The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (11 page)

Read The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz Online

Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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Scattered Seeds: McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea
374
Epilogue
379
Index
381
 
Page xiii
INTRODUCTION
Jazz music is more popular now than it has been in many years. New York's Lincoln Center has made it a permanent part of its agenda along with the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera, big-budget movies have been made about it, talented young musicians seem to arrive in New York City weekly, and record companies have been issuing classic as well as newly recorded material at an astonishing rate. Everybody seems to be curious about jazz, but it can be a little hard to know where to begin.
The book you are holding is designed to serve as a guide to the territory, to give you a sense of how jazz developed, who has played it, what they think about when they play it, and what their best recordings are. It concentrates on artists and recordings from the period in which the idiom's greatest and most definitive statements were made - the period roughly between 1920 and 1970. With the boom in jazz reissues that has coincided with the introduction of the compact disc, a staggering number of classic jazz recordings are once again available, often with greatly improved sound.
The Guide
is intended to be a companion to that great body of work. In writing it, I have concentrated on the recordings that have endured, that are as vital today as they were when they were first recorded.
The Guide
is different in conception from other books on the subject. It is the only book of its scope and purpose to have been written entirely by one author. Most books on recorded jazz have consisted of encyclopedia-style entries written by a number of different writers. It can be tricky in such books to know who's talking when and what their assumptions are. The artists are discussed briefly and their recordings are rated, but the larger picture is often lacking.
The Guide
, on the other hand, discusses more than eight hundred recordings in stylistic and chronological context rather than merely offering capsule evaluations in a vacuum. The judgments and evaluations here are all, for better or worse, those of the author.
The Guide
is organized into two main sections, the first called Ensembles and the second called Soloists. Each section takes a complete pass through the
 
Page xiv
period covered, but from a different vantage point. Some musicians - such as bandleaders Fletcher Henderson and Jelly Roll Morton - have been more important as leaders of ensembles than as instrumentalists, and some - trumpeter Roy Eldridge or saxophonist Charlie Parker, for instance - have been more important as soloists. Some have been significant both as solo voices and as ensemble thinkers, Miles Davis being probably the best example.
The Guide
's Ensembles section begins by looking at the New Orleans ensemble tradition exemplified by King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, then investigates the adaptation of that style for the larger ensembles of the 1920s and 1930s, such as those of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie, traces the stripping-down process that went along with what was called bebop in the recordings of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Tadd Dameron, and others, and explores the ensemble styles that developed out of bebop in the 1950s, especially in the work of Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis. Finally, it looks at the major groups of the 1960s, like those of Davis, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman, which, while using the stripped-down instrumentation of the bebop ensemble, returned to something very much like New Orleans group improvisation.
The Guide
's Soloists section discusses the major soloists on the main solo instruments - trumpet, saxophone, and piano - in chronological order. The discussion of trumpeters, for example, begins with Louis Armstrong and his contemporaries of the 1920S, proceeds through the flowering of great trumpeters of the 1930s whom he inspired, looks at Roy Eldridge's innovations, then the work of Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, and so on. Most guides discuss only a musician's recordings as leader, but much of almost any great soloist's best work is done as a sideman on other musicians' recordings. In
The Guide
, each musician's important recordings as both leader and sideman are discussed together.
Above all,
The Guide
is meant to be both useful and enjoyable. It can be read as a narrative history of the music's development or used as a buyer's guide to available jazz recordings. All of the book's musical examples are tied to specific available recordings, including label and catalog numbers for easy reference.
You can find the recordings of any artist by looking in the Table of Contents. If, for example, you want to know what recordings by Roy Eldridge are discussed, look up his name in the Trumpets section under Soloists and turn to the appropriate pages in
The Guide
; there you will find a discussion of his style as well as an in-depth look at important recordings he made both as leader and as sideman. You will also be steered to especially characteristic or exciting solos on specific discs. If you want to know what recordings to seek out by Art
 
