Jazz Singers (Essay)

For decades the question has been asked: What is a jazz singer? Some listeners claim that a vocalist has to scat like a horn (what do they consider Billie Holiday?) while others say that simply swinging is enough (do they include Tony Bennett and Jack Jones?).

Here is the most logical definition. A jazz singer is a vocalist who brings his or her own interpretation to a song and improvises through words, sounds, notes and/or phrasing. The difference between a jazz and a pop singer (and the same can be said for musicians) is that a jazz vocalist is spontaneous in concert. The goal is not to duplicate a record (although arrangements and frameworks can be followed), but rather to express how one feels at the moment. Respect can be shown for the original lyrics and melody, but if one is only duplicating the written music, the chances are that the singer falls into the cabaret area.

Since the human voice was the first musical instrument and the earliest music had to be spontaneous, one can accurately surmise that the first musical sounds were made by a jazz singer. However, it was in the 1920s that the first jazz vocalists were documented on record.

For simplicity's sake, the history of male and female jazz singers are here discussed separately. Starting with the former, Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby were the most important male jazz singers of the '20s, but they were not the first. Cliff Edwards (known as Ukulele Ike), a talented performer who also played ukulele and kazoo, was a colorful jazz-oriented singer who led his first record dates in 1924. Although he became an alcoholic and a part-time actor used for comedy relief, Edwards made a brief comeback in the early 1940s as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, singing "When You Wish Upon A Star." Another early singer was the versatile arranger-reed player Don Redman, who took the first ever recorded scat vocal (substituting nonsense syllables for words) with Fletcher Henderson on 1924's "My Papa Doesn't Two-Time No Time."

Most male singers who were caught on record in the 1920s are difficult to listen to today. Notable primarily for their volume and ability to sing words clearly, the great majority come across as pompous and semi-classical. The early blues singers were exceptions, but they had less of a connection to the jazz world than their female counterparts (such as Bessie Smith).

Louis Armstrong was the first major male jazz singer. Other than one early song with Fletcher Henderson, his initial vocals on record were in 1925-26 with his Hot Five, and they still sound fresh and lively today. Armstrong vocalized with the phrasing of a trumpeter, consistently improvised, and (starting with "Heebies Jeebies") proved to be a masterful scat singer. Even when Satch was sticking close to the words, his phrasing was spontaneous, and he altered both the notes and their timing to dramatic effect. Through the years his singing was such a huge influence on everyone from Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday to Ella Fitzgerald and Jon Hendricks that it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that he largely invented jazz singing.

Bing Crosby, a great admirer of Armstrong's, brought Louis' innovations into the world of pop music, first as part of the Rhythm Boys with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and then as the premier "crooner" of the 1930s. Crosby's baritone voice saved the world from the many "boy tenors" who were threatening to dominate music of the late 1920s. Other important pre-swing male singers included the always-exciting Cab Calloway, trombonist Jack Teagarden and pianist Fats Waller, plus the Mills Brothers. While the Mills Brothers became famous in later years for their pop records, in the 1930s they brought the art of imitating instruments to an unparalleled level, often sounding like a five-piece band when in fact the only "real" instrument that they used was an acoustic guitar.

During the swing era, female singers were much more common than male jazz vocalists (virtually every big band had the former), but there were some major stylists. From Kansas City came the two memorable blues singers Jimmy Rushing (with Count Basie's Orchestra) and Big Joe Turner, both of whom had long careers. Billy Eckstine made his debut with Earl Hines' band, and Frank Sinatra (an inspiration to jazz vocalists, although not an improvising jazz singer himself) became famous with Tommy Dorsey. A brilliant pianist, Nat King Cole's highly appealing singing would eventually draw him to the world of pop. Two other influential forces were the jivey Slim Gaillard (whose "Flat Foot Floogie" kept him going for 50 years) and the charismatic Louis Jordan, who with his Tympani Five helped launch R&B.

With the rise of bebop in the mid-1940s, jazz and pop singing largely split apart. Scat singing became more complex as practiced by Babs Gonzales (with his Four Bips and a Bop), Joe Carroll and Dizzy Gillespie. Vocalese, the art of writing lyrics to fit recorded solos, was developed by Eddie Jefferson, popularized by King Pleasure (whose "Moody's Mood for Love" and "Parker's Mood" are classics) and brought to its highest level by Jon Hendricks in the 1950s as part of the definitive jazz vocal group (Lambert, Hendricks and Ross) with Dave Lambert and Annie Ross. Manhattan Transfer in the 1980s and '90s, when they perform jazz, sometimes approaches the magic of L, H & Ross.

While Ray Charles mixed gospel, soul and R&B with the spirit of jazz, and Jimmy Witherspoon, Ernie Andrews, Bill Henderson and Joe Williams fell into both the jazz and blues worlds, Chet Baker's boyish charm on ballads in the '50s made him a heartthrob for a period. Billy Eckstine's warm baritone voice would have made him a movie star were it not for the racism of the period; blacks were not given romantic leads in the 1950s. Eckstine did influence a generation of ballad singers including Earl Coleman and Johnny Hartman (whose 1963 collaboration with John Coltrane is a classic).

Two of the most significant male jazz singers of the 1960s (and beyond) were both talented lyricists who sang ironic and socially conscious words: Oscar Brown Jr. and Mose Allison. However, there were few important male singers in the avant-garde and fusion movements, although Leon Thomas' yodelling with Pharoah Sanders made "The Creator Has A Master Plan" into a surprise hit. Mark Murphy and Bob Dorough had their niches, and Dave Frishberg developed into a superb lyricist and composer, but by the 1980s and into the '90s, there was a serious shortage of significant jazz singers under the age of 60. Dominating the era was the swinging and remarkable Mel Torme (who until his stroke in 1996 was improving with age throughout his sixties) and the seemingly ageless Joe Williams. The talented Al Jarreau had shown great promise in the 1970s, but then chose to spend his musical life in R&B. Bobby McFerrin, an incredible singer (check out the hard-to-find Elektra Musician LP The Voice for an unaccompanied concert), maintained a disappointingly low profile after having a major hit in 1988 with "Don't Worry, Be Happy." The gospel-jazz a cappella group Take Six also were wandering away from jazz into pop music.

However, in the mid-1990s two new voices emerged. While Kevin Mahogany is building his career on the tradition of Joe Williams, bop and standards, Kurt Elling is an extension of Mark Murphy, who also takes wild chances, sometimes improvising words and stories. Both show great promise in keeping alive the legacy largely founded by Louis Armstrong seventy years before.

In contrast, there has never been a shortage of female singers. Starting with the classic blues singers in the 1920s (Mamie Smith began it all with "Crazy Blues" in 1920), females have largely graced bandstands as singers rather than musicians; that situation has only been gradually changing in the 1990s. The fact that so many females can sing at least at a mediocre level (and an average singer always seems to get more applause than any mere musician) has resulted in a great deal of unfair prejudice against female singers in general through the decades. As is true of the male vocalists, the best female singers are the ones that have a real feel for the music rather than just a pleasant voice, and the greats always emerge eventually from the masses.

An incomplete history of female jazz singers can be described in four words: Bessie, Billie, Ella and Sassy. Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, towered over the 1920s. After Mamie Smith started the blues craze, many female singers who had ties to the vaudeville stage, carnival shows or just had strong voices were rushed to the recording studios. Among the more memorable performers were Ma Rainey, Ida Cox and Alberta Hunter (who made a successful comeback in the late 1970s when she was in her 80s), but Bessie Smith outshone everyone. Her powerful voice overcame both the primitive recording facilities of 1923 and erratic musicians; her interpretations of timeless messages still communicate to today's listeners. Fortunately Columbia has made all of Smith's recordings available, most recently on five double-CDs.

Ethel Waters was Bessie Smith's closest competitor in the 1920s and she eventually surpassed Bessie. A versatile singer who started with the blues, Waters was one of the first black performers who was permitted to interpret superior American popular songs; Irving Berlin even wrote several numbers specifically for her. Waters, who introduced such standards as "Dinah," "Am I Blue" and "Stormy Weather," also became a dramatic actress and a major influence on such slightly later singers as Lee Wiley.

Ruth Etting was probably the best-known female vocalist of the early 1930s and, although more of a pop singer than a jazz performer, her voice is still worth hearing. Annette Hanshaw was her counterpart in jazz, and only her decision to retire when she was but 23 kept her from gaining worldwide fame for her very likable style. The Boswell Sisters also broke up early (in 1936 when all of the sisters got married), but during the seven previous years, they set a very high standard for jazz vocal groups that was not reached until Lambert, Hendricks and Ross were formed two decades later. Connee Boswell continued a reasonably successful solo career, but it is her early work with Martha and Vet Boswell that is most stirring.

Mildred Bailey was the first "girl singer" to perform regularly with a big band (Paul Whiteman's). She soon became a leader in her own right and, during her marriage to xylophonist Red Norvo, co-led his orchestra. Her high voice appealed to many, and she helped to popularize "Georgia On My Mind" and "Rockin' Chair."

During the swing era there were countless female singers who straddled the boundary between jazz and pop music. Most were used by big bands to add glamour to the stage, and they generally only had the opportunity to take one melody chorus per song. Among the better band singers were Helen Ward with Benny Goodman, Helen O'Connell with Jimmy Dorsey, Ivie Anderson with Duke Ellington, and Helen Forrest who spent time with the bands of Goodman, Harry James and Artie Shaw.

However, the mid- to late 1930s were most notable for the emergence of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Lady Day's behind-the-beat phrasing disturbed some clubowners and fans at first before they became used to her approach. Her phrasing was subtle (influenced initially by Louis Armstrong), and Holiday frequently altered melodies to fit her small range and her particular mood. She spent mostly undocumented periods with the orchestras of Count Basie and Artie Shaw, but it was her small group recordings with all-star groups headed by pianist Teddy Wilson (and which by 1937 often teamed her with tenor saxophonist Lester Young) that initially made her famous. Lady Day's chaotic personal life and eventual heroin addiction ruined her life and career (during the 1950s her voice declined year by year), but her prime (1935-52) was filled with classic music that still inspires other singers, for Billie Holiday often lived the words she sang.

