Generational Disturbances: 2011

Jazz exploded at the same time that rock and roll first sprang out of the shoot. It may be that with the death of alto saxophonist Charles "Yardbird" Parker in 1955 and the consequent end of the bebop period, something had to happen to keep the music alive without competing with commercial pop music. Maybe it was the weather. Whatever the cause, it was an era (known by the inappropriately mechanistic neologism "post bop") that saw a number of wild talents at their best: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones, Sonny Rollins and Max Roach--among many others--were playing their brains out on a nightly basis from 1955 through 1960. And even better, most of them made a habit of playing on one another's albums.

John Coltrane

Miles Davis move from Alton, Illinois, to New York City in 1945. After a very brief stint at Julliard, he found Charlie Parker and eventually moved in with him. In 1949 he recorded The Birth of Cool for Capitol Records. "Cool" in this sense referred to a style of playing that projects a subdued demeanor about itself. The rhythm section is extremely quiet and essentially does nothing more than keep time. Improvised lines are smooth and there is not a preponderance of surprise accents. Part of this subdued demeanor may have been due to a heroin addiction that he struggled with between 1950 and 1953.

Miles Davis

From 1964 through 1968, the Davis quintet was even more open in harmonic structure and played with sharper accents on recordings like Sorcerer, Nefertiti, and Miles Smiles, three albums that are so good they are nearly unlistenable. Then, from 1968 until 1971, Miles was in a pop mood, and fused jazz to elements of rock and R&B while adding electronic music to his recordings. Bitches Brew, while vastly overrate as a piece of music, possibly grammatically incorrect and influential of the remarkably unpleasant fusion movement, nevertheless became one of the best selling jazz albums of all time. A car accident in 1974 severely restricted the horn player's recording output.
Miles himself said in 1958, "I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them." To the extent that I think I know what he was talking about, it seems he was aiming for a variety on melody, using the band as integrated support for featured soloing and strolling themes with more imagination than ordinary men. Even if that isn't what he meant, that is how Kind of Blue sounds, except that it sounds even better every day. Davis utilized the best and brightest and most appropriate players for the two sessions that went into this springtime 1959 recording. John Coltrane's tenor sax dueled with Cannonball Adderley's alto, Bill Evans' piano created contrapunctural rhapsodies more closely aligned with Paul Chambers' timid as a mountain bass playing than the bass is with Jimmy Cobbs' drums, the latter being not one iota less melodic than any other instrument here. Unified, this work bruises as it brushes and kicks as it kisses. It would be many years before anything eclipsed this monument.

The exact opposite album came from John Coltrane the following year. Where Kind of Blue celebrated pure melody, Giant Steps is a flood of harmonic virtuosity. Featuring some of the same players as on the Miles' album, Giant Steps dances all over a maelstrom on interplay among improvising musicians, moving in and out of each other's paths up and down scales that hadn't been invented the day before.
A few years ago, I took this album to a meeting of people diagnosed with various mental illnesses and played it at a low to moderate volume in a far corner. This group of about a dozen heavily medicated people had always been annoyingly quiet--even sedate. At this meeting there was a very obvious sense of tension in the air, and several of the participants stood and told off one another. Two of the twelve never returned. Higher praise for recorded music does not exist.

In the spirit of maintaining spirit, we offer a spirited spiritualizing about three of the bloggist's favorite jazz musicians, Albert Ayler, Art Blakey, and Carla Bley, those three being among the first he discovered as a child in the record bins of used vinyl stores, naturtally enough, being in alphabetical order by last name, this discovery preceding the Internet.

