A friend texted me to tell me that he was listening to a jazz show on public radio in Denver, and that they referenced an old blog post of mine about “Freedom Jazz Dance” by Eddie Harris. That was a pleasant surprise, and it made me want to go back to the post and freshen it up. So here are some new thoughts about what is arguably the weirdest jazz standard.
To be clear, there are many weirder jazz tunes than this, but not in the core repertoire. Also, “weird” does not mean “complex”. This tune is radical in its simplicity. In fact, it is so radically simple that usually when other people play it, they insert more structure into it. It illustrates the surprising fact that the simpler a tune is, the harder it can be for jazz musicians to improvise on it. We will get to this idea in more depth below.
In addition to Eddie Harris’ tenor saxophone, the track also features Ray Codrington on trumpet, along with a dazzling rhythm section: Cedar Walton on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums. Someone, I’m not sure who, also plays tambourine. The track begins with a very long intro, a cheerful rhythm section groove on a four-chord blues trope:
||: Bb7/D Cm7/Eb | C#°7/E Bb7/F :||
After the first time through, the first chord gets anticipated by a beat, so the loop looks more like this:
||: [gap] Cm7/Eb | C#°7/E Bb7/F Bb7/D :||
These chords continue in the same rhythm for the entire ten minutes of the recording. That is minimalist even by James Brown standards. This is definitely a groove and not a song in Anne Danielsen’s sense.
The melody, when it comes, is not minimalist at all. It’s eight bars of angular abstraction, stacks of fourths moving around chromatically. The pitches bear no apparent relationship to the underlying chords aside from starting and ending in Bb blues tonality. There are three segments to the melody: a two-bar call, a two-bar response, and a four-bar elaboration. This structure loosely evokes the twelve-bar blues, in shape if not in actual musical content. The last note, an abrupt jump to a higher-octave squawk, is followed by a two-bar drum break. Those ten bars repeat, and then there’s nine minutes of solos on the open-ended groove.
The rhythmic feel is nominally jazz swing, but in the first complete measure, Billy Higgins plays a snare hit on beat three that sounds like a backbeat in half time. Once you have 86 beats per minute in your head rather than 172, it’s easy to hear the whole thing as proto-funk. Eddie Harris and Ray Codrington play the head in almost perfectly straight eighths with crisp staccato articulation, which contrasts nicely against the rhythm section’s easygoing swing.
How do you improvise on a structureless groove like this? You’d think it would be easy. At the beginner level, if you just want to play something that sounds okay, it is easy. However, if you are more advanced and you want your solo to have a satisfying shape, you may struggle with the lack of constraints. You don’t have any guideposts telling you which notes to play when, what the boundaries of your lines are supposed to be. Even if you are the kind of improvisor who willfully plays past the boundaries of the form, that choice only has meaning because the formal boundaries exist. This is why my jazz friends tend to have an easier time navigating a dense and twisty set of changes than a harmonically static and open-ended groove.
Eddie Harris has no problem finding a shape for his solo. He starts off in a funky, bluesy style, with song-like phrasing. Over time, he starts bringing in more chromaticism, and his lines get longer and less predictable, but he never strays from his funk-oriented tone and rhythmic vocabulary. Even when he is at his most harmonically eccentric, the groove is always clear and present. Ray Codrington sticks closely to the blues for his solo. Cedar Walton plays blues interspersed with doubletime bebop runs, inventing a harmonic tension-release structure for himself to follow as he goes. Then the band plays the head out and ends on a button.
As befits such an eccentric yet popular song, Eddie Harris was an eccentric yet popular guy.
Harris had the first gold record in jazz, an arrangement of the theme from the movie Exodus. He invented several wind instruments and modifications to existing ones, and in 1975 he even released a standup comedy album, The Reason Why I’m Talkin’ S**t. He also had a major subconscious impact on me by writing most of the music on the Cosby Show.
“Freedom Jazz Dance” is not Eddie Harris’ only minimalist R&B-flavored composition. He also had a moderate hit with “Listen Here“, which is a Bb7 to Eb7 groove to infinity. Here’s a blistering live performance of “Listen Here” that ends with the “Freedom Jazz Dance” head. Check out Harris’ electronically modified saxophone.
