By …sloe walker
THE SOUND
1954 was a tough year in the jazz business. Charlie “Bird” Parker was an emotional and physical wreck, all jonesed out, teetering badly. By then, Billie “Lady Day” Holiday’s voice was a mere shadow of its former ethereal wonder, caused by years of strain, middling care and self-abuse. The celebrated father of bebop piano, Bud Powell, was grappling with his own particular demons, brought on in large part by a racially fused incident of police brutality occurring a decade earlier.
On the flip side, Miles emerged triumphant from his drug-induced semi-exile, producing the bristling masterpiece, Walkin.’ He followed up that sterling effort with a well-received Christmas Eve album attended by the stalwart likes of a young Sonny Rollins and Milt “Bags” Jackson among others. Clifford Brown had found his voice, signaling his burgeoning, although tragically short-lived ascendancy. Masters such as Dizzy (Gillespie), Lester “Prez” Young and Coleman “Bean” Hawkins were in various stages of their preeminence. (Thelonius) Monk, long accepted by his peers as a genius of singular virtuosity and one of the architects of the bebop movement, was only a few years away from mass popular acceptance by the listening public, and perhaps more important, club and venue operators.
Concurrently, an equally important development in the presentation of artists was fermenting. Record labels were becoming more readily identified with a specific sound or genre. Prestige and other relatively small labels such as Decca, Dial, EmArcy, Riverside and Savoy, among others, were busy churning out hard vinyl of varying degrees of sophistication and quality. Excepting Columbia, the 900-pound recording gorilla, one label was poised to leap to the head of the pack featuring the sound that would come to dominate the next generation of jazz. One label in particular featured the men that would make the music that would define the rest of the fifties, sixties and beyond. That label was, of course, Blue Note.
Blue Note Takes Charge
We can readily date Blue Note’s ascension to the vanguard of jazz music presentation. On February 21, 1954, Art Blakey assembled his young Turks, Clifford Brown, trumpet; Lou Donaldson, alto sax; Horace Silver, piano and Curley Russell, bass, at the Big Apple’s venerable Birdland. With master of ceremony chores handled by the diminutive Pee Wee Marquette, “half a motherfucker” (as waggishly described by Lester Young), Alfred Lion, producing and Rudy Van Gelder, recording engineer, set down for posterity the sound that would come to spotlight a generation. A Night at Birdland is assuredly the hard bop line of demarcation.
In his review of Eric Dolphy’s seminal Blue Note production, Out To Lunch!, the erudite Ricard Giner i Sariola gets it just right in also chronicling the label’s modus operandi. Check out what good friend “Cootie” has to say:
“Out to Lunch! is one of the most important jazz albums of the 1960s. It also represented a triumph for Alfred Lion and his label, Blue Note. Lion had painstakingly nurtured jazz musicians and provided them with the most supportive recording environments of the period. It was arguably with this album, Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure; Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil; Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyageand Bobby Hutcherson’s Dialogue, all recorded within a space of just over a year, that Blue Note became the paradigmatic reference point, the standard bearer for modern jazz recordings. The clarity of the recording, the individual space accorded each instrument, the meticulous attention to the nuances, the refined texture of the overall sound, the sheer presence of each recorded moment — these were the hallmarks of its sound, the Van Gelder sound. Rudy Van Gelder was the chief engineer of the day, and his role in shaping the jazz cognoscenti’s expectations of what constitutes good jazz was more than significant, it was conclusive. A Blue Note record was not just a meeting of exceptional musicians, it was a complete product, combining the charisma of Van Gelder’s sound production values with the distinctive artwork of Reid Miles and Francis Wolff to produce albums that promised serious new jazz experiences. Consumers weren’t the only ones who gravitated towards these highly cultivated products — musicians themselves wanted a taste of the action. Alfred Lion had fostered a culture for groundbreaking musical encounters and immortalized them on vinyl. They would make Blue Note records the most desired documents in jazz.”
I’ll button this up by simply noting: Columbia had Miles. After his late ‘50s stint with Prestige and a brief but momentous encounter with Atlantic, Impulse! had Trane. Blue Note had damn near everyone else of note!
