A few weeks after the Stockholm concert, Coltrane left
Miles's group for good and formed his own combo, which would ultimately include pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. By this time he had become the most widely imitated saxophonist since Charlie Parker. His sensibility, like hard bop itself, seemed to yoke together the world of corner bars and roadhouses and the complex preoccupations of self-conscious artists in our century. For all that Coltrane was denounced as a renegade and celebrated as a pathfinder, he had paid heavy R . B dues. In J. C. Thomas's book Chasin' the Trane, bassist Steve Davis remembered one of Coltrane's characteristic early gigs: "John and I worked a date in Cleveland in 1954 backing Big Maybelle. The club owner wanted John to walk the bar, but John just looked down and patted his stomach, saying, 'Sorry, I've got ulcers.' We cracked up and the club owner got hostile, until our guitarist, Junior Walker, offered to walk the bar because he had an extra long cord from his guitar to the amp. He did it while John played some wailing blues behind Big Maybelle. She was so pleased she told the audience, 'John Coltrane is my favorite musician, and you'd better believe it, because that's the truth.'"24
Other jobs were with Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Gay Cross (formerly with Louis Jordan), Earl Bostic, and Bull Moose Jackson—not to mention Jimmy Smith ("Wow. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and hear that organ. Those chords screaming at me").25 Despite some work with Johnny Hodges, Dizzy Gillespie, Howard McGhee, and Bud Powell, Trane, by the time he joined Miles Davis in 1955, had played much more R B than jazz in public. The head-shaking, finger-popping physicality of R B would remain an essential element in his style, grounding it in an intensely social, communicative, and cathartic music.
At the same time, in the late fifties, Trane was studying. He would spend hours a day working on scales and harmonies, trying to get them to "lie under his fingers" to the point where they could emerge naturally in his solos. His months in
Thelonious Monk's quartet at the Five Spot Cafe, where jazzmen, poets, painters, and bohemians in general flocked to find out what was happening at the cutting edge of hard bop, were especially important: "Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order. I felt I learned from him in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically. I would talk to Monk about musical problems, and he would sit at the piano and show me the answers just by playing them. I could watch him play and find out the things I wanted to know. Also, I could see a lot of things that I didn't know about at all."26
All these influences, plus Miles Davis's ("He also made me go further into trying different modes in my playing"),27 converge in Coltrane's style on a tune like "Chasin' the Trane," recorded in 1961 with bassist Reggie Workman and Elvin Jones. In the liner notes accompanying the record [Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard), the saxophonist explained that "usually, I like to get familiar with a new piece before I record it, but you never have to worry about the blues, unless the line is very complicated. In this case, however, the melody not only wasn't written but it wasn't even conceived before we played it. We set the tempo, and in we went."
"Chasin' the Trane" is a sixteen-minute solo, but in another sense it is really a duet with Elvin Jones, whose interactive drumming swirls around, above, below, and behind the beat as he dialogues with Trane. The proceedings are anchored by Workman's robust walking bass and by Coltrane's deep empathy with the blues. Trane takes elemental phrases and turns them upside down, playing them all kinds of ways, transposing and fragmenting them. You can hear him thinking as he improvises, yet the result is anything but aridly "experimental." Trane's forward-driven rhythmic sense and his hot, piercing sound make this as relentless a performance as one can find on a jazz record. In Frank Kofsky's Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, Coltrane called the jazz-and-blues tradition "a big reservoir, that we all dip out of."28 Here the reservoir is not only in these elemental blues phrases but in the tonal effects that fill his solo. His experiments with harmonics, so evident on "All Blues," have now been reabsorbed to the point where they are no longer experiments but another electrifying timbral effect to go with his honks and screams. Likewise, all those hours of practicing scales and harmonic exercises have now been assimilated, so that whereas "All Blues" modulates out of the tradition into first "sheets of sound" and then harmonics, "Chasin' the Trane" gives the primal and the sophisticated to us all at once.
