Jazz: A Short History

by Michael Morangelli

  The Cool School has been sometimes described as a revolt against the complexities of Bop. I would rather not use the term revolt in describing its evolution but rather deal with the styles as a difference in emphasis - both were complex. Bop emphasized the melodic line in relation to the vertical chord structures while Cool emphasized the melodic line in relation to the harmonies that linear structure implied. With this orientation, the particulars of the Cool Style became a logical outgrowth of Bop - and a problem both were seeking solutions for: freedom and extension of the melodic and improvised line.

  The term Cool [in Jazz] has been used to describe a sophisticated (if not arrogant) point of view, a ‘school’ of musicians, and a style of music. By the end of the ‘50’s, the attitude of Cool had faded, replaced by artistic hard work; the musicians who were members of the School had left their permanent mark on Jazz; and, the style influenced not only Jazz performance and composition but had found its way into Tin Pan Alley arrangements.

  Leonard Feather dates this style from the Miles Davis group of 1949-50. It is often described briefly as an unexcited, quiet, dreamy, behind the beat, with a striving for a feel of relaxed swing. The Miles Davis recording dates in 1949 included Lee Konitz, Bill Barber, Gerry Mulligan, Joe Shulman, and Gil Evans. The classic album of this unit was prophetically titled ‘Birth of the Cool’ which demonstrated that European instruments unusual to Jazz, early forms, and more modern harmonies could be introduced into Jazz without ruining the feeling of a light and swinging rhythm - it is all of this but also much more.

  Lester Young was the first outstanding exponent of the style - a slightly misleading statement. It was Lester Young’s STYLE (with part of Parker) that led to the evolution of Cool, not Cool which produced Lester Young. It was his treatment of time which was unique.He played ‘behind the beat’ in a period when Swing demanded an ‘on top of the beat’ placement. This, coupled with his lighter and thinner sound ideal, created a new rhythmic conception in Jazz.

  Lennie Tristano was the transitional figure - carrying the music toward further complexity. His use of chromatic passing chords, dissonant voicings, unresolved intervals, and bi-chordal structures pointed not to just complexity but tended toward atonality. He had his own school of followers: Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, Billy Bauer, and John LaPorta. Among these, Lee Konitz proved more influential than his teacher. A featured soloist in the Claude Thornhill band of 1947-48, he pulled out of the mainstream for a few years, returned with Stan Kenton in 1952, and formed his own band in 1954. As mentioned in the Stern book, he clearly articulated the objective of the Cool School; “I feel that it’s possible to get the maximum intensity in your playing and still relax” and credited the roots of Cool to Lester Young “Too many people have forgotten what Lester did in the Basie days…he never sounded frantic…it was very pretty and at the same time, it was very intense” and the lyrical side of Charlie Parker “Listen to Parker’s ‘Yardbird Suite’, that’s the Parker I like”

  The style characteristics of ‘Cool’ support the statement that “Lester Young created a new conception of Jazz”.- and these stylistic elements are present in the two branches of the Cool School (West Coast, and Third Stream). In brief, the Cool ensemble can be compared to a classical Chamber Orchestra in instrumentation, rhythmic fluidity, and sonority. The use of French Horn, Tuba, bowed strings, Flute and Oboe are all unusual to the immediately preceding period - either the function was different as in the case of the tuba and violin or they were new colors as with french horn and flute. The extended forms of the period were not only restricted to the overlapping phasing between chorus’ and soloists but included a flirting with classical forms such as the Rondo and Fugue. Both of these broke the confines of working within standard song forms and created a fluid continuity in performance - a subtle difference from the Head/Solo/Head structure to one of a unified sound event over time.

  Lester Young Lennie Tristano It was in this concept of time that the Cool School stood unique. This new concept of Rhythm directly forced radical changes in the Rhythm Section and it was proponents of the West Coast School which articulated it best. Jimmy Guiffre stated clearly: “The beat in implicit but not explicit….in other words, acknowledged but unsounded” - the listener is to feel rather than hear the rhythmic pulse (a concept from the Classical Tradition). This concept of implicit time led directly to a major characteristic of the West Coast Sound - the elimination of the drummer. This required a change from all working in the Rhythm Section - especially the drum function within the Cool School.

  The Drummer had to change his entire approach to the elements in his ‘Kit’:

  1. The Bass Drum was used infrequently but accurately to propel the soloist

  2. The rhythmic center shifted from the bass drum to the Ride Cymbal

  3. The snare provided accents tied to the melodic rhythm.

  The Piano/Bass/Guitar:

  1. The Bass assumed the responsibility for defining the pulse - again, it is NOT stated but truly defined

  2. Enabled the Pianist to free the left hand for chordal punctuations and the right hand for a fast and complicated melodic or improvisation line (Basie’s style gives ample precedence for this)

  3. Bass and guitar become solo instruments in their own right - with the introduction of the Amplifier

  4. The Bass was freed from the Root-5th line and able to weave freely through the complex harmonies

  5. (Jimmy Blanton is credited with this development).

