JAZZ & FUSION - Part One

The origins of jazz, an urban music, stemmed from the countryside of the South as well as the streets of America's cities. It resulted from two distinct musical traditions, those of West Africa and Europe. West Africa gave jazz its incessant rhythmic drive, the need to move and the emotional urgency that has served the music so well. The European ingredients had more to do with classical qualities pertaining to harmony and melody. The blending of these two traditions resulted in a music that played around with meter and reinterpreted the use of notes in new combinations, creating blue notes that expressed feelings both sad and joyous. The field hollers of Southern sharecropping slaves combined with the more urban, stylized sounds of musicians from New Orleans, creating a new music. Gospel music from the church melded with what became known in the 20th century as the blues offered a vocal ingredient that translated well to instruments. Marching bands, played primarily by whites but also blacks, introduced instruments that otherwise would have remained an expression of classical musical traditions. Drums and stringed instruments would combine with trumpets, trombones, tubas and, later, saxophones. The music of West Africa and the music created by slaves was translated in yet another way by the infusion of Caribbean and Latin strains. And what would later become known as popular song was incorporated with gospel, blues and field hollers, adding a rich texture to a music the world had never heard before.

The musical world in America, filled as it was with its own marching music and faux classical interpretations from Europe, was ripe for the transformation that would become jazz. Eventually, ragtime entered the scene toward the end of the 19th century, and the rest is, as they say, history. Ragtime is unique in that it didn't include improvisation or a blues feel. And yet, it was an influence on early jazz forms, coming along as it did during the first 15 years of the 20th century. Primarily a music for piano that was completely written out, it could be performed by orchestras, and represented a blend of classical and marching band influences with a zest of syncopation thrown in. Listen to the music of Scott Joplin for a taste of ragtime. Dixieland is a style that could be considered a variant of classic jazz and New Orleans jazz. It's real roots as a musical form stem from the Chicago music jazz scene of the 1920s. The musicians in essence were seeking a revival of the classic jazz and New Orleans jazz of yesteryear, and were quite successful in beginning a tradition of Dixieland revivals that continue to this day, thanks to subsequent generations. The style of Dixieland involved collective improvisation during the first chorus of playing, with players entering solos against riffing by other horns, followed by a closing ensemble with, usually, the drummer playing a four-bar tag who in turn is answered by the whole band. Overlapping with the onset of ragtime music, New Orleans jazz burst onto to music scene during the first two decades of the 20th century. Considered the first style of jazz, it can be dated from as early as 1895 with the music of Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton in the Storyville district of New Orleans until roughly 1917. We have documentation of the first New Orleans jazz from the Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1917 on into the 1920s, when recording technology became more available.


The music developed around trumpet and cornet leaders, such as Joe 'King' Oliver and Louis Armstrong, performed as an ensemble-oriented style, with trumpeters stating the melody, and harmonies and countermelodies coming from the trombonist and/or clarinetist. The rhythm section developed into an ensemble of banjo, drums, tuba or bass, and piano. Overall, the thrust of New Orleans jazz was to emphasize the ensemble more than any one soloist. The music continued to flourish during the 1920s, eventually being eclipsed by the nascent swing music which soon replaced it. Although the Original Dixieland Jass Band's 'Livery Stable Blues' a 1917 effort by a white quintet, is credited with being the first jazz recording, it's also clear that the black musicians of New Orleans had for years been playing far more authentic, original jazz that was undocumented, largely because there were no recording facilities in the Crescent City. The reputedly brilliant New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden never recorded and the Memphis music of W.C. Handy was published and performed long before the public heard of jazz or the ODJB recording. Given credit as the first black musician to make a jazz recording was trombonist Kid Ory, who had to travel from New Orleans to California to pursue musical opportunities. That 1922 recording, not widely circulated, was followed in 1923 by studio efforts from cornetist King Oliver, soprano saxophonist/clarinetist Sidney Bechet, pianist Jelly Roll Morton and singer Bessie Smith. Armstrong, the acknowledged jazz fountainhead, recorded with Clarence Williams, Fletcher Henderson, Bessie Smith and others before making his leader debut in late 1925. The history of jazz may have its origins in New Orleans around the turn of the century, but the music really took off in the early 1920s, when trumpeter Louis Armstrong left New Orleans to create a revolutionary new music in Chicago.

Likewise, the migration of artists to New York shortly thereafter heralded a permanent shift from South to North. Chicago was to take the music of New Orleans and make it hot, turning up the temperature not only with Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven bands, but with others as well, including such artists as Eddie Condon and Jimmy McPartland, whose Austin High gang helped usher in a revival of the New Orleans school. Armstrong and Benny Goodman eventually made their way to New York, helping create a critical mass that has served the city well, making it the jazz capital of the world. Bebop was born in New York City, created and played by such luminaries as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. During the 1960s, alternate performance opportunities allowed for even more creative music to surface in both cities. In Chicago, the emergence of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and a variety of loft-type venues nurtured a new kind of rough, in-your-face avant-garde, headed up by musicians such as saxophonist Fred Anderson. In New York, the loft scene was defined by all manner of musician, especially during the 1970s and '80s, offering up players as diverse as saxophonist Sam Rivers, members of the World Saxophone Quartet and the Vanguard Orchestra. There was a time when musical dinosaurs traveled the earth: the Swing Era.

