TERRY TEACHOUT - JAZZ MASTERPIECES & BIOS

Commentary Magazine - November 1999   Music Masterpieces of Jazz:A Critical Guide Terry Teachout Early in the 20th century, a new kind of dance music--a syncopated, semi-improvised hybrid of ragtime, brass-band music, popular song, and the blues--began to be heard in New Orleans and other American cities. It had coalesced into an identifiable style by 1910, and around that time came to be called "jazz," a term whose etymology is as elusive as the origins of the music itself. In 1917, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first recordings of jazz; just 21 years later, the jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman and his orchestra performed at Carnegie Hall, then as now the best-known concert hall in America. By that time, even those who still believed jazz to be vulgar fare fit only for the masses suspected that it was here to stay. Jazz long ago evolved into an art music, studied in colleges and universities and heard as often in concert halls as in night clubs. One critic has gone so far as to dub it "America's classical music." Yet at the same time, it remains an essentially popular music, in keeping with its humble utilitarian origins as an accompaniment to social dancing. (The current revival of swing dancing has introduced a whole new generation of listeners to the big-band jazz of the 30's.) Perhaps for this reason, it has become one of this country's chief cultural exports, and is now generally ranked alongside the movies as the most important art form to have originated in the U.S. Jazz criticism and scholarship, however, have developed more slowly than the music itself, in part because jazz is usually improvised rather than composed, thus making it harder to study formally. To date, there have been no more than a dozen or so jazz critics of genuine stature, while the number of first-rate scholarly biographies can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The only fully effective means of documenting jazz performance styles is through recordings, and the fact that such recordings did not begin to be made in significant numbers until 1923 means there has not yet been sufficient time for a jazz "canon" to win more than tentative acceptance. Not surprisingly, most attempts to draw up jazz canons have been marred by idiosyncrasy and poor scholarship.1 A case in point is The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, a 1973 anthology of 84 recordings selected by the late Martin Williams and issued by the Smithsonian Institution, in which a large number of key figures failed to make the cut, with others receiving token or otherwise misleading representation. More recently, outright historical illiteracy has been at least partly to blame for the exclusionary quasi-canon devised by Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray and promulgated by Wynton Marsalis and "Jazz at Lincoln Center," in which white musicians of the past play no significant part.2 It is thus in the interest of clarifying our historical understanding of jazz at century's end that I have drawn up the following list of 65 recorded masterpieces. This list, which I shall present in three installments, is modeled after my "counter-canon" of modern masterpieces of classical music that appeared in Commentary earlier this year.3 In compiling it, I applied broadly similar criteria: * Just as my list of modern classical masterpieces (which included no works by living composers) ended in 1969, the time span covered by the present list runs from 1923, when jazz began to be recorded in earnest, to 1972, the year that "fusion," an amalgam of jazz and rock-and-roll, first won widespread popularity. No subsequent stylistic development has commanded comparable loyalty, and the musicians who have come to prominence since then have mainly been neoclassicists of one sort or another. Meanwhile, virtually all the major exponents of pre-1960 jazz have died or retired, while the leading players of the 60's and early 70's are increasingly regarded as elder statesmen, making it possible to discuss their work in something like a definitive manner. * Even though it is far shorter, I have consciously sought to make this list more diverse than The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, which gave disproportionate coverage to certain musicians.4 Eight recordings by Duke Ellington, for example, were included in the Smithsonian set; I have chosen instead to represent artists like Ellington and Louis Armstrong by only two performances each, not counting their appearances as sidemen on other recordings. * As in my classical list, these recordings were not chosen because they were "influential" (though many have been, some greatly so) or to strike a "balance" of any kind, racial or otherwise. Each one was picked for its musical excellence. Similarly, none is an all-star "catch-all," included so as to cover the largest possible number of miscellaneous names in one fell swoop. As a result, a number of performers who ought to have been represented--among them the trumpeter Bunny Berigan, the trombonist J. J. Johnson, and the pianist-arranger Mary Lou Williams--are instead conspicuous by their absence, very much to my regret. * Except for Louis Armstrong, I have omitted all vocalists (though a number of other instrumentalists are included who also became known, like Armstrong, for their singing). I believe that "jazz singing" is best understood and discussed as a variety of American popular singing, about which I intend to write at a later date. * I have listed individual works, not full-length albums, which for the most part did not exist prior to the invention of the LP in 1948. The albums recommended through 1951 are anthologies devoted to individual artists, and in all cases contain other significant recordings not on the list. Thus, anyone who purchases all 65 recommended performances will in the process acquire a wide-ranging "five-foot shelf" of great recorded jazz on CD. Any list like this one is both provisional and personal. These records are, first and foremost, 65 of my favorites. Some are less familiar than others--I have not felt bound by critical precedent--and a few choices will no doubt seem controversial. Nevertheless, I believe they are all masterpieces, and that, taken together, they paint an accurate sound picture of the first half-century of recorded jazz. This month's installment, in chronological order by date of re cor ding, takes us up to 1937 and the dawn of the swing era, the decade when big-band jazz became the lingua franca of American popular music--a convenient resting place. 1923 1. New Orleans Rhythm Kings Tin Roof Blues The earliest jazz recordings of permanent musical interest were made by two Chicago-based groups consisting mainly of musicians from New Orleans. Both played in the "classic" New Orleans style in which the contrapuntal interplay of clarinet, cornet, and trombone was emphasized over individual solos--though the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a quintet of white players who performed in a relaxed, light-textured style, also boasted in Leon Roppolo (1902-43) a strikingly lyrical clarinetist, perhaps the first truly distinguished jazz soloist to be heard on record. "Tin Roof Blues," which later became a Dixieland staple (and later still a pop song, "Make Love to Me"), features one of Roppolo's most intensely personal solos. "Tin Roof Blues" is included on Lost Chords: A Musical Companion, an anthology of 49 performances discussed in Richard M. Sudhalter's pioneering book, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945, and reproduced in exceptionally clear transfers from issued 78's (Retrieval RTR 79018, two CD's). 2. King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band Dipper Mouth Blues Joe "King" Oliver (1885-1938) led the first great black jazz ensemble to make records. Several members of his Creole Jazz Band--among them Johnny and Warren "Baby" Dodds on clarinet and drums and a young man from New Orleans, Louis Armstrong, who played second cornet to Oliver's lead--would become deservedly famous in their own right. But Oliver's own blues-drenched playing was central to the group's initial appeal. His three-chorus solo on "Dipper Mouth Blues" (named after Armstrong's large mouth, which won him the nickname "Satchelmouth," later shortened to "Satchmo") became a set piece reproduced verbatim by younger cornetists and trumpeters, Armstrong included, whenever the song was played. The first of two versions of "Dippermouth Blues" recorded by the Oliver band in 1923 is on Louis Armstrong and King Oliver (Milestone MCD-47017-2). 