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The World
of Jazz - Benny Green
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Contents |
1. Inroduction |
2. New Orleans |
3. Chicago
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4. The Pianists and The Blues |
5. Big Band |
6. Ellington |
7. The first generation
of vituosi |
8. The birth of ‘modernism’ |
9.
New frontiers |
10. The
1960s and beyond |
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Introduction |
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In
discussing jazz music, there is one overriding difficulty, which
is that nobody has ever defined it to anybody else's satisfaction.
But although jazz, like Hegel's beach, is neither land nor sea,
it is a very definite musical entity, and is perhaps the most
intriguing phenomenon with which the 20th century musicologist
has had to come to terms. The two words most frequently applied
to it are 'syncopation' and 'improvisation', each of which represents
only a half-truth. All jazz is syncopated music, but not all
syncopated music is jazz. Even more perversely, jazz is by very
definition an improvised music, and yet some of its most brilliant
and subtle performances have been achieved at least partly by
the stratagems of prearrangement.
If there is a factor common to all jazz performances, it
is that the musician is creating his own melodic variations
on a given melodic theme, these variations being based on
the underlying harmonies of the original material, the whole
being conceived against a background of rhythmic syncopation.
The student of jazz history can do no better than to concentrate
on the harmonic aspect of the music, for only then do the
The story of jazz is in fact a story of harmonic exploration.
Its greatest figures have been those adventurers who extended
the harmonic territory available to the jazz musician, although
it is wise to remember that so far as the history of harmonic
advance in music is concerned, jazz has, until very recently,
remained strictly within its own confines, so that what is
defined in jazz as 'modern' is only modern in the jazz sense.
Perhaps the most convincing demonstration of this vital fact
is found in the chord of the minor seventh, one of the characteristic
effects of the modern movement which transformed the face
of jazz in the 19405. Although the minor seventh chord was
virtually new to jazz, it was by no means an unfamiliar sound
to the world of music at large. As early as 1859, the Russian
novelist Turgenev describes one of his characters 'pausing
entranced over minor sevenths', and in I907, Maurice Ravel's
Introduction and Allegro opens with a comprehensive exposition
of the use of the chord precisely as it was later to be deployed
by the jazz musicians of the 1940s.
Jazz, then, has not only lived a curious existence isolated
from the main body of music, but has lived that existence
for no more than sixty or seventy years, which explains the
feverish haste which it has evolved from era to era. In those
seventy years, it has moved from the crudest primitivism to
the most hypersophisticated Neoclassicism; so baffling has
the overlapping of styles and generations become that it is
possible for a founding father of the music to share the same
concert stage with the most ferocious exponent of the avant-garde
of the 1960s. And it is only if the rapid progression from
style to style is observed in harmonic terms that the history
of jazz falls at once into a logical, indeed inevitable pattern. |
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New Orleans |
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The beginnings of the music are obscured by an impenetrable
fog, although it seems quite certain that the emancipation
of the African Americans after the American Civil War made
it inevitable that in time this oppressed minority, dumped
in an alien environment, would seek its own forms of artistic
self-expression. To the African American of Louisiana at the
turn of the century, music was an integral part of his life
and experience, and yet the conventional paths to musical
accomplishment were closed to him. Not only was it impossible
for him to attend a conservatory, or even more humble music
lessons, but very often even the conventional musical instruments
were beyond his grasp. For this reason much early jazz was
vocal, and it was only very gradually that its influence began
to stretch out from the church choirs where the seeds of its
later stylistic devices were sown.
New Orleans at that time is usually described by the cliche,
'melting pot of the nations' and, like all cliches, that particular
one is accurate enough. Old French, New American, Creole,
African American and Native American, all races and cultures
mingled, until gradually a new musical language arose from
the chaos. People there not only thought in terms of making
their own music, but also associated it with the mundane episodes
of daily life. There was music at weddings, funerals, christenings,
confirmations, picnics and birthdays, and because a great
deal of this music-making took place out of doors, the loudness
of a musician's tone became as important as the subtlety of
his ideas or the proficiency of his technical execution. For
this reason, bands were always led by trumpeters, and the
rivalry between them was intense. The figure who stands on
the border between legend and fact is the trumpeter Buddy
Bolden, who, around 1900, was the undisputed trumpet champion
of the city and, although no recordings of his work survive,
it is evident from eye-witness accounts that, with Bolden,
the convention of collective improvisation known as New Orleans
Style had already evolved.
