The History of Jazz (65 page)

After a time, Roach regrouped, forming a quintet with trumpeter Kenny Dorham; in the wake of Dorham’s departure the drummer employed Booker Little, another trumpeter fated to die in his twenties. Although these were solid units, Roach’s musical interests were increasingly taking him further afield from the hard-bop style. For the most part, his strongest later works would look elsewhere for inspiration: some would incorporate elements of free jazz, or explore different aspects of percussion music, or feature vocal work (often provided by Abbey Lincoln, his wife from 1962 to 1970), or even embrace hip-hop. Some fans were shocked when he laid down tracks for rapper Fab 5 Freddy—could this be the same drummer who played with Bird on Fifty-second Street?—but anyone who had followed the career of this forward-looking percussionist knew that Roach took delight in expanding his own musical horizons. In other instances, he would put his rhythmic stamp on symphonic concerts, dance performances, gospel singing, or theater productions. Roach was also an early and ardent supporter of the civil rights movement, an advocacy that influenced his music. “Two theories exist,” he told an interviewer in the early 1970s. “One is that art is for the sake of art, which is true. The other theory, which is also true, is that the artist is like a secretary. … He keeps a record of his time, so to speak. … My music tries to say how I really feel, and I hope it mirrors in some way how black people feel in the United States.”
¹⁷

It would be left to another modern jazz drummer to push the hard-bop style to the next level. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Art Blakey was already working in the local steel mills at age fourteen. Music provided an escape from this grueling day-to-day labor. In the evenings, Blakey would play piano at local venues—he had received a few lessons and showed a ready knack for music. When a young Erroll Garner joined the band, Blakey switched to drums. (Was there a lingering influence? As a percussionist, Blakey came to delight in sudden dynamic shifts and odd interjections, strikingly similar to Garner’s idiosyncratic approach to the piano.) In 1939, Blakey joined Fletcher Henderson and later worked with Mary Lou Williams before getting his first taste of modern jazz as drummer with Billy Eckstine’s bop-oriented big band. Here Blakey crossed paths with Gillespie, Parker, and a host of other forward-looking young musicians. Blakey revealed his affinity for the new music, forging a crisp, driving drum sound marked by a ferocious cymbal attack and punctuated unpredictably by swelling crescendos, brash rolls, and careening bombs. Blakey would later serve as a sideman on a number of important modern jazz recording sessions, including many of Thelonious Monk’s finest early efforts. In the late 1940s, Blakey also led a large band and a smaller combo under the name Jazz Messengers. In the mid-1950s, he revived the name with a co-op quintet that featured pianist Horace Silver and a front line of trumpeter Kenny Dorham and tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley. The Jazz Messengers, in various formats, would remain a major force in the jazz world for the next thirty years. In the process, it served also as a finishing school for up-and-coming jazz stars, many of whom would become important bandleaders in their own right.

Blakey’s early efforts with Silver kept faithful to the bebop model. But in early 1955, the Messengers embarked on a new direction with their recording of “The Preacher,” a funky blues piece infused with elements of gospel music. This recording was immensely popular and widely imitated by later hard-bop bands. The time was ripe for this return to the roots. Rhythm and blues and the gospel sounds of the sanctified church were starting to exert a powerful influence on American popular music. Singers as ostensibly different as Mahalia Jackson and Ray Charles were drawing on these same traditions in pursuing their sharply contrasting sacred and secular agendas. A new generation of Chicago blues artists, such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, was similarly showing that traditional sounds could revitalize contemporary musical styles, and over the next few years rock and roll would incorporate many of these same ingredients into a brusque, clangorous approach whose impact still reverberates. The jazz idiom also benefited from a return to these first principles of African American music—at least for a time. Eventually, these funky and soulful sounds would become stale clichés in the jazz world, but for a period in the 1950s their simpler attitudes—grooving two-steps, guttural backbeats, insistent melody lines drenched with blues notes—offered a healthy alternative to the more cerebral and aggressive strands of modern jazz.

