The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (25 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

Tags: #Discography, #Jazz, #Reviews, #Sound Recordings, #Music, #Discography & Buyer's Guides, #Genres & Styles, #Reference, #Bibliographies & Indexes, #test

BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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members, as well as in the service of mood pieces. (Later, Davis would be one of the first to use the whole LP as a form in itself.) And, although Davis was saddled in the popular imagination with the "cool" label, he led many recording dates in which the music snapped, crackled, and popped. The 1951 sides with Sonny Rollins and young Jackie McLean, available as
Miles Davis Featuring Sonny Rollins: Dig
(Prestige/OJC-005), are an early and very satisfying example of this, as are the 1953 sides on
Collectors' Items
(Prestige/OJC-071), teaming Davis with both Parker (again on tenor) and the up-and-coming tenor player Sonny Rollins.
The 1953 session is worth looking at in some detail as a typical example of 1950s group playing. Perhaps the biggest reason for this is the rhythm section. Pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., was one of the great bop accompanists; he understood how to feed accents at just the right places. (You might think of a pianist as playing chords the same way you'd nudge a basketball that you are spinning on your finger. A nervous accompanist spins it too much and wastes energy. An incompetent one hits it at the wrong time or place and knocks it off. A great accompanist knows how to feed chords to a soloist at just the right moments to keep the rhythmic and harmonic momentum going.) Percy Heath was, and is, one of the greatest bassists in jazz because of his big tone, his swing, and the variety of his lines; Heath's presence on a 1950s recording date practically guarantees excellent music from all concerned.
But perhaps the one to watch closest here is drummer Philly Joe Jones, who would later join Davis's late-1950s quintet. Like Art Blakey, one of the most swinging drummers of the time, Jones tended to accent on the second and fourth beats of each measure with his high-hat cymbal, as well as maintaining a crackling pace on the ride cymbal. Jones also was developing a constantly ready repertoire of snare drum accents with which to answer, goad, underline, and comment upon the soloists' statements. This brought up the temperature of any session he was involved in, because the soloist could have an ongoing rhythmic dialogue with the drums.
The most exciting track of the session is probably the first one they recorded, Davis's up-tempo cooker "Compulsion." From the opening ensemble, Jones adds little fills and accents on the snare. The riffs behind each soloist help generate momentum, too. Bird plays a deep-toned pair of choruses, with Heath providing giant rubber tires for him to drive on, then Rollins comes in like the cavalry coming over the ridge in a western. Listen to the way in which, after Rollins's long opening phrase, which covers almost his full first eight bars, Jones answers with a "bump-de-bump" figure on the bass drum and Bishop answers Jones with an "uh-huh" on the piano. Also, under that first long opening phrase, listen to how Percy Heath plays an ascending line, going
 
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higher on the bass in order to build up excitement. (Generally, ascending lines build up tension, and descending lines discharge it.)
Rollins really plays to Jones on this track, as he does throughout, and Jones plays back, answering many of Rollins's phrases with little snare drum figures, as if to say "uh-huh," or "yeah," or "say it again." Listen for these figures throughout the date; they are a perfect example of how a mature bop-oriented rhythm section plays together. The ideas go back and forth, too, as in Rollins's solo on the second take of ''The Serpent's Tooth," where Jones plays a rhythmic figure before Rollins's first bridge, and Rollins immediately follows with a melodic figure based on exactly the same rhythm.
This was the archetypal 1950s way of playing in, and with, a rhythm section. Davis's late-1950s quintet, with John Coltrane, pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones, would refine the approach and stylize it perhaps to the point where nothing much further could be done with it, at least until some more discoveries were brought into the picture. They made a number of albums for Prestige, all of which are excellent, and they were comfortable with high-voltage cookers as well as romantic ballads.
Cookin'
(Prestige/OJC-128),
Workin'
(Prestige/OJC-296), and
Steamin'
(Prestige/OJC-391) are classic statements. The Columbia quintet material is at least as good. '
Round about Midnight
(Columbia CK 40610) contains Parker's contrapuntal line "Ah-Leu-Cha," Tadd Dameron's "Sid's Delight" (renamed "Tadd's Delight"), Monk's "'Round Midnight," and several standards;
Milestones
(Columbia CK 40837), which adds altoist Cannonball Adderley, is even better - a last look at the bebop group concept before Davis began to lead his group in another direction. (See the discussion of Davis in the Soloists section.)
East Coast, West Coast; Hot and Cool
The "cool" that the
Birth of the Cool
gave birth to was never a particularly well defined school; it was more a temperamental tendency. Perhaps the quintessential cool recordings were those made in California in 1952 and 1953 by baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan (who was in on the
Birth of the Cool
) and trumpeter Chet Baker. Some feature them with only bass and drum accompaniment; some involve a band that harks back directly to the Davis sides. Available on
The Complete Pacific Jazz and Capitol Recordings of the Original Gerry Mulligan Quartet and Tentette with Chet Baker
(Mosaic MR5-102), these recordings use many of the same stylistic elements that the Davis recordings used - unison lines with a high voice and a low voice, counterpoint (both written and improvised), written backgrounds for solos (especially on the Tentette recordings), and a legato, very lightly accented rhythmic orientation.
To the extent that these recordings are to be compared with the Davis
 
