Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  Though more conventional than Hope's, Sonny Clark's style also seemed to imply great things to come. On the back of his Cool Struttin' album (Blue Note), the pianist praises Len-nie Tristano's "technical ability and conception," and the debt to Tristano is clear on Max Roach/George Duviviei/'Sonny Clark. But it is a mixed debt, for Clark's playing seems at first hearing to be so firmly rooted in the Powell tradition that one is hardly prepared to detect Tristano as his second guiding spirit.

  The link with Tristano (though also with Powell) is most evident in Sonny Clark's snaking melodic lines. These lines, which can extend for several bars at a time, building through surprisingly accentuated melodic turns, are really the essence of Clark's style and his dominant musical mode. The intensity generated by this onrush of ideas, pouring forth in rapid succession as the long phrases build toward delayed climaxes or, at times, multiple internal ones, lends an air of concentrated taking-care-of-business to the side. Clark's other major influence, however, is Horace Silver, and nearly every cut on this trio set includes at least one bow in the funkmaster's direction—usually in the form of one of his pet phrases. Laced through intricate multi-bar lines but often increasing in frequency as the solo approaches its climax, these phrases turn into another element of surprise within the otherwise unremitting context. They seem to ground Clark's music in the popular tradition, while making few concessions to it and maintaining an atmosphere of charged lucidity quite different from Silver's more relaxed effects.

  The record is entirely devoted to Clark originals (mostly medium to medium-up blues or variations on standard chord changes), whose themes tend to be functional. Few chords— other than an occasional third, fourth, or octave—are used in the right hand, and the emphasis is almost exclusively on single-note lines. One exception, however, is "My Conception," an unaccompanied ballad played mostly out of tempo, with the slightest hint of stride in the last chorus. Here Clark's appreciation of Art Tatum's lush virtuosity is expressed in meditative clusters of runs, embellishments, and two-handed, contrapuntal figures.

  Rhythmically, on most numbers Clark tends to push the beat for an effect of urgency, rather than retard it for a laid-back groove as Kelly would have done. Clark's staccato attack fits in well with the serpentine structurings he favored, and his

  playing makes one feel that all the bebop and blues vocabulary ever required was musicians who employed it with sufficient conviction. Clark seemed to be such a musician, and many expected great things from him: a career in which the record with Roach and Duvivier would merely be the opening statement, showing he had assimilated his sources and was ready to take off on his own.

  This success, of course, never occurred, nor did Kelly and Hope reach the sort of public they deserved. Jazz has always been a minority taste, and few listeners have been able to keep more than a dozen names in their minds simultaneously. Critics, also, have often had an overly schematic approach to the music, devoting attention to those they deem major innovators at the expense of equally talented musicians whose individuality is expressed in subtler ways. (The amount of ink expended on Lester Young, as opposed to Ben Webster, is a good example of this phenomenon.) Such an approach has been particularly unfortunate when applied to hard bop and to Dance's Mainstream. Like the style Dance championed, hard bop was "a vast body of music." Part of its richness—and part of the reason so many hard-bop record dates are being reissued today—is the school's extraordinary depth and range of figures. That, of course, was what made it "mainstream": almost everyone good was playing it!

  T HE SCENE

  Jazz in the Ghetto

  Critics usually assume that jazz ceased to be "popular music" with the arrival of bebop in the mid-1940s. While this assumption is partly true, it also requires a good deal of qualification. Jazz, like blues, remained economically viable in black neighborhoods until driven out by the pop sounds of the late 1960s. That jazz (with the exception of the "cool" style played by Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, and others) had a primarily black audience is confirmed by Joe Fields, currently with Muse Records and formerly employed by Prestige and Columbia: "Our records sold to some white college kids, but our sales [at Prestige] were overwhelmingly to blacks—not just tenor and organ stuff but hard bop too. That's why what we sold in Boston was nothing compared to Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland . . . Our sales in Los Angeles were much better than in San Francisco." To understand this world is also to understand why, although jazz is currently enjoying one of its periods of greatest popularity among whites, the flow of talented black teenagers into the music has been reduced to a trickle. From 1945 to 1965, jazz attracted the ghetto's most gifted young musicians.

