E� | E � || A�m7 | Fm7 | A�m7 | Dm7 G7 || Cm7 | F7 | Fm7 | B �7 |

This chord chart, without a notated melody, furnishes a diagram of thestructure of the song Tenderly, in the key of E�. (A “key” essentiallymeans that most melody notes fall on a certain major scale, here E�, andthat the song’s harmonic movement usually heads to a final rest on anE� major chord, the group “hum” if you will. Any song may be playedin any of the twelve keys.)

Nearly every song has a more or less unique harmony (chordsequence), but progressions from one chord to the next follow nar-rowly defined rules, so that most tunes share many common chord

12 Beginnings

sequences. Gaining experience in playing many songs, one learns suchcommon patterns, and eventually comes to find good chords to har-monize a melody without a chord chart. There are various ways ofspeaking of relations between a melody and its appropriate harmo-nization, musicological ways that needn’t concern us now. I will dis-cuss such relations in quite different terms.

In early lessons with my new teacher the topic was chordconstruction, or voicing, playing a chord’s tones in nicely dis-tributed ways. However a chord may be described as a groupof named notes on a keyboard with geometrically measuredproperties, during play a chord is a grabbed place. What’sinvolved in such grabbing?

Anyone who’s witnessed or been a beginning pianist or gui-tarist learning chords notices substantial initial awkwardness.Lots of searching and looking are first required. The chord mustbe detected as a sequence of named notes with a look thatreviews the terrain up and down, finding the chord as a serialordering of these and those particularly identified tones, goingleft to right or right to left, consulting the rules to locate theplaces. Then some missing ones in the middle are found. Andalong with such looking are hands that behave correspondingly.

I would find a particular chord, groping to put each fingerinto a good spot, arranging the individual fingers a bit to finda way for the hand to feel comfortable, and, having gained ahold on the chord, getting a good grasp, I’d let it go, then lookback to the keyboard—only to find the visual and manual holdhadn’t yet been well established. I had to take up the chord againin terms ofits constitution, find the individual notes again, buildit up from the scratch of its spoken parts.

Over the course of my first days, much time was spent doinginitial grabbing, trying to get a hold on chords properly, goingback and looking at them as named notes, grabbing again,

Beginnings 13

repositioning the hand to get into a chord with a comfortablehold so it could be grasped as a whole; finding ways of sinkinginto a chord that didn’t involve the sounding of neighboringtones; arching the hand appropriately so the fingers camedown with a correct spacing and trajectory relative to theshape of the chording hand; balancing the different intensitiesof pressure so as not to lose balance, the edges of neighboringnotes not extraneous spots to be avoided but edges whose tac-tile appreciation became part of a natural hold on a settled-intochord; arching the hand and arraying its fingers with the sortof proportional spread that, when the chord was grasped, letthe fingers not only come into the right spots but with equalintensity, so its tones sounded simultaneously, and not clumsilyserialized (the way the high school band often slightly serializesthe voices of the opening chord of a marching tune).

As my hands began to form constellations, the scope of mylooking correspondingly grasped the chord as a whole, seeingnot its note-for-noteness but its configuration against thebroader visual field of the terrain.

It’s not enough to get into a chord. It was essential to getfrom one to the next, playing progressions smoothly. And ahost of expanding skills, ways of looking, moving, and think-ing were needed to execute such successions. It took a shortwhile for individual chords to be properly grabbed, and in acouple of weeks I could smoothly produce all dominants,majors, and minor sevenths. Turning to chords, to songs, pro-ducing successions of clusters with a melody—that was nowthe task.

There’s chord A and B, separated from one another, this onea way down the keyboard from the other:

14 Beginnings

A

B

A’s production entails a tightly compressed hand, B’s an openlyextended spread. A’s involves coming at the keyboard straightahead, as one comes at a typewriter to make contact with thehome position, while B’s involves a shift in the axis of the handrelative to the keyboard, the little finger moving much fartherfrom the body’s center than the thumb. And A is played forcounts 1 2 3 4, and when the next 1 arrives, B must beannounced.

Beginners get from A to B disjointedly. The grasp of A maybe at hand, and B too, but there’s a distance to be traveled, andwhat happens, at first, is that after doing A, a novice sets outfor B without going for it in the right way from the start. Onemoves to the left for B, but doesn’t reach for all of B. Headingout for B’s rough place in the keyboard, one still has to reshapethe hand upon reaching its vicinity. To go correctly from A toB, grabbing for the whole of B, is to be directed from the startnot just to where B is, but in shape to play it on arrival. And

Beginnings 15

doing that means preparing all along the course to reach thegoal in productional form.

The experienced hand lifts off of A, and as it moves towardB it changes its configuration as a smooth and not jerky unfold-ing. No sooner does a liftoff from A occur than the movementis already toward all of B, a proper transition requiring thatmanifold realignments of the hand occur simultaneously.

Adherence to a steady pulse is a critical resource. With anupcoming time of arrival preestablished by former beats, oneknows just when to reach B, having lifted off from A.

Fluent chord production for song play must meet otherrequirements, for it’s not enough to grab chords cleanly, or onlyto move smoothly in tempo from one to the next. To play asong well, one can’t do more than peripherally monitor the key-board, if at all, to handle chord transactions. At the outset, andfor some while for beginners—the more so the more complexthe sequence and rapidly changing the chords—one must fairlyclosely survey the left side in order to move from place to place.But before songs are well played, and surely before one can tryimprovised melodies, one must transcend this tilted viewing.

Looking’s work load progressively lightens for finding dis-tances, the gaze at the keyboard progressively diffuses in func-tion, as places gradually become places toward which theappreciative fingers, hand, and arm are aimed. As I reached forchords (and reaching for chords in song contexts alwaysinvolves reaching for recurring patterns of them), I was gaininga sense of their locations by going to them, experiencing a rateof movement and distance required at varying tempos, therebydeveloping an embodied way of accomplishing distance.

Our symmetrical stance toward settings is striking. Sit downat a dinner table and, without thinking about it at all, pull yourchair up to eat. Your nose is most likely exactly over the centerof the dinner plate. Go before a bathroom sink to wash your

16 Beginnings

face and find that nose smack in the vertical middle of the mir-ror. Sit down at the bench of a piano and position yourself as ifto play, even if you never have. Chances are high that yournavel (and nose, assuming the usual alignment) is facing the Dthat’s one note above the C closest to the middle of the key-board (middle C), this D nearly the true center of a piano,where all navels end up, halving beings that we are.

From this middle of the piano, the beginner gradually acquiresan incorporated sense of places and distances, incorporated, forexample, in that finding the named, visually grasped place-out-there by theoretic looking becomes unnecessary. The body’s ownappreciative structures serve to find places. A grasp develops ofthe setting of the keyboard and its dimensions relative to thehand’s and arm’s moving extension from the body’s center, andin time this skill becomes so refined and generalized that precisealignment at the center isn’t even needed.

Only after years of play do beginners attain the sort of com-petence at place finding that a jazz pianist’s left hand displays inchord execution. Reaching the point where, with eyes closed, Imay now sit down at the piano, gain an initial orientation withthe merest touch anywhere on the field, if at all, and then reachout to bring my finger precisely into a spot two feet off to theleft, where a half-inch off is a very big mistake, come back upseventeen inches and hit another one, go down twenty-threeand a quarter inches and get there at a fast clip—a skill a greatmany competent players have—this takes a lengthy course ofgradual incorporation.

After three or four months of practice I was no longer doingtoo much looking to make chord changes on time, and soonwas able to perform a growing repertoire of songs withoutwatching the left side especially. Once chord progressions werepreliminarily at hand, the full song was relatively easy for me,since I had no trouble finding melodies without a notation. (I’d

Beginnings 17

picked out melodies at a piano since I was a young child.) AndI had no special difficulty coordinating both hands’ use, playingone chord every two or four beats say, with more events ofvarying time values articulated by the right hand. Fresh begin-ners struggle over this coordination.

In six months I could read a chord chart and play the melodyof a new song after a few moments of review, gaining anincreasing number of standard tunes with nicely voiced, jazz-sounding chords, played at a relatively steady tempo and withmore or less appropriate feeling.

When my teacher said, “now that you can play tunes, tryimprovising melodies with the right hand,” and when I wenthome and listened to my jazz records, it was as if the assign-ment was to go home and start speaking French. There was thisFrench going on, streams of fast-flowing strange sounds,rapidly articulated and crisscrossing, an enormous amount ofintricate windings, styles within styles in the course of anyplayer’s music. There were rising and falling intonations, con-stantly shifting accents, and I started listening in a new way—for answers to the question, how are they doing that?

I didn’t need an analysis. I needed advice. How could I nowlearn to do it? That it was certainly first done mostly by blackmen? That was beside the point. That it was done in a musicaltradition with a particular history and the evolution of variousdevices for constructing chords and melodies? That matteredonly if I had to become involved in this history. That the historyentailed increasing demands for technical expertise, corre-sponding to an increasingly refined instrument for which suchtechnique was geared and from whose aspirations it was fash-ioned, as well as an increasingly professional position for themusician, a growing gap between amateur and pro and thedevelopment of an orientation toward the definitive perfor-mance—however interesting the sociology, this all mattered

18 Beginnings

only if I had to take up with the technical training much jazznow seems to require. These jazz musicians were doing thingsvery quickly. Were my fingers agile enough? Any theory’s rele-vance depended on its possible bearing for my practice.

However one might describe what may be heard on therecords, the first relevant question about this music for me was:what notes are they playing? The music had a rhythm, anassortment of intensities, an intonational structure, subtleties ofshading, and much more. But when it came to sitting down atmy piano it was a rhythm of something, intensity of something,intonational structure of something, subtlety of something, andthe something that first mattered was: these and those particu-lar notes being played.

I could bring my hands to a piano and do things in a jazzrhythm, as I’d clapped hands to this music for years. I could sub-tly shade a contact with the keyboard, touching keys very softlyor loudly, with nuances in between. Given a handful of notes Icould’ve moved my fingers quite fast or slow. I could do all thisas many can, but sitting at my piano, playing a song’s sequenceof chords, and trying to follow my teacher’s instruction to makeup melodies with the right hand, the main question was: where?

Not everything the melodic right hand was doing in playingthese notes seemed relevant. I didn’t figure the looks of players’hands could be consulted as a guide for learning what I neededto know. When I looked at my teacher’s hands, I looked pastthem to the places they went, not how they were going about,but where. I sat at my piano and had to bring my fingers to par-ticular notes. I could more or less get them to any particularnotes I wanted to, given my well-trained hands, but I didn’tknow where to go. It seemed impossible to approach this jazzexcept by finding particular places to take my fingers. And myteacher encouraged that approach.

Beginnings 19

I got a first taste of the magnitude of problems I was in forwhen I tried to listen to a piece of jazz melody on a record andgo to the piano to play it. While I could perfectly well hear asimple melody a few times over and attain it as a singableaccomplishment with voice and hands, these jazz melodies wereby no means simple. A three-second stretch of play within acourse of improvisation I’d listened to for years now engagedme for several hours, unsuccessfully trying to grab the realdetails so as to bring each of its tones to singability and then getthe strip down at the keyboard. The sheer looks of several sec-onds of transcribed jazz are suggestive:

(Charlie Parker, My Little Suede Shoes)

When taking a melody from a record whose improvisations Ifigured I knew—and recording gives improvised melodies a rad-ically new status they didn’t formerly have, as they can now belearned at a level of detail that a one-time hearing can’t achieve—I discovered a symptomatic vagueness in my grasp of these famil-iar improvisations. I apparently only knew the melodies incertain broad outlines. Particularly with respect to the rapid pas-sages, I found that when singing along with a Charlie Parkerrecording, for instance, I’d been completely glossing the detailedparticularities of the pitches of melodies that I figured I knewwell, since my introduction to this jazz as a young teenager. Igrasped their essential shape perhaps, but hadn’t ever really sungthem with a refined note-to-note precision. And it was very par-ticular notes that needed to be at hand now, at the piano, if I was

20 Beginnings

to reproduce this music in its particularity. I wondered: what hadI been listening to as a jazz fan all these years?

The extraordinary difficulties of a first solo-copying attempt,trying to find the tiny spot on the record again and again, end-lessly rehearing the same minuscule passage to narrow in on itsnotes, finding those places on the piano, working out a finger-ing solution that didn’t just play the right notes but with theright time values—after a major struggle I sensed this wasn’t theway to go, at least for me. And, as I thought of it at the time,perhaps because of frustration with the difficulty of such copy-ing, I wanted to improvise my own melodies, not the recordedor transcribed ones of others.

I told my teacher I didn’t know where to go, how to evenbegin to make up melodies as one plays. There was no problemstriking several notes over and over again and keeping that upthroughout the course of a song cycle, but this was no more jazzthan noinoinoinoinoinoinoinoinoinoino is writing, which I cando forever and in various tempos.

Here was the problem. There is this song, its melody has beenplayed, and now the tune is to be sustained as a continuingcycle of chords. If I was to do jazz it would mean playingmelodies over these song chords, not just this little snatch ofmelody notes and that, but playing on the changes for sustainedperiods. The changes keep changing, say one chord a second forabout a minute through one complete cycle of a typicalmedium-tempo ballad. And one must continue playingmelodies while handling the chords at the right times, cycleafter cycle of the song.

But my right hand had nothing to say in this language. Itmight as well have gone anywhere, but once it did there wasnothing next to do. And if you don’t know where you’re goingyou can’t go anywhere correctly. The hand has to be motivated

Beginnings 21

to very definite next keys to depress, and when there’s nowherefor it to go you’re immobilized.

My teacher dealt with my problem by giving me routes to take.He started by noting that with this particular chord you can geta characteristic jazz sound by playing this particular scale. Welooked at a particular chord and particular scale, examining theirrespective constructions. Here’s how he spoke of it:

Take a dominant seventh chord, for example. Say F dominant:

With it you can play a so-called diminished scale, a scale con-sisting of alternating half and whole steps:

And, he pointed out, you get a characteristic jazz sound becauseof various dissonances when the sustained chord’s sound isheard alongside various notes of the scale.

The second note of this scale is a half step above F of thechord; the scale’s third note, A�, is a half step below the chord’sA. The B, fifth note of the scale, is a half step below the C of the

22 Beginnings

chord, and the seventh note of the scale is a half step below theE� of the chord.

These half step dissonant concurrences, in particular, have aslightly grating sound, a husky, bluesy quality very common injazz melodies. Of course to talk of this characteristic jazz soundis like saying a certain r is characteristic of French. Learningthat sound is one thing, and having a native-sounding chat inParis another.

In the case of a diminished scale which he furnished at first,feeling it was a particularly good starting place for jazz, thereisn’t one path but three, depending on the opening note, andwhether you count your first move as a whole or half step(prove that to yourself: choose any note; go up a half step, thena whole, then a half—or a whole, half, whole—alternating likethis, and write down each spot you reach; no matter where youstart, you’ll find only three unique arrays).

Because of these dissonant relationships and rather simpleparallels between all chords, the three different diminishedscales, he explained, each go well with four of the twelve dom-inants (each scale produces precisely the same dissonant halfsteps with a different four of the twelve dominants). Given aneed to do melodies that accorded with a song’s harmony, hav-ing these three scales was thus to have jazzy-sounding places tobe going for a full third of all the thirty-six chords!

It was a great-sounding path. I excitedly went home with thestep rule written in my notebook, identified the three dimin-ished routes, and then did what having a linear array almostasks for: I learned to play them fluently as scales, as rising anddescending successions. Though he furnished a route withoutdirections, with no beginning and end but only a collection ofwhat could be regarded as arrayed places, I first took up with itas a left-to-right and right-to-left path. Having such places togo, I had to pick some means to go there, and doing scales as

Beginnings 23

scales was a useful means of travel. I’d learn to do them fast,and since they duplicated themselves at each octave, there wasa long string of action at hand, starting low and going way upor the other way around. He’d in fact displayed these charac-teristic sounds by doing just that, demonstratively playing thescales fast, as up and down paths. It was very jazzy.

Using the paths involved working out fingering solutions.Here’s the solution I found best suited to a smooth rapid pro-duction from low to high over the range of several octavesalong this particular diminished scale (1 = thumb, 2 = index,3 = middle):

I worked out comfortable fingerings for the three routes, prac-ticed their fluent production as scales, and soon it wasn’t nec-essary to consider their theoretic constitution. I could producethem rapidly without looking, and then set about practicingeach with its corresponding dominant chords, type X fittingthese four, type Y those, and Z the others.

In my first weeks of improvisation, whenever a dominantchord arose (and nearly half the chords in most songs are dom-inants) I now had places to go. I’d play one of my diminishedscales, characteristically beginning it in a region where I couldsustain a long run. I’d have two beats of time to fill, forinstance, a second or so in a moderate-tempo song, and thesejazz melodies were fast. So I had a long stretch of swift notes.

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24 Beginnings

When I first learned a scale, I consulted the rule and regardedthe scale’s individual notes by way of it, seeing an arrayedcourse of keys. Soon a gestalt of the route as a whole wasdetected, and I saw the path as a figure against the backgroundof the terrain.

But the scale wasn’t seen apart from how I’d first played it,and when I looked at a scale I especially attended to the left-most starting note, from which the scale takes its name. Thisscale seemed to be arrayed specifically from one F up to thenext. Practicing the scale from bottom to top had focused mylook, and now, during play, the ways I looked often directedmy hands. Analytic inspection had evolved into a usableinstruction.

When I first learned scales, I gave attention to each note andthe finger whose use on each produced the most fluent produc-tion. But once a course was mastered, it became a way of myscale-playing hand, as chords had passed from being individu-ally fingered to handfully grabbed places. I went for each scaleat a particular place, a finger-by-finger orientation now sup-planted by a whole-handed entry. Having scales available thisway made it difficult at first to start the scale in the course ofplay on a note other than the starting note from which it waslearned. Only after much practice at upward and downwardmovement did I get decent at entering other points. Considerthe same scale again:

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Beginnings 25

At first I started on the F with my thumb and went up. But thenI came to play the scale by starting with my fourth finger on A,

coming down with a 3, 2, 1 fingering over its first three notes,then going back up, as shown above (on a tabletop, try moving4, 3, 2, 1 from right to left with your right hand, or left to rightwith your left if you’re left-handed, 1 being a thumb; that canbe done extremely quickly by everyone, while moving the otherway—1, 2, 3, 4—is somewhat less fluently fast, for everyone).

Using the fourth finger on A allowed for a very rapid down-ward course and quick turnaround into an upward run. Usinga thumb on the A, as in a bottom-to-top fingering, was a muchless fluent way to start a fast downward course.

Going for this particular diminished scale seldom involvedme starting on B with the second finger, say, not because I can’tmove around fast when starting there, but because (as the scalewas known as a handful and not an individual note/individualfinger affair) I “didn’t know” that, for this scale’s production,my second finger was used for a B. It was initially learned thatway; once learned, just as the finger-character responsibilitieson a typewriter are forgotten as conceptually available facts forthe touch typist, so which finger played the B in the course ofthis particular diminished scale was unknown to me (whenteaching scale fingerings to students today I must play scalesslowly to rediscover best fingers; if you’re a decent touch typist

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26 Beginnings

try calling out the names of letters on the second bank of char-acters without looking down).

My maneuvers with the diminished scales (one of many sim-ilarly jazz-sounding structures) were initially most limited. Overthe course of the first year of play, nearly every time I playedthis one of the three scales, I either started it on F with thethumb or on A with the fourth finger, moving quickly down toF and then back up, this move to become my most commonearly variation on that particular route.

In years to come there were many sorts of orderings withwhich I’d experiment in using such scales. Consider the nu-merical typewriter characters. One may go directly up,1234567890; one can go up 123 234 345 456 567 678 789, or132 243 354 465 576 687 798, ad infinitum. The teacherafforded me only a pathway, not particular instructions for itsuse, and manipulations like these are common in melody mak-ing. There are far more intricate possibilities, of course: 13542465 3576 4687 . . . 13423 24534 35645 46756 57867 . . . allsorts of series achieved by maneuvers that employ some orderof interdigitation and intervallic transposition.

I didn’t work over these scales this way at the start, becausewhat I needed wasn’t merely one path to use with a given dom-inant chord, but a host of them. Having learned diminishedscales, I usually played each in one or two first-acquired ways,gaining facility at matching them with their correspondingdominant chords. My attention was mostly given over to gain-ing numerous places to go, practicing different pathways withthe chords, engaging in an analysis of the keyboard in search ofever-new routes.

No matter how many manipulations I performed with agiven scale, the use of such a scale was something I heard as aconstant repetitiveness in my play, but at the same time, and

Beginnings 27

more importantly, I was being encouraged to find other solu-tions to the various chords. My teacher was preparing me toplay jazz of a particular sort, the song-based bebop traditionwith melodies winding through fast-changing chords, ratherthan styles of modal jazz where sustained improvisations can bemade for an extended period on a single route and one chord.

