The term conveys different though related meanings: 1) a musical tradition rooted in performing conventions that were introduced and developed early in the 20th century by African Americans; 2) a set of attitudes and assumptions brought to music-making, chief among them the notion of performance as a fluid creative process involving improvisation; and 3) a style characterized by syncopation, melodic and harmonic elements derived from the blues, cyclical formal structures and a supple rhythmic approach to phrasing known as swing.
2. Jazz and the New Orleans background (1895–1916).
3. Early recorded jazz (1917–23).
5. Swing and big bands (1930–1945).
6. Small groups and soloists of the swing era.
7. Traditional and modern jazz in the 1940s.
8. Post-bop developments in the 1950s.
9. Mainstream, third stream and the emerging avant garde.
10. Free jazz, fusion and beyond (1960–80).
11. Jazz at the end of the century (1980–99).
MARK TUCKER (text), TRAVIS A. JACKSON (bibliography)
Writers have often portrayed the history of jazz as a narrative of progress. Their accounts show jazz evolving from a boisterous type of dance music into forms of increasing complexity, gradually rising in prestige to become an artistic tradition revered around the world. Certainly attitudes towards the music have changed dramatically. In 1924 an editorial writer for The New York Times called jazz ‘a return to the humming, hand-clapping, or tomtom beating of savages’; in 1987 the United States Congress passed a resolution designating jazz ‘an outstanding model of individual expression’ and ‘a rare and valuable national American treasure’. In keeping with this general theme of progress, historians have emphasized innovation as a primary force driving jazz forward, identifying new techniques, concepts and structures that presumably helped push the music to ever higher stages of development.
But tracing lines of evolution and innovation in jazz reveals only part of a story much broader in scope and more complex in structure. For if some musicians have sought to make a mark as adventurous innovators, many others have viewed themselves as stalwart bearers of tradition. If some have struggled as uncompromising creative artists whose work reaches only a small, select audience, others have flourished providing entertainment for the masses. And if jazz has undeniably accrued status and respect over the years, it has also consistently provoked controversy. The term itself has often carried negative associations, which is partly why Duke Ellington and other musicians spurned the label, and why Max Roach once told an interviewer, ‘I resent the word unequivocally’ (Taylor, H1977, p.110).
Several factors account for the volatility of jazz as an object of study. First, its musical identity cannot be isolated or delimited. Although often used to designate a single musical idiom, ‘jazz’ (like the signifier ‘classical’) refers to an extended family of genres, with all members sharing at least some traits in common yet none capable of representing the whole. Second, the varying functions of jazz have made it difficult to perceive as a unified entity. Jazz can be background sounds for social recreation, lively accompaniment for dancing or music that invites close listening and deep concentration – and the same performance might operate on these different levels simultaneously. Third, the subject of race has generated heated debate over jazz and shaped its reception. While jazz is a product of black American expressive culture, it has always been open to musical influences from other traditions and since the 1920s has been performed by musicians of varying backgrounds throughout the world. In different eras, for example, commercially successful white musicians such as the bandleader Paul Whiteman and the saxophonist Kenny G have been identified by large segments of the public as major exponents of jazz. Many others, however, view these two as standing outside the tradition altogether and consider jazz to be a form of ‘black music’ in which black Americans have been the leading innovators and most authoritative practitioners.
Such problems in accounting for the identity, function and racial character of jazz are bound up in one another. They have been present from the very beginning.
‘Jazz’ took on musical connotations in the USA during the years of World War I; before then it was a colloquialism possibly southern and black American in origin, perhaps derived from African roots. Writers have offered several definitions of the term in this pre-war period, claiming it to be a verb that meant to make something livelier or faster, to demonstrate pep and energy or to engage in sexual activity. In its earliest printed appearances, ‘jazz’ turns up as a noun. A San Francisco sportswriter in 1913 used the word to describe a kind of spirited liveliness shown by baseball players, for example: ‘Everybody [on the team] has come back full of the old “jazz”’, and ‘Henley the pitcher put a little more of the old “jazz” on the pill [i.e. ball]’ (Porter, E1997, p.5).
A few years later, small ensembles from New Orleans playing spirited, syncopated dance music began featuring the term – also spelled as ‘jass’ – in their names. One was Stein's Dixie Jass Band, a white group from New Orleans that in 1917 (with slightly different personnel) performed and recorded in New York as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Another was the Creole Band, a group of black American musicians that toured on vaudeville circuits in various parts of the USA (1913–18) and was occasionally advertised as a ‘New Orleans Jazz Band’ or as the ‘Creole Band/Sometimes called the Jazz Band’. These ensembles gave northern urban audiences their first exposure to an energetic, blues-tinged musical idiom derived from southern black performing traditions. A New York newspaper article commented on the phenomenon in 1917 (Osgood, G1926, p.11):
A strange word has gained wide-spread use in the ranks of our producers of popular music. It is ‘jazz’, used mainly as an adjective descriptive of a band. The group[s] that play for dancing, when colored, seem infected with the virus that they try to instil as a stimulus in others. They shake and jump and writhe in ways to suggest a return to the medieval jumping mania.
Novel and entertaining, this music usually accompanied dancing and was performed in places serving alcoholic beverages: restaurants, night clubs, cabarets and dance halls.
Yet while jazz first drew widespread notice in the years just prior to 1920, some musicians and historians have claimed that it originated much earlier. Bunk Johnson stated that he and Buddy Bolden were playing jazz in New Orleans in about 1895–6; Jelly Roll Morton said he invented jazz in 1902 (he was 12 at the time). Various brass bands from New Orleans (the Olympia, the Golden Rule and the Eagle) have also been cited as playing in a jazz style before 1910. Since these assertions have been made retrospectively, often by individuals with a strong personal investment in the histories they have related, and since there is little contemporary evidence to put such claims in perspective, questions of when and how a jazz performance practice emerged remain open for speculation. Despite this uncertainty, most historians of jazz agree that New Orleans was the principal incubator of this musical tradition.
New Orleans in the early 1900s displayed a syncretic blend of African, Caribbean and European cultures unique among American cities. Jelly Roll Morton's Catholicism and belief in vodoun exemplified the cultural fusion that also characterized the city's musical traditions. A major port and commercial centre, New Orleans attracted black Americans from rural communities in Louisiana and neighbouring states, offering economic incentives, educational opportunities and more relaxed racial codes. At the same time, many residents had to endure poverty and sharp tensions that divided neighbourhoods and districts according to ethnicity, class and skin colour: blacks, whites and the lighter-complected subgroup ‘Creoles of color’ (gens de couleur, henceforth designated by ‘Creoles’) of mixed African and European ancestry.
The foundations of jazz were established by black Americans in this urban environment before the music had a name, or when it was still referred to as ragtime or ‘ratty’ music. The process unfolded as musicians gradually developed new ways of interpreting a varied repertory that included marches, dance music (two-steps, quadrilles, waltzes, polkas, schottisches and mazurkas), popular songs, traditional hymns and spirituals. What might be called a nascent jazz sensibility arose from the loosening of performance strictures and the adoption of an individualistic, defiantly liberating attitude that has remained at the core of this musical tradition. Although we lack documentation that shows this process unfolding, it is possible to hypothesize some of the stages involved. Rhythms, for example, gradually may have come to be interpreted more freely than in earlier 19th-century marches, ragtime and cakewalks. Phrases were stretched out and either played in a more relaxed manner or syncopated more vigorously, not just in one instrumental part but in two or more simultaneously. Drummers ‘jazzed up’ – that is, enlivened – simple duple and triple metre by introducing syncopated patterns and phrasing over bar lines. Players began embellishing and ornamenting melodies, inventing countermelodies, weaving arpeggiated lines into the texture and enriching diatonic harmonies with blue notes (see Blue note (i)).
Though such techniques may have been applied to music by solo pianists active in New Orleans, among them Jelly Roll Morton and Tony Jackson, they generally came to characterize a style of ensemble playing. Precursors to the jazz bands during the period 1915–20 included small dance groups led by such players as Buddy Bolden, Lorenzo Tio and Oscar ‘Papa’ Celestin, together with brass bands (often featuring some of the same players) that provided music for such community functions as parades, picnics, parties and funerals. Morton, in a 1938 Library of Congress interview with Alan Lomax, recalled the typical brass band instrumentation as including ‘a bass horn [e.g. tuba or euphonium], one trombone, one trumpet, an alto [horn] and maybe a baritone [horn] or clarinet, and a bass drum and snare drum’. These bands gave employment and ensemble experience to such early New Orleans jazz musicians as Bunk Johnson, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and many others. They fostered a sense of group identity, pride and competitiveness. They formed a professional sphere comprised almost exclusively of males, a trait that characterized jazz in the following years (except in the area of singing, where women have predominated); they also helped create a performance environment in which individual expression was encouraged yet closely coordinated with the activities of other ensemble members. As the writer Ralph Ellison later observed, ‘true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group … each solo flight, or improvisation, represents … a definition of [the jazz artist's] identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition’ (Ellison, H1986, p.234).
Given the scanty documentation for New Orleans jazz during these formative stages (c1895–1915), it is unclear to what extent improvisation was practised in the early dance and brass bands but, judging from later exponents of the style, a phrase like ‘collective improvisation’ (used by writers to suggest a basic approach to performing) exaggerates the degree to which the music was spontaneous, invented in the moment. Players were guided by familiar formal plans, ordered sequences of themes and keys, specific functions of individual instruments within ensembles and common techniques of embellishment. When musicians invented new rhythmic devices and melodic patterns, these were imitated by others and repeated in different pieces, then passed on through oral tradition. The way in which Louis Armstrong once described his approach to soloing – ‘First I play the melody, then I play the melody 'round the melody, then I routines’ – hints at the conventional practice that shaped his approach to improvising, belying the primitivist myth of ‘instinct’ or ‘natural feeling’ that produced the music and challenging the concept of ‘collective improvisation’. Moreover, musicians working in certain New Orleans contexts (high society balls and parties, and on the excursion boats that went up the Mississippi River) were required to play from written parts, their opportunities to improvise limited accordingly. Many Creole musicians in particular, who lived in and around the city's French Quarter, were proficient readers who combined an ability to play from notation with techniques of embellishment and variation.
Who created jazz? This has been a controversial issue in the jazz literature, especially since much of the evidence concerning origins comes from vague and often conflicting oral testimony. Yet it can be said with certainty that New Orleans musicians of African descent – both the blacks living ‘uptown’ and the Creoles ‘downtown’ – played a leading role both as inventors and expert practitioners of the techniques that came to characterize jazz. Concurrently, members of other racial and ethnic groups became involved early on in the development and dissemination of these same techniques. The white musician George ‘Papa Jack’ Laine, for example, led brass and dance bands that trained other white musicians later active in jazz, among them Tom Brown, George Brunis and Nick LaRocca. These bands furnished music for similar social functions as their black American counterparts, such as parades and riverboat entertainment. As with the early black bands, the lack of recorded documentation makes it difficult to know the styles in which these white groups played. It is conceivable, though, that white New Orleans musicians in the early 1900s were also beginning to adopt a looser and more syncopated approach to the repertory of brass and dance bands.
Musicians of Caribbean ancestry and of mixed racial and ethnic heritage also contributed to the formation of a jazz performance practice. One was the Cuban-American cornettist and cellist Manuel Perez, who played with the Onward Brass Band and led a well-known dance band called the Imperial Orchestra. The Creole population of New Orleans included many descendants of Haitians and Cubans who had immigrated to the city in the 19th century, and the New Orleans-Caribbean connection proved especially important for jazz rhythm. When Jelly Roll Morton spoke of the ‘Spanish tinge’ present in jazz, he had in mind rhythmic patterns like the tresillo (ex.1a), habanera (ex.1b) and cinquillo (ex.1c) of Cuban and other Caribbean and Latin American dance genres. Such rhythms turn up in some of his own compositions, such as New Orleans Blues (c1902–5; 1923, Gen.) and The Crave (c1910–11; 1939, General). They also appear in late 19th-century pieces published in New Orleans such as W.T. Francis's The Cactus Dance, Danza Mexicana (1885) and his arrangements of pieces played by the Mexican Military Band at the 1885 World's Exposition in New Orleans.
The racial and ethnic profile of early New Orleans jazz, then, was multicultural, reflecting the mixed heritage of the city's residents. At the same time, most of the leading musicians identified with jazz were black Americans. These two generalizations would remain constant as the music spread beyond New Orleans in the years that followed.
It is likely that characteristic syncopating and embellishing techniques employed by black, Creole and white musicians in New Orleans might have been heard in small ensembles elsewhere in the country. Groups that played instrumental ragtime, dance genres such as the habanera, rumba and tango, and blues pieces like W.C. Handy's Memphis Blues (1912) and St Louis Blues (1914) probably displayed features that resembled what might be called ‘proto-jazz’. The Ohio-born reed player Garvin Bushell recalled playing with a circus band in 1916 that performed marches, ragtime and blues throughout the South and Midwest; he also identified the accomplished black clarinettists – Percy Glascoe, J. Paul Wyer (the ‘Pensacola Kid’) and Fred Kewley – who travelled with circus and minstrel bands and later could be heard in jazz and blues settings.
Nevertheless, there was something distinctive about the musical fusion that occurred in New Orleans, a flavour and piquancy that resulted from a subtle blending of many different ingredients. Together with this intermingling of musical traits, other extra-musical qualities helped shape an emerging jazz aesthetic. In his memoirs, Sidney Bechet described how black American jazz expression embodied memory, pride and the happiness that followed Emancipation. ‘All that waiting’, he wrote (F1960, p.48), ‘all that time when that song was far-off music, waiting music, suffering music … It was joy music now. … It wasn't spirituals or blues or ragtime, but everything all at once, each one putting something over on the other’.
In the decade before 1920, players from New Orleans took this ‘joy music’ to California, Chicago and other parts of the country offering employment opportunities. They also began recording jazz, which quickly catapulted a regional American vernacular idiom into the international arena.
Recordings have played a crucial role in disseminating jazz. From 1917 to 1920, the years when ‘jazz’ began appearing with increasing frequency as a stylistic label, record companies were mainly issuing 8-, 10-, or 12-inch discs that were played at 78 r.p.m. The performances, most lasting between three and four minutes, were recorded by acoustical methods; microphones did not come into widespread use until after 1925. Thus the glimpses of early jazz afforded by recordings are compromised by the technology of the day. The balances of sound and timbral qualities heard on these recordings, for example, may have been quite different in live settings, while the relatively short duration of recorded performances may have been extended when bands played live. The acoustical recording process also affected instrumentation: drummers often had to limit their activity to wood blocks and cymbals since drums could cause distortion in the sound. In addition, the pieces recorded by bands may not have reflected what they performed regularly outside the studio: record producers and publishers often selected the repertory as part of a larger marketing effort to help sell sheet music copies of newly published compositions. Finally, race was a factor that helped determine who could record and what they could perform. Black jazz musicians only began to record in significant numbers during the period 1923–5 and even then found themselves expected to play a repertory emphasizing blues and hot jazz (fast, rhythmically energetic dance music) that ostensibly would appeal to the black American consumers record companies were seeking to reach in their segregated race series (see Race record). As Duke Ellington's saxophonist, Otto Hardwick, observed, ‘The field for recording was quite limited … if you didn't play the blues, there was no room for you’.
For all these reasons, recordings may offer unreliable sonic representations of early jazz performing practice. But at the very least they preserve evocative echoes of the varied jazz styles that were beginning to circulate in the USA and overseas by the early 1920s.
The historical distinction for being the first group to record jazz goes to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. A quintet of white musicians from New Orleans, it made its first recordings early in 1917 in New York, where the band had been attracting attention through appearances at Reisenweber's Restaurant on 58th Street. Though the Original Dixieland Jazz Band lacked both banjo and a bass instrument (string bass or tuba), its other instruments became standard for small New Orleans jazz units, consisting of three lead or melody-carrying instruments (cornet, clarinet, trombone) with piano and drums providing accompaniment in the rhythm section. Pieces they recorded show a mixture typical for early jazz bands: blues, ragtime, popular songs and novelty numbers. Improvisation, however, is minimal. Often the band seems to be following set routines: Livery Stable Blues (1917, Vic.), for example, uses a common multi-part strain form derived from 19th-century marches and ragtime (e.g. AABBCCABC); when individual strains are repeated, they vary little from previous statements. The band must have impressed listeners with its ebullience and extroverted humour: the group was a seasoned vaudeville act, and its crowd-pleasing tactics, for example the imitation of animal noises in Livery Stable Blues, may have reflected more its stage experience than its New Orleans jazz background. The New Orleans Rhythm Kings, another white band, showed more restraint, demonstrated in their smoother and more rhythmically supple rendition of Livery Stable Blues (1922, Para.) when compared with recordings of the same piece made by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917 and again in 1923 under the title Barnyard Blues (OK).
