A part doesn’t necessarily stand for the whole.
I was just watching an interview (quite an old interview) with Pat Metheny and he was talking about the importance of studying the form before you can be a good improviser, or to have the ability to play a good part. For example, a bass player has to understand the harmony to a large degree because it’s foundational. If you’re going to build a building you have to understand the geology to understand what the engineering will require. That’s what a bass player and a drummer do. But I think a lot of players want to be writers and they want to have their part be the piece in itself: their part would stand for the whole — a synecdoche. But on the lower levels of music, there’s not much you can do with decoration and you have a narrow range of possibilities. Still, you can play with ranges, leaving notes out or displacing notes, but harmony and rhythm are more difficult to play with because they weaken the foundation. (In a bass part, try inverting every chord throughout the piece and you’ll hear that it sounds adrift). Jazz is different because you can play around with tension and not have to resolve it to achieve that feeling of being adrift. But pop music is square (ironically). You can’t waver too much or it can drift into jazz — or it can drift into classical in the sense that it is more of a counterpoint. Where bass and guitar work well is if the ranges are interlocked such that they weave in and out of each other, and can stand alone as interesting interplay without something having to be defined with a root. The ear knows when it needs one, and could be a way to use tessitura (“heart of the range”).
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It’s interesting how people want to solo over everything — even diatonic changes in simple pop songs. If a pop song did a have solo section (a rarity in 2024 — or ever since the 1980s) it would be for 4 or 8 bars, not 4 minutes in a jazz tune. Even in jazz, the soloist shouldn’t be standing for the whole. It’s not that it’s just the solo — it’s a horizontal aspect of music supported by vertical elements. I think that was the problem sometimes with Jaco: he thought that he was the music and could play all the parts on the bass: the harmonics would be the comping Rhodes part, or rapid staccato lines would be a conga or percussion part. Of course, they are imitations, but if those instruments are already there, why duplicate them? Jaco’s best playing was when he was supportive and he was certainly capable of doing that especially early on — on Bright Size Life for example, or his work on Joni Mitchell’s records. She wanted him precisely because she wanted to get away from purely foundational approaches, and it worked very well in his playing on Shadows and Light, and he was given the spotlight on some of the songs, sometimes stealing it (supposedly on Dry Cleaner From Des Moines). He often thought he was the music, but that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. He was truly a rebel and innovator, and I guess one couldn’t do that if one didn’t want to dominate the music, or want to stand for the whole.
