The History of Jazz (60 page)

For a time in the 1950s, a West Coast alto style was taking form, a more mellifluous alternative to the astringent Parker-inflected lines of the other coast. Art Pepper, Bud Shank, Lennie Niehaus, and Paul Desmond, among others, exemplified this warm, dulcettoned approach. In time, the styles of these players diverged. Of this group, Paul Desmond stayed truest to the ultracool aesthetic. He had little interest in adopting a flashier style, jokingly referring to himself as the “world’s slowest alto player.” On the surface, Desmond’s solos appeared to offer a lush romanticism, but only careful listeners were apt to catch their richer implications. Desmond carefully avoided excesses of sentimentality with a range of devices: witty references to other songs and solos, playful call-and-response motives, oblique references to an odd assortment of substitute chords and modes, even quasi-aleatory exercises in translating phone numbers into musical phrases using intervals relating to each digit—a steady stream of melodic surprises linked by Desmond’s exceptional skills in thematic improvisation. A single solo from the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s twenty-fifth anniversary reunion tour finds Desmond celebrating these old acquaintances with a snippet of “Auld Lang Syne”—followed by allusions to “52nd Street Theme,” “The Gypsy,” “Taps Miller,” “Drum Boogie,” and “Organ Grinder’s Swing”—all in the context of a complex piece that shifts back and forth between 3/4 and 4/4. The next night, in a different town, Desmond no doubt initiated the process all over again, drawing on still other sources in his artfully constructed saxophone stream of consciousness. Yet these clever asides were never forced, and Desmond somehow made the cerebral and the plaintive coexist in the same solo, even in a single phrase. For much of his career, Desmond served as an appropriate foil for Brubeck. Their collaborations were experimental in the best sense of the term: open to new sounds, but never (as with so many progressive works) in a doctrinaire manner. After the breakup of the Brubeck Quartet, Desmond’s music became even more introspective and delicate. His guest pairings with Chet Baker and Jim Hall, and his final quartet recordings with guitarist Ed Bickert, are neglected gems of the improvisational arts, jazz performances that bespeak a
serene
mastery as rare as it is affecting.

By the start of the 1960s, this burst of creative work on the Coast was mostly completed. These were hard years for jazz in any locale—with the audience for improvised music at an all-time low—but several factors were especially damaging to West Coast jazz during this period. The leading exponents disappeared from the scene, some going into studio work (Rogers, Shank), others to prison (Pepper, Hawes, Morgan), a handful gravitating to New York (Dolphy, Coleman, Cherry) or overseas (Baker, Gordon), a few meeting early, tragic deaths (Gray, Counce, Perkins). Each musician’s story was somewhat different, but the overall effect was devastating to the local jazz scene. Although some of these players would rebuild their careers in the 1970s and 1980s, the West Coast’s relevance as a defining force in the jazz world had now virtually come to an end, the legacy of these glory years mostly forgotten in the midst of a new California youth culture with its surf music, fast cars, longer and longer hair, and shorter and shorter attention spans.

JAZZ IN TRANSITION: MILES, ’TRANE, EVANS, DOLPHY, ROLLINS

In time, Miles Davis would come to personify the cool jazz movement of the 1950s. His demeanor and his trumpet playing were one in this regard, both reflecting the enigmatic mixture of aloofness and emotional immediacy, that odd contradiction that added fire to the cool, invigorating this otherwise subdued, quasi-chamber music. Yet in the early 1950s, all this still lay in the future. At the time, Miles, despite his key role in the Capitol
Birth of the Cool
(as they would come to be called) sessions, maintained only a peripheral relationship to the burgeoning cool jazz scene. While Getz, Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Gerry Mulligan, and others generated publicity and built followings, Davis struggled in his attempts to define a personal style on the horn and attract an audience for his music. “The club owners just froze me out,” he later reflected. “Wasn’t no gigs happening for me.”
⁶

After the breakup of his Nonet, Davis traveled to Paris with a combo led by Tadd Dameron. In this band, Davis returned to the bop-inflected style promulgated during his stint with Charlie Parker. Recordings show the spirit of Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro hovering over his playing. Yet, though his technique on the trumpet is more proficient than in earlier years, the Dameron collaboration represents, on the whole, a step backward from the more innovative Capitol project. French audiences, however, gave the music an enthusiastic response, and Davis luxuriated in the tolerant, hip attitude of the Parisians who gathered around the visiting jazz players. Kenny Clarke, the drummer with the band, decided to stay on in France, where he remained—enjoying a successful career working with small combos and a large band he co-led with Francy Boland, as well as writing for films—until his death in 1985. Miles also felt the attractions of the European environment and briefly considered a similar move.

