Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965
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The development of poetics, as well as jazz and painting, seems to be chronologically parallel, which is to say you have fixed form, which then evolves toward more free form where you get let loose from this specific repeated rhythm and improvise the rhythms even, where you don't have a fixed rhythm, as in bebop the drum became more of a soloist in it too. So you find that in painting, the early de Koonings have a motif or a theme, the woman or something like that, but it gets more and more open, less dependent on the theme, and in poetry, where you have less and less dependence on the original motifs and more and more John Ashberyesque improvisa-tional free form flowing without even a subject matter, though I always kept a subject matter like the old funky blues myself. It was partly a parallel development within each discipline: painting, poetry, music. There were innovators who opened up the thing after Einstein, so to speak—you know, relative measure, as Williams said—which is in a sense something that happened with bebop: not the fixed measure but a relative measure. It was both inter-influential and parallel, also integrating."
If jazz opened up Ginsberg to "the awakening of Afric slave sensibility, of black sensibility, black funk as distinct from white, clean Doris Day ethic, and mind funk instead of well-combed, academic, button-down poetry," some jazz musicians, as Cruz comments, were also "interested in learning about all of it." Many, however, were not. After all, there were still plenty of clubs in black neighborhoods until the mid-sixties, and for lots of jazzmen, a job downtown—at Cafe Bohemia, the Village Vanguard, the Five Spot, or wherever— was just another gig. When I asked Walter Bishop, Jr., about his take on the lower Manhattan avant-garde twenty-five years ago, he replied that at the time he'd "had blinkers on," that for him it had been "bebop or bust"—in other words, that he'd had no artistic interests outside jazz.
Others, however, like Jackie McLean, were intensely curious about the worlds around them. McLean found his way into painting and (to a lesser degree) literature through his "friendship with guys who were doing this, for instance Harvey Cropper, who was the first painter that I knew. He was the one that introduced me to Bartok, to a lot of painters, the style of Cezanne. He introduced me to Hieronymus Bosch and that opened another world. That was the painter that had the greatest influence on me, Bosch, because my world was so horrible at that time that I could understand his paintings. I could look at the horror in some of his paintings and feel it when I was sick [from lack of narcotics], and then when I met Bob Thompson in 'sixty-one and we became very close, I learned a great deal about painting from Bob, being around him and talking about the music and painting and what not. And of course Leroi Jones was around in those days, and we were all hanging in the Village together during that time."
McLean's period (1959-1963) with the Living Theatre also widened his interests. During these years he evolved from a promising journeyman bebopper, described by Steve Lacy in The Jazz Review in 1959 as having "the most rhythmic vitality and, so far, the least discipline"5 of major saxophonists, into the brilliant experimentalist we hear on records from the early sixties like Let Freedom Ring and Evolution. The intensity of McLean's experience in the Living Theatre comes through in his reminiscences about the troupe: "I thought they were great people. I thought they were people who were looking far into the future, for a better way. You had to love them to be with them, because the Living Theatre was like a big commune. Mostly everybody lived together, ate together, and were together working out each person's problems. I didn't live with them because I had my wife and kids, but I was part of it because certainly I lived with them when we left New York, when we went to Europe.
"It was weird because the day that we left, there was a big snowstorm in Manhattan and all the transportation was stopped. It was the biggest snowstorm I ever saw. The night before there was no snow. I wake up the next day, we're supposed to leave for Europe, and the phone rings. The guy says 'Jackie, this is Hacker.' So I said 'Yeah, I know. We're not going. We can't get there,' so he says 'No. An ambulance is coming to get you. We had to hire ambulances to pick everybody up.' I said 'Jesus Christ, man,' and I was so strung out, so sick, so my wife walked me to the hallway and we stood there with my bags and my horn and my children and this ambulance came and I went downstairs and put my bags in the ambulance and two arms came out and helped me in. We went and picked up the next guy and went to where the ship was, the Queen Elizabeth, and the whole cast was coming in in ambulances, a sick group coming in ambulances, but when I say 'sick,' I mean sick in terms of having a better understanding of what life is supposed to be about. They were very hip people, Judith and Julian and the whole crowd. They were humanists. They were all into every aspect of art and their idea of theater was brand-new in terms of how they wanted to present it."
