Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  The feeling on Cookin' is far more spontaneous than on Further Explorations. There are no secondary themes, and the whole formal framework suggests a "blowing session" rather than the kind of careful preparation evident on the Silver LP. Yet if a "blowing session" implies musicians unfamiliar with one another's work, then Cookin' is anything but! For one thing, Garland, Chambers, and Jones comprised one of the most cohesive rhythm sections in the history of jazz, a trio closely attuned to each other and to Davis and Coltrane. In addition, as Joe Goldberg observed: "At least part of the unique quality of the quintet performances lay in a particular principle which Davis grasped, a principle so simple that it apparently eluded everyone else. To put it in terms of this particular group, a quintet is not always a quintet. It could also be a quartet featuring Miles, and, at different times on the same tune, it could be a quartet featuring Coltrane or a trio featuring either Garland or Chambers. The Davis rhythm section, Jones in particular, was well aware of this, and gave each of the three principal soloists his own best backing. Behind Davis, the rhythm was full of space, with few chords; behind Coltrane, it was compulsive; and with Garland, it lapsed into an easy, [Ahmad] Jamal like feeling."4Finally, a few timbral devices— Garland's use of block chords in the style of Ahmad Jamal or Erroll Garner, Chambers's bowed solos, and Davis's mute-in-microphone approach to ballads—added textural variety.

  Davis's ballads enabled him to reach an audience far broader than jazz aficionados and made him in a sense the greatest jazz torch singer since Billie Holiday. Playing the microphone as much as his horn, he produced a sound, quivery and haunting, charged with restrained passion, that dominates "My Funny Valentine." Unmuted on the other tunes, he also makes the most of his sound, which seems to contain depths and nuances lacking in other trumpeters. At times jauntily ironic, at times playing in a hoarsely anguished whisper, Davis creates a set of solos in which silence, used for dramatic impact, punctuates striking figures from which all extraneous embellishments have been burned away. This is particularly true on the medium-tempo "Blues by Five," but even on up-tempo numbers Davis refuses to be hurried and sometimes slows his own tempo to half that of the rest of the quintet.

  Coltrane, who to some critics seemed to sort so ill with Davis, was in fact the trumpeter's ideal foil. Over a more volcanic Philly Joe, he unleashes a firestorm of convoluted phrases that alternate with simpler gutbucket figures (Coltrane had paid extensive "dues" in R B bands, including Daisy May and the Hep Cats and King Kolax's combo), piercing cries, and melodic fragments tumbling over each other as though he hadn't time to say everything he wanted to. As fiery as Davis is severe, Coltrane strains against bar lines and chord changes. The contrast between the two is crucial to the group's impact. Nearly as important, however, are Chambers's dark, woody sound and choice notes and Philly Joe's volatile, double-jointed rhythmic sense. Speaking of the drummer, whose life was even more disordered than usual for a jazz musician of the era, Davis told Nat Hentoff: "Look, I wouldn't care if he came up on the bandstand in his B. V.D.s and with one arm, just so long as he was there. He's got the fire I want. There's nothing more terrible than playing with a dull rhythm section. Jazz has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport festival."5

  Davis's and Silver's quintets were perhaps the two most influential hard-bop bands of the late fifties. Funky yet sophisticated, formally innovative without straining to draw attention to themselves on this count (certainly no one would confuse them with any earlier style of jazz), they both embodied and created the hip sound of urban America. Mainstream hard bop, however, consisted of far more than its "stars" and by 1958 was the common currency of virtually all gifted black musicians. Among these were pianists Wynton Kelly, Elmo Hope, and Sonny Clark. None was enormously successful in a commercial sense, but their lives and music embody hard bop's underside: a penumbral world where most of the era's best jazzmen suffered and created.

  Scufflin': Three Pianists

  Born in Jamaica, Wynton Kelly (1931-1971) came to the United States at the age of four and grew up in Brooklyn. He made his professional debut in 1943, and two years later he toured the Caribbean with Ray Abrams's combo. Gigs with bands somewhere between jazz and R B followed, and in the early fifties Kelly also worked and recorded with such giants as Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, and J. J. Johnson. His first LP as a leader, never reissued, was a ten-inch trio date for Blue Note. In the mid-fifties, he spent three years as Dinah Washington's accompanist, and it was during this period that he began to establish himself as an unusually engaging, light-fingered stylist as well as (in record producer Orrin Keepnews's words) "possibly the finest jazz accompanist of our day."6