Albert Ayler spent the last seven years of his life taking the concept of NO FEAR to ionospheric levels. The Cleveland born tenor and alto saxophonist was influenced by the more tonal aberrations sweltering about in the mid-1960s. Meanwhile, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor were proving that atonal improvisations could still be music and could even still be jazz. And so from 1964 through 1966, Ayler decided that sound mattered more than notes. By reviving the art of collective improvising, his recordings during this period became spiritual chants, exotic, fantastic, even folksy. His best albums from that time are Spiritual Unity and Prophecy. From 1865 until his strange death in 1970, Ayler recorded for the Impulse label, a company keenly identified with John Coltrane, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders. Surrounding songs that were childlike in their simplicity and naive in their themes, the mad man insulated himself with trumpeter Don Cherry, drummer Sunny Murray and bassist Gary Peacock, along with intermittent violins, harpsichords and cellos. Much of what they recorded remains among the most spiritually energetic and cacophonous music ever made. Other standouts are Spirits Rejoice, Witches and Devils, Vibrations and Lorrach/Paris 1966. His career ended in what was ruled a suicide, despite the curious fact that his body was found in New York's East River tied to a juke box.

A working musician from before he could legally drive a car, Art Blakey persisted his way into a job with Billy Eckstein's bebop big band during the mid-1940s. This gave the young drummer exposure to the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzu Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and other creators of modern jazz. After a stint in Africa gathering spiritual roots, the renamed Abdullah Ibn Buhaina returned to New York in 1948 and his old associates marveled at how incendiary his drumming had become. His awakened talents landed him a role as house drummer for Blue Note records. By 1955, the bands he worked with became known as the Jazz Messengers, helping to define the soulful hard bop style that unified their best recordings. Although the line-up of accompanists was always changing, through at least 1964 Blakey's recorded work was never less than outstanding. As Lyons and Perlo put it, "Blakey's long press roll followed by a cymbal crash seems to elevate the entire band a foot above the stage" (Jazz Portraits, 1989). His best stuff through 1964 would be A Night at Birdland with the Art Blakey Quintet Volumes 1 and 2.

Carla Bley was only three years old in 1941. It was at that age that she began studying piano with a church organist who just happened to be her father. Tinges of religious music would inform many of her subsequent performances. By the time she was sixteen, she had left Oakland, California, to sell cigarettes at New York City's Birdland. There she was privileged to see and hear Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and even a fine pianist named Paul Bley, whom she married straight away. She paid the rent and taxes writing songs for her husband's trio and for George Russell, Jimmy Giuffre, and Art Farmer. Ten years later she and new husband Michael Mantler had become the prime organizers of the Jazz Composers Orchestral Association (JCOA), a quasi-union that spawned the JCOA label which released albums by Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd, and Bley herself. In 1973, they co-founded the Watt group for their own recordings. Her best works have been as composer-arranger for Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, as a pianist-composer on Escalator Over the Hill (an opera with a wild assortment of performers), and The Carla Bley Big Band Goes to Church.

No one since Charlie Parker has built on what already existed and totally transformed that music as powerfully as Ornette Coleman. The Fort Worth, Texas, native summed up his revolutionary philosophy thus: "If I'm going to follow a preset chord sequence, I might as well write out my solo." Because his compositions do not have chord changes, variable pitch, or asymmetrical phrases, they are "free" to transfer the listener's attention from a dominant soloist to collective improvisation. Because his groups based their solos on melody rather than on chord changes. Coleman referred to this blend of harmony, melody and motion as "harmolodics." It was in 1959 that Coleman assembled a double quartet that included Don Cherry on trumpet, Ed Blackwell on drums and Charlie Haden on bass. The result was a thirty-six minute album on Atlantic called Free Jazz.
The album was more liberated from musical convention than anything ever recorded to that point. As Len Lyons and Don Perlo describe it, "The music is based on a given tonal center, around which collective playing alternates with solo performances." Another way to describe it is divinely sublime noise. Almost everything Coleman did for Atlantic is stunning, changing the way the world understood music. In addition to Free Jazz, his 1959-1961 period also created Change of the Century, The Shape of Jazz to Come, and This is Our Music.

While not as prolific as some of his predecessors, bassist Charlie Haden has been just as evocative. Haden worked with saxophonist Coleman during the latter's free period, and along with drummer Ed Blackwell, provided the steady rhythm required for free music's success. What Haden did on those recordings that was so spectacular was using rhythm to link the band's solos into a unified composition. And while he had accomplished something similar with pianist Keith Jarrett, it is on his own that his creativity is most commanding of attention. His first major attempt at composing was on 1969's Liberation Music Orchestra, where he bends, double stops (plucking two or more notes simultaneously) and trills notes to emphasize their importance. Carla Bley served as this recording's musical director. The album links the Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, Cuba and the Chicago riots in a celebratory railing.

