The History of Jazz (53 page)

Garner was self-taught—who could have instructed him in this crazy-quilt style?— and unable to read music. This did little to deter him from a career in music. After all, “nobody can hear you read,” he was quick to explain. For his hands, Garner needed to make no apologies. They were said to span a thirteenth—hard to believe given his diminutive stature—and he could sign autographs with either the left or the right. Such ambidexterity also showed at the keyboard. “He could play a totally different rhythm in each hand,” Sy Johnson once marveled, “and develop equally what he was doing in each hand.”
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And few pianists knew better than Garner how to keep their ten fingers gainfully employed. He is said to be responsible for over one thousand recordings on around seventy labels. Given this massive discography, Garner’s consistency, enthusiasm, and freshness of approach are especially impressive. His best-known works include his “Fantasy on Frankie and Johnny,” his pop song “Misty” (eventually immortalized in the noir movie
Play Misty for Me
), and his best-selling Columbia recording
Concert by the Sea
. Other Garner projects of note include his
Paris Impressions
,
Afternoon of an Elf
, and
Magician
. Despite the large audience he attracted during his lifetime, Garner has exerted little influence on players who came of age after his death in 1977—yet this is their loss, since his recorded legacy is rich with implication, unhindered by the prosaic, and could serve as the basis for a sparkling and brazen style even today.

Ahmad Jamal’s sparse, ultracool pianism stands as the antithesis of Garner’s rocking rococo ruminations at the keyboard. And if Garner was a throwback to an earlier era, with his prebop rhythms and traditional sense of swing, Jamal was a harbinger of the future of jazz. His studied use of space influenced Miles Davis and anticipated the later work of Bill Evans. His understated approach led some to dismiss him as essentially a cocktail pianist with little jazz substance: “Jamal’s real instrument is not the piano at all, but his audience,” quipped one jazz writer. Such comments reveal more about the state of jazz criticism during these years—deeply suspicious as it was of any musician who developed a wide following among the general public—than about Jamal’s streamlined keyboard attack. In this instance, Jamal’s cardinal sin was apparently the substantial success of his 1958 live recording at Chicago’s Pershing Lounge,
But Not for Me
, which reached number three on the
Billboard
album chart, and remained on the list for over two years. The song “Poinciana,” recorded at this engagement, would become Jamal’s signature theme, and effectively conveys the trademark virtues of his sparse, vibrant keyboard attack.

This may have been popular music, but its appeal was not achieved through slick commercialism, rather was driven by the singularity of Jamal’s vision. Jamal is often praised for his use of silence, but this scarcely conveys the depth of his musicality. After all—the precedent of John Cage notwithstanding—how difficult is it to be silent at the keyboard? The charm of Jamal’s music came rather from his ability to maintain the swing, emotional conviction, and mood of his music even when playing the fewest notes. He accomplished this through a mastery of volume and phrasing, outstanding tone control, an orchestral conception of the piano, and an unfailing instinct for how to shape a solo from beginning to end. Yet Jamal’s choice of sidemen also figured into this equation. Drummer Vernel Fournier and bassist Israel Crosby were unsurpassed at swinging while retaining the most subdued dynamic level. Together with Jamal they formed one of the most underappreciated rhythm sections of the 1950s. Jamal’s later work found him in a variety of settings, sometimes experimenting with electronics or performing with string accompaniment. The quality of these efforts is mixed, but the best of them—typically those finding him at the acoustic piano in a small-combo setting—are on a par with his milestone recordings from the 1950s.

While Jamal’s
But Not for Me
was gracing the Billboard charts, Dave Brubeck was achieving even more dramatic popularity with his
Time Out
recording. “Take Five,” the Paul Desmond composition included on this album, achieved unprecedented sales for a modern jazz instrumental performance and did much to legitimize unusual time signatures. But this represented no sudden rise to fame for Brubeck. Rather, the building blocks of his success had been slowly put in place during the course of the prior decade. In the late 1940s, Brubeck started drawing attention for his advocacy of the new and unusual, initially through the work of his Octet. This ensemble, which drew on the most progressive strains in both jazz and classical music, was formed during Brubeck’s stint at Mills College, where he and many of his colleagues in the Octet were studying with modernist composer Darius Milhaud. Subsequently, Brubeck broadened his following while leading a piano trio that mostly showcased his adventurous reworkings of jazz standards. But Brubeck’s greatest popularity came with the formation of his quartet, where his thick harmonies and strident rhythms were set off by the smooth alto work of saxophonist Paul Desmond. The combo recorded a number of outstanding live performances for the Fantasy label, in which the dictates of modernism and melodicism were artfully balanced. In 1954, Brubeck left Fantasy for the Columbia label and, that same year, his photo graced the cover of
Time
magazine. His gradual building of a mass market audience, and the growing polish of the quartet, aided by the addition of the exceptional drummer Joe Morello (in 1956) and journeyman bassist Eugene Wright (in 1958)—to form what many consider the “classic” Brubeck quartet—set the stage for the
Time Out
success.

