The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (34 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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situations in 1966 and 1967. The first two tracks feature Ayler on alto saxophone with a group consisting of two basses, a cello, and, on one track, drummer Beaver Harris. The tunes "For John Coltrane" and "Change Has Come" do not use jazz-based rhythm at all; the overall effect, as with Cecil Taylor's music, is more or less that of contemporary European chamber music. The tunes are completely out of tempo, and all instruments improvise at once.
The other two tracks feature Ayler on tenor, with his brother Donald on trumpet and a violinist, two bassists, and a drummer. Here, partly because of the presence of the trumpet and drums, the music sounds less like European chamber music and more like a Salvation Army band. "Truth Is Marching In" and "Our Prayer" are arranged around one tonal center, and the horns play held notes in simple major-scale relation to the tonal center. There is no tempo, and the other instruments contribute as they please. After a beginning in which the horns play meditative held notes, they move into an extended section of playing that is outside the conception of notes altogether, in which Ayler plays with all the other sounds - squawks, screeches, double tones, overtones, etc. - that his horn can produce. With the drone effect, the music has an incantatory aspect, as one might expect from the spiritual orientation of the titles. Ayler had a very piercing and unique sound on the saxophone, which can be very affecting, but the group concept goes nowhere, which was probably the point.
Archie Shepp's 1965
Fire Music
(Impulse MCAD-39121) is a different story. One of the New Thing's most outspoken musicians, Shepp was closely associated with John Coltrane and many of the other New York avant-gardists of the 1960s.
Fire Music
is much more worked-out than the Ayler or Roscoe Mitchell sets and much more rooted in the jazz tradition than either their work or that of Cecil Taylor. Much of it sounds, in fact, like a combination of the formal concern and surging rhythms of Charles Mingus and the melodic freedom of Ornette Coleman.
"Hambone," for example, begins with a bass vamp over a little repeated cymbal figure, over which the trumpet and trombone play a very free, mournful melody; this segues almost immediately into a countertheme, a heavily rhythmic riff played by the ensemble (which consists of trumpet, trombone, and alto sax) and answered by Shepp's tenor. The drums play a critical role here in setting the groove; it is blues-based music, and it swings hard. After repeats of the slow theme and the riff, there is a trumpet solo over a chanted ensemble riff played on top of a trickily accented six-eight rhythm. It has some of the same effect of a Mingus piece like "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting." The trumpet soloist, by the way, is Ted Curson, who contributed so much to the quartet sides on Mingus's Candid recordings. Then comes a shuffle-
 
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rhythm section for Shepp's tenor, which is steeped in the blues tradition. The track shows a willingness and ability to address the whole spectrum of approaches to jazz and bring something fresh to it.
"Los Olvidados," a more lyrical piece, likewise has a number of sections which go in and out of a swing feeling, including a fast waltz. There are also versions of Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss," the popular Brazilian song "The Girl from Ipanema," and a tenor, bass, and drums performance of a Shepp composition dedicated to Malcolm X. All in all, this is a satisfying set, a good example of the avant-garde using its head as well as its emotions and keeping its mind on its roots.
What's New?
The approaches we've just glanced at, as taken by Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell, the Ayler brothers, and others, were by no means the work of more than a small minority of the people playing jazz, even at the height of the New Thing. The mid-1960s work of John Coltrane (see the Soloists section) had a broader impact, as did Ornette Coleman's work, but most musicians continued to play with the basic vocabulary of bebop, with some harmonic alterations stemming from the modal approach taken by Miles Davis and Charles Mingus.
Still, some of jazz's most basic assumptions had been challenged, and the music that was seen as being on the cutting edge had, in fact, brought jazz to the end of a long first cycle that had begun in New Orleans. For the most part, the New Thing signaled a retreat from the notion of time as something that moves forward, as well as from a cosmopolitan vision of the music as a symbol of literal social mobility.
Yet the avant-garde of the 1960s, with a few exceptions, for all its tribal overtones and egalitarian conception of group organization, did not succeed in putting together a new aesthetic that worked in terms of the challenges already laid down by the music. The community music of New Orleans was spiritual music that was involved with the rituals of people's day-to-day lives, the weddings, parades, and funerals that marked their progress through the world. The music of the 1960s avant-garde lacked the ritual basis of the spiritual authority it seemed to want to claim. It was a nonhierarchical group music, the justification of which was an increased freedom to pursue individual revelation, and it never managed to resolve that paradox successfully
in musical terms
. The logical extreme of the most extreme edge of the music, as heard in Coltrane's
Meditations
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-39139) and Ayler's work, never really caught on with the black community in the way the musicians wanted it
 
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to, and musically it produced a very passionate chaos. It offered a group meaning based exclusively on individual freedom, and that paradox leads to meaninglessness if there isn't also a clear vision of the needs of the ensemble.
Throughout the 1970s people continued to make music that sounded like all the various styles of jazz, but we have had to wait until fairly recently to hear musicians who would again begin addressing a group concept that could reflect the complexities of a democracy in the terms that the landmarks of the music outlined. Those terms involve the maintenance of a constant and delicate tension between the freedom of the individual and the coherence of the group.
 