The classic New Orleans style was based on the interplay
of three front-line instruments, trumpet (or cornet), trombone
and clarinet; the trumpet embellished the melody, the clarinet
contributing filigree effects above, and the trombone a bass
foundation below. There was little or no solo playing as the
modern student knows it. Integration of ensemble was everything,
and it was even felt in some quarters, and still is among
diehards, that solo extravagance stained the purity of a New
Orleans performance. Perhaps more to the point is the fact
that in Bolden's day individual techniques were so primitive
that to avoid long solos was an act of personal prudence rather
than of aesthetic morality.
It was evident that this classic style, which concentrated
exclusively on ensemble textures, was doomed the moment a
virtuoso appeared with the technique and imagination required
to produce long bravura passages. This virtuoso arrived in
the person of Louis Daniel Armstrong, born in New Orleans
in 1900, and a protege of Joe 'King' Oliver, Bolden's successor
as the trumpet champion of the bayou. As a teenager Armstrong
played second trumpet in Oliver's band, but by his early twenties
it was obvious that a whole new concept of jazz technique
was evolving. In the face of Armstrong's gathering virtuosity,
the New Orleans ensemble style, too restrictive to contain
the prolific music of an unquestioned genius, was soon to
split at the seams. But apart from the titanic proportions
of Armstrong's gift, there was another factor which helped
to kill off New Orleans as the center of the new music. In
I917 its notorious Red Light district, Storyville, whose bars
and brothels gave employment to hundreds of young jazz musicians,
was closed by order of the U.S. secretary of the navy, alarmed
by the regularity with which his sailors became involved in
incidents of violence and dissipation. As we shall see, this
was by no means the first time that a social or economic event
was to turn the course of jazz history.
With the closing down of New Orleans' Storyville, the first
watershed had arrived. Virtually expelled from his own city,
the New Orleans jazz musician had now either to turn inward
and restrict his music to the proportions of a local dialect,
or seek new audiences. Inevitably the music spread, and it
did so through two agencies, the northward migration of many
of the best players and the riverboats plying their way up
the
Mississippi from New Orleans to Memphis, St Louis and points
north. All the riverboats employed bands and their importance
as an evangelising agency can hardly be exaggerated. For many
young white men, the sound of a riverboat band, as the great
cumbersome vessels drifted into some small-town levee, was
their first experience of the new music. The white cornettist
Leon 'Bix' Beiderbecke, destined to make so profound an impact
on the jazz art, was only one of thousands of teenagers galvanized
by this experience.
The greatest of the New Orleans masters, King Oliver, soon
became one of the leading attractions of Chicago nightlife,
and it was not long before he sent to New Orleans for young
Armstrong to join him. From this point on, the future of jazz
as an international music was assured, although nobody suspected
it at the time. New York had seen a feeble white imitation
of the real thing as early as 1917 with the debut of the Original
Dixieland Jazz Band, the first group in history to make a
commercial jazz recording, but it was not till the supreme
art of men like Armstrong began to gather support that jazz
really began to move away from its origins. |
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Chicago |
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By 1927 the central base of the music had moved to Chicago.
