Brave New World
The World War II jazz scene brings surprises and challenges.
Modern Blues Is Born
While jazz was in the calm before the bebop storm, the blues world was expanding. The boom was centered in Chicago, where a generation of legends like Muddy Waters had created an active scene after migrating from the Mississippi Delta, and in California, where economic refugees from Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma worked in defense factories by day and looked for music that reminded them of home at night — provided by jazz-inflected bluesmen like T-Bone Walker.
Outside, Looking In
Jazz, still riding high on the success of swing, was a booming business as the 1940s began. But it was no longer an equal-opportunity employer as race re-entered the picture, reducing many of the music’s African-American originators to minor players, while rewarding white efforts to emulate the originals with massive popularity. The situation would be repeated in the 1950s when radio-friendly white singers like Pat Boone sold millions of copies of watered-down renditions of rhythm and blues hits.
Misplaced Rewards
The problem wasn’t with the top tier of white big bands, most of which were legitimate jazz operations. But mediocre white dance bands disguised as jazz orchestras were making rock-star wages while the more significant African-American big bands, such as those led by Teddy Wilson and saxist Benny Carter, couldn’t always pay their musicians.
What made the situation even more exasperating for the struggling African-American bands steadily losing gigs to white bands was that the music the white bands were playing with such great commercial success was their own. Most of the arrangements came from African-American arrangers, including Don Redman’s work for Benny Goodman.
Mainstreaming Leaves Some Bands Upstream
The inevitable attrition of stars being lured away by bigger paychecks and audiences also hit the African-American bands very hard. Even the Ellington Orchestra, which worked steadily through the period, lost stars, beginning when trumpet sensation Cootie Williams was hired away by Benny Goodman. Ellington, always seemingly above the action, continued unaffected but other African-American big bands, less resilient and less successful, were effectively put out of business by the defection of their featured soloists to white dance bands.
It’s an ongoing philosophical argument whether “mainstreaming” assists or endangers racial identity and achievement, but there’s no doubt the outcome of the process in the early 1940s was to diminish the musical vitality and commercial viability of the vast majority of African-American big bands. The positive of gaining a wider audience was balanced by the negative of putting an end to a unique era in jazz history.
At the Bottom of Things
Bassist Jimmy Blanton spent fewer than three years with the Ellington Orchestra, yet his influence extended at least three decades beyond. The youthful Blanton used an advanced technique and experimental spirit to liberate the bass from the rigid restrictions and formalized role previously confining it, and he did it without forsaking the instrument’s ability to underpin the music. Blanton, who died at 23 from tuberculosis, also established the bass as an instrument for serious soloing.
The Dynamic Duo
The names Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn can be found on many of the most memorable songs produced by American popular music. Their creations are core components of American culture in the 20th century, but they’re also still heard nightly in jazz clubs and concert settings. When jazz fans and musicians speak of “standards,” it’s a given that a Strayhorn/Ellington song will be part of the discussion.
Strayhorn already had a classic, the sublime standard “Lush Life,” to his credit when he teamed up with Ellington, who already had a legendary career underway. But both elevated their art by combining forces.
Meeting Strikes a Chord
The two met in 1938 when Ellington played Pittsburgh, where Strayhorn had been working as a pianist. A few months later Strayhorn had moved to New York City and was on the Ellington payroll in an undefined, multipurpose role with no contract. His mandate was to take the Ellington sound to a higher level, and he immediately did so, taking over arranging duties while contributing a series of classic compositions.
They were undoubtedly an odd couple, but their enlightened musical sensibilities so perfectly intertwined that their unique creative synergy seemed to give them a single voice. “Take the ‘A’ Train,” the theme song of the Ellington orchestra, was such a perfect musical expression of the personality of the band’s leader that it had to be written by Strayhorn. And it was, supposedly, inspired by directions to Duke’s Harlem apartment.
Mutual Admiration
Strayhorn, who died of cancer in 1967, would devote the remainder of his musical career to Ellington’s music, only rarely writing or arranging for friends like singer Lena Horne. Shortly after Strayhorn’s death, Ellington honored his friend and musical alter ego with an impassioned tribute album, “And His Mother Called Him Bill,” which stands as one of the greatest recordings in the extensive Ellington catalog.
