Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  What this bridge was constructed of can be heard on recordings like Dizzy Gillespie's 1946 version of "Our Delight." The tune, like a number of Dameron's compositions, has entered the standard jazz repertoire and is typical of his best work. In some ways closer to Swing tunes than to improvisation-based lines like "Donna Lee," "Our Delight" is a genuine song: a bubbly, jaggedly ascending theme that sticks in one's mind, enriched by harmonic interplay between a flaming trumpet section led by Dizzy; creamy, moaning reeds; and crooning trombones. The written accompaniments to the solos—in particular the leader's two statements—are also full of inventiveness, creating call-and-response patterns and counter-melodies. What is boppish here is the off-center, syncopated melody, as well as the shifting, internal voicings of the chords, especially at the very end. These voicings, along with a love of tuneful melodies that one walks out of a jazz club humming, were Tadd's main legacy to such composers and arrangers as Benny Golson, Gigi Gryce, and Jimmy Heath.

  While the joy and beauty of Dameron's work belied his hard life, Bud Powell (1924-1966) created a music in which anguish and demoniacal fury alternated and at times mingled. From the late forties on, Powell was in and out of mental hospitals, undergoing shock treatments and suffering a series of psychotic episodes. Even when more or less functional, Powell was known as a sullen and eccentric character. Liquor aggravated his problems, sometimes causing him to "flip out" with unpredictable consequences. Chronic liver disease and tuberculosis also plagued him in the latter part of his life.

  With a few exceptions (most notably The Scene Changes, an album he cut for Blue Note Records in 1959), Powell's best recorded work dates from the 1945-1953 period. During those years he was the unchallenged king of bebop piano, with a status analogous to Charlie Parker's on alto saxophone. Most hip young pianists aspired to play like Bud, and his influence, though diluted, continues to be felt today. Like Bird (Parker), Bud could solo at breathtaking speeds yet retain a lucidity and precision in accentuation, an ability to think in fifth gear, that are beyond most musicians.

  Although Bud recorded with virtually all the major beboppers—Parker, Gillespie, Gordon, Navarro, Stitt, and others— most of the real depths and heights of his work are found on his trio and solo performances. On "Tempus Fugit," for example (recorded for Verve in 1949 with bassist Ray Brown and Max Roach), torment and frenzy come together in the theme, an uptempo minor original whose portentous rolling chords punctuate a whiplike, forward-driven melody. Bud's solo is a torrent of notes, which at first flow forth in smooth, legato phrases but which build in percussive ferocity as he hammers out transposed and repeated phrases and descending runs. Roach's insistent accentuation and Powell's own restlessly prodding left hand add to the urgency until Powell takes the theme out, playing faster and striking the notes harder this time.

  "Tempus Fugit" is vintage bebop, to be sure, yet there's something else present, something suggestive of jazz in the fifties. The minor mode in itself makes the piece somewhat unusual in bebop and accounts for part of the tune's dark mood. This quality, however, derives mainly from Bud's solo. Equally far from the exuberance we hear in Parker and Gillespie and from Dameron's lush romanticism, Bud's playing is full of seething intensity, and it is this brooding, obsessive side of Powell that leads into hard bop.

  All the musicians comprising bebop's first wave had come up through Swing: Parker had played with Jay McShann, Powell with Cootie Williams, Gillespie with Cab Calloway, Monk with Coleman Hawkins, and Navarro with Andy Kirk. Tadd Dameron wrote two of his most popular tunes, "Good Bait" and "Stay on It," for Count Basie's orchestra. In the late 1940s, however, the first generation primarily formed by bebop—those who had been fifteen or younger in 1945—began to emerge. For these youngsters, modern jazz was necessarily a point of departure, a language they had inherited and in which they had to find something new to say.

  Although groups of second-wave beboppers sprang up in all big North American cities, those who attracted attention first were New Yorkers like saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Jackie

  McLean, pianist Kenny Drew, and drummer Art Taylor, all of whom lived in Harlem. Such teenagers were eager apprentices, striving to emulate not just bebop as music but also hip talk, hip dress, and often hip drugs—that is, heroin. Harlem had a vigorous jazz scene, including clubs like Minton's, Club Lido, Monroe's Uptown House, the Showman Bar, Club Harlem, Small's Paradise, Connie's Inn, the Baby Grand; the Apollo Theatre; and the Audubon and Renaissance ballrooms. Since New York City was home to most beboppers, these young musicians had plenty of chances to rub elbows with their idols. McLean, for instance, was befriended and informally taught by Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk. One of his first professional gigs was with Monk's band.