1924 3. Clarence Williams's Blue Five Texas Moaner Blues Armstrong (1900-71) left the Oliver band in 1924 to pursue his own musical interests, and within months made it clear that he was not merely another talented New Orleans cornetist but a soloist of astonishing force and individuality, whose golden tone and rhythmic poise quickly put him at the forefront of jazz. In this sober yet surgingly vital 1924 performance, he is heard alongside the clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet (1897-1959), an equally commanding player who might have become as famous as Armstrong had he not spent much of the 20's working in Europe. An Introduction to Sidney Bechet: His Best Recordings, 1923-1941 also contains an excellent selection of later recordings Bechet made with his own small groups (Best of Jazz 4017). 1927 4. Frank Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke Singin' the Blues The white cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (1903-31), who began recording around the same time as Armstrong and Bechet, was a soloist of directly comparable individuality and significance, though his style was as different from theirs as night from day. An elegant melodist with a chime-like tone and an interest in the harmonic techniques of such modern French composers as Debussy and Ravel, Beiderbecke offered a gentler alternative to the bluesy exuberance of Armstrong. "Singin' the Blues," which was almost as influential as Armstrong's "West End Blues" (see below under No. 8), is memorable not only for Beiderbecke's beautifully organized solo but also for the dryly witty C-melody saxophone playing of Frank Trumbauer, his friend and colleague. An Introduction to Bix Beiderbecke: His Best Recordings, 1922-1931 includes a good selection of small-group sides by Beiderbecke and Trumbauer, as well as several performances by the orchestras of Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman on which the cornetist is featured. The unfairly maligned Whiteman led a remarkable ensemble--among the first large instrumental groups to play jazz--in which Beiderbecke, Trumbauer, and the innovative arranger Bill Challis, who scored the version of "Lonely Melody" heard on this CD, played prominent roles (Best of Jazz 4012). 5, 6. Jelly Roll Morton The Pearls Wolverine Blues Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton (1890-1941) was one of the first jazz musicians to win distinction as a composer and arranger. In such ensemble pieces as "The Pearls," based on an earlier Morton composition for solo piano, the characteristic techniques of ragtime and New Orleans jazz are incorporated into tightly structured, colorfully scored vignettes. Morton's lively piano playing, however, is better displayed in the informal trio setting of his "Wolverine Blues," recorded at the same session as "The Pearls," in which the echt-New Orleans styles of Johnny and Baby Dodds can also be heard to delicious effect. All nineteen recordings Morton made for Victor in Chicago in 1926 and 1927, including "The Pearls" and "Wolverine Blues," are on Birth of the Hot (Bluebird 66641-2). 7. Charleston Chasers Imagination The cornetist Red Nichols (1905-65) and the trombonist Miff Mole (1898-1961) led a "New York school" of white jazz musicians whose studio recordings, exactly contemporary with those of Morton's Red Hot Peppers, aspired to the same kind of formal control. Both men were consummate technicians who, like Beiderbecke, were deeply affected by the harmonic language of the French Impressionists. "Imagination," an adventurous composition by the largely forgotten saxophonist-arranger Fud Livingston (1906-57), is typical of their approach. "Imagination" is on Lost Chords (see above under No. 1). 1928 8. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five West End Blues Armstrong, who had recently switched from cornet to the brighter-toned trumpet, joined forces in 1928 with the pianist Earl Hines (1903-83) for a series of recordings in which his solo style reached its early maturity. The grandly proclamatory opening cadenza and efflorescent climactic solo of "West End Blues"--the best-known and most influential recording in the history of jazz--epitomize Armstrong's irreplaceable contribution to the form, as does his wordless, gravel-voiced vocal solo. Louis Armstrong: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1923-1934, Columbia/Legacy's four-disc retrospective of Armstrong's early record ings, is out of print, but can still be found in many record stores and is worth seeking out. This Is Jazz: Louis Armstrong, a single-CD anthology drawn from the larger set, contains "West End Blues" and fifteen other key recordings, including "Cornet Chop Suey," "Potato Head Blues," and "Star Dust" (see below under No. 12) (Columbia/ Legacy CK-64613). 9. Earl Hines Fifty-Seven Varieties Simultaneously with the Armstrong Hot Fives, Earl Hines recorded a series of piano solos in which his electrifying playing is given still freer rein. Early jazz piano descended directly from the written-out ragtime of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries; the same "striding" left-hand patterns are present in the playing of such Harlem pianists as James P. Johnson and his pupil Fats Waller. "Fifty-Seven Varieties," a variation on the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's "Tiger Rag," shows how Hines loosened up the stride style, making it more angular and asymmetrical--as well as more explicitly virtuosic. Piano Man! (ASV CD AJA 5131) contains "Fifty-Seven Varieties" and other piano solos from the 20's and 30's, a few of Hines's later big-band recordings, and several 1928 performances with Armstrong, including the breathtaking "Weather Bird," their only unaccompanied du et recording. 1930 10. Duke Ellington Orchestra Mood Indigo The big band of Duke Ellington (1899-1974), which he led for a half-century, was a performing unit of unparalleled originality. The band's idiosyncratic soloists inspired its pianist-leader to write a long series of increasingly complex musical cameos that ultimately won him recognition as jazz's foremost composer. The justly popular "Mood Indigo," co-composed by and featuring the clarinetist Barney Bigard, is a particularly attractive example of the young Ellington's ability to enrich a simple melody with unexpected harmonies and instrumental combinations (in this case, muted solo trumpet and trombone and low-register clarinet). Beyond Category, an outstanding anthology of performances recorded by Ellington for RCA, contains an early version of "Mood Indigo" (Ellington recorded it many times for many labels), plus 36 other pieces recorded between 1927 and 1967, some composed by or in collaboration with Billy Strayhorn (Buddha 99632-2, two CD's). 1931 11. Casa Loma Orchestra White Jazz Paul Whiteman's success inspired hundreds of other musicians to start their own large dance bands, a development that would lead to the emergence of the swing era. The Casa Loma Orchestra, which played the imaginative compositions and arrangements of banjoist Gene Gifford (1908-70) with matchless discipline and verve, was the most successful of the early swing bands, and left its mark on virtually every such group that came afterward. Black and white bands alike were influenced by such Casa Loma recordings as "White Jazz," the first in a series of Gifford originals that also included "Black Jazz" and "Blue Jazz." "White Jazz" is on Lost Chords (see above under No. 1). 