The History of Jazz (66 page)

Horace Silver’s mid-1960s combo might have challenged Blakey’s supremacy in the hard-bop idiom, if only it had lasted longer. Saxophonist Joe Henderson and trumpeter Woody Shaw, two of the most promising younger jazz talents of the day, fronted this edition of Silver’s band, but unfortunately only one studio project,
The Cape Verdean Blues
, captured this lineup in action. Henderson joined the group in 1964, a few months before Shaw’s arrival in the band, and participated on Silver’s notable
Song for My Father
date. This release marked a critical juncture in Silver’s development as a composer, oddly inspired by a return to the Cape Verdean– Portuguese musical roots of his father—a tradition Silver had long dismissed. “My dad, through the years, had always said to me, ‘Why don’t you take some of this Portuguese folk music and put it into jazz?’ I never could see it. To me it always seemed corny.”
²⁰
But a trip to Rio de Janeiro, where the inviting sounds of bossa nova were in the air, inspired Silver to attempt just such a Cape Verdean–jazz fusion. The resulting album became one of the biggest-selling releases in the history of the Blue Note label. Silver’s follow-up project,
The Cape Verdean Blues
, built on this same foundation and featured, in addition to Henderson and Shaw, guest artist J. J. Johnson. Shaw had already performed and recorded with Eric Dolphy, whose influence was reflected in the trumpeter’s use of wide intervals and his insistence on pushing harmonic structures to their breaking point. Shaw did this through the use of dissonances and melodic patterns that stretched the underlying chord changes and occasionally danced on the dividing line between tonal and atonal improvisation. Saxophonist Henderson was equally adept at this type of deconstructive phraseology. The title of his Blue Note release
In ‘n Out
could serve as an apt description of Henderson’s approach, in which his sandpaper sax lines insistently rub away at the hard-bop structures undergirding the music.

Shaw’s later career was defined by deferred gratification amid many setbacks. The trumpeter did not receive widespread recognition in jazz circles until the late 1970s, when he made a series of celebrated recordings for the CBS label. Here his sinewy melodic lines often superimposed jagged melodic fragments and modal stop-and-start phrases, spiced with a heavy dose of fourths, on top of conventional chord structures. This was an increasingly faddish sound of the period—if intervals were fashions, the perfect fourth would have been the jazz equivalent of the leisure suit during the late 1970s—but no horn player employed this technique with more verve and sheer energy than Shaw. And no jazz trumpeter of the day seemed to have a brighter future. Yet by the early 1980s, Shaw’s prominence was abruptly eclipsed by the arrival of Wynton Marsalis, who not only was quickly tagged as the new young lion of the trumpet, but also succeeded Shaw as the major focus of jazz promotion efforts at CBS Records. Still other events conspired to derail Shaw’s career: a broken relationship, depression, substance abuse, failing eyesight. A career that looked as though it would take off through the stratosphere now faltered, and finally came crashing down when Shaw lost his arm in a mysterious 1988 fall in the path of a New York subway train. This accident—if it was, in fact, an accident—was followed by a number of setbacks during the ensuing hospitalization, which led to the trumpeter’s death from kidney failure ten weeks later.

Henderson’s career, in contrast, revealed a gradual ascendancy, a pilgrim’s progress marked by a steady accumulation of good works with few lapses. He recorded extensively for Blue Note in the mid-1960s, both as a leader—resulting in major efforts such as
In ‘n Out
,
Inner Urge, Mode for Joe
, and
The Kicker
—and as a sideman. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Henderson undertook a series of gigs with such high-profile bands as Miles Davis’s, Herbie Hancock’s, and Blood, Sweat and Tears. During this same period, Henderson continued to evolve as a bandleader, a process documented on a number of solid recordings for the Milestone label. These were laudable achievements, but in retrospect only a preamble to Henderson’s widespread beatification, as he approached his fiftieth birthday, as a leading tenor of the times. This second phase in Henderson’s career was kicked off by the magisterial
State of the Tenor
releases on Blue Note, recorded live with a trio at the Village Vanguard in 1985. Such an effort demanded—and survived—comparison with Rollins’s classic trio project (same label, same club, same instruments, same multivolume format) from 1957. In the 1990s, Henderson enjoyed the greatest critical success—and record sales—of his career, with a series of theme albums celebrating Billy Strayhorn, Miles Davis, and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Possessed of a powerful tenor voice, Henderson skillfully adapted the leading influences of his formative years into a vehement personal style. The Coltrane element is reflected most clearly on early Blue Note recordings where Henderson is accompanied by McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones; the Rollins influence comes more to the fore in his midcareer works, especially the various trio projects; and at times a wistful Getz-inspired warmth is evident on Henderson’s 1990s projects, particularly when the tenorist interprets Strayhorn’s “Blood Count” or Jobim’s bossa nova compositions.

