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S02E02 'Birth of The Cool' (The Post-Bebop Years)
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The role of jazz music in Cold War propaganda and the respect which foreign audiences attributed to it greatly influenced its place in American culture. However, its wider cultural acceptance by the early 1950s was aided by significant developments in musical styles and performance environments. The ability of musicians, critics, and promoters to equate jazz with a genuine artistic sensibility derived partly from changes that brought one wing of the music (classified as Cool Jazz, Third Stream, and West Coast Jazz) “closer to the appearance of a fashionable and utterly respectable modernist classical music”. Musicians like Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis enjoyed immense success and became household names. This transition brought into sharp relief the extent to which race relations within the United States were transforming at this point in time with greater emphasis on social de-segregation and integration. These developments would both influence and be influenced by the radical changes in how Jazz music was composed, recorded, and performed live. The broader racial composition of musicians and audiences would manifest itself in the form of more diverse, sometimes oppositional, musical styles; the Afro-American influence of the blues and spirituals clashing against and melding with the modernist aesthetics of European classical music.
Tracks:
Dave Brubeck Quartet - 'Le Souk' (Dave Goes To College)
Dave Brubeck Quartet - 'Take Five' (Time Out)
Duke Ellington - 'Diminuendo In Blue' (Live at Newport)
Modern Jazz Quartet - 'Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea' (The Modern Jazz Quartet)
Lennie Tristano - 'Wow'
Dizzy Gillespie - 'Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac (The Ebullient Mr. Gillespie)
Shorty Rogers - 'Short Stop' (Cool and Crazy)
Miles Davis - 'Moon Dreams' & 'Budo' (Birth of the Cool)
Miles Davis Sextet - 'Walkin' (Walkin')
EMCK
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode and Jazz's Historical Context
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to Season 2, Episode 2 of Real Gone. In the last episode we discussed developments in how jazz was perceived in the post-war period and how its status as an art form was crucial to efforts by the American government in competing with the Soviet Union at a cultural level in the context of the Cold War.
Jazz as an American Art Form: Evolution and Acceptance
00:00:18
Speaker
Jazz attained greater artistic credibility and commercial success as the 1950s progressed and in this episode we're going to address the question of how to jazz shift from being perceived as musical entertainment to an essential American art form.
00:00:32
Speaker
The role of jazz music in Cold War propaganda and the respect which foreign audiences attributed to it greatly influenced its place in American culture. However, its wider cultural acceptance was also aided by significant developments in musical styles and performance environments.
Race Relations and Jazz: Composition and Performance
00:00:48
Speaker
The ability of musicians, critics and promoters to equate jazz with the genuine artistic sensibility, derived partly from changes that brought one wing of the music.
00:00:58
Speaker
classified as cool jazz, third stream and west coast jazz, closer to the appearance of a fashionable and utterly respectable modernist classical music. This transition brought into sharp relief the extent to which race relations within the United States were developing at this point in time, with greater emphasis on desegregation and integration, and how those developments would both influence and be influenced by the radical changes in how the music was composed, recorded and performed live.
00:01:25
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Racial tension within jazz music and American society at large would dictate how the musicians were expected to conduct themselves in public towards their audiences and with their band members.
Jazz's Commercial Success and Public Engagement
00:01:35
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This tension would also manifest itself in the form of opposing musical styles. The Afro-American influence of blues and spirituals clashing against and melding with modernist aesthetics of European classical music The performance and broadcasting of jazz in a wider range of public venues and platforms during this period was also crucial to its wider success. The famous jazz pianist Dave Brubeck was always careful to cultivate an audience among high school and college students. Between 1947 and 1949, a time when many universities did not consider jazz to be worthy of presentation in its performance halls, Brubeck played at Stanford University, San Francisco State, and the University of the Pacific in California.
00:02:19
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His band would play classical pieces during the first half of the show, with jazz material being played after the intermission. When Brubeck reduced the size of his band to a quartet at the start of the 1950s, he played in San Francisco's Black Hawk nightclub, operated by local impresario Jimmy Lyons.
00:02:36
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Lyons also hosted Brubeck's band on radio broadcasts that played across California, finding an audience with high school and college students.
Dave Brubeck's Influence and University Tours
00:02:44
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The Black Hawk owner cleverly hosted all the-age concerts on Sunday afternoons, where students could see Brubeck play live in the company of their parents who would sit at the back of the club. To curb the length of time Dave Brubeck would spend on the road, his wife Iola made direct contact with over 100 West Coast universities to recommend the Dave Brubeck Quartet for campus concerts.
00:03:06
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Below Brubek recounts that colleges were initially reluctant to let his jazz band perform, the soon built Momentum, and by 1953 were booked solid at West Coast universities for months at a time. This played a large part in their high earnings and huge record sales, between $40,000 to $50,000 per quarter.
Re-Evaluation of Jazz as Art and Festival Influence
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Brubek appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1954.
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Despite the lukewarm reception to his music from many music critics, Rubeck became one of the most successful jazz artists of the post-war era and maintained a wide audience for many years. As evidenced by readers' polls in magazines like Downbeat, Metronome and Billboard, his popularity opened up college campuses to other performers.
