The Rock Explosion

At the end of the sixties, strengthened by his quintet's experiments, Miles Davis was ripe for bringing himself before rock and its immense audience.

Miles Davis as a Rocker?

A fusion of country music and black rock and roll (derived from boogie), rock was created by white artists in the mid-fifties. Over the next decade, it adopted the effective rhythm sections of rhythm and blues and profited by carrying soul and other types of American music forward. At the same time it received support from new recording and production methods and made use of the electric instruments that had appeared with the urban blues.

Jimi Hendrix onstage, Woodstock 1969

Instrumental performances became increasingly important not only with rock - leading to the appearance of 'guitar heroes' - but also with the transformation of musical forms. In the late sixties, 'rockers' invaded realms hitherto reserved for better-informed kinds of music, such as classical, jazz and certain types of traditional non-European music.

After this point rock could be played for extended periods, and huge sound systems were installed, making enormous outdoor concerts possible.

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The Reawakening Of Big Bands

Carla Bley Big Band

Since the forties, big bands were increasingly the domain of white musicians.In the course of the sixties, Don Ellis outdistanced the metric preoccupations of jazz-rock. Carla Bley, with her compositions evoking the worlds of Charles Ives, Eric Satie and Kurt Weill, introduced a dimension of parody.

Don Ellis Big Band

Don Ellis

As for Gil Evans and George Russell, their invariably avant-garde writing led them to the dismantling of the structures of the big band, frequently shrinking the wind section, shifting the weight to the rhythm section, and adopting a freedom inherited from free jazz. Aura (1989) was the first record Miles Davis brought out with a large group since he recorded Quiet Night with Gill Evans in 1962.

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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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The Jazz-Rock Of Miles Davis' Children

Innumerable musicians who were temporarily of Davis' band attempted to prolong that musical experience and hold on to the public won through that contact. Transposing the energy of rock into their bands, they put their savoir faire as jazz musicians to the service of jazz-rock.

John McLaughlin

Mahavishnu Orchestra

John McLaughlin, for example, met with great success with his Mahavishnu Orchestra, starting in 1971. He allied a virtuosic writing and incantations  inherited from John Coltrane to a concern with technical performance that excited the rock audience. Mystical, like Coltrane, and fascinated with India, he blended the metric and modal sophisticated of Indian music with the rhythmic and harmonic effectiveness of rhythm and blues.

Jan Hammer

  The pianist Jan Hammer was a pioneer in exploring the phrasing possibilities offered by the first electronic keyboards. The violinist Jerry Goodman attracted the public's attention, and the drummer Billy Cobham gave proof of fascinating technique in music with uneven meters.

Jerry Goodman

Through their power, speed of execution and impressive equipment,drummers unleashed great excitement.

Now in the forefront of their bands, leaders such as Tony Williams or Billy Cobham often eclipsed the fame of their entourage.

Billy Cobham

This, however, was not the case with Lenny White (drums) and Stanley Clarke (the first great electric bass soloist), who played with Chick Corea's group, Return to Forever. As for Corea himself, who had shared in Miles Davis' first electronics experiments, his keyboard virtuosity and brilliant writing were seductive. Swinging toward the Spanish with the addition of the guitarist Al Di Meola, the strong Latin feeling in his repertoire delighted the public.

Lenny White & Stanley Clarke, Return To Forever (1975)

Al Di Meola & Chick Corea, Return To Forever (1975)

Return To Forever (L-R) Lenny White, Chick Corea, Al Di Meola, Stanley Clarke

Also emerging from Miles Davis' universe, Herbie Hancock created a group that was more profoundly anchored in the popular African-American tradition. Leaning on the deep-sounding 'drop' of the drummer Harvey Mason, Hancock's music became funkier than Davis'. More accessible to the general public, it was enormously successful, particularly with the album that takes its title from the name of the group: Head Hunters.

Herbie Hancock & Paul Jackson, Headhunters

Like Chick Corea, who was now swinging between acoustic and electronic music, Hancock alternated successful inroads into 'electrofunk' with returns to formulas close to the spirit of the Miles Davis quintet of the sixties.

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Miles Plugs In His Trumpet

By now fed up with the elitism of free jazz and with rock (which, he said, diverted and weakened rhythm and blues), Miles Davis turned his full attention to popular black music, and particularly to the funk of Sly and the Family Stone. Sly Stone practised a violent and direct aesthetic inherited from James Brown.

