The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (23 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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speeds that placed unbelievable demands on their coordination and presence of mind. The essential grammar of the style was made up of the lines of legato eighth notes perfected by Lester Young and Charlie Christian, but with an important difference.
An improvising musician works with a sort of harmonic map of a certain song in his or her head. The map is usually referred to as the song's "changes," short for chord changes; the song is a progression through changing harmonic territory, the nature of which is designated in a harmonic shorthand of chords. Chords are groupings of three or four (or more) notes that outline a certain harmonic gravity or tension and sometimes indicate a new harmonic direction. If I give you directions to get somewhere, I may give you a succession of route numbers, with some indication of how long to stay on each road -"Get on I-95 until you see the sign for Route 3, get off and make a right and go two miles until you hit the overpass for County Highway 103 ..." In jazz, certainly in bebop, musicians usually indicate these routes by a series of chord names. Some chords, to follow the metaphor, stand for roads, some stand for the signs or landmarks that you have to look for, some are destinations, some are turning points.
But these chords are only a shorthand, just as saying "Route 3" gives no sense of the ups and downs of the road, its character, the sights you see, or whether it's a main road or a tributary. To each chord are attached scales, which give a more fleshed-out sense of the harmonic terrain, and musicians really think of these scales when they address the harmonic map of a tune. To make things more complex, often several scales are appropriate to any given chord, and a large number of chords can fit on the same scale. This may sound confusing, but it gives some sense of the kinds of knowledge a musician has to have metabolized beyond any conscious level in order to play coherently.
In the scales, certain notes and note groupings are like landmarks that let you know what road you're on. In a jazz solo, a musician tends to accent these characteristic notes, even though he or she plays many other notes of the scales. In the swing players' grammar, the accents and the characteristic notes tended to fall on the down beat. One thing that distinguished the true bebop players of the mid-1940s from even the most forward-looking of the swing players was that their accented notes as often as not fell on the up, or "and," beat. This more flexible system of accenting, combined with a tendency to play many more notes, gave a more detailed picture of the harmonic landscape's contours, just as a topographical map will be more detailed the more rings per inch there are or a newspaper photo will have more definition the more dots there are per square inch.
Just as the swing players learned to use the expectations set up by the re-
 
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lentless four beats per measure, the boppers learned how to set up rhythmic expectations by accenting certain places in each measure during a solo passage, which would become a sort of code for the accompanying musicians, who would use it to shape the choices they made. In Charlie Parker's "Ko Ko" (available on
Bird: The Savoy Original Master Takes
[Savoy ZDS 8801]), Parker plays a series of figures that resemble the melody of "Tea for Two," leading the ear to expect the same rhythmic pattern to be repeated. Then he staggers it, doubles up on it, just as a boxer will set up a pattern of expectations with a certain kind of punch or combination, then surprise his opponent by breaking the pattern unexpectedly.
The new style required the technical ability to accent certain notes within very long melodic lines; this meant great control over fingerings, for pianists, and great breath control for players of wind instruments. Bird played long melodic lines over a complicated harmonic background the way a skier traces a particularly daring but logical path over difficult terrain at high speeds. You could think of the accents as the places where one cuts one's legs left or right. Listen, for example, to his Savoy recording of "Warming Up a Riff" on
Bird: The Savoy Original Master Takes
, recorded as a rehearsal on the chord changes of Ray Noble's popular song "Cherokee." You can hear how Parker accents certain notes in his extraordinarily long lines and how the accented notes act as pivot points for the tonal direction the music takes.
But bop wasn't the total revolution many made it out to be. At first, at least, it used all the compositional devices jazz had always used - riffs, breaks, polyphony, blues, and chord changes of popular tunes - but it infused them with a somewhat different sensibility and emphasis. The earliest bebop records, like "Woody'n You" and "Disorder at the Border," by Coleman Hawkins with Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach (available on
Dizzy Gillespie: The Development of an American Artist
[Smithsonian Collection R004]) still used conventions from big bands - riffs, large ensembles, arranged interludes. And the first recordings by Dizzy Gillespie's small groups, like "Groovin' High," "Salt Peanuts,'' "Dizzy Atmosphere," and "Blue and Boogie" (available on
Dizzy Gillespie and His Sextets and Orchestra: "Shaw 'Nuff
" [Musicraft MVSCD-53]), carry on this technique. Throughout the late 1940s, Gillespie led a big band of the standard instrumentation which played an exciting, highly arranged version of the new music; some excellent examples of the band's work can be found on both the Musicraft set and
The Bebop Revolution
(RCA/Bluebird 2177-2-RB). But the typical bop ensembles left maximum space for improvisation and eventually stripped away even the interludes and arranged parts that had been there in the early Gillespie records, leaving nothing but the classic bebop format: head (or melody), solos, head.
 