12. Louis Armstrong Orchestra Star Dust In 1929, Louis Armstrong abandoned the small-group format and spent the next eighteen years playing popular ballads and novelty tunes with big bands of varying musical quality. Though the change brought him mass popularity--including a movie career--it did not in any way represent a diminution of his artistic powers. Armstrong's 1931 recording of Hoagy Car michael's "Star Dust" reveals that his trumpet playing had grown freer and more expansive, while his singing had gained in emotional directness. If anything, Armstrong was even more influential among his colleagues in the 30's; by the end of the decade, he was universally regarded as the greatest of all jazz musicians. "Star Dust" is on This Is Jazz: Louis Armstrong (see above under No. 8). 1932 13. Billy Banks and His Rhythmmakers Bugle Call Rag Armstrong left his mark on innumerable later trumpeters, the best of whom nonetheless forged their own personal styles. Among the best was Henry "Red" Allen (1908-67), whose wonderfully intense playing had a rhythmic flexibility all its own. Allen was among the first black jazz musicians to take part in integrated recording sessions, and his front-line partner on this joyful romp through the jam-session standard "Bugle Call Rag," the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell (1906-69), was an equally distinctive player noteworthy for his Beiderbecke-like harmonic vocabulary and choked, growling tone. Both men were much admired by later jazz modernists, and "Bugle Call Rag," improvised on the spot when a singer failed to show up on time, shows off their respective styles to perfection. "Bugle Call Rag" is on Swing Out, together with other performances recorded by Allen with his own groups and the orchestras of Luis Russell and Fletcher Henderson. Of special interest are the four Henderson sides cut in 1933 and 1934: "King Porter Stomp," "Hocus Pocus," "Down South Camp Meeting," and "Wrappin' It Up." No acceptable single-CD collection of Henderson's best recordings is currently available in this country, but these selections give a clear idea of his prowess as a bandleader and arranger (Topaz Jazz TPZ 1037). 14. Sidney Bechet and His New Orleans Feetwarmers Maple Leaf Rag Sidney Bechet returned home from his European travels to form a New York-based combo, the New Orleans Feetwarmers, that played in a fervid manner ideally suited to Bechet's own high-voltage style. But audiences of the day were more interested in big bands, and Bechet was temporarily reduced to working as a tailor; it was not until the 40's that a revival of interest in the "New Orleans style" of collective improvisation would restore his fortunes and lead to his being widely acknowledged as a giant of early jazz. Fortunately, the Feetwarmers left behind six 78 sides, including this ferocious performance of Scott Joplin's most celebrated rag, a showcase for Be chet's spectacular playing. "Maple Leaf Rag" is on An Introduction to Sidney Bechet: His Best Recordings, 1923-1941 (see above under No. 3). 1933 15. Joe Venuti-Eddie Lang Blue Five Raggin' the Scale The violinist Joe Venuti and the guitarist Eddie Lang, the first major jazz musicians to be born outside the United States, were also the first to play jazz on their respective instruments. Between 1927 and Lang's sudden death in 1933, they recorded extensively, both separately and together, working with such noted white musicians as Beiderbecke, Trumbauer, and the members of the Nichols-Mole "New York school"; they also made a large number of small-group sides on their own. Though Venuti's playing was hot and extroverted, such Venuti-Lang recordings as "Raggin' the Scale," most of which also feature the brilliant multi-instrumentalist Adrian Rollini, are best described as chamber jazz, and their sophisticated musical interplay remains fresh to this day. Stringin' the Blues contains fourteen Venuti-Lang recordings (including "Raggin' the Scale") and eight small-group sides of similar quality cut by the violinist shortly after his partner's death (Topaz Jazz TPZ 1015). 1934 16. Le Quintette du Hot Club de France Lady Be Good The first great European jazz so loist did not appear until 1934, when Django Reinhardt (1910-53), a Belgian guitarist of Gypsy parentage, joined forces with the fine French violinist Stephane Grappelli to form a "string band" (violin, three guitars, and bass) known as the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. Reinhardt's rhapsodic yet hard-driving playing, while influenced by the single-string solo style of Eddie Lang, was unconventional to the point of exoticism, inspiring a cultish enthusiasm on the part of his admirers. To this day he remains Europe's preeminent jazzman and, along with Lang and Charlie Christian, one of the key figures of jazz guitar. The Quintessential Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli contains a generous selection of recordings by the Hot Club Quintet and other groups featuring Reinhardt and Grappelli (ASV Living Era CD AJA 5267). 1936 17. Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra Organ Grinder's Swing By the mid-30's, the richly varied orchestrations of such early big-band writers as Challis and Ellington were giving way to a plainer, more direct style, known as "swing," that would give its name to an era. Though swing eventually became rigid and cliché-ridden, its best practitioners knew how to balance rhythmic vitality and textural complexity--and none more so than Sy Oliver, who wrote for the orchestras of Jimmie Lunceford and Tommy Dorsey. In his arrangement of "Organ Grind er's Swing," a novelty tune of 1936, Oliver draws from the Lunceford band a kaleidoscopic range of colors and textures, and the band responds with the irresistibly danceable "two-beat" rhythm that was its trademark. Eighteen of Lunceford's best re cordings, including such Sy Oliver arrangements as "Organ Grind er's Swing," "For Dancers Only," and "Stomp It Off," are on Swingsation: Jimmie Lunceford (GRP GRD-9923). 18. Jones-Smith Incorporated Lady Be Good Kansas City was the fountainhead of a unique regional style, at once blues-based and lyrical, that would be central to the development of postwar jazz. Its principal exponents were Count Basie (1904-84), whose spare, sparkling piano style set the tone for his incomparable big band, and the tenor saxophonist Lester Young (1909-59), who eschewed the aggressive approach of Coleman Hawkins (1904-69), the first great jazz saxophonist, in favor of a light-footed, harmonically oblique style based on the playing of Beiderbecke and Trumbauer. Young's first re cording session produced this classic small-group performance, in which he is backed by the buoyant rhythm-section work of Basie, the bassist Walter Page, and the drummer Jo Jones. Countless jazz musicians have learned his two-chorus solo by heart, and its echoes can be heard in the playing of such later masters of the saxophone as Charlie Parker and Stan Getz. Lester Leaps In (ASV Living Era CD AJA 5176) contains a balanced assortment of recordings made by Young between 1936 and 1944, including performances by the full Basie band ("Swinging the Blues," "Taxi War Dance") and small groups drawn from its ranks ("Les ter Leaps In," "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans"). Coleman Hawk ins's early performances of "King Porter Stomp" and "Hocus Pocus" with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra are on Swing Out (see above under No. 13). 1937 19. Red Norvo Orchestra Remember Red Norvo (1908-99) was the first musician to play jazz on mallet percussion--the xylophone and, later, the vibraharp. His real significance, however, was as a technically impeccable, stylistically forward-looking soloist--he was one of the few jazz musicians prominent in the early 30's who assimilated the later innovations of the beboppers--and as the leader of a subtle big band that whispered and purred at a time when orchestral jazz was inclined to ebullience and extroversion. This suave performance of Irving Berlin's "Remember," which features a deft Norvo solo, was orchestrated by Eddie Sauter (1914-81), whose scores for the bands of Norvo, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Ray McKinley placed him among the most advanced jazz composers of the 30's and 40's. Knockin' on Wood is a wide-ranging collection of 22 big-band and small-group performances recorded by Norvo between 1933 and 1946 (ASV Living Era CD AJA 5341). 