Part 3 - "1959: The Beginning of Beyond: Conceptualizing Jazz, Jazz Changes and Invisible Missiles" - Darius Brubeck

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

“ … revealing the harmonic subtlety of the popular song … [became] the defining, exclusive characteristic of jazz.”

- Darius Brubeck

Part 3 is from the Darius Brubeck’s essay - 1959: The Beginning of Beyond - which in its final form, serves as Chapter 10 in Merwyn Cooke and David Horn, The Cambridge Companion to Jazz [2002].

As noted in the first posting, 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.

Keeping in mind Darius’ observation of 1959 as a pivotal year in the evolution of Jazz, this portion of his essay emphasizes how the conceptualization of Jazz influenced the manner in which musicians played the music and how this would move from a structural, stylistic approach to one that emphasized cyclical formats involving complex harmonies based on chord progressions; i.e. “Jazz changes.”

One consequence of this transition was the advent of what Andre Hodeir referred to as “the most advanced jazz … [that] launched invisible missiles toward the public of tomorrow.” Put another way, Jazz conventions based on recognizable melodies “developed [into] a way of conceptualizing music that has little to do with how it sounds in an ordinary sense of audition.” And by extension, the ordinary listener got lost [nuked by these “invisible missiles”] trying to discern what was going on in the music.

For those non-musicians, just run your eyes over the closing paragraphs that contain the more technical aspects of this part of the discussion, but while doing so, try to grasp the complexity of what a Jazz musician has to keep in mind and deal with during the process of improvising a solo.

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

Conceptualising jazz

The familiar fault-lines in the generally accepted version of jazz history have always appeared immediately after an influential individual or group was in a position to articulate a conception of jazz. By this I mean defining what jazz was in their time, not a manifesto of which 'direction jazz should go in1. It is as if certain musicians in each generation, after a number of years of playing gigs and 'paying dues', gradually or suddenly find the hitherto hidden 'deep structure' of everything they have done or will ever do. These revelations, 1 believe, preceded and sometimes precipitated the new movements in jazz. Of course 'movements' or sub-genres do not have to happen consecutively and there is no reason that every new direction is inevitably 'forwards'.

Musicians have always been more concerned with ways of playing music than talking about it. Nevertheless thinking about the potential of what they do is as traditional as blue notes. In his chapter on Jelly Roll Morton in Early Jazz, Schuller uses Morton's own words (transcribed from the Library of Congress recordings made by Alan Lomax) and his own exhaustive case-study of Morton's work to show that what Morton called the 'invention' of jazz was the first conceptualisation of jazz:

To Morton the composer, ragtime and blues were not just musical styles, but specific musical forms... These were as well defined as the sonata form was to a 'classical' composer, and Morton accepted them as active continuing traditions. At this point Morton's claim to be the 'originator of jazz' begins to take on a degree of plausibility. In his mind and perhaps in actual fact Morton had isolated as 'jazz, an area not covered by the blues or ragtime. Since he applied a smoother more swinging syncopation and a greater degree of improvisational license to a variety of materials, such as ragtime, opera and French and Spanish popular songs and dances, Morton's claim to have invented jazz no longer seems so rash.   [1968, 139-41]

Morton's statement that 'jazz is a style that can be applied to any type of tune' and his use of jazz' as a verb, as in 'jazzing' the 'Miserere' from Il Trovatore (see page 163), make it clear that the essence of jazz (noun and verb) is process and perhaps manner, but not content. It must be remembered that the American popular song was early, but not original, material for jazzing. 

A final comment from Schuller's chapter on Morton lends some strong historical backing to the 'formalism' that was decried as infiltrating and diluting modern jazz: 'Morton's vision of jazz entailed contrast and variety-instrumental, timbral, textural; in short, structural.' This aspect of Morton's vision was de-emphasised by bebop with its formulaic head-solos-head approach to performance. (The 'structure' talked about when musicological terminology is used to explain why an improvised bebop solo is 'great' is not what Morton had in mind.)

Valid conceptualisations are holistic by implication but in practice it often seems that a disproportionate amount of attention is focused on one parameter at a time. In Morton's music, jazz was structurally complex but also harmonically primitive and improvisationally constrained compared to later styles. For soloists to soar it was found that one needed cyclical rather than additive forms and simpler arrangements. The professionally composed 'popular song' replaced traditional sources like hymns, marches and other borrowings referred to by Morton and his contemporaries and the great challenge ahead was the 'jazzing-up' of complex harmony.

