The History of Jazz (67 page)

Born in Indianapolis in 1923, Wes was a member of a musical family that also included bassist Monk Montgomery and pianist/vibraphonist Buddy Montgomery. Despite a late start—he did not begin playing the guitar until he was almost twenty years old—and a lack of formal training, Wes quickly developed into a distinctive stylist and a quirky but exquisite improviser. He never made much traction in learning to read music, or even chord symbols, but this hardly hindered his progress. Within months, Wes was working on gigs with his brothers and other local musicians. A reluctant traveler, Montgomery went on the road with Lionel Hampton in the late 1940s, but returned to Indianapolis in 1950 where he raised a family, worked by day in a radio factory, and performed at night.

Montgomery’s career might well have ended in obscurity in this setting. However, an enthusiastic recommendation by Cannonball Adderley led to the Riverside label’s signing Montgomery in 1959. Under the direction of producer Orrin Keepnews, Montgomery recorded extensively over the next several years in jazz combo settings with top-quality sidemen, creating a number of milestone performances, including “Four on Six,” “West Coast Blues,” and “Besame Mucho.” A modest man, with recurring doubts about his self-taught technique, Montgomery ultimately made a virtue out of his unconventional methods of playing the guitar. Whether through necessity or choice, he pared down the guitar vocabulary of the bebop years, replacing the convoluted, note-filled phrases of the post-Christian period with taut, uncluttered solos. Using his thumb instead of a pick, Montgomery produced a vibrant, singing tone on the instrument, reinforced by his frequent use of octave melody lines. Montgomery’s later work, produced by Creed Taylor, found his playing increasingly featured in lackluster settings with syrupy strings. By the time of his final projects with the A&M label, Montgomery was relegated to playing cover versions of Beatles songs and other pop/rock tunes. But even these recordings were not without their moments, and they had at least the benefit of broadening Montgomery’s audience— indeed, Montgomery’s
A Day in the Life
release became the biggest-selling jazz record of 1967. The guitarist did not live long enough to enjoy the full benefits of this success. The following year he succumbed to a heart attack at age forty-five.

As Montgomery’s late-career switch to a more pop/rock-oriented format should make clear, the soul jazz idiom was showing its age by the late 1960s. For many years, the soul jazz players had managed to maintain a solid following among the black working class. But other musical styles were now on the rise, usurping this audience. The Motown sound, jazz-rock fusion, and other related idioms reflected a slicker, more contemporary facet of African American music. The 1970s saw the completion of this trend, with the urban market for soul jazz almost completely displaced by funk, disco, reggae, soul, and rock. Jazz devotees sometimes groused that this shift reflected a watering down of standards in black popular music. To some degree, this may have been true. But what these critics missed was that the most talented artists in these new styles—Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone, Minnie Riperton, Bill Withers, Earth, Wind & Fire, and others— were offering listeners a body of music that was, for the most part, fresher and more creative than the increasingly predictable soul jazz regurgitations of gutbucket blues and organ-and-tenor groove tunes.

On a broader level, the entire hard-bop movement was similarly in danger of running out of steam. By 1960, hard bop, in the opinion of historian James Lincoln Collier, “had come to a dead end.” Amiri Baraka, viewing the music from a much different perspective than Collier, reached essentially the same conclusion in his book
Blues People
: hard bop, “sagging under its own weight, had just about destroyed itself” by the close of the 1950s. It had become “a self-conscious celebration of cliché, and an actual debilitation of the most impressive ideas to come out of bebop.”
²¹
The ideological distance between these two critics can be gauged by the fact that Collier follows his denunciation of hard bop by praising the superiority of the Dixieland revival, while Jones’s critique is in the context of a paean to free jazz. The fact that they could agree on the degraded state of hard bop, post-1960, is revealing. There may have been debates about the line of succession, but many concurred that the old king was dead.