Bohemianism, of course, is not all purity and innocence. Ever since the concept was invented, it has also meant pleasure, doing what feels good, and rebellion, surreptitious or open, against constraints of all sorts. Another aspect of jazz's attraction for Village types was its renegade connotations. Again in Emilio Cruz's words: "Jazz became the heretic art form. What we call 'gutbucket' has not to do so much with the guts or the bucket but it has to do with heresy. So what is unique in modern culture is the heretic form. Everything that is created, in truth, outside of the sciences which deal directly with a mechanistic culture, comes out of heresy, so that Allen Ginsberg was involved in a kind of heresy. Charlie Parker was also involved in a kind of heresy. There is the idea of violation, and that violation would attract those people that were searching for that heretic tradition."
At one extreme, such heresy and will to violation leads artists to flirt with or embrace the most perilous vices. While jazz was the banner of a kind of fresh and Edenic newness in the arts, it was also a path into the lower depths, as implied by Sukenick's comment on underground rebels of the 1950s: "Where are you in the mid-fifties? Are you fighting your way up the heart-burning ladder of career, or have you finally decided there's no place to go but down? Burned out into a dead-end underground. Into the shadow world emblemized above all by Bebop. Digging Bop is one of the main ways subterraneans can express their cultural radicalism."6
Jazz's "shadow world" was the kingdom of the hipster, a stereotype partly mythical and partly based on reality, but far more cynical than the flower-child, love-and-peace "hippies" of the late 1960s. A furtive, jive-talking sociopath, the hipster was supposedly alert only to his own whims and his craving for intense experiences. In "The White Negro" (1957), which remains an intriguing and annoying essay, Norman Mailer wrote that "the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knifelike entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation—that postwar generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the twenties, the depression, and the war."7
Mailer's piece drew heavy criticism from those in the jazz world who read it. They faulted it for presenting a series of caricatures. So it does—not necessarily much of a defect in an essay whose tone is so exaggerated and polemical anyway— but many of them fit, at least partly, the jazz scene at that time.
What Mailer perhaps did not emphasize enough was the centrality of drugs and particularly heroin among hipsters. As Leonard Feather noted in "Jazz in American Society" (published as a foreword to his Encyclopedia of Jazz, 1960): "A serious effect of the use of drugs, quite apart from the medical, is its creation of a sub-society in which all the users are 'hip' and the rest of the world is 'square.'"8 "Hip talk" itself was partly a necessary camouflage for discussions of drugs, what Mailer called "the cunning of their language, the abstract ambiguous alternatives in which from the danger of their oppression they learned to speak ('Well now, man, like I'm looking for a cat to turn me on . . .')."9
The mysterious, hedonis
tic yet cooled-out universe of junkies in pursuit of what Balzac called "quiet, inner enjoyment," and their profound alienation from society as a whole—an alienation often compounded by race—were perceived as deeply attractive by some bohemians. Even as fire-breathing a revolutionary as Amiri Baraka, who has often railed against drugs, surrenders to their sinister glamour when describing (in The Autobiography of Lewi Jones) his use of heroin with painter Bob Thompson in the early sixties—this despite the fact that Thompson's very promising career was cut short by an overdose: "I walked all the way back to Avenue C, not to see Lucia, but to find a friend of mine, Bob Thompson, a black painter. Bob lived in a huge loft on Clinton Street. He was there with a couple of bohemians, getting high, shooting heroin. I didn't know he used it, but he was sending one of the bohemians out to cop. I dropped some money in the mitt and meanwhile used some of Bob's 'smack' and we took off together, down, down, and right here! Bob and I were a number after that."™
There can be no doubt that heroin use was widespread among jazz musicians. As Leonard Feather pointed out in "Jazz in American Society": "Of the 23 individuals listed as winners in a recent Down Beat poll, at least nine were known narcotics users, five of them with a record of arrest and conviction. The proportion is even greater among proponents of certain types of jazz, notably 'hard bop,' whose principal soloists include an alarmingly high percentage with police records as heroin addicts."11
The percentage of junkies among hard boppers was indeed alarming and is the main reason why so few of them are alive today. Why did so many get hooked? It has often been said that heroin cannot improve one's music. This is probably true, and yet . . . what made Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday so haunting, and in such similar ways? Heroin certainly induces relaxation, and with it a kind of detached lucidity, as suggested by Nat Hentoff in The Jazz Life when he quotes "one very successful musician, who compared taking heroin to '. . . going into a closet. It lets you concentrate and takes you away from everything. Heroin is a working drug, like the doctor who took it because he had a full schedule so he could work better. It lets me concentrate on my sound.'"12
Still another standard explanation—discrimination, lack of recognition, or whatever you want to call it—was summarized by Walter Bishop, Jr., who, like Clifford Jordan and Jackie McLean, is an ex-junkie: "The whole thing is when you've got a whole lot to express and you can't express it, so it's a form of self medication, just trying to cool yourself out. It's the pain of being so creative and not having avenues to express it or having your work considered less than important that could drive a man to many things."