Ella Fitzgerald had a major hit ("A-Tisket, A-Tasket") with Chick Webb's Orchestra in 1938 when she was only 20. Although quite popular from then on, she was often saddled in her early years with juvenile novelty tunes, despite the fact that she was actually superior at that point on ballads. After becoming a solo artist in 1942, Ella developed quickly as a jazz singer and within a few years was a superb scat singer and witty ad-libber. Her beautiful voice allowed her to uplift virtually everything she sang and she was a major attraction throughout the 1940s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s and into the early '90s, when bad health forced her retirement. Some observers have carped that Ella always sounded too happy (she absolutely loved singing) and that she did not put enough feeling into heavier songs such as "Love For Sale" and "Lush Life." However, late in life, Ella once again became a superior ballad interpreter. The ironic part is that her upbringing was as tumultuous as Billie Holiday's, but to her, singing was an escape from her beginnings. Certainly when it came to swinging and adding beauty to a song, she had few competitors.

Other top female singers from the swing era include Anita O'Day (who found her initial fame with Gene Krupa's band), Helen Humes (who came into her own after leaving Count Basie's band), the sophisticated Lee Wiley (the first singer to record full sets of a specific composer's songbook), Maxine Sullivan, and Peggy Lee (whose quiet style foreshadowed and inspired the cool-toned singers of the 1950s).

Late in the swing era, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan made their first impact. Dinah Washington, after starting with Lionel Hampton, proved during the 1945-58 period that she could sing anything: jazz, blues, R&B, religious hymns and pop. Her distinctive and spirited voice made her a regular big seller. After having a giant hit in "What a Difference a Day Makes" in 1959, Washington stuck mostly to pop music during her last few years.

Sarah Vaughan, who first sang with the Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine Orchestras, had an incredible voice. From the mid-1940s until her death in 1990, Sassy was always one of the top jazz singers, even when she spent long periods off records. She understood bebop (recording with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie), and she had the technique to interpret any song that interested her; sometimes she would strangle weak material to death. If only Sassy had recorded with Ella!

Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan dominated the postwar years, but they were far from alone among female jazz singers. Anita O'Day's sly, swinging style was an influence on June Christy, whose work with Stan Kenton in turn inspired other cool-toned singers. The 1950s and '60s found such vocalists maturing as Carmen McRae (who had a productive 40-year career), Helen Merrill, Chris Connor, Annie Ross (the female third of the innovative vocal group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross), Ernestine Anderson and Peggy Lee. Abbey Lincoln interpreted dramatic lyrics under the tutelage of Max Roach, Betty Carter stretched the boundaries of scat singing, and a housewife named Astrud Gilberto cooed "The Girl From Ipanema."

Although initially tied to the bop tradition, Betty Carter could be considered among the first avant-garde jazz singers. Sheila Jordan (who is one of the few who can improvise intelligent words in rhyme) recorded infrequently but always memorably before becoming more active in the 1980s. Patty Waters recorded two atmospheric (and somewhat scary) records for ESP before slipping away; she re-emerged in the mid-1990s. Jeanne Lee, who debuted on a duet set with pianist Ran Blake, created some very explorative music in Europe, Flora Purim frequently hinted at greatness and Urszula Dudziak utilized electronic devices. However most female jazz singers have preferred to stick to standards.

With the passing of Ella and Sassy, there is not currently one single dominant female singer, but that is not from a lack of candidates. Veterans such as Shirley Horn (who mostly sticks to slow ballads), Ernestine Anderson, Etta Jones and Abbey Lincoln continued in the 1990s to make fine music. Dee Dee Bridgewater (based in France), Vanessa Rubin and Nnenna Freelon give consistently fresh viewpoints to standards. Kitty Margolis, Madeline Eastman, Roseanna Vitro and Karryn Allyson keep the spirit of bop alive, Diana Krall's Nat King Cole tribute delights many, Diane Schuur sounds at her best when a big band is blaring behind her, Banu Gibson is the finest of all the classic jazz singers and, when it comes to interpreting lyrics from the golden age of the American popular song, Susannah McCorkle is difficult to beat.

The biggest problem facing today's singers is the lack of new material that can be successfully turned into jazz; most pop songs of the 1980s and '90s are not easily transferable. Cassandra Wilson, who has gained a great deal of publicity in the mid-1990s after years spent performing complex M-Base funk, has found a fresh repertoire by combining ancient country blues with odd pop songs and world music. Dianne Reeves, who has the potential to be the pacesetter, has spent much of her career alternating between pop, R&B, world music and jazz but in recent times her formerly erratic recordings have been as exciting as her wonderful live performances.

Whether Dianne Reeves or Kurt Elling will affect the future of jazz at the level of an Ella Fitzgerald or Mel Torme is open to question, but one has few doubts about the health of creative singing as jazz continues in its second century.

by Scott Yanow

New Orleans Brass Bands (Essay)

What sets brass bands in New Orleans apart from other variants is the wide spectrum of functions they serve as an aspect of the festival traditions of the Crescent City. While many of the Black brass bands of the late 19th century (such as the Excelsior, the Eureka, and the Onward) began as marching units, with the rise of jazz near the turn of the century the interpretation of their functional connection to events such as parades and funerals underwent a major change. Taking the "jazz funeral" as an example, the use of dirges and hymns on the way to the cemetery remained constant, but the return trip began to move away from strict renditions of marches, loosening up the 6/8 march beats into a funkier 2/4 rhythm with a danceable backbeat. As the bands plied the neighborhoods of the city (on their way to favorite "watering holes"), a "second line" of gyrating dancers would spill onto the streets, becoming a part of the swelling procession and daring the band to heat up the playing. The expressiveness of the dancing encouraged the musicians to respond in kind, creating a vortex of intensified feeling designed to purge the members of a deceased's family and fraternal order of their sense of loss, replacing it with a celebration of life and a sense that the dear departed had gone on to "a better place." Whether in Mardi Gras parades or for the annual marches of the numerous Benevolent Associations and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, New Orleans brass bands have become world-renowned for their ability to evoke an unequalled excitement and involvement from their audiences, forcing even the most impervious listeners to "shake it."

During the period through the '20s, brass bands remained an important benchmark on the musical landscape of New Orleans, but by the mid-'40s there were very few of them left. Interest in the brass band tradition by adherents of the New Orleans revival helped to reverse the situation, and by the '60s many discontinued bands had been restored, with new units like the Young Tuxedo, the George Williams Brass Band, Dejan's Olympia, and the Gibson Brass Band developing and reinterpreting the tradition of rhythm and blues, funk, and modern jazz. Led by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, this movement also includes the Algiers Brass Band, the Treme Brass Band, and the Rebirth. Today, the brass band tradition in New Orleans is thriving, as visitors to the French Quarter or other Big Easy environs will soon discover.

by William Ruhlmann

Jazz in Turkey (Essay)

The music of Turkey has so impressed past visiting jazzmen that many wrote music incorporating the local rhythms and colors. A few examples are Brubecks "Blue Rondo A La Turk," "Turkish Bath" by Don Ellis, and John Surman's "Galata Bridge." Closer to an "exotic" vogue is Pete LaRoca's album Turkish Women at the Bath, while Lennie Tristano's "Turkish Mambo" (definitely not a mambo) may have some Turkish connection as a dedication to the Ertegun brothers, two Turks that definitely played a major role in black music and jazz in the USA. Let's not forget Atlantic's Arif Mardin or Ilhan Mimaroglu, a pioneer of electronic music, producer of some Atlantic Mingus sessions, and author of some disturbing works featuring jazz soloists like Freddie Hubbard and Janis Siegel. Don Cherry included traditional Turkish tunes in his Live at Ankara, and the almost-forgotten multi-instrumentalist and educator Donald Rafael Garrett studied Turkish music intensively: some of his pioneering work is available on the live Ankara recording Memoirs of a Dream reissued by Kali Fasteau's label Flying Note.
Turkish music's variety of time signatures is inherently close to the polyrhythmic feeling typical of jazz. The harmonic system, close to what we call modal -- in fact all modes are called with names derived by Anatolian regions -- the microtonal "bending" of notes (similar to techniques used in jazz & blues idioms), are all elements appealing to jazz musicians.

For centuries in Istanbul, the most cosmopolitan of towns, musicians of Mediterranean origins -- Greeks, Jews, Italians, Armenians, Gypsies -- met virtuosos and theorists coming from the nations of Islamic civilizations. The modernist Turkey of the Twenties, with its eye on the West as the ideology of the new Republic, was especially open to Western dance music quickly popularized by radio and records. Incidentally, there's a wealth of Turkish tangos available on CD.

In the 30's there were professional jazz orchestras, and from the 40's on the radio began to broadcast jazz. In the 50's, trumpet player Maffy Falay was "discovered" by Dizzy Gillespie in Ankara, and went on -- with the American's encouragement -- to a major career. His group Sevda was among the first experiments, at the beginning of the 70's, in "fusion" of jazz and traditional Turkish idioms. In it a prominent role was played by percussionist Okay Temiz, whose own Oriental Wind was another step in the same direction. Temiz and Falay moved to Northern Europe, but their prestige and influence in the native country continued to grow, inspiring younger players like Burhan Oçal and Tuna Otenel. Oçal, a master darbuka player and multi-instrumentalist, can be heard in the Groove Alla Turca project co-led with Jamaladeen Tacuma: meeting of a jazz group with an oriental-style ensemble, it has exhilarating moments. Otenel, pianist and saxophonist, is a key sideman in many Turkish jazz records, and leads his own European trio in France where he recorded L'Ecume De Vian with Pierre Michelot on bass.

Turkish jazz musicians can be divided today into those more interested in developing a "proper" Jazz idiom, and those more oriented toward experiments that fuse jazz with different strains of Turkish music. Among the former, pianist Aydin Esen recorded for CBS in New York, and keeps a loose connection with top European players like Czech bassist George Mraz and French drummer Daniel Humair; guitarist Onder Focan is a major interpreter of the standard repertoire, but he plays in a wide variety on contexts. For the latter, very representative is Asia Minor, led by electric bass player Kamil Erdem and including saxophonist Yahya Dai, with a very attractive mixture of electric jazz and Turkish motifs. Erkan Ogur, extraordinary player of all plucked strings, traditional or otherwise, produces extended meditations influenced by Coltrane and Hendrix in his Telvin trio, and is a major force in all Turkish music.