Yet both critics go too far. As we have seen, Blakey and Silver—the two main protagonists in the birth of hard bop—led some of their finest bands during the 1960s. Blue Note, the label most responsible for promoting the style, refused to be limited by their customers’ preconceived notions about the so-called “Blue Note sound”: during this decade, the label released iconoclastic projects such as Cecil Taylor’s
Unit Structures
, Eric Dolphy’s
Out to Lunch
, and Ornette Coleman’s
Love Call
. Most listeners would have had trouble linking these projects to the traditional Blakey-Silver approach, but other, less radical Blue Note releases showed that there could be a meeting point between hard bop and the avant-garde. Important projects such as Andrew Hill’s
Point of Departure
, Bobby Hutcherson’s
Dialogue
, and Jackie McLean’s
Let Freedom Ring
were anything but drab repetitions of old hard-bop formulas. A host of other Blue Note projects by Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, and others also made it clear that this idiom was far from exhausted.

Anyone who doubted that hard-bop stylings could adapt and evolve during the 1960s need merely listen to pianist Andrew Hill’s 1960s recordings for Blue Note. Few fans did so at the time—and it is testimony to the label’s commitment to this artist that Blue Note continued to release new music by the pianist throughout the decade despite his poor sales. Hill, born in Chicago in 1931, drew on a wide range of influences at an early stage in his development, studying with mentors as diverse as Bill Russo and Paul Hindemith, and gigging with beboppers and rhythm-and-blues bands. Hill’s mature work was a strange amalgamation, prickly and cerebral by turns, and not targeted at crossover airplay like so many other Blue Note releases from the period. At the time, his music was too “inside” to be embraced by the avant-garde, but too “difficult” to appeal to most soul jazz and hard-bop fans. Yet history has validated his importance: his hybrid of experimentalism and formalism, dissonance and tonality, above all his focus on pushing at the limits of musical structures while still respecting their value, have made Hill an influential role model for many later pianists. At the time of Hill’s death in 2007, one could hear echoes of his work in leading younger-generation artists such as Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, and Matthew Shipp.

Two preeminent jazz bandleaders of the era—Charles Mingus and Miles Davis— also drew inspiration from the hard-bop style, albeit transforming it in the process. Mingus’s music during this period is especially interesting when viewed from the perspective of hard bop. He drew heavily on the same ingredients that had proven successful for Blakey and Silver: an appreciation for African American roots music such as gospel and blues; a zest for hard-swinging, often funky playing; a rigorous schooling in the bebop idiom; a renewed emphasis on formalism and the possibilities of jazz composition; and a determination to exploit the full expressive range of the traditional horns-plus-rhythm jazz combo. Despite these similarities, few critics of the period saw Mingus as part of the hard-bop school. Yet his mature musical explorations rarely ventured far afield from this ethos. Had Mingus recorded for Blue Note and drawn on the services of other musicians affiliated with that label, these links would have been more evident. As it stands, he is typically seen as a musician who defies category—more a gadfly, skilled at disrupting hegemonies rather than supporting the current trends in play. Mingus is remembered as a progressive who never really embraced the freedom principle and a traditionalist who constantly tinkered with and subverted the legacies of the past. Yet for all these contradictions, his ouevre has stood the test of time and has grown in influence while others more easy to pigeonhole have faded from view.

This convergence of conflicting influences was a product of Mingus’s development as a musician. His early biography is the history of a heterogeneous series of allegiances to a variety of styles. Known as a steadfast advocate of modern jazz, Mingus had actually been late to the party. Under the sway of Ellington, the younger Mingus had denounced bebop, going so far as to claim that his friend Buddy Collette could play as well as Bird. But when he changed his mind, he did so—in typical Mingus fashion—with a vengeance. “Charles Mingus loved Bird, man,” Miles Davis later recalled, “almost like I have never seen nobody love.”
²²
Later Mingus passed through a phase where cool jazz was a predominant influence, and even aligned himself for a time with the Tristano school. His relationship with the free players was even more complex, with Mingus vacillating from disdain to extravagant praise. These various strata were underpinned by Mingus’s early study of classical music, diligent practice on the cello, and rapt listening to Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel, and Strauss, among others. This was an odd musical house of cards, in which Strauss’s
Death and Transfiguration
and the Duke’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” were precariously balanced against one another.