Perhaps, after all, hard bop's frequent combination of tough street attitudes and somber melancholy did have something to do with heroin. In any case, it was central to many of the school's members; hard-living, fast-burning creative torches who appeared in remarkable profusion and all too often were snuffed out at their brightest moments. It is to some of these— lyricists, soul-jazz specialists, and tormented poets of anguish in the manner of Billie Holiday—that we shall now turn our attention.
T HE LYRICISTS
Brown, Farmer, Golson, Gryce, Jones, and Associates
In Mark C. Gridley's Jazz Styles: History and Analysis, a textbook designed for use in history of jazz courses, we find trumpeter Art Farmer, pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris, and composers Benny Golson and Gigi Gryce classified as "hard hoppers."1 Such musicians are indeed to be associated with hard bop for two reasons. First, they often collaborated with hard boppers; and second, the very breadth and diversity of hard bop helped their styles to develop. But the decisive quality they share with each other is their gentle, thoughtful elegance. The distance between them and the school's rawer exponents can be seen in Barry Harris's account of a run-in with Blue Note Records' Alfred Lion, who favored more high-voltage sounds: "I made a record with Lee Morgan, The Sidewinder, for Blue Note, and I went to the Blue Note man and asked him why didn't he give me a record date—he said I played too beautiful. So I thanked him and walked out."2
"Beautiful," of course, is one of the vaguest words around. But Harris's meaning—tunefulness and lyricism—is clear enough. It brings us close to what Tadd Dameron meant when he told his band in 1953: "When I write something it's with beauty in mind. It has to swing, sure, but it has to be beautiful." The lesson was not wasted, for those listening included Golson and Gryce, Tadd's main heirs (along with Jimmy Heath) in writing richly voiced, vibrantly melodic modern-jazz originals.