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SOLOISTS
 
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The Trumpet Section
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong - also known as Pops, Satchelmouth, Satchmo, and Dippermouth - was the most important jazz instrumentalist who ever lived. He more than anyone else developed the idea of the jazz solo and brought to it a shape and grandeur of conception that all who followed have had to take into account. The details of Armstrong's life, from his birth at the turn of the century in poverty in New Orleans to his death as an international celebrity in 1971, are well known. Countless people have heard his music, but relatively few, still, know just how deep, broad, and significant Armstrong's work was - not just in the 1920S, when he was defining the agenda for every jazz instrumentalist, but throughout his life.
Armstrong's recording career had several stages. The first consists of the years in the early and mid-1920S when he recorded as a sideman with the bands of King Oliver and Fletcher Henderson and as an accompanist to numerous blues singers, including the immortal Bessie Smith. After that came the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of the late 1920s, a time of virtuoso soloing. From the very late 1920S through the years of World War II, Armstrong played almost exclusively in front of big bands and became a world famous singer, musician, and personality. The years after World War II saw him break up his big band in favor of a small group, called the All Stars, which he would lead, with shifting personnel, for the rest of his life. During this latter
 
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period, which lasted some twenty-five years, he recorded in many different kinds of settings in addition to his work with the All Stars.
Dippermouth Blues
The 1923 recordings of Armstrong with King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band are discussed in detail in the Ensembles section. Of all of them, only two contain Armstrong solos; one - ''Chimes Blues" - is available on
Louis Armstrong and King Oliver
(Milestone MCD-47017-2). But a close listen to the band's ensemble approach, as well as to the cornet playing of his mentor, King Oliver, will help you understand where Armstrong was coming from. The New Orleans emphasis on playing a clear lead, a defined melody with a strong rhythmic basis - and on having a strong, singing tone - set Armstrong's course for life and, with it, the traditional role of the trumpet in the jazz group, small and large.
The Milestone set also includes several blues performances on which Armstrong accompanies singer Alberta Hunter. On three tracks, this ensemble (called the Red Onion Jazz Babies) is joined by the New Orleans clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, who was the only musician at the time who could give Armstrong some competition as a soloist; the most exciting performance is "Cake Walking Babies from Home," on which Armstrong and Bechet engage in a famous battle of wits.
For the finest examples of Armstrong's way with blues accompaniments, proceed directly to
Bessie Smith/The Collection
(Columbia CK 44441). Four 1925 titles - "St. Louis Blues," "Reckless Blues," "You've Been a Good Old Wagon," and "I Ain't Gonna Play No Second Fiddle" - feature Armstrong accompanying the greatest blues singer of the time. Armstrong's cornet dances around Smith's strong vocal lines, echoing them and sometimes puckishly mocking them; the coupling of these two artists was one of the high points in American music. Also in this set, don't miss the work of trumpeter Joe Smith, especially on "Young Woman's Blues." A tragically short-lived contemporary of Armstrong, Joe Smith was one of the stars of the Fletcher Henderson band.
When Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson orchestra, the premier black dance band of its day, in September 1924, his career, as well as his influence on the course of the music, began to skyrocket. On
A Study in Frustration: The Fletcher Henderson Story
(Columbia/Legacy C3K 57596), you can hear examples of the band's work both before Armstrong arrived and afterward. In early solos with the band, such as those on "Copenhagen" and "Shanghai Shuffle," Armstrong provides electrifying, swinging moments in the midst of otherwise dated or pedestrian performances. The somewhat later "T.N.T." is a more integrated performance, with Armstrong and the band
 
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played off against each other. (Joe Smith has some good moments here, too, as he does on the set's version of "The Stampede.")
But in the Henderson band, Armstrong was still one soloist among many, and in November 1925 he left to be featured as a star with the large orchestras of Erskine Tate and, later, Carroll Dickerson in Chicago. He can be heard raising the roof with the Tate band in May 1926 on "Stomp Off, Let's Go" and the thrilling "Static Strut" on the possibly hard-to-find
Young Louis, the Side Man
(MCA-1301, cassette only) and with the Carroll Dickerson band, playing "Symphonic Raps" and "Savoyagers' Stomp" on
Louis Armstrong, Volume 4: Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines
(Columbia CK 45142). But by far the most important activity he engaged in immediately after leaving Henderson was a series of recording sessions with the small groups he called the Hot Five and the Hot Seven.
Hotter than That
Possibly the most influential series of recordings in the history of jazz, certainly one of the very greatest and definitely one of the most enduringly enjoyable, the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens are available from Columbia in four volumes:
The Hot Fives, Volume 1
(CK 44049),
The Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, Volume 2
(CK 44253) and
Volume 3
(CK 44422), and
Louis Armstrong, Volume 4: Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines
(CK 45142). Every side that Armstrong made with these bands has moments worth singling out, but there is space here only to point to the most important highlights.
Volume 1
begins with a masterpiece of group playing, "My Heart," on which Armstrong's cornet leads the band with a buoyancy that is as fresh today as when it was recorded. Notice that he doesn't solo here, although he takes some ingenious breaks. A couple of months later, however, they recorded "Cornet Chop Suey," on which he takes a solo of fantastic power and definition. On the same day, he recorded "Heebie Jeebies," the first example of scat, or wordless, singing on record. Also worth pointing out are Armstrong's minor-key blowing on "King of the Zulus," a piece of period New Orleans jive, and the original version of the New Orleans standard ''Muskrat Ramble."
Volume 2
finds Armstrong switching to the brighter-toned trumpet for some performances that to this day have the power to thrill and surprise, foremost among them "Potato Head Blues," on which Armstrong takes what may be his most famous solo over a full chorus of stop-time rhythm, a marvel of controlled tension and structure. "Potato Head Blues" is something you live with as a jazz fan; you listen to it periodically, and it grows in meaning over the years.

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