00:03:47
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The credibility of the concert hall environment fed into the re-evaluation of jazz at this time is an important art form. More expansive efforts at promoting jazz and expanding its popularity added greater complexity as to how artists related to the business aspects of the music world.
00:04:03
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Norman Granz cemented his reputation as the top jazz and presario in America and became a millionaire in the process when he organised travelling groups of musicians under the moniker Jazz at the Philharmonic, which was the location of his first commercial venture in Los Angeles.
00:04:19
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By the 1950s, the JITP tours had enlisted major acts like drummer Gene Krupa, pianist Oscar Peterson and tenor saxophonist Lister Young. Star musicians could earn $1,000 per week for four or five concerts. Grants would pocket approximately $600,000 to $700,000 per year.
00:04:39
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Critics, musicians and fans were respectful of the role Grants had played in bringing jazz music out of the smoky nightclubs into larger performance venues and to a wider audience. However, there was a feeling that something was being lost or diluted in the process. The clunky presentation of the JITP concerts and Grant's supposed interest in profit over culture drew much criticism.
00:05:00
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So, The Newport Jazz Festival was formed in 1954 by tobacco tycoon Lewis Lorillard and his wife, Elaine, with the deliberate intention of elevating the cultural status and appreciation of jazz music. After visiting the Storyville nightclub in Boston, the Lorillards invited its owner, George Wine, to produce the first annual event at their exclusive Rhode Island retreat. They were also assisted by Columbia Records executive John Hammond.
00:05:52
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Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Jerry Mulligan, Eddie Condon and the Modern Jazz Quartet all played the first Newport Festival in July 1954, with the lower large providing funding by way of a $20,000 grant.
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Festival organizers arranged a programme of additional events, including photographic and artistic exhibitions, a jazz film series, lectures and discussion groups, all to promote an understanding of jazz as an art form by providing it with a history. Newport Festival donated $3,500 in three years to the Institute of Jazz Studies, the first jazz archive and scholarly centre in the United States.
00:06:31
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This was a major turning point in the change from jazz performance as a social event to the format of concert performance. The festival format in the US expanded quickly. By 1969, major music festivals played to over 300,000 people on an annual basis.
00:06:48
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The Newport Festival board's drive to increase revenues soon led to compromises with its not-for-profit charter. Early rehearsed all-star bands were placed high on the bill at the expense of better drilled, road-tested, but less well-known artists. The most profitable years were those that saw folk, rock and cabaret acts join the line-up. This approach would culminate in the disastrous riots at the 1971 festival,
00:07:12
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where rock music fans without tickets burst through the festival perimeter to see the intense blues rock of the Allman Brothers. This led to George Wein hosting the festival in concert halls of New York City the following year, an event we discussed in more detail in episode 2 of our first season. In 1958, the movie Jazz on the Summer's Day depicted visits to the Newport Jazz Festival as a way for the upwardly mobile to enjoy the good life.
00:07:36
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The festival was sold less as a celebration of the music and more as a lifestyle experience, something inherent in the marketing of music festivals to this day. The Newport Jazz Festival was a crucial factor in recalibrating the public perception of jazz and its place in American culture. It was a focal point of national media attention and the high class setting was representative of the journey of jazz towards respectability.
Technological Advancements and Jazz Recording
00:07:58
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Record store owners at this time reported an increase in record sales for jazz music and Middle Brown magazines introduced new jazz columns.
00:08:07
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Advancements in recording technology expanded producers' ability to showcase the vitality of the music. In 1948, Columbia introduced 33.3rd RPM vinyl microgroove discs, which became industry standard, along with RCA's 45 RPM singles within a few years, replacing the traditional 78 RPM discs.
00:08:26
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These long play, or LP, records provided space for up to 50 minutes of music on both sides of the record. This meant recording artists could play for extended periods of time, approximating a live performance. LPs also offered artists the appropriate format to create albums of music unified by concept or vision. Music could now be structured and presented as an artistic statement. The popularity of jazz music was also massively aided by advancements in live recording technology.
00:08:55
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Norman Grants, the entrepreneur responsible for Jazz at the Philharmonic, released his first live recordings from those tours in 1945. The spontaneity and uniqueness of live jazz recordings meant there was massive commercial potential in live records. Dave Brubeck released his Jazz Goes to College live album in 1954, his first on Columbia Records to create commercial success. This is the track, Lassuc from that album.
00:09:26
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Bye! By 1956, improvements in magnetic tape recording allowed engineers to capture outdoor events with enhanced sound quality.
Racial Integration Efforts in Jazz Bands
00:09:51
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Listen to Duke Ellington's live at Newport 1956, which sold 100,000 copies, his most popular release. This is the brilliant Diminuendo in Blue from that album.
00:10:26
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During the 1940s, there was a greater focus on diversifying the membership of jazz bands so that white and black musicians could play together. However, this meant a significant part of the problem in relation to how music was presented was not addressed. Even mixed bands continued to play to segregated audiences in many US states.
