Part 6- "1959: The Beginning of the Beyond - The 1959 Recordings" - Darius Brubeck

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

“The freedom to import or invent musical resources fundamentally changed the role of the composer-performer in jazz. Like Jelly Roll Morton, one could go on inventing jazz or take it as a given. The jazz composer-performer can choose to be a creator within a form and/or creator of forms. The difference, as of 1959, is that jazz was at last strong enough to venture beyond established conventions without losing its identity.”...

“There were many earlier victories on the socio-cultural level, for example, the 1938 and 1939 Carnegie Hall concerts, but the collective breakthrough in 1959 was the decisive emancipation of jazz from its popular past; a break not only from being seen as popular entertainment and dance music, but from being defined by the very (musical) characteristics that lasted even through the so-called bebop revolution. Modern jazz was not a rejection of tradition but, like modern 'classical' music, was built on re-conceptualising what was already possible. Present-day jazz pedagogy and theory within the jazz tradition is a lasting and powerful link with this period.”

- Darius Brubeck

Part 6 is from 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 and having previously considered and delineated the factors building up to why this was so, he now turns to a discussion about the specific albums that created this critical juncture - “the beginnings of the beyond” - in the development of Jazz.”[paragraphing modified in places to fit the blog platform].

My thanks to Darius for allowing me the privilege of representing his work on these pages.

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

“The 1959 Recordings”

“Since 1959, unresolved questions surround the alternative approaches to harmonic activity as the primary controlling factor in jazz performance and composition. If playing 'the changes' can be questioned, so can every other 'given.’ The almost simultaneous popularisation of devices that were undoubtedly known but barely used in jazz is no accident. I will now turn to the four recordings I listed at the start of this chapter, without meaning to imply that four very different musicians were knowingly working in tandem or constituted a self-conscious 'movement'. Along the way I pointed out contemporaneous critical and technical concepts and now we can examine what these records 'mean' in jazz history and why these 40-year-old recordings remain both contemporary and historical. All recorded in 1959, they confirm that jazz was not just on yet another new course but was rapidly expanding like a galaxy. To risk stating the obvious, the collection of music represented here does not add up to a new style; on the contrary, it signals the break-up of a broad consensus (already charged with centrifugal forces) and perhaps, with hindsight, the last chapter of the collectivism and evolutionary narrative. Each record included in this set showcases an idea that contributes to the overall stockpile of jazz resources, and the net result was to remove from jazz Mehegan's 'circumscribed limits of a diatonic harmonic system, 4/4 time, eighth-note, quarter-note, half-note time composite, eight bar sections and the various attendant qualities we have been accustomed to' (see above, p. 181/ Mehegan reference in Part 1). Taken together, these landmarks of modern jazz at the end of the 1950s anticipate the 1960s as the epoch of stretching the form. And, by the way, they did call it 'jazz'.

Of all of the 'experimental' albums ever made, only Kind of Blue seems perfect and still able to please everybody. Time Out by Dave Brubeck was attacked as too 'commercial' while anything by Coleman is still too 'far out', just too different, for mainstream cultural assimilation. Leaving aside anything we know about the subsequent careers of the musicians involved, these three albums are high-quality realisations of their creators' artistic goals at the time; in every sense of the word, good records. In spite of its historic importance as a 'great' album, Giant Steps (with all due respect to Coltrane) sounds thrown together. Canonic status is accorded on other grounds: it represents a crucial stage in a celebrated artist's growth, premieres of compositions that will be performed for the rest of time, a strong declaration of stylistic stance.

An appreciation of jazz differs from the way one appreciates classical music. The 'rough edges', sloppy execution and inconsistency within some jazz performances are not there by design, but that they remain there at all in a medium that allows for retakes, editing or rejecting a track that is unacceptable, points to other priorities. Jazz recordings that are considered good (and of course there is debate about which these are) have a long shelf-life and usually contain some brilliant unrepeatable moments framed within identifiable musical contexts that are interesting in themselves and capable of replication elsewhere. The context - composition, the ensemble, the style and maybe certain 'licks' in the solos - is all that alternate takes should have in common, so from the standpoint of a musician making a recording, the unrepeatable is most important. 

