I have often wondered about a solo driven style of jazz composition, where the solo is made first, then the accompaniment is built around it. This is something akin to reharmonization, or even what is done on TikTok, where one person sings a line and others add the backtrack to match the initial recording.
Letting the soloist to drive the composition adds a unique form of flexibility. If we think of a Charlie Parker solo, he often drifts into different keys, or stretches and compresses phrases, de-synchronizing with the band momentarily. But he always returns to the composition. It is fixed and the band will continue the form with or without him.
In early blues, many soloist would linger on passages, repeating or holding chords for several meters. They often played alone and were not concerned with following any form, so the accompaniment would wait for the voice to continue. This to me feels like a run-on sentence of sorts. But it isn’t automatically sloppy, in fact it often feels more natural.
Hear this from Lightnin’ Hopkins. The blues form cowers in fear of this man. At about the 2 minute mark, he start something that sounds very much like the typical 12 bar blues form, but he stretches it to 17 bars. The first section is the expected 4 bars, the second section is stretched to 9 bars, and the last section is the expected 4 bars. (I won’t even mention the 2 minutes that precede this part.)
I follow this from early blues. When I solo, the melody gets priority, and the accompaniment is along for the ride.
I wonder how this would sound in the context of a band. But there are practical concerns: How can a soloist signal to their band that they want to continue to the next chord? Or hold on a chord? Or substitute a chord all together?
It is inconceivable in a live context. What about practicing the solo with the band, so that alteration can be responded to properly? Or as with tiktok just record the solo and then have the band add their accompaniment after? All fine ways of doing it. And the solution I used amounts to just that.
If I give my solo recording to Suno, with the context of having played the main head in time without substitutions, it can build a band around my solo. This makes the solo driven composition possible. Suno takes my solo performance, with all the expansions and compression of meter, and builds the accompaniment around it.
This is the Suno generation:
There’s another layer of fun for me, because I have not played with a jazz band for several years, but I have been practicing new ways of soloing.
There is nothing revolutionary here, but I have been using George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept to build modified pentatonic scales, and Barry Harris’ methods of constructing runs on arbitrary scales.
For years I have had no clear indication that my method of soloing would work with a band. Not to mention that the composition starts with a heavily modified blues form, which I had no indication it would be identifiable as the 12 bar blues in the context of a band.
I played the Suno song for my friend, and he said there was no way I could solo that well. Then I played him the original piano recording, and he agreed: suno is not adding to (or taking away from) my ability to solo. I know how to improvise sensible melodic lines.
You be the judge.
This is my original piano recording: