I've been on a total Jim Hall kick recently. Partly this is because I discovered a recording of a lesson I took with him about 30 years ago. The trove of information from that lesson astonished me. I'd forgotten just how much was there. I've been transcribing some of what he played, and his casual mastery is a wonder to recall. Below are a couple of things that he said that every improviser should take to heart:
I WOULD BE CAREFUL ABOUT REALLY MAKING A STATEMENT WITH EVERYTHING YOU PLAY
MAKE SURE IT SOUNDS LIKE IT’S PLAYED WITH CONVICTION—AND I DON’T NECESSARILY MEAN LOUD
IMAGINE THE TIME IS GOING BY ITSELF—MY FEELING IS THE TIME IS GOING WITHOUT ME, SO I CAN DIP IN AND OUT OF IT
IF I’M PLAYING A TUNE IN TIME BY MYSELF I MIGHT CONSIDER THE GUITAR DIVIDED INTO 3 AREAS—A COMPING AREA FOR CHORDS, AN AREA FOR BASS IF I NEED IT, AND A DIFFERENT AREA FOR SOLOS. I DON’T FEEL IT’S ALWAYS NECESSARY TO PUT IN BASS NOTES, UNLESS I’M, SAY, IDENTIFYING THE BRIDGE.
All this becomes more pertinent to me as I try for the first time to play solo guitar in a meaningful way. It's terribly hard to do, and I have mostly avoided it my whole life. To celebrate this revisiting with Jim, I'm going to share one more essay from my upcoming book entitled Pity the Genius: A Journey through American Guitar Music in 33 Tracks. As I've mentioned before this book, which I've been working on for a couple of years, will come out on Cymbal Press in the late spring.
We miss you, Jim!
Jim Hall: Scrapple From the Apple— Jim Hall Trio Live (Horizon1975)
Jim Hall looms over every note of jazz I play—him and Wes Montgomery. Jim celebrated the unknown. He did so with incredible affinity with his collaborators—his improvising always sounds like it was meant to be. There's no excess, no fluff. This courage as an improviser is not a given. Jim lived by it. His music was by turns gorgeous, funny, bold, quizzical, and spare. He was a master of the jazz vocabulary, and he could also free improvise with the best of them. Jim was one of our great rhythm guitarists. I love how he cited Richie Havens as an inspiration for his rhythm playing.
Jim’s subtle sense of humor shows up in this story. One time a fan asked him how many tunes he knew. Jim considered the question for a moment and said, “Oh I guess about 1000.” He turned to go, and before he got too far, he stopped and turned back around. “Actually,” he said, “More Like a 100.” This time he made it all the way through the door, before he popped his head back in and said, “Actually…just one.”
I took a lesson with him in the late 90’s, and going over to his West Village apartment was one of the great experiences of my life. Jim and his wife greeted me as if I were an old friend. As I was ushered into his small office I felt more like a dinner guest than student. Of course he spoke to me about technique, the use of dyads, voice leading, stuff that was foundational to his approach. But the heart of the experience was the music we made. We played a jazz standard and I felt infinite possibility, completely supported, seen, if you will. The way Jim accompanied me was simple yet profound. No matter where I took my playing he would have been right there with me, not ahead, not behind—there.
This testimony is borne out by anyone I have spoken to who played with him, Bill Frisell, Julian Lage, Pat Metheny.
One word for this is empathy. It’s a quality that every improviser must have, but some have more than others, and Jim had a ton. His improvisations were ever unpredictable, and yet he was so in tune with his band that it seemed all notes led home. No matter what corner he painted himself in during a solo he found a way out. He could have made a five-minute composition out of two notes.
Jim was a master of understatement. He played less than you expected, which somehow always contained more than you expected. Sometimes he’d turn his guitar down during a solo, to the point where he had no amplification at all—as if to make the point that strength comes not from volume but conviction. It was pretty radical. But as Julian Lage pointed out he could really hit the guitar hard, too. He presented in a very gentlemanly way, but he felt free to knock the instrument around. Later in life he adopted a few effects, and although I'm not sure he truly integrated things like the Whammy Pedal into his sound, it was fun to hear him expanding into the digital age.