Silver and Blakey parted ways in 1956, with the drummer retaining the Jazz Messengers name for his band, while the pianist continued working with Mobley. Both Blakey and Silver relied on the hard-bop sound in their combos, at times drawing on the “down home” approach exemplified by “The Preacher” but also refusing to be limited by it. Silver is often described as a key exponent of this funk-inflected style, yet his major compositions reveal, in fact, a refreshing diversity. These efforts include explorations of 6/8 rhythms (“Señor Blues”), Caribbean-Latin hybrids (“Song for My Father”), medium-tempo jaunts (“Silver Serenade”), free-spirited romps (“Nutville”), jazz waltzes (“Pretty Eyes”), and serene ballads (“Peace”). The unifying factor in these works is not so much Silver’s funkiness, but rather the sharp focus of his musical vision. His sound is uncluttered. His melodies are succinct and memorable. The rhythms are propulsive without being overbearing. The obsession with virtuosity, so characteristic of bebop, is almost entirely absent and never missed.

Art Blakey also worked to broaden the scope of hard bop. But with Blakey, much of the evolution in his music was driven by changes in the personnel of the Jazz Messengers. After separating from Silver, Blakey explored a wide range of possibilities. In 1957 alone, Blakey led sessions for eight different record labels. Around this time he renewed his musical relationship with Thelonious Monk; put together a percussion ensemble; led a fifteen-piece big band; spearheaded small combos that featured, among others, Jackie McLean, Johnny Griffin, and Donald Byrd; and, with the Messengers, even gave the movement a flagship album with his
Hard Bop
release. For a period, he relied heavily on writers outside his band, enlisting the services of Duke Jordan, Mal Waldron, and Jimmy Heath. But in time Blakey realized that his greatest successes came through nurturing the talents around him, as composers as well as players. The band’s 1958 Blue Note release
Moanin’
mesmerized listeners with pianist Bobby Timmons’s title track—which evoked church music and early African American call-and-response refrains—as well as with “Blues March” and “Along Came Betty” by Messenger saxophonist Benny Golson.
Moanin’
remains one of the defining statements of the hard-bop idiom, largely because of Blakey’s willingness to led his sidemen take the lead in crafting the music.

This unit of the Messengers also benefited from the gritty contributions of Lee Morgan, an impassioned improviser and, in many ways, the quintessential hard-bop trumpeter. There was no brass player better able to extract the maximum amount of emotional energy from the bluesy minor-key groove numbers that characterized the new sound. A Philadelphia native, Morgan had honed his skills in the working-class taverns and clubs of his hometown before joining Dizzy Gillespie’s big band while still in his teens. Originally under the sway of Clifford Brown, Morgan came to develop a more personal style that mixed pungent short phrases with swinging longer lines and repeated figures. After leaving Blakey in 1961, Morgan recorded extensively as a leader for the Blue Note label and achieved a major success with his 1963 staccato funk outing “The Sidewinder,” which eventually reached number twenty-five on the
Billboard
chart. Morgan spent much of the rest of his career trying to recreate this winning formula, although he was also capable of probing, less jukebox-friendly artistic statements, such as
Search for the New Land
, an exquisite release recorded only a few weeks after “The Sidewinder.” One of the most spirited improvisers of his generation, Morgan was killed in 1972 between sets at a Lower East Side nightclub, shot with a pistol by a jealous lover.

Benny Golson left the Messengers in 1959—prodded in part by Blakey’s expressed distaste for the overly arranged drum parts on his charts—and formed the Jazztet, a combo that he led with Art Farmer. This ensemble, which for a brief period challenged the Messengers as the preeminent hard-bop band of the day, lasted until 1962. Its work, superbly realized on the 1960 release
Meet the Jazztet
, relied heavily on Golson’s writing. This music represented a different facet of the hard-bop sound, less funky, more song-oriented, and in many ways modeled on the work of Golson’s former employer Tadd Dameron. In this regard, Golson ranks among a handful of jazz composers (among them Jimmy Heath, Gigi Gryce, Oliver Nelson, and Quincy Jones) whose stately and uncluttered style, reflecting firm roots in the Swing Era and stylistic affinities with the West Coast sound, has tended to be overshadowed by the more extroverted efforts that dominated the jazz world during these transition years. In time, many of these players gravitated to work as composer-arrangers, often outside the context of jazz music.