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A perfect session in which to hear the classic bebop small-group approach was recorded under Charlie Parker's leadership in May 1947, with young Miles Davis on trumpet, Bud Powell, the most influential pianist of the time, Tommy Potter on bass, and Max Roach, the genius of modern drumming. The four tunes they recorded - "Donna Lee," "Chasin' the Bird," "Cheryl," and "Buzzy" - give a good sampling of the approach. Several takes of each may be heard on the three-CD set
The Complete Charlie Parker Savoy Studio Sessions
(Savoy ZDS 5500).
The repertoire is revealing in itself. "Donna Lee" is a quintessential bebop melody: a test of dexterity (in fact, a famous Charlie Parker head was entitled "Dexterity") full of long lines of trickily accented eighth notes interspersed with triplets, a mixture of scales, and arpeggios, based on chord changes borrowed from a popular song, in this case "Indiana." "Chasin' the Bird" is one of two contrapuntal lines Parker wrote, the other being "Ah-Leu-Cha'' (in both, Parker plays one melody on alto and Miles Davis plays another on trumpet). "Cheryl" is a bouncing, medium-tempo blues with a heavily accented melody, and "Buzzy," another blues, is a riff tune.
We can notice two things right off the bat about these recordings. One is that the focus is, superficially at least, very much on the soloists. There is, in each case, a statement of the head in unison (except on "Chasin' the Bird," where the head is in counterpoint), and then there are solos all the way until it's time for the head again. There are no arranged backgrounds, no tempo changes or changes in dynamics - only the soloists showing their prowess and powers of inventiveness over the harmonic map.
The other thing to notice, after an initial fascination with the soloists' brilliance, is that the pianist and drummer are much more actively involved with what the soloists are playing than they tended to be in earlier forms of jazz. Max Roach puts in accents on his bass and snare drums, anticipating and echoing the accents in Parker's melodic lines. Bud Powell does the same at the piano, answering and commenting on the soloists' lines, sometimes jabbing, à la Basie, like trumpet accents in a big-band arrangement, sometimes like a saxophone section background, always responding, both harmonically and rhythmically, to what the soloists are playing (and, when his solo comes, his right-hand lines are a translation, for piano, of the horn players' styles, but with a more percussive element).
The implication of this kind of group interplay was, to those who were equipped to think in these terms, a new gloss on New Orleans polyphony, a kind of collective group counterpoint based on an agreed-upon harmonic map, modified by collectively evolved choices in how to negotiate that map. This approach, at its best, makes for tremendously exciting music because one
 
