The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

Blue Note, the label most responsible for promoting the style, refused to be limited by their customers’ preconceived notions about the so-called “Blue Note sound”: during this decade, the label released iconoclastic projects such as Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch, and Ornette Coleman’s Love Call. Most listeners would have had trouble linking these

Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure, Bobby Hutcherson’s Dialogue, and Jackie McLean’s Let Freedom Ring were anything but drab repetitions of old hard-bop formulas.

Andrew Hill’s 1960s recordings for Blue Note. Few fans did so at the time—and it is testimony

The bassist’s 1954 Jazzical Moods, for example, reveals a cerebral and restrained Mingus very much at odds with the hot-blooded extrovert of a few years later.

Mingus, as documented by a number of outstanding projects, including Pithecanthropus Erectus from 1956, Tijuana Moods, East Coasting, and The Clown from 1957, and Blues and Roots and Mingus Ah Um from 1959.

“Pussy Cat Dues” and “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” from Mingus Ah Um

Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. “What Love,” an early Mingus composition revived during this period—in part because Dolphy noted its similarity to Ornette Coleman’s work—exhibits the bassist engaging in intricate free-form dialogues with Dolphy’s bass clarinet.

Mingus’s recordings for the Impulse label in the early 1960s continued to find him in top form. His 1963 The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady stands out as his strongest and most structured extended piece.

Mingus Moves, Cumbia & Jazz Fusion, and the two volumes of Changes. Mingus’s compositional skills continued to shine in diverse works, ranging from the constantly shifting “Sue’s Changes” to the unabashedly traditional swing ballad “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love.” Three or Four Shades of Blue from 1977 found Mingus joined

Hancock made his first album as a leader, Takin’ Off for the Blue Note label. Although this release featured Hancock’s funk composition “Watermelon Man,” destined to become a crossover hit, the project gave only the barest hints of the flair and cogency the pianist would manifest with the Davis band, as well as on three superb later Blue Note recordings: Maiden Voyage, Empyrean Isles, and Speak Like a Child.

By the time of Filles de Kilimanjaro, recorded during June and September 1968, the multilayered textures of the earlier quintet releases were increasingly replaced by more insistent ground rhythms. With In a Silent Way from the following February, the change was all but complete. The band’s sound now tended toward uncomplicated patterns reminiscent of the dance and soul music of the day. The harmonies were often static. To cement this change, Davis was enlisting the skills of a wider range of musicians, including keyboardists Joe Zawinul and Chick Corea, guitarist John McLaughlin, and bassist Dave Holland. Within a few months, the last fading elements of the mid-1960s band were purged in favor of the more overtly rock-oriented approach celebrated in Bitches Brew. This release, lamented by many of Davis’s older fans, would attract a younger audience to his music and earn the trumpeter the first gold record of his career.

It is impossible to comprehend the free jazz movement of these same years without understanding how it fed upon this powerful cultural shift in American society. Its practitioners advocated much more than freedom from harmonic structures or compositional forms—although that too was an essential part of their vision of jazz. Many of them saw their music as inherently political. They believed that they could, indeed must, choose between participating in the existing structures—in society, in the entertainment industry, in the jazz world—or rebelling against them. The aesthetic could no longer be isolated from these cultural currents. In the overheated Marxist rhetoric that increasingly found its way into mainstream political debate during those days, even a “pure” art such as music was ultimately part of a superstructure of social institutions and events that was delineated and determined by economic realities and, ultimately, class values. “Pure” music? One was advised that such abstractions were, at best, an idle delusion, at worst a conscious deception.

From a purely musical point of view, freedom or atonality in jazz music had appeared many years before Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor raised it to a decisive issue. Lennie Tristano had experimented with free techniques in a series of pieces—“Intuition,” “Digression,” “Descent into the Maelstrom”—some of them dating back to the late 1940s. Bob Graettinger’s writings for the Stan Kenton band, most notably his 1948 magnum opus City of Glass, were uncompromising works that defied the conventions of existing jazz harmonic and melodic techniques, as was Jimmy Giuffre’s 1953 recording of “Fugue.” Contemporary classical composers were also attempting to use jazz instrumentation to explore avant-garde techniques, as in Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto (1946) or Milton Babbitt’s All Set (1957). Sensing the potential of these various trends, Gunther Schuller—who had composed Atonal Studies for Jazz in 1948 and, at the start of the 1950s, was playing with Miles Davis’s nonet and composing twelve-tone-row works—coined the term Third Stream in 1957 to describe a merging of the most promising and progressive currents in jazz and contemporary classical music.