Returning to New York in the summer of 1949, Davis fell into a deep depression. He had left behind a promising romance with French actress Juliette Greco (“the first woman that I loved as an equal human being … she taught me what it was to love someone other than music”
⁷
), which now left him emotionally numb. Moreover, the racial divisiveness of postwar America stood in stark contrast to the more open attitudes he had experienced in France. Finally, few opportunities to perform and record were coming his way, while many of Davis’s former sidemen were enjoying success in the new cool movement. In the face of these various problems, Miles fell under the sway of heroin. For the next four years, drug addiction would afflict him physically, drain him financially, and limit him artistically.

Davis’s recordings of this period provide only the barest hints of the dramatic evolution that would distinguish his post-1954 work. His “Bluing” recording with Sonny Rollins from October 1951 anticipates the classic “Walkin’” performance of 1954, but the lines are less formed, and the solo lacks the continuity of the latter piece. “Yesterdays” from May 1952 indicates Davis’s potential as a balladeer, but his tone has yet to show the burnished patina of his mature work. A restless quality permeates these sides, perhaps a reflection of Davis’s life during this period. His stay in New York was followed by moves to St. Louis, California, and Detroit, but old problems followed him to these new locales. Finally, after several failed attempts, Davis broke his addiction to heroin and in February 1954 returned to New York. He was healthy, his musical ambitions were revitalized, and, as subsequent events would prove, he was playing better than ever.

Critics would later acknowledge Davis’s 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival as the turning point in his career. In fact, Davis in early 1954 was already showing that he had reached a new plateau in his music. His solo on “Walkin’,” from April 1954, is a major statement and clearly represents Davis’s best playing on record to date. His improvisation is taut; his tone is rich. Moreover, Davis’s relaxed swing inspires the whole band. This thirteen-minute track—at the time, an extreme length for a studio recording of a jazz combo—never lags, even when Davis is not playing. Follow-up sessions with Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson, and Thelonious Monk proved that this performance was no fluke. At age twenty-seven, Miles Davis had blossomed into a major jazz soloist with his style now almost fully formed.

Around this same time, Capitol contributed to the trumpeter’s reputation by rereleasing the earlier Nonet recordings on a long-playing album, titling them
Birth of the Cool
for the first time. But it was Davis’s unexpected success at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival that galvanized his following and spurred Columbia, the most powerful record company in the world, to sign the trumpeter to a contract. Davis had not been listed on the festival program, but he was added at the last minute to an all-star jam session. For his feature number, Davis performed Thelonious Monk’s composition “‘Round Midnight” on muted trumpet. “When I got off the bandstand,” Miles later noted, “everybody was looking at me like I was a king.”
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During their drive home, Monk told Davis that he had played the song wrong. But for jazz audiences, Davis’s moody interpretation would stand as the definitive version, even more than Monk’s own, of this classic jazz ballad. It remained in Miles’s repertoire for years to come.

Miles disdained the hubbub following the Newport appearance. “What’s the fuss?” he seemed to say. “I always play that way.” In truth, Davis had made a remarkable artistic leap, with few counterparts in the history of jazz. Some months earlier, Davis had recorded “‘Round Midnight” with the Lighthouse All-Stars, and that rendition, for all its virtues, was a far lesser achievement. Now, almost overnight, Davis had staked out a position as one of the most original ballad players in the history of jazz. One recalls, to cite a rare point of comparison, Ben Webster’s triumphant struggle with the dominant Coleman Hawkins tenor model of the 1930s, which Webster finally distilled into his own personal approach. But doing so required a radical pruning and Webster’s inspired shift away from Hawkins’s voluptuousness toward a more oblique style. Miles had now made a similar transformation of the dominant Gillespie trumpet model. Hints of the bebop vocabulary remained but were now subsumed into a more minimalist style. A handful of tones sufficed, where the younger Miles would have played baroque phrases. And the notes themselves were only the smallest part of the overall effect, with Miles’s toucan tone steadfastly refusing to be reduced to black-and-white notes on a page. As with Webster, timbre and texture, breath and silence were the decisive factors.

