Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  These efforts, one is sorry to say, were neither commercially nor artistically successful. The late sixties were not propitious years for such undertakings, as R B displaced jazz from black jukeboxes the two styles had previously shared. Moreover, the "popular touch" is one of the muses' more special gifts. Not every outstanding jazz musician can produce a tune like Horace Silver's "Song for My Father," at once a musical creation of great charm and a natural hit. Hill, for all his brilliance, lacked this particular knack—as did Powell, Tatum, Monk, and most major jazz pianists.

  Hill's musical groping and disintegration, unfortunately, were matched by many of the Blue Note regulars. Hard bop, which had entered the sixties so exuberantly, was moribund by the end of the decade. Why this happened and what exactly did happen—as well as the possible future of jazz in an era of virtual invisibility in black neighborhoods—are the subjects of the next chapter.

  T HE LAST OF HARD BOP

  There's no live name jazz to speak of in Atlantic City nowadays. But thirty or forty years ago there were all kinds of things going on—not only there but in dozens of other American towns. Harry A. Reed's "The Black Bar in the Making of a Jazz Musician: Bird, Mingus, and Stan Hope" describes the jazz clubs of that era: "First, the clientele, at least those attending the sessions, came to listen, not to dance. They were a musically hip audience that could appreciate the nuances of fine playing. Additionally, spectators played an active role in encouraging young players. Not only did they clap enthusiastically but also they shouted, talked to soloists, snapped their fingers and created an appreciative, critical, and interactive atmosphere. The fact that the listeners were not primarily dancers was tremendously liberating to the young jazzmen, for they felt no necessity to learn popular tunes with repetitive beats attuned to dance rhythms."1

  Reed goes on to recall the clubs in Atlantic City, where he was initiated into the music and watched his friend Stan Hope develop into a professional pianist: "Since Atlantic City was convenient to New York and Philadelphia, it was then a magnet for hopeful black musicians. The larger clubs, both black and white, and the Steel Pier booked big bands and well-known small groups to attract the tourist trade. In the years 1948 through 1955, a typical week might have the Count Basie band, Tadd Dameron's Orchestra, Earl Bostic, and Chris Powell's Five Blue Flames featuring Clifford Brown, all playing in town. Simultaneously, smaller big-name groups would be booked into certain smaller clubs: Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, Lester Young, Jimmie Smith, and Sonny Stitt. Lesser-known musicians from the New York State and Pennsylvania areas would augment this talent supply. Preeminent among this latter group were tenorman Morris Lane, guitarist and vocalist Billy Butler, and drummer Coatsville Harris. Finally, local musicians such as pianist Stan Hope, drummer Sid Trusty, bassist Donald Watkins, and others would fill out this talent pool. In short, a ready supply of musicians and a range of bars existed to provide a laboratory for exploring musical ideas."2

  Though Reed was talking about the period just before hard bop, I myself encountered a somewhat similar world in Chicago in the early 1960s: a cornucopia not only of jazz but of urban blues, soul, and gospel. By 1970 this world—or at least its jazz and blues components—had vanished. Again in Alan Rosenthal's words: "The 'rock explosion' and the mass exodus of black listeners from more commerical types of jazz to R . B resulted in an almost complete sealing off of club gigs, airplay, and record dates to jazz musicians. The effect was economically and psychologically devastating. It was almost as though jazz had had a stroke in late 1967. Even just a few years later, in the early '70s, it was referred to in a few prominent places where it was beginning to be nurtured again as a music whose 'comeback' was urgently to be desired."3

  This "devastation" was felt most acutely by the young up-and-coming hard boppers of the early sixties. In 1962, Freddie Hubbard had told Ira Gitler: "This is a thing I want to stay in for life. I don't want to joke about it. 'Cause if you're not doing what you really want to do, you're never going to be satisfied ... I mean I want to make money—everybody does—but I'm not going to go in any certain direction for money."4 Ten years later, Hubbard was recording blatantly commercial, excruciatingly banal albums as he tried to position himself in the fusion/jazz-rock/crossover scene. In 1981, covering Hub-bard's return to jazz pure and simple, Stanley Crouch remarked that "for the past year or more, Hubbard has expressed weariness, if not revulsion, with his attempts at superstardom, reiterating a desire to start playing real music again."5 Yet Hubbard's work since 1981 has not regained the sparkle and grace of his playing in 1964.