The fame and enormous record sales that Brubeck enjoyed were all the more remarkable given the uncompromising nature of his piano work. His approach to the keyboard was almost totally purged of the sentimental and romantic trappings or the oh-so-hip funkiness that characterized most crossover hits. His chord voicings were dense and often dissonant. His touch at the piano was heavy and ponderous—anything but the cocktail bar tinkling fancied by the general public. His music tended to be rhythmically complex but seldom broached the finger-popping swing of a Peterson or Garner. Only in his choice of repertoire, which was populist to an extreme with its mix of pop songs, show tunes, traditional music—indeed anything from “Camptown Races” to “The Trolley Song” might show up on a Brubeck album—did he make a deferential gesture to the tastes of the mass audience. But even these familiar songs were apt to take on an unfamiliar guise under Brubeck’s hands. He may have put aside the twelve-tone row in favor of “Tea for Two,” but by the time he had finished with the Vincent Youmans standard it could sound like Schoenberg had tampered with the sheet music.

Almost all the popularizers of modern jazz piano discussed here felt a degree of hostility from the critics of their day. As previously mentioned, this was very much part of the ethos of the jazz world during the postwar years. Parker and his colleagues had permanently changed jazz into a counterculture movement, suspicious of mass market acclaim, protective of its outsider status. A wide audience was now a sign of having “sold out.” The motivations behind this pervasive and persistent attitude among the jazz establishment are complex—no doubt ranging from the personal to the political—and a detailed analysis of its evolution could fill a lengthy monograph. Suffice it to say that, for whatever reasons, the felicitous marriage of popular music and jazz, which reached its apotheosis in the Swing Era, was succeeded by a painful, often acrimonious divorce.

BIG BANDS IN THE MODERN ERA

Nowhere was this new separation more apparent than in the struggles faced by big bands in the postwar years. Working with an instrumentation and vocabulary formed during the period of jazz’s greatest popularity, these large ensembles appeared to be distinctly unsuited to lead the jazz idiom into the modern era. By the start of the 1950s, singers—many of them former vocalists with big bands— had taken center stage in the world of popular music. Instead of Ellington, Goodman, Shaw, Basie, and Miller, the pop charts were dominated by Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, Jo Stafford, Doris Day, and Perry Como. One era had ended, another had begun.

It is not difficult to find reasons to explain this shift. The problems faced by the big band leaders after the late 1940s were legion. The costs of taking a large band on the road had grown prohibitively high. The general public’s interest fell to new lows. Even jazz devotees wavered in their loyalty, increasingly showing a preference for smaller combos. An entertainment tax instituted in 1944, which levied a 30 percent surcharge on venues that allowed dancing, led to a decline in ballroom patronage. This created a wedge between jazz music and dance, which widened during the postwar years due, in part, to a shift in performance styles, with medium tempo swing numbers gradually losing favor to a less danceable mix emphasizing very fast or very slow pieces. Meanwhile, a panoply of modern technologies and conveniences—television, high-fidelity sound, various newfangled appliances—seemingly conspired to keep Americans at home in the suburbs. The result was an inexorable decline in the role of dance halls and other big band venues. The contemporary jazz scene of the 1950s was abandoned to the outsiders, the bohemians and beatniks, and the young—those who still frequented the urban clubs late at night. For this crowd, the big band was most often viewed as a dinosaur, the retrograde sound of a generation whose time had already passed.

In the face of these daunting circumstances, a few leaders persisted in their efforts to bring the jazz big band into the modern age, to adapt it to the changed circumstances of the day. The most ambitious of these—a Stan Kenton or Sun Ra—sought nothing less than revitalizing the big band as the creative center of the modern jazz world. A noble but, alas, an almost impossible task—akin to reintroducing sackbuts and lutes into the symphony orchestra. But though these attempts did little to return large ensembles to a position of prominence in the jazz world—that is hardly likely to happen again—they nonetheless spurred the creation of a vital body of work, a music of artistry, which served also as a quixotic protest against the marginalization of the big band sound.