  In the late fifties and early sixties, Kelly seems to have recorded with virtually every major jazz soloist: John Col-trane, Sonny Rollins, guitarist Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Heath, Johnny Griffin, and a host of others, including Miles Davis, with whom he spent the years between 1959 and 1963, replacing Red Garland in Miles's band. In the course of the same period, Kelly recorded several albums as a leader for Riverside and Vee Jay. After leaving Miles in 1963, the pianist formed a trio with two other Davis alumni: Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb, cohorts in what was by then widely regarded as jazz's most swinging rhythm section. Wes Montgomery later joined the unit for concert and club appearances, some of which were recorded by Verve Records.

  Throughout these years, Kelly's ebullience, phenomenal swing, and deep empathy with the blues (which earned him the invitation to sit in on "Freddie Freeloader" for Davis's Kind of Blue album) made him a favorite with other musicians. Yet Kelly seemed unable to escape the typecast role of sideman. Bill Evans's admiring words, quoted in Leonard Feather's and Ira Gitler's Encyclopedia of Jazz in the 1970s, express an appreciation that Kelly only rarely won outside an inner circle of his peers: "When I heard him in Dizzy's big band, the whole thing was so joyful and exuberant; nothing about it seemed calculated. And yet, with the clarity of the way he played, you know he had to put this together in a very carefully planned way—but the result was completely without calculation, there was just a pure shining through the conception."7Perhaps it was his apparent casualness, as if swinging, joyously expressive music came as naturally as breathing, that kept Kelly from the forefront of most listeners' awareness. A heavy drinker for years, he died in Toronto, apparently of an epileptic seizure.

  Full View, an LP recorded for the Milestone label with bassist Ron McClure and Jimmy Cobb, was Wynton Kelly's last record as a leader and offers ample opportunity to savor the many graces of his style. The tempos range from slow to medium-up, thus ensuring more swing than technical fireworks—and swing Kelly does, with all the resources in his varied repertoire. The most potent of these, perhaps, is a penchant for lagging slightly behind the beat, especially toward the end of one of those cascading phrases that were his forte. Such figures spiral unevenly downward, their fall broken by occasional upward flights, gathering power toward the end through the delayed rhythm and resultant tension between piano and drums. Though Kelly's lines frequently alternate with block chords and funky octave tremolos, there is no predictable modulation from single-note lines to chords in the manner of many Garland- and Garner-influenced pianists. Instead, Kelly keeps his music bubbling through fine tunings of time and attack and can make a series of eighth notes jump as few other pianists could have done.

  The repertoire on Full View also reflects Kelly's closeness to popular music, especially in the torch songs ("Born to Be Blue" and "What a Difference a Day Makes," the latter a tune Kelly frequently played with Dinah Washington) and blues pieces ("Scufflin'" and "Dont'cha Hear Me Callin' to Ya," both with the kind of danceable, forward-leaning beat popularized by such jazz hits as Cannonball Adderley's "Jive Samba" and Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder"). The ballads show off Kelly's adroit pedal work, his silky, caressing touch, and his ability to swing a slow tune without violating its tempo and atmosphere, while the blues revea
l the pianist's sublimely dirty sense of the idiom, as does "I Want a Little Girl," a smoldering, rocking slow grind.

  The medium-tempo pop tunes ("I Thought" by Rudy Stevenson, "Autumn Leaves," "On a Clear Day," and Burt Bacharach's "Walk on By"), however, probably show Kelly in his most characteristic groove: alternately soulful and airy, tipping light and bearing down hard. The whole record, like Kelly's playing itself, is an object lesson in how to derive maximum rhythmic impetus from an instrument whose tonality is more fixed than any other commonly used in black music. If jazz piano has two sides, an artistically self-conscious one (Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Andrew Hill, et al.) and a "lighter" one closer to the perspectives of our best popular music (Teddy Wilson and ErroU Garner, for example), then Kelly is one of the three or four giants within the latter tradition. His techniques and discoveries, however, have been appropriated by almost everyone—for example, by the "experimentalist" Muhal Richard Abrams in some of his jazzier moments. For sheer sensuality and expressive charm, Kelly is just about unbeatable, and although in his wake scores of musicians have adopted his methods, Kelly himself still haunts those semi-anonymous catacombs inhabited by the shades of "musicians' musicians."