Page xv
Blakey's Jazz Messengers, with that band's procession of major sidemen and classic albums, look up Blakey in the Ensembles section of the Table of Contents, then turn to the pages listed there, where you will find a discussion of the development of the style he represented, as well as evaluations of his most important albums.
In trying to write a book that could fit between two covers, I have concentrated on what I considered to be classic recordings from the 1920S through about 1970. By classic, I mean recordings that have formed or that exemplify the definitive elements of the jazz style, in as undiluted a form as possible. In the past twenty-five years or so, many hybrid forms of jazz have been popularized, most notably what has been called jazz fusion, a form which incorporates heavy electronics and rock elements into a context of instrumental improvisation. In recent years, forms of indigenous music from around the world have offered techniques and approaches which some jazz musicians have used.
All of this is healthy and inevitable, but it is telling that the use of the word ''jazz" persists throughout all of this hybridization. Even the term "jazz fusion" implies that there is something called jazz, which has been fused with something else. My concern here has been to discuss recordings that, taken together, might say something essential about what is meant by the word "jazz."
That has become a thorny issue lately. Surprisingly loud arguments have been conducted in print over the meaning of the word and even over whether it has a meaning. Many of the people who use the word most vociferously insist on a usage for it that is so broad as to be, in my mind, meaningless. I think it is true to say that, no matter what "style" of jazz one is playing or listening to, certain specific musical techniques and structures tend to be present consistently. The writer Stanley Crouch has made a short but useful list of the essential musical elements that jazz musicians deal with: the blues, the romantic ballad, Afro-Hispanic rhythms, and the attitude toward the passage of time (at slow, medium, and fast tempos) that is called swing. To these I would add that jazz always demonstrates a call-and-response sensibility derived originally from the African American church and which is present in the music's most basic structures. These elements are discussed in this book; at times they are used as a kind of acid test to decide whether certain recordings or the work of certain musicians is or isn't jazz.
For the sake of
The Guide
's length, I have made the decision not to include a separate section devoted to singers. Singers form a special case within the music; often, the work of even the most jazz-steeped of singers ranges from heavily jazz influenced to essentially pop work, and the difference is usually
 
Page xvi
dictated by the musicians around them. So Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, and many other singers are touched on here, but only in the context of discussions of the major instrumentalists or bands with whom they recorded.
In order to make
The Guide
most useful, I have based my discussion on easily available recordings, for most of which you should have to look no farther than a good record store in a medium-sized or even small city. The catalog numbers given for the recordings are always those of the compact disc issue. The cassette catalog numbers of these sets are usually identical to the compact disc number, except for a different numerical suffix indicating the different format. In a very few cases, where important material is still available only on LP, I have noted it as such.
In the past few years, since the development of the compact disc, there has been an explosion in the amount of classic material available; for a time, many new titles seemed to arrive in stores every week. Since I began
The Guide
, that flow has slowed somewhat, with certain companies even beginning to trim some titles from their lists. I have kept adding material to
The Guide
until as close to publication as possible, but new titles will inevitably be available by the time it is published. Likewise, some of what I've listed will almost certainly go out of print. But most of this material will remain in print, in one form or another, for as long as people listen to sound recordings.
The Guide
will prove useful, I hope, as a comprehensive overview of the music's classic recordings for years to come.
 
Page xvii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No project like this could get off the ground without the cooperation of record companies large and small. I am indebted to all the following, who were very understanding and more than generous in making available the recordings I needed: Terri Hinte of Fantasy; Kevin Gore, Monica Shovlin, and Arthur Levy of CBS/Sony Music; Marilyn Laverty of Shore Fire Media; Steve Backer, Marilyn Lipsius, and David Goldfarb of RCA/BMG; Michael Cuscuna of Blue Note; Michael Bloom of GRP; Don Lucoff of DL Media; Richard Seidel and Mary Stone of Polygram; Joe Fields of Muse; Didier Deutsch of Atlantic; Don Schlitten of Xanadu; James Austin of Rhino; the late Martin Williams and Tom Dube of Smithsonian; Andy McKaie and Don Thomas of MCA; P. J. Littleton of Bainbridge Records; Carrie Svingen of Rykodisc; Jerry Valburn of Merrit Record Society; Will Friedwald of Stash; Hugh Fordin of DRG; Steve Wagner of Delmark; Glenn Dicker of Rounder; and a special thanks to Michael Cuscuna (again) and Charlie Lourie of Mosaic Records, who have brought a new level of sophistication and commitment to jazz reissues.
Many people helped in different ways, knowingly and unknowingly, to make this book, but none helped more than my mother and father, who supported and encouraged an interest they must have had trouble understanding. I got interested in jazz when I was about eleven years old, and they always managed, somehow, to find the records I wanted for Christmas and my birthday. And a special thanks to my mother for spending those long Saturday afternoons ferrying me to antique stores on Long Island looking for old 78s. Thanks, Mom; thanks, Dad.
My editor, Paul Zimmer, and everyone at the University of Iowa Press have shown an inspiring understanding of what I tried to do here, and I want to thank them for the energy and faith they showed in bringing this project to fruition. John Hasse, of the Smithsonian Institution, made very valuable comments on the manuscript, for which I am grateful. Erroll McDonald of Pantheon Books was a supporter of this project in its earliest stages and made it possible for me to develop the initial outline.

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