16 May 2008 :: unemployed and/or bored writers please take note: CMG is now hiring

Retconning


VII :: Be-Bop, Cool, & Hard Bop
Mark Abraham :: 4 March 2007 |            


As I’m sure readers have noticed, this column plays fast and loose with the “obscure” and “experimental” tags I sort of imposed at inception. In some cases, like here with pre-sixties jazz, that’s because the famous albums we all know about are famous for a reason. With bebop and its variants this is doubly so since a) most of the pre-sixties stuff came out of larger sessions that may or may not have resulted in an album — or, in many cases, an album was released retroactively — and jazz heads tend to refer to this stuff in terms of sessions more so than albums, and b) most of the great albums that do exist involve some combination of the same twenty or so famous musicians. And though I consider my knowledge of jazz competent, I’d hardly call it exhaustive. Instead of unveiling obscure curios, then, this month’s installment of Retconning is about situating landmark albums in a history of innovation. Because postwar jazz was created out of circumstance, economy, and Civil Rights, and the way these musicians responded to each is fascinating. Plus, let’s face it: even if you already really like Kind of Blue, you’ve always wished you had a sweet set of bullet points about it to impress people at parties, right? (Retconning takes no fault if anybody thinks you’re a lame-o for doing exactly that. Lame-o.)

Be-bop is the result of two shifts in jazz ideology that resulted from economic, political, and social shifts in postwar American culture. First, the practical shift: even by the fifties, when the Eisenhower administration widened the scope of the Social Security Act and the G.I. Bill to bolster a fluctuating postwar economy the results only really affected the white middle class. In an era where US citizens were beset with new cultural media in the form of television and the vast expansion of Hollywood industry — as well as white flight from the urban center — the dance halls and clubs that had facilitated big band jazz became economically unfeasible and the jazz bands themselves found it harder to get work. In response, younger jazz artists began to jam in small groups — many had already begun practicing that way before the war when their band leaders looked in askance on their less traditional solos — and as the music conducted within those private and public jam sessions became increasingly free-form and complex the small band format began to captivate jazz enthusiasts.

Second, the cultural and musical shift: playing in small clubs with no space for a dance floor refocused the audience’s place at a jazz concert. If audiences were meant to watch and experience, young musicians brought up on a diet of solo-based swing suddenly found even more reason to stand out for hungry jazz audiences. At the same time, young black musicians reacted favorably to the increasing unrest of African American Civil Rights leaders. Frustrated over continued segregation and, in 1945, still almost two decades away from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these musicians adapted more complex harmonic possibilities into a style that fore grounded substance over gratification. In essence, these young jazz musicians abandoned the celebratory gestures and crossover appeal of swing in favor of a new form of jazz that defied mainstream chart success (which, in 1945, meant success with a white, over-30 audience, and by 1955 meant a white, 15-30 demographic). And though overt identification with the Civil Rights Movement would not really occur until the late fifties (Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” [1949] notwithstanding), the musicians who most closely identified with the movement — Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins — were all intimately involved with the evolution of be-bop throughout the fifties. And, of course, it’s also worth noting that the white-owned labels that produced jazz music in the fifties weren’t exactly chomping at the bit to release black-identified politically conscious music.

However you want to drop textual analysis to determine how political this music is, what’s critical is that the black/white coalition of swing and ragtime that had developed in Harlem in the 1920s dissolved as jazz groups became increasingly insular and dynamic, focusing on the performance and personalities of the artists rather than the experience of a jazz hall dance. Be-bop and its variants became more cerebral than swing at the exact same time that the physical playing of be-bop artists became more spastic. In other words, as inchoate rock music was just beginning to grasp the imagination of American youth and challenge the assumptions of their parents, jazz was already forging a mainline directly into the heart and head of its adherents.




