The History of Jazz (64 page)

Yet one should not minimize the cerebral aspect of his work. In an often-cited essay, Gunther Schuller analyzed Rollins’s style of improvisation, calling attention to the tenorist’s skill in constructing solos through the manipulation of simple musical motives. Rollins excelled in using these as thematic material—restating them, varying them, elaborating on them—a jazz equivalent of the development section in sonata form. Schuller’s observation may have made the spontaneous flow of Rollins’s creativity sound like the result of a pseudo-mathematical process. (And Schuller glossed over the fact that a similar claim could be made for many earlier jazz artists. Is there a better example of thematic development than King Oliver’s solo on “Dipper Mouth Blues” from 1923?) Still, much truth lay at the heart of these observations. At a time when jazz solos were increasingly sounding like a discontinuous flow of scales and licks, Rollins built his improvisations the old-fashioned way, phrase by phrase. This gave them a solidity, a strength, much like a house built carefully, one brick at a time—alongside these edifices, the work of other, lesser talents, like the fairytale piglet’s house, seemed mere palaces of straw, losing their shape after the first huff and puff. Even so, Rollins’s reaction to Schuller was equivocal. “When I read that I was sort of taken aback, because I didn’t know what I was doing,” the tenorist later explained. “It made me self-conscious about playing. It took me a while to get over that.”
¹⁶
This may well be construed as a disavowal of Schuller’s thesis, but just as likely, it reveals how instinctive the whole process of thematic improvisation had become to Rollins.

Perhaps no jazz musician has ever had a more intense upbringing in the heart of the jazz world than Sonny Rollins. Born in New York on September 9, 1930, Rollins was always surrounded by world-class players. While still in his teens, and after only two years playing the sax, he spent idle hours rehearsing with Thelonious Monk. During his high school years, Rollins fronted a band with other like-minded youngsters: Jackie McLean, Art Taylor, and Kenny Drew—no typical student band, this. At age eighteen he participated in the classic Bud Powell’s Modernists session for Blue Note, a date that could be pegged as the birth of the hard bop style. Other early performances and recordings find him alongside Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, J. J. Johnson, and many other stars of the postwar jazz scene. In the mid-1950s, he was a member of the Clifford Brown–Max Roach Quintet, a unit that ranks, by any measure, among the most important working bands of the decade. Right before the breakup of that group, following trumpeter Brown’s death, Rollins participated in another classic session: the “Tenor Madness” date where he matched wits with John Coltrane in a historic pairing. By the time Rollins began releasing his many classic recordings as a leader in the late 1950s, he could boast a curriculum vitae unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries in the jazz world.

Flourishing in these settings would, one might think, dispel any self-doubts Rollins might have had. Yet they apparently had the opposite effect, leaving a permanent undercurrent of self-criticism and dissatisfaction below Rollins’s calm exterior. Fans have grown familiar with this attitude—few were surprised when Rollins decided not to release the recording of his celebrated 2007 Carnegie Hall concert, which, despite rave reviews, did not live up to his own expectations. This was simply the tenorist’s standard
modus operandi
, as demonstrated over the course of a career clouded by retracings, temporary retirements, and disappearances from the scene for practice and self-assessment. A half-century before the nixed Carnegie Hall album, Schuller’s essay had caused Rollins even greater anxiety as he tried to live up to its theoretical implications. Similarly, the advent of Ornette Coleman and free jazz helped to spur another period of introspection. However, Rollins’s most famous sabbatical from the jazz scene, which lasted from August 1959 to November 1961, has taken on mythic proportions in the artist’s biography. This period often found the famous jazz star strolling up and down the Williamsburg Bridge on many evenings, playing his horn for the astonished passersby.

At the time of his departure, Rollins was at the peak of his fame. During the previous four years he had put together a remarkable body of work. A series of tenacious trio and quartet recordings were at the core of his oeuvre. No tenorist has ever played better when accompanied simply by bass and drums, as Rollins’s work from this period makes clear:
Way Out West
, featuring him with Ray Brown and Shelly Manne from March 1957; the seminal trio recordings from a November 1957 date at the Village Vanguard; and
Freedom Suite
with Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach from the following February. Among the quartet projects,
Worktime
from December 1955 stands out as a major statement, perhaps Rollins’s finest to that point in his career. This was followed by the even more lauded
Saxophone Colossus
from June 1956, and
The Sound of Sonny
, with pianist Sonny Clark, made one year later. These efforts, as well as his various guest appearances with other artists, such as the aforementioned showdown with Coltrane, made it clear that Rollins ranked among the premier improvisers of his generation.

