Box. Midnight

Did you say you saw death and danger there?

I saw you there. You were across the room. We thought we knew each other.

Some were drawing their magic circle and dancing. We looked forward to see the avant-garde. Their name stood high, up to the street. Four walls joined a club that might not have you.

We went down to be there, hear, watch, be diverted. Did we fall into a hole?

Someone could find fallen women, lost brothers, artists clinging to the rugged ledges of their angst to keep from forgetfulness.

Did you say you heard death and danger?

You surprised me with who you were. That was the only thing I could have expected. You made the room what you are. Others there who were not you told me who I am.

We heard about freedom from ones who had lost. They had not even decided what they would do when they got it back.

We saw what we might be able to do, though, if we looked well ahead, projected on the walls of our very own catacomb, before we knew we could do it.  

We escaped, we made love, and then fell upward.

You say you felt death and danger?

A Modernist Byas

This track shows Don Byas’ mastery of a standard of the hard bop repertoire, Jordu. He is thoroughly comfortable with the frequent chord changes and his style fits the rapid harmonic pivoting necessary to play or imply them.

Critics and historians don’t know what to do with Byas. They wind up giving him short shrift. He unsettles the narrative that modern jazz (aka bop, bebop, rebop) was created one day in 1942. And that is a narrative many of them take as an article of faith.

The narrative says that swing preceded modern jazz. Don Byas is both. At the same time. 

Because he can do both, musically. And he was part of both, historically.

Byas cut his eye teeth in territory big bands during the 1930s—the “Swing Era.” (Actually, he was already gigging in the late 1920s, when he was in his late teens). Then he came to New York with Basie in 1941, just after Lester Young left.

Byas then participated in jam sessions at Minton’s that were supposed to have been founding moments for the main currents of what we think of and hear as “jazz” today. (I’m sure they were in fact, but Charlie Parker did not like Minton’s and there has to be more to the story.) He was there with Thelonious Monk and Charlie Christian.

Parker heard Byas and was influenced by him. Byas probably heard Parker and in turn was influenced by him. They were original, quick, and had their ears to the ground. For those who do want to trace lineages, both greatly admired Art Tatum.

And all saxophonists to come along later knew him. When Byas played in Europe, John Coltrane used to sit in the audience, saying nothing, and listen all night (according to a Byas interview.)

Fast forward to 1970. Byas came to the US to tour with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Hard bop. Blakey knew what Byas could do. As Dizzy said simply: "Don Byas was a master."

John Coltrane is Sendin’ Out Good Vibrato

People say that modern jazz horn playing left vibrato behind, left it in the fusty old pre-modern eons of ragtime and swing. That’s what they say. But it’s not true.

John Coltrane is as progressive as you can get. He uses vibrato. Why do they say that vibrato ended with the swing era? Charlie Parker, bebop avatar, used a marked vibrato. Coltrane used it too—and he used it to striking effect even when he was at his edgiest, during his brilliantly scorching last years.

So let me say it again: Coltrane used vibrato. Coltrane used a very distinct vibrato on his slower songs. He also used it when he played fast, at times when he played a note long enough to hear vibrato.

You can hear it on “Nature Boy” from the LP released as The John Coltrane Quartet Plays Chim Chim Cheree etc.

You can hear it—on longer held notes—on “Transition,” from the album Transition. Late ‘Trane at his most cutting edge.

You can hear it in his early years, of course, with Johnny Hodges and with Tadd Dameron. (I'm saying this just in case you thought Coltrane adopted vibrato later on in his career.)

Read my lips: Coltrane used vibrato.

Ahhh, but what kind of vibrato did he use?

Actually, tremolo may be closer to what Coltrane, in particular, is using on the “Nature Boy” version linked above. Yes, it’s a consistent, rapid wave or oscillation in tone quality, but it’s more of a change of timbre than of pitch (or pitch and timbre). Tremolo.

That kind of vibrato has to come more from the larynx and the diaphragm than from the jaw or the lip itself. The latter is more mechanical, easier, and has a correspondingly more obvious and crude effect.(It's often used to cover up intonation problems, so is frowned on.) The former has a profoundly soulful, passionate effect because it comes from inside. The rapid pitch-variant vibrato is, in fact, more characteristic of some early jazz, and that approach is truly out of fashion.

I've heard that the rapid shivering of pitch, to the point where the tone seems to detach into separate repeated notes, was called the “quiver” school. That’s according to reedman Haywood Henry, who told me in the early 1990s. You might hear it on early Fletcher Henderson records or those of other Northern bands of the 20s. Here's one by Clarence Williams featuring the otherwise excellent Buster Bailey.

Soloists in the New Orleans tradition, forerunners though they may be, are not really playing in the “quiver” mode. They had vibrato aplenty—but not in the rapid, constant mode of the quiver school, a more Northern trend of that day. Louis Armstrong used a terminal vibrato: a strong attack, then a widening of the note with a corresponding widening and strengthening of the vibrato toward its end. It’s more blues oriented, I would say. Coleman Hawkins followed Louis in this.

It’s good to bear in mind that opera had enormous prestige in those days, and all of these jazz players in New Orleans and in New York listened to and respected it. It's interesting that even opera at that time had adopted vibrato fairly recently, toward the end of the 19^th century, as halls grew larger, and singers and soloists used it to project. So, yes, vibrato--or a certain kind of vibrato--is rooted in its time and an article of fashion rather than necessity.

Lester Young had a more subtle approach, closer to Coltrane’s tremolo. Milt Jackson thought this was the really soulful way to play vibrato—the slow way—and he certainly put that in practice with the vibraphone rotors he called his “soul” and which were essential not only to his sound quality but his subtle rhythmic approach. 

Coltrane, meanwhile, respected Lester Young and held that respect throughout his career. Today, only Pharaoh Sanders has any element of Coltrane’s transcendent, spiritual vibrato feeling.

But those who say we are wholly past vibrato are right about one thing: vibrato has a history, and its history parallels that of jazz’s expressive, coloristic horn techniques.