The classical bop, Blue Note style & the nature of creativity in the music

[christianm77]

I was having a think about my transcription of Hank Mobley and thinking about the nature of that era of jazz in general. I would say from my work transcribing so far:

1950s/60s jazz had developed into a pretty coherent language of the back of Parker. After transcribing Mobley, I would say there is little or nothing his solo that is unusual notes wise. This is the same with the other players of that era I have transcribed. There's a specific approach to note choice that is common from player to player.

I think others would agree with me?

You could almost describe these players as basically generic when it comes to note choices. Even the rhythmic side of it is a bit simpler than what Bird was doing... It's more 8th notes and 'balanced' phrases.

Thing is I would describe all these players as highly creative, although I'm not sure I could argue this coherently. I just love the way they play.

I think it's the same as Bach being highly creative, although the guy was not about to go beyond the language of his era and start writing romantic symphonies or quartal harmony or something.

So creativity within a very specific language - it's everything else - the tone, time, phrasing.. the intangibles.

So a transcription is in this case only useful in so much as it teaches you the language. Therefore you learn nothing about what makes a musician creative or unique from learning the 'language' in so much as it can be recorded in notation, or learning the notes on your instrument.

I would also question the assumption that creativity involves progressing music in some direction, particularly in adding more 'stuff' - usually note choices etc, but also some rhythmic stuff.

The narrative seems to be fixated on 'innovators' - usually framed as harmonic note choices - Parker, Miles, Coltrane, and so on, when in fact many of the greats were not innovative in this way at all.

[NSJ]

Who can walk the tightrope at breakneck speed like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell?

The tempos definitely slowed down, The notes were a blur, and wized by at lightning speed; but now they, and their phrasing and articulation, could be heard with greater clarity. The blues, which had never left, became even more apparent. The feel became much more sultry, sweating like a cat on a hot tin roof .

Nobody swung harder than Horace silver. " filthy McNasty" until the cows come home , please.

[pcsanwald]

An analogy here is the Lester Young school of tenor players: Stan Getz, Allan Eager, Zoot Sims, Brew Moore, Al Cohn. None of these guys, particularly early on, ever ventured outside the largely diatonic sound style that Pres pioneered. Nevertheless, I love listening to this style and definitely can hear slight differences in their approach that I find pretty fascinating.

I think the same is true of "hard bop" school, Tina Brooks, Mobley, I'd say Ike Quebec even though he was older, also Lou Donaldson. Not innovative in the way that someone like Wayne Shorter would be, but immensely satisfying to listen to because they all have their own sound and authentic feeling.

This somewhat applies to Wayne, early on. I remember transcribing his solo on "The Joker" and someone commented that the note choices could have come from Dexter Gordon. He really plays fairly inside on that and on a lot of his really earlier work.

My takeaway from all this is how little the pitches matter. I mean, how many of the very greatest jazz bassists have questionable intonation? Literally almost all of them pre-80s.

[AlsoRan]

Christian,

Is there a particular Hank Mobley album you could highly recommend that illustrates your points?

[ecj]

I think I'd disagree that Mobley et al are as creative as Parker or Coltrane. I think being a great artist means innovating and taking music in a new direction. But there's still something to be said for being really freaking good and playing awesome music.

I really love 50/60s "classic jazz" and almost prefer it to the earlier breakneck speed bop at times (I prefer Coltrane to everything). But I can still appreciate that as awesome as these guys are, they're living in Bird's shadow and we're all about to be eclipsed by the power of Trane's sounds.

Also pretty sure you're wrong about Bach. He was considered pretty controversial in his day. I believe people at the time actually preferred his son's music. It wasn't until much later that he was recognized as a genius.


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[christianm77]

Christian,

Is there a particular Hank Mobley album you could highly recommend that illustrates your points?

I've been listening heavily to Soul Station and Workout. What I have said re: Mobley I would equally say is true of Grant Green and Wynton Kelly.

[grahambop]

I mean, how many of the very greatest jazz bassists have questionable intonation? Literally almost all of them pre-80s.

I wonder how Charles Mingus would have reacted to this statement, you would probably want to be somewhere else (if it referred to him)!