  The Rhythm Section Unit:

  1. The section began to work to assist the soloist, NOT keep the time

  2. The ability “to ‘feed’ the soloist with the correct ‘beside the beat’ punctuations became the determining factor for the successful rhythm section musician”.

  Tanner and Gerow give the dates 1954 - 1963 for the ‘Funky’ period. Actually, the Funky Style was an offshoot of the Hard Bop School. Originally a piano style attributed to Horace Silver, it is characterized “by slow or medium blues, played hard on the beat, with all the feeling and expression characteristic of the old blues”

  [Berendt] and later with gospel influences - a ‘soul’ style different but with the same roots as the Pop music Soul.

  Hard Bop which dominated the second half of the ‘50’s was centered in New York City. Berendt states: “…the purest bop, enriched by a greater knowledge of harmonic fundamentals and a greater degree of instrumental-technical perfection.”

  It should be noted - among the players already mentioned within this Style - that early John Coltrane can be listed among them.

  In summarizing this period, Marshall Sterns stated: “Indeed, modern jazz as played in New York by Art Blakey and his Messengers,…has never lost its fire. The harmonies of cool jazz - and bop - were taken over, the posture of resignation disappeared, the light sound remained, but the music always has a biting sharpness. In a word: It has changed, but fundamentally it remained ‘hot’ and ‘swinging’.”

  All of the stylistic changes brought by the Cool/Hard Bop Schools stem from the advent of Bop. When the music no longer functioned as dance music and became a concert Art Music it did not have to state the Rhythmic pulse for a dancing audience - the time could become as fluid, free, and the harmonies as complex as the Art factor demanded. It also centered the attention of both audience and musicians on the creation of Art - in an improvisatory music that attention is necessarily centered on the Improviser. But, above all else, one must realize that Hard Bop and Cool are two manifestations of the same immediate post Swing musical trends - many of characteristics are shared and both Hard Bop and Cool musicians had elements of both in their playing styles.

  12 Yin and Yang and all that Jazz

  A recent NewsWeek article included a chart on music market share for the various genres of recorded music. The Jazz share was 3.0% - Classical was 2.9%. It seems the Artistic leap brought about by the emergence of Bop has relegated Jazz to the Artistic Marketplace - and a comparable marketshare. This transf
ormation from a functional popular music to an ‘Art Music’ was a logical progression for the Jazz genre - one also reflected in the influences mentioned by Charlie Parker. In naming his favorite musicians he mentioned Brahms, Schoenberg, Ellington, Hindemith, and Stravinsky. At a very basic level, what the musics shared was an adaption to a modern culture and a modern world - a striving for the music to reflect the time and place both existed in and of the people involved with these musics to express and reflect that time and place.

  Music is a living language and responds to new circumstances in a constant evolution to reflect, relate, and express the time and place it exists in. But change is never easy - it requires the Artist and Audience to constantly learn a new musical language and actively explore the musical art utilizing this new musical language. It is not an easy process - it is one which consistantly meets with resistance. The new must be explored to become comprehensible and the accepted previous norms realized as not rules but ‘accepted norms’ for another time and place.

  This resistance to the new is not new - for it has accompanied every change in the musical language: • Boethius [an accoustical theroitician c.480-524]: “Music was chaste and modest so long as it was played on simpler instruments, but since it has come to be played in a variety of manners and confusedly, it has lost the mode of gravity and virtue and fallen almost to baseness.” • Jacob of Liege [regarding the Ars Antiqua and the Ars Nova c. 1425]: “Music was originally discreet, seemly, simple, masculine, and of good morals. Have not the moderns rendered it lascivious beyond measure?”

  • G.M. Artuse [composer and theorist 1600]: ”They are so enamored of themselves as to think it within their power to corrupt, spoil, and ruin the good rules handed down in former times by so many theorists and excellent musicians.”

  • August von Kotzebue [German dramatist 1806]: “The Overture to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio was performed recently, and all impartial musicians and music lovers were in complete agreement that never was anything written in music so incoherent, shrill, muddled, and utterly shocking to the ear.”

  • Henry Pleasants [author of the Agony of Modern Music 1955]: “Serious music is a dead art. The vein which for threehundred years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded spectators picking through the slag pile.”

  These quotes are from the Joseph Machlis text “Introduction to Contemporary Music” It is the source for my research for this part of the series. The subject area is the Modern Western Concert Tradition - but the concepts are relevant for any contemporary art music in our modern society. I originally turned to the book to get some information on the influences Parker metioned - as I read, I realized that Jazz not only shared some very broad similiarities with this music but also the changes in musical elements. Both were seeking a new expressive musical language - a language that was discriptive of a modern society.

  Machlis mentions Rules and the Artist. What he in essence says is that the rules of artisic creation are not broken for the sheer joy of breaking them. These rules are used to achieve freedom of action wihin a self-imposed frame and when these rules are rejected it is because they have ceased to be meaningful. It is not the concept of ‘rules’ which changes but a search for new rules reflecting the new time and place - a search to make music expressive of this new time and place.