Luckily there are no strict boundaries between groups and genres, so an internationally famous classical pianist like Fazil Say and the last exponent of the foremost lineage of Sufi ney players, Kudsi Erguner, naturally found their meeting ground in jazz. Their live collaboration has not yet been issued, but check out Erguner's excellent CDs Ottomania or Islam Blues on the German ACT label. Ihsan Ozgen, learned conservatory professor, leads his Anatolia group in extended improvisations, and brushed with European jazz in a one-time collaboration with Dutch pianist Guus Janssen. Songwriter Ozdemir Erdogan led a series of '70s jazz groups, where pop star Fatih Erkoç showed his "second identity" as a jazz trombone player, while in the current CDs of the queen of Turkish pop, Sezen Aksu, there are many jazz influences, with Marc Johnson playing bass and percussionist Arto Tunçboyaciyan arranging. The Armenian Navy band led by Tunçboyaciyan, now based in the USA, is a major example of traditionally-based, but jazz influenced, music.

Tenor saxophonist Ilhan Ersahin commutes with New York with his mixture of electronic rhythms, throaty jazz improvisation and poetry. Rapper Sultana, Saadet Turkoz, Sibel Kose and Feyza represent a growing group of vocalists, and established "art" singer Esin Afsar gave a charming jazz reading of Asik Veysel's hugely popular airs. Ayse Tutuncu created a unique sound with her Piano-Percussion group, its repertoire ranging from Debussy to Carla Bley, from Turkish tangos to the Yellowjackets, but the base of active jazz musicians is rapidly growing, and Butch Morris's Istanbul conductions featured many of them.

Keyboardist Ali Perret, drummers Can Kozlu and Cengiz Baysal are now teaching in the first major Jazz education program -- at Bilgi University in Istanbul where Mingus alumnus Ricky Ford leads the band -- but many Universities boast their own jazz society and well-attended festivals. The "alternative" Acik Radyo in Istanbul makes Jazz a substantial part of its offerings, and a specialized quarterly is widely available in bookstores and newsstands.

For the music-interested tourist, Istanbul is full of surprises: in the Beyoglu area many clubs feature live music, and one should check at least Babylon and Roxy, at the opposite ends of the pedestrian thoroughfare Istiklal Caddesi, where several excellent record shops are located, including Lale Plak, specialized in jazz, it's friendly and well-stocked, and is where labels featuring the best of Turkish production, like Doublemoon and Kalan, can be found.

by Francesco Martinelli

Jazz in Germany (Essay)

" If we cannot conquer the communist world with weapons, we will do it with the jazz trumpet."

--British Field Marshall Montgomery


What was the most important event in German history between 1980 and 2000? That's easy: the destruction of the Berlin wall. What was the worst thing that happened to German jazz musicians in the same era? Same answer. Tearing down the Berlin wall. Many Germans want to put the wall back up, and not just jazz musicians.

The wall itself was just a symbol for the divided Germany, whereas it was reunification that put the German government so far in the hole that arts funding had to be sliced into like a Bavarian ham thigh. The jazz scene on either side of the wall had much in common with the train system in Germany, and America for that matter. Neither jazz nor choo choo can pay its own way.

Musicians would earn less than dishwashers if it was left up to the public. In the old East German system a guaranteed wage was provided for those players who had been approved by an official panel of appointed music experts, a process that sounds threatening but is really is not much worse than getting a big name booker to touch a demo tape. Similar panels existed to green light new jazz clubs or performance spaces, some of which were like social meeting halls. In West Germany, a similar process had helped create a network of youth clubs, performing art centers and other venues, in villages as well as big cities

The post-war era was when the German "trad" jazz scene ruled whichever local gasthaus could put up with it, but from the 60's onward free jazz became a popular mode of expression. In the west it was seen as a music of rebellion and freedom. The fever took hold on both sides of the wall, and ironically, free jazz was something communists and capitalists seemed to agree about. Some eastern bloc governments regarded free jazz as a musical attack on the western capitalist system, and decided to encourage it. This included the ultra-repressive Caecescu government in Romania.

Among European nations, Germany was the king of free jazz. Not everyone was thrilled with this in an era when animosity between the old and new was at a height. Guitarist Attila Zoller, up til then one of the few German jazz musicians to make a name for himself in the United States, took strong exception to the music of young Peter Brotzmann. Despite Zoller's his own barbaric first name, he actually comparied Brotzmann to a Hun gone berserking.

Others looked for positive rather than negative connections between free jazz and the country's history, finding free jazz to part of a tradition of self-criticism dating back to Goethe. Original players such as guitarist and instrument inventor Hans Reichel, saxophonist Rudiger Carl, bassist Peter Kowald, and Brotzmann were furthermore part of a Ruhr Valley Style based on the idea that inhabitants of this overly populated, extremely busy industrial region had a special kind of energy sucked in from the surroundings, industrial pollution included.

Another explanation that has been offered for the popularity of free jazz in Germany is other styles of jazz required a feeling for playing the blues, something East Germans in particular were said to lack. "We really cannot play the blues. It is really quite impossible," was a stock explanation for this cultural drawback offered to musicians visiting East Germany. The sounds of an East German blues club might back up such an opinion, but it still runs contrary to the notion of blues being played best by people who have actually suffered. And suffering was how most jazz musicians on the German scene in the 70's and 80's would have described their lot, east or west. Little did they know they were actually really thriving compared to the future.

East German jazz players wound up feeling like they had been dropped off the edge of a cliff. The entire government program supporting them literally vanished overnight. It was also like waking up to every jazz recording company out of business, since the state-operated recording monopoly Amiga had been flushed down the drain along with the rest of the eastern bloc.

In West Germany, foreign musicians were hurt by the cutbacks as well as German passport holders. West Germany's arts subsidies had stuffed the wallets of many jazz and avant garde players from the United States, Japan and other European nations. Prior to the reunification, some of these musicians estimated a third of their income was Deutsch marks in a given year. Smaller audiences in all parts of Germany for jazz or improvised music events was also part of the cash crash. In the former Eastern bloc countries this was interpreted as a depressing trend in which the newly liberated youth embrace mainstream culture and in the words of Czech organizer Borek Halacek, "are no longer the slightest bit interested in anything alternative."

Falling subsidies were the largest problem for organizations such as Free Music Productions, a Berlin-based record label and concert organization responsible for much politically important musical interaction between East and West German improvisers. Its festivals such as the Total Music Meeting had always been well attended, but were never able to rely on ticket sales to pay all expenses. By 2000, FMP was in such bad financial condition it almost aborted its annual events-in the end, the festivals took place with musicians donating their services for free, a situation that would have been unheard of in the fat funding days. The creation of new enterprises with as epic a scope as the FMP catalog seemed unlikely in the future, although new jazz labels did crop up in Germany. These ranged from wee enterprises such as Grob which burn limited editions to the ambitious Between the Lines, a label backed by a German bank and windmill manufacturer.

The large scale jazz festival scene did continue, although Germans complained the events had gotten more expensive and too commercial. Compared to the United States, on the other hand, Germany would still seem to have many darn good festivals, no wall or no wall. These include events in Berlin, Nurnburg and Munich and the summer Moers Jazz Festival in the Ruhr. Sadly, the latter event's important improvisation project was scaled back drastically.

Darmstadt also holds an annual Jazzforum in which professionals convene in panels to discuss topics such as the changes in the jazz scene since the old days. There was the time, for example, when East German jazz drumming legend Gunter 'Baby' Sommer was finally allowed to come to West Berlin for the Free Music Workshop. He sat in the dimly lit café of the Berlin Latin Quarter club and watched a waitress calmly mash down the remains of a candle with an entirely new one. "In the east, we have no candles at all, so we would keep every scrap. In the west, they just put another candle on top of the old one and waste it," Sommer observed. That was the late 70's. By the late 80's, musicians from the east such as the trombone blowing brothers Johannes and Connie Bauer were no longer comparing candles with their West German brethren, but the scarcity of gigs. Total Music Meeting had become almost Total Lack of Gigs.

This no doubt made the increase in interest in European jazz among the American audience in this period all the more exciting, especially since it is said that

the dream of every German boy is to travel to America. Players would have gladly hitched themselves to covered wagons if that was necessary. Some German musicians had toured the states in the 80's--most notably the crazed Bergisch-Brandenburgisches Quartet with Reichel, Carl, the fire-breathing East German alto saxophonist Ernst Ludwig Petrowsky and goofy drummer Sven-Ake Johansen-but activity of this nature increased tenfold in the 90's. The most ambitious of these treks was that of bassist Peter Kowald, who claims to have landed 20 gigs in one night simply by posting his intentions on the internet. He not only likes to drive a band, but also likes to drive, period. Amongst German jazz musicians, it is known as "pulling a Kowaldsky" if one decides to drive home at night after the last gig of a tour no matter how far away home happens to be. Kowald arranged to buy a station wagon upon his arrival in America in 1999 and was off touring coast to coast for the next two months. He estimated that he performed with some five dozen different American improvisers and got in one car wreck in the process, all in all a much more successful tour then it would have been had these figures been reversed.

The amazing synthesizer player Thomas Lehn also toured in the late 90's with American percussionist Gerry Hemingway under the cartoonish name of Tom and Gerry. Big sound and big man, tenor saxophonist Brotzmann proved himself to be just as big a draw in the USA as any American free jazzer. And in a slight bit of payback, he was one of the few German players to benefit from some form of American funding, namely the McArthur grant that Chicago musician Ken Vandermark decided to spend a wad of mounting a Brotzmann large band tour.

The most famous German jazz musician of them all, the virtuoso trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff who comfortable in both free and swing styles, easily held onto his international reputation while doing most of his playing in Germany. He consolidated his considerable power on the scene by taking over as musical director of Jazzfest Berlin in the early 90's. and finally got to make a recording with one of his big influences, saxophonist Lee Konitz. What is considered a relative lack of animosity between young and old generations of players in Germany is often credited to the senior statesman Mangelsdorff's calm and engaging personality, setting a good example -- which is a lot more than anyone can say for Brotzmann! ~ Eugene Chadbourne

by Eugene Chadbourne

Italian Jazz (Essay)

Italy and Jazz go a long way back together. Around 1895 Joe Alexander (Alessandra) was already playing syncopated music in New Orleans. The first jazz record included Nick La Rocca, leader of the ODJB, the first band to record "Tiger Rag," and Tony Sbarbaro; Louis Armstrong took inspiration from Caruso's records for the projection of his trumpet sound.

At the end of the First World War General Pershing's orchestra played in Italy ragtimes and foxtrots. With his musicians played another Italian, guitarist Vittorio Spina, who met a 5-year-old Django Reinhardt when around 1915 the gypsy caravan wandered until Rome.