I went to my lesson each week, my teacher would have meimprovise on the chords, and I played little pieces of melodyusing such first-acquired scales: up would come this chord anddown would go this melody, then a next chord and a scalelikedevice used for it, then on to the next. It was terribly awkwardat first, for it took some time before I could easily and rapidlypick a run to use with any next chord.

Although my teacher provided readily accessible instructionon chord production, voicing, and song play, offering construc-tional rules that were easily followed and quickly producedquite wonderful-sounding results for just playing and arrangingthose standards I loved so much, when it came to assistancewith improvisation the lessons became increasingly unsatisfy-ing. I’d play for a while, and he’d offer some advice that struckme at the time as altogether vague, hardly affording clear guide-lines for the week’s practice, like “try to get the phrasing moresyncopated.” But then, after I did some playing, producing myhalting little melodies, chord by chord and run by run, eachstarting at the same points, each going more or less fast becausegoing more or less fast made them sound jazzy at least, he’dattempt to demonstrate a way of phrasing by doing improvisa-tions himself.

As he was winding all over the keyboard, producing the musicI so much wanted to make, all I could see was that whatever hemeant by phrasing, he wasn’t simply using the few scale devicesI’d used for each chord. He was going many more places and

28 Beginnings

producing all sorts of melodies which, looking past his hands’ways to where they headed, revealed other patterned courses.

I’d spot him going over what I could detect was an orderlypath. Here was a little downward run I could vaguely see toinvolve some sort of a regular intervallic array of notes, as thediminished scale does. He’d go many places where this couldn’tbe seen, involving interweaving intricacies that seemed puz-zling, but I figured they were constituted as all the rest, andwithin his play many little spates of seemingly orderly passagecould nonetheless be spotted.

I’d ask “what was that?” He’d ask “what was what?” “Thatlittle figure you just did over the G minor seventh right there.”And he’d have a hard time finding what he’d just done. He’d attimes remark, “I’m not following rules so I don’t know what Ijust did,” and, on occasion, “I just improvise and can’t tell youhow; you’ll develop a feel for it.” I’d ask him to play somemore, or I’d try to produce some portion of a happening I’dbeen able to spot in his play. Given a piece of some possiblyorderly array, he’d accommodatingly do a jazz-sounding figurewith it, but it wasn’t what he’d originally done. He found thatalmost impossible to reproduce. Only if an express intention todo some play for its reproduction was sustained in the course ofa first production was it possible for one to play it again.

But the new little thing he’d do when I indicated a course Iwanted him to recover was good enough for me, and I’d writeit down, not necessarily in its details as notated pitches, butextracting a principle that could be generatively used. Forexample, he’d do some line and, to offer it as an instructablemaneuver, we’d together speak of its constitution in theoreticterms. I’d spot some possibility, he’d take what it seemed Imight’ve seen and do a quick melody which he’d then analyzeas an arrayed, frozen pathway:

Beginnings 29

“Well, here, on a dominant chord, you can get a nice soundby playing the notes of a major chord built on the second noteof the dominant chord’s root scale.” Having another character-istic jazz-sounding piece of melody, my stockpile increased.

And so it went for a course of some months. I’d practice agrowing collection of runs, things to do fast jazz melodies with,spend a short while nervously playing for him at the start ofeach lesson, and he’d then do lots of playing as I spotted thingshe tried to recreate. A negotiation took place over the sorts ofstructures he could extract and state as principles. At times I felthe was keeping secrets. He’d beg off the procedure while offer-ing little in its place, as I’d request access to this and that path-way, seeing he was after all taking more routes than I was.Reluctantly he’d come up with yet another analysis, giving mean ever-expanding vocabulary of possible words. I acquired anincreasing mass of principled solutions for knowing where to gowith the various chord types: arpeggios (serially rather thansimultaneously struck chords) to be taken, scales to be linearlyplayed, various melody fragments constituted by certain orderlyintervallic relationships.

Here’s a dominant chord:

and, just for the sake of a visual appreciation, here are onlysome of the innumerable routes that, articulated more or less

! $ # %�

30 Beginnings

evenly and quickly, yield a characteristic jazz sound with thisdominant:

At first the problem of finding places to go was posed as“which notes go well with which chords?” It became apparentthat any of the notes may be played with any of the chords(this true not only for dominants but for majors and minorsevenths too):

Beginnings 31

This chromatic scale, traversing every adjacent note on thekeyboard, could itself be made to yield a characteristic jazzsound. But finding that any note might do was tantamount tohaving no paths to take save the above one, whose extensive useamounted to little more than baby talk from me.

After about six months of instruction I had a host of placesto go, melodic resources of named notes, a vocabulary of silent,still sights to be seen, places to go in a theory’s terminology onthe surface skin of an untouched piano, ways of looking andtalking that could be remembered, hosts of licks, written down,told by teachers to students, traded off between students, pro-fessional shoptalk, routes without speed limits from no oneplace to no other place in particular, melodies to be seen at aglance, wheres without hows, places you can make music withon a soundless, practice keyboard.

And there was their use in learning: arrayed places to go,elaborate ranges of possibilities for lending organization tomanipulations they themselves told me nothing about, visuallydetected and then tactilely found fields and crisscrossing vectorsfor practicing maneuverability, instantly available potentialcourses to be seen at a glance while trying to keep up the playas the changes went by.

And their use in pathway playing, contrasted with ways ofnegotiation which in fact make jazz happen: their utility as anarchitect’s drawing fully serves a worker in actually hammeringup a framing; as the map of a city shows you just how to

32 Beginnings

browse, hurry, avoid bad neighborhoods, or ride subwayswhose entrances are depicted on its intersections; as a book onhow to play chess can teach you to win; as your attempt to say“Vil du ud mig mi i aften?” will achieve its intended result inÅrhus.

After around six months of instruction and practice on manychord charts with my corpus of melody-making routes, I foundsome chances to play with other musicians. I frequented localjazz clubs and became well acquainted with many players in thecommunity, both accomplished musicians with long professionalexperience and other students in various stages of progress. Iwanted to play in a group, and on occasion was invited to sit in.In one nightclub in particular there was a weekly jam session,when musicians from the area took turns throughout theevening. There were a bassist and drummer, often several hornplayers, and aspirants would literally line up, preferential rightsdistributed to better ones. Novices like myself were eventuallygiven a chance to play a tune or two, and then quickly shuffledoff the stand. Accomplished players wanted to play with thoseof their own caliber, and the club owner needed to keep realmusic happening. But beginners were given a chance.

I’d learned the chord charts for many jazz standards, quiteanxiously took the stand when invited up for a turn, called atune to be played—prerogative of a pianist in the trio situation—establishing a tempo for the song with that “one, two, three,four” I’d seen done by others, and we were off and running. Iwas in a rodeo when the gate opens and a steer takes over.

Recall Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line in Modern Times:the conveyor belt continuously carrying a moving collection ofnuts and bolts to be tightened, their placement at regular inter-vals on the belt, Chaplin holding these two wrenches, fallingbehind the time, rushing to catch up, screwing bolts faster to

Beginnings 33

stay ahead of the work, missing one or two along the waybecause the upcoming flow seems to gain speed and he gets fran-tic, or because it actually does speed up, eventually caught up inthe machine and ejected onto the factory floor in his hystericalepileptic dance.

The music wasn’t mine. It was going on all around me. I wasin the midst of the music the way a lost newcomer finds him-self suddenlyin the midstof a Mexico City traffic circle, with nohumor in the situation, for I was up there trying to do this jazzI’d practiced nearly all day, there were friends I’d invited to joinme, and the musicians I’d begun to know. I was on a buckingbronco of my own body’s doings, situated in the midst of thesesurrounding affairs. Between the chord-changing beat of my lefthand at more or less regular intervals according to the chart,the melodic movements of the right, and the rather moresmoothly managed and securely pulsing background of thebass player and drummer, there obtained the most alienativerelations.

I got through the opening section reasonably well, playing thetune with its originally written melody. Then came the solo por-tion. For each of the now passing chords there’d be a pathwayselection, and though at home I’d executed these runs smoothly,under pressure of the situation they were very sloppily pro-duced, and there were many errors.

A chord lasts for two beats, a second say, and the melody isplayed rapidly, with four or more notes for every beat in a four-beat measure. Now a run for chord A was started near the mid-dle of the keyboard and rose up, while the path I knew best forchord B started at the middle also. So I began going up with afast, sputtering, and nervous scale course, and the next chordcame up and I had to shoot back down to the middle of the key-board to get the thing I knew how to do well done for it, andthen came the next chord.

34 Beginnings

My hand jumped around from place to place like Chaplinstabbing with his wrenches. Chords would be missed altogether.I’d draw a blank. An upward-moving line would more or lessend when the chord had to be terminated, no matter where itwas. Or, in order to get to the next starting place, I’d play thefirst chord just a bit sooner to give myself time to relocate, feel-ing the upcoming chord as an encroaching presence whosenecessity was fixed by adherence to the chord chart of the songwe were after all playing together, so what the left hand wasdoing in its preset ways was guiding what the right was obligedto do. The pacing of the chord productions would becomejagged as well, and I tended to rush the time, changing chordsa trifle before they were due, missing a beat here and there,occasionally having one too many, and really sweating it out allthe way, trying to get some lines down nicely, checking out thefaces in the crowd and trying not to seem too besieged, attempt-ing all the while to produce the most intricate maneuvers I’dlearned, to make the full-blown complex jazz those before andafter me in line would do, charging around in the swarm of themusic, trying to hold on to the time, wishing things would stopfor a moment so I could catch a breath.

My right hand became enormously tired and stiff and wouldalmost freeze up, so while I’d struggle not to let errors occur,where an error meant playing wrong notes in the course of apath’s traverse, there’d be moments when I was simply immo-bilized and nothing would come out. Then I’d stab for some-thing else that had gone well at home but now couldn’t besmoothly taken up the line, so it disintegrated. My improvisinghand went not so much for a sequence of individual tones asfor a sight all at once. The notes of the run were notes to begotten over with, the hand setting out on a familiar course thatwouldn’t end particularly here or there, but would start outand keep going up along the route to wherever it happened to

Beginnings 35

get before the next chord arrived. The hand set straight outinto a course, going for the whole of it, once committed to itsonset committed to its unaltered continuance as that course inparticular, so that the selection occurred at the outset, and fora while all further matters were predetermined.

Each of the runs I tried had been more or less smoothly mas-tered at home yet were much less fluently done now, and whileI could do lots of playing without watching the execution indetail, I’d scrutinize the field anyhow, and my looking, anappeal to the keyboard for answers, was party to a theoretic in-course analysis I did over the keyboard’s sights, trying to keepthe terrain under regard to aid large leaps and get from onepath to another, a looking that was altogether frantic, likesearching for a parking place in a very big hurry. The music wasliterally out of hand.


Going for the Sounds

I

Over the next several years, committed to learning jazz but for-tunately not needing to make any money at it, I played for themost part at home and alone, seldom looking for settings whereI could’ve joined in with musicians. Whenever I did, perhapsfour or five times a year, the results weren’t substantially betterthan at first, and I’d come away sadly feeling that my inade-quacy resulted from nervousness and a lack of experience.

I was now and then advised to start working as a musician,that getting a steady job would help my playing come together.Too vaguely formulating that as possibly useful for learning torelax, I frankly wasn’t attracted to work situations where oneof my level would be first compelled to play. I saw no real pointperforming on bad pianos in noisy bars where no one listenedto the music, when I could practice alone, on a good one athome, and all at my own schedule.

I’d been making what I thought was real progress on manyfronts, sensed I had a decent grasp of the shape and feelings ofjazz, and, with lessons that gave me a good understanding ofthe keyboard, I figured I was in position to learn the rest in soli-tary practice.

38 Going for the Sounds

I did things for two or three hours a day that seemed more orless reasonable. I practiced certain well-known technical exercisesthat I heard many musicians had used, spent lots of time investi-gating the keyboard to discover new sorts of melodic configura-tions, found ever-new intervallic relationships, evolved morepathways constructed on principles similar to those I’d been toldabout, with their characteristic jazz sounds, listened to a growingcollection of records, seldom trying and always quickly abandon-ing the horrendous task of solo copying, and aimed for what I feltto be the most sophisticated and intricate examples of contempo-rary jazz piano. For the most part, my playing sessions weredevoted to a handful of songs, doing improvisations, the particu-lar handful’s contents changing entirely every several months, assome tunes became more enticing and others a bit less so.

Fluent manipulation on these paths produced a semblance ofcompetence, and I was able to sustain long playing sessions,going for this rapidly articulated music, sensing I was on target.I knew my play left qualities to be desired. When I recordedmyself it sounded disjointed, frantic, and wanting in otherrespects. I knew I wasn’t making music like what I heard. Butby virtue of the sheer extent of what I could do at the piano, thelarge collection of songs at my command, and what I felt to beincreasingly an insider’s perspective on the music I listened to,after a couple of years I thought of myself as one with nearlycompetent basic jazz skills.

In some respects that was warranted, in others pretentiouslypremature. I was in some ways as far from the mark as couldbe. Of course this was only clear in retrospect, as deficiencies inearlier efforts were made transparent by acquisitions gainedlater. But this delayed appraisal allowed me to sustain motiva-tion to play a good deal without feeling too far off base.

I was learning to play in what can be loosely termed a back-ward direction. In first language acquisition, one initially gains


facility with restricted little movements, then heads for evermore extensive gestural trajectories. But I was aimed from theoutset, and nearly always, for the most complex of doings, asthough trying to speak a new language by ridiculously plunginginto a serious conversation at the usual adult pace. This with-out really knowing how to say any “words” properly, onlymaking little bits of sound that could here and there be heardto fall within the language. All this without regularly interact-ing with other speakers, where a give-and-take provides ongo-ing encouragement and a need to speak properly.

These pathways allowed for this peculiar possibility, as if atypewriter keyboard and corresponding language were arrangedso that by following a rule like “go up every other key” you’dproduce numerous sights characteristic of some actual adulttext. Having a visual/conceptual means for going to reasonablyacceptable places, now incorporated into a tactilely managed setof maneuvers with varieties of dexterities at the keyboard, Icould at least sustain large streams of conduct at a fast clip fromearly into my training. Moving along paths, going repeatedlythrough a chord cycle, I produced enough overall jazzness in myplay that I felt I was basically doing what jazz players do.

In the first years there were very few moves like this:

the book, the book, the book book bookthe book, the book, the book book book

I was, instead, in pursuit of the most magniloquently organizedaffairs, each day the bulk of my practicing spent roaming allover the keyboard, rather than lingering in a delimited territoryand mastering ways to deal with a sparse course of melodicmovements.

My isolated situation was so skewed in this backward direc-tion that it was nearly two full years before I had an experience


with the keyboard that would seem altogether essential to mak-ing music from the outset. It wasn’t until the start of my thirdyear that I thought of myself as “going for the sounds.”

I specifically recall playing one day and finding, as I set outinto a next course of notes after a liftoff had occurred, that I’dexpressly aimed for the sounds of these next particular notes,that their sounds seemed to creep up into my fingers, that thedepression of the keys realized a specific sound I’d gone there tomake, as if when walking one brought intentional regard to thesounds of one’s steps, expressly then doing each and every oneof their successive sounds, as in a march. I wasn’t only going forgood places. I was aiming for sounding spots.

Of course I hadn’t really been going only for good places fortwo years, playing some game at the keyboard, cultivating skillsat rapid visual detection or merely gaining manual dexterities. Iwas going for music. I listened to my records and aimed for thatjazz, intentionally directed to a course of sounds. It wouldn’thave done in the least to have only played an electric piano withthe amplifier off. I filled the room with sounds.

But these so-called sounds had various qualities for me, andI couldn’t form a practically usable description of sound thatwould help seize hold of this new acquisition, and describe it indetail as well, without considering just how these sounds werebeing produced.

I knew what these paths sounded like, wasn’t surprised bythem as one is startled by accidentally leaning on an open key-board. Hardly! But how the paths sounded to me was deeplylinked to how I was making them. There wasn’t one me listen-ing, and another one playing along paths.

I listened-in-order-to-make-my-way, to find that as I playedeach day I was doing this jazz. I recognized the pathways’sounds, to put it way too mildly. But it’s one thing to recognizefamiliar sounds that you’re making, and another to aim success-


fully for these and those very particular ones to occur, and justwhen you want them to, especially if you’re trying to find newnotes in course and not following a score. Very different direc-tionalities of purpose and potentials for action are involvedwhen you set out to make these and those sounds in particular.

I first felt myself going for the sounds when I now sensed Iwas making up a melody. I’d been striving for these fast-flowing, characteristic jazzlike runs, with quickly articulatedstreams of broad-ranging highs and lows. Armed with devicesthat of their own accord furnished a high frequency of jazzphonemes, one would hear some jazzness to a sequence in theirrecurrent use—as, when one mimics another language, somecharacteristic quality of the sounds might create a certain vagueresemblance to the real thing.

And my listening also discovered other qualities. One doesn’tstay in a territory for too long, but moves up and down the key-board. One doesn’t often go fast and suddenly make an extremechange in the pace of a melody line, but for reasonable stretchesof play maintains a more or less constant rate of articulation.One doesn’t often play the same note over and again, but manydifferent ones. And there were a host of attack and decay qual-ities and rhythmic features of jazz phrases that I’d graduallyincorporated into my play. Jazz, I’d long heard, was comprisedof melodies with shifting metrical patterns. So it wasn’t a mat-ter of playing series of evenly spaced notes—1 1 1 1 1 1 1. Somecharacteristic pacing variations had become almost a stockapproach to certain runs. A long sequence would very often bepreceded by a spate of three or four notes taken quite rapidly,for instance—111 1 1 1 1 (“did-di-ly bop bop bop bop”;“why-don’t-you come with me now”). The melodic turnaroundreferred to when I described how I’d played an F diminishedscale, coming down very fast on a bit of it and then going up itmore slowly—it was usually paced this way.


But, as regards the finely textured note-to-note nature of mystatements, an order was mostly guaranteed by the path’s for-mal construction, like the diminished scale’s alternating halfsteps and whole steps, or a superimposed arpeggio.

I wasn’t really doing much note-to-note selectional work atall. I decided where to start every run, which to choose, howfast to play it. But, we’d say, no intended aim was given to eachand every particular next pitch.

I began to enter melodically into the play when I started try-ing to do something that related back to something I’d justdone, and/or play something that I’d then try to restate, in rela-tion to a new next chord. Such successively shifted replicationsmake up a family of practices that generate a large percentageof melodic gesturing in all music.

Imagine that a course of several notes is played during thetenure of a particular chord and, when a next chord comes upin a couple of beats, say one second, a new sequence is donethat relates to this new chord just as the first fragment relatedto the first. Such a practice helps characterize essential featuresof this interim stage in my development.

In my earliest pathway play, what I did on any chord wasdecided by the choice of an appropriate fitting run de novo, onechord at a time. Now there was a change. I first did things likethis, playing notes from here:


to here:

Regard the dotted notes on melodic right sides (dark verticals dividethe hands) as if played in sequence, left to right say, not simultaneously.The melodic fragments are identical: notes of major chords built on thesecond note of the scale starting on each chord’s root, i.e., on the low-est note in the left hand. (G, lowest right-hand note in the first picture,is the second note of the F scale, F being the root of the chord playedin the left hand. In the second picture, C is the second note of the B�root’s scale. So we have G major chord notes over F, and C majorchord tones over B�. The chords are skeletally played, using just theroot and the flatted seventh while omitting the third and the fifth, acommon left-hand form used when improvising.)

As a melodic intentionality emerged, as I began taking upwith a course of notes as I proceeded, notes whose relations Iaimed now to repeat, I had gained much experience thatenabled me to try to do something congruous with what wentbefore. At first, and for some time, this was a largely conceptualprocess. I’d think: “major triad on the second note of the scale,now again,” then “diminished on the third and a repeat for thenext,” doing hosts of calculating and guidance operations ofthis sort in the course of play.

A small sequence of notes was played, then a next followed.As the abilities of my hand developed, I found myself for thefirst time coming into position to begin to do such melodicwork with respect to these courses. I had been able to pick out


song melodies before, but for a long time I couldn’t grasp thedetails of a pathway course I was doing and then do somethingfurther with this course of sounds, operate upon the arrange-ment of particular note-to-note series of which it was formed,especially with more complex figures. The notes of the pathseemed to go by too fast to take hold of them; my hand hadn’tdeveloped the sort of grasp over their working constitution thatpermitted taking up with them in ways such repetitionalmelodying required.