00:10:45
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By the 1940s, it was generally regarded within the mainstream that a move towards integrated bands was a positive development. The more militant activists within the progressive wing of the music industry began to hold band leaders to account for accepting contracts at segregated venues. In 1947, Norman Grants, who will go on to operate the jazz at the Philharmonic Tours, send a written plea to 30 band leaders including Gene Krupa, Cap Galloway, Woody Herman, Duke Ellington and Count Basie,
00:11:12
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imploring them to include an anti-discrimination clause in their contract. Grants presented the Jazz at the Philharmonic Clause as a precedent they could adapt for their own use. Grantz had been inspired by the singer and activist Paul Robeson, who campaigned for a similar clause to be used in theatre contracts at the time. A number of these band leaders enthusiastically offered their support to Grantz's proposal. This resulted in a concerted effort to force club owners and theatre managers to alter their Jim Crow policies, which excluded black people or segregated audiences within their venue.
00:11:44
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Grants had already achieved some success with this method in Los Angeles through Sunday jam sessions at Hollywood clubs where he had insisted that segregated seating plans were disapplied. Once club owners realised non-restictive seating plans could increase their revenue, they stopped excluding African Americans from attending. Grant's first major JITP concert was a benefit for 21 Mexican youths who had been convicted of various charges resulting from the 1943 Zoot Suit riots.
00:12:11
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Its success led to a series of 18 similar benefit concerts at the Philharmonic Auditorium in l LA. The jazz at the Philharmonic concert tours were conducted with a clear activist stance against racial discrimination. Other benefit concerts were held for the Fair Employment Practices Commission and for organisations campaigning for anti-lynching legislation, as written by Ingrid Monson in her book Freedom Sounds.
00:12:34
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Discourse linking jazz and integration became an article of faith for many musicians, and in the process coupled jazz with the moral stance in politics that shared the goals of the emerging mainstream civil rights movement. The idealism of these goals would often break apart under the economic pressures and complexities of the music business.
00:12:52
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Compared to the black music press, the white jazz press were slow to pick up on the significance of artists refusing to play in segregated venues as a sign of social progress. Norman Granz highlighted this issue in February 1960, after Downbeat magazine had lavishly praised Dave Bruback for cancelling his tour of southern universities when a number of them had insisted he sign up to a lily white contract in relation to the racial composition of his band.
00:13:16
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The form of the contract would have required Brubeck to rep replace band member Eugene Wright with a white bassist. Brubeck was genuinely indignant at those institutions that would not host a mixed band and implored them to consider the recent US State Department tours, which we discussed in the last episode.
00:13:32
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where black musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong were sent to the Middle East and Africa as part of a governmental cultural presentations program. Band member Paul Desmond joked how the State Department may have to consider funding a government program to tour and educate the southern states within its own borders.
00:13:50
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Norman Grant's criticized Downbeat for failing to appreciate that he and others had been campaigning in favour of integrated bands since at least 1946, but also pointed out that, even if Brubak's mixed band was playing at Southern colleges, it would be doing so in front of segregated audiences, which was, in his opinion, the more important issue to address. Different interpretations as to the correct meaning and intended benefits of integration in the music industry became apparent by the 1960s.
00:14:18
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For African Americans, the primary goal of integration was to expand economic and educational opportunities for black people with better access to employment, housing and an end to discrimination. To the extent that eliminating segregation did not necessarily improve economic conditions for many black people, many African Americans became more open to alternative ideologies that sought empowerment.
00:14:40
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through the strategies of autonomy and self-determination, a jettisoned adherence to a strictly integrationist approach. The idea of black separatism, as espoused by Marcus Garvey during the 1920s, and the discussion around a literal or metaphorical return to Africa for black Americans, became more central to black cultural movements as the 60s progressed.
Perception of Jazz's Universal Appeal
00:15:01
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White jazz fans and musicians tended to view integration differently as something that would bring them closer to the black experience as opposed to the other way around. During the 1950s, a new white college-aged audience found its way to jazz music, something that had major your commercial implications.
00:15:19
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Jazz offered an alternative to the straightliest suburban experience. The interracial communal experience of following jazz music was for many white fans, critics and musicians then, and now, genuinely fulfilling and socially liberating. It's understandable how much of this new white audience placed a greater premium on arguments that underlined the universality of the music.
00:15:39
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and its celebration as a pure art form to be appreciated as independent of any socio-historic or political connotations. Differences over the goals of integration would brew quietly in the 1950s, but emerge into an intense and fractured dialogue after the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins of 1960.
00:15:57
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Dave Brubek, like Lenny Tristano, who we'll discuss later, was viewed by many as lacking sufficient expression of African-American styles that were supposedly necessary to convey a genuine jazz feeling, however that elusive quality might be scientifically measured, as with Lenny Tristano.
00:16:13
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Downbeat writer Barry Yulinoff was emphatic about Brubeck's classical training and his status as a great composer who had the potential to elevate the status of jazz music to that of a more seriously respected art form. What much of the favorable reporting feel to mention is that Brubeck was almost dropped from his university undergraduate program at the College of the Pacific after it was discovered he was unable to sight read music. Brubeck's real talent was in playing by ear.
