Part 1 -"1959: The Beginning of Beyond: Introduction and Historical Records" - Darius Brubeck

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The following serves as an explanation about how Darius Brubeck’s essay - 1959: The Beginning of Beyond - came about. 

In its final form, it serves as Chapter 10 in Merwyn Cooke and David Horn, The Cambridge Companion to Jazz [2002].

It’s a long piece, so we have used the subject headings within the essay as a means of presenting it on these pages in smaller samplings.

Darius is not the first to observe 1959 as a pivotal year in the evolution of Jazz but he is one of the few to have written about it in a broader context, one that goes well beyond the immediate impact of developments that took place that year.

We wrote to him to request his permission to offer it as a blog feature and he kindly gave his consent for us to do so.

[As a point in passing, I would add Charles Mingus' Mingus Ah-Um to the list of significant recordings released in 1959.]

© Copyright ® Darius Brubeck, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“The idea for this chapter came from Mervyn Cooke's suggestion that we jointly organise a seminar - on jazz in 1959 - at the University of Nottingham. As soon as I began I found the choice of year felicitous both as a decisive cultural moment in establishing an autonomous art-form and as a year for musical landmarks recorded in every style of jazz (from mainstream to avant-garde). Nineteen fifty-nine was the year when jazz, as it is now, began. Jazz before this time is now largely regarded as historic, as music usually identified by regional (e.g., Harlem school, Chicago style) and temporal (early jazz, Swing Era) associations. From 1959 onwards, it more strongly resembles universal current practice, indicating - and without condescension to pre-1959 jazz - that this is the beginning of contemporary jazz. This is easily demonstrated by the still pervasive familiarity of certain of the recordings made in that year. Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), Time Out (Dave Brubeck), Giant Steps (John Coltrane) and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come are albums that can scarcely be unknown or un-owned by jazz aficionados - and the 1960s had not even officially begun. Perhaps they began when John F. Kennedy was elected to the US Presidency and Robert Frost read his poetry at the Inauguration ceremony. In his speech, the young president raised the image of a relay in which 'the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans'. This was turnover time in American culture and politics, as it was in jazz.

All reliable histories recount and analyse the musical achievements at and around this time and the broader discussion of American culture hinted at above is beyond the scope of this chapter. What is offered here is an interpretation of how and why so much happened when it did and the impact of this history on present-day jazz reality. The jazz life is as different from what it was 40 years ago as every other kind of life, but there has been surprisingly little discontinuity in the music. This is remarkable, given the breadth of outside influences and, of course, the many major artists who have flourished in the intervening years.

While the aforementioned album titles themselves proclaim new directions and the artists involved were simultaneously pushing the boundaries of jazz outwards, jazz in general was 'groovin' high' and definitely in forward gear that year. Wes Montgomery signed with Riverside, Thelonious Monk recorded his famous Town Hall Concert and two of Miles Davis's sidemen on Kind of Blue, John Coltrane and Bill Evans, were recording as leaders while Miles himself was working on Sketches of Spain with Gil Evans. Further, John Lewis and Duke Ellington composed feature-film scores, Odds Against Tomorrow and Anatomy of a Murder respectively. Nineteen fifty-nine also saw the term 'bossa nova' used for the first time (in connection with 'Desafinado' by Antonio Carlos Jobim) and the publication of the second edition of George Russell's almost mystical treatise on music theory, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation for Improvisation. It was the year Eric Dolphy moved to New York, of Johnny Dankworth's success and also of the infamous riot at Newport (the first regular US jazz festival, founded by George Wein in 1954), and much else. Studious fans could prolong this scene-setting recitative of 1959 to chapter length. The music that was recorded in that year is enough to flag it as one of unusual creativity in jazz even in the context of the extraordinary period from the mid-1950s through to the mid-1960s when American artists and intellectuals in every discipline were successfully modernising the cultural landscape. Indeed, it was a 'golden era' in terms of the high quality of art, music, dance, film, literature, drama and even television, one which was embraced by audiences large enough to confer full celebrity status on a few jazz musicians and many other artists in every field.

Historical records

The year 1959/60 is a sort of axis of symmetry between the first jazz recordings (1917) and the end of the twentieth century. It is often stated that jazz is the first music almost fully documented by sound recording. The annotated boxed set of records From Spirituals to Swing, made from Carnegie Hall concerts starring Benny Goodman in 1938 and 1939, only reached the market in 1959 and has remained the foundation of many enthusiasts' collections ever since. Prominently featuring Count Basie with members of his and Goodman's bands, with gospel, blues and boogie-woogie musicians representing African-American tributaries to the then modern music, the Carnegie Hall concerts were the first public presentation of jazz as a historical music, but it was really the 1959 release - which sold over a million copies - that popularised this idea. It is interesting to reflect that a sort of manufactured historical document in 1939 was, by 1959, really historical. In the late 1950s, as compilations of archival jazz and folk recordings became available, the relatively new medium of long-playing records made it possible to hear jazz history without being an expert collector. Anthologies compiled from early commercial releases of jazz, blues and 'field recordings' of African-American music in the Deep South posited and fixed (in time) musical traditions that became canonised as the roots of Jazz. What had been mostly accessible to researchers as 'oral history' was becoming accessible to everybody as 'aural history', but always, of course, in the shape of a packaged product, which we now might see as somewhat suspect - not in terms of the authenticity or simple worthiness of the music presented, but for the criterion for selection. I have yet to be convinced that it is fundamentally wrong or misleading to teach a 'canon' in jazz studies, but for better or worse this is how it started. Through the compilation of historical tracks, be they rescued from deepest archival obscurity or re-packaged hits, the musical past is constructed as leading up to something - in this case, modern jazz. This in turn encouraged people to believe, correctly, that modern jazz and jazz LPs could have long-term artistic and commercial value and would also be worth collecting; or, from the record companies' point of view, re-packaging.

Even though members of the first generation of jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong had some good years left, Sidney Bechet's death in 1959 foreshadowed the inevitable passing of the New Orleans/Chicago era. Billie Holiday and Lester Young, who directly influenced modern jazz, particularly the cool style of the 1950s, also died in 1959. The 1950s generation of musicians that grew up listening to them, to Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Goodman and Basie, and later to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, had all but taken over from those with local and historical connections with early jazz. Born in the 1920s and later, they were entering their prime in the 1960s as mature talents, hitting the scene just behind the watershed of bebop. They pursued careers with a full awareness that jazz is both a changing modern music and one with its own history and traditions. They were, on the whole, musically educated, experienced and inclined to experiment. This was not avant-gardism for its own sake. Making a living in jazz was going to depend on the appeal of the music per se rather than the previous built-in marketability of social dancing and jazz versions of popular songs. A 'personal voice', always prized and admired in jazz circles, was now also a personal 'approach' (in the jargon of the time) to music itself, more than just a 'sound' and some signature 'licks'. Many musicians felt that putting theory to work in practical and individual terms was going to be important to their survival, so it was important to 'study'. Interest in music theory and theories about music was not 'academic' in the narrow sense, but part of finding an approach.”

To be continued with -

A critical debate at the end of the 1950s