The History of Jazz (57 page)

7 The Fragmentation of Jazz Styles

The ascendancy of bebop inevitably invited challenges. A music so radical in its intentions, so open in its defiance of conventions, almost demanded dramatic responses. Perhaps the greatest surprise, though, was that the ripostes came from so many different directions at once. One expected the Swing Era veterans to launch heated counterattacks on the boppers—and this they did, with a vengeance. Less expected was the extraordinary rebirth of traditional jazz in the late 1940s, championed by those who hoped to douse the fires of bop with Lu Watters. Still others sought a tempering effect in “the cool,” brandished as nothing less than a new aesthetic for modern jazz. And as the 1950s progressed, a host of other alternative styles emerged on the scene, each with a contingent of devotees: hard bop, West Coast jazz, soul jazz, modal jazz, Third Stream jazz, free jazz.

In the jazz press, interviews and reviews were now interspersed with polemics and philosophical musings on the “validity” of these various forms of improvised music. The most popular rebuttal, a time-honored approach since the advent of bop, was to deny that the opposition’s music was “real jazz.” During these Cold War years, fans split into factions, and factions subdivided faster than suburban real estate. Of course jazz had always been a source of controversy, since at least the time of Buddy Bolden. Only now the disputes were mostly fratricidal, with few besides jazz fans paying attention. The general public had gone on to other concerns—bobby-soxers and bomb shelters, television and 3-D movies, pop singers backed by string orchestras, and the nascent sounds of rock and roll. In this context, jazz had become a subculture, surviving on the fringes of the entertainment industry.

Meanwhile jazz writers debated the future of jazz. Would it be hot or cool? Would it hail from East or West? Would it maintain allegiance to tonality or demand freedom from the tyranny of the chord? But for the most reactionary fans, this very obsession with the future was castigated, renounced in favor of a return to the past. Under a variety of banners—some calling it traditional or trad jazz, others referring to it as New Orleans or Chicago jazz, still others preferring the term Dixieland—the sounds of older jazz styles grew ever more popular. As early as the late 1930s, the first signs of a traditional jazz revival could be seen, but this movement would not gain momentum for another decade. By then the growing antipathy to bop in certain quarters—certainly among the general public, but also among many jazz fans and musicians—made this return to the roots more than a casual indulgence of nostalgia. It coalesced into a movement, and—irony of ironies—borrowed some of the revolutionary ideology of the boppers. Thus, the trad fans were not just interested in hearing their music, but also wanted to hold it up as a model, assert its primacy, and use it to oppose the “enemy” in the other camps, much like the boppers had done a few years before. The jazz press fueled this antagonism with the tone of its coverage, pitting one faction against the other with the zest of boxing promoters. Booking agents followed suit, staging musical “battles” between boppers and traditional jazz players. A few tried to stay above the fray—Charlie Parker, in his various interviews, had only praise for the exponents of earlier styles—but most fans and players, critics and impresarios, felt compelled to choose sides.

The chronology of this “return to the roots” begins with the resurgent careers of Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet at the close of the 1930s. Around this same time, jazz historians latched onto the forgotten trumpeter Bunk Johnson, who parlayed his New Orleans connection into a brief period of fame during the 1940s. Johnson’s various claims and pronouncements on jazz history later turned out to be largely “bunk,” and his trumpet playing made few listeners forget Armstrong and Beiderbecke. But his transformation into a mini-celebrity indicated that the traditional jazz revival was a powerful force, one that could build a substantial following for an aging field worker who had never been more than a second-tier player during his prime. Johnson’s lead was followed by many others. George Lewis, who had been making a living as a dockworker, displayed the simple elegance of his clarinet playing on a 1942 session with Johnson, an association that led to a spate of other opportunities to record and perform as a leader. Kid Ory, who had been working on a poultry farm and in a railroad office, returned to active playing in 1942 and delighted audiences for the next quarter of a century—then retired in Hawaii, far from brass bands and second lines, on the proceeds of this unanticipated career turnaround. Like tribal elders in a gerontocracy, these survivors of jazz’s earliest days now found themselves venerated and apotheosized in a manner they had never enjoyed in the past. Suddenly they were “historical figures”—formerly they had simply been musicians, often part-time or unemployed.

