Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965
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Harris has made his mark especially as a keeper of the bebop flame. In an interview with Bob Rusch, he bristled at the very term "hard bop": "I don't even know what you mean when you're talking about hard bop—bop is bop as far as I'm concerned. And when you think of bop and that's Bird and Diz— we don't have too much bop ever—I'm a purist."21 In recent years, Harris has often paid tribute, on records and in person, to Tadd Dameron, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell and has expressed his skepticism about the value of changes in jazz since the 1940s.
A disc like Barry Harris at the Jazz Workshop (recorded in 1960 with Sam Jones and Louis Hayes, Harris's teammates in Cannonball's rhythm section) certainly pays its respects to bebop, most obviously in tunes by or associated with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie ("Moose the Mooche," "Star Eyes," "Don't Blame Me," and "Woody'n You"). Yet the only track with a genuinely "boppish" air is Harris's own "Curtain Call," a bright fanfare that leads into a fleet piano solo in the style of Bud Powell, though without the quicksilvery surprise and sense of discovery that we find in Bud's best work. The other cuts, except for "Don't Blame Me," which also owes something to Bud's somber readings of ballads like "Embraceable You," are medium tempo. Harris's touch is weighty, deliberate. He embeds himself in the beat instead of skimming over it or floating upon it as beboppers often had, and this—together with Jones's solidity and Hayes's fiercely purposeful drumming—creates a heavy swing that is one of the record's strong points. Harris often comes down hard on the first beats of phrases that then seem to trail away (in Whitney Balliett's words) "as if they were being blown out of hearing."22 All these factors make for an emphasis on "cooking." More than Hank Jones or Tommy Flanagan, Harris is a pianist you pop your fingers to.
But the three do have much in common. All are "musicians' musicians"—that is, masters of nuance who appeal to educated tastes, to listeners who can get beneath the surface of jazz, its overall "sound," and savor the dynamics and imaginative eccentricities of specific solos. As Gary Giddins noted: "In the 1980s, they practically monopolize classical bop piano."23 Yet ironically, they are more conservative than the inventors of classical bop piano. In a sense, artists like Jones, Flanagan, and Harris, as well as Farmer and Golson, may represent what modem jazz would have been had the bebop revolution not taken place under the sign of radical innovation. Without Bird, Monk, et al., jazz would certainly have evolved since the 1940s, but perhaps in a less flamboyant and iconoclastic manner. This relatively subdued manner—along with the emphasis on "beauty" that led Blue Note to reject Harris—is the source of these lyrical stylists' affinities with the great Swing musicians. Like Benny Carter, Duke Ellington, and so many others associated with Swing, they have improved over the years, adding layer upon layer of finish, polishing and refining their art's sheen and subtle symmetry.
T ENORS AND ORGANS
Benny Carter and Duke Ellington represent refinement and urbanity—but big-band Swing had a rawer, more "down-home" side as well. While this earthier variant is best known to jazz aficionados through the work of Count Basie's orchestra, it can be heard in many other southern and southwestern "territory bands" of the 1930s. Such bands, which included Walter Page and His Blue Devils and Milt Larkins's and Jay McShann's ensembles, performed in the main for black audiences. Mostly, they played the blues and showcased "blues shouters," like Jimmy Rushing in Basie's band, who could generate big enough sounds to be heard over seventeen wailing musicians.
Written arrangements were usually rudimentary or nonexistent. Riff-based tunes would be worked out in rehearsal and performance, "by head." Talking about his years with Basie, trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison remembered that "when I first joined the band we had maybe six arrangements in the entire book. Now since I was going to make music my career, I wanted to read music and learn more about it. But they kept playing and playing until I didn't know where I was. Finally I said, 'Hey, Basie, where's the music?' and he answered, 'What's the matter? You're playing, aren't you?' So I said, 'Yes, but I want to know what I'm playing.' And I said, 'When the band ends I don't know what note to hit.' Then Basie told me, 'If you hit a note tonight and it sounds right, just play that same note tomorrow.'"1
This Texas-Oklahoma-Kansas City-based, riff-oriented, hard-and-sinewy orchestral sound was to have a long life in both jazz and black pop music. The backgrounds for most of B. B. King's records from the 1950s, for instance, come straight out of it. When vibraphonist Lionel Hampton left Benny Goodman and formed his first big band in 1941, he plugged into the Southwest scene. This was partly due to his friendship with guitarist Charlie Christian, who was at once a pioneer of modern jazz and a quintessential Oklahoma bluesman. Hampton also raided the Southwest for two tenors: Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb, both veterans of Milt Larkins's Houston-based outfit. Jacquet, born in Louisiana and raised in Texas, scored a smash hit for Hampton with his solo on "Flying Home" in 1942. Though deep-funk tenor playing should perhaps be traced back to Ben Webster's lusty, swaggering solos, the honkin'-and-screamin' movement is usually linked to Jacquet's outing on "Flying Home" and to his antics at Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts in the mid-forties.
