Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  JAZZ AND

  BLACK MUSIC

  19 5 5-1965

  DAVID H. ROSENTHAL

  PREFACE

  My brother David was fourteen (I was ten) when he discovered jazz while attending one of those music and art summer camps in the Berkshires. Chuck Israels, soon to be Bill Evans's bassist, was the son of the woman who ran the place. Randy Weston, a fabulous pianist, would drop by to play basketball. Within a year, David knew more about jazz than many adult jazz-lovers ever do (many of the thoughts contained in these pages were already being expressed), and had managed by hook or crook to gather around himself a very serious little record collection.

  At this time (1960), almost all the musicians David discusses in this book were hard at work creating sounds that are still lighting fires under jazz enthusiasts. "Hard bop," whatever the hotly-debated merits of the term, was "alive," by which I mean not just that the music was being played (as it still is), but that it was responding with passionate urgency (as it emphatically no longer is) to its own imbedded implications and those of the larger surrounding culture. It was in, of, and about the world in which it lived.

  To David, a poet, critic, and savvy observer of the chaotic postwar world, this quality of currency was never secondary throughout his thirty-year involvement in jazz. Music was only one of the trouble spots he kept an eye on, and he was untiring—ruthless, really—in his determination to pull it all together. Not a jazz musician but a jazz-loving artist who was very much of like mind, David was the perfect man for the job of chronicling the complex processes by which jazz flowed into and out of its "hip" environs. He especially relished those dizzying moments when some new artistic flowering, individual or collective, would swoop down to startle sleepy expectations.

  Conversely, he distrusted art that had been cut off from its own time to drift, encapsulated and revered, into the future. As the last chapters of this book were being completed, it appeared that jazz might be headed for just such a fate. The "nostalgic nineties" were in full swing (more people probably heard John Lennon's "Imagine" in 1991 than during the entire 1970s). The big jazz labels, seeking salvation by promoting a small group of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-old males as the "young lions" of their generation, had giddily exhumed a number of early-sixties musical, demographic, and sartorial cliches. Lincoln Center launched a successful jazz program, while previously all-classical magazines and record outlets expanded their well-guarded boundaries just far enough to include jazz. Such intimations of respectability made it seem that "standard repertoire" classical music and 1945-1970 jazz were preparing to share a single high-toned niche in the twenty-first century.

  David was disheartened by such possibilities. We spent many hours brooding together over the post-apocalyptic state of our beloved culture, a state he once likened to a garbage can that had been overturned on a windy day. As jazz musicians and listeners continually readjust their fix on the music's future, strength and sanity can be derived from David's refusal to "dumb down" the past in terms of later developments. It was utterly characteristic of him to write (in Chapter 3), "Jazz has always been a volatile music, changing quickly and often, and the hard-bop period .. . represents a moment of balance and polish in the work of many musicians. . . . (But) the elegant equilibriums thus achieved cannot be sustained for long. Such styles generate their own pressures for radical change." No one would cite the jazz of the last fifteen years as a shining example of healthy evolution; David's use of the present tense in this passage typifies his uncompromising attitude.

  David completed the writing of this book in 1990. Although he continued following the jazz scene after that, his views on the music discussed here, molded by a lifetime of intense concentration, remained about the same. The major exception to this was the pianist Elmo Hope. In 1991, Blue Note reissued Hope's two ten-inch LPs, from 1953 and 1954, on CD. David was struck by the strength, focus, and originality of the 1953 trio date (with Percy Heath on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums). He felt that he had been too dismissive of Hope's pre-1959 playing, and realized that inadequate rehearsal opportunities and the exigencies of heroin had conspired to misrepresent Hope as much more of a "late bloomer" than he really was. Many of the qualities David described in Hope's Hifijazz and Riverside albums can be heard to only slightly less stunning effect on this wonderful earlier session.

  Finally, a personal note. Although David and I certainly had our differences in musical outlook, there is no point in pretending otherwise: his view of the jazz universe, the thoughts contained in these pages, were the mother's milk that started and guided me in my life as a jazz pianist. As my family continues struggling with the emptiness left by his unexpected illness and death, this "piece" of him, recalling so powerfully the smoke-filled, jazz-filled hours we spent together, is a tremendous comfort.

