The Advent of Bebop: How Many Prophets?

One often hears that bebop was a "revolution": that it was an abrupt break with the jazz that came before it. I can barely pick up a new book or article about jazz these days without hearing the claim that the "modernism" was created by the few who visited Minton's Playhouse and that represented a radical break with the past. (Radical in more senses than one, as I will suggest.) But the transition, musically speaking, was actually more gradual than these commentators and authors acknowledge, and perhaps more than they realize.

One does hear of two forward looking swing players, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, who not only influenced but participated directly in the bebop movement. But these saxophonists were star soloists in the Fletcher Henderson and Count Basie bands, respectively. So they were part of the broad-based movement in popular music known as swing or big band that emerged to dominate American music in the early ‘30s and cannot conveniently be reappropriated for the cause of “bebop.”

In fact, many things Parker and Gillespie perfected or became known for were being anticipated by swing players for at least ten years before the famous jam sessions took place at Minton’s. So many, in fact, that the ostensible rupture of bebop loses focus.

Consider these “pre-bop” achievements: the long melodic lines of Roy Eldridge. The coloristic, tense harmonies of Duke Ellington (and yes, before 1941). The angular melodic freedom of Nat King Cole (the pianist) and Erroll Garner.  The trio format used by these same two musicians. The musicianship, control, and beat of Benny Carter. The blues inflection, coupled with fabulous technique, of Johnny Hodges. The speed and fluidity of Chu Berry. The metric displacement of Charlie Christian. And of course, the chordal substitutions of Art Tatum, transferred to the saxophone by Don Byas before Bird took his first flight (yes, this is demonstrable in the recorded history of jazz, but that’s another post).

Don Byas: Bird or Dinosaur?

How many prophets can there be before the Messiah starts to seem a little cramped in his firmament?

Parker and those in his circle are important for synthesizing the work of these swing masters. (That they were quite familiar with all of them can be demonstrated in their music as well as their statements on record.) The bebop insurgents had a novel and compelling rhythmic approach that was their own. But like any musicians, their ideas were also wound up in their personal ways of approaching their horns and their medium. Their personal styles became an orthodoxy later—an ironic, though not unique, outcome for their “revolution”. Fifteen or so years later, that is, with the help of critics, producers, and retrospective discourse of musicians themselves.

The claim that bebop was a new musical wave often appears in tandem with one asserting a new political maturity. Black modernism in this narrative carries the component of self-awareness of racial subjugation and is a form of resistance to it. “Revolution” in this sense is not therefore not used nor intended as a strictly aesthetic term. Yet the notion of modernism on which this whole narrative rests depends on a pre-modern. I submit there is an implicit condescension regarding the jazz, included its African-American strains, of at least the 20s and 30s, and perhaps earlier.

Political sympathies, then, ought not to be driven by artistic tastes anymore than the reverse. Insofar as we are interested in jazz and modernism in the arts, it is valid to consider swing era masters as both modern and progressive. If we wanted to read the history of their time in their music, we would find northern migration and growth of mass popular culture through new media to be significant factors in its making. If we were interested in the aesthetic outlines of modernism, we could find it in swing masters concern with technique, awareness of their place in the development of their music and its past, and their view of their art as autonomous from a direct social function such as dancing or civic occasions.

If we are interested in looking to music for a progressive reading of the eventual consolidation of American rights and of racial empowerment, why should the advent of the swing era not be subject matter? Louis Armstrong’s performative style has been criticized as playing to white stereotypes. But perhaps the sheer power and confidence visible in film footage could be viewed differently, as evidence of black man in control of his own image—just as is celebrated with Miles Davis, evident in Ellington’s manner, and arguable even in the case of John Coltrane’s spiritualist stance.

There are aesthetic implications in bringing the music of the swing era back in to jazz studies. Techniques (both in the sense of skill and of concept) may change with history, but they are not history itself. When fashions change, when the zeitgeist changes, of course new techniques arrive that help give them expression. But music is not cumulative like science: old ways may be lost precisely in the effort to do something different. Bebop was faster than swing, but playing slowly was not a limitation. It is a technique that must be achieved.