Not surprisingly the jazz style which takes its name from
that city was a musical reflection of conditions in Chicago
at the time. A brash, coarse and excitable city enjoying its
dubious distinction as the capital of Al Capone's bootleg
empire, Chicago teemed with gin mills and speakeasies where
illegal liquor was consumed to an accompaniment of loud, aggressive
music. Chicago style was really no more than a modification
of the old New Orleans methods, a compromise between the ensemble
convention of the pioneers and the great age of solo virtuosity
soon to come. The Chicago groups, composed of fiery, extrovert
players who thrived in the brassy, violent environment of
the town, usually began and ended each tune with the ensemble
effect but filled in the middle with a string of solos, thus
following the precepts laid down by Armstrong in a monumental
series of recordings with groups he called The Hot Five and
The Hot Seven (1927-28). In these remarkable performances
Armstrong established once and for all the hegemony of the
individual virtuoso over the group, but unfortunately not
all who followed his example were able to shoulder the immense
responsibilities which solo freedom endows. Most of the Chicago
stars were white players whose talents varied from excellent
to mediocre, but none remotely approached the heroic stature
of Armstrong's music.
The three most interesting products of this school were the
clarinettist Benny Goodman, destined to alter the whole social
context of the music, Jack Teagarden, a Texas trombonist of
sublime melodiousness, and Bix Beiderbecke, perhaps the most
intriguing and romantic figure in jazz history. Beiderbecke
symbolizes the middle-class white American with a musical
aptitude, whose whole course of existence was changed through
exposure to the new African American art. Beiderbecke had
a harmonic sense which occurs perhaps once or twice in every
generation, and had it not been for the fortuitous confluence
of this aptitude and the sound of the new music, he would
no doubt have been one of thousands of musicians who enjoyed
a reasonably successful professional life without ever thinking
about jazz at all.
Beiderbecke enjoyed a brief and riotous career, beginning
in 1923 with a band of college boys called The Wolverines,
and ending in bathos with the pseudo- symphonic puerilities
of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. At his peak, around r927,
Beiderbecke, through the agency of an exquisite bell-like
tone, produced sequences of subtle phrases which made up in
introspective intensity what they lacked of the fire and passion
of an Armstrong. Bix was also a self-taught pianist and casual
composer, and his piano recordings of his own work remain
a testimony both to his own gifts and to the twin influences
of jazz and the concert hall, which he never resolved. He
died in 1931 at the age of twenty-eight.
Recordings of the period give an impression of white and
black musicians operating in hermetically sealed compartments,
but although a tacit color bar operated both on the bandstand
and in the recording studio, by the mutual admiration of Armstrong
and Beiderbecke. Towards the end of the decade Armstrong made
history with Knockin' a jug, the first jazz record to be created
by white and black musicians working together, Jack Teagarden
being among the players involved. |
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The pianists and the Blues |
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While the soloists were pursuing their quest for the subtler
solo based on more sophisticated harmonies, a parallel development
was taking place which was to have enormous influence in the
years that followed. The pianist Fletcher Henderson one of
the few pioneer jazzmen to have the advantage of an academic
musical education had been experimenting with the larger type
of jazz orchestra since 1923. His method was to hire outstanding
soloists, cushioning their playing with simply conceived,
written ensemble figures which might enhance the individual's
effectiveness. A few earlier men, especially the New Orleans
pianist-composer Ferdinand 'Jelly Roll' Morton, had been working
along similar lines with smaller groups, but with Henderson
the convention of sections of instruments within the frame
of the large orchestra was born. Today, naturally, much of
Henderson's scoring sounds crude, but his recordings retain
their interest through the superlative work of his soloists,
among them Louis Armstrong and the first of the tenor saxophone
virtuosi, Coleman Hawkins.
However, in retrospect, by far the most important single
event of the later 1920S was the arrival in New York from
Washington, D.C. of the pianist-bandleader-composer Edward
Kennedy 'Duke' Ellington. In his early New York days Ellington
aligned himself with the flourishing school of two-handed
pianists headed by James P. Johnson and Willie 'the Lion'
Smith. The playing of this school was characterized by the
towering rhythmic strength of the left hand and the ten-note
harmonies of the right. Johnson and Smith were undisputed
masters, but ironically the flower of their school was produced
by their two pupils, Ellington and Thomas 'Fats' Waller, both
of whom amended Johnson's 'stride' style to their own ends.
