As a composer and bandleader, Mingus was equally original. He encouraged collective improvisation in his ensemble and frequently used what Mai Waldron called "suspensions" and modes instead of conventional chord changes. His shifts of tempo and mood created complexly episodic structures. All these innovations contributed to his musical legacy. In the late fifties and early sixties, his working bands were mainly composed of hard boppers. In addition to McLean and Waldron, we find trumpeters Art Farmer, Clarence Shaw, Richard Williams, Ted Curson, Johnny Coles, and Bill Hardman; and saxophonists J. R. Monterose, Ernie Henry, Shaft Hadi, Pepper Adams, John Handy, Booker Ervin, Leo Wright, Benny Golson, and Clifford Jordan. Anyone who played with Mingus learned from him. His difficult compositions and his ardent quest for new modes of expression forced musicians to play "over their heads." Many of the sidemen just named—and particularly those who stayed long enough for Mingus's lessons (and his constant hectoring) to sink in—were radically changed by the experience. He resembled Ellington in his knack for burning away what was conventional and encouraging spontaneity and inventiveness. But above all, he resembled Ellington in his range and depth as a composer. The fact that many of Ellington's best musicians stayed with him to the end—in this he had better luck than Mingus and was easier to get along with—is testimony to his ability to create a varicolored cosmos of sound beside which other music appeared monochromatic. Mingus's repertoire, too, provided a rich and elaborated context that few if any modern jazz ensembles could match. It is significant that several of his sidemen (for instance, John Handy and Clarence Shaw) never produced work outside his band to match what they had done in it.
The variety of Mingus's music and his gifts as a writer can be heard on Mingus Ah Um, his best-selling record and perhaps the one that is artistically most satisfying. A few years earlier, he had outlined his compositional and rehearsal methods: "My whole conception with my present Jazz Workshop group deals with nothing written. I 'write' compositions—but only on mental score paper—then I lay out the composition part by part to the musicians. I play them the 'framework' on piano so that they are all familiar with my interpretation and feeling and with the scale and chord progressions to be used. Each man's own particular style is taken into consideration, both in ensemble and in solos. For instance, they are given different rows of notes to use against each chord but they choose their own notes and play them in their own style, from scales as well as chords, except where a particular mood is indicated. In this way, I find it possible to keep my own compositional flavor in the pieces and yet to allow the musicians more individual freedom in the creation of their group lines and solos."16
As a result of this approach, the musicians on Mingus Ah Um sound particularly at home in the music, with a looseness in improvising countermelodies and a layered sound that surely comes from Mingus's methods—though the soloists' concision was a result of careful editing after the recording date. The band itself is a powerhouse, featuring John Handy's sweet-and-sour alto, Booker Ervin's fiery preaching on tenor, Horace Parian's funky, chordal approach to the piano, and Jimmy Knepper's avant-gutbucket trombone. It kicks off with "Better Git It in Your Soul," a gospel-based number, mostly in j time, underpinned by driving riffs and Mingus's shouts of "Lawd I know!" "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" (dedicated to Lester Young) is a lament showcasing a mournful tenor solo by Handy that includes some effective flutter tonguing. "Boogie Stop Shuffle," also in the minor mode, incorporates elements suggested by its title and includes a roaring Ervin outing, while "Self-Portrait in Three Colors" is one of Mingus's deliriously romantic Ellington-style ballads, complexly voiced with interweaving contrapuntal lines. "Open Letter to Duke" rounds out the first side, beginning with some of Ervin's high-octane blowing over a shuffle beat and then segueing into a languid, filmy ballad led by Handy's alto, another shuffle episode, and finally a Latin vamp.