  The attrition rate in modern jazz had always been very high. Bebop began in 1945, but within a decade most of its major figures were dead (usually of drug addiction) or out of commission. Artistic burnout—even without crippling vices or aesthetic wrong turns—has not been uncommon. Sooner or later, a young musician must lose some of the fire and audacity of his early playing and (one hopes) replace it with a mellower, more thoughtful style. Some hard boppers have known how to make this transition; many haven't. Even more than other artists, jazz musicians as improvisers are on the spot. What they create is fragile, and their genius must constantly be proven anew. Anyone who tires of the effort or settles into a style based on his own cliches has lost his creative edge.

  Fortunately for the music, there always seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of young jazzmen to replace the fallen— again, until the late 1960s. As Jackie McLean recently recalled: "I felt it and that's why I moved out of New York. One of the reasons I wasn't reluctant to move out of New York in 1969, 1970 when I moved out, [was] because there was a real void in the music in terms of young people going after it like we used to go after it, Sonny Rollins and all of us when we were kids, Arthur Taylor. I couldn't find those kids, and I was in education. They weren't available."

  Why did this happen? The answers are complicated, and the question has been asked not only by jazz fans but by lovers of blues and rawer forms of R B (which today sound even more anachronistic to young blacks than does jazz). On the one hand, we have seen the homogenization of the music business on all levels, from the disappearance of mom-and-pop record stores to the charting of "megatrends" by conglomerate record companies. Television has been a mighty leveler of autonomous cultures of every sort. The collapse of black ghettos as viable cultural contexts—partly due to the decline of discrimination in housing, which dispersed working and middle-class blacks and left the subproletariat to stew in its own juices— has been an additional factor. Prior to the 1960s, it is true, black neighborhoods were segregated racially, though not as all-black as they would be after the riots. But they were remarkably integrated in terms of social class, for professionals and others with steady jobs were forced to live cheek by jowl with the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, this story and its cultural consequences are as old as jazz, which was born in New Orleans partly as a result of interaction between two groups. One consisted of mulattos schooled in European music but deprived of their special status by the Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth century. The other consisted of men who played a rawer, "blacker" style but lacked the mulattos' formal polish. When these two groups were thrown into contact—or so the legend goes—jazz was born.

  In the late 1960s, the reverse occurred. According to Jackie McLean, young people who earlier might have become jazz musicians now were affected by "the way the commercial music was taken and the onslaught of the Beatles and Rolling Stones and all the groups like that that just turned it around. I mean, the black community didn't follow the Beatles that much. A lot of the kids, when we began to have a black middle class and you found black families moving away from the centers of black culture, the Harlems and the inner city here in Hartford, moving out in West Hartford and Bloomfield up this way, those kids naturally interacted with the middle-class white kids, so their musical standards and mores changed somewhat."

  As had happened in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the weakness of jazz around 1970 coincided with a robust and innovative
black popular music that siphoned off at least as much of its audience as the Beatles and Rolling Stones had done. This music drew on a variety of sources, including jazz but also rock. The new work introduced "concept albums," lyrics that were more intimate than before but also hipper and more realistic, and greater harmonic subtlety. These were among the elements in soul music's broadened range. Jazz had previously been considered the most sophisticated, demanding, intellectually supple product of black musical culture. But by the early 1970s, this point had become questionable. Albums like Stevie Wonder's Music of My Mind, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Let's Get It On, Curtis Mayfield's superb sound tracks Supeifly and Claudine (the latter featuring Gladys Knight and the Pips), as well as Norman Whitfield's collaborations with the Temptations were arguably more interesting in every respect and particularly—in relation to what preceded them—more daring than anything happening in jazz.

