The Other Notes: A Lesson Learned from Steve Coleman at the Stanford Jazz Workshop

by Rob Kohler, SJW Jazz Camp Faculty Director
A Montana native, Rob Kohler is a bassist who has performed jazz, classical, and pop music all over the world. His playing, composing, and producing skills have appeared on recordings by groups such as the Jared Burrows Trio, the Olem Alves Band, Three Form, This World, and the Platt/Kohler Trio. He has also toured and performed with such artists as Stefan Karlsson, Alice DiMicele, Madeline Eastman, John Stowell, Danny Gottlieb, Nancy King, Brian Bromberg, and Art Lande. Kohler has also been long active as a private tutor and school music teacher.

I was very excited to see Steve Coleman in person for the first time (during a presentation at the 1994 Workshop). He was giving a clinic on some of his concepts of improvisation, using the famous solo that Bird had played over the changes to Cherokee as his main example. Bird and Dizzy called the tune Ko-Ko. Steve put the horn to his mouth and proceeded to play the solo note for note. I remember it being flawless, with Bird-like grace and tone with a signature Coleman bite. It completely floored me and the other workshop participants. Afterwards he remarked dryly, “I didn’t come out of my room for months, learning that one.” He went on to explain how he heard and understood the notes that belonged in the changes, but noted that Bird also used pitches that weren’t in the changes. He proceeded to show the class some amazing examples of how he had developed concepts for his own melodic ideas from this discovery. Later on in the clinic he talked about putting these concepts in his compositions together with ideas that he had learned from various African traditions of melody and rhythm, but my mind was transfixed by what he had said about the “other” notes.

I went home inspired by the workshop and decided to analyze the melody of Parker’s Anthropology to see if this concept worked on other pieces of music by Bird. Truthfully, I felt a little intimidated by the complexity and speed of Bird’s solo on Ko-Ko, and, reasoning that Bird’s finished tunes are essentially solidified solos, Anthropology seemed to be a good place to start testing Coleman’s concept for myself. The tune uses the chord changes of I Got Rhythm or “rhythm changes,” and the A section is predominately a diatonic or key-centered sequence of chords. I had already studied and memorized the melody of Anthropology, but also used a published version of the notation. When I examined the chart, I found that if I extracted the “other” notes from the ones inside the changes, they seemed to suggest all of the notes of a B-major scale, a half-step above the key of Bb in which the piece is written (see example 1).

If you put together the notes of two major scales set a half step apart, you have a chromatic scale. When teaching jazz theory, I have often said that any tonality can be thought of as a re-organization of the chromatic scale. If you line up a chromatic scale from C to C and take out certain pitches, you can spell any scale or tonality. I have always felt that for the jazz improviser, any note is possible in any situation, and Dizzy himself is credited with saying that “the right note is always a half step away.” By this he meant that any note, even a note that sounds like a “mistake,” might be resolved successfully by movement of a semitone up or down. Be-Bop melodies and scales are full of chromatic passing tones. By adding extra half-steps to seven-note scales, an improviser can play long, smooth lines that resolve at surprising, seemingly random places in a measure. In this context, chromatic approaches are often though of as leading towards or emphasizing the chord tones. What Coleman’s workshop showed me was that, in a composition or solo, the chromatic approach tones can actually suggest a specific alternate tonality. Traditionally, we refer to diatonic notes or chord tones as being “inside” and chromatic approach tones as “outside,” These non-harmonic or “outside” tones must then be resolved to agree with the key center or chords. Coleman’s teaching suggested to me a completely different way of viewing non-harmonic tones as belonging to an alternate tonality. The traditional understanding of keys and chord functions still exists, but other tones are presented as valid alternatives to those structures. This not only opened up a completely different way of hearing and understanding Be-bop melodies, but also suggested many new possibilities for constructing my own.

After this discovery, I slowly began to integrate Coleman’s ideas into my own playing. I began to emphasize these non-harmonic tones by landing on them in strong rhythmic places in the bar, such as beat one or at the end of a phrase. Instead of using these pitches only as chromatic passing tones, I started playing a whole phrase in B major over the Bb tonal center. Up to this point, I had considered chromatic passing tones only as alternate routes to get from one chord tone to another inside the tonality, but now I had a musical way to think about using these sounds as the main point of the melodic phrase. I immediately started to come up with some interesting melodic patterns with this approach (see example 2). During this process, I gradually began to understand why Steve Coleman’s solos sound so other-worldly and yet familiar at the same time.

In this one-hour demonstration, I had been given the key to discover for myself these subtle, intricate harmonic and rhythmic relationships in all kinds of melodic structures. I learned two other things at that workshop: the first thing (which I kind of already knew) is that Steve Coleman is truly an original and accomplished player. Perhaps even more importantly however, I found out that he achieved this level of ability through deep and careful study of the past, and that his understanding is helping to suggest a future for the rest of us.

Left: Alto Saxophonist Steve Coleman. Read more about Steve by visiting
www.m-base.com/resume1b.html.