The Story of the Band That Wrote a Hit Record on Live TV Within Minutes of Meeting Each Other

June 19, 1969. It’s the last night of the Montreux Jazz Festival, and The Les McCann Trio is taking the stage with two horn players–Eddie Harris and Bennie Bailey–who have never played with Les before.

Eddie and Bennie have had zero rehearsal time. They’ve never even heard the tunes they’re about to play in front of a packed house at The Montreux Casino, a free spins casino. Ella Fitzgerald is in the audience. Live TV cameras are rolling.

And the improvised group’s leader, Les McCann–the only guy who has any idea what songs they’re about to play–is stoned out of his mind.

Les smoked hashish for the first time about ten minutes ago, and he is wrecked because it was similar hashish to this Moroccan hash Canada produces for medical purposes. Hasish, these days, can also be procured from e-stores like BuyMyWeedOnline. These web stores tend to be generally well-stocked on a wide variety of strains like OG Kush kief, jet fuel or nepali hash.

Coming back to Les, he can barely understand where he is and what the hell is going on–but somehow he scrapes enough of his wits together to sit down at the piano.

He begins to play the first few measures of “Compared to What.” Eddie Harris and Benny Bailey are tasked with delivering solos on this song they’ve never heard.

Eddie positions himself next to Les so he can peek over Les’s shoulder, watching the stoned piano player’s hands. Luckily, Eddie was a piano player before he played sax, so he can figure out the chords of the songs by keeping an eye on where Les’s hands fall on the keys.

Benny, on the other hand, has to rely on Eddie’s help. As Les accompanies Benny’s solos, Eddie watches Les’s fingers and calls out the chords to Benny, who closes his eyes, listens, and plays using those chords to piece together his trumpet solos. In other words, Benny has no idea what the chords of the song are until they hit and Eddie shouts them.

Oh, and aside from being televised, the gig is also being recorded. Just in case something interesting happens.

Utterly unprepared players, huge live audience, and a bandleader stoned out of his gourd–this had all the makings of a very bad night for Benny, Les, and Eddie.

So how’d it go?

Well, as it turns out, the gig went so well that the live tapes were pressed as a live album, Swiss Movement, that sold millions of copies.

How’d they pull it off?

While you’re holed up in your practice room at night, racking your brain for melody ideas, jazz musicians in hundreds of cities worldwide take the stage and make up music on the spot. From thin air. Unrehearsed. Sometimes the players have never even met each other before they play as a group onstage–and they still manage to sound good. Once in a while, everything falls into place and they sound great.

How do they do it? It might be tempting to believe that jazz musicians are just more talented than the rest of us. But whatever a player’s natural talent and learning speed might be, here’s the reality: they all work hard to become that melodically fluent.

The Swiss Movement band’s formation may have been totally off-the-cuff, but each of those players was already expert long before they ever met one another. By 1969, the year Swiss Movement was released, trumpeter Benny Bailey had already cut six albums of his own. Sax player Eddie Harris had cut nineteen. And Les McCann had recorded twenty-six albums in his first decade of work.

And that’s just the music that these guys had actually recorded at that point. That doesn’t count their years of training, their thousands of live gigs, their regular practice routines–all the labor of learning piano or trumpet or saxophone inside and out.

In jazz, improvisation is the norm. Each of those players took the stage knowing that he had the skills necessary to survive an unrehearsed gig.

Jazz musicians practice improvising

On its face, this might not seem to make much sense. How exactly do you practice spontaneity?

The deveptively simple answer is: you practice improvisation by improvising. Jazz musicians go out every night in front of live audiences to concoct music on the spot. They’re used to having to use their ears, their instincts, and their knowledge of music to help them not only survive unfamiliar musical predicaments, but to thrive in them.

But although each performance is spontaneous, jazz players prepare themselves for such feats by training their ears, training their fingers, and deepening their understanding of music. Most jazz players can write and read sheet music fluently. They understand music theory inside and out; name any chord or scale and they can list every note that comprises it. They understand which scales sound good over which chords, and how to rhythmically mix the notes from those scales into melodies.