Almost from the start, the veteran trad jazz players were joined by New Orleans revivalists who brought with them few connections to the Crescent City, merely a zest for the older sounds. On the West Coast, California native Lu Watters founded a traditional jazz group in 1940, the Yerba Buena Jazz Band, that would enjoy a wide following. Turk Murphy, a Watters sideman who formed his own traditional jazz band in 1947, achieved even greater popularity. His group graced the stage of Carnegie Hall, toured extensively overseas, and weathered every changing jazz fad and fancy for almost forty years. In late 1937, Bobby Hackett began leading a band at Nick’s, a Greenwich Village nightclub where modern jazz was anathema, and though the trumpeter was a decade younger than most of the New Orleans–Chicago “old timers,” he soon distinguished himself through his sure instinct for melodic improvisation and exalted tone. Eddie Condon, who worked with Hackett’s band, pursued a similarly successful career as a revivalist—although with more substantial ties to the music’s history than many late-to-the-party traditionalists could boast— building a following at Nick’s, where he continued to work until 1944, and later at his own nightclub. A number of other seasoned players—Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman, Edmond Hall, Miff Mole, Jimmy McPartland, and Max Kaminsky, to name a few—flourished amid the reviving prospects for traditional jazz styles. Much of the revival music, it is true, tended toward banality—it represented the way jazz might have sounded “if it had existed in mid-Victorian times,” quipped one critic. But, at its best, this movement was capable of creating fresh, vibrant performances, such as Wild Bill Davison’s November 1943 sessions with Russell and George Brunis for the Commodore label; or Muggsy Spanier’s illustrious 1939 sides, which inspired comparisons with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Even Bunk Johnson’s once-controversial recordings hold up well today, when one simply enjoys them for their verve and free-spirited interplay, and not as evidence submitted in support of a polemic. For those with ears to hear them, such efforts dispelled any notions that jazz needed to progress in order to sound good.

The trad jazz revival quickly spread overseas, in some instances exerting even more influence on local tastes and talents than in the United States. The English scene was especially vibrant, under the impetus of players such as Humphrey Lyttelton, Chris Barber, and Ken Colyer, among others. French clarinetist Claude Luter, who fell under the sway of Bechet after the latter’s move to Europe, kept the flame of New Orleans jazz alive on the Continent, as did a host of trad players in Stockholm, Rome, and other locales. By one estimate, around half of the jazz clubs in Europe would eventually come to specialize in traditional jazz styles. But other players on other continents—from Melbourne to Shanghai—would also join in the movement. More than any later jazz styles, the two-step syncopations of New Orleans and Chicago testified to the universal appeal of jazz music.

But the most persuasive sign that early jazz was once again a major force came in 1947. In that year of bop triumphant, Louis Armstrong abandoned the big band format he had pursued for almost two decades and made a much-celebrated return to the traditional New Orleans style. Armstrong no doubt loved this music but, as a savvy artist in tune with changing audience tastes, he would hardly have taken such a step unless he had seen the commercial potential of the revival movement. The following year Earl Hines followed Armstrong’s lead. He disbanded his swing orchestra to take a job as pianist in Armstrong’s combo. Jack Teagarden, another traditionalist who had made the move to big bands, also retraced his steps. Teagarden joined Armstrong in 1947, and in 1951 formed his own Dixieland combo. Some jazz modernists denigrated these erstwhile pioneers of jazz past and their fans—often alluding to the enthusiasts for bygone styles with the pejorative term “moldy fig.” But for Armstrong and Teagarden, Hines and Bechet, this was clearly a misnomer. Their return to the tradition in their middle years signaled a revitalization in their music. Their rollicking sounds had gathered no moss, and one could—should?— view these career moves as a proclamation of core values, and a return to first principles in an age caught up in a sometimes too complacent frenzy of progress, in music as in all other spheres of postwar life.

