Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  Despite these conflicts, the session produced some of Davis's best solos ever. One tune, a blues by Jackson entitled "Bags' Groove," featured two trumpet outings that are remarkable for their economy of means and their extraordinary richness of ideas. Playing few notes, Davis relied on a subtle rhythmic sense. He could energize a simple phrase by slight displacements, and he possessed a melodic fecundity that filled almost every bar with figures that could well be "tunes" themselves. Davis teaches us what "less is more" means in jazz. As fellow trumpeter Art Farmer remarked: "When you're not technically a virtuoso, you have to be saying something. You've got no place to hide."6As a composition, "Bags' Groove" went on to become a standard at jam sessions. Its loose-jointed, medium-tempo beat and "catchy" theme made it a perfect vehicle for both novices and professionals. The former liked it because it was so easy to play, the latter because its simplicity forced them to concentrate on musical coherence rather than digital dexterity.

  The other important trumpeter to come of age in the early 1950s was Clifford Brown ("Brownie"), who in many ways, both musically and personally, was the opposite of Davis. If Davis was the most lunar of modern jazz artists, then Brownie was the sunniest, with a joyous, bubbly style that overflowed with high spirits. Born in 1930 in Wilmington, Delaware,

  Brownie was performing with beboppers like J. J. Johnson, Max Roach, and Fats Navarro in the late 1940s. Navarro, in particular, both encouraged and influenced him. Another early champion was Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie visited Brownie in the hospital during his year-long convalescence after an automobile accident in 1950 and urged him to persevere in his career as a trumpeter.

  Having recovered from this accident, Brownie worked for two years with Chris Powell's Blue Flames, which, in Ira Gitler's words, "was an R B unit but in those days bands of that nature had quite a bit of jazz in them."7This, Brownie's first extended professional gig, was followed by stints with Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton, Art Blakey, and Max Roach. At the time of his death in 1956 in a second road crash—one that also killed Bud Powell's younger brother Richie, a pianist and composer of delicate refinement—Brownie had been co-leading a quintet with Roach for two years.

  Today, he is remembered not only for his music but also for his generosity and his determination to avoid the vices that had killed or immobilized so many other jazzmen. Sonny Rollins, who was struggling with some of these vices in the early fifties, told Joe Goldberg that "Clifford was a profound influence on my personal life. He showed me that it was possible to live a good, clean life and still be a good jazz musician."8After Clifford's death, Quincy Jones expanded on the point: "Brownie had a very hard job. He constantly struggled to associate jazz, its shepherds, and its sheep, with a cleaner element, and held no room in his heart for bitterness about the publicity-made popularity and success of some of his pseudo-jazz giant brothers, who were sometimes very misleading morally and musically. As a man and a musician, he stood for a perfect example and the rewards of self-discipline."9

  Perhaps no other modern jazzman was so missed by those who knew him as Clifford Brown. Though he is recalled by some as almost childlike, he was a highly skilled musician— technically one of the best jazz trumpeters who ever lived—as well as a passionate chess player and something of an amateur mathematician. "Clifford always took time to listen to and talk with young people," his widow LaRue wrote recently. "He stressed the need for youngsters, especially aspiring musicians, to get a good education and to be 'clean' spiritually and morally. Clifford enjoyed going to Heritage House when we were home in Philadelphia. He would help kids, like Lee Morgan, with their music and jam with them."10

  It was partly his moral example, then, that was missed; but also, Clifford was far and away the best trumpeter of his generation. Taking Fats Navarro's style as his point of departure, he breathed new life into bebop, making it sound as fresh as if it had just been invented. Like Navarro, Brown had a fat, "buttery" sound and played long melodic lines that lent his solos a sense of effortless, flowing ease. This similarity may derive partly from both men's work with Tadd Dameron. Speaking of both Navarro and Brown, Dameron commented: "I used to tell him, 'Fats, when you play a solo, you're going from your first eight bars into your second eight, that's where you really play—those turnbacks.' That helped him a lot. I used to tell him, 'Look, there's where you can tell whether a man can really blow—when he starts playing that eighth and ninth bar and then when he comes out of the middle into the last eight. Those turnbacks mean so much.' I told Clifford that too. I tell all my soloists that."11 Negotiating such "turnbacks," including the ones leading into and out of the bridges on thirty-two-bar songs (the "bridge" being the B element in an A-A-B-A pattern) has always been one of jazz's trickier undertakings. Failure to do so elegantly creates an effect of rigidity, of being trapped by the song's structure, similar to that of a soloist hewing too closely to a tune's chords because he's not familiar with them.