Paul Bley, the pianist and nominal leader of the Hillcrest band, would stay with Coleman for only a short while but would make his own mark on free jazz in later years. In a series of seminal recordings—Footloose, Mr. Joy, The Floater Syndrome, Open, to Love—Bley demonstrated a masterful conception of solo and combo playing, distinguished by a rare sensitivity to space and time, tone and texture.

Something Else! The Music of Ornette Coleman. Pianist Walter Norris described to me, in a 1990 interview, the peculiar preparations for the unconventional session: “We rehearsed two or three times a week for about six months leading up to the recording. A number of times we rehearsed at my house. I would take a paper and pen and make notes about the compositions and about what we were supposed to be doing. But the funny thing was that at every rehearsal Ornette would change what we had done the last time. He would change the structure of the song or where the rubato was. And then when we finally showed up for the record date, he changed everything again.”

Earlier that same year, two follow-up recordings had been taped by different labels within a few weeks of each other: Tomorrow Is the Question (on Contemporary) and The Shape of Jazz to Come (on Atlantic). The Atlantic release stood out as an especially important statement of the new music. For the first time, Coleman was able to record using his working quartet of Cherry, Haden, and Higgins. The breadth of their music was striking, ranging from the almost unbearably poignant “Lonely Woman” to the forceful “Congeniality” and the moody “Peace.”

The A&M release Dancing in Your Head revealed how far Coleman had come since Free Jazz.

Coleman recorded little after this point, but his 2006 release Sound Grammar was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music, only the second time a jazz artist had received that honor. Cecil Taylor, whose

Unit Structures, recorded for Blue Note in May, stands as a landmark performance for Taylor, a full flowering of the promise shown on “Air” and “Cell Walk for Celeste.” Conquistador, from this same period, is less well known, but an equally impressive statement of the pianist’s mature style.

In the final analysis, Unit Structures ranks with Coleman’s Free Jazz, Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, and Coltrane’s Ascension as defining statements of the free jazz movement as it matured in the early 1960s.

Other solo outings—Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within), Fly, Fly, Fly, Fly, Fly, Indent—rounded out this picture of the keyboardist as human howitzer.

Witches and Devils, Ayler’s February 1964 quartet date, showed how completely the tenorist had broken away from the customary jazz vocabulary.

The ensuing trio recording Spiritual Unity, which featured Ayler alongside Murray and Peacock, was a major statement, the most cohesive ensemble project the saxophonist had undertaken to date.

His 1968 release New Grass must rank among the strangest jazz albums of the decade, with its attempt to mix freedom music and formulas from the commercial hits of the day. Here Ayler’s untempered saxophony is backed by a hard-grooving rhythm section that includes funkmeister drummer Bernard Purdie, and is overwhelmed by a team of sassy if undistinguished Motown-ish singers.

Metheny’s most impressive achievements in the fusion idiom have been a series of genre-crossing recordings— Still Life (Talking) from 1987, Letter from Home from 1989, and Secret Story from 1992—that incorporate advanced jazz compositional techniques with pop-rock and Brazilian elements. These are highly original projects that sound deceptively simple, yet include some of the most sophisticated jazz writing of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Rapper Guru (born Keith Edward Elam in 1966) collaborated with a number of seasoned jazz artists in crafting an appealing hybrid of hip-hop and jazz for a series of albums released under the name Jazzmatazz.

the M-Base Collective, a group of young New York players that included Greg Osby, Steve Coleman, and Cassandra Wilson, was taking a different approach to revitalizing funk-oriented playing in the jazz world. The M-Base crew articulated an ardent defense of the virtues of mixing jazz and popular dance-based idioms, meanwhile concocting a complex type of groove music, with a less stereotyped sense of time and a greater openness to shades of dissonance.

Medeski Martin and Wood,

Jarrett made only one record with Blakey, the vibrant Buttercorn Lady release, but the twenty-year-old pianist’s solos on “Secret Love” and “My Romance” were enough to generate excitement in the jazz world.