  Elmo Hope (1923-1967), who was christened St. Elmo Sylvester Hope after the patron saint of sailors, grew up in Harlem, where he and Bud Powell were close friends. The two young pianists often practiced together and played for each other—both classical music and jazz—and Bud introduced Elmo to his friend Thelonious Monk. Bud, of course, went on to become the most widely imitated pianist of the era, while Elmo remained in the shadows, working mostly with R B bands, in particular a long (1948-1951) stint with trumpeter Joe Morris. Not until the fifties did Elmo start recording in a jazz context with Sonny Rollins, Lou Donaldson, Clifford Brown, and Jackie McLean. In addition, he cut two ten-inch LPs for Blue Note, a trio set for Prestige, and another featuring John Coltrane and Hank Mobley for the same label.

  None of these achievements, however, won Hope much acclaim, and he was usually thought of—by those who knew of his existence—as simply another competent Bud Powell disciple. The problems Hope faced as a heroin addict may also have limited the amount of attention he could devote to his music during this period. All the same, on a tune like "De-Dah," a Hope original from a Clifford Brown-Lou Donaldson album on Blue Note, one can already hear many elements of the pianist's emerging style: somber, internally shifting chords in the introduction,- punchy, twisting phrases in his solo,- and the smoldering intensity that always characterized his best work.

  In 1957, after a spell on the road with trumpeter Chet Baker, Hope decided to settle in Los Angeles. The move, however, proved to be a mistake; and by 1961, in a Down Beat interview with John Tynan entitled "Bitter Hope," Elmo advised young West Coast pianists: "This is no place to try to learn anything. If they want to learn, let them go back to New York—both for inspiration and brotherly love. They'll find more things happening."8Yet the years in California marked a turning point in Elmo's development. Though generally isolated and denied much chance to record, he made giant strides musically and capped his period in L.A. with two monumental albums for Hifijazz that ensured his place in history. The sides are his own Elmo Hope Trio and Harold Land's The Fox, on which four of the six tunes are Elmo's. The Fox is dominated by his spirit and conception, despite superb performances by the leader, trumpeter Dupree Bolton, bassist Herbie Lewis, and drummer Frank Butler. It was when these albums appeared that jazz critics began to take more notice of Hope. The trio date received five stars, Down Beat's highest rating, and John Tynan's review defined "the essence of Hope" as "a sort of bitter-sweet melancholy that seems to lie at the core of other jazzmen—and other individuals of comparable sensitivity— who sometimes find the world 'a bit much,' as the English say, to cope with."9

  Not long after the interview, and with the encouragement of Riverside Records' Orrin Keepnews, Elmo decided to take his own advice and return to New York. There he recorded (in June 1961) another major album called Homecoming with trumpeter Blue Mitchell, Jimmy Heath, tenor saxophonist Frank Foster, Percy Heath, and Philly Joe Jones. More records followed, including a duet session with his wife Bertha and several trio sets, but gigs were hard to come by despite some work with Johnny Griffin. Poor health and drug problems also plagued the pianist in his last years. Another disc, Sounds from Rikei's Island, featured a group entirely composed of junkies and an essay by Nat Hentoff attacking America's penal approach to narcotics addiction. On May 19, 1967, Hope died of pneumonia.

  Elmo Hope's reputation as a gifted and tragic figure is based, above all, on his trio date for Hifijazz, now available on Contemporary Records. The LP, on which Elmo is backed by one of California's fiercest bass and drum duos (Jimmy Bond and Frank Butler), is evenly divided between dark-toned ballads ("Barfly," "Eejah," "Like Someone in Love," and "Tran-quility") and jagged medium-up tunes ("B's a Plenty," "Boa," "Something for Kenny," and "Minor Bertha"). Mostly in the minor mode, Elmo's compositions are dominated by a sense of urgent musical questing as well as by a feeling of self-exposure far beyond standard jazz postures.

  Intentionally or not, Hope's solos do everything possible to convey these tonalities and to give the impression that nothing is being played merely as a lick or to fill up space. Ideas and fragments of ideas abruptly spill over and intersect each other, as if the pianist's hands could barely keep pace with his emotions. Bars densely packed with runs and baroque filigrees alternate with stark, dissonant figures or Monkish seconds, wide intervalic leaps, and octaves. Even more than in most modern jazz, melodic units rarely coincide with bar lines, and the sequence of phrases is extremely irregular. Likewise, conventional ballads (such as "Like Someone in Love") are also undercut and transformed by unexpected, violent accents.

