Toward My Own Theory of Description: Cymbal Splashes

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (c.1897)

I’m still exploring types of sensory description. In my first post, I considered description of touch (“The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving”). In my second, I looked at description of smell (“About a month before Christmas, when the bakery began turning out its seasonal cookies, neighborhood breezes effloresced with cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger”). Today, I’ll consider description of sound. My example is from Whitney Balliett’s great “A Walk to the Park” (The New Yorker, May 18, 1968; included in his splendid 1971 collection Ecstasy at the Onion), a profile of the extraordinary jazz drummer Elvin Jones:

The first number, built around Jones’ wire brushes, was a fast version of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.” Farrell soloed on flute and Greene and Ware followed. Jones handles brushes the way a great chef handles a wire whisk, with fast, circular, loose-wristed motions. He began almost inaudibly, with polishing, sliding, ticking sounds on the snare, broken by silvery cymbal strokes. Slowly he rent this gentle flow with bass-drum beats and with jagged, irregular wire-brush strokes on the snare and the big tomtom. These were multiplied and intensified until it sounded as though he were using sticks, and the solo ended. It was a short, perfectly designed warmup. The group went into “Night in Tunisia.” It started in a high, intense fashion, and by the time Farrell had finished a ten-minute solo Jones had switched to sticks and Pookie’s was ballooning with sound. Then Jones took off. He began with heavy rimshots on the snare, which split notes and split them again, then broke into swaying, grandiose strokes on his ride cymbals, accompanied by lightning triplets and off-beat single-notes on the bass drum. Switching patterns, he moved his right hand between his big and small tomtoms in a faster and faster arc while his left hand roared through geometrical snare-drum figures and his high-hat rattled and shivered. He switched patterns again and settled down on his snare with sharp, flat strokes, spaced regularly and then irregularly. He varied this scheme incessantly, gradually bringing in bass-drum beats and big tomtom booms. Cymbals exploded like flushed birds. Jones had passed beyond a mere drum solo. He was playing with ear-splitting loudness, and what he was doing had become an enormous rolling ball of abstract sound, divorced from music, from reality, from flesh and bone. It trampled traditional order and replaced it with unknown order. It delighted the mind and hammered at the guts. Jones waded through his cymbals again and went into a deliberate, alternately running and limping fussilade between his snare and tomtoms that rose an inch or two higher in volume. Suddenly he was finished. Farrell played the theme and Jones slid into a long, downhill coda that was a variation on the close of his solo, paused, and came down with a crash on his cymbals and bass drum.

Wow! That’s one of the most bravura descriptions of jazz I’ve ever read (I almost said “heard”). That “Cymbals exploded like flushed birds” is inspired! There’s another passage earlier in the piece that’s equally as good:

Farrell started quietly on the blues and Jones set up light tic-tic tic-tic-tic tic tic-i-tic tic-tic strokes on the snare, followed by softer irregular strokes and a shaking roll. The high-hat jiggled unevenly up and down and the bass drum was quiet. Farrell grew more heated, and Jones began throwing in cymbal splashes, bass-drum accents, and complex, charging left-hand figures. His volume rose steadily, though it never eclipsed Farrell, and suddenly one realized that Jones’ quadruple-jointed rhythmic engine was in high gear. Pookie’s was rocking. At the end of Farrell’s solo, Jones abruptly dropped his volume to some sliding cymbal strokes which shimmered below the opening of the piano solo. Jones scuttled and rattled behind the piano. His snare-drum accents were light and loose, and the center of his efforts fell on the ride cymbal, on which he would run softly ahead of the beat, fall exaggeratedly behind then catch up and ride the beat before shooting ahead again. During Ware’s solo, Jones whispered along on the high-hat, dropped occasional bass-drum beats, and made Ware’s tone sound fat and assured. Farrell returned, exchanged some four-bar breaks with Jones, and the number ended with a shuddering rimshot. 

Note the profusion of mimetic verbs and verbal adjectives: “polishing,” “sliding,” “ticking,” “split,” “roared,” “rattled,” “shivered,” “exploded,” “trampled,” “hammered,” “waded,” “shaking,” “jiggled,” “charging,” “rocking,” “shimmered,” “scuttled,” “shooting,” “whispered.” These passages describe both the action of Jones’ drumming and its sound. They blend two types of description: sensory and kinetic. I’ll have more to say about kinetic description in later posts, but first I want to finish my discussion of sensory description. My next post will be on description of taste.