  During the late 1950s and early 1960s, hard bop was the basic idiom in the neighborhoods where such youngsters lived. Less intellectual and less technically dazzling than bebop before it, hard bop was also more open to the black popular tradition— especially blues and gospel. Hard bop was expressive. It was sometimes bleak, often tormented, but always cathartic; and it was "bad" (sinister, menacing) in the sense that James Brown was "bad." In 1959, virtually every apartment building in areas like Harlem or the South Side of Chicago housed at least a few knowledgeable, serious jazz fans. Their historical awareness might not have extended very far back before the arrival of bebop, but they could eloquently debate the relative merits of tenor saxophonists like Harold Land and Booker Ervin or pianists like Bobby Timmons and Kenny Drew. Such fans usually had no more formal education than their neighbors who preferred the Drifters or Little Walter, but the quality of their interest was often different. They tended to be aficionados rather than casual listeners, and they thought of jazz as both "art" (in the Western sense of the term) and background music for partying, rather than as exclusively the latter.

  Bars, of course, were crucial points of exposure to jazz, both live and on jukeboxes. Particularly common in ghettos— especially after Jimmy Smith hit the scene in the mid-fifties— were "soul jazz" combos featuring the likes of Lou Donaldson, Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Brother Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff, and Shirley Scott, as well as pianists like Ramsey Lewis, Gene Harris (of the Three Sounds), Red Garland, and Les McCann. In midwestern clubs (Manhattan below 96th Street was already in a more racially mixed, sophisticated class by itself in regard to live jazz), groups of this kind performed as often as "hard core" jazz combos led by musicians like Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and Horace Silver. Many bands were composed of local musicians who never achieved national recognition. As with salsa in the early 1990s, jazz in the 1950s was a good way to make a living and a lousy way to get rich. The concentration of independent labels in New York (Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, and Savoy were the big four) also made it difficult for musicians to get a hearing elsewhere and acted as a magnet, sucking young jazzmen out of cities like Detroit and Philadelphia that had no recording industries to speak of.

  A look at the jazz labels' singles lists reveals much about black taste during this period. Blue Note and Prestige each issued approximately three hundred 45-rpm singles between 1955 and 1970. Though both lists were stylistically broad, the tendency was definitely toward "listenable" and/or funky sounds: in other words, ballads and groove numbers. Blue Note leaned heavily toward the kind of playing done by the Three Sounds and by organists Big John Patton, Freddie Roach, Jimmy Smith, and Baby Face Willette; guitarists Kenny Burrell and Grant Green; saxophonists Lou Donaldson, Ike Quebec, and Stanley Turrentine; and trombonist Bennie Green. In second place were singles by hard-bop "stars" like Cannonball Adderley, Blakey, Silver, and Sonny Rollins. Musicians like Jackie McLean and vibist Bobby Hutcherson were far less generously represented (in McLean's case, for example, by "Greasy" from New Soil, and in Hutcherson's by "Ummh," from San Francisco). Both "Greasy" and "Ummh" are blues, "Greasy" being a kind of modified boogie-woogie and "Ummh" a slow grind with a heavy back beat. Still other artists, like Andrew Hill, were apparently judged too cerebral, even at their funkiest, to merit single releases.

  Th
e Prestige catalogue tells much the same story, but in a more extreme way. Bob Weinstock, who ran Prestige, was less committed to jazz as an "art form" than Blue Note's Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff. One result was that instead of just dominating Prestige's catalogue soul jazz is nearly the whole show: pianists Red Garland and Bobby Timmons; organists Chalres Earland, Richard "Groove" Holmes, Jack McDuff, Freddie Roach, Shirley Scott, Johnny "Hammond" Smith, and Larry Young; saxophonists Gene Ammons, Arnett Cobb, Lockjaw Davis, Jimmy Forrest, Red Holloway, Gator Tail Jackson, and Houston Person; and guitarist Kenny Burrell, plus a very modest admixture of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the like.

  In considering both lists, however, we should bear in mind that soul jazz musicians on the order of Gene Ammons, Kenny Burrell, and Jimmy Smith were outstanding jazzmen and that such others as Houston Person, Lockjaw Davis, and Ike Quebec were also very good indeed. Moreover, though for some musicians (like Gator Tail Jackson) soul jazz was the only context in which they felt comfortable, others (like Larry Young) could play demanding music (for example Unity on Blue Note) of great subtlety, attuned to a far more demanding aesthetic. One final point along these lines: although "groove numbers" were certainly the type most likely to end up on single releases, virtually all black musicians regarded them as simply one element of a varied repertoire.

