Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  Mode for foe, like almost all Morgan's records under his own leadership, appeared on the Blue Note label. Alfred Lion and Frank Woolf, the owners, consistently sought out and recorded the baddest hard boppers in New York. Refugees from Nazi Berlin who arrived in the United States shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, they explained their purposes in their first catalogue, published in 1939: "Hot jazz, therefore, is expression and communication, a musical and social manifestation, and Blue Note records are concerned with identifying its impulse, not its sensational and commercial adornments."

  During the next thirty years, Blue Note recorded Fats Navarro, Milt Jackson, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, J.J. Johnson, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Andrew Hill, and many others—more than five hundred sides altogether. Many sessions, moreover, never reached the record store bins because they lacked the polish Lion and Woolf demanded. The opportunities Blue Note gave to young and unknown artists, and its policy of paying for rehearsal time, made it unusual among independent jazz labels. The album covers were also unusual, striking in their austere, high-modernist beauty. These were the work of prize-winning designer Reid Miles and producer-photographer Woolf, a portraitist highly attuned to the musicians' fleeting moods and possessed of a subtle compositional sense.

  All these factors, plus the distinctive "Blue Note sound" achieved by engineer Rudy van Gelder, contributed to the label's mystique in the fifties and sixties: a mystique comparable to that enjoyed by New Directions Books in avant-garde literary circles. I myself remember, as a teenager, sometimes buying Blue Note discs without even knowing who the artists were, so complete was my faith in Lion's and Woolf's perspicacity. In addition, the two producers' taste for hard bop at its most uncompromising was rare among whites in the music business. As Bobby Hutcherson put it: "Alfred and Frank were more like jazz musicians than record executives. They loved to hang out and have a great time."4 This amalgam of a severe aesthetic akin to Bauhaus perspectives and an informed passion for Afro-American music was extraordinarily productive. More than any other record company in the history of jazz, Blue Note actually affected the evolution of the music.

  If, in record producer Bob Porter's words, "the difference between Blue Note and Prestige was two days' rehearsal,"5 this was nowhere more evident than in the case of Jackie McLean, who switched from Prestige to Blue Note in 1959. Jackie could play as aggressively as Lee Morgan. But he also possessed a poignant—even tragic—sensibility that brought him close to Billie Holiday, whom he remembers as an important personal influence: "Yeah, it is true, very true [that his approach owed something to Holiday's] . . . there was something in her emotion and expression, the way she approached the melody, the way she didn't just sing a melody straight, the way she bent notes and stuff, the feeling that comes with her sound: that was something that I wanted to have."

  Jackie's dates for Prestige had their moments—in particular, two somber ballads by Mai Waldron: "Abstraction" and "Mirage," which appeared, respectively, on 4,5, and 6 and Jackie McLean e) Co. But those sessions did generally suffer from lack of preparation. McLean's angry comments on the company, quoted by A. B. Spellman, could be applied to many small jazz labels of the period: "If you can imagine being under the Nazi regime and not knowing it, then you've got an idea of what it's like to be with that company. I was starving when I signed that contract. The baby was being born, so I was glad to get my name on a record and make some money. And my condition didn't help either; any money was money then. Everybody made that move—Miles was with that company, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and Monk. They all got out of its as soon as they could, just as I did.

  "It's a perfect example of giving everything and getting nothing back. They give you a little bit of front money, and then they tell you about the royalties you are going to get after the record is released. I did a million dates for them, and all it amounted to is that I paid for the whole thing: engineer, the notes on the back of the album, the color photograph, the whole thing, out of my money. I still get statements saying that I owe that company ridiculous sums like $50,000; I'm exaggerating, but it's not much less ridiculous than that."6

  McLean's signing with Blue Note coincided with the beginning of his four-year (1959-1963) stint with the Living Theatre. This was a particularly lucky break, since his lack of a cabaret card—a result of drug arrests—made it impossible for him to perform legally in New York City jazz clubs. As we have seen, McLean's first spurt of development occurred in the late 1940s. But when he made his debut on records with Miles Davis in 1951, the only element of his style really in place was his tone. This tone, at once hard and plaintive, along with what critic Michael James has called his "fierce enunciation" and "trenchant attack"7 were what got him through the next eight years. In those years he barely practiced: "I never had my horn. It was always in the pawnshop from 1950 on." Even so, McLean's style slowly evolved toward greater structural coherency. Stints with Art Blakey and Charles Mingus probably helped, though in quite different ways.