The miracle of Mingus’s music was that he could develop a coherent and moving personal style out of this hodgepodge of influences. A generation later, such eclecticism—the “style without a style”—would increasingly become the norm in the jazz world. Jazz players would aspire to be historians, using the bandstand as a lectern, the bells of their horns quoting a series of textbook examples. Alas, only a fine line often separates these histories from mere histrionics: hearing many latter-day players struggle to tie together the various strands, most often serving only awkwardly to regurgitate the past, makes it all the more clear how extraordinary was Mingus’s ability to ascend and descend through the various roots and branches of the jazz family tree. Then again, Mingus had the advantage of learning these styles firsthand—he was among a select group who could boast of having worked as sideman for Armstrong, Ellington, and Parker, the three towering giants of the first half-century of jazz, not to mention having served alongside Tatum and Powell, Norvo and Hampton, Dolphy and Getz, Eldridge and Gillespie. This was jazz history of a different sort, imbibed directly and not learned in a school or from a recording. Perhaps because of this training, perhaps merely due to his sheer force of personality, Mingus managed not only to embrace a world of music but to engulf it in an overpowering bear hug. Despite these many linkages to jazz history, his music sounded neither derivative nor imitative. Whether playing a down-home blues, a silky ballad, an abstract tone poem, a New Orleans two-step, or a freewheeling jam, his work was immediately identifiable, bearing the unique imprimatur of Charles Mingus.

A few months after his birth in Nogales, Arizona, on April 22, 1922, Charles Mingus lost his mother, Harriet, to myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart. The child was raised mostly in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles by a prim and devout stepmother who advocated spiritual flagellation, and an abusive father, Sergeant Charles Mingus Sr., who simply handed out earthly whippings. Around the age of six, Mingus began learning to play a Sears, Roebuck trombone. Studies on the cello followed, and for a time Mingus performed with the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic. Lloyd Reese, who trained two generations of Southern California’s finest jazz talent, helped transform the youngster from a classical cellist into a jazz bassist; his efforts were supplemented by other teachers including jazz bassist Red Callender and classical bassist Herman Rheinschagen. With diligent practice and a clear goal—to be the world’s greatest on his instrument—Mingus developed quickly into a solid player in a Jimmy Blanton mold.

From the start, composition also fascinated Mingus. While still a teenager he wrote “Half-Mast Inhibition” and “The Chill of Death”—works he proudly revived and recorded decades later. He learned traditional jazz at the source, gigging with Kid Ory in 1942 and Louis Armstrong in 1943. His late initiation into the world of bop came, oddly, when he joined an LA band of white would-be boppers, including Parker’s most fanatical disciple, Dean Benedetti (who later gave up performing to trail Parker from gig to gig, a portable recording device in tow, aiming to capture the altoist’s solos for posterity). In time, Mingus was jamming with Bird and immersing himself in modern jazz. Yet his early recordings show that other jazz styles continued to be a source of inspiration. Tracing a lineage through these efforts is not easy: the shadow of Ellington looms over many early recordings (and would never entirely be absent from Mingus’s music); his trio work with Red Norvo and Tal Farlow from the early 1950s was, in contrast, bop of the highest order; Mingus’s ensuing projects for the Debut label also included noteworthy modern jazz sessions, but of a much different flavor, especially on the dazzling Massey Hall concert recording with Parker, Gillespie, Roach, and Powell; these efforts coexisted with a series of involvements with various cool players, ranging from Getz to Tristano. Indeed, the cool style, for a time, seemed like it might become a decisive influence. The bassist’s 1954
Jazzical Moods
, for example, reveals a cerebral and restrained Mingus very much at odds with the hot-blooded extrovert of a few years later.

It was not until the late 1950s that these different allegiances began to be subsumed into a more distinct, personal style. These years constituted a prolific and exceptionally creative period for Mingus, as documented by a number of outstanding projects, including
Pithecanthropus Erectus
from 1956,
Tijuana Moods
,
East Coasting
, and
The Clown
from 1957, and
Blues and Roots
and
Mingus Ah Um
from 1959. Some of Mingus’s finest music from this period was not released at the time. As a result, his impact on the jazz world of the late 1950s may have been diluted compared to what it might otherwise have been. Yet, viewed cumulatively, Mingus’s efforts from the era represent landmark accomplishments. His mature style had now blossomed into full-fledged artistry, and was evident in the music’s exuberance, its excesses, its delight in the combination of opposites. Here, the vulgar rubs shoulders with royalty: a stately melody is bent out of shape by sassy counterpoint lines; a lilting 6/8 rhythm is juxtaposed against a roller-coaster double-time 4/4; the twelve-bar blues degenerates into semi-anarchy; tempos and moods shift, sometimes violently.