Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965

by David Rosenthal

  Turrentine's work has been remarkably consistent, and he's still going strong, as his performances on Jimmy Smith's recent Off the Top LP show. When he hit the scene in 1960, "soul jazz" was something of a fad. Prestige Records ran ads in Down Beat saying: "Despite opposition of critics, Prestige gave birth to soul jazz,"12 while references to "soul," "funk," and black cuisine seemed to crop up in the titles of half the albums issued. Some of the "soul" being purveyed was more jive than real, but Turrentine was the genuine article. As Clifford Jordan put it: "Some people can play that and really extend that, like King Curtis or Stanley Turrentine. They can play that little snap. It's right in their body and they're not trying to imitate nobody. It's a natural feeling that they project."

  Turrentine's "snap" (described by Michael James as his "pronounced taste for inflections, often bending the final note of a phrase upward in a most unusual and effective way"13) is pervasive on That's Where It's At, a side he cut for Blue Note with pianist Les McCann, bassist Herbie Lewis, and drummer Otis Finch. Except for the ballad ("Dorene Don't Cry I: . . ."), all the numbers are either blues or near-blues. What first leaps out and grabs the listener's attention is Turrentine's sweet yet muscular sound, which suggests Johnny Hodges more than the classic Swing tenors. A flexible voice; it can deepen to a resonant honk, soar into one of the most piercingly full-throated cries in jazz, and broaden to a thick, sensuous vibrato on ballads. Turrentine tends to play on top of the beat, making for a deep, trancelike groove, and his phrasing draws on both modern jazz and R B. Angular lines alternate with timeless blues phraseology. That's Where It's At, which represents "soul jazz" at its most eloquent, also owed much to McCann's orchestral blues- and gospel-soaked style, as well as to the exquisite ballad he contributed to the date. (McCann has composed a number of memorable ballads, another of which, "Fayth, You're . . . ," can be heard on his Les McCann in New York album.)

  If the tenor was one pillar of soul jazz, the other was the electric organ—to be exact the Hammond B-3—which in effect was given its jazz debut by Jimmy Smith in 1955. Although Smith legitimized the instrument in jazz, he did not, of course, invent it. As early as the 1920s, we find Fred Longshaw accompanying Bessie Smith on harmonium. Fats Waller also made some brilliant recordings on pipe organ in the late 1930s. He had started playing the instrument in his father's Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and later worked as house organist at the Lincoln Theatre in the same neighborhood. The detail about Waller's church backgound is significant, for the electric organ really evolved as an important instrument in black music in the context of gospel. It also gained a certain standing among Swing musicians. Count Basie doubled on electric organ, while Milt Buckner, a veteran of Lionel Hampton's band, made it his primary instrument after 1952. But perhaps the most important piano-to-organ switch prior to Jimmy Smith's was Wild Bill Davis's—among other things because hearing him in 1953 inspired Smith to do likewise.

  Davis, who had been pianist and arranger for Louis Jordan's jazz-and-blues ensemble between 1945 and 1948, pioneered a roaring, excitement-building approach to his instrument that made him a natural choice when Lockjaw Davis decided to cut a tenor-and-organ album: "One of the ventures I did at that time was a tenor and organ record. This was in 1951.1 wanted to do it with Wild Bill Davis who was working as a single then, but he had a contract with another record company so I used Bill Doggett, who had been a pianist with Ella Fitzgerald. On bass we had Oscar Pettiford and the drummer was Shadow Wilson. This was the first organ and tenor album. It came out on Royal Roost Records and sold very well in the States. I made some more afterwards with Doc Bagby for King."14

  Doggett, who had also worked with Louis Jordan, went on to record a string of hits for King. The biggest of these was "Honky Tonk," which sold four million copies and helped him win Cashbox magazine's awards as top R B performer in 1957, 1958, and 1959. Another pioneer (this time in jazz rather than R B) was Les Strand, whom Smith has called "the

  Tatum of the organ."15 Strand began playing bebop on his instrument in the late 1940s and recorded several albums for the Fantasy label in the fifties.