BU
Perhaps most important, Blue Note had Blakey. Born on October 11, 1919 in Pittsburgh, Art began his music career as a self-taught pianist who by the age of 15 was already leading a big band, migrating to drums only after being displaced in his own group by an even younger Erroll Garner. Much later in life he converted to Islam and was given the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina. That is how he came by the nickname “Bu.”
Alfred Lion had recorded Blakey and his octet, “The Messengers,” so named due to its heavy representation of Islamic musicians, as early as 1947. And yet despite Blakey’s steady presence on the scene performing with such period icons as Billy Eckstine, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, the 34 year old was yet so unheralded as to place first in the 1953 DownBeat Critics Poll in the “new star” category.
Bu’s indirect path to jazz immortality was not dissimilar to the experiences of his genius contemporaries. He cut his eyeteeth during countless one-nighters, slogging down endless back roads, between nondescript towns and long-forgotten gigs. The pay was bad more often than not, the food worse. At times the venues were of the humblest station imaginable, and even then, taking into consideration the often execrable conditions offered up by the road, lending to serious dues paid by Bu and his men, the music managed to not only survive, it thrived.
As tones lightened, tempos quickened and improvisational excursions led further away from the self-imposing constraints of Parker/Gillespie exhortations, Blakey grew to serve as the inductive counterweight to the mandates of the “new thing” as defined by those nonpareil co-fathers. Bu was unquestionably an exceptional general, a great leader of men. Technically, his speed, dexterity, creativity and passion for the music were unsurpassed. Consider, with Bird’s overwhelming eminence soon to be removed from the scene, the timing was perfect for the evolution, Blakey, his accompanists and their fellow visionaries at Blue Note collaborated on and led.
With Bird as the high priest of bebop in 1954 and only a year away from his passing, the music had stagnated. In nearly every corner of nearly every club you could find players, major jazzmen in their own right, playing exactly like Bird, desiring to be Bird (did someone mention Sonny Stitt?). Unfortunately for them what they lacked most was the immediacy of having something fresh and innovative to say. They could not replicate Bird’s fluency and even more so the shock of the new had worn off, and with it, the jolt of hearing something never before experienced. It was fair to ask, where was the music going and who would carry it there?
Blakey. And perhaps his single most important contribution to the art? Signature timekeeping. Melody and swing were everything and the Pittsburgher, deeply rooted in the blues, swung relentlessly. Bu was no less than the most exciting and audacious drummer then practicing the craft. His unparalleled thunder became the anthemic pulse that ushered in the new era of jazz. It thus informed the new era, so-called hard bop, the natural successor to bebop. And many were the uninitiated soloist threatened with inundation beneath a tsunami of modern percussion.
Of Blakey’s sidemen even an extremely selective list must include Johnny Griffin, Benny Golson, Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Timmons, Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Jackie McLean, Walter Davis, Jr., Woody Shaw, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, and Charles Fambrough. And these were just the Messengers. He played with them all. Miles, Monk, Trane, Rollins, Hank Mobley, Sonny Clark, Dexter Gordon, et al., they all swung one time or another backed by his percussive ferocity. Listen to Johnny Griffin speaking about the potentially flagging inspiration of a Blakey soloist: “He’d make one of those rolls and say, ‘No, you can’t stop yourself now!’
“Look, I’m not claiming Blakey alone invented hard bop, however, he was undeniably among its foremost practitioners. Art illuminated the path. Fact is although only five years younger than Kenny “Klook” Clarke and five years older than Max Roach, it was those two monsters that were universally considered the peerless contemporary champions of the kit. It was left to Bu, the “middle child,” to assume the authoritative position in what was to follow, with he, his Jazz Messengers and Blue Note in particular coming to symbolize the drive, the swing, the beat and sound of hard bop. As accurately concluded in, Jazz • The Rough Guide, “By his death on October 16, 1990, Art Blakey had not only nurtured generations of major contributors to the music, he had inextricably established himself as a true cornerstone of the jazz tradition.”