Yet Rollins, as we have noted, was dissatisfied. He went into seclusion for over two years, practicing, refining his craft, reading, thinking. His return was eagerly anticipated by jazz fans—especially given the superheated atmosphere of the jazz world circa 1960. New sounds were in the air. At no time in the history of jazz music had the mandate to progress been felt so pervasively by the leading players. At times it seemed as if progressivism were the only aesthetic measure that really counted for many critics and some fans at this juncture in the music’s evolution. Rollins felt these pressures yet ultimately reacted with ambivalence. When he returned, Rollins may have been a changed man—during his sabbatical he had become a Rosicrucian, studied philosophy, exercised, practiced—but his music was strikingly unchanged, disappointing those who felt that Rollins, like Coltrane and Coleman, would create a totally different sound. His comeback album,
The Bridge
, was a solid effort, but found Rollins again playing jazz standards with a fairly traditional combo. The main change here was the addition of guitarist Jim Hall, a subtle accompanist and inspired soloist, but hardly the “new thing” in jazz.

Post-1960, Rollins’s career tended to display tentative forays into the latest trend, followed inevitably by a return to more familiar ground. For a time, Rollins hired some musicians associated with Ornette Coleman, but never made the full plunge into “freedom” music. Later recordings found him flirting with jazz-rock fusion but never assimilating it fully either. When interest in acoustic jazz increased in the 1970s, Rollins obliged by joining McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, and Al Foster for a much-publicized concert tour and recording. But this, too, proved to be a passing phase. In general, latter-day Rollins’s finest moments came in mainstream settings of this sort, where he was challenged by formidable peers—a duet with Tyner, a sax battle with Branford Marsalis, a recording with Tommy Flanagan and Jack DeJohnette—or playing without a band, as on
The Solo Album
from 1985, rather than fronting his often merely adequate working combo.

Rollins’s various retirements, reclusions, and reconsiderations could stand as symbolic of the whole era. Jazz was in a period of transition, of self-examination, of fragmentation into different schools. The music’s modernist tradition, which Rollins epitomized, could no longer simply be taken for granted. Its assumptions—about harmony, melody, rhythm, song structure, instrumentation, and perhaps even more about the social role of jazz music—were constantly being questioned and increasingly found wanting by the more revolutionary musicians of the younger generation. Rollins’s self-doubts were in many ways the same anxieties felt by his whole generation as it struggled to clear a path through this seeming pandemonium. Some looked for even more, for a transfiguring movement, the
next
new thing, that would draw these fragments back together into a new coherence. Others, less sanguine, felt that there would be no more towering figures, titans of the caliber of Armstrong, Ellington, Goodman, or Parker, who could define a whole age, give impetus to an entire generation. Instead jazz, it seemed, was condemned to—or was it blessed by?—a pluralism, in which “next new things” would come and go with amazing alacrity.

HARD BOP, POSTBOP, AND SOUL JAZZ

In the fall of 1953, Max Roach moved to California to replace Shelly Manne as drummer with the Lighthouse All-Stars. This sideman stint lasted only a few months before promoter Gene Norman approached Roach about leading his own band at the California Club. Roach had occasionally taken top billing on the marquee in the past, but by his own admission had never pursued bandleading with serious intent. The Norman proposal, however, spurred Roach to form a working quintet, one that not only would signal a turning point in the drummer’s career but, even more, would stand out as arguably the most influential jazz unit of the early 1950s.

Roach invited the young trumpeter Clifford Brown to serve as coleader. Brown had made his first recordings, as a member of a rhythm-and-blues band, only two years before, but was already being heralded by jazz insiders as a major talent. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 30, 1930, Brown had played the bugle as a youngster, and began trumpet lessons at age twelve. His studies, under the guidance of influential Wilmington jazz educator Robert Lowery, emphasized ear training and basic trumpet technique. For a time, Brown attended Delaware State College as a math major, but by his late teens had decided on a career in jazz. A 1950 car accident—eerily foreshadowing his later death—sidelined Brown for almost a year, but in the interim he practiced the piano and expanded his knowledge of harmony.