The emergence of a melodic intentionality, an express aimingfor sounds, was dependent in my experience upon the acquisi-tion of facilities that made it possible, and it wasn’t as thoughin my prior work I had been trying and failing to make coher-ent note-to-note melodies. Motivated so predominantly towardthe rapid course, frustrated in my attempts to reproducerecorded passages, I had left dormant whatever skills formelodic construction I may have had. The simplest sorts ofmelody-making work entailed a note-to-note intentionality thathad been extraordinarily deemphasized by virtue of the isolatedways in which I’d been learning.

The new experience with sound illuminates one difficultyamong many I’d formerly had. Compounding the general des-perateness of my first session-playing attempts, there was afrustrating inability to hear myself. On a small bandstand witha small spinet piano, a bass player over one shoulder and drum-mer over the other, I continually felt I was being drowned outand often played with excessive force in the attempt to hearmyself (my complaints about the acoustics were probablyignored by other musicians, since they sounded like a weakexcuse for a poor showing).

Yet it wasn’t a question of simple concentration on thesounds, of their loudness as that might be measured on an oscil-


loscope, of a deficiency of my hearing. Other players seemed tohave no trouble in this respect. What was really involved in myinability to hear, in these earliest sessions, was that there was solittle courseness to my play, so little developmental unfoldingwith which I could be prospectively and retrospectivelyengaged.

A symphony orchestra in an outdoor amphitheater maysound disappointingly faint from far away, until one’s partici-pation with the unfolding course of the melody is heightened;then the volume seems to increase, so much so that the verynotion of volume becomes problematic. Or listening to a con-versation at a nearby table you can’t clearly hear what’s beingsaid; but if you grasp a phrase or two, some details of the con-tinuing talk may then come within range.

One Saturday morning I used a tuning hammer to totallyuntune my grand piano, and then spent among my most aggra-vating weekends, with a few necessary tools and a manual onHow to Tune Pianos, trying to put it back into a shape that atuner accomplished in about an hour on Monday morning. Themanual described a procedure for tuning that involves a sys-tematic course of adjustments to make, regulating tensions onthe tuning pins around which the strings are wrapped, usingthis hammer-sized tool with a socket for these pins at its end.Two strings are brought into desired alignment by so tighteningor loosening one relative to the other that a certain wah wahwah wah sound, a pulsation said to be perceptible as a result ofdiffering vibrational frequencies, is brought to a proper rate.When two notes, say a fourth apart (from C to F for example),are sounded together, there’s to be a pulsation of approximatelyone beat for every two seconds. The two notes are simultane-ously and continuously sounded, one listens to this beat, andadjusts the rate by turning one of the pins with this tuning ham-mer. Then there’s a three-century-old method for proceeding


through a cycle of strings, tuning each to the others with elab-orate checks along the way, since minor errors quickly becometerribly cumulative.

I never made it past the first page of the manual. I spent lit-erally all day Saturday banging away at two notes and trying tofind a beat. I put my head in between the location of the twostrings, figuring that since the beat was a function of some sortof distance between the two, it might be found in the middle. Ihit the notes hard and soft. I tried to listen at the very decayingend of the sound. I pretended to listen to something else. Nowah wahs wahs to be heard, let alone one every two seconds!9

I later learned that piano tuners first spend months of appren-ticeship working with limited pairs of strings, practicing hear-ing beats. This consists in gaining such a delicacy in theemployment of the tuning hammer that a style of movement isacquired with it—strings under very great tension requiringvery refined pressure, for example—that elucidates a beat byever so delicately varying the tautness of the strings.

The piano tuner doesn’t hear the beats between vibratingstrings by developing a finer ear, not at all, and these pulsationsare detectably present to an oscilloscope whether I strike thekeys or he does. He learns to hear beats by learning to ride onthe sound waves of a pair of pulsating strings with shoulder,arm, and hand artfully engaged with a hammer and this firmlyentrenched pin. I couldn’t hear a beat because I so clumsily usedthe hammer as to never elucidate it by my movements, sub-stantially over- or undershooting it all the time. It wasn’t reallyoscilloscopic sound about which the manual was practicallyspeaking. It was the sound of piano tuning as a skillful arm-and-hammer enterprise.

As attempting to pay attention, to concentrate, didn’t bringthe sounds of the small spinet piano into relief in my earliest


group play, so hearing a beat between two sounding notes was-n’t achieved by focusing my listening, as that’s colloquially andotherwise conceived. In both cases, a manner of bodily engage-ment describes how listening and sounds must be first describedin the context of an activity at hand.

For an improviser, it’s melody making that’s done, and if Iengage myself with such sounds of the piano as the tuner’s tasksrequire, which would take a third arm to move a hammer, Ican’t take up with a course of notes to do jazz. Melody soundsare different from the sounds of vibrating strings, which is tosay that making melodies is a different business from designingpianos, tuning them, or teaching a course in physics.

Look to what my hands were learning. As I found nextsounds coming up, it wasn’t as though I’d so learned about thekeyboard that by looking down I could tell what a regardednote would sound like. I don’t have that skill, nor do manyother musicians. I could tell what a note would sound likebecause it was a next sound, because my hand was so engagedwith the keyboard that through its own configurations andpotentialities it laid out a setting of sounding places right upahead of itself.

To clarify this way of being engaged, consider the instance ofplaying a series of notes over one chord’s duration, and thentraversing a similarly constituted path in the next’s. There areobviously innumerable variations possible. A second run couldduplicate the first one exactly, starting on a tone standing in thesame relation to a new chord as the first run of melody did toits chord, then following precisely similar continuing pitches.Or a second run might only repeat certain essential shapes ofthe first, glossing over specific intervallic distances. Still again,a second run might duplicate the first in terms of its pitches,


while articulating the individual notes with an altered timespacing between some or all of them.

Corresponding to such varied continuity practices, I culti-vated ways of the hand that were more or less suited to managesuch maneuvers. My hand had experience with the keyboardthat allowed repetitions of all sorts to be sustained withouterrors, but at the same time there were sorts of courses whoseintact or even essentialized replication was something I wasn’table to handle. Here’s the hand frozen in three different config-urations over places with the same internal relations in eachlocale. Imagine the fingers moving left to right over the notes onwhich they’re posed for the camera, from one note to the nextto the next:


To aim for swift repeats of this sort required rapidly shiftingconfigurations and realignments.

My earliest melodic efforts often attempted exact repetitions,bringing a particular course into another sector with notes inprecise correspondence. Here a wrong note stood out like a sorethumb. When an equivalently pitched and paced transpositionwas clearly what a next run started to look like, so that oneheard the attempt at a repeat, there was the clear possibility ofwrong notes. The keyboard had come under the sort of controlwhere I could try such moves in ongoing rapid play, and I did,with some confidence.

But many errors occurred. I had become quite fluent in thepathway playing described above, a mistake having a differentstatus in that way of negotiating. My beginning melodying wasfilled with errors, now defined by a heard grasp for an exactlypitched-spaced repetition.

I would play a rapid and intricately winding passage and seekits reiterated production in an upcoming chordal context; andwhile many such attempts would come close, a good numberfell enough off the mark that there was a distinct sense of strug-gling to make it happen. I began to sound like someone tryinghard to say something.


In a setting of movable parts so easily having a voice of theirown with only the slightest slip of the hand, I made quitesophisticated lunges for melody, aiming for highfalutin’ sayings.Rather jazzlike strips would be played, asking for longevity. AsI reached for one of them, I knew more or less where it lay.Spatial capabilities had developed to the point that I was ableto move up to a good next position for a repeat. And pathwayplaying made the terrain available as a setting of places knownin terms of a shifting course of chords. As I played a chord andthen a next, the new one furnished an overall field of engage-ment, an overlapping and crisscrossing range of axes, in whichthe hand going for a saying could locate itself. And between thechordal hand’s pose and the melodic stretch for reiterativeaction, there was no longer just a strict relationship of theoreticcorrectness.

I’d get to a good place to begin a next statement, and at firstgo for a precisely corresponding pitched duplication. With oneclass of places there was no trouble. With others there wasplenty. I was often close to where a correct repeat would be, butat a rapid tempo there was no time for checking things out, andI’d try to make the restatement happen even while making mis-takes, mistakes that stood out as errors in the very attempt atleast to get the rest of it right. There was an ambitiousness ofthe aim unmindful of the difficulties, a reliance upon locationalfacilities and configurational shifts that would suffice for muchof the replication, but an imprudence at the same time withrespect to fine details of the new locale with which the intendedpassage had to continuously cope.

My hand was able to get to a good next arena, finding har-monically consonant nodes for arrival and orientation along theway, established by an acquired togetherness of the chordal-melodic engagement. Much of the replication got done. Shifting


lumps on the surface were under a general mobile and reposi-tional control. But my efforts to reiterate the fully intact frag-ment at a never-changing tempo, especially with more complexforms than the major chord arpeggio, met resistance.

Nonetheless, the hand came into the new territory for a repe-tition, found a concordant locale for its sensible restatementthere, found the doing could be well done there, and came intothe sector ready to play there. Putting down there, knowingwhat “there” would be like as a setting for it in its axial relationto the topography, it came in as a hand only partially in trouble.

Moving up to a space, the breadth of the place being aimedat, its extensiveness or compactness, the edges to be contendedwith there, the layout of highs and lows—these had been placedin operational scale by a hand that had its bearings. It was ahand that had a bearing with respect to the contours and theirrespective distances, for in its very constitution as a hand athome on the keyboard, it appreciated what keys were like any-where. From high off the keyboard, a field of keys lay presentbeneath the fingers, to be engaged by a spread and arched,pointed configuration. It was a field of keys whose stability andhorizontality relative to the body was assured in the hand’s rela-tionship to the arm’s and shoulder’s angularities. It was a fieldof keys whose straight, rather than encircling, horizontality wasfound by arms and hands that extended outward from thebody’s center at the same time as they managed a proportion-ally proper extension away from the trunk. It was a field of keyswhose dimensions throughout were stable, so that, however thehand was spaced over some part of it, a precisely correspond-ing relative spatial configuration had to be sustained throughextensions and contractions of the arm’s lateral movements.The arm moved far off to a side, while the hand retained thatkeyboard as its field for engagement.


In an appraisal of the space, the thumb takes a bearing, as inthis photo,

appraising the crack between two keys as a crack occupying somuch space against that thumb; appreciating the magnitude ofthe crack as a breadth of contact along its surface, a presenceis gained to the size of things at hand throughout the territoryas an extending field. And more than this, the thumb is capa-ble of participating in a rescaling for the hand (as each of itsparts can do for the rest), should the crack be somewhattighter, as in the small scale of a child’s toy piano, which in amoment of adjustment becomes a familiar keyboard again tohands with generative ways of knowing how to be at home ina setting of keys.

Striving so intently to make a saying happen, I’d often go fora reiteration by lunging for the general shape and ordering of aprior figure. The first course had a particular intervallic con-struction, with highs and lows within the gesture, and a mannerof pacing. Sometimes the second course would not aim for aprecise pitch duplication in terms of whole and half step dis-tances, but would move up and down more or less where thefirst did, retaining various essential nodes of the fragment. Anda hand had been fashioned that could come into the chordally


implicated sector and get itself into particular notes so as topossibly realize these essential similarities.

Through extensive pathway play, as the hand developed waysof being in a sensible scope without a strictly duplicating aim, Igradually grew able to do such work because my hand couldfind, in how it could now enter a sector, actual, real live keys-at-hand there.

Keys were at hand in a sector for me in ways that displayedmy hand’s growing improvisationality in its overall approach.The classical artist operates under constraints of a score to bearticulated just so. He operates within a social organization ofprofessional certification, excellence, and competitiveness dif-fering from mine as an avocational jazz aspirant, his situationplacing great demands on faithfulness to the score.

For jazz, note-to-note selections were what I wanted. Havingthe hand touch the surface with a broad-palmed appraisal,say—not now as a means of groping for notes as a beginnerwith closed eyes might employ such a contact—this was, atfirst, a way of securing sorts of places in which sorts of actioncould be taken.

A broad-palmed appraisal may be part of the hand’s sense of aterritory for variously shaped maneuvers, which would have to


proceed through particular keys. And this extended, sector-sur-veying hand not only finds particular keys, the placement of dis-tances of actual depressable spots, but broad contours of theterritory whose relevance fits within the conduct of classes ofgestural maneuvering.

Consider extended fingers appreciating the twosome-threesomelayout of black keys. As I was now aiming for continuities, thehand moving for sequences of action essentially implicated by apreceding figure, abilities with the twoness-threeness aspect ofthe terrain entered into newly organized activities. The handwould appraise the twoness-threeness layout in order to find,for instance, how much space was available for doing notedwork in a sector, how the sort of crossover pivoting needed tobe essentially true to a prior remark could be managed withrespect to available space at hand in a new locale.

I was now beginning to appreciate more than a number ofparticular notes for particular fingers, grasping for where somenamed note should be. Under a melodic guidance toward theessential reiteration of a prior gesture, the hand needed to find,in an amount of space, that there was the sort of room to bemoved about in, to carry out a desired course; a sort of spaceinto which a thumb could be taken, say, so you could get uphigher in getting a thumb down around there; a sort of spacebeyond which there might be a path to fall back on; a sort ofspace to be avoided were I only going slow enough to avoid it;a sort of space somewhere in which was probably a usable note.The twoness-threeness appraisal had differing significanceswithin these classes of actions; and in much of my melodyingefforts, along with good things I was finding to do beneath thehand, there was the discovery of a stretch of rapids coming up,as it were, too fast.

It wasn’t any longer a simple matter of taking up somethingand precisely repeating it in an upcoming sector. There was a


way of entering the topography with both key places and gen-eral arenas for classes of improvisational action accessiblythere. A hand was developing that was possessed of mobileways with the topography that allowed a reasonably hopefulattempt, at least, to make the best of things.

But, still, at this phase of my studies there was a struggle toachieve an expressly determined melody, with an adherence tochord-specific prior shapes. As the hand moved to a next sector,shapes were given their historical integrity (and the complexityof continuity practices increased) with a working-to-make-it-happen. Only later would there emerge a sort of making thebest of things, a way of being with the keyboard that would becontinuously prudent rather than struggling to get about sensi-bly. Here I was very much backward-looking and reparativelyforward-going, still engrossed in continuous analytic thinking,looking back at that passage I’d just done and striving to repeatit. My hands didn’t know how to stay more involved within theshorter and steadily moving framework of only several particu-lar next notes at a time.

I’d head into a new territory for a next chord, do a gesturethat replicated the prior sequentially intricate move, and find Icould preserve some of its features, sometimes exactly, some-times glossingly. And I’d find that a bit of this got done in thenext chordal context and there’d still remain a period of tenurefor the chord’s duration to be filled with melody. The hand fin-ished parts of the preceding that it could melodically manage,some of whose sounds it could prehear on the way downbecause there was an assured path-implicated note target for itsaim in the new sector. The hand then—this fast jazzy player Ialways sought to be—had more to do. Not playing seemed tomake the music stop.

As the hand did things it was seeking to do singingly, it hadall the while been becoming a hand able to do all sorts of things


everywhere. I’d play a figure, go for its repetition, get some wayinto it, and stumble. To fill what I felt to be the remainingempty space and keep the jazz going, I’d do something quiteunrelated to the explicit continuity I’d partially achieved. I’daccomplish the beginning of a reiteration (transposition, inver-sion, exact or approximate repeat, etc.), and then, for example,use up a remaining allotted chord time by taking on any notesthat were thereabout to take.

There were the familiar pathways, and these could at timesbe gotten onto, but with respect to the integrity of the soughtcontinuity of the statement they were “any notes thereabout”that would keep the action under way. Not quite that, however,for they were often filled with their characteristic jazz sounds.The originally sought replication had its characteristic jazzsounds here and there within it. And there was a melodyingbeing done with them, aimed-for continuities so that strips werebeing brought together into statements of a sort. There were, aswell, particular chordal sounds, and these other characteristic-sounding little afterthoughts stuck on the end of a graduallyevolving coherence. From a virtual hodgepodge of phonemesand approximate paralinguistics, a sentence structure wasslowly taking form, sayings now being attempted, themes start-ing to achieve some cogent management. But at the same time,courses of action were being sustained that faded and disinte-grated into stammerings and stutterings, connectives yet tobecome integrally part of the process.

These “any notes thereabout” weren’t only places on actualpathways that I tried to stick at the end of a gesturally guidedcontinuity, for there’d developed ways of moving around thatcouldn’t, at this point, any longer be described in terms of apath’s traverse.

There’s a chromatic scale in its theoretical organization, totake just one example. The scale contains every note on the key-


board. It can be played in a strictly orderly progression,expressly as a chromatic run, from bottom to top or down-ward. But then there was a manner of proceeding that had beengained through manipulations along it and paths like it, a waythat involved a general style. Take the index and the fourth fin-gers, touching two black notes, the hand in that sort of postureadopted when chromatically situated and engaged:

Or, for instance, there was this way, with the hand broadlyspread:

where distances required to move about between the secondand third fingers may be known since a known kind of courseis taken.


There’s a globalized appreciation for the fourthness of acourse (a possibility in this second photo), or for a course’s gen-eral chromaticality, and now my hand didn’t always come intothe keyboard for a first note and then a second one in particu-lar, but would, as well, enter the terrain to take a certain essen-tial sort of stride.

Two years of pathway manipulation taught me a chromaticstyle of engaging the terrain, and coming into this chromatic runthe hand assumes a unique posture, with the fingers bunched upinto a preparatory shape. Where notes lay along the chromaticpath was anticipated in the hand’s posturing for a sector to bechromatically taken. The second finger finds a place relative tothe fourth and the fourth relative to the second, as they togetherfind themselves spaced within a chromatically configuring hand.

In a chromatic pose, my hand could be aimed toward anysector in sufficiently prepared shape, precisions then to be tonedup as the contact is made. As one finger in this chromaticallypoised hand makes contact, it finds where in the depth andwidth of a key it is, and the hand’s chromaticality becomes cor-respondingly toned for the sector’s dimensions running off inboth directions from the point of appraised contact. In such achromatic approach, the thumb stays back away from the blacknotes, so that a directed course can be taken regardless of wherethe starting point of a setdown happens to be.

I gained a host of such strategies for entering into the key-board, postures like the chromatic one. And when I got intotrouble with specifically sought, soundful melodying, it wasthrough the availability of such general styles that any notesthereabout could begin to be errorlessly handled, at least in thesense that no tripping occurred, for instance, when a reiterativeattempt ended with time still left to be filled up with activity.

Styles of being had developed, becoming more generalized,done everywhere, modes of moving first gained from pathway


play yet now freed from the specific routes on whose travelthey were acquired, freed by a striving toward melodicality.There were scaling ways, and up-a-little-down-a-little ways,rocking ways and every-other-finger ways, and skipping ways,hopping ways, rippling ways, ways to go a long way with, andmore.

In the availability of such shaped means of approach, I had acapacity to keep the action going in a sector, making streams ofnotes, while still doing a great deal of unthoughtful, weaklygearing aiming for sounds. Nonetheless, these general styles ofmoving were gradually evolving into a connective tissue ofaction, with attempts to tie up courses taken with one chord tothose played with the next; and, more importantly, facilitieswere emerging that would enable maneuvering about in a quitedifferent manner over my next year of studies, a way of makingthe best of things continuously.

II

In this phase of play I aimed for sounds with great inconsis-tency. If that note shown beneath the thumb (B) here is played,I might know what the note beneath the first finger, E�, willsound like:


if the finger is aimed to that place along with a quiet or loudlysinging me also directed to it as a place that will sound just so.

Sing a small sequence of notes, exaggerating your expressive-ness for the sake of illustration. Your head, torso, and the innerstructures of the mouth noticeably rise and fall. Face a mirrorand sing some tones. Mark the opening position of your nosevis-à-vis the mirror with a chalk. As you then pass through sev-eral sung steps of a well-known song, similarly mark yournose’s location at the arrival vicinity of each tone. With aninsignificant degree of exaggeration that easily feels natural,several conscientious passes over a five- or six-note melody willyield a vertical array of resultant chalk marks isomorphicallycorresponding to the vertically spaced arrangement of discretepitches in a musical score, or the horizontal array of spots on akeyboard.

There’s a system of concordantly pitched and shaped move-ments, most crudely put here, between vertical movements ofthe head and the horizontal spread of fingers on the terrain. Toknow what a next place will sound like is to be somehow syn-chronously directed along these dimensions. A sustained orien-tation to a melodic course of sounds consists in a togethernessof such aiming. Voice and fingers seek the selfsame and thusknown sounding spots.

And this is most intricate indeed. The contours of a sung pro-gression can outline its shapes with a very miniaturized line ofaction, while the synchronously linked hand is moving across afixed-sized grid, possibly akin to the accomplished pianist’sability to adjust his hands’ sense of the scale of a terrain so asto actually play well on a considerably shrunken child’s key-board. Akin too, perhaps, to the fact that the selfsame hand-writing, with very particular details, can be seen whether onewrites with large arm and shoulder strokes on a blackboard ortiny fingered ones on a small piece of paper.