00:16:38
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The dean of the university agreed to keep Brubeck on the program, provided a promise never to pursue a career in teaching music. Brubeck was openly critical of the American composers straying too far from what he referred to as the roots of our culture, and that for American composers, quote, our roots should be in jazz. He was emphatic there should be no dichotomy between jazz music and what others might deem to be more serious music.
00:17:02
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In his view, jazz did not and should not have to compromise or dilute itself to be treated with the respect accorded to modern classical music. In a 1950 article for Downbeat magazine, Brubeck wrote that jazz had an emotional energy of its own that required an emotional awareness outside the bounds of traditional critique. Rather than pushing for wider cultural acceptance by way of greater emulation of classical music,
00:17:24
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Brubek emphasized the mixed parentage of jazz and suggested that the investigation of African musical styles offered a way to invigorate the genre. This was fairly prescient, given the developments in jazz music and black American culture that would manifest themselves as the 60s progressed.
Brubeck's Role in Racial and Cultural Debates
00:17:40
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Brubeck's recommendation for American composers using jazz as a musical foundation was to go to the fountainhead. For him, this was the original blues, spirituals and ragtime, so that their music, as he put it, would not be victimised by the usage of cliche from the more recent ephemeral jazz styles. On 8th November 1954, Dave Brubeck became the first jazz musician to appear in the cover of Time magazine.
00:18:04
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Jazz critics discussed openly how Duke Ellington would have been a more appropriate choice. Even Brubeck agreed with this. Brubeck later sheepishly admitted that when Ellington called him to offer his congratulations, that made me feel even worse. As with the Metronome and Downbeat articles on Brubeck,
00:18:20
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The Time article appeared to utilize some racially coded language to comment on Brubeck's career trajectory. Brubeck was supposedly a signifier of a new kind of jazz age in the US. The music Brubeck played, along with Jerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Stan Goetz and Shorty Rogers, all white musicians, is neither chaotic nor abandoned. It goes to the head and the heart more than the feet.
00:18:44
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Rebecca's popularity with college-age students seemed to promise a new type of jazz music that would be more upscale, less interested in social protest and seemingly wider. The time article seemed almost deliberately designed to insult black people. It disparagingly referred to historical jazz that had emerged from sleave chants, the blues, field songs, and, quote, gaudy Negro funeral parades, where the likes of Lou Armstrong and Sidney Bechet had bleated their way from the cemetery playing Didney Ramble or High Society. The reference in the article to Brubeck
00:19:17
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and his massive financial earnings, $100,000 for that year-end, and his custom-built mansion in Oakland, seem to deliberately underline the aspirational aspect of this new type of jazz superstar.
00:19:30
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After receiving a barrage of criticism for the article, Brubeck suggested he was being treated unfairly. He claimed he had done little to court the media attention, and many black musicians, Charles Mingus and Charlie Parker among them, came to his defence. Some of Brubeck's most severe critics were white, which underlines how the ambivalence towards classical strains being introduced to jazz music was something that straddled the racial divide.
00:19:54
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Critic Leonard Feather compared Brubeck with the Modern Jazz Quartet, what he suggested was a comparable black equivalent for a clean-cut, classically influenced, respectable music band. Feather argued that John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet had achieved more musically than Brubeck, but was unlikely to gain as much economically because of the colour of his skin. To some extent, the clean-cut Brubeck was a kind of sacrificial lamb been offered up to stir wider, but very necessary, discussions about race in America and the economic disparities between black and white musicians.
00:20:24
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He still made beautiful music, and for many white jazz fans their first exposure to the music may have been through hearing the day of Brubeck Quartet. It's still fairly common to hear Take Five from Time Out, the fifth best jazz-selling album of all time, ringing out as you walk into a trendy bar or a restaurant or on radio or television advertisements.
00:20:42
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Aesthetically, you can see how Brubeck's melodically catchy music was easy to market, and off the back of such commercial success, how, coupled with other factors I've mentioned, jazz as a mainstream commercial product became more popular as the 1950s progressed.
00:21:10
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you In the late 1940s, as Bebop reached the heights of its popularity and maxed out its commercial potential, a number of musicians began to re-examine the fundamental elements and aesthetics of modern jazz. Bebop, with its tendency to foreground improvisation and individual dexterity, had minimized dependence on arranger composers. However, a number of artists that came to prominence during this period, Gil Evans, Jerry Mulligan and George Russell among them,
00:21:46
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sought to apply their musical training to more sophisticated productions. Musicians like tenor saxophonist Dan Goetz deliberately bypassed the jagged virtuosity and complex rhythms of bebop to get closer to a style that recalled a more lyrical, romantic tone of musicians like Lester Young. As much as any other recordings, it was the birth of the cool sessions of 1949 to 1950 led by Miles Davis that, for better or worse, influenced the style, instrumentation and tone of the most successful jazz music of the early 1950s.
Miles Davis and the Birth of Cool Jazz
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Malice Davis moved from East St. Louis to New York City in 1945 to attend Juilliard School of Music. He quickly abandoned his studies to play trumpet and bands led by his bebop heroes Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins in the 52nd Street Music Club. The fragile tone of his trumpet playing stood in stark contrast to the more robust playing of the bebop musicians. He searched for alternative settings for his unique sound and found the perfect collaborator and composer Gil Evans.
