delivered in an unexpectedly keening tone. After a rather lackluster Blue Mitchell interlude, McLean steps forth with one of his most whiplike statements ever, followed by an equally "mean" contribution from Drew with a rhythmic edge comparable to Bobby Timmons's best work. Drew's style, combining funky touches with highly individual runs and figures, is one of this side's major assets. Like Hubbard's youthful exuberance on True Blue, it operates as a foil to Tina's looser beat on such cuts as "The Blues and I" or "The Ruby and the Pearl."
Drew is also present on volume four (Tina's last record date), along with two other under-recognized but brilliant musicians, trumpeter Johnny Coles and bassist Wilbur Ware, and another world-class drummer, Philly Joe Jones. Again, on cuts like "Dhyana" and "Stranger in Paradise," Tina shows how to construct complex, arresting solos while also wailing in the best gutbucket tradition. Thoughtful, at times melancholy and at others puckish, Coles approaches Tina's conception more than the other trumpeters on these sides. Ware, at once old-timey and avant-garde, adds an extra dimension, while Philly and Kenny smoke in their customary fashion. Philly's time is so loose it sometimes seems about to fly apart at the seams on numbers like "King David," but the center always holds, and the result is a particularly dense rhythmic texture for Tina to explore over.
Such rhythmic density, of course, was typical of hard bop, which was both close to the black popular tradition and, as it evolved, colored by a variety of musical influences (Asian, Caribbean, French impressionist). In the hands of musicians like Brooks, Morgan, and McLean, hard bop also opened up a set of emotions that in general had been little explored in jazz. These new affects, as I have noted, included defiance, bitter sarcasm, and pathos, all of which can be found on The Complete Blue Note Recordings of the Tina Brooks Quintets, though it is the last that dominates in Brooks's composing and playing. Like "Us" and "Caribbean Fire Dance," these records whirl us into a universe where hip street attitudes and "a tragic sense of life" intersect. Yet there are also grace and sweetness here—all played out in a context that allows jukebox values to coexist with a stringently severe aesthetic.
This was a remarkable achievement, a true fusion of black pop culture's cathartic possibilities and intense physicality with "Art" of the most demanding kind. Yet during hard bop's heyday, it was bitterly attacked by many jazz critics. Even one as sympathetic as Martin Williams, in his ironically entitled "The Funky-Hard Bop Regression," felt obliged to begin on the defensive, saying: "The gradual dominance of the Eastern and then national scene in jazz by the so-called 'hard bop' and 'funky' school has shocked many commentators and listeners. The movement has been called regressive, self-conscious, monotonous, and even contrived."13
These were not the only charges leveled against hard bop. As the word "hard" suggests, it gave an opening—previously uncommon in jazz—to darker emotions than we would find in Louis Armstrong or even Charlie Parker. Some jazz critics were put off by such emotions, which included wrath and bitterness. In The Jazz Life, Nat Hentoff comments that "among the modern 'hard boppers/ there are several musicians who have played with unalloyed hatred. 'This guy doesn't fit on the date,' one critic observed while listening to a 'hard bop' session. 'He doesn't hate enough.'"14
In the 1955-1965 period, Down Beat was the most widely read jazz periodical in the United States. Its reviewing staff included a number of critics whose views of hard bop verged on the hysterical. Preeminent among these was John S. Wilson. With incomprehensible perversity, Down Beat persisted in assigning Wilson many of the best hard-bop records for review. One example would be Art Blakey's The Big Beat, with Lee Morgan, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Bobby Timmons, and bassist Jymie Merritt. The record bristles with such exuberant invention (among other things, it offers our first exposure to Shorter's fiery compositions) and the review is so short and
dismissive that it is worth quoting in full: "Except for the opening ensemble on Paper Moon, this is merely a repetition of material that has been gone over time and time again by the Jazz Messengers and other groups.
"The general atmosphere is typified by Dat Dere, which is a mechanical repeat of something that was better the first time around.
