From The Church To The Street

African-American jazz has always sought to maintain its footing in the sociological reality from which it was born.

Quincy Jones

Ray Charles and Quincy Jones

Such was the significance of Quincy Jones' Back on the Block, which came out in 1990. Taking stock of this century as it nears its end, Jones - Count Basie's former arranger and Michael Jackson's producer at that time - assembled a few of the great names of Black American music, from Ray Charles to Miles Davis, along with Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie.

Ella Fitzgerald

Geri Allen

Soul music and rap welcomed jazz, as if to remind it they grew up together in black churches and on the street. From the delicate neo-classical touch of the pianist Geri Allen to the fanfares of Lester Bowie (the Art Ensemble of Chicago's trumpet player), along with the saxophonists Kenny Garrett (like Geri Allen, trained in Detroit with the trumpet players Marcus Belgrave) or Gary Thomas (discovered while with Jack DeJohnette and Miles Davis) - the same concern with roots, the same attention to the latest developments of funk, and openness of spirit that reflected the lifestyle and choices of the sixties loft generation.

Lester Bowie

 

Marcus Belgrave

What do the following have it common: Wynton Marsalis in his three-pieces suit, the rap group 2 Live Crew with its obscenities, and the jazz that came forth in the sixties, mixing the acquisitions of free jazz with the certainties of bop?

Kenny Garrett

2 Live Crew

All belong to that same community - they were different reactions to the mounting economic difficulties, the marginalization of the most disenfranchised and the increase in the minority population in the eighties.

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Big Band Bebop

With Dizzy Gillespie's big band,especially on 'Cubana Be' and 'Cubana Bop',the revolutionary nature of bebop language exploded on wider scale.

Dizzy Gillespie's Big Band

In his quest for modernity Dizzy Gillespie chose his collaborators judiciously. Among them, Tadd Dameron created a sensation. A composer-arranger trained in the school of swing, Dameron allied himself very early with the bebop aesthetic through the daring of such tunes as 'Hot House'. He begrudged his white colleagues on the West Coast nothing.

Gladly citing French composer Maurice Ravel among his influences, he attached equal importance to the resonant beauty of the whole and to the melodic quality of each part, at a time when many others were concerned only with the lead voice.

Tadd Dameron & Fats Navarro

Dameron's skill in preserving melody through even the most 'dissorted' harmonies was shared by one of his closet friends, trumpet player Fats Navarro. A soloist who use uncommon imagination to avoid the harmonic traps of bebop, Navarro chiseled melodic lines of such density and pertinence that they were a decisive influence on future generations.

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Toward Hard Bop And Modal Jazz

While cool was gaining popularity on the West Coast, the black musicians on the East Coast were active, too. They made bop accessible to the large ensemble, enriched its forms, mastered its vocabulary and became apprentices to new rhythms. By the mid-fifties, they had developed a hardened tone, drawing from blues and gospel in order to preserve the specific characteristics of African- American music.

Dizzy Gillespie

The trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie started his career in big bands and did not hesitate to let the first sounds of bebop be heard there, sometimes under the glare of his bandleaders. In 1946 he formed his own big band, in which some of the best-known names played, and he created  a sensation by incorporating Afro-Cuban elements into his music. Indeed, contacts between American jazz musicians and those hailing from Cuba and Puerto Rico - many of whom had been in New york since the thirties - multiplied in this decade. In this way, jazz musicians broadened their rhythmic habits and explored new ways of exploring the beat.

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And The Cool is Born

Cool mean fresh and refreshing but also, of course, relaxed. To someone who is getting upset, you say, 'Keep Cool'. In the late 1940s white jazz musicians began to interpret Charlie Parker's jazz in a new, 'cool' way - and the name stuck. But, paradoxically, the beginnings of cool are attributed to the boldest of the black musicians, Miles Davis.
Indeed, his 1949 recordings for Capitol Records are so significant in this regard that later reissues were grouped under the title Birth Of The Cool.

Miles Davis in a 1940s Recording Session

Compared to Dizzy Gillespie, the other all-star trumpet player of the period, Miles Davis lacked both virtuosity and a brilliant tone. Yes he created a sober, airy, reflective style all his own, featuring a quiet resonance, avoiding high notes and favouring the medium register. 'Keep cool!' he seemed to say to Dizzy Gillespie's velocity, mimicking the message Lester Young seemed to convey to the impetuous Coleman Hawkins. But he was not satisfied with the rapid unison phrases and the unbridled solos that characterized bebop.

In 1948, when Davis formed an ensemble, he tried something new, instead of the usual bebop quintet, he formed a nine-piece band, a nonet.

Miles Davis Nine Piece band (nonet) in a 1940s Recording Session

And there he called on arrangers Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan. The band featured Davis' trumpet - along with two saxophones, a trombone, a rhythm section, and two instruments rarely used in jazz until then, a French horn and a tuba. (The tuba had been used in rhythm section of the first jazz ensembles in New Orleans, but had been largely replaced by the string bass by this time.)

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