  Jackie was also closely involved in the late forties and early fifties with Miles Davis, who in a sense was the first second-wave bebopper, since almost from the beginning he had worked with groups like Billy Eckstine's bebop big band and Charlie Parker's quintet. It is perhaps significant that while musicians like Gillespie and Powell remained essentially beboppers in the fifties and sixties Davis played a key role in most jazz styles after bebop, nor would anyone think of citing his work between 1945 and 1950 as the best he has done.

  Both McLean and Rollins began playing professionally in their teens, often at dances and "cocktail sips" in Harlem but also on gigs with Monk, Powell, and the like. McLean's early playing, of which our first recorded example is Davis's Dig session (with Rollins, pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., Tommy Potter, and Art Blakey), is particularly intriguing and suggestive of the shape of jazz to come. On the title cut, one can hear all his defects at the age of nineteen. His solo is stiff, full of meaningless runs, strange pauses as though he were trying to think of what to play next, and reheated Charlie Parker licks all thrown together in disarray. And yet, there's something about his time, his timbre, his way of attacking a note that is riveting. A true cry from the heart, piercing and ragged, McLean's tone has always been his strong point. A mediocre bebopper, he would go on to become a major presence on the hard bop scene, where his ability to create moods would count for more than his failure to live up to bebop's standards of quicksilvery inventiveness. (Only in the early sixties would McLean's musical thinking mature.)

  By 1950, bebop had burnt itself out as a fad and to some extent as a school of jazz, though this statement requires considerable qualification. (After all, many of those who survived the forties—for example, Dizzy, Monk, J.f. Johnson, Kenny Dorham, and Milt Jackson—went on to produce work at least as good in the fifties.) Still, a music that had depended so much on surprise couldn't go on repeating itself. In addition, a new school, "cool jazz," had arisen, dominated by musicians like saxophonists Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, and Gerry Mulligan and pianist Lennie Tristano. Although some blacks—for example, Miles Davis and pianist John Lewis—were involved, at least briefly, with the "cool" movement, it was overwhelmingly a white phenomenon, both in its protagonists and its audience.

  Some cool jazz has stood the passage of time very well. Stan Getz's early recordings, for instance, are full of passion, combined with a supple rhythmic sense and a delight in flowing improvisations. Tristano's work, at once cerebral and relentlessly expressive, remains some of the most original piano playing in the history of jazz. The movement as a whole, however, produced a great deal of forgettable "chamber jazz" and preciosity of various sorts. In black neighborhoods, cool jazz went virtually unnoticed, while beboppers languished, finding it harder and harder to get jobs. "Musicians," an ad in Down Beat warned at the time, "remember today you not only must be able to play, you must be able to do some acting, singing, dancing and also speak lines."10 And indeed, at the beginning of the fifties Dizzy Gillespie led a combo that featured more "novelty tunes" than jazz and relied more on his sense of humor than his musicianship. J.J. Johnson, bebop's star trombonist, spent the years between 1952 and 1954 working as a blueprint inspector, while Kenny Dorham's employers at the time included Republic Av
iation and the Jack Frost sugar refinery in California.

  For a while, it was hard to see what the future of black jazz might be. The early fifties saw an extremely dynamic rhythm-and-blues scene take shape, including a succession of brilliant doo-wop combos like the Ravens, the Clovers, and the Orioles: a New Orleans school centering on Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Shirley and Lee, and others,- urban blues of the Muddy Waters and Bobby Bland type; and much else besides. This music, and not cool jazz, was what chronologically separated bebop and hard bop in ghettos. Young jazz musicians, of course, enjoyed and listened to these R B sounds which, among other things, began the amalgam of blues and gospel that would later be dubbed "soul music." And it is in this vigorously creative black pop music, at a time when bebop seemed to have lost both its direction and its audience, that some of hard bop's roots may be found.

