Hancock, Wess and Konitz Listened for Different Things

Lee Konitz usually stood in front of the rhythm section, as the named soloist was expected to do, but said he would rather stand behind it. The arrangement was not especially fashionable, he admitted, yet it placed him nearer the information he needed. “I just go out and start from scratch, hopefully,” he said of improvising.

That beginning was difficult to preserve. During a week at Dizzy’s Club in New York, Konitz caught the group slipping into familiar solo routines and warned the players against reaching automatically for what they already knew. Freer group improvisation demanded more listening because nobody could hide inside a fixed function. An available space was not a vacancy for a prepared line; somebody else had just altered the terms.

Frank Wess placed the danger elsewhere. After eleven years in Count Basie’s orchestra, he described swing as a pulse that could not be interrupted, however much or little a player contributed. “You have to hear, listen to everything, and play together,” he said. Otherwise, the musicians’ feet would strike the floor at different times and the band would resemble horses walking down the street.

Herbie Hancock met the more volatile version of that bargain in Miles Davis’s band. At a Detroit engagement, Davis noticed that Hancock and Tony Williams broke up the time and supplied freer rhythmic ideas when George Coleman soloed. Behind Davis, they played more conventionally because they assumed he preferred it. The trumpeter asked, “Why don’t you play behind me the way you play behind George?”

At the next performance, Hancock and Williams did exactly that. Davis initially played a few notes at a time; the following day his phrases grew longer. By the third day, he was finding solutions beyond the expected chordal and rhythmic structures, leaving Hancock to rebuild his own footing. The episode embodied Davis’s larger rule: discovery belonged on the bandstand, not in a polished figure brought in from the practice room.

A later Miles Davis Quintet recording, “Footprints,” makes that responsibility audible with Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Hancock and Williams. The time feel keeps shifting, and Williams continues after the piece seems to have ended. The band hears the opening and returns for one more statement of the theme. It is not a recording of the Detroit episode, but it preserves the same compact drama: one musician refuses the ending, and four others decide whether he is right.