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recordings (the Tentette instrumentation, which includes French horn and tuba but no piano, is very similar), they are less interesting. The rationale for leaving the piano out was that its absence would afford greater harmonic and rhythmic freedom to the soloist (a dubious notion in itself), but these recordings are not notable for their great harmonic or rhythmic adventurousness. The absence of a piano, widely hailed at the time because it was so unusual, makes for a certain sameness of sound, which Mulligan tried to balance with various ensemble devices - switches between unison, harmony, and counterpoint and occasional tempo variation (as on the quartet's "Lullaby of the Leaves"). The problem was that the piano is not just a harmonic factor but a rhythmic factor.
In order to maintain interest in a pianoless context, the drummer must be very inventive, and the drummer here (either Chico Hamilton or Larry Bunker) does little more than keep subdued time. Without the piano to provide accenting, the ensemble texture becomes very monotonous. This holds true even for soloists who are much more interesting than either Mulligan or Baker were then. On a number of the tracks here, the Mulligan/Baker quartet is joined by altoist Lee Konitz, who was, and is, a truly inventive improviser; these sides are somewhat more interesting because of his presence. (For a couple of examples of pianoless groups that really work, check out Sonny Rollins's 1957
A Night at the Village Vanguard, Volume 1
[Blue Note 46517] and
Volume 2
[Blue Note 46518], which feature the great drummer Elvin Jones, as well as Jones's own 1968
Puttin' It Together
[Blue Note 84282].)
The Mulligan records, and much of the so-called West Coast music that took its inspiration from them as well as from the
Birth of the Cool
recordings, are admirable for their attempt to keep the ensemble in the forefront of things and for their high standards of musicianship. But finally, they are weak, as jazz, for the simple reason that there is very little blues feeling in them, which is to say very little blues-idiom, dance-oriented accenting. Without that, a music's roots in jazz will be very shallow.
Some music was about to be recorded on the East Coast that seemed designed to underline this last observation. Actually, such music had never stopped being recorded; the previously mentioned Davis sides with Parker, Rollins, and Jackie McLean are obvious examples, as are all of Charlie Parker's recordings of the time and more others than I could possibly mention here (although I have to mention the sextet sides by trombonist J. J. Johnson, with trumpeter Clifford Brown, on
The Eminent Jay Jay Johnson, Volume 1
[Blue Note 81505] and an explosive Miles Davis session with Johnson, saxophonist Jimmy Heath, and Art Blakey on drums on
Miles Davis, Volume 2
[Blue Note 81502]). But beginning in 1954, Art Blakey, who had powered the Eckstine
 
