Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965
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Marsalis first came to most listeners' attention through his work with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He went on to become a star at the head of his own combos, which have often included his brother Branford on tenor and soprano saxophones. After Marsalis's departure, Blakey assembled another band featuring young modern-jazz traditionalists from New Orleans: trumpeter Terence Blanchard and saxophonists Donald Harrison and Jean Toussaint. Blakey, of course, was one of the inventors of hard bop, which his ensembles continued to play, but the term "hard bop" fell into disuse as musicians and listeners conflated it with bebop. Nonetheless, Marsalis, Blanchard, and company tried to go back to the fifties and sixties, bypassing free jazz and fusion, reestablishing contact with a tradition they feel was broken and that had produced especially subtle and demanding music. The danger, as many have noted, is that hard bop in their hands will become a "period style" to be "re-created." As Blanchard commented: "Part of trying to play jazz and being young is—I have all the records, I've listened to so many things that when I start playing my first reaction is, 'Oh, that's not what Clifford Brown would play, that's not what Miles would play, let me stay away from that.'"11
These young musicians' work was not innovative, and as a result many critics responded not so much with condemnation as with a kind of queasy faint praise. In an article entitled "In Jazz, Young Players Turn to the Old Hard Bop," Jon Pareles remarked that Marsalis's pianist Marcus Roberts "never threatens to go out on a limb, much less to shake foundations. But his revivalism lends his music a sense of security, of sanctuary, that may be as prized in our times as hard bop's exploratory outreach was in the 1960's."12 And in "The Return to New Orleans," Gary Giddins's take on the school was that "considering the pervasive influence of Miles Davis's quintets on these musicians, I'm not sure there's anything indigenously Southern about this flurry of New Orleans talent—except perhaps for the uncommonly skillful musicianship that precedes their quest for originality. Judging from their liner comments, they aren't especially concerned with being original, and they are quick to catalogue the particular lessons of particular masters. They approach jazz with refreshing detachment, as though it were a music to be mastered and not a spontaneous revelation of soul. How novel."13
To which Terence Blanchard indirectly replied: "That's also part of the problem of people looking at young jazz musicians and saying, 'They aren't playing anything new.' They haven't even given us a chance to develop."14Well, fair enough, but most of the jazzmen Blanchard admires developed individual styles early on. In Chapter 3,1 listed some of the best hard-bop pianists of the 1950s: Ray Bryant, Sonny Clark, Kenny Drew, Tommy Flanagan, Elmo Hope, Wynton Kelly, Herbie Nichols, Horace Silver, Mai Waldron, and Randy Weston. None of them was an "innovator" in the sense that Art Tatum had been, but they all were individuals with easily recognizable styles. It's one thing not to want to storm the heavens and push back the frontiers of jazz, and most jazzmen haven't been interested in such a quest. But it's another to put together such a bland pastiche of Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, and Cedar Walton (or of Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard) that nobody can tell who's playing.
If critics have shown caution in evaluating the neo-boppers, musicians like Henry Threadgill have sometimes been more forthright: "Music doesn't come out of a vacuum. It's connected to the whole fabric of life. I don't believe that you can escape the influence of your times—you can't fabricate the feelings and social connections of another period. For the first time in the history of jazz, many young artists have become virtuosos of styles that have passed. A lot of people have taken the wrong slant, working on being technically proficient, but technique is supposed to be a given; unless it's innovative, don't bother me. Are we so nostalgic that we need virtuosos of the graveyard?"15
Threadgill's own music is also full of references to the past, but he doesn't try to re-create any particular style. A member of the Chicago AACM, in the early sixties he played in a sextet that included bassist Malachi Favors and saxophonists Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell (all members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago), as well as behind blues vocalist Mighty Joe Young, gospel singer Jo Jo Morris, and several Latin bands. In 1971, together with bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve Mc-Call, Threadgill formed Air. Air evolved into one of the most original and intriguing groups in jazz. Constant rehearsals produced a rare integration of written and improvised material (often you couldn't tell which was which) and helped the three musicians develop a sublime and almost eerie attunement to each other. For the last few years Air had been inactive, and Threadgill has turned his attention to larger ensembles: in particular, a septet that nonetheless goes by the name of the Henry Threadgill Sextett.
A lot of Air's material—mostly composed by Threadgill— was too "free" for the finger-popping segment of the jazz public. The Sextett, in this sense, is more "accessible." Threadgill's voicings are often sourly brassy in the manner of old-time street bands, and his charts conjure up all kinds of ghosts from American popular music's past: New Orleans funeral marches, fanfares, heavy-groove blues, calypsos, even a number ("Award the Squadtett" on Easily Slip into Another World) that sounds like a football anthem. The brass players— at first trumpeter Olu Dara and trombonist Craig Harris; later trumpeter Rasul Siddik and trombonist Frank Lacey—possess vocally inflected styles reminiscent of the twenties and thirties and complete with growls, wah-wah effects, and a whole set of dirty-trombone tactics. The band is anchored by two drummers, Fred Hopkins's booming bass, and Deirdre Murray's cello. Its particular quality, however, comes from Threadgill's compositions, which combine irony and passion, re-creating the rowdy pandemonium of the AACM but channeling it into performances that also swing mightily.