Another example of early jazz recorded by New Orleans musicians, this time a black American group, was provided by Kid Ory and a five-piece band (cornet, clarinet, trombone, piano and drums) that recorded in Los Angeles in 1922. Though its instrumentation is identical to that of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Ory's band displays a gentler, more lilting rhythmic style on Ory's Creole Trombone/Society Blues (Nordskog). A greater sense of relaxation pervades these performances, in contrast to the more febrile qualities of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. In other respects, though, the multi-strain formal patterns, the ‘set’ quality of many of the instrumental lines (though the cornettist Mutt Carey does take liberties in embellishing parts), the functions of instruments within the ensemble and the use of breaks (short passages played by soloists while the rest of the band stops) all resemble aspects heard in the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's performances. As with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, virtually nothing played by Ory's band would qualify as ‘collective improvisation’. Instead it was repetitive, highly ordered and predictable music, probably intended for dancers though, as Gushee has noted (G1977, p.5), it is likely that the band's lack of a full rhythm section (one that included bass, banjo and a complete drum kit) made it sound different on record from what listeners heard live.
In addition to these early recorded examples by small groups from New Orleans, larger ensembles playing syncopated dance music showed another side of the emerging jazz phenomenon. Black bandleaders in New York such as James Reese Europe, Ford Dabney, Tim Brymn and Leroy Smith performed with groups consisting of up to 15 or more players, including strings together with brass, reeds and percussion. The relatively few recordings made by these ensembles during the period 1914–23 have often been cited as examples of late instrumental ragtime or ‘pre-jazz’. Indeed, in some ways they seem closer in sound and spirit to the bands of John Philip Sousa and Arthur Pryor, or to theatre pit orchestras and polite society dance orchestras, than to the insouciant, convention-flaunting strain of jazz that characterized the Roaring Twenties. Nevertheless, the energy and rhythmic verve of Europe's orchestra, especially when the drummer Buddy Gilmore was driving the ensemble as on Castle Walk (1914, Vic.), as well as the loosely embellished performance practice and repertory of rags, pop songs and blues, relate this group to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, New Orleans Rhythm Kings and Ory's band, even if the overall sonic identity seems quite different in character. (The frequent unison melody lines account in large part for the difference, not just the larger size or stiffer rhythmic practice, of Europe's orchestra.) Europe, who directed the celebrated 369th US Infantry Regiment Band in France during World War I, linked his approach to jazz in 1919, explaining that ‘jazz’ was associated with certain instrumental effects (mutes, flutter-tonguing), strong rhythmic accents and ‘embroidery’ and ‘discordance’ in the instrumental parts. He also made clear his belief that jazz originated in black American culture: ‘The negro loves anything that is peculiar in music, and the “jazzing” appeals to him strongly … We have our own racial feeling and if we try to copy whites we will make bad copies’ (Porter, E1997, pp.126–7). A contemporary of Europe who led a large ensemble that included early jazz or pre-jazz in its repertory was Will Marion Cook. Though his Southern Syncopated Orchestra made no recordings, it travelled to Europe in 1919 and made a deep impression on listeners, among them the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet who found Bechet's blues solos ‘admirable equally for their richness of invention, their force of accent, and their daring novelty and unexpected turns’ (Walser, H1999, p.11).
Other bandleaders provided models for organizing and standardizing the instrumental components of dance orchestras playing jazz. On the West Coast during the mid- to late 1910s, Art Hickman led a ten-piece ensemble consisting of two brass (cornet and trombone), two saxophones, violin, piano, two banjos, string bass and drums. He took the orchestra east in 1919. Evidence of the impact of New Orleans jazz style upon Hickman can be heard in the final chorus of Whispering (1920, Col.), both in the arpeggiated embellishing techniques of the soprano saxophone (emulating a New Orleans clarinettist) and the loose connecting phrases of the trombone, playing in ‘tailgate’ fashion. Hickman's configuration of brass, reeds, violin and rhythm section was emulated by Paul Whiteman, another California-based bandleader who came to New York in 1920. The instrumental line-up of Hickman's and Whiteman's bands required arrangers skilled in composing embellished melodic variations and exploring different timbral combinations. One was Ferde Grofé, who worked first with Hickman in California and after 1919 as arranger and pianist with Whiteman. Grofé helped Whiteman develop a concept of Symphonic jazz by adding strings and double-reed instruments (oboe and bassoon) to the brass, single-reed (saxophone and clarinet) and rhythm sections, and by borrowing themes from the classical repertory – such as Rimsky-Korsakov's ‘Song on the Indian Guest’ (1921, Vic.) from his opera Sadko – to produce dance music that sought to evoke the ‘high art’ aesthetic of the concert hall. In Chicago Isham Jones was another prominent white bandleader who by the late 1910s was fronting an ensemble made up of three distinct sections (brass, reeds and rhythm instruments) with the addition of violin, which later would disappear from the standard dance-band ensemble. Jones's arrangements often featured ‘hot’ sections that emphasized syncopation and improvising soloists, as in the cornettist Louis Panico's muted, growling statement on Never Again (1924, Bruns.).
By the early 1920s, then, jazz could be heard on recordings made by small ensembles like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and Kid Ory's group, by medium-sized dance bands like those of Hickman and Jones and by larger ensembles like Europe's society orchestra and Whiteman's concert orchestra. Yet another recording outlet for jazz musicians came in the form of small pick-up groups accompanying female blues singers. Beginning with the recordings Mamie Smith made in 1920 with her promoter Perry Bradford, and continuing with the flood of singers that followed as the blues craze took hold, it was customary to hire two to five musicians to back up vocalists for record dates, especially those made for race labels in Chicago and New York. Often these musicians had experience playing jazz in dance bands and displayed their skills as improvisers in studios. In 1920–21 the New York trumpeter Johnny Dunn and a small band with rotating personnel took part in a number of sessions with the singer Edith Wilson. The loosely organized ensemble work on recordings like Nervous Blues and Vampin' Liza Jane (1921, Col.) – with clarinet, trombone and trumpet sometimes doubling, embellishing or playing around the melody – hints at the kind of informal accompanying conventions players were using in clubs and theatres. At times the interweaving polyphonic strands suggest the New Orleans small-group model, but Dunn's style is both busier and more clipped rhythmically than that of such Crescent City lead cornettists as King Oliver and Tommy Ladnier. Other musicians with jazz credentials turn up on these blues records from the early 1920s, including the trumpeter Bubber Miley and the clarinettist Buster Bailey with Mamie Smith (1921), the trumpeter Joe Smith and the pianist Fletcher Henderson with Ethel Waters (1922), and the pianist Fats Waller with Sara Martin (1922).
In 1923, six years after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded its first sides, black American jazz musicians started getting more opportunities to distribute their work via recordings. That year, companies in Chicago and Richmond, Indiana, issued the first discs of such noted New Orleans figures as King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. In New York Fletcher Henderson and his orchestra began recording regularly for various labels, and Bessie Smith cut her first sides accompanied by jazz instrumentalists. In St Louis Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra made its first recordings. From this time on, recordings offered a more accurate and representative sampling of jazz activity in the USA.
The 1923 recordings of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band revealed the cohesive, relaxed yet hard-driving rhythmic style of this band of mostly New Orleanians working regularly on Chicago's South Side. Though slightly larger than the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Ory's band, Oliver's group featured a similar two-part configuration: a front line of melody-playing instruments made up of clarinet, trombone and two cornets (played by Oliver and the young Louis Armstrong) and a rhythm section of piano, banjo, drums and occasionally bass. Oliver's repertory combined older, ragtime-based strain forms (Froggie Moore, 1923, Gen.) with current pop songs (I Ain't Gonna Tell Nobody, 1923, OK.) and earthy blues (Jazzin' Babies Blues, 1923, OK.). Blues lyricism was central to their brand of jazz, epitomized by Oliver's keening muted solos, like the celebrated one on Dipper Mouth Blues (1923, Gen.) which later trumpeters emulated and embellished. The fuller, more dynamic rhythm section heard in Oliver's band (compared to Ory and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band earlier) reflected the group's function playing for dancers, a point that would have been illustrated more vividly if the drummer Baby Dodds had been able to use his entire drum kit instead of being restricted largely to wood blocks and cymbals. Also, the democratic performing mode, which gave each individual a voice while working harmoniously together as a unit, showed a model of ensemble playing positioned midway between the loosely improvised accompaniments of Johnny Dunn and his Jazz Hounds and the precisely controlled arrangements of Paul Whiteman. For these reasons, and by virtue of their sheer exuberance and irresistible rhythmic momentum, Oliver's 1923 recordings made a powerful statement about the expressive potential of New Orleans jazz that resonated loudly for decades to follow.
A contrasting strain of black American jazz in about 1923 is found on recordings made in New York by Fletcher Henderson's orchestra. For Henderson, ‘hot jazz’ did not define his group's identity, as it did for Oliver in Chicago, but instead constituted one of the idioms it provided for dancers, together with ‘sweet’ popular songs, novelty numbers and waltzes (though the breadth of Henderson's repertory was never fully documented on record). It was in part Henderson's versatility, as Jeffrey Magee (G1992, pp.58–64) noted, that helped him succeed as a black bandleader competing for jobs with other white and black ensembles in New York, as when he secured a long-term engagement at the Roseland ballroom in Manhattan (1924). On recordings, Henderson and his musicians at times appear to be following commercially published stock arrangements (Oh! Sister, ain't that hot?, 1924, Emerson); at other times they play arrangements contributed by Don Redman, a member of the band's reed section. In general, the reliance on notation and three-section configuration of Henderson's groups (brass, reeds and rhythm) placed it more in the dance-band tradition of Hickman and Whiteman than in the New Orleans mould of Oliver, Ory and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, although traces of the New Orleans polyphonic weave show up occasionally, as in the final chorus of When you walked out someone else walked right in (1923, Puritan), an arrangement by Redman of an Irving Berlin song. Together with the active sectional interplay and set melodic variations dictated by arrangements, Henderson's band also featured ‘hot’ improvised (or improvised-sounding) solos by such players as Coleman Hawkins (Dicty Blues, 1923, Voc.), the trombonist Charlie Green (Shanghai Shuffle, 1924, Pathe) and Louis Armstrong (Copenhagen, 1924, Voc.).
‘Jazzin', everybody's jazzin' now’, sang Trixie Smith in The world's jazz crazy and so am I (1925, Paramount). The song attested to the fever generated by jazz during the 1920s as it spread throughout North America to Europe, Latin America and distant parts of the globe. This expansion occurred in two concurrent phases. First, American jazz was exported overseas in the form of recordings, published sheet music and arrangements and by travelling ensembles. As early as 1918–19 Louis Mitchell and his Jazz Kings performed in Paris and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band undertook a long residency in England. They were followed in the 1920s by Benny Peyton, Arthur Briggs, Sidney Bechet (who returned after his first trip in 1919) and other American musicians scattered throughout Europe. Europeans could also hear jazz interpreted by orchestras touring with such black musical revues as From Dover to Dixie (1923), Plantation Days (1923) and Chocolate Kiddies (1925–6). The market for jazz extended beyond western Europe: Sam Wooding's orchestra appeared in Hungary, Russia and Argentina, while the pianist Teddy Weatherford travelled with Jack Carter's orchestra to East Asia in the late 1920s.
At the same time as American jazz reached new listeners abroad, those living in different parts of the world began to perform, record and write about the new syncopated music. Local jazz bands sprang up everywhere, from those led by Bernard Etté in Germany and Fred Elizalde in England to Dajos Bela in Hungary and Eduardo Andreozzi in Brazil. A number of these ensembles recorded for major labels like Columbia, Decca, Odeon and Victor. Jazz also made an impact on European composers of concert music, just as ragtime had done earlier. Attempts to incorporate (or parody) the rhythmic patterns, harmonic vocabulary and sonorities of jazz were undertaken in France by Milhaud (La création du monde, 1923) and in Germany by Hindemith (Suite ‘1922’, 1922) and Krenek (Jonny spielt auf, 1925). During the same period, writings on jazz began to proliferate in newspapers, periodicals and literary magazines. The German periodical Der Querschnitt published articles on jazz in 1922–3, and in Leipzig Alfred Baresel turned out pedagogical materials and Das Jazz-Buch (1925), which Bradford Robinson called the first comprehensive textbook on jazz in any language.
Public reaction to jazz varied widely in the USA during the 1920s. Early on some condemned the music as improper, even immoral. Jazz ‘excite[s] the baser instincts’, according to John Philip Sousa (Ogren, E1989, p.56). It ‘offends people with musical taste already formed’, charged an editorial in the New York Times (8 Oct 1924), ‘and it prevents the formation of musical taste by others’. Jazz had supporters, too. Carl Engel, head of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, noted that ‘jazz finds its last and supreme glory in the skill for improvisation exhibited by its performers … [good jazz is] music that is recklessly fantastic and joyously grotesque’ (G1922, p.187). For some, jazz symbolized the spirit and temper of contemporary American life, whether it was F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tales of the Jazz Age (1923) describing the rebellious hedonism of the younger generation or the music critic W.J. Henderson claiming in 1925 that jazz expressed ‘ebulliency, our carefree optimism, our nervous energy and our extravagant humour’ (New York Times Book Review, 8 Feb 1925). Not everyone linked jazz exclusively with the USA. For the American cultural critic Waldo Frank (In the American Jungle (1925–1936), New York, 1937, p.119), jazz was emblematic of the ‘Machine’ and symbolized the diseased condition of industrialized society, ‘the music of a revolt that fails’. In 1921 the British critic Clive Bell (‘Plus De Jazz’, The New Republic, 21 Sept 1921, pp.92–6, esp. 93) equated jazz with artistic modernism, identifying such figures as Picasso, Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot and Woolf with the ‘jazz movement’, noting in their work an underlying quality of ‘impudence in quite natural and legitimate revolt against Nobility and Beauty’.
Notwithstanding the varied associations that jazz took on in the 1920s, the music itself served two primary functions. First and foremost it accompanied dancing, as jazz bands supplied lively, syncopated rhythms that set people in motion; recordings issued by jazz groups often identified on their labels the particular dance step for which the music was suitable: Oliver's Chattanooga Stomp (1923, Col.) was a ‘Shimmy One Step’, Ellington's East St Louis Toodle-00 (1926, Voc.) a ‘Fox Trot’. James P. Johnson's ‘Charleston’, written in 1923 for the show Runnin' Wild, inspired a popular craze for this dance, and its characteristic rhythmic motive (related to the tresillo; ex.2) turned up in individual solos and arrangements played by jazz orchestras. Many jazz instrumentals referred to specific dances or implied dance movement in their titles, among them Doin' the New Low Down, St. Louis Shuffle, Birmingham Breakdown, Hop Off, 18th Street Strut and Moten Stomp. Jazz musicians accompanied not just social dancers but professional dance acts in vaudeville and musical theatre. When Coleman Hawkins performed in 1921–2 as one of Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds, he and other band members accompanied both the singer and various dancers appearing on the same bill. Similarly, Count Basie joined the vaudeville act of Gonzelle White (1926) in which fellow band members danced and performed stunts onstage. The drummer Freddy Crump, Basie recalled, ‘used to come dancing back in from the wings and hit the drum as he slid into a split. He used to grab the curtain and ride up with it, bowing and waving at the audience applauding’ (Basie and Murray, F1985, p.86).
Basie's recollection of Crump points up the second main function of jazz in the 1920s: to provide entertainment that often had a comedic flair or novelty component. Jazz bands were often visually stimulating, with players throwing objects such as hats and drumsticks in the air, striking dramatic positions while performing and taking part in stage business. Theatres provided a common venue for presenting jazz musicians on bills with other performers. As a result, jazz bands were often judged by the quality of their visual presentation or act. Duke Ellington's band once performed a routine at a Harlem theatre in which the set resembled a backwoods church and Bubber Miley dressed as a preacher to deliver a musical sermon on his trumpet. Louis Armstrong had a similar preacher's act, calling himself Reverend Satchelmouth, when he played in New York with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra and in Chicago with Erskine Tate and the Vendome orchestra. These theatrical aspects of jazz were carried on by Cab Calloway and Jimmie Lunceford in the 1930s, avoided by most after World War II, and revived years later in a different guise by the avant garde, as in the work of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Cecil Taylor.
A concert staged by Paul Whiteman at New York's Aeolian Hall on 12 February 1924 crystallized conflicting views of jazz in the 1920s. Titled ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’, Whiteman's event sought, among other things, to suggest that the old ‘discordant Jazz’ (the New Orleans small-group style identified with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band) was being replaced by ‘the really melodious music of today’, namely ‘Modern Jazz’. Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, arranged by Grofé and first performed on this occasion, was referred to in the press as a ‘Jazz Rhapsody’. For Whiteman and others, then, jazz was a form of American popular music, not necessarily racially marked, suitable for polite dancing by urban sophisticates or adaptable by composers for use in the concert hall. This perspective on jazz also dominated Henry O. Osgood's So This Is Jazz (Boston, 1926), the first book-length study of the subject in English. The main figures profiled by Osgood were all successful white bandleaders or composers, among them Whiteman, Gershwin, Berlin and Ted Lewis.
Jazz in the 1920s was a fluid, unstable construct. Depending on who used the term, it could refer to Jelly Roll Morton, Vincent Lopez and his Hotel Pennsylvania orchestra, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land or Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. The breadth of its semantic range is demonstrated by the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, in which the lead character, played by Al Jolson, is a white Jewish singer who performs in blackface, employs jerky body movement and does trick whistling. Jolson's taut delivery and histrionic mode of ‘jazz’ singing contrasted sharply with the work of other contemporary musicians, such as the proud, joyful strains of Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five in Struttin' with some Barbecue (1927, OK.) and the stark tonal portrait sketched by Duke Ellington and his orchestra in Black and Tan Fantasy (1927, Bruns.).