In 1979, Eddie Harris recorded a solo version of “Freedom Jazz Dance”, literally: he recorded a piano track and then overdubbed saxophone on top.
My first exposure to “Freedom Jazz Dance” was not through Eddie Harris; I was introduced to it by Miles Davis on his devastatingly great album Miles Smiles.
This record features Ron Carter, the same bassist that played on the original Eddie Harris recording the year before. It also includes the rest of the Second Great Miles Davis Quintet: Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Herbie Hancock on piano, and Tony Williams on drums. They play “Freedom Jazz Dance” very differently from Eddie Harris. Tony Williams opens with a strange fast triplet feel on the drums, but once the tune gets underway, he moves back and forth between that and an almost hip-hop-like halftime funk feel. Miles and Wayne Shorter insert longer pauses between the phrases of the melody, and they phrase its ending differently. Herbie replaces the blues chords with a single repeated Bb7#11 chord. When Miles’ solo starts at 0:47: he comes in a beat early and the band quickly adjusts, retroactively making his entrance feel like a downbeat. Miles continues to disrupt the meter, freely adding and dropping beats as he feels like it, implicitly creating bars of 3/4 and 5/4 throughout his solo. He does it again at the head out.
If you are interested in Miles’ creative process, you can hear 23 minutes of his directing the band in the studio as they worked out how they would play “Freedom Jazz Dance.”
First Miles coaches Ron Carter on the bassline, suggesting that he play E diminished, maybe to fit the Bb7#11 Herbie is playing. Then he helps Herbie figure out where to drop chords, and tries out drum ideas with Tony Williams. At one point, he has Tony play rolls on wood blocks, which they agree sounds silly (“Put that in the trash.”) At 10:48, Miles complains to producer Teo Macero that the melody is too hard for him: “Teo, I can’t play that sh–.” Teo drily replies, “Yes you can.” It makes me feel better knowing that Miles struggled with the head! He isn’t the only one who finds the tune challenging, either. When he suggests the idea of snare drum triplets (“diddly diddly diddly”), Tony Williams says that he can’t play them fast enough. Miles suggests leaving off the first snare hit in each triplet, and that apparently does the trick.
This recording has been the subject of some scholarly analysis in the past few years. In his book Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention of Post Bop, Jeremy Yudkin says:
Tony Williams plays particularly imaginatively on this track. He snaps the high hat on every beat, leaving his hands free for rolls of irregular length, cymbal splashes, and cross rhythms. He changes color and feel for each soloist, while the constant light triplets on cymbal and snare add strongly to the overall sense of delicate intensity. Carter invents endless ways of directing his phrases, constructed mostly in two-measure lines to match the newly chiseled opening, down to the Bb pedal.
Davis’s solo is a model of his newly abstract style… He plays mostly in the middle range, using brief scalar patterns, repeated notes, and short irregular phrases, but the lapidary solo makes constant reference to the tune by means of significant melodic fragments. Davis manipulates the elements of the tune in a masterly manner. For instance, recognizing that the tune’s cell structure is a two-eighth-note pattern, he suspends two-eighth-note motives in the background wash of bass, drums, and sparse comping chords. He also dissects the tune into eighth-note patterns, or spreads out its components, or isolates the final punching note.
As always, Davis uses silence to great effect. The statistics are revealing. Out of 87 measures of this solo, the rests add up to about 38 measures, or about 44 percent. More revealing, of course, is a consideration of how, where, and why Davis uses silence. In general, he was a master of understatement and obliqueness, and saying less was his rhetorical method. Individual short phrases gain in meaning when they are isolated, and here every phrase counts, even those of two eighth notes. (In this case, the isolation of the phrases echoes Davis’s “compositional” separation of the tune’s originally crammed statements.) The silences create expectation and tension. The two-eighth-note motif may occur by itself, or it may be expanded into a longer phrase. It may appear at the beginning or the end of a measure, and it may or may not have a pickup. A melodic phrase may be a fragment of the tune, or it may be newly created. The silences allow these questions to remain in play throughout the solo (pp. 110-115).
Keith Waters also analyzes the tune in his book The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965-68.