Further, there may be an absence of any sense of motion inthe mouth and its parts, the rising and falling pitches thatsinging entails readily transferred into a lateral head move-ment, as if the very head and shoulder were doing high and lowwhen moving sideways. This coupling of aim—the sort ofcoordinational, rescaling, gestural shrinking, transferring(from one place to another) capabilities of a synchronouslyaimed body—was variously refined and ragged at this point ofmy play.

It’s not that, being with a thumb, in particular, on this B, I’dknow the E� was a place to melodically go. In a reiterativeattempt, let us suppose, such an interval had been previouslyplayed and I was now heading for this distance again. In a newmini-landscape this distance resided in a new contour, and thesetwo fingers were part of a hand that was establishing its over-all shape, by, for example, the other fingers’ appraisal of mygeneral location within the keyboard where this particulardesired interval would be.

The pinkie, in the above photograph, may anchor a hand’sspread, feeling an open space, finding the significance of thisopen space by reference as well to the fourth finger’s apprecia-tion of the outer edge of those three black-note mounds. Thefeel of how much key is under an extended finger likewise aidsin the hand’s sense of the E�’s place, not only along a horizontalaxis but as a spot whose depth and size are present as well.

For many actions, such appraisals may not be necessary,however, and indeed only the beginner’s hand regularly makescontact to aid in place finding. But when shifts of ranges occur,when a broad leap is taken, a slight touch may tone up theplaces.

But if it wasn’t a matter of finding a single intervallic trans-position, the repetition of a third, as with these fingers, but oneof winding with the hand into a new arena for continuing


melody making, where transactions entailed much more thankeeping the terrain and its contours in tactile regard, many pos-sibilities arose for imprecisions in the manual-vocallic unity ofthe gesture.

I’d go for a reiteration, beginning with an interval like this B-E�pair, its location assuredly sought and known, prehearing itsforthcomingness with a definitely known distance as a (possiblyrepeated) third, for instance, allowing a meshing of voice andfingers. But with respect to a continuing course, I couldn’t man-age to preserve a pitched-spaced duplication because of how Iwas moving. Essential contours of the gesture—highs wherehigh, lows where low, the same number of notes, a bunch ofnotes that sounded as dense, a similar relative pitch—mightcome off reasonably fluently. But notes beyond a two-noteopening, I may accurately say of myself, weren’t often definitelyimplicated next spots. And instead of really knowing what theywould sound like in detail, I’d be saying some of them particu-larly and definitely, and others would, as it were, be speakingback to me. Making melodies, going for certain pitched trans-actions in this phase of play thus had a characteristic uneven-ness, me trying to have the hands say this in particular, thehands saying some of what I took them to say, but not all, thensaying things of our own jointly inappropriate choosing.

There was a recurrent piece of advice in the jazz subculturewhen the discussion was of ways to develop skill at improvisa-tion: “sing while you’re playing.” In pathway playing I wassinging what I played only after the fact, and felt foolish, liketrying to speak in unison with another’s talk. I was only veryintermittently playing what I was singing. My singing hadsomething of a life of its own. Sometimes its aims were real-ized, often only their essential shapes, and at other times amuch greater discrepancy arose, with a total lack of synchronybetween moves toward good next sounds that “I” would


project and those moves the hands had to be making towardgood next spots.

It was as though the enterprise of melody making now toooften came under the jurisdiction of an artful listener, and hadI been able to jump into the keyboard with my tongue, thingswould’ve been smoothed out. By now I had developed a capac-ity for melody in jazz ways. It wasn’t really that I needed morepractice to gain still more complex scale-shifting skills (thoughmuch more would be had). It was, instead, that I had yet todevelop ways of melody making where the sorts of well-inten-tioned reachings that were now getting me into trouble wouldbe replaced by an altogether different way of moving.

If I strike a first note and reach for a second, I may or may notknow what it’ll sound like. In manifest or minute bodily move-ments accompanying the finger’s journey, I may find I vocallyappreciate only the vicinity of places where a finger will settle.

If someone plays a note on the keyboard and I’m asked tosing another that’s pointed to nearby, I can generally do it, butoften most easily by singing some orderly path (like a majorscale) that links the two notes, and whose steps I count until Ireach the indicated target. I haven’t had that sort of very spe-cialized music-dictational training that prepares one to makesuch visual-aural identifications.

If someone calls out a note’s name, I can’t sing it, nor can Iname a note that’s played, a skill much too loosely termed per-fect pitch. But if I sing a tone, or listen to one on a record, I canthen go to the piano and play it on my very first touch of theinstrument about eighty percent of the time. So my hands, arms,and shoulders (for, like other pianists, I can do this while stand-ing up, off center from the middle, reaching down to the key-board with one finger, and often without looking)—they havealmost perfect pitch. My thoughts don’t.


When I say I know what an upcoming note will sound like, Imean that I’m moving along a course that will provide for thatnote’s sound, in providing for precisely targeted next moves.

I would, for instance, make a statement and then go for itsexact repetition, and there’d be notes in addition to the ones I’dplayed that might be soundfully attained, if I’d managed to domore notes in the transformation while going fast. When Iplayed a figure like this, to use the simple example of superim-posed major chords discussed above,

and aimed for its replication on a new chord, the fourth notebelow (the higher F),

for instance, might be soundfully approachable. The majortriad (a three-note chord, here F major: F, A, C) establishes aterritory of related sounds. If I play a major triad I can aimfullyattain the octave, the fourth note in the picture, and know what

)

3 . 0


it’ll sound like. This is because I’ve learned a soundful way ofmoving around all the positions of a major triad: I can alwaysprecisely aim for any of its tones from any of its others, fingersand voice together. Its tones are soundfully given in having veryspecifically known distances from any finger to any finger, inevery sort of mutual relation to one other, because, for exam-ple, I’ve done all sorts of arpeggios, with all manners of order-ing throughout the keyboard with these major chord triads,using all kinds of fingerings, many thousands of times; becausethe distances to get to and from any of the notes in a triad toand from any others have become known in the most thor-oughly intimate way.

I can play a major triad’s notes (here shown simultaneouslydepressed for the sake of illustration) with these fingers:


And the reach from the C (the third depressed key from the left)to the higher F can be securely aimed for, as that sounding placein particular. I don’t know “distances between keys” in general,but always in a context of unfoldingly handled moves. I don’tknow the distance from this C to F:

because I specifically know how to move up in fourths (thisinterval), with that sort of turnunder. Abstractly speaking, as amatter of anatomy and the corresponding geometry of a key-board, it’s actually an awkward maneuver. But, in the context ofa hand engaged with an F major triad, such turnunders can bequite securely targeted because that triad is part of an intendedpresence at the keyboard: an F major triad way, within which Chas been enunciated, and from which C can be a launching pad.


The distance from the C to the F here isn’t known because myfourth and little fingers can span such a distance in general, norbecause my third and little fingers know it as well. While thesefingers are at home with such spreads, the reach from the C tothe F here, doable with various digits, is informed by the coursethat’s (possibly) being taken by the hand. And it’s by referenceto this course possibly at hand—here “major-triadness”—thatsuch distances are known and attained.

As another example, with the middle finger on the C below,the amount of spread required for the little finger to reach theF is assessed by reference to how the other fingers are engaged,and by the way the unused fourth finger informs the shaping ofthe hand:

The reach to get to F here isn’t at all unrelated to how the sec-ond finger feels itself situated, the axial position of the right sideof the hand being quite different in this pictured minor triad(F A� C). Where “F” then lies, relative to C, becomes more thansome distance along a strictly linear horizontal scale. In ongo-ing play, aiming for a next sound within a course, one mustreach a note so as to depress it, and without improperly touch-ing any neighboring tones, while going on to and coming fromother places. And how high the rest of the hand is, the contours


the hand as a whole assumes, and the shaping of distances run-ning along every dimension are critical.

In the course of doing a major triad, to say I know wherenotes of that triad definitely are, that I can be aimed to themsynchronously with voice and hand, is to say I have a secureway of going to them, and going to them to play them. Foran improvising pianist, having a known upcoming soundmeans being able to aim securely at a very definite locationthat’s fully implicated by a context of deeply incorporatedroutes. If I project a sung sound, going upward, and can bringa finger-within-the-routing-hand to that destination, I find aplaceful realization of my aim as a concerted manual-vocallicaccomplishment.

It’s important to note, as we’ll soon see, that in doing com-petent jazz improvisation now, I never project sung soundsindependent of how my hand finds itself situated. But in thisphase of play I’d often go for a next place that wasn’t clearlytargetable by a hand firmly in command of itself on such acourse. My overly self-conscious melody making had me reach-ing about for places indefinitely, and not just to places whosedistances were clearly implicated by a particular handful coursethat locates the specific whereabouts of thereby soundableplaces. I wasn’t often wayfully engaged on a path.

If I play some notes on a major chord, I know what othernotes of the chord sound like. That is, I know how to get to anyother chord place soundfully. But it ain’t necessarily so. It’shardly just a matter of playing notes that happen to lie on achord which delineates clearly implicated next distances,according them a particular known sound.

I must be major chord-oriented with these notes, before itsplaces will lead me to others. These selfsame notes might arisewhile I was doing some other manipulation, along other routesnot necessarily related to a major chord way of moving. From


the standpoint of play, a major chord way isn’t a collection ofisolatable spots with “their sounds.” It’s an intended arena ofwell-aimed maneuvers.

And to be wayfully oriented on a path, it isn’t at all necessaryto play every note on it, any more more than a competent dri-ver always has to pass through fourth and third gears to down-shift from fifth to second, as a beginner might.

Another detailed example. First let’s have two longer arraysof scale paths in view:

E�:

A�:

I’d play a relatively rapid figure like this (here the numbers indi-cate the sequence of the notes being played):

5 6 7

8 9 :/�


and the D� would not, we’ll say for purposes of illustration, besoundfully approached. It would, instead, have been amongthose “any notes thereabout,” tagged on to fill out the remain-ing time. I’d be involved in a course of struggling maneuversthat didn’t handfully provide for that space having its known-in-advance sound. It wasn’t a wayful place.

Note that while this is an empirically likely but perhaps hypo-thetical example, it’s so typical of my negotiations at the time,involving troubles so vexing, long-standing, and recollected infine detail, that it can be reconstructed with a plausibility ade-quate for the needed observations.

How might its soundfulness have been assured? I possess ahuge number of courses within which it’s a secure there. For itto be securely there isn’t, for example, to say I can move to thefirst black of a twosome from the second, or that I can comesquarely down into the center of a note without slipping. It’ssecurely there if within a context of places at hand in theintended ways I’m moving.

Most simply, D� could’ve been aimed at from E�, as if on anA� major scale way used from the very start. E� and D� both lieon an A� major scale path, and all prior notes in the sequencefall on it too. But I was, we’ll say (here reconstructing my con-duct), oriented, instead, on a sequence along one intended E �way, an E� major scale. I had that scale’s feel “in hand” all alongthe way until I got to the D�. Tones 1–5 are on an E� scale. D�isn’t.

So oriented along an E� way from notes one to five, for me tohave used D� would’ve meant I was switching paths. But at thispoint in my play it would’ve been most unlikely for me to havesmoothly shifted from a figure like this right onto some otherway. Such extended continuities had yet to contain a criticalmissing ingredient, main topic of my next chapter—a manner oftiming.


At this point in my play, such a D� would’ve been a mere“sound careless” afterthought, an “any note thereabout with-out a known sound.” This means that neither an A� major scaleway nor any other sound-giving course with these places on itwould have been intendedly at hand in the move between thesenotes (and there are a very great number of other paths that canhere provide for a soundable location, like a diminished scale,to take just one, where a D� could follow an E�).

A definiteness of aim, a synchrony of a pianist’s vocal anddigital intentions, is never merely a secure aim toward a place.A gesture’s confident aim is assured in its being a movement toa key which at the same time is a movement past that key. Andone behaves wayfully singing with the fingers if every key isentered with its future and past wheres securely present in aroute-finding hand.

The sound-there-routing hand is one that finds places with adefiniteness of aim continuously toned up as the articulationunfolds. If, in a path switch, D� was intended, from E�, as a movethen possibly oriented to a C, B�, and A� to come, successivelower tones on an A� major scale (which might now be a likelyswitch for me), where that D� really is, for a hand going to it, isdefined by the shaped course that brings the finger into it.

A finger taking a D� in such a downward A� way would be afinger taking a D� to be then potentially followed by a thumband crossover rotation, the usual way D� is passed through indescending an A� scale. And such prospective orientations of thehand toward upcoming spots provides for the finest detectabledetails of a particular kind of D� landing, where, say, you’d typ-ically see a thumb already well turning under, anticipatingmovement down along the new way.

The way a finger comes into a key is an intrinsic part of howone must speak of where a key is. There’s no single place called theD� place (except in analytic thought). Productionally speaking,


there are many different D�s a hand may wayfully achieve. Thisselfsame locale, objectively speaking, is in fact a spot for actionsthat define it as many possible places in reference to wayfulnegotiations.

Getting to a D�, in the context of this figure, was, at the timefor me, to get to a place where I just happened to land. Strivingfor melodies in the ways I did, merely happening to land onkeys was responsible for most of my mistakes.

To go for D� “definitely” isn’t at all a matter of doing sostrongly, or with firm pressure, but with the confidence of anintended-sounding aim. It would be to come at it from within acourse of movements that locates a particular D�, grounded bythe locations and configurational requirements of other placeson that course with respect to which it is being wayfullyapproached.

A finely integrated aiming for places, giving soundedness tokeys by reference to a wayful series of moves, would onlyemerge as a continual possibility in the next phase of my stud-ies. And such notions as the definiteness of an aim, a provisionof soundedness, and the very idea of a way at hand—thesemust await fuller clarification as I describe an essential changein my play.10

Going for the Jazz

I

More than any other single experience, it was listening toJimmy Rowles play the piano that marked the crucial turningpoint in my fourth year of study, when very significant changesbegan to occur in my path to improvisation.

Rowles was known as a musician’s musician, and at the clubin Greenwich Village where he often performed, jazzmen fromall over New York City would drop by on their off evenings tohear his marvelous presentations of ballads. A renownedaccompanist—for Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra,et al.—Rowles often also played as a soloist or with a bassplayer, and here his forte was a most lilting, casual, yet veryswinging way of playing standards like Over the Rainbow,Body and Soul, All the Things You Are, The Man I Love. To lis-ten to him was to relish each and every place of a luxuriouslylingering song. He was a fine improviser and superb accompa-nist, but it was especially the way he played ballads that com-manded professional respect.11

Rowles had a way with the instrument. He sat rather lowdown and stretched back, as relaxed with the piano as the verycompetent driver is nonchalant behind the wheel on an open

74 Going for the Jazz

road. Still, there was a supreme caretaking with a melody, acaressing of it, giving each place its due. He was never in ahurry. In fact it was as if he’d fallen behind the beat. But it onlyseemed that way. It was late-at-night music, and the song wouldtake its time.

For months, night after night I’d watch him move from chordto chord with a broadly swaying participation of his shouldersand entire body. I’d sympathetically feel him delineate waves ofmovement, some broadly encircling, others subdividing thebroadly undulating strokes with finer rotational ones, so that ashis arm reached out to get from one chord to another it was asif some spot on his back circumscribed a very small figure at thesame time, as if at slow tempos this was the way to bolster asteadiness to the beat.

At times I’d watch his chordal hand coming in gently for alanding, and even while it stayed depressed for a bit he stillalways appeared to take a chord in passing, never seeming toreach a totally final rest, as the elbow and arm ellipticallyrotated around the engaged keyboard hand. Looking veryclosely, one could see that his fingertips themselves were neverreally fully stationary, always smoothly gliding over the tiniestof distances to pass from their points of first contact to those ofdisengagement. And along with his almost strictly linear foottaps, a small head gesture circumscribed the arm’s sameaccented temporal path. In an anchored heel you’d only see up-and-down movements of the foot, but in his slight head rota-tion and shoulder swaying, you’d see an undulating flow ofmotion, a pushing, releasing, thrusting, and relaxing.

At live performances I often watched fast players whoserecords served as my models. But their body idioms in no wayseemed connected to the detail of their melodies, and adoptingthe former had absolutely no bearing on the latter. This one, forexample, had a little shoulder tic, but mimicking that, as I found


myself quite unselfconsciously doing after an evening of watch-ing him, didn’t begin to produce his sorts of improvisations.Another sat tightly hunched over the piano, playing furiouslyfast, but assuming that posture had no apparent consequence forgetting my jazz to sound in the least like his.

But over the course of several months of watching and lis-tening to Jimmy play, and starting to play many more slow bal-lads myself, which I’d earlier done mostly when first learningchord voicing, I found that for getting a song to feel like his, hisobservable bodily idiom served as a roughly useful guide. In thevery act of swaying gently and with elongated movements, thelilting, stretching, almost oozing quality of his interpretationscould be at least vaguely evoked.

I couldn’t emulate his intonations and phrasing with genuinesuccess, capture the richness of his way of moving, pacing, andcaretaking. His special skills in handling pulsation, indeedRowles’s entire manner of looking, walking, talking, or laugh-ing—his way of temporally being in the world—this was dis-tinctive enough to make him a quite difficult player to copyrealistically. But I found I could get some of his breathing qual-ity into a song’s presentation by trying to copy his ways.

Listening to him, paying special notice to a manner of mov-ing, playing many more ballads myself, bringing attention forthe first time (clearly the result of my peculiarly long isolationfrom the occupation) to a caretaking regard for the overall pre-sentation of a song from front to finish, trying to shape a beatlike Jimmy did, I began to develop an entirely new way of beingat the piano.

And while at first it was particularly in playing slower stan-dards that I found a payoff from these new attentions, progressslowly started to appear in the faster improvisational play atwhich I’d still spent most of the time.


Now, within my practice sessions, little spates of that jazz onthe records surprisingly showed themselves to me. Then theywere gone. No sooner did I try to latch onto a piece of good-sounding jazz that would seem just to come out in the midst ofmy improvisations, than it would be undermined, as, when onefirst gets the knack of a complex skill like riding a bicycle or ski-ing, the very attempt to sustain an easeful management under-cuts it. You struggle to stay balanced, keep failing, then severalrevolutions of the pedals occur, the bicycle seems to go off onits own, you try to keep it up, and it disintegrates. Yet there’s noquestion but that the hang of it was glimpsed, the bicycleseemed to do the riding by itself, an essence of the experiencewas tasted with a “this is it” feeling, like a revelation.

And a long-term conversation with myself now began to takea particular form. Looking down at these hands of mine, attheir ways, at my ways of employing them, seeking practicallyuseful terms for conceiving my relationship to their ways, think-ing of the particular things I could do for this music to happenregularly—a thoughtful scrutiny over such matters and over thevery consequences of such thinking itself—this became theessence of what practicing now entailed.

It was an all-or-nothing affair. I’d see a stretch of melody sud-denly appear, unlike others I’d seen, seemingly because of some-thing I was doing, though my fingers went to places to which Ididn’t feel I’d specifically taken them. Certain right notes playedin certain right ways appeared just to get done, in a little strip ofplay that’d go by before I got a good look at it. And while I cer-tainly did these notes in these ways, a practically relevant obser-vation, for ways of moving I’d come to develop, was revealed inthis odd sort of first observation. Watching from above and see-ing a stretch of action occur in a way that almost prompted meto exclaim “some jazz just came out!” prophesied a way of doingthese notes so they’d appear just to come out. A sense grew of


finally being onto something, and I’d search for just the way toproceed. Small indications became targets, glimpses of what theway of being would somehow have to achieve.

It wasn’t that a sort of jazz line would appear, somewhat bet-ter than another, then one a bit better still, with gradations thatrevealed readily detectable shifts in a range of isolatable com-ponents of my ways. The distinction wasn’t as between a streetcorner conversation and a passage of Rilke, a typically compe-tent jazz pianist’s solo and the exquisite elegance of a ChickCorea improvisation. It was like the difference between anaphasic’s or stutterer’s or new foreigner’s attempts to puttogether a smooth sentence, and a competent three-year-old’sflowing “Daddy . . . come see my new doll.” Former ways werelacking at that level of difference, between features of actionthat all jazz on the records shared and the sorts of strugglingamateur efforts that didn’t really count as competent talk at all.This level now becomes my descriptive concern, as it was thenan obsessive practical one.

What happened, suddenly appearing and disappearing in thisway, was dramatically different from what my former practiceshad achieved. For a brief course of time while I played rapidlyalong, a line of melody interweavingly flowed over the durationof several chords, fluently winding about in ways I’d not seenmy hands move before, a line of melody whose melodicalitywasn’t being expressly done, as in my reiterative attempts tosustain continuity. Somehow, a sequence of notes flowing fromone chord’s jazz-related ways to the next’s, singing this jazz, wasachieved. And it was clear that these ways of interweavinglysinging jazz with my fingers, first so difficult to sustain with anysatisfying frequency, were the ways of the jazz on the records.