The 20's in Italy saw the introduction of the trap set - called "jazz" - while dance bands switched from violins to trumpets and saxophones. In 1932 Elio Levi, a Jew, praised Ellington in print; in 1935 Armstrong played his first Italian concert. Futurist musicians praised Jazz, but by the end of the 30's Fascism began to cut down on the "foreign" rhythms and the "degraded" music. Racial laws prevented black and white musicians to play together; little did the Duce know that his own son would become a jazz pianist of sorts….

During the II world war both the German and the Allied Armies relied on big bands for their propaganda broadcast, providing precious experience to musicians. In 1948 Gilberto Cuppini's Bebop Sextet recorded Night In Tunisia/Salt Peanuts: Italian modern Jazz was born. In 1949 pianist Armando Trovajoli's trio played the Paris Festival, and in the same Salle Pleyel in 1952 trumpetist Nunzio Rotondo with his cool style à la Miles Davis had a great success.

In 1957 Giorgio Gaslini presented at the Sanremo Festival his Tempo and Relazione op. 12, possibly the first attempt to combine jazz and dodecaphonic music in Europe. Accomplished classical pianist and composer, Gaslini's presence is crucial to the Italian scene, he's the first to bring jazz to the Conservatory. Another pianist took the road from his small village in the Alps and wandered all over Europe: Guido Manusardi will form an extraordinary partnership with Red Mitchell, and his compositions inspired by Rumanian airs remain among the most successful experiments of this kind. Tenorman Gianni Basso took advantage of his family's immigration to Belgium to learn from Toots Thielemans and Jacques Peltzer, and back in Italy founded with Oscar Valdambrini on trumpet a popular sextet, inspired by the relaxed approach of Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. Chet Baker and Gato Barbieri lived in Italy, famously playing for movie soundtrack and bringing up the standard of musicianship.

In the mid-sixties Giorgio Gaslini is again at the forefront of Free Jazz in Italy together with Mario Schiano and the Gruppo Romano Free Jazz. Other pioneers of free music in Italy are Guido Mazzon, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Marcello Melis: Schiano's Controindicazioni festival in Rome is still a major forum for European free improvisation.

Meanwhile Enrico Rava brought Italian Jazz out of the country: his 1965 Sanremo concert with Lacy, Moholo and Dyani shocks the audience, but after a long stay in New York his groups with Massimo Urbani and his European quartet will charm the whole continent, establishing the first truly international Italian jazz star.

During the musical and social turmoils of the Sixties Jazz gathered popularity, with festivals and schools blooming all over the country. Jazz-rock group were born: Area featured the multiphonics vocals of Demetrio Stratos, Perigeo launched the careers of major jazzmen Claudio Fasoli and Franco D'Andrea. In the 70's and 80's a new crop of talents appeared: pianists Enrico Pierannunzi, Rita Marcotulli and Piero Bassini, bassists Bruno Tommaso and Paolo Damiani, saxmen Eugenio Colombo, Gianluigi Trovesi, Pietro Tonolo, Carlo Actis Dato all gave their personal contribution to the creation of a recognizably Italian sound. Tiziana Ghiglioni pioneered a freewheeling style of vocal jazz inspired by Jeanne Lee and Betty Carter, opening the way for a number of other singers, notably Maria Pia De Vito. Another trumpeter, Paolo Fresu, followed Rava establishing an European career: he partly lives in France but keeps a strong relationship with his home town, Berchidda in Sardinia, where he created an internationally renowned Jazz festival. After Fresu, a number of younger, talented players has found its way on the French scene: among them, Riccardo Dal Fra (Fresu's bass partner), trumpeters Fabrizio Bosso and Fabio Boltro, saxmen Emanuele Cisi and Stefano Di Battista. Pianist Salvatore Bonafede and saxist Rosario Giuliani play a hard bop with a new twist.

Founded by Apulian trumpeter Pino Minafra in 1990 the Instabile Orchestra became the most durable and arguably the most renowned internationally of all Italian Jazz bands. From opera arias to brass bands, from contemporary composition to Mediterranean suggestions, the Italian musical traditions creating a fascinating sound through Jazz's improvisational practice. The Instabile also promotes yearly in Pisa its own festival.

A whole new generation came in the 80's from Apulia and Sicily: Roberto Ottaviano, Stefano Maltese, Gianni Gebbia, Sebi Tramontana, Giorgio Occhipinti. From Milan, Nexus' Daniele Cavallanti and Tiziano Tononi keep working at their swinging brand of free jazz, Tononi's monumental three-Cd tribute to Roland Kirk receiving world-wide recognition; Rome's answers are pianist Danilo Rea and his Doctor Three with Enzo Pietropaoli and Roberto Gatto. Riccardo Fassi's Tankio Band and Roberto Spadoni's Urkestra are fresh takes on the big band traditions. Dazzling pianist Stefano Battaglia played the modern jazz book with trio partners Paolino Della Porta and Fabrizio Sferra, lead Theatrum, an improvisation workshop band, and produced a series of brilliant piano solos. At Siena's Summer Jazz Seminars since 1978 young musicians meet the established Italian jazz stars, while from all over Italy new talents keep appearing: the Parma Jazz Frontiere orchestra led by bassist Roberto Bonati, the Apulian Dolmen Orchestra led by saxist Daniele Pisani, from Umbria clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi's groups. Alongside Umbria and Rome Jazz Festivals, mammoth Italian versions of Montreux and North Sea, smaller festivals are promoted in many towns - among them Clusone, Parma, Bergamo, Vicenza, S. Anna Arresi, Tivoli, Barga, Roccella, Reggio Emilia - letting visitors discover less-known places and a wealth of exciting music. ~ Francesco Martinelli

by Francesco Martinelli

Classic Jazz (Essay) (Scott Yanow)

When one thinks of the 1920's as it is portrayed by the mass media, the images of dixieland, college kids wearing raccoon coats, the Charleston, gangsters and speakeasies come quickly to mind. It was termed "The Jazz Age" by F. Scott Fitzgerald and was thought of nostalgically as a somewhat hedonistic era by later generations who had to live through the Depression and World War II.

Although there is some truth in the stereotypes, there was much more to the decade than is seen in movies depicting the era, and there was more to its jazz scene than dixieland. The term "classic jazz" refers to music from the era and its later revivals and recreations, overlapping with New Orleans jazz and dixieland but covering a wider area.

The 1920's were arguably the most important decade in the evolution of jazz. In 1920, jazz was largely unknown to the general public and those that knew of it often disapproved, considering it barbaric and even sinful compared to more sedate dance music, marches, ragtime and classical music. By 1930, even though it was still not taken all that seriously as an art form, jazz had become a permanent influence on popular music and it was danced to by a countless number of people who had never heard of Jelly Roll Morton or King Oliver.

The number of significant developments that occured during the decade in jazz are remarkable. It was during the 1920's that important soloists first emerged in jazz, causing the music to develop beyond its brass band roots (where all of the musicians generally played at the same time) to a vehicle for creative virtuosoes. Musicians began to phrase differently, changing from a staccato approach to legato and not hitting every note right on the beat. Arrangers began to infuse dance band arrangements with the rhythm and phrasing of jazz, leaving room for soloists; even most of the more commercial orchestras featured a brief trumpet solo after the vocalist. The recording industry grew drastically, propelled by the change in the mid-1920's (mostly during 1925-27) from an acoustic to an electric process that greatly improved the technical quality of recordings. And perhaps most importantly, it was in the 20's that top black jazz musicians began to record.

In 1920, jazz was primarily known to the general public as the colorful and primitive music of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The ODJB's sound dominated records of the 1917-21 period to the point where most groups (virtually all white) who attempted to record jazz sounded similar to the band. While the ODJB was very important in helping to introduce listeners to jazz (including in England where they visited in 1919), it is not surprising that its music scared off some listeners. The group's initial recording "Livery Stable Blues" (a big hit) found the horn players imitating the whinnying, roars and cackles of barnyard animals and, beyond its novelty value, it was not comparable on any level to the typical playing of a classical violinist.

It was up to bandleader Paul Whiteman to make jazz accessible to the general public. Called "The King Of Jazz" by a press agent (which has led to his importance being underrated and ridiculed through the years), Whiteman could more properly be called "The King Of The Jazz Age." Starting with a million-selling 1920 recording of "Whispering," Whiteman's bands featured high musicianship and versatility. Its jazz content throughout the first half of the 1920's was not that strong but Whiteman always featured superior dance music and kept his ears open. In 1924 he persuaded George Gershwin to compose "Rhapsody In Blue" and his string section often played semi-classical works, an early predecessor of Third Stream music. In Henry Busse, Whiteman had a limited but appealing trumpeter whose hot choruses were generally just doubletime repetitions but had the feel of jazz; hit versions of "Hot Lips" and "When Day Is Done" were due to the excitement that Busse could generate. By the mid-20's, Whiteman started signing up serious jazz players such as cornetist Red Nichols and trombonist Tommy Dorsey and in 1927, with the collapse of the Jean Goldkette Orchestra, he added such important musicians as cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, C-melody saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, violinist Joe Venuti, guitarist Eddie Lang and the inventive arranger Bill Challis. When Bing Crosby joined as part of the Rhythm Boys, Whiteman during 1927-29 finally had a frequently great jazz orchestra. Other contemporary dance bands followed in his path.

While one thinks of the big band era as having begun in 1935 when Benny Goodman caught on, the 1920's were filled with preswing jazz orchestras. Shortly after Paul Whiteman began to become famous, pianist Fletcher Henderson formed his own big band and started to record on a frequent basis in 1923. Arranger Don Redman (credited with being the first to divide an orchestra musically into trumpet, trombone, saxophone and rhythm sections) wrote complex, experimental and futuristic charts for Henderson that put the orchestra at the top of its class by 1924. However it was the emergence of Louis Armstrong that made the Henderson big band into the first swinging jazz orchestra. At the time, the New York musicians were better technically than the New Orleans players who were based in Chicago, but it took Armstrong to introduce blues phrasing and swing to the East Coast. Louis was an expert at constructing dramatic statements that expertly used space and he made each note count. By the time his year with Henderson was up, Armstrong's influence had permanently changed the band and the New York jazz scene.

New York had heard the blues before. In fact in 1920 Mamie Smith recorded "Crazy Blues" and her record started a blues craze that lasted a few years. Suddenly the word "blues" was tacked on to the titles of many songs and scores of vaudevillian-oriented female singers began to record. Although some (including Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters) were quite talented, it was not until Bessie Smith recorded Hunter's "Downhearted Blues" in 1923 that listeners began to know the difference between a singer performing a blues and a real blues singer. Throughout the 1920's, many "classic blues singers" would pop up on records but the one who made the biggest impact was Bessie Smith (rightfully called "The Empress Of The Blues"); even when faced with very primitive recording facilities and weak sidemen, Bessie (who recorded until 1933) overpowered the surroundings and created performances that still communicate to today's listeners.