Charlie Parker (& Dizzy Gillespie) Bird and Diz (1950)

By 1945 Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were causing havoc in the jazz community, raising the ire of older jazz legends while captivating the minds of many other young players who would dominate the fifties including Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Coleman Hawkins. Had recording technology kept pace with their energy and racial tension not proved an obstacle for the reception of their work we might well have better documents of the five-year interval between be-bop’s emergence from the shadow of big-band mentality to this document, a curious piece that has been praised and criticized in equal measure. Parker apparently had an epiphany in the midst of a 1939 jam session; his explorative emphasis on 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths -- the extended intervals of a root chord progression -- would define early bebop sound. His compositions here -- and it’s a shame that none of Gillespie’s slightly more eccentric gems were used in these sessions, though the original pressings slated this as a Parker album and not, as the reissue suggests, a co-led piece -- all show off the basic elements of be-bop. Curly Russell’s quarter-note bass plucks rise and fall through the scales, Thelonious Monk’s piano chimes in at awkward angles to add edge or curve and the implied incidental chords that drive be-bop, and the two horn players indulge in rhythmic asymmetry and soaring arpeggios, Parker flitting through his trademark smooth undulating riffs and Gillespie all sharp tacks and jives. Buddy Rich’s drums sound the closest to swing (he receives the most flack from the critics), but he’s full-on swing soloing for the entirety of each track, collapsing rhythmic intervals on top of the solos and throwing them forward. Several innovations here: “An Oscar for Treadwell” redefines the popular Rhythm Change swing vamp on Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” for be-bop, contrasting Monk’s opening atonal piano riff with a furiously happy melody played by Gillespie and Parker in unity; “Mohawk” anchors both horn players at the same time that the rhythm section explores it’s own connectivity, Russell sometimes chasing his own tail and Rich employing the now-familiar but innovative technique of adding the color an absent orchestra couldn’t with incredibly deft cymbal work; “Bloomdido” is basically be-bop’s mission statement, galloping forward and backwards on top of itself but everything is tight as fuck. It's not a perfect mission statement; it's five years late; unearthed live recordings from 1945-1950 have shown Bird and Diz more on point; but this is the album that made be-bop a tenable studio project.



Sarah Vaughan (& Clifford Brown) Sarah Vaughan (1954)

The transition to be-bop was easier and harder on vocalists. Easier, since the music in part had to remain focused on tangible melody. Of course, I mean “melody” in this case, since Vaughan immediately fore grounds her allegiance to be-bop with opener “Lullabye of Birdland,” a scat-infused ode to the New York club that Parker had made famous. Vaughan, backed by Clifford Brown’s muted trumpet, acts as if the difference between scat and words doesn’t exist, switching back forth between the two, ranging over harmonic intervals with aplomb. Her ballads and up-tempo tracks both allow her to switch between clipped arpeggiated runs, harrowing -- although not quite Nina Simone harrowing -- swoops, and her gorgeous sense for delivery. “Embraceable You,” perhaps the best-known track on the album, puts her on the razor’s edge of timbre; the chords follow not-quite-atonal runs but the slow tempo forces her to hold long arched deliveries before sliding ever so slightly up the scale. This is the kind of shit people don’t do anymore thanks to Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera, but arguably this takes far more skill than the over-the-rush dynamics they espouse. But harder, because Vaughan liked it that way: her vocal skill allowed her to walk a fine line between be-bop and pop, and her voice walked many more, between feminine and masculine tone (she loved to indulge in those low growls), and between the morals of what was expected from and possible for white and black female artists on record. Consider: because Vaughan defied “race music” and defined a be-bop mode of pop jazz, because she sang like a man while she expressed female sexuality, and because she did more to bring be-bop to a wider audience than any of her male contemporaries -- more contentiously, more publicly, and therefore more at risk -- you can’t just think of this as a pretty jazz album. In the segregated fifties this was a fucking atom bomb.