The other outstanding bassist of this period--arguably the best bassist of all time--is Charles Mingus. This was a man whose playing, composing, arranging, leadership and even writing connected the modern jazz of someone like charlie Parker with the free jazz of Ornette Coleman.

Mingus manipulated and coerced spontaneous moments of collective improvisation to determine the ultimate shape of his compositions. So the standard song forms of theme, improvisational variations, etc., were cracked open by the vibration of musical force. In 1952 Mingus organized a performance recording in Toronto called--with typical understatement--The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever. The recording featured Mingus on bass, Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, the alto sax of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell on piano and the drums of Max Roach. A firm believer in the role that teaching played in leadership, he would often teach his band mates the compositions by ear, resulting in more expressive and spontaneous performances. He even taught saxophonist Dannie Richmond to play drums because he couldn't find anyone else who could play the way he wanted. Meanwhile, he continued to add clever techniques to his performances, such as tremolo, flamenco rhythms, and the act of fingering and plucking notes with the same hand. All of this and more are heard on his finest recording, the album-length exorcism called The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. From the mid-1960s until 1970 he retired from performing to write his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog. In the meantime, his recordings for nearly a dozen different labels continued to entertain and inspire. Preeminent among them were Better Git It in Your Soul, Stormy weather, and Changes One. Cultural artifacts arising from his death in 1979 include the Joni Mitchell recording Mingus, a band called Mingus Dynasty, and a book by Brian Priestly called Mingus: A Critical Biography.

And so at a time when so many writers have claimed that popular music was swamped with mediocrities, we see that some of the most exciting music of Post-WWII twentieth century happened in the late 1950s and early 1960s, between Elvis' departure for Germany and the arrival in the United States of The Beatles. It was indeed one of the most exciting times in large part due to the assimilation of a sense of spirituality with an awakening of cultural and political consciousness. Just as things were now possible that had never seemed so in the arts, so did it seem possible that social systems could change.

Rock music did not immediately evoke intelligent criticism in the way that movies or paintings or sculpture or even other forms of music had done. No John Simon or Pauline Kael had come forth. Instead, all that existed were screaming fans and hostile religious organizations, yearning uvulas and outraged racists, amused parents ans scheming politicians, all listening to this new noise in different ways. From 1958 until 1975, former fashion model and intuitive dream weaver Gloria Stavers edited the marvelous 16 Magazine, which, while a million miles from criticism, was the prototype of rock mags to come, as well as the only genuine source of information and pictures about teen stars as well as more obscure performers. In its wake came the totally teen Tiger Beat and the more ambitious and hard edged Hit Parader.

The first genuine attempt at creating a forum for a dialog between rock writer and rock fan was Paul Williams' Crawdaddy. The photocopied pages of that magazine carried analysis and interpretation of the importance of rock n roll in articles that were insightful, ridiculous, passionate, literate, embarrassing, brilliant and moronic, often within the span of the same paragraph. Crawdaddy proved there was an interest in such things as serious criticism of contemporary music, a condition that allowed a young Barry Kramer to create what to this day is the only magazine that could lay legitimate claim of "America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine." That, of course, was Creem.

The music celebrated by these periodicals no longer exists, mostly because the music they usually celebrated whited itself out of existence. Mindless guitar dazzle over droning sludge beat was lame compared to the sounds leaping and lurching off Prince and Michael Jackson albums, but this black stuff apparently was not thought to be rock because in was only available in the R&B sections of the local record stores. That no one was interested in buying recycled Bad Company riffs mattered not at all to the marketing morons at the ever-dwindling number of Big Name Record Companies and so synthetic bass patterns punctuated drum slaps as melody (much less harmony) became ofey and nobody much gave a damn, especially once People Magazine became respectable and analysis became obsolete. There was nothing to think about and even less to feel as the endless party stupefied worse than a melted Alice Cooper album and it became more important to look good on MTV than to make music that someone might still enjoy three years later.