I haven't particularly noticed this, but then I find it quite hard to hear the bass clearly on most 50s/60s recordings. But maybe sometimes it's deliberate, in the same way classical violinists can play 'pure' thirds on a fretless instrument? I think I've heard examples of this from Paul Chambers for example.

[Shadow of the Sun]

While I can't really comment on Mobley and Bach, I do think that there's a "cult of innovation", when innovation isn't anywhere near as important as some other things. Namely, execution.

I've seen youtube comments on bands I like put them down, claiming that they're just derivative of someone else (the specific case I'm thinking of involved someone saying that a band was derivative of Pink Floyd). My response was "even if that's true... so what? Just because a work is derivative doesn't mean it's bad".

I think this is a recurring thing in terms of invention and creativity - people tend to emphasise being innovative over being able to execute things well, but in most of the cases where an idea's become big, it's not because the idea is "new", it's because the person who is doing it is able to execute it in such a way as to make the new idea really work.

[christianm77]

I think I'd disagree that Mobley et al are as creative as Parker or Coltrane. I think being a great artist means innovating and taking music in a new direction. But there's still something to be said for being really freaking good and playing awesome music.

I really love 50/60s "classic jazz" and almost prefer it to the earlier breakneck speed bop at times (I prefer Coltrane to everything). But I can still appreciate that as awesome as these guys are, they're living in Bird's shadow and we're all about to be eclipsed by the power of Trane's sounds.

Also pretty sure you're wrong about Bach. He was considered pretty controversial in his day. I believe people at the time actually preferred his son's music. It wasn't until much later that he was recognized as a genius.


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I wrote a long essay about this lol, fortunately for you I managed to delete it accidentally.

The gist of it is - I think what we think of as 'progressive' players who 'move music in a new direction' are most often very individual players whose approach becomes fashionable.

Really music is fashion... We like to talk about progression, but the concept of progression is I think a very 19th century idea imposed on music to try and elevate it to the level of the sciences. Progression in science & technology means something very concrete.

IMO what we call progressive players are simply very individual musicians whose style becomes fashionable. Then everyone copies them and it becomes a movement. There are musicians who were very individual whose style did not create a movement, at least maybe not till much later.

Are they progressive? Perhaps in the sense that they are using a very personal voice, but I doubt the impulse for that is to 'change music.'

Was Coltrane more 'advanced' than Hank Mobley? Well his note choices were more eclectic, but then I might say Hank's phrasing was more sophisticated, and so on. Really Mobley was in the prevailing fashion of his times and Coltrane was a bit of an unusual player that ended up becoming fashionable later on. And despite using a very commonplace harmonic language for the time, his playing is still what I would think of as highly individual.

Now Bach is an interesting one because his music was actually considered old fashioned at the time AFAIK and that';s why he was controversial, not because his music was seen as modern... Very Germanic counterpoint when the prevailing fashion was for more Italianate music (opera was huge, even Bach wasn't immune to its appeal!) Musicians always dug his work though - it was the wider public that had to rediscover him.

So what do you disagree with? Bach wasn't about to write Beethoven symphonies. That wasn't going to happen. The term 'ahead of his time' doesn't really apply.

In any case if the concept of progression in music meant anything, we would have no trouble saying Beethoven would be more advanced than Bach.

But that kind of seems a silly thing to say, Sure, Beethoven does stuff Bach wouldn't do, but more sophisticated? No.

But then our idea of the revolutionary, avant garde musical artist really starts with Beethoven.

[ecj]

I see what you're trying to say, and don't disagree entirely, but I don't think you can totally boil down serious art music to fashion. There's always clearly an element of "fashionability" in music, and once you go post-Bach it's not entirely clear that anything is more virtuosic or "more advanced" than what he was doing with the Goldberg Concertos, but there's clearly a distinction between his music and what came before that is more than just fashion. I think you are diminishing the importance of "craft" in your aesthetic judgments here in a way that pushes too close to some kind of relativism where nothing is better than anything else.

There's a big difference between Giant Steps and Coleman Hawkins playing Body & Soul. I don't know if Giant Steps is "better" than Hawkins' take, but it's clearly different in kind and more advanced in terms of the demands on the performer.

Similarly, in the visual arts, there's a reason people flock to see the David. It's not just because a perfect sculpture of the human form was fashionable for a while. It's because it's incredibly good, and there's something of wonderment in appreciating the power of the human spirit to doggedly pursue perfection.