As mentioned, the changes are matters of personal artistic choice, and do not necessarily imply a higher conceptual advancement. This is why no one knows what to do with Thelonious Monk or Lucky Thompson. They were not bebop, because they did not simply apply Parker and Gillespie’s instrumental style to their own instruments. But they were just as advanced. Modern jazz. The techniques of any era, past and present, are interesting intellectually and artistically available for those who might want to change again and stand outside orthodoxy. Especially if we, as artists or writers on the arts, don't see history as linear.

There are pedagogical reasons along with scholarly ones to take a broad view of jazz history. Jazz performance can and should teach techniques that may be basic but are still necessary. Are young musicians taught to play slowly and convincingly? Is it really that simple to play guitar with four equal quarter notes, in accompanying other musicians, as Freddie Green did? Try it. Insofar as these techniques are simple, they have a profound simplicity: they must be achieved, and carry insights that are lost in greater complexity. Rhythm itself, an item of mastery from the ragtime era (to listen to Jelly Roll Morton’s recordings), is hard to represent with notation, but can be transmitted in practice, through mentorship within an artistic community—just as they were once developed.

In the end, the retrospective assignment of “revolutionary” status to bebop is a sign of a definite political agenda. It is not bad to have such an agenda. I am in accord with this agenda, or its political thrust. That is one reason why I want to make it explicit. The assignment of revolutionary status to bebop, however, seems to be a way of justifying later radical experiments. The implicit argument behind this self-legitimation is that change is a constant, and thus the desired changes must happen in the present. The corollary for the need to justify radical change is to point to radical change in the past. Part of this view stems from the ‘sixties and its music, when revolution, or talk of it, was actually in the air for reasons that it was not in the ‘forties.

To those that take the view of history as constant, radical and still necessary change—and the history being made now—I would only ask, do we all change together, in one direction? That we is a question to which many revolutionaries, and those leaders who made their revolution into an oppressive orthodoxy, might answer “yes.” It is not the view of artists, though, who value individual expression, however politically engaged they may be. With respect to swing and to bebop, let us go back to their history and ask how they viewed it themselves.

On the Aesthetics of Improvisation

What part of improvisation can we hear? If it is granted that music performance with improvisation involves some structure, and foreknowledge, what is the element that is improvised--and how is it perceived?

Improvised music is often said to be legitimate by virtue of the process that go into making it. These processes are valued because the music they produce is thus original, authentic, democratic. Its creation is truly "creative" in some special or multifaceted way.

When the performance is apprehended, by the audience, by other musicians, by consumerrs of recordings, even in close, expertly trained analysis, it makes sense that they would value the product because they are aware that the production of this music followed these principles. But they can not be merely abstract conventions, distinct from the act of hearing and interpreting the music. They must be perceptible to be truly valued.

I believe improvisation can if fact be perceived. Insofar as an improvised performance involves indeterminacy, i.e., lack of prior determination, that element can be heard in the music. After all, randomness, or "pure" indeterminacy, can be heard; listen to wind chimes as a song. Greater degrees of prior determination of music, such as twelve-tone composition or total serialization, can also be heard. So why should the element of creation in the act of performance not be perceptible?

I submit that the listener finds originality, authenticity, democracy in the music because, even if passive, he or she is in some sense participating. They are more or less able to sense the unstructured, or unplanned elements insofar as they are more or less familiar with the structure or a priori decisions in the music. It is easy for a well-versed listener to hear what is truly unique in a Dexter Gordon solo insofar as they are familiar with the structure Gordon agrees to and the material he tends to identify with as his own (his "licks"). But free improvisation--that is, the improvised part, can also be perceived.

The perception of improvisation depends on familiarity with the individual composer's prior intentions, decisions, boundaries--with their identity. So the exact nature, not just the exact profile, of each improvisation, is unique. The element of improvisation that is heard depends on the improvised.

The listener may feel, and value, these qualities of originality, authenticity, and especially democracy, insofar as they have the sense of participating in them and that they are meaningful. He or she may even perceive that it is beautiful because randomness and indeterminacy are facets of real experience, often welcome in the face of oppressive determinacy.