  Alan Rosenthal April 28, 1993

  CONTENTS

  Introduction 3

  1. Bebop 10

  2. Hard Bop Begins 25

  3. A New Mainstream 41

  4. The Scene 62

  5. The Lyricists 85

  6. Tenors and Organs 101

  7. The Power of Badness 117

  8. Hard Bop Heterodoxy: Monk, Mingus, Miles, and Trane 132

  9. Changes 151

  10. The Last of Hard Bop 168

  Notes 183

  Selected Hard Bop Discography 191

  Index 195

  I NTRODUCTION

  In January 1972, in a scene straight out of "Frankie and Johnny," trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot dead by his mistress at Slug's, a jazz club on New York City's Lower East Side. Morgan was thirty-three years old. His death—spectacular in jazz not so much because he was young as because it involved a woman instead of drugs—is remembered thus by one of his closest musical associates: "For years Lee had been with Helen [More], an older woman—maybe ten years older than him— who sort of looked after him and had straightened him out a little, helped him stay away from dope. A few weeks before his death, Lee had started hanging out with a younger girl, very pretty; she looked like Angela Davis. He was taking her all over town, showing her off to his friends. One day he dropped by the school in Harlem where I was teaching jazz workshops and introduced her to all of us.

  "That night in January was one of the coldest nights of the year. It was about five degrees below zero, and Lee was relaxing between sets at the bar with this fine new girlfriend of his when Helen walked in. She came up to him, but Lee didn't want to be bothered and he walked her over to a table, sat her down, and told her to wait. Then he went back to the bar. After a while she came up to him again. This time Lee took her by the shoulders and, without her overcoat or anything, marched her over to the door and put her out in the cold. Now she had Lee's pistol in her pocketbook, and when she came back in she pulled it out and shot him: one of those shots that go straight to the heart. A little red stain came up on his shirt—the bleeding was all inside—and a few minutes later he was dead. Then she realized what had happened and she was crying and hanging over him and screaming 'Mogie'—that was what she called him—'What have I done?' But he was dead."*

  In a number of respects, Morgan could be considered a quintessential—or even the quintessential—hard bopper. His sardonic, "dirty" solos, full of aggressively bent, half-valved, and smeared notes, epitomized the "badness" many jazzmen of his school strove to achieve. Like James Brown in soul music, he had honed his time, attack, and timbre to razor sharpness. The development of his style, from its early bebop-influenced phase when he was with Dizzy Gillespie's big band to the surging modal compositions of his later records, closely paralleled hard bop's evolution. Morgan's life and personality—the
moody arrogance that still glares out at us from so many photos, and his readiness to live willfully for the moment—were also those of a typical jazz hipster of the era. Finally, his death coincided with the collapse of hard bop artistically and economically (as music with a large enough audience to support it). And, of course, it deprived the school of its star trumpet player.

  Morgan grew up in North Philadelphia, coming of age at a time when black neighborhoods in America's big cities pulsed with the sounds of jazz and virtually every block was home to at least a few knowledgeable jazz fans. One such fan was Lee's older sister Ernestine, who—in addition to playing the piano and organ—took charge of her brother's musical education. When Lee was ten or twelve, she brought him along with her to hear such eminent beboppers as Charlie Parker and Bud Powell at the Earle Theatre. At the age of fourteen, Lee got his first trumpet: a gift from Ernestine. He attended high school at Mastbaum Tech, which, like Cass Tech in Detroit and Du Sable in Chicago, was a hotbed of adolescent jazz musicians, many of them stars-to-be. At fifteen, Lee formed a band with other teenagers that began playing local dances and whose personnel included, at various times, pianist Bobby Timmons, bassists Henry Grimes and Spanky DeBrest, and drummers Lex Humphries and Albert "Tootie" Heath. He also sat in at the Music City instrument shop's "workshop sessions" with drummers Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, and Max Roach; saxophonists Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins; trumpeters Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Roy Eldridge, and Dizzy Gillespie; and pianist Bud Powell.