Side two starts with "Bird Calls," an up-tempo tribute to Charlie Parker, with fierce Ervin and liquid-toned Handy. "Fables of Faubus" is a loping, medium-tempo minor theme, played against a descending run on the bass. All the soloists smoke on this one,- Handy is gutsy yet lithe, Parian is sublimely bluesy, contributing a carefully constructed statement full of unexpected turns, and Ervin wails. "Pussy Cat Dues," a slow blues, offers a glimpse of Handy's clarinet playing and Knepper's dirty, deliriously vocal trombone. The album ends with "Jelly Roll," an affectionate tribute to Jelly Roll Morton that effectively contrasts an old-fashioned, bouncy two-beat with straight-ahead j modern-jazz blowing.
In its abundance of memorable compositions and its multiple references to the Afro-American tradition in such varied aspects, Mingus Ah Um is a kind of summation of everything Mingus could do. It is also a quintessential hard-bop session, having all the qualities typical of the school: heavier use of the minor mode and strong rhythmic patterning, along with slower tempos, blues- and gospel-influenced phrasing and compositions, and sometimes lusher melodies. Mingus, of course, was as "unique" as Monk; that is, each possessed an immediately recognizable sensibility and approach. But then, that's what makes Mingus Ah Um a high point of hard bop rather than a "typical" hard-bop date.
Several years before Mingus Ah Um was recorded, Mingus announced in the liner notes to his Pithecanthropus Erectus album that he had "superimposed scales within chords and replaced bars with 'cues.'" The idea of "superimposing scales within chords"—or simply replacing conventional jazz chords with scales or "modes"—was one that a number of jazzmen were toying with at the time. Among them was composer George Russell, who had written for Dizzy Gillespie's big band and contributed two compositions ("Ezzthetics" and "Odje-nar") to a Miles Davis-Lee Konitz date for Prestige in 1951. In the late 1950s, Russell was working on a modally based approach he called the "Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization."
Davis and Russell had remained friendly, and after listening to the composer explain his ideas, Miles told him: "George, if Bird were alive, this would kill him."17
In an interview with Nat Hentoff around the same time, Davis elaborated on his reasons for wanting to break free of standard jazz harmonies: "I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them. Classical composers—some of them—have been writing this way for years, but jazz musicians seldom have.
"When I want}.}. Johnson to hear something or he wants me to, we phone each other and just play the music on the phone. I did that the other day with some of the Khatchaturian scales; they're different from the usual western scales. Then we got to talking about letting the melodies and scales carry the tune. J. J. told me, 'I'm not going to write any more chords.' And look at George Russell. His writing is mostly scales. After all, you can feel the changes.
"The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them. You know, we play 'Funny Valentine' like with a scale all the way through."18
The first fruits of this new direction were presented in the sound track for Louis Malle's film L'Ascenseur pour l'echa-faud [Elevator to the Scaffold). This entire sound track was recorded in one session between midnight and dawn. The band—tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, pianist Rene Utreger, bassist Pierre Michelot, and Kenny Clarke—was one Miles had been leading at the Club St. Germain in Paris. They improvised as they watched scenes from the movie, basing their solos on tonal centers and dispensing with themes and chord progressions. Although the film itself is rather insubstantial, the sound track won the Prix Louis Delluc in 1957. Miles's improvisations are alternately skittish and ominous as he meshes with Clarke's crisp brushwork on up-tempos and makes the most of his haunting tone on the slower numbers. The ad-lib quality of this music is its strength, and it has an unusually relaxed feeling. It also represents a radical break with the harmonic frameworks previously used in modern jazz.
A few months later, in April 1958, Davis was back in New York leading an ex
panded version of his earlier quintet. Altoi'st Cannonball Adderley had joined John Coltrane in the front line, while the Red Garland-Paul Chambers-Philly foe Jones rhythm section remained intact. The ensemble recorded a tune, called "Milestones" (or "Miles," since Davis had recorded another "Milestones" in 1947 with Charlie Parker) that again explored the possibilities of scalar improvisation. "Milestones" is based on two modes (Dorian and Aeolian) used in an A-A-B-B-A pattern. The soloists (Adderley, Davis, and Coltrane) are free to pick whatever notes they like as long as they "fit" the modes. This, of course, allows them more freedom than they would have had in a standard harmonic format, but it also deprives them of the variety such a format automatically provides. Variety, however, is built into the tune itself. In the A section, Chambers lays down a solid "walking" foundation, while Philly Joe raps out a rimshot on the fourth beat of every measure and the three horns play with bright, staccato articulation. In the B section, the phrasing is legato, Philly's rimshots are less regular, and Chambers plays a two-note figure instead of walking. The A sections sound ebullient, while the B ones have a mournful, languorous quality.