In their heyday, the honkers and screamers aimed at creating maximum excitement. Romping and stomping, rolling on the floor, bellowing single notes over and over, they induced paroxysms, hysteria, catharsis. Record producer Teddy Reig recalls that "when Hampton played theaters he would give everybody a fit, because he'd get into a groove and the people would be going crazy and he just wouldn't quit. He'd screw up the schedule and make overtime, and they'd have to close the curtain. And sometimes when they did that he'd take the band out in the audience. Lionel was the big band version of honking and screaming."2
Another of Reig's anecdotes describes the end of a concert featuring baritone honker Paul Williams, whose hits included "The Hucklebuck": "The place was in an uproar. People started screaming and running up on stage as I was closing the curtain. I ran out there and grabbed Paul's arm and said, 'Let's get out of here!'" As Williams's popularity grew in the late 1940s, crowds began lining up around the block for his appearances. "Every five minutes," says Reig, "the fire department would come in and I'd give them a bunch of tickets to count. But there were hundreds of tickets in my pockets they didn't know about. Then there was a shooting or something. Before it was over, Paul Williams closed down every dance hall in Baltimore. There wasn't one left he didn't close with a riot."
The honkers were known for their blatant showmanship. Williams, for example, paid a midget to walk along the bar doing the hucklebuck while the saxophonist walked beside him and customers dropped money into the bell of his horn. Such high jinks didn't sit well with jazz critics. Emerging simultaneously with bebop, the honkers marked a parting of the ways between highbrow and lowbrow black music—what Johnny Griffin meant when he said promoters "took the music out of Harlem and put it in Carnegie Hall and downtown in those joints where you've got to be quiet. The black people split and went back to Harlem, back to the rhythm and blues, so they could have a good time."3
In fact, however, Griffin's lively picture was oversimplified. He himself graced Joe Morris's R B outfit with his big-toned, dirty solos on tunes like "Lowe Groovin'." After leaving Morris, he played with Lionel Hampton's orchestra before joining Art Blakey and then Thelonious Monk. Even in 1961, when he was firmly established as a jazz saxophonist, Griffin described himself as "a nervous person when I'm playing. I like to play fast. I get excited, and I have to sort of control myself, restrain myself. But when the rhythm section gets cooking, I want to explode."4 Dizzy Gillespie's bebop big band featured James Moody's wild and woolly tenor work in the late 1940s. Today Illinois Jacquet, who supposedly started it all, remains a respected jazz tenorman (see his comments on bebop's genesis at Minton's in Chapter 1). Other honkers like Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson, whose nickname comes from the title of his biggest R B hit, later emerged as seductive balladeers in the boudoir-saxophone tradition of Ben Webster and others.
If the honkers'
glory days as stars in their own right were the late forties, the reverberations have nevertheless been felt ever since in both jazz and black popular music. For instance, much of the impact and musical density of Marvin Gaye records like What's Going On and Here, My Dear come from contributions of tenormen "Wild Bill" Moore and Ernie Watts, respectively. On the back of his Ornette on Tenor album (Atlantic), Ornette Coleman declared that "the tenor is a rhythm instrument, and the best statements Negroes have made, of what their soul is, have been on tenor saxophone. Now you think about it, and you'll see I'm right. The tenor's got that thing, that honk, you can get to people with it. Sometimes you can be playing that tenor and I'm telling you, the people want to jump across the rail."