When you get into the later periods, I agree, it becomes really difficult to decide if Picasso was "better" or "worse" than Da Vinci, or if cubism was an "advancement" over what came before. But clearly those things were better than a Thomas Kinkade. And if we can make that judgment, we can make others.

I think for the same reason we so admire craft and perfection, we also admire innovation. Because it's difficult, and because it's rare and precious. When someone combines the two: innovation with perfection, it's so rare and beautiful and inspiring that we remember the names of the people who achieved those things.

[artdecade]

I think you are diminishing the importance of "craft" in your aesthetic judgments here in a way that pushes too close to some kind of relativism where nothing is better than anything else.

I would argue that relativism is exactly why we can't make definitive statements about art, because the appreciation of it comes from a subjective place. Some art finds immediate adulation whereas other works are slow burners that take decades or even centuries before finding an audience. We can try to place gravitas on what we feel deserves more recognition, but unless we are preaching to the choir, it will require the skeptic to have a paradigm shift before reaching agreement.

[destinytot]

Love Blue Note - but I'm kind of glad (relieved) that neither Benson nor Wes have a discography on that label. There was a slogan along the lines of 'blues is the preacher, jazz is the teacher' - and I think Blue Note really is that teacher.

[princeplanet]

We're talking about Hard Bop, right? Before that, Bird laid down his thing only to watch it being imitated and then modified, maybe "straightened" out.... The clever, jerky, asymmetric, angular lines and rhythms were ironed out into a bluesier framework. Like anything, this seems to be as a result of a whole host of reasons, none the least some cultural ones (but that's another thread). New champions became popular that seemed to strike the right balance between sophistication, attitude and tunes you could maybe hum and tap your feet to (maybe even click your fingers if that was your thing!)...

So, those Miles sessions, the Jazz Messengers, the Max Roach 4, the Jazztet etc ushered in a new take on things which left Bebop behind in some ways, but that doesn't mean it was any less an "advancement". Who would dare say that Sonny Rollins in the mid 50's had any less artistic merit than Bird, or Diz? For one thing it elicits more "feeling", being less gratuitous or clever for clever's sake. Now it was clever and cool (not the west coast kinda cool...). And I happen to think it was the beginning of the most exciting era in Jazz, where some great personalities really put it out there. We all know who they are, and I don't wanna come across like I'm telling you anything you don't already know, but I just wanted to explain why I listen to people like Jackie McLean, or even Tina Brooks far more than I do Charlie P. I mean Bird is the word, make no mistake, but I find I get more feeling from listening to the early disciples, some of whom amplified some of Bop's aspects as well as simplified them.

The enduring popularity of the classic Blue Note era shows that I'm not alone...

[NSJ]

Even much more than Prestige, which were often just blowing sessions, made by whomever was around to be quickly paid in cash, never enough to make a living, but enough to feed a habit ....

The classic blue note records from the 50s to the 60s, overseen by the "wolf and lion ", remain a national treasure of unprecedented levels, which will continue to bring joy to one's hearts, even as the fingers snap and the toes tap .

They remain the audio crown jewels of modern jazz-- Horace Silver, Jimmy Smith, Art Blakey, too many to count and remember .

Let us also remember that the fidelity of the recordings improved drastically somehow from the mid 50s onward. Before that, the sound quality was very much substandard. I don't know what happened with the technology but decent modern recording started in the mid 50s

[destinytot]

not sure what you mean here, but blue note was always more about preaching than teaching imo. the quintessential soul jazz recordings are on BN and prestige. even the freest BN records always had some funk to them.

benson played on at least four BN records (mobley, lee morgan, lonnie smith, lou donaldson). and i'm probably forgetting a few.

Actually, it was 'jazz is the teacher, funk is the preacher'. Had it on a T-shirt many moons ago.

[destinytot]

benson played on at least four BN records (mobley, lee morgan, lonnie smith, lou donaldson). and i'm probably forgetting a few.

Benson with Lee Morgan! And Mobley! Thanks!
Taru (album) - Wikipedia

This channel is chock-full of rare goodies - indispensible:
Joe Louis
- YouTube

[pcsanwald]

I wonder how Charles Mingus would have reacted to this statement, you would probably want to be somewhere else (if it referred to him)!