  To start this exploration of the ‘new’ musical elements one must understand the Yin and Yang of Art - any work of art, regardless of medium, exists on two basic levels: the Formal vs the Expressive. Both of these impulses are always present throughout the history of Art - at times one will predominate over the other. That predominace is a matter of degree - but always ‘in the mix’. Which of these is the major influence has immediate effects on the elements of the Artistic Medium. These elements are shaped by the predominate artistic impulse and in turn shape the Medium to reflect that impulse.

  The Formal seeks above all to safeguard the purity of form. It reflects the values of order, lucidity, and restraint. It seeks a purity of style and proportion, striving to bring perfection to what already exists. The Artist achieves a certain measure of detachment from the artwork and expresses himself through symbols that have achieved a universal validity. The Expressive is concerned with the expression of emotion. It exalts the unique character of the artists personal reactions, striving always for the most dirct expression of emotion. It is a rebellion against the Tradiltional, valuing passionate utterance above perfection or form - an art of sensual enchantment. To these formal and expressive aspects, Nietzsche ascribed two images - that of Apollo, god of Light and Harmonious Proportions and Dionysus, god of Wine, Ecstasy, and Intoxification. For the Western Concert Tradition, the shift from the Dionysian to the Apollian became one of the gestures of the new music of the 20th Century - but what of the Jazz Idiom.

  Though the roots of Jazz have a 300yr history, it certainly is not a comparable time span to the Western Concert Tradition - traced back to Judiac Chant. But this Yin and Yang of Formal vs Expressive is still present in the music. Once this Jazz music entered the Artistic sphere and left the realm of Popular Music it must, out of necessity, embrace the same strivings that the Western Classical Tradition must - to be relevant as a medium of expressing our current time and place. Its language - as it had from the very first identification as a genre called Jazz - must express the time and place it exists in. Popular Music must also - but it is the difference in function that is crucial. For such music, its reason for being is to provide entertainment. That is its function and all else is secondary. It changes over time to address that need - make the entertainment component responsive to time and place. Art music is a medium of communication and exchange between audience and artist. Its ‘function’ to communicate - and its success is judged by how well it accomplishes that communication. The search for a language to successfully communicate the time and place of the artist is constant - the interim periods are ‘stressfull’ and meet ‘resistance’. Above all it’s language must adapt to the current and the new - just as we must constantly adapt to a lifetime of change.

  Jazz evolved to speak to a modern age - and like Tradition Concert Music sought a new language of musical elements to communicate this modern time and place between artrist and audience - because it is an art music. Its “function’ is to communicate.

  13 Searching

  Of all the changes occurring within Jazz, it seems the great enabling event of the music was its emergence as an Art form. Its movement out of the popular realm was a necessity for further development - to evolve it needed to be free of its dance music function. The limits imposed rhythmically by this function constricted all other musical elements - to evolve, the music had to be free of any restrictions imposed from outside the music itself. It needed to make the musical elements which, when manipulated, defined the music as jazz the primary focus. Any constraint by the need to define a dance beat as primary would have precluded any further growth as a musical genre. From the Bop era onward, this freedom allowed the music many avenues of growth and expansion.

  A period of experimentation and innovation flowed from the developments of the 1950’s.

  Accompanying this was a fundamental change in the approach toward Jazz. From its beginnings, the one consistent and unifying thread between the different styles of the genre was the practice of using preexisting material adapted for use [or original material written in a pre-existing style]. This freed the jazz performer and allowed him to concentrate on improvisation. This borrowed material included everything from spirituals to popular songs - the bulk coming from a vocal tradition.

  The 1950’s saw the extension of the technical resources of the soloists and an increase in the complexity of the material accepted, modified, or composed for jazz. The language of Jazz had been greatly enriched by the advent of Bob and the West Coast school of the era. In the ‘60’s, the previous pattern of evolution and revolution regarding prior sty
les would continue but something new would happen - it would almost mirror the developments of the new trends of Western Concert Music.

  This additional path would be concerned with the disintegration of the structural background of the music itself [much like their ‘Classical’ counterparts]. The jazz musician - in considering established practice no longer relevant to contemporary culture and society - would start a search for a new musical language relevant to contemporary life. Like the Contemporary Composers of the Western Concert Tradition, they experimented with the elements of music - attempting to redefine and reinvent them for the new and modern world they lived in.

  No longer functioning as a Popular Music, but rather a true Art Music, they were free of any market considerations or audience demands. This enabled experimentation and innovation dependent only on artistic ‘vision’ - and as such, parallel much of what the New ‘Classical’ music did in manipulating the musical elements. The 20th Century Concert Tradition is a logical introduction to this next and multi dimensioned Jazz period. In investigating these changes, it is best to keep in mind the Yin and Yang of any art music - that swing between the Formal and the Emotional. This constant tension - both of degree,dominance, or rejection - determines the parameters of the musical search for a contemporary musical language.

  • Melody: neither the formal beauty of the Classical nor the lyric beauty of the Romantic were emulated. The 20th Century composer had little use for standard patterns - in phrase or repetition of theme or motif. The melodic contour has been divorced from vocal tradition - it was not conceived in terms of what the voice can do, utilizing wide leaps, jagged turns of phrase, and an angular line. It becomes an abandonment of the familiar landmarks on which the listener relies to recognize a melody.