If, in his 1924 Aeolian Hall concert, Paul Whiteman attempted to predict what type of jazz would prevail in the years to come, his crystal ball was cracked. It was not his polite and decorous symphonic jazz that captured the public imagination but rather the rhythmically charged hot jazz of black bands like Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, McKinney's Cotton Pickers and Bennie Moten, and of white bands like the Casa Loma orchestra, that set the tempo for developments in the 1930s and 40s. Instead of displaying the hefty girth of Whiteman's 20-piece orchestra, these ensembles were sleeker, each numbering roughly a dozen players around 1930, usually comprising three trumpets, two trombones, three reeds (saxophone doubling on clarinet) and four in the rhythm section. By the early 1930s the tuba had been replaced by a string bass and the banjo by a guitar, yielding a leaner sound overall. Arrangers for these bands included Benny Carter, John Nesbitt, Eddie Durham, Don Redman, Horace and Fletcher Henderson and Gene Gifford, who discovered ways to translate the freedom and flexibility of improvising soloists into the parts they wrote. Sometimes they played the reeds off against the brass as in the final ‘shout’ chorus of Fletcher Henderson's New King Porter Stomp (1932, OK.), based on an antiphonal call-and-response figure reaching back to older black American musical forms like the work song and spiritual. They devised short repeated phrases (riffs) that could accompany solos or serve a primary melodic function, as in Casa Loma Stomp (1930, OK.) by the Casa Loma orchestra and the last chorus of Moten Swing (1932, Vic.) by the Bennie Moten orchestra. They lightened textures by cutting down on doubled parts and streamlining harmonies. Such features gave large-ensemble jazz speed and grace and made the rhythm buoyant, propulsive and infectious. The term for this rhythmic quality – borrowed from the vocabulary of black musicians – was Swing, and it soon became a noun synonymous with jazz and a rallying cry for a new generation of listeners, dancers and critics.
A figure who played a major role in popularizing swing in the mid-1930s was Benny Goodman. Like Whiteman earlier and Elvis Presley a few decades later, Goodman was a white musician who could successfully mediate between a black American musical tradition and the large base of white listeners making up the majority population in the USA. Wearing glasses and conservative suits – ‘looking like a high school science teacher’, according to one observer (Stowe, E1994, p.45) – Goodman appeared to be an ordinary, respectable white American. Musically he was anything but ordinary: a virtuoso clarinettist, a skilled improviser who could solo ‘hot’ on up tempo numbers and ‘sweet’ on ballads, and a disciplined bandleader who demanded excellence from his players. With these combined personal and musical attributes, he built a following through radio network programs (‘Let's Dance’, 1934–5 and ‘The Camel Caravan’, 1936–9), recordings made for the Victor label beginning in 1935 and live performances nationwide. Jazz historians have often used the date of one of these appearances (21 August 1935, when his orchestra broadcast live from the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles) to mark the beginning of the swing era, a period stretching into the mid-to-late 1940s when the large-ensemble jazz purveyed by Goodman and many other bandleaders reigned as the popular music of choice. Significantly, the pieces that galvanized listeners most during the Palomar performance were hot jazz numbers from Goodman's repertory that had been arranged by a black American musician, Fletcher Henderson.
In some ways Goodman practised a racial politics more inclusive than that of his predecessors, though he was not the first prominent white bandleader to perform music written by black Americans. (Paul Whiteman, for example, had commissioned arrangements from William Grant Still in the late 1920s.) Besides featuring the work of such black arrangers as Fletcher and Horace Henderson, Jimmy Mundy, Edgar Sampson and Mary Lou Williams, Goodman formed small groups that brought white musicians together on the bandstand and in the recording studio with such notable black players as Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Charlie Christian and Cootie Williams. During Goodman's Carnegie Hall concert (16 January 1938), members of his band jammed onstage with musicians from Count Basie's orchestra. Colour lines were also crossed when black musicians were hired as featured soloists with white bands, such as Billie Holiday with Artie Shaw (1938) and Roy Eldridge with Gene Krupa (1941–3). Despite these examples of integration, black musicians confronted widespread segregation and discrimination throughout the swing era. While they profited economically from the vogue for swing, an idiom they had largely invented in the late 1920s and early 30s, black musicians were unable to realize the level of commercial success and media visibility enjoyed by the bands of Goodman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Harry James and Artie Shaw.
In the guise of swing, jazz became domesticated in the 1930s. Earlier, jazz had been associated with gin mills and smoky cabarets, illegal substances (alcohol and drugs) and illicit sex. Swing generally enjoyed a more wholesome reputation, although some preached of the dangers it posed to the morals of young people. This exuberant, extroverted music, performed by well-dressed ensembles and their clean-cut leaders, entered middle-class households through everyday appliances like the living-room Victrola and the kitchen radio. It reached a wider populace as musicians transported it from large urban centres into small towns and rural areas. Criss-crossing North America by bus, car and train, big bands played single night engagements in dance halls, ballrooms, theatres, hotels, night clubs, country clubs, military bases and outdoor pavilions. They attracted hordes of teenagers who came to hear the popular songs of the day and dance the jitterbug, lindy hop and Susie Q. The strenuous touring schedule of big bands was far from glamorous. Nevertheless, musicians who played in these ensembles could symbolize achievement and prove inspirational, as the writer Ralph Ellison recalled from his early years growing up in Oklahoma City (H1986, p.220):
And then Ellington and the great orchestra came to town; came with their uniforms, their sophistication, their skills; their golden horns, their flights of controlled and disciplined fantasy; came with their art, their special sound; came with Ivie Anderson and Ethel Waters singing and dazzling the eye with their high-brown beauty and with the richness and bright feminine flair of their costumes, their promising manners. They were news from the great wide world, an example and a goal.
In less densely populated areas of the USA, bands might be based in one location but travel regularly within a circumscribed area covering two or more states. These so-called territory bands were especially active in the midwestern and south-central USA. Among the better-known leaders of black territory bands were Don Albert and Alphonso Trent (based in Dallas), Troy Floyd (San Antonio), Jesse Stone (Dallas and Kansas City), Walter Page (Oklahoma City) and Bennie Moten and Andy Kirk (Kansas City, Missouri). Though territory bands enjoyed modest financial success and made relatively few recordings (with the exception of Moten and Kirk), they provided black musicians with important professional opportunities and fused together the vocal expressivity of the blues with the rhythmic verve of dance music and the electric spontaneity of improvised solos and ensemble riffs.
These latter stylistic traits became hallmarks of the Kansas City-based orchestra led by Count Basie beginning in 1935. Basie had earlier worked the southwest territory circuit with Walter Page's Blue Devils (1928–9) and Bennie Moten (1929–35). Forming his own band after Moten died, he drew upon the local blues-drenched and riff-oriented ensemble style to create a dynamic version of swing that gained national exposure by the late 1930s. His orchestra featured a rhythm section renowned for their smoothly interlocking parts and relaxed teamwork, reed and brass sections capable of explosive accents and muscular phrasing, gifted improvising soloists such as the saxophonist Lester Young, the trumpeter Buck Clayton and the trombonist Dicky Wells, and the warmly expressive vocals of Helen Humes and Jimmy Rushing. The heat and excitement generated by the Basie band comes across especially on recordings of live radio broadcasts from this period, but can also be heard on such studio issues as Doggin' Around (1938, Decca), Jumpin' at the Woodside (1938, Decca) and Lady, be good (1936, Voc.).
The big bands of the swing era were entertaining for both listeners and dancers and instructive for the musicians who played with them. Formal education in jazz was scarce before the 1950s; in particular, racial discrimination often blocked access to music conservatories for black musicians. Working and travelling with big bands, however, young musicians learned about blending and balancing within an ensemble, constructing terse, shapely solos, setting background riffs and coordinating with the rhythm section; older musicians offered technical tips and help in interpreting written arrangements. Players also learned the non-musical values of presentation and appearance, managing finances and maintaining disciplined habits. These groups, then, represented both self-contained social units as well as systems of apprenticeship. Most of the leading jazz instrumentalists who emerged in the 1940s and 50s had spent time in big bands.
Big bands also provided a training and proving ground for vocalists. Ensembles usually carried with them at least one solo singer; some had both male and female singers as well as small vocal groups, and these expanded the timbral palette of big bands as arrangers used harmonized voices to deliver melody lines as well as supply background harmonies. (The Boswell sisters had begun exploring this vocal jazz territory in the early 1930s.) Solo singers added glamorous presence as well as musical variety. In 1929 Paul Whiteman became one of the first major bandleaders to feature singers regularly with his ensemble, such as the soloist Mildred Bailey and a vocal trio, the Rhythm Boys (Bing Crosby, Harry Barris and Al Rinker). The practice became standard in the 1930s and 40s, with the roster of distinguished big band vocalists including Ivie Anderson with Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb, Billie Holiday with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, Peggy Lee with Benny Goodman, Anita O'Day with Gene Krupa, Frank Sinatra with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, and Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine with Earl Hines. The exposure and experience these singers received from big bands helped them launch successful solo careers: performing each night with 15-piece orchestras, they absorbed important lessons about rhythm and phrasing and learned how to use limited space (a 32-bar vocal chorus inserted in the middle of a three-minute instrumental arrangement) to maximum advantage. Singers were also presented as featured soloists who received accompanying support from big bands; a number of Fitzgerald's recordings with Webb's band, such as A-tisket, A-tasket (1938, Decca), Bei Mir bist du Schön (1938, Decca) and Undecided (1939, Decca), placed her at the centre of attention, dominating the arrangements.
For those aspiring to compose and arrange in the jazz idiom, big bands offered a ready-made performing outlet. New pieces were constantly needed, whether original works or fresh arrangements of older ones; many bands hired staff arrangers to fill the demand. Commercially published arrangements were also widely used, but it was the specials (distinctive arrangements owned by individual ensembles and often not circulated) that helped give bands a unique sound, setting them apart from the competition. Duke Ellington's orchestra was identified by its signature muted brass sonorities, its thick polyphonic textures and its high level of dissonance, all of which characterized such compositions as East St Louis Toodle-oo (1926, Voc.), Ko-Ko (1940, Vic.), and Blue Serge (1941, Vic.). Showmanship, novelty vocals and razor-sharp precision contributed to the musical persona of Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra, as did the polished, economical arrangements of his staff arranger, Sy Oliver. Artie Shaw's big band was distinguished by the leader's clarinet as well as the employment of a string section, effectively used by William Grant Still in his arrangement for Shaw of Frenesi (1940, Vic.).
Some composers approached writing for big bands not just as a practical assignment but as an opportunity for musical experimentation. Eddie Sauter stretched conventional harmonic practice in arrangements for Red Norvo and Benny Goodman, raising dissonance to a level higher than was customary in popular dance music. In this he was joined by Don Redman in Chant of the Weed (1931, Bruns.), Coleman Hawkins in Queer Notions (1933, Voc.), Jimmie Lunceford in Stratosphere (1935, Decca) and Claude Thornhill in Portrait of a Guinea Farm (1941, OK.). Efforts to stretch the length of big-band compositions beyond the usual three-minute limit of 78 r.p.m. recordings were made by Duke Ellington in Reminiscing in Tempo (1935, Bruns.) and Diminuendo in Blue/Crescendo in Blue (1937, Bruns.). Some composers (Ellington, Sauter, Artie Shaw and Mel Powell) invoked the classical concerto tradition when they wrote vehicles for soloists with big bands, though they did so without directly borrowing formal procedures and compositional techniques. Another example of swing-classical hybridity surfaced in arrangements for big bands of pieces from the concert-music repertory, as in Still's version of Edward MacDowell's A Deserted Plantation (1940, Vic.) for Artie Shaw's band.
By the late 1930s there were signs that jazz was gaining respect as a musical tradition in the USA. It began to be heard more often in Carnegie Hall (where James Reese Europe's Clef Club Orchestra had performed several times before 1920), from Goodman's first concert there in 1938 to John Hammond's ‘Spirituals to Swing’ evenings in 1938–9 and Ellington's annual series of programmes there starting in 1943. Winthrop Sargeant's Jazz, Hot and Hybrid (1938) treated the music as a subject fit for musicological inquiry, analysing rhythmic, melodic and harmonic features in close detail. Interest in reconstructing jazz history was evident in Frederic Ramsey jr and Charles Edward Smith's Jazzmen (New York, 1939/R), which explored the origins of jazz in late 19th-century New Orleans and traced the later evolution of hot jazz and blues in Chicago and New York.
Serious interest in jazz also developed in Europe during the 1930s. Such visiting American musicians as Armstrong, Ellington and Hawkins gave jazz lovers in England and on the Continent first-hand opportunities to hear major artists whose careers they had been following on recordings. Some European writers sought to define what they called ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ jazz and to distinguish it from the more commercialized forms offered up by Tin Pan Alley songwriters and white ‘sweet’ orchestras. This was the critical agenda set by the Belgian writer Robert Goffin in Aux frontières du jazz (Paris, 1932) and the Frenchman Hugues Panassié in Le Jazz Hot (Paris, 1934) and The Real Jazz (New York, 1942/R). Panassié's passion for traditional and hot jazz led him to help found the Hot Club de France in 1932 and edit its magazine Jazz Hot for a number of years. Another member of this group of French enthusiasts was Charles Delaunay, who published one of the first comprehensive reference guides to jazz recordings, Hot Discography (Paris, 1936), and started the French jazz record label Swing. Also affiliated with this group was the Quintette du Hot Club de France, featuring the guitarist Django Reinhardt and the violinist Stephane Grappelli. The recordings of this ensemble provided a showcase for the nimble technique and inventive soloing of Reinhardt and Grappelli and established the quintet as one of the first major jazz groups to emerge from Europe.
The vogue for swing and jazz was widespread in the late 1930s. In Holland the Ramblers (a big band formed in 1926) made recordings on its own and accompanied Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter. In England the BBC initiated the programme ‘Radio Rhythm Club’ (1940) that featured jazz on a regular basis. Political authorities in some nations (Germany and the Soviet Union) perceived jazz as a threat, branding it as unwholesome and decadent – ‘entartete Musik’, as the Nazis termed it – and attempted to put forward their own sanitized forms of popular dance music allegedly purged of unwanted ‘black’ and ‘Jewish’ characteristics. Despite this crackdown, in some cases resulting in the persecution of musicians, jazz continued to circulate in Nazi Germany and in the USSR under Stalin. As the historian S. Frederick Starr noted (E1983, p.175), ‘Jazz everywhere proved far easier to denounce than eradicate’.
While big bands offered many musicians steady employment and professional training during the 1930s and 40s, smaller groups were also prevalent. They approached the problem of balancing composition and improvisation in different ways, ranging along a continuum from the highly controlled to the loosely coordinated. The Raymond Scott Quintette and John Kirby Sextet were like miniature big bands, specializing in precisely executed and, at times, intricate arrangements that displayed the talents of arrangers as much as players. Other small groups were less rigorously scripted, relying more on head arrangements (memorized riffs and harmonized parts scattered throughout a given piece) or using composed sections to start pieces followed by improvised solos and ad lib final choruses for the full ensemble. This looser approach, shifting the balance away from writers toward improvising instrumentalists, can be heard on recordings by the Kansas City Six (made up of members of Count Basie's big band) and the various Ellington and Goodman small-band units of the late 1930s. Looser still, on the opposite end of the spectrum from Scott and Kirby, were groups that adopted an informal, jam session approach. Musicians in these settings depended little or not at all on pre-planned parts, relying instead on familiar performing conventions and a common musical vocabulary to play a repertory drawn largely from the 12-bar blues and familiar popular songs such as I got the rhythm, Sweet Georgia Brown and Lady, be good. Such ensembles could be heard in many situations: in night clubs when the regular evening's entertainment was over; on recordings, like those made for Milt Gabler's Commodore label, that assembled skilled improvisers in the studio and let them generate performances with minimal rehearsal; on the soundtrack to Gjon Mili's film Jammin' the Blues (1944), which re-created a late-night session using such players as the saxophonists Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet, the trumpeter Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison and the drummers Sid Catlett and Jo Jones; in the series of ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ concerts launched by the impresario and record producer Norman Granz (1944), which, like the Commodore recordings and Mili's film, set up controlled performing contexts within which jazz musicians were expected to play with freedom and spontaneity.
Small groups were particularly valuable in honing the skills of soloists. They gave individual players more time to develop their ideas than was customary (or practical) in big-band arrangements. The pianist Sammy Price recalled stopping in a Kansas City club one night when a jam session was underway, going home, then returning over three hours later to find the same piece still being played. In competitive contests or ‘cutting sessions’, musicians took turns building long, virtuosic solos designed to vanquish the opposition. Small-group recordings did not permit such extended excursions, but they could still let soloists shine in the spotlight. The several sides made for Commodore in 1940 by the Chocolate Dandies (featuring the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and alto saxophonist Benny Carter) placed emphasis on individual statements rather than on ensemble playing. On the ballad I surrender dear, Hawkins states the theme in the first chorus, Eldridge solos in the second chorus, then Hawkins returns for the third; all the while the rhythm section sustains behind them a steady, secondary accompaniment. This practice of placing a higher value on creative soloing than on sectional interplay and group collaboration differed markedly from that of the big bands of the swing era (as well as the New Orleans and Chicago groups of the 1920s), which strove for more parity between soloing and ensemble playing.
