The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (33 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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changes at the soloist at an unprecedented rate, two per measure at a furious up-tempo, and with a set of interchordal relationships that was uncommon, to boot. Coltrane eats the changes up on the record; the power and fire with which he tears through them shock listeners even to this day. A measure of the tune's difficulty is that Tommy Flanagan, the session's pianist and one of the best in jazz, seems dumbfounded in his solo, struggling to keep up.
At the same time that Coltrane made
Giant Steps
he was participating, as a member of Miles Davis's group, in the sessions for the album
Kind of Blue
(Columbia CK 40579), which would make a clear and totally successful use of modal improvisation. On tunes like "So What" and "Flamenco Sketches," the group improvised over only one scale instead of over a series of changes; instead of being challenged to run the changes, one was challenged to make a coherent melody over a static harmonic backdrop. This provided a way out for Coltrane, at least temporarily. "Giant Steps" represented the farthest he could go in the domination of time; harmonic time, in terms of the changing of chords, was passing as fast as time could pass under him, and he still dominated it, and there was still that hunger. After
Kind of Blue
, the mainstream of his playing would be in the direction of one chord or no chord, a burning present, an eternal moment.
That change seemed to stand for the frustration many were having with the assumptions that had been in force for a decade or more. If forward movement is a manifestation of faith in the visible, knowable world, Coltrane had worked his way to the logical conclusion of bop's technological aspect. His was the musical equivalent of a real spiritual crisis, which seems to have had its parallel in Coltrane's extramusical life. After he left Miles Davis, his music would become increasingly spiritual and less and less based on an illusion of forward movement. In Coltrane's classic quartet of the early and mid-1960s, with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones, all the instruments, as often as not, participated in an incantatory and pointedly spiritual approach, often grounded in vamps, as on his famous
A Love Supreme
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5660 JVC-467). Solos stopped being lines that led from one place to another and began to seem more like chants, the object of which was a meditation upon higher things, an escape from the world of contingency.
While few of the New Thing, or avant-garde, players of the 1960s could approach the profundity of Coltrane's spiritual dimension, most of them had also begun questioning the point of movement through time, echoing or anticipating in that questioning the period of self-examination that was in store for a nation that was about to be severely shown its limits for the first time in over thirty years.
 
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Tomorrow is the Question
What was happening in jazz, belatedly, was what had been happening in painting since the turn of the century. The hierarchical convention of background and foreground broke down at the same time as the convention of representation. In jazz, the equivalent of the illusion of representation was, and is, the illusion of the passage of time, a sort of hyper-real time that is measured not by the clock but by the implicit rate of beats passing within the bar line. The illusion of the passage of time began to feel like a prison to many of the younger musicians.
Part of that breaking down of illusion in painting was the breaking down of distinctions between foreground and background. Elements that were background were made an equal part of the design elements of the picture with the foreground objects. In jazz, too, as the illusion of the passage of time broke down, the rhythm instruments were brought up to become an integral part of the composition and not just as background for soloists.
When Ornette Coleman made his first records with his pianoless quartet, which included trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and either Billy Higgins or Ed Blackwell on drums, many people had trouble believing that he was serious. His melodies often seemed at first to have nothing to do with the background that the bass and drums were playing. Sometimes the bass and drums seemed to be playing the melody along with the horns. Sometimes they played in a conventional group structure, but nobody could tell where in the form the soloist was.
There was nothing contrived about Coleman's music, however; it was extremely natural, and it addressed the fundamentals of the jazz tradition: it swung in slow, medium, and fast tempos, it was steeped in the blues, and it used Afro-Hispanic rhythms. And there was nothing vague or experimental about it. Everything that Coleman played was very definite. Today the music still sounds fresh and invigorating, unlike much music that is consciously designed to be new.
Although a closer look at Coleman's work will be found in the Soloists section, two of his records bear looking at here strictly for their ensemble work.
The Shape of Jazz to Come
(Atlantic 1317-2) is probably the best single album by the quartet, and you can hear most of the elements that seemed so odd when compared to the bop-oriented playing everyone was used to. The first track, "Lonely Woman," begins with Higgins playing a very fast tempo on the ride cymbal and Charlie Haden strumming an almost flamenco-sounding, insistent, droning bass figure in what sounds like a much slower tempo. When Coleman and Cherry come in to state the theme, it seems to float way above
 