Next priority is the realisation of the composition, or concept, to the extent that there is one. Sometimes the first priority is to get down on record a prototype that can be improved on. But choosing between takes that equally get the idea across the brilliant improvised passage reverts to priority number one. Jazz musicians often hear or play 'what a piece is about' and are satisfied if the idea - in musical terms - is made sufficiently clear. Ideally, everyone plays the right notes, in time, in tune and with the right feeling and the instruments in perfect balance and sounding better under studio conditions with controlled reverberation than they would 'live.’ 

Musicians accept that this cannot be always the case and listeners have learned too that high-quality jazz moments and imaginative ideas are worth more than flawless execution devoid of risk and freedom. That said, polished recordings such as those made by the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Miles Davis Sextet and the Dave Brubeck Quartet are not to be written off jazz-wise as less spontaneous, but rather the result of the same musicians working together long enough to develop a collective consistency of execution. (The Shape of Jazz to Come is spectacularly 'tight' in a less obvious way.) Giant Steps did not document the collective effort of a working band but the leader's material and musical ideas.

Miles Davis was first identified with the bebop movement of the 1940s and, from then on, seemed to lead the way in every new movement in modern jazz. Kind of Blue was not so much a revolution as a realisation, a supreme realisation of achieved simplicity. This is music that is expressive and cool, modern and simple, intellectually conceived - it is explicitly based on a theoretical idea — yet spontaneous in execution. Declaring 'war on the chord' meant no longer having to race around a slalom course of harmonic 'changes'. For example, the opening track, So What, uses just two chords in 32 bars. In the album notes, Bill Evans refers to Davis's compositions not as 'tunes' but as 'frameworks': 'As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time. Miles Davis presents here frameworks which are exquisite in their simplicity and yet contain all that is necessary to stimulate performance with a sure reference to the primary conception.'

Kind of Blue has been extensively written about and has by now, in a Milesian, low-key way, worked its way into mass culture (see, for example, Khan, Kind of Blues: The Making of a Masterpiece, 2000). I have already discussed some of the background to modal jazz. Kind of Blue is not the first jazz record to 'use modes' consciously and of course it is not just one technical factor but a fully integrated aesthetic achievement, including the performances of all members of the sextet, that make it the modal 'classic.’ [Mark Gridley, Listening Guide to Kind of Blue, in Jazz Styles: History and Analysis, 1997].

In the same year that he recorded Kind of Blue as a member of the Miles Davis Sextet, Coltrane pushed working with chord changes to the nth degree on his own Giant Steps. Poet and sociologist LeRoi Jones, writing in 1963, was also aware of the war on the chord:

If Coleman's music can be called nonchordal, John Coltrane's music is fanatically chordal. In his solos, Coltrane seems almost to want to separate each note of the chord (and its overtones) into separate entities and suck out even the most minute musical potential. With each instance, Coltrane redefines his accompanying chords as kinetic splinters of melody, rather than using the generalised block sound of the chord as the final determinant of the music's direction and shape.  [Blues People: Negro Music in White America, p.228]

Certainly after Giant Steps Coltrane had nothing to prove as a virtuoso. Tunes using 'Coltrane changes' (progressions in thirds, semitones and fourths, perhaps inspired by Hasaan), along with transcriptions of his solos, are still the advanced literature of the tenor saxophone and indeed for chordal jazz in a modal era. If most musicians learned So What because it was so simple, everyone had to learn Giant Steps because it was so hard. Coltrane's short career at the top began with posing and solving technical problems (but with passionate commitment), and ended with smashing his way through layers of complexity to pure expression. Perhaps he was looking for the answer to the rhetorical question, 'So what?' The year 1959 finds him still near the beginning of this self-described spiritual journey and at this stage his music is intellectual; he is preoccupied with its technical elements rather than the esoteric musician as conduit for divine energy he later became.

For Ornette Coleman, playing on chord changes would have been just 'playing the background', the equivalent of not really improvising at all. Naming an album that demonstrated his harmolodic alternative, The Shape of Jazz to Come was an affront or at best a puzzle to many musicians. Coleman's approach seemed a crude abandonment of hard-earned skills and the collective wisdom of two or three generations. 'Free jazz' was a rejection of deeply felt criteria of 'validity' so painstakingly learned and observed by jazz musicians. By 1959, most took for granted that their work happened within a tradition that they had inherited and that would outlive them. 