Coleman was not the only one to think the tenor had a special relationship to black people's "soul." In 1950s R B, for every one alto star (like Earl Bostic), there were a dozen tenormen. Most of the four-, eight-, and twelve-bar "breaks" on R . B vocals were tenor solos. In hard bop, too, in the fifties and sixties, good to very good tenors outnumbered altoists of equal stature. Rollins and Coltrane were the most influential saxophonists of the period. The initial generation of postwar honkers was diverse in its aspirations. Some—like Lee Allen of New Orleans, heard alongside Fats Domino, Smiley Lewis, Little Richard, and others—stayed within an R B context. Others, like Johnny Griffin, gravitated toward "straight jazz" of a fairly uncompromising variety, although Griffin's fiery declamations still recall his roots. Others worked in an area on the border between jazz and R . B, creating a new kind of music that ended up being called "soul jazz." These included Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Gene Ammons, Arnett Cobb, Red Holloway, Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson, Ike Quebec, Jimmy Forrest, and—a little later—Stanley Turrentine, Houston Person, and Grover Washington. The basis for their playing lay in Swing saxophonists of the rowdier sort—for example, Webster or Chu Berry—but the new crop of soul-jazz saxophonists had also learned from both R . B and bebop. Among this crop, perhaps the most interesting was Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis.
Born in 1921, Davis (usually known as "Jaws" or "Lock") came of age in the late thirties, when Harlem's ballrooms were filled with dancers jitterbugging to the big-band sounds of Chick Webb, Jimmy Lunceford, and Lucky Millinder. "I really became a musician because my kid brother was a bouncer at the Savoy Ballroom up in Harlem," Jaws has commented. "I was just a kid then and he used to let me in for free. I used to take it all in, you know: the lights, the noise, the music. This was the big band era and the biggest guys there were the musicians. They got the awe, the girls and all the admiration. I thought straight off, that's for you man. In the big bands, the big guys were usually the drummer and the saxophone player. The drums were a bit cumbersome but I could manage a horn so I settled for the saxophone."5
Eight months after he first picked up an instrument, Jaws was playing in an ensemble (including Bud Powell) that was hired one night in its entirety, minus saxophonist Rudy Williams, by trumpeter Cootie Williams. Cootie Williams's orchestra, whose book included arrangements by Tadd Dameron and Thelonious Monk and whose theme song was Monk's "Epistrophy," played at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, "the Home of Happy Feet," and then, Jaws recalls, "went on the RKO theater circuit with Ella Fitzgerald, the four Ink Spots, a dancer—Ralph Brown—and a comedian. It was a six-month tour: three months north and three months south."6 After leaving Cootie, Lockjaw performed with Millinder and Louis Armstrong, and from 1945 to 1952 he led the house band at Minton's Playhouse.
Jaws has cited Coleman Hawkins, Herschel Evans, Lester Young, Don Byas, and Ben Webster—all major Swing tenormen—as his "real influences."7 In particular, he emphasizes his early friendship with Webster ("I used to hang out with Ben Webster . . . people used to call me'Little Ben'"8) and Byas. Nonetheless, he has often recorded with modern-jazz musicians. The year 1946 found him in a studio leading a band called "Eddie Davis and His Beboppers" that included Fats Navarro and pianist Al Haig. This is very immature Lockjaw. From a jazz point of view, his solos are badly paced. He gets hot too soon and therefore often has nowhere to go after the first few bars. Still, a number of his virtues can already be glimpsed: his percussive approach to his ax; a penchant for descending phrases and down-bent notes that trail away melismatically; and a wonderfully insinuating vocal sound that can erupt from dark, smoky mutterings into raw urgency in a single bar. One tune, "Hollerin' and Screamin'," is a kind of raving nonstop honk-fest (even Navarro catches the spirit) that starts with a raunchy shout of joy and plunges into an orgy of bellows and screams that anticipate some "free jazz" of the 1960s.