"Morgan, Shorter, and Blakey live up to average expectations."15
If Wilson's attitude represented a kind of prissy squeamish-ness about high-voltage jazz, hard hoppers were soon getting it from another angle too. In the early sixties, Amiri Baraka began publishing polemics in Down Beat, Metronome, and other journals that were designed to advance the cause of "free jazz" (Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, et al.), sometimes at the expense of hard bop. Thus, in a review of Into the Hot, a record Gil Evans used to showcase Taylor and Johnny Carisi, Baraka remarks that "Taylor and Coleman do not have to worry about the meaningless antics of a Cannonball Adderley when there is Coltrane's continuous public confession spelling out how close to oblivion musicians like Cannonball (or Art Blakey or Bobby Timmons or the Jazztet) had brought jazz."16
Unfortunately, hard bop had numerous detractors and few articulate defenders,- and perhaps partly for this reason, many of the critical opinions expressed above came to be accepted as received wisdom. By the late 1970s, the school no longer represented the menace it had posed in its glory days, but we find the same derogatory cliches in James Lincoln Collier's The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History: "The hard bop style was exhausted [by 1960], worn out by overuse . . . The central problem was a lack of musical intelligence, a failure of imagination on the part of the players in the style."17
But that wasn't generally true. In fact, the opposite could more easily be maintained: that hard bop was just hitting its stride in 1960. One thinks of such younger musicians as trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw, saxophonists Joe Henderson and Jimmy Woods, vibist Bobby Hutcherson, pianists Cedar Walton and Andrew Hill, and drummers Joe Chambers and Billy Higgins. In addition to these "new stars," many older hard boppers produced their best work after 1960: saxophonists Jimmy Heath, Jackie McLean, Harold Land, and Booker Ervin and pianists Elmo Hope and Freddie Redd, among others. Hard bop both needed and got a kind of second wind in the early sixties, and this had something to do with Ornette Coleman's rejection of conventional chord changes, but it had far more to do with developments inside the school: Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Coltrane's evolution, and the influences of Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus. These developments rescued hard bop from its own formulas, emboldening its young practitioners to cut loose and to expand what the school could encompass emotionally and formally.
H ARD BOP HETERODOXY:
MONK, MINGUS, MILES,
ANDTRANE
In Andre Hodeir's Toward Jazz, Thelonious Monk is quoted as saying, "I sound a little like [stride pianist and composer] James P. Johnson."1 Critics have also compared Monk to such stomp-down, stride-and-blues pianists as Jimmy Yancey and Willie "the Lion" Smith. In the late forties and early fifties, Blue Note Records billed him as the "High Priest of Bebop," and he also led some classic hard-bop sessions. Two of these were Brilliant Comers (1956), with saxophonists Ernie Henry and Sonny Rollins; andMoziic's Music (1957), featuring, among others, John Coltrane and Gigi Gryce. No one, however, has ever been able to pin a label on Monk. In one of his infrequent interviews, he told Grover Sales: "I'm not commercial. I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public wants—you play what you want and let the public pick up what you are doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years."2
Bom in 1920, Monk was raised on San Juan Hill, an area in the West Sixties near the Hudson River that was New York City's first black neighborhood. In the same interview with Sales, he recalled: "I learned to read notes before I took lessons. My older sister took—the girls always took in those days—and I learned to read by looking over her shoulder. Got interested in jazz right from the start. Fats Waller, Duke, Louis, Earl Hines—I dug all kinds of music—liked everybody. Art Tatum? Well, he was the greatest piano player I ever heard!"3 On his first gigs, he was a church organist and played the pia
no at house parties: "They used to have what they called rent parties and they used to hire me to play when I was very young. They'd pay you about three dollars, and you'd play all night for 'em. And they'd charge admission to the people who would come in and drink. That's the way some people used to get their rent together."4
At the age of seventeen, he toured the country with a group accompanying a preacher: "Rock and roll or rhythm and blues, that's what we were doing. She preached and healed and we played. And then the congregation would sing."5 Barrelhouse, boogie-woogie, stride, and gospel—all these elements would resonate throughout Monk's career. Stride, for example, informs his solo on "Thelonious" on his first session as a leader for Blue Note in 1947; and gospel informs his luminous interpretation of the hymn "Abide with Me" on Monk's Music. His deep attachment to the black "folk" traditions, both sacred and profane, is one of Monk's links to hard bop. He revealed it long before "returning to the roots" became fashionable.