  Blakey urged Jackie to discipline his solos, building to logical and emotionally satisfying resolutions: "He'd say once you reach a climax it's better to back off than push and pursue."8 Mingus, for his part, forced the young altoist to look beyond bebop orthodoxy: "I hadn't been content with what I was doing with changes yet, and here came Mingus telling me, 'Forget changes and forget about what key you're in,' and 'all notes are right' and things like that, and it kind of threw me. I was going through a hip phase then, but I find that I really got involved with Mingus and all of his things on a lot of nights. Mingus gave me my wings, more or less; Mingus made me feel like I could go out and explore because he was doing it and was accepted by the audience and loved for it."9

  As a composer, McLean had created some striking melodies early on. Three of his compositions—"Dig," also known as "Donna"; "Dr. Jackie"; and "Minor March," later retitled "Minor Apprehension"—were all first recorded by Miles Davis and had entered the jazz repertoire as semi-standards by 1960. In that same year, for the first time, Jackie tried his hand at orchestrating for a three-horn front line consisting of himself, trumpeter Blue Mitchell, and tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks and backed by Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers, and Art Taylor. Largely self-taught as an arranger, he explained that "this was a challenge for me, because I didn't have much musical education and most of what I know about writing I found out myself."10 The results, some of which appear on one side of the Blue Note LP Jackie's Bag, show his increasing maturity as a soloist and composer, as well as the benefits of Blue Note's policy of subsidizing rehearsal time.

  One of these tunes, "Appointment in Ghana," opens with an almost dirgelike out-of-tempo figure by the front line. This figure then leads into a driving modal theme kicked along by Taylor's forceful accentuations and topped by the sound of Mitchell's tart trumpet. The song's harmonic basis is akin to Miles Davis's then recent modal experiments, but the melody's A-A-B-A pattern adds variety to the solos, with the B section serving as a foil to the terser A theme. McLean's statement comes first and shows his increasing rhythmic fluidity. He plays across the beat rather than on top of it, thus avoiding the stiffness that had sometimes plagued him before.

  Alert to the song's textural possibilities, he exploits them by contrasting longer, more intricate phrases with short, staccato outbursts. In general, his playing is more thoughtful and melodic than it had been, though his characteristic urgency is still present. The other McLean composition, "Ballad for Doll," on which only the piano solos, is a full-bloodedly romantic tribute to his wife that shows a surprising richness of orchestration. After stating the theme, the horns breathe softly in unison behind the beginning of Drew's solo, a mixture of passion and delicacy that is a glowing extension of the composition.

  Listening to "Appointment in Ghana" and "Ballad for Doll," one might have thought McLean would evolve in the direction of such polished jazzmen as Benny Golson and Art Farmer, but other records and performan
ces in the early 1960s revealed a much more unsettled musical personality. On "Us," for instance, recorded live with Kenny Dorham, Walter Bishop, Jr., bassist Leroy Vinnegar, and Art Taylor, McLean explodes into one of his most scaldingly emotional solos. Over Taylor's driving beat, he mixes growls, penetrating cries, and edgily throaty outbursts with flatter, Coltrane-like inflections. Me-lodically, the solo is chaotic. At times McLean's ideas flow smoothly, but at others they seem both banal and disconnected. Yet somehow this heightens the emotional pitch, as though he had so much to express and tried to convert raw feeling so directly into music that he didn't have time to think. For savage intensity, the solo matches Morgan's on "Caribbean Fire Dance" and is another example of hard bop at its most relentless. In its restless straining against the limits of what his style could encompass, it also points ahead to McLean's experimental outings in the mid-1960s.

