Bob Graetinger, from his City of Glass (1951) Watch this for a minute to see how Graetinger scored his piece for the Stan Kenton Orchestra.
Here are some things that have changed in jazz since I was twenty.
INSTRUMENTS
- In 1956, not many jazz musicians played exotic instruments. It was pretty much trumpets and trombones, and occasionally the French horn, for the brass; the saxophones from alto down to baritone, plus clarinet and flute for reeds; piano, guitar, vibes, bass, drums, and the rare timpani for rhythm. That’s what most jazz musicians played. (Oh yes, Johnny Guarneri played harpsichord in Artie Shaw’s Gramercy Five.)
Cy Touff, “Keester Parade” (1955)
a. I knew of two bass trombonists –Bart Varsalona did big band section work and Cy Touff was featured on a quirky, Basie-ish small combo album that I bought for one tune, “Keester Parade.” The West Coast tenor man Richie Kamuca, a Lester Young disciple, soloed on the album along with Touff.)
b. No one that I knew of played the flugelhorn, which was supposed to be hard to keep in tune. Flugelhorn became a craze after Miles Davis’s epochal albums with arranger Gil Evans, Miles Ahead, Sketches of Spain, and Porgy and Bess. Miles used the larger-bored horn for its soft, mellow sound which blended well with the floating clouds of Evans’s horns and reed. A few years later, Art Farmer, one of the best young trumpet players and amazingly lyrical in his approach, switched to flugelhorn as his main axe, using trumpet for backup. Today, many horn players double the horns, just as in the 20s and 30s, they did cornet and trumpet. (Trumpet won out over cornet mostly because it had a sharper attack and thus was heard better effect on the acoustically primitive recording sessions of the day and in New Orleans-style polyphonic ensemble playing.)
cornet
trumpet
flugelhorn
c. It wasn’t much different among the reeds. When bop came along, clarinet went into partial eclipse although Tony Scott (my favorite), Buddy DeFranco and John Laporta still played bop clarinet.
i. To my knowledge, no one played bass clarinet until Eric Dolphy came along at the tail end of the 50s and switched back and forth among alto sax, flute and bass clarinet.
Bud Shank-Bob Cooper, “I Want to Be Happy” (1955)
ii. The first time I heard someone on oboe was in 1957: played by West Coaster Bob Cooper (husband of singer June Christie, then one of my favorites). He recorded a small group album entitled Flute ‘n’ Oboe, with Bud Shank on flute.
iii. In 1957, I heard the Australian Jazz Quintet as part of a package concert in Cleveland. That was the age of chamber music jazz from groups like the Dave Brubeck quartet, the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Chico Hamilton quintet (about which I will have more to say later on). The two horn players in the AJQ played a lot of instruments but in retrospect, I don’t remember them playing all that well.
Yusef Lateef , “In the Evening” (1971)
iv. 1957 was also when Detroit Yusef Lateef started recording. He tripled among tenor sax, oboe and bassoon, and with him, oboe and bassoon were no longer chamber jazz instruments. A few years later, I forget exactly when, Lateef was playing in Cannonball Adderley’s funk jazz band.
v. No one, I mean no one, played the exotic end instruments of the saxophone family –-soprano sax, sopranino, and bass sax. Adrian Rollini played the bass sax in the late 20s and early 30s and Sidney Bechet was a giant –but an anomaly–on soprano sax. (The next bass sax solo I would hear was on an early 60s Dizzy Gillespie album: tenor sax player Charlie Ventura played bass sax on one cut.)
A. Somewhere in the Ellington archives, you’ll come across Otto Hardwick doing section work on soprano, and I think Johnny Hodges once or twice. But not soloing. The received wisdom in the mid-50s was that the soprano sax was too unreliable to play solo –the problem was the same as with the flugelhorn. It went too easily out of tune.
Gil Evans + 10, “Ella Speed” (1958) w/ Steve Lacy on soprano sax
B. Then Steve Lacy came along –the first album under his own name came out in 1957 and he really took off after his work with Gil Evans. In 1959, when tenor saxist John Coltrane was playing with Thelonious Monk, Lacy, who adored Monk, was invited in for six weeks. Supposedly, that’s when Coltrane became interested in the possibilities of the soprano sax. A year or two later, when Trane moved beyond post-bop to create his own sound and way of playing jazz, he played soprano almost as much as tenor, to whit, on his breakout recording of “My Favorite Things” (which popularized his approach to modal jazz).
C. Now everyone plays soprano, from Jane Ira Bloom and Jane Bunnett and Branford Marsalis and John Surman to …. well, just about … everyone. And no one seems to have tone problems with it.
2. It wasn’t until the 60s that we heard from the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Anthony Braxton and other AACM musicians like Muhal Richard Abrams and (younger) George Lewis. Those guys played anything. Anything that worked.
a. The Art Ensemble (AEC) was famous for using what they called “small instruments” –hand percussion, bells, whistles, ratchets, what have you, anything that produced noise– sometimes for long portions of long pieces. (Listen to how long it takes for the sound and volume to build up in People in Sorrow.)
b. And Anthony Braxton plays anything with a reed in it. There are some fine duets between Braxton and the AEC’s Roscoe Mitchell on Mitchell’s 1977 double album, Nonaah. Henry Threadgill’s another one.. He’s mostly a composer now (Pulitzer Prize for musical composition, 2016) but in his early trio, Air, he played not only alto and flute but hubkaphone, a tuned percussion instrument he created out of hubcaps.