  The ferment of Philly's jazz scene and Lee's place in it were recently recalled by bassist Reggie Workman: "Lee grew up in North Philadelphia, a poor neighborhood with a mixture of working-class people. Some were doing okay, some weren't. Lee was like a child prodigy, but there were many of them in Philadelphia at that time, including his friend Kenny Rodgers, who played alto sax. He and Kenny were the stars at Mastbaum Tech. Lee was very well-disciplined. Very jovial, with a great sense of humor—an almost exaggerated sense of humor. He was from a very close-knit family. His older sister [Ernestine] was great friends with my older sister Gloria. They were in a choir together—a community choir. But you have peer pressure in communities like that. The real music of that day was jazz: Charlie Parker, Percy Heath, people like that.

  "Lee came up when Philly jazz was very strong and there were lots of clubs: Pep's, the Showboat, the Blue Note around 15th and Ridge, the Oasis, the Aqua Lounge in West Philly, plus all kinds of social clubs and taverns that had live music. The owners and managers were so into music that they'd allow us to have jam sessions and come into the clubs and play during the early evening hours, even though we were too young to drink. There was a very healthy music scene in the community taverns at that time, aside from the fact that there were people like Tommy Monroe who ran music workshops for young musicians, or Owen Marshall's big band workshop with new music he wrote and that rehearsed in living rooms, taverns, ballrooms, any place that had a piano and chairs and where we could make music. [Rodgers's alto playing and some of Marshall's compositions can be heard on Lee Morgan Sextet, Blue Note.]

  "Lee worked very hard at his craft and understood the oral tradition of jazz. He had an incredible record library and all of us would get together every week to listen to his records. His parents helped him out with that, and he used to also go out and hustle and work to get those records. We'd listen to records for hours at a time at his place. He was sought after at a very young age to leave Philadelphia because people would hear him at Music City, where we'd have workshops with Blakey, Coltrane, Jimmy Heath, Herbie Nichols, whoever was in town. His parents always supported his interest in music. Now Kenny Rodgers was very advanced too, but he didn't move into the music business because he got married at a young age. Some of the others in our crowd were Donald Wilson [trumpet and piano], Stanley Wilson [tenor sax], Owen Marshall, Johnny Splawn [trumpet], James (Spanky) DeBrest, and McCoy Tyner. They came in waves. Lee and I and the Wilson brothers were all in one age bracket. Philadelphia wasn't unique in that sense. Chicago and Detroit were like that too—any place where there were factories and parents migrating for jobs. A lot stopped in Philadelphia because New York wasn't so comfortable and it was easier to settle down in Philly.

  "Lee was a very sensitive human being. He'd reach out and help anyone he felt had merit, and he helped a lot of us to make it in music. He was very, very cocky, very childlike, and very arrogant in his own way. He was always searching for new vistas, comparing notes and telling us about his experiences when he'd come back to Philadelphia. He loved Fats Navarro. He knew about everybody from Pops [Louis Armstrong] right on up to today, yet he amalgamated it all into his own sound so you knew right away it was him playing."

  In 1956—all of eighteen years old—Morgan cut his first records as a leader for Blue Note and Savoy (two of the era's four main New York-based independent jazz labels, the others being Prestige and Riverside) and toured, first with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and then with Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra. Nat Hentoff, in his liner notes for Morgan's Leeway album, described the impact of his first exposure to Dizzy's protege: "Every listener to jazz has had a few experiences so startling that they are literally unforgettable. One of mine took place during an engagement the Dizzy Gillespie big band had at Birdland in 1957. My back was to the bandstand as the band started 'Night in Tunisia.' Suddenly, a trumpet soared out of the band into a break that was so vividly brilliant and electrifying that all conversation in the room stopped and those of us who were gesturing were frozen with hands outstretched. After the first thunderclap impact, I turned and saw that the trumpeter was the very young sideman from Philadelphia, Lee Morgan." When the Gillespie big band disbanded in 1958, Lee rejoined the Jazz Messengers, with whom he played until 1961 and again from 1964 to 1966.