Sly & The Family Stone

In 1968 Miles met Jimi Hendrix, the hero of rock guitar. Hendrix knew how to funnel the force of blues to the universe of pop. Hearing him, Miles Davis understood that the guitar, on the margin until then, was destined to be in the forefront of the evolution of jazz. Indeed, at that point keyboards, bass and even wind instruments were following in the guitar's footsteps, becoming electrified. The volume increased, and new types of sound appeared. After 1969, when Miles recorded In a Silent Way with John McLaughlin, a young British guitarist, electronics were a standard part of his world.

Miles Davis, electrified

Limiting his written work to a few suggestive measures, hooking his trumpet up to a wa-wa pedal, Miles set off true electronic revels on the records that followed. On them, there was new combination of electric guitar, bass guitar, various keyboards, percussion instruments from the world over, and the binary hammering inherited from Tony Williams.

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The Endurance Of Miles Davis

Throughout the sixties Miles Davis was haunted by the short time (1958-9) Bill Evans and John Coltrane were both in his group. Twice he replaced his pianist, first with Wynton Kelly, then with Herbie Hancock, who combined the refinements of Bill Evans and the more vigorous statement of the funk pianist. On the other hand, it took him several years before he found the replacement for John Coltrane in the person of Wayne Shorter.

(L-R) Wynton Kelly, Gene Ramey (bass)

When he did, a new era opened up for Miles Davis, marked by recordings that today are considered to be masterpieces of modern jazz for small groups. Thus, from one year to the next, E.S.P, Miles Smiles, Nefertiti and Miles In The Sky, among others, raised and then answered a series of musical questions. Davis' quintet was, at that time, a truly experimental group - each entrance into the studio would bring new development.

  

Herbie Hancock

Wayne Shorter

In this way, the rhythm section exploited the heritage of Bill Evans trio: Herbie Hancock (piano) was suggestive; Ron Carter (bass) no longer stated the tempo systematically but imposed a powerful sense of pulsation; Tony Williams (drums), sophisticated and daring, freed himself from accompanist's role. he took the Elvin Jones' poly rhythm, gave it air, and diversified it by superimposing figures conceived in binary measures. In session after session, the quintet explored a repertoire dependant on Wayne Shorter's innovative ideas. Shorter, a master improviser, showed Davis a way to widen the range of liberties allowed by modal playing even further. On the stage Davis stayed with a more conventional program, but the risks he took in the studio changed the way the public saw the band.

  

Miles Davis Quintet

Ron Carter

Like the innovations of Charlie Parker twenty years earlier, these measures, ground-breaking at the time, have become the conventions of small-group jazz

Tony Williams

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On The Fringes Of The Free

In its rush to explain history, jazz criticism has often been mistaken in presenting the explosion  of free jazz and the supremacy of improvisation over writing as the sole significant developments of the sixties. 

Horace Silver

After this decade the history of jazz no longer moved in one direction; many tendencies showed themselves on the fringes of free jazz. Besides Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy, other, influenced by Horace Silver, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman (some recording under the Blue Note and Candid labels), declared themselves outside of any identifiable group. Musical Language advanced, feeding both the autonomy of the improviser and the emancipation of rhythm. The players of 'the new thing', involved in a political struggle, embraced their cultural heritage, but, in contrast, a large number of their contemporaries demanded the freedom to control, master and assimilate what they wanted from the cultural environment at large, from classical music to free jazz.

Sonny Clark Sextet Blue Note LP

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The Road To Freedom

John Coltrane was the master of modern jazz in the early sixties. He was a leader for angry young black musicians who wanted to re-appropriate their music from the dominant white culture. Against a background of the civil right movement, jazz musicians rejected the aesthetic criteria of mainstream American society and invented something new that would be called free jazz.

John Coltrane

The saxophone player John Coltrane was a calm, reserved, contemplative man, completely absorbed by his music and, even more, by the philosophical and mystical problems he sought to solve through his music. Although annoyed by Coltrane's incessant questions, Miles Davis asked him to join his quintet in 1956. Perhaps he understood that one of the great figures of jazz would emerge from these interrogations. From his first steps with Davis until his death, Coltrane never stopped questioning his art.

(L-R) John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis and Bill Evans; Kind Of Blue Recording Session

With Giant Steps

In 1957, during a stint at the Five Spot in New York City with the Thelonious Monk Quartet, Coltrane was inspired by the unusual piano accompaniments. When Monk would leave the stage, Coltrane would take advantage of this time to explore new harmonic processes during long improvisations.

 In 1958 Coltrane joined Miles Davis' new sextet, which recorded his masterpiece, Kind of Blue, a year later. Coltrane's playing had changed: from this point on he produced absolute torrents to sound. He brought his reflections on chord progressions to an end while recording 'Giant Steps', the ultimate outcome of the harmonic system of bebop, with his quartet. Thereafter he pursued his quest in the direction of modal jazz. In the meantime, even side by side with Miles Davis, he became increasingly alienated, and his long solo flights seemed to come from another universe.