20. Benny Goodman Orchestra Down South Camp Meeting In 1934, Benny Goodman, a Chicago clarinetist who had moved to New York to play in studio orchestras and on commercial recording dates, started a big band modeled on the Casa Loma Orchestra. He began purchasing the simple yet swinging arrangements of Fletcher Henderson (some of which had previously been recorded by the Henderson band), and hired such crack players as the trumpeters Bunny Berigan and Harry James, the pianists Jess Stacy and Teddy Wilson, and the drummer Gene Krupa. Goodman's own playing was notable for its rhythmic drive and exceptional technical finish, and his meticulously rehearsed band soon became one of the finest large en sembles in jazz, playing such numbers as "Down South Camp Meeting" with a fire and precision unmatched in Hendersonown undisciplined versions. By the end of 1935, the Goodman band had scored a huge success among American teen agers, thereby ushering in the swing era. Benny Goodman: On the Air (1937 -38) contains thrilling live performances of many well-re mem bered items from the repertoire of the Goodman band, including "Down South Camp Meeting," "King Por ter Stomp," "Sometimes I'm Hap py," "Bugle Call Rag," and an incendiary version of Mary Lou Williams's "Roll 'Em" recorded just two weeks before Gene Krupa, disillusioned by Goodman's famously peculiar behavior, left to start his own band. Also included are several excellent numbers by the Goodman Trio and Quartet, the first racially integrated jazz group to perform in public, featuring Wilson on piano, Lionel Hampton on vibraphone, and Krupa or Dave Tough on drums (Colum bia/Legacy C2K-48836, two CD's). Fletcher Henderson's 1934 recording of "Down South Camp Meeting" is on Swing Out (see above under No. 13). To be continued All of the CD's mentioned in this piece can be purchased online at www.commentarymagazine.com. 1 A conspicuous exception to this rule is the annotated list of 250 jazz LP's compiled by the British critics Max Harrison, Charles Fox, and Eric Thacker, and published in 1984 as The Essential Jazz Records: Volume One, Ragtime to Swing. A second volume is about to be published in England. 2 The Crouch-Murray-Marsalis "canon" is discussed in my article, "The Color of Jazz," Commentary, September 1995. 3 The three-part series was published in the April, May, and June issues. 4 In 1987, an expanded and revised second edition containing 95 recordings was released, but only some of the failings of the original version were remedied in the process. TERRY TEACHOUT, COMMENTARY'S music critic, is a contributor to Time magazine. He worked as a jazz bassist in Kansas City from 1975 to 1983.

Commentary Magazine - December 1999   Music Jazz Masterpieces: Part 2 Terry Teachout In 1934, H. L. Mencken dismissed jazz as "undifferentiated musical protoplasm, dying of its own effluvia. . . . Its melodies all run to a pattern, and that pattern is crude and childish." Similar statements were made by many American cultural commentators in the 20's and 30's; even those who affected to admire jazz tended to see it less as an art form than as a symptom of reaction against what had come to be known as the "genteel tradition." When F. Scott Fitzgerald titled one of his collections of short stories Tales of the Jazz Age, it was the sex life of the flappers, not the music of Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke--about which he knew nothing--that he had in mind. Today, the emergence of jazz is rightly ranked among the most significant musical events of the 20th century. But the speed with which jazz evolved into an art form comparable in interest to American classical music--an evolution that was already well under way by the mid-30's--has inevitably outpaced the best efforts of critics and scholars. Even now, despite the fact that most college music departments in the U.S. offer courses in jazz, there is still no first-rate full-length scholarly history of the music's first century, and no widely accepted "canon" of major jazz recordings.* As a step toward the formulation of such a canon, I have compiled a list of 65 recommended works, the first installment of which appeared last month. As with my earlier Commentary series on modern classical music, which appeared in the April, May, and June issues, I chose these pieces not for their historical "significance"--though many are highly significant--but because I believe them to be masterpieces of permanent interest. Taken together, they comprise a representative cross-section of recorded performances by the greatest jazz musicians of the century, not all of whom are now generally recognized as such. This second installment runs from the early years of the swing era--the decade in which New York-based dance bands dominated American popular music--to the rise of the "cool jazz" of the early 50's, when the epicenter of creativity moved (briefly) from New York to California. I have listed individual works, not full-length albums, since nearly all the titles included in this installment were originally released as 78 r.p.m. singles; in each case I have also listed the best available CD anthology containing the recording in question. Last month's installment took us from 1923 to the beginning of 1937 and up to number 20 on my list of 65 masterpieces. Herewith the next 25 recordings: 1937 (continued) 21. Fats Waller and His Rhythm Blue, Turning Grey Over You Louis Armstrong (see Nos. 2, 3, 8, and 12 in the November issue) was the first great jazzman to win fame as an entertainer--a singing comedian who also played jazz. He was followed by Thomas "Fats" Waller (1904-43), the composer of such standards as "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose" and a leading exponent of the ragtime-derived style of jazz piano known as stride (his students included Count Basie). Starting in the early 30's, Waller began singing as well, specializing in low-grade commercial ditties which he enlivened with his sardonic lyric readings. But he continued to play piano, and this delightful instrumental version of one of his best songs is an example of 30's combo jazz at its most engaging. Many of Waller's most characteristic performances are included along with "Blue, Turning Grey Over You" on Ain't Misbehavin': 25 Greatest Hits (ASV Living Era CD AJA 5174). 22. Bob Crosby Orchestra South Rampart Street Parade Most of the dance bands of the 30's and 40's played in a style derived more or less directly from Fletcher Henderson's arrangements for his band and, later, the orchestra of Benny Goodman (see Nos. 13 and 20 in the November issue). Among the few exceptions was a band nominally led by Bob Crosby, Bing's younger brother, whose arrangers, most notably the bassist-composer Bob Haggart (1914-98), created a big-band version of New Orleans ensemble jazz--the style later known as Dixieland. Though the Crosby band also employed such outstanding soloists as the tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Eddie Miller, the trumpeters Yank Lawson and Billy Butterfield, and the pianist Bob Zurke, it was Haggart who shaped the group's musical identity with compositions like the high-stepping "South Rampart Street Parade," which deftly evokes the spirit of a New Orleans jazz parade. South Rampart Street Parade contains an excellent selection of recordings by the Crosby band (Decca Jazz GRD-615). 1938 23. Teddy Wilson Orchestra Jungle Love When not playing for Benny Goodman, the pianist Teddy Wilson (1912-86) directed for the Brunswick label a series of pickup groups that eventually included nearly every well-known jazz instrumentalist of the 30's and early 40's as well as the influential vocalist Billie Holiday. "Jungle Love" features three major soloists: Bobby Hackett (1915-76), a soft-spoken cornetist who blended elements of the playing of Armstrong and Beiderbecke into his own personal style; Johnny Hodges (1906-70), who spent most of his adult life as Duke Ellington's urbanely bluesy solo alto saxophonist; and Wilson, whose graceful playing was always a highlight of his small-band recordings. An Introduction to Teddy Wilson: His Best Recordings, 1935-45 contains 22 solo, small-group, and orchestral recordings, including "Jungle Love" (Best of Jazz 4044). 