A few years later, in 1951, Jaws recorded with trombonist Bennie Green in an ensemble that included Art Blakey. By this time, he had learned to pace himself better. On "Green Junction," a loping, exultant medium-tempo strut, his playing is far more controlled, though it still bristles with swinging energy. His sound here is more nuanced, at once relaxed and ardent. "Whirl a Licks," another tune from the same date, kicks off with a duet between Jaws and Green. The cut is a fast-paced flag-waver, yet Lockjaw's solo again is well paced, using honks and screams sparingly and building to a climax. Before taking the number out, the two soloists trade phrases and finally merge in a rip-roaring simultaneous improvisation.
Throughout the 1950s, Lockjaw recorded gutbucket R B for King Records, including such off-color vocal ditties as "Mountain Oysters." In addition, in 1955 he formed a trio with organist Shirley Scott that would stay together till the end of the decade. By now, his jazz style had mellowed still further as he evolved into a master of the ballad. On "But Beautiful," recorded with Scott in 1958, he limits himself to playing the tune, but his time is so loose, his tone so breathy and erotically charged, and his timbre and phrasing so original that he makes it entirely his own. Indeed, by 1958 Jaws had evolved into an example of everything that gives a jazzman a "voice." Never a great musical thinker, he created a combination of hot funk and tenderness that has been his trademark ever since.
In the early 1960s, Jaws formed a two-tenor combo with Johnny Griffin that helped to solidify his jazz bonafides. As Lockjaw remembered it: "At first we had some difficulty finding engagements—probably because of the image people had of me as a honking, loud rhythm and blues performer. In fact, one guy came up to me and said that he was a club owner and had had three opportunities to book us into his place but turned them down because he thought I was strictly an R B tenor. After hearing the quintet, he said he was happy to admit he was wrong and wanted to book us on the spot."9
The two-tenor idea had been tried before in modern jazz, especially by Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray and by Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, but never with such musically gratifying results. The contrast between Jaws's warm sound and laid-back rhythmic sense and Griffin's impetuous rapid-fire lines made the quintet more a study in contrasts than a "battle." It recorded at least half a dozen superb albums before disbanding in 1963. One highlight was the tune "Abundance" (pronounced, in appropriately sexy fashion, "A Bun Dance"). Here we find Lockjaw in top form, playing spare, carefully constructed lines and using vibrato to grab notes and rock them from side to side at moments of peak intensity. More than anything else, the unit with Griffin established Lockjaw's place in jazz circles.
If Lockjaw (along with Gene Ammons) stands out among the older generation of soul tenors, Stanley Turrentine occupies a similar position, to my mind, among the younger group. His self-evaluation ("I know I'm not a virtuoso on my instrument, but I am a stylist"10) could be applied to Lockjaw too. Born in Pittsburgh in 1934, Turrentine took up the saxophone at the age of eleven, encouraged by his father, who had played the same instrument with Al Cooper's Savoy Sultans. Turren-tine's first professional gig was with Lowell Fulsom's blues band. "I guess my sound started back then," he says. "I couldn't avoid the blues. That band had a blind piano player in it, name of Ray Charles." Charles was already writing songs, which Turrentine would transcribe after they finished work in the joints and barns the band played. After leaving Fulsom, Turrentine moved to Cleveland,
where he gigged with Tadd Dameron before going on the road again in Earl Bostic's R . B combo. Following two years in the army (1956-1958), he joined Max Roach.
It was at this point that Turrentine began to make an impression in the jazz world. In particular, he caught the attention of Alfred Lion, who signed him to an exclusive contract with Blue Note Records that lasted until 1969. During this ten-year period, Turrentine recorded regularly as a sideman for the label on albums by Horace Parian, Art Taylor, Jimmy Smith, Duke Jordan, Horace Silver, Duke Pearson, and Kenny Burrell. For several years in the 1960s, he co-led a combo with his wife, organist Shirley Scott (who had previously accompanied Lockjaw). "We called it the 'Chitlins Circuit.' A lot of small places, with bad sound systems, small audiences . . . We used to deadhead a lot. Twice we drove to the coast in three days, New York to L.A., eating in the car, sleeping in the car, with the organ in a little trailer in the back. You'd get there to the gig and for days you'd still feel like you're still riding. It's funny now; it wasn't so funny then. We'd get to clubs where the hallways were too narrow for the organ, and once in Virginia, we had to carry the organ up three flights of fire escapes. But for all that, we'd go in that night and we'd blow our hearts out."11