Over years of study and practice, the jazz player earns an incredible facility with her instrument. Play or sing a melody, and she can echo it back to you from her instrument immediately, even if she’s never heard that melody before now. The ability to hear or imagine any musical phrase and immediately play it on her instrument allows the jazz improviser to “catch” melodic ideas from the other players she’s playing with, echoing them. Introducing variations. Offering surprising new ideas of her own.

As you can imagine, if you put a band together that’s entirely comprised of such sensitive listeners and proficient musicians, amazing things can happen even if those players have never met.

Jazz musicians work within a framework

Here’s another reason why jazz performances sound so great despite being off-the-cuff: jazz musicians tend to work within a framework. Though much of what’s played onstage is spontaneous, that spontaneity is rooted in a context. Approaches may vary from group to group and tune to tune, but here’s a rough idea of what happens in a typical jazz performance:

First, there may be an intro of some sort. Maybe the rhythm section lays down a groove; maybe somebody lets off a brief solo.

Next, the whole group plays the chorus melody of a song. Drums and bass form the rhythmic backbone, and at least one guitar or piano strikes the chorus’s chords.

After playing the chorus melody once or twice through, usually somebody solos. The rest of the band backs up the soloist by playing the chorus’s chord progression (often with variations and chord substitutions; jazz players are creatively restless like that). The soloist improvises in reference to the original melody, perhaps altering the notes, the timing, the rhythms–sometimes wandering quite far away from the written tune or composing entirely new ones on the fly. Meanwhile, the whole band listens to what the soloist is doing and does everything possible to make her sound great and propel her forward.

At any given time the soloist may not know exactly what she’s going to play next, but she knows which chord the band is on now and knows which chords is coming next. She can trace any number of interesting paths from this chord to the next one. When you hear a jazz musician solo, you hear her thinking out loud about a musical topic–experimenting.

When the soloist’s time is up, the whole band plays the chorus melody again–and then it’s someone else’s turn to solo while the band backs him up.

So how does this all apply to songwriters?

What can songwriters learn from the mastery of jazz players? How can we reach a level of skill where melodies come to us just as easily as a spoken sentence of everyday conversation?

I’ve been able to isolate four points.

1. Study and train

Learn everything you can about how music is made–listen to many different styles; learn the techniques used in those styles. Study music theory to learn how scales and chords and chord progressions are constructed. Train your ears by singing musical intervals. Play those intervals on your instrument. Listen for them in music.

Learning these things takes focus, time, and patience. Musical fluency is worth every hour of time spent training, though–because it allows you to understand exactly what you’re doing when you write a melody, and gives you the skills you need to make intelligent experiments and variations.

Eddie Harris and Benny Bailey may not have ever heard those songs that they played on Swiss Movement, but they knew a hell of a lot about melody and harmony–enough to pull melodies right out of their hats.

2. Give yourself a context to work with.

Melodies don’t sprout easily from silence. Give yourself some kind of musical context to work within, just as jazz players like Les McCann and his bandmates base their improvisations on pre-written tunes.

Context can be as simple as strumming a chord progression as you feel out a vocal melody. It might mean having a top-notch band back you up as you solo. Or it might just mean jamming out to drum loops.

If you have piano skills, you can play chords with your left hand while you feel out melodies with your right. If you’re a guitarist, you can record yourself playing chords, then overdub improvised solos and vocal melodies.

The more musical situations you expose yourself to, the more likely you are to discover interesting new ideas. Go ahead–give yourself a framework, even if only to see what kind of outrageous freedoms you can pull off within that framework.

Conclusion

Composing brilliant melodies with any reliable frequency calls for focus and training. Jazz musicians spend years preparing so that they can walk onstage unprepared.

Whether or not you have any interest in playing jazz yourself, we can all learn something from the work ethic, the creative restlessness, and the adventurous spirit of jazz players like Les, Eddie, and Bennie. Working on technique may be hard work, but if it buys the kind of triumphant freedom that comes from walking onstage and pulling a masterpiece out of thin air, it’s more than worth the effort.

If you want to hear Swiss Movement for yourself (and you really really should), click here to buy it on Amazon.