TENOR MADNESS
Alright you worshippers at the shrine of Coltrane (full disclosure: I too am a self-professing idolater), we’re going to have to deal with this nugget: By the March release of 1956’s Saxophone Colossus, throughout much of the remainder of the ‘50s, Sonny Rollins was widely considered to be the greater of the two, dynamic, hard bopping tenor men. Let me make this point abundantly clear. Hard bop was a direct reaction against the west coast “cool school” way of playing and a second generation of genuflecting bop players that sent the music spiraling into a kamikaze of base imitation. Players, principally saxophonists, and most especially altoists, lined up at the trough of Bird, striving for his sound, his rapidity, his heat, his virtuosity. Bird-bathing. The result of all that unabashed sycophancy was the music becoming stale and creatively indulgent, even impotent, at least according to that pompous school of jazz critics captive to their own finger wagging, tsk-tsking pedantry.
With Bird’s passing, seamlessly followed by the sudden and unexpected ascendancy of Sonny and Trane, the tenor supplanted the alto as the prominent voice of jazz. Hard bop naturally favored attack. The tenor growl, propelled by the rollicking geniuses of Coltrane and Rollins, was uniquely prepared to meet the moment. Those two birds of musical prey swooped in on the sleepy mid-fifties and proceeded to get their hard-driving freak on. The music, since, has never been the same.
John William Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina on September 23, 1926. Four years Trane’s junior, Theodore Walter (Sonny) Rollins, was born on September 7, 1930 in New York City. The tenor colossi’s musically formative years proceeded along eerily similar tracks, both of them receiving their initial public notice during the late forties (lukewarm in Trane’s instance), also making their first appearance on record around that time. The fifties witnessed their ascent to Olympian height.
A discordant note: Both titans took a sabbatical from the scene during the mid-fifties in order to kick heroin habits (with Trane, heroin and alcohol addictions).
Between them, Rollins found his voice first. He joined the Clifford Brown/Max Roach quintet in 1955, generally considered one of the two, leading, hard bop groups then active. From the first his tone was big, muscular, built on the substance of Lester Young, however, more aptly owing to the husky Coleman Hawkins style. As previously addressed, ‘56 witnessed the release of Saxophone Colossus that included the much analyzed, much praised, “Blue Seven.” Consequently, Rollins’ star was firmly set.
Trane held forth on the tenor seat of the other, towering, fifties hard bop group, the classic Miles Davis quintet. During his first stay with Miles, Coltrane’s blowing was often denounced as being raw, gruff. While Sonny was “wowing critics with his logical solos and continual upending of musical clichés,” Trane was being heaped with critical scorn (to a lesser extent, as was Miles for employing him). Trane recorded his own initial masterpiece, Blue Train, in ‘57, a milestone year in his progression, also being the year he successfully kicked his heroin jones. Although Blue Train clearly marked his route to greatness, it wasn’t until ‘59’s Giant Steps, recorded merely weeks after his incandescent performance on Miles’ magnum opus, Kind Of Blue, that he assumed the ultimate position astride the hard bop world, supplanting Rollins once and for all. By then, Trane’s style of playing multiple chords within a single measure, famously termed “sheets of sound” by Ira Gitler in an October 16, 1958, Down Beat article, was well established.
While enjoying healthy competition, Trane and Rollins legitimately enjoyed, respected and liked one another, despite the misinformed assertions of select contemporaneous jazz commentators. They even collaborated for their first and only time on the celebrated Rollins’ release, Tenor Madness, the title track being a twelve-minute, magnificently hard bopping muse. An anthem of sublime tenor improvisation times two.
Some accuse Rollins of conceding the field to Coltrane greatly due to his intermittent sabbaticals and woodshedding. Certainly, by Trane’s untimely death due to liver cancer on July 17, 1967, he singularly reigned as the foremost influence in modern, post Bird jazz - on tenor or otherwise (with apologies to Miles). Insofar as this is an unassailable truth, clearly by the end of the fifties, Sonny was, at the very least, the hard bopping tenor shadow king.