After Golson’s departure, Blakey hired tenorist Hank Mobley for a spell, recording a stirring nightclub performance under the title
At the Jazz Corner of the World
during this period. The addition of saxophonist Wayne Shorter later in the year initiated a new expansion in the scope of the band, which was solidified by the arrival of trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and pianist Cedar Walton in 1961. Shorter’s elliptical manner of improvising and composing would come to exert a decisive influence on the Messengers, signaling a break with the rhythm-and-blues orientation of the Morgan-Timmons-Golson unit. A Newark, New Jersey, native who studied fine arts during his adolescence and early teens, Shorter did not take up music until age sixteen. The work of his mature years would retain the painter’s singular vision and sensitivity to subtle shadings: indeed, many of Shorter’s finest pieces could be described as tone poems evoking mental vistas. “I was thinking of misty landscapes with wild flowers and strange, dimly-seen shapes,” was Shorter’s explanation of his masterful
Speak No Evil
recording,
¹⁸
but this description would be equally appropriate in characterizing many of the saxophonist’s other works. After high school, Shorter worked for a year in the Singer sewing machine factory, saving the money he needed to attend New York University as a music major. While in the army, Shorter continued to visit Manhattan on weekend passes, where he was befriended by John Coltrane, who would become a role model for the younger player. In time, Shorter would develop a deeply personal take on Coltrane’s approach, using more space and adding a languorous, off-centered manner of phrasing wholly his own.

The advent of Freddie Hubbard to the band represented a less radical break with the past. Hubbard shared many similarities with his predecessor Morgan. Like Morgan, his trumpet playing was fiery, propelled by insistent rhythms, but also softened by a warm, full tone. Hubbard made greater use of the lyrical potential of the instrument, developing into a stellar ballad player, and offered a slightly more polished alternative to the sometimes rough-and-tumble Morgan. But he built his reputation on his nonpareil mastery of medium and fast tempos, where he stood out as an intimidating player you wouldn’t want to battle at a jam session. An outstanding improviser with solid technique, Hubbard was an ideal choice for Blakey. Like many other Indianapolis-born jazz musicians (such as Wes Montgomery, Buddy Montgomery, Carl Perkins, and Leroy Vinnegar), Hubbard showed an uncanny natural feel for the music. How did he learn to play the trumpet? “I just picked it up and started playing,” he once explained to an interviewer.
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In 1958, Hubbard came to New York, where he gigged with Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, Philly Joe Jones, and J. J. Johnson before joining the Messengers. Hubbard fit comfortably into the band’s hard-bop approach, but his musical aspirations also took him on productive detours into other styles. Even before joining Blakey, he had participated on Ornette Coleman’s
Free Jazz
session, one of the most adventurous recording projects of the period, and he also shows up as sideman on albums by John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Randy Weston, and Oliver Nelson. His leader dates for Blue Note from the 1960s, including
Hub-Tones
and
Ready for Freddie
, are outstanding examples of the hard-bop style. His ensuing work for the CTI label tended to be a slicker product, incorporating some elements of the jazz-rock fusion idiom; but the best of these projects, most notably
Red Clay
from 1970 and
First Light
from 1972, were effective vehicles for the trumpeter. The next decade found Hubbard vacillating between mainstream jazz and funk-pop offerings of varying quality (some of them later repudiated by Hubbard himself). He returned to a more straight-ahead style in the 1980s, and although he still commanded respect as a major soloist, his accomplishments tended to be obscured by the rising stars of Woody Shaw, Wynton Marsalis, and Terence Blanchard. An injury to his lip in 1992, complicated by an infection, came close to ending his career. Hubbard continued to record and perform until his death in 2008, and though his late-period work is several steps below the masterful output of his earlier years, his legacy is secure as one of the most formidable trumpeters in the history of the music.

With Hubbard and Shorter fronting the band, Blakey electrified audiences and produced a series of outstanding recordings, including
Caravan
,
Kyoto
,
Three Blind Mice
, and
Ugetsu
. Already a solid soloist, Shorter blossomed as a composer during his Blakey years. “This is for Albert,” “Lester Left Town,” “Children of the Night,” and other Shorter contributions bespoke a far greater sophistication than the rhythm-and-blues-influenced numbers that had dominated Blakey’s late 1950s repertoire. Hubbard’s extroverted improvisations served as an attractive foil for Shorter’s moody lines, while the addition of trombonist Curtis Fuller completed a potent horn triumvirate that gave depth to the Messengers’ sound. Until the saxophonist’s departure to join the Miles Davis Quintet in September 1964, this edition of the Messengers stood out as the most captivating mainstream jazz combo of its day. Over fifteen years would elapse before a Blakey band, then bolstered by the presence of Wynton and Branford Marsalis, would cause such a stir on the jazz scene.