  The Hammond B-3, a now endangered species no longer being manufactured, offered jazz/R B performers a number of advantages. It produced a huge sound that could compete with the ghetto's most boisterous audiences. It was also the first synthesizer, and as such could generate a variety of tones. While these tones had little in common with the instruments they purportedly replicated—such as "trumpet"—they certainly offered a wide range of effects. The B-3's pedal could produce a bass line that enabled the organ to replace both piano and string bass. And in general, there was something raucous, something down and dirty, in its array of electronic growls, wails, moans, and shrill ostinato tidal waves that immediately appealed to black ears. Indeed, every jazz organist of note has been black, from Jimmy Smith to Larry Young and Charles Earland; and the organ's hoarse, raspy tonal quality is far closer to blues singing than the piano's is.

  Smith was born in 1926 in Norristown, Pennsylvania. As a child he studied piano, and at the age of nine won a prize on Major Bowes' Amateur Hour. "Music was just part of my life as far back as I can remember," he has commented. "I was about sixteen when I teamed up with my father to do a song and dance routine in local night clubs. I kept on gigging around locally through the 1940s, except for the time when I was in the service."16

  In the late forties Smith also studied string bass and piano, respectively, at Philadelphia's Hamilton and Ornstein Schools of Music. In the meantime, he played piano with groups like Bobby Edwards and His Dial-Tones and Johnny Sparrow and His Bows and Arrows around Newark and Philly, and in 1951 he joined Donald Gardner and His Sonotones, an R . B outfit. He stayed with Gardner until 1954, but after 1953 he spent his days perfecting his technique on the organ, whose possibilities he felt "hadn't been fully explored."

  In 1955, having emerged from the woodshed, Smith opened in Atlantic City, leading a trio that included a guitarist and drummer. Word of his prowess and his startling approach to his ax had been spreading through the jazz grapevine, and artists flocked to hear him. One of these was singer and composer Babs Gonzales, who wrote the liner notes for Smith's first two LPs on Blue Note Records: "Last summer he opened at a club in Atlantic City. He didn't need any 'tubs' because all the drummers there were lined up nightly waiting for a chance to play with him. Within three days news reached me about this 'insane' organist and I drove down to 'dig' for myself.

  "What I heard was a 'cat' playing forty choruses of 'Georgia Brown' in pure 'Nashua' tempo and never repeating. I heard 'future stratospheric' sounds that were never before explored on the organ. I was supposed to see a host of 'cats' that night, but all I did was 'lay dead' because every cat in town made it by Jimmy's 'gig' during the night."

  A few months later, Smith was rocking the house in New York City spots like Small's Paradise in Harlem and Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village. Partly at Gonzales's urging, Blue Note owners Alfred Lion and Frank Woolf journeyed to Smalls's to hear the new star. Woolf has left us a vivid description of his first encounter with Smith: "It was at Smalls in January of 1956. He was a stunning sight. A man in convulsions, face contorted, crouched over in apparent agony, his fingers flying, his foot dancing over the pedals. The air was filled with waves of sound I had never heard before. A few people sat around, puzzled but impressed. Jimmy came off the stand, smiling . . . 'So what do you think?'he asked.'Yeah!'I said. That's all I could say. Alfred Lion had already made up his mind.

  "Right from the inception of his recording career, he was in full command of this very complex and demanding machine. Apart from his incredible technique he had fire, feeling, beat, humor—all adding up to a highly personal style. Everything was there, everything was right, when he did 'The Champ' and on through all the other masterpieces in the years that followed."17

  "The Champ" was the eight-minute showpiece on Smith's second Blue Note LP. What we hear, on this and his other early recordings, is an intoxicated deli
ght in the organ's many voices, its huge sound and textural variety. In addition, we discover a master of blues vocabulary who is also familiar with bebop and ready to use the two styles contrapuntally. From the first, with singles like "The Champ" and Horace Silver's "The Preacher," Smith hit big on ghetto jukeboxes, where the ground had been prepared by Wild Bill Davis and Bill Doggett. Yet at the same time, he was being compared by Leonard Feather and others to Bud Powell for his dazzling technique and to electric guitarist Charlie Christian and bassist Jimmy Blanton, both of whom established their instruments as major jazz solo vehicles in the early 1940s. In the 1957 Metronome Year Book, Smith was declared 1956's New Star.

  Over the next few years, Smith recorded dozens of times for Blue Note, often with his trio but also in larger hard-bop ensembles that included trumpeters Blue Mitchell, Donald Byrd, and Lee Morgan and saxophonists Hank Mobley, Lou Donaldson, Jackie McLean, Tina Brooks, and Ike Quebec. During this period, Smith's style matured. His exuberance and "look ma, no hands!" attitude, his joy in the organ's multifarious possibilities and his wish to try them all out at once were brought under control. As the English critic Jack Cooke noted in 1961: "It seems perfectly obvious now, though it was less so at the time, that what must take place within Smith's style was a process of refinement, of shedding rather than adding; an intelligible idiom, based on the fundamental laws and principles of the electric organ, out of the mass of occasionally unrelated accomplishments which he possessed and was using with such liberality.