  Brownie extended Navarro's style. He played with more vibrato, especially on ballads; and at faster tempos he employed half-valve effects, slurs, and grace notes that gave his solos a wryly puckish quality. (These effects were later developed still further by Lee Morgan.) "Ebullient," "effervescent," "elated," and "exultant" were words applied to his improvisa-tional style. His ballads were soaringly romantic rather than somber. "Pent-up House," recorded three months before his death on the LP Sonny Rollins Plus 4 (with Richie Powell, bassist George Morrow, and Max Roach) is a good example of his solo style. The trumpet statement crackles with fire and swing. Tuneful phrases and shouts of pleasure fill every chorus. Rarely has modern jazz radiated so much sweetness, light, and sheer elan. In the article already quoted, Quincy Jones said: "Here was the perfect amalgamation of natural creative ability, and the proper amount of technical training, enabling him to contribute precious moments of musical and emotional expression. This inventiveness placed him in a class far beyond that of most of his poll-winning contemporaries. Clifford's self-assuredness in his playing reflected the mind and soul of a blossoming young artist who would have rightfully taken his place next to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gill-espie, and Miles Davis and other leaders in jazz."12 By 1956 Brownie had taken his place beside such greats. Although Jones is right to suggest that he might have developed further, he had already "made it," and his influence would be audible through the rest of the decade in young hornmen like Lee Morgan and Donald Byrd.

  For the last year and a half of the Brown-Roach ensemble's existence, Sonny Rollins shared the front line with Clifford Brown. We have already met Rollins as one of Jackie McLean's pals and a fellow student at Benjamin Franklin High School in New York City. McLean, in a long interview with A. B. Spellman, recalled the Harlem jazz scene in the late 1940s and Rollins's place in it: "Sonny influenced everybody uptown, playing every instrument. There were a lot of musicians in our neighborhood like [drummer] Art Taylor, [pianist] Kenny Drew, Connie Henry, who played bass for a while, Arthur Phipps, who also played bass, and [alto saxophonist] Ernie Henry, and there were guys who used to come from out of the neighborhood to see what was happening, like Walter Bishop. Sonny was the leader of all of them. And when Miles came to town he began to hang up there on the Hill with us."13

  By 1949 Rollins was recording with beboppers like Babs Gonzales, Bud Powell, and J.J. Johnson. On these sides, he was still digesting Bird's structural precepts and phraseology, but his playing already had fluidity, coherence, and a lithe, off-center rhythmic sense that show why he was held in such esteem by older musicians.

  After gigging around New York with Powell, Tadd Dam-eron, and Art Blakey, Rollins set out for Chicago, where he spent some time in drummer Ike Day's band. In 1951 he was back in New York, appearing live with Miles Davis and participating in Davis's Dig session with McLean et al. On the title cut, Rollins stretches out for the first time on record, and you can hear how he has developed. His tone is smooth and lustrous, his phrasing legato, and he shows a flair for songlike melodic figures interspersed with standard bebop li
cks. At the time, Rollins was still in thrall to Bird, but on "In a Sentimental Mood," recorded two years later with the Modern Jazz Quartet, he also pays homage to Coleman Hawkins, his first idol. Here, in a husky, swaggering treatment of the theme, Sonny reveals a more sanguine tone, complete with growls and hints of Ben Webster-like breathiness. An even clearer example of Hawkins's enduring presence is "Silk 'n' Satin," another ballad and Sonny's first recorded masterpiece. Rollins offers a heartfelt interpretation of his own tune, delivered with all the impassioned authority of a Swing titan. His solo is based on the melody rather than just the chords, while Elmo Hope's stately, almost dirgelike accompaniment intensifies things considerably.