Coleman's re-shaping of jazz 'to come' was uncomfortable in this context. Most disquietingly of all, his music could be quite beautiful. It was correctly predicted by the nay-sayers that whatever merit there might be in Coleman's own music, the influence of free jazz as a movement would have the effect of driving people away. It did, and this had real-world consequences. The resolute traditionalism of our present age is perhaps meant to protect the jazz scene against a similar economic catastrophe in the future. In the 1960s, free jazz won adherents even among established players like Coltrane. To the average listener, the problem with much of free jazz had less to do with not being 'based on the chord' than with the strident and deliberately 'unmusical' sounds often associated with it. Nevertheless, in the long run, the mainstream benefited from avant-garde explorations of an enlarged jazz sound-world, e.g., how instruments are played, which sounds are musical and how sound is organised. The avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s generously opened up a non-imitative space for improvisers, especially European musicians, for whom the disciplines and re-worked 'standards' (tunes) of bebop were of marginal relevance to their artistic goals and culture.

After the intellectual intensity surrounding the three above-mentioned albums, to include a popular hit like Time Out may seem like dragging Star Wars into a discussion of avant-garde cinema, but it really did open up a 'final frontier' of jazz. Like Kind of Blue, it was an album entirely dedicated to working out a particular musical idea. Steve Race's sleeve notes begin:

Should some cool-minded Martian come to earth to check on the state of our music, he might play through 10,000 jazz records before he found one that wasn't in common 4/4 time... Dave Brubeck... is really the first to explore the uncharted seas... The outcome of his experiments is this album.

Experimenting was much closer to Brubeck's outlook than hit-making. In fact, the production of Time Out was undertaken somewhat in a spirit of artistic rebellion under a cloud of corporate disapproval. Columbia Records did not like the idea of an album of 'originals', the odd time-signatures concept or even the cover art he wanted. Because Brubeck (like Davis) was one of the top-selling jazz artists on the label, Columbia agreed to release Time Out, but only on condition that he also record an album of standards (Gone with the Wind, CL450984, 1959)

In spite of 'war' rhetoric, chords are not really destroyed by modes and/or free playing any more than 4/4 is rendered obsolete by 5/4. Soon after Kind of Blue, the chord-density Davis cleared out of his kind of jazz came back as second growth in the shape of 'modal' changes, compound harmonies, chord shapes and clusters over pedal points, primarily through the influence of McCoy Tyner, Coltrane's pianist during his 'classic' Quartet years. The chord, though weakened, has not yet surrendered completely and unconditionally, and jazz musicians still play and compose 'tunes' based on 'changes'.

The freedom to import or invent musical resources fundamentally changed the role of the composer-performer in jazz. Like Jelly Roll Morton, one could go on inventing jazz or take it as a given. The jazz composer-performer can choose to be a creator within a form and/or creator of forms. The difference, as of 1959, is that jazz was at last strong enough to venture beyond established conventions without losing its identity.

In the twenty-first century the idealistic notion of an 'autonomous art form', especially one like jazz with popular roots, requires some qualification. What I have been writing about relates mostly to the internal methodologies of jazz because, as we have seen, this is what certain leading musicians and intellectuals were engaged with in 1959. Of course this engagement did not happen in a historical or cultural vacuum. Contributing factors ranged from the industry-wide changeover to the stereo 33 1/3 LP record around 1957 to broad social trends such as the surge in higher education affecting musicians and audiences in post-war America, economic growth and nationalism (the decline of regionalism) in culture, electronic media and commerce, the appearance of sub-cultures identified with alternative expressions in the arts and the vexed, pervasive, dynamics of race. Zen and Existentialism proclaimed the reality of the here and now and the modernist spirit encouraged experimentalism for its own sake. In the otherwise ambiguous jazz world, a new phase was clearly ushered in by 'music about music', as demonstrated in the four albums briefly discussed in this chapter. I therefore considered the background of intellectualism, technical means and critical expectation in order to understand the amazingly rapid success and recognition by an elite and canonisation of what was, of course, radical innovation. Mehegan's blustering in Down Beat would not seem ridiculous to us now if Kind of Blue, Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Time Out had not been by and large accepted first of all by the dynamic artistic community in which they arose.

There is a relatively simple answer to the question asked earlier about the similarity between jazz now and 40 [60] years ago, but it does require a cultural perspective on 'internalist' matters. Jazz musicians and their advocates were entering a further stage of the long struggle for legitimacy. Of course, the greater part of this struggle had (and has) to do with minimising the practical consequences of long standing elitist and racial prejudices. For cultural legitimacy to be a prize worth having, jazz musicians also had to succeed in their internal struggle to invent or discover appropriate values. Articulate critics, academics and musicians were inevitably drawn to formalist terminology and experimentation, and were challenged to create as well as replicate. Criteria in the classical world, though not usually useful in valorising performances in terms that jazz musicians themselves thought relevant, were much closer to the level of practical criticism that was needed.[Gabbard, The Jazz Canon and Its Consequences, in Jazz Among the Discourses, 1995].

