The History of Jazz (69 page)

Ron Carter was in his late twenties when he joined Davis, but his résumé in the jazz world was fairly brief at the time, since most of Carter’s training had been in classical music. Until his late teens, Carter had focused his energies on the cello. Perceiving that racial prejudice would make it difficult to pursue a symphonic career, Carter switched his emphasis to the double bass, but even then continued to study and perform the classical repertoire. After completing studies at the Eastman School in 1959, Carter worked with Chico Hamilton, Thelonious Monk, and Cannonball Adderley, and recorded with Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, Randy Weston, and Don Ellis, among others. These engagements paved the way to Carter’s five-year stint with Davis beginning in 1963. A skilled technician, versatile section mate, and solid soloist, Carter would come to be the most in-demand bassist of his generation, eventually appearing as sideman on more than two thousand recordings, as well as leader at more than fifty sessions.

These two recent arrivals on the New York scene were, however, seasoned professionals in comparison with Davis’s choice for drummer. Tony Williams was only seventeen years old when he joined Davis in May 1963—just a few months after having moved to New York at Jackie McLean’s behest. Williams was so young that Davis faced problems with authorities when he was booked to play in nightclubs where minors were not allowed. But Williams compensated for his lack of professional experience with an abundance of power, passion, and creativity—one could make the case that no other percussionist in the history of jazz ever played so well, so young. In other settings, Williams might have dominated the proceedings, driving the band with his unbridled energy. But this Davis unit demanded different skills. Along with Hancock and Carter, Williams engaged in a complex polyrhythmic dialogue, a cat-and-mouse game in running meter. This was, for the most part, a music of implication, a path half hidden in the underbrush, not a paved two-lane highway. True, at appropriate moments, Williams could and would kick the Davis combo into a steady groove, but these outbursts were especially effective because they came in the context of the more open and unfettered sound typically favored by the quintet.

On the surface, it appeared as if Davis’s mid-1960s band led two separate lives. The studio recordings revealed a pioneering unit performing quasi-abstract original compositions, whose musical iconoclasm bordered on the avant-garde. Yet, in concert, Davis continued to program the same ballads and popular standards (“Stella by Starlight,” “My Funny Valentine”) as well as 1950s jazz originals (often blues-based, such as “Walkin’” or “All Blues”) that had been in his repertoire for years—despite his sidemen’s desire to play the newer material in front of audiences. But this duality was only superficial: in performance, the Davis band played the old songs with such experimental zeal that no one could have accused the band members of harboring the slightest tinge of nostalgia or conservatism. Any lingering sentimentality was being squeezed out of these pieces, the tempos were getting faster and faster, and the band’s interpretations more daring and unpredictable. We are fortunate that this combo was so well documented in performance—its recorded legacy includes memorable concerts in Europe and Japan, and more than seven hours of ardent music making captured at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel in December 1965. In total, this body of work encompasses some of the most vital reworkings of the jazz standard repertoire from any era.

The influence of this Davis unit would linger long. Its sound hovers behind the scenes in the music made by Wynton Marsalis early in his career and by other young traditionalists during the closing years of the century and into the new millennium. The release of the complete Plugged Nickel recordings, some three decades after they were taped, reinforced how fresh and contemporary Davis’s music still sounded despite a whole generation of passing jazz fads and fashions. Yet Davis himself, at the very moment he had reached the pinnacle of mainstream jazz, was anxious to explore newer approaches. Around this time, the trumpeter began listening to the music of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Muddy Waters, and other artists with only peripheral ties to the jazz world. His own music was now evolving in response to these new influences. The big break with the past would come with his seminal
Bitches Brew
release of 1969, but even before that seismic shift, the signs of this coming change could be seen in his growing use of electric instruments and vamp forms. Sessions from late 1967 and early 1968 find Davis experimenting with the addition of electric guitar (played by George Benson or Joe Beck). During this same period, Hancock began using an electric piano on some tracks. By the time of
Filles de Kilimanjaro
, recorded during June and September 1968, the multilayered textures of the earlier quintet releases were increasingly replaced by more insistent ground rhythms. With
In a Silent Way
from the following February, the change was all but complete. The band’s sound now tended toward uncomplicated patterns reminiscent of the dance and soul music of the day. The harmonies were often static. To cement this change, Davis was enlisting the skills of a wider range of musicians, including keyboardists Joe Zawinul and Chick Corea, guitarist John McLaughlin, and bassist Dave Holland. Within a few months, the last fading elements of the mid-1960s band were purged in favor of the more overtly rock-oriented approach celebrated in
Bitches Brew
. This release, lamented by many of Davis’s older fans, would attract a younger audience to his music and earn the trumpeter the first gold record of his career.

