Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  Likewise, Jordan's own early professional experiences (from his first gig, a dance he played in 1947, to his arrival in New York City in 1956) exposed him to a wide variety of contexts and styles: "There were a few clubs that had the combos like Art Blakey and Bud Powell and Dizzy and Bird, Miles. They

  came through there, but there wasn't too many of those clubs around, and in the mainstream of the music at that time, all these so-called jazz musicians were playing commercial gigs. We had to play for a show, for dancers, so the only time we could play something that was really like the new type of music, bop as you would call it, would be when the band had a feature on the show, but a lot of times we had to play something like 'Flying Home,' which was a hit, and it was sort of like the house-rocking tenor solo, but people liked that.

  "I played behind [blues singers] Willie Dixon, Arbee Stidham, Jump Jackson, Cool Breeze, all in Chicago. And I also played in Helen Coles's band, a woman who played drums from Texas. We did a little traveling to Buffalo and Peoria and places like that. Those were the kind of gigs you went on. Everybody wanted to hear some shake, rattle, and roll. I used to work a lot of strip gigs, for striptease, burlesque dancers, and we had a three-piece band. This was in Calumet City, and we would play behind a screen. So I had all these kinds of experiences."

  Jordan's half-ironic comment on the influence of such work on his style reflects jazz musicians' mixed feelings about R . B gigs: "You try to clean house once in a while, but there's a lot of stuff that keeps coming out."

  Just as most major rhythm-and-blues singers started out in church choirs, virtually all the best hard boppers paid at least some R B dues. Even Jackie McLean, who identified himself early on as a bebopper and was sponsored by Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, had experiences parallel to Jordan's: "I played in rhythm and blues bands when I went to North Carolina in 1953 to try to go to school again, and I stayed down there for a year, and yeah, it helped me. It influenced me. I was playing with a group in Greensboro. Danny Richmond at that time was playing saxophone, and it was him and myself and T. J. Anderson, who was a jazz and classical composer for Tufts University. He was there at that time, so we played around in the local clubs and rhythm and blues bands, the ABA Club and different clubs in the city, backing up singers and playing blues, most of the time in one key all night depending on who was the bandleader. There was one saxophone player who used to play everything in E-flat. When he was the bandleader we played blues in E-flat all night, and I used to walk the bar with him, battle with him. I worked with him a great deal. The first record I made was not with Miles. I made a rhythm-and-blues piece with Charlie Singleton's band called 'Camel Walkin' where I played baritone sax, no solo."

  It was also in North Carolina that McLean was first exposed to gospel music, an experience that remained semi-dormant in him until his stint with Charles Mingus in the late 1950s: "When I heard it, I heard it as a child in church, and especially when I would go visit my grandmother in North Carolina. She went to a traditional Pentecostal kind of Baptist church, tent meetings in small churches that really got into the heavy aspects of the rhythm and the people passing out, feeling the spirit and the whole thing, so I saw that as a child, and I never really put that in place again and put it into my music, even though it was there unconsciously, till Mingus's band, which gave me a kind of resurgence of that, because he used to like to shout and play shout music and music that was closely related to the church, so my experience with Mingus might have helped me."

  Thus, when McLean describes the differences between bebop and hard bop, he is also describing his own evolution and the elements of his style: "Certainly Charlie Parker kept all the roots there. I mean, he was definitely a blues player and a lot of the music that he composed was structured on the blues form, and yet there was another kind of gospel feeling, a funk kind of feeling if I can use that term, that came into the music in the mid-fifties with Horace [Silver] and some of the guys that were thinking along these lines. I certainly, myself, thought along heavy blues lines, blues feeling, and my concept of it, so I just think it had more of a gospel feeling to it, a sanctified feeling to it mixed with all the other ingredients that Bird, Bud, Thelonious gave us."