  "A study of the recordings Smith has made since 1956 will indicate how this painstaking process of refinement took place; exuberance curbed and a considerable amount of discipline and forethought introduced into his playing."18

  As these words were written, Smith was enjoying enormous success on a series of records (the first was Midnight Special, recorded in 1960) that featured Stanley Turrentine and either Kenny Burrell or Quentin Warren on guitar. Still another outstanding side from the same period, at least as good as the ones with Turrentine but not quite so successful commercially, was Home Cookin' with Burrell, saxophonist Percy France, and drummer Donald Bailey. All the tunes on it are blues or blues based, yet each is different from the others. They range from a very slow, after-hours groove on "See See Rider" to a briskly rocking, head-shaking, blues-shouting version of Ray Charles's "I Got a Woman." The record shows off many aspects of Smith's technique, including his solid bass lines and what Gonzales called "the only 'Oklahoma funkish' style of comping on the Blues since Charlie Christian."19 Smith's solos benefit greatly from his two-handed approach, his attention to dynamics, his structural sense, and, of course, his phenomenal swing. Phrases that arch upward and then tumble back upon themselves alternate with chords, figures played against screaming held notes, and basic blues licks. Interweaving in classic call-and-response style, Burrell and Smith get into some genuine duets. Today Home Cookin' remains one of the great jazz-and-blues dates. Another, also featuring the same duo, is Blue Bash on the Verve label. For sheer elan and down-home funk, they have rarely been equaled.

  In the late fifties and early sixties, a number of other musicians—mostly pianists—followed Smith's lead in taking up the electric organ. Among them were Shirley Scott, whom we have encountered with both Lockjaw Davis and Stanley Turrentine, and Richard "Groove" Holmes, so renowned for his bass-line footwork that other organists would come to watch him and try to learn his secrets. Still another was Jack McDuff, who in the early sixties led a quartet with tenor saxophonist Red Holloway, guitarist George Benson, and drummer Joe Dukes that could get into one of the meanest, most absorbing grooves ever heard or—alternatively—generate enough heat to lift the roof off any club or dance hall. Before striking out on his own, McDuff had backed up "Gator Tail" Jackson,- and in fact, by the early sixties, boss tenors and R B-tinged organists had come to seem a natural combination. The music they created was unpretentious. As McDuff put it: "We play that good-time thing. We play the way we feel . . . It's always been a happy thing; play and swing and have a good time. No formula."20 In interviews and liner notes, soul-jazz artists often sounded defensive about the fact that they weren't pushing back the boundaries of Afro-American music but rather playing to what Joe Fields of Muse Records called a "jazz-oriented, finger-snappin', ass-shakin' black population." Yet much of what they created has stood the passage of time very well. Few young jazz experimentalists of the 1960s could caress a ballad with the depth and authority of Jackson playing "My One and Only Love" or Houston Person giving us "The Nearness of You." Among the youngsters who could do so, Archie Shepp acknowledged his debt to Lockjaw both in so many words and with every breathy phrase he blew, while Joe Henderson had worked the "chitlin' circuit" (clubs in the black neighborhoods of cities like Cleveland, Newark, and Pittsburgh) with Jack McDuff.

  Jazz as "high art" has always drawn sustenance from jazz as "folk art." Often it's not clear which is "better." The classic comparison is between Duke Ellington and Count Basie, who was less "highbrow" yet equally sublime in his way. Indeed, it is one of jazz's problems today that there's not much of a "chitlin' circuit" left to come up through. Thus it's harder for young musicians to acquire a grounding in the basics of rhythm, voice, and delivery—that is, to draw nourishment from the wellsprings of black North American song. Anyone who has heard McDuff, or Person, tear up a neighborhood joint before an audience of his peers, all drinking, carrying on, hustling, trying to make out yet deeply attuned to the sounds being laid down, has drunk from these same wellsprings.