By 1961, Ornette Coleman had hit the scene, and the "free jazz" movement was shaking up a generation steeped in hard bop's certainties, irritating some and inspiring others. Coltrane was obviously among those inspired, but rather than dispense with fixed harmonies as Coleman had done, he sought to stretch them as far as he could. As Martin Williams remarked, Coltrane was "prepared to gush out every conceivable note, run his way a step at a time through every complex chord, every extension, and every substitution, and go beyond that by reaching for sounds that no tenor saxophone had ever uttered before him."29 Thus, for the generation of hard boppers coming of age in the early sixties, Coltrane was more of a model than Coleman could be. Coltrane was the sound of hard bop revitalizing itself, sloughing off everything rigidly formulaic, seeking out new modes of expression while retaining the school's mixture of high-modernist self-awareness and hip-ness. Eventually, Coltrane would abandon musical "hipness" altogether, but this development was still several years in the future. In the meantime, along with Miles, Mingus, and Monk, he epitomized jazz's amalgam of the earthy and the exalted, galvanizing a new generation of musicians with his achievements.
C HANGES
In Blues People, which remains one of our most provocative studies of jazz, Amiri Baraka declares that by 1960 "hard bop, sagging under its own weight, had just about destroyed itself as a means toward a moving form of expression."1 This is an exaggeration (and, indeed, the author goes on to say that hard boppers like John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Elvin Jones "emerged in the sixties working in new areas"), but one does understand what he means. As the 1950s drew to a close, a certain sameness crept into hard bop, both in public performances and on the records issued by Blue Note, Prestige, and other labels. The tunes were too perfunctory and banal, and solo styles had become increasingly formulaic. Rollinsoid saxophonists and Clifford Brownoid trumpeters; overuse of flatted fifths on the piano; simplified, squared-off bebop and blues-and-gospel cliches trotted out for the millionth time were symptoms of rigor mortis setting in. Horace Silver had dipped into the styles of Pinetop Perkins and Jay McShann, but when young pianists began copping them from Silver (tapping the "wellsprings of black music" at a considerable remove), one knew something was amiss. Hard bop was feeding on itself. As Elmo Hope put it in 1961: "The fellows out here need to do a little more exploring. They should delve more in creativity instead of playing the same old blues, the same old funk, over and over again."2
Yet hard bop was also under pressure to change, and musicians within the school moved to burst its constraints. In addition, Ornette Coleman's 1959 arrival in New York City fissured the jazz world as had nothing since bebop. Coleman was hailed by many—and particularly by a number of critics— as a genius, a true original, a "new Charlie Parker." Others, however, felt that far from moving beyond conventional harmonies and the chromatic scale, he had simply never mastered them. Coleman's music, at once revolutionary and atavistic, charged with the raw cry of the blues (he had paid as much dues on the "chitlin' circuit" as any boss tenor), left no one indifferent. How deeply Coleman shook even the most idiosyncratic hard boppers can be heard in Mingus's comments in a 1960 interview: "Now aside from the fact that I doubt he can even play a C scale ... in tune, the fact remains that his notes and lines are so fresh. So when Symphony Sid played his record, it made everything else he was playing, even my own record that he played, sound terrible. I'm not saying everybody's going to have to play like Coleman. But they're going to have to stop playing Bird."3
Few hard boppers actually converted to Coleman's brand of music. Many,
however, were influenced by it directly or indirectly—and especially indirectly. Coleman redefined the outer limits of jazz, making anyone less iconoclastic seem relatively "conventional." Coltrane, for example, who in the early sixties was being reviled by some for playing "anti-jazz," was at the same time being urged by more avant-garde critics to break, once and for all, the umbilical cord tying him to chord changes and modes. Compared to Coleman, he was conservative; and within a few years he did in fact abandon fixed harmonies.
Another eminent hard bopper who responded to Coleman's music was Sonny Rollins. In 1959, Rollins had retired from jazz temporarily and, in Leonard Feather's words, had entered "a period of self-imposed exile during which he re-assessed his values, investigated Rosicrucianism, and practiced assiduously, often in the solitude of the pedestrian walk of the Williamsburg Bridge, high above the East River. "4His first gigs and his first record date after his return in 1961 sounded much like his previous work, but in 1962 he put together a band with trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins, both of whom had played with Ornette (a few months earlier Coltrane had also hired a bassist, Jimmy Garrison, who had been working with Ornette).
