Just one week out and the commentary has focused not on what was included but what was excluded. I never promised a Top 10 list, but a list of ten musical recordings that had historical significance in the development of our country’s original art form—jazz—a list that I had hoped would bring elation to the new listener…a primer, as it were, to the willing novitiate. But such is the nature of lists.
To this date, I’ve only mentioned three featured artists out of a promised ten. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and the duo of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie seem to me a strong beginning and I was surprised that some readers were eager to ever-so-slightly chastise me for not mentioning their favorites with seven slots still open. Perhaps patience is no longer such a virtue.
Oh, well…
The two-plus decades of fifties and sixties were exciting times in jazz. The bebop of Diz and Bird became hard bop in the hands of pianists Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver, drummers Art Blakey and Max Roach, bassist Charles Mingus, saxophonists Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter and Cannonball Adderley, and trumpeters Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard.
The laundry list could go on and on, as many of the above stuck around to keep a style alive, while others moved to the next platform to become innovative forces in any number of stylistic changes that jazz would see under its wide evolutionary umbrella well into the seventies, eighties and beyond.
Brilliant Corners (Riverside, 1957), introduced a rhythmic urgency and drive that would come to lend definition to the hard bop movement, or, perhaps better stated, evolution. The recording was released under pianist Thelonious Monk’s leadership and featured such musicians as tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, drummer Max Roach and bassist Oscar Pettiford, each of whom would become mainstay players as jazz took various turns to the modern.
One of the great examples of hard bop came from Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers through a 1961 recording, Roots and Herbs (Blue Note) that wasn’t released until 1970. Although there was no shortage of jazz messages from the drummer/bandleader Blakey through the years, this album featured tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter and trumpeter Lee Morgan, along with pianists Walter Davis, Jr, and Bobby Timmons, and bassist Jymie Merritt.
The recording helped showcase and establish Shorter as one of the most important composers in all of jazz—a stature enhanced by the Newark-born musician as he would go on to help form the ground-breaking fusion band, Weather Report, and the composing and performance schedule he currently maintains in his 85th year.
It can be easily demonstrated that popularity doesn’t necessarily reflect quality, but in Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (Sony, 1959) there is no doubting that the recording’s impact on jazz would be immediate and lasting.
The biggest-selling jazz record of all time, Kind of Blue, turned the corner on hard bop as Davis abandoned the chord-based constructs of composition, which he found to be limiting, in trade for the modal concepts he had first explored on Milestones (Columbia, 1958) and, with arranger Gil Evans, Porgy and Bess (Columbia, 1959).
Kind of Blue featured Davis’s ensemble sextet consisting of saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb, with former band pianist Bill Evans appearing on most of the tracks in place of Kelly.
While each of Davis’s band mates would go on to be influential participants in various jazz movements, none has had as much an impact as John Coltrane (1926-1967). It didn’t take long for Trane to move from bebop to hard bop to his own concepts of free jazz and the avant garde that would introduce such players as pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones on such seminal recordings as A Love Supreme (Impulse, 1965) and Ascension (Impulse, 1966).
I can think of no better introduction to Coltrane’s music than Giant Steps (Atlantic, 1960).
The recording was the fifth studio album by the tenor saxophonist and is widely considered to be his first genuinely iconic record. Much of what would define Coltrane’ s music was exhibited with his broad strokes of sound and chordal structures that are still imitated by other musicians.
Beyond the album’s exhibiting Trane’s compositional abilities and his band’s exemplary musicianship, the song selections are relatively short, thereby helping the novice listener to handily absorb the intent and feel of the music.
Coltrane’s band mates for the record include pianists Tommy Flanagan and Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Art Taylor. Pianist Kelly and drummer Cobb, mainstays of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (recorded just a couple of weeks before the Coltrane session) were featured on the track “Naima.”
Bill Evans, already mentioned above in several settings, was a pianist and composer whose best setting was a trio of piano, bass and drums. It was there that his impressionistic approach to harmony—contrasted by his block chord voicings—unique vision of the jazz repertoire, and wafting sense of melody gave rise to a pianist whose style continues to influence jazz pianists to this day.
The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (Riverside, 2005) reflects Evans’s commitment to the music. The trio, with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, stands as the seminal jazz trio.
Closing out my very personal falling-in-love-with-jazz list will have to include the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s landmark recording, Time Out (Columbia, 1959). At the time of its release, Brubeck (1920-2012), was a well-regarded pianist and composer whose quartet with Paul Desmond (alto sax), Eugene Wright (bass), Joe Morello (drums) had achieved considerable commercial success. Although it seems odd that a tune in 5/4 time (the iconic “Take Five,” composed by Desmond) would rise to the top of the Hit Parade, it did. It furthered the band’s commercial standing and opened more than a few doors to jazz experimentation.
Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz (1927-1991) had a warm and burnished sound that seemed appropriate in almost setting. But it found its truest place in the gentle bossa nova he explored with the Brazilian guitarist João Gilberto and the pianist and composer Antônio Carlos Jobim on the 1964 Getz/Gilberto (Verve). The album features the vocals of Astrud Gilberto on two tracks, “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Corcovado,” and served to introduce American audiences to a unique genre.
Go ahead. Fall in love with jazz. It’s easy to do,
Photo illustration by Courtney A. Liska