There was no mistaking it. No recording was needed to verifymy perception. I was quite certain about it without inviting a


musician’s confirmation. And I was right. I could hear it. I couldhear a bit of that language being well spoken, could recognizethat I’d done a saying in that language, in fact for the very firsttime, a saying particularly said in all of its detail: its pitches,intensities, pacing, durations, accentings—a saying said just so.

The particularly said jazz saying would get done, and then I’dlapse into the usual lungeful, unsinging path-following ways.My practical theorizing, searching for instructions that wouldwork, now made up a course of several months of almost con-tinuous playing, getting close and not wanting to let the changesrecede, trying to nail matters down firmly so I could always doit again. At first, many days of regular playing might not pro-duce a single instance, and many months went by before I couldplay anything like an entire song-length chorus of this jazz onthe records. My protracted struggle kept alive various problem-atic aspects of the task, making possible their study and descrip-tion here, a payoff that, I assure you, came only after the fact.

I clearly knew when the right appearances were displayed,knew it in the deeply familiar sounds on the records, and in thelooks of the hands. I saw my hands as a jazz piano player’shands, a bit at a time, and would oddly recall the looks of otherplayers’ hands. My hands’ looks looked like theirs had looked.Things passingly seen in the others’ hands were now clarified inhindsight—having been seen but not watched—through looksmine now passingly revealed to me.

And this remembrance itself gradually proved most helpful.The puzzling interweavingness of my teacher’s fingers, whoseorder I couldn’t formerly see, looking beyond their conduct forrules about their destinations—this, for example, I now spottedin mine. I recognized modalities of movement previously wit-nessed in others’ hands, with noticeably variegated detail, sothat regularly emulating such non-note-specific memories gen-erated many new possibilities for my own hands.


Playing the piano now, by myself, for friends, students, or ina nightclub, within a minute I usually find myself softly singing(though you’d surely prefer to call it middle-aged, hummedgrunting). I sing with my fingers. One may sing along with thefingers, one may use the fingers to blurt out a thought, and onemay sing with the fingers. Each is a specifically different way ofbeing.

Instructions that helped achieve this singing with the fingersbegan to figure into a mode of guided presence at the terrain,integrating with other helpful practices I could begin to locate,features of my play I could understand and instruct my handsabout.

Consider using one’s fingers to blurt out a thought, the promi-nent feature of my earlier repetitional lungings. Finding thatproblems of improvised writing inform and are informed by prob-lems of improvised piano playing, I did some casual yet revealingstudies of typing, involving this, among other practices:

I typed rapidly, without a text, striving to make real sayings,sensible ones, expressing “ideas,” as language likes to put itabout itself, seeking to sustain a pace that approximates that ofrather slow but not too terribly stilted talk (at about 120 wpm).

Doing such typing and trying to continue without unduepausing, exploring improvisation in this terrain, it often hap-pened that I’d come to places where I couldn’t reach fartherahead. My movements weren’t broadly aimed forward, lackedways of going on in certain malleable, improvisationally flexible,accentually targeted thrusts. And at such times I simultaneouslyfound myself sensing that I couldn’t find what to say next.

I’d try to keep on typing nonetheless, continuously aiming toproduce sensible sayables for a viewing audience, sayables thatcome and disappear as talking comes and goes, purposefullyconstraining myself with a video camera focused on a movabletypewriter carriage, so that one only saw a few words come up


and go off a TV screen. And I gave a dozen televised lectures,seated at an old carriage-moving IBM typewriter with a videocamera over my shoulder in front of a large class of (bewil-dered) sociology students, who watched my talks on monitorsunder instructions to prepare for an exam on their content.

In such finger talking, I’d feel myself coming upon a loss forwords as my hands began to falter and lack certainty in theirforward sweep, and, sensing such difficulty just up ahead, I’dfrequently say a group of words to myself, trying to get out oftrouble, trying to do this while still typing fast.

I felt compelled to prefigure a little stretch of places to aimfor, going rather foolishly fast with a continuing aim to staycogent this way—the better to study it—and, feeling an impassearising, I’d take an inner course of action to help the outer oneout, metaphorically speaking. In such a search, a course ofwords can be given in a flash, with that sort of rapidity think-ing to oneself can have. Doing such thinking while typing along,attempting such prefiguring without pausing as other placeswere being handled, I’d often lunge for the imagined group ofwords all at once.

Lunging for a group of words all at once, roughly possible inthinking, would only work interactionally in a world where lan-guage somehow occurred with the sorts of actions a postal clerktakes when stamping Air Mail Special Delivery on your letter inone blow. But talking, writing, and melodying at least currentlyrequire sequential articulations of the body, and to lunge for agroup of words all at once is to produce garbled-lookingsayables or garbled-sounding sayings.

Gestural productions must be serialized. I may think in sev-eral words more or less given at once, doing what’s calledmonothetic thinking (not that it’s without duration itself). Butwhen I move my fingers over the typewriter doing finger talk-


ing, or move my mouth to speak, I must say each next sound ina progressively unfolding way.

Finding myself in a jam, trying to do a thoughtful saying,finding trouble flowing backward through the ill-aimed for-ward reach of the hands, I’d lunge for a group of words andproduce a garbled-looking sayable that often contained bits andpieces of the words that were lunged for scattered aroundwithin it over a several-second struggle to get back on track, asthe fingers reached to stamp out a thought. Many errorsoccurred.

And in that form of being singingly present when I tried touse my fingers to blurt out an elaborate note sequence, in ear-lier reiterative attempts to duplicate a prior melodic figure, theconsequences of the lunge produced, for the music, an order ofdisarray equivalent to the disarrayed sights I got in such lung-ing gestures at the typewriter.

Then there’s a way of typing where, for a while, one sustainsan ongoing course of thought as the typing, without any innersayings or imaginings with words apart from the fingers’ move-ments, when a strict synchrony is sustained between any sayingsyou may be saying to yourself and the movements of the fin-gers. That sort of typing can occur with few pauses on occasion,and quite fluently, however slowly; one is then singing with thefingers.

The things I formerly had to say weren’t the sorts of sayingsto say, for lunging wouldn’t work. Better said, the brand of jazzimprovisation on the records that I aimed for isn’t filled withlunges of the sort I made, with so many notes merely landedupon. It’s instead made up of sayings that are particularly artic-ulated, each and every next-sounding note expressly aimed forand arrived at. My play was full of sounds that resulted from avery unevenly sustained singingness.


A good first instruction was to take directions from the localeand readiness of the hands, when choosing notes to say. Withmy hand in this position:

I have a host of soundful places to aim my fingers, for all thechords of a song, without venturing. Before, I’d proceeded inlittle chord-by-chord strips, and while I’d practiced some runsthat accorded well with a progression of a couple of customar-ily adjacent chords, there were only very few of these at hand,few worked-out solutions for continuously and rapidly travelingfrom one smoothly available and characteristic jazz-soundingpath, like the diminished scale, onto another one. Perhaps I’dexpressly practiced only three or four such switching routes.

Playing along fast on one path and feeling a next chord com-ing up, I needed to change paths, and while I could by this pointemploy some of the routes from various starting points—top tobottom, coming in at the middle, playing every other note fromthe top, bottom, or middle—still, going fast, in the ways I wentfast, it always felt essential to prefigure the configuration of awhole route onto which I’d switch, as the next chord’s statementwas imminent.

It was a while since it’d been a frantic searching ahead, as inmy first year, since I’d experienced an explicit conceptual pro-


cedure of chord route matching as a naming process. But therewas still considerable imagining of arrayed routes while Iplayed, and visualizing where I was in the terrain; and theseimages were, on occasion, up ahead of where my fingers were,to aid in a transition when moving along rapidly and feeling theencroaching arrival of a next chord.

Now I can play along rapidly, singing the jazz with my fingers,fully involved in a singing being particularly said, totally caughtup in the music. And without looking at the keyboard I can visu-alize the notes being played, their names and spellings, each nextone at a time while I play, just as I can, but only synchronously,conceive of the spellings of the words as I speak running acrossan imaginary teletype screen, for instance. The same sort of syn-chrony, it can be suggested, between visualizations and singingsoccurs here at the typewriter, in relations between what I maysay to myself as I type and the movements of my fingers.12

If I say something up ahead of where the fingers are, I’llsurely make an error. And if I speak aloud, typing along withmy sayings, I find that the fingers move through just thoseplaces on this terrain that correspond to the places my mouthparts traverse in voicing the sayings that are being typed.

As I type a long word, speaking aloud at the pe cul iar lye long at ed pace involved in speaking while typing or writ-ing longhand, I enunciate the various syllables and stretch thecourse of my mouth’s movements in slow motion right along instrict synchrony with the movements of the hand and fingers.The two go precisely together as two hands together reach fora package, each hand getting to its side of the parcel, howeverdifferently distanced the two sides are from the hands’ locationswhen the move begins, going together toward their destinationsand arriving on time together.

Looking down at my hands and finding a spate of jazz com-ing out, I’d find I was looking to the hands themselves, not their


destinations, now seeing ways of travel over and above thoseparticular notes being chosen. While before I’d looked past thehands’ ways to their destinations, when a spate of that jazz wasnow spotted my look at times shifted back, the focal planeseemed closer, and I saw a configuring hand, in a certain over-all stance with respect to the keys, whose shaping was beingwatched, whose shaping and moving became graduallyinstructable.

I began to see and find use for further work in the observa-tion that I needn’t lunge, that usable notes with any chord wereright there at hand, that there was no need to find a path, toimagine one up ahead, get ready in advance for a blurting out.Indeed, conceiving particular places up ahead seriously under-mined the singing I sought to sustain.

Good notes were everywhere at hand, right beneath the fin-gers. While it had before often seemed necessary to reach for abig path for a chord, foreseeing its locale and organizationalrequirements with a monothetic hand thinking thoughts all atonce, a single note would perfectly well suffice to make up amelody over several chords’ duration.

Melodies in most western music certainly aren’t only charac-terized by successions of many different notes, but contain plen-tiful portions of only one, a couple, or a few of them (anexquisite popular song example is Jobim’s One Note Samba). Icould take my time in going for a long run, or linger, findingright beneath a nonventuring hand all sorts of melodic possibil-ities—if I lingered in the right ways. And when venturing in theright ways, I could move fast and take my time, both together.

One note could be played during one chord’s duration andanother right next to it for another’s, and melodies could bedone that way. Of course I knew that as a child, picking outtunes like Jingle Bells. But jazz had more than anythingappeared as a fast-flowing rapidity: to do that was to be a jazz


player, and in the solos I listened to it was always the hardestpassages to which I attended, never those plentiful examples onthe records of sparsely textured, nonventuring melodies.

I began to employ the melodic hand in ways to let it speak tome, about the sort of shaping it was in, the sort of stance overthe sector being adopted. I could take directions from the fin-gers about ways of moving and where to go, avoiding lunging’stroubles, and at the same time, because of this caretaking andmy characteristic sounding routes, jazz melodies began to beseen and heard. I could venture when ready, or not if I wished,making jazz melodies both ways, such variability to my playbeing part of what using the hands requires for the sounds ofthis music.

A new sort of hookup between the singing me and my handswas developing, as next sounds I’d project began to come underthe hands’ jurisdictional review of their own positional readi-ness, as where we were going together slowly began to integrateinto an altogether different way of doing singing at the piano: anew way for intentions to be formed, a more refined synchronyand bidirectionality of linkage being forged between my head’sreach for sounds’ places and my fingers’ reach for singable ones.

II

Recall my lungings, getting part of a saying definitely said andthen merely happening to land on any notes thereabout. In animportant sense all was amiss. I’d play a figure and reach for areiteration, move for restatement in another setting, one I feltwas appropriately located for the figure’s moves in concordancewith the chord progression. It had been a sequence of articu-lated movements to be accomplished in a chord-allotted time.Then a new chord came up, with its durational tenure, and thepitching shape of the first sequence was reached for in the next


place, to be accomplished during this chord’s duration. Thechords go by: 1, 2, change, 4, 1, 2, change, 4 . . .

The movement traversed thus and so many steps, and I triedto transport it in its entirety to the new place. I’d set out intothe reiteration with a very particular number of notes to getdone there, often get the beginning well placed, and then feelobliged, transporting the strip in its entirety, to say as manymore notes as were required. It had so many notes to it, thisnumber now to be done again. Try tapping six, seven, or tenfingertaps on the table, counting and going up and down withyour whole hand; then pause, shift places, and tap out the samenumber again at the same pace in the new place, with the sameinternal time relations, each tap to the next: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . .1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

I’d go for such a specific number of notes, but, as we know,I was often in shape to get a beginning part successfully reiter-ated but not singingly aim for all of the rest of it, voice and fin-gers going together to particular next known, handfullyimplicated sounds. I lost grasp of its shaping because of config-urational changes required to do it equivalently in the newterritory, new fingerings that I couldn’t accommodate to inrapid-course, turn-under arrangements posed by the new place.With a moment’s reshifting, I (my hand) might have been ableto take account of the new place, had I given myself a moment.But I didn’t. I usually went into the repeat with a paced courseof articulations whose successive timings were established bythe very pace of the opening two moves, a pace that committedme to the whole of it, with just so many notes in the allottedchordal time. And losing handful grasp over its restatement,having set up that sort of pace that committed me to the wholenumber of notes of it before the new chord’s tenure expired, I’doften play any notes thereabout to finish up the whole of it,with just so many of them.


Having set out in pacing ways that would’ve made stoppingshort of just so many of them often likely to have made me trip,the hand going faster than it could keep its composure in thenew sector to get those pitches done, setting out in paced waysthat would’ve compounded the experienced loss of grasp overthe attempted saying with a stopping-short trip, I’d instead oftenproduce a just-so-many string of unsung notes. I’d get the fingersdown somewhere, to preserve at least the whole of it, withouttripping up on top of everything else. Often it’d go like this:

I’d start into a reiteration just a bit late, perhaps if a lungewas a large one, or involved a slight preparatory reconfigura-tion to get to a new locale in possibly workable form. Or theprior figure itself, being paced from its beginning to predeter-mine that a certain number of notes got achieved in its reach,lasted a tiny trifle longer than its chord duration, delaying thetransition, or requiring an even faster shifting movement to thenew place. I’d often start out just a tad late into a new sector,sometimes speed up the pace to get the whole of it down beforethe new chord; or, starting late, I’d run a little over into the nextchord’s temporal reign.

At times a grab for a next chord would be held up ever soslightly, the left hand’s reach trying to accommodate the rate ofthe right’s articulations, so that the two might participate instating some beat together, keeping the song tempo’ed. Such anaccommodation didn’t often lend an impression of a beatmissed altogether, wasn’t pronounced enough to sound like Icouldn’t keep time, but was enough to throw the flow of theproceedings out of kilter ever so slightly. And when a flow ofarticulatory proceedings is ever so slightly out of kilter, what’ssaid is thrown into a disorganized mess. An ever so slightly ill-paced reach may not be at all recognizable as that melody, mayproduce placed and paced statements so disfigured as to makeit unclear that they’re of any particular language at all.


The joint reachings of my left and right hands were usuallyout of kilter because of the pacing character of the right’s artic-ulating moves, as I seldom made the left hand accommodatemuch to the right, feeling the song’s harmonic intactness was tobe maintained at a steady beat at all costs.

The left hand would reach for its chords, and the right hand’smelodic sequences would start out and end as best they couldduring the necessary interims. Despite my intentions, the lefthand’s reachings were often less than really rhythmically solid,the right hand’s movings having their ways of upsetting the left’s(and vice versa).

The out-of-kilter relation between the two hands at timesresembled two workers’ moves in lifting a heavy package,where, if they mistime their respective uplifting thrusts, theobject comes off the ground tilted down at the heavy end, forinstance. The worker at that end, having to heave with moreaccentual force than the other, perhaps not having assessed theparcel’s weight or the distance to be traversed, is usually the onewho shouts: “Hold it a minute. Let’s start over, OK? Get ready. . . get set . . . and go.”

Often the trouble occurs in the first instance because their“ready, set, go” lacks the sort of pacing shape, as a course ofmoves in itself, suited to coordinate the tasks of the respectivehands; or because while it has a workable thrusting form forone worker’s task it doesn’t for the other’s; or a “ready, set, go”suited to both is done just a bit too privately by each, and is notadequately concerted.

I’d reach for a course of places for each chord at a time, theforward extent of my reach abbreviated as a course of articula-tions that would come to an end, somehow, somewhere, foreach chord. The reaching was toward an ahead that was postedbefore or upon the next chord’s arrival time, to enable a switch.I reached for interim, ill-defined arrival times, rather than for


long stretches of melody that would wind through a sequenceof characteristic jazz sounds for a succession of chords. Ireached for melodies as beginning toddlers get across the roomby lunging first for a leg of the coffee table, then mother’s, thento a bottle at the end of the couch.

As for the left hand, the chord-grabbing reaches weresecurely targeted, moves whose places were set by the fixedchord chart of the song. But there wasn’t really a doing some-thing with something already done down there in the left hand;the chords sang only as the sounds of your feet might sing asyou walk while talking with another, not as when you walk toexpressly make a march happen in the taps of your steps. Onlywhen interconnected right-hand melodying occurred did chordprogressions themselves gain a true sounding status.

So along with these sometimes ragged chordal walking grabs,rather than marchingly sung steps, I reached with the right handfor hunks of articulations, batch by batch—from the coffeetable to mother’s leg, from this intersection only to that one,from this phrase to this one and to this.I reached step by step, rather than the way one moves rightthrough the production of a sentence like the one I am now typ-ing, were you able to see it, very quickly, moving straight aheadas I proceed, finding myself in difficulties but knowing at thepace I am now moving, however little is being said well, how-ever rambling things are going . . . (I lost it).

You can lose the thought in very rapid typing or very rapidtalking (and in slow typing and talk as well, of course), depend-ing on the kinds of interwoven courses you try to generate. Andyou may have to take stock. But with the format of a fixed setof chords always coming up, you don’t lose your place in thesame ways. There’s always an orderly chord sequence to unitethe proceeding, a format that specifies places toward andthrough which to reach, these chordal landmarking targets.


Having a chord progression is in certain general respects likehaving the task of giving a stranger instructions on how to getfrom here to there in the hometown you know so well: throughthe course of the instructions there are places you must sayinglylead the other through to get to the end; there’s the destinationthe instructions must come to, with benchmarks along the wayin the best intersectional course you outline to get from here tothere. And, in such sayings, you find those actual spoken move-ments to lead him from this standardly employed intersection tothat one, in and through the course of these gestures.

But my reaches—aphasically targeted step by step and notbroadly moving along through several sounding chordal land-marks, to bring off a course of jazz-ordered, sentential inter-weavings—my reaches were in their own ways spastic. Andarticulationally spastic reaches produce coordinational troublesin making any next step go well. They are movements with tem-poral disarray throughout, akin to that of the workers liftingtheir package, and they may well arise, as they did in my pianoplaying, out of an ill-formed shaping of a ready-set-go, of con-tinuously maintained ready-set-goes.

So many notes had to be played, and these so many notes layin a terrain whose shaping and dimensions were known, by thehand’s territorial and distancing commands, as a setting ofplaces-at-hand. So many places-at-hand had to be played in acourse whose pace was established at the outset by the attemptto reiterate the preceding melody in time. And the places weren’tat hand in ways they needed to be for a specifically preset num-ber of them to happen by then. Places weren’t approached inthe first place with a way of moving that enables reaching justexactly so many places singingly selected in course by then.

The problem was that instead of trying to stamp out bunchesof melody, I should’ve been getting the then-ness of my reachestogether, using ways of managing a pulse that would allow for


travel to get so many singable notes found in course. I should’vebeen moving toward a together-then-ness.

The most relevant instruction generated out of my earlyobservations, the single thought most helpful for getting mat-ters under consistent control, was to get the beat into the fin-gers and not let it merely be the foot and left hand’s work. Morebroadly conceived: establish a firmly recurrent accentual beateverywhere, not just a somewhat straggling though timekeepingtap of a foot, a course of rather rigidly grabbed reaches with theleft hand, while the right hand races around jazz-a-maniacally.

I needed a firm sense of upcoming arrival times, just as theworkers need a firm pulse, to know just when “go” will hap-pen, when that next node of the pulse being bodily implied inthe shaping of a “ready” and a “set” is to be done, so they notonly know where they’re going, but exactly when they’ll arrive.Knowing when they must get there enables them to pace acourse of the differently distanced movements toward theresmoothly, smoothness always defined in terms of the require-ments posed by the tasks at hand.