Pace Fred Lerdahl: we actively construct music as listeners in order to make meaning out of it. And we do so when we hear improvisation.

Live Review: McCoy Tyner

McCoy Tyner, Piano
Charlie Parker Jazz Festival – August 28, 2010
Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem

It was an emotional experience seeing the last living member of John Coltrane Quartet perform (after nearly 40 years; my bad). Tyner’s bearing in pictures from the days of the classic Coltrane quartet projected Eastern asceticism and deliberate humility (contrasting a certain wild energy of Elvin Jones, both musically and personally). Yesterday he seemed more outgoing and personable than I remembered. He brought his family and introduced them with a very American down-home friendliness to the crowd in front of him.

Those who expect to hear the complex but swinging right hand acrobatics Tyner used until the 1970s would have been disappointed. At yesterday’s concert, his playing was reminiscent of Abdullah Ibrahim or Keith Jarrett, sustaining incantatory ostinatos for whole numbers, and across numbers. In terms of the piano, it was all about how both hands work together, not melody (right hand) and accompaniment (left hand).

His first piece was the most intriguing. He set up a counterpoint between two very regular melodies, with chords changing with each melody note. It was classic (or classical) in its strict development and balance, but African in its polytexturality and churning depth below the surface.

Other songs included the standard I Should Care, Coltrane’s Mr. PC, and his own Blues on the Corner. On the latter two, he punctuated the ostinatos with some short, stabbing clusters. But otherwise his measured pace seemed appropriate to an elder statesman, rather than a young firebrand.

The First Thing Bird Would Have Said

Revive Da Live
Charlie Parker Jazz Festival
(Raydar Ellis, Ben Williams, Justin Brown, Jaleel Shaw, Marcus Strickland, Marc Cary, Corey King and Ingmar Thomas)

“It’s too loud.”

This all star group’s aim, according to the program, is to “explore the genius of Parker by combining music from his past with modern day interpretations” in order” to educate and inspire broader audiences about the depths and origins of today’s popular music.”

The funk beats, a rapper, an electronic keyboard, and the modal harmonies so compatible with the ethos of the 1960s rock generation, would have been unfamiliar to Parker. But my gut feeling is he would have understood those things, because they are musical choices and he understood that music must change.

But the excessive volume—sensed even where I was at the other end of the park space from the stage—seems unmusical, and that, I submit, is where he would have drawn the line. These are all fine musicians, who offered very confident, interesting improvisations—no qualms there.

Why must it be so loud to appeal to “broader audiences”? (read: those unwashed multitudes who only know rock or hip-hop.) That seems to me to be caving in to corporate-backed technology and mass media as fast as Harry Reid caves in to the Tea Party. It’s one thing to use a public address system. It’s another to achieve a level of volume so electronic and alien that it subtly undermines the audience’s health. (Yes, I mean health.)

I’m not saying that it was ear-splitting. Just uncomfortable to body and breath. It’s about respect for nature, for public space, and the conviviality of the outdoor festival audience. An impromptu conga circle group was playing simultaneously (maintaining their regular Saturday meeting, one presumes). That sound added to the chaos. But close up, they seemed hipper, in the sense of understatement: more sensual, more about drawing you in than pushing you back.

I don’t know whether this acoustic problem was the responsbility of the producers, rather than the musicians. This is not the only jazz concert I’ve been to with this issue. It can’t be because I am old—I grew up in the ‘60s when loud became de rigeur (in every sense of the Gallic word). Can we talk about this, please?

The group updated a standard Bird recorded, I’ll Remember April, and his own Now’s The Time and Little Willie Leaps. The latter replaced the looping, difficult up-tempo rendition Parker chose with a much slower, straight-eighth note version made to fit a funk beat. The effect was to turn Parker’s roller-coaster into a treadmill.

What Bobby Hutcherson is doing NOW

"You haven't heard him recently?" said guitarist Peter Bernstein. "It's really different now."

Bernstein was referring to a change in Hutcherson's playing in the last several years.

"He used to come on with this incredible force, playing a rush of notes. Now it's different. But I can't put it into words." Pete did say that he was using shorter phrases, but declined to say what he was doing during that shorter time.

