The Structure of Jazz
Jazz performance can be confusing to the uninitiated . Even many hard-core jazz fans find aspects of the music mystifying. They struggle to identify a melody or discern an underlying structure to the music. Songs sometimes change direction suddenly and unpredictably. Different musicians in the band take charge at unexpected junctures—the fo- cal point moves from saxophone to trumpet to piano to bass or other instruments—but seemingly without rhyme or reason.
What’s going on here? We’ve all heard that jazz musicians improvise. But does that mean they just make it up as they go along? Is it possible that there is no real structure to this music? Is jazz just a free-for-all, like those wild moments in TV wrestling when all rules are abandoned, the referee ignored, and every combatant goes for broke? Or is there method to this apparent musical madness? Is jazz more like a chess match—but played much, much faster—in which creative freedom is bound by rules and imagination must operate within carefully defined constraints?
In truth, jazz is a little like both those examples. Sometimes it feels like hand-to-hand combat on the bandstand, but it can also get as cerebral as a room of grand masters debating the best way to achieve checkmate. Rules define almost every aspect of the music, but they are applied flexibly, and sometimes can even be ignored. Much of the beauty in the music draws on this creative tension.
Newcomers to the music immediately grasp the freedom in jazz. The sense of liberation in this music is so palpable that jazz has often been embraced or censored as a symbol of political freedom and human rights. We are all familiar with lyrics getting banned because they broached some taboo subject, but how can instrumental music serve as an ideological rallying cry? Yet the Nazi leaders feared the influence of jazz music, as did the overseers in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes. During the German occupation of France in World War II, jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt needed to get approval from the Propaganda-Staffel before each performance for the songs he planned to play. And Nazi fears were not without justification: after “La Marseillaise” was banned, Reinhardt’s jazz song “Nuages” was adopted as an alternative song of rebellion by the French resistance movement. Among the citizenry, jazz stood as the antithesis of repressive rules.
Yet jazz has its own rules—although not repressive ones—and they can be elusive, hard to grasp, especially from the perspective of a newcomer to the music. But a se- rious fan can’t really appreciate what happens during a jazz performance without some understanding of these struc- tural underpinnings and how they are applied in practice.
The vast majority of jazz performances follow a famil- iar pattern. You might call it “theme and variations.” You can divide the song into three parts. First, the musicians play the melody (or theme). Second, they improvise over the harmonies of the song—with some or all of the per- formers taking solos (these are the variations). Third, the musicians return to the melody for a final restatement of the theme. Not every jazz performance follows this blue- print—and in some extreme cases, the musicians follow no set pattern—but more than 95 percent of the jazz music you will encounter in recordings or live concert will adhere to this theme-and-variations structure.
The themes are of set duration. Frequently, they are thirty-two bars long with four beats in each bar, especially when the piece in question is a jazz standard drawn from the classic American song repertoire of George Gersh- win, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and other mid-twentieth- century tunesmiths. But song lengths of other durations aren’t uncommon. Twelve-bar forms are especially popu- lar, most notably in blues songs (we will learn more about them later). But when a song is fairly short, say twelve or sixteen bars in duration, the musicians typically play the melody twice at the beginning and conclusion of the performance. These three options—thirty-two-bar songs, twelve-bar songs, sixteen-bar songs—account for the vast majority of the jazz performed since the early 1930s. True, you will occasionally encounter jazz compositions that de- viate from these patterns—especially in recent years, when many jazz players are trying to move beyond the popular song structures that have long dominated jazz. Also, the ear- liest jazz composers, back in the 1920s, favored more com- plex patterns for their compositions. But those exceptions can’t obscure the fact that a few simple structures account for most jazz music performed since its inception.
We are getting off easy, my friends. If this were a book on the symphony, our heads would spin under the weight of the jargon and charts necessary to explain the organi- zational precepts and their major variations. If this were a listener’s guide to fugue and counterpoint, you would have probably tossed it in the trash can ten pages ago. But jazz isn’t like that. It draws on the same basic structures we find in many pop songs. If you can count to thirty-two and keep the numbers in time with the beats in the music, you are ready to roll. You can follow along with the music, and always know where the musicians are in the underlying structure.
You have Thomas Edison to thank for all of this. It’s hard to envision jazz flourishing without Edison’s inven- tion of sound recording technology, which made it pos- sible to preserve and disseminate musical improvisations for the first time in history. But this same technology also imposed severe structural constraints on jazz compositions. Musicians turned to simpler structures because recordings in the early days couldn’t capture more than about three minutes of music. Before the rise of jazz, African American composers worked extensively with more complex forms. Most of Scott Joplin’s ragtime pieces relied on four separate sections, each with its distinctive melody and chords, and many of the earliest jazz musicians continued in this vein. If you play a song of this sort fast enough, perhaps you can finish it in just under three minutes; but even if you win this race, will you have any time left for improvised solos? I marvel at the recordings Jelly Roll Morton made in the 1920s, in which he tries to retain the comparatively com- plex structures he had learned from the rag composers and still leave a little space for improvisation. But few jazz artists had the skill to pull this off; and even more to the point, most of them preferred to feature their solos on record rather than demonstrate mastery of complex compositional forms. Something had to give, and that usually turned out to be the song structure. If a band kept to twelveor thirty- two-bar songs, they still had time for several solos before they ran out of ‘disk space.’ A few renegades resisted this process of simplification—most notably Duke Ellington, who continued to work with elaborate structures even when his contemporaries were embracing simple riff tunes. But he was a rare exception. Most jazz artists in those days before the long-playing (LP) album were content to draw on pop songs and blues, and even when they wrote their own material, they borrowed the uncomplicated structures of those genres.
The most common thirty-two-bar song form in Amer- ican twentieth-century popular music and jazz is AABA. The two themes—A and B—are each eight bars long. The B theme, which offers a countermelody in a contrasting key, is sometimes called the “bridge” or “release.” It provides a dose of aural variety before returning to the final eight- bar A theme restatement. Another familiar thirty-two-bar structure features a sixteen-bar single melody played twice, but with a slight variation between the first ending and second ending. And simplest of all, as mentioned above, are the many jazz songs that rely on a single theme, usually of twelve or sixteen bars, repeated without variation. These are child’s play compared with the typical form for a Scott Joplin ragtime piece from the early 1900s, which presents four different sections in the sequence AABBACCDD. Or check out Duke Ellington’s structure for “Sepia Pan- orama” from 1940, which briefly served as his band’s theme song (later replaced by “Take the ‘A’ Train”). It relies on four themes arranged in the unconventional sequence ABCDDCBA.
Here is what Ellington serves up on this three-minute- and-twenty-second track:
A theme (12 bars) Dialogue between orchestra and bass
B theme (16 bars) Dialogue between reeds and brass
C theme (8 bars) Dialogue between orchestra and bari-
tone sax
D theme (12 bars) Blues improvisation featuring piano
and bass
D theme (12 bars) Blues improvisation featuring tenor
sax
C theme (8 bars) Dialogue between orchestra and bari-
tone sax
B theme (8 bars) Dialogue between reeds and brass
A theme (12 bars) Dialogue between orchestra and bass
Coda
(2 bars) Concluding passage played by bass