The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (84 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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Page 375

and South American music, Hancock and Corea wanted to be liked by many rather than loved by a few and found rock a good way to achieve that, and Taylor, who had begun as an Ellington acolyte, was playing a serious but finally not very blues-inflected form of semi-improvised chamber music. Taylor's work is discussed briefly in the Ensembles section; he is a serious artist but, as I say elsewhere, the musical choices he has made place him outside the frame of reference of this book.

Of the four, Tenore probably had the most influence on other acoustic jazz pianists. In his early-1960s work with John Coltrane's quartet, as well as in numerous albums as a sideman, Tenore outlined a style of accompanying and soloing that constituted the first meaningfully new (in jazz terms) approach to the piano since Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. With a touch that originally resembled Wynton Kelly's staccato, crisp, on-top-of-the-beat style, Tenore began to incorporate the pentatonic scale, with its overtones of African scales, into his playing, as well as phrasing in different note groupings from the beboppers; in this way, he fit in with Coltrane's melodic concept. The pentatonic approach, as well as his way of chording with open fourths, contributed to the evolution of the static time feeling, discussed in the Ensembles section, that many players were working toward at the time.

In any case, Tenore's playing with Coltrane, on albums such as
Coltrane's Sound
(Atlantic 1419-2),
Crescent
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5889),
Coltrane
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5883),
My Favorite Things
(Atlantic 1361-2),
Ballads
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5885), and
A Love Supreme
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-5660 JVC-467), is truly innovative jazz piano playing. So is his work on countless Blue Note albums of the 1960s, such as Wayne Shorter's
Juju
(Blue Note 46514) and Joe Henderson's
Inner Urge
(Blue Note 84189) and
Page One
(Blue Note 84140), as well as his own
The Real McCoy
(Blue Note 46512) and
McCoy Tyner Plays Duke Ellington
(MCA/Impulse MCAD-33124). In much the same way as young tenor players almost invariably chose Coltrane as their model during the last years of the decade and for the entire 1970s, so young pianists almost invariably voiced their chords as Tenore did, accompanied as he did, and soloed as he did.

Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea were the electric twins of the 1970s, the avatars of so-called fusion, sired by Miles Davis out of Jimi Hendrix (or vice versa). Both were extremely talented acoustic jazz pianists with varied experience in the early and mid-1960s. Of the two, Hancock probably had the more impressive pedigree, having been part of Davis's last great quintet, with Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, as well as the leader on several classic 1960s dates such as
Maiden Voyage
(Blue Note 46339) and
Empyrean Isles
(Blue Note 84175) and sideman on countless more; their names read like a list of Blue Note's greatest hits - Hank Mobley's
No Room for Squares
(Blue Note

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84149), Lee Morgan's
Search for the New Land
(Blue Note 84169) and
Cornbread
(Blue Note 84222), Wayne Shorter's
Speak No Evil
(Blue Note 46509) and
Adam's Apple
(Blue Note 46403), and Kenny Dorham's
Una Mas
(Blue Note 46515), to name just a few.

Hancock had prodigious technique and harmonic understanding, and he found a way of playing in a rhythm section, most famously along with Carter and Williams, that was a true and supple extension of the Red Garland-Paul Chambers-Philly Joe Jones conception, tailored for the Davis band's new sense of dynamics and form. He used tone clusters, ambiguous and complex harmonies, and a fine sense of the gradations of touch in fashioning a very complete approach to the keyboard. Almost from the beginning he showed an interest in rock-flavored elements (he recorded his famous composition "Watermelon Man" on his 1962 album
Takin' Off
[Blue Note 46506]); by the time he participated in Miles Davis's last great album,
Filles de Kilimanjaro
(Columbia CK 46116), he was firmly committed to electronic music and would stay that way for several years, recording albums, like the famous
Headhunter
(Columbia CK 32731), that had little to do with jazz. In more recent years, he has applied his talents to harmonically interesting music again; a good sampling of the results can be heard in
Herbie Hancock - A Jazz Collection
(Columbia CK 46865), which includes some revealing 1978 acoustic duets with Chick Corea (what I think they reveal is how much better both of them sounded on acoustic piano). Probably the most revealing of those duets is their outing on George Gershwin's "Liza," a nine-minute fantasy that begins as stride, moves through bebop, gets increasingly harmonically sophisticated, and ends up in outer space before making a successful landing. This is a real tour de force, a treat for the ear, the mind, the heart, and the nervous system.

Corea had a technique almost as prodigious as Hancock's, plus more melodic inventiveness as a soloist, a certain extroverted quality, and a Latin- flavored tang that were hard to resist. You can hear what he sounds like in a very straight-ahead jazz context on trumpeter Blue Mitchell's excellent 1964 album
The Thing To Do
(Blue Note 84178), with the exciting calypso "Fungii Mama" and Corea's own swinger "Chick's Tune," as well as Jimmy Heath's title tune. Throughout, Corea's solos always surprise, melodically; they swing like mad, and they show a knowledge of the tradition.