Jarrett’s career gained rapid momentum after his departure from Davis in 1971. He initiated his ECM relationship with a duet recording with DeJohnette and an extraordinary solo piano release, Facing You. The latter marked a compelling departure from the conventions of mainstream jazz piano, delineating an orchestral two-handed approach that revealed Jarrett’s novel, integrated concept of harmony, rhythmic momentum, and melodic phrasing, perhaps demonstrated most notably on the ten-minute composition “In Front.” Jarrett’s 1973 masterpiece Solo Concerts: Bremen and Lausanne built on these same elements in two titanic improvised performances, three hours of inspired keyboard music. Jarrett’s follow-up Köln Concert may have lacked the depth of Facing You and Bremen, but it attracted a large nonjazz audience with its sparse, simple harmonies and flowing melodic lines. The record quickly sold over one million copies and spurred a rash of imitators. It is only a slight exaggeration to claim that the burgeoning market for New Age music grew out of the influence of the opening twenty minutes of this recording, a mostly diatonic improvisation built primarily over a simple two-chord progression. But Jarrett quickly moved on to other projects, leaving it to other, far lesser talents to build on the commercial potential of this quasi-minimalist approach.

Perhaps the biggest surprise here was the depth of Jarrett’s commitment to the old songs. The Standards Trio would continue to be a major focal point for the pianist in later decades, representing a rare anchoring point in a career that, in earlier years, had been mercurial and unpredictable. This embrace of the tradition, however, extended beyond the jazz world, as demonstrated by Jarrett’s exploration of the classical music repertoire. While other jazz musicians had dabbled with classical

Vibraphonist Gary Burton, who had anticipated the jazz-rock fusion movement with his 1967 recording Duster, fostered a more pristine, chamber-music ambiance

bassist Dave Holland, originally from Britain but a U.S. resident for most of his career. Holland’s releases stand out for their vital, cliché-free music making, evident whether he was recording as a solo bassist (as on Emerald Tears from 1977), serving as a member of a progressive jazz collective (as on his recordings with the Circle quartet from the early 1970s), or leading small combos and big bands. In the combo setting, Holland has compiled an impressive body of work over the course of four decades, as documented on projects such as the Conference of the Birds release from 1972, Jumpin’ In from 1983, Dream of the Elders from 1995, and Prime Directive from 2000. The core virtues of Holland’s music include its tight, metrically advanced arrangements, a transparent contrapuntal sound (typically accentuated by the absence of piano or guitar), and a disavowal of the familiar or hackneyed. Even when trying his hand at leading a big band, as Holland has occasionally attempted in the new millennium, he somehow manages to cut through the weightiness—of both the the format and its attendant tradition—in forging the same pellucid sound and nimbleness associated with his small combo works.

Pass’s 1973 solo recording Virtuoso attracted attention for the guitarist’s speed of

joe pass

Carmen McRae and Betty Carter, who had first recorded as leaders in the 1950s,

Sheila Jordan

“J Mood,” for example, is a twelve-bar blues, but the main melody employs twelve very unusual bars: the meter changes with virtually each one, completing a total of thirty-six beats broken down (according to this writer’s ears) in the pattern 4/2/1/3/3/4/1/4/4/3/4/3. “Phryzzinian Man” from Black Codes takes a similar circuitous route, starting with a bar-length pattern of 4/4/2/4/4/2/3/2/4/4/4/4. The band returns to straight 4/4 during the solos—which is something of a letdown after the intriguing melody statements—however, the ambitions of the compositions showed the direction in which Marsalis was now moving. The trumpeter’s next two recordings, Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. 1 and Live at Blues Alley, delivered on the promises of these previous projects and remain the most impressive examples of modernist combo playing in Marsalis’s oeuvre.

On the first, Marsalis Standard Time, the band is at its finest pitch, incorporating the experimental metrics of J Mood into the heady motion of jam-session jousting: on “A Foggy Day” Marsalis superimposes 6/8, 12/8, 5/4, and other meters onto the song’s basic foundation; during part of “Autumn Leaves” the band changes meter every bar; “Caravan” is masterfully reworked, once again with virtuosic cross-rhythms. Much credit was due to Marsalis’s rhythm section for this tour de force. Pianist Marcus Roberts stood out as an advanced structural thinker in the mold of Monk, Tristano, and Hancock and clearly delighted in pushing and prodding Marsalis, who in turn showed how far his phrasing had grown since his first recordings. Jeff “Tain” Watts and Robert Hurst, on drums and bass respectively, also proved to be facile at these games in running time, but equally skilled in maintaining the drive and swing of the music.