To get the time into the fingers, hands, shoulders, every-where, was to begin to develop such mobile ways that commit-ments to arrival times could be continuously altered and shiftedabout while moving along, a steady beat as a whole sustainedall the while. It was to aid in having sayings always at hand forany pace, always known to be singingly right up ahead in anymove, without having to know a whole bunch of particular up-ahead-wheres through prefiguring. It was to permit nonstutter-ing and nontripping disengagements when a saying wasn’treally at hand, disengagements that wouldn’t now seem tomake the music stop, but would instead be silences of the music.

Watching Jimmy Rowles, I’d come home and begin movingby setting a tempo in new ways. Before, in group play or alone,I’d counted a 1, 2, 3, 4 that was really more suited for counting


from 1 to 20 than for making music. Now I began to do a 1,and a 2, and a 1 2 3 4, setting a tempo with rotating cyclicalmovements, with strong forward thrusts. Now, instead of keep-ing a beat as one may tap with rigid up-and-down finger-con-fined moves on a tabletop, I began to count off the time withfinger-snapping, head-bobbing, arm-and-shoulder rotatingmoves that had little elliptical shapings: push and push andpush and push. More than that, I began to state a beat, as theforward thrusts of my body, with a 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 23 4 (bold figures getting greatest emphasis, underlined ones less,plain type less still)—with an accenting and not merely a pulse.I began doing at the piano the sort of accentual moving mostlisteners do, the sort of accentual thrusting I’d certainly alwaysdone in listening to music, be it jazz with its class of ways,Beethoven with his, or the Beatles with theirs: whether a strongthrust or gentle sway, a syncopated or jointly aimed move, anabrupt thumping or gliding flow of ups and downs, the thrustsof marching’s aims or of minuets’, reaches for a very elongatedcourse of melodic sayings all the way up to and through anaccentual thrust just now, or for “Daddy, come here”—all witha firm grasp of what would arrive next, and when.

For improvisational negotiations, it wasn’t enough that thebeat be my foot’s work. It had to come into the hand. I’d see itthere when I came home from an evening of watching Rowlesand got lazy and low down with the piano, finding my entireright hand beginning to do accentually thrust, pulsating moves.During pauses I sometimes watched the tempo being tapped outwith little forward thrusts on the front of very tiny circles at myfingertips, above or even ever so slightly on the keys, neversounding one, eventually, unless I also sang it, with thus andsuch an accented and paced gesture into the terrain, sprung offthose tiny circles at the fingertips; unless I sang it just so, justnow, just then.


It would be found—this accentually multifaceted pulse—coming into the arms and shoulders as well, the shoulders, forexample, in light of relations between the hands. The chord-grabbing reach must do its stretch with correspondingly firmaccentual thrusts, as the fingers skip an accent, which they’dcome to do, heading instead for a longer succession of notes.And the hand now found, without looking ahead, that it was inshape to take a longer reach, for just so many yet largelyunknown places singingly up ahead until some further accen-tual node.

Expanding the temporal prospectivity with a deemphasis inone accent, elongating the move toward an accent farther upahead (1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4—skipping accents in areach for a longer stretch), the chord-grabbing and now sound-ful left-hand reach would begin to breathe for the right. And asolidly swaying back and shoulders helped tell it, as the twohands lifted this package together, when and how to take abreath, and where a breath could be taken quickly, withoutupsetting the right hand’s accentually targeted and elongatedachievements of place.

Watching Jimmy Rowles doing things like that, pieces of thatjazz would appear in my emulations. But before describing indetail what this new mobile hand would do and had become, asan improvisatory organ under my instructions as I was underits; how this strongly established, prospective accentual nodewould figure into soundful place finding in course; would fig-ure into doing long reaches toward further-ahead accents;would enable systematic ways of skipping and shifting accentsabout that were firmly there; would figure centrally intosingable reaches for long interchordal passages—before com-pleting a first description of the jazz-improvising hand, I offersome observations about pulsing and accenting.


Trying to get a closer view of the work pulsation did, I didsome amateur science.13 I draw two dots:

• •and set myself the task of connecting them with a line drawn bymy right hand, while at the same time I regularly tap a left-handfinger on the table. The goal is to move smoothly from the firstto the second dot, and reach it exactly as the evenly tapping fin-ger touches the table again with a next in its series of alreadyestablished regular, evenly timed taps.

I must set out in one of two ways to achieve simultaneity. Imay begin the movement of the line exactly as the finger startsto rise off from a prior beating:

or when the finger is at the top of an upstroke, as it starts back down:

(Here, however, to insure coincidence, “somewhere” in the body onesympathetically first rides with the upstroke, to know when the down-stroke starts and its pacing.)

If I begin when the finger is already on its way up, or some-where in the midst of its downstroke,


I can’t possibly bring the line to the next dot in conjunctionwith a finger tap in a smooth way. I don’t know how fast tomove, and must hold up one or another hand’s movements andthoughtfully bring the two into temporal alignment. For a coor-dination to happen unselfconsciously, I must employ a commonpulse to unite the two differently distanced moves (the readermay very easily verify this observation).

The line starts quickly, as movements from standstills must.It then reaches a nearly constant speed for a short time beforeit begins decelerating, lest it overshoot its destination. The fin-ger tapping likewise reaches a turnaround from its upbeat to itsdownbeat phase. Each hand’s gesture has a distance to traverse,a speed to attain, changing rates of acceleration to attain thatspeed, and of deceleration to reach the next target. And thespeeds and rates of change vary from one gesture to the other.But they share a maximum-speed turnaround phase at the sametime.

Differently distanced reaches arrive at their respective tar-gets together because of a pulse they share, an acceleration-deceleration pattern with a common turnaround phase.

I space dots on a piece of paper:

A ( • - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - • )

B ( • - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - • )

and with two hands set myself the task of connecting those ineach pair, going left to right say, a pencil in each hand, startingtogether and reaching both right-side dots at the same time


(constraining the moves by adhering to the edges of rulers ren-ders a cleaner description and easier measurement).

First I establish and continue a steady tap—1 2 3 4 1 2 3 41 2 3 4—with my foot on the floor. The line drawings startexactly as the foot starts rising from a tap. The two move aheadat different rates of acceleration to attain different speeds toreach the goals together, A going slower than B. Both lines gaintheir maximum speed and attain a constant speed at the samepoint in time:

(Each slash represents one unit of time, these produced by filming linedrawings with a high-speed motion camera, using a frame-by-frameanalyst projector on a blackboard, marking and measuring intervals oftime and distance.)

The example of the workers suggests the interbody work ofpulsing. Each worker adjusts the thrust of his movements byaiming toward an upcoming time of arrival, established by apreceding count, appraising the speed required to manage theweight and the distance to be traversed, adjusting the force andextent of the move accordingly, holding these variables in a del-icate bodily balance. And their joint pulsing joins their respec-tive moves in accord with the same phasing structure that unitesthe drawing of two lines of differing lengths, although the par-ticular patterns of acceleration and deceleration always varywith respect to the tasks at hand.

In one context, for one variety of a move, one acceleratesquickly and slows down at the last moment. In another, accel-


eration is slow at first and increases after a while. But whenevertwo or more moves are coordinated toward various destina-tions for simultaneous arrival, turnaround phases from acceler-ation to deceleration are shared in common by the variouslyrelevant solo and/or multibodied movements.

Consider this situation. I play some notes, beginning as myfoot comes off the floor and moving until it reaches the flooragain, with a pulsing rate established by a series of prior taps,so a time of arrival of the projected next tap is prospectivelygiven. Instead of drawing a line, I enter the keyboard. And thelast note in a series of several articulated notes, the hand’s finalreach, let us say for the sake of illustration, must coincide withthe foot’s arrival at the next beat. A reach is present, with astring of individual articulations situated within it.

Look at this last note. A reach will have to be made for it, tra-versing a distance, and the spot must be attained just as the footreturns to the floor. The same basic organization is present as inthe line-drawing suggestion. One can’t start this last reachexcept by integrating its organization within the flow of thebeating. If I begin a reach for a last note after the foot hasalready started its final downward thrust, for instance, I won’tachieve a simultaneous arrival.

If I sustain an even and nonaccented pulse, one that doesn’tstress a downbeat more than an upbeat, I take a course ofmovement that may be conceived as follows:


Counting with this beating, I wouldn’t stress the first beatalone but would count 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and . . . , givingequal stress to each swing. My tapping has the regularity of apendulum. This isn’t a rhythm, with recurring forms of dis-tributive accents, but only a pulse. To accent is to move withsome thrust, and when I reach for a note I strive toward adesired intensity of sound, coming in with a strong stroke, orwith a letup that will reduce the intensity. Here’s a schematicportrayal of an accenting on the upbeat, and one with a down-beat organization:

Or we may have a trajectory like this:

where a course takes an apparently uniform turnaround (incases when a change of direction occurs) and the accelerationalthrust happens just before contact occurs. There’s a long evenstretch . . . with a hurry-up-at-the-end.

To say I must begin my reach for the last note of a sequence,articulated between two beats when the downward thrustbegins, is to say it must occur right along with the onset of anaccelerational thrust, at point A above, for example. Elsewise,destinational coincidence isn’t achieved.


A sequential course of articulations is paced by reference to aprospective time of arrival at the completion of a phase. Allreaches are given their smoothness and internal pacing layoutsby reference to prospective arrival times. The ubiquity ofrhythmic pulsation for finely organizing gesturing of every vari-ety, perhaps most highly refined in the unfolding articulationsthat constitute music and speech, is profound.

When I say “word,” my mouth parts stretch forward to theend of their movements, establishing an orderly flow of dis-tanced, resonating, breathing reaches toward completion at aforeknown time. And the internal durational spacings of the stepsalong the paths of moves that “word” is are molded by that tem-poral prospectivity, set before reaching for “word” by, say,breathing in at a certain pulsed pace before speaking, or ever soslightly nodding back for a ready-set, and then slightly forwardfor go, with “word.” Perhaps very slightly. But very essentially.

In jazz play, when my hand begins a sequence of notes with acertain pacing, it commits itself to a certain specific number ofnotes to be executed up until some prospective arrival node. If it’sto play six notes, or seven, three, or twelve, a pacing is establishedfor the reach, is determined at the outset with a pace set with theopening two moves, and is internally modifiable only in an orderlyfashion. If the first two notes are set for a six-noted passage, witha set termination time, the hand cannot set out fast and then slowdown within the course and still reach the destination on time.

A course of paced movement is undertaken that implies anumber of notes to follow and implicates a manner of forwardmovement for the hand, a manner of movement that must bebrought to the necessary sort of completion if the gesture is toproceed smoothly, without faltering or tripping.

There are various qualifications. The hand may begin veryrapidly and allow a pause prior to reaching for a final note inconjunction with the beat. But even if a break of this sort occurs,


a course of notes between one tap and the next therefore notequidistant, which is of course very common, the first notes willbe articulationally aimed toward the top of upbeat phases; a vir-tual standing-still of the foot tapping, for example, will consti-tute a pause in the succession, perhaps even over several cyclesof pulsation, and then a reach may be finally realized.

Or a reach forward on a downstroke may be bypassed alto-gether, the upswing phase providing a prospective segment, anda next course may then be taken in an orderly fashion withrespect to a still later cycle.

III

Every once in a while the time would get into the fingers, as Isat and tried to move like Jimmy Rowles, setting a beat first bygetting my shoulders going elliptically around just a bit, as Itapped my foot and snapped my fingers before play, countingoff the time with a care I’d never before taken, a care for thejazz and the listener and the others with whom I’d have beencoordinating my moves, had I not played in isolation, for thatbass player and drummer who were never around.

Taking the role of the other with this caretaking beat, everyso often the time would get into my fingers. One of the ways I’dtry to keep it there was to stay in a place for a while, playingthe same few notes over and over again, thrusting moves gain-ing an ever more stable shape, saying this same thing over andover and over, so all of me would stride into the song together.And the song was already under way, the improvised jazz song,with a handful of notes said again, again, and again, and thena slight bit differently yet again, expanding matters somewhatand getting the time into the hands more thoroughly, gaining anice grasp of the places, a good jazz tonicity and mobility forthe hand established. The hand had so many digits. There was


so much to the terrain, so fast or slow to go, singing a song asI moved along, and I had to gain a strong sense of the hand’snumerical capabilities, the numbers of upcoming known places,and its own fingeredness, as the typist who digs in for a partic-ularly unfamiliar sight becomes especially attentive to the fin-geredness of the hands and field of action.

Taking first breaths between phrases, getting the time into thefingers and shoulders, my hand would often find itself posi-tioned on the keyboard in such a posture,

just before entering a passage of play, and were you to view afilm of the jazz pianist’s hands, you’d see such poised stancesfrequently assumed prior to a noted part of the musical action.So, too, this photo could well have been taken at a slow shutterspeed during rapid ongoing writing,


for during the course of a carriage’s return, say, the hands mayposturally ready themselves at times to pick up again with athought under way. And here a word may be known in advanceof a renewed entrance into the terrain, as a handful readiness toalmost say the word but never quite do so, pursing the lips tosay it as I “purse” the fingers to do it, holding onto the thoughtduring this breath and never saying it until it can be articula-tionally said with sequential movements as a soundful sighting.

Or a word’s beginning may be handfully anticipated, a begin-ning whose opening movements will receive proper gesturaldevelopment, improvisational writing hands having ways oftraverse that produce good-looking sayables through andthrough.

The improvisatory jazz piano hand, alive to ranges of possi-bilities in its grasp of good ways always present, may hover oversuch spots as the places shown above, tasting possibilities hereand there, doing the jazz that way. Having to keep the actionunder way, long pauses for reflection being never very judiciousin jazz, music gets improvisationally made out of exploratorymovements akin to the alternating back and forth between shiftkeys that I may do here, as I pause for reflection in the courseof finger talking, bouncing back and forth with the little fingersfrom one shift key to another to allow the other hand to reflectin its hoverings for a good next move to get the wayful reach-ing ready again; feeling a “This” or a “Here” or an “As” toopen the sentence; finding in such bouncing back and forth thata ready reach may be just exploratorily hit upon, without pre-figuring apart from these hoverings at times, as the basketballplayer dribbles the ball first with this hand then that, ready torespond to an opening in the line of defense and a course forsetting off into the running action.

Such explorations as a typing writer may undertake are inac-cessible in what you see on the page, of course, the work of


writing not recoverable from this, the activities of most writingnot requiring that the action be kept under way that way. Shiftkey work isn’t a publicized part of writing, the way a course ofindividually stated piano notes bounced back and forthbetween two digits is part of the music, the hand getting itselfsituated on a good way to move at a certain pace into a longerreach.

Now as I found myself taking breaths between phrases, emu-lating Jimmy Rowles’s shoulder breathing, the hand would finditself situated in such poised positions. And I began to tell it tolinger, tasting possibilities, to find ways of traverse singinglyavailable right there at hand: known to be at hand right thereas routes for thus and such a pacing course, as routes quicklytraversable when at hand this way there, as routes not usablewithout venturing when at hand this way there, and so on.Staying on a way at all times, remaining singingly aligned withthe fingers, I started to expressly appreciate the ways as terraincourses at hand for classes of pacing possibilities.

With the hand poised over a passage of notes, a particulardigit ready over a particular key, lots of melodying was sound-fully possible, going up and down quickly over this course. Thehand was able to take an array of notes beneath it with pacingmoves from left to right or right to left, or one way then theother then the other, for example, with a rocking course quicklypaced to where the mobile hand aimed, reaching for a good-sounding place, for good-sounding and yet not prefiguredplaces ahead.

The hand had a safe way for knowing what next notessounded like, through repetitions over the same places, thesefirst times through establishing sounds for a gearing in with thefingers: a way to stay singingly on that route for variously num-bered, paced sayings, without venturing, not a way to be overlyused, a way among many for appraising the whereabouts and


paceable presence of ways, such appraisings making up thisstrategically accomplished music at the same time.

Taking a breath between phrases, I began to assume such safestances, as emulating Jimmy Rowles’s means of setting a tempogave me pause for thought. I discovered the jazz happening inthe looks of the hands and familiar sounds of the music, in waysI began to use frequently, at first too frequently, for they wereso productive. Moving from such a handful:

onto a diminished path, say:

from one chord-specific, jazz-sounding route to another, suchsafe-stancing-after-shoulder-breathing began to afford handfulmeans for interchordal melodying. And this particular switch,


characteristic of many such maneuvers, is a particularly pro-ductive example for elucidating the essence of the practice.

Moving from chord to chord, I would, for instance, under-take a course aimed toward a next downbeat for the secondchord. The left hand grabs the first chord (G minor), thenreaches toward the next, a C dominant, while a series of indi-vidual notes now traverses these paths, from one possible Gminor way (the notes D, F, A, C comprising one known Gminor way) onto this C dominant way. And I would tellmyself quite explicitly, seeing the jazz in the hand’s looks andfamiliar sounds, to use such safe stances as jumping-offspringboards.

I started into a left-to-right, or right-to-left (or mixed) reach-ing, with a rocking movement over these four places beneaththe hand on a G way. And I stretched toward a next accent thatI could come down upon after a high liftoff, the hand finding away, through such accenting, to disengage and get up off thekeyboard before the downthrust.

I would find myself able to now aim toward a C way havingits assured rapid availability, and I began using such spring-board actions for path switching. Going left to right over fournotes for example, my hand would follow an arc, so if I drew aline aimed toward a next dot, tracing the shape of the moves, apace like this would be portrayed:


By simply lifting off the keyboard, getting an undulating timeinto the fingers, I’d find myself coming back down into this(diminished) run in such a way that my hand had that pathavailable for rapid travel; found myself able to do a path-switching maneuver in ways I’d not previously known.

The import was profound. Finally, my blurted, aphasic stabsfor hunks of melody would now, in the critical achievement ofcontinuously interchordal articulations, be just like that jazz onthe records. A means to get from way to way began to showitself, I learned from it, and I expressly began doing spring-boarding as an instructable maneuver.

How is this diminished scale, one C dominant way, availablefor rapid traverse? I had the route available for quick movementwith a fingering solution long ago worked out as a best way tohandle this one quickly:

Now going up the four-noted Gm7 way, aimed to a nextdownbeat, in the reach for a next note, as the chordal grabachieved its destination, lifting high off the keyboard there wasthis C way approachable with a second finger on F�, to give oneexample among many possibilities.

Aiming for this way, aiming for a melody opening thatstarted this way, getting the second finger onto F� was to get

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onto this path in such a way that I had it available for rapidmovement in either direction.

It’s not that I can’t play this scale with other fingers, for I laterlearned to organize more complex articulational moves in apacing manner that enabled more in-course digital reorganiza-tion. But I then had it firmly available as a C way for rapidupward or downward travel with my second finger on an F�.And coming up high, after a liftoff, without venturing or lung-ing, I found a new way of having room to align the hand to starta fast word beginning.

The hand rose with a high liftoff, the upward course of fournotes started after the G minor chord had been stated, and thechordal hand was already on its way toward the statement of thenext beat, its landing on the C dominant chord. The foot rose upafter the tap, and a slight configurational alignment was smoothlyoccurring during the silent music above the keyboard. And themelodic hand would come down into the C way like this:

ready for taking the way rapidly up or down, a melody beginningthat’s now anticipated before the engagement, an articulationalcourse back down into a way with an almost chordal stance.

Heading into a course of articulations toward a beat the nextchord was now part of, being interchordal now this way, the


hand took room to breathe, its arm and shoulder undulationstemporally synchronized with the left hand’s reach and a foot’sparticipation. Getting somewhat high off the keyboard, at first,became part of an unfolding posture that would have the C waycoming into reach through the course of the turnaround anddownward accelerational thrust. The C way would be poisedfor, as in a melody-beginning configuration, with the F� andturned-under thumb, prepared for as a C way for continuedupward melodying.

The melodic reach back down into a C way was now quicklyavailable from this F�, among my first (actual) new interchordalaccomplishments. I’d then move rapidly up this way but would,at first, run into difficulties as a still next chord was approached.

Broader nodes for accentual targeting weren’t well set yet, asa time in the hands, shoulders, everywhere. And I would, gettingspringboardingly onto the C way there, often proceed quicklyup the keyboard without that knowing where you are goingthat’s continuously modifiable over its course, with a small stripof targetable places moving right along just up ahead of unfold-ingly prefiguring sequences.

Instead, I’d proceed with an unsinging continuation, the Cpath’s layout given as a long layout that would bring me tosome “any notes thereabout,” as a next chord now came up. SoI’d fall out of singing touch with the hands in falling off a way-ful aim toward still a farther wayful routing, out of gear with aspecifically paced saying said just now and then. The jazz wouldfade from control on this fragile precipice, the temporal-spatialsynchrony of my singings broken, the rest of the passage notthat interweaving music on the records.