"Understatement?" I asked, to which Bernstein said that wasn't really it.

I'll venture to try to describe what I then heard Hutcherson do, with the hubris of one who would dance about architecture.

It was packing a number of ideas into a short space. Not understated as much as densely compressed. Each phrase suggested several different musical directions, but did not complete or follow through with or exhaust those directions. Each direction pointed way outward, but didn't travel there before another challenge was seamlessly taken up.

On "Nancy with the Laughing Face," for example, Hutcherson completed one arching phrase that first introduced a fairly startling whole tone scale, then went in a modal fourth pattern far from the original key.

Typical materials from the chromatic language of bop and beyond. But the phrase was only a bar long.

The effect was like vertigo, as I reacted to this surprising interruption to the lyricism of the song, then experience another swoop away from the expected so soon.

It's like poetry. To suggest more than one says, by using ambiguity, allusion, ellipsis. Holding eternity in a grain of sand.

Bringing the Audience Back In

Who’s listening?

I pose this question to musicians, and especially to people writing and thinking about jazz, such as journalists, historians, educators and researchers. Those of us who are intensely involved in jazz may have been preoccupied with the production end: the music itself, the people who play it, and at times those who record or promote the artists. Without taking on any particular instances of this “productivist” bias, in this post I would like to simply suggest that there is much to learn about jazz by looking at the consumption side of the equation: how it is consumed, when it is (or was) consumed, by whom, and why.

We have some basic data about jazz listeners’ age, income, gender or skin color, particularly in the last twenty years or so. I do not know of anyone who has gone deeper with this data to ask what trends say about the reception or development of jazz. What sort of experience are audiences or record-buyers having, and what stays with them after the set is over or the CD player shuts off? Has their profile changed since the “Golden Age” of jazz (or since various ages whose “goldenness” is perennially contested)? Whatever the data suggest, what would that mean for the trajectory of jazz since, say, 1945, 1965, or 1985?

Information about audiences may be harder to come by the further we go into the past. But I submit that it would possible to research it by creatively looking at live performance reviews, advertisements in jazz magazines, sales data, and historic photographs and film clips. There are theses to be written, and methods to be explored, based on these research sources.

If we knew more about them, perhaps it would be possible to view audiences, then and now, as actively shaping jazz rather than passively consuming it. After all, if jazz is truly democratic, shouldn’t the people who appreciate it be thought of as part of the creative process or evolution of jazz? There is a tendency among jazz aficionados and experts to look at audiences as naïve or susceptible to a herd mentality. But there may be things that audiences know intuitively that those of us on the “production” side may tend to forget. The ways certain performers get evaluated might change if we looked more carefully at what it is that audiences tend to respond to.

Ahmad Jamal, Gene Ammons, and Dr. Lonnie Smith come to mind as examples. All three are masters of their music and successful entertainers. The latter, however, has been a liability for them in their critical reception. (I can cite evidence but my word will have to do in this short space.) By dismissing these artists as “second-string”, we have missed the fact that being an entertainer is not incidental to their work but is a deliberate, fully-realized part of their art. Consider Jamal’s electric mix of meticulously arranged structure and spontaneity, Ammons’ cool economy and story-telling flair, Smith’s wild and risky search for new material every set, paralleled by his own narration on the mic.

Audiences eat this stuff up. But why? We will never know if we focus only on the detailed fabric of the improvised line—its convolutions and complex harmonic layers and cross-references. (Jazz has gotten very baroque, and the details are sometimes too fleet even for experts to follow or discuss.) What Ammons, Jamal, and Smith have in common is a masterly feel for how a whole solo or set are organized (or deliberately not organized, given that we are talking about improvised music here.) Audiences respond intuitively to the pacing, larger formal patterns, and the potential for surprise and drama that control of these elements can bring. Are these structural elements something we can afford to dismiss in talking seriously about jazz?