  In 1954 Sonny again headed for Chicago. It wasn't until the end of 1955 that he emerged from his self-imposed exile. Bedeviled by drug problems, Rollins had shown up for his first record session as a leader in 1951 "disheveled" (in Joe Goldberg's words) and with "his horn held around his neck by a rope."14 Now, however, he was "clean" and replaced saxophonist Harold Land in the Roach-Brown ensemble. Though he had always been considered a promising musician, the quantum leap in the power and originality of his playing was astonishing. On "There's No Business Like Show Business" (from Worktime, December 1955, his first date as a leader after his "return"), he shows a marked increase in authority, twisting the tune out of shape, reinventing it with surprising hesitations and rhythmic displacements, slowing things down to half time, returning to the theme, punctuating angular runs with gutsy cries delivered in a searing tone, fragmenting and reassembling his materials in the course of eccentrically accented up-tempo flights, and topping it all off with a throaty cadenza. This is our first look at Rollins as a tenor giant with a loose, double-jointed sense of rhythm, unexpectedly patterned phrases, deep swing, and a dark, husky delivery alternating with smoother, Bird-like intonations.

  On this record and others (including the Sonny Rollins Plus 4 date with Clifford Brown and Saxophone Colossus, featuring pianist Tommy Flanagan, bassist Doug Watkins, and Max Roach), Rollins established a reputation as the most original and compelling saxophonist since Charlie Parker. The full-bodied emotionality of his style, and his raw, expressive sound, also led him to be universally associated with the emerging hard-bop school centered in New York City. And his gift for thematic improvisations, somewhat unusual in modern jazz, attracted the attention of critics like Gunther Schul-ler, who wrote a widely noted essay on Rollins. Schuller's piece, "Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation" (originally published in Jazz Review) is an incisive attempt to demonstrate through a close analysis of "Blue Seven," a slow, walking blues on Saxophone Colossus, that "with Rollins thematic and structural unity have at last achieved the importance in pure improvisation that elements such as swing, melodic conception and originality of expression have already enjoyed for years."15

  In a way less likely to attract the attention of highbrows like Schuller, Horace Silver (whose last name, a corruption of "Silva," reflects his Cape Verdean ancestry) was also playing solos based on carefully structured elaboration of melodic motifs in the early 1950s. In the liner notes for his LP Serenade to a Soul Sister (Blue Note), Silver listed his "guide lines to musical composition":

  A. Melodic Beauty

  B. Meaningful Simplicity

  C. Harmonic Beauty

  D. Rhythm

  E. Environmental, Hereditary, Regional, and Spiritual Influences

  Of these, "meaningful simplicity" is by far the most significant. Horace's improvisational style has always relied on the creative use of space and on an inexhaustible supply of striking, songlike figures. His compositions, usually for five pieces (the "classic" bebop lineup of trumpet, sax, piano, bass, and drums) and often voiced in 4ths and 5ths to give ensembles a "fuller" sound, are crystallizations of his solo style, which abounds in blues-and-gospel-based figures. As part of his apprenticeship, Silver memorized Avery Parrish's piano solo on Erskine Hawkins's recording of "After Hours." Phrases lifted from Parrish's solo and from the standard blues and boogie-woogie repertoire of "funky licks" crop up on many tunes that are not actually blues—an element of Silver's playing that had a huge impact on other pianists in the late fifties. Incorporating material from jazz's "roots" into his music, he passed on many of his own favorite phrases, which today remain embedded in the jazz vocabulary.

  Born in 1928 in Norwalk, Connecticut, Silver studied piano in high school with a church organist. While performing in Hartford with Harold Holdt in 1950, he was heard by Stan Getz, who hired him to play in his quintet. Horace remained with Getz into 1951, when he settled in New York City, gigging as a sideman with Art Blakey, Coleman Hawkins, Oscar Pettiford, Lester Young, and others. By 1954, he was one of the most sought-after pianists in jazz. In the latter part of that year, Silver led a quartet at Minton's that included tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley and Doug Watkins. Asked by Blue Note Records to assemble a quintet for a recording date, Horace called upon Mobley, Watkins, Kenny Dorham, and Art Blakey. The ensemble took the name "Jazz Messengers," which had been used by Blakey in the late forties both for a seventeen-piece band he had led around New York and for a septet that had recorded for Blue Note. Thus, one of hard bop's most influential combos was born.