  The ferment in soul music naturally caught the attention of jazz's hemorrhaging black audience. Despite some dubious generalizations and his ignorance of jazz, Simon Frith gives a good overall picture of this shift in The Soul Book: "Affluent blacks (middle-class and well-off workers, suburb not street people) had always had unsettled tastes in music. Basic black forms—blues and R B and gospel—were too basic, too rough and emotional in content and place, too redolent of hard pasts and feared futures. This audience needed elements of prosperity and elegance and style. For a long time they found them in jazz, being the main supporters of jazzmen and jazz clubs, but the introspective styles of the late fifties were too uninvolving and left the audience looking elsewhere for comfort and fun. They discovered soul: the brassy jazz soul of Cannonball Adderley, Ray Charles and their slicker successors; the sweet soul fusion of blues and gospel of Sam Cooke, the Impressions and the Motown acts.

  "But during the sixties this affluent audience began to experience and react to the same changes that affected young whites and the ghettos. As they became more aware and assertive of their blackness, soul music seemed to be getting whiter—whether teenage white of the Top Ten groups or show-biz white of the Ebony stars. But the new black music was not theirs either—it was too rough, too much in awe of ghetto values and ghetto vices and ghetto myths. The Temptations' new music was just what was needed: it was black, it was funky, it was soulful—and it was adult, complex and cool. Whitfield's achievement [in tunes like "Cloud Nine" and "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone"] was not exactly to make street music respectable (one contrast to rough) but to make it sophisticated (another contrast to rough) and this had musical as well as social significance. The affluent black audience was an audience of stereo owners and LP buyers; they spent their nights in small clubs, not huge halls; their musical expectations were formed by jazz as much as pop. The new Temptations, as compared to, say, James Brown, went down like a good red wine as compared to corn whiskey."6

  What was jazz offering at the same time? To an unfriendly observer, the answer would be Miles Davis's neurotic noises on Bitches Biew, Pharoah Sanders's cheap incense, and stale bebop. Moreover, with few exceptions—like Donald Byrd's work with the Blackbirds—"crossover" and "fusion" meant jazz plus rock rather than jazz plus soul. Perhaps a fusion with soul was impossible. The music was too singer oriented, and jazzmen weren't about to give up their hard-won places in the spotlight. On the other hand, there were some excellent soul instrumental groups—for instance, the Bar-Kays—and Marvin Gaye made good use of jazz arrangers like J.J. Johnson and Bobby Scott and instrumentalists like pianist Joe Sample and saxophonist Ernie Watts. Gaye, Wonder, Mayfield, et al. knew how to use jazz—and especially hard bop, up to and including the advances of Miles Davis and John Coltrane—but jazzmen didn't know what to do with "soul," even though they had introduced the term. Instead of defending their access to the audience described by Frith, many either aimed their efforts at white teenagers or retreated into a bland, vaguely jazzy muzak that lacked personality of any sort. If fusion with soul would have been difficult, fusion with rock and the more anemic sorts of pop was musically degrading.

  At about this time, some interesting offshoots of "free jazz" were growing more visible. Much like hard bop (though without hard bop's rigorous standards of proficiency), it had been a sprawling, varicolored movement. Alongside charlatans who couldn't play were stylists of real genius. Often all they had in common was ostracism by the now moribund "jazz mainstream." From Sun Ra's kaleidoscopic performance art to Steve Lacy's ascetic probings to Archie Shepp's reformulation of the big-toned Swing-tenor tradition, the movement bristled with creative energy while at the same time allowing entry to practically anyone who owned an instrument.