There were many earlier victories on the socio-cultural level, for example, the 1938 and 1939 Carnegie Hall concerts, but the collective breakthrough in 1959 was the decisive emancipation of jazz from its popular past; a break not only from being seen as popular entertainment and dance music, but from being defined by the very (musical) characteristics that lasted even through the so-called bebop revolution. Modern jazz was not a rejection of tradition but, like modern 'classical' music, was built on re-conceptualising what was already possible. Present-day jazz pedagogy and theory within the jazz tradition is a lasting and powerful link with this period.

The pre-1959 historical canon was already in place; the best of Morton, Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, Goodman, Parker (and of course many names that fit alongside or in between) and the present-day canon - Miles, Coltrane and all the rest - was simply added to it and is now taught around the world. The evolutionary hypothesis (in its technical aspects) works deceptively well up to this point, but for the longer future and beyond, the organic analogy with its corollary of artistic progress breaks down. It would be unfair to write off all the music of the 1970s and 1980s, but this was not a period of comparable importance for the art-form as a whole. The recent re-emergence of acoustic post-bop based on the 1960s and the unassailability of the modernist canon would seem to mark, if not 1959 exactly, then not very long after as the beginning of the present era. The reason there has been relatively little change over such a period is that a secure sense of cultural legitimacy, musical values and intellectual purpose was achieved with reference to music that was produced at the end of the 1950s. Significantly, not by fixing limits but by destabilising them, jazz remains an open, experimental field grounded in now universally accepted traditions.”

DISCOGRAPHY

The following albums referred to in the text are available as CD reissues at the time of writing:

Brubeck, Dave, Time Out, CK 65122

Coleman, Ornette, The Shape of Jazz to Come, Atlantic 7567-81339-2

Coltrane, John, Giant Steps, Atlantic 8122-75203-2, Rhino R275203

Davis, Miles, Kind of Blue, CK 64935

Goodman, Benny and various, From Spirituals to Swing, Vanguard VCD2-47/48

Mingus, Charles, Mingus Ah Um, CK 65512

Schuller, Gunther, The Birth of the Third Stream, CK 64929, 1996

[CK = Columbia Legacy]

Part 5 - "1959: The Beginning of the Beyond - The Lydian Chromatic Concept and The Third Stream" - Darius Brubeck

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

“Russell codified the modal approach to harmony (using scales instead of chords) in a theoretical treatise that he says was inspired by a casual remark the eighteen-year-old Miles Davis made to him in 1944: Miles said he wanted to learn all the changes and I reasoned that he might try to find the closest scale for every chord ... Davis popularised those liberating ideas in recordings like Kind of Blue, undermining the entire harmonic foundation of bop that had inspired him and Russell in the first place.”

[Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz, 1998, 6]

Part 5 is from 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, the factors building up to why this was so from this portion of his essay emphasizes “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, the first text written specifically as Jazz theory and The Third Stream which had the potential to be created from a melding of Jazz and Classical music.”[paraphrase]

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

“The Lydian Chromatic Concept”

“The first text written specifically as jazz theory was The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation by George Russell, first published in 1953 and issued in a revised edition in 1959. Russell is a composer, teacher and sometime bandleader who had a great influence on the rising third-stream intelligentsia of the 1950s and early 1960s. He studied composition with Stephen Wolpe and also wrote scores for Gillespie. He taught at Lenox in 1958 and 1959, which gave his ideas the most important exposure imaginable at the time, (He later taught at New England Conservatory from the late 1960s.) As an academically trained composer he added unusual technical skill at manipulating structure, harmony and balance, affecting the usual concerns of jazz composition, which are the interplay of improvised solos and arranged ensemble passages. He was a daring and rigorous experimentalist as a composer (see, for example, All About Rosie and Living Time). Perhaps because he did not project himself enough as a performer (on piano) his music is little known to the public but it remains controversial, influential and respected within professional circles. Whatever the ultimate verdict on The Lydian Chromatic Concept, there is no doubt he was an inspirational teacher. All About Rosie (re-issued on Schuller, The Birth of the Third Stream) is a singular accomplishment: it is mainly the exciting piano solo by Bill Evans that gives it an aura of historic specificity, but in style and conception it sounds as if it could have been written much more recently.