The addition of Cannonball Adderley to Miles's quintet turned the contrast between the leader and Coltrane into a more complicated, three-sided study in differences. Miles continued to hone his stripped-down, middle-register approach, which emphasized the nuances of his tone and his abilities as a melodist. Cannonball and Trane resembled each other more than either one did the trumpeter, but while Cannon was bubbly and extroverted, Trane was restless and uncompromising. "Milestones" is such a propulsive piece, however, and the joy of discovery is so apparent in everyone's playing that these differences between the saxes are less obvious than in other contexts. Some of them, however, are implied in Eric Nisen-son's comments on the three in his book Round Midnight: A Portrait of Miles Davis: "Cannonball and Coltrane were learning from each other, each encouraging the other saxophonist's growth and curiosity. Miles encouraged this as much as possible, just as he had done when both Sonny Rollins and Coltrane were in his midfifties band. When Cannonball was playing, Miles would whisper to Coltrane, 'Listen to how Cannonball gets in all his lyrical ideas without playing as long as you. You should learn how to edit your ideas from him.' And when Coltrane was soloing, Miles would tell Cannonball, 'Listen to Coltrane's harmonic ideas. You should learn to play with his type of harmonic thinking.' After the gig, Coltrane and Adderley would each tell the other what their boss had said about him and laugh—they both appreciated the accelerated learning experience that Miles was providing."19
As stunning as "Milestones" and the sound track for Elevator to the Scaffold had been, Miles's modal approach reached its apogee on Kind of Blue, recorded in spring 1959. Again, the band's personnel had changed. Philly Joe Jones and Red Garland had departed, to be replaced, respectively, by Jimmy Cobb and Bill Evans. Evans, in particular, with his brooding impressionism, had great impact on the ensemble, while Cobb, though swinging as hard as Philly Joe, was less inventive and volatile. Actually, by the time Kind of Blue was cut, Evans was also on the way out, and his replacement, Wynton Kelly, was present at the session, though he only played on one number: "Freddie Freeloader."
Thirty years after it was recorded, Kind of Blue remains, for many, Miles's greatest single achievement. In his often-quoted liner notes, Evans described its unusual circumstances: "Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear some- thing close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a 'take.'"
The tunes, originals by either Davis or (in the cases of "Blue in Green" and "Flamenco Sketches") Evans, are masterpieces of inspired simplicity. On the first number, "So What" (in the Dorian mode), the melody is played by the bass, while the band replies with a two-note figure. Thus the mood of the album is immediately established: a blend of the blues legacy, with its bare-bones lyricism and call-and-response patterns; and the freshness of scalar experimentation. The songs that follow are a twelve-bar blues ("Freddie Freeloader"), the voluptuously wistful "Blue in Green," a waltz ("All Blues"), and "Flamenco Sketches," a ballad that, again in Evans's words, is "a series of five scales, each to be played as long as the soloist wishes until he has completed the series." If the frameworks themselves are inspired, the genius of the soloists and the contrasts among them are equally satisfying. Miles, with his blues-heavy sound, at times yearning and at others sardonic, grounds the side in a kind of jazz timelessness. Coltrane's voice is flatter and harder, harking back to his experience in blues bands yet pushing into the future through asymmetrical, arching arpeggios and cascades of sixteenth notes. Evans's solos are sketchy and introverted, almost spectral, as though his real achievement were the whole record (whose conception certainly owed much to his) rather than particular statements. And finally, Cannonball, Kelly, and Cobb concentrate on hard cooking, bringing the sound of the streets into play as a major ingredient. All these elements knit together perfectly on Kind of Blue, lending the record exceptional textural variety.
