The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (32 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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lington's alter ego. Trumpeter Clark Terry joins the band on fluegelhorn for this set, to good effect. The emotional high point here is "Blood Count," Strayhorn's last composition; Johnny Hodges and the entire band combine to make a thing of supernatural beauty. Ellington's solo piano version of "Lotus Blossom" is also enormously moving, but if I were to start singling out tracks, I'd have to continue through the whole disc. Please don't miss this.
For some unique small-band performances from 1957 and 1958, check out
Happy Reunion
(Signature/Sony Music AK 40030). The 1957 tracks here are by a septet including Johnny Hodges on alto and Clark Terry on trumpet and include the swinger "Rubber Bottom" and the haunting "Where's the Music?" The 1958 titles feature tenorist Paul Gonsalves alone with the Ellington-Jimmy Woode-Sam Woodyard rhythm section, playing two takes apiece of "In a Mellotone" and the fine ballad "Happy Reunion," as well as thirty-one hot choruses of blues billed as a version of the ''wailing interval" from "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue."
But the ultimate treasure trove of unusual late Ellington is certainly the ten-volume series called
Duke Ellington
-
The Private Collection
(SAJA 7 91041-91045 and 91230-91234). It would be impossible here to detail everything in this amazing mix of live and studio recordings from the 1950s and 1960s, most of which was recorded by Ellington himself, at his own expense. Almost every volume contains tunes unheard elsewhere or familiar material in radically altered arrangements. Stanley Dance's liner notes provide fascinating glimpses into the actual circumstances of the recordings.
Some highlights, briefly noted:
Volume 1
contains studio material recorded in 1956, with Johnny Hodges and Paul Gonsalves heavily featured. Notable here are the furiously swinging "Feet Bone" and the bop-flavored "Short Sheet Cluster," on which Clark Terry plays brilliantly.
Volume 2
features a very loose 1958 band playing for a dance at a California Air Force base. The sound here isn't that great, and Ellington doesn't get to the piano until the fifth track. Johnny Hodges and trumpeter Cat Anderson were both missing, and this gets my vote for least interesting set of the series.
Volume 3
is one of the best and most interesting of the series, with a number of previously unreleased tunes, including Billy Strayhorn's arrangement of Thelonious Monk's "Monk's Dream" and Ellington's Monk tribute called "Frere Monk." Gonsalves is featured heavily in these 1962 tracks, to especially good effect on the very fast "ESP" that opens the set.
Volume 4
is another excellent set, consisting of studio tracks from 1963 on which cornetist Ray Nance is the most prominent voice; on most, he is the only brass voice, along with the reeds and the rhythm section. He even is allowed to take over the Hodges feature "Jeep's Blues." Also check out the
 
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jumping version of "Harmony in Harlem," with the bass of the undersung Ernie Shepard.
Volume 5
consists of the two suites discussed earlier.
Volume 6
consists of live tracks from yet another California dance gig for the Air Force, on the night after the one featured on
Volume 2
. This set is somewhat more pulled together, although Hodges's presence is still missed. The band does some interesting things, like "Such Sweet Thunder" and "Blues To Be There," which is from the "Newport Jazz Festival Suite."
Volume 7
is something of a grab bag, full of tracks from several 1957 and 1962 studio sessions, with Gonsalves again prominent. His chase choruses with Clark Terry on "Circle of Fourths'' are very exciting.
Volume 8
contains some very unusual studio things, all but one of which date from the mid-1960s, including three tunes with the drums playing heavy-handed rock/funk rhythms, which make the tracks sound dated. The good news on this one is all the Johnny Hodges there is to hear, especially "Banquet Scene" from "Timon of Athens" and the oddly titled "Rod La Rocque."
Volume 9
would be worth having if only for the informal "Sophisticated Lady" by Hodges and the rhythm section. These 1968 studio tracks also include a fine "I Can't Get Started" by tenorist Harold Ashby and an Ellington piano solo on his "Meditation." Finally,
Volume 10
contains almost a full reading of "Black, Brown, and Beige," recorded mostly in 1965, and extremely important for an understanding of Ellington's work. It also contains a reading of "Harlem" that is not quite up to the versions on either
Ellington Uptown
(Columbia CK 40836) or
The Great Paris Concert
(Atlantic 304-2) and an alternate version of "Ad Lib on Nippon," the definitive version of which is to be found on
The Far East Suite
(RCA/Bluebird 7640-2-RB).
 