The quality of writing in Creem was outstanding for a magazine about high art. It just so happened that the people who wrote at Creem at one time or another were among the greatest writers of their generation. Dave marsh, Lester bangs, Jaan Uhelszki, Cameron Crowe, Patti Smith and Nick Tosches were among the greatest real literary figures of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and they wrote primarily about rock n roll.
Rolling Stone, in its early days, gave voice to a number of fine writers as well, such as Greil marcus, Robert Christgau, Janet Maslin, Jon Landau, Ellen Willis, and Greg Shaw. And as intelligent, gifted, inspiring and all-around wonderful as these writers were, they did not express the spirit of the music in quite the same way as Creem. If anything, the RS folks were too erudite, too full of good ideas, whereas Creem writers could extrapolate on one or two ideas for hundreds of pages, if necessary, even if the idea stank, without losing the enthusiasm that maintained the reader's interest.

Dave marsh was a kid from Pontiac, Michigan, a guy whose pissed off view of life wound up through a fan's fever and clotted out over a tendency to include lots of details. It was his ability to verbalize the passions he shared with others about the music, as well as an encyclopedic knowledge of even the most hyper-0specific minutiae, that provided a credible outlet for people who wanted to read about the music. In his own way, he became to rock what Ralph Gleason had been to jazz, except he was more lucid. He wrote about the music and politics of the MC5 and other Detroit acts at a time when much of the media was behaving as if it never rained in southern California. Most of Motown's more threatening acts, such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, along with Chicago's Chi-Lites, received from Marsh the high level of critical press they deserved at the peaks of their artistic careers, as did Mitch Ryder and John Fogerty, neither of whom was at his peak in the early 1970s, and the latter being one West Coast kid with a Mid West attitude. Marsh has written more than twenty books, including such subjects as Elvis, the Who, Bruce Springsteen, and others. Two of his finest are Fortunate Son and The Heart of Rock and Soul.

Dave Marsh

Lester Bangs grew up in El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego. But it was only after moving to Detroit where he and Marsh worked for Barry Kramer's Creem that Lester found the mind that would untie the knot of vague feelings the thinking audience felt and the voice to whisper and scream those complex feelings coherently. At Creem, his pieces about Iggy Pop, Black Oak Arkansas, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and others of the period became more popular than the music they were marginally about. While he also wrote extensively for Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, it was at Creem that he found and was given the freedom that fueled his art. Although the two books he published in his lifetime--Blondie and Rod Stewart--were so far beyond the fan bio genre they to some extent inspired, his best writings are collected in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, edited by Greil Marcus. here one can find bangs writing in the argot, style and meter of popular music. he also had a healthy disrespect for the performers he loved, which may have been spawned by envy of their successes but was nevertheless an attitude he maintained was vital to mental survival and good music. He is the subject of one biography called Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, an ambitious book, large on detail.

Lester Bangs

Greil Marcus is more scholarly in his approach to music than any of his brethren or sistren, and on occasion that fact has created some magnificent literature. His Mystery Train is nothing less than six detailed sketches of American artists through which Marcus extrapolates cogent connections through which the rest of pop music is inexorably bound. On the tracks Greil walks, he finds the footprints of Harmonica Frank and Robert Johnson. The inheritors--those who followed the same tracks but walked on their own--were The band, Randy Newman, Sly Stone, and Elvis Presley. Mystery Train is guided by strong fluid instincts and a narrative style that climbs, glides and descends through some metaphoric caverns and corridors, just like the Junior Parker song that in the voice of Elvis Presley inspired the theme and title of his book. Marcus has also earned well-deserved recognition for writing Lipstick Traces and Invisible republic, as well as for editing Stranded.

Greil Marcus

Here at long last we present the complete list and links of all the songs referenced above, as well as an earful that were not. Do not fear this list. It is 1,294 songs. They will not hurt you, although they could if they wanted to.