Horace Silver Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers (1954/55)

A 1955 compilation of the group’s previous two 10-inch releases hastily re-assembled for the new 12-inch format, this album shows be-bop’s transition to hard bop, bolstered by the bass skills of Doug Watkins and the brilliant drums of Art Blakey. Hard bop tried to be more accessible to jazz audiences who found bop too cerebral and stoic at the same time that it reached out to soul, gospel, and blues and emphasized intense rhythmic dexterity. You can easily hear the difference: Silver’s piano gets its Ray Charles on during “Creepin’ In” and is total blues counterpoint on “To Whom It May Concern”; horn players Kenny Dorham and Hank Mobley have to remain incredibly focused to stay in step given the rhythm section’s penchant for outlandish tangents, best exemplified on “Room 608” and “Hippy”; be-bop tends to employ shifts through harmony but hard bop like this really focuses on dynamic interplay. In other words, new and far more proficient bassists and drummers like the two here and Charles Mingus and Max Roach refused to simply provide a backdrop for the soloists, and so hard bop saw the creation of a rhythmic approach to complement the harmonic advances of be-bop. While Silver gets billed as bandleader and his piano playing is incredibly vital throughout, it’s no secret that Blakey was a dominant force in the group. It’s interesting, though, to hear Blakey run rough-shod over Silver’s compositions (they’re good, though not so good as when Silver would really come into his own in the sixties); the tension this album exhibits is palpable, and while its influence is undermined by Silver's nominal status in this period, it's probably the most sheer fun of any of the albums on this list.



Charles Mingus Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956)

Wanna know why the heads like Mingus? Just listen to the intro of the opening title track, which anticipates artsy hard rock and metal. And then listen to the rest of the album, which anticipates krautrock, fusion, psychedelic, minimalism, and modern blues. I think most would say Mingus’s best album is Mingus Ah Um (1959); it’s gorgeous, but nothing is so fucking insanely revelatory as his work here, building on the overdubbed work of jazz experimenter Lennie Tristano’s Descent Into the Maelstrom (1953) without the overdubs, exploring jazz tone poetry, and linking the music to Civil Rights through obvious references to evolution and roots. The band is bluesy: Mal Waldron -- who would later become a popular free jazz musician -- switches between bluesy runs and thunderous piano chords; Jackie McLean and J. R. Montrose punctuate the music’s intervals and sound more like incidental soundscapes than soloists; and Willie Jones’s drums are just delicious, switching between bop drumming and Varesé-like scatology. “A Foggy Day” interrupts itself with found noise like whistles and car horns; the music sounds a ruddy glow where people keep bumping into each other because they can’t see. “Profile of Jackie” gives McLean ample opportunity to soar, but his playing is tethered by gorgeous counterpoint thanks to Montrose and Waldron. In the creases, Jones sounds like he’s playing drums on abandoned machinery. “Love Chant” plays on Mingus’s fondness for a melody that consumes the whole band; when the track breaks into the faster section and Mingus starts playing counterintuitive rhythm, it’s obvious that the melody that McLean and Montrose distend is just an umbrella for all sorts of other movement; when the band gets cute by following each other’s riffs “Row Your Boat”-style, Mingus’s genius is incredibly apparent: this is serious music, sure, but everybody is still laughing. “Love Chant” is maybe the only song ever I would actually call “tantalizing”; it perfectly captures a balance between giving and holding out, and even when it does finally surge into more traditional bop, those long passages are still implied and played underneath actual solos, humming in the background like the basic anatomy of music.