Unlike its respected author, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation for Improvisation (to use its full title) has a mixed reputation, probably because, according to Russell, 'The Lydian Chromatic Concept is as large as all of the music that has been written or that could be written in the equal tempered tuning system.” ... Unfortunately, his attempt to present and prove such an audacious comprehensive theory sometimes resulted in unreadably turgid discourse burdened with jargon, yet the work's influence has spread far beyond those who have actually read it:

Russell codified the modal approach to harmony (using scales instead of chords) in a theoretical treatise that he says was inspired by a casual remark the eighteen-year-old Miles Davis made to him in 1944: Miles said he wanted to learn all the changes and I reasoned that he might try to find the closest scale for every chord ... Davis popularised those liberating ideas in recordings like Kind of Blue, undermining the entire harmonic foundation of bop that had inspired him and Russell in the first place.

[Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz, 1998, 6]

Davis, who according to this story was indirectly responsible for the Lydian Chromatic Concept, is reported to have given it its most succinct formulation, something like 'F should be where middle C is on the piano.' What this means is that instead of basing pitch relations on the major scale from C to C, our basic scale should be the Lydian mode, the white notes from F to F. The reasons given in Russell are acoustic (overtone series), historical (the major/minor scale system was a compromise which allowed for cadential harmony using the subdominant) and musical (the dissonant sound of fourth against major third making the fourth an 'avoid note’ in major harmony). The series, moving up the cycle of fifths seven times starting from F, is as follows: F-C-G-D-A-E-B (-F). The augmented fourth (in either direction) is the last interval in this series, taking it back to F. Rearrange these notes in stepwise order and the result is the Lydian scale. To get to an enharmonic [notes that are the same in pitch though bear different names] version of the 'perfect fourth' of the major scale (A flat) would require going right to the end of the series of fifths. (Continuing one more fifth would land on E# which is F, the starting note.) A#, that is, B flat, is therefore the remotest possible note from the Lydian tonic. 'Enharmonic' distinctions are inaudible and therefore meaningless to Russell who takes equal temperament for granted. Why do we have a major scale with a perfect fourth rather than a Lydian scale and its derivatives?

The major scale probably emerged as the predominating scale of Western music, because within its seven tones lies the most fundamental harmonic progression of the classical era... the tonic major chord on C... the sub-dominant major chord on F ... the dominant seventh chord on G - thus, the major scale resolves to its tonic major chord. The Lydian scale is the sound of its tonic major chord.                            

   - [Russell 1959, iii, iv]

This is original, brilliant, even self-evident, but no one had quite said it before. The practical implications are indeed far-reaching and amount to a theory that works both for playing and teaching jazz. It follows then that Davis's original aim can be fulfilled by studying what are now called chord-scale relationships; this is, in fact, what jazz students are taught and there is of course much material (published by Aebersold) that supports teaching in this way. Davis's Kind of Blue is often used to illustrate what chord-scale relationships mean in practice and a pedagogy based on an ahistoric [lack of concern for history] but serviceable system of modes (of major and melodic minor plus synthetic scales, etc.) is how improvisation is formally taught. For example, one of the first pieces I teach beginners is 'So What', which gives a convincing demonstration that the Dorian mode and the minor-seventh chord (with all extensions) are co-extensive; somewhat like describing light in physics as either a wave or a particle depending on what you need the description for.

Russell himself, perhaps thinking more as a composer and theorist than as a musician in search of an 'approach', took things in a somewhat more obscure direction, inventing special terminology (e.g., Vertical polymodality' and 'auxiliary diminished scale'). The details of this aspect of the Lydian Chromatic Concept seem so far not to have infiltrated practice today but the basic principle of chord-scale is now pervasive, even cliched.

Russell was not merely tinkering with abstract relationships for the sake of it. His vision also had an observational and predictive dimension that was proven correct by the end of the 1960s:

Since the bop period, a war on the chord has been going on I think... [Parker] probably represented the last full blossoming of a jazz music that was based on chords... Even the need to do extended form pieces, whether successful or not, is a desire to get away from a set of chord changes.                                                                             - [Russell 1959, xx]

Ian Carr (Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography, 1999) believes that Davis's mature career can be plotted as a gradual reduction of harmonic activity. The decade that started with Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain ended with In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.