Within a few years of arriving in New York, Ellington was
destined to far outstrip orchestral experimenters like Henderson,
but for the moment he contented himself with a mere quintet
which grew by the end of the decade to exactly twice the size.Although
there is no question that Johnson was one of the most influential
as well as one of the most gifted of all the early jazz figures,
his style was soon to be superseded by a new piano approach
which laid down the precepts followed by jazz pianists to
this day. The man responsible for this revolution was Chicago
pianist Earl Hines who, through his work with Armstrong, conceived
the possibility of the pianist producing right-hand figures
consisting of single notes instead of Johnson's two-fisted
clusters. Because the lines which Hines produced could be
transposed on to any of the instruments able to play only
one note at a time, the new style became known as 'Trumpet-style
piano', and within a short time it was the Hines approach
rather than Johnson's which spread across the face of jazz.
The late 1920S also saw the maturing of perhaps the greatest
of all the authentic jazz singers, Bessie Smith, who specialized
in countless variations of the traditional twelve-bar blues,
singing lyrics whose earthiness and realism stand in stark
contrast to the sentimentality of Tin Pan Alley which superseded
the Smith repertoire in the 1930s. Bessie Smith interpreted
the folk poetry of the blues with incomparable power and pathos.
Her successors in the vocal field would find themselves deprived
of that poetry and faced instead with the mawkishness of the
conventional commercial love song.
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Big band |
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Throughout the burgeoning period of the late 1920S and early
I930S, jazz was tied economically to the prohibition laws
which had caused the mushrooming of thousands of illegal drinking
rooms, most of them employing a band, or at least a pianist
and a jazz-tinged cabaret. And just as the closing of Storyville
had brought about a radical amendment in the location of the
jazz center, so did the repeal of Prohibition become a prime
factor in the next great development in jazz history. It is
interesting to note that so far jazz had been more or less
the music of illegality, the background effect of the brothel
and the speakeasy. Now in the mid-1930s, it was to take the
first of its giant steps towards respectability, enjoying
in the process its first taste of genuine mass popularity,
and also a remarkably brilliant Golden Age of individual virtuosity,
when the art of constructing a solo evolved with amazing rapidity.
The area which jazz now invaded was the ballroom of the Roosevelt
era. The phenomenon was born of the touring Big Band, groups
of twelve or fourteen musicians, meticulously drilled to meet
the demands of strict-tempo dancers and ballroom managers
who required the balanced programming of different types of
dances. Although the jazz world hardly realized it, the age
of innocence was over. The carefree days of the small group
with its hit-or-miss approach were passing and, because the
technical demands of playing in an orchestral setting were
so severe, the jazz musician found himself equipped, for the
first time in the music's history, to sell himself in more
commercial markets. And most significant of all, the orchestrator
now came into his own.
In retrospect the era of the big bands is the most hysterical
and least comprehensible of any in jazz history. Orchestras
became as keenly supported as football teams, and their individual
stars as admired as boxing champions. Audiences were numbered
in thousands, Hollywood beckoned to the more successful bandleaders,
magazines conducted annual popularity polls evoking response
from people all over America. Police had sometimes to be called
out to control adoring crowds, and the profits soared into
five figures, then six, then seven. Jazz now enjoyed the questionable
prestige of its first millionaires.
What had happened was that the general public became aware
of the surface excitement of jazz. A new generation of college
students was delighted to find that the music it danced to
was also an emergent art. Benny Goodman, the Chicago clarinettist
who led the march into the ballrooms, later wrote that he
and his musicians were totally unprepared for anything like
the hysterical response they received. Goodman played for
dancing and saw that instead of shuffling round the floor
to his music, hundreds of the customers were crowding the
bandstand instead, watching with rowdy fascination the feats
of his drummer Gene Krupa, or his trumpet soloist Harry James,
or his own dazzling pyrotechnics. Others soon followed Goodman,
among them Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, a rival clarinet virtuoso
to Goodman called Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, James himself,
and literally hundreds of others. Eventually the big band
boom was to peter out, musically if not commercially, in the
decadence of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, which cultivated
felicity of dancing rhythms at the expense of the jazz content,
but for a long time it was the mastodons of the Swing Age
who produced music artistically ingenious as well as commercially
viable.
