How to Listen to Jazz by Ted Gioia

Author:Ted Gioia [Gioia, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
Tags: Music, Genres & Styles, Jazz, History, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780465097777
Google: PjVVCwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01AFE3994
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

Cool Jazz

Bebop never found a large commercial audience, but it did attract a cadre of sophisticated devotees while earning begrudging respect from the general public as cutting-edge music, the newest new thing in jazz. This period of ascendancy came and went with surprising speed. No one could keep at the forefront of the jazz world for long during the Cold War years. Like newly crowned boxing champions, leaders of each succeeding movement had to face ambitious rivals, upstarts determined to assert their supremacy and knock everyone else down a peg.

Even before the close of the 1940s, a reaction against the bop ethos could be heard on both the East Coast and West Coast. In time, this movement got a name—‘cool jazz.’ The contrast with bebop could hardly be more striking. On the tracks from his 1949 and 1950 sessions, now known as the Birth of the Cool, trumpeter Miles Davis fronts a nine-piece ensemble that stands out for its shimmering instrumental textures, relaxed rhythms, and understated melodicism. The influence of classical composers, especially impressionists such as Debussy and Ravel, can be heard in this music, and the concert hall ambiance is furthered by the use of French horn and tuba alongside the more familiar jazz instruments. Yet the improvised solos are as surprising as the composed passages, displaying a restrained lyricism and emotional delicacy that boldly breaks away from the paradigms of swing and bop.

Few paid attention at the time, and Davis’s nonet gave only a handful of performances before the individual members went their separate ways. But over the next several years, Davis and his former colleagues would bring the ‘cool school’ to the forefront of the jazz world. The leading cool jazz performers even attracted a crossover following, enjoying occasional radio hits and finding a receptive audience at college campuses and other settings where boppers seldom ventured.

In fact, you can trace most of the key developments in cool jazz during the 1950s and early 1960s back to the various alums of Davis’s short-lived ensemble. Davis himself would rise to stardom over the course of the next decade, a period that culminated with the release of Kind of Blue, the biggest-selling mainstream jazz album of all time and a defining statement of the cool aesthetic. He also reunited with arranger Gil Evans, who played a key role in defining the sound of the Birth of the Cool band, on a series of high-profile projects, most notably Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy & Bess (1959), and Sketches of Spain (1960). Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, who also served as performer and arranger with the Birth of the Cool band, found success as a rising star, most notably in his West Coast quartet alongside trumpeter Chet Baker. John Lewis, the pianist with the Davis nonet, would do the same with his Modern Jazz Quartet, which refined a cerebral yet sweetly swinging breed of jazz chamber music. Gunther Schuller, who played French horn with the Davis band, went even further in mixing classical music and jazz.

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