Sonny Rollins Saxophone Colossus (1956)

For those of you who read my review of Grindstone, thought I was crazy, and have finally just decided to shake your heads and say “that must be a Mark album,” here’s an easier introduction to the thing I find most exciting about musical possibility: Sonny Rollins plays it solemn and cute all over this album, and in doing so articulates a language that is far closer to how we actually think and speak and communicate as humans than music that tries to capture a specific mood. And I want to be careful here: Rollins is one of the primary victims of fifties and pre-Hendrix sixties (Hendrix being the victim) music crit that tied passionate, expressionistic playing directly to race. When I say “Sonny Rollins is the most articulate and expressive saxophone player ever” what I mean is simply that dude knows how to inject attitude into his playing, and when I say “attitude” I mean every attitude a human being could possess. Because Rollins upped the ante on soloing, moving from a simple who-can-play-fastest/hardest/bestest game to a broader question of elocution. The object suddenly had to mean something, and listening to Saxophone Colossus is like listening to somebody tell you awesome stories and not -- as was constantly iterated in the contemporary music press and Beat culture -- like listening to a possessed black man enslaved to communication through his instrument. It’s important to reject that notion, not just because it’s racist but because it tends to disguise the brilliance of what Rollins and his band are doing here. As they transition from a formal, academic style of be-bop into something meant for as broad an audience as possible they avoid the prewar problems of swing -- this ain’t just dance music; it's still highly confrontational. And, ultimately, this is the kind of jazz that we understand as “jazz” today; the culmination of bop as a style manifest through incredibly articulate and technically complex playing that is borrowing from blues, R&B, gospel, and soul, and yet still conforms to the basic tenants of bop: thick descriptive phrases, asymmetric but tonally erudite passages, and complex rhythmic interplay. “St. Thomas” is the most well-known track here, but all of them show just how brilliant Rollins was at coaxing the same performances from veteran pianist Tommy Flanagan and the wicked rhythmic combo of Doug Watkins and Max Roach (check out the opening drum section on “Blue 7”). But it’s the solos that work so well, here: Rollins is telling you shit, and it's shit that hurts, because that's what the fifties were like. Stand up and listen.



Thelonious Monk Monk's Music (1957)

The trickster of jazz, Monk opens an album titled to offer just his music with a traditional horn fanfare. Then he crams himself into that cart for the cover photo. To understand Monk, you have to understand his position in the jazz community, and there's only one way I can really describe it. Monk’s eccentricity has only ever really been copied successfully by Tom Waits; neither of them really play music that is that weird but are still seen that way (which isn’t really a critique; it’s just strange how both can be so uncompromising while still being so popular); both seem to be the perfect soundtrack for drinking; and both don’t give a fuck. Monk did it first, though, and right from the inside; he’s the Dennis Rodman of jazz, and Monk’s Music certainly cemented the idea. Employing both Coleman Hawkins and a young John Coltrane (the past and present of tenor saxophone), Gigi Gryce on alto, Art Blakey on drums, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Ray Copeland on trumpet, Monk exploited his expanded horn section to toy with odd harmonies and flesh out a few recycled compositions. Aside from the beautiful “Ruby, My Dear” -- essentially played as a Hawkins vehicle, and the rest of the brass sit out -- this is slinky, septet jazz that exploits a lot of the innovations of all the albums I’ve already discussed. “Well, You Needn’t” fluctuates between straight-forward be-bop and Monk’s fascination with weird tangents; “Off Minor (Take 5)” shows Blakey at his finest, warping the track across transitions between solos, and also some Italian mobster movie-style harmonies from the brass section; “Epistophy” gives Ware space to shine as makes subtle modifications to his tone which seems to place each solo in a different geography; and “Crepuscule with Nellie (Take 6)” is gorgeous slow jazz featuring wide horn harmonies over Monk’s weirdly staccato avant-blues riffs. This album is wickedly sweet and wickedly sour; every time you think you get it, the whole focus shifts. Which is precisely why Monk was so important to be-bop; while everybody else was interested in showing off their skill in the traditional fashion -- "how do I make this solo more complicated and fast?" -- Monk was already seeding the base for free jazz, Ornette Coleman, and Eric Dolphy by asking, "how do I make this sound weirder? No. Weirder than that, even."