00:22:45
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In the 1950s, mixed-race, integrated bands were often celebrated as a sign of new racial attitudes, especially when contrasted against the segregation of the bandstand during the swing era. It was notable that white sexophonist Stan Getz, played with black pianist Horace Silver, bassist Eugene Wright, played in the Dave Bruback Quartet, bassist Charlie Hayden, played with Hernack Coleman. For its time, the most famous and conspicuously integrated project As described by Ian Anderson, writer of This Is Our Music was the birth of the cool collective led by Miles Davis in collaboration with Gil Evans, recorded at WR Studio's New York over three sessions in January and April 1949 and March 1950. This marked the proper beginning of Miles' celebrated career as a band leader
00:23:27
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when he would step out of the long shadow cast by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker's musical acrobatics. While involved in arranging work for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, Gil Evans had written orchestral arrangements for the bebop standards, anthropology, and thriving on a riff. He requested permission from Alice Davis to arrange Davis' composition, Donna Lee, for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra.
00:23:48
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Davis agreed on the condition that he was allowed to study the musical scores Gil had prepared. The birth of the cool sessions grew out of musicians meeting in Gil Evans' basement studio on 55th Street and 7th Avenue to workshop compositional ideas. Miles and Gil organised a nine-piece ensemble which included French horn, tuba and baritone saxophone.
00:24:07
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about three studio dates. Players on the three studio dates included pianist John Lewis, saxophonist Lee Connott and Jerry Mulligan, drummer Max Roach and bassist Nelson Boyd, who would later travel to the Middle East with the Dizzy Gillespie Band on a State Department tour in 1956.
00:24:24
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Ingrid Monson writes that the goals of the group included the development of a writing style that retained the immediacy of improvisation, the creation of fresh sonorities through innovative instrumental combinations and the production of a more seamless integration between the written and improvised components of an arrangement.
00:24:40
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The instrumentation allowed for a lusher orchestral approach with impressionistic harmonies that would have been ill-suited to the more combative style of bebop. The slower tempos and relaxed accompaniment created the framing for smoother transitions between individual improvisation and pre-composed orchestral arrangements. This is Moon Dreams from Birth of the Cool, which perfectly conveys the more hushed tones dreamed up by the non-out of musicians assembled by Miles and Gil Evans.
00:25:27
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Despite its influence, this approach was not met with universal adulation. In their polemical 1971 book Pre-Jazz Black Power, French writers Philippe Carle and Jean-Louis Camoli delivered a fairly intense analysis of the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism Cool jazz, the birth of the cool sessions specifically, come under heavy criticism. They describe birth of the cool as a black music deliberately westernized, a kind of chamber pop devoid of all panic and sense of urgency. On generally slow beats, all musicians adopt a meditative dreamy state and renounce the prolyxity of bop improvisation. The music emphasized softness and refuses the feverish rhythms of bebop.
00:26:09
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The music from Birth of the Cool and the early 1950s in general may have seemed tame to these critics when viewed through the free jazz matrix, but it's maybe too harsh to say that the rhythms of Bob had been discarded entirely, but there was certainly a greater emphasis placed on control and structure in the music. Listen to the Birth of the Cool recording of Bud Powell's Budo, which was eventually released as a 78th single by Capitol Records.
00:26:40
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so
00:26:56
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The music created at the birth of the cool sessions had the potential to attract a much wider audience than the niche crowd often seen in the East Coast Jazz Clubs, but the group of musicians that recorded to together only made two public appearances. A WMCA live radio broadcast from the Royal Roost Jazz Club on 1580 Broadway in 1948 was met with what writer James Kaplan reports as admiring puzzlement from the politely clapping audience, one of the first introduced to this novel style of big band orchestration.
00:27:25
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The venue's focus on hosting new bebop musicians earned it the moniker of the Metropolitan Bobber House. Count Basie, whose band headed up the bill on the first night Miles Nonet of Musicians played, remarked how those slow things sounded strange and good. I didn't know what they were doing but I liked it.
00:27:43
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Recordings of The Birth of the Cold Sessions dribbled out as singles and 78s in 1949, credited to Miles Davis and his orchestra. But a full-length album release with 11 tracks was not released by Capitol Records until 1957. This was a period during which Miles experienced great personal strife and would have to battle personal demons, including crippling heroin addiction, to salvage his career and his place among the great American jazz musicians.
00:28:09
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Miles Davis would face questions from interviewers about the hiring of white musicians for the Birth of the Cool sessions, but his preference, at least outwardly, was to say that race was irrelevant. When asked about his hiring of white alto sax player Lee Connaughts, David responded to one interviewer by saying, I wouldn't give a damn if he was green with red breath. I'm hiring the motherfucker to play, not for what colour he is.
00:28:31
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This type of criticism would be a recurring theme in Miles' career during the periods of his further collaborations with Gail Evans, including the massively successful Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain, and his employment of other white musicians, among them genius pianist Bill Evans, who played on the Miles Davis quintet that recorded Kind of Blue in 1959.