The emphasis on solos in small-group jazz of the 1930s and 40s set new standards of virtuosity and instrumental proficiency. Hawkins inspired other saxophonists who wished to learn some of the advanced ideas he applied to the changes (chord progressions) of popular songs; trumpeters admired Eldridge's control of the upper register and daring construction of phrases. The pianist Art Tatum, who performed both as soloist and with his trio at the Onyx on 52nd Street, brought to jazz a new combination of harmonic savvy, playful wit and transcendental technique: what he did seemed so impossible that it helped raise the ceiling for what other musicians might accomplish. The guitarist Charlie Christian, with his fluent, horn-like phrasing and clean articulation, demonstrated how his instrument could assume a leading soloistic role in jazz, and Jimmy Blanton performed a similar function for the bass through his work with Ellington's orchestra (1939–41).
The rise of virtuosity in jazz was due not just to exceptionally talented individuals, however. In the USA opportunities for instrumental instruction in high schools and colleges helped improve the general level of musicianship. Black American teacher-bandleaders like N. Clark Smith and Walter Dyett in Chicago fostered the development of many young black musicians – among them Lionel Hampton, Nat King Cole, Milt Hinton and Ray Nance – who later moved into the world of big bands and instrumental jazz. Jimmie Lunceford's popular orchestra grew out of the student group, the Chickasaw Syncopators, formed at a high school in Memphis. Another band that emerged from an institutional programme was the all-female International Sweethearts of Rhythm, formed in 1939 at the Piney Woods Country Life School in Mississippi. By the early 1940s, the general technical ability of jazz players was significantly higher than it had been a decade or two earlier: recordings of both small groups and big bands demonstrate this convincingly.
The swing era reached its apogee in the early 1940s, with the bands of Ellington, Basie, Goodman, Shaw, Dorsey, Miller and many others enjoying unprecedented popularity and commercial success. There were problems: wartime conscription thinned the ranks of big bands; record manufacturing was slowed by a shortage of shellac used in the war effort; the musicians' union called for a ban on commercial recording which limited distribution of the music between 1942 and 1944. Generally, however, swing remained the popular music of choice throughout the years of World War II, in tandem with a craze for the blues-based, ostinato-driven genre of Boogie-woogie.
Meanwhile other forms of jazz during the 1940s presented alternatives to the prevailing swing style offered by big bands. A resurgence of interest in older, pre-swing jazz styles led to what some critics later called a New Orleans or Dixieland revival. The musicians identified with this movement came from different places and backgrounds. Some were older black players from Louisiana such as the clarinettist George Lewis and the cornettist Bunk Johnson, both of whom had performed mainly in and around New Orleans until they began receiving national recognition through recordings and live performances in the 1940s. Johnson in particular was hailed as a living link to an older, ‘authentic’ jazz tradition, since he had figured prominently among New Orleans musicians in the early 1900s. Louis Armstrong praised Johnson's playing from this period, comparing it favourably to that of Buddy Bolden and King Oliver. Yet Johnson's recordings, made between 1942 and 1947, when he was in his 60s and past his prime, do not convincingly present him as the accomplished musician the young Armstrong may have remembered. Other exponents of earlier jazz during this period were white northerners who drew upon their experience playing New Orleans and Chicago small-group styles in the 1920s, among them the cornettists Wild Bill Davison and Muggsy Spanier, the clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow and the guitarist Eddie Condon. Davison's version of Eccentric (1947, Cir.), a piece the New Orleans Rhythm Kings had recorded 25 years earlier, combined the instrumentation and interweaving polyphonic textures of older New Orleans ensembles with the smoother rhythmic flow of swing. Still another group of musicians participating in this revival of interest in early jazz were white players on the West Coast, such as the cornettist Lu Watters and the trombonist Turk Murphy, who attempted more self-consciously to recreate the styles of such celebrated early jazz bands as King Oliver. Altogether the New Orleans revival made its impact through recordings, performances at such venues as Condon's and the Stuyvesant Casino in New York City and Earthquake McGoon's in San Francisco, and articles in the jazz press, often polemical in tone, in which critics championed early jazz as more expressive and ‘authentic’ than what they considered to be the vitiated commercial product presented by big bands during the swing era. In effect, these writers, labelled as ‘moldy figs’ because of their conservative tastes, carried on the work begun by Robert Goffin and Hugues Panassié during the previous decade, waging a similar battle with the opposing factions only slightly changed.
While some musicians and fans assumed a retrospective stance in the 1940s, seeking to reclaim the roots of jazz tradition, others began to construct a fresh musical vocabulary that would set themselves apart from both the traditional and swing camps. If the New Orleans revival was a nationwide phenomenon, the impetus to forge a modern jazz idiom was centred in New York, initially in Harlem, and came from a younger generation of black American musicians born between 1913 and 1925. Major figures involved in the effort included Kenny Clarke (b 1914), Dizzy Gillespie (b 1917), Thelonious Monk (b 1917), Charlie Parker (b 1920), Bud Powell (b 1924) and Max Roach (b 1924). These players did not deliberately set out to create a new jazz idiom, but gradually it happened. Through informal and after-hours jam sessions held in small night clubs and musicians' apartments, a process of collaborative discovery unfolded in which new ideas about harmonic substitutions, rhythmic vocabulary and melodic construction were worked out, shared and tested on the bandstand. One primary site for this activity was the Harlem club, Minton's Playhouse. Gillespie recalled some of the advance preparation he did for informal evening performances there: ‘On afternoons before a session, Thelonious Monk and I began to work out some complex variations on chords and the like, and we used them at night to scare away the no-talent guys’ (Shapiro and Hentoff, E1955, p.337). Parker, who first visited New York in 1939, recalled spontaneously making harmonic discoveries while jamming in a Harlem ‘chili house’. Having grown weary of improvising solos on conventional harmonies, he described a moment of revelation: ‘I was working over [the popular song] Cherokee, and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive.’ (ibid., 354). Evidence of Parker's Cherokee experimentation can be heard in a private recording made in early 1942 at Monroe's Uptown House. This document points toward Parker's magisterial treatment of the Cherokee chord progression a few years later on his commercial recording Koko (Savoy, 1945).
Recordings from the early 1940s prove limited as sources documenting the emergence of modern jazz, or Bop and bebop as it was onomatopoeically dubbed by critics. The recording ban of 1942–4 was partly to blame, but as Scott DeVeaux noted, even without the recording ban it is doubtful that companies would have found bop to be an appealing, marketable commodity, characterized as it was by ‘a loose, improvisatory format and an eclectic repertory of standards studded with harmonic obstacles’ (DeVeaux, E1997, p.298). There are glimmers, though, of modern techniques being introduced within a conventional swing context. Live recordings of sessions at Minton's in 1941, when Monk and Kenny Clarke were members of the house band, contain the pianist's dissonant, chromatically inflected harmonies and the drummer's explosive accents that later would dominate the rhythmic topography of bop. Similarly, a few of Charlie Parker's solos with the Jay McShann band hint at imminent departures from swing conventions, as in the saxophonist's asymmetrical phrasing on Moten Swing and double-time lines on Body and Soul (both from the 1940 Wichita transcriptions).
More dramatic evidence of a fully formed modern jazz practice, however, turns up in recordings from 1944–5, by which time the experimentation described by musicians had presumably been going on for several years or more. The use of chromatically altered pitches within a diatonic harmonic context (e.g. flattened 5th and 9th, sharp 9th, flat 13th) can be heard in some of Gillespie's solos recorded with Hawkins and his orchestra in February 1944, and the trumpeter's trademark double-time phrasing can be heard toward the end of the ballad I stay in the mood for you (1944, Deluxe), recorded with the Billy Eckstine orchestra. The dissonant syntax, whole-tone runs and off-kilter rhythmic patterns of Monk contrast with the longer, spun-out phrases of Hawkins on the latter's recordings of On the Bean (1944, Joe Davis) and Flyin' Hawk (1944, Joe Davis). Differences between the older swing style and the newer bop idiom are vividly illustrated by instrumentalists on Sarah Vaughan's recording of Mean to Me (1945, Contl), in which the relaxed, flowing solo of tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips is followed by the darting, agitated lines of Parker and Gillespie.
A
stylistically cohesive example of bop can be heard in Shaw 'Nuff,
recorded by Gillespie and his All Star Quintette (1945, Guild). The ominous
tone of the introduction comes from the flattened 5ths played in the bass register
of the piano by Al Haig, shadowed by Sid Catlett on tom-toms. The dissonant
tritone also figures in the rapidly moving melody or ‘head’ played in unison by
Gillespie and Parker, returning at the end with the repeat of the introduction
and the final D
to G
fillip in the piano. The rapid tempo, irregular phrase groups (in both head and
solos), sudden, sharp drum accents, chromatically altered notes, spare
accompanying of Haig and the enigmatic introduction and coda are all aspects
that point to the development of a modernist ‘art for art's sake’ aesthetic in
marked contrast to the popular trajectory of swing and the folkloric echoes of
traditional jazz.
Though bop was primarily a small-group style of jazz, performed usually with two or three lead instruments (most often trumpet and saxophone) and three or four in the rhythm section, some big bands played a role in promoting this music. Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine both directed ensembles that featured young modernists in their ranks, among them Gillespie, Parker, Vaughan and Fats Navarro. Gillespie himself led a big band in the second half of the 1940s; his recording of Gil Fuller's Things to Come (1946, Musi.), with its breakneck tempo, wildly aggressive phrasing and ubiquitous flattened 5ths, shows the attempt to make bop effective in a large-ensemble format. The big band of Boyd Raeburn in the mid-1940s was known for its provocatively dissonant harmonies and unusual timbral combinations. Even such an avid exponent of entertaining swing as Hampton recalled wanting ‘some of that bebop sound in my performances’, hiring Betty Carter (Lorraine Carter at that time) for that purpose in 1948. Other bands, such as those led by Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Claude Thornhill and Duke Ellington, featured bop-flavoured arrangements in their repertory without necessarily championing the cause of modern jazz.
In addition to drawing upon the newly minted expressive resources of the bop idiom, some modern jazz groups in the 1940s began incorporating rhythmic features from the Afro-Cuban heritage. To be sure, rhythmic patterns from the Caribbean and Latin America had been part of jazz from early on, as in Jelly Roll Morton's ‘Spanish tinge’ pieces and in the presence of such dance forms as the Argentine tango and Cuban rhumba in the repertories of jazz orchestras in the 1920s and 30s. Latin stylistic features had also been introduced to American dance orchestras by musicians who had come to the USA from Caribbean nations, such as Ellington's trombonist Juan Tizol (Puerto Rico), the flute and reed player Alberto Soccarras (Cuba) and the trumpeter Mario Bauza (Cuba). But in the 1940s jazz forged stronger bonds with the Caribbean in the work of Machito (Frank Raul Grillo) and his Afro-Cubans and in the contributions made by the Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo to Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra in 1947–8. Gillespie showcased Pozo's talents in such compositions as Manteca (1947, Vic.) and the two-part Cubana Be/Cubana Bop (1947, Vic.), composed by Gillespie with George Russell, which fused together forward-looking, dissonant harmonies with traditional Afro-Cuban conga patterns and vocal chanting led by Pozo. Similar features are heard in Pete Rugolo's Cuban Carnival, recorded by Stan Kenton's orchestra (1947, Cap.). The impact of Afro-Cuban rhythmic practice on small-group jazz performance can be heard in Max Roach's playing with the Bud Powell trio on Powell's composition Un poco loco (1951, BN) and Gillespie's Night in Tunisia (1951, BN).
In seeking to understand the rise of ‘modern jazz’ in the 1940s, historians have tended to stress either its affinities with swing and earlier jazz (bop as a further evolution of harmonic practice and virtuosity cultivated in the 1930s) or its radical, self-conscious break with tradition (bop as a revolt against the watered-down, commodified form of jazz presented by big bands). Other writers, though, among them DeVeaux and David Stowe, described bop as reflecting the contingencies of professional music-making and the economic structures of the music industry. Their studies depict the emergence and reception of modern jazz as a complex, socially mediated process, not merely as an artistic decision to replace an older prevailing style with an innovative new one. Another way of viewing bop is as a response to social and political conditions black Americans faced in the 1940s. Claiming that swing was not ‘expressive of the emotional life of most young Negroes after the war’, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) argued that the ‘willfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound of bebop’ reflected the anger and alienation of those who felt themselves to be ‘outside the mainstream of American culture’ (Baraka, H1967, pp.81–2). Eric Lott, similarly, called bop ‘intimately if indirectly related to the militancy of its moment’ (Gabbard, H1995, p.246). None of these interpretations takes precedence over any other; all prove useful in understanding a dynamic musical movement that fundamentally changed the way jazz was played and perceived.
Enthusiasm for big-band swing gradually waned after World War II: the postwar generation preferred other music for dancing and listening. The popularity of rhythm and blues in the late 1940s signalled a shift in taste towards earthy songs with a strong, shuffling backbeat. The rich, brassy textures of big bands gave way to a leaner, more streamlined sound featuring vocals, one or two horns, electric guitar, bass and drums. Figures formerly associated with instrumental jazz, such as the pianist Nat King Cole and the saxophonist Louis Jordan, highlighted their vocal talents as they moved into the more commercially lucrative field of rhythm and blues and contemporary pop. Singers who had launched careers with big bands, such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, found success as soloists in the later 1940s and 50s, often recording pop songs with orchestral accompaniment in settings removed from the jazz sphere. The appeal of solo singers and close-harmony vocal groups, and the rise of rhythm and blues and early rock and roll, brought the swing era to a definitive close and created problems for many jazz musicians who had formerly worked with big bands. While a few of the most successful big bands survived this period and carried on, others were forced to reduce their numbers or broke up altogether. Count Basie began leading smaller units in 1950–51, then reconstituted a big band that gained popularity with slow, melodious, gently swinging pieces such as Frank Foster's Shiny Stockings (1956, Verve) and Neal Hefti's Lil' Darlin' (1957, Roul.) and riff-driven blues numbers with a heavier backbeat (Every day I have the blues, 1955, Clef, and Blues in Hoss' Flat, 1959, Roul.). To survive economically, big bands had to keep current with popular tastes or, in the case of Ellington and Kenton, assemble a repertory so distinctive and players so accomplished that they could still command a public following.
With big bands becoming increasingly risky ventures, small-group activity picked up during the 1950s. But if jazz lost popularity and economic clout, its musicians gained the creative freedom to try out new approaches. For some this meant finding fresh ways to integrate composition and improvisation, while for others it meant tapping into the rich vein of black American vernacular idioms, blending jazz with rhythm and blues, blues and gospel. This was a time of synthesis and consolidation, in which techniques from both swing and bop were freely mixed together. Bop initially may have been, as Baraka noted, ‘harsh’ and ‘anti-assimilationist’, but during the 1950s its profile changed: the musical language became more moderate as it came to be absorbed into everyday speech.
The career of Miles Davis during this period shows these synthesizing and moderating processes taking place. Although Davis had been a member of Charlie Parker's band (1945–8), his own playing avoided the virtuosic brilliance of the bop idiom. It was slower, sparer and softer. What Davis lacked in conventional trumpet technique he made up for in plangent lyricism. In 1949–50, collaborating with such arrangers as Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis, Davis assembled a nine-piece band to record a group of pieces that were later reissued as a long-playing album entitled Birth of the Cool (Cap., 1957). These recordings combined the harmonic language and gestural vocabulary of bop with the ensemble precision derived from big-band swing; all the musicians had had experience playing with big bands, and Evans's arranging for the orchestra of Claude Thornhill made a direct impact on the sound and style of the Davis nonet, particularly in his use of tuba and french horn in the ensemble and in a slow, atmospheric number like ‘Moon Dreams’. Throughout Birth of the Cool a sense of relaxation prevails quite different from the frenetic motion and whirling turbulence of bop. At the same time, the basic idiom on such pieces as ‘Move’ and ‘Boplicity’ displays features recognizable from the work of Parker, Gillespie, Powell and others. Beyond transforming – and to an extent subduing – the language of bop, the Davis nonet sought in these performances to find a more flexible model for integrating solo improvisation with group ensemble passages. Improvised and written lines often intertwine in a symbiotic relationship, departing from the conventional big-band practice of having soloists play only with rhythm section or with accompanying riffs.