It was when the blues craze was at its height that jazz began to emerge more fully on record. During 1921-22 trumpeter Phil Napoleon started recording frequently in New York with small bands that were more creative and swinging than the ODJB; the Original Memphis Five was the best known (and most prolific) of these recording groups. In Los Angeles trombonist Kid Ory in 1921 with the Seven Pods Of Pepper Orchestra (his usual band with cornetist Mutt Carey) recorded two instrumentals that were the first documentation of a black New Orleans group. During 1922-23 the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (with clarinetist Leon Rappollo) showed that not all the early jazz pioneers were black and then in 1923 King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band (an octet with both Oliver and Louis Armstrong on cornets, clarinetist Johnny Dodds and drummer Baby Dodds) proved to be the finest of the early New Orleans jazz bands to make it on record. A few years later pianist-composer Jelly Roll Morton with his Red Hot Peppers perfectly blended together arrangements and creative frameworks with concise solos.

However classic New Orleans jazz was soon overshadowed by the rise of the great soloists. James P. Johnson, called "the father of the stride piano," was a brilliant pianist whose complex left-hand patterns ("striding" up and down between bass notes and chords) inspired youngsters such as Fats Wallerand often scared away his potential competitors. His first recorded piano solos were in 1921 and even now few listeners probably realize that this multi-faceted talent composed "Charleston." Sidney Bechet, a masterful soprano-saxophonist and clarinetist, recorded some virtuosic sides during 1923-24 although his extensive stays in Europe cut back on his impact in the U.S. Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, who had a beautiful cool tone and a harmonically advanced style, recorded solos with the Wolverines (a fine Midwest jazz band) in 1924 that were full of subtlety and unexpected moments. Symbolic of the "jazz age," Beiderbecke became the top white jazz player of the decade yet was unknown to the general public. He was the star sideman with the short-lived Jean Goldkette Orchestra, recorded many brilliant solos in 1927 with recording groups headed by Frankie Trumbauer and was featured in occasional spots with Paul Whiteman's Orchestra during 1927-29 before alcoholism caused his rapid decline and death in 1931. His death at age 28 made him a jazz martyr and a legend.

But it was Louis Armstrong who, although a New Orleans player, really helped end the New Orleans era and pave the way towards swing. He was just too skilled a soloist to be confined to ensembles. After leaving Fletcher Henderson and returning to Chicago in 1925, he worked nightly with big bands and recorded a series of classics with his Hot Five and Hot Sevens. His 1925-27 records generally also included clarinetist Johnny Dodds (arguably the top clarinetist of the era) and trombonist Kid Ory who at first were nearly equals until Armstrong's rapid growth made him the dominant force. Armstrong's 1928 records with pianist Earl Hines (one of his few matches in rhythmic daring) are among the most advanced of Louis' career and his playing on the flawless "West End Blues" (with its memorable opening cadenza) was his personal favorite recording.

Even without Louis Armstrong, it seemed only a matter of time before soloists would become more important. The muffled sound of acoustic recordings were giving way to their much more lifelike electric counterparts by 1925-26 and jazz stars were destined to emerge. Dixieland was evolving from New Orleans jazz and the number of distinctive players that were inspired by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, King Oliver, Bix and Armstrong were multiplying yearly. While Armstrong and Beiderbecke were the pacesetters among cornetists and trumpeters, there were also such up-and-coming brassmen as Jabbo Smith (who in 1929 at the age of 19 showed tremendous potential that he never lived up to), Red Allen (the last major New Orleans trumpeter of the era), Jimmy McPartland and Red Nichols (a Bix-inspired player who was very important during the era as the leader of many jazz-oriented record sessions in New York, often under the name of his Five Pennies). The trombone evolved from the percussive and guttural playing of Kid Ory and the wide interval jumps of the unique Miff Mole (who often teamed up with Nichols to create unpredictable music) to the more influential Jimmy Harrison and Jack Teagarden. The New Orleans clarinetists (chiefly Johnny Dodds and Jimmie Noone) ruled during the decade but the young Benny Goodman was showing great promise with drummer Ben Pollack's fine big band. The saxophone, considered a novelty instrument and a poor replacement for a trombone at the beginning of the decade, worked perfectly in dance orchestras and some important voices emerged including on tenor Coleman Hawkins and Bud Freeman, both Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter on alto, Frankie Trumbauer on the C-melody sax (which soon became nearly extinct), bass saxophonist Adrian Rollini and baritonist Harry Carney.

As far the rhythm section went, James P. Johnson's followers and contemporaries at nightly jam sessions included Fats Waller, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Earl Hines (in Chicago) and the young Duke Ellington. Banjos and tubas by the late 1920's gave way to more flexible rhythm guitars and string basses. While Eddie Lang occasionally had brief guitar solos (often teaming up with the immortal violinist Joe Venuti) and bassist Steve Brown drove ensembles in the mid-1920's, their instruments were largely confined to a supportive role. The same was true of drummers who, until Gene Krupa in 1927, were not even allowed to record with a bass drum or a full set due to fears that it would overpower the recording balance. Baby Dodds, thought of as one of the era's top drummers, generally recorded with just a cymbal, woodblocks and a snare drum! It was not until the late 1920's that one can hear how a drummer really sounded.

While instrumentalists evolved quickly during the 1920's, vocalists lagged behind. Other than the female classic blues singers and the male blues performers (who were in a different musical world than players of jazz and dance music), very few vocalists on record were worth hearing before 1925. Singers were hired for their volume and ability to enunciate words, and many sounded like rejects from opera who were lowering themselves to sing pop music. An exception was Cliff Edwards (known as Ukulele Ike) but it was once again Louis Armstrong who introduced swing to singing. In addition to popularizing scat singing (substituting nonsense syllables for lyrics), Armstrong phrased his vocals like a trumpeter and virtually changed the world of pop singing. Bing Crosby, who was in Paul Whiteman's band at the time, learned from Louis' example and his rise saved the world from the pompous baritones and boy tenors who appeared on far too many jazz-oriented records through the late 1920's.

By the end of the 20's, jazz was a major part of popular music and Duke Ellington's innovations with his Cotton Club Orchestra were leading the way towards the future. Jazz, although hardly considered respectable by the middle class, was being utilized at least to a small degree by nearly every commercial dance orchestra and it was the vocabulary of talented musicians at after-hours jam sessions who indulged in freewheeling dixieland-oriented solos and of territory bands from outside the major metropolitan areas. In addition, the spontaneity of jazz by 1927 had become the soundtrack of the freewheeling 1920's.

With the onset of the Depression and the development of swing, the classic jazz era came to a close. Dixieland went underground and then re-emerged full force in the 1940's as did New Orleans jazz. Enthusiasts from later decades often tried their best to bring back the spirit and sound of classic jazz circa 1925-33 but it is a difficult task both because the recording quality has improved so much since then, and because most later musicians phrase in a more modern fashion. There have been exceptions along the way, particularly since the Stomp Off label began to extensively document the traditional jazz scene in the 1980's, but it is a tricky balancing act to recreate the excitement and joy of the early recordings and particularly to play with creativity (rather than merely copying the original records) while sticking within the older boundaries. Fortunately many (but not all) of the classic recordings are readily available on CD and, with the proliferation of so many dixieland and trad jazz festivals, the music lives on in different forms.

11 Essential Classic Jazz Recordings

The Original Memphis Five, Collection, Vol. 1 (Collector's Classics)

Fletcher Henderson, 1927 (Classics)

Louis Armstrong, (Classics)

Fletcher Henderson, 1927 (Classics)

Louis Armstrong, Vol. 4: Louis Armstrong And Earl Hines (Columbia)

Bix Beiderbecke, Volume 1: Singin' The Blues (Columbia)

Bix Beiderbecke and Paul Whiteman, Bix Lives (Bluebird)

James P. Johnson, Snowy Morning Blues (GRP/Decca)

Fats Waller, Fats And his Buddies (Bluebird)

Jabbo Smith, 1929-1938 (Retrieval)

Red Allen, 1929-1933 (Classics)

Benny Goodman and Red Nichols, BG & Big Tea In NYC (GRP/Decca)

Duke Ellington, Okeh Ellington (Columbia)

Books

Early Jazz by Gunther Schuller (Oxford Univ. Press, 1968)

Bix - Man And Legend by Richard Sudhalter, Philip Evans and William Dean Myatt (Schirmer Books, 1974)

Jazz Masters Of The Twenties by Richard Hadlock (Da Capo Press, 1965)

Voices Of The Jazz Age by Chip Deffaa (Univ. Of Illinois press, 1990)

Ellington - The Early Years by Mark Tucker (Univ. Of Illinois Press, 1991)

By Scott Yanow

Hard Bop (Essay) (Scott Yanow)

Hard bop, like cool jazz and soul jazz, started out as a subsidiary of another style of music, in this case bop. With the rise of bop in the mid-to-late '40s, the chord structures, rhythms and improvising in jazz had become much more complex. Although its pacesetters were masterful virtuosoes, many of the followers sacrificed feeling for precision, emotion for speed. Charlie Parker  and Dizzy Gillespie were nearly impossible musical role models and they certainly could not be topped at the music they had originated.

When cool jazz emerged in the late '40s, some of the qualities of swing that had been de-emphasized (arrangements, a use of space and more of an emphasis on tone) were restored to jazz. However other young musicians wanted to utilize a wider range of emotions than was to be found in cool jazz, and they sought to infuse jazz with elements of spiritual and gospel music (ie: soul). Hard bop gradually developed and by the mid-'50s it had become the new modern mainstream.

Although based in bop, hard bop had a few differences. Tempoes could be just as blazing but the melodies were generally simpler, the musicians (particularly the saxophonists and pianists) tended to be familiar with (and open to the influence of) rhythm & blues and the bass players (rather than always being stuck in the role of a metronome) were beginning to gain a little more freedom and solo space. Due to the soulful nature of some of the solos and the occasionally catchy rhythms, hard bop was nicknamed "funk" for a time. By the early '60s soul jazz (which relied more on a groove) had developed out of hard bop although the two styles frequently overlapped. As the '60s evolved, hard bop players started to incorporate aspects of both modal music (staying on one chord for longer periods of time) and avant-garde into their music.