1939 24. Coleman Hawkins Body and Soul Coleman Hawkins (1904-69), jazz's first great tenor saxophonist, lived in Europe from 1934 to 1939, the years when Lester Young, his chief rival (see No. 18 in the November issue, and below under No. 34), won fame as a soloist. Within weeks of his return to the U.S., Hawkins recorded this leonine version of "Body and Soul," a summa of his aggressive, arpeggio-based style. Not only did it immediately reestablish him as the foremost saxophonist of the day, but it even became--improbably enough--a jukebox hit. Though Young's lighter-toned playing would be more influential in the long run, Hawkins remained a powerful voice in jazz to the end of his life, and "Body and Soul" still appears on every short list of key jazz recordings. Body and Soul contains 21 tracks recorded between 1929 and 1941 in which Hawkins joins forces with such noted contemporaries as Henry Allen, Benny Carter, Django Reinhardt, Pee Wee Russell, and the pianist Art Tatum (Topaz Jazz TPZ 1022). 1940 25. Benny Goodman Sextet Till Tom Special Throughout his long career as a bandleader, Benny Goodman featured small groups drawn from his big bands. From 1939 to 1941, these groups included Charlie Christian (1916-42), among the first guitarists to amplify his instrument electronically and the first major jazz instrumentalist to be influenced by Lester Young. Christian spun out long, harmonically adventurous melodic lines that in turn influenced the beboppers with whom he jammed after hours; he also wrote most of the originals recorded by the Goodman Sextet, including "Till Tom Special," a dapper minor-key theme whose tightly voiced riffs (repeated rhythmic figures) are typical of small-group jazz in the swing era. Also heard are the vibraharpist Lionel Hampton (b. 1908), a celebrated Goodman sideman who later led his own exuberant big bands, and the elliptical piano of Count Basie (see No. 18 in the November issue), a frequent recording-studio guest with the sextet. "Till Tom Special" is on An Introduction to Charlie Christian: His Best Recordings, 1939-1941 (Best of Jazz 4032). 26. Duke Ellington Orchestra Ko-Ko Duke Ellington came into his own as a composer at the end of the 30's, and the recordings he made for Victor from 1940 to 1942 (some of which were written in whole or part by Billy Strayhorn) are, taken together, the most important group of big-band compositions in the history of jazz. He employed a spectacularly individual array of sidemen--among them Johnny Hodges, the clarinetist Barney Bigard, the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, and the trumpeter Cootie Williams--from whose solos he plucked many of the melodies that later went into his pieces. "Ko-Ko," a tumultuous minor-key blues of exceptional harmonic richness, includes a "talking" solo by Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton (1904-48), whose tightly muted trombone was one of the most pungent colors in Ellington's orchestral palette; also soloing briefly is Jimmie Blanton (1918-42), whose big-toned, unprecedentedly virtuosic playing influenced every jazz bassist thereafter. Beyond Category (see No. 10 in the November issue) contains "Ko-Ko" and other recordings by the 1940-42 Ellington band, including Ellington's "Cotton Tail" and "Concerto for Cootie," Strayhorn's "Chelsea Bridge," and two superlative small-group recordings from the same period: Strayhorn's "Passion Flower" and Mercer Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used to Be," both featuring Hodges. 27. Chocolate Dandies I Can't Believe that You're in Love with Me The Chocolate Dandies was the generic name for a series of studio-only black combos of the 30's and early 40's. This 1940 incarnation included Coleman Hawkins; Roy Eldridge (1911-89), the raspy-toned trumpeter whose bold playing later enlivened the big bands of Gene Krupa and Artie Shaw; and Benny Carter (b. 1907), a uniquely suave alto saxophonist who was equally accomplished as a composer and arranger (in which capacities he will appear in next month's installment). The piano-less rhythm section is led by Sid Catlett (1910-51), by common consent the finest drummer of the pre-bop era, whose irresistibly swinging style can be heard on recordings by everyone from Louis Arm strong to Dizzy Gillespie (see below under No. 32). "I Can't Believe that You're in Love with Me" is on Body and Soul (see No. 24, above). 28. Bud Freeman and His Famous Chicagoans Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble In the early 20's, a group of teenagers from the suburbs of Chicago, including the guitarist Eddie Condon (1905-73), the tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman (1906-91), and the drummer Dave Tough (1908-48), fell in love with jazz, learned how to play it, and ultimately began to record it themselves. Their brand of improvised ensemble playing--a brash blend of New Orleans jazz and Bix Beiderbecke's cooler style--became known as Chicago-style jazz. In 1939, Condon, Freeman, and the brilliantly eccentric clarinetist Pee Wee Russell (see No. 13 in the November issue) formed a septet called the Summa Cum Laude Orchestra whose recordings are a vade mecum of Chicago style. The following year, they recorded with the great Texas trombonist Jack Teagarden (1905-64), whose blues-drenched, technically innovative playing set new standards for his instrument. "Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble," drawn from the repertoire of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, has solos by Freeman, Russell, and Teagarden, faultlessly accompanied by the subtly varied drumming of Tough, Sid Catlett's only peer. "Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble" is on Lost Chords, along with two other performances by the Summa Cum Laude Orchestra, "Jack Hits the Road" and a radio broadcast of "Ja-Da" (see No. 1 in the November issue). The complete Summa Cum Laude studio recordings are on Bud Freeman, 1939-1940 (Classics 811). 1941 29. Artie Shaw Orchestra Suite No. 8 The clarinetist Artie Shaw (b. 1910), an incomparable virtuoso with an astonishingly well-developed high register, led a series of big bands--each one with a different style--that served as showcases for his distinctive musical conceptions. In 1941, he put together a 32-piece ensemble ingeniously juxtaposing the bluesy trumpet playing and vocals of Oran "Hot Lips" Page (1908-54) with a fifteen-piece string section and Dave Tough on drums. Paul Jordan's "Suite No. 8" exploits the full tonal range of the band to unusually sophisticated effect. Shaw chose "Suite No. 8" for inclusion in Personal Best: The Bluebird/Victor Years (1938-45), a collection of eighteen of his favorite recordings that also contains a 1945 perform ance of Eddie Sauter's "The Maid With the Flaccid Air" and seven live radio broadcast performances by Shaw's great 1938-39 band, featuring Buddy Rich (see below under No. 33) on drums (Bluebird 61099-2). 1943 30. James P. Johnson Mule Walk-Stomp James P. Johnson (1891-1955), Fats Waller's teacher, was the most admired stride pianist of the 20's,as well as a composer whose works ranged from standards like "Charleston" and "If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight" to a lengthy series of concert pieces (now mostly forgotten or lost) that sought to fuse jazz and classical music. "Mule Walk-Stomp" is a vivid portrait of a Harlem night spot where he worked in 1913, playing for dancers who had just migrated to New York from the South. "The dances ran from fifteen to thirty minutes," he recalled, "but [the dancers] kept up all night long or until their shoes wore out--most of them after a heavy day's work on the docks." Hot Piano contains "Mule Walk-Stomp" and 23 other solo and small-group performances recorded by Johnson between 1921 and 1945 (Topaz Jazz TPZ 1048). 1944 31. King Cole Trio Easy Listening Blues Nat "King" Cole (1917-65), who was, with Frank Sinatra, the most popular balladeer of the 50's, started out as a piano player. Initially influenced by Earl Hines (see No. 8 in the November issue), he developed into an innovative stylist now regarded by connoisseurs as one of the half-dozen greatest jazz pianists. The King Cole Trio, which also featured Oscar Moore (1916-81) on electric guitar, was a polished, deeply swinging ensemble that served as the ideal setting for its leader's light-filled solos. Cole sang on most of the trio's recordings, but the all-instrumental "Easy Listening Blues" leaves no doubt of his singular gifts as a pianist--or his wonderfully relaxed way with the blues idiom. Eighteen instrumental sides by the King Cole Trio, including "Easy Listening Blues," "The Man I Love," "Body and Soul," and "What Is This Thing Called Love?" are on The Best of the Nat King Cole Trio: Instrumental Classics (Capitol Jazz CDP 98288). 