00:28:53
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Jerry Mulligan, who played on the Birth of the Cool Sessions, moved to Los Angeles where he played in Stan Kenton's big band, among other musical groups that also favoured more carefully arranged compositions that were popular with the young audiences.
Development of West Coast Cool Jazz
00:29:06
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Stan Kenton's albums The Lighthouse All-Stars and Jerry Mulligan's own piano-less quartet with Chet Baker did much to popularise the cool jazz sound pioneered by Davis's Birth of the Cool Sessions and significantly helped reconfigure the audience for modern jazz.
00:29:21
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Independent Californian labels such as fantasy, pacific and contemporary that had established themselves by releasing Dixieland jazz music recorded the artists who defined this new west coast sound and brought it to the national attention after 1952. These included musicians such as Shelley Mann, Art Pepper, Shorty Rogers, Zoot Sims, Stan Getz and Chet Baker.
00:29:44
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Hollywood and its lush film soundtracks would also fall in love with Kool and West Coast Jazz, a subtle form of jazz capable of complimenting image without disturbing it as the music of Thelonious Monk or Dizzy Gillespie might. Indebted to the birth of the Kool sessions, these West Coast Jazz musicians inflected their improvisations with an academic knowledge of classical structure and form. The focused marketing strategy of Columbia Records was crucial to the success of Miles Davis in the late 1950s. His sharp suits, beautiful girlfriends, fast cars and celebrity lifestyle enabled the record label to sell the music as part of an aspirational lifestyle
00:30:20
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something that had been going on for a number of years. The West Coast image of surf sand and sacks provided a viable sales pitch with many of the independent label artists, soon signing the major labels during this period.
00:30:34
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In 1953, RCA assigned Shorty Rogers to record the Cool and Crazy album, and he moved to Atlantic Records in 1955. In 1955, Capitol Records signed Jimmy Groove, and Columbia signed Dave Brubeck from Fantasy Records. Brubeck's success demonstrated the profitability of the new jazz styles more than any other artist. This is Short Stop by Shorty Rogers from 1953.
00:31:18
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Many of the most famous cool and west coast jazz musicians had trained with European educated musical instructors. Dave Brubeck studied under Darius Milhout at Mills College. This was often highlighted by music journalists as if to copper fasten their message that this was legitimate music. Time magazine published an article about Gerry Mulligan in 1953 which emphasized how his quartet should be distinguished from the prevailing styles in jazz music, bebop in particular.
00:31:45
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The article states that, in contrast to the frantic extremes of bebop, his jazz is rich and even orderly, is marked by an almost Bach-like counterpoint. Music critics placed an emphasis on comparing jazz musicians and modern classical composers as a means of elevating the status of jazz music for wider public and critical appreciation.
00:32:06
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While playing at The Hague in 1953, Gerry Mulligan stopped his performance to admonish two audience members who were talking during his show. Jazz musicians themselves were beginning to make demands of their audience and that the music should be treated with respect and admiration. Even Charlie Parker had intimated in 1954 that he was planning to undergo a course of compositional study in Paris with compositional teacher Nadia Bolonger, who would later mentor New York composer Philip Glass.
Jazz's Reception in Europe vs. America
00:32:33
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Part of the appeal of European classical music for visiting African Americans was down to the relatively non-discriminatory manner in which they were treated by their hosts, and the greater receptiveness and respect European audiences offered to jazz musicians Music writer Frank Kofsky, in his book John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s, is less charitable about the influence of classical music and the prevalence of classical features in cool and West Coast jazz styles. He writes, "...never before since has such a plethora of fugues, concerti, divertamentos, rondas, and the like inundated jazz
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How these works sold, if they ever did sell, what audiences bought them, who listened to them, these are the riddles of the Sphinx. Before a decade it had elapsed, the great bulk of the white cool and west coast music of that era had become unendurable. I very much doubt that I am the only person to have disposed of nearly all my collection of records from that particular era. Kofsky goes on to say,
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The history of cool and west coast jazz demonstrates with surpassing clarity what happens to the music when it becomes the plaything of middle class whites with huge appetites for the trappings of status and legitimacy. If there has been no other period when control of the musical aspects of jazz has been vested so completely on white hands, so also has there been no other period of such uniform and wholesale artistic bankruptcy.
00:33:54
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Another feature of cool jazz, as highlighted by Frankowski, was the extent to which the music can be identified as a musical counterpoint to the beat generation literary movement. Writers such as Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, who referenced jazz music in their writing and were associated with themes of passivity and withdrawal, dropping out as opposed to the active engagement of bebop.
00:34:15
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The East Coast also saw musicians, a number of whom had played on the birth of the cool sessions, attempting quite effectively to fuse elements of jazz with classical music. John Lewis, a pianist on the second birth of the cool session, formed the Modern Jazz Quartet with drummer Kenny Clark, vibraphanist Milt Jackson and bassist Percy Heath. Their swing-inflected improvisation imposed on classical structures was designated the label Third Stream.
