Caveat emptor - I am not, nor have ever claimed to be, a jazz aficionado; I have simply responded to a request from Rob and Sadds to assist on kicking off the thread. They are the thread's Mr & Mrs Hart, I'm just Max, in fact I might only be Freeway but let's not worry about that.
Jazz
A basement night club, cigarette smoke spirals through the spotlight mimicking the spiralling improvisation of a sunglasses clad saxophonist. A cliché that’s a small part of a much bigger story of incredible talents, rivalries, schisms, revivals and players who regularly reinvent themselves; action and reaction as ideas, styles and players compete for pre-eminence. It’s called “America’s classical music” for a reason.
Origins
More racially integrated than most of the south, 1860’s New Orleans saw a fusion of diverse types of music, from early blues (with its African American work song origins) to church spirituals, brass marches, European classicalism and immigrant music, particularly that of the Sicilian community. Local ensembles used military band instruments, left in pawn shops after the Civil War, to create the archetype of the New Orleans brass band leading the funeral parade, and playing at picnics and fish fries too.
By the 1900s a further ingredient of this musical melting pot had emerged. Piano and banjo based, Ragtime wasn’t jazz, but its players would be instrumental in its creation. Engaging syncopated rhythms (and sheet music availability) made Ragtime popular in parlours and barrooms. Jelly Roll Morton moved things towards jazz in the 1910’s and claimed to have “invented” Jass/Jas, as it was initially called. That claim is too big a reach (with that honour probably going to the never recorded King Buddy Bolden), but his
‘Jelly Roll Blues’ was one of the earliest songs where you can hear an evolution from pure ragtime into something else; looser, more improvised and blues tinged.
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Scott Joplin (left) was the King of ragtime, but Jelly Roll Morton (right) became the jazz innovator.
Traditional Jazz
By the end of the 1910’s, a fusion of Ragtime’s syncopation, New Orleans brass influences and the Blues, resulted in jazz’s first style: Dixieland (also called Trad or Hot).
It took off sufficiently that by 1919 The Original Dixieland Jazz Band were touring the UK and by 1925 a young Louis Armstrong had progressed from riverboat bands and was pioneering a new format: the charismatic soloist accompanied by a small ensemble.
'Hotter than Hot' recorded with his ‘Hot Five’ ensemble, clearly illustrates that ‘hotness’ in comparison to Jelly Roll’s music.
(Top) The Original Dixieland Jazz Band headed to London and
(bottom) a fresh-faced Louis Armstrong headed to Chicago
Trad would continue to be played to this day (including a UK focused revival decades later) but it would also become the first style to experience being ‘overtaken’ by jazz’s tireless innovation. Even as Armstrong pioneered his ensemble format, the next waves were readying themselves to swallow up the stage and him too.
Chicago, New York & Kansas
New Orleans ceded control to New York and Chicago as new styles emerged. In Chicago the saxophone and clarinet now played a bigger part and instruments like the tuba and to a degree trombone lost out, as the upright bass replaced them at the bottom end. In NY, ‘Harlem Stride’ was about duelling virtuoso piano players and gave us Fats Waller and Art Tatum and a young up and comer called Duke Ellington.
Creating the space for solo improvisation whilst still fitting into the short duration of the new ‘78’ recording format required some simplification. Artists developed the ‘standard’ structure of much jazz (theme, theme, solo, revisit theme) but Ellington achieved what most couldn’t (then and now) by writing three-minute bangers without compromising on the sophistication of the song structure,
'Take The A Train', one of his orchestra’s signature songs, being an example.
A young Duke Ellington, who would still be a force to be reckoned with well into the 1960s
Meanwhile Kansas was attracting the likes of William “The Count” Basie and also helping to lay the foundations that would fuel the explosion of jazz in both the US and Europe: Big Bands & Swing.
Big Bands & Swing
Americans had long danced to European polkas and waltzes, but they were about to get their own dances to accompany the music they were creating. Big bands with larger formats emerged in the 1920’s and by the 1930 the sound was evolving beyond traditional 4/4 and the Swing Era was born. Bassists like Walter Page started to play on all four beats rather than the traditional two and the ‘walking bassline’ we know today was born. Count Basie brought together Page and other greats like Lester Young and Hershel Evans on sax and typified the swing approach with songs like
'Swinging the Blues'.
Count Basie (piano) with Walter Page on Bass, and Evans and Young on Tenor Sax.
Lester Young was of the first great multi-instrumentalists in jazz.
When Benny Goodman, clarinettist, band-leader and the ‘King of Swing’ tipped jazz over into the mainstream in the mid 30’s, it became in effect the first form of pop music. Goodman was also an interracial pioneer. For what was historically Black music, many white folks appeared in the big band era. Early cultural appropriation or the pioneering of multi-racial harmony in a still highly segregated country?
Either way, giants like Duke Ellington came to the fore in part through working with white artists like Irving Mills. Mills, like Goodman and many others, was Jewish. Jazz was music by ‘outsiders’ but increasingly loved by people who might otherwise treat them with suspicion or disdain.
Modern, multi-racial, swinging and filling dancefloors, the big band sound was the music of the day, surely the pattern for jazz was settled? But heading to the 1940s, things were about to change for both the world and jazz.
Bebop
Born in the shadow of WW2, 'Bebop' was the beginning of ‘modern jazz’. Complicated, frenzied times with the world on the edge became mirrored in frenetic, complicated sounding music that was also on the edge.
Charlie “Yard Bird” Parker and John "Dizzy" Gillespie – about to upset the apple cart.