1945 32. Dizzy Gillespie and His All Stars Shaw 'Nuff Starting in 1944, a number of younger jazz musicians who felt constrained by the increasingly cliché-ridden language of late swing began to record in a purposefully "modern" style known as bebop. Bop soloists like the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917-93) and the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker (1920-55) tossed off unevenly accented, triplet-flecked unison lines at alarmingly fast tempos, incorporating chromatically altered harmonies into their improvisations. Some older musicians were appalled by bebop, but others took it in stride--the drummer on "Shaw 'Nuff" is Sid Catlett, who demonstrates no trouble in keeping up--and what at first seemed impenetrably arcane soon came to dominate the language of jazz. "Shaw 'Nuff" is on Yardbird Suite: The Ultimate Charlie Parker Collection (see below under No. 35). 33. Woody Herman Orchestra Your Father's Moustache One of the first dance bands to play bebop was that of Woody Herman (1913-87), a fine swing-era clarinetist and singer who had an uncanny knack for putting together first-rate bands. Herman's "First Herd" played simple, riff-based arrangements with youthful fire, sparked by the drumming of Dave Tough, one of the earliest swing-era musicians to take an interest in bop. "Your Father's Moustache" is a loose, raucous romp on the chords of "I Got Rhythm" that offers another glimpse of vibraharpist Red Norvo (see No. 19 in the November issue). The hard-driving Buddy Rich (1917-87), here filling in for the epileptic Tough, played with Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, and Harry James before starting his own band in 1966; he is widely (but not universally) regarded as the greatest big-band drummer in jazz. In addition to "Your Father's Moustache," The Thundering Herds, 1945-1947 contains seventeen other performances by the First and Second Herds--a mere fraction of their best performances on record. A comprehensive reissue of Herman's Columbia and Capitol record ings from this period is urgently needed (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces CK 44108). 34. Lester Young These Foolish Things Lester Young's style changed noticeably after World War II, partly as a result of his alcoholism: his tone grew thicker and coarser, his solos less rhythmically poised. Although the melancholic cast of his playing eventually grew enervating, in 1945 he was still capable of such memorable efforts as this haunting, darkly lyrical version of "These Foolish Things" (in which the melody is never stated, a then-rare practice that has since become a commonplace). The difference between Young's harmonically oblique playing and Coleman Hawkins's more straightforward style can be seen by comparing this recording to Hawkins's "Body and Soul." The Complete Aladdin Recordings of Lester Young contains "These Foolish Things" (and its companion piece from the same recording session, the equally fine "D.B. Blues"), four drummer-less trio sides from 1942 in which Young is exquisitely accompanied by Nat Cole, and an inconsistent but generally rewarding selection of other postwar small-group sides (Blue Note CDP 32787, two CD's). 1946 35. Charlie Parker Septet A Night in Tunisia "A Night in Tunisia," whose exotic minor-key harmonies and faux-African beat made it one of the best-known bop tunes, showcases Parker the revolutionary. The four-bar break through which he hurtles at the end of the first chorus--a polished set piece that he would play more or less in the same way for the rest of his short life--neatly encapsulates his contribution to the language of postwar jazz. In addition, "A Night in Tunisia" introduces the trumpeter Miles Davis (1926-91), still fresh out of Juilliard, who would become the most influential jazz musician of the 50's and 60's. Yardbird Suite: The Ultimate Charlie Parker Collection is not quite the "ultimate" anthology of Parker's recorded work--among other things, it includes the wrong take of his classic 1947 performance of "Embraceable You"--but no other collection generally available in the U.S. contains a larger number of important performances by the master of bop saxophone, including all the recordings on this list in which he figures as leader or sideman (Rhino R2 72260, two CD's). 36. Kenny Clarke and His 52nd Street Boys Epistrophy The boppers made no harmonic discoveries that had not already been foreseen by Beiderbecke, Ellington, or Art Tatum. Instead, they emphasized their chromatically altered harmonies, putting them at the center of compositions rather than using them for purely coloristic purposes. "Epistrophy," composed by the pianist Thelonious Monk (1917-82), is a typical example of this strategy--so much so that in this performance, the players are forced to improvise on a less abstruse set of chord changes than those used in Monk's theme. The leader, Kenny Clarke (1914-85), was a dominant figure in early bop, the first drummer to break decisively with the swing-era style; also heard is Bud Powell (1924-66), whose coruscating right-hand solo passages became synonymous with bop piano. "Epistrophy" is on RCA Victor 80th Anniversary: Vol. 3, 1940-1949 (RCA Victor 09026-68779-2), a collection of swing and early bop recordings released on RCA during the 40's. It can also be heard on Bud Powell: The Complete 1946-1949 Roost/Blue Note/Verve/Swing Masters (Definitive DRCD11145), an imported collection of 24 of Powell's best recordings that can be found in well-stocked record stores. 1947 37. Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra Manteca At its best, Dizzy Gillespie's big band uncompromisingly translated bebop into orchestral terms, never more memorably than in "Manteca," a Gillespie composition in which bop harmonies and a soaring trumpet solo are superimposed on the churning beat of Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo (1915-48). This "Afro-Cuban" synthesis, which became a hallmark of Gillespie's later style, foreshadowed the absorption of the Brazilian bossa nova beat into American jazz beginning in the 60's. Greatest Hits contains "Manteca" and a representative selection of other big-band and small-group performances recorded by Gillespie for Victor in the late 40's (RCA Victor 09026-68499-2). 1948 38. Thelonious Monk Quartet I Mean You Thelonious Monk's splintery, primitive-sounding piano playing was as original as his angular compositions. Opinions vary on his effectiveness as a soloist--he became increasingly repetitive from the late 50's on--but his first recordings of such pieces as "I Mean You" still have a freshness that a half-century of familiarity has done nothing to diminish. In this quartet version, he is joined by the vibraharpist Milt Jackson (b. 1923), whose liquid playing would later grace the Modern Jazz Quartet. Thelonious Monk 1944/1948 contains Monk's earliest recordings as a leader, plus four sides he cut as a member of Coleman Hawkins's quartet (Jazz Archives 159502). 39. Benny Goodman Septet Stealin' Apples Contrary to widespread belief, bebop was not a departure from jazz tradition but an extension of that tradition. Most of the older boppers, including Gillespie and Parker, had played with big bands and were fully conversant with the language of swing-era jazz. This witty recasting of a Fats Waller theme, for example, teams Benny Goodman with the tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray (1921-55), one of the first musicians to add bop inflections to a Lester Young-derived style, and the trumpeter Fats Navarro (1923-50), whose playing was warmer and more unabashedly lyrical than Gillespie's. The three players--even the notoriously prickly Goodman--sound comfortable with one another, and their contrasting styles prove nicely complementary. "Stealin' Apples" is on Complete Blue Note and Capitol Recordings of Fats Navarro and Tadd Dameron, together with four sides by a Bud Powell-led quintet featuring Dam er on on trumpet, and other recordings in which Navarro and Gray can be heard with the composer-pianist Tadd Dameron (Blue Note CDP 33373, two CD's). 