John Ruggero wrote: ↑22 Feb 2022, 03:43
When I first started improvising using lead sheets I was always bothered by the fact that the bass lines were not present, having done quite a bit of theory using figured bass. (You'll have to factor in that I am a "classical" musician and think of the bass line as just as important as the top melody.) So I thought the slashes for bass notes were a real advance.
I do not think the importance of the bass line was disregarded in any way. You have to take in account that a big part of jazz is oral tradtion. People learned from transcribing by ear and by rote listening to radio, records (sometimes with pitched down manipulated grammophones as reported e.g. from Charlie Parker, by Barry Harris or by Lennie Tristano’s students) and last but not least at all they would learn on the bandstand. A bassist would stand on the left side of the piano and watch the pianist’s left hand, so if he didn’t know the tune called he could “fake” it by sight and ear. There were no fake books back then, everyone was playing by rote and by ear.
What makes playing everything by rote easier is that many of the chord progressions were often very similar. The bridge of Gershwin’s “I got rhythm” was so commonly used that it was called “Sears Roebuck bridge” after Sears, Roebuck and Co., another one used e.g. in “Sunny Side of the Street”, “When You're Smiling”, “Satin Doll”, “Honeysuckle Rose” was called “Montgomery-Ward bridge”.
[Big bands of course did not play by rote apart from the “head arrangements” of Kansas City Bands like early Basie or Jay McShann. And the above said doesn’t mean nobody could read music. Musicians were learning tunes from original sheet music, too. But they would not take the music to a jam or a gig. Many learned classical music or played in marching bands in high school. If you were from a poor Afro-American family that was a huge opportunity, especially as you could borrow instruments from school, at least those available. AFAIK that great system of music education in the US has has totally declined in the last decades in public schools.]
So people simply “knew” how to interpret the chord symbols regarding bass lines or piano left hand (or improvisation as well of course) from those simple chord symbols – they knew the “language”. (Or they even became innovative and invented new “dialects”, like e.g. the beboppers.)
There is an educational book by Ron Carter about double bass playing. For every quarter of a bar he notates a chord with all the chord notes of the correspondent chord available on the bass. Then he tells you to develop walking bass lines by connecting one “dot” (note-head) of one quarter with another “dot” from the next quarter. This was an eye-opener for me: The bass doesn't always have to play the root on the one. Or as pop, rock, soul and funk studio bassist legend Carol Kaye (who started out as a bebop guitarist) likes to put it: “You have to know your chordal notes”. And you have to know ways using passing chords and substitutions so you can play “movements” instead of static chords (a term Barry Harris caught from Coleman Hawkins).
I do not know much about figured bass but I think its rules of stricter than that. Jazz is more about freedom and experimentation. Often a piano would reharmonize every “chorus” (playing once through the chord changes of a tune for those who don’t know the term) or even change the key. Which made it not easy for those playing with him. The bandstand was a tough place also (ca. 1st minute of the video):
https://invidio.xamh.de/watch?v=d3S3XIaM9cs
In a nutshell Jazz is a lot about experience.
John, am I getting you right that at that time starting improvising you were frustrated because you had no real explanation of what to do in the left hand? I know the kind of frustation when you are stuck. (By the way I play guitar, my piano skills are very rudimentary. I practice Musescore editing in the moment if I want to know how a piano score sounds, listening to the built-in synth.)
Nowadays everything is so much easier – you have so many tons of educational books, music schools, colleges and universities, online master classes, skype and zoom lessons, Youtube videos, software. The hardest thing today is separating the sheep from the goats. If you want to listen to a certain piece it is a few clicks on Youtube or Spotify instead of staying up all night with one ear on the radio.
[By the way: AFAIK people like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Paganini, Liszt (to name just a very few) were all great improvisers but the art got lost later on, after everything got written out, even the (is that the right term?) cadencas.]