Some of the same qualities manifest on the 1949 Davis nonet sides (relaxed pacing, understated expression, softer-edged tone) turned up in the work of other jazz musicians of the 1950s, causing critics to tag them with the descriptive label of Cool jazz. The Modern Jazz Quartet drew upon players formerly in Gillespie's big band: the pianist John Lewis, vibraphone player Milt Jackson, bass player Ray Brown (later Percy Heath) and the drummer Kenny Clarke (later Connie Kay). They specialized in stately, classical-tinged, small-group swing, presented in pellucid textures and with an air of formality reminiscent of the concert hall. Like the Davis nonet, the Modern Jazz Quartet sought creative solutions to the problem of combining written parts with improvisation, with Lewis composing many of the vehicles used for such exploration. The group also introduced new formal models for jazz, not just with extended works or suites made up of shorter movements (as Ellington had been doing since the 1940s) but with different structures used for soloing, as in the 32-bar chorus form for Django (1954, Prst.), organized in the following scheme: A (6 bars) A (6) B (8) A' (4) C (8). Another composer-driven small group of the same period that became identified with cool jazz was the Dave Brubeck quartet. They enjoyed great success with such albums as Jazz Goes to College (Col., B1943, 1954) and Time Out (Col., 1959), the latter featuring pieces using time signatures unusual for jazz (5/4 for ‘Take Five’, 9/8 for ‘Blue Rondo a la Turk’), together with the liquid alto saxophone solos of Paul Desmond. More experimental and less popular than Brubeck and the Modern Jazz Quartet were New York-based groups led by the pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano, which featured in the late 1940s and 50s two of his students, the saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, whose playing was more austere and restrained than that of bop's leading exponent, Charlie Parker. Historians have tended to view the tenor saxophonist Lester Young as the progenitor of the cool school of playing that in the 1950s and 60s might be said to include Konitz, Marsh, Desmond, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and, in California, Chet Baker, Bud Shank and Jimmy Giuffre. Then again, Young played an important role in Parker's musical evolution, and Parker himself (according to Gerry Mulligan, recalling the Birth of the Cool period) was the ‘no.1 influence on us all’. So the critically convenient opposition of 1940s bop and 50s cool jazz belies important underlying lines of musical kinship.
Davis did not confine himself to the cool aesthetic mapped out by his nonet in 1949–50. The quintet he led in 1955–7 with the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, the pianist Red Garland, the bass player Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones, delivered a mixed repertory of high-voltage bop (Oleo, 1955, Prst.), relaxed blues (Blues By Five, 1956, Prst.) and haunting ballads (My Funny Valentine, 1964, Col.). Beginning in 1957 he made a series of LPs in collaboration with arranger Gil Evans, in which he held forth as lead soloist against a lush and luminous orchestral backdrop in album-length suites that resembled extended jazz concertos. (One piece, in fact, was Evans's arrangement of a movement from Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, included on Sketches of Spain, Col., 1960.) Concurrent with these Evans collaborations, Davis could be heard in a sextet format that contrasted his aphoristic style with the effusive outpourings of the saxophonists Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. Whatever cool aspects might have formed part of Davis's musical persona were effectively complemented (or countered) by fellow group members, especially the hard-driving swing of drummer Jimmy Cobb. Nevertheless, on the LP Kind of Blue (Col., 1959), the Davis sextet offered a veritable ‘rebirth’ of the nonet's cool affect from a decade earlier, featuring pensive tone poems like ‘Flamenco Sketches’ and ‘Blue in Green’ that relied mostly on individual solos rather than pre-arranged parts and offering players the chance to construct solos using specific modes (other than major or minor) over radically simplified harmonic underpinnings. Davis explained his approach at the time as part of a general movement in jazz ‘away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation’ (Williams, G1962, p.167). His modal experiments on Kind of Blue opened up liberating possibilities for players of the 1960s.
Davis was one of many jazz musicians in the 1950s who discovered ways of assimilating and transforming the bop idiom that had seemed so experimental and self-contained in the previous decade. Many younger players absorbed the lessons of their ‘modern jazz’ elders, becoming fluent speakers of a bop lingua franca. Clifford Brown, for example, teamed up with Max Roach to form a quintet in the mid-1950s that extended the reach of bop while making it more accessible. Using a musical vocabulary derived from the work of the Parker-Gillespie axis, the Brown-Roach quintet offered energized renditions of popular songs and bop standards. For this group, employing the idiom of ‘modern jazz’ was not so much a statement of difference or being outside the mainstream, as it had been for the first generation of boppers, but an effective and by now familiar set of guidelines for group organization and individual expression. The intense rhythmic propulsion of their performances may have led to their labelling by critics as a Hard bop group. This designation, implying a stylistic variant of 1940s bop, was also applied to the work of the drummer Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, Horace Silver (Blakey's pianist for several years), Sonny Rollins (who worked with the Brown-Roach quintet and Miles Davis, then began leading his own groups) and Miles Davis's mid-1950s quintet and others.
Though such journalist-coined labels as hard bop and bop tend to push jazz uncomfortably into narrow categories, there were some significant departures in the small-group modern jazz of Blakey, Silver and others from the work of those who preceded them. Tempos on the whole tended to be slower, allowing drummers to articulate a stronger underlying beat that created a regular rhythmic groove. Melodies were simpler; the dizzying intricacies of Parker's Donna Lee and Gillespie's Be-Bop gave way to repetitive, riff-based tunes such as Silver's Doodlin' and Bobby Timmons's Moanin' (1958, BN). The blues presence became stronger in hard bop, and rhythms and harmonies evoking the church helped anchor the music solidly in the black American vernacular, as in the instrumental ‘amen’ responsorial figures in Timmons's Moanin' and the folksy melody of Silver's The Preacher (1955, BN). Even the titles of pieces became friendlier, more familiar: instead of Parker's Klactoveedsedstene and Monk's Epistrophy, it was Davis's Walkin', Brown's Swingin' and Silver's Cookin' at the Continental.
The greater accessibility and populist tinge in the music of Blakey, Silver and other small-group jazz figures of the 1950s pointed to larger shifts taking place within the music itself. As the fundamentals of 1940s bop became part of daily practice, forming a common foundation for many younger musicians to follow, what was once ‘outside the mainstream’ in LeRoi Jones's phrase moved to the centre. At the same time, the discrete, often oppositional jazz factions of the war years – especially the advocates of traditional jazz (‘moldy figs’), swing fans and boppers – became more moderate in tone. A broader, more inclusive conception of jazz began to take hold that folded bop or ‘modern jazz’ in with other styles that made up the ‘jazz tradition’. This consolidating process can be seen in the jazz literature of the time, such as M.W. Stearns's The Story of Jazz (New York, 1956), Shapiro and Hentoff's oral-history anthology, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (New York and London, 1955) and in The Jazz Review (1958–61), a journal that gave serious consideration to jazz from all eras. The traditional–modern rift was similarly bridged in the television special, ‘The Sound of Jazz’ (1957), which featured different generations of musicians together, at times deliberately mixing them to emphasize their shared heritage, as when Count Basie was placed sitting at the far end of a grand piano where he could be seen enjoying the dissonant blues chords of Thelonious Monk.
The perception of a common practice within the multi-layered jazz tradition led to the use of the adjective ‘mainstream’ (seeMainstream jazz) as a descriptive label during the 1950s. The British-born critic Stanley Dance, often credited with introducing the term, issued a series of albums under the rubric ‘mainstream jazz’, featuring artists who had emerged on the scene in the 1930s and 40s, among them Coleman Hawkins, Earl Hines, the trombonist Dicky Wells and the cornettist Rex Stewart. Dance used mainstream as a delimiter, referring to musicians whose work fell both chronologically and stylistically between the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ categories. By the early 1960s, though, bop had become old and familiar enough to join the jazz mainstream that now was bounded on one side by New Orleans or traditional jazz and on the other by the searching experimentation associated with the avant garde. From this time on, mainstream has remained a popular signifier to imply such characteristic traits as improvised solos over cyclical, repeating chorus form, use of popular songs, blues and short original compositions as basic units of structure, pervasive rhythmic feeling of ‘swing’, reliance on functional harmony within a tonal system and greater weight placed on individual improvisation than on pre-set or composed material.
Consensus about a jazz mainstream was also reflected in the term Third stream, coined by Gunther Schuller (1957), which described music that drew upon jazz techniques as well as aspects of the European art-music tradition. Schuller was particularly interested in finding ways to juxtapose composed and improvised parts and to integrate post-Schoenberg harmonic practice into the active vocabulary of jazz musicians. These goals are apparent in his composition Transformation (1957, Col.), recorded by an 11-piece ensemble including the trombonist Jimmy Knepper and the pianist Bill Evans and consisting of an improvised middle section flanked by a pre-composed introduction and coda evoking Webern's spare textures and Klangfarbenmelodie. Similar blendings and juxtapositions of jazz with European art music (from the Baroque to atonality) can be heard in compositions from this time by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet (Vendome, La Ronde Suite, Concorde and Piazza Navona), George Russell (Concerto for Billy the Kid, written for Bill Evans, and All about Rosie) and Charles Mingus (Gregarian Chant, Revelations). Much of this repertory was presented not in the night club venues customary for jazz but in concert halls, school settings (for example at the Brandeis Jazz Festival and the Lenox School for Jazz) and art museums. If one result of modern jazz in the 1940s had been the introduction of a musical vocabulary that later formed the basis of mainstream practice, third stream represented another part of its legacy, embodying the notion that jazz was a serious form of artistic expression and not solely meant to be relaxing, diverting or danceable.
There were other paths musicians followed in search of new modes of jazz expression in the 1950s. In New York Mingus adopted a workshop format in which players collaborated in rehearsals and public performances to produce music that grew out of a process of group composition and improvisation. Such works as Pithecanthropus erectus, Haitian Fight Song and Ecclusiastics contained thematic material supplied by Mingus, but their fluidity and sense of collective creation reflected the workshop ideals he fostered. At the same time, while some of Mingus's work showed the forceful impact made upon him by early 20th-century European musical modernism, his pieces often drew deeply upon the black American vernacular, particularly blues and gospel, as in the 12/8 metre and plagal harmonies of Better Get Hit in your Soul (both 1959, Col.), displaying a soulfulness and joyous abandon associated more with the Blakey-Silver hard bop axis than with the diplomatic negotiations of third stream.
Another
major innovator to emerge during this period was John Coltrane. Building upon
the expanded harmonic vocabulary of bop, the saxophonist employed techniques of
chord substitution and superimposition to loosen the music from its tonal
moorings. Original pieces such as Giant Steps and Countdown (both
1959, Atl.) used unconventional chord movement, such as root motion by 3rds
replacing cycles of 5ths, and chromaticism to create rich harmonic
environments. Like Miles Davis, his former bandleader, Coltrane gravitated
toward the combination of modal melodies with stable harmonic fields. He based Impressions
(1961–3, Imp.) on the two-mode framework (D and E Dorian) of Davis's So What and used
pedal points in My Favorite Things (1960, Atl.) and A Love Supreme
(1964, Imp.) to provide tonal reference points while permitting melodic
excursions to go even further afield. Coltrane's virtuosity and brilliance as
an improviser enhanced the appeal of his musical experimentation, and his
personal conception of the tenor saxophone proved greatly influential for
several generations of players in the following decades.
Beyond the modal techniques taken up by Coltrane and Davis, other means were adopted by musicians seeking to expand the harmonic vocabulary of jazz. Monk brought a high level of dissonance (for jazz, at least) to his piano solos and compositions, and his interest in chromatic-based chord progressions can be traced back to compositions written in the early 1940s, such as Epistrophy and Well, you needn't. As an accompanist, he often stopped playing while a horn player improvised, thus allowing soloists greater harmonic freedom as they continued with just drums and bass. (Gerry Mulligan also explored the idea of a pianoless quartet in the 1950s.) Examples of that freedom can be heard in recordings made by Monk with Coltrane (1957) and in live recordings featuring both artists when they played together at the Five Spot Café (1957). Monk's interest in raising the dissonance threshold and rewriting the rules of functional harmony were later taken up by fellow pianist-composers Herbie Nichols, Cecil Taylor and Andrew Hill. Lennie Tristano displayed a similar penchant for dissonance, although in his case it was often linear and contrapuntally derived rather than introduced through vertical harmonic structures. In contrast to these figures, Bill Evans treated dissonance almost as a colouristic device, using minor 2nds in voicings, for example, to lend an edge of tension to rich chords built upon extended triads, occasionally 4ths. Evans also pursued a piano sound ideal radically different from that of Monk, Taylor and Tristano, distinguished by a singing, rounded tone, legato touch and, especially on ballads, liberal use of the damper pedal, all features that pointed in the direction of 19th- and early 20th-century European composers (Chopin, Brahms and Ravel) whose works Evans knew and admired.
In addition to developing new technical resources for jazz in the late 1950s and early 60s, some artists showed a concern with addressing social and political issues through their music. Jazz had always contained implicit messages about exercising personal freedom and striving together to realize a practical model for participatory democracy. But it had rarely been overtly political: Billie Holiday's performance of the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit (1939, Com.) and Duke Ellington's satirical treatment of racial inequities in the musical Jump for Joy (1941) were unusual statements for jazz musicians to make. But, as already noted, bop could be said to embody the protest of young black Americans who felt marginalized and oppressed by the ‘Jim Crow’ racial inequities in the urban north. And it was partly the defiant stance assumed by Parker, Gillespie and their peers that enabled a young musician like Mingus to comment directly on current political events and social conditions, as when he indicted a segregationist Arkansas governor in Original Faubus Fables (1960, Can.) or protested inequality for black Americans in Freedom (1962, UA). During this period, as the civil rights movement was gathering momentum and black nationalism was emerging as a powerful political force, other jazz musicians joined Mingus in speaking out. Sonny Rollins issued The Freedom Suite (Riv., 1958), the liner notes containing a statement by the saxophonist decrying the persecution and repression faced by black Americans. Max Roach collaborated with the singer and songwriter Oscar Brown jr on We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (Can., 1960), featuring sections titled ‘Driva’ Man' and ‘Tears for Johannesburg’. The pianist Randy Weston, in collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes and the arranger Melba Liston, celebrated the cultural and spiritual homeland of black Americans in Uhuru Afrika! (Roul., 1960). Abbey Lincoln, similarly, affirmed pride in the black American heritage through the songs ‘When Malindy Sings’ and Weston's ‘African Lady’ on her album Straight Ahead (Can., 1961). A negative review of Straight Ahead in Down Beat caused the magazine to arrange a panel discussion made up of critics and musicians, published by the magazine under the title ‘Racial Prejudice in Jazz’.
If a single musician personified the searching spirit of progressive jazz in the late 1950s and early 60s, it was the saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Although steeped in the bop of Parker and the hard-edged blues of his home state of Texas, Coleman ventured far beyond this musical territory in the company of several musicians he met in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s: the cornettist Don Cherry, the bass player Charlie Haden and the drummer Billy Higgins. Coleman's pianoless quartet came to New York in 1959 and drew considerable critical attention performing at the Five Spot Café. Although Coleman's solo lines frequently implied an underlying tonality and used intervals and gestures familiar from the blues, the group's collective effect suggested abandonment of set chord changes, known forms and conventional instrumental functions. Haden and Higgins proved to be not just supportive accompanists but assertive participants in a four-way conversation. Harmonic activity was unpredictable, regular phrase structures abandoned and functional tonality at times erased. Blues Connotation (1960, Atl.) begins with saxophone and trumpet stating an aggressive theme – not quite in 12-bar blues form – that sounds typical of the Silver-Blakey school of hard bop. As Coleman delves into his solo, however, the structure opens up and dissolves, and the established tonality flickers in and out of focus. The blues is no longer a governing principle but a point of reference, as Coleman explained (N. Hertoff: The Best of Ornette Coleman, Atl., 1970 [disc notes]): ‘[The piece] is played in the blues tradition, which makes it sound like a blues, but as you listen throughout you hear that the minor 3rds do not dominate but act as a basis for the melody’. Coleman, like Davis around the same time, thus demonstrated an interest in ‘melodic rather than harmonic variation’, jettisoning the bopper's chord-driven engine in order to increase options for improvised lines.
The titles of Coleman's albums sought to reflect the spirit of innovation driving his activity: Tomorrow is the Question! The New Music of Ornette Coleman (Cont., 1959), The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atl., 1959), and especially Free Jazz (Atl., 1960), in which a double quartet collectively improvises to produce dense textures, jarring dissonance and agitated rhythmic activity. While some hailed Free Jazz as a liberating manifesto, opening a new world of possibilities for adventurous musicians working in jazz, others saw it as a violent, even destructive act: the Down Beat reviewer John A. Tynan wrote
This witches' brew is the logical end product of a bankrupt philosophy of ultraindividualism in music … these eight nihilists were collected together in one studio at one time and with one common cause: to destroy the music that gave them birth.
In the 1960s the bold challenges to the jazz tradition posed by figures like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane appealed to other young musicians seeking to find their voice. A breakaway movement formed within the jazz community, analogous in some ways to the ideological formation of the bop school 20 years earlier, in which proponents of what some called Free jazz (or ‘the new thing’) distanced themselves from the mainstream that had gradually taken shape during the 1950s. These musicians, most in their early to mid-20s, sought to liberate themselves from the constraints of chord progressions, pre-composed melodies, swing, the Tin Pan Alley songbook and predictable roles for ensemble players. They gave priority to unbridled energy, raw emotional expression and collective improvisation; their music was fierce, angry, passionate, chaotic, discordant and uncompromising.