The justifications, precedents and far-reaching claims Russell crowds into his oddly organised treatise tend to complicate rather than clarify, but the Lydian Chromatic Concept meant liberation from the obsolete concerns and dictates of ‘legit’ academic theory which is based on a different tradition of tonal organisation.

Even back in 1959, the 'war on the chord' escalated to thermonuclear proportions with the advent of free jazz and [Ornette] Coleman's harmolodic theory, which he has not systematically defined. His music generally seems to include reference to a tonal centre but no key or tonal hierarchy, accidental harmonies generated by moving parts (considerable parallelism) but no set sequences of chords, and communicative and often beautiful or humorous melodies.

In recent correspondence on these jazz theories, Barry Kernfeld wrote to me:

the theoretical underpinnings of harmolodic theory are extremely suspect, even more so than those of George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept, but there is no question that these sorts of casual, home-made approaches to jazz theory have been of great value to performers and educators, helping them to capture, or to communicate, through inferential or emotive means, some of the processes involved in jazz improvisation.

To which I replied:

I think the word 'theory' in Coleman's case has to be taken in a less technical - as in music theory - sense and recast as something like 'critical theory', 'reception theory'; even a musical version of relativity theory. It is an outlook or idea rather than a process of analysis or a set of instructions. 

My workaday answer to 'what does harmolodic mean?' is 'the theory that melody, harmony and rhythm should not be considered separately, especially in improvisation, because they all generate each other'.

My workaday answer is an example of both the strength and weakness of formalism. It isolates a principle which Coleman has made the centre of his musical universe just as Russell has made the Lydian scale — 'the sound of its tonic major chord'- the centre of his. On the other hand, my quasi-definition cannot explain any particular musical result or why there was a need for harmolodic theory. Coleman must have had an intuitive cultural motive for dreaming up a word like "harmolodic' and making it stick by playing out its implications throughout a career spanning decades. Coleman came from obscurity and gutbucket rhythm-and-blues gigs to the foremost intellectual forum of jazz in Lenox, encoding as 'theory' the emotional, primal and sacral substratum of a music now on the threshold of entering its academic phase. He renders unto academe a substantial and varied body of work and a word for it, a technical-sounding neologism of dual 'signifyin, and formalist connotations. Now it is up to us, not him, to do the explaining. I think Kernfeld is right about the pedagogic importance of leaving a path open to continue communication 'through inferential or emotive means, some of the processes involved in jazz improvisation'. I would add, in the creation of music generally.

The Third Stream

'Third stream’ ideology offered the potential of the two great mainstreams of western music, jazz and classical, blending into a third style. For those who have not yet heard The Birth of the Third Stream, 'blending jazz and classical' could have kitsch connotations ranging from Paul Whiteman's orchestral jazz in the late 1920s to modern popularisations such as the often disparaged Bird with Strings, Jacques Loussier playing Bach accompanied by brushes on the snare drum, and orchestral 'pops' arrangements of Gershwin tunes sung by an opera star or even with a lonely jazz soloist in front. That third stream was entirely something else will become clear to any jazz fan looking at the list of composers on The Birth of the Third Stream: Jimmy Giuffre, J. J. Johnson, John Lewis, Charles Mingus, Gunther Schuller and George Russell. The majority of the players are jazz musicians (for example, Bill Evans, Bernie Glow, Miles Davis, Urbie Green and the composers) and, other than the basses and Barry Galbraith on guitar, there are no strings attached.

Despite well-made manifesto albums [two Atlantic LPs by the Modern Jazz Quartet] on major labels in the 1950s and a prolific and respected advocate in Schuller, third-stream music seems at first to have been only a movement of its time. Did any "invisible missiles' arrive in the future? Record producer George Avakian writes in the liner notes to The Birth of the Third Stream: 'With the passing years, it's been said that one doesn't hear much about third stream any more. There is a good reason for this; it has been absorbed into the mainstream.' Some of Schuller's new liner notes for this re-release contain the same message:

Looking back to those heady, exciting days of 40 years ago, it is also fascinating to observe how the technical and stylistic horizons of musicians have broadened and deepened in the intervening years... it is commonplace today to find many performers who will readily deal with any kind of music: improvised or written ... Varese and Stravinsky... Mingus and Coleman ... The world of music in the 1950s was still for the most part divided among sharply defined lines of musicians who, on the jazz side, could not (or preferred not to) read music... while on the 'classical side' musicians could not improvise, could not swing, could barely capture the unique rhythmic inflections and expanded sonorities of jazz.