  What was needed was a little discipline. And to some extent, help was provided by two midwestern collectives: the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM, founded in the early 1960s), and its St. Louis counterpart, the Black Artists' Group (BAG, founded in 1968). The fact that pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams co-founded the AACM was a sign of new astringency, since Abrams could play in any style, had impeccable hard-bop credentials, and certainly knew the difference between experimentation and noise. Among those who emerged from or helped form the AACM were trumpeter Lester Bowie, trombonists Joseph Bowie and George Lewis, saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill, and drummers Steve McCall and Philip Wilson. BAG was responsible for three quarters of the current World Saxophone Quartet (Hamiet Bluiett, Julius Hemphill, and Oliver Lake). All these musicians had excellent chops. They were voraciously eclectic, absorbing elements of Latin and "exotic" musics, ragtime and marching bands, avant-garde classical music, and gutbucket blues. They made joyous, disconcerting, unpredictable music, and when they descended on New York City in the early 1970s, they caused considerable commotion on the "loft jazz" scene. They didn't win back jazz's audience, but they put out some terrific sounds. Like Mingus and Monk, they disdained rigid notions of "hipness" and reached deep into jazz's past while also apparently suggesting its future.

  Jazz's future in the 1980s, however, proved to be quite different. The music did make something of a comeback, but among whites more than among blacks. One wouldn't want to overstate the case—after all, classical orchestras playing the nineteenth-century symphonic repertoire are far more generously subsidized than is jazz—but in a modest way, jazz began to get some government and foundation support, along with considerable airplay on public radio. There was a flood of reissued records, covering every period of jazz history (but especially hard bop) and bringing huge chunks of the repertoire back within reach of listeners. Independent jazz labels again appeared, and major companies like CBS, Capitol, and RCA started active jazz programs. History of jazz courses became popular at universities. For young whites, jazz was once again "hip," and older people bored with rock also embraced it. There have even been some jazz films, including Round Midnight, which starred Dexter Gordon, and Clint Eastwood's Bird. Jazz is back. In Desperately Seeking Susan, a 1980s movie about a bunch of cool young artsy types in Soho, one character's loft is burglarized. His first question is: did they get his Charlie Parker sides?

  Here Charlie Parker functions as an icon—as indeed he did in life and has ever since his death. As Bob Reisner remembered: "To the hipster, Bird was a living justification of their philosophy. The hipster is an underground man. He is to the second World War what the Dadaist is to the first. He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and overcivilized to the point of decadence . . . His [Bird's] death was felt powerfully in these circles. For days and weeks afterwards, on sidewalks and fences I saw a crude legend written in chalk or crayon, BIRD LIVES. To the hipster Bird was their private possession."7That was Bird in his own time. And today, what kind of complicated nostalgia (complicated because it's a second-hand nostalgia for an era one never knew) could he evoke in a twenty-year-old? As many years have passed since Bird's death as between the beginnings of recorded jazz and his death.

  Today, for many listeners, jazz is indeed a nostalgia trip, and the boundary bet
ween celebrating jazz and embalming it is not always very clear. Still, young musicians, some of them very good and others very promising, continue to play the music. But particularly if they are black—and virtually all the great jazzmen have been black—they can no longer pluck it from the air but have to come by it more circuitously. Thus Wynton Marsalis, the most praised young trumpeter of the 1980s, declared: "I know if it weren't for the fact that my father [New Orleans pianist Ellis Marsalis] is a jazz musician, for the fact that he has jazz records, I know that I would not play jazz, because there was nothing. None of my surroundings, none of my peers, nothing on the radio, nothing I got at school gave me any input."8And tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist David Murray recently characterized the kind of music that is available in black neighborhoods: "Well for one, they got the blaster in their ear and they got it on the wrong stations. It's peer pressure. A guy turns on a jazz station and the kids say, 'Aw, man, turn it off, put on Kool Moe Dee or something.' Some kids don't listen to anything that's not a rap. I think it's kind of a drag that a kid won't listen to a whole song that's instrumental all the way through. They want to hear that slave beat."9

  Marsalis has emerged as something of a spokesperson for a group of neo-boppers who have made their mark in the last few years. Perhaps his clearest statement of how he sees himself came in an interview with Francis Davis: "No, see, when I first came to New York in 1979, everybody was talking about fusion. Everybody was saying that jazz was dead because no young black musicians wanted to play it anymore, and because the established cats who should have been setting an example were fouiishittin', wearing dresses and trying to act like rock stars. So when people heard me, they knew it was time to start takin' care of business again. I wasn't playing shit no one had ever heard before, but at least I was playing some real music."10