Although he appeared on some of the biggest-selling recordings in the history of the Blue Note label (
Song for My Father
,
The Sidewinder
), Henderson never became mesmerized, as did many of his contemporaries, by the commercial potential of soul and funk-oriented music. In this regard, Henderson was something of an exception on the Blue Note roster. Alfred Lion, founder and manager of the Blue Note label, had originally objected to the release of Silver’s “The Preacher,” the piece that established this crossover sound. But skyrocketing sales made Lion a true believer, and in time he was aggressively promoting an assortment of similar recordings. Other labels followed suit, propelling a whole cadre of musicians, of greater and lesser talent, to relative fame (by jazz standards) supported by airplay, jukebox spins, and brisk record sales. Many critics dismissed this “soul jazz” style out of hand, but listeners responded with enthusiasm, boosting the careers of a new crop of jazz stars, including Jimmy Smith, Ramsey Lewis, Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy McGriff, Brother Jack McDuff, Eddie Harris, Ray Bryant, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Wes Montgomery, Les McCann, Lou Donaldson, Stanley Turrentine, and others.

This style drew on a number of historical antecedents. The burgeoning rhythm-and-blues movement of the late 1940s and 1950s profoundly influenced the soul jazz players, as did (tracing the sound even farther back) the blues-drenched Kansas City and Texas tenor traditions. The crowd-pleasing antics of battling sax players, a jazz staple from the 1950s—celebrated by Gordon and Gray, Ammons and Stitt, Cohn and Sims, even Coltrane and Rollins—also anticipated this later idiom. (The successful relaunching of the battling tenors format during the heyday of soul jazz, under the capable hands of Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Johnny Griffin, was no coincidence. It demonstrated how close this time-honored approach was to the newer style.) Bits and pieces of other African American idioms were further tributaries flowing into this hybrid music: big band riffs, urban blues, call-and-response forms, and gospel music, among others.

Soul jazz found its own voice most clearly in the electronically produced tones of the Hammond B-3 organ. The B-3’s rough-and-ready, distorted sounds—in theory, they were intended to emulate “real” instruments, but in practice were
sui generis
— captured the essence of the jazz sensibility, exciting audiences with their unabashed vigor, much as King Oliver’s “dirty” cornet playing had done a generation earlier. Of course, the organ had appeared previously in jazz, mostly at the hands of keyboardists who usually played piano, such as Fats Waller and Count Basie. And it had always figured prominently in African American sacred music. But the secularization of the organ in the jazz world did not gain momentum until the 1950s. Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis’s 1951 recording with Bill Doggett was a pioneering effort in popularizing the tenor-and-organ combination. Around this same time, Wild Bill Davis established an organ trio that would also prove influential. But it was not until the arrival of Jimmy Smith on the jazz scene in the mid-1950s that the Hammond organ achieved wide recognition as a legitimate jazz instrument. In time, a legion of other keyboardists followed Smith’s example and, by the close of the decade, the Hammond organ was firmly established as a mainstay of soul jazz.