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hears a number of musicians thinking at full creative tilt at once, reacting to each other's ideas and shaping a coherent group sound as they go.
This approach, and the possibilities it opened, formed the basis of jazz group playing, except for those who chose to play in earlier styles, through the 1950s and into the 1960s. You can hear examples of it, in its early incarnations, in the following albums, all of which are recommended:
Sonny Stitt/Bud Powell/J. J. Johnson
(Prestige/OJC-009),
Fats Navarro: Fat Girl
(Savoy SJL 2216),
Dexter Gordon: Long Tall Dexter
(Savoy SJL 2211),
J. J. Johnson: Mad Bebop
(Savoy SJL 2232), and
The Bebop Boys
(Savoy SJL 2225). The music on the albums is discussed in somewhat greater detail under the appropriate instrumentalists' names in the Soloists section.
No Room for Squares
Bebop created a lot of confusion - and hostility - at first, and for quite a while thereafter, among people who had grown up on earlier forms of the music. Bop sounded jarring to many of them; the new harmonic landscape produced what sounded to them like wrong notes, and the up-front role of what had been considered supporting instruments produced what they thought was a cacophony. But there was something else underneath these elements that increased the hostility.
Most of the music of the swing era, no matter how sophisticated, was inclusive music, music for communal experience. Primarily, it was music for dancing, music that was finally functional in that it got people together in a social context and provided the lubrication on the gears of romance and good times. People danced and celebrated to it, and its repertoire depended heavily on the current romantic songs, often complete with lyrics sung by the band's singer.
Bebop, on the other hand, was harder to penetrate. Its tempos were often too fast to dance to, and its melodies were often difficult for the uninitiated even to hear as melodies. Even when they were based on the harmonies of popular tunes, the new melodies the boppers made were extended out of recognition. Sometimes, as in Charlie Parker's recordings of "Klaunstance," "Bird Gets the Worm," and "Merry-Go-Round" (all on
The Complete Charlie Parker Savoy Studio Sessions
[Savoy ZDS 5500]), there was no melody played at all; the performance would start right in on a white-hot, up-tempo improvisation. Some true bop bands, among them those led by Gillespie and by composer-arranger Tadd Dameron, had singers, and Parker and his contemporaries occasionally played for dances. But bop was primarily a musicians' music. You had to know all kinds of harmonic and rhythmic passwords to be "in"; the very aesthetic of the music was based on difficulty - dexterity,
 
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technique, harmonic sophistication, and an understanding of a new and complex system of accenting. To those who didn't understand, the surface of the music could be as opaque as the trademark sunglasses that many bop musicians wore night and day.
If the 1930s in jazz were about finding a way to step lightly on the beat and keep moving forward - music of the road, with all the social mobility and possibility of the frontier and the Midwest and Southwest of the time - then the music of Kansas City's own Charlie Parker was an unprecedented extension of that mobility. If the background tempo and harmonic structure in a jazz performance are the axis of the community assumptions of the jazz ensemble, then the melodic inventiveness and resourcefulness of the soloist are the axis of the individual's ability to function against the background of a given social organization at a given time. The tempos that Bird was able to play at - liked to play, practically defined a style by playing (listen to the 1947 "Dizzy Atmosphere" on
Bebop's Heartbeat
[Savoy ZDS 1177] or "Lester Leaps In" on
Live at the Rockland Palace
[Charlie Parker Records CP(2)502]) - were sometimes so fast as to be nearly meaningless. This post - World War II, post-atom-bomb four-four was no longer really about the elegant, triumphant possibilities of mobility but about mobility being taken to its limit, apocalyptic mobility, mobility exhausted by its own logic. Bebop at its most characteristic struck a chord of peculiarly American tragic lyricism - a sense of the exhaustion waiting at the end of all that optimistic mobility - that had found expression in earlier years in the Melville of
Moby Dick
, in the Fitzgerald of
The Great Gatsby
, and in Hemingway. It would remain for John Coltrane to come along and play Ahab in the obsessive chase to boat the harmonic white whale, but that is a story for later.
If the incredibly fast bebop tempos (and accompanying harmonic complexity) were, in effect, an echo of a society that was changing too quickly for anyone but a true adept to keep up with, then the soloist, the individual who had prepared himself or herself to be part of an elite that could deal with that complexity, was the real cultural hero of that movement, and that fact was to lend a certain character to jazz until the late 1950s, when there was another swing of the pendulum.
Rhythm in a Riff
Big bands didn't just dry up and blow away with the coming of the new style; many of the established ones incorporated bop elements into their arrangements, and others were part of the new music from the beginning. One in the latter category was the justly famous big band of singer Billy Eckstine.

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