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JazzEd by Scotty Wright of JAZZ NOW magazine
Review of Jim Grantham's
Jazzmaster Cookbook: Jazz Theory and
Improvisation.
I remember reading an article about jazz in which the writer compared
the music to food. As I recall, the challenge of improvisation was
likened to conceiving, preparing, cooking and serving a gourmet meal
instantly at the dinner table with the guests assembled and
waiting.
It should come as no surprise, then, that someone came up with a Jazz
Cookbook. No, I don’t mean a cookbook featuring food recipes of
jazz artists, like the one from Concord Jazz. And we all remember the
“Jazz Cooks” dinner concert series, cleverly produced by
Herb Wong (reviewed in our Sept. 94 issue).
No, this, my friends, is a Jazz cookbook, designed to create more
master chefs like Rollins, Marsalis, Vaughn, and Flanagan who are
capable of handling the seemingly simple campfire-dinner-for-one of
solo performance, or creating banquets in large bustling kitchens like
those of Ellington, Basie, and Thad Jones and Mel Lewis.
Jim Grantham, a graduate of the Berklee School of Music in Boston, has
developed this course, combining jazz theory and improvisation with a
practice regimen called the “Jazzmaster Workout” into one
volume and named it the Jazzmaster Cookbook. It is quite possibly the
finest do-it-yourself jazz course I’ve ever seen. In my opinion,
the Cookbook succeeds at every course of the meal, but I must point
out a few things that separate it from similar efforts:
Basics: One of the first textbooks on Jazz improvisation was the Jazz
Improvisation series, by John Mehegan, written during his tenure at
Juilliard school of music (1947-1956). Mehegan’s series in terms
of its detail, its thoroughness, and its longevity, has been the
standard for jazz improvisation for years, but it has one major
flaw. Mehegan, since he was teaching at one of most prestigious music
schools in the country, assumed all his students read music
fluently. His job, therefore, was to introduce the philosophies,
concepts and techniques peculiar to jazz, prodding his students to
rethink their approach to musical performance.
Grantham, however, knows full well that many of his benighted students
using the Cookbook don’t read music well, if at
all. Consequently, he has started his course with elementary concepts
of music reading, assuming nothing about the training of the reader,
yet building upon those concepts in such a fashion that even an
intermediate student will not skip Chapter I, but will reconfirm his
present knowledge of those concepts, applying them to what
follows.
Vocabulary: Ever notice that in textbooks (and in classrooms) things
are never what they’re called in the real world? Computers, cars,
social work, dance and fashion all have their own languages. So does
music, especially jazz, whose lingo has entered the language of
mainstream culture as early as the 1940’s.
Grantham has addressed this language barrier with copious definitions
and synonyms, so a student can understand the terms and phrases she
hears faster than those of us who hung out in clubs for years feeling
like Alice trying to decipher the codes of this Jazz Wonderland. (Hey
you veterans, how many jam sessions did it take to learn what
”around the horn” or “Trane it” mean?)
At first, I was disappointed that there was no actual glossary for
reference. In retrospect, I see that the author has forced the student
to learn these terms in context, gaining explicit, not implicit
knowledge. Thanks Mr. Grantham, for not giving Jazz another horde of
under-prepared neophytes who can’t walk their talk.
Melody: More than anything else, the jazz improviser is challenged to
create a musically logical, emotionally valid melody spontaneously.
Grantham respects this tenet as the cornerstone of good jazz. He
never gives the student the easy out of memorizing licks, practicing
quotes from recordings of masters, or running scales over a set of
changes and calling it a solo. Instead, Grantham, constantly stresses
thought, not reflex: listening, not pre-conception; design, not
cliches.
Practice Does Not Make Perfect: Something I always emphasize in my
school assemblies and clinics is that this fallacy must be abolished
and replaced with a slightly altered, infinitely truer version;
Perfect Practice makes perfect. Doing something incorrectly over and
over won’t make it better. Only a system of graduated exercises
and drills with careful attention to progress will yield positive
results.
I believe that the Cookbook would still have been very good with just
Section I. But rather than leaving his students to develop their own
practice system, Grantham has devised the “Jazzmaster
Workout,” and what a workout it is!
Chords, scales,
guide tones, tonal centers all have detailed study exercises. Better
yet, all the exercises in the book are in the key of C; the student
must transpose them to the other eleven keys. We’re talkin’
serious time in the shed!
These are but a few of the reasons why I highly recommend the
Jazzmaster Cookbook. As with the best of jazz (and life), the little
things mean so much: song forms, chord shorthand, a basic list of
standards, arrangement devices such as turnarounds and vamps, big use
of the page’s margins to summarize adjacent paragraphs. So many
little things add up to one great book, a great tool for teachers and
students, a great triumph for Jim Grantham, and a great asset to Jazz
Education.
Scotty Wright, Jazz Now Jan. 1995
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