But by taking such breaths, starting “late” into a run of hand-fully available, rockingly swift moves, over notes digitally pres-ent, after the left hand had already settled into its now sounding


place, swiftly pacing a move toward a firm prospective landing,able to rock up and down or doubly over such a handful, find-ing I could move from familiar way to familiar way, with a secu-rity of aim experienced in that fact, the jazz seen and heard in ittoo, a singability enabled, at least, in being thoroughly wayful—finding this, I did springboarding in many ways, as here:

Lifting high off after a four (or seven or ten)-noted passage, forinstance, in a pacingly smooth move up to a new sector, I wasprospectively aligned toward the C way a bit higher up, with-out thumb turnunders for smooth interchordal transitions.

And the hand could configurationally shape toward the Cway come upon in this fashion, with new latitudes for rout-ings, a deeper improvisationality present in the ways of itsprospective movement toward a variously handleable array.Springboarding up to a higher register, I found myself comingdown to the C way for more than just upward-or-downwardmovement.

Coming upon the C way from above, moving down towardthis little bunching of good-sounding places, moving from oneunfolding posturing to another through the springboarding arc,I would take it as a bunching for manifold directed courses.


Now not only present for the hand as a C way to go long wayswith, but as a segment of a C way to go many short ways with,in the very fact of this after-the-beat sector jump I’d begin toemploy such a way as a ready-at-hand cluster for varied articu-lating use.

Not doing lunging but smooth springboarding, I’d findmyself moving from poised stance to poised stance, sequentiallyunfolding on the way down toward the higher little bunching.And I’d find (as a finding smoothly made on the way down, asa sequential readiness pacingly molded toward that arrivaltime) which of a number of directions and ratings to employ asa noted saying.

The hand unfolded from the peak of the turnaround, for thissequentialized preparation:


for a little upward, or up-then-down, or up-then-down-then-upcourse; or this way:

for an opposite maneuvering, or these:


for interdigitating possibilities I’d formerly seldom employed inmy pathway practicing. And a more familiar jazz orderingbegan to be seen and heard here, as my instructions to dospringboarding, do interweaving, change directions frequently,change paces frequently, took notice of first happenstanceorderings and employably instituted them, each interactingwith the other, in my conversation from above.

Getting the time into the fingers and hand, coming downfor a saying to be said just so, having a soundful way right athand in these first rather cautious yet increasingly smoothsector shifts, I began to find, in the undulating nature of myentrance and pacingly tuned interdigitations, that I couldundertake new shaped and rated courses with well-at-handroute segments.

While the C way in such a sector-shifting jump was at first stillcome on as a C way for rapid traverse, a segment of the wayquickly known for the hand digitally ready for its notes, new waysof moving and assessing and pacing and fingering began to emerge.

Moving now from way to way without extensively longstretches always in hand, the hand would sequentially comeinto the way with an unfolding realization of its stance. Andthis stance might entail the hand over the new sector like this,with a little finger targetable toward an F�:


The little finger is now part of a handful engagement with theC way nonlungefully present, but not just for long scalarmelodying. Taking breaths, letting time go by, I did consider-able posturing at first, ways became reconstituted as right thereat hand, and I’d come upon this C way with a prospectivestance ill suited for a long upward rapidity, say, but well suitedfor opening anchored negotiation.

Doing after-the-beat springboarding toward the C way’splaces this way, with a little finger coming toward a place in theunfolding encounter that hadn’t been a place for it before, I wascoming to freshly appreciate routes with new digital placementpossibilities, new directional possibilities, the time in the handsto permit pacings through ways with digital placements appro-priate for such fingerings. The hand learned more aboutfingering-pacing relations.

My hand already knew the ways not merely as spatial affairs,but as ways for the digits relative to particular note assignmentsfor classes of action. So the C way under consideration wouldnot be scalefully ascended farther up the line with a little fingeron the F�, at least not for a rapid and evenly paced courseinvolving a turnunder of the thumb beneath that finger—into aG, A, and B� of the C way for a scalar rise—not without appro-priate prior measures.

I’d come down into the keyboard with prospective sequen-tialized decision. Starting with a pace entailing so many furthernotes, I would, for example, go quickly up the course of theway to the F�, and quickly back down again. The hand wouldfind the availability of the way present for such a maneuver andfind, through the course of a quick rise, the generation of acommitment to a mode of traverse that would involve that F� ornot. If so, it was involved as the upward boundary of a course,at least a first time through.


A first time through, at least, because on a second pass I couldeither do that turnunder that was customary for continuedupward travel, getting the thumb down on the preceding E, tobring the second finger to the F�; or, quite significant among mynew discoveries, I’d now manage a turnunder beneath this new F�.In a first pass, the hand could now assess how that scale could betaken in this new way, a sharpening of precise digitational acuitygained by an exploratory pass, securing the places attainable thatway, with the time in the fingers, and a strongly set prospectivityfrom early into the ascent for a longer, under-reaching thumbstretch, toget the hand under the little finger, just there, just then.

And starting with a pace that implied so many notes, wherewhether and how to use this F� was decided in the course of aquick rise and not in advance, involved a hand whose manyspecific finger sequence possibilities were now thoroughlyappreciated. It wasn’t that a layout in advance was needed tomatch the available fingers to the number of notes. It was thatthe hand was on a way where “it knew” that an order of fast-ness could be soundfully managed.

For the hand knew its ways so that, say, entering this dimin-ished bunching with one sort of unfolding, it could go up ordown within one range of speeds. Going with alternating (e.g.,1-3-2-4) rather than left-to-right digitation could be donewithin some other, perhaps partially overlapping range. But insuch a case, for instance, going like this:

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the hand knew this alternating-fingered passage couldn’t beprospective to places farther up this C way, not that way, notwithout appropriate prior measures.

This C way, known this way, for alternating digiting, was soappreciated that such actions would be kept bounded before Iventured away from the bunch without a pacing shift, withoutreconfigurational breathing. And it would be bounded, here, tothe bunch itself. This array had a known range of paces foralternating fingerings that could be rapidly sustained this way:

or with multiple repetitions of alternating moves, as one possibility.This knowledge of the paceable use of kinds or parts of ways

was by now generalized, for the hand had the terrain every-where known for possible pacings relative to its skills. Beingover any bunching, for example, was to be in some knownrange of paces for rocking moves back and forth; being spreadover handfuls of a certain sort was to be in a pacing range forrocking moves, and also for however-paced actions of a largenumber of classes. There were outer-inner rockings, rockingswith repetitions for part of the way always extendable in con-tinuous pace into a rocking over all or more of it, and so on.

To know these ways as paced and ranged places at hand wasto be temporally able to afford an unfolding prospectivity to mynumerical appraisals. A rapidly paced entry into a way thusknown could take it with a sure availability for a numerical

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articulational commitment, and with no prefigured digit count-ing. Its paceable availability, here and now, afforded securelypaced entries whose soundfully targeted particular placeswould now be found in course, doing improvisation.

This paceable appreciation was a manual understanding aboutclasses of postures with the keyboard: for a spread hand, abunched hand, a poised and digitally note-targeted hand, a handdoing rapid scale ascensions, a hand doing arpeggiated turnunders.

Still, of course, the note specificity of a very particular arrayinteractively participated with this generalized knowledge. Ican’t do any arpeggiation with any particular degree of fastness.The extensiveness of a prospectively committed pace alwaystakes each particular way’s known (and often idiosyncratic)pacing possibilities into caretaking account.

An overall sense with which I can come assuredly fast intoany bunching, say, knowing I can play fast in such quarters, stillmust handle a particularly spaced jazz-making bunch. ThoughI can do alternating-finger patterns in familiar jazz-paced wayson my tabletop, at the piano the C way, from here to there inparticular, poses unfoldingly revealed requirements specific toits unique digitable contours.

And appropriate prior measures, like a shoulder breathing,afforded a precise digitational acuity to be formed, getting thetime into the hands. It afforded movements into a course that,with a shift in a means of approach and toning up of the hand’sdestinational presence to a precisely shaped sector, could nowbe taken with a manner of continued alternating digitation upthe line. It afforded an ascent that, in former unbreathing play,might have been attempted in the new sector, but trippinglyrealized.

The time would have to be solidly in the shoulders, hands,fingers, arm, everywhere, for such acuities to be gained inmaneuvers such as with a little-fingered F� turnunder, after anexploratory first pass:


I undertook such practices as first-pass assessing and even theexplicit use of “wrong fingers,” maximizing now, it might besaid, not the most efficacious way to move fast but the mostjazzful way to be at the piano, the music’s looks and soundsseen and heard as instigations and payoffs.

But using “wrong fingers,” and doing repeated passes so asto do “finger solution jazz,” initially productive as express cog-nitive practices, were only preliminarily so formulated by refer-ence to the context of their emergence, regarded andundertaken this way against a background of “correctly fin-gered paths.” In that same way I’d at first instruct myself to dofingering changes as a practice in its own right, as here:

where, going up a G way, I’d purposely pace toward the B� of thisC way with a fourth finger, aiming for it as the next accentual


node’s landing. I’d aim there, then hold there as a place to land,coming down into this C way this way intentionally, to affordan opportunity for a finger change.

Soon bouncing off that B� and setting back down on the mid-dle finger, doing more melody this way, I’d now head with apacing aimed fast toward a time of arrival farther up ahead,quickly aimed down along a diminished scale, say, my custom-ary third finger now on B� for this way. And while, in earlierplay, finger changes arose on occasions of trouble, they nowbegan to arise as of the music, holding onto a soundful way bystaying soundful, rather than trying to pick up the pieces of analready disintegrating saying.

I began intentionally to do fingering changes, using wrongfingers and struggling fingers from the standpoint, perhaps, ofhow a very competent sight reader at the piano does fingering,but right jazz fingerings. The competent sight reader, having totake in a long passage, foresees that passage with a looking atthe score that’s as finely integrated with the movements of hisfingers as the looking of the competent text-reproducing typist.Foreseeing it that way, having to foresee it that way to do thatwork (an often strong constraint in live sight reading), foresee-ing its fingerability he will seldom if ever find himself in a situ-ation he might be disposed to see my hands as “merely finding”themselves in.

For I would not just undertake finger changes for the expresssake of realigning my way onto a route particularly prospectivebeneath an entering reach—with a sense for the path as a wholepresent in such motivated realignments—but would also under-take such changes as would appear to amount to nothing.

But though they would appear to amount to nothing, a gen-eralized improvisational mobility was amounting to that jazzon the records. Staying in a particular sector, the time well intothe fingers, hands, shoulders, everywhere, shifting on the same


note from the fourth finger to the second, posturing upward,then back on the same note extending downward, then doingthe saying midhandedly, now I might go into a multiplacedcourse begun with the finger I’d originally employed as a samestarting place.

In such dancing about, extending downward or upward, myhand was not feeling its way about in the dark, not spreadingout to gain contact with the terrain to assess a way’s paceableat-handness by taking an anticipatorily explicit spatial stock,touching a particular way for example. My hand was now infact extending upward or downward as here:

and while a new preparatory stance was often assumed duringfingering shifts, the wayfulness of the terrain as a place for jazz


singing was being everywhere taken into continuously thematicaccount by a continuously jazzful organ: spreading out for anunfoldingly explicit commitment to a fast saying, shifting essen-tialized fulcrums of extensions as a very jazzful way to do sparsesayings, singing with the fingers.

Two-chord-long melodying was occurring through such prac-tices as springboardings and finger changes, for example, butthat jazz on the records was spoken in sentences, and a longerreaching was required. Many of my short phrases were nowwell formed, in being pacingly well placed, and new orders ofpaced placing began to emerge as these well-said phrase andsentence fragments became part of adult jazz utterances.

As I began doing breathings, getting off the keyboard anddown into a run in pace-assessing shape for a farther move up,I would at first come into the switched-onto path with a strongaccentual thrust, pacing an articulation over such a handful asexamined above, aimed toward a time of arrival up ahead coin-cident with the hand-grabbing chord reach, coincident with itsparticipation in the very next beat.

Coming down on F� with a second finger,

I came down with an accelerating rapidity, striking it hard,doing the very next beat as an assertive just-then opening.


The aim of the articulational reach proceeded in concert withthe aim of the chordal reaching toward a strong downthrust incommon, as the foot struck the floor on that next beat, and amore solidly systemic synchrony between left-hand reachingsand right-hand articulational aims was being gained, throughmy emulations of Jimmy Rowles’s shoulder breathing.

Now such prospectively synchronous reachings becameincreasingly expansive in scope, for, as I would reach into afamiliar routing, had at hand for a long stretch, finding its avail-ability at hand for a long stretch in ways indicated, I wouldsoon now often set out fast up the line in new ways.

In my beginning discoveries of springboarding, with the insti-gations and payoffs of these looks and sounds, I set out for along stretch on that familiarly fast C diminished way (to con-tinue with this example), often at first setting out fast withoutregard to where it would end up. But as the establishment of astably thrusting beating became an increasingly consistent wayof being at the keyboard, all my melodying practices began tocome under the jurisdiction of opportunities for wayful andsynchronous negotiation that it facilitated.

This beat becoming the way of the arms and shoulders, itsstable accentualities and deaccentualities of cyclical thrustingafforded an increasingly fluid, in-course molding of prospectiv-ities for my articulational moves. The use of a way for rapidtraverse, the use of all ways, negotiatively proceeding throughthe course of an improvisation, now happened like this.

The left hand would reach from chord to chord, and the rightwould sequentially traverse the terrain. And a course of contin-uously firm rotational moves was defining the beats, and subdi-vidingly defining the beats, and expansively defining the beats.For as an articulational course was being taken up or down,interweavingly through the keyboard, entry into the terrain,shiftings of pacings of noted work in the terrain, disengagements


from the terrain, refingerings and reconfigurings in the terrain,springboardings in the terrain, moving up a line beat by beatand then breaking into a multi-note-per-beat flurry through theterrain—such pacings off the tips of the fingers’ thrusting couldproceed in the following ways.

The articulational course could now take up in downbeat syn-chrony with the foot; now in upbeat synchrony with the lefthand’s rise toward a next chord; now in top-of-the-turnaroundsynchrony within one-shoulder-sway-per-four-foot bounces; nowjumping in on the upbeat phase of a chordal reaching arc, andtaking a soundful traverse through thus and so many places to afoot downbeat, one that was located within the course of thebroader-reaching arc of the chordal stretch; now extending fastfrom within the chordal reach to a farther-ahead downbeat,simultaneously making contact with some good note as the chordgrasp finally reached the goal it would reposingly pass through.

Now the hand was reaching out for a fast run through acourse of ways, aimed toward a periodically modifiable seriesof accentual landmarks, prospective periodicities of jazz hands’paceably wayful sayings, sayings that would traverse the dura-tion of multi-landmarked left-hand reachings.

A gesture through several left-hand unfoldings was inter-weavingly now of an accentual patterning that involved thechordal reaches themselves. This chord was passed through withan accelerational deemphasis, the right hand stretching furtherahead around the bend of a turnaround, or through an attenu-ating intonational ascent or descent, the next punctuated in syn-chrony with a strong melodic landing. And with this chordalarticulating of a slow melody down there, said just now and justthen, just this hard and just this soft, right-hand reachings wereinterweavingly giving jazz presence to a progression of land-marks through places traversed since the seventeenth century.


As the left hand would pass over a chord, the melodyinghand would, for example, making its in-course appraisals, slowdown slightly as it did a little springboarding turnaround thatwas hardly a diving board sort of operation, but rather a littlepuddle-jumping–Gene Kelly–Singing in the Rain step.

And springboarding of the sort described above can be con-sulted as indicating the temporal essence of mobilities andappraisings that were thoroughgoingly present, in continuouslyunfolding, in-course accentual modifications, within the span ofa broader shoulder breathing.

IV

As the time got into the fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, every-where, altogether new relations between chords and paths werebeing fulfilled now, my analytic choices of good notes graduallyevolving into a handful choosing. And soon my jazz sayingsbrought my full vocabular resources, my full range of wayfulreachings, into the service of that jazz on the records, into thehands’ ways of paced traverse, not from route to route butdoing singings.

Standing outside my play and looking down at my hands,watching a moment of action and searching for paths to iden-tify as I had over my teacher’s shoulder years before, one mightspeak of my new modes of traverse by identifying note order-ings in terms such as these:

Coming up a diminished path for four successive notes, he switchesinto a three-note chromatic turnaround, and then up in fourths threeintervallic steps, down into a major triad that accords well with thenext chord about to be played, and passing through this triad as thenext chord is already announced, he arpeggiates up and then down aseven-note course of minor sixth intervals; taking a quick major triadthat wouldn’t accord well with this chord in Bach, but accords fine


with this chord since Beethoven, he proceeds over this dissonant pathinto a resolution by landing on the third of a next major chord on itssecond beat in the measure, and with a next chord he plays a dissonantscale starting on the major second degree relative to the chord, whichgoes up the keyboard in stepwise fashion and then doubles back overthat scale, going down it in fourths . . .

Had I filmed and slowed down my teacher’s play so that suchidentifications could be made, so those mysterious interweav-ings could be reduced to such ways of talking, an enumerationof namable places and namable devices producing these char-acteristic jazz sounds, I’d probably have given up right then andthere, encountering a nomenclature and intricacies of structurethat would’ve made practicing the piano impossible.

Was I now to practice a diminished scale, or practice a dimin-ished scale followed by or interspersed with chromatic halfsteps? Should I call it a diminished scale in the first place, orseek ways of looking that would yield broader classificatoryprinciples? Should that movement down in fourths be generallypracticed, or ought it be a movement down in fourths along cer-tain particular paths? And what was the movement down infourths a movement along, for multiple paths could be said tobe fourthingly traversed? Should I find an alternative back-ground route being alternatingly traversed, assuming there wasone as I did, which would then make it not down in fourths but,for instance, down the suspended dominant chord on X degreeof the new route?

When my teacher extracted a piece of melody under my urg-ing and spoke of its construction, he was affording me a text ofpractices, ways of speaking I could carry around in my images,looks, and fingers’ ways, a phrase book of pictured melodies.And saying “you can use a diminished scale here,” extracting anamable route to formulate his doings for my sake, he gave mea way to formulate mine each day at the piano. And it worked


to get me started, started on a route toward ways he didn’t tellme about.14

Having that path, having its insufficiency continually leadingme to do more with it, having that record collection, it workedto sustain daily practicings, to allocate my time at the keyboard,to find this and that to practice in particular, all the while see-ing some progress taking place. And through improvisationallymotivated practicings with a sizable corpus of such routes, I’dgained handful command over myriad varieties of paths, nowawaiting syntactic synthesis through jazz temporalizations.

Were it not for my interest in writing an account of the devel-opment of the hands’ skills, I’d probably now say, as he feltobliged to urge, at the same time as he was obliged to teach: Idon’t think at all about where I’m going. My hands make it upas they go along. Had he more explicitly urged me to get thephrasing right, or had I been more inclined and perhaps occu-pationally compelled to learn by first getting some simple sen-tences together, a different course of socialization might haveevolved.

The notion of a melody, for example, formulated above asthe doing of something with something done before, with suchpractices as exact repetitions, inversions, and essential repeti-tions, descriptive of my ways of being musical at that point—those ways of talking require a proper perspective.

In mature play, any “repetitional intent” exists as a general-ized caretaking so that one always does things with things donebefore by having consistently jazzful hands. It is an “intent”manifest in such handful practices as staying in a territory for awhile, being jazzfully caretaking by lingering, establishing astrong wayful point of departure for further venturings, doingsuch handfully strategic melodying, doing jazz competently.And, staying in a territory, the same notes get played again and


again on occasion, and repetitions could be thus said to be sus-tained. But if an express “repetitional intent” arose duringongoing play, it could cause trouble.

When a repetition can be said to occur, there are now suchincidents as: a little fragment repeated at twice its original speedfollowed by another fragment of a preceding figure played atone-third its former rate; a melody fragment repeated muchmore rapidly than the preceding as a way into a longer courseof reachings; a melody fragment inserted into a longer passagethat repeats a portion of some preceding figure; a melody frag-ment turned upside-down, said twice as fast, leading intoanother fragment that says what was said long before, at halfspeed, in alternating steps rather than sequentially preciserestatement.

And such a list, with all sorts of structural differentiations,can go on as endlessly as a terminology of keyboard paths, andpresents exactly the same problems of nomenclature, definingpieces of melody as units for analysis, a conceptually mislead-ing rather than productionally relevant way for describingmusic.

For there is no melody (or talk) as an objective structure,existing in nature. There are practices of melodying (and talk-ing), of soundful, articulated reaching. And there’s no shortageof dubiously useful ways for characterizing “structure” in thefrozen object called “melody,” given possibilities of transcrip-tion, recording, and terminological classification.

