The Evolution of Jazz; 32; Bop Continued, Part Two

And the voices of Jackie and Roy crawl as part of an ensemble were also instruments in this modern jazz version of scat singing. And astronomy. A discovery might also make an estimate. Tradition love the. Stuff for your Ferrari. I mean I. Can now.

This is from honest man green. And in terms of the utilization of the voice as an instrument always more relaxed

more imaginative than any of the others. God where. What was

we eat good for whatever. OK we say. Oh and it was can. The. Old Lady Knollys goalies are good to me. Alone in this big city while somebody. Else alone some day. Was. Ole ole goalie. To me that they didn't have it didn't do it

it was easy. For you tonight. Very good job of it. Well. One of the favorite pianists of the musicians was not in any strict sense of man himself though he often played in bop ensembles. It's hard to define where you stand in the evolution of jazz I expect he has more than most his own island. It's doubtful in a sense whether he will influence anyone just as it's hard to assess his own influences although there certainly have been many. His name is Errol Gunnar Gunnar can't read music but that seems no handicap to his inventiveness. He's often lost in both his sound and his conception but he always swings and he's very much in the tradition of two handed piano players that is some of the modern is for a time neglected their left hands and focused on achieving fantastically rapid

figuration is on the right. Not all certainly men like Bud Powell as we've heard had a left hand as well-developed as his right. Gone are a two headed pianist actually is closer if anything to the melodic and rhythmic ideas of the 30s and 40s than to the BOP or it's the Teddy Wilson for example admires him greatly. They're always amazing you know has caught the advanced harmonic usages of modern piano got his work has been called impressionist and many other vague adjectival descriptive words have been used. The best way to describe that however is to play one of his recordings. I am.

I am. I am. I am I am. I am. Gunner usually works however with bass and drums.

A. Good summary of the impact of bipolar Early Modern Jazz on the

general jazz scene was provided by Professor Marshall storerooms in Harper's magazine in April 1950. He writes all the scenes of broth had been planted long ago they blossom during the Second World War. Because of the enormous demand for music dance bands were able to experiment and make a living at the same time because of the scarcity of musicians. Boys and their teams landed good jobs with first rate bands. These youngsters were eager flexible and bent upon developing a style of their own. During the same period in an atmosphere of restless rebellion the Great Migration to the north was taking place and time itself seemed to be speeded up. After the war some of the older idols of jazz having spent the intervening years in the Army on happily wedded to military bands returned to find a music that was rather strange to them jazz musicians were already split into warring camps from the early days of 1940 admittance up in Harlem when the experimentations began and as we pointed out Dizzy Gillespie and Felonious Monk often would work up a complicated harmonic modulations just to

scare musicians off the stand. When they didn't want to play with during a jam session where the breach had Ryden from those days and those of 1951 Sterns was writing the split was largely a matter of age alone he writes musicians over 30 are inclined to criticize Bach and musicians under 30 tend to praise it enthusiastically. However that even then and even in the 40s that was an overstatement. The split was never that extreme. Many jazz men over 30 appreciate Bob some he said and some learned to play it from the beginning. Men of all styles the Chicago pianist Floyd being for example. And more and more have come as their ears have become accustomed to the music to appreciate early and later in modern jazz. And of course in the in the interim since the 40s modern jazz itself has matured in many of its excesses have been dissolved. One aspect of the state of affairs as of 1950 was indicated

by the harsh comments of Louis Armstrong Louis who makes it a rule to speak no evil of any music or musician. But the day arrived when he could no longer restrain himself on the subject of rights with us historians referring to as Armstrong said they want to cut everyone because they're so full of malice and all they want to do is show you up in any old way will do so long as it's different from the way you played it before. So you get all then we had chords which don't mean nothing and for us people get curious about it just because it's new but soon they get tired of it because it's really no good and you have no melody to remember no beat to dance to. So they're all poor again and nobody's working and that's what that lot analysis done for you. Since the Armstrong is endowed with a fine musical intelligence his objections deserve to be taken seriously the professor continues to take his last point for us there is no doubt that brought which made good money for a while cut down on the earning power of the older musicians to some extent. There was also some truth in Armstrong's charge that Bob was merely a novelty boiling over with a revolt against tradition in general and musical conventions in particular. Really

Bob often was dominated by the desire to be different it's no longer that way now a trifling shift in the musical amenities illustrates the point. Ten years ago a musician at a jam session would nod his head as he neared the end of his solo to forewarn the man who was to follow him in early. Often the barber would start a new chorus and stop short leaving his successor to pick up the pieces. And this sort of trick would on your of an old timer. Either in technical innovation seamen perhaps are intended to seem maliciously wrongheaded to the older generation the BOP or often remain silent precisely where the traditionalist would be blowing his heart out only to fill the customary pause with a cascade of notes executed at breakneck speed. Remember Lester Young's use of silence and. Both as dramatic pauses and at other places where silence was the accustomed thing he would fill it with various conceptual ideas. Another reversal of the usual jazz procedure paralleled by the BOP

musicians use of cool instead of hot as a word of highest praise is the tendency while taking a solo to lag tantalizingly a fraction of a second behind the beat. To a devotee of the older Dixieland style I was accustomed to having most of the melody fall on top of the beat. The effect was nerve racking but after a time the result can be one of relaxation and even restraint. The point of course is that these surface symptoms indicate something that took place deep in the heart of bup when Louis Armstrong complained of them weird sounds which don't mean I think he put his finger on the most obvious innovation of bop in terms of harmony as we've heard jazz has developed along the same lines as classical music but more recently and more rapidly. It still lags behind the drop as of 1950 roughly parallel the period in classical music which followed Wagner in debut C and ninth and augment it for its jazz musicians call them flatted fifths appear over and over again in the so the solos as well as the accompaniment. In the current cool school and the work of Tristan and Brubeck jazz is beginning to parallel and it's