I wasn't referring to Mingus particularly. Paul Chambers is a great example of someone who very frequently plays out of tune in higher positions and yet is a complete and total bad MFer and no one, including me, really cares that he's playing a bit out of tune. Which is really kinda my point.

[mrcee]

Actually, it was 'jazz is the teacher, funk is the preacher'. Had it on a T-shirt many moons ago.

I've heard that quote attributed to James Ulmer. Or maybe he just appropriated it.

[destinytot]

I've heard that quote attributed to James Ulmer. Or maybe he just appropriated it.

Google tells me it's the title of a track by James 'Blood' Ulmer (whom I remember for his Gibson Byrdland), but I associate the phrase with loud acid-jazz at nightclubs.

[christianm77]

I see what you're trying to say, and don't disagree entirely, but I don't think you can totally boil down serious art music to fashion. There's always clearly an element of "fashionability" in music, and once you go post-Bach it's not entirely clear that anything is more virtuosic or "more advanced" than what he was doing with the Goldberg Concertos, but there's clearly a distinction between his music and what came before that is more than just fashion. I think you are diminishing the importance of "craft" in your aesthetic judgments here in a way that pushes too close to some kind of relativism where nothing is better than anything else.

No I'm not arguing that. My point is not that fashion validates what is good in music, instead that innovation is validated by changing fashions. But there are plenty of forgotten people in history.

The crazy harmony of Gesualdo is a historical curiosity for example, you can't call him an innovator - apparently crazy harmony was actually quite common in some Renaissance music of that era, but kind of became a dead end. Beethoven was an innovator because everyone started writing big long symphonies after he did it.

There's a big difference between Giant Steps and Coleman Hawkins playing Body & Soul. I don't know if Giant Steps is "better" than Hawkins' take, but it's clearly different in kind and more advanced in terms of the demands on the performer.

There's that word ADVANCED again - what does it mean in this context? I don't necessarily agree because I don't know what it means.

Here is what I think it means: 'advanced' music has more interesting harmonic choices than less 'advanced' music. Or perhaps other elements that are intellectually appealing.

If my statement is not what you mean, I would be interested to know what it is.

[mrcee]

Google tells me it's the title of a track by James 'Blood' Ulmer (whom I remember for his Gibson Byrdland), but I associate the phrase with loud acid-jazz at nightclubs.

I saw Ulmer at a club in Hollywood around 1985 and he was great. Calvin Weston on drums and Ali somebody on bass. There was a lot of loud acid jazz at that time which I didn't think was so great. Free leaning Jazz to whatever degree is hard to get right. Was that a Byrdland he played? I was always under the impression it was one of those thin, budget Gibson archtops like a 225. I've scoured YT and heard a few records but none sounded as good as what I heard that night.

[christianm77]

I would argue that relativism is exactly why we can't make definitive statements about art, because the appreciation of it comes from a subjective place. Some art finds immediate adulation whereas other works are slow burners that take decades or even centuries before finding an audience. We can try to place gravitas on what we feel deserves more recognition, but unless we are preaching to the choir, it will require the skeptic to have a paradigm shift before reaching agreement.

Yeah.

So is my opinion on music better than someone else's, for instance? Well among other reasons, my tastes are always in flux.

Different people evaluate music differently. I wouldn't trust Roger Scruton to evaluate groove music, for instance. Actually, I'm not sure I'd trust him to evaluate anything to be honest.

Philosophers are the worst people for that... Theodore Adorno's another one. There has to be an angle.

[NSJ]

Ah yes Ted's "talk" on jazz.

At first, when I found out that Adorno had written essays on Jazz I was kind of excited. Until I read them. Yikes.

[destinytot]

I'd like to hear Grant Green do this:

[destinytot]

I saw Ulmer at a club in Hollywood around 1985 and he was great. Calvin Weston on drums and Ali somebody on bass. There was a lot of loud acid jazz at that time which I didn't think was so great. Free leaning Jazz to whatever degree is hard to get right. Was that a Byrdland he played? I was always under the impression it was one of those thin, budget Gibson archtops like a 225. I've scoured YT and heard a few records but none sounded as good as what I heard that night.

Wikipedia says "Ulmer plays a Gibson Byrdland guitar."