But it must be remembered that now that jazz was a saleable
commodity, non-musical considerations were bound to impinge.
Although it was Benny Goodman who was referred to as the King
of Swing, neither he nor his business rivals were representative
of the best in the big band art. Because of the curious tendency
to include pigmentation of skin as one of the relevant factors
in assessing artistic merit, the truly outstanding bands of
the 19305 were placed out of court in the dash for popularity.
The orchestras of men like Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford and
Chick Webb, although musically superior to those of Goodman
and company, were not eligible for appearances everywhere
m America, and so remained far behind in public acclaim. It
was the Basie band which included one of the greatest of all
sol masters, the saxophonist Lester Young, whose work as virtuoso
in this age of the great soloist was to have far reaching
consequences among the young men of the generation which followed
him.
Young's name is bracketed with that of Coleman Hawkins as
the man who gave his instrument complete coherence. Hawkins,
rescuing the saxophone from the status of a vaudeville joke,
had endowed the tenor with the full, rich sound of the romantic.
He favored a hot sensuous tone and a passionate stream of
arpeggios grouped together in a way which hinted at an instinctive
mastery of form. Young provided an alternative approach in
which the tone was distilled to a metallic honk, in which
selection of notes superseded a proliferation o notes, and
in which silence was used for the first time as a telling
weapon in the soloist's armory.
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Ellington |
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But a greater figure than even Young or Hawkins, and leader
of an orchestra far greater than Basie's or Goodman's, was
Duke Ellington. By the late 1930S, Ellington's mastery of
orchestral textures had 'dowered to the point where his work
was no longer in the same category as anyone else's in jazz.
Unlike all other jazz orchestral writers, Ellington wrote
not for grouped instruments, but for the individuals who played
those instruments, so that the number of different effects
he could achieve with a simple c major chord was limited only
by the number of permutations he could command in a band of
fifteen men. Ellington represents the greatest paradox of
all for those people who believe that all authentic jazz must
be improvised. A truer definition seen in the light of Ellington's
prolific achievements, would seem to be that all authentic
jazz need not be improvised, but must at any rate create the
illusion of improvisation.
Ellington's development as orchestrator and composer has
been of profound significance, because it alone refutes the
otherwise justifiable claim that jazz music, although it can
express deep emotions, is strictly limited in the breadth
of its sensibilities. Through the agency of orchestral mastery,
interpreted by outstanding soloists, Ellington has contrived
vastly to extend the area in which jazz can operate with any
validity, producing since the 1940s a whole range of extended
works running concurrent with his more conventional exercises.
These extended works, ranging from a series of Shakespearean
vignettes (Such Sweet Thunder, 1957) to paraphrases of Grieg
and Tchaikovsky (1959Ä60) have passed the acid test of
remaining faithful to the original programmatic intent without
sacrificing the animation and vitality of jazz.
Ellington apart, the musicians of the pre-war years, whether
working inside the framework of the big bands or devoting
their time to small-group work, were busily involved in the
task of assimilating all the harmonic possibilities of the
diatonic system. That is to say, whatever they played, there
was implicit in every performance a home key, a key center,
so that the harmonic conception of each essay in improvisation
was strictly conventional in the I8thÄcentury sense.
There was to come a time when the limitations of the diatonic
approach appeared repressive, but this was only because throughout
the 19305 the great soloists plumbed so thoroughly all the
diatonic possibilities. It is doubtful whether jazz had ever
known before, or ever will again, such a proliferation of
brilliant individual talents, ranging through every instrument
from trumpet to string bass, and even incorporating one or
two new ones, like the vibraphone and the electric guitar.