harmonic ideas. Some of the work of SURE been buried and the very contemporary classical composers. Binder back whose preoccupation was Davis he was echoed by the unusual intervals in his solos was as we pointed out a remote ancestor of Bob. The effect on the ear of the older generation at first was not altogether delightful. I mean for years and even up to now Dizzy Gillespie one of the ablest of the ablest modern jazz trumpet player has been forced to clown and pretend to be playing strange notes in order to obtain any hearing at all. I'm strong criticism that Bob has no beat or rhythmic drive also goes to the heart of the problem and it affords a clue as to why older musicians are often unable to play Bach the rhythm has become is much more subtle and complex. The late Dave Thomas one of the few older drummers who survived the transition remarked ruefully. I had to forget everything I ever learned before I could put on that new musical look. He admired Max Roach one of the foremost drummers of Bach and pointed out that he could never anticipate when Max

was going to drop a bomb. That is he was an offbeat accent although it always seemed right afterward. On first hearing Bob the traditionalist usually objected to that drummer would quit banging the cymbal I'd be able to hear the bass drum and as a matter of fact as we heard there wasn't any regular bass drum to hear the heavy chug chug of the rhythm section Armstrong knew with its incessant disappear the full four beat was often heard in the flexible and melodic accents of the string bass alone. That's the reason for the mistaken notion that you can't dance to Bach. You can but it took a rhythmically educated ear. I'm mixing my tenses here present and past because much of the objections to Bob again refers to the early and middle stages of the music in it and the in terms of contemporary jazz with its more mature product and attitude. Many of these objections no longer hold and also many never did at any time as this one that Bob couldn't be danced to or that it had no rhythmic drive. We keep her Kushan instrument and bop was the

symbol which dominated the rhythm of the continuous flowing accent the changed phase to fit the contour rhythms suggested by the soloist while the bass drum marks special accents and contributes explosions to punctuate the performance as a whole. When the offbeat inter-relations of the guitar and the piano were added the result in the best of Bob was and still is a light and delicate rhythm closely integrated with the improvisation of the soloist. Maybe a first rate jazz musicians when they first heard Bob as illustrated by Dave top story of how he and a group of men from Woody Herman's band dropped in on the Gillespie pedophile group on 50 second Street in 1944. As we walked in said Tough more in wonder than anger these cats snatched up their horns and a blue one would stop all of a sudden another would stop for no reason at all. We never could tell when a chorus was supposed to begin or end then they quit all at once and walked off the stand. It scared us. A year later the Herman band was growing its own version of Bach. The process of assimilation makes a fascinating study in its conflicts and most dramatically illustrated in the solos of the great musicians of the thirties like Benny Conner

Coleman Hawkins or Benny Goodman who had the courage to attempt a new idiom under the critical scrutiny of a younger generation. For example after a flat plate condemning Bob in print Benny Goodman admitted that he couldn't play it. Finally had a change of heart and organized a broad band but to judge from his playing he didn't like it and later abandoned it again. Meanwhile the cliches of watered down almost past recognition began to appear in the arrangement of dance bands all over the country. And one thing is certain says the professor Jazz will never be the same. Many years hence if you have a more simple melodic twists of yesterday's Bob will turn up in the accompaniment to a hit parade tune played by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians as the shouting and the dissonances die. It may be that Bob's greatest contribution or one of its greatest contributions I would say to jazz is rhythm. Why it should have happened is different. Difficult to explain. Writes Professor Stearns is the birth of jazz in New Orleans but one major So as can be documented Afro-Cuban music. So in a sense there was a circular

move in the evolution of jazz Dizzy Gillespie that one of the pacesetters of Bob borrowed a conga drummer from another orchestra and featured him in his own band and that was the beginning of a trend as early as 1940 Gillespie had listened carefully to the rhythms of Afro-Cuban band. It's worth noting that it was one of the first musicians who understood what does he was trying to play. Bonzo had been with various jazz bands and it was he who got dizzy is really job with Cab Calloway. Later when the legendary channel Pozo arrived from Cuba already famous as a composer and virtue also drummer Dizzy Gillespie heard him and hired him on the spot for his town hall concert of 1947 and Pozo broke up that concert. I was born in Cuba though the musicians who grew up with him there say that his grandparents were born in West Africa. In Cuba belong to the non-ego secret society an African cult whose members speak only in a West African dialect he never learned English but that did not interfere with his inspired drumming. Back by the Gillespie band he could hold a large audience and trance to half an

hour while he sang in a dialect full of African phrases and played incredible rhythms in the many voiced Congo drum. It was all help bring the Gillespie band when he had a very exciting experimental large band of the peak of its performance. He made a few recordings that are hard to get. And in 1949 was killed. There was always influence on jazz drummers was direct and electric. First let's listen to one of the rare recordings of tonal Pozo by himself and then briefly with the Gillespie band. OK. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

NO NO NO NO NO You know I don't want to wake up I think I know what. How do I do my driving I don't want anybody I knew by now they don't. Remember nobody I know. When I got that way

I got it. Can I say. That. Yes. EH

and the end. Of the end. Of. The end. You have been listening to the evolution of jazz. I recorded series prepared and produced by

Nat Hentoff under the auspices of Northeastern University and presented by the Lowell Institute cooperative broadcasting Council. The evolution of jazz was recorded in the Boston studios of WGBH Af-Am. This is the national educational radio network.