Jazz changes and ‘invisible missiles’

Bebop drew on various and new sources, including modern European composers, but by far the greatest influence was the immediate past and present of jazz itself. The conventions of jazz playing had attained stability in the Swing Era, and Art Tatum and other piano virtuosi, professional arrangers working for Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, the Ellington-Strayhorn team and composers working in Hollywood were constantly pushing harmony towards greater complexity. Harmony in the 1940s was dense, functional yet richly chromatic and highly mobile. Jazz musicians, though popularly celebrated as 'rhythm cats' in the commercial media, had become chord-meisters. Just being able to play the changes', let alone improvise a coherent chorus on songs like 'Have You Met Miss Jones', 'Invitation' or 'Stella By Starlight', is still an indication of sophistication.

Playing 'standards' means creating culturally and musically transformed versions of recognised Broadway or Hollywood songs. Eventually this became the art of playing an alternative version to prior jazz versions while the non-jazz original faded from memory, leaving only the tune and chord progression. In this way, a 'standard' is infinitely re-adaptable. For jazz musicians, hearing 'the changes' is so ingrained and natural that they barely notice that it is probably only jazz musicians who automatically relate to music as being essentially 'the changes'. Most can name a tune they know well within a few seconds of hearing it, even if the excerpt starts in the middle of a solo and is played with a different feel or tempo, using different instruments from those in any previous version. In other words they have developed a way of conceptualising music that has little to do with how it sounds in an ordinary sense of audition.

Jazz musicians adapted and improved a notational system of alphabetical chord symbols, originally used as early as the 1910s for labelling ukulele or guitar tablature in sheet-copy versions of popular songs. For example, the first two measures of 'I Got Rhythm' would have four box diagrams showing frets, strings and finger position labelled thus: C6, Amin., Dmin., G7 (not indicating chord function, as in the analytical notation I, VI, II, V). Published 'stock arrangements' for dance bands included piano parts consisting of chords in staff notation, but besides being literally harder to see, staff notation seemed to require restating identical chord voicings chorus after chorus and, worse, articulating them in the same rhythm. It is difficult to think of one recording where such a part was actually played. Similarly, bass parts were notated bass parts, but players who understood how to construct bass lines by connecting chord tones usually ignored them and wrote in the chord progression according to the alphabetical system, referring to staff notation only where a specific bass line was required. Guitar parts were always in chord symbols and therefore became the lingua franca of rhythm-section players even as the traditional role of 'rhythm guitar' was becoming obsolete in the 1940s. In small combos where every player (not only the soloist of the moment) is improvising most of the time, the normal and easiest way to coordinate performance by visual means is to give every player the same information. All musicians (including poor readers and regardless of instrument) know how to work from a lead-sheet consisting of the melody in treble clef with chord symbols above the line and sometimes the lyrics.

Chord symbols consist of the letter name of the root, a symbol such as a () - for minor plus numbers if needed. F-7 therefore means F minor seventh. If F-7 occurs at the beginning of a measure of 4/4 time, it means the harmony starts on the downbeat (not that the pianist must play the chord on 'one') and if it comes near the middle of the bar, F-7 is the chord 'change' on beat three. The merit of this system is that it leaves so much up to the musician. Chord symbols do not specify register, inversion, top note, doublings or density. They do show the harmonic rhythm, in other words, the sequence and distribution of the ‘changes'. You can write 'the changes' for a tune on any scrap of paper that comes to hand - menus and napkins become bass parts between sets - or, if there isn't even a pen available, the pianist or bass player can just call them out. (Not exactly professional behaviour, but who hasn't done this once or twice?)

There was no authoritative source for chord symbols so there were inconsistencies and disagreements, especially regarding notating extensions beyond the seventh. Does F-7+9 mean add the ninth (G) or add and raise the ninth (G#)? Of course musicians could decide for themselves which sounded best and which seemed logical. (G# is A-flat enharmonically, which adds nothing to an F minor chord, so G is the right answer.) Certainly by the 1950s, jazz musicians had to know some 'theory' whether or not they thought of it as that. Composers such as Milhaud, Stravinsky, Bartok and even Schoenberg were icons of highbrow modernism to jazz musicians, but not ones to emulate on the gig. Playing changes was, at first anyway, an exploration and re-codification of the inherited tonal system before there could be an 'attack' on it. Rhythm-and-blues and urban blues used improvisation, a heavy beat and much else in common with 1940s jazz, but revealing the harmonic subtlety of the popular song was the defining, exclusive characteristic of jazz.”

To be continued ….