  According to Michael Cuscuna, arguably the world's leading authority on Blue Note and currently in charge of Capitol-EMI's Blue Note reissue program, the average sales for the company's singles were three thousand to jukebox operators, plus another thousand or so to individuals in black neighborhoods. Jukeboxes, in the 1950s and 1960s, were almost as important a means of exposure as radio. Joe Fields adds that singles (some of them truncated versions of tunes issued on LP in their complete form—for example, Cannonball Adderley's "Jive Samba," put out by Riverside in 1963) were sent out to black radio stations. Like virtually every other aspect of the music business, including distributors, record stores, and the companies themselves, black radio was then very different from what it is today. The voices of jazz dj's like Symphony Sid in New York and Daddy-O Daylie in Chicago filled the air of America's ghettos. Critic and musician Mark C. Gridley's comments on his early exposure to jazz give something of the flavor of radio fare at the time: "Growing up in Detroit, I heard hard bop more than any other style. In fact, during the early

  1960s there was a radio station in Detroit that played almost nothing but hard bop. After arranging my high school and work schedules to enable me to hear as much of it as possible, I soon found that I could distinguish the sounds of Freddie Hubbard from Lee Morgan, Barry Harris from Tommy Flanagan, the Horace Silver Quintet from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, etc. So, even though my first jazz albums had been Duke Ellington reissues, I soon became very comfortable with hard bop, as well. (Eventually I managed to develop a tone quality in my tenor saxophone playing that resembled Joe Henderson's.)"1

  How did jazz sell between 1950 and 1965? This question is not as easily answered as for other forms of black music, because jazz sales tend to accumulate over decades, not weeks. Thus, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, one of the most popular jazz LPs ever with estimated sales of half a million, does not figure in Billboard's lists of the Top 200 LPs between 1945 and 1972. Likewise, we find no Miles Davis records at all in Billboard's listings before 1962, though by 1960 Miles possessed a townhouse in Manhattan, drove an expensive sports car, and dressed in custom-tailored Italian suits. Nonetheless, Billboard's charts—both for LPs and for R B singles—are worth examining. What we find, first of all, is that singles by Swing musicians (for instance Ella Fitzgerald's "Smooth Sailing," Lionel Hampton's "Rag Mop," and Johnny Hodges's "Castle Rock") still enjoyed brisk sales in the ghetto at the beginning of the 1950s. Modern jazz, no matter how much one stretches the term, is represented by only two entries during this period: King Pleasure's vocal versions of James Moody's "Moody's Mood for Love" and Gene Am-mons's "Red Top." In addition, we find sides on the borderline between jazz and R B (what would later be dubbed "soul jazz") like Illinois Jacquet's "Port of Rico" and Jimmy Forrest's "Night Train."

  Very little jazz reached the R B charts between 1953 and 1960, when jazz singles again began to appear there regularly. The reasons are diverse, but one of them is certainly that as

  Swing began to sound old-fashioned to blacks and as bebop— never the stuff of jukebox hits—played itself out, the audience for jazz singles disintegrated. Meanwhile, however, a new generation of musicians returned to black music's popular roots. These musicians, in turn, made jazz more appealing to black listeners, who in the early 1960s responded by purchasing a new crop of hits. Some best-sellers of the period were Cannonball Adderley's "African Waltz," Ray Bryant's "Little Susie," Eddie Harris's "Exodus," Groove Holmes's "Misty," Ramsey Lewis's "The In Crowd," Gloria Lynne's version of Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man," Jimmy McGriff's rendition of Ray Charles's "I Got a Woman," Jimmy Smith's "Midnight Special," and Nancy Wilson's and Cannonball Adderley's "Save Your Love for Me." In all these cases, what we see is not so much popularity among jazz fans as crossover into R B territory. Horace Silver, for instance—one of the era's biggest sellers on LP—is unrepresented, despite his numerous singles on Blue Note. Nonetheless, it was Silver and other prominent hard boppers who had created the atmosphere for such hit-makers, returning jazz to the hot, danceable rhythms and funky-butt emotions it had strayed from during the bebop era.