Consider the so-called “parts of speech,” for instance. They’reentirely misnamed. They are “parts of sights,” like those beforeyou, right here, extraordinarily refined little signposts for mov-ing along with a body of text. But how can their pictorial analy-sis, as sedimented “speech” in its textual form—these articles,verbs, objects, subjects, nouns, phrases, utterances, speech acts,


turns at talk, and the rest—ever teach us about speaking? Howcan we possibly learn about our body’s ways of movement byanalyzing still sights? And what might a part of speaking looklike?15

I learned this language through five years of overhearing it.Overhearing and seeing this jazz—in a terrain nexus of handsand keyboard whose surfaces had become known as the sur-faces of my tongue, teeth, and palate are known to each other—I came to see that this jazz music is, first and foremost,particular ways of moving from place to place. Without thatmotivated, skilled accomplishment, there’s no jazz for anyoneto otherwise address.

Little bits and pieces of jazz handlings showed themselves tome, revealed as that jazz music in my hands’ ways, and I wouldnudge myself: Springboard—get the beat right—keep the handloose and flexible—bounce around on a place—go for a longreach—breathe deeply—interweave—relax—don’t go fast tillready—let the hands say where and how to go—be careful—remember Jimmy—go for an opening chord by theory—just getstarted talking—get those shoulders moving—keep that handfrom tripping—they’re listening to you—you’re playing fastbebop, with lots of interwindings in tight quarters, so get espe-cially bebopical—play beautifully.

Little bits and pieces of jazz handlings showed themselves tome, and particular nudgings worked, especially in the begin-ning, as I took notice and told myself about ways of moving,with an instructional nudge translated into a practice, a quasi-worded reflexive spark turned right back down into the key-board, dissipated as an inner saying into a singing.

Without getting the beat right, without establishing thoseprospectivities for articulational reachings, without assessing


the paceably available presence of ways for classes of rated trav-erse, without essentializing command over these paced pres-ences in and of the terrain nexus, jazz handlings did not andcannot appear. For, and I speak generically, it don’t mean athing if it ain’t got that swing, and the swing of jazz handlingswas at first shored up by thinking.

But the instruction is now embodied in the ways of my hands,just as “listen carefully to the beats” is in the ways of a pianotuner’s arm and shoulders; as “wait for the dial to return,”advice a youngster must explicitly follow, is in the adult’s way-ful, sequentially unfolding hoverings with a rotary phone; as“be careful in the typing test” is in the strongly establishedupright posture; as “reach ahead” is in every undertaken courseof talking.

And to say “remember Jimmy” is a way I have of saying “getthe time into the fingers,” which I can translate as: Keep strongforward prospectivities, get especially bebopical, relax, with abig etc. I can institute jazz handlings by telling myself—lookingat my hand and composing its appearance over the course ofplay for a pose to satisfy a look which asks—“let me see jazzhands!”

Telling myself “let me see jazz hands” works as a nudge inthat it instructs and notices everything else at the same time.And my instructions that work, born of my history as explicitlyrequired and consequential noticings, can best now be regardedas a usable compendium of caretaking practices for toning up,separably usable because each speaks of all the rest, eachanother way of saying the same thing; and now and then doinga saying to myself has useful instigating payoffs in my currentplay.

But for the most part I now unselfconsciously follow onepiece of advice—heard a long time before from jazz musicians,


perhaps their most oft-voiced maxim for new improvisers,literally overheard through my years of pursuing those noteson the records, always regarded from my standpoint as noviceand ethnographer as nothing but the vaguest of talk, andfinally accessible as the very detailed, practical talk it was onlywhen a grasp of those details to which it pointed were acces-sibly at hand—now my central instruction: Sing while you’replaying.

A “speaking I” is struck by the awesomeness of findingmyself singing as I play, singing right along with the movementsof my fingers, reaching for next sounds with a synchronousreach of two body parts, an achievement formerly quite impos-sible. How do I know just what each of these little slices ofspace will sound like, as a joint knowing of my voice and fin-gers, going there together, not singing along with the fingers,but singing with the fingers? How is that possible? I take myfingers to places so deeply mindful of what they will sound likethat I can sing these piano pitches at the same time, just as Imake contact with the terrain.

Are the singings merely given to me as some payoff to keepme engrossed, my fingers really operating only through inde-pendent mechanisms that are essentially beyond my awarenessor comprehension? Am I really singing along right behind thesounds with a lag in timing I don’t notice, some split-secondneurological delay? Is the overwhelming impression of an inter-twiningly formed voice just ignorance about my real body’sworkings?16

From an upright posture I look down at my hands on thepiano keyboard during play with a look that’s hardly a look atall. But standing back, I find that I proceed through and in a ter-rain nexus, doing singings with my fingers, so to speak, a single


voice at the tips of the fingers, going for each next note in say-ings just now and just then, just this soft and just this hard, justhere and just there, with definiteness of aim throughout, takingmy fingers to places, so to speak, and being guided, so to speak.I sing with my fingers, so to speak, and only so to speak, forthere’s a new being, my body, and it is this being (here too, soto speak) that sings.

Notes

1. Further information is available at www.sudnow.com.

2. See: www.pscw.uva.nl/emca.

3. Especially my “Normal Crimes: Sociological Features of the PenalCode in a Public Defender Office,” Social Problems 12, no. 3 (1965);Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1967); and my edited collection, Studies in SocialInteraction (New York: Free Press, 1972).

4. I offered some entirely programmatic remarks about language andmusic in Talk’s Body: A Meditation between Two Keyboards (NewYork: Knopf, 1979).

5. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior (Boston:Beacon Press, 1963), and its sequel, Phenomenology of Perception(New York: Humanities Press, 1962), originally published in Frenchin 1942 and 1945, respectively. I began to document my piano skillswhen I encountered problems in thinking about sound, the prime con-cern of my second chapter. And it was at just about this time that Ialso came upon the writings of Merleau-Ponty. His Phenomenology ofPerception, in particular, soon became a singular source of intellectualinspiration. Sitting at the piano, trying to make sense of what washappening, and studying Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of embodiment,I found myself, in his own terms, “not so much encountering a newphilosophy as recognizing what [one] had been waiting for.” A copyof his Phenomenology always remains close at hand.

6. My preoccupation with a “production account” and the “practi-tioner’s” perspective derives from my most fortunate personal associa-tion with three leading figures in twentieth-century sociology—ErvingGoffman, Harvey Sacks, and Harold Garfinkel.

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Goffman, from whom I earned a PhD at Berkeley, transformed myadolescent Bronx street smarts into an adult ethnographic facility. Hislectures and writings made it clear that a glance or handshake couldbe as systematically described as a class structure or the concentriczone theory of urban growth. Erving first showed me what mundanesociological detail could be. His many extraordinary books are widelyavailable.

Sacks, a lawyer, sociologist, and founder of the discipline of con-versation analysis, was a close friend and then teaching colleague,from graduate students days at Berkeley in 1961 until his fatal autocollision in 1975, while on the faculty at UC Irvine. It’s impossible toattribute particular indebtedness for particular inclinations, so perva-sive was his influence. But especially important were his elegant meth-ods of warranting the relevance of social facts as matters that aremethodically known about and produced by the members of a soci-ety, first and foremost, well before sociology comes along; and thesheer range of his discoveries of orderliness in the most minute forms.Goffman first showed us what details might be like, but he was a sortof ethologist, while Sacks was the microbiologist. Notwithstandingmy misgivings about using transcripts to study the activities of talk-ing, as he did, whatever acumen I have for appreciating the possibil-ity of order in the tiniest details was substantially nourished by mylong association with him. His monumental, two-volume, posthu-mously published Lectures on Conversation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1991), brilliantly sculpted from his tape-recorded Irvine lectures byDr. Gail Jefferson, is unquestionably among the most innovative,comprehensive, and rigorous documents of twentieth-century socialscience.

Garfinkel developed a sociological perspective called “ethno-methodology.” Its theoretical speculations furnish a useful point ofdeparture from which to simultaneously address the classical prob-lems of an objective social order while affording the actor’s perspec-tive a definitional priority. I owe the general concept of a “productionaccount” to him, and my initial thoughts about ways to study musicwere influenced by our conversations. See his Studies in Ethno-methodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), and“Ethnomethodology’s Program,” Social Psychology Quarterly 59, no.1 (1996), 5–21.

7. This and the diagrams to follow are necessarily crude. In fact,keyboard topography is characterized by a very rarely noted and yetextremely consequential feature: the distances from each white key

Notes 133

to the black key just above (or below) it are unequal. A more accu-rate rendering (but one inconvenient for small diagrams) looks morelike this:

Whites are all of one width, blacks are all of another width, and thestrips of whites between blacks are all equal, too; but distances fromeach white key to the black above or below it are idiosyncratic. Forexample, it’s a good deal farther from the vertical center of an A to anA� (the black note just above it) than it is from F to its correspondingblack neighbor. No two such distances are precisely the same, thoughthose from C to C� and F to F� are nearly so. All other distances varymore considerably.

When this fact (a physical requirement if these twelve spots arearranged to preserve the equal widths mentioned above) is pointedout to others, people with piano experience are uniformly baffled.Numerous renowned pianists were quite taken aback when shown theirregularity, apparently known primarily to those who manufacturekeys and/or replacement ivories. One of the world’s finest, with fortyyears of concertizing experience, felt compelled to sit down quickly invertiginous amazement, remaining silent for some while. His years ofextensive keyboard playing had never expressly revealed these imme-diately visible differences to him.

Several observations seem pertinent. For one thing, when pianistsmove from an A to the black key just above it, for instance, that blackkey isn’t struck with only half of the finger pad, which would occur ifthe distance from F to its upper black neighbor, say, were rigidly trans-ported to A. Instead, pianists’ fingers strike each black key in a cen-tered way, making these tiny discriminations quite unselfconsciously.Secondly, these minor differences are demonstrably central for thedevelopment of piano technique, and yet, to my knowledge, they’renowhere discussed in the extensive, centuries-old literature on thissubject. It can be unambiguously proven that the pianist’s unwatched

134 Notes

hand continuously knows just where it is on the keyboard in largemeasure because of these digitally detectable discrepancies.

The nomenclature of a keyboard, its alphabetic designations sugges-tive of a perfect equivalence among the keys, is surely a massively use-ful (though by no means necessary) analytic for instructing musicalaction. But any description of actual keyboard conduct that failed toappreciate such a feature as this variability of distance would be seri-ously incomplete, at best. It is certainly startling that an analytic ofnamed notes is so thoroughly internalized, from one’s first days at theinstrument, that one then forever sees past the actual physical keys totheir names, and that this could be so for most, it may be safely said,even of those who spend their lives dwelling in these spaces. This factis surely rich with broader phenomenological implications. An analyticterminology of note names and musical theory is only preliminarilyuseful for attending to musical structure, both for musicians and in thisaccount, whose descriptions develop an alternative language forregarding the keyboard terrain from a productional perspective.

8. For purposes of this account it’s unnecessary to confuse the generalreader with a full discussion of chord voicing. In light of my preoccu-pation with improvisational fluidity, I give harmony relatively shortshrift. My illustrations don’t clarify how a chord is actually played,and treat only right-hand improvised melodies with simple left-handforms. The simplification is designed to get at certain essential fea-tures of the single-note-at-a-time jazz melody.

9. For a description of a productional struggle with manual/visualproblems in the context of a computer game, phenomenologicallyakin to this beat-hearing problem, see my book Pilgrim in theMicroworld (New York: Warner Books, 1984).

10. It isn’t that we’re reduced to mystified conceptions of such phe-nomena. I see wayful acquisitions as I watch beginning piano studentsfirst gain facility in picking out a melody. Before they’ve gained skillwith scales, the keyboard is a place that has its sounds, as they huntand peck for every next note. Students handfully ask the keyboard foranswers to a hopeful intent, rather than display a method with it.They try to find a next note and go too high or low, overcompensateor undercompensate for the next one, trying to narrow in on someright tone in between; sensing that a note is higher they go too muchhigher, keyboard places having that sort of vagueness which a pitch-dark room has for one trying to find telling places for negotiatingblind passage.

Notes 135

These beginners’ hands display manifold hesitations, holding ontoa given note that’s found to be in the melody, so as to be able to returnto it, then finding a next place, leaving it, and immediately losing thatplace when it comes up right away again, and more.

As scales are incorporated, the hand’s searching for correct melodytones undergoes progressive elaboration, and the single hunting-pecking finger becomes increasingly part of a scale-oriented appraisalof the terrain. Most melodies are constructed in terms of major scales;acquisition of these scales gradually finds the hand arraying itselfalong scale axes; choices for next notes become progressively inte-grated with this grasp of axes of scale territories.

This change can be seen in the developing looks of searching fingersas they come to find rather than search, the security of each reachalong a “way” seen as an emergent acquisition. From the beginninguse of a single stabbing-in-the-dark finger—similar in its general ele-gance to typing with one finger but only in that way, as the piano hasnothing written on it that tells one about its sounds—beneath a more-or-less-high- and then more-or-less-low-reaching hand and arm theregradually emerges a digitally fluid grasp of the contours of a scale.And the competent melody finder immediately locates that particularscale within which a melody resides, given some starting note. Heknows his way so as to find a well-tempered bearing with only a quickfirst exploration (the well-tempered tuning of modern instrumentsfashioned by and for bodies with wayful-tempering potentials). Thehand becomes rapidly posed once a scale path has been identified.

With further progress, my students’ hands show increasing incor-poration, where closely hovering appraisals of places at hand aregradually loosened. The process is not unlike the change from thatpoint when a beginning typist must hover over a home territory andreach out gingerly for each digit’s particular assignments, to wherepositions are very fluidly sustained in ongoing reconfigurational workwell above the keyboard, hands hovering over the whole terrain“typefully.”

One concerned with a close investigation of wayful acquisitions asgeneral mobility phenomena of the body may take up, as one example,such a task as picking out a melody. A videotaping of several monthsof such work can aid in a further detailing of this process, offeringappearances whose relevance is informed by what the student himselfcomes to learn in solving the task at the keyboard. Appearances maybe screened for their productional relevance, with new potential detailsmade available through such a record.

136 Notes

11. Jimmy Rowles’s play can be nicely encountered in these record-ings, among his very many others:

1. The Special Magic of Jimmy Rowles (Halcyon, 1974)2. Heavy Love (Xanadu, 1977)3. The Peacocks (Columbia, 1977)4. Tasty (Concord, 1979)5. Plays Ellington and Strayhorn (Columbia, 1981)

For those specifically interested in jazz, I offer the list of jazz pianogreats to which I refer my piano students: Fats Waller, Earl (“Fatha”)Hines, Teddy Wilson, Nat King Cole, Art Tatum, Bud Powell,Thelonius Monk, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, ChickCorea, and Keith Jarrett. If, in this era of polls, one asked the hundredbest-known popular (i.e., nonclassical) musicians to name the twentymost significant jazz pianists, these dozen names would almost surelybe on all lists.

12. The beginning typist may find himself spelling every word as hetypes, thinking of the spellings as a step-by-step search of looking fin-gers for correct places. The advanced typist may sometimes have tomake it through an unaccustomed passage by conceiving of the fingersas doing the spelling, not to remember where proper characters liethrough an image of the terrain, but to help make it through a veryunfamiliar sight in the text being copied. The wheres of the fingersand the terrain here assume a temporarily renewed significance.

Specific finger-character responsibilities aren’t imaged, having longsince been forgotten. But that the terrain is a place for spellingbecomes, in an especially unaccustomed passage, a part of the typist’sentire way of approaching the keyboard. The hands behave spellingly,gearing up with a precision of stance more characteristic of the begin-ner’s way of staying in close hovering proximity to the home territory,to help move assuredly through the definitive transportation of a trou-blesome sight.

Perhaps the sights of a text-being-copied don’t deserve the designa-tion “sayables.” A text’s sights are differently constituted for a typistthan for a reader. I’ve found that in fairly short order I can type froma foreign-language text whose sights I cannot say or understand at all,though a productive research question may be posed: how does thecorrect sayability of a sight nonetheless figure into typed reproduction?

After practice at typing Czech for some while, gaining a vague graspof some of its characteristic looks as spelled affairs, and moves astypewriter courses, I’m still far from my usual speed in reproducing

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English sights. Would much more practice decrease or eliminate thediscrepancy? Word-sights-seen-to-be-typed are appreciated with alooking reach that doesn’t require that breadth needed to find anunfolding sensibility, and, conversely, the looking that reproducing atext requires may not be at all suited to such appreciation. Its pacingstructure, for one thing, isn’t like that which makes up normal read-ing, not because it’s slower, but because it has a different organizationof forward thrusting to integrate with the task at hand.

Still, the recognizability of the sights-seen-to-be-typed might wellinvolve something more than just a reach over a surveyable landscapefor the competent native typist. The sayability of the sights, and per-haps their sense in the ways a sense can still be had in typing-looking,may enter into the accomplishment in ways whose study could leadone to learn more about reading, looking, and understanding.

13. An extensive literature search revealed no findings directly relatedto those reported here. While there are a vast number of physiologi-cal and experimental-psychological studies of timing in human andother animal behavior, most surprisingly I found none documentingthe specific and absolutely critical role that a pulsation plays in coor-dinating bodily movements. Should the reader know of any suchresearch, I’d be most grateful to receive any relevant citations([email protected]).

14. One doesn’t have to learn about places by their names to becomean improviser, though most beginners do much of that these days, andmost recent jazz vocabulary sounds like it. Melodies now oftenbespeak their origin in practicings along the sorts of routes that havebeen heavily influenced by the classical written tradition. To speakcolloquially, you must practice your scales; learners these days writedown pictures to aid that process, elaborate these pictures, and pro-duce new scales, telling of conversations between musicians, jazz play-ers with classical training, years of working over named keys. Notinconceivably, the most complex possibilities may be attained by justlistening to records and doing no theorizing. But in modern literatecircles, where a language undergoes continuous and substantial mod-ification over single-generational careers, where playing fast and intri-cately has competitively come to differentiate performers in a verytight market, where being a good musician means to be multilingual—in such a set of circumstances, speaking colloquial sociology, the daysof the young man and his horn, sitting on the edge of the bandstandevery night, practicing every day, learning to speak jazz as one first

138 Notes

learns to speak a first language without records or transcripts, arepoverty-stricken and numbered (not that affluence awaits the classi-cally trained jazz musician!).

15. That some languages are considered nonsemantic with respect topitch or tone, for example, is an entirely artificial observation, basedon a productionally unwarranted differentiation of aspects of talking,and unexplicated assumptions of what pitch and tone are in musicmaking as the contrastive model. I conceive talking to be paced/placedmovements. If anything is semantic, available for semantics in cobod-ied movings, it is sustained articulational moves from place to place,each next place to the next, just here, just there, for us together.

In my view, a productional distinction between melodying andspeaking is neither empirically nor philosophically justifiable (how-ever much a use theory specifies rather massive social organizationaldifferences). Until we allow that music talks about itself—in no othersense than we must allow that the course of movements I do in sayingthe word “about” is, before all else, just that: a course of movementslanguage says that it makes “about” itself—rampant confusions willremain in any distinctions between fundamental features of music andlanguage.

16. With an electric piano I bypass the amplifier so I can’t hear whatI’m playing, which is nevertheless continuously recorded by a taperecorder. A foot pedal can instantly put the music into the room andremove it.

Singing aloud, recording my voice as well, then comparing unheardpiano pitches with sung ones, I find that the pitch correspondence isoften thrown into disarray. Hitting the amplifier switch in the midstof play, for a while I stay in alignment and then drift off a bit. Mysinging pitches and fingered piano pitches frequently, if only slightly,part company.

When I play a melody on a table, with ink on my fingertips, andmeasure distances attained there to define a correspondence with myvoice, there are highs where high and lows where low, if I play thegame with a serious intent to get the melody accurately simulated. Butthe detailed note-to-note correspondence is crude. If I do fingerings inthe air (playing “air piano”), the relationship between sung and fin-gered pitches disintegrates further, with differing orders of distur-bance. For one thing, playing the game in the air I can feel that myinterdigitations, by not being in contact with their missing parts, aretemporally uncertain.

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I need to be going to places precisely for that jazz to happen. Wehave no text here if I can’t find this typewriter terrain being used withimpressional contact, and I feel like I am playing at writing if I type inthe air.

A home territory makes it possible not to look in order to be cer-tain, the paper (or screen) mainly attended to not to detect errors butto keep the margins aligned (though a skilled typist often reaches fora return key or lever with margin-proper pacing and without looking).

If that jazz on the records could arise as home territory play, par-ticular digit-key responsibilities never changing, discrepancies wouldbe minimized. But in adventurous play I will often reach for some notewithout really knowing what it will sound like (not synchronouslyaiming with fingers and singings), but, once locked in on a particularplace, I may then proceed wayfully on a path from it, one that accordswith the harmony at that point. With the acoustic sounds unavailable,such adventures often slip from synchronous alignment. Having suchsounds sustains a continual centeredness and synchrony of singingsand fingerings. While my hands may be wayfully and securely tar-geted, the sound-there-routing hand is only ambiguously linked withmy vocalizations when I can’t hear the music, and it’s not really partof a singing body knowing where it is going and properly gettingthere.

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