  All these elements, taken together, create an effect of conventional forms being pushed to their limits under the pressure of Hope's turbulent sensibility. This effect bears a certain resemblance to Andrew Hill's angry, intellectually exploratory work in the mid-sixties, but in Elmo's case molds seem mutilated and broken in a sort of intimate agony. The ballads, of course, with their solemn dignity and nobly "classical" references, convey this sensation especially. Another possible comparison would be with Bud Powell in his later years—that is, if Powell's assault on symmetry and flow had produced not incoherent gestures but some musical correlative for life on the brink.

  Hope's harmonic imagination is one of the record's strong points. His voicings are a constant source of surprise, while the chord patterns—especially in ballads like "Barfly"—are fresh and richly textured. Though one can feel the remembered presence of his early musical companions, Elmo possesses his materials absolutely. Indeed, when this record first appeared, some listeners felt that a third great bebop pianist had emerged, after a strangely prolonged incubation, at the very instant when Monk and Powell had lost some of their creative fire. Elmo Hope, at that moment, seemed destined to assume a place among the very finest pianists in jazz history, but he had little chance to build on his achievements. Instead, he left only a few glimpses with which we may conjure what a full and secure career might have offered.

  Conrad Yeatis "Sonny" Clark (1931-1963) was born in Her-minie, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town of some eight hundred inhabitants. At the age of twelve, the pianist moved to Pittsburgh and began playing professionally while he was still attending high school. In 1951, he journeyed to the West Coast with an older brother. After deciding to stay, Sonny began gigging around San Francisco with saxophonists Wardell Gray and Vido Musso, Oscar Pettiford, and Buddy De Franco, with whom he stayed from late 1953 till the beginning of 1956. Sonny's next move was down to Los Angeles, where he joined Howard Rumsey's All Stars at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. Asked by Leonard Feather to give his impressions of that experience, Sonny replied: "The climate is crazy. I'm going to be truthful, though: I did have sort of a hard time trying to be comfortable in my playing. The fellows out on the west coast have a different sort of feeling,
a different approach to jazz. They swing in their own way. But [drummer] Stan Levey, [trombonist] Frank Rosolino and [trumpeter] Conte Candoli were a very big help; of course they all worked back in the east for a long time during the early part of their careers . . . The eastern musicians play with so much fire and passion."10

  Like Elmo Hope, Sonny took his own advice and headed for New York, accompanying Dinah Washington along the way "more or less for the ride." Once there, he began to record for Blue Note (four albums: Dial S for Sonny, Sonny's Crib, Sonny Clark Trio, and Cool Struttin') and was frequently in clubs and on record sessions with the likes of Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Clifford Jordan, and Johnny Griffin. The personnel from his own Blue Note sides in the late fifties (including Art Farmer, Donald Byrd, Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, Louis Hayes, and Art Taylor) reads like a Who's Who of the New York hard-bop scene in that period.

  Although this flurry of activity produced results of varying quality, within a few years Clark had evolved into one of jazz's best pianists. After a brief hiatus in the late fifties, he cut an album [Max Roach/George Duviviei/Sonny Clark, later reissued on the Bainbridge label) of such concentrated inventive fire that it could stand comparison with even the quickest-burning bebop torches. During the early sixties, Sonny also recorded with such Blue Note regulars as Jackie McLean and Dexter Gordon, both of whom he matched in fluency and passion. In 1961, the pianist made another album for Blue Note, by far his best on that label and also, as it happened, his last: Leapin' and Lopin'.

  Less eccentric than Hope but without Kelly's popular, let-the-good-times-roll approach, Sonny Clark never had much trouble finding work. He was one of many musicians encouraged and supported by Blue Note's discerning musical director Alfred Lion; yet, like Kelly and Hope, he was little known outside of jazz's inner coteries. His difficulties in reaching a wider audience were compounded by narcotics addiction, and late in 1962 he was hospitalized after a heart attack. Released in early January 1963, he played his last gig at a New York club called Junior's, where he died of an overdose in the early hours of January 30. To avoid bad publicity and to preserve their liquor license, the owners moved his corpse to a private apartment before calling the police. Bill Evans, who acknowledged his influence and shared both his "problem" and his long-lined, sinuous pianistic approach, dedicated the tune "N.Y.C.'s No Lark" (an anagram of Clark's name) to his late friend.