00:34:41
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This was perfect for concert halls and art festivals, where the band would often headline during their hugely successful career, which lasted over 20 years. The band's clean-cut image certainly made the marketing of their music less complicated. Miles Davis would play Flugelhorn on a 1956 album with Gunter Schuller entitled Music for Brass. Schuller himself had played Frenchhorn on The Birth of the Cool Sessions.
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Davis' experience of recording the album encouraged him to develop the cool sound for a larger ensemble. He again linked up with Gil Evans, this time to arrange and conduct a 19-piece orchestra on the album Miles Ahead. This massively successful album placed Miles' music in a symphonic setting.
00:35:22
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Popular opinion that modernist styles seemed to bleach jazz music of its ties to black culture underlined an issue that rankled many African-American musicians. The credibility and critical support that white musicians, integrated groups or even black artists who adopted more modernist styles that incorporated elements of classical music were afforded by critics and industry gatekeepers indicated that commercial success was somehow inhibited for artists who failed to adopt supposedly white modern aesthetics such as pretty melodies, relaxed time signatures, thinner timbres and so on. The notion of colour blindness and celebrating musical achievement as a higher goal were espoused as essential for cultural progress. However, the manner in which the blues, spirituals and African-American influences as core components of jazz were frequently discarded in critical discussions of this time
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was considered by many black artists to be red flags for assimilation and whitewashing rather than a genuine intention to attribute some kind of universality to the music. Ellington was the Duke, Basie was the Count, but the title King of Swing had to be attributed to white band leader Benny Goodman.
00:36:28
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Some credence has to be given to these concerns when one considers the historical context of black Americans within the United States prior to and after the abolition of slavery. When enslaved Africans were first transported to North America in the 17th century, their musical talents largely went unnoticed by the plantation class.
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until they were introduced to the evangelical missionaries. Drumming by slaves had been banned in many plantations out of fear on the part of landowners who recognized the instruments could be used as a means of communication by their prisoners, but the imposition of Christianity led to new black congregations transforming the traditional hymns of Methodist theologians such as John Wesleyan in performance and later inventing their own Christian texts and melodies to convey the pain of their own experience.
00:37:12
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These folk songs such as Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Motherless Child and Wade in the Water became known as the spirituals. These songs would fundamentally inform the musical structures of blues and jazz music. As a way of reclaiming authorship of the repertoire of spiritual music, the American musicologist George Pullen Jackson and others would argue that Negro spirituals had in fact taken their origin from medieval English folk songs, an argument that remains highly contentious.
Jazz's Cultural Roots and Spiritual Influence
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There was therefore a certain defensiveness going forward about how credit should be attributed to African Americans in enriching the culture of American music.
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an attitude that was emphatically revived during the 1960s. A metaphor of escaping to freedom as sung in Swing Low's Sweet Chariot would be playfully invoked by Dizzy Gillespie in his 1959 recording, Swing Low's Sweet Cadillac. The old message is always opening new configurations, this time around with the jazz musician celebrating escape from the daily humdrum by way of life on the open road.
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I look over Jordan and what did I see?
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Oh, in El Dorado coming after me.
00:38:42
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There was, to some extent, a complex and often uneasy relationship between African-American musicians and modern classical music. On one hand, a cosmopolitan display of knowledge and affiliation with classical music had enabled artists like Duke Ellington to display a certain level of musical sophistication and to challenge white stereotypes of the black jazz musician as uncultured, musically primitive entertainers. On the other hand, musicians that embraced classical ideas and incorporated European traditions faced criticism.
00:39:10
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Some critics saw any kind of adherence to classical forms as an admission that jazz innovations were historically indebted to or vulnerable to influence by European traditions. Others saw an overemphasis on classical aesthetics as being pretentious or signaling insufficient pride in their roots. The latter was a criticism regularly levelled at the modern jazz quartet during their long career.
Lenny Tristano's Precision and Innovation
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00:39:59
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The music of Lenny Tristano is a good example of the skepticism that classical or modern experimental styles being applied to jazz was treated with. Lenny Tristano was an innovative white pianist and composer from Chicago, who had eventually become a reputable music teacher after he moved in York City in 1946. He was known for his prickly personality, but drew the admiration of a wide range of jazz musicians.
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including bebop pianist Bud Powell and the famous saxophonist Charlie Parker who he played with alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Roach in the live radio broadcast in 1947. The jazz press, most notably by Yulinov of Metronome magazine, fawned over Tristano's intellectual approach to jazz, reporting that his American Conservatory degree and academic compositional studies heralded a kind of bright new era for jazz, a progression from those musicians who were content merely to feel, in his words,
00:40:51
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Implicit in the reporting by Yulnov was the racial stereotyping of African-American musicians as all emotion and no intellect. This fed the perception that the jazz press were all too eager for a white saviour to enthuse over at last. The Tristano record's intuition and digression are often cited as early precursors to the free jazz aesthetic in that the musicians played with no preset plans other than the order in which the performers entered the piece. Despite his undeniable influence on musicians in the post Bebop period, the Levins among them, Tristano's music was often criticized for stepping too far away from what were seen to be African American and blues aesthetics, e.g. call and response structure.