The beginning of hard bop on record is difficult to determine since its development from bop was a gradual process. A good starting point is Miles Davis' Blue Note sessions of 1952-54; Davis seemed to be at the start of a half-dozen styles! His Blue Note sides featured such important young hard bop stylists as altoist Jackie McLean (whose sound was much different than the cooler-toned Paul Desmond and Lee Konitz), tenor-saxophonist Sonny Rollins (a hard bop extension of Coleman Hawkins), trombonist J.J. Johnson, the highly influential pianist Horace Silver and drummer Art Blakey.

Another important series of recordings were made by the Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet of 1954-56, a unit that featured either Harold Land or Sonny Rollins on tenor. While Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis were important influences on other trumpeters, Clifford Brown took his main inspiration from Fats Navarro (who partly derived his style from Howard McGhee), a short-lived and fiery bop player whose warm tone and logical ideas were easier for brassmen to follow than Gillespie's angular flights. Brownie, before his tragic death in a car accident at age 25 in 1956, became jazz's brightest new trumpeter and his huge influence on other trumpeters (and the entire hard bop movement in general) continues to this day. Since his time, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw to a large extent based their early styles on Clifford's.

With the gradual decline of West Coast Jazz during the mid-to-late '50s, hard bop essentially took over. A whole generation of top young modernists developed in the wake of the innovations of Parker and Gillespie, eager to develop their own voices. The development of the Lp in the late '40s had made recordings not only lengthier (individual songs could now reach 20 minutes rather than the previous three) but much more numerous. While many labels opted for inexpensive jam sessions, Blue Note (under the direction of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff) paid musicians for rehearsals and encouraged the inclusion of new material. Their numerous releases were not only consistently high-quality (particularly during 1952-67) but classy.

There were many top musicians involved in hard bop, but few were more important than drummer-leader Art Blakey. The co-founder of the Jazz Messengers in 1955 with Horace Silver, Blakey retained the group's name after Silver went out on his own. Throughout a 35-year period, Blakey was a masterful talent scout (perhaps even surpassing Fletcher Henderson in earlier years and Miles Davis). The passionate drummer pushed his musicians to play themselves rather than copy their role models and to come up with original compositions. Here is a partial list of the young talent that benefitted from their periods as members of the Jazz Messengers: tenors Benny Golson, Hank Mobley, Johnny Griffin, Wayne Shorter, Billy Harper, Bill Pierce and Javon Jackson, altoists Jackie McLean, Bobby Watson, Branford Marsalis and Donald Harrison, pianists Bobby Timmons, Walter Davis Jr., Cedar Walton, John Hicks, Keith Jarrett, James Williams, Donald Brown, Mulgrew Miller, Benny Green and Geoff Keezer, bassists Doug Watkins, Reggie Workman and Charles Fambrough, trombonists Curtis Fuller and Robin Eubanks and trumpeters Kenny Dorham, Donald Byrd, Bill Hardman, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Chuck Mangione, Woody Shaw, Valeri Ponomarev, Wynton Marsalis, Wallace Roney, Terence Blanchard, Phillip Harper and Brian Lynch!

In addition to the Jazz Messengers, other significant hard bop groups included the Horace Silver Quintet (particularly when it featured trumpeter Blue Mitchell and the tenor of Junior Cook), the Jazztet (with trumpeter Art Farmer and Benny Golson on tenor) and the Cannonball Adderley Quintet (which crossed over into soul jazz).

Even though the avant-garde began to garner most of the headlines by the early '60s, hard bop was quantity-wise the most dominant jazz style of 1955-68. In general the pacesetters were trumpeters Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan (who had a major hit in the mid-'60s with "The Sidewinder") and Freddie Hubbard, trombonists J.J. Johnson and Curtis Fuller, tenors Sonny Rollins and Hank Mobley (although John Coltrane's influence was felt by the late '50s), altoists Phil Woods, Jackie McLean and Cannonball Adderley, guitarists Kenny Burrell, Grant Green and Wes Montgomery, organist Jimmy Smith and pianists Horace Silver and Bobby Timmons. As the 1960s progressed, such new players as tenors Joe Henderson and Stanley Turrentine and trumpeter Woody Shaw emerged to give the music some fresh blood.

But by the mid-to-late-'60s hard bop was running out of gas. With the sale of Blue Note to Liberty and eventually United Artists, the style (and jazz in general) gradually lost its most significant label. Soul jazz, which was becoming more commercial, took part of hard bop's audience and many of the musicians were looking elsewhere towards the emerging fusion movement, the avant-garde or more commercial sounds. The rise of commercial rock and the consolidation of most of the independent record labels caused hard bop to have a much lower profile in the 1970s as it was overshadowed by other trends.

However hard bop never died and in the 1980s it served as the inspiration for the Young Lions movement. Wynton Marsalis and many of the other later graduates of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers used hard bop (along with the post bop music of Miles Davis' mid-60s quintet) as a starting point for their own careers. With so many young players being signed to major labels (at least for brief periods), hard bop suddenly returned full force to the extent where detractors complained that the new musicians were merely recycling the past. Although that was true to an extent, the top members of the Young Lions eventually developed their own musical vision without forgetting their straightahead roots.

In the 1990s, hard bop is the modern mainstream music of the era. Sometimes called "traditional" or merely "mainstream," this style of music still seems to offer improvisers endless possibilities and is the foundation of modern acoustic jazz.

17 Essential Hard Bop Recordings:

Miles Davis, Vol. 1 (Blue Note)

Clifford Brown/Max Roach, At Basin Street (EmArcy)

Sonny Rollins, A Night at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note)

Horace Silver, And the Jazz Messengers (Blue Note)

Art Blakey, Moanin' (Blue Note)

Art Farmer/Benny Golson, Meet the Jazztet (Chess)

Jackie McLean, Bluesnik (Blue Note)

Hank Mobley, Workout (Blue Note)

Freddie Hubbard, Ready for Freddie (Blue Note)

Donald Byrd, Chant (Blue Note)

Wes Montgomery, Full House (Original Jazz Classics)

Lee Morgan, The Sidewinder (Blue Note)

Joe Henderson, Page One (Blue Note)

Grant Green, Idle Moments (Blue Note)

Cannonball Adderley, Dizzy's Business (Milestone)

Horace Silver, Song for My Father (Blue Note)

Art Blakey, Straight Ahead (Concord Jazz)

by Scott Yanow

Italian Jazz (Essay) (by Francesco Martinelli)

Italy and Jazz go a long way back together. Around 1895 Joe Alexander (Alessandra) was already playing syncopated music in New Orleans. The first jazz record included Nick La Rocca, leader of the ODJB, the first band to record "Tiger Rag," and Tony Sbarbaro; Louis Armstrong took inspiration from Caruso's records for the projection of his trumpet sound.

At the end of the First World War General Pershing's orchestra played in Italy ragtimes and foxtrots. With his musicians played another Italian, guitarist Vittorio Spina, who met a 5-year-old Django Reinhardt when around 1915 the gypsy caravan wandered until Rome.

The 20's in Italy saw the introduction of the trap set - called "jazz" - while dance bands switched from violins to trumpets and saxophones. In 1932 Elio Levi, a Jew, praised Ellington in print; in 1935 Armstrong played his first Italian concert. Futurist musicians praised Jazz, but by the end of the 30's Fascism began to cut down on the "foreign" rhythms and the "degraded" music. Racial laws prevented black and white musicians to play together; little did the Duce know that his own son would become a jazz pianist of sorts….

During the II world war both the German and the Allied Armies relied on big bands for their propaganda broadcast, providing precious experience to musicians. In 1948 Gilberto Cuppini's Bebop Sextet recorded Night In Tunisia/Salt Peanuts: Italian modern Jazz was born. In 1949 pianist Armando Trovajoli's trio played the Paris Festival, and in the same Salle Pleyel in 1952 trumpetist Nunzio Rotondo with his cool style à la Miles Davis had a great success.

In 1957 Giorgio Gaslini presented at the Sanremo Festival his Tempo and Relazione op. 12, possibly the first attempt to combine jazz and dodecaphonic music in Europe. Accomplished classical pianist and composer, Gaslini's presence is crucial to the Italian scene, he's the first to bring jazz to the Conservatory. Another pianist took the road from his small village in the Alps and wandered all over Europe: Guido Manusardi will form an extraordinary partnership with Red Mitchell, and his compositions inspired by Rumanian airs remain among the most successful experiments of this kind. Tenorman Gianni Basso took advantage of his family's immigration to Belgium to learn from Toots Thielemans and Jacques Peltzer, and back in Italy founded with Oscar Valdambrini on trumpet a popular sextet, inspired by the relaxed approach of Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. Chet Baker and Gato Barbieri lived in Italy, famously playing for movie soundtrack and bringing up the standard of musicianship.

In the mid-sixties Giorgio Gaslini is again at the forefront of Free Jazz in Italy together with Mario Schiano and the Gruppo Romano Free Jazz. Other pioneers of free music in Italy are Guido Mazzon, Giancarlo Schiaffini, Marcello Melis: Schiano's Controindicazioni festival in Rome is still a major forum for European free improvisation.

Meanwhile Enrico Rava brought Italian Jazz out of the country: his 1965 Sanremo concert with Lacy, Moholo and Dyani shocks the audience, but after a long stay in New York his groups with Massimo Urbani and his European quartet will charm the whole continent, establishing the first truly international Italian jazz star.

During the musical and social turmoils of the Sixties Jazz gathered popularity, with festivals and schools blooming all over the country. Jazz-rock group were born: Area featured the multiphonics vocals of Demetrio Stratos, Perigeo launched the careers of major jazzmen Claudio Fasoli and Franco D'Andrea. In the 70's and 80's a new crop of talents appeared: pianists Enrico Pierannunzi, Rita Marcotulli and Piero Bassini, bassists Bruno Tommaso and Paolo Damiani, saxmen Eugenio Colombo, Gianluigi Trovesi, Pietro Tonolo, Carlo Actis Dato all gave their personal contribution to the creation of a recognizably Italian sound. Tiziana Ghiglioni pioneered a freewheeling style of vocal jazz inspired by Jeanne Lee and Betty Carter, opening the way for a number of other singers, notably Maria Pia De Vito. Another trumpeter, Paolo Fresu, followed Rava establishing an European career: he partly lives in France but keeps a strong relationship with his home town, Berchidda in Sardinia, where he created an internationally renowned Jazz festival. After Fresu, a number of younger, talented players has found its way on the French scene: among them, Riccardo Dal Fra (Fresu's bass partner), trumpeters Fabrizio Bosso and Fabio Boltro, saxmen Emanuele Cisi and Stefano Di Battista. Pianist Salvatore Bonafede and saxist Rosario Giuliani play a hard bop with a new twist.

