Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct

by David Sudnow

An ethnographer's account of his study of jazz-piano playing, which led to discoveries concerning the ways his hands learned about the keyboard and improvisation, sheds light on the nature and range of improvised conduct

Genres: Music

192 pages, Hardcover

First published February 23, 1978

Reviews

[Joe Milazzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine if Bill Evans or, better yet, Cecil Taylor had, after reading a slew of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION, set out to take ownership of those critical vocabularies by engaging in an exhaustive description of the postures, gestures and composures of spontaneous pianisms. (Also, Sudnow's is an early classic of what is now being advertised as the genre of "self-tracking", accomplished with analog tools -- chief among them, prose.)

[Norman Cotterell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This all started when I picked up a strange paperback in a book store in the early 80’s, and tried several times to read it. I found it to be a dense, frustrating, poorly written book. Eventually I got through it, reading it like Shakespeare — just going for the gist. I couldn’t get it. I couldn’t forget it. Eventually, somehow, I lost it.

Twenty years later wandering the stacks in a library, I found it again. Once again I picked it up. Once again, I thought Suds was on to something, or else just on something. Now, I found it to be a fascinating study, with words popping off the page as if in a Charlie Parker solo. It’s a jazz study masquerading as beat poetry masquerading as sociology masquerading as a jazz study. It’s a book not meant to be read, but heard. And preferably in Suds' own voice.

Well, that led me to Google his name and find his piano method.

Later on, I purchased the second re-written edition — where he often substitutes clarity for poetry. He described “Ways of the Hand” as a book on how NOT to learn jazz — focusing on particular scales and tone collections, breaking the discourse into particular jazz phonemes, into which one can build words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books.

His frustration with this led him to create his method, in which he takes a top down approach, breaking a sophisticated sound into something the “rest of us” can get our hands on.

In one of his forum posts, I believe he said that if he had to do it all over again, he would have just taken a solo, a piece, an improvisation, and taken each step phrase by phrase, until he got it into his hands.

What I loved about Suds was his rebellious spirit: Iconoclast, academic, humanist, populist, comedian. He was all of that. He even rebelled against his own rules, breaking them with the first chord of Misty. And he encouraged the same in his students. After defining his voicing rules, he provided 18 pages of material (at least) on how to violate them.

As for myself, I had little use for the dot diagrams in his method. But his fractional notation really spoke to my condition. I felt like an old tin pan alley arranger, experimenting with different ways to get out the sound. (Steven Sondheim uses similar notation; so did Bach) It’s a great deal of fun. And it will always be with me.

He never believed in playing by ear. He felt it to be a misnomer. He played by hand. Enormous hands. He spoke of developing piano player hands. And he titled his book “Ways of the Hand.” not “Ways of the Ear.” He just regarded the ear as the final arbiter, the judge of what stays and what goes.

It’s amazing. He denied that his method was a jazz course. I showed his voicing rules to my teacher, a jazz pro. He stated simply, “It’s Jazz.”

[Romann Weber · Rating 2 out of 5]

An inscrutably written, nearly inaccessible book about the creative art of improvisation. Read it only if you want to perform an exegesis of lines like this on nearly every page: "A rapidly paced entry into a way thus known could take it with a sure availability for a numerical articulational commitment, and with no prefigured digit counting. Its paceable availability, here and now, afforded securely paced entries whose soundfully targeted particular places would now be found in course, doing improvisation."

[Rachael Shipard · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most difficult book i have ever read…autoethnography and phenomenology doesnt have to be this hard

[Esma · Rating 3 out of 5]

My advisor recommended this book to me as a good example of/introduction to understanding the process of acquiring skills because I am very interested in handcrafts. I have to admit that Sudnow's writing tends to get very descriptive and inaccessible to the reader unless she is familiar with musical theory. However, what was really interesting for me in the book was the idea that the range of our vocal perception, what we can hear, is quite determined by whether we can produce that sound. There seems to be a affinity between advancing one's proficiency in music playing, and her heightened sensitivity to sounds, and indeed, whether she hears more or less. I think this applies to the perception of a lot of other things as well. When I started knitting, that pushed me into thinking more about how garments came together, how they emerge. My interest in producing them changed the way I looked at them, and eventually changed how much I saw: instead of a totality, I saw it as little, different stitches coming together in ways that enable the total to take the form that it has. Like Sudnow, the range of my vision have been expanded in proportion to what my hands could do. An important example Sudnow gives to illustrate this point is a comparison of the range of sounds he can hear as a jazz improvisor and the piano tuners who work with strings can. Depending on the manner of bodily engagement, the sounds that you work with become different: "Melody sounds are different sounds from the sounds of vibrating strings, which is to say that making melodies is a different enterprise than designing pianos, or tuning them, or teaching a course in physics."