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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