FREE4ALL, Part 18: Ascension

Jazz music in the 1960s?

It was the quiet rest of times; it was the loud burst of times.

It was a kaleidoscope of options. It was a battlefield of factions.

It was everything, essentially…except easy to summarize.

Recall that jazz was one of the first truly American forms of music.

It rose joyously from the shadow of the Reconstruction South, and was a dance craze in New Orleans by the time of the first World War.

And it became an indomitable international sensation during the US’s campaign against Hitler.

Throughout those early decades, the sound of jazz had shifted with the times and to please broader audiences. And it was always willing to mix in new styles and influences, even at the very beginning. Even so, there was no real question of what was and what was not, jazz.

That changed after World War II.

Yet just a few years later, the radical pioneers had softened their approach, while jazz audiences actually grew to like a more adventurous sense of melody. The movement had largely survived this initial shock.

It was in the 1960s that the real splitting occurred, building from cracks that had first emerged in the late 50s.

Off Key: 1959 – 1964

For the most part, jazz music wasn’t topping the charts anymore. A notable exception was “Hello Dolly” by the original jazz pop phenom Louis Armstrong.

But more often than not, young audiences were listening to rock n roll bands, girl groups, or easy listening variations of the same.

One new sound that took the jazz and pop worlds by storm was the slow tropical sway of Bossa Nova.

The music Jobim wrote was based on Brazilian samba, but some of the songs featured a soft melancholy that departed from the festive Carnival setting of the story.

In 1958, Moraes and Jobim worked together on an album for the popular singer Elizete Cardoso. 

Then in 1959, Joao released his own bossa nova album, Chega de Saudade, the debut of his famously soft, silken vocals. The formation of the style was now complete.

Jobim and Gilberto had been influenced by earlier cool jazz musicians like Stan Getz and Chet Baker, so it’s perhaps not surprising that this elegant new sound would eventually be championed by a similar crowd.

In 1962, Stan Getz recorded his own version of a song written by Jobim for Gilberto, “Desafinado” (Portuguese for “off key”). With this single, the US bossa nova craze began in earnest.

Its soft tones and gentle melodies made for perfect easy listening. Yet the insistent rhythm and sultry mood spur on slow dances and romance. It’s no wonder that so many other jazz musicians jumped on the bossa nova trend.

Like so many jazz musicians in the post-bop years, Davis wasn’t above the idea of making a profit, but he wanted to do so on his own terms, without any sort of pandering. And he did so with aplomb throughout the 60s, building on the success of his earlier breakthroughs.

Davis had been in the jazz scene since Charlie Parker’s first recordings in 1945. Yet in the decade to follow, he proved restlessly creative, constantly changing up his formulas. He helped develop cool jazz, as well as the slower and bluesier alternative to bebop: hard bop.

Throughout it all, Davis was steadily refining how he played his trumpet. 

In the summer of 1959, just one month after Lady Day passed away, Davis had released what was perhaps his greatest work. Kind of Blue was an album that excited music critics and audiences alike. And more importantly, it inspired other musicians to follow in its footsteps.

Beyond perfecting his expressive phrasing, Miles used Kind of Blue to try out a new approach to writing and playing with his band.

Ever since the rise of bebop, jazz music featured melodic passages that were mostly improvised, but the musicians always tied those improvised lines to chord progressions specified for a given song, within a given key.

But the magic of Kind of Blue came from the fact that such experiments don’t sound like exercises at all. They sound intuitive. Heartfelt. Naturally beautiful. 

Paramount to the album’s magic was the roster of musicians that Davis had assembled for the recording. His band for the last few years had included Jimmy Cobb, Paul Chambers, Cannonball Adderly, and a young tenor saxophonist named John Coltrane.

It was Evans’ delicate, dreamy melodicism that had originally inspired Davis’ forays into modal composition. His playing set the standard for many big jazz pianists to come, from Vince Guaraldi to Herbie Hancock.

But it was Coltrane on the tenor saxophone that was the boldest ingredient.

And being the polar opposite to Davis’ introverted style, he also provided a crucial sense of balance to it all.

This particular band would not record together again, but they would all enjoy critical and commercial success in years that followed. Davis brought in the new decade by fusing modal jazz with Spanish flamenco music, and then moved on to a flurry of other projects. Evans led his own band, and even hit the charts with his lovely “Waltz for Debby.” Coltrane would also form his own band. And he would start to release his own masterpieces.

At the same time, plenty of other jazz musicians sought to strike the balance between artistic innovation and popular appeal that Kind of Blue did so perfectly. Perhaps the closest was Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out from 1959.

There was also Herbie Hancock’s Afro-Cuban fusion in “Watermelon Man” and “Cantaloupe Island,” not to mention Vince Guaraldi’s wildly popular tunes for Charles Schultz’s Peanuts.

At the same time, a new generation of musicians were coming into their own, and they had no desire for commercial success or popular appeal. Even more than the beboppers who came before, they wanted to take jazz to new extremes of expressive freedom.

First came albums from pianist Cecil Taylor and saxophonist Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s.

Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come introduced a particularly raw and loose style of playing. While melodic, the band almost sounds like they are about to fall apart. Coleman and his friends then released an album of collective improvisation that was so unbridled and so unruly, it was outright cacophonous. This was Free Jazz from 1961. Beyond perfectly embodying the new generation’s approach to jazz, the album provided them with a label to describe their revolutionary sound.