One final note on the ranking of the tenor glitterati: It was written and widely held at the time that Rollins and Trane were the co-heavyweight champions of the instrument, Hank Mobley was its middleweight champ and Stan Getz maintained the lightweight belt. Full stop.
MILES AHEAD
There has been so much written about Miles Dewey Davis, b. Alton, IL, May 26, 1926; d. Santa Monica, CA, September 29, 1991, regarding his music, his influence, his discography, that I’m intentionally minimizing this section. One can find so many other works that authoritatively describe his impact and his significance, not the least of which being the arguably definitive work, Miles • The Autobiography, written with Quincy Troupe. Furthermore, Miles was not necessarily considered a hard bopper in the traditional sense. In many instances he covered popular tunes (i.e., Surrey With A Fringe On Top, Bye Bye Blackbird, Time After Time, etc.), crafting them after his own inimitable manner, adding his familiar embellishments, making them his own.
Suffice it to say, notwithstanding Louis Armstrong and Bird, perhaps no single individual other than Miles has so distinctively blazed the course of the music on an ongoing basis. Period. At the end of three consecutive decades Miles re-established the contemporary jazz paradigm. At the end of the forties he ushered in the Birth of the Cool. He introduced us to true modal jazz with the pace-setting Kind Of Blue at the end of the fifties. And then, closing out the sixties, Miles firmly established fusion and electronic jazz with Bitches Brew. Miles’ influence is undeniable. Nearly all jazz royalty played with him and he produced some of the most important and celebrated music in the genre, ever. Out of Miles sprung new directions and the angels rejoiced.
THE ART OF SWING
At the height of the thing hipsters took their jazz with a hearty dollop of pulse. Danceability was an absolute prerequisite. Conversely, many (pseudo) intellectuals, era beatniks and other liberal, sensitive souls, preferred merely to groove to the happening, all transcendentally swept up. Whatever, the music absolutely had to swing... bottom line. One final note here: When it came to keeping time, authoring the beat, bassist of choice for top boppers was another native Pittsburgher and Miles Davis veteran, iron-fingered Paul Chambers. And here at the end of the day, a brother so metronomic roommates swore even his snoring kept rhythm.
THE PLAYERS
In no particular order I offer you a drastically abbreviated list of hard boppers worthy of remembrance. These immortals remain timeless: Sonny Clark Grant Green Gigi Gryce Dexter Gordon Freddie Hubbard Herbie Hancock Gene Ammons Booker Ervin Horace Silver Kenny Burrell Bobby Timmons Wayne Shorter Lee Morgan Curtis Fuller Lou Donaldson Joe Henderson Elvin Jones Donald Byrd Sonny Stitt Larry Young McCoy Tyner Jimmy Smith Woody Shaw Ron Carter Dizzy Reece Kenny Dorham Red Garland Cannonball Adderly Yusef Lateef Bill Evans “Brother” Jack McDuff Art Taylor Kenny Drew Blue Mitchell Junior Cook Tommy Flanagan Johnny Griffin Bobby Hutcherson Doug Watkins Cedar Walton Tony Williams Tadd Dameron Wynton Kelly Donald Byrd Stanley Turrentine Wes Montgomery Tina Brooks Jackie McLean Art Farmer Andrew Hill...and the beat goes on!
THE MUSIC
Here’s a brief list of era discs, also in no particular order, classics and old favorites all, representative of the best of the times. Light ‘em up if you got ‘em! Dexter Gordon, Go; Grant Green, Idle Moments; Hank Mobley, Soul Station; Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, Free For All; John Coltrane, Crescent; Wayne Shorter, Speak No Evil; McCoy Tyner, The Real McCoy; Booker Ervin, The Book Cooks; Sonny Clark, Sonny’s Crib; Lee Morgan, The Gigolo; Kenny Burrell, Midnight Blue; Johnny Griffin, A Blowin’ Session; Larry Young, Unity; Tina Brooks, True Blue; Wes Montgomery, The Incredible Jazz Guitar; Dizzy Reece, Comin’ On; Herbie Hancock, Maiden Voyage;Cannonball Adderly, Somethin’ Else... Ciao.