Unlike the dinosaurs, the big bands avoided total extinction—but just barely. Reading press clippings about swing bands from the late 1940s and early 1950s is as uplifting as browsing through a stack of obituaries. There are mostly tombstones and eulogies, few cigars and celebrations. In December 1946 alone, eight major big bands broke up. A host of name leaders, many still in the prime of their lives, took early retirement, changed careers, or retrenched. Artie Shaw, age forty-four, put away his clarinet case for good. Cab Calloway took to the stage to play Sportin’ Life in
Porgy and Bess
, the character George Gershwin had based on the Hi-De-Ho man some years before. The Dorsey brothers grew nostalgic, settled their fraternal feud, made a (mostly fictional) movie about their career—
The Fabulous Dorseys
(1947)— and soon took their act to television. Louis Armstrong fired his big band and returned to a small-combo traditional jazz setting—and convinced Earl Hines to do the same. Around the time of his fortieth birthday, Benny Goodman effectively ended his career as a bandleader, restricting himself from that point on to sporadic appearances with ensembles hastily gathered for specific tours or concerts.

Who knows how many big bands were working regularly in America during the peak years of the Swing Era? George Simon’s book on the subject refers to several hundred by name—and this is, of course, only a partial roster. A typical issue of
Downbeat
, circa 1940, might list some eight hundred ballrooms, hotels, theaters, and other venues featuring big band music. For a time, big band jazz seemed always within earshot in America’s cities. Yet after the painful contraction in swing music, only a handful of major big band leaders from the war years—most notably Ellington, Basie, Herman, Kenton, and James—still kept the flame alive. And even these few survivors struggled.

The challenge, as most bandleaders saw it, was to hold onto the past. But for the most committed ones, the goal was nothing less than to bring the big band into the future. A few daring visionaries looked to the world of contemporary classical music for inspiration. “Serious” composers, such as Igor Stravinsky, were brandished as symbolic figures if not as actual role models by the more progressive big band arrangers. Boyd Raeburn recorded a chart titled “Boyd Meets Stravinsky”—on which, despite the name, Stravinsky did not perform. George Russell responded with his 1949 piece “Bird in Igor’s Yard.” Shorty Rogers was also, apparently, on a first-name basis with the maestro (after all, the Russian composer reportedly based the horn work in his “Threni” on Rogers’s style), penning his song “Igor.” In 1948, when jazz writer Leonard Feather gave a “blindfold test” to Charlie Parker, he mixed in Stravinsky’s “The Song of the Nightingale” with recordings by Basie, Goodman, and Kenton. Parker immediately identified the composer, adding, “That’s music at its best.”
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But Woody Herman had already outdone all of these acolytes—he was actually approached by Stravinsky himself, who offered to write a chart for the band. But the resulting work, the
Ebony Concerto
, should have made it clear that the jazz world, despite all its deference to the more progressive currents in contemporary classical music, had very little in common with such rarefied styles of composition. The
Ebony Concerto
was a turgid work that made little attempt to tap the rhythmic vitality of jazz. Those seeking to bring big band jazz to a higher level would need to look elsewhere for inspiration.

For the most part, they looked to bebop as the magical ingredient that would revitalize the big band. And though this would seem an easy and obvious formula to follow, few did it with any degree of success. As noted before, Earl Hines, Billy Eckstine, and Dizzy Gillespie all led big bands featuring world-class modern jazz players, but none of these celebrated units lasted more than a few years. Boyd Raeburn’s ensemble made a similar attempt to marry progressive sounds with traditional Swing Era instrumentation, but was scorned by major labels who thought its music “too weird” for dancers—a verdict all too well borne out by 1946 recordings of George Handy’s charts “Dalvatore Sally,” which served as the band’s theme song, and “Temptation,” which, despite its name, fans found all too easy to resist. Critics and musicians were enthusiastic about Raeburn’s work, but his big band finally shut down in 1949, without ever having achieved a substantial hit. Benny Goodman also embraced bop, in a famous reversal—only a short while before he had asserted that the beboppers were “not real musicians” and were “just faking”—but by 1948 he was publicly praising the new style and featuring a number of modern jazz players in his band, including Wardell Gray and (for a brief stint) Fats Navarro. Yet the following year, Goodman disbanded his bop unit, and by 1953 he was again bad-mouthing the movement, telling the
New York Times
: “What you hear in bop is a lot of noise.”
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