1959: Jazz's Incandescent Year
1959 was a monumental year in the history of jazz and, coming about halfway through its documentation on disc, perhaps its most incandescent. It was a year of breakthroughs by four distinctly different jazz icons Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus each transcending prevailing ideologies to create classics. That one year yielded the collision and co-existence of such diverse sounds (and aesthetics) makes it memorable.
It was a year that produced Davis's Kind of Blue, arguably the most famous jazz album ever. His tenor saxman Coltrane boldly announced a commitment to eternal search with Giant Steps. Jazz history went "back to the future" with Mingus Ah Um, the bassist-composer's best-known album in a lusty career. And Coleman created the year's great controversy with the aptly-titled The Shape of Jazz To Come.
Each of these works re-defined the possibilities and directions of jazz. They arrived four years after the premature death of its patron saint Charlie "Bird" Parker from which the jazz world was still reeling with a "what now?" anxiety and 15 years since the emergence of its previous revolution, bebop. What's amazing is that there was so much fully-formed change compressed into one year. Again, the jazz listener is fortunate to have available accumulated scholarship and histories that tell us how this music was made.
Kind of Blue was the real quiet storm, dropping standard chord changes in favor of scales, or "modes," as a basis for improvising. Davis presented his group with the tunes just before entering the studio, recording them in one take with virtually no rehearsals. The result, said drummer Jimmy Cobb, "must have been made in heaven." The feeling is bluesy, lyrical, timeless, ethereal, serene.
Pianist Bill Evans likened the process to "a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous ... These artists must practise a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see will find something captured that escapes explanation."
Twenty years later Evans said, "We just really went in that day and did our thing." Comparing Kind of Blue's centrality to jazz to Beethoven's string quartets to European chamber music, musicologist Thomas Owen adds, "Every student of jazz should own this recording." A perennial best-seller, it is the one album instinctively "understood" by listeners new to jazz.
Kind of Blue also marked the crowning achievement of the synergy between Davis and Coltrane. Through four years, 'Trane injected a restless energy crucial to the career resurrection of the "Prince of Darkness," which had floundered due to drugs. In turn, Davis challenged 'Trane. "When I joined him I realized I could never play like [Miles], and I think that's what made me go the opposite way." Now, with his luminous performance on this album, Coltrane was ready to take the next step.
Coltrane doggedly practised for two years what he had in mind for Giant Steps, virtually memorizing Nicolas Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Then, like Davis, he presented the music to his sidemen cold. "Some things didn't even appear on the record we just couldn't play them," said pianist Tommy Flanagan. "It almost kills you, to stay with that playing so intense for eight hours a day." He added that while Coltrane's sidemen were barely coping, "he knew what he was doing." 'Trane himself noted, "I'm worried that sometimes what I'm doing sounds like just academic exercises, and I'm trying more and more to make it sound prettier."
Coltrane's famous "sheets of sound" now became machine gun fire (yes, a little prettier), but as ordered as Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Inspired by Miles' modalities, he bared a spiritual devotion to form in the service of search, as an end in itself. It didn't have the lilt of Blue, but it reflected an intensity of striving spirit that few have matched since. Giant Steps became mandatory listening for students and tenormen alike. Still is.
No sooner had 'Trane made his breakthrough when Ornette Coleman who had absorbed Bird's flights and Thelonious Monk's eccentricities dispensed with harmony altogether. His bassist Charlie Haden described the new improvisational language as "playing on the tune of a composition rather than [its] chord structure
There aren't too many people who were raised in that way of playing." He led his cohorts through copious rehearsals, then let them loose. Coleman would later call it "harmelodics"; others dubbed it "free jazz." Coleman maintained, "If I'm going to follow a preset chord sequence, I may as well write out my solo," and "Let's play the music and not the background."
The attendant publicity and controversy was overwhelming. The fact that Coleman played a toy-like white plastic alto, born from lack of funds for a new horn, only added to the hubbub. He explained that it responded "more completely to the way I blow into it. There's less resistance than from metal. Also, the notes seem to come out detached, almost like you could see them."
Some could see, others couldn't. John Lewis, leader of the chamber-styled Modern Jazz Quartet and seemingly his antithesis, convinced Atlantic Records to sign them up, throwing down the gauntlet: "Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk." In November, Coleman's quartet opened a stay at the Five Spot in New York City that became a lightning rod, attracting Leonard Bernstein and just about every major jazzman eager to hear the revolution for themselves. Miles sniffed: "If you're talking psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside." Gillespie: "I don't know what he's playing but it's not jazz." Monk: "Man, that cat is nuts!" but added, "This is a gang of potential." Composer and scholar Gunther Schuller said, "His playing has a deep inner logic, based on subtleties of reaction ... of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz."
And Coltrane came to the Five Spot and heard them every night and, according to Haden, "He would grab Ornette by the arm as soon as we got off and they would go off into the night talking about music." Heard today, Coleman's music has a fresh "but of course" logic to it.
The always opinionated Mingus expressed his own ambivalence by saying that while he doubted Coleman "could even play a C scale in tune, the fact remains that his notes and lines are so fresh ... I'm not saying everybody's going to have to play like Coleman. But they're going to have to stop playing like Bird."
Ironically Mingus, infatuated with Duke Ellington and classical modernists, at first rejected Parker's breathtaking bebop but then did an about face and, according to Davis, loved Bird "almost like I have never seen nobody love." As it turned out, Mingus was one of the few musicians to have played with Louis Armstrong, Ellington, Parker and Davis, a stylistic lineage that embraced the history of jazz. Thus, as historian Ted Gioia points out, Mingus is "typically seen as a musician who defies category, a progressive who never really embraced the avant-garde, and a traditionalist who constantly tinkered with the legacies of the past."
In Mingus Ah Um he melded the influences as his own, from the sophisticated sonorities of Ellingtonia to low-down blues to ecstatic church hosannas to New Orleans colour to sleek cool to fleet hard bop to the lilt of, say, Debussy. He taught his musicians, including tenorman Booker Ervin and trombonist Jimmy Knepper, by ear from "mental score paper" and played them the "framework" on piano so that they were "familiar with my interpretation and feeling ... and with the scale and chord progressions to be used." He wrote for "a big sound" by "thinking out the form that each musician as an individual is going to play in relation to all the others in the composition. This [replaces] the old hat system of passing the melody from section to section ..."
Practise made perfect. Mingus welcomed the seeming contradiction between tradition and freedom with a bear hug. In Mingus Ah Um, form served improvisation and, remarkably, vice versa.
To a jazz musician, wrote the critic Martin Williams, "thought and feeling, reflection and emotion, come together uniquely, and resolve in the act of doing ... Through doing, jazz musicians have arrived at, and have lived, a fundamental insight of contemporary philosophy."
Thus 1959 was the year that tenor titan Sonny Rollins quit the scene altogether for two years to take stock of what he had heard. Jazz fans are still at it thirty years later.
written in 1989, this is the first time this article is published