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Transition
In the Late 1950S many musicians' ideas about the passage of time and about the roles instruments should fill in the jazz group began to change. The music they had been playing up to that point was basically a metaphor for the cycle of voyage and return. Its essential harmonic devices were linked to the idea of finding home; a tension was set up by a chord or chords, then finally resolved, if only momentarily.
That metaphor for voyage and return was also built into the music's structure - the organization into choruses, whether the twelve-measure chorus of the blues or the usual thirty-two-measure chorus of the standard popular song. Choruses were little stories, the plots of which consisted of the way-onto-way of the harmonic pulls and rests; they ended in resolution, then began again. It was music of cause-and-effect over time; the sense of mastery of time was a big part of the satisfaction the music delivered. But in the late 1950s a number of elements of the music began to undercut the sense of movement through time.
One of those elements was the use of gospel harmonies and vamps in the work of Art Blakey and Horace Silver. In gospel-based tunes such as "Moanin'" and "The Preacher," the harmonic background was simpler than in much bebop, with fewer turns in the map. Part of the notion underneath this was to ground the music again in the community it had come from, in the bedrock sounds of African-American life - the church and the blues. It was less about venturing out, as the midwestern swing of the 1930s and Charlie
 
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Parker's music were, and more about reaffirming something. And it was supposed to be more accessible to people, more popular, more involved in the community at large in that sense, too, instead of a being a hermetic music that only in-group members could properly play or understand.
If, as I said earlier, the background tempo and harmonic structure in a jazz performance are the axis of the community, 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 complex bop harmonies and fast tempos inevitably reflected the kinds of social and even class contrasts that were becoming more commonplace in the wake of World War II, and they also reflected a faith in the individual's ability to master the rules of that increasingly complex social (harmonic, rhythmic) system. For whatever mix of reasons, the music that Blakey and Silver were making was pointing less toward social (harmonic, rhythmic) contrast and more toward simplicity and stasis.
As their music developed, it went farther in this direction. They began using vamps, the repeated phrases in the rhythm section that make for an incantatory quality, which comes from religious music. Vamps usually imply little or no harmonic movement. They don't move you through time; they immerse you in the present. Vamps are associated with ritual and myth, and ritual and mythic time is eternal, as opposed to historical time, which is contingent.
Another element that began to undercut the sense of movement through time was the modal approach used by Charles Mingus on
Pithecanthropus Erectus
(Atlantic 8809-2) and, most famously, by Miles Davis on
Kind of Blue
(Columbia CK 40579). Instead of an intricate harmonic map, musicians played off of one scale, or mode, either for a preordained number of measures or until someone signaled to change to another scale. But staying in one scale kept the harmony static and weakened the sense of time passing.
At the same time, what were once accompaniment or rhythm instruments were being integrated into the total group sound. At its most extreme, the tendency was to eliminate the distinction between lead and accompaniment altogether. The Mingus quartet with Eric Dolphy, Ted Curson, and Dannie Richmond, as heard in
Mingus Presents Mingus
(Candid CD 9005), was a very well realized example. This approach made the group fully polyphonic again, like the New Orleans bands, where the various voices contributed to a group counterpoint. Only now the drums and bass, along with the so-called melody instruments, were front-line instruments.
This amounted to a full-scale overhaul of the group democracy. Whereas once, by mutual agreement, certain instruments took the lead and certain instruments filled a formalized accompanying role, now all instruments were in
 