Jim was a composer first, a guitarist second. He had a degree in composition from Cleveland Institute of Music. Everything he played had the consideration, the shape and form that a classical composer might prioritize. Because of this Jim was asked to be part of projects by some great band leaders, Jimmy Guiffre and his trio, Gunther Schuller’s Jazz Abstractions with Ornette Coleman, Bob Brookmeyer’s Traditionalism Revisited. Sonny Rollins hired him, and I have to believe it’s because Sonny, too, improvised with incredible attention to form. Perhaps his most iconic recordings are the two duos with pianist Bill Evans, Undercurrents and Intermodulation. These were a first in jazz. No guitarist had done a series of duos with a piano player in which roles were so easily swapped, in which their approach was so free and yet so rooted in the foundation of the tunes.
His band's performance on “Scrapple From the Apple” from the 1975 live recording, which featured Don Thompson on bass and Terry Clarke on drums, is a marvel of motivic development and band dialogue. Jim’s accompaniment to the bass solo is a study in and of itself. The solo he then takes over multiple choruses is truly a conversation with his collaborators. It’s one heck of a journey. Although you continually hear reference to Charlie Christian and Charlie Parker, there is nary a bebop cliche to be found. Rather he extrapolates on a few motives in a way that is focused, surprising, and great fun. Jim goes in and out of the key, he uses jarring dissonance, he plays his own idiosyncratic chord melodies, and finally ends up in a burst of rhythm that is reminiscent of Red Garland. It’s full of exploratory rhythmic play.
Mainly what you hear is people taking chances.
Jim was not fussy. He seemed incapable of putting on airs. I don't think he would have been caught dead wearing sunglasses on stage, and he never used any of the cliche jazz tropes in conversation. You'd never hear him say use the word “cats,” or say, “Let’s hang.” I was told by Julian Lage, who Jim took under his wing, that Jim didn’t like to talk about the old days. He was always looking ahead. He rejected any idea that an earlier era of his life in jazz held romance. He said the so-called “good old days,” were full of racism, poor working conditions, and low pay. I'm told that as a young man Jim had a problem with alcohol. He sure became a straight arrow by the time I started listening to him. I believe his wife Jane, a psychotherapist, had a lot to do with that. They were both tremendously devoted to one another.
Jim was a mentor figure to about every jazz guitarist I’ve known—from Mick Goodrick to Pat Metheny to Russell Malone, Steve Cardenas, Frisell, and Lage. The list is endless. Mick said to a friend once that “Being accompanied by Jim Hall is like being in a cathedral.” He carried the entire history of the jazz language inside him, from Freddie Green and Charlie Christian up through the most way-out free improviser you could name. I think a great duo project would have been Derek Bailey and Jim. It’s interesting to note that in performance, at least in the last thirty years of his life, he almost always included some of the same tunes in his set, Body and Soul, All the Things You are (in ¾ time), Skylark. Was this…I don’t know—playing it safe? Hell no! I advise this approach to anyone. Know 10 tunes (or one?) really well, not 1000 kind of well. Every time he performed Body and Soul it was totally different. He was immune to repeating himself.
Part of the journey in jazz music inevitably involves the blessing of the elders. One of the greatest compliments I ever received was when Jim said in the lesson I took with him—“You know when people say someone sounds ‘interesting,’ it usually means nothing—but in your case I really mean it. You’re playing is really interesting, it holds my attention, and for me that’s a big deal.” He said this despite my relatively scant knowledge of jazz pedagogy at the time. But my favorite memory of my brief interactions with this casual sage was when we honored him in 2013 in an early incarnation of the Alternative Guitar Summit. I organized a night of his music at of all places, Rockwood Music Hall, a kind of pop venue in Manhattan. Why Rockwood? Better venues refused my entreaties. On this auspicious night folks such as Chris Potter, Vijay Iyer, Vic Juris, Nels Cline, Steve Cardenas, Ben Monder, Liberty Ellman, Gilad Hekselman, and others played Jim's compositions. Jim was in poor health at the time, he was suffering from back problems, so he elected not to attend the show. He’d been told the seating at Rockwood was uncomfortable. Had we done the show in a theater, he probably would have showed up. Nonetheless he called me on the phone before the show to thank me, and he asked me to be sure to send him a recording. I did so, and received a handwritten thank you note from him a couple weeks later as well as a request for the addresses of all the performers so he could write to them too.
What can you say about this small courtesy? That the man behind it was brimming with humanity and consideration for others.