  As soul jazz of the tenor-and-organ sort came to sound stale in the 1970s, some performers (like George Benson or, to a lesser degree, Stanley Turrentine) moved into pop music and began to make big money. Others, like "Gator Tail" Jackson, went on playing a steadily contracting black club circuit. Still others, like Groove Holmes, virtually dropped out of sight, at least as far as records are concerned. Only one—and this from the early sixties on—had moved into a more adventuresome sort of jazz: Larry Young, whom McDuff has called "the Trane of the organ."21 After a soul-jazz apprenticeship, Young began adapting McCoy Tyner's ideas to the organ and made a couple of brilliant, ground-breaking records for Blue Note: Into Some-thin' and Unity. Then he seemed to lose his bearings, veering off into a particularly muddy version of "free jazz" and later into fusion. Unfortunately, he died before he could reorient himself, and no one has followed up on his ideas. Today soul jazz survives more than thrives, yet its best living practitioners—including Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff, Houston Person, and Stanley Turrentine—can still swing up a storm in person and on records, where they are heard mainly thanks to Joe Fields and to Person himself, who has produced many dates for the Muse label. Not only musical basics but also emotional ones can be found in their work: the joy, tenderness, and pain of existence, and the hard battle to wrench transcendence out of daunting circumstances.

  T HE POWER OF BADNESS

  Soul jazz's purpose, in Stanley Turrentine's words, was "to help people relax and enjoy, "l but hard bop often expressed and provoked more troubling emotions. In this sense, perhaps the first authentic hard bopper was Billie Holiday. True, some of her earlier recordings—for instance, "Miss Brown to You" or "What a Little Moonlight Can Do"—possess a kind of jaunty insouciance, yet even these are shadowed by a defiant irony that cuts against their gaiety. Irony, despair, and rage are what we mostly find in her later work, as her voice rotted away, her troubles multiplied, and she fell deeper and deeper into the toils of heroin addiction and alcoholism. But the defiance remained, along with a will to triumph through the artistic act itself, creating the kind of spectral, self-lacerating beauty we hear in songs like "You're My Thrill" and "Don't Explain." Holiday described "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do," another tune she was extremely fond of, as "more than a song to me. It spells the way of life I tried to live, personal freedom, to hell with what-will-people-think-people, and all that":2

  If I go to church on Sunday then cabaret all day Monday, ain't nobody's business if I do.


  I swear I won't call no copper if I'm beat up by my papa. Ain't nobody's business if I do.

  Now that's a "bad" song, to be sure, by the normal definition, but what exactly is badness in black music? What did James Brown mean when he proclaimed that he was "su-perbad"? At times "badness" can refer to musical qualities: heightened alertness to timbral and rhythmic values, and the blues-inflected melodic vocabulary that makes a musician's solo style "funky." Thus it is that jazzmen of essentially sunny dispositions, like Cannonball Adderley or Wynton Kelly, are sometimes described as "bad." But in general, and certainly in order to claim "superbadness," one must also project an atmosphere of menace. In black pop music, James Brown epitomized this quality, and it is partly for this reason that rappers today acknowledge him as their most important precursor, for whatever its other virtues and defects, rap is certainly the "baddest" music currently being produced in the USA.

  In jazz, Lee Morgan in the late 1950s and early 1960s was just about the baddest thing going. His statement, "I'm an extrovert person . . . and hard bop is played by bands of extrovert people,"3 is more a smokescreen than an insight and does nothing to explain how he differs from more congenial extroverts like Adderley. What Lee possessed and Cannonball lacked, at least by comparison, was malice. On "Caribbean Fire Dance" on Joe Henderson's Mode for Joe album, the trumpeter manages to make his colleagues—Henderson, trombonist Curtis Fuller, vibist Bobby Hutcherson, pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Joe Chambers, all pretty "bad cats" themselves—sound like a bunch of sissies beside him. The tune itself is "mean," consisting of a tension-building minor vamp underlined by an obsessively repeated cross-rhythmic piano figure and an explosive release that together create an air of foreboding. Lee's solo opens with a raw, guttural cry that cuts through all this polymetric layering like a knife. The cry is repeated and then gives way to an urgently tumbling figure, also repeated, that falls behind the beat as it comes to a close. The total effect thus created is one of urgency held under iron control. The rest of Morgan's solo is marked by constant rhythmic displacements in counterpoint to the piano, bass, and drums, by blues-based phraseology, by his typically sardonic tone, and by key notes almost always bent, slurred, or half-valved: all elements in one of the most searingly dramatic trumpet styles in modern jazz.