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The first generation of virtuosi |
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While Young and Hawkins between them extended the possibilities
of the tenor saxophone and unwittingly created a tradition
which has endured to this day Ellington's Johnny Hodges was
perfecting an elegiac, rhapsodic style on the alto saxophone
whose reverse was the dandified elegance of his rival Benny
Carter. Although Louis Armstrong had by now succumbed to the
fleshpots of Hollywood, and his influence as a developing
musician was on the wane, his effectiveness as a player remained
enormous. The younger school was represented by the pyrotechnics
of Roy Eldridge, the muted ferocity of Cootie Williams, the
swaggering romanticism of Bunny Berigan and the quiet felicities
of Buck Clayton. Jack Teagarden remained the classical trombonist,
and while Thomas 'Fats' Waller became the sunset master of
the now all but discredited stride school, disciples of Earl
Hines' trumpet-style piano like Teddy Wilson were attaining
a degree of technical proficiency which would have astonished
the founding fathers of jazz. Belonging to no category and
transcending them all was the solo pianist Art Tatum, a blind
virtuoso whose technical command was so staggering that he
was able to decorate his work with rococo flourishes so complex
that even today the debate goes on as to his qualifications
as a purely jazz artist. With the big bands came the day of
the drummer-showman, symbolized by the frenetic Gene Krupa;
while Ellington's string bassist Jimmy Blanton provided the
first
proof that the string bass could be a solo instrument as
well as a harmonic pulse in the rhythm section.
Perhaps the two greatest figures of this era were the singer
who came at the beginning of it and the electric guitarist
who symbolizes its close. Billie Holiday, daughter of an itinerant
guitarist who had once played in the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra,
may be said in one sense to have transcended even the achievements
of Bessie Smith. Where Bessie Smith had utilized the genuine
poetry of an ancient folk tradition, Billie Holiday had only
the depressing pap of the commercial songwriting business
at her hand. It is one of the miracles of jazz that, restricted
in this way, she should have produced so many recorded masterpieces.
It has been said that while Bessie Smith interpreted the poetry
of the blues, Billie Holiday had to create her own, and on
the evidence of her recorded small-group work, and particularly
her exquisite duets with Lester Young, it is doubtful whether
her equal will ever be heard.
If she represented the flower of the old diatonic thinking,
then the guitarist Charlie Christian stands for its imminent
dissolution. Christian was an unknown Mid-West musician who
burst suddenly into the ranks of the Benny Goodman band, eclipsing
not only all the other musicians in the group, but also every
guitarist in jazz. Using an instrument amplified by electric
power, Christian overnight transformed the guitar from a rhythm
to a front-line instrument as powerful and as exciting as
any trumpet or saxophone. But by the time of his advent, in
1939, the diatonic era was already drawing to a close. Men
like Hawkins, Young and Carter had extended that system to
its limits, and the new wave of players, which included Christian
(he died in 1942 in his early twenties), having digested all
that the old masters could offer, once again began to chafe
at the restrictions of a convention whose widest possibilities
had already been explored.
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The birth of 'modernism' |
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The introduction of conscription in the United States in
1 942 dealt the big band boom its death blow, and this accident,
combined with the effect of revolutionary thinkers like Christian,
was to change the face of jazz so dramatically that within
a few years diehards would be denying that the new music was
jazz at all. Christian is a vitally significant figure in
the emergence of the new modernism, not because he played
a very dominant part, but because he is the sole figure who
could be said to link the diatonic and modern ages of jazz,
the one instrumentalist of great stature to bestride the two
eras. His partners in the experimentalism of the 19405, Bebop
as it was then called, were all strange young men with unfamiliar
names, whose acceptance was to be a protracted and harrowing
affair for all concerned.