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either tempo, almost as Louis Armstrong does at the end of "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues" on
Laughin' Louie
(RCA/Bluebird 9759-2-RB). So even though the drums are articulating what would usually be taken to be a very fast, forward-moving up-tempo on the ride cymbal, it is undercut by the theme itself, as well as by the different tempo superimposed by the bass. This in itself was a fascinating discovery - that you could neutralize the conventions of the passage of time by superimposing two different time schemes. Coleman would use this to supreme effect on
Free Jazz
(Atlantic 1364-2). (When the Modern Jazz Quartet performed "Lonely Woman," they underlined the melody not with simultaneous tempos but with ominous chords out of tempo, to much the same effect.)
Almost all the other tunes on
The Shape of Jazz to Come
undercut the sense of the passage of time in a variety of ways. "Peace," for example, seems tempo-less at first; the bass and drums come in and out, sometimes playing the actual theme with the horns, sometimes playing straight time, sometimes being silent. The first solo is Charlie Haden bowing very soft whole notes at the bottom of his range, then the horns restate the theme. Notice that Coleman's solo is very melodic, but it would be very difficult to put chord changes behind it. When Sonny Rollins plays with only bass and drums on
A Night at the Village Vanguard, Volume 1
(Blue Note 46517) and
Volume 2
(Blue Note 46518), you can almost always hear the tune and its harmonic progression implied in what he plays. Coleman here doesn't outline a set of chord changes; he lets his melodic imagination lead wherever it wants to go.
Despite the newness of much of
The Shape of Jazz to Come
, it sounds fairly conventional next to
Free Jazz
(Atlantic 1364-2), recorded in December 1960 and subtitled
A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet
. A first listening to this album may seem to reveal total chaos, but a closer listening shows an ingenious scheme. The first copy I owned of this record, when I was something like fourteen years old, was in mono, and I had no idea what was going on. In stereo, however, it is easier to see what the "double quartet" amounts to. On the left channel, Coleman, Cherry, bassist Scott La Faro, and drummer Billy Higgins are grouped; on the right, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums. What seems like a chaos of tempos on first listening is, in fact, two very regular tempos being played simultaneously: Charlie Haden's medium-tempo walking bass (in a low register), with Blackwell keeping time in that tempo, versus Scott La Faro's bass walking twice as fast as Haden's, mostly in the bass's upper register, with Higgins keeping time in La Faro's tempo. Both drummers add fills, accents, and all the other devices of the bop and postbop bag. But, as on "Lonely Woman," the superimposition of times
 