Julius "Cannonball" Adderly Somethin' Else (1958)

Sort of hard bop, but mostly cool, the extent to which Miles Davis may have actually been in charge for this landmark record is highly disputed. What is clear is that this album continues Davis’ approach to jazz started with Birth of the Cool (1957; a compilation of the initial "cool" sides Davis had recorded in 1949 and 1950). It doesn’t really matter who was in charge, though; what matters is that Somethin’ Else is a lot of people’s favorite jazz album precisely because it sounds like an album, or, more correctly, that Somethin' Else is the template for albums as we understand them today. The band creates dynamic and tonal differences between the songs that move beyond the typical up-tempo/ballad distinction; the composition employs lovely hints of Latin and World sounds; but mostly each song is just so obviously different, like be-bop and cool had just finally reached a point where the chord backings for solos could be developed into entirely different geographies. Opener “Autumn Leaves” is all close-miked and intimate; Davis sounds for all the world as if he’s just blowing artsy tobacco rings at the microphone. Blakey’s been put on a leash here, but it doesn’t matter; his style is just as frenetic when he’s playing softly, it’s just embedded in the folds. Adderly is all curves compared to Davis’s chilled-out ‘tude. Sam Jones’s bass crawls beneath them and Hank Jone’s piano floats over top. The band than puts a light samba spin on Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” that completely changes the tone of the song. Davis is quietly coy as if he’s trying to play sexy; Adderly dispenses with the hesitance and he and Blakey wonk out all over the place. “Somethin’ Else” is a Davis tune; it’s played like one, adopting that track-long crescendo quality that Davis is famous for, starting at “intense” and slowly building from there. “One For Daddy-O” is all blues until Adderly injects it with a surf-song solo intro; he slides across the greasy backing like a figure skater; Davis takes another laid back solo, slowly climbing out of the wall of cymbal ambience Blakey airs the track with. “Dancing in the Dark” is all Adderly; he plays his trademark cyclic runs over a stilted backing beautifully. The album isn’t rocket science; take two incredibly distinct soloists and give them five distinct compositions and you get an album that is thoroughly cool and thoroughly accessible. Plus, "Autumn Leaves" is a great go-to track for hip ambience at dinner parties and weddings.



Milt Jackson & John Coltrane Bags & Trane (1959)

Vibraphones are awesome. I’m pretty sure that’s a statement of fact. And while Milt Jackson would go on to do free jazz-influenced work in the sixties and seventies (as would Coltrane) there’s something endlessly charming about his fifties be-bop work. This album is co-credited; the two young musicians shared leadership duties, and though Jackson composed three of the five songs (the other two being standard “Three Little Words” and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Bebop”) Coltrane’s emerging sensibilities can be heard everywhere. This is one of the last pure bop albums before jazz would branch out in several different directions, and like Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers it doesn’t break new ground as well as it synthesizes jazz to this point. “The Late, Late Blues” starts with a piano/drum riff courtesy of Hank Jones and Connie Kay that sounds like it was recorded in 1935 before Paul Jones’s bass and Jackson’s vibraphone lead it into more modern bop territory. When Coltrane takes his solo the rhythm section does this awesome breakdown where they only play the 1s and 3s. “Bags & Trane” is a melancholy, insular piece where the band climbs over one another with bluesy minimalism; the solos are neatly overzealous given the staid backing, creating a neurotic effect that propels the track forward. “Three Little Words” really shows off Jones’s skills; his intro spirals down into a quick up-tempo track that gives Coltrane an excuse to show off his ability to cross octave-intervals really quickly. Jackson plays with the same intensity, and both soloists keep hitting the tonic as if they’re pointing at us and saying, “y’know?” Their take on “Bebop,” though, is what really sells the album. The frantic pace and the orchestral feel the vibraphone gives the track push this be-bop into new territory, and Kay’s drums especially sound pre-ready for free jazz exploration. Using Gillespie’s mission statement to make a new one, these two young musicians set the stage for their ascendancy.



