Confession of a Jazz Fiend,  Part One of One

I never thought of it as something to confess until now, but it’s keeping me up. I have been contemplating two sparse choruses of a Count Basie solo for days. Not only is it economical, it’s short. Yet there is so much space in it! I have been learning the architecture of all 24 bars as a whole, their shape against the grid of bars and beats, their excruciatingly delayed symmetry. Of course when I say “the solo” it is a frozen improvisation, the trace of one, and it is only the act of tracing it off the record onto paper that makes it look anything like architecture. Yet the engineering is there. The swing of the bridge depends on the math behind the suspension. There is tension in this transcription of Basie’s use of space; swing compressed into tension like a flattened spring. So bear with me, we have to move carefully for a while before we can

see the big picture and view the solo from above.

            Down in the keyboard, a fifth above middle C, Basie starts with the smallest idea he can play and still engage the groove.  He starts an eighth note before the beginning of the first bar with a string of four eighth note ending with a G. This G, the root of the V chord in this blues progression, establishes the tonality by sounding an octave up and down before stopping briefly on a the root of the chord, middle C, with the added stability of being a quarter note, and the second full beat of the measure. There are two more notes in this phrase, both eighth notes, followed by a quarter note rest. After the C we get the first note beyond root and fifth, the E, which is the third of the C triad, thus closing off any ambiguity about what key we’re in here.  Rhythmically,  there is both symmetry and asymmetry in this design, and that is why it swings. There is a symmetry to the quarter note being preceded and followed by a figure of two 8th notes, altogether it sounds like Da-da- Dum-Da-da. But this whole phrase is assymetrical because it begins with an eighth note before the first group of two note phrases, Da-da-dad-Dum-da-da. The quarter note rest at the end of this first bar is then the ghosted symmetrical echo of the quarter note C that sounded on the second beat. In the next bar, Basie finishes the phrase with four eighth notes on the first two beats, making a two bar phrase with an eighth note “pick-up,” a rest on the 4 of the first bar and a half bar rest at the end of the phrase. There is space rhythmically in the rests taking up a little less than 3/8ths of the phrase, and there is space harmonically in that we have only hinted at the triad with one note, the rest are all just root and fifth of the chords. Although G is the outside boundary of all the phrases, the one C and the one E are inside the first grouping, and the grouping in bar 2 begins and ends with the same octave G.

            After all that space, Basie gives a relative flurry of notes in the next two bar phrase. The phrase begins with a triplet figure blues cliché, just enough of it to propel itself into the long eighth note phrase of the next bar. The blues figure, an eighth note rest,  and then an eighth note G, followed by three triplets each composed of the half step blue note up to the third  and fifth of the chord, again, all ending in that same G in that same octave from the opening. Over this last whole four bar phrase the highest note is the one most often repeated, and the pattern that the G repetition makes rhythmically is one that repeats in the chord jab accents of the second chorus!

            This chorus lasts about a half a minute in real time. I have been up all night writing it out so I could look at it for a long time, at the rhythms outlined by the spaces between notes.

And now I’m writing out my experience of writing out, the Basie solo, tracing it, playing it, touching a swinging place in the universe, an echo of ivory and starched cotton in a Kansas City dive in the 1930s.