A term applied to attempts, chiefly in the 1940s and 1950s, to renew the big band tradition of the 1930s; it is generally associated with the work of Stan Kenton. The movement sought more complex goals for the large jazz ensemble and especially a more advanced vocabulary; in the work of Kenton and his arrangers, like Pete Rugolo and Bob Graettinger, this was expressed almost solely in terms of extreme loudness and dissonant, often illogical harmonies. More successful in the 1940s was the work of Earle Spencer and Boyd Raeburn who produced several orchestral pieces (particularly those by George Handy, a pupil of Aaron Copland) that were fairly modern in temper and quite adventurous in their resources, though with an increasing tendency to densely overcrowded scores. Improvisation usually had little place in progressive jazz; its exponents produced much overtly commercial material and the contradiction between it and the more ambitious music was never resolved.
A. Jackson: ‘Boyd Raeburn’, Jazz Monthly, xii (1966), Nov, 5
M. Sparks: Kenton on Capitol (Hounslow, 1966)
A. Morgan: ‘The Progressives’, Jazz on Record, ed. A. McCarthy (London, 1968), 361
MAX HARRISON