It seems a natural development that a new appreciation of Monk in the mid-fifties coincided with the rise of hard bop. Before then, he had had his champions—including Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, and Dizzy Gillespie—but many jazzmen were put off by his "weird" conception, his technically demanding tunes, and his eccentric approach to the keyboard. Hawkins (with whom Monk did his first record date in a studio in 1944) remembered, in a conversation with Joe Goldberg, that "one of the worst things I went through in those days was with Monk, when he was working in my group. I used to get it every night—'Why don't you get a piano player?' and 'What's that stuff he's playing?' "6 In 1955 Monk was still often ridiculed, and Orrin Keepnews of Riverside Records was able to buy his recording contract from Prestige for $108.27. But by 1957 he had virtually been canonized, and reviewers now placed him in what Keepnews called "the automatic five-star category."7
It also seems natural that Monk's reputation and that of Miles Davis should have risen at the same time. In fact, Davis's "comeback" was sealed by his rendition of Monk's "Round Midnight" at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival. Both Miles and Monk reformulated the jazz tradition, returning to such basics as timbre, attack, and melody while shaking off bebop's cliches and its sometimes-calisthenic standards of creativity. Like Miles, Monk preferred to pare things down, creating an uncluttered musical space where he could work out his own solutions. In his essay on Monk in Toward Jazz, Hodeir mentions "the acute struggle between disjunct phrasing and those pregnant silences"8 and declares that "only in Monk's music do asymmetry and discontinuity enhance one another, thereby assuming their full, symbiotic significance."9
These are matters of overall structure, but Monk was of course original in other ways too. Instead of arching his fingers (as anyone who has taken piano lessons knows all teachers recommend), he held them flat out, creating a hard, percussive sound that seemed to coax more ringing overtones from the piano than others could achieve. Monk's harmonic sense was also unique, even though his tunes were often based on conventional changes. As Alan Rosenthal observed in the Nation: "His chords were dissonant clusters of notes that often seemed to be groping for some sound, some sort of musical meaning, which could not be expressed on a conventional instrument. Monk once said that he would often strike two adjacent notes on the piano in an attempt to get at the note between the two. One can hear, in Monk's harmonies, this seeming attempt to express simultaneously every sound or combination of sounds made possible by its being a given moment in a given piece. Moreover, whole phrases of Monk's tunes—whole tunes, in a few cases—were without any tonal center at all. Instead, the transition from each chord to the next would create a sort of momentary or instantaneous tonality, resulting from the interaction of the two chords. Then, this tonality would change with the arrival of a third chord. In short, the listener's entire frame of harmonic reference was constantly shifting."10
Monk's tunes are brilliant little universes full of humor, passion, and quirkiness. His indifference to modern-jazz orthodoxy and his love affair with the past had a liberating effect on hard boppers. As Miles Davis put it: "A main influence he has been through the years has to do with giving musicians more freedom. They feel that if Monk can do what he does, they can."11
Exactly how this happened can be heard on Brilliant Coiners, which features Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach as well as Henry and Rollins. (Paul Chambers and trumpeter Clark Terry also play on one track.) As always on Monk's dates, his personality reverberates throughout the album, encouraging everyone to extend himself individualistically and to avoid banalities. On the title cut that opens the LP, both saxophonists and Roach, challenged by the tune's eccentricity (they never did get the head quite right, and the take finally released was spliced together from various attempts) and by Monk's suggestive comping, turn in inspired performances. The raunchy, squawky theme, played first in medium tempo and then faster, leads into a Rollins solo marked by wide intervalic leaps, extended harmonies, and phrases that begin and end in unwonted places. Then Monk comes in, all minor seconds, dissonances, and idiosyncratic runs and fillips. Henry is gruff and raw, leaning heavily on his vocalized tone, from which he draws a variety of growls and slurs. The last soloist is Roach, playing melodically and even quoting the tune at times.
"Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are" is a "classic" Monk blues, at once immemorial and personal. One can feel Henry and Rollins being tugged between standard phraseology and Monk's universe. The result, in Henry's case, is a kind of bent-out-of-shape bebop, a fractured sequence of ideas, as though fragments of bop and R B had been pasted together in a collage. Monk is calm, lucidly minimal, toying with a few elements to see how far out you can go while staying deep inside. Often he plays in duet with Roach. Rollins's warm, relaxed solo makes an effective contrast with the more strident and disquieting Henry, while Max contributes another marvelously melodic and dazzlingly polyrhythmic statement, sounding at times like a whole African percussion ensemble.