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the foreground. Also, since the rhythm instruments weren't necessarily keeping time, the lead instruments had to assume responsibility for thinking about that as well.
Along with this came a tendency in many jazz groups to eliminate the piano. The piano implicitly gives at least a harmonic context for what everyone else does. A horn player's single-note melodic lines can often be in several keys at once. Or if there is a pedal tone from the bass, the horns can play in several keys off of that, switching at will. The piano puts the notes that the other instruments are playing into the context of a chord. It sets boundaries and arranges everything into a vertical hierarchy, and to many players at the time it felt like a straitjacket. Without the piano, they felt, each instrument had maximum flexibility in harmonic direction; you could play in a number of harmonic valences at once, like 3-D tic-tac-toe.
Such seminal recordings as the Mingus Candid quartet records, Sonny Rollins's
A Night at the Village Vanguard, Volume 1
(Blue Note 46517) and
Volume 2
(Blue Note 46518),
Freedom Suite
(Riverside/OJC-067), and
Way Out West
(Contemporary/OJC-337), and Ornette Coleman's
The Shape of Jazz to Come
(Atlantic 1317-2) and
Free Jazz
(Atlantic 1364-2) had no piano. The groups that did have pianists often began using them in different ways. The important pianists of the time were players like McCoy Tyner, Andrew Hill, Herbie Hancock, and Bill Evans, who used lots of tone clusters and suspensions that made the harmonic destination ambiguous.
The effect of this, too, was to lessen the emphasis on movement through time. If three people are developing their own lines, without someone to tell them where they are going, there will be a shift from a focus on forward movement to a focus on the nature of group dynamics. The group began, figuratively, to stay in one place and examine itself.
With these developments, we are a long way from the regal smile on Count Basie's drummer Jo Jones's face, which said that time had been tamed, which assured us that time went forward and that conquering it was something worth doing, that there was order and hierarchy, a happy and willing acquiescence to the directives of the Count (or the Duke or Mr. Jelly Lord). As America's faith in its own manifest destiny began to break down, the relationship between the individual and the group, as well as between the spontaneous and the planned, inevitably began to tilt.
Chasin' the Trane
The career of John Coltrane illustrates several of the questions, frustrations, and aspirations many musicians had in the late 1950s. In a sense, Coltrane was
 
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an extreme embodiment of some of the bebop principles; perhaps as a result, he became an extreme embodiment of some of the reactions to those principles. But at each phase of his development, at least up until the final one, he was able to play exquisitely beautiful and lyrical things on ballads, for example, and he never failed to address the blues and four-four swing. His career is studied in more detail in the Soloists section; this is a study of one aspect of it.
Trane was extremely preoccupied with the nature of the harmonic maps, the chord changes, of the music. He was obsessed with scales, and he liked to play lots of notes, as if he was trying to play as many permutations of the scales in as short a space as possible. On his album
Blue Train
(Blue Note 46095), you can hear him attacking the chord changes of the title tune, a blues, as if he is trying to scour every corner of the harmonic pot. It seemed, too, as if the standard rate of chord progressions wasn't dense enough for him; on that same album, his tune "Moment's Notice" has a harmonic map on which the routes change more quickly than in almost any tune written up until that time, sometimes twice in a measure for several bars at a stretch. It was as if, with his great mastery of scales, he needed a more complex obstacle course thrown at him in order to maintain interest. Musicians puzzled over "Moments Notice" for quite a while. That was in 1957.
By the next spring Coltrane was playing with a technique that critic Ira Gitler clubbed "sheets of sound," in which he played so fast over a medium-tempo background that he sounded almost out of tempo. "Sweet Sapphire Blues" on the album
Black Pearls
(Prestige/OJC-352) is only one example, but a startling one. Red Garland and the trio play chorus after chorus of a medium-tempo, swinging blues, a finger-popping groove designed for maximum swing. When Coltrane finally enters, he plays one or two choruses that actually address the tempo, then he goes off into a cascading, tumbling reading of what seems every possible chord change, inversion, and permutation, as if trying to quench something that couldn't be quenched. Listening to it is an odd experience; Coltrane seems to be banging his head against a wall. He had learned all the changes, mastered them better than anyone, and still there was this huge, even unmanageable hunger expressed in his playing. The bebop group organization, he seemed to be saying, couldn't provide him with a satisfactory framework of meaning; what the rhythm section is doing on ''Sweet Sapphire" is designed for something very different from what he is doing. What he had spent his career trying to do was turning into a dead end for him.
The next year he recorded
Giant Steps
(Atlantic 1311-2), which took the "Moment's Notice" idea to its logical extreme; the title tune rolled chord

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