Assessment of the new modernism of the 19405 is always made
difficult by the fact that its outstanding figure, the alto
saxophonist Charlie Parker, was the greatest improvising genius
since Louis Armstrong and would unquestionably have excelled
himself no matter which era he had been born into. A staggering
technician with a tone of wild beauty, Parker's great achievement
was to resolve the deep complexities of his harmonic thought
into melodic patterns of the most ravishing beauty. Where
his early partner in the modern revolution, the trumpeter
Dizzy Gillespie, was a shrewd and calculating musician with
a professional grasp of harmony, Parker was much more the
instinctive jazzman able to improvise on any theme, from the
most sophisticated ballads to the basic blues formula. Several
of his blues recordings, Now's The Time, Billie's Bounce,
Parker's Mood, Chi Chi and dozens of others, rank among the
finest versions in the entire jazz repertoire.
The Parker-Gillespie generation, by grasping the nettle of
chromatic harmony, at one blow increased the size of the jazz
musician's harmonic vocabulary tenfold. The dream of Bix Beiderbecke,
that one day the jazzman would have at his disposal the complete
harmonic palette used by the formal composer, had come true.
But at a terrible price. Even the most indifferent layman
can listen to a performance by anyone from Armstrong to Christian
and recognize in it the same language with which he has been
made familiar since birth, by lullabies, by nursery rhymes,
by national anthems, and the rest of the daily diet of music
to which Western man is exposed. But the new musicians, almost
as interested in the thought processes of Debussy and Bartok
as in those of any of their jazz predecessors, divorced the
music once and for all from the mass ear. From here on jazz
was to be a musician's music, its harmonic conventions so
convoluted that it became increasingly difficult for the untrained
ear to distinguish the justified neologism from the unjustified
solecism.
What was most surprising of all about the new chromatic jazz
was the incredible speed with which its implications were
grasped by the younger musicians. Instead of a long period
of digestion, by the mid-l950s musicians were once again showing
impatience at the restrictions of the new harmony. Only this
time the dilemma was a far more baffling one. The old diatonic
player had at least chromaticism to look forward to. What
was the chromatic thinker to do, now that disenchantment had
set in once again ? The modern movement in jazz gradually
evolved into a campaign to free the soloist once and for all
from the tyranny of discord and resolution, to win what one
or two of its younger theorists called 'freedom', by which
they appear to have meant anarchy.
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New frontiers |
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The break away from the conventions of harmonic structure
was not sudden but slow and steady. One of the key figures
in the early days of this movement was the trumpeter Miles
Davis, an exquisite soloist whose introspective melancholia
introduced a new mood into the jazz context. In a highly significant
album, Kind of Blue, Davis probed the possibilities of improvising
on a modal instead of a harmonic base, with the soloist guided
not by chords but by scales. But even this revolutionary step
did not endow the soloist with his hypothetical freedom. The
great break was made around the end of the 19505 by the saxophonist
Ornette Coleman who explained that a musician must be free
to create any sound at any given time, and then produce quartet
recordings to prove his intense seriousness about his theory.
The great paradox which has outfaced the attempt' by Coleman
and the avant-gardists who followed him to create coherent
jazz that was yet utterly free (Coleman's music has been referred
to as 'free form') is that although jazz is the one musical
art which glorifies the individual performer, it is by its
very nature a communal enterprise, so that the moment any
two jazzmen come together, they either have to agree on some
prearranged pattern, or drift into chaos. Coleman's dialectics
would be more to the point if he and his followers were each
satisfied to play alone in a room.
Another attempt to find a way out of the impasse has been
the quite different movement to integrate the vitality and
stylistic devices of jazz with the formal conventions of concert
music. This has taken several forms, from the austere Europeanisation
of jazz by the pianist John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet,
to the use of flamboyant Afro-Cuban rhythms and textures by
Dizzy Gillespie, the experiments in arcane time signatures
by Dave Brubeck, and the 'third stream' movement involving
the brass player Gunther Schuller and the trombonist Bill
Russo. So far the wedding has been barren. Lewis, in attempting
to refine the coarsenesses of the jazz muse, has thrown out
the baby with the bath water; Gillespie's rhythmic eccentricities
are really the old modernism hiding behind a battery of percussive
exotica; while Brubeck's thumping platitudes, when seen in
the light of the grace of Tatum or Hines, are reduced to very
minor proportions.