Prominent figures in this group were the saxophonists Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, Marion Brown and John Tchicai, the trombonists Grachan Moncur III and Roswell Rudd, the cornettist Don Cherry, the trumpeter Bill Dixon, the pianist Cecil Taylor, the bass players Gary Peacock and Buell Neidlinger and the drummers Ed Blackwell, Andrew Cyrille and Sunny Murray. They found outlets for their music in artists' lofts, galleries and small concert halls. Record studios also formed part of the free jazz scene. Coltrane's historic recording session of Ascension (Imp., 1965) brought together members of his own quartet with seven young players, based in New York. The issued disc contained a 40-minute performance that had some elements of pre-planning (melodic motifs and mode choices) but relied primarily on spontaneous collaboration. ‘The emphasis was on textures rather than the making of an organizational entity’, said Shepp, one of the participants. ‘There is no casual approach to be taken to this record’, warned A.B. Spellman in the liner notes, observing that the group formed ‘a plexus of voices, all of different kinds, but most belonging to that generation which grew up on Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, [Cecil] Taylor, [Jackie] McLean, Coleman, Coltrane, the human rights struggle, and nuclear weapons’.
Impulse, the label that released Ascension, put out this recording and others by experimental younger musicians under the rubric ‘the new wave in jazz’. Typical is Shepp's piece The Chased (1965, Imp.), showing his fusion of Coleman's blues phrases and short, riff-like motives with Coltrane's muscular tone and headlong momentum, all unveiled in a charged, unstable environment free of set forms and chord changes. In the liner notes to his album Mama Too Tight (Imp., 1966), Shepp praised Coleman for ‘revitaliz[ing] and refurbish[ing] the blues idiom’ and stated his own aim ‘not to “overthrow” the many valid musical references that are extant, but to include them whenever possible’.
The dissonant, strident, often atonal style cultivated by the free jazz players made the music appealing only to a small group of listeners. Conservative jazz fans found it unpalatable and denounced it. The music's low commercial value, together with problems in getting it performed, led to the formation of organizations aiming to provide a sympathetic community of listeners, together with a base for economic support, teaching and playing opportunities. In Chicago such a group was the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded (1965) by the composer and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, and which spawned such ensembles as the quintet Art Ensemble of Chicago (formed 1969) and the trio Air (formed 1975). A similar musicians' collective, the Black Artists Group (BAG), took shape in St Louis (1968), serving as a meeting-ground for Julius Hemphill, Hamiet Bluiett and Oliver Lake, who later joined with David Murray to form the World Saxophone Quartet (1976). Other important musical organizations supporting experimental jazz improvisation and composition included New York's Jazz Composers Guild and Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association, Detroit's Creative Arts Collective (CAC), and in Europe, Amsterdam's Instant Composers Pool (ICP) and Germany's New Artists Guild (later Free Music Production). The mystical pianist, composer and bandleader Sun Ra also exemplified the trend in constructing communal structures for avant-garde jazz. Sun Ra lived together with members of his Arkestra first in Chicago, later in New York and Philadelphia, rehearsing and touring with the group while issuing recordings on small independent labels such as ESP and Saturn. Sun Ra and his Arkestra, like the Art Ensemble of Chicago after them, used theatrical elements and costumes to present music as ritualized spectacle.
Because of their novelty and innovative edge, free jazz players of the 1960s have received considerable attention from historians writing about that period. But they represented only one of many currents in jazz flourishing by this time. Mainstream or ‘straightahead’ jazz continued to be the dominant style of jazz heard around the world. This category now subsumed both the work of bop and post-bop musicians like Gillespie, Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey, as well as older musicians still active, among them Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge. Some jazz musicians in the 1960s sought to reach wider audiences by performing popular material: Louis Armstrong with Hello, Dolly!, Ella Fitzgerald with the country and western album Misty Blue and Duke Ellington and the guitarist Wes Montgomery with songs by the Beatles. Others drew upon black American vernacular idioms like blues, rhythm and blues and soul to bring their music closer to prevailing popular styles of the day. Horace Silver incorporated rock and ‘boogaloo’ beats in The Jody Grind (1966, BN) and Psychedelic Sally (1968, BN), as did Les McCann and Eddie Harris on their 1969 hit, Compared to What (Atl.). Cannonball Adderley also achieved commercial success with his relaxed and soulful rendition of Joe Zawinul's Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (1966, Cap.). Some of the most inventive small-group jazz by younger players who did not exclusively embrace the free jazz aesthetic can be sampled in the series of albums Blue Note issued featuring such artists as Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson, Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock.
Vital life signs in the field of big-band jazz were also present during the 1960s. Ellington produced some of the most memorable music of his career during this period on such albums as Afro Bossa (Rep., 1963), and The Far East Suite (RCA, 1966). He also turned to composing concerts of sacred music requiring the combined forces of orchestra, solo singers, choir and dancers; these works, didactic in tone and devout in character, were performed in cathedrals and churches in the USA and Europe. Meanwhile, he and his orchestra kept touring steadily and performing for both listeners and dancers, as did other swing era survivors such as Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Woody Herman. Joining these veterans on the scene were newly formed ensembles, including the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band in Germany, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis orchestra in New York and the Don Ellis Orchestra in Los Angeles. These groups attested to the continued appeal of the big-band sound while seeking to attract younger listeners by incorporating features drawn from other idioms, as in the funky rhythm and blues groove in the Jones-Lewis orchestra's version of Central Park North (SolS, 1969).
An important stream of jazz activity during the 1960s flowed from Brazil. The popularity of Brazilian samba and bossa nova first reached American jazz musicians through recordings by Antônio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto and Laurindo Almeida. In the early 1960s guitarist Charlie Byrd introduced Stan Getz to bossa nova this way and both went on to perform pieces from this repertory together and with Brazilian musicians, as on the albums Jazz Samba (Verve, 1962) and Getz/Gilberto (Verve, 1963), the latter featuring Jobim's ‘Girl from Ipanema’ performed by João and Astrud Gilberto. The nearly whispered vocals, gently strumming rhythms and cool affect of these jazz bossa nova performances occupied vastly different aesthetic terrain from the angry and aggressive free jazz emerging at the same time. The Brazilian contribution to jazz grew stronger in the decades to follow, from artistic collaborations between musicians (Wayne Shorter and Milton Nascimento on Native Dancer, Col., 1974) to the series of important Brazilian performers who contributed to the jazz scene, among them the percussionists Airto Moreira and Alphonse Mouzon, the singer Flora Purim and the pianist Eliane Elias.
Japan was another country that began to figure more prominently on the world jazz scene in the 1960s and 70s. Beyond developing a significant base of jazz fans that would draw American musicians to cities like Tokyo and Osaka, Japan produced musicians who launched successful international careers as performers and recording artists, among them the pianist and bandleader Toshiko Akiyoshi, the saxophonist and flute player Sadao Watanabe, the trumpeter Terumasa Hino and the pianist Yosuke Yamashita. Record companies in Japan also issued music by American artists that featured both a higher quality of sound and at times previously unreleased material not available in the USA and Europe.
Just as Miles Davis in the 1950s had inspired jazz musicians to embrace a ‘cool’ aesthetic and to explore modal options, so in the 1960s and 70s he paved a way others found attractive. The quintet he led from 1965 to 1968 (featuring the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bass player Ron Carter and the drummer Tony Williams) specialized in richly textured original compositions written by its members. It perfected a free and fluid performance style that nevertheless remained tonally anchored, though often modally inflected, and used cyclical harmonic structures derived from earlier jazz practice. Davis was also increasingly drawn to create lengthy improvised statements over static harmonic fields, and this tendency, together with the adoption of a solid backbeat, even quaver-note rhythmic motion and electronic instruments (such as bass and keyboards), brought his music closely in line with rock and funk on such albums as In a Silent Way (Col., 1969) and Bitches Brew (Col., 1969). This jazz-rock admixture came to be called fusion by the critics, some of whom considered the music no longer part of the jazz tradition. Davis was undeterred, later writing of this time: ‘I wanted to change course, had to change course for me to continue to believe in and love what I was playing’ (Davis and Troupe, F1989, p.298). He also observed that fewer black musicians were playing jazz in the 1960s because it was ‘becoming the music of the museum’.
A number of young musicians who played with Davis in the late 1960s followed their leader's example in playing loudly amplified music that fused together elements of jazz, rock, funk and soul, as well as non-western musical traits. Shorter and the keyboard player Joe Zawinul co-founded Weather Report in 1970, a group that combined the improvisatory freedom of jazz with a rhythmic vocabulary derived from rock, Latin American and Afro-Caribbean traditions. Weather Report could produce liquid, floating textures that resembled those of Davis's mid-1960s quintet but was also adept at hard-driving rock, as on ‘Teen Town’ and ‘Birdland’ from the album Heavy Weather (Col., 1976). Another Davis alumnus, Chick Corea, formed a jazz-rock unit, Return to Forever, that reached its peak of popularity in the mid-1970s, while Herbie Hancock similarly achieved commercial success with multi-layered, polyrhythmic, jazz-funk fusion on the albums Headhunters (Col., 1973) and Man-Child (Col., 1975). In 1971 the British guitarist John McLaughlin, who had performed with Davis on the recordings In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, formed his own high-energy, high-decibel electric band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which took jazz-rock fusion further into the acid rock mode of the period, also incorporating hypnotic ostinatos and modal melodies derived from Indian music. In the 1970s McLaughlin pursued another kind of fusion with the acoustic trio Shakti, in which he collaborated with the Indian musicians Lakshminarayana Shankar and Zakir Hussein. Virtually alone among these gifted Davis alumni in the 1970s, Keith Jarrett rejected the electrified rock, funk and fusion options, preferring instead to appear before the public as solo acoustic pianist, spinning out lengthy, discursive improvisations that at times took on the aura of religious ritual. Nevertheless, Jarrett's investment in process over product, together with his adamant insistence on artistic self-determination, marked him as yet another musician who had been significantly moulded through his experience with Davis.
While many musicians in the 1970s were intrigued by the possibilities of mingling jazz with rock, funk and non-Western influences – some of them enjoying commercial success in the process – others continued to pursue the adventurous artistic agenda set forth by free jazz exponents in the 1960s. Interest in free jazz was especially high in Europe. Among the important musicians there contributing to a robust alternative jazz scene, against the backdrop of mainstream and traditional jazz, were the guitarist Derek Bailey and the saxophonists John Surman and Evan Parker in Britain; the trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, the vibraphone player Gunter Hampel and the pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach in Germany; the drummer Han Bennink, the pianist Misha Mengelberg and the reed-player Willem Breuker in the Netherlands; and the Ganelin Trio and Sergey Kuryokhin in the USSR. Large ensembles also emerged from this activity, notably Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra (founded in 1966), the Breuker Collective (1974), Mathias Rüegg's Vienna Art Orchestra (1977) and Pierre Dørge and the New Jungle Orchestra (1980). These aggregations tended to be highly eclectic in style and drawn to open-ended forms and spontaneous compositional procedures. Jazz constituted only part of their musical identity, which also included folksongs, rock, 20th-century art-music techniques and liberal doses of satire and Dadaesque humour. The European avant garde also proved nurturing for American musicians touring or living abroad, such as Don Cherry, Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton.
Stylistic pluralism also characterized approaches to avant-garde jazz in the USA during the 1970s. Two important centres of activity were New York and Chicago. In lower Manhattan a vibrant scene developed in artists' lofts and other non-commercial performing spaces. At Sam Rivers's Studio Rivbea in New York's SoHo, a series of recordings was made in 1976; released under the title Wildflowers, they featured such musicians as the saxophonists Kalaparusha (Maurice McIntyre), Byard Lancaster, Marion Brown, Anthony Braxton and David Murray, the drummers Sunny Murray and Andrew Cyrille and the trumpeters Olu Dara and Leo Smith. For these figures, as for their European contemporaries, playing ‘free’ was more a performing option than a mandate. Although Byard Lancaster and Sunny Murray took considerable harmonic and rhythmic liberties with the Harold Arlen song Over the Rainbow (1977, Douglas), the original melody was still there for listeners; in Kalaparusha's Jays (1977, Douglas), similarly, the saxophonist's free and probing solo unfolds over a bass ostinato that serves a binding rhythmic function throughout. Such fusions of free techniques with principles of compositional ordering characterized the work of figures associated with Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, notably Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell and Braxton, later Leo Smith and George Lewis.
Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington and others likened jazz to a tree: with roots extending deep into black American, African and European musical traditions, it has grown upward and outward, its branches and limbs representing varied styles all joined to a sturdy trunk that keeps alive connections to a rich musical past. In the late 20th century, the diverse and multifaceted character of this tree of jazz was striking. Nearly all the major jazz styles from the past – New Orleans, big-band swing, bop, mainstream, free jazz and fusion – are still being performed by contemporary musicians. The longevity and international appeal of these styles refute the familiar unilinear, evolutionary model of jazz history. When new forms of jazz emerge, the old branches do not drop off and vanish but keep growing on their own. Far from being radical revolutionaries, most jazz musicians are committed conservationists who cultivate pre-existing styles or develop hybrid strains through creative recycling.
One example of this hybridity surfaced in the 1990s when musicians fused 1960s ‘soul jazz’ (the funky, populist-tinged work of Donald Byrd, Les McCann and Lou Donaldson) with the rhythms, rapping and technology of hip hop. Dubbed acid jazz (see Acid jazz (ii)) by critics, the music is characterized by short, riff-like quotations (sampling), layered polyphonic textures, heavy beats, digitally synthesized sound effects and collage-like construction. Typically the style's jazz flavour comes from individual solo lines and harmonic inflections, while the hip hop component dominates the rhythmic accompaniment. In Music Evolution (Col., 1997), by the group Buckshot LeFonque led by the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, a vocalist raps about connections between jazz and hip hop while in the background Marsalis and the trumpeter Russell Gunn provide harmonized riffs that evoke hard bop of the 1950s and 60s. In Cantaloop Island (Flip Fantasia) (BN, 1993), the British group Us3 rework Hancock's Cantaloupe Island by placing a vocal rap atop the original melody and modernizing the rhythmic background. This process of rearranging and updating is traditional for jazz musicians: Hancock himself had done it with Cantaloupe Island (cf the 1964 version on the album Empyrean Isles, BN, with that of 1976 on Secrets, Col.), and earlier, bop musicians supplied new melodies for familiar harmonic structures (e.g. Miles Davis's Donna Lee, based on the harmonies of (Back Home Again in) Indiana) and arrangers retooled older pieces from the repertory (e.g. Don Redman's transformation of King Oliver's Dipper Mouth Blues into Sugar Foot Stomp for the Fletcher Henderson orchestra). While the rhythmic character of acid jazz has led some to question whether it properly qualifies as jazz, the music clearly is located somewhere on the tree's outer branches, no further out on a limb, in some ways, than third-stream experiments of the 1950s or free jazz of the 1960s.
For other recent younger players, hybridity results not so much from the fusion of disparate idioms, as with acid jazz, but from the adoption of a wide-ranging repertory and an open-ended attitude towards musical techniques. Every sound source is available for use, including jazz recordings from every era which remain readily available as reissues on compact disc. Players also freely incorporate aspects of popular, classical and world music traditions. On Joshua Redman's début recording (WB, 1992), he performed original compositions, standards from the swing and bop eras, together with a song by the ‘Godfather of Soul’, James Brown's I got you (I feel good). The World Saxophone Quartet's Rhythm and Blues (Elek. Mus., 1988), similarly, presented fresh investigations of a repertory previously thought outside the realm of jazz: songs associated with the Motown artists Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding and the songwriters Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. The saxophonists David Murray and James Carter can, in a single performance, recapitulate the entire history of their instrument in jazz, from low-down gutbucket blues to the harmonic virtuosity of Hawkins and Rollins to the cries and shrieks of Ayler. With his group Masada, the composer and saxophonist John Zorn filters traditional Jewish musical materials through the lens of contemporary jazz practice and chamber music performance; in other settings he constructs postmodern pastiches that rapidly juxtapose such styles as hard bop and free jazz with punk rock and music from films and cartoons. The saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom integrates movement and live electronics into her performances; the composers Fred Ho and Jon Jang draw upon East Asian musical resources in works conceived for their ensembles; the clarinettist Don Byron's specialities include free jazz, klezmer music and small-group swing.
While some jazz musicians of the 1980s and 90s embraced a philosophy of stylistic pluralism, others aligned themselves more directly with figures and trends from the past. Recordings often supplied occasions for homage, as in the saxophonist Antonio Hart's For Cannonball and Woody (Novus, 1993), honouring Cannonball Adderley and Woody Shaw; the pianists Danilo Perez's Panamonk (Imp., 1996) and Jessica Williams's In the Key of Monk (Jazz Focus, 1999); the trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas's tribute to Wayne Shorter, Stargazer (Arabesque, 1997); and the saxophonist Joe Henderson's series of discs devoted to single figures, among them Billy Strayhorn, Miles Davis and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Musicians undertaking such concept albums usually sought to capture distinctive traits of the artists being honoured, at the same time retaining their individual voices and improvising freely within stylistic parameters of their choice. Retrospective gestures are also common fare at jazz concerts and festivals, as at George Wein's annual JVC festivals in New York, which always include celebrations of past jazz masters, or at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1991, when Miles Davis, in collaboration with Quincy Jones, revisited arrangements Gil Evans had written for him more than 30 years earlier.