  For some musicians steeped in the bebop tradition, with its cult of defiant innovation, interest in the "roots" of black music—blues and gospel—only awakened gradually. Indeed, McLean implies as much in his comments on gospel. Pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., who along with McLean formed part of New York City's second generation of beboppers and went on to play with Charlie Parker, recalls that: "My generation rebelled against that simplistic music coming or even blues. I couldn't even play the blues till later years. I didn't want to know about the blues because to me the generation of the blues was representative of the subservient black. We'd graduated from that.

  "I had to reach a certain level of confidence, of being secure in my power to know that it wasn't a drag to play the blues. Then I could let that go and relax enough to absorb some of the roots. Before that I would have been afraid to even get into that because they would think that was all I could do. Bebop was a social statement as well as music because the whole thing evolved and changed. I mean the generation that were before mine absorbed the pain and humiliation of the fact that they had to be buffoons. They made it possible for my generation to get over on pure virtuosity and ability, so I remember when I first started making professional gigs people would look at me: 'Why don't you smile, boy? Ain't you happy?' I said: "Smile? What's that got to do with it? I'm serious about this.' But I got just a little taste of what my predecessors dealt with, that they couldn't be accepted as artists. They had to be buffoons."

  In the late fifties, the cult of "soul" was also connected to a rise in militancy among black musicians, and the blues became a symbol of racial pride rather than of oppression. Nat Hentoff quotes a "young Negro trombonist from Detroit who came close to starvation during several months of trying to establish himself in New York, but nourished himself on the belief that the jazz at least had the authenticity that many white musicians lacked. His playing had 'soul,' and, as he once explained the term warily to a white jazz critic, 'that soul only comes from certain kinds of experiences, and only we—you know who I mean—go through what you need to have the kind of soul that makes real jazz.' "2

  Hentoff goes on to say that "This renewed reverence for 'church' feeling and 'funky' blues by Negro musicians has turned into one of the most commercial jazz commodities in the past fifteen years, judging by record sales and club appearances of the neo-gospel boppers. 'I think most of that soul music is now being manufactured rather than felt,' said a Harlem record store owner, 'but at least this is one time in jazz history when the Negroes are popularizing their own music. It would take a lot of courage for Stan Kenton or Shorty Rodgers to call one of their albums The Soul Brothers.' "3

  It "soul" was both (in Jackie McLean's words) "rooted in what Ray Charles sings, blues and gospel music" and a banner of racial self-affirmation, it was certainly a marketing device during hard bop's heyday. Nonetheless, in their emphasis on expressiveness, physicality, and "funk" (a word whose original meaning—strong bodily odors, especially sexual ones— expresses its earthiness), hard boppers restored jazz to popularity in black neighborhoods. Art Blakey, one of hard bop's most eloquent spokesmen, summed it up recently: "Fire! That's what people want. You know, music is supposed to wash away the dust of everyday life . . . You're supposed to make them turn around, pat their feet. That's what jazz is about . . . Play with fire; play from the heart, not from your brain. You got to know how to utilize, make the two meet. You just don't play out of the top of your head, or play down to the people. I think you should play to the people."

  Jazz and Bohemia

  The period between 1945 and 1965 was an extraordinarily creative one in New York City and—in a more dispersed way—in other parts of the United States as well. New York, however, was the magnet that drew artists of all sorts. Space
was still cheap in lower Manhattan. America's far-flung universities had little interest in recruiting experimentalists-in-residence, and the one serious exception to this rule, Black Mountain College, folded in the fifties, sending much of its teaching staff and student body to New York as well. Bohemian Manhattan was an intimate, small-scale scene: a band of outsiders easily recognizable by their dress and demeanor. Groups that later would seem diametrically opposed or at least very different— for example, the Beats and the "New York School" of poetry— rubbed elbows amiably and frequented the same bars and jazz clubs. Being few in number, they were obliged to stick together; in Eisenhower's blandly conformist America, all weirdos were brothers until the opposite was proven. In addition, artists shared an exhilaration born of their recent liberation from Europe. The old American colonial complex—a sense of being on the periphery of things, still strong among the modernists of the 1920s—had been swept away by the triumph of abstract expressionism, by William Carlos Williams's appropriation of American speech as a basis for new poetry, and, of course, by jazz, the American art form par excellence.