Third stream experiments have shown so far that after all
the soloist, happy or not with the old-fashioned business
of resolving his discords, sounds more effective inside the
frame of a jazz unit than in the ranks of a classical orchestra.
To what extent the instrumental mannerisms of jazz will eventually
influence the classical composer remains to be seen, but there
is no question that the modern orchestral writer will ignore
the innovations of jazz at his own peril. From the jazz standpoint
there are parallel dangers. Evidence so far suggests that,
in his attempts to merge with the main stream of Western orchestral
music, the jazzman is exposing himself to the possibility
of losing the one property of his art which justifies its
existence, its vigor. The jazz soloist is, after all, an impromptu
composer, and the degree to which he can subordinate this
talent to the notes on the printed sheet is problematical.
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The I960s and beyond |
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In the meantime the influence of jazz continues to grow.
In the 19605 there is no film score entirely free of its presence.
Indeed, a few jazz figures, among them Ellington, Miles Davis
and John Lewis, have already composed full film scores of
their own with a considerable degree of success. Television
commercials, popular music, operetta, musical comedy, all
now bear the stamp of the jazz influence, and it is extremely
doubtful whether in fifty years time any composer of music
in the world will be considered to know his craft without
at least an elementary grasp of the processes of making jazz.
However, the most serious question currently faced by the
jazz world concerns its very existence. Jazz is based on the
principles of improvisation on a given harmonic base. Already
the jazz musician, frustrated by the limitations of harmony,
is rejecting this convention and in the process of destroying
the frame which has lent coherence to his art in the past.
It may well be that jazz music is, after all, a finite art,
that all practical possibilities have now been exhausted,
that the intrepid explorer, having crossed a whole continent
of harmonic thought, has finally reached the sea. But if no
new styles seem imminent, the jazz follower of the 19605 can
at least console himself with two thoughts; first, that jazz
has always proved in the past to be an utterly unpredictable
form, and second, that masters of all styles coexist today
in an atmosphere of healthy exchange. As to the unpredictability
of jazz developments, the history of the music contains too
much proof to be denied. Who could have predicted that a contemporary
of Louis Armstrong, the soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet,
would emigrate in old age to Paris and there enjoy a new career
of such staggering brilliance that those who never saw him
in the flesh could not credit the fact that he was a septuagenarian?
Who could have predicted that jazz, an essentially Black American
art form, would find in the music of a Basque gypsy called
Django Reinhardt some of its finest moments, or that Reinhardt
would reverse the order of things and cause American guitarists
to copy him?
Above all, who could have known that jazz, the art of the
improviser, would achieve its apotheosis in the work of Duke
Ellington, a musician who for fifty years has been committing
jazz to manuscript without impaling its vitality on the end
of his pen-nib? Posterity may well come to acknowledge that
Ellington, who started out as a primitive stride pianist,
ranks among the great orchestral innovators of 20thÄcentury
music, and that his jazz label is irrelevant.
Jazz is now an eclectic affair. Stan Getz, a stylistic descendant
of Lester Young, co-exists with Sonny Rollins, a saxophonist
whose work shows jazz extended as far as it can go without
abandoning entirely the harmonic frame. The pianist Oscar
Peterson has developed the findings of Earl Hines to the very
highest point of sophistication, while Parker's old contemporary
Thelonious Monk, with his fetish for jagged dissonance, has
contrived to preserve much of the primitive fire of the early
pianists. That it is still possible for the young player to
achieve originality of style without either pillaging the
works of the past or throwing formal discipline out of the
window is proved by the young vibraphonist Gary Burton, perhaps
the strongest candidate for greatness among the new generation.
What is quite certain is that whether the future of jazz lies
in the wedding with formal music, or in its reckless pursuit
of free form, there can be no turning back. One of the essential
acts of the harmonic explorer is that he burns all his bridges.
The jazz musician today is a hypersophisticated animal, versed
in every harmonic subtlety. Whether he has left himself any
fresh fields to conquer remains to be seen.
Larousse Encyclopedia of Music
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