"Pannonica" is one of a series of ballads (including "Round Midnight," "Monk's Mood," and "Ruby, My Dear") in which fervent romanticism combines with Monkish astringency. After a full-blooded, rhapsodic Rollins, Monk enters on both piano and celeste, echoing one of Rollins's phrases and then dueting with himself in a solo built around variations on his own theme, whose melody he alters through subtle rhythmic and harmonic displacements. Another ballad follows: "I Surrender, Dear," one of Monk's lovingly humorous treatments of standards. The record closes with "Bemsha Swing," where Monk again bases his solo initially on the theme and then launches into a simultaneous improvisation with Roach, who plays both jazz drums and tympani on this cut. Rollins picks up Monk's last phrase and soars over the drummer's thundering accompaniment, alternating long phrases with jagged fragments. After a characteristically tart and puckish Clark Terry interlude, Roach moves to the foreground, first in duet with Monk, then alone, setting up call-and-response patterns between his two sets of tubs, and finally in duet with Rollins before the band takes the theme out.
Another composer who challenged and extended hard hoppers was Charles Mingus. Equal in musical stature to Monk, Mingus was the pianist's opposite in many respects. While Monk was cryptic in his utterances, Mingus was garrulous, writing an autobiographical manuscript that ran to over a thousand pages. Monk's tunes, models of concision, were very much of a piece. Mingus's opus sprawls, ranging from forays into "classical music" to re-creations of holy-roller church services. Monk's art, in its way, was serene. Mingus's was tumultuous, boiling, seeming to chafe at the limitations of music itself. Nonetheless, the two shared several traits. Both rejected modern-jazz conventions and, drawing partly on the past (in particular the work of Duke Ellington), created worlds that set them apart from their contemporaries. They were at once more "traditional" and more experimental than most hard boppers. Thus, when hard bop began to seem played-out in the late fifties, Monk and Mingus each offered an alternative way of thinking, helping to save the school from the canned funk and simplistic cliches that sometimes threatened t
o choke it.
There are many stories of how Mingus would goad "hip" young musicians into reaching beyond their formulas. We have already seen his effect on Jackie McLean. Recalling the same period—when he and McLean were both in Mingus's band—pianist Mai Waldron told Joe Goldberg: "He makes you find yourself, to play your own style. At that time, I played a good deal like Horace Silver, and whenever I did, Mingus would be on me with 'That sounds like Horace.' . . . When I was with him, all the guys were playing very 'hip' blues, with all kinds of extra chords and passing tones. Mingus got rid of that, and made it basic. He made us play like the old, original blues, with only two or three chords, and got a basic feeling. And he brought in some gospel music too, the first time that was done. And suspensions. The way Miles and Coltrane play, getting to a particular part of a number and staying on the same chord for several bars before going on, Mingus was the first one to do that."12
Born in 1922, Mingus grew up in Watts, California. His first exposure to music occurred in the church he attended with his stepmother: "A lot of my music came from the church. All the music I heard when I was a very young child was church music. I was eight or nine years old before I heard an Ellington record on the radio. My father went to the Methodist church; my stepmother would take me to a Holiness church. My father didn't dig my mother going there. People went into trances and the congregation's response was wilder and more uninhibited than in the Methodist church. The blues was in the Holiness churches—moaning and riffs and that sort of thing between the audience and the preacher."13 The Ellington record was "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo," "the first time I knew something else was happening beside church music."14
After taking lessons on trombone and cello, Mingus finally chose the bass, which he studied first with Red Callender and then with Herman Rheinshagen, a former member of the New York Philharmonic. Under their tutelage and through his own diligence, Mingus developed a prodigious technique. In the late forties and early fifties, he was heard in a multitude of contexts, including (for various lengths of time) the bands of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Earl Hines, J.J. Johnson, Red Norvo, and Charlie Parker. Certain jazz bassists—Percy Heath, for example—are outstanding "walkers"; that is, they can establish solid, cushiony beats that lend tremendous rhythmic impetus to the soloists they're accompanying, while also creating harmonic density through well-chosen notes. "Walking," however, was not Mingus's specialty. Instead, he developed a freer style, both in accompaniment and in solos, that represented a step beyond Ellington bassist Jimmy Blanton's innovations in the early 1940s. Mingus's work tended toward the liberation of the bass from a subordinate role. In an excellent study of Mingus's life and work, Brian Priestley describes his vast influence on several generations of bassists playing several kinds of music: "Each of these three approaches [that can be found on Mingus's early records]—the double-stops, the octave leaps, and the subdivision of the beat by means of passing-notes—were eventually to develop further . . . But equally, they were to influence many of his successors and, ultimately, not so much through Mingus's own example but through the combined weight of all the jazz bassists he had influenced by the 1960s, they had a marked effect on the style of bass-guitar players, first in the soul field and then in rock and pop music generally."15
Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965 Page 14