40. Charlie Parker's All-Stars Parker's Mood Some boppers had little or no interest in the blues, but Charlie Parker, for all the proliferating complexity of his up-tempo playing, was also a superbly idiomatic bluesman, perhaps the best of his generation. "Parker's Mood," in which the saxophonist's solos are effectively contrasted with the gentle piano of John Lewis (b. 1920), who later became famous as the music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, is the quintessential bebop blues--indeed, one of the finest blues recordings in any style. "Parker's Mood" is on Yardbird Suite (see above under No. 35). 1949 41. Lennie Tristano Sextet Wow The overt intensity of bebop proved unattractive to some progressive-minded jazz musicians, who opted instead for a more intellectualized approach bearing much the same relationship to the Parker-Gillespie style that Young had to Hawkins, or Beiderbecke to Armstrong. The blind pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano (1919-78), among the first of these players, put together a sextet that included two of his students, the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz (b. 1927) and the tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh (1927-87). Tristano's "Wow," though cast in the bop idiom, departs unmistakably from its orthodoxies: the melodic lines are longer and more rhythmically even, the instrumental timbres cooler. Out of such performances came a style known, logically enough, as cool jazz. Intuition contains all seven sides recorded by the Tristano sextet for Capitol in 1949 (Capitol Jazz CDP 52771). 42. Miles Davis Orchestra Israel Concurrent with his work with the Tristano sextet, Lee Konitz also appeared with a nine-piece group led by Miles Davis, another musician seeking a cooler alternative to the Parker-Gillespie style. John Lewis and the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan (1927-96) also wrote for and played in Davis's band, whose unusual instrumentation--alto and baritone saxophones, trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, and rhythm section--was devised by the group's mastermind, the arranger Gil Evans (1912-88), who had previously written for the influential big band of Claude Thornhill. "Israel," a blues composed by Johnny Carisi, shows off the pastel timbres of the nine-piece Davis ensemble to arresting effect. The Complete Birth of the Cool contains all twelve of the group's studio recordings, plus ten live performances recorded in 1948 at the Royal Roost, a bebop-oriented Manhattan nightclub (Capitol Jazz CDP 94550). 1953 43. Shorty Rogers and His Giants Powder Puff Though the recordings of the Davis group sold poorly, they influenced countless younger musicians, many of whom lived in and around Los Angeles and San Francisco. These players--most of them admirers of Lester Young and the Count Basie band--began to develop a broadly similar style in which Basie was emphasized over bebop. The trumpeter-composer Shorty Rogers (1924-94), an alumnus of the Woody Herman and Stan Kenton bands, was the first to record as a leader, assembling an eight-piece group that featured the alto saxophonist Art Pepper (1925-82), the tenor saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre (b. 1921), the pianist Hampton Hawes (1928-77), and the drummer Shelly Manne (1920-84), all of whom would become distinguished leaders in their own right. Rogers's "Powder Puff," a light-textured swinger with a Latin bridge, is a locus classicus of what soon became known as West Coast jazz. Shorty Rogers and His Giants contains "Powder Puff" and other performances recorded in the early 50's by Rogers-led groups (BMG 74321609892). 44. Dave Brubeck Quartet Stardust In 1951, the California pianist-composer Dave Brubeck (b. 1920), a pupil of the French classical composer Darius Milhaud, started a quartet that featured the intensely lyrical playing of Paul Desmond (1924-77), one of the very few postwar alto saxophonists whose style owed nothing to Charlie Parker. Brubeck's quartet performed regularly on college campuses, thereby building a young following that made it the most popular jazz group in America. (In 1954, Brubeck became the second jazz musician--after Louis Armstrong--to appear on the cover of Time magazine.) With the addition in 1956 of the drummer Joe Morello, the quartet's playing became louder and more extroverted, but in performances like "Stardust," recorded at an Oberlin College concert, Desmond's wryly nostalgic solos and Brubeck's complex yet lucid harmonies add up to a style that remains attractive to this day. "Stardust" is on the Brubeck Quartet's Jazz at Oberlin (Fantasy OJCCD-046-2). 45. Gerry Mulligan Quartet Five Brothers After Davis, the most successful alumnus of Miles Davis's "Birth of the Cool" band was Gerry Mulligan, who in 1952 moved to Los Angeles and started a piano-less quartet with the trumpeter Chet Baker (1929-88). The unorthodox instrumentation proved eminently suitable to such Mulligan compositions as "Five Brothers," which makes striking use of both written and improvised counterpoint, and the absence of a chordal accompanying instrument throws the quietly swinging solos of Mulligan and Baker into high relief. Though the quartet broke up after just two years, it is still among the best-remembered bands of the 50's. Jazz Profile: Gerry Mulligan contains a wide-ranging selection of performances by the quartet; by a 1953 ten-piece group that played Mulligan's own compositions and arrangements; by a later quartet featuring the valve trombonist-composer Bob Brookmeyer; and by the great mid-50's sextet that included Mulligan, Brookmeyer, and the tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims, another distinguished Woody Herman alumnus (Blue Note CDP 54905). To be continued All of the CD's mentioned in this piece can be purchased on line at www.commentarymagazine.com. * By far the best short treatment is Max Harrison's article in the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, also available separately as part of The New Grove Gospel, Blues and Jazz (Norton, $16.95 paper). The best-written popular history is Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz (Oxford, $15.95, paper). TERRY TEACHOUT, COMMENTARY'S music critic, is a contributor to Time magazine. He worked as a jazz bassist in Kansas City from 1979 to 1983.

Commentary Magazine - January 2000   Music Jazz Masterpieces: A Finale Terry Teachout In 1919, the Swiss musician Ernest Ansermet, who was in London to conduct for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, took a night off to attend a concert by an American ensemble called the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. He later wrote an article in praise of the group's featured soloist, a then-unknown clarinetist from New Orleans named Sidney Bechet: Already, [Bechet's solos] gave the idea of a style, and their form was gripping, abrupt, harsh, with a brusque and pitiless ending like that of Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto. . . . What a moving thing it is to meet this very black, fat boy with white teeth and that narrow forehead, who is very glad one likes what he does, but who can say nothing of his art, save that he follows his "own way," and then one thinks that this "own way" is perhaps the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow. Eight decades after Ansermet wrote those astonishingly prescient words, Bechet's ancient 78's have been transferred to digital CD's, and the music he played on that long-ago night in London is known the world over as one of America's outstanding contributions to Western art. Yet jazz is still too young for critics and historians to have formulated a definitive "canon" of major recordings. To that end, I have compiled a list of 65 recorded masterpieces intended to offer a wide-ranging but historically representative sound picture of jazz's first century. The first two installments, consisting of 45 recordings made between 1923 and 1953, appeared in the November and December 1999 issues of Commentary. By way of reminder, here they are again, chronologically and in capsule form:   1923: New Orleans Rhythm Kings, "Tin Roof Blues"; King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, "Dipper Mouth Blues." 