Live at Blues Alley moved in this same direction, but with even greater intensity. This recording features the most aggressive solos of the trumpeter’s career. The rhythm section plays at fever pitch for long stretches. The music moves confidently from modal to chordal structures and into different conceptions of time, but with a fiery, unrelenting undercurrent. On the whole, these two releases represent Marsalis’s most successful and fully realized attempt to expand the vocabulary of combo playing set out in the Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Ornette Coleman recordings from the 1960s. Yet at the peak of this forward-looking

In retrospect, we can see that the resulting album, The Majesty of the Blues, initiated a new period in Marsalis’s career. In some respects, the new style marked an extension of earlier concerns—one notes the shifting meters of the deceptively simple-sounding “Hickory Dickory Dock”— but in other ways, Marsalis was moving dramatically away from his previous practices. The trumpeter who, as a teenager, had amazed audiences with his pure, clean tone was now exploring the “dirtier” approach favored by prebop jazz musicians, increasingly distorting his sound with a mute. Instead of living up to his early reputation as the “next Clifford Brown” or his midcareer tag as the bandleader who would build on Miles’s work from the 1960s, Marsalis now seemed intent on reviving the aesthetic of King Oliver and Bubber Miley. At the same time, Marsalis’s melody lines were becoming more compact; as he would later describe it, he was focusing on “clarion” phrases rather than imitating saxophone lines. The ensemble textures were more open and uncluttered.

During the course of In This House, on This Morning, which was given its premiere in May 1992 at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, a beachcomber’s assortment of musical styles is paraded onstage by the seven instrumentalists, who are joined by vocalist Marion Williams: the gospel sounds of the sanctified church; the twelve-bar blues; boisterous New Orleans counterpoint; waltz time and two-beat struts; even a measured dose of atonality in a memorable moment when Marsalis uses his horn to mimic a babbling speaking-in-tongues. Yet this backward glance never collapsed into mere mimicry, and Marsalis, perhaps preeminently among his generation, proved capable of resurrecting the vocabulary of past masters while putting the stamp of his own personality on the proceedings.

Yet bigger ensembles also gave Wynton a chance to flex his muscles as a leading post-Ellington composer, demonstrated most notably on his 1994 piece Blood on the Fields (later awarded the Pulitzer Prize) for a fifteen-member jazz orchestra. This impressive and lengthy work, some three and a half hours in duration, seemed determined to swallow whole not only the early jazz tradition but elements of a range of other African American musical styles—gospel, work songs, blues, and other cultural bric-a-brac from a bygone era. This historical eclecticism would constantly reemerge, in ever-differing forms, in Marsalis’s later work, whether he was sharing the stage with country artist Willie Nelson, collaborating with Ghanaian drum master Yacub Addy on the trumpeter’s composition Congo Square, or devoting tribute albums to everyone from Jelly Roll Morton to Thelonious Monk.

Important early recordings documenting the AACM’s music included Mitchell’s Sound (1966), Jarman’s Song For (1967), Bowie’s Numbers 1 & 2 (1967), Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light (1968), Braxton’s Three Compositions of New Jazz (1968), and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s People in Sorrow (1969), Tutankhamun (1969), and A Jackson in Your House (1969).

Rivbea Studio, the loft home of saxophonist Sam Rivers, and released under the name Wildflowers,

By the time of their return to the United States in April 1971, the expanded Art Ensemble had gained a reputation as a powerful exponent of what critic Gary Giddins aptly called “guerrilla jazz.”

A series of releases on the Elektra label—Plays Duke Ellington, Rhythm and Blues, Metamorphosis (with African percussion)—demonstrated the WSQ’s expertise in these different genres, while earlier recordings for the Black Saint label, such as Steppin’ with the World Saxophone Quartet, Revue, and Live in Zurich, served as effective showcases for the compositional skills of the individual members.

John Zorn.

Cobra

Zorn projects such as Naked City and The Big Gundown (featuring the music of Ennio Morricone),

Frisell’s viewpoint avoids reduction into mere satirical distance, and on his Disfarmer album from 2009 he achieves a stark and moving unity of purpose