A more conservative form of engagement with the past has been taken by jazz repertory ensembles. These groups, typically big bands affiliated with universities, conservatories or large cultural institutions (such as the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra), attempted to revive the sounds of earlier well-known ensembles, such as those of Ellington, Basie and Goodman, often playing from transcriptions of recordings and reproducing solos as well as ensemble and rhythm section parts. If the transformative recycling of acid jazz reflects black American traditions extending back for centuries, the re-creative impulse behind jazz repertory groups derives from the model of European art music, interpreting finished ‘works’ (scores generated from recordings) and striving for ‘authenticity’ through historically informed performing practice.
The jazz repertory movement was but one symptom of the larger process of institutionalization jazz underwent in the 1980s and 90s. In the USA particularly, jazz came to receive a level of economic support and recognition previously reserved for classical music. Private foundations, government arts agencies, museums and major corporations became important sources of funding, underwriting special events and media projects and sponsoring fellowships, awards and competitions for jazz musicians. Institutions of higher learning established jazz degree programmes and hired seasoned professionals to serve as teachers. The literature on jazz expanded greatly in the form of textbooks, scholarly monographs, popular biographies and histories and pedagogical materials. And when in the 1990s some writers began to debate the virtues or perils of a ‘jazz canon’ (recorded performances that had assumed the status of ‘masterpieces’, as on the critic Martin Williams's widely-used anthology The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, 1972, 2/1987), it was evident that jazz had covered vast cultural distance over the relatively short course of its history.
One figure who played a crucial role in popularizing and promoting jazz during this period was Wynton Marsalis, a trumpeter, composer, bandleader and educator from New Orleans. After emerging in the 1980s as a talented soloist with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, then with his own groups featuring his brother Branford, Marsalis began exploring past eras in jazz while refining his own musical language both as player and composer. The recording Black Codes (From the Underground) (Col., 1985) displays his virtuosity as a trumpeter together with his interest as a bandleader in exploring the rhythmic freedom, expressive vocabulary and formal play of Miles Davis's mid-1960s quintet. As founding artistic director of the jazz programme at Lincoln Center, New York's prestigious and powerful sponsor of European-derived performing arts (opera, ballet, symphony and chamber music), Marsalis helped bring jazz solidly within the embrace of America's cultural establishment. He increased visibility for jazz through his concerts and recordings, television and radio programmes, and book and video projects; he commissioned new works and sponsored high-school band competitions; he toured widely with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and appeared regularly as clinician and lecturer in schools throughout the country. At the same time, he sparked controversy by articulating views some considered to be unduly rigid and conservative, particularly his insistence that certain musical features (swing, the blues, call and response) must be present in order for music to qualify as jazz. Others criticized his programming at the Lincoln Center, claiming that it excluded members of the jazz avant garde or did not adequately highlight contributions of white and female musicians. Despite his singular success in raising the cultural capital of jazz, then, Marsalis was unable to resolve questions that had surrounded the music from early on in its history, fundamental questions of definition, ownership, racial identity and function.
Marsalis and other contemporary jazz musicians around the globe make up an extended musical family with widely varying ideas about what jazz is and how to play it. Some seek the thrill of the cutting edge, others the security of tradition. Some devote themselves to free-form improvisation on street corners, others unveil new works in clubs and concert halls, still others play Ellington and Gershwin in crowded hotel lobbies and noisy restaurants. Yet despite their striking differences, these musicians share a common ancestry that can be traced back to New Orleans, to the ‘joy music’ of Sidney Bechet and the blues of Buddy Bolden, and before that, to the bands of Europe and the drums of Africa. They have been drawn one and all to a resilient musical tradition that beckons with the promise of self-discovery and preserves the hope of freedom.
A. General reference. B. Discographies. C. Bibliographies. D. Periodicals. E. Histories. F. Biographies. G. Theory, analysis and criticism. H. Other studies.
g. theory, analysis and criticism
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L. Feather: The Encyclopedia of Jazz (New York, 1955, suppl. 1956; enlarged 2/1960/R)
L. Feather: The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties (New York, 1966)
R. Kinkle: The Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz, 1900–1950 (New Rochelle, NY, 1974)
L.G. Feather and I. Gitler: The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies (New York, 1976)
J. Chilton: Who's Who of Jazz: Storyville to Swing Street (London, 1970, 4/1985)
I. Carr, D. Fairweather, and B. Priestley: Jazz: the Essential Companion (London, 1987)
I. Carr and others: Jazz: the Rough Guide (London, 1995)
C. Delaunay: Hot Discography (Paris, 1936, 4/1943, enlarged 1948 by W.E. Schaap and G. Avakian as New Hot Discography)
C.E. Smith: The Jazz Record Book (New York, 1942)
B. Rust: Jazz Records, A–Z (London, 1961–5, rev., enlarged 5/1983 as Jazz Records, 1897–1942)
J.G. Jepsen: Jazz Records, 1942–[1969] (Holte and Copenhagen, 1963–71)
W. Bruyninckx: 50 Years of Recorded Jazz (1917–1967) (Mechelen, 1968–75, 3/1991 as 70 Years of Recorded Jazz (1917–1987))
M. Ruppli: Prestige Jazz Records, 1949–1971 (Copenhagen, 1972)
M. Cabanowski and H. Choliński: Polskie dyskografia jazzowa, 1955–1972 (Warsaw, 1974)
M. Harrison and others: Modern Jazz: the Essential Records, 1945–1970 (London, 1975)
M. Ruppli: Atlantic Records (Westport, CT, 1979)
H. Nicolausson: Swedish Jazz Discography (Stockholm, 1983)
J. Leder: Women in Jazz: a Discography of Instrumentalists, 1913–1968 (Westport, CT, 1985)
G.G. Simon: Magyar Jazzmelek 1912–1984 (Pecs, 1985)
M. Ruppli and B. Porter: The Clef/Verve Labels (New York, 1987)
M. Cuscuna and M. Ruppli: The Blue Note Label (New York, 1988)
J. Mitchell: Australian Jazz on Record, 1925–80 (Canberra, 1988)
T. Lord: The Jazz Discography (West Vancouver, BC, 1992–)
E. Raben and O.J. Nielsen: Jazz Records, 1942–80 (Copenhagen, 1995)
A.P. Merriam and R.J. Benford: A Bibliography of Jazz (Philadelphia, 1954/R)
R. Reisner: The Literature of Jazz: a Preliminary Bibliography (New York, 1954, 2/1959 as The Literature of Jazz: a Selective Bibliography)
C.G. Herzog zu Mecklenburg: International Jazz Bibliography: Jazz Books from 1919 to 1968 (Strasbourg, 1969, 2/1975)
D. Kennington: The Literature of Jazz: a Critical Guide (London, 1970, 2/1980 with D.L. Read)
B. Hefele: Jazz Bibliography (Munich, 1981)
D.-R. De Lerma: Bibliography of Black Music (Westport, CT, 1984)
W.H. Kenney: ‘Jazz: a Bibliographical Essay’, American Studies International, xxv/1 (1987), 3–27
J. Gray: Fire Music: a Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959–1990 (New York, 1991)
E.S. Meadows: Jazz Research and Performance Materials: a Select Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1981, 2/1995)
G. Carner: Jazz Performers: An Annotated Bibliography of Biographical Materials (New York, 1990)
Australia: Australian Jazz Quarterly (1946–57); Jazz (1981–); Jazz Australia (1976–)
Austria: Jazzforschung (1969–); Jazz Forum (1967–)
Belgium: Jazz Hot (1945–)
Canada: Coda (1958–)
England: Crescendo (1962–); Jazz Journal (1974–77); Jazz Journal International (1977–); Jazz Monthly (1955–71); Music Mirror (1954–8)
Finland: Rytmi (1934–7, 1949–)
France: Cahiers du jazz (?1959–68); Jazz-hot (1935–9); Jazz magazine (1954); Revue du jazz (1948–)
Germany: Jazz Revue (1950–54)
Japan: Swing Journal (1947–)
Netherlands: Jazz wereld (1965–73)
USA: American Music (1983–); Annual Review of Jazz Studies (1982–); Be-Bop and Beyond (1983–); Black Music Research Journal (1980–); Black Perspective in Music (1973–90); Cadence (1976–); Clef (1946); Down Beat (1934–); Hot Record Society Rag (1938–41); Jazz (1962–7); Jazz: a Quarterly of American Music (1958–60); Jazz Review (1958–61); Journal of Jazz Studies (1973–81); Metronome (1885–1961); Record Changer (1942–58); Record Research (1955–); Tempo (1933–40)
A. Baresel: Das Jazz-Buch (Leipzig, 1925)
R. Goffin: Aux frontières du jazz (Paris, 1932)
W. Hobson: American Jazz Music (New York, 1939/R)
F. Ramsey jr and C. Smith, eds.: Jazzmen (New York, 1939/R)
R. Goffin: Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan (Garden City, NY, 1944, 2/1948 as Nouvelle histoire du jazz: du Congo au Bebop; Eng. trans., 1975)
B. Ulanov: A History of Jazz in America (New York, 1952)
N. Shapiro and N. Hentoff: Hear me Talkin' to ya: the Story of Jazz as Told by the Men who Made it (New York, 1955, 2/1966)
M. Stearns: The Story of Jazz (New York, 1956, 3/1970)
N. Hentoff and A.J. McCarthy, eds.: Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of Jazz by Twelve of the World's Foremost Jazz Critics and Scholars (New York, 1959)
S.B. Charters and L. Kunstadt: Jazz: a History of the New York Scene (Garden City, NY, 1962)
J. Goldberg: Jazz Masters of the Fifties (New York, 1965/R)
R. Hadlock: Jazz Masters of the Twenties (London, 1965/R)
I. Gitler: Jazz Masters of the Forties (New York, 1966/R)
M. Williams: Jazz Masters of New Orleans (New York, 1967)
F. Kofsky: Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (New York, 1970, 2/1998 as John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s)
D.H. Kraner and K. Schulz: Jazz in Austria: a Brief History and a Discography of all Jazz and Jazz-Like Recordings Made in Austria (Graz, 1969/R1972 as Jazz in Austria: Historische Entwicklung und Diskographie des Jazz in Osterreich)
M. Williams: Jazz Masters in Transition 1957–69 (New York, 1970)
R. Russell: Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest (Berkeley, 1971)
A. Shaw: The Street that Never Slept: New York's Fabled 52nd Street (New York, 1971/R1977 as 52nd Street: the Street of Jazz)
E. Southern: The Music of Black Americans: a History (New York, 1971, 3/1997)
R. Stewart: Jazz Masters of the Thirties (New York, 1972)
D. Morgenstern: The Jazz Story: an Outline History of Jazz (New York, 1973)
L.W. Levine: Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977)
F. Tirro: Jazz: a History (New York, 1977, 2/1993)
V. Wilmer: As Serious as Your Life: the Story of the New Jazz (London, 1977, 2/1980)
J.L. Collier: The Making of Jazz: a Comprehensive History (Boston, 1978)
A. Bisset: Black Roots, White Flowers: a History of Jazz in Australia (Sydney, 1979, 2/1987)
C. Nanry and E. Berger: The Jazz Text (New York, 1979)
E.A. Berlin: Ragtime: a Musical and Cultural Study (Berkeley, 1980)
F. Driggs and L. Harris: Black Beauty, White Heat: a Pictorial History of Classic Jazz, 1920–1950 (New York, 1982)
M. Miller: Jazz in Canada: Fourteen Lives (Toronto, 1982)
S. Placksin: American Women in Jazz, 1900 to the Present: their Words, Lives, and Music (New York, 1982)
S.F. Starr: Red and Hot: the Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1980 (New York, 1983, rev. 2/1994 as Red and Hot: the Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1991)
L. Dahl: Stormy Weather: the Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen (New York, 1984)
J. Godbolt: A History of Jazz in Britain, 1919–50 (London, 1984)
J. Litweiler: The Freedom Principle: Jazz after 1958 (New York, 1984)
S. DeVeaux: Jazz in Transition: Coleman Hawkins and Howard McGhee, 1935–1945 (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1985)
L. Feigin: Russian Jazz: New Identity (London, 1985)
I. Gitler: Swing to Bop: an Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s (New York, 1985)
R. Gordon: Jazz West Coast: the Los Angeles Jazz Scene of the 1950s (London, 1986)
A. Medvedev and O. Medvedeva: Sovetskiy dzhaz: problemï, sobïtiya, mastera (Moscow, 1987)
W. Schworer: Jazzszene Frankfurt: Eine musiksoziologische Untersuchungen zur Situation anfangs der achtziger Jahre (diss., Giessen U., 1987)
C. Small: Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music (New York and London, 1987)
J.L. Collier: The Reception of Jazz in America: a New View (Brooklyn, NY, 1988)
D.D. Harrison: Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988)
L.A. Erenberg: ‘Things to Come: Swing Bands, Bebop, and the Rise of a Postwar Jazz Scene’, Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. L. May (Chicago, 1989), 221–45
J. Godbolt: A History of Jazz in Britain, 1950–70 (London, 1989)
K.J. Ogren: The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York, 1989)
P.J. Broome and C. Tucker: The Other Music City: the Dance Bands and Jazz Musicians of Nashville, 1920 to 1970 (Nashville, 1990)
S. Nicholson: Jazz: the Modern Resurgence (London, 1990)
T. Gioia: West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945–1960 (New York, 1992)
M.H. Kater: Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York, 1992)
B.W. Peretti: The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race and Culture in Urban America (Urbana, IL, 1992)
D.H. Rosenthal: Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955–1965 (New York, 1992)
C. Ballantine: Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville (Johannesburg, 1993)
P. De Barros: Jackson Street after Hours: the Roots of Jazz in Seattle (Seattle, 1993)
W.H. Kenney: Chicago Jazz: a Cultural History, 1904–1930 (New York, 1993)
C.E. Kinzer: The Tio Family: Four Generations of New Orleans Musicians, 1814–1933 (diss., Louisiana State U., 1993)
B. Moody: The Jazz Exiles: American Musicians Abroad (Reno, NV, 1993)
L. Porter and M. Ullman: Jazz: from Its Origins to the Present (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993)
D.G. Such: Avant-garde Jazz Musicians: Performing ‘Out There’ (Iowa City, IA, 1993)
T.J. Hennessey: From Jazz to Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians and their Music, 1890–1935 (Detroit, 1994)
W. Knauer, ed.: Jazz in Europa (Hofhenn, 1994)
D.W. Stowe: Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge, MA, 1994)
L. Gourse: Madame Jazz: Contemporary Women Instrumentalists (New York, 1995)
E. Kolleritsch: Jazz in Graz: Von den Anfängen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zu seiner akademischen Etablierung (Graz, 1995)
H.H. Lange: Jazz in Deutschland: Die Deutsch Jazz-Chronik bis 1960 (Hildesheim, 1996)
S. DeVeaux: The Birth of Bebop: a Social and Musical History (Berkeley, 1997)
T. Gioia: The History of Jazz (New York, 1997)
M. Miller: Such Melodious Racket: the Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914–1949 (Toronto, 1997)
L. Porter: Jazz: a Century of Change (New York, 1997)
S. Nicholson: Jazz Rock: a History (New York, 1998)
K. Whitehead: New Dutch Swing (New York, 1998)
R.M. Sudhalter: Lost Chords: White Musicians and their Contribution to Jazz, 1915–1945 (New York, 1999)
L. Armstrong: Swing that Music (New York, 1936)
M. Mezzrow and B. Wolfe: Really the Blues (New York, 1946)
L. Armstrong: Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York and London, 1954)
S. Bechet: Treat it Gentle: an Autobiography (London, 1960)
W. Smith: Music on My Mind: the Memoirs of an American Pianist (Garden City, NY, 1964)
A.B. Spellman: Four Lives in the Bebop Business (New York, 1966)
S. Dance: The World of Duke Ellington (New York, 1970)
C. Mingus: Beneath the Underdog: his World as Composed by Mingus (New York, 1971)
C. Albertson: Bessie (New York, 1972)
D. Ellington: Music Is My Mistress (Garden City, NY, 1973)
B. Holiday: Lady Sings the Blues (New York, 1973)
A. Lomax: Mister Jelly Roll: the Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and Inventor of Jazz (Berkeley, 1973)
S. Dance: The World of Swing (New York, 1974)
H. Hawes and D. Asher: Raise Up Off Me (New York, 1974)