  Billboard's top LP listings (not specifically R . B) also include a certain amount of jazz. As might be expected, hard bop and soul jazz predominate, though some of the material is more for "hard core" aficionados than that on the R . B charts, reflecting (among other things) the fact that jazz fans tend to buy LPs. Some serious jazz sides that made the Top 200 between 1960 and 1966 were Cannonball Adderley's Jazz Workshop Revisited; Gene Ammons's Bad Bossa Nova; Kenny Burrell's The Tender Gender; Blue Bash, featuring Burrell and Jimmy Smith; Miles Davis's Someday My Prince Will Come and Seven Steps to Heaven; Lou Donaldson's Alligator Boogaloo,- Groove Holmes's Soul Message; Gloria Lynne's I'm Glad There Is You; Jack McDuff's Live!; Thelonious Monk's Criss Cross; Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder; Horace Silver's Song for My Father; six Jimmy Smith sides on Blue Note, the most successful being Back at the Chicken Shack; and Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley.

  Such LP charts, like the R . B listings, reflect a combination of weekly sales, airplay, and, in some cases, the clout of record companies advertising regularly and heavily in Billboard. In the case of independent jazz labels, this pressure was felt negatively. Blue Note, for example, never advertised in industry publications. According to Cuscuna's recollections, the label's all-time best-sellers were Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder, Horace Silver's Song for My Father, and Lou Donaldson's Alligator Boogaloo, all of which figured in Billboard's charts and sold something like a hundred thousand copies apiece over several years. Another big seller was Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, which must have been slower to take off since it never made the charts. Like the title cut from The Sidewinder, used as background music for a Chrysler television spot, "Maiden Voyage" figured in a Faberge commercial and, in fact, was listed on the master tape simply as "TV Jingle" and only christened later by Jean Hancock, Herbie's sister. Average initial sales for more straight-ahead hard-bop LPs like Jackie McLean's New Soil, again according to Cus-cuna, ran from 6000 to 8000 copies, the break-even mark being about 2500. But, of course, many such records are still in print and selling well.

  The world that generated them, however, has vanished into history books and recollections. I myself was lucky enough to experience the last few years of that world, and I can recall those glorious jukeboxes where Jimmy Smith, Miles Davis, and Cannonball Adderley rubbed shoulders with Martha Reeves, the Impressions, Muddy Waters, and Howlin' Wolf. The pervasiveness of jazz in the ghetto can be seen in the work of many R . B musicians formed during the 1960s—for example, that of the instrumentalists featured with Kool and the Gang or with Earth, Wind and Fire. Others, like saxo
phonist Wilton Felder and pianist Joe Sample of the Crusaders, actually were well-known jazz musicians. Still others, like Ray Charles, played jazz along with R B, and even James Brown cut a few soul-jazz numbers (such as "Evil" on fames Brown Showtime). All this occurred before, as Andrew Hill put it, "the music got separated."

  How little "separated" the music was, at least in Chicago, can be seen from Clifford Jordan's memories of his introduction to jazz in the late 1940s. Like Hill, Jordan grew up on the city's South Side. We encountered him in the last chapter as Horace Silver's tenor saxophonist on Further Explorations. Since then, Jordan has evolved into one of the most expressive storytellers in jazz. In a way reminiscent of Swing titans like Benny Carter or Ben Webster, he has mellowed with the years, purifying his melodic conception without losing his fire: "When you'd go to a record store, they wouldn't have just thousands and thousands of pieces of material like you have now. They had the new Duke Ellington record, the new Count Basie, the new Louis Armstrong, so you could keep up with the music.

  "I used to hear Eddie 'Lockjaw' Davis playing 'Doghouse' on the jukebox, and you could hear Coleman Hawkins's 'Body and Soul.' Yeah, all the jukeboxes, they had jazz, but nobody called it 'jazz' then. It was just music. It was just our music, folk music. So when I started playing saxophone, I went to the record store. I told the man behind the counter, I said, 'I'm interested in some saxophones. What records do you have with a saxophone on it?' So he pulled out Ben Webster, Charlie Ventura, Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, so I bought a few records and listened to the guys. I got to Don Byas, but it was just easy to come by the music. They had two or three key record stores in the neighborhood."