Not surprisingly, considering the impromptu nature of the proceedings, the musicians didn't realize quite what they had created. In an interview with Ian Carr, Jimmy Cobb recalled that "after it was over and we heard it, we went through the things . . . and it sounded so nice in the studio . . . and it came out so good on the record ... I said 'Damn!—it sounded good!' But since then it got to be something special in the music ... a lot of people started listening to the music with that record, and a lot of guys started to play jazz from behind that record . . . and I had a few people tell me that they had worn out three or four copies of that record."20 Kind of Blue would influence the course of jazz from 1959 on. Like Monk's work and Mingus's, it was to stimulate several generations of hard boppers (including the current one), as well as "free jazz" musicians of the 1960s, suggesting new approaches and providing new challenges. Today, the disc has become part of the tradition, absorbed, as unconsciously as the lungs absorb oxygen, by young jazzmen everywhere.
In a piece published in Down Beat in 1960, Coltrane recalled that on returning to Miles Davis's group after a period with Thelonious Monk, he had found the trumpeter "in the midst of another stage of his musical development. There was one time in his past that he devoted to multichorded structures. He was interested in chords for their own sake. But now it seemed that he was moving in the opposite direction to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in songs. He used tunes with free-flowing lines and chordal direction. This approach allowed the soloist the choice of playing chordally (vertically) or melodically (horizontally). In fact, due to the direct and free-flowing lines in his music, I found it easy to apply the harmonic ideas that I had. I could stack up chords—say on a C7, I sometimes superimposed an E flat 7, up to an F sharp 7, down to an F. That way I could play three chords on one. Miles's music gave me plenty of freedom."21
As this passage implies, Coltrane was in a very different frame of mind from Davis's. His approach was hyper-vertical. Davis commented: "He's been working on those arpeggios and playing chords that lead into chords, playing them fifty different ways and playing them all at once."22 The demonic urgency of this search was clearer in live performances with Miles—including those released on fazz at the Plaza, Miles and Monk at Newport, and Miles Davis and John Coltiane Live in Stockholm 1960—than on Kind of Blue. On the Stockholm side, in particular, we hear Trane pursuing his twin obsessions of the moment: on the one hand, to squeeze every possible implication from a song's harmonies; and on the other, to produce actual chords on the saxophone. This was a technique Monk had suggested to him: "Monk was one of the first to show me how to make two or three notes at a time on tenor . . . It's done by false fingering and adjusting your lip. If everything goes right, you can get triads. Monk just looked at my horn and 'felt' the mechanics of what had to be
done to get this effect."23
Coltrane's playing was controversial (indeed, it remained so until his death in 1967), and it's not hard to hear why on the Swedish date. On "All Blues," for example, his solo makes concessions neither to the audience nor to the rhythm section. Wynton Kelly, normally one of the best accompanists in jazz, appears uncertain of his role behind Coltrane. What he does play often sounds fatuous, and Trane, for his part, doesn't seem to care about fitting in with the group's format. His solo is a kind of practicing in public, especially when he gets into his "harmonics" bag, fiddling with a couple of phrases for bar after bar as he tries to get the sound he wants from his instrument. Yet his solo also coheres, starting with simple phrases from the jazz-and-blues lexicon delivered in his penetrating tone and highlighted by guttural cries that are actually the standard use of harmonics in the black saxophone tradition. As he warms up, his phrases become longer, shading into the rapid-fire lines that Ira Gitler called "sheets of sound" and that were the vehicle for his chordal explorations. These are balanced by simpler, more "classic" figures that themselves lead into the stretch of harmonics mentioned earlier. And finally, he returns to earth in the last chorus, easing back into the standard improvisational vocabulary that had been his point of departure.
Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965 Page 15