To be continued ….

Part 4 - "1959: The Beginning of Beyond: "The Way The Music Had to Go, Lenox & Music Theories" - Darius Brubeck

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

“The confusion and disunity of the 1960s was not the result of running into blind alleys and losing audiences to rock so much as an inconvenient profusion of overlapping epiphanies. There was no single way in which the 'music had to go' or just one 'genius' that had the 'style'”. -Darius Brubeck

Part 4 is from 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, the factors building up to why this was so from this portion of his essay emphasizes the inevitability of bebop,  how “the modern movement of the 1950s demanded … greater knowledge on the part of musicians; the role of the Lenox School of Jazz [1957-1960] on the immediate and long term future of Jazz; the development of a self-contained, systematic theory of tonality and harmony.” [paraphrase]

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

“The way the music had to go”

“'Whatever we were using had been around since Bach's time, or maybe Brahms's. Parker had the style,’ Dizzy Gillespie told me in an unpublished interview in 1987. In context it was clear that Gillespie was talking about harmony, possibly the seamless modulating sequences in Bach and Brahms's reassertion of functional harmonic relationships (analogous to Parker's use of ii-V?). He was not more specific. From a present-day perspective, harmony is the least difficult aspect of bebop. (Correctly reproducing the rhythms and phrasing of a Bud Powell or Charlie Parker solo in transcription takes considerable practice at a high technical level, but any jazz pianist can play the left-hand chords by ear.) I think the point about harmony that older musicians keep coming back to is simply that jazz harmony seemed to be the one aspect of music that was systematic and learnable. I suspect that the mystique of harmony has to do with not having an overview of tonality as a coherent, closed structural system. When I asked Gillespie if his colleagues in the 1940s saw themselves as part of a movement, he said he didn't think so. Were they consciously developing a new style? No, 'it was just the way the music had to go', insisting on inevitability almost as if 'music' were determined to 'go' somewhere of itself. But not quite, because, without 'the style' of Parker, without his specific and essential integration of all elements, it would not have been bebop. Along with the individual beauty and brilliance of Parker's music, a virtuosic and studied approach to playing 'the changes' was in tune with post-war modernism.

This is perhaps a good moment to reflect a little further on the question of the ‘evolution’ of jazz. This was not a problem in the 1950s because it was true for everyone coming into their own at the time. They had experienced a modern movement that demanded (but also began providing) ever greater knowledge and skill on the part of musicians and repaid their efforts with ever greater creative freedom and sometimes even a good living doing interesting, experimental music. In the 1960s it became difficult to see where 'the music' was trying to go, but 'evolution' was still tenable because developments that were taking place side-by-side claimed a shared past. The confusion and disunity of the 1960s was not the result of running into blind alleys and losing audiences to rock so much as an inconvenient profusion of overlapping epiphanies. There was no single way in which the 'music had to go' or just one 'genius' that had the 'style'.

The Lenox School and jazz education

The Lenox School of Jazz lasted only four summers (1957-60) but it had a great influence on the immediate and long-term future of jazz. Organised by John Lewis and Gunther Schuller, it was surely one of the main launch-sites of Hodeir's 'invisible missiles'. Simply intoning some other names of teachers and students who were there (Bill Evans, George Russell, Bill Russo, Kenny Dorham, Jim Hall and Jimmy Giuffre among the former, and Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Freddie Hubbard, Chuck Israels, Don Ellis and Steve Kuhn among the latter) risks making this School sound even more momentous than it was. Realistically, three weeks a year of intense study and interaction with great musicians is probably not enough to change the everyday world of jazz completely, unless that world is taking off in new directions anyway. But, strangely, the opposite of exaggeration has occurred and relatively few people know about Lenox. Even though literature about jazz is a high proportion of what I read, the only reason I know about this amazing School is because I was there as a 12-year-old in 1959, the year my father Dave was 'in residence', accompanied by his family.