Smith had studied piano as a child and later learned to play the string bass. But around 1953, Wild Bill Davis’s work inspired him to devote his energies to the organ. In 1955, Smith, accompanied only by guitar and drums, opened in Atlantic City and soon caused a sensation with his passionate performances: stretching out for forty choruses on “Sweet Georgia Brown,” propelling the band with driving bass lines played on the foot pedals of the organ, exploiting the Hammond’s full range of wails, buzzes, groans, shouts, honks, and screams. Within months, Smith was gigging in New York, where he caught the attention of Alfred Lion. Over the next several years, Smith would undertake dozens of sessions for Blue Note and establish himself as one of the label’s biggest-selling artists. Jukebox singles and radio airplay helped build his career, but Smith frequently ignored the demands of these outlets, recording lengthy works that could never fit on the side of a 45-rpm record. Classic Smith performances, such as “The Champ” and “Back at the Chicken Shack,” might last eight minutes or more, while Smith’s “The Sermon” clocked in at twenty minutes and eleven seconds of gut-wrenching blues. Yet the records sold despite (or perhaps because of) their length. The unrelenting intensity and powerful drive of the music were hypnotic, a soul jazz anticipation of John Coltrane’s marathon performances, which audiences would find similarly compelling a few years later.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, a host of other jazz organists were plowing this same field, promoting a sound that soon would be in danger of becoming a stale cliché. Before long, sales of tenor-and-organ and organ trio records would plummet, and eventually the Hammond B-3 would be taken off the market, replaced in the public’s imagination by the more versatile (but perhaps colder) sounds of “synthesized” music. But during these glory years of the Hammond B-3, audiences could enjoy the work of Jimmy McGriff, Brother Jack McDuff, Shirley Scott, Richard “Groove” Holmes, Johnny “Hammond” Smith, Charles Earland, and other masters of the instrument.

Without the sterling example of Larry Young, one might have thought that the possibilities of the Hammond organ had been exhausted by the mid-1960s. Although Young was well schooled in the soul jazz idiom, he came to reject the narrow funk and blues orientation of most Hammond players. Over the next several years, Young would record a series of important releases for Blue Note that incorporated modal phrasing and denser harmonies, and drew inspiration from John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, free jazz, even hard rock. He would later record with Miles Davis on the influential
Bitches Brew
release, as well as with fellow Davis sidemen John McLaughlin and Tony Williams. His 1970s work with them, recorded under the band name Lifetime, was one of the most promising developments of the jazz-rock fusion movement, although it never achieved the commercial success that many lesser fusion bands enjoyed. This most forward-looking exponent of the Hammond organ, perhaps its final major innovator, was only thirty-eight years old when he died in 1978, the victim of an improperly treated stomach ailment.

The jazz organ would never again match the level of popularity it achieved during the soul jazz years, yet—strange to say—the many advances in synthesizer and programming technology failed to make this comparatively primitive instrument obsolete. Even in the new millennium, the organ is the most popular jazz keyboard outside of the piano, attracting a cadre of dedicated fans and world-class exponents. The glory days of the Hammond B-3 were all but over by the time Joey DeFrancesco was born, in 1971, but he has completely assimilated the tradition of Jimmy Smith and other predecessors, and has introduced new generations of fans to its persuasive sounds via relentless touring, amounting to around two hundred nights on the road in any given year, and more than two dozen recordings as a leader. DeFrancesco has done more than anyone to keep the organ in a prominent position in the jazz world during the new millennium, but he is far from a lone evangelist. A talented cohort of performers—including Gary Versace, Sam Yahel, and John Medeski—has expanded the vocabulary and expressive range of the instrument and moved it beyond the soul jazz clichés of the past.

The electric guitar also played a key role in the soul jazz idiom, sometimes working in tandem with the Hammond organ. This too would quickly become a hackneyed sound, although major players such as Kenny Burrell and Grant Green proved capable of important recordings that transcended the form’s limitations. Burrell’s 1963
Midnight Blue
is a classic hard-bop release, while his
Guitar Forms
project with Gil Evans, from the following year, less easy to categorize, is a major milestone by almost any measure. Grant Green’s
Matador
, recorded in 1964 but not released for fifteen years, finds the bandleader in the inspirational company of Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner, then anchoring John Coltrane’s rhythm section, while Green’s collaborations with pianist Sonny Clark from the early 1960s represent one of the most inspired pairings of piano and guitar in the hard-bop ouevre. Yet of this generation of guitarists, Wes Montgomery stood out as the most skillful in combining commercial appeal with jazz street cred. An incisive soloist with an unsurpassed gift for melodic improvisation, Montgomery was an ideal candidate for crossover success as a pop jazz star. His recordings cover a wide gamut—from straight-ahead to soul jazz to mood music—but his singular talent gave even the most blatantly commercial efforts a stamp of artistry.