Such beauty was also what bebop trumpeter Freddie Webster had in mind. As harmonically sophisticated as Dizzy Gillespie and other jaggedly multi-noted beboppers, Webster played more sparely, emphasizing melody and a fat sound, dark yet brassy, that Gillespie called "the best I ever heard."3 Webster's career was tragically short. He died in 1947 at the age of thirty, leaving behind only a handful of recorded solos from which those of us who never heard him in person must reconstruct his style. His legacy, however, turned out to be as important as Gillespie's or Fats Navarro's. Webster has been frequently cited as an early influence on Miles Davis. And in 1984, nearly forty years after Webster's death, Art Farmer described the tonal quality of his own playing: "I wouldn't say it was a completely original sound, I've heard similarities in other musicians, like Shorty Baker, Miles Davis, Freddie Webster, Benny Bailey ... a broad sound with a little bit of edge when you want it."4
Webster, then, along with Dameron and swing pianist Teddy Wilson, whose delicate, flligreed style colored Hank Jones's and Tommy Flanagan's music, was another major influence on hard-bop lyricists. Apart from Davis, Webster's best-known disciple was Art Farmer. Born in 1928, Farmer grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. In 1945, he and his twin brother Addison (an excellent bassist who died in 1963 just after completing his studies at the Juilliard School of Music) spent their summer vacation in Los Angeles. Their holiday coincided with the eruption of bebop. In an interview with Coda magazine's Bill Smith, Farmer recalled the feeling of shared discovery among young musicians: "There was so much going on compared to Phoenix that we decided we would just stay
there. And we met all the guys around. Things were quite open. There was a lot of enthusiasm. Everybody was trying to learn. There was a general sharing of knowledge. I remember Charlie Parker came there with Dizzy and he decided to stay. We were all in the same clique, but he would walk the street with us at night too. Looking for a place to play. If a job came we'd take it and if it didn't we'd just go and jam and wait until the next gig came."5
Farmer spent his senior year of high school in L.A. After working with Horace Henderson and Floyd Ray, he went on the road with Johnny Otis's jazz and R B group. But after four months in Otis's outfit, Farmer's lip gave out and he was fired: "I was first trumpet in the band, with no previous experience, and I was doing it wrong. Freddie Webster told me to see a guy named Grupp, and he was a very warm and human person. I thought I'd better stay in New York and study and get myself straightened out. I worked as a porter in a theater and studied with Maurice Grupp every day."6
After this period of "woodshedding," Farmer joined Jay McShann's band (another ensemble combining jazz and blues) and worked his way back to the West Coast. By now his style and technique had evolved to the point where he could hold his own with California's leading beboppers: musicians like trumpeter Benny Bailey (who remains one of his favorites); saxophonists Sonny Criss, Teddy Edwards, Dexter Gordon, War-dell Gray, and Frank Morgan; and pianist Hampton Hawes. Though these associations were not very lucrative ("I played every chance I got . . . They were hard times then. And at that time I was still trying to learn. But I was one of many. There must have been a million guys there"7), they led to Farmer's first jazz recording date: a sextet session led by Gray. Here Farmer's style is still embryonic, though on "April Skies," a medium-tempo cut on which he plays with a mute, one can glimpse the future artisan of carefully crafted lines. Two of the faster tracks ("Bright Boy" and "Farmer's Market") also feature trumpet solos. These are of a more conventionally boppish or
der, yet here too, in Farmer's pure, ringing tone and attention to timbre, one can glimpse his future development.
In 1952 Farmer joined Lionel Hampton's big band, which also included, at various times during his stay, Benny Bailey, Clifford Brown, and composers Golson, Gryce, and Quincy Jones. That must have been one hell of a band! More's the pity that, having assembled such a brilliant group of young jazzmen, Hampton, anxious to please a public that expected him to repeat his past glories, didn't allow them more freedom. Nonetheless, both Gryce and Farmer deemed the orchestra the best Hamp had ever led. As an incubator for hard bop's more lyrical stylists, it was extraordinarily productive, as important a nucleus of major talents as any since the birth of modern jazz. We can get some idea of what it sounded like from a series of sessions recorded for French Vogue during a 1953 European tour. The tunes, Brian Blevins reports in his liner notes, "were provided mainly by Gigi Gryce and Quincy Jones (the arrangements had probably been charted for the Hampton band but unused by that organization)." These arrangements are an intriguing mixture of such Swing big-band approaches as the sleek, bouncingly Basieish theme of "Keepin' Up with Jonesy," Dameronian tints, and orchestral ideas taken from scores by Johnny Carisi, Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, and others that ended up on Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool LP. The richness of the voicings and secondary themes, the tight ensembles, and the constant play of surging, shifting orchestrated accompaniments all help create some of our finest examples of big-band modern jazz.
These sessions, as their collective title [Clifford Brown in Paris) suggests, featured Brownie, Hampton's fiery young trumpeter. Brown also cut a ten-inch LP for Blue Note in 1953 featuring charts by Gryce and Jones, but he soon veered off in another direction, playing first with Art Blakey and Horace Silver and then with Max Roach and Sonny Rollins. It was Art Farmer, heard only in ensemble passages on the Paris dates, who went on to collaborate more extensively with Gryce and later with Golson as well.