There are political as well as aesthetic reasons to bring audiences back in. The growing interest in jazz in academia and in popular attention in the last 20 years or so has been motivated in part to reclaim and affirm a vital piece of African-American culture. Towering figures like Ellington or Coltrane, whose voices may indeed have advanced their people, get a lot of ink. But what about the other jazz artists who sold well with “ordinary” black folks? If sales are any indication, working class black people during the 1950s preferred soul or funk jazz over hard-core bebop. (If you want to argue with this claim, you are welcome. The debate itself would further my main point that audiences matter.)

There have been few if any articles about jazz players with funky roots like Arnett Cobb, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, or Jimmy Smith. I can’t think of any tributes to them at Lincoln Center. Yet they not only appealed to black audiences, they were influential as artists. Is there implicit condescension to this segment of the historical black audience for these artists? Is there a class as well as racial bias in this pattern? The problem is artistic and political. Sonny Rollins loved Louis Jordan’s music and saxophone playing, yet there has never been much written about Jordan. What does the canonical Rollins see in Jordan that the critics and historians, the ones who canonized him, have missed? Have they made Rollins into an “elite” artist, a status he might reject?

It is true that the most original, influential, and productive figures like Rollins will and should receive our appreciation as such. But isn’t the way they, too, “played” their audience, and appealed to eyes and minds as well as ears, a part of the fascination they hold? Lester Young’s angular stance matched his angular approach. Is that a mere accident of history? Miles Davis may or may not have turned his back on the audience. But who was more concerned with image and taking the pulse of the time than he was? Even the famously undemonstrative John Coltrane brought drama and meaning to performances with his feats of endurance, his spiritual motives, and his leadership of a quartet that was so free yet thought as one with him. One of jazz’ most challenging musicians is thereby also one of its best selling.

Young performers are taught to emulate these great musicians’ licks and chord changes. Are they taught, in any direct way, to engage an audience? (If anyone has examples, I would like to know.) Research and education on jazz is in some sense presenting it to an audience of readers, students, and, indeed, potential listeners. It follows that fledging jazz musicians must be the ones to promote their music in every sense if it is to have a future. And, if promoting music is the goal, one must understand the audience in question.

Being mindful of one’s audience is important even in the most challenging forms of jazz performance. Even, that is, in those often presumed to have bravely charged ahead in spite of what appeared to be limited audiences. As George Lewis notes in his book A Power Stronger Than Itself, which is about the experimental Association for the Advancement of Creative Music of his native South Side of Chicago: free or avant-garde jazz is perfectly capable of winning over audiences. The trick is in how and where it’s presented, and there may be ways of presenting specific kinds of jazz. (Big-ticket nightclubs never clicked for the Art Ensemble of Chicago, for example; they played the college circuit instead.)

The reception of “free jazz” shows that “selling out” and “remaining pure” is a false choice. Capitulating to a “crowd” mentality on one hand, and remaining heroically, perhaps tragically, aloof from popular acceptance on the other are two sides of the same coin. If an artist is to communicate, she or he has to approach the Other, even if that meeting must be only halfway. The same is true of those who document or interpret the artists’ work.

Live Review: Leny Andrade

BIRDLAND
August 13, 2009


I don't know much about Brazilian jazz, but I had the impression that Leny Andrade is it. I caught her at Birdland on the recommendation of her pianist, Brazilian expert Cliff Korman, who kindly put me on the guest list. Otherwise I must say she wouldn't be on my screen, but she is now.

The language is Andrade's instrument. She takes full advantage of the guttural, earthy sounds of Portuguese (at least, that I hear in it) to elide, stretch, kajole, push and pull the pulse, as all great jazz singers do. Her scat singing is very rhythmic: no virtuosic swoops, like Ella, just swinging to the beat.

She chose the Portuguese language version of familiar Jobim tunes, like "Wave", "So Nice", "Girl from Ipanema" and "Corcovado", as well as Lusitanified versions of jazz standards like "Bluesette" and "Night in Tunisia." I believe this was a means of drawing in and warming up a North American crowd. Quiet at first, they clearly needed it, but the strategy worked.

Chiding New Yorkers for working too hard, exuding devilish fun, Andrade's flamboyantly Latin personality was on display (or at least that was the mask she chose to put on for us). Like Louis, her personality is one with her music.