Bob Brookmeyer: “Blues for Alec”: BB, p; Jim Hall, quit; Percy Heath, b; Connie Kay, dr. (1961)
At twenty-two, I’d graduated from college and in theory, though not practice, I was now a grownup. My opinions counted. Supposedly, they pointed somewhere.
Given how important music was in my life already and what a pleasure it was to me, where, at twenty-two, did I stand, and why? What appealed to me in the musics I liked?
I had definite tastes in music but though they’d matured some, they hadn’t really broadened. I’d grown to appreciate certain musics by shutting out others. Even within jazz, my preferred musical flavor, my tastes were narrow although they’d received a good jolt toward the end when I heard and finally listened to “hard” post bop of players like Sonny Rollins, Monk, Silver, Art Blakey, Miles and Trane –the possibilities were infinite! Still, I shut out all jazz before the ’30s, which meant I ignored the awe-inspiring music of Louis Armstrong’s late-’20s sessions with the Hot Five and Seven though they’d shaped the music I loved, setting it on its present path. I had no clue why Jelly Roll Morton’s music was deemed great rather than just “old.” I didn’t appreciate Fats Waller: I felt he fooled around too much and his music was too light and I didn’t like Gene Cedric’s sax. Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Frank Teschemacher, Jack Teagarden, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Adrian Rollini were names I’d heard but music I didn’t know. I may have heard a cut or two by them but I had no idea why anyone would deliberately spend time listening to moldy figs like them when they could listen to the interesting music of the present day instead. I flatly dismissed Scott Joplin and ragtime as overly dainty. Once I formed an opinion, there was little room left for quibbling in my tastes.
I downrated the funky rhythms and the sounds of rock and roll, r ‘n’ b, Motown and soul. They seemed too ‘simple’ to me: they may have been great to dance to but they weren’t for serious listening. Jazz because it was ‘substantial.’ These other musics weren’t. They weren’t as ‘creative.’
Until my last semester in college, I listened primarily to cool-toned bop and Basie-based jazz, the kind marketed as “West Coast.” The goal in that music was not to heat things up but remain forever cool. Gerry Mulligan was the music’s exemplar. He wrote tight, coherent arrangements that sounded like swing but used bop harmonies and progressions. In his groups, the horns (Mulligan, Baker, Brookmeyer, Zoot, Eardley) played rhythmically charging, harmonically interesting lines in solo, then joined together in polyphony, with two to four horns riffing at once, running against each other but somehow staying out of each other’s way.
One of the things I liked was that I could sing along with his music, not just the melody line but the solos and backup riffs. Listening to Mulligan –or Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre or any of the other West Coasters I listened to–was a participatory activity. I didn’t listen passively! Anyone who’s sung or played an instrument knows how good a feeling it can be to be part of the music making.
***
Why jazz? Early, I responded to rhythm, and jazz was, above all the other musics I knew, shaped and propelled by rhythm. I know other musics now that use rhythm as intimately as jazz does —various folk musics, Romanian wedding music, Afro-Cuban, African and Argentinian music– but I hadn’t heard any of them at twenty-two. At twenty-two, jazz was the one music I knew that built on and used rhythm as the base for its expressive potential.
I responded positively to the idea of taking a melody and constructing an alternative one out of it. I was never in my wildest dreams a jazz singer but at my best, and early, I inflected notes and bent lines like jazz singers do when I sang. I used blue notes. I preferred having my accompanist play jazz chording behind me. I dug it when horns abandoned safety for flights of fancy and in my head, I felt my voice was a horn too. (This sounds fluffy but it’s the way I felt.)
I responded too to the sound of particular musicians –saxophonists in particular. The classical repertoire of music for saxophone players is diminished. The sound of the saxophone in those pieces is anemic compared to the variety of sounds and approaches used by jazz musicians. The great jazz players all sounded unique. After a while of listening, I could identify them when they played without bothering to look at the album liner notes. The light but deep-toned sound of Gerry Mulligan’s baritone sax compared to the lush baritone of Harry Carney. The soft as velvet, melting in your mouth sound of Johnny Hodge’s alto compared to the dry, light, almost fluttery sound of Paul Desmond or the faintly off-pitch, vinegary sound of Jackie McLean. The harsh, slashing attack of Sonny Rollins and the sheer, blunt, cutting hardness of Coltrane..
On piano, the contrast among players intrigued and excited me. Erroll Garner used lush chords to introduce a tune and made complicated musical introductions. Then the rhythm took off and his one hand strummed a beat in one time while the other hand played melody in a slightly different rhythm, creating a tension that was released in explosions of notes catching up or slowing down the beat to level it out across both hands. Horace Silver’s solos were strings of riffs rather than a continuous melody line. Monk hit the keys in a peculiarly percussive way: crouched fingers plunging down on the keys, blues dominated chords riding on top of left hand stride, the rhythm almost slowed down and never smooth, jagged edges ringing out. Powell, the archetypal bop pianist, unleashed torrents of single notes that rode the front edge of the beat, creating an urgency of propulsion, minimal left hand chording underpinning them. Tatum –well, I’ve already written about him!
Bass playing opened up in the ’60s, right about the time I’m writing of but before I became hip to new styles of bass playing. The bassists I heard in the ’50s played walking bass –single note lines ascending and descending in regular time anchoring the horns to the chords. I liked the style –bass was the one instrument I wanted to play as a little boy (an idea my parents found incomprehensible). Charles Mingus was playing in the fifties, as was Oscar Pettiford, but I was just starting to listen to Mingus then and Pettiford, a transitional player anyway, died too young to leave the mark he should have left. Charlie Haden and Scott LaFaro, first generation exponents of the liberated bass, were just starting to make their mark. I heard them after college –La Faro with Bill Evans, Haden with Ornette Coleman.
Listen to the recordings I earmarked in earlier postings and you’ll get a sense of which drummers excited me in college. Until the very end, it was the unobtrusive time keeping of drummers like Chico Hamilton, or Shelly Manne, who was a genius percussionist. Blakey changed that. He played heavy — I don’t know of any drummer of his day who played heavier– but in his hands, ‘heavy’ was a good thing. His concentration on beat, beat, beat energized the players in front of him: no one was as good as Blakey at moving horn players along. The summer I graduated, I heard Blakey with his Jazz Messengers in Pittsburgh. We went more than one night. He sat and talked with us more than once. That was heaven!
In sum, at twenty-two, I was comfortable with one music but not shut out of exploring others. That’s not a bad place to be when your future is mostly ahead of you and that’s how I felt about mine. So much music unexplored yet and so little time!
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Paolo Conte, “Sotto le Stelle de Jazz” (n. d.)
MUSIC & ME 