  This cooperative unit, which was to stay together with its original personnel for nearly two years, emphasized swing, emotional openness, and receptivity to older black musical traditions. Along with Silver, the key ingredient in the band was Art Blakey, who at thirty-six Was already something of a veteran. Blakey's first spurt of development had occurred during a three-year stint with the Billy Eckstine band. By the time the band broke up in 1947, he was acknowledged by both fellow musicians and aficionados as one of the best young drummers around. He had already shown what he could do on recorded small-group sessions—for example with Fats Na-varro or Thelonious Monk—as well as with his own group, the original Jazz Messengers.

  In 1947 Blakey went to West Africa, where he remained for two years. Although he denies that this experience influenced his drumming, common sense would indicate the opposite. In any case, what is certain is that when he returned, he played with considerably more maturity and was soon among the most highly regarded musicians in New York City. A list of his employers during the early fifties will indicate the esteem he enjoyed: Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, and a host of others, including Buddy De Franco, with whom he spent a year before getting together with Silver to form the second, cooperative Jazz Messengers in 1955.

  By that time, Blakey had developed a fiercely individual style that was simultaneously volcanic and severe. Blakey was among the least superfluously "busy" drummers in jazz. His rhythmic sense was so sharp, and his foot and wrist control so precise, that he needed do little more than "keep time" to create an atmosphere of tremendous power. His accompanying figures, sparingly used, came at the right moments to support the soloist with sudden bursts of energy. Likewise, Blakey's solos were usually structured around a few melodic motifs played against each other contrapuntally as he built to a climax. Musical coherence was never sacrificed to technical flash.

  The cut on this first collective outing, entitled Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers, that made the deepest impression on musicians was Silver's gospel-flavored "The Preacher." The composition grew out of his habit of playing "Show Me the Way to Go Home" as his final number of the evening. "The Preacher," however, nearly went unrecorded, since Alfred Lion of Blue Note, in Horace's words, "said it was too old-timey, that no one would go for it."16The tune was indeed old-timey, "corny" in bebop terms, showing that, again in Silver's words, the Jazz Messengers could "reach way back and get that old time, gutbucket barroom feeling with just a taste of the back-beat."17 Fired by the song's rocking beat, Dorham and Mobley soar into blues-drenched, vocally inflected solos. Silver follows with a typically stripped-down statement, built around first a two-chord percussive figure and then a descending run, each repeated. Before taking the tune out, the band riffs behind his funky
noodling in classic call-and-response fashion.

  "Doodlin'," a medium-tempo blues with a two-beat feel, is another of Horace's excursions into the black popular tradition. His solo is phrased in the timeless language of the blues, with barely a nod to bebop's vocabulary. As in "The Preacher," his playing is motif-based and sparely percussive. These motifs then turn into insistent riffs behind Mobley and Dorham.

  Dorham in particular enters into the spirit of things, using a lexicon that antedates modern jazz. The soloist who most closely parallels Silver, however, is Blakey, whose improvisation is as starkly melodic as the pianist's is percussive.

  Listened to more than thirty years later, tunes like "Doo-dlin'" and "The Preacher" no longer sound as earth-shattering as they did in 1955. After all, Charlie Parker and other bebop-pers had composed simple, earthy blues too. One of Bird's tunes, "Now's the Time," was used as the basis for an R B hit called "The Hucklebuck." Nonetheless, the Jazz Messengers hit at a time when young black musicians were eager to embrace an amalgam of bebop and popular tradition. Likewise, Afro-Cuban influences had been frequent in bebop (for example, Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca" and Tadd Dameron's "Cas-bah"). In fact, such Caribbean elements go back at least as far as New Orleans pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton, one of whose most intriguing maxims, transcribed by Alan Lomax, was "If you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz."18 "Spanish tinges," also known as "Latin," "Afro-Cuban," and "Eastern" in black music, are frequent in Silver's and Blakey's work together, cropping up in performances like "Ecaroh" and "Nica's Dream." In hard bop, such tunes, usually featuring sinuously minor melodies and strong rhythmic patterning, were to be part of every working band's repertoire.