Miles Davis Kind of Blue (1959)

Should I say “poor Miles Davis”? This album is famous, and rightly so, but for none of the reasons Davis really wanted it to be. This was going to be Davis’s calling card; it was going to allow him to change jazz (possibly again). And then stupid Ornette Coleman released The Shape of Jazz to Come like a month later and everybody though that was way cooler.

If jazz had been built on the integration of Western and diatonic scales (for simplicity’s sake, the white and black keys on the piano), modal jazz, as Davis presented it on Kind of Blue, was supposed to abandon those scales and chords altogether. Instead, Davis trained his band to function through modes, creating a much wider palette for collective improvisation. Davis, however, still refused to play atonally (something he would only lightly dabble in even at his most obscure on In a Silent Way [1969] and Bitches Brew [1970]). But even if free jazz (and, not entirely coincidentally, the shift from Civil Rights to Black Power) would mute the impact of Kind of Blue, the album itself is a monster. Opener “So What” is probably one of the best-known jazz tracks ever; revolving around Bill Evan’s chiming piano chords built on perfect fourths mixed with a major third, the stately progression of the track runs over Paul Chamber’s devastating bass ingenuity. John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly are opposing forces, Coltrane always going down, Adderly always going up, both whirlpools to Davis’s blanching, dart-like notes. “Freddie Freeloader” replaces Bill Evans with Wynton Kelly to get more of a bluesy tone, but the piece is still anchored in complex chords from the opening horn harmony. Jimmy Cobb’s understated drumming on the gorgeous “Flamenco Sketches” leaves room for Evans and the horn trio to create waves of soloed ambience. And perhaps that’s why this album is so critically important; every track -- for entirely complex and absolutely boring mathematical reasons that I won’t get too much into, but, basically: this was the most complexly harmonic album that had been released to this point outside of avant-garde composition -- articulates the basic ideas of be-bop in an entirely different way. As a revolutionary album it’s masterful and dwarfs The Shape of Jazz to Come in execution, even if the style of free jazz would ultimately take over. But also, just how listenable is this thing? Davis always managed to temper his experimental impulses with a deep desire for popular consensus; never was he more successful than he was here, crafting a punch in the face with the grace of a dancer. Hee -- now that I think about it, it's just like West Side Story!



Betty Roché Lightly and Politely (1961)

I will say “poor Betty Roché.” Once-vocalist for Duke Ellington in the early forties, Roché had to wait until 1956 and then 1960 to record her own material -- three albums, of which this (for me) is the superior document. The reason for her late matriculation into the industry was the fact that Ellington hired her right before the 1942 recording band shut down recording sessions (the record industry was refusing to make music because radio stations were playing it for free. Or something. The record industry is fucking stupid.) Anyway, she was never recorded with Ellington, so she never gained prominence with the industry.

But she has some fucking voice. Like Sarah Vaughan, but with even more range, even more willingness to modify her tone. Listen to “Why Shouldn’t I?” She sounds like two different singers doing a duet. That song is the most strictly bop on the album, but even if the rest of the album is quite bluesy Roché’s voice sounds like a bop instrument, skirting tonality and fluctuating like Nina Simone but keeping that jazz sensibility fore grounded, all kinds of brief voice quivers that completely modify her tone and delivery at her disposal. Roché paved the way for women like Vaughan and Simone, if not prepping the industry for them, at least opening up jazz to this kind of awesome vocal dissidence in direct contrast to more melodic singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. It’s unfortunate that Roché was only finally able to record this stuff when Stax and Motown co-opted the vocal-based R&B market and be-bop vocalists were left behind. This is beautiful stuff, and while the instrumentation is a bit rote at times, Roché makes it worth it, dealing some of the finest vocals ever. So fine that the very first time I heard "Why Shouldn't I?", driving home from Halifax to Fredericton on the foggy, foggy road, but when the CBC launched up that track I swear I almost drove off the road. Lightly and Politely: not safe while driving.