The most pressing challenge to bop, however, came not from these champions of the past. The “cool” movement, as it soon came to be known, presented an especially promising alternative to the bop paradigm. Spearheaded by members of the younger generation, most of them in their early twenties at the close of the 1940s, cool jazz was—like bop—an overtly modernist music with radical implications. Its exponents shared many of the aesthetic values of the boppers—an allegiance to contemporary trends in music, a predilection for experimentation, a distaste for conformity, and a view of jazz as an underground movement—and many had served as sidemen in prominent bop groups. Miles Davis, who would emerge as the leader of the new cool players, had worked with Parker—even more, had looked up to the altoist as a guide and mentor. The Modern Jazz Quartet, which would earn praise as a quintessential cool combo, got its start as the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. But even those with weaker links to bop—Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Paul Desmond, Art Pepper—could not avoid its pervasive influence. They realized that bop was the defining style of their generation, and that even an attempt to sidestep the idiom would invariably be interpreted as rebellion against it.

Davis had left Parker’s band at the close of 1948, disturbed by Bird’s increasingly erratic and self-destructive behavior. His new source of inspiration, arranger Gil Evans, was in many ways the antithesis of Parker. A dowdy, introspective country boy from Canada, Evans came to Fifty-second Street clubs wearing a cap and carrying a paper sack full of radishes, munching on them during the performance. “Man, he was something else,” Davis would write in his autobiography. “I didn’t know
any
white people like him.”
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Evans enjoyed little name recognition at the time, even within jazz circles. His biggest claim to fame, to the extent he enjoyed any, was due to his forward-looking arranging for the Claude Thornhill orchestra.

The Thornhill band was a jumble of contradictions: it was sweet and hot by turns; progressive and nostalgic—both to an extreme; overtly commercial, yet also aspiring to transform jazz into art music. Like Paul Whiteman, Thornhill may have only obscured his place in history by straddling so many different styles. Chroniclers of the music, not knowing what to do with this range of sounds, prefer to relegate Thornhill to a footnote and dismiss him as a popularizer or some sort of Claude Debussy of jazz. True, this band was best known for its shimmering, impressionistic sound, exemplified in Thornhill’s theme “Snowfall.” But this was only one facet of the Thornhill band. Evans, in particular, brought a harder, bop-oriented edge to the group, contributing solid arrangements of modern jazz pieces such as “Anthropology,” “Donna Lee,” and “Yardbird Suite.” In due course, these songs would become jazz standards, practice-room fodder for legions of musicians, but at the time Evans was one of the few arrangers interested in translating them into a big band format.

Yet Evans was equally skillful in developing the more contemplative side of the Thornhill band. His later work with Davis would draw on many devices—static harmonies, unusual instruments (for jazz) such as French horn and tuba, rich voicings—refined during his time with Thornhill. Gerry Mulligan would also contribute arrangements to the Thornhill band, and later credited the leader with “having taught me the greatest lesson in dynamics, the art of underblowing.” He described the Thornhill sound as one of “controlled violence”—perhaps an apt characterization of the cool movement as a whole.
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Another leading light of the later cool school, Lee Konitz, also participated in the 1947 Thornhill band. Although Miles Davis’s work the following year would be dubbed the
Birth of the Cool
(an inspired—and influential—title only added several years after the fact by a savvy marketing mind at Capitol Records), the Thornhill band was its acknowledged model in many respects. By implication, the Thornhill 1946–47 band should be seen as the “incubation” of the cool. In Davis’s words: “The
Birth of the Cool
album came from some of the sessions we did trying to sound like Claude Thornhill’s band. We wanted that sound, but the difference was that we wanted it as small as possible.”
³