Leading this band, Rollins made a record {Our Man in Jazz) that represents a kind of culmination of his previous work. Despite what one might have expected, the group is certainly rooted in hard bop. Rollins sounds like his former self, and both Cherry and Higgins had extensive modern-jazz credentials. Yet the record leaves one feeling that everything eccentric, original, and exploratory in Rollins's post-1955 production was here taken to its logical consequences.
His tone is a bit drier, more sinewy than it had been. His time is even looser, his references to bebop vocabulary more oblique. A tune like "Oleo," which occupies an entire side, opens with an up-tempo cascade of tumbling phrases interspersed with deep-funk figures and half-time passages. Cherry follows Rollins's lead with sensitive obbligatos that sometimes build into simultaneous improvisations. About halfway through this cut, a descending, Ornettishly bluesy secondary theme is introduced, eventually kicking off another Rollins solo that turns what had been a breakneck chase into a laid-back medium tempo. Higgins follows the sax's lead till it eases into a loping duet with Cherry's mournful riffs. Having lowered the temperature, Rollins then starts building again. Quotes abound, seeming to function as historical references— for example, to Wardell Gray's "Twisted Blues." Of all the jazz records ever made, this is one of the few that truly capture the atmosphere of free interaction, the spontaneity of the best live performances.
At the time of its release, Our Man in Jazz was taken as a sign of Rollins's defection to the free-jazz camp. Though it remains one of the peaks of his career, it proved to be merely an episode in his development. The association with Cherry and Higgins didn't last long, and afterwards Rollins returned to a more conventional style. The side stands, however, both as a sign of Ornette's intensely magnetic attraction and as an indication of how pointless the bebop versus free-jazz controversy was essentially. Rollins, Cherry, and Higgins could and did play in both modes, and this was true as well of most young jazzmen who emerged in the early sixties.
Jackie McLean also responded to jazz's altered landscape. In the liner notes to his Let Freedom Ring album, he confessed that "getting away from the conventional and much overused chord changes was my personal dilemma. Until recently this was the reason why many of the things I composed in 1955 left me helpless when it came to a basis for improvisation, for example, 'Quadrangle' and 'A Fickle Sonance.' Both of these tunes were just recently recorded. I used 'I Got Rhythm' for the solo section in 'Quadrangle.' These changes do not fit the personality of the tune at all. Today when I play 'Quadrangle,' I use sections of scales and modes. I try to write each thing with its own personality. I choose the outstanding notes of the composition and build a scale or a motif to fit the feeling of the tune. Today I am going through a big change compositionwise, and improvising. Ornette Coleman has made me stop and think. He has stood up under much criticism, yet he never gives up his cause, freedom of expression. The search is on."
Let Freedom Ring does represent a breakthrough for McLean, though in a way that resembles Coleman less than these comments suggest. In the background one hears John Coltrane's and Miles Davis's modal experiments, and some aspects of Trane's evolving improvisational style—yet even so, what takes place falls far short of wholesale appropriation. All the elements of McLean's previous approach remain present, including his unmistakably soulful sound and his blues-and bebop-based phrasing, but others have been added. He uses the alto's lower register—and its "freak" upper register above the normal upper register—to brilliant effect. At times he flattens his tone. Modes rather than chord changes dominate, and in general the side bristles with excitement and the thrill of discovery. Like Our Man in Jazz, it benefits enormously from Higgins's relaxation, his rattling commentaries on the solos, his kaleidoscopic accents and cross rhythms.