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gives an effect of stasis. Each musician gets a solo section in which he plays essentially in the time frame of the bass and drums from his own quartet, with the drummer and sometimes the horn players from the other quartet offering commentary as they see fit.
Free Jazz
, once you really hear what's going on, addresses all the fundamentals of the music; you listen for the same things in it that you listen for in earlier jazz - you just have to listen a little harder because there's more stuff over-laid on it. There are riffs, polyphony, swing, melody, blues tonality. In fact, it helps to have listened to a good amount of jazz from all styles before you try it, or it won't make sense easily. But if you've listened to King Oliver, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and the Miles Davis quintet of the late 1950s, you're ready for it.
A highly regarded (by many) pianist and composer associated with jazz is Cecil Taylor. Much of his music has always sounded like contemporary European classical music with drums added, and I have reservations about associating it with the jazz tradition because I think that once Taylor began producing his most characteristic work, he stopped addressing the fundamentals of African-American musical expression. Many people disagree with this notion, though quite a few agree with it; you can make up your own mind by listening. His 1966
Unit Structures
(Blue Note 84237) shows some approaches he took in his composing and performing. "Steps," the first piece, demonstrates clearly why this music was of the avant-garde - all the instruments are in the foreground, and the lines don't move forward through time. The horns have lines written out for them, and Taylor's playing is all over the place, splashing, skittering, and commenting on what the horns are playing. There is a pulse running through it, but no tempo.
"Enter Evening" has an entirely different mood; it's softer and much less dense. Muted trumpet, oboe, alto, and arco bass all play discrete lines, seemingly out of tempo, although, again, there is a discernible pulse. Taylor pays much attention to density, instrumental timbre, and dynamics in his music. In some respects it seems to have less in common with jazz than with the modern dance of someone like Merce Cunningham, a situation in which everyone seems to be doing something different over a static temporal background but with echoes, rhythmic and motivic, that serve as organizing figures. Still, this music is not primarily grounded in jazz, by my criteria, as Coleman's indisputably is. But it is careful music, worked out music, and worth hearing. If you like
Unit Structures
, you might want to try his subsequent
Conquistador
(Blue Note 84260), which many Taylor fans hold in high regard.
Both
Free Jazz
and
Unit Structures
, although they cut the cord on the stan-
 
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dard four-four passage-of-time format, have a pulse running through the performances; the listener is in another time zone, not the zone of the clock but of musical time. But Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell's 1966
Sound
(Delmark DS-408) rips the innards out of any clock you care to use. There is no illusion whatsoever of time passing in any other way than it ordinarily passes. There is no rhythmic momentum, no groove or anything to orient you. Suddenly you're in a room full of strangers who are all doing their own thing, and you have to deal with it.
Or you can take the record off. But if you listen to it for what it is, it has its virtues; at its best, its virtue is a sense of humor. "The Little Suite" is an example of this. It appears to be random sounds at first; there's a harmonica, a saxophone, bass sounds, drum rattle. The sounds get denser, then sparser. You hear police whistles, shouts. After a while, it feels like you're sitting on a porch in a strange neighborhood - you hear people fighting, a truck going by, a siren in the distance, a chicken being strangled, a five-car pileup, a drunken barbershop quartet, and then that guy walking by with the harmonica again ... It's funny, I think. But it sounds, finally, as if it was more fun to make than it is to listen to.
One leader whose unorthodox approach is championed by some and derided by others is the pianist Sun Ra, who, with his Arkestra, made extraordinary music for well over thirty years. His music has much in common with the avant-garde but also much in common with rhythm and blues, big-band swing, bebop, African music, and anything else he chose to use. Probably the best all-around introduction to Sun Ra is one of his first albums,
Sound of Joy
(Delmark DS-414). The program includes tunes laden with percussion instruments and cross-rhythms, as well as a baritone saxophone bebop battle ("Two Tones"). "El Is a Sound of Joy" has characteristically ethereal harmonies in the first theme, then shifts into a swinging, rhythm-and-blues-flavored riff for baritone, accompanied by hand clapping. "Saturn" is an up-tempo big-band chart with interesting backgrounds to a series of good solos. Maybe the most interesting tune on the record is "Planet Earth." It begins with a slow, lyrical melody over a slow tempo, which continues to be played at the original tempo as the rhythm section shifts into a much faster tempo. Recorded in 1957, it anticipates Ornette Coleman's subversion of the time scheme by a couple of years. Sun Ra and his Arkestra were very active up until his death in 1993. His shows often included dancers, stilt walkers, acrobats, singers, costumes, and group singing, as well as band work that ran the gamut, literally, from Fletcher Henderson to planet Neptune.
Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village
(Impulse MCAD-39123) is a document of one of the best-known New Thing saxophonists in two different playing

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