With high-profile engagements coming his way, Davis was now able to hire and retain a world-class band. One suspects that the Ahmad Jamal Trio, greatly respected by Davis, served as the main model for the working ensemble he was now putting together—indeed, even the tunes Davis called on gigs would, over the next several years, echo Jamal’s own choices. Like Jamal, Davis’s pianist Red Garland boasted a delicate touch, a taste for sweet comping chords, and solos that made their point without unnecessary ostentation. Garland was also a consummate swinger, in which regard he was ably supported by bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones. Barely out of his teens, Chambers had resided in New York only a few months before he was hired by Davis. Other leaders might have overlooked this Pittsburgh native, whose unassuming style hewed close to the walking-line tradition of Blanton and Pettiford. But with a resonant tone and sure sense of time, Chambers was perfectly suited for Miles’s group, now in the process of honing a more understated swing. He would come to serve eight years with Davis. Philly Joe Jones was the old man of the band, in his thirties at the time he joined the Davis combo. He had apprenticed with Parker, Gillespie, and other modern jazz players, and brought a bop-oriented urgency to his work that energized the Davis band. But Jones was also a master of nuances: subtle polyrhythms, delicate brushwork, and crisp cymbal playing were his trademarks. None of these three players were well known at the time Davis hired them, but soon they would garner recognition as one of the finest rhythm sections of their day.

In the summer of 1955, the new Davis band opened at Cafe Bohemia with tenorist Sonny Rollins joining Miles in the front line. Rollins’s robust sax sound and linear style made him a perfect counterweight to Davis’s more pointillistic approach. Rollins, however, like Miles before him, soon left the New York scene to break himself of his heroin addiction. Seeking a replacement, Davis briefly tried John Gilmore before settling on John Coltrane. In time, Coltrane would be revered as the most influential saxophonist of his generation, but when Miles brought him into the band, Coltrane’s reputation in the jazz world was modest, built on a few low-profile sideman stints—with limited chances to solo—most recently as part of Johnny Hodges’s band. One of the jazz world’s most successful late bloomers—his maturing as a major stylist took place, for the most part, during the last twelve years of his life—Coltrane was a practice-room fanatic, obsessed with constantly improving and expanding his skills. Davis had heard him a few years earlier and had been distinctly unimpressed, but now Coltrane was poised to challenge Rollins and Getz, then established as the leading modern jazz tenor saxophonists. Once again, Davis (like his mentor Charlie Parker) sought a frontline player with a contrasting style to his own. The newcomer filled this role to perfection. Coltrane’s elaborate solos conveyed a restless urgency. Hear him follow Miles’s plaintive interpretation of “‘Round Midnight,” on the quintet’s celebrated 1956 recording, with a probing examination of the harmonic crevices in the music. Such solos were an odd hybrid: a world of emotion diffused through the analytical perspective of a scientist. This Davis group stayed together only a short while before a falling-out between the trumpeter and tenorist—aggravated by Coltrane’s heroin addiction—sent the saxophonist packing to join the Thelonious Monk quartet. However, the Davis unit recorded prolifically before disbanding. Miles needed to fulfill his obligations to the Prestige label, in addition to his Columbia work, and quickly recorded a host of material released in four solid albums (under the names
Steamin’
,
Cookin’
,
Workin’
, and
Relaxin’
).

Only a few weeks after Coltrane’s departure, Davis entered the studio to record with a large ensemble under the direction of Gil Evans. Building on the aesthetic leanings and instrumentation the two had developed during the
Birth of the Cool
recordings, Davis and Evans created a series of chiaroscuro pieces joined by linking passages composed by Evans. This project, titled
Miles Ahead
, ranks among the high points of both artists’ careers. Davis’s playing on flugelhorn represented a novel “antivirtuosity” that he would refine over the next several years. He rarely challenges the band in the style of a Gillespie or Eldridge, content to float over Evans’s impressionistic harmonies. His phrases reach for the essence of the music, for sheltered spaces within the chords. The success of
Miles Ahead
inspired several follow-up projects. Davis and Evans’s 1958 recording of compositions from
Porgy and Bess
came close to matching the high quality of the earlier work. A third project,
Sketches of Spain
, was recorded in late 1959 and early 1960 and features an exceptional adaptation of Joaquin Rodrigo’s
Concierto de Aranjuez
, originally written for guitar and orchestra, as well as a gripping Davis performance on “Saeta.” At his most inspired moments, Davis could now manage to draw a primal cry from the horn, a haunting sound unlike anything else in modern jazz. In such a deeply charged musical flow, even his “mistakes” were effective. They hinted at a depth of feeling that may have been undermined by a more meticulous approach, much as the mourner’s sob cuts deeper than the orator’s eulogy.