In its appropriation of jazz's "roots," Threadgill's group suggests hard bop, and particularly Mingus's reach into the past and his slightly bugged-out reworkings of Ellington. Threadgill is too complex to pin one label on, but his work definitely tilted toward the tradition in the late 1980s. So did that of the World Saxophone Quartet, which in addition to Bluiett, Hemphill, and Lake, included David Murray. The WSQ began as an every-man-for-himself affair, and its early performances were rather shapeless. Within a few years, however, it had evolved into one of the smoothest, freshest sounds in jazz: a creamy choir by turns funky and swooningly Ellingtonian (again!). In fact, two of its records featured Ellington tunes in one instance and rhythm and blues in the other. The AACM-based Art Ensemble of Chicago also became somewhat more traditional in the late 1980s. Even so, no one would ever confuse Threadgill, the WSQ, or the Art Ensemble with the neo-boppers, whose idea of usable tradition is more restricted.
Why did groups like Threadgill's reorient themselves toward groovier sounds? One reason was probably money. Free jazz never brought large financial returns, and perhaps they got tired of playing for small audiences and small change. In addition, in some cases there was a change of heart. As David Murray put it: "I like to swing and swinging brings out the best in most people. It has to be listenable. You know how we used to play,- the drummer would never play . But if a guy comes out and plays that way now, in the eighties, the people start walking out. On a positive musical plane, I love to swing, I think I can swing, I just need to find the right people to swing with. "l6 Murray's comments also imply financial motives (no club owner is likely to hire a group that drives away customers) and a sense that times had changed and jazz's climate was more conservative. Still, Murray, Threadgill, and company were definitely living in the present; no one was likely to confuse their music, for all its historical awareness, with the products of some earlier period.
Murray's love of swinging was always evident, but the overall formats of his tunes, their rhythms and harmonies, moved closer and closer to hard bop. His earliest musical experiences in California could hardly have been more funky: the Murray Family Band, a gospel group including his parents and two brothers; and the Notations of Soul, a fifteen-piece revue he co-led as a teenager with pianist Rodney Franklin. Murray's conversion to jazz was sp
arked by hearing Sonny Rollins perform at a jazz festival. Since then he has learned from many other tenor saxophonists, ranging from Swing titans Paul Gonsalves and Ben Webster to the avant-garde. For a time after his arrival in New York City in 1975, he was an active participant in the loft-jazz scene. In the eighties, however, he worked in more tightly organized contexts: a big band, a string ensemble, his quartets and octets, and the WSQ. With the exception of the WSQ (a cooperative ensemble whose charts were mostly written by Julius Hemphill), these groups combined exploratory solos using free jazz but not confined to it with Murray's catchy, melodically appealing compositions.
Among these combos, perhaps the one that most clearly shows Murray's direction in the 1980s is his octet, whose most celebrated record, Home, features Olu Dara, cornetist Butch Morris, Henry Threadgill, pianist Anthony Davis, bassist Wilbur Morris, and Steve McCall. All these musicians paid dues on the free-jazz scene, none has renounced its advances and innovations, but all can acquit themselves admirably in more straight-ahead situations. Side one begins with "Home," a ballad carried by muted brass and Threadgill's flute. Like many of Threadgill's own compositions, it seems to echo the work of Charles Mingus. This is followed by "Santa Barbara and Crenshaw Follies," a high-spirited, contrapuntal, bluesy
strut; and "Choctaw Blues," a good-natured appropriation of Hollywood's notion of an Indian war dance, underlined by McCall's rolling-thunder mallets. Side two is devoted to two longer cuts: "Last of the Hip Men," a modal number using vamps and an implied Afro-Caribbean beat; and "3D Family," a waltz leaning heavily on blues-and-gospel riffs to build intensity. Though these tunes are freshly and interestingly voiced, they also respect and rejoice in jazz's conventions and establish solid grooves for the musicians to work in. Murray doesn't hog the spotlight, but his solos dominate the record. His broad, swaggery sound, punctuated by penetrating honks and false-register squeals, soars and swoops over the rhythm section in an outpouring of undulating lines, yet there is melody and rhythmic precision here too. He brings the entire history of the tenor sax, from Coleman Hawkins to Albert Ayler, into play, while making you feel that its future is ensured as long as young musicians can create with so much authority.
While hard bop can be heard in bands like Murray's and Threadgill's, there's no point overstating its influence on their music. It's there, along with other elements, as one aspect of jazz's history to be combined with the others. As for the neo-boppers, they do have the chops to create great music, and their diligent apprenticeship in the tradition may yet bear fruit. Jazz, as Marsalis and Murray make clear, has not regained its standing in black neighborhoods. Perhaps it never will, but while talented musicians play it, it will endure and evolve. As Art Blakey, leader of some of the fieriest young bands in jazz, recently remarked: "[Jazz] isn't as widespread, but [young musicians] are closer than they ever were, and it's better because you don't need the majority to conquer. You get just twenty of them that's strong enough to hold together and you can go through anything."