In time, this style came to be known as jazz-rock fusion—or more simply fusion. For the next decade this sound would exert a powerful influence on the jazz world with a host of former Davis sidemen using it as a foundation to promote their own careers. But for all its commercial success, fusion failed to establish itself as a dominant style. By the close of these transition years, the jazz idiom had become too fragmented to embrace any one approach as representative of the age, as swing and bop had tended to do in earlier decades. Instead a smorgasbord of sounds, a range of possibilities, prevailed.

The most pressing alternative to the fusion style during this period would come at the opposite end of the spectrum. Free jazz was virtually its mirror image. If the one style was a path to financial success, the other represented economic isolation. If the one style was tied to commerce and the music industry, the other thumbed its nose at these same forces. If the one style reflected a return to simpler dancelike musical structures, akin to what jazz had done during the big band era, the other preferred to subvert structures in whole or in part. One style espoused pragmatism, the other progressivism. The jazz magazines of the day rarely talked about a battle between free and fusion styles—as they had years earlier in the days when traditional and modern forms had engaged in an ongoing war of words and, occasionally, horns— but this may have been only because the chasm between the two styles was too wide to admit any common ground. Then again, perhaps it was only that, by this time, the fragmentation of jazz styles had become so much a part of the musical landscape that it was accepted as an inexorable fact.

And though many of the proponents of free jazz saw their music as a logical development, evolving clearly from the music’s history to date, the obvious “next thing” in a history of next things that could be traced back to Buddy Bolden, others remained unconvinced. For them a clear progression to a new dominant style, an unambiguous linear development in the history of the music, the ascendancy of one more advanced and liberated jazz language, was very much in doubt. For still others—as would become clear with the new traditionalism of the 1980s and 1990s—a eturn to earlier styles of jazz (whether in the guise of New Orleans back to-basics, Duke Ellington’s visionary moods, Miles’s mid-1960s aesthetic, or other strands of the music’s heritage) would come to emerge as a beguiling option, a comforting way of regaining this lost sense of unity, and even then perhaps only achieving a symbolic wholeness. Yet the true heir to the jazz mantle, as subsequent events proved, would be neither free nor fusion, a return to roots or a celebration of rock and rap. Instead, there was merely an exemplary splintering, a disintegration into isolated modules.

8 Freedom and Fusion

Freedom
stood out as a politically charged word in American public discourse during the late 1950s and early 1960s—it would be hard, in fact, to find a term more explosive, more laden with depths of meaning, or proclaimed with more emotion during these tumultuous years. This truism of civics classes and refrain from the nation’s founding documents now took on new force, in the process outlining a sharp divide in the country’s social and economic structures. The civil rights movement of the day raised it aloft as a battle cry, held it forth as a goal, and asserted it as a first principle on which all else depended. It could no longer be put out of mind as an empty phrase or accepted as a fait accompli in American society. “Freedom” was very much something to live for, or, for a few, even to die for.