A Sound from Overseas
Germany’s ECM Records, springboard to fame for pianist Keith Jarrett and guitarist Pat Metheny, took a different approach from the European jazz labels that recorded only self-exiled African-American artists. Founder/producer Manfred Eicher developed an easily identifiable label sound, one dismissed by critics as cold, sterile, and devoid of the all-important component of swing. They had a point but were also missing one, as the impeccably performed and intriguingly impressionistic music had its own enduring attractions.
The Color of Jazz
Jazz was born colorblind, but it wasn’t allowed to stay that way very long. The infamous Jim Crow segregation laws we encountered in the first lesson were the tip of an iceberg of racism that America spent most of the 20th century trying to melt. Jazz, as the major African-American cultural expression, as well as the primary entertainment industry, was continually caught in the sociopolitical crossfire of racial discrimination.
Racial Discrimination Breeds Reverse Discrimination
In modern times, jazz fans of all colors have occasionally complicated the situation further by engaging in a subtle form of reverse racism, doubting and demeaning the achievements of some musicians merely because of their white skin. It’s an attitude as equally unenlightened as that of establishment whites who originally dismissed jazz as being little more than primitive jungle music.
It’s amazing that the question of racial credibility arises on the current jazz scene, one where African-American clarinetist Don Byron plays Jewish klezmer music, white pop instrumentalist Kenny G has a large smooth jazz following among African-Americans, and the most progressive young African-American acts draw almost completely white audiences. But, sadly, it often does.
Geographical Bias Sets Further Limits
A corollary to the continuing racial debate is the geographic one that questions the credibility of jazz created overseas, especially in Europe, where the music was heard not long after its American debut. Some European jazz is indeed just a pale echo of American efforts, but much of it is intriguingly eclectic and original.
The best of the European players and bands don’t attempt to perfect American jazz tradition but instead create personalized sounds. A group like the madcap Dutch big band the Willem Breuker Kollektief, which theatrically mixes everything from slapstick musical humor to avant garde operas in its sound, perpetuates the jazz tradition through its experimentation and spirit of adventure even while it’s playing music that seemingly has few roots in jazz.
Figure 7-1: Nobody had ever heard anything like Bird, the immortal Charlie Parker.
Birds of a Feather
While most saxists thought, quite rightly, that Charlie Parker’s high-flying inventions were beyond their capabilities, a courageous few attempted to emulate his signature style. His disciples included Sonny Stitt, who openly copied his solos; Charles McPherson; Richie Cole; and Charlie Mariano. But it was Phil Woods, who coincidentally married Parker’s former wife Chan, who was ultimately dubbed “the new Bird” because of his own bop inventions, not because he could (almost) duplicate Parker’s originals.
The Bird: Few Flew Higher
Star-crossed sax genius Charlie Parker is one of the enduring icons of jazz, and his tragic tale of tribulations and triumphs is the music’s best-known real-life melodrama. His life, evocatively enacted in the movie Bird, can be reduced to one of heartbreak and heroin addiction interspliced with legendary musicianship, but, while that’s the truth, it’s not the whole truth.
Jimi Hendrix of the Sax
Parker’s sensationalistic life often obscures the reason it receives attention in the first place: that he was arguably the greatest improviser in the history of jazz, a music that prizes improvisational ability above all. Parker was the Jimi Hendrix of the saxophone, a musician who seemed plugged into a future sound other ears couldn’t yet hear. Like Hendrix, Parker not only played better than his contemporaries, but also differently, as he introduced techniques and sensibilities previously unused, if not unimagined, by his peers.
Kansas City native Parker led a fast life from his teens, slowly perfecting his talent on the active local scene. His original sax mentor, Buster Smith, former member of the Blue Devils, introduced him to the concept of double-time solos, something Parker would later build on with his mercurial, rapid-fire improvisations.
Unsolved Mystery
Once Parker found a kindred creative spirit in Dizzy Gillespie, it was inevitable he would revolutionize jazz, an event we’ll cover next lesson when we look at the birth of bebop. We’ll also talk more about “the needle and the damage done,” but suffice to say that Parker committed slow suicide, and by doing so, sadly short-changed the very music he built his life around. By the time of his death at age 34, he had already led jazz into a brave new world of exciting musical possibilities. How much farther he would have advanced the art in just another year or, better yet, another decade or two, is one of the most unfortunate mysteries of jazz.