3. As to cello, there were a few cello players around then but not many. Oscar Pettiford had picked up the cello in 1948 when a broken arm made it difficult for him to maneuver around his big string bass. He tuned the cello the same way as the bass but an octave higher and by the mid-50s was playing mostly cello in his combo. (He hired a second bassist to carry the walking bass line while he soloed on cello.) The Chico Hamilton quintet featured a front line of sax/flute (Buddy Collette), guitar (Jim Hall) and cello (Fred Katz) but Katz didn’t solo much — mostly added color to the front line. Charles Mingus incorporated Jackson Wiley’s cello in his experimental band in 1955.
TIME SIGNATURES
- There’d been jazz waltzes all the way back –think of the Fats Waller classic, “Jitterbug Waltz.” But waltz time was considered tricky. It didn’t swing, they said. The first to make a smash with time signatures was Dave Brubeck on his Time Out album which featured all kinds of tricky time signatures –5/4, 3/4, …. I never liked that album all that much but it was important in jazz history. (I guess!)
On Sonny Rollins Plus Four album (1956), tenor saxophonist Rollins played a tune of his own, “Valse Hot,” which clearly swung. The backing group was the rest of the Max Roach quintet, with whom Rollins played at the time –Clifford Brown, trumpet; Richie Powell, piano; George Morrow, bass; Roach, drums –not bad backup!
The next year, 1957, Roach released Jazz in 3/4 Time, all waltzes, with Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Rollins, Ray Bryant on piano, and morrow and Roach. Then in 1959, Mingus kicked the myth of waltzes not swinging to smithereens on his first Columbia Records releases, Mingus Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty, playing heavily gospelized waltzes, “Better Git It in Your Soul” on Ah Um and “Slop” on Dynasty.
Charles Mingus, “Better Git It in Your Soul” (1959)
BORROWING FROM THE CLASSICS
- Musicians had toyed with the idea of merging jazz and classical music as far back as the 20s. There were Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924); Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto (1945), composed for the Woody Herman Orchestra; and, most controversial, in 1951, Bob Graetinger’s dissonant City of Glass, written for and played by the Stan Kenton Orchestra. And of course, Ellington’s band featured many classical-ish “suites” from the ’20s Black and Tan Fantasy on. They sounded like solid jazz but composed by someone who’d listened not only to the tone palettes of Ellington’s players but Debussy or maybe Ravel.
a. Starting with his octet in 1948, Dave Brubeck, who had studied with composer Darius Milhaud at the University of the Pacific, mixed jazz and classical approaches and techniques. Brubeck’s quartet typically ended pieces with an improvised counterpoint between pianist Brubeck and alto player Paul Desmond, enjoyable to l.isten to in small doses but ultimately derivative and formulaic.
Modern Jazz Quartet, “Vendome” (1952)
b. From its founding in 1952, the Modern Jazz Quartet dabbled with classical form under the leadership of pianist/music director John Lewis. Sometimes it worked (e.g., various recordings of “Fontessa”). Sometimes it didn’t. There was an interesting tension in the MJQ between bop and blues-oriented vibes player Milt Jackson and classically oriented and Basie-like pianist Lewis.
c. The joining of forms accelerated around 1957, the year that composer-theorist Gunther Schuller came up with the designation “Third Stream” for musics that blurred the lines among types of musical composition. George Russell was an important figure in this change.
In 1981, Schuller offered a list of “what Third Stream was not.” It was NOT
jazz with strings / jazz played in ‘classical’ instruments / classical music played by jazz players / inserting a bit of Ravel or Schoenberg between be-bop changes –or the reverse / jazz in fugal form / a fugue played by jazz players / designed to do away with either music, jazz or classical, but rather another option
A CHORD AND KEY BASED MUSIC
In 1956, jazz was still chord and key based. (I can think of two exceptions –Mingus and Tristano, both musical adventurers.) String bass players still largely walked their basses and horn and piano soloists “ran the changes” (alt notes but the same chords) when soloing. There was no such thing as modal jazz, not even in the Afro-Cuban numbers played by the Dizzy Gillespie band when Chano Pozo was still on congas. There was no Ornette Coleman quartet, where chords were indeterminate, and the beat too. No Cecil Taylor, with his dense, often cacophonous-sounding music rooted as much in twentieth-century advanced composed music as in jazz.
In 1959-60, I listened to my first Ornette Coleman records and kind of got it and my first Cecil Taylor records and didn’t, but I knew it was something special. A year later, in 1961 I was listening to the Coleman double quartet’s Free Jazz and five years later yet, 1966, to John Coltrane’s Ascension and they clicked for me –I knew what they were doing and why.
It all came together for me around ’61-’62 when I bought Don Ellis’s first quintet album and the first album by saxophonist-flutist Paul’s Horn quintet. The Ellis album included one concrete music piece. On the Horn album, the combo played in almost every time signature I could conceive of.
George Russell, “Concerto for Billy the Kid” (1956) –Bill Evans on piano
MUSIC & ME 