  H ARD BOP BEGINS

  In an interview with Stanley Crouch, pianist Andrew Hill recalled Chicago's black music scene in the 1950s, when he could "sneak up on a gig with Gene Ammons, play accordion, or back up some rhythm and blues singers like the Flamingos. Then a musician was really getting his music across because there were bars on every corner and you couldn't go anywhere without hearing music. That's why people were so into music. Now they have commodities like ghetto blasters, but they don't have instruments and they don't hear the music. They have become consumers instead of listeners. A consumer buys what he's told to buy. A listener appreciates variety and individuality."1

  Hill's statement, with its nostalgia for lost worlds of musical bounty, is intriguing on more than one account. Maybe his mentions of the doo-wop group the Flamingos and tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons were casual. On the other hand, both references suggest black music's intersecting variants in the early fifties. The Flamingos are perhaps best known for their version of "I Only Have Eyes for You," a Tin Pan Alley standard whose impact derives from the contrast between a dreamlike, whole-tone-based vamp and a release that explodes into impressionistic chords. As an example of what Ornette

  Coleman calls "not-in-tuneness": of subtle and deliberate adjustments of the diatonic scale to create (in this case) an atmosphere of haunting mystery, the recording would be hard to beat. The Flamingos were at once vertebrators of the traditional American songbook, an extension of gospel harmonizing, and pioneers of soul music.

  Ammons, likewise, was a musician who could be looked at from several angles. In the 1950s, he cut a series of records for Prestige that featured such astringent hard boppers as John Coltrane, pianist Mai Waldron, and Jackie McLean. Another facet of Ammons—this one closer to Earl Bostic than to McLean—can be heard on his fulsomely romantic rendition of the ballad "My Foolish Heart," which made Billboard magazine's black pop charts in 1950.2Ammons had also played in Billy Eckstine's 1944-1947 big band alongside such beboppers as Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro, and Charlie Parker. At the end of the forties (on the other hand), he replaced Stan Getz in Woody Herman's orchestra, a major incubator of cool jazz. And in the early fifties, "Jug" (as he was called) co-led a two-tenor combo with Sonny Stitt that ripped it up in an area usually defined by jazz critics as "on the border between jazz andRB."

  Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz, referring both to performances like "My Foolish Heart" and to the Stitt-Ammons duo, declares that Jug "made entry into R . B field with sweet ballad and 'honking' styles before returning to jazz. British critic Alun Morgan said of him, 'Ammons has regained his position as an inventive soloist whose big tone gives him a commanding personality.'"3 The implication here is that Jug had somehow strayed from the path of righteousness and then returned to it, but in reality he had never lost his position as an inventive soloist whose big tone gave him a commanding personality. He had simply played in several contexts—some closer to modern-jazz orthodoxy than others—and in each of them he had remained himself.

  Jug's father, as it happened, was Albert Ammons, one of the finest boogie-woogie pianists. In boogie-woogie's heyday, fewer hairs were split about what was and wasn't "jazz." To some degree, jazz and urban black pop music were coterminous. Bessie Smith, Count Basic, and Albert Ammons were certainly considered part of both. It was only in the late forties—that is, with bebop—that these categories began to diverge more radically. Some musicians accepted the jazz/ non-jazz dichotomy; others didn't. Even those who did, however, were often forced to take "non-jazz" gigs. Trumpeter Joe Morris's jump-blues band, for example, included tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, trombonist Matthew Gee, pianist Elmo Hope, bassist Percy Heath, and drummer Philly Joe Jones. Some of these musicians may have enjoyed the experience more than others (one suspects that the flamboyant Griffin would have had more fun than the more cerebral and introspective Hope in such a group), but most learned from their R B experiences and were influenced by them.

  Nonetheless, the fact that the jazz-R . B distinction wasn't as clear as some would have made it didn't mean it was nonexistent. The problem in the early fifties was: where do we go from here? Bebop, which had begun as a promise of freedom, had turned into something of a straitjacket, an increasingly codified form of expression. Many of its best practitioners were dead, and others, like Charlie Parker, were in decline. R B might be a source of new ideas, but it was too limited to satisfy jazz musicians as a regular context. Slowly—hesitantly at first and then more decisively—the outlines of a new, more emotionally expressive and more formally flexible style began to emerge in the music of trumpeters Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, saxophonist Sonny Rollins, pianist Horace Silver, drummer Art Blakey, and others.

  Among these, Miles Davis's evolution between 1950 and 1955 was perhaps the most emblematic. Though Miles had been in the bebop movement—and at its very center, with Parker, Dameron, and others—he had never really been of it. His spare melodic lines in the middle register and his achingly mournful sound contrasted with the flaming acrobatics of Gillespie, Navarro, and others. Then, in 1949, Davis collaborated with Gil Evans, Lee Konitz, John Lewis, and Gerry Mulligan on what many consider the finest examples of cool jazz (collected by Capitol Records on the LP Birth of the Cool).