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instead focusing on long, uninterrupted melodic lines where, unlike Bebop, the music was left uninterrupted by dramatic interjections from the drummer. For many, Tristano's music, despite its technical ambition and the skillfulness of the musicians, was seen as emotionally cold, too refined, and too modern.
Black Musicians and Modern Art Evolution
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For disciples of his music, however, Philip Glass among them, his melodic control and virtuosity still produced an intense emotional experience, just a type they had not been exposed to before.
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The Tristano piece Wow demonstrates how the absolute precision of his style of composition leaned away from the looseness of jazz towards the technical rigidity of classical orchestral music. Rhythm is de-emphasized and a premium is placed on the precision of the horns.
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so
00:42:37
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In the early 20th century, African-American jazz musicians took up the mantle of the modern artist and the associated dress, style, and social codes that went along with it as a means of legitimizing their music and as part of a broader transformation from rural to urban styles of living with increased migration for black Americans towards the larger northern cities of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston, where the music became concentrated, for cultural theorist Amiri Baraka,
00:43:04
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Bebop had been a triumph of African American musical artists over what he saw as the commercialism of mass marketed white swing. For every argument that jazz was a universal colourblind art music open to all skilled enough to master improvisational skills and individual expression.
00:43:20
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There was a counter-argument that jazz was a music whose origins were in African America, with its most central aesthetic components being rooted in the blues. To underline the credibility of this argument, cultural critics, fans and musicians would point to the limited number of white jazz players that had genuinely innovated and influenced black musicians. Bill Evans is often cited as being one such white musician credited with the status of innovator.
00:43:45
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The reality was that jazz music would draw on multiple aesthetic streams, not always neatly classifiable. Cool Jazz, West Coast or Third Stream were typically associated with white musicians. This categorization was complicated by the prevalence of black musicians, Miles Davis and Milt Jackson among them.
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within those genres and the lyrical beauty and sophistication of their music and the emergence of Dexter Gordon's heavy driving saxophone sound from within the West Coast scene. For musicians there was some aesthetic agency that meant their choice of musical stylings did not necessarily have to reflect their place of birth or the social and economic conditions that were imposed on them or from which they benefited. In this sense jazz did positively transcend social boundaries but the extent to which the broader acceptance and popularity of the music papered over some significant social, political and economic disparities between white and black Americans would become more apparent during the subsequent growth of the civil rights movement and the seismic political events of the 1960s.
00:44:44
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Professor Ingrid Monson identifies some of the aesthetic streams within jazz during the 1950s including 1. African-American vernacular music such as blues, gospel and R and&B 2. American popular song including Tin Pan Alley songbook and musical theatre 3. Modern classical music, led by composers such as Bartok and Schoenberg 4. The aesthetics of Africa and the African diaspora 5. Non-Western musical styles, including the Indian scales enthusiastically adopted by the likes of John Coltrane and those musicians that would develop the genre of spiritual jazz
00:45:20
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Even though it's certainly justifiable to point to the sophistication of cool jazz, the new musical forms of the early 1950s as being progressive, the feeling that something was being surrendered to a more structured formality and shallow respectability was prevalent. The hard-bop jazz music of the late 1950s can be considered as something of an organic reaction to the cool jazz west coast and third stream styles.
00:45:41
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This more intense music would be invigorated by the civil rights movement, and the influence of African independence movements would fuel a wider rejection of what Frankowski refers to as Eurocentric cool aesthetics. Just as cool jazz and west coast aesthetics may have reflected the economic prosperity of the early 1950s,
00:45:58
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Hardbop and later free jazz, both informed by early funk and R and&B, would mirror the political upheavals of the early 1960s and the prevailing social attitudes of the time among black Americans. The 1954 recording of Walkin' by Miles Davis, ironically one of the progenitors of cool jazz, is often cited as a significant signpost for Blue's influence styles seeping back into mainstream jazz to underline the Hardbop approach.
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Oh.
00:46:53
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In the 1950s and 60s, jazz music deployed aesthetic resources of Western modernism together with black vernacular music to progress themselves as artists and to elevate the social status of black music and culture. In his excellent book, The Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double Consciousness, Social historian Paul Gilroy talks about the black Atlantic music as a counterculture of modernity.
00:47:16
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As written by Ingrid Monson, modernism in jazz was most successful when it infused improvisation with its sonarities, harmonic extensions and virtuosity without undercutting its improvisational and expressive principles. The development of jazz and the continuing opposition of white and black aesthetics in the music can be interpreted as a conflict over which set of criteria European high art or Afro-modernism was to be applied to determine the quality of the music.
00:47:41
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This internal tension within jazz music remains endlessly fascinating and contentious over 70 years later, not least because the brilliance and complexity of the music means that attempts to designate certain styles and characteristics as fitting within black or white aesthetics are always open to the debate, and complicated by the various motivations of those musicians who adopted a modernist approach to their music.
00:48:02
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Ultimately, the commercial victory of hardbop in defining the aesthetic centre of jazz between the late 1950s and the late 1960s, arguably the cultural high-water mark of jazz history, represents the starting point for the enduring triumph of Afro-modernism in American music and art culture.
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