Situated at The Music Inn, a summer resort in the Berkshires and within walking distance of Tanglewood (the famous summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), the School had, in effect, its own country hotel, concert tent, two bars and other venues for making music 'inside' and/or 'outside' - in every sense that those terms came to imply. When I recently interviewed Schuller about 'Lenox' (as it is referred to), he modestly played down the unique role of the School, because 'it was everywhere at that time'. Common sense nevertheless suggests that, as a result of the concentration of professionally active, highly skilled, creative and analytical musicians at a specific time and place, new 'discoveries' in jazz were mutually recognised and at least made known within the nuclear community. This in turn would inevitably accelerate the diffusion and acceptance of new ways of playing and thinking about music. How long would it have taken for Ornette Coleman to be recognised (and even popular in Hodeir's sense) had he not been there? And, in the theoretical realm, who would have spontaneously gone out and bought a book by a little-known composer named George Russell, especially one called The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation for Improvisation? News gets out when musicians are gathered.

Furthermore, the formal practical study of jazz was, to a great extent, later developed by two Lenox students, David Baker and Jamey Aebersold. They were recruited, along with Freddie Hubbard and bassist Larry Ridley, by Schuller from Indiana, and it was here that they were all first exposed to jazz as a formal academic discipline. After Lenox, Aebersold created and published practical methods for learning jazz, eventually building his publishing and training courses into a multi-million-dollar international business. Baker is the long-serving Distinguished Professor and Head of Jazz Studies at the Conservatory at Indiana University [d. March 26, 2016] and author of numerous analytical and pedagogical works years ahead of the wave of jazz studies now cresting in American universities.

The Lenox School of Jazz prospectus offered 'a conception of the history of jazz, the development of its styles and idioms, and its relationship to music as a whole... a point of view toward jazz as a significant and vital art form of our time' Schuller told me that Coleman was extremely moved by hearing Jelly Roll Morton's music for the first time. The largest impact from an education 'missile' was, however, both directly and indirectly, the kind of music theory being taught at Lenox. It remains a major influence on what jazz students learn today.

Theories of music

The ability of African performance arts to transform the European tradition of composition while assimilating some of its elements is perhaps the most striking and powerful evolutionary force in the history of modern music. [Gioia, The History of Jazz, 1997, 8]

The historical transformation of jaw, from an entertainment music to an art music, initiated by the bebop revolution in the mid-1940s, represents arguably one of the most significant cultural shifts of the century ... no form of mass culture seems to have crossed the boundary between 'entertainment' and 'art' as decisively or irreversibly as Jazz. [Gendron, Jazz Among The Discourses  1995, 31]

A perennial difficulty with teaching music theory is forcing minds and ears more attuned to the jazz tradition to accept as provisionally true fairly essential 'facts' of the European harmonic tradition. To jazz ears, the final tonic major chord of a piece or section could easily have a flat seventh. A dominant-seventh chord a tritone away from another chord is its freely interchangeable 'substitute'. Parallel octaves strengthen a line (but are seldom noticed given the common octave doubling of trumpet and tenor saxophone). In general, controlled 'dissonance' is more desirable than 'consonance', chord voicings without roots are 'hip' and simple triads with voices doubled are only used to convey an atmosphere of funky reverence.

What was still lacking in the 1950s was a self-contained, systematic theory of tonality and harmony that took for granted jazz chords and other devices that musicians actually had developed and put into practice over time. Such a theory was needed for 'irreversible development' as the 1950s drew to a close.

A body of information (generalities about music) and drill (exercises to demonstrate their application) is what academic music curricula refer to as 'theory.’ Corresponding information came into jazz usage through invention, discovery and piecemeal appropriation by individual artists like John Coltrane, who was 'looking for something to play' (Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music, 1998,88) and for practical solutions to specific musical problems:

A new influence [on Coltrane in c. 1951-2] was the legendary pianist Hasaan Ibn All. Born in Philadelphia in 1931, Hasaan, as he was called... became known as an original composer and theorist. He was interested in the properties of fourths, in chord progressions that moved by thirds or seconds instead of fifths, in playing a variety of scales and arpeggios against each chord - all of which figured prominently in Coltrane's music later on.                                                                         [Ibid.]

Hasaan is reported to have used the chord-voicing of flat seventh, major third and thirteenth (without sounding the root) before it became common in the 1960s. This isolated piece of information (coupled with the fact that not many people today know about Hasaan) reads like erudite trivia, but actually provides a typical example of jazz musicians as 'a learning community.’ (see Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 1994, 36-62). Even better, this precise piece of ‘trivia,’ the chord made up of an augmented fourth and a perfect fourth, is a distinctive feature of jazz harmony. It also represents the overvalued, fragmentary bits of information jazz musicians invented or collected to fill the vast space between 'legit' theory and jazz practice.”

To be continued ….