  By 1951, Miles's interests had shifted again. In the words of Bob Weinstock, owner of Prestige Records: "Miles sort of disappeared from the scene, and I was on a business trip out to St. Louis, and I knew Miles lived around there. I made some calls, there were a few Davises in the phone book, and I reached his home. They told me he was in Chicago. I said, 'Please, if you should hear from Miles, ask him to call me in New York. I want to record him.' Finally he got in touch with me, and he came back East. Miles, at that time, although he still dug the cool music of Mulligan and Evans, some of the primitiveness in him started to come out. I say primitiveness, because to me the music of the bop masters is primitive music, like the original New Orleans music of King Oliver and Louis. He sort of drifted back into that element, and he liked Sonny Rollins, as crude as Sonny was at that time . . . On his first date, you can hear a very different Miles Davis than on the Capitols."4

  Over the next few years, Davis recorded infrequently and had other things to think about besides honing his musical conception (he had acquired a heroin habit in 1949 that took him more than four years to break). Nonetheless, the two ten-inch LPs he cut for Blue Note in 1952 and 1953 are fascinating indications of his development. Both feature sextets, whose members include saxophonists Jackie McLean and Jimmy Heath, J.J. Johnson, pianist Gil Coggins, bassist Oscar Pet-tiford, Art Blakey, and Kenny Clarke. On the one hand, Davis seems to have sloughed off superficial bebop influences. His solos are unadorned (possibly perforce, since one gets the impression that he wasn't practicing much at the time), and his emphasis seems to be on wringing maximum poignancy out of every note. His sound is husky, slightly raspy, and his execution conveys a feeling of tentativeness and vulnerability.

  This quality comes across most strongly on ballads like "Yesterdays" and J.J. Johnson's "Enigma," but is also present on uptempo and medium-tempo numbers. On the other hand, a full third of
the twelve tunes (Oscar Pettiford's "Chance It," Ray Brown's and Gil Fuller's "Ray's Idea," "I Waited for You," and "Woody'n You") are either by or associated with Dizzy Gillespie—as if Miles had defiantly set out to show he was so different from Dizzy that he could even play his book without showing the slightest influence.

  In many ways, the music on the two dates points ahead to hard bop. There is a marked preference for the minor mode. Up-tempo tunes are the exception. Melodies are simpler and rarely based on bebop's standard chord changes (for example, "I Got Rhythm" and "Indiana"). Above all, the mood of the music is far darker than in bebop. As Leonard Feather remarked in his liner notes: "Davis's solos seem to reflect the complexity of the neurotic world in which we live. The soaring spurts of lyrical exultancy are outnumbered by the somber moment of pensive gloom."

  By 1954 Davis had kicked his heroin habit and began recording more frequently, mostly for Prestige Records. Performers on these sessions varied, but the customary rhythm section was Horace Silver, Percy Heath, and Kenny Clarke—one of the most tightly knit and well-balanced trios in jazz history. Their equilibrium came from the contrast between Heath's and Clarke's flowing, cushiony beat and Silver's choppily percussive comping: a mixture of smoothness and roughness that was extraordinarily propulsive. Davis's outstanding record date in 1954, however, featured a group dubbed by Prestige the "Modern Jazz Giants" who, at least on a personal level, worked together in a way that was anything but smooth.

  This combo consisted of Davis, Thelonious Monk, Milt Jackson (nicknamed "Bags" because of the circles under his eyes), Heath, and Clarke. They recorded four tunes on December 24, in a session famous in part for the tensions between Monk and Davis. Davis told the pianist to "lay out" (not accompany his solos). Monk took offense at this order, and one of their arguments is preserved on wax, with Miles saying, "Man, you can't start anything" after Monk comes in late on a theme and Monk instructing the engineer to "put this on the record—all of it." Miles later told Nat Hentoff: "I love the way Monk plays and writes, but I can't stand him behind me. He doesn't give you any support"5—a statement, however, that was not really accurate. Monk was one of the most stimulating accompanists in jazz, but his notion of "supporting" soloists included prodding and challenging them. Obviously Davis wanted someone less demanding and perhaps also someone with a less forceful personality.