Given the predominance of perfect fourths, the melody is an outgrowth of what Harris referred to as his “interverlistic” approach, described in his improvisation manual published in 1971… The single pedal point and the straight-eighth feel of the recorded performance provide two musical features that intersect with Davis’s later turn to fusion.
The insertion of bars of silence between the three phrases (turning the original 10-bar form into a 16-bar form) arises only in Take 6. And the shift to the underlying triplet subdivisions in the drums begins at Take 10. There is no discussion of improvisation on these tracks. Rather they contain an ever-evolving series of ways for working out specific identity roles for the rhythm section instruments, and for ironing out problems of executing the melody. These tracks belie comments that Miles Smiles “consists of previously unrehearsed music” and descriptions of Davis as a “one-take” player. Instead, in this instance they reflect a detailed, experimental, and ongoing concern with the final recorded product.
Since the composition relies on a single B♭ pedal point in the bass as the harmonic focus, there is no harmonic progression to generate chorus structure. And with the use of the single pedal point, the composition reflects the notion of modal jazz defined by static harmonic structures. Yet the use of mode/scales by the soloists is fluid, and considered differently by the three different soloists. Davis’s solo relies significantly on the B♭ dorian mode, interspersed with melodic paraphrase. Perhaps as a response to Davis’s final two-note phrase, which includes D natural, Shorter begins his solo with the pitches of B♭ mixolydian (mm. 1–10). The motivic correspondences in these opening ten measures come about through the opening pitches: each of these opening ideas initiate with the perfect fourth E♭4–A♭4. Characteristic, too, for Shorter is the role of motivic expansion. The opening two-note idea (mm. 1–2) expands at mm. 4–5, and expands further at mm. 6–8. Following a very loose paraphrase of the melody at mm. 11–15, Shorter then uses the pitches of the mode of F ascending melodic minor, emphasizing E natural, the ♯11 of the harmony. Hancock, in stark contrast, bases his accompaniment and solo on a mode of A♭ harmonic minor, as well as the octatonic (diminished scale) collection beginning with B♭–C♭. The opening measures to the piano solo use the pitches of the A♭ harmonic minor mode, and project the harmony of BMaj7♯5/B♭ (this same harmony features prominently in Hancock’s composition “Madness,” released on Nefertiti). By the ninth measure, Hancock now alters the collection to express the octatonic (diminished) scale (B♭, C♭, D♭, D, E, F, G, A♭).
The freedom—arising from very different modal interpretations of the B♭ pedal—gives rise to questions regarding musical organization and consistency. The disparity between the pitch choices of Hancock’s comping and those of the two horn soloists challenges some fundamental assumptions about the degree of accord between accompanist and soloist. This recording provides instead a wide degree of latitude, allowing for different simultaneous collections above the bass pedal point (pp. 169-172).
Miles’ recording has been sampled by a few hip-hop artists. You can hear fragments of the head and Wayne’s solo throughout “I Thought Ya Knew” by Ed OG and Da Bulldogs.
Fu-Schnickens uses the beginning of Miles’ solo in their Bugs-Bunny-referencing track “Creepin’ Up On Ya.”
The Pharcyde uses part of the head and the beginning of Miles’ solo along with lots of other jazz samples on “Pork”, the B side to the “Passin’ Me By” single.
Beyond Eddie Harris and Miles Davis, many more people have made interesting recordings of “Freedom Jazz Dance”. First, here’s Bobby McFerrin and Esperanza Spalding from the 2011 Grammy Awards.
There have been lots of big-band arrangements. I like Woody Herman’s maximalist take from 1973.
Joey Alexander adds some gospel-y chords and uses a nicely unhurried tempo in this 2015 in-studio performance.
When I think of freedom, jazz or dancing, my mind does not immediately go to the US Army, so why is the US Army Band’s 2014 recording so awesome?
Okay, but so why is the tune so catchy? Once I learned how to play it on guitar, I could not stop. I re-learned it while writing this and have been driving my kids nuts playing it over and over. I walk around humming it, too. I don’t think that music has to have any meaning beyond itself. “Freedom Jazz Dance” doesn’t have to symbolize anything beyond a groove bookended by a short, angular melody. Maybe it just symbolizes Eddie Harris’ good taste.
Just wanted to briefly say I really enjoyed this.