R.M. Sudhalter, P.R. Evans and W. Dean-Myatt: Bix, Man and Legend (New York, 1974)
J.C. Thomas: Chasin' the Trane: the Music and Mystique of John Coltrane (Garden City, NY, 1975)
C. Calloway and B. Rollins: Of Minnie the Moocher & Me (New York, 1976)
S. Dance: The World of Earl Hines (New York, 1977)
M. Waller and A. Calabrese: Fats Waller (New York, 1977)
D. Gillespie and A. Fraser: To Be, or not … to Bop: Memoirs (Garden City, NY, 1979)
A. Pepper and L. Pepper: Straight Life: the Story of Art Pepper (New York, 1979, 2/1994)
S. Dance: The World of Count Basie (New York, 1980)
A. O'Day and G. Eells: High Times, Hard Times (New York, 1981/R1989 with updated discography)
I. Carr: Miles Davis (London and New York, 1988, 2/1998)
B. Priestley: Mingus: a Critical Biography (London, 1982)
D. Travis: An Autobiography of Black Jazz (Chicago, 1983)
J. Chambers: Milestones (Toronto, 1983–5)
W. Basie and A. Murray: Good Morning Blues: the Autobiography of Count Basie (New York, 1985)
D. Barker: A Life in Jazz (London, 1986)
J. Chilton: Sidney Bechet: the Wizard of Jazz (Basingstoke, 1987)
T. Fitterling: Thelonious Monk: Sein Leben, Seine Musik, Seine Schallplatten (Waakirchen, 1987; Eng. trans., 1997, as Thelonious Monk: his Life and Music)
G. Giddins: Celebrating Bird: the Triumph of Charlie Parker (New York, 1987)
G. Bushell: Jazz from the Beginning (Ann Arbor, 1988)
G. Giddins: Satchmo (New York, 1988)
M. Hinton: Bass Line: the Stories and Photographs of Milt Hinton (Philadelphia, 1988)
J.L. Collier: Benny Goodman and the Swing Era (New York, 1989)
M. Davis and Q. Troupe: Miles: the Autobiography (New York, 1989)
J. Chilton: The Song of the Hawk: the Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins (London, 1990)
R. O'Meally: Lady Day: the Many Faces of Billie Holiday (New York, 1991)
D. Rosenberg: Fascinating Rhythm: the Collaboration of George and lra Gershwin (New York, 1991)
R. Stewart: Boy Meets Horn (Ann Arbor, 1991)
M. Tucker: Ellington: the Early Years (Urbana, IL, 1991)
J. Litweiler: Ornette Coleman: a Harmolodic Life (London, 1992)
L. Wright and E. Anderson: ‘Fats’ in Fact (Chigwell, Essex, 1992)
S. Nicholson: Ella Fitzgerald (London, 1993)
R.M. Radano: New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (Chicago, 1993)
E.A. Berlin: King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his Era (New York, 1994)
W.D. Clancy: Woody Herman: Chronicles of the Herds (New York, 1995)
G. Lees: Leader of the Band: the Life of Woody Herman (New York, 1995)
S. Nicholson: Billie Holiday (London, 1995)
D. Hajdu: Lush Life: a Biography of Billy Strayhorn (New York, 1996)
F.M. Hall: It's about Time: the Dave Brubeck Story (Fayetteville, AR, 1996)
D.L. Maggin: Stan Getz: a Life in Jazz (New York, 1996)
C. Woideck: Charlie Parker: his Music and Life (Ann Arbor, 1996)
J.F. Szwed: Space is the Place: the Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York, 1997)
L. Porter: John Coltrane: his Life and Music (Ann Arbor, 1998)
S. Nicholson: Reminiscing in Tempo: a Portrait of Duke Ellington (Boston, 1999)
A. Shipton: Groovin' High: the Life of Dizzy Gillespie (New York, 1999)
SchullerEJ
C. Engel: ‘Jazz: a Musical Discussion’, Atlantic Monthly, cxxx (1922), 182–9
H.O. Osgood: So this is Jazz (Boston, 1926/R)
H. Panassié: The Real Jazz (New York, 1942/R)
R. de Toledano, ed.: Frontiers of Jazz (New York, 1947, 3/1994)
A. Hodeir: Hommes et problèmes du jazz (Paris, 1954; Eng. trans., enlarged, 1956/R, 2/1979 as Jazz: its Evolution and Essence)
J.F. Mehegan: Jazz Improvisation (New York, 1958–65)
E.J. Hobsbawn: The Jazz Scene (London, 1959, 2/1993)
L. Ostransky: The Anatomy of Jazz (Seattle, 1960)
B. Green: The Reluctant Art (London, 1962, enlarged 1991)
A. Hodeir: Toward Jazz (New York, 1962/R; Fr. orig., Roquevaire, 1984, as Jazzistiques)
M. Williams, ed.: Jazz Panorama: from the Pages of the Jazz Review (New York, 1962/R)
F. Tirro: ‘The Silent Theme Tradition in Jazz’, MQ, liii (1967), 313–34
W. Russo: Jazz Composition and Orchestration (Chicago, 1968)
M. Williams: The Jazz Tradition (New York, 1970, 3/1993)
M.L. Stewart: Structural Development in the Jazz Improvisational Technique of Clifford Brown (diss., U. of Michigan, 1973)
R. Wang: ‘Jazz circa 1945: a Confluence of Styles’, MQ, lix (1973), 531–46
N.T. Davis: The Early Life and Music of Charlie Parker (diss., Wesleyan U., 1974)
E. Jost: Free Jazz (Graz, 1974)
T. Owens: Charlie Parker: Techniques of Improvisation (diss., UCLA, 1974)
F. Tirro: ‘Constructive Elements in Jazz Improvisation’, JAMS, xxvii (1974), 285–305
R. Byrnside: ‘The Performer as Creator: Jazz Improvisation’, Contemporary Music and Music Cultures, ed. B. Nettl and others (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1975), 233–51
W.E. Taylor: The History and Development of Jazz Piano: a New Perspective for Educators (diss., U. of Massachusetts, 1975)
T.D. Brown: A History and Analysis of Jazz Drumming to 1942 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1976)
M. Harrison: A Jazz Retrospect (Newton Abbot, 1976, 2/1991)
C.C. Blancq: Melodic Improvisation in American Jazz: the Style of Theodore ‘Sonny’ Rollins, 1951–1962 (diss., Tulane U., 1977)
L. Gushee: disc notes, Steppin' on the Gas: Rags to Jazz, 1913–1927, New World NW 269 (1977)
R.L. Stein: The Jazz Trumpet: Development of Styles and an Analysis of Selected Solos from 1924 to 1961 (diss., U. of Miami, 1977)
M.J. Budds: Jazz in the Sixties: the Expansion of Musical Resources and Techniques (Iowa City, IA, 1978, 2/1990)
J. Coker: Listening to Jazz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978)
D. Bailey: Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Ashbourne, Derbys., 1980)
G. Giddins: Riding on a Blue Note (New York, 1981)
L. Gushee: ‘Lester Young's “Shoeshine Boy”’, IMSCR XII: Berkeley 1977, 151–69
B. Kernfeld: Adderley, Coltrane, and Davis at the Twilight of Bebop: the Search for Melodic Coherence (1958–59) (diss., Cornell U., 1981)
O. Perguson: The Otis Ferguson Reader (Highland Park, IL, 1982/R1997 as In the Spirit of Jazz: the Otis Ferguson Reader)
A. Jaffe: Jazz Theory (Dubuque, IA, 1983)
G.F. Smith: Homer, Gregory, and Bill Evans? The Theory of Formulaic Composition in the Context of Jazz Piano Improvisation (diss., Harvard U., 1983)
P. Alperson: ‘On Musical Improvisation’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xxxxiii (1984), 17–29
G. Giddins: Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation in the ’80s (New York, 1985)
H. Martin: Enjoying Jazz (New York, 1985)
L. Porter: Lester Young (Boston, 1985)
M. Williams: Jazz Heritage (New York, 1985)
W. Balliett: American Musicians: Fifty Six Portraits in Jazz (New York, 1986, 2/1996 as American Musicians II: Seventy-Two Portraits in Jazz)
F. Davis: In the Moment: Jazz in the 1980s (New York, 1986)
G. Schuller: Musings: the Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (New York, 1986)
C. Suhor: ‘Jazz Improvisation and Language Performance: Parallel Competencies’, Etc., xxxxiii (1986), 133–40
S. Larson: Schenkerian Analysis of Modern Jazz (diss., U. of Michigan, 1987)
O. Keepnews: The View from Within: Jazz Writings, 1948–1987 (New York, 1988)
J. Pressing: ‘Improvisation: Methods and Models’, Generative Processes in Music: the Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, ed. J.A. Sloboda (New York, 1988), 129–78
R.F. Rose: An Analysis of Timing in Jazz Rhythm Section Performance (diss., U. of Texas, Austin, 1989)
G. Schuller: The Swing Era: the Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York, 1989)
E.S. Meadows: ‘Africa and the Blues Scale: a Selected Review of the Literature’, African Musicology … a Festschrift presented to J.H. Kwabena Nketia, ed. J.C. Djedje and W.G. Carter (Los Angeles, 1989–92), 263–76
D. Baker, ed.: New Perspectives on Jazz (Washington DC, 1990)
A. Beeson: ‘“Quoting Tunes”: Narrative Features in Jazz’, Collectanea, i (1990), 1–15
F. Davis: Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists, and Singers (New York, 1990)
W. Friedwald: Jazz Singing: America's Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop (New York, 1990)
W. Knauer: Zwischen Bebop und Free Jazz: Komposition and Improvisation des Modern Jazz Quartet (Mainz, 1990)
G. Potter: ‘Analyzing Improvised Jazz’, College Music Symposium, xxx/1 (1990), 64–74
S. DeVeaux: ‘Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography’, Black American Literature Forum, xxv (1991), 525–60
J. Gennari: ‘Jazz Criticism: its Development and Ideologies’, Black American Literature Forum, xxv (1991), 449–523
R.T. Dean: New Structures in Jazz and Improvised Music since 1960 (Philadelphia, 1992)
J. Magee: The Music of Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra in the 1920s (diss., U. of Michigan, 1992)
J. Taylor: Earl Hines and Black Jazz Piano in Chicago, 1923–1928 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1993)
M. Tucker, ed.: The Duke Ellington Reader (New York, 1993)
P.F. Berliner: Thinking in Jazz: the infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago, 1994)
G.P. Ramsey jr: The Art of Bebop: Earl ‘Bud’ Powell and the Emergence of Modern Jazz (diss., U. of Michigan, 1994)
N. Hentoff: Listen to the Stories: Nat Hentoff on Jazz and Country (New York, 1995)
B. Kernfeld: What to Listen for in Jazz (New Haven, CT, 1995)
J.A. Prögler: ‘Searching for Swing: Participatory Discrepancies in the Jazz Rhythm Section’, EthM, xxxix (1995), 21–54
G. Carner: The Miles Davis Companion (New York, 1996)
H. Martin: Charlie Parker and Thematic Improvisation (Newark, NJ, 1996)
I. Monson: Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago, 1996)
T.F. Coolman: The Miles Davies Quintet of the Mid-1960s: Synthesis of Improvisational and Compositional Elements (diss., New York U., 1997)
M.C. Gridley: Jazz Styles (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978, 7/1997)
J. King: What Jazz Is: an Insider's Guide to Understanding and Listening to Jazz (New York, 1997)
T.A. Jackson: Performance and Musical Meaning: Analyzing ‘Jazz’ on the New York Scene (diss., Columbia U., 1998)
M. Berger: ‘Jazz: Resistance to the Diffusion of a Culture Pattern’, Journal of Negro History, xxxii (1947), 461–94
S. Finkelstein: Jazz: a People's Music (New York, 1948)
H.S. Becker: ‘The Professional Dance Musician and his Audience’, American Journal of Sociology, lvii (1951), 136–44
R.A. Waterman: ‘African Influence on the Music of the Americas’, Acculturation in the Americas: … XXIXth International Congress of Americanists: New York 1949, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1952), 207–18
W.B. Cameron: ‘Sociological Notes on the Jam Session’, Social Forces, xxxiii (1954), 174–82
A.P. Merriam and R.S. Mack: ‘The Jazz Community’, Social Forces, xxxviii (1960), 211–22
P. Oliver: Blues Fell this Morning: the Meaning of the Blues (London, 1960, 2/1990)
N. Hentoff: The Jazz Life (New York, 1961/R)
N. Leonard: Jazz and the White Americans: the Acceptance of a New Art Form (Chicago, 1962)
A. Baraka [L. Jones]: Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963)
R. Ellison: Shadow and Act (New York, 1964)
A. Baraka [L. Jones]: Black Music (New York, 1967)
A.P. Merriam and F.H. Gamer: ‘Jazz is the Word’, EthM, xii (1968), 373–96
R.A. Stebbins: ‘A Theory of the Jazz Community’, Sociological Quarterly, ix (1968), 318–31
C.A. Nanry: The Occupational Subculture of the Jazz Musician: Myth and Reality (diss., Rutgers U., 1970)
W.C. Allen, ed.: Studies in Jazz Discography (Newark, NJ, 1972)
D. Meeker: Jazz in the Movies (London, 1972, 3/1981)
G. Stevenson: ‘Discography: Scientific, Analytical, Historical, and Systematic’, Library Trends, xxi (1972), 101–35
J. Buerkle and D. Barker: Bourbon Street Black: the New Orleans Black Jazzman (New York, 1973)
R.S. Gold: A Jazz Lexicon (New York, 1964/R1975 as Jazz Talk)
A. Murray: Stomping the Blues (New York, 1976)
Z. Knauss: Conversations with Jazz Musicians (Detroit, 1977)
F. Kofsky: ‘The State of Jazz’, BPM, v (1977), 44–68
A. Taylor: Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews (Liège, 1977)
L. Ostransky: Jazz City: the Impact of our Cities on the Development of Jazz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978)
O. Sudnow: Ways of the Hand: the Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge, MA, 1978)
J.S. Roberts: The Latin Tinge: the Impact of Latin American Music on the United States (New York, 1979, 2/1999)
M. Gordon: Live at the Village Vanguard (New York, 1980)
B. Rusch: Jazztalk: the Cadence Interviews (Seacaucus, NJ, 1984)
G. Sales: Jazz: America's Classical Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1984)
U.B. Davis: Paris without Regret: James Baldwin, Kenny Clarke, Chester Himes, and Donald Byrd (Iowa City, IA, 1986)
R. Ellison: Going to the Territory (New York, 1986)
Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka: The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (New York, 1987)
D.J. Elliott: ‘Structure and Feeling in Jazz: Rethinking Philosophical Foundations’, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, no.95 (1987), 13–38
N. Leonard: Jazz: Myth and Religion (New York, 1987)
E.S. Meadows: ‘Ethnomusicology and Jazz Research: a Selective Viewpoint’, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, no.95 (1987), 61–70
S. DeVeaux: ‘Bebop and the Recording Industry: the 1942 AMF Recording Ban Reconsidered’, JAMS, lxi (1988), 126–65
T. Gioia: The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (New York, 1988)
H. Gray: Producing Jazz: the Experience of an Independent Record Company (Philadelphia, 1988)
F.A. Salamone: ‘The Ritual of Jazz Performance’, Play and Culture, i (1988), 85–104
G. Early: Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (New York, 1989)
M. Gridley and others: ‘Three Approaches to Defining Jazz’, MQ, lxxiii (1989), 513–31
R.J. Powell, ed.: The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (Washington DC, 1989)
R.T. Buckner and S. Weiland, eds.: Jazz in Mind: Essays on the History and Meanings of Jazz (Detroit, 1991)
P. Chevigny: Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City (New York, 1991)
G. Tomlinson: ‘Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: a White Historian Signifies’, Black Music Research Journal, xi (1991), 229–64
J. Berendt: Das Jazzbuch: Entwicklung und Bedeutung der Jazzmusik (Frankfurt, 1953, 6/1992 as The Jazz Book: from Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond)
R. Crawford: ‘Notes on Jazz Standards by Black Authors and Composers, 1899–1942’, New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. J. Wright and S.A. Floyd (Warren, MI, 1992), 245–87
R. Crawford and J. Magee: Jazz Standards on Record, 1900–1942: a Core Repertory (Chicago, 1992)
Y. Hayashi and others: Tokyo Shitamachi Jazzdori (Tokyo, 1992)
K. Stratemann: Duke Ellington, Day by Day and Film by Film (Copenhagen, 1992)
P.L. Sunderland: Cultural Meanings and Identity: Women of the African American Art World of Jazz (diss, U. of Vermont, 1992)
J.L. Collier: Jazz: the American Theme Song (New York, 1993)
B. Johnson: ‘Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: Problems of Jazz Discourse’, Popular Music, xii (1993), 1–12
D. Meltzer, ed.: Reading Jazz (San Francisco, 1993)
G.L. Starks jr: ‘Jazz Literature and the African American Aesthetic’, The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions, ed. K. Welsh-Asante (Westport, CT, 1993), 143–57
C. Keil and S. Feld, eds.: Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues (Chicago, 1994)
W. Marsalis and F. Stewart: Sweet Swing Blues on the Road (New York, 1994)
M. Stearns and J. Stearns: Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York, 1968, 2/1994 by B. Buffalino)
S. DeVeaux: Jazz in America: Who's Listening (Carson, CA, 1995)
S.A. Floyd jr: The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States (New York, 1995)
K. Gabbard, ed.: Jazz among the Discourses (Durham, NC, 1995)
K. Gabbard, ed.: Representing Jazz (Durham, NC, 1995)
W. Minor: Unzipped Souls: a Jazz Journey through the Soviet Union (Philadelphia, 1995)
T. Owens: Bebop: the Music and the Players (New York, 1995)
K. Gabbard: Jammin' at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago, 1996)
R. Gottlieb, ed.: Reading Jazz: a Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now (New York, 1996)
R.G. O'Meally: The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York, 1998)
R. Walser, ed.: Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (New York, 1999) [incl. E. Ansermet: ‘A “Serious” Musician Takes Jazz Seriously’, 9–11]
J. Gennari: Critiquing Jazz (forthcoming)