Some older musicians, such Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, thought that this “free jazz” was just regular jazz played poorly. Still, other veterans found a primitive sense of emotional power in the new style of playing, especially bassist Charles Mingus and the drummer Max Roach. While they never made music free enough to merit the new label, they would soon release their own challenging works of avant garde jazz.

In a section titled “Protest,” the lit fuse explodes into rage. Abbey Lincoln veers suddenly from solemn wails into shouts and screams amid Roach’s violent bursts of rapid-fire drums. This performance predated Yoko Ono’s freewheeling musical experiments by a decade. Even now, the piece has the power to shock listeners out of their complacency.

Along with Roach, the young free jazz musicians set about cultivating a new consciousness for black men and women. Whether the rest of the world could keep up was not their concern.

I Think To Myself: 1965 – 1970

In the second half of the decade, the innovations of the radicals began to take root. Even in the pop charts, as the British Invasion paved the way for a new youth counterculture.  And it took root among the jazz establishment as well, whether they realized it or not.

In the summer of 1965, Miles Davis showed off a new band with the release ESP.

Yet Miles’ playing in this and later releases seems ever so slightly expanded in his tonal palette. Perhaps the rising flood of free playing was starting to lift all boats. If so, it’s unlikely Miles was actively absorbing the work of the young free jazz artists, and perhaps was absorbing the work of his old bandmate, John Coltrane.

Coltrane himself didn’t immediately adopt free jazz ideas in his own work, but he went down a path that became increasingly unstructured. 

A Love Supreme from early 1965 was his magnum opus, his most sincere expression of his spirituality to date.

Coltrane would ultimately take free jazz to the higher planes of sonic daring. And new levels of sheer power. No one could match Coltrane in terms of energy and force, so when this train veered off the tracks, the results were explosive.

Coltrane had long sought to expand his understanding of melody, harmony, and other aspects of musical structure in order to transform his approach to jazz soloing. One major influence in this respect was the Indian raga music of Ravi Shankar, which he first encountered in the late 50s. Coltrane studied Indian classical music, and he met Shankar in 1964. Yet it was when he had embraced free jazz in his music that those debts to Indian ragas became more and more overt.

Om actually quotes from the Bhagavad-Gita before descending into freewheeling chaos.

Both groups were interested in unbridled personal expression flavored with Eastern mysticism.

Yet by the time of Om’s release, John Coltrane had been dead for one year. He died of liver cancer at the age of 40. As such, the otherworldly sounds of later works such as Om and Interstellar Space can’t help but feel eerie, as if Coltrane’s spirit has been summoned in a séance to float through our ears before ascending back to heaven.

Other musicians pursued their own spiritual journeys through free jazz, such as Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane. And they can be just as compelling and terrifying as shamanic rites as Trane’s original experiments.

Free jazz was always radical in sound and philosophy, but in the late 60s it culminated in some of the most extremely punishing music available.

Some of this later free jazz was adjacent to the hippie scene and other celebrity musicians, but for the most part it was on the outskirts, and deliberately so.

It wasn’t until 1969 that someone actually fused jazz music with the sounds and sensibilities of rock.

However, once Davis had heard this John McLaughlin jam out, he was compelled to have him play guitar for his own new project.

They improvised together for long vamps during these recording sessions, then producer Teo Macero cut up the tape reels and reassembled them to create new arrangements. Musique concrete was as old as bebop, but it took the advent of psychedelic rock for these techniques to finally cross into the world of jazz.

The result was In a Silent Way, a work of electric jazz that was equally driving and spacious. Undoubtedly a precursor to the “krautrock” of Cologne, Germany. It was also moderately successful, allowing Davis to enter the charts for the first time in four years.

The band then decided to take this hybrid sound into the stratosphere.

It wasn’t true free jazz: the music was carefully designed, often minimal in delivery, and reassembled through tape edits. Nevertheless, Davis’ notion of tonality opened up dramatically here, and the resulting cacophonies could indeed be terrifying.

Amazingly, Bitches Brew ended up being Davis’ best-selling album since Kind of Blue. Perhaps the time was right for untethered sonic adventures.

In the decade to follow, every member of this Davis band would subsequently contribute their own hybrid experiments, making “jazz fusion” a dominant presence in popular music. At this point, jazz had to play catch up with the next new things rather than the other way around. But jazz artists had found a way to remain active in the cultural discourse. They weren’t inspiring many kids to play jazz anymore, but they got rock musicians to think outside the box in terms of experimentation and improvised playing.

By the start of the 1970s, society had plenty of anger to go around, but Black solidarity had become increasingly important. Appropriately, the various generations of jazz musicians seemed to come to terms with one another. For a time, at least.

In the summer of 1970, Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis both participated in a recording session with Louis Armstrong, along with many other invited guests.

Louis passed away just a few months after that session. Following one last set of concerts, the New Orleans legend had a heart attack and died at the age of 69. Jazz music went on, of course, but surely this was the end of an era. 

Louis’ unbridled optimism had felt out of place to the younger generation in the early 50s, and even more so by the end of the 60s. 

No matter their place in society or how terrible their personal situation could be, these men and women radiated hope and dignity through their creative collective alchemy. 

It’s hard not to feel grateful when looking back at all the talented souls who have graced us with their music. 

No matter what else might be transpiring around me, I think to myself:

What a wonderful world.

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