To call Let Freedom. Ring McLean's most scorching album is to say a lot, considering the incandescent quality of most of his playing; but this recording seemed to catch him on a day when he was especially ready to blow his heart out. Of the four tracks, three are dedicated to members of his family—his mother Alpha Omega, his son Rene, and his daughter Melonae—and one to Bud Powell, Jackie's first mentor, who had been caught in the toils of madness since the early 1950s. This tune is one of Bud's most poignant compositions, the minor-keyed ballad "I'll Keep Loving You." In a moving tribute to its composer, McLean plays a solo as concentrated and free of extraneous clutter as any Ben Webster recorded. The tune is topped off by a breathtaking out-of-tempo rendition of the theme in which McLean first blows hard, using the "freak" upper register to build intensity, and then softens his sound to a wispy sob.
Another high point on the LP is "Omega," which McLean described as "in two sections. The outside is built on an F# major mode and is free of tempo, to a degree. The second section swings along with a happy feeling."5Actually, the first section is no more "free" than the second, but the tempo is varied by alternation between a patterned vamp, underscored by an ascending bass figure and Higgins's cymbals, and a more straight-ahead section. McLean's blowing is perhaps his loosest on the date, as he shakes off a lot of bebop grammar, phrases more personally than usual, and again employs all his horn's registers in this joyously shimmery performance. Walter Davis, Jr., who previously had been known as a good journeyman bebop pianist, also obviously felt liberated by the proceedings and displayed a more orchestral style in his solos than he had before.
Around the same time that he cut Let Freedom Ring, McLean formed a working unit that included three of the most talented younger musicians around: vibist Bobby Hutcherson, trombonist and composer Grachan Moncur III, and the remarkable seventeen-year-old drummer Tony Williams. All of them were firmly rooted in modern jazz—Moncur via J.J. Johnson, Hutcherson via Milt Jackson, and Williams via Roy Haynes and Elvin Jones—but they were also attracted to the "new thing," which they both played and drew upon in their work as hard boppers. Though Moncur was the weakest soloist, his compositions and use of the combo's original instrumentation contributed much to its special character. The band recorded three albums for Blue Note—One Step Beyond, Destination Out, and Evolution (this last under Moncur's name). All were very good, but Evolution was perhaps the best, partly because Lee Morgan was added to the quintet.
As with the other albums just mentioned, the title of Evolution proclaims these musicians' exhilarated sense of adventure. They truly were evolving, a process underlined in liner notes by A. B. Spellman, one of free jazz's main advocates: "My initial reaction to this record—the first representation on LP of Grachan Moncur's work as composer and leader—was surprise. I'd expected to hear a hip, hardbopping, J.J. Johnson-esque trombonist leading a band with like bent thru tunes as familiar as the IND subway line, but what I got was a serious and courageous date composed out of an audacious interest in the more open methods of solo and group improvisat
ion, in the kind of playing that's already been declared anathema by the more conservative factions of the jazz world . . . Men like Moncur, Hutcherson, Williams, Cranshaw are part of what I have called the second wave of the avant-garde in that they, with such radicals from the preceding generation as Jackie McLean and John Coltrane, form a bridge between the outcast revolutionists and the mainstream. Their ears are wide open; they are technically prepared to execute the most demanding and abstract parts; their professional and social involvement with more traditional musicians keeps their historic reference in front of them, but their interest in what can be done in musical self-assertion forces them to constantly alter the rules, which is about the most commercially dangerous thing a musician can do; and, best of all, because so many of the more talented young musicians are falling in with them, they are undeniable."
All four tunes on Evolution are Moncur originals. The first, "Air Raid," consists of two parts: one out of tempo and the other medium-up. The slow segments, dominated by bassist Cranshaw's glissandi and Hutcherson's undulating tremolos, seethe with the kind of dramatic menace implied by the title. The faster interludes are fueled by Williams's prodigiously inventive drumming, a tempest of controlled sound and fury. Over all this atmospheric turbulence, McLean creates a collage of fragmented bebop, elliptical snips and wisps of phrases he leaves dangling, allowing the listener to fill in the empty spaces. Morgan also contributes a riveting solo, biting and precisely articulated on up-tempos, languidly bluesy on slower ones, which ends with a quote from "Blues in the Night" ("my mama done tole me") that seems to anchor Moncur's experiments in the earliest jazz.
Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965 Page 16