  McLean and Morgan were outgoing types. (McLean still is, and this has helped him build a career as a an educator.) Both enjoyed considerable success—at least for jazzmen. Their work was respected by other musicians and admired by aficionados. (There was even a Jackie McLean Fan Club in the early 1960s. The club's credo affirmed that "we believe Jackie McLean is the most stimulating alto saxophonist on the jazz scene today. We like his style, we adore his sound, and we love his approach.") For the blistering hard bop they played, each was considered tops on his instrument. Many of the school's more uncompromising exponents, however, led a far more shadowy existence, as we have seen in the case of Elmo Hope. Another figure of this sort was tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks (1932-1974), who appeared on Jackie's Bag and for a while was McLean's understudy in Jack Gelber's play The Connection. Brooks recorded four albums as a leader for Blue Note between 1958 and 1961, but only one (True Blue) was issued in his lifetime. In 1985, all four were at last made available in the United States by Mosaic Records on The Complete Blue Note Recordings of the Tina Brooks Quintets. Though the recordings feature many of hard bop's foremost representatives, the dominant presence is Brooks. His tenor playing, at once melancholy and muscular, and the brooding quality of his compositions, determine the overall mood.

  Tina (pronounced Teena, a reference to his size as a child) was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His father, David, played the piano and encouraged his eight children to study music. Of these, two became professionals: David, Jr. ("Bubba"), who went on to perform with Bill Doggett's combo, and Tina. In 1944 the Brooks family moved to New York City, but Tina, who kept getting beaten up by street gangs in their new neighborhood, was sent back to Fayetteville for most of his high-school education, only returning to the metropolis for his senior year. By 1950, Bubba was established as an R B player, and Tina replaced him for parts of that year and the next in Sonny Thompson's band, making his recording debut with them for King Records. Other R B gigs followed with Charles Brown, Joe Morris, and Amos Milburn, and in spring and summer of 1955, Tina also toured with Lionel Hampton's orchestra.

  In 1956, Tina met the bebop trumpeter and composer Little Benny Harris at the Blue Morocco, a Bronx jazz club. Harris schooled him in modern jazz's complex and demanding structures. At the same time, Tina struck up a friendship with Elmo Hope, whose dark-hued, minor tunes may have influenced his style as a composer. With these two mentors, saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, and Oliver Beener (a trumpeter who became his closest friend), Tina gigged around the Bronx and jammed wherever he could. Another member of this group, saxophonist Herman Riley, recently recalled their activities: "We'd warm up every Monday at Connie's, then go directly across the street to Small's Paradise for their famous Monday night jam sessions ... I lived near Tina. We'd all practice during the day in the Bronx and then find a place to play at night somewhere. We'd go anywhere just to get the opportunity to play. We'd even drive to New Jersey or as far as Philadelphia. We were all just learning then and very eager."11

  In late 1957, Benny Harris introduced Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records to Tina's playing. Favorably impressed, Lion used Tina on three Jimmy Smith sessions (issued as House-party, The Sermon, Confirmation, and Cool Blues) and two led by Kenny Burrell {Blue Lights and On View at the Five Spot Cafe). In addition, Brooks cut a record of his own with Lee Morgan (volume one of the Mosaic set).

  Through Lion, Tina also met tenor saxophonist Ike Quebec, who brought him and Freddie Hubbard together. Freddie used Tina on his first Blue Note record date {Open Sesame, recorded June 19, 1960). A week later, Tina cut another album, True Blue (volume two on Mosaic). Other sessions followed, with Jackie McLean {fackie's Bag), Freddie Redd {Shades of Redd), and Howard McGhee {The Connection for Felsted Records, Brooks's only recording not on Blue Note), plus another two unreleased dates under his own name (volumes three and four on Mosaic). By 1962, Brooks's career as a recording artist was over. Nonetheless, he continued to appear at Bronx jazz spots like the Blue Morocco, Freddie's Bar, and the 845 Club with Hope, Beener, and others. Heroin addiction—complete with

  spells in jail and in hospitals—limited his professional activity during the rest of his life. The official cause of his death in 1974 was kidney failure. He had been too ill to play for several years.