The early bands of the Swing Era emerged on the scene in the early '20s, and credit for the beginnings of the big band era must go to leader-arranger Fletcher Henderson, who somewhat enlarged the format of what had been combo music into bigger ensembles as early as 1923. At almost the same time, Duke Ellington began expanding his smaller groups into larger ensembles and big band music had found its greatest composer and arranger. The early recordings of the Henderson and Ellington bands appeared in 1931. Jazz took on a distinctly arranged form in the big bands of the early 1920s through the late 1940s. Instrumentalists, numbering somewhere in the teens for most big bands, played specific parts either memorized in rehearsal or read from printed charts. Careful orchestration, coupled with large brass and reed sections, brought out the rich harmonies of jazz and created a huge sonic sensation known as 'the big band sound'. Big band became the popular music of its day, hitting its peak in the mid 1930s. It fueled the nation's Lindy Hop and swing dance crazes. Well-known bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Chick Webb, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Jimmy Lunceford and Glenn Miller wrote and recorded a virtual parade of hit tunes that were played not only on radio but in dancehalls everywhere.


Although big band declined after World War II, orchestras led by Basie, Ellington, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and numerous others toured and recorded for several decades afterwards. The music became highly modernized as groups led by Boyd Raeburn, Sun Ra, Oliver Nelson, Charles Mingus, Thad Jones-Mel Lewis and Muhal Richard Abrams explored new concepts in harmony, instrumentation and improvisational freedom. The jazz language changed drastically with the emergence of bebop in the early to mid 1940s. A gutsy group of musicians that included Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk invented bebop in an outright attempt to create something new and challenging. Recognizing bebop as a musician's music that demanded instrumental virtuosity and a sophisticated knowledge of harmony, jazz players caught on quickly. They wrote melodies that zigzagged and spun over chord changes of increasing complexity. Soloists incorporated dissonant scale tones in their improvisations, giving the music a more exotic, edgier sound. A fascination with syncopation resulted in unprecedented accents. And the tempos began to burn faster and faster.

Bebop played best in a small-group format; quartets and quintets proved ideal for both economic and artistic reasons. The music thrived in urban jazz clubs, where audiences came to listen to inventive soloists rather than dance to their favorite hits. In short, bebop musicians made jazz into an art form that appealed not only to the senses, but the intellect as well. New jazz stars emerged from the bebop era, among them trumpeters Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard and Miles Davis, saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Art Pepper, Johnny Griffin, Pepper Adams, Sonny Stitt and John Coltrane and trombonist J.J. Johnson. In the '50s and '60s, bebop went through several mutations: hard-bop, West Coast, cool-jazz and soul jazz among them. The heat and urgency of bebop began to relax with the development of Cool Jazz. Starting in the late '40s and early '50s, musicians began to develop a less frantic, smoother approach toward improvising modeled after the light, dry playing of swing-era tenorist Lester Young. The result was a laid-back and even-keeled sound bearing a facade of emotionally detached 'coolness'.

Trumpeter Miles Davis, one of the first bebop players to 'cool it' emerged as the greatest innovator of the genre. His Birth Of The Cool nonet recordings of 1949-'50 are the epitome of Cool Jazz lyricism and understatement. Other notable instrumentalists of the Cool school include trumpeter Chet Baker, pianists John Lewis, Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano, vibraphonist Milt Jackson and saxophonists Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Zoot Sims and Paul Desmond. Arrangers, too, contributed significantly to the Cool Jazz movement, most notably Tadd Dameron, Gil Evans and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Their compositions focused on instrumental colors and slower-moving, more suspended harmony, which created an illusion of spaciousness. Dissonance played some part in the music as well, but in a softened, muted way. Cool Jazz allowed room for slightly larger ensembles; nonets and tentets were more common than during the lean-and-mean bebop years. Some arrangers experimented with altered instrumentation, including conical brass like french horn and tuba.

Starting in the late 1950s, trumpeter Miles Davis and tenor saxophonist John Coltrane experimented with modes, an approach to melody and improvisation borrowed directly from classical music. These players used a small number of modes, or specific scales, instead of chords to form the backbone of tunes. The result was a harmonically static, almost purely melodic form of jazz. Soloists sometimes ventured outside of the preset modes and back again to create a sense of tension and release. For a more exotic effect, players sometimes used non-European scales (e.g., Indian, Arab, African) as a 'modal' basis for their music. The vague tonal center of modal jazz would serve as a launching pad for free-jazz experimenters who followed, including tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. Some classic examples of Modal Jazz include Davis' 'Milestones' 'So What' and 'Flamenco Sketches' and Coltrane's 'My Favorite Things' and 'Impressions'.
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