Brown’s musical education, thus described, may seem haphazard, but the end result would have been the pride of Juilliard or Eastman. By the time of his emergence on the jazz scene in the mid-1950s, Brown had developed into a poised virtuoso. Perhaps he lacked Gillespie’s range or Miles’s inspired moodiness, but Brown’s tone control, his “fat” sound (literally and metaphorically, given its source in Brown’s chief inspiration, Fats Navarro), and flawless execution stood out even in a jazz world filled with hot young trumpeters. A quarter of a century before Wynton Marsalis straddled the jazz and classical fields, Brown showed a similar precocious talent. Had he been so inclined, Brown could have flourished as an interpreter of the classical repertoire for the trumpet. As it was, he successfully married concert-hall polish with the unbridled energy and creative impetus of modern jazz.

Brown’s work with Roach built on this same combination. The rougher edges of bebop were rounded off with finesse. Composition and arrangement were emphasized. Even when playing standards, the band would usually add an interesting twist to their interpretation, as in the shifting meters of “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” and “What Am I Here For.” In other instances, the unison heads typical of bop would be replaced with counterpoint or harmonized trumpet and saxophone lines. Increasingly, medium tempos were favored, but when pieces were played very fast, the performances still sounded controlled and collected. Even Roach’s most impassioned drum solos reflected a concern with compositional structure and subtle dynamic effects. A lyrical strain was always evident to some degree, but never obscured the prevalent influence of the blues. The music collected these divergent streams into a coherent style, one that still showed an underlying allegiance to the bebop tradition but was tempered by these other currents.

In time, this style would come to be known as hard bop. The Brown-Roach Quintet may not have been the originator of this sound: elements of it can be heard, for example, on the August 1949 Bud Powell combo session for Blue Note, in some of the early 1950s West Coast jazz combos (including the Lighthouse All-Star band Roach had just left), and in the work of two previous Brown employers, Tadd Dameron and Art Blakey. Nor did Brown and Roach explore all the implications of this style of jazz. Yet no group did more to give impetus to the hard-bop idiom than this seminal quintet. Over the next decade, this style would gradually gain acceptance as the dominant mainstream sound of modern jazz.

Even before leaving California, the Brown-Roach Quintet gave notice of its evolving approach to combo playing through a series of recordings made in Hollywood in early August 1954. Two Brown compositions destined to become jazz standards, “Joy Spring” and “Daahoud,” were given definitive performances, graced by exceptional trumpet solos, as was Duke Jordan’s “Jordu.” “Delilah” and “Parisian Thoroughfare,” from the same sessions, further highlighted the thoughtfully arranged, medium-tempo sound that would become widely imitated by later hard-bop ensembles. The following February, the band made additional recordings in New York, producing a number of memorable sides including “Sandu,” a gospeltinged piece that anticipated the later “soul” jazz side of the hard-bop movement. “The Blues Walk,” from the same period, showcased the more assertive side of the combo in a fiery performance climaxed by a dazzling series of “chase” choruses that pitted Brown and saxophonist Harold Land against one another. Soon after this recording, Land was replaced by the young Sonny Rollins, who was featured prominently on the band’s 1956 recordings at Basin Street in New York. This period also witnessed the growing maturity of the quintet’s pianist Richie Powell (brother of Bud Powell), who contributed two compositions to the band’s repertoire—“Powell’s Prances” and “Time”—built on moody minor key themes (also destined to become a trademark of the hard-bop style).

The Brown-Roach Quintet would last little more than two years. In June 1956, Brown was killed in a late-night automobile accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, along with pianist Powell and Powell’s wife Nancy. Brown’s early demise was an ironic tragedy. He was one of the few major modern jazz musicians of the period who had avoided the indignities of substance abuse, who offered younger musicians a worthwhile role model not only in his musicianship but equally in his mature offstage demeanor. If any artist of this generation seemed destined for a long and productive jazz career, it was Clifford Brown—yet he was dead at age twenty-five.