  As with dozens of other jazz musicians, the word "underrated" is unavoidable in connection with Tina Brooks. Even during his period of greatest visibility (1958-1961), Brooks was unnoticed by most jazz fans; and were it not for Mosaic co-producer Michael Cuscuna's belief in his work, he would be even less recognized today. Drug addiction is certainly part of the story. So, apparently, was Tina's personality. He is remembered as a self-effacing man who shied away from the kind of sociable "hanging out" that gets jazz musicians gigs. Tina's survival instincts seem to have been feebler than those of others—including some fellow junkies. As McLean put it: "Tina Brooks was a sensitive human being and a brilliant saxophonist, who was crushed under the pressures of this industry. And he took the same route that a lot of guys did: self-destruction."12

  The four records issued by Mosaic provide our first chance to study Tina's work as a leader. Among them, volume one is the least stamped by his personality. Robert Palmer, in a perceptive essay that accompanies the set, describes it as a possible case of "too much, too soon." Certainly recording with Lee Morgan, Sonny Clark, Doug Watkins, and Art Blakey—among the sharpest-edged musicians around New York and all more battle hardened than Tina—would have intimidated most young jazzmen. The ensembles are ragged, which may account for Alfred Lion's decision not to release the date. (Lion was a stickler for tight, precise heads, and this was undoubtedly one of the reasons for his rehearsal policy.) Nonetheless, most of the key elements of Tina's style are already in place: a plaintive, sinewy tone; a floating, legato rhythmic sense not unlike Lester Young's,- and an ability, similar to McLean's at the time, to compensate through timbre and "presence" for sometimes commonplace melodic ideas. Blakey is his usual volcanic self, Watkins is rock solid, and Clark shows his penchant for intricate, snakingly long-lined solos. This record also, like several others of the period, catches Lee Morgan in transition between Clifford Brown's effervescence and the more aggressive style he later cultivated. Of the tunes, only one, in retrospect, can be deemed a true Tina Brooks composition: "Minor Move," which, despite its title, has a lushly chorded major bridge.

  The "Spanish" or "Latin" tinges we find in "Minor Move" are pervasive in Tina's later compositions, where they usually mean minor melodies and emphatic rhythmic patterning. Frequently, they are balanced by strikingly "pretty" major changes on the bridge. On True Blue, Tina's next date as a leader, such tunes—"Good Old Soul," "Theme for Doris," and (a variant: pretty tune with Latin vamp) "Miss Hazel"— predominate. As a soloist, Tina also sounds bolder and more sharply defined. Drawing on his R B background, he uses slurred notes, honks, and other vocal inflections in counterpoint to a supple rhythmic sense that makes his solos seem to soar above the rhythm section. The combination, enriched by his mournful tone, works especially well on "Theme for Doris." On this cut Tina reaches a pitch of sorrowful eloquence, ver
tebrated by Art Taylor's driving beat, that lifts him for the first time to the level of the great jazz storytellers. Freddie Hubbard, then the brightest young trumpet star in New York, is an exuberant, brassy foil to the leader's musings.

  Volume three, recorded a few months later and originally scheduled for release as Back to the Tracks, is also dominated by minor compositions. One of these, "Street Singer," cut at the same session as "Appointment in Ghana" and "Ballad for Doll," turns out, more than two decades after the fact, to have been an authentic hard-bop classic, comparable to "Caribbean Fire Dance" or "Us." Here pathos, irony, and rage come together in a performance at once anguished and sinister. Drew, Chambers, and Taylor keep the rhythm extremely taut. Against this backdrop, Tina weaves a tapestry of extended lines that lean into the beat, punctuated by soulful licks