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band and had been a drummer of choice for many of the best of the modernists, would be at the helm of a series of groups that constantly reaffirmed jazz's roots in the blues and even gospel music and that swung as if their collective lives depended on it.
Jazz Messengers
The idea behind the Jazz Messengers seemed from the beginning to be implied in the group's name: there was more to jazz than just a set of musical conventions; something further, spiritual, was embodied in the music and constituted a "message" that jazz alone could deliver. That "message" was one that went back to the roots of jazz, to blues and gospel music, and was in danger of getting lost when the music got too far from those roots. Art Blakey and pianist Horace Silver, who were the core of the original Jazz Messengers, both made careers out of keeping those roots watered and vital.
You can hear the two of them together in early 1954, in a group under Blakey's leadership, on
A Night at Birdland, Volume 1
(Blue Note 46519) and
Volume 2
(Blue Note 46520). One of the earliest live recordings in jazz and still one of the best, the album is a sort of apotheosis of the early-1950s approach. It features perhaps the greatest trumpeter of the decade, Clifford Brown, the soulful Parker disciple Lou Donaldson on alto, and a rhythm section that includes ex-Parker bassist Curly Russell in addition to Blakey and Silver.
For the most part, the group takes the familiar head-solos-head approach - but what solos and what group interplay! The horn players' work is discussed in the appropriate Soloists sections, but there is something to notice in the rhythm section. Whereas bop pianists like Bud Powell or Al Haig might surgically insert chords here and there as an answer to a particular line or like crisp trumpet-section accents, Silver tended to accompany a soloist like a big band riffing away in the out chorus of a flag-waver or like a gospel pianist playing behind a choir. His voicings tended to be elemental and his rhythm very churchy. He was the perfect foil for Blakey, whose high-hat cymbal accented on two and four and who liked to use the tom-toms for African-sounding, riff-style accents behind a soloist. These were the seeds of what later came to be called hard bop, which was basically a bebop group conception laced heavily with blues tonality and an accent on the second and fourth beat of the bar, an intensely rhythmic orientation.
The heat this group generates on "Split Kick," the fast blues "Wee Dot," and almost everything else is hard to believe; Blakey and Silver spur Donaldson and, especially, Brown to inspired heights of cogency and momentum. Blakey always had very strong trumpet players, and he liked to play off
 
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trumpeters' phrases when they played percussive ideas; Brown played peppery, flowing lines that were lyrical and percussive at the same time. The music on this set can't be recommended highly enough. This same rhythm section, by the way, can be heard to very interesting effect accompanying two of the giants of the swing era, Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge, on the probably hard-to-find
Coleman Hawkins - Disorder at the Border
(Spotlite 121, LP only).
Later that year, the Jazz Messengers proper recorded their first album for Blue Note, under the leadership of Horace Silver. Blakey played drums, and the front line consisted of the ex-Parker trumpeter Kenny Dorham and a young tenor player named Hank Mobley, from whom much more would be heard. Doug Watkins, one of the 1950s finest bassists, rounded out the group. The album,
Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers
(Blue Note 46140), lays out almost all the directions that both Silver and Blakey would go on to explore in more depth. Silver wrote all but one of the eight tunes.
The first tune, "Room 608," has two themes; the first, stated at the beginning, is a fairly typical bebop line, but the second, which separates Silver's piano solo and Mobley's tenor solo, is something different - a gospel-influenced call-and-response between the horns and the rhythm section. Listen, too, to the change in Silver's accompanying style behind Mobley; both his rhythms and his harmonies suggest a gospel pianist. "Creepin' In" is an archetypal walking-tempo minor-key blues-based tune on which Silver's piano answers the short phrases of the horns. "To Whom It May Concern" contrasts a typical bluesy repeated figure with a Latin interlude; "Stop Time," "Hippy,'' and "Hankerin'" are all cookers. "The Preacher," probably the most famous item from the session, is a simple theme over very simple gospel-type chords, on top of a New Orleans-inflected two-beat rhythmic background that shifts into straight-ahead four-four during the solos. All of this - the shifting rhythms, the interest in Latin rhythms and gospel-flavored tunes and harmonies, the simple, short-lined blues themes, and the sheer joy in swinging - would go on to mark the work of both Blakey's and Silver's groups.
Late in 1955 the same band recorded a live performance that was released as
The Jazz Messengers at the Cafe Bohemia, Volume 1
(Blue Note 46521) and
Volume 2
(Blue Note 46522). Neither volume has the quality of a complete statement that
Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers
has; what we get instead is a chance to look at this group philosophy as it plays itself out over a typical evening in a club. The program is a mix of standards ("Like Someone in Love," "Yesterdays," "Just One of Those Things") and originals by Dorham and Mobley.
One departure that this style made from classic bebop was that it tended to

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