Jimmy Garrison

The Ascension

Artistic Retouched Photo of Coltrane's Dream Quartet

After listening to various musicians, Coltrane put his dream quartet together 1961. With the solid double bassist Jimmy Garrison as pivotal figure, the drummer Elvin Jones developed a poly-rhythm that implied, rather than stated, the tempo; and into this tumultuous undertow McCoy Tyner's piano repeated tireless motifs that lured the soloist into a trance. Tyner's intentional harmonic uncertainties invited Coltrane to multiply the melodic phrases. One mode followed another, mixed, ground down, saturated with notes jostling each other until they overlapped, for a 'multiphonic' effect. Occasionally the tempo even disappeared altogether, diluted in long incantatory recitatives, such as the last section of love supreme.
More and more often, Coltrane preferred to omit the piano and double bass and remain alone with the energy flow transmitted by Elvin Jones.

Pharoah Sanders

Some young members of the avant-garde of free jazz, who worshiped Coltrane, were invited to participate in the recording of the influential album Ascension,and one of them, Pharoah Sanders (tenor sax), began to play with him regularly after that. Soon Coltrane rid himself of McCoy Tyner's piano, which he had begun to see as standing in his way.

Rashied Ali and John Coltrane perform

 Elvin Jones left, too, in reaction to the arrival of the drummer Rashied Ali, whose conceptions of free jazz he did not share. Coltrane died on 17 July 1967, finally having attained the end of his quest for the upper limits of both fame and music. Throngs of musicians of every type remain haunted by the influence of his work to this day.

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Monk's 'Gap'

  During the 1950s Miles Davis continued to make an impact; in fact, he had never stopped asserting himself as one of the major voices of bebop since Birth of the Cool.In contrast, pianist-composer Thelonious Monk, a master improviser, remained little understood.

  On 24 December 1954 the two came together in a recording studio. Davis had a hard time falling in with Monk's strange harmonies, and finally he told the piano player to be quite during his solos, preferring to rely solely on the double bass, which provided him to more space.

Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Gigi Gryce, and Max Roach (1954)

  Was what happened on the second take of 'The Man I Love' due to Thelonious Monk's frustration?
His solo began as they so often did, with an elongated deconstruction of the theme, in this case by George Gershwin. Then the rhythmic shifts and unexpected dissonances multiplied, so much so that listeners have the feeling of a staircase giving way beneath their feet. Suddenly, a long silence set in: Monk stopped playing. Losing patience, Miles Davis started playing his trumpet to fill the void - upon which the pianist, coming out of his torpor, immediately threw himself on the keyboard to take the floor again.

  Much has been said about this 'gap' of Monk's though no one knows precisely what happened between the two men. However, the incident does illuminate these fundamental figures of bebop.
Thelonious Monk, a misunderstood modern hermit, threw his harmonies on the piano the way one throws a match on an explosive. Each new combination seemed to plunge him into intense thought, out of which the next harmonies would emerge. he died in 1982, after a silence of the years, and yet his compositions are among the most frequently played today. The eccentricity of his playing has remained a touch point for reach new generation breaking with the conventions of the moment.

Thelonious Monk

  Thelonious Monk was not the first pianist condemned to silence during Miles Davis' solos. The way in which Davis distributed the roles and the order of instrumental entrances in his pieces came strange out of the theatre. He managed the time constraints of a long-playing record as a true director, multiplying the internal arrangements or modifying the atmosphere with his mute. He never hesitated to have the lights in a studio turned off to put his musicians in a particular mood. Whether he was with the arrangers of Birth of the Cool or the young musicians of his quintet, Miles was always a great dramatist.


  These many enrichment of the early material of bop among black and white musicians ensured that, despite Charlie Parker's death in 1955, there would be a definite future for this music. It would be relaunched with hard bop.

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West Coast And Cool Jazz Are Not The Exclusive Property Of White Musicians

Lester Young

In the Hollywood the sublime duels of the black saxophone players Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray were recorded in June 1947. They shared the cult of Lester Young with there white colleagues, but their sound was more expressionistic, the flow of their phrases more consistent with the demands of bebop, and their intention more aggressive. When they gave themselves fully to the indolence of phrasing 'like Lester', they did so with much more sensuality.