The Bebop pioneers disliked how commercialised and ‘safe’ jazz had become. Seemingly saying, “here’s some complex chord progressions and 180bpm...go try and dance to that then!”; it revolutionised the consumption and intellectualisation of jazz. Feet on the dancefloor was no longer the measure of success; invention, improvisation and virtuosity were king. Though earlier players like pianist Art Tatum were virtuosos, the Beboppers like saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie took things to a different level and in a new direction. It’s no exaggeration to say it was a schism, Louis Armstrong disparagingly called Bebop ‘Chinese music’ In later years, UK traditionalists would unfurl a banner in Birmingham aimed at Bruce Turner reading ‘Go Home Dirty Bopper’.
I was lucky enough to see Gillespie in the flesh, but you can’t ignore Parker, so I’ve chosen the famous '
Salt Peanuts', a Gillespie track led here by Bird.
As we’ve mentioned the war; the Nazi’s, like most authoritarians, hated and feared jazz, denouncing its freedom and creativity and despising it’s creators. So, we’ll shoehorn in a jazz guitar great; after the banning of the Marseilles in occupied France, Django Reinhardt’s ‘
Nuages’ became an unofficial Resistance anthem.
Cool/West Coast Jazz and the Hardbop 'backlash'
Bebop seemed to have overturned the old order; but then the war ended, and the world exhaled a bit as did jazz in the form of “Cool”. Slowing things down, it focused on the flow of the melody rather than rhythmic complexity. There were still bebop elements, but Cool Jazz also revisited the 1920’s, big bands and players like Bix Beiderbecke for a lighter touch and tone. Maybe Bebop had been a failed revolutionary flash in the pan? Not so.
No sooner had Cool Jazz become prominent when, in the 1950’s “Hardbop” emerged with a return to faster tempos. Born of Bebop but this time the tempos were a bit slower with a more soulful and melodic focus than its parent, a harbinger of some later forms of soul. Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane were key exponents, but consensus says if you want to understand Hardbop, listen to drummer Art Blakley’s album Moanin’, so our playlist track is '
Drum Thunder Suite.'
However, Cool, and its sibling West Coast Jazz, weren’t banished by the arrival of Hardbop; they simply coexisted with a less dominant profile for a while. It would remain influential and just before our 1960 cut off, the Dave Brubeck Quartet recorded '
Time Out', a sleeper hit that remains a Cool/WC standard to this day.
Vocal Jazz
Before we complete this journey at its logical end, there’s an elephant in the room: where are the women?
Despite pioneers like Alice Coltrane playing piano in her husband’s band, women’s role in pre-60’s jazz tends to be 'relegated' to jazz vocalists. Sarah Vaughn was technically stronger than Billie Holliday, but “Lady Day” was more soulful. Ella Fitzgerald combined the best of both worlds and as we’ve not yet mentioned George Gershwin, who fused jazz with classical and other music forms, our next track is Fitzgerald singing
'Summertime' from Porgy and Bess. I've seemingly ignored one of the great jazz voices, Frank Sinatra; a great swing singer with supernatural phrasing ability. He will however appear at a later point.
Ella Fitzgerald, given the honorific ‘The Queen of Jazz’.
Heading back to our timeline and the 60s, there’s only one way/person to finish this introduction.
Miles goes Modal
Hugely influential before and after our 1960 cut off, Miles Davis is a one-man history of post war jazz and its genres. Starting in Bebop working for Charlie Parker, he next helped create Cool jazz. He then became a Hardbop disciple but embodying the restlessness of jazz he was keen to experiment and move on. Like others, he decided the increasingly complex chord changes of Bebop/Hardbop were a creative dead end that had begun to hamper his improvisations.
Which leads him and us to ‘modal jazz.’ Modal rejected the ‘strict’ chord progression foundations of Bebop/Hardbop in favour of exploring more freely within a scale (or mode) hence the name. After experimenting a bit, Davis fully embraced this style on the perfect album to finish this summary. It’s our ending but for many their first introduction to jazz.
Released in 1959 and often topping the lists of greatest jazz albums,
"Kind of Blue" was Davis’s first full exploration of modal jazz, recorded with John Coltrane, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, and Bill Evans (think Cruyff captaining Pele, Zidane and Bell). Completed over two days with no rehearsals, Davis explained the proposed structure of the songs and off they went. Forty-six minutes of improvisation once again resetting the template for jazz. It’s what many think of when they picture that smoky nightclub. Elegance personified, no matter what goes on around him, Davies never sounds hurried and it’s always about the melody.
L-R: Evans, Davis, Adderley and Coltrane – about as good as it gets.
Davis would continue to push the boundaries, he was so focused on future exploration that he would dismiss of Kind of Blue in later life; which shows even geniuses can be prone to silliness. Doubtless we’ll cover other, post ‘59, great jazz albums in the thread journey, but Kind of Blue is rightly lauded as a classic, from which I’ve selected
‘So What.’
Apologies
In this flawed attempt to sum up jazz, I’ve not even mentioned guitar greats like Charlie Christian or Wes Montgomery, or great jazz pianists like Erroll Garner (of ’Misty’ fame). No Mingus or Monk is ridiculous too; nor British greats like Dankworth, Scott and Lyttleton. Giuffre, Getz, Baker, Peterson, the list goes on. You could write a whole post on Sidney Bechet, another pioneer of the soloist format. I’ve ignored things like the intersection of Bossa nova and jazz and only touched on the defining element of improvisation and how it differentiates jazz. Hopefully, others will pick up on these artists and other points.
Hugely influential, full of tradition and rules but regularly ripping those rules up. Highly structured music that sounds like it’s just freewheeling. Quintessentially American but loved around the world. Often intellectualised but still ultimately about the ‘feeling’. Maybe the best way to sum Jazz up is…
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jazz.fm