  It was during these years that Morgan evolved into a major jazz stylist. His early playing, though impressive both for its technical mastery and for its bravado, betrayed the not entirely assimilated influences of his favorite trumpeters: Fats Na-varro, Clifford Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Kenny Dorham (in descending order of importance by Lee's own ranking). This order is by no means casual, for Morgan's early affinities were clearly more with the "extroverted" school represented by the first three than with Davis's or Dorham's lyrical and pensive styles. With the passage of time and perhaps under Blakey's tutelage, Morgan's solos became more melodic: he played fewer notes, and they counted more. His tone darkened, losing much of its effervescent, Clifford Brown-like sweetness and acquiring a timbre that seemed to convey a mixture of bitter irony and sorrow. Though—like hard bop itself—Morgan's style remained rooted in the bebop idiom, by 1960 he had developed an unmistakable sound, attack, and phrasing that fit in perfectly with Wayne Shorter's brass anthems and with the spirit of the Jazz Messengers as a whole, at once sinister and exuberant.

  In 1964, Morgan had a hit in "The Sidewinder," a rolling, punching blues with a heavy R Si B beat that took his disc of the same name to number twenty-five on Billboard's LP charts. The song was widely played on the radio and in 1965 even cropped up (with strings) as background music for a Chrysler television commercial. Despite several efforts—for example, "The Rumproller" and "Cornbread"—Morgan was never able to repeat this success. And in fact, within only a few years of his triumph, jazz had lost most of its popularity among both blacks and whites, and musicians of his sort were viewed as anachronisms by listeners attuned to Motown and rock. Morgan had hit the scene during the last period in which jazz customarily attracted the hippest young black musicians: the most musically advanced, with the solidest technical skills and the strongest sense of themselves not only as entertainers but as artists. By 1970 this scene was fading fast, while the network of independent jazz record labels, black dj's, and distributors that had nurtured and sometimes exploited it was rapidly disintegrating. Working- and middle-class blacks, fleeing escalating street crime and riots and encouraged by laws forbidding housing discrimination, forsook neighborhoods that had just recently
seethed with musical activity—a world of jazz and blues, R.B, aspiring doo-woppers crooning on street corners, gospel, and, of course, families for whom singing and playing were part of everyday life. They left behind smoldering ruins and an underclass that would henceforth be left to its own devices.

  Morgan, because of his work with the Jazz Messengers and his success with "The Sidewinder," remained popular enough to make a living playing jazz. But many others of his generation had to abandon their music or water it down in a quest for commercial success or, in some cases, mere survival. While remaining true to jazz, Morgan's own records deteriorated in the late sixties and early seventies. He seemed to be turning into a mannerist of his own style, repeating his cliches without the conviction and sense of discovery that had made his earlier LPs and live performances so riveting. In short, he was in a rut, while the milieu that had buoyed him up—ghetto life with jazz at its center—had vanished.

  The decade in which he played such a major role is now just a set of recollections for some and part of "history" for others. Nevertheless, it remains unrivaled for the number of outstanding jazz records it produced. Indeed, to many listeners, hard bop and jazz are still virtually synonymous. When most fans think of jazz, they think of hard bop's mixture of hip street attitudes and a kind of hard-boiled melancholy; and a large percentage of the "new releases" in record stores today are reissues of sides cut during the late fifties and early sixties. To understand this era of extraordinary musical abundance, however, we must first backtrack and consider the meaning and impact of bebop, which laid the foundation for the school and even supplied half its name.

  B EBOP

  Perhaps the most often-told story in modem-jazz lore is "How Bebop Was Born at Minton's Playhouse." Opened on New York City's 118th Street in 1940, Minton's soon featured a house band led by drummer Kenny Clarke and including pianist Thelonious Monk, trumpeter Joe Guy, and bassist Nick Fenton. Under the management of ex-bandleader Teddy Hill, the club evolved into a musicians' hangout and a focal point for experimentation, drawing advanced Swing musicians like saxophonists Ben Webster and Don Byas, guitarist Charlie Christian, and bassist Jimmy Blanton, along with such incipient beboppers as trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Bud Powell. Altoist Charlie Parker also dropped in whenever he was in town. Minton's late-night jam sessions drew some of the best and some of the worst. The latter, however, would "feel a breeze" after a chorus or so. Indeed, another often-told tale about the birth of bebop holds that its "weird" chord changes and keys were designed to hustle incompetent musicians off the stand.