Founded by Apulian trumpeter Pino Minafra in 1990 the Instabile Orchestra became the most durable and arguably the most renowned internationally of all Italian Jazz bands. From opera arias to brass bands, from contemporary composition to Mediterranean suggestions, the Italian musical traditions creating a fascinating sound through Jazz's improvisational practice. The Instabile also promotes yearly in Pisa its own festival.

A whole new generation came in the 80's from Apulia and Sicily: Roberto Ottaviano, Stefano Maltese, Gianni Gebbia, Sebi Tramontana, Giorgio Occhipinti. From Milan, Nexus' Daniele Cavallanti and Tiziano Tononi keep working at their swinging brand of free jazz, Tononi's monumental three-Cd tribute to Roland Kirk receiving world-wide recognition; Rome's answers are pianist Danilo Rea and his Doctor Three with Enzo Pietropaoli and Roberto Gatto. Riccardo Fassi's Tankio Band and Roberto Spadoni's Urkestra are fresh takes on the big band traditions. Dazzling pianist Stefano Battaglia played the modern jazz book with trio partners Paolino Della Porta and Fabrizio Sferra, lead Theatrum, an improvisation workshop band, and produced a series of brilliant piano solos. At Siena's Summer Jazz Seminars since 1978 young musicians meet the established Italian jazz stars, while from all over Italy new talents keep appearing: the Parma Jazz Frontiere orchestra led by bassist Roberto Bonati, the Apulian Dolmen Orchestra led by saxist Daniele Pisani, from Umbria clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi's groups. Alongside Umbria and Rome Jazz Festivals, mammoth Italian versions of Montreux and North Sea, smaller festivals are promoted in many towns - among them Clusone, Parma, Bergamo, Vicenza, S. Anna Arresi, Tivoli, Barga, Roccella, Reggio Emilia - letting visitors discover less-known places and a wealth of exciting music.

 Francesco Martinelli

New Orleans Jazz (Essay) (by Scott Yanow)

Arguably the happiest of all forms of music is New Orleans jazz and its later descendant Dixieland. The sound of several horns all improvising together on fairly simple chord changes with definite roles for each instrument but a large amount of freedom cannot help but sound consistently joyful.

In New Orleans jazz, the emphasis is on ensembles rather than solos. The style overlaps with Dixieland and classic jazz; to confuse matters more, all three idioms have often been called "traditional jazz" while the charts of Billboard Magazine classify any style of jazz with a walking bass as "traditional!" New Orleans jazz usually features a trumpeter (or a cornetist) in the lead and not wandering far from the melody. The trombonist plays harmonies (occasional saxophonists have similar roles) while the clarinetist is free to supply countermelodies and fills around the brass. While the tuba player (or string bassist) emphasizes the first and third beats of the bar, the drummer amd the banjoist (or guitarist) accent the second and fourth and the pianist often pounds chords on all four beats. The most exciting New Orleans jazz groups are fairly dense during the ensembles (with so much going on that they resemble a three-ring circus) while remaining quite coherent and purposeful.

New Orleans jazz (and jazz itself) really began with the brass bands. In New Orleans (starting in the 19th century), brass bands were plentiful and hired for everything from weddings, parties and parades to funerals. Musicians who might be playing the same song for 15 or 20 minutes naturally chose to come up with fresh variations as they marched and the result was jazz. Influenced by church music and spirituals (some of which have been effectively turned into New Orleans jazz), blues singers (who generally performed solo, backing their vocals with their own guitar while performing on street corners), work songs, marches, ragtime and folk music of the 1800s, jazz began to have its own identity by 1895 when cornetist Buddy Bolden (the music's first legend) formed his earliest group. Bolden was the first New Orleans "King" among cornetists. In future years (after mental illness forced his retirement in 1906) he would be succeeded by Freddie Keppard and Joe "King" Oliver before Louis Armstrong permanently gained the distinction of the top New Orleans trumpeter.

Because there were no jazz recordings before the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917 (and the first black New Orleans group, Kid Ory's band, would not make any records until 1921 or 1922), one can only guess how the early New Orleans groups sounded. Some bands (such as Bolden's) emphasized the lowdown blues and fairly basic chord changes while other had more sophisticated (and sometimes classically-trained) musicians who played written-out arrangements based on ragtime and folk songs. Since New Orleans bands played at a wide variety of functions (from rundown bars and dances to more polite concerts) and parades were plentiful, versatile musicians with plenty of endurance were always in great demand!

New Orleans jazz would have remained just a regional force were it not for two factors: an exodus of musicians from the area starting around 1910 and the booming recording industry of the 1920s. Both trends resulted in the music receiving exposure outside of the South and influencing musicians everywhere.

The exodus began when New Orleans musicians, having outgrown the small pond, decided to explore the rest of the country. Some, like pianist Jelly Roll Morton, traveled throughout the South and spent time on the West Coast. Others eventually headed for Chicago. Years later the legend would be that the closing of New Orleans' red-light district Storyville in 1917 led to the city's musicians going "up the Mississippi" to Chicago but that is rather simplistic. Few other than solo pianists played in Storyville's bordellos, not all of the players went immediately to Chicago and New Orleans continued to have a viable (if reduced) music scene in the 1920s. However many of the city's top musicians did eventually end up for a period in Chicago where by the early '20s they were dominating the city's black music world.

The first jazz band to ever record, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was a white group that was musically limited but frequently exciting. Their first record release, "Livery Stable Blues," featured the horns (led by cornetist Nick LaRocca) imitating animals and it became a sensation; the group also introduced such future Dixieland standards as "Tiger Rag," "Original Dixieland One Step," "Margie," "Indiana" and "At the Jazz Band Ball." The ODJB (which was fairly original for the time although certainly not the originators of jazz that LaRocca sometimes claimed they were), introduced jazz to many listeners and in 1919 during a pioneering tour they brought jazz to Europe for the first time. So strong was the group's initial impact that during 1919-21, the word "jazz" was being applied to nearly every new song and quite a few heated white bands did their best to play in the ODJB style.

The next big step forward (at least on records) was made by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. In 1922 the group (featuring leader-cornetist Paul Mares, the gifted but ill-fated clarinetist Leon Rappolo and trombonist George Brunies) made recordings that sounded a decade ahead of the ODJB. They featured short solos, high musicianship and (unlike the ODJB) the horns were strong improvisers. Mares later modestly claimed that he got many of his ideas from another Chicago-based New Orleans import, King Oliver.

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, which recorded in 1923, was the finest of all the classic New Orleans jazz groups. Although they emphasized ensembles, the band also had influential soloists in cornetist Oliver, the great clarinetist Johnny Dodds and the young second cornetist, Louis Armstrong. Oliver had sent to New Orleans for Armstrong the previous year and the interplay between the two cornets gave the group an explosive power and spontaneity that amazed listeners.

Louis Armstrong has sometimes been called jazz's first truly significant soloist but actually he was preceded by Sidney Bechet. Bechet, a remarkable clarinetist and soprano-saxophonist whose wide vibrato made him either loved or detested by listeners, was a virtuoso whose early tours of Europe (starting in 1919) gave him fame overseas although it reduced his initial impact at home. He would end up his life in the 1950s fairly unknown in the U.S. but a national celebrity in France where he resided and played in his timeless style.

Another important early force was pianist-composer Jelly Roll Morton. Although Morton's tendency to brag (claiming to have invented jazz in 1902) has resulted in him being underrated by many, he was jazz's first important composer, a highly original pianist and an important bandleader in Chicago. His recordings with his Red Hot Peppers (particularly during 1926-28) had a perfect balance of worked-out ensembles, group improvising, brief solos and dynamics. Morton's compositions (which sometimes had three or four themes similar to ragtime) were a transition between ragtime and swing and in fact one of his earliest songs, "King Porter Stomp," became a standard among swing big bands in the 1930s during a period when Jelly Roll himself was completely forgotten.

The decision of Louis Armstrong to leave King Oliver's band in 1924 (in addition to a money dispute, his wife Lil Armstrong convinced Louis that he needed room to grow) ended the Creole Jazz Band and resulted in a major development. Armstrong moved to New York to join Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra. At the time New York musicians may have been technically advanced but they trailed behind the New Orleans players in blues feeling and ability to swing. Armstrong's virtuosity immediately impressed New Yorkers and by the time he returned to Chicago a year later, he was responsible for most top jazzmen virtually changing the way they phrased, used space and drama and developed their ideas.

It is somewhat ironic that Louis Armstrong has always symbolized New Orleans jazz for, starting with his first Hot Five recordings in late '25, he paved the end of the road for classic New Orleans jazz, starting the gradual transition towards swing. Armstrong was such a brilliant soloist that it seemed a waste for him to always be playing in ensembles. The early Hot Fives found him sharing the spotlight with trombonist Kid Ory (his former employer in the late teens) and clarinetist Johnny Dodds but by 1927 he was so far ahead of his contemporaries that he had pushed the music beyond New Orleans jazz.

Although many New Orleans players were recording (including trumpeters Red Allen, Jabbo Smith and King Oliver, trombonist Ory, clarinetists Dodds and Jimmie Noone and the groups of Jelly Roll Morton), by the late '20s the improvised ensembles of New Orleans jazz were gradually being replaced by written-out arrangements. With the 1929 stock market crash, New Orleans jazz largely went underground and such musicians as Oliver, Morton and Dodds stopped recording altogether while others had to adapt to the newer styles.

In New Orleans itself, such trumpet kings emerged as Manuel Perez, Buddy Petit and Chris Kelly but, other than occasional field trips to the South conducted by Victor, few recordings actually took place in New Orleans; in fact none of those three legendary trumpeters made any records. By the late '20s, jazz in New Orleans itself was being influenced by records made up North and was gradually evolving with the times and often losing its uniqueness.

The Depression years were a barren time for New Orleans jazz although the music was still being performed. New Orleans-styled trumpeters Wingy Manone and Louis Prima had success with combo recordings, Bob Crosby's big band featured Dixieland solos in a swing setting and Louis Armstrong was quite famous (although he was regularly touring with a big band and would not return to the New Orleans format until 1947). By the late '30s the jazz world was ready for a New Orleans revival.