Two years later, in material later released on
Inner Space
(Atlantic 2-305-2), Corea was showing Tenore's influence in the use of the pentatonic scale and in certain left-hand chord voicings; this set has some very good, swinging music on it, including a version of Corea's "Litha," a modal tune that alternates sections of walking tempo with sections of up-tempo improvising by Corea, tenorist Joe Farrell, and trumpeter Woody Shaw. In 1967, as a member of Stan

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Getz's quartet, Corea would record "Litha" again, on what is arguably Getz's best album,
Sweet Rain
(Verve 815 054-2). Corea's acoustic piano work on this set is consistently excellent. The next year Corea, like Hancock, would take part, on electric as well as acoustic piano, in Miles Davis's
Filles de Kilimanjaro
(Corea also recorded a stunning acoustic trio album,
Now He Sings, Now He Sobs
[Blue Note 90055] with bassist Miroslav Vitous and drummer Roy Haynes). The year after that brought Davis's all-electric
Bitches Brew
(Columbia G2K 40577), and the rest is history, or histrionics, depending on how you look at it. In the early 1970s Corea formed his own electric band, Return To Forever. Lately he has made some return trips from forever to lead, once again, a trio consisting of Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes, which he calls Trio Music, with whom he has proven that he can still play brilliantly within the jazz idiom.

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EPILOGUE

At the end of his book on bullfighting and Spain,
Death in the Afternoon
, Ernest Hemingway wrote a lyrical, elegiac chapter about all the things he wasn't able to include, and I have to admit to some of the same feelings. I wish there were a way to give some sense of what it was like to see Duke Ellington rehearse his band, or to accompany the great Basie trombonist Dicky Wells on his rounds as a Wall Street messenger (we visited Fats Waller's clarinetist Rudy Powell, who was pushing a mail cart in the Merrill Lynch building; a number of older musicians worked down there, it was a sort of fraternity), or to be sixteen and see Sonny Stitt and Dexter Gordon square off at Radio City Music Hall while two middle-aged Harlemites hollered constant encouragement and poured me shots of Tanqueray gin from a bottle they carried in a doctor's bag. I wish there were room to convey the sense of anticipation that hovers in the odd twilight of the recording studio, the strange foreshortening of sounds, the muffled quality of nearby voices, and the unexpected crispness and presence of voices from the studio as they come over the speakers. I'd love to show what certain jazz clubs are like long after closing, or the reactions of a school bus full of swing-era musicians en route to a concert at the old New York World's Fair grounds when they found out the bus driver was lost (earlier, Gene Krupa had opened his wallet and pulled out a well-creased photograph of Louis Armstrong and Big Sid Catlett, which he always carried around with him; he showed it to Jo Jones, who was sitting next to him on the bus seat, and the two of them looked at it silently, the way old college friends at a reunion might look at a photo of classmates long gone). These kinds of experiences are, in their way, almost as much a part of being involved with the music as the music itself is, and everyone who hangs around enough has his or her own stories to tell.

But, finally, what lingers most for me are the occasions when I first heard something that I knew would be part of my life forever - Roy Eldridge's ecstatic solo at the end of "Let Me Off Uptown" (with Gene Krupa's band) on my grandparents' old record player, for instance, or Charlie Parker suddenly

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swooping out of the speakers in a used-record booth at a Long Island farmers' market when I was about twelve (it was his solo on "I'll Remember April," from
The Happy Bird
; I bought the album immediately), or the shock of hearing the urgency in John Coltrane's tenor as he peeled off chorus after chorus of "Mr. P.C." on the
Giant Steps
album. All of these recordings have become a part of my life; I revisit them regularly, and I never tire of hearing them. But the surprise, the exhilaration of hearing them for the first time, has been one of the nicest things in life, for me, and that is something I can share with you, through this book.

In that respect, I'm luckier than Hemingway was with Spain; the sounds and the spirit that this book addresses are out there to be had, as close as your nearest record store, and they are as fresh now as they were when they were first set down. The spirit that jazz embodies will never die; as long as we can touch a button and begin again, at the beginning, of Duke Ellington's "KoKo," or John Coltrane's "Crescent," or Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues," we will have proof that the individual and the group can be reconciled, that African and European cultural streams are compatible, and that the blues can be held at bay. And when the balance sheets are toted up for this country, and this century, let no one miss the sweet justice that the greatest artistic expression of the American ideal has come from the descendants of slaves, who found the true meaning of democracy and the essence of freedom.

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INDEX

A page number in boldface indicates a major entry, which may continue on the pages following
.