Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity (Ep. 211), May, 2024. The scope of the conversation:
Coleman Hughes believes we should strive to ignore race both in public policy and in our private lives. But when it comes to personal identity and expression, how feasible is this to achieve? And are there any other individual traits we should also seek to ignore?
Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a color-blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be ‘autism-blind’, and Coleman’s personal experience with lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman’s learned from J.J. Johnson, the hardest thing about performing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, what reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he’s learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, the Coleman Hughes production function, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and more.
I'm only part-way into the conversation, but I assume the whole thing is worthwhile as both interlocutors and interesting and intelligent. I was struck by remarks that Coleman made about J.J. Johnson:
COWEN: Now, before we get to your book, I have just some random questions for you. What have you learned from J.J. Johnson?
HUGHES: What is most interesting about J.J. Johnson is that he was an extreme perfectionist. What people don’t realize about J.J., at least people that aren’t deep connoisseurs, is that most of his solos on his records were prepared. To an extent, that is not true of his other contemporaries like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, etc. Most of their solos were truly improvised. Like if you go to the alternate takes on those records, it’s a different solo. If you go to J.J.’s alternate takes, it’s almost the same solo.
I think that, rather than be a bug, that was a feature of his success. Because if you consider the challenges required to make the trombone into a bebop instrument — which nobody thought was possible before J.J. Johnson did it — it’s a catch-22 because the level of perfectionism you would have had to have in order to be the first successful bebop trombone player would also preclude you from being a truly improvisatory musician, which is generally characteristic of jazz musicians.
COWEN: Are most of your trombone solos prepared?
HUGHES: No. But, in a way, I benefit —
This is why you can’t compare modern players to players of the past. I benefit enormously from having studied and learned all of, or many of, J.J. Johnson’s solos. There were things he had to invent that are now second nature to most trombonists, which make it easier to improvise in that style than it would have been for him.
COWEN: Physically, what’s the hardest thing about playing the trombone?
HUGHES: It’s actually not the slide. The slide, in my view — that’s what attracted me to the trombone, the fact that you push and pull rather than pressing buttons or valves, and that’s what makes it distinct. But the slide motion is not actually the trickiest thing about it. The trickiest thing about it is the same thing that’s tricky about every other brass instrument, which is the embouchure. That’s what separates great trumpet players from poor trumpet players.
In my view, the finger technique is not nearly the hardest part. It’s always the small muscles of the mouth and coordinating those to play the instrument effectively.
I'm curious about Coleman's statement about the embouchure being most difficult aspect of trombone playing rather than the slide. As a trumpet player I understand about the embouchure. However, Hughes makes that statement just after having discussed J.J. Johnson, where he points out that Johnson seems to have prepared his solos so meticulously that "most of his solos on his records were prepared. [...] If you go to J.J.’s alternate takes, it’s almost the same solo."
So, just what are "the challenges required to make the trombone into a bebop instrument"? I would have thought it had to do with the slide, not moving it back and forth, but rather getting clear articulation between notes at a very rapid clip – a requirement of bebop. When you're playing a valved instrument there's a break in the air stream between one pitch and the next, so it's easy to separate them – unless both notes have the same fingering, which happens often enough. That's not the case with trombone, where the airstream is uninterrupted. In order to play rapid bebop lines cleanly I have always assumed – I've never talked with a jazz trombonist about this – that it was necessary to introduce some kind of tongued articulation and that's what's difficult, the tonguing AND the coordination of the tonguing with both slide movement and embouchure changes. I just did a search on "jj johnson double tongue." If you look at what comes up, you'll see lots of mention of tonguing.
As for improvisation and jazz, I think that's tricky. Back in 2018 pianist Ethan Iverson interviewed Carla Bley. She talked of having met Louis Armstrong:
I, of course, revere him for the same reason as I revere Count Basie. Everything is perfect. Every note, all the phrasing, is perfect. He worked on it. He told me he didn’t have that ethic that the rest of the musicians have, always coming up with something new, never repeating themselves. He just worked on a solo until he had it, and that was really freeing for a person like me, used to writing everything down. I couldn’t really enjoy improvising.
Thus, it seems that when Armstrong performed, the solos he played are more like un-notated composition than "true" improvisation. Back in 1973 Joachim Berendt suggested, on the basis of recordings, that un-noted composition was common in the big band era (The Jazz Book, pp. 193, 132-33) and Gunther Schuller made similar observations (Swing, pp. 165, 173-176, 445, 481). Thus if you listen to various versions of “Take the A Train” that Duke Ellington recorded, you’ll hear Cootie Williams playing pretty much the same trumpet solo. Was he doing what Armstrong had done, playing the solo he liked, or was he simply playing what the fans obligated him to play because they wanted to hear what was on the record? As far as I know, the issue hasn't been properly investigated, though I haven’t looked into it in awhile.
Note: The stuff after JJ is from a blogpost: Some varieties of improvisation, from New Orleans, through bebop, to Cage, and to K-Pop.
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