The 1939 book Jazzmen summed up jazz history to that point and made readers aware of the existence of the thus far undocumented trumpeter Bunk Johnson who was languishing in retirement. With the rise in popularity of Dixieland (whether it be the Eddie Condon-associated groups or the San Francisco style jazz of Lu Watters' Yerba Buena Jazz Band which took Oliver's Creole Jazz Band as a direct model), jazz historians and fanatics started to descend on New Orleans in hopes of discovering some lost links to the past. Bunk Johnson, who had been a major figure in New Orleans during 1910-30, was given a new set of teeth along with a horn. Soon Bunk became the symbol of ancient New Orleans, he came up North and he began recording fairly frequently. His original band included clarinetist George Lewis and trombonist Jim Robinson and Johnson was proclaimed by his supporters to be playing "true jazz," unspoiled by the influence of swing. Actually Bunk, who soon became erratic due to his excessive drinking, was well aware of swing and enjoyed incorporating current pop tunes into his repertoire but his ensemble-oriented style had strong hints of the past and he enjoyed playing the role of a New Orleans trumpet king even if his playing was not consistently at that level.

While Bunk Johnson had a few years of glory before returning back into obscurity and other veterans were brought out of retirement, New Orleans jazz tended to be overshadowed by Dixieland during the 1945-60 period. George Lewis, who had also returned to New Orleans after a period, formed his own band by 1950 out of the nucleus of Bunk's group and became one of the most popular figures in the movement for the next 15 years. Another renowned group was led by trombonist Kid Ory who with either Teddy Buckner or Alvin Alcorn on trumpet perfectly balanced solo space with exciting ensembles. In the 1950s there were really two types of New Orleans jazz players, the more primitive (at least technically) stylists who played with sincerity, simplicity and spontaneity (such as Lewis and veteran trumpeter Oscar Celestin) and the slicker and usually younger Dixieland groups which were no less enjoyable (such as the Dukes of Dixieland); often there was a lot of overlapping between the two idioms.

While Dixieland faded in popularity in the U.S. by the late '50s, New Orleans jazz received a major boost in the early '60s with the opening of Preservation Hall, which served as a homebase for the veteran players. Soon a Preservation Hall Jazz Band was formed to take the music worldwide and, although the group declined in later years, it did serve as a way to keep the music popular. Several small labels in the 60s (most notably George Buck's Jazzology and GHB companies and Big Bill Bissonnette's Jazz Crusade label) documented the music of such players as trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine, altoist Captain John Handy, trombonist Jim Robinson, clarinetist George Lewis, Billie and De De Pierce, pianist Alton Purnell and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band among others.

With the passing of time, New Orleans jazz declined greatly by the 1970s. However it began to enjoy a bit of renaissance in the 1980s when Wynton Marsalis, who originally played hard bop and post bop, began to explore his roots. Marsalis paid tribute to Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and even Buddy Bolden in some of his projects and his example was followed at least on a part-time basis by other New Orleans modernists who enjoyed incorporating parade rhythms and some group improvising in their music. The rise of pianists Harry Connick Jr. and Marcus Roberts, trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Leroy Jones and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band (a modern brass band that combined their heritage with r&b) also helped to keep classic New Orleans jazz alive and fresh. In the 1990s New Orleans jazz is played at festivals, jazz parties, overseas and even in New Orleans itself. And it's still the happiest music on earth!

Chicago Jazz 1980-2000 (Essay) (by Eugene Chadbourne)

There have been times when the Chicago jazz scene has seemed like a burned out office building., but it wasn't always like that. The significant and in depth research carried out by the Jazz Institute of Chicago tells the story of the 30's, 40's and 50's, decades when a magnificent series of players interacted in clubs and recording studios with as much regard for genre restrictions as a jackrabbit might have for fenced in property.

Yet by the time Anthony Braxton was a young man in the late 50's and early 60's it was common for jazz players to complain bitterly about the lack of outlets. The important cooperative Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians came about largely out of total frustration with the Chicago jazz scene. Veterans mainstream players were putting their saxophones in the closet and going to work for banks. As for Braxton and his associates such as Roscoe Mitchell, Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins or Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, a typical concert was commonly described as "chick gigs", meaning the only audience were the musician's girlfriends, one of whom would also required to take up the door.

These guys and gals wouldn't recognize the Chicago of today. Life returned to jazz, beginning with what small developments at first. Eventual international reverberations have not prevented the scene from retaining a small town atmosphere-because, after all, that's Chicago. This comes with a down side, as in cozy 'best pal' relations between players, critics and festival organizers, who all too often were the same person doffing different chapeaus. But there's also a good side: comfortably atmospheric venues, expansive booking policies, and a less ruthless side to commerce than in New York City. Chicago's Jazz Showcase, for example, proudly announces on its website that customers who pay for one set will probably be allowed to stay on for the next one gratis, provided there is not a line-up at the door.

This venue enjoys decades of success representing the mainstream jazz scene, whose winds have not always blown as hot and strong as the Windy City's nickname might suggest. Yet developments in the last decades have also been kind to the musical swingers, including the success of the club scene in the Lincoln Park and Lincoln Avenue area, with clubs such as the Perfecto providing the one thing these types of players really need: a place to jam. Vocalist Kurt Elling was a magnificent newcomer to this scene, in a period when both traditional saloon singers and highly technical bebop singers in the Mark Murphy vein were both becoming as rare as the dodos hunted by the Dutch navy. The fat, honking tone of tenor saxophonist Ed Peterson became more in demand, and an album Peterson cut in tandem with Von Freeman was classic enough to bring back memories of the Gene Ammons/Johnny Griffin tenor contests. As for Freeman, it was no longer appropriate to say this senior tenor man was "not as famous as his son Chico", as the old man's career engine became fueled by all the added attention the Chicago scene was getting. Others swimming out of the mainstream included drummer Paul Wertico, working frequently with Pat Metheny, and the interesting guitarist Fareed Haque, a member of the ensemble The Natural.

It was not until several new venues such as The Empty Bottle and the Lunar Cabaret appeared in the 90's that more progressive musicians had a reason to leave the house regularly. Prior to that, percussionist Michael Zerang, whose musical family includes several percussionists playing traditional Arab music, gets credit for driving the bus when everyone else had fallen asleep. "He kept things going in in the 80's before a lot of the other free players moved to town.," Chicago composer and multi-instrumentalist Jim O'Rourke says to describe more than Zerang's drumming ability. Zerang was one of the fellows who ran the shows in the various gig spaces in the historic Links Hall building, former meeting place of the Wobblies. Brothers Steve and Chris DiChiara were also active, inviting out of town musicians to Chicago for gigs, as well as making music under the band name of The Blitzoids.

The music of the DiChiara brothers, O'Rourke and others from the Chicago scene paralleled the so-called New York City "downtown" scene in its relationship with jazz. It was new music, it was free improvisation with rock elements, it was progressive rock with a new music influence. It was a little bit of everything including jazz, but few would have simply described it as just another form of jazz, least of all the musicians. But one thing many of these players had in common was that they sure had listened to plenty of jazz. In the case of the Blitzoids, the lads' father had been a big band tenor saxophonist.

"Post rock" was perhaps the label everyone had been looking for to describe artists such as these, but the phrase wasn't coined until the early 90's success of the Chicago ensemble Tortoise. It was "post rock" not because it involved sending rock music by mail but because listeners who wanted to move beyond rock were attracted. This actually meant these listeners would be led into forms of music that had actually thrived before rock, or featured musicians with the courage to shatter musical norms in the days when rockers just wanted to hold our hands. Snobbish older listeners thought that "pre-rock" might have been more historically accurate, but this sold the entire process short. What was interesting about Tortoise, a group collaboration featuring players such as Jeff Parker, John McEntire, John Herndon, Douglas McCombs, Bundy K. Brown, Dan Bitney and David Pajo, was not that it was just another rock band whose members had John Coltrane posters on their walls. The group's major jazz influences happened to be intense studio mixing projects such as Bitches Brew by Miles Davis or Sextant by Herbie Hancock, jazz clearly influenced by psychedelic rock. The audience for these sounds was by nature intelligent enough to know what it was getting into, expanding the crowd for jazz and improvisation, and not only in Chicago. Many offshoot Tortoise bands were formed such Isotope 217, which combined Herndon and Bitney with trombonist Sara Smith and guitarist Rob Mazurek.

The Empty Bottle club became a Chicago institution with annual festivals, weekly events and much collaboration between Europeans and Americans. Saxophonist and composer Ken Vandermark, the surprised recipient of a McArthur "genius" grant in 1999, used a chunk of his funding to pay for a large band project headed up by the German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann. This free music dream group also involved the Swedish saxophonist and frequent Chicago visitor Mats Gustaffson, a selection of Chicago players and the landmark American free jazz player Joe McPhee. The group's exhausting accomplishments brought to mind a crew of sweaty forest rangers returning from a hard day of fixing up mountain trails. The double CD set made some free jazz fans drool, and there was an American tour that was grueling enough to cause the trim, atheletic Vandermark to collapse from exhausation in the aisle of an airplane. All this effort didn't please every jazz critic, but it certainly established artists such as Vandermark, bassist Kent Kessler, trombonist Jeb Bishop and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm as players of international stature. "Chicago scene" began to be a phrase on the tips of tongues, and not because somebody was about to describe King Oliver's first trip up the river.

A spotlight began to shine on many of the city's long under-appreciated players as a result. The important saxophonist Fred Anderson began to perform out of town much more, including European festivals and collaborations with pianist Marilyn Crispell. Drummer Hamid Drake also became an international presence, at one point touring throughout the USA and Europe in a new group formed by avant garde tenor giant Pharoah Sanders. Hal Russell was one of the great figures of Chicago jazz and American creative music in general, wailing on a variety of instruments and encouraging several generations of players to loosen up and go wherever their imaginative spirits would lead them. The 80's and 90's certainly were a Hal of a time as the great man finally got a chance to go off on European tours and release sides on larger labels. Then he was gone, off to join many other departed jazz spirits, his young disciples such as saxophonist Mars Williams eager to carry on in his name. Death also visited one of the city's most famous jazz groups, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, taking away the hilarious and very jazzy trumpeter Lester Bowie. The group was now down to a trio that would probably not continue, having already lost reed player Joseph Jarman to meditation and the karate dojos. The group abandoned Chicago as a base so long ago that its fans jcalled it simply the Art Ensemble. Considering developments of the 80's and 90's, perhaps "of Chicago" was the most important part of the name after all. ~ Eugene Chadbourne

by Eugene Chadbourne