  Needless to say, not all artists frequented bars and jazz joints, but a remarkable number did. The abstract expressionists—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and others—were hard drinkers and inveterate hangers-out. One of them, Larry Rivers, was also an accomplished jazz saxophonist and served as a point of intersection between the worlds of painting and jazz. The Beats also spent a lot of time in night spots. For the New York School (Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and others), a key connection with jazz was Frank O'Hara, whose best-known poem, a poignantly oblique homage to Billie Holiday, is entitled "The Day Lady Died." Judith Mal-ina's and Julian Beck's Living Theatre, with its mixture of raw psychodrama and dreamy pacifism, sponsored poetry readings at its headquarters on 14th Street and featured Jackie McLean and hard-bop pianist Freddie Redd in its production of Jack Gelber's play The Connection.

  Almost anyone's account of the era includes both this heady mixture of scenes and the centrality of jazz as an artistic model and jazz clubs as meeting places. Ron Sukenick's Down and In: Life in the Underground, a combined study and memoir covering the period from 1945 through the eighties, describes the clientele and atmosphere at the Five Spot in the late fifties: "If the painting seemed more consciously American after 1950, the uniquely native American art form, jazz, became, through the fifties, more central than ever for underground artist of all kinds. It came together at the Five Spot, a bar on Cooper Square where the brothers Iggie and Joe Termini hosted a basically flophouse clientele until the artist started coming in during the mid-fifties. Painters like Grace Hartigan, Al Leslie, David Smith, de Kooning became habitues. Larry Rivers, the painter, played jazz there, poets read poetry to jazz, and avant-garde film makers even showed their films to jazz. Writers like Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch moved in, and finally the great jazzmen themselves came down to play—Charlie Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Thelon-ious Monk, Ornette Coleman."4

  In response to a question about which jazz musicians downtown artists and intellectuals were friendliest with, the painter Emilio Cruz (who also writes poetry and plays jazz drums) gave this description of the scene: "In the case of Jackie McLean, I would think that if he was around the Living Theatre crowd, he was friendly with Judith Malina and Julian Beck and that crowd, and a number of interesting people in that company. Also Cubby Selby; we all called him Cubby. I never knew his real name was Hubert Selby, Jr., until his book [Last Exit to Brooklyn] came out. Paul Blackburn, the poet, who was a good friend of mine, knew a lot of those people. Bob Thompson the painter, Allen Ginsberg at times, Bob Kaufman the poet, some of the Black Mountain poets. Rollins lived downtown and knew a number of artists, though he was very solitary.

  "Others who were there not just because it was cool but because they had a deep interest in the music were [Amiri] Baraka and Larry Rivers. [Rivers] was a friend of Zoot Sims, Stan Getz. I know he considers himself as serious a saxophone player as he does a painter. During that period I lived on Jefferson Street, down by the river. Pepper Adams lived in that building underneath me. In fact, he was the only one in the building who had heat. He had a gas heater, so in the winter when he was on the road I was a lot colder than when he was there. Donald Byrd used to come by a lot because they had that band together at that time. Jefferson Street was south of East Broadway, maybe southeast, not that far from where the old Fulton Fish Market was. That's all changed now. I don't even know whether that street exists anymore. Ed Blackwell used to come by that building too.