Dexter Gordon

On the other hand, other black musicians, on the West Coast and elsewhere, developed a taste for muffled and refined tones. When 'hard bop' which arose in the 1950s, was at its hottest, Miles Davis was continuing to cultivate a restrained cool style of playing. What he obtained, however, was not so much an effect of relaxation as impression of controlled violence that would provoke a feeling of tension in the listener.

Wardell Gray

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The West Coast And World Weariness (2)

Despite the indelible impression made by the Miles Davis nonet, West Coast music may have seemed true to the image conveyed by California beaches: sunny and carefree. But the apparent easiness hid a fundamentally disciplined innovative spirit.

Shorty Rogers

Among the names in California jazz, the trumpet player Shorty Rogers was prominent. Combining the colours of Miles Davis with the spontaneous and 'swinging' writing of Count Basie's middle years, Shorty Rogers also borrowed from the sophisticated structure of classical music.

Dave Brubeck

These borrowings were legal currency on the West Coast. Dave Brubeck's quartet popularized a number of processes foreign to jazz in this manner and encountered widespread success - so much so that even today he remains suspect in the eyes of purists.

Jimmy Giuffre

The experiments of the saxophone and clarinet player Jimmy Giuffre during the fifties, however, were far more radical. With an unusual ensemble - clarinet, trumpet and drums - he anticipated the liberties taken by 'free jazz' in the sixties. His taste for the intimate atmosphere of chamber music made him the precursor of the options that bloomed in the seventies.

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Cool Crystallizes On The West Coast

In the forties Stan Kenton, originally from the West Coast, combined swing with the spirit of 20th century Europeans composers. While they may have contributed to the frequent bombast of his work, his classical leanings - he pastiches both Stravinsky and Ravel - served as crucible for West Coast jazz. 
Indeed, it was in California that the principal players - Art Pepper,Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne and Frank Rosolino - met, all of them white and equally fascinated by Charlie Parker and Lester Young.

Stan Kenton & His Orchestra, "Night Watch" in 1951

From 1947 on Woody Herman made the 'Four Brothers' famous by putting the four unrelated sax players (three tenors and a baritone) at the centre of this band. The best known of the 'brothers' will always be Stan Getz. Discovered because of his solo in ' Early Autumn' in 1948, he set him self up as the apostle of fragility and romanticism that typified the West Coast style.

Stan Getz

Even though the majority of the West Coasters emerged from the ranks of Stan Kenton's and Woody Herman's big bands, it would be dangerous to reduce this style to a single current. Before anything else, it was a question of a geographic place where young musicians came  together, more attracted by the gentle California life-style than by the hard edges of New York. Technically able musicians, they found work in Hollywood studios and shared a taste for the subtlety and writing style that they had developed under the influence of Miles Davis' nonet.

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Evans, Mulligan and Davis

Whereas in some bands there was a very clear musical separation between the trumpets, trombones and saxophones,Gil Evans preferred the density and the richness obtained by fusing their varied tones in his arrangements. His orchestrations evoke the shimmer of colors and weight of fabrics.The seduction of the sounds took precedence, and his 'Moon Dreams' stretched itself out in dramatic torpor.

Gil Evans - Miles Davis in Studio, 1949

Among the other arrangers Miles Davis worked with for the occasion, all of them regulars at Gil Evans room, baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan was particularly innovative: he made deliberate efforts to break with the traditional eight measure form.When the harmonic structure still revered to this convention, he would shift his orchestration to the theme of 'Jeru' he called the sovereignty of the four-beat measure and rhythmic unity into question with isolated two- and three-beat measures.

Miles Davis nonet went against all the then current ideas about the lightweight quality of jazz. It seemed to demand the kind of listening one would expect Carnegie Hall, not a noisy club.

The alto sax player Lee Konitz, one of the principal soloists Miles Davis invited to the 1949 Capitol Records sessions, seemed an unlikely candidate for major role. He was to the bebop saxophone what Woody Allen is to American cinema: he had the pallor of an absentminded student, in sharp contrast to the exuberant faces of bebop. The same was true of his playing. He softened the aggressive virtuosity of Charlie Parker through the influence of the floating phrases of Lester Young and the pianist Lennie Tristano.

Gerry Mulligan in Live Performance 1940s

Tristano contributed a theoretical foundation to bop musicians discoveries and spread their ideas through his teaching. Emphasizing melody, harmony and rhythm, he streamlined bop's expressionistic aspects. The coterie of young white musicians he assembles, particularly sax players Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, tempered bop's dazzling language by adopting airy resonances and vibratoless tones. Referring to the fugue and counterpoints of Johann Sebastian Bach, these musicians loved to do two part improvisations and, with Lennie Tristano, were responsible for the first free improvisations (without any written theme or even any agreed upon harmonic pattern).

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