The
Brown v. Board of Education
decisions of the mid-1950s, which were critical in reversing a long history of racial segregation in American schools, were not, as some may have suspected at the time, closing chapters of a struggle for racial equality that had raged since before the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead, these moves to integrate public institutions set off a chain of reverberations throughout American society, reenergizing the civil rights movement and setting the stage for a series of confrontations in which the quest for freedom would figure as a repeated motif. “Freedom riders” defied segregation in buses and terminals in the Deep South, often at great personal risk. The “Freedom Vote” of 1963 attracted tens of thousands of participants to mock elections that demonstrated the absence of real representative democracy in the South. The “Freedom Summer” of the following year found activists organizing to register African American voters in large numbers in anticipation of the fall presidential election. The “Freedom Singers” chorus toured the country, giving concerts and raising money for civil rights advocacy. Black leaders sought to form “Freedom Schools” and establish a “Freedom Democratic Party.” The word was imprinted on the public’s consciousness, dramatized in speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, sung in hymns, brandished at Little Rock, Birmingham, Selma, and other battlegrounds in the fight for equality.

It is impossible to comprehend the free jazz movement of these same years without understanding how it fed upon this powerful cultural shift in American society. Its practitioners advocated much more than freedom from harmonic structures or compositional forms—although that too was an essential part of their vision of jazz. Many of them saw their music as inherently political. They believed that they could, indeed must, choose between participating in the existing structures—in society, in the entertainment industry, in the jazz world—or rebelling against them. The aesthetic could no longer be isolated from these cultural currents. In the overheated Marxist rhetoric that increasingly found its way into mainstream political debate during those days, even a “pure” art such as music was ultimately part of a superstructure of social institutions and events that was delineated and determined by economic realities and, ultimately, class values. “Pure” music? One was advised that such abstractions were, at best, an idle delusion, at worst a conscious deception.

An undercurrent of political advocacy had always existed in the jazz world, but now it exploded on the surface as never before. Amiri Baraka, then writing under the name LeRoi Jones, declared in his 1963 book
Blues People
that the new music signified “more ‘radical’ changes and reevaluations of social and emotional attitudes toward the general environment.” Critic Frank Kofsky took this view further, asserting that the free jazz movement represented nothing less than a vote of “‘no confidence’ in Western civilization and the American Dream.” In the 1964 U.S. election, Kofsky even wrote in John Coltrane’s name on his ballot as his choice for Vice President, alongside Malcolm X as his pick for President, a strange ticket only for those unaware of the larger symbolic resonance of progressive jazz currents during this period. This overt linking of free jazz and sociopolitical criticism went so far that Ekkehard Jost, a historian of the movement, lamented that the “autonomous musical aspects of the evolution of free jazz—i.e., those aspects which escape a purely sociological analysis—often were ignored.”
¹
The music risked being relegated to a secondary, utilitarian role, valued for what it advocated rather than for how it actually sounded.

In truth, the sociopolitical ramifications of this music remained, in many ways, decisive in distinguishing the new free jazz players from the older generation of experimental jazz performers. From a purely musical point of view, freedom or atonality in jazz music had appeared many years before Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor raised it to a decisive issue. Lennie Tristano had experimented with free techniques in a series of pieces—“Intuition,” “Digression,” “Descent into the Maelstrom”—some of them dating back to the late 1940s. Bob Graettinger’s writings for the Stan Kenton band, most notably his 1948 magnum opus
City of Glass
, were uncompromising works that defied the conventions of existing jazz harmonic and melodic techniques, as was Jimmy Giuffre’s 1953 recording of “Fugue.” Contemporary classical composers were also attempting to use jazz instrumentation to explore avant-garde techniques, as in Stravinsky’s
Ebony Concerto
(1946) or Milton Babbitt’s
All Set
(1957). Sensing the potential of these various trends, Gunther Schuller—who had composed
Atonal Studies for Jazz
in 1948 and, at the start of the 1950s, was playing with Miles Davis’s nonet and composing twelve-tone-row works—coined the term Third Stream in 1957 to describe a merging of the most promising and progressive currents in jazz and contemporary classical music.