  "That was a period, in my life, when a lot of things were integrated. Jazz was integrated within artists' lives. A lot of people lived in lofts, and oftentimes the musicians might not have lived in lofts themselves, but they would come over there (at least on the Lower East Side) to play, to rehearse a band, so there were a lot of connections because of that. That connection would then extend what a person's capacity was, so that one person might learn more about music, another person might learn more about painting or poetry, and I knew a number of musicians who were interested in learning about all of it. Like I'm friends with Grachan Moncur III. I was his drummer last year at his workshop in New Jersey. He used to come visit my studio all the time. There was a lot of openness between various people. Herbie Lewis, the bass player, he lived around the corner. He was a neighbor of mine, so we spent a lot of time together. Miles ... I know numbers of people from the beat generation who were friends with Miles, like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Frank the photographer. So there was an integration of lots of the arts. The beat generation spent much of their lives in clubs.

  "Now one of the things that it's very important to understand is that there weren't thousands of people involved in the arts in those days, so when you would walk down the street in New York City, you would look at somebody and you would recognize them instantly as an artist, and you would immediately find that you had some kind of rapport, and there's another thing. I can't speak for right now, but there was youth. Youth reaches out. There's one thing that was consistent in all the artists in New York City at that time. They were reaching out for new things, new ways of expressing themselves. They were attempting to discover new values. Those values were not necessarily ones that were supported by the society at large, so there was this that they had in common. Another thing was that there was an attempt to break down racism, and politically there was a sense of hope that America could arrive at a higher moral state. So racism was something that in that world was frowned upon."

  What did jazz mean to those experimental artists who took it most seriously? Part of the answer, as Sukenick indicates, has to do with its American qualities, also underlined by Hettie Jones, author of Big Star Fallin' Mama, a study of black female vocalists from Bessie Smith to Aretha Franklin: "I think jazz was the music they [downtown bohemian types] felt closest to, the way someone feels close to music that's part of the Zeitgeist. It was American. There's that whole idea that abstract expressionist art was the first truly American art movement; and those people saw themselves as an avant-garde in what they were trying to do. It was a shared feeling that they were all part of a changing American art scene."

  Jazz was also influential in its improvisational freedom and structural openness, as Allen Ginsberg indicates in his description of jazz's relationship with his poem "Howl": "In the dedication of 'Howl' I said 'spontaneous bop prosody.' And the ideal, for Kerouac, and for John Clellon Holmes and for me also, was the legend of Lester Young playing through something like sixty-nine to seventy choruses of 'Lady Be Good/ you know, mounting and mounting and building and building more and more intelligence into the improvisation as chorus after chorus went on . . . riding on chorus after chorus and building and building so it was a sort of ecstatic orgasmic expostulation of music. So there was the idea of chorus after chorus building to a climax, which was the notion of part one of 'Howl,' with each verse being like a little saxophone ob-bligato or a little saxophone
chorus, as though what I was doing was combining the long line of Christopher Smart, the eighteenth-century poet, with notions of the repeated jazz or blues chorus, till it comes to a climax, probably in the verse 'ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe.' And then there's a sort of a coda from then on."

  Ginsberg also claims jazz as an important model for his work and that of his contemporaries: "The whole point of modern poetry, dance, improvisation, performance, prose even, music, was the element of improvisation and spontaneity and open form, or even a fixed form improvisation on that form, like say you have a blues chorus and you have spontaneous improvisations, so in 'Howl' or 'Kaddish' or any of the poems that have a listeny style, 'who did this, who did that, who did this,' you start out striking a note, 'who/ and then you improvise, and that's the basic form of the list poem or, in anaphora, when you return to the margins in the same phrase, 'Or ever the golden bowl be broken or the silver cord be loosed or the pitcher be broken at the fountain,' as in the Bible or as in some of Walt Whitman's catalogues or in Christopher Smart's 'Rejoice in the Lamb' poem or the surrealist example of Andre Breton's free union, 'my wife with the platypus's egg, my wife with the eyes of this, my wife with that and that . . .'

  "It [jazz] was a model for the dadaists and it was a model for the surrealists and it was a model for Kerouac and a model for me and a model for almost everybody, in the sense that it was partly a model and partly a parallel experiment in free form.