1924: Clarence Williams's Blue Five, "Texas Moaner Blues." 1927: Frank Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke, "Singin' the Blues"; Jelly Roll Morton, "The Pearls" and "Wolverine Blues"; Charleston Chasers, "Imagination." 1928: Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, "West End Blues"; Earl Hines, "Fifty-Seven Varieties." 1930: Duke Ellington Orchestra, "Mood Indigo." 1931: Casa Loma Orchestra, "White Jazz"; Louis Armstrong Orchestra, "Star Dust." 1932: Billy Banks and His Rhythmmakers, "Bugle Call Rag"; Sidney Bechet and His New Orleans Feetwarmers, "Maple Leaf Rag." 1933: Joe Venuti-Eddie Lang Blue Five, "Raggin' the Scale." 1934: Le Quintette du Hot Club de France, "Lady Be Good." 1936: Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, "Organ Grinder's Swing"; Jones-Smith Incorporated, "Lady Be Good." 1937: Red Norvo Orchestra, "Remember"; Benny Goodman Orchestra, "Down South Camp Meeting"; Fats Waller and His Rhythm, "Blue, Turning Grey Over You"; Bob Crosby Orchestra, "South Rampart Street Parade." 1938: Teddy Wilson Orchestra, "Jungle Love." 1939: Coleman Hawkins, "Body and Soul." 1940: Benny Goodman Sextet, "Till Tom Special"; Duke Ellington Orchestra, "Ko-Ko"; Chocolate Dandies, "I Can't Believe that You're in Love with Me"; Bud Freeman and His Famous Chicagoans, "Shim-Me-Sha-Wabble." 1941: Artie Shaw Orchestra, "Suite No. 8." 1943: James P. Johnson, "Mule Walk-Stomp." 1944: King Cole Trio, "Easy Listening Blues." 1945: Dizzy Gillespie and His All Stars, "Shaw ëNuff"; Woody Herman Orchestra, "Your Father's Moustache"; Lester Young, "These Foolish Things." 1946: Charlie Parker Septet, "A Night in Tunisia"; Kenny Clarke and His 52nd Street Boys, "Epistrophy." 1947: Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, "Manteca." 1948: Thelonious Monk Quartet, "I Mean You"; Benny Goodman Septet, "Stealin' Apples"; Charlie Parker's All-Stars, "Parker's Mood." 1949: Lennie Tristano Sextet, "Wow"; Miles Davis Orchestra, "Israel." 1953: Shorty Rogers and His Giants, "Powder Puff"; Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Stardust"; Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "Five Brothers."   Now for the final twenty items on the list, recorded between 1954 and 1977. During these tempestuous years, jazz penetrated American popular culture to an unprecedented degree, entered an avant-garde phase from which it emerged as an art music whose audience had shrunk appreciably, then sought once more to engage the public at large by incorporating elements of rock-and-roll. The list ends at the high-water mark of the popularity of the jazz-rock movement, a time when the common language of jazz appeared to have permanently splintered into a variety of incompatible stylistic dialects, and many critics and musicians were questioning the continuing viability of jazz as a living musical tradition. Following the list, I shall briefly summarize subsequent developments, and then offer some concluding reflections on the place of jazz in the history of Western music.   1954 46. Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers Stop Time The vogue of such West Coast-based "cool-jazz" players as Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, and Shorty Rogers (see Nos. 43-45 in the December issue) alienated many East Coast musicians who felt that cool jazz was overintellectualized. Their response was "hard bop," a simplified variant of bebop that emphasized rhythmic directness over compositional sophistication. Together, the drummer Art Blakey (1919-90) and the pianist-composer Horace Silver (1928- ) led the first important hard-bop group, the Jazz Messengers, which featured Blakey's explosive solos and Silver's gospel-tinged tunes, of which "Stop Time" is a choice example. Silver would later lead a series of quintets that played his music with irresistible verve; Blakey continued to lead the Jazz Messengers until his death, employing many young players who became noted soloists in their own right, including Keith Jarrett, Wynton Marsalis, and Wayne Shorter. "Stop Time" is on Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers (Blue Note CDP 7 46140 2). 1955 47. Erroll Garner It's All Right With Me A self-taught pianist unable to read music, Erroll Garner (1921-77) was one of jazz's great primitives, and his extroverted style won him a broad popular following in the 50's and 60's. His twin trademarksólong, bustling solo lines superimposed over the guitar-like "strumming" of his left handócan be heard to exhilarating effect on this up-tempo version of Cole Porter's tune taped at a California concert. "It's All Right With Me" is part of Concert by the Sea, the best-selling album ever recorded by a jazz pianist (Columbia/Legacy CK-40589).   1956 48. Clifford Brown and Max Roach Pent-Up House Though many early boppers died young or were sidelined by drug use, those who survived continued to deepen and refine their playing throughout the 50's. Among them was the drummer Max Roach (1924- ), who played with Charlie Parker in the 40's and subsequently led a quintet together with the trumpeter Clifford Brown (1930-56). The tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins (1930- ) joined Brown and Roach in 1955, and their recording of Rollins's "Pent-Up House" shows all three men at the peak of their powers. Brown is bold yet precise, Rollins vibrant and richly elaborate, and Roach caps the performance with one of the "melodic" solos that won him recognition as the most musical of bebop drummers. Three months after "Pent-Up House" was recorded, Brown was killed in a car crash that tragically cut short a career of immeasurable promise. "Pent-Up House" is on Sonny Rollins Plus 4 (Prestige/Original Jazz Classics OJCCD-243-2). 49. Art Tatum-Ben Webster Quartet All the Things You Are This performance of a Jerome Kern ballad long favored by jazz musicians for its challenging chord progressions features Art Tatum (1909-56), jazz's greatest virtuoso. Tatum used the stride-piano style of James P. Johnson and Fats Waller (see Nos. 21 and 30 in the December issue) as the basis for a technically elaborate, harmonically subtle style admired by both jazz and classical pianists. Though he usually appeared as an unaccompanied soloist, Tatum's final recording session teamed him with the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster (1909-73), a key soloist in Duke Ellington's early-40's orchestra, whose ripely romantic yet swinging playing proved ideally complementary to the pianist's ornate traceries. "All the Things You Are" is on The Tatum Group Masterpieces, Vol. 8 (Pablo 2405-431).   50. Jimmy Giuffre 3 The Train and the River Jimmy Giuffre (1921- ), a clarinetist-saxophonist-composer, launched his drummerless trio with its unorthodox instrumentation (it also included guitar and bass, and was modeled after Claude Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp) as a showcase for his quietly inventive playing and folk-flavored compositions. "The Train and the River," a lyrical exercise in jazz impressionism (at one point, the players imitate a train whistle), is one of his most delightful pieces, and an example of West Coast jazz at its freshest. Also heard is Jim Hall (1930- ), who played with Giuffre in the 50's and is now widely regarded as jazz's greatest living guitarist. "The Train and the River" is on The Jimmy Giuffre 3/The Music Man (Collectors Jazz Classics COL-CD-0248). 1957 51. Miles Davis + 19 My Ship/Miles Ahead The trumpeter Miles Davis (see Nos. 35 and 42 in the December issue) became a musical trend-setter comparable to Charlie Parker or Louis Armstrong, though his idiosyncratic playingóat once tonally fragile and unforgettably passionateówas less influential than his ability to assemble small groups made up of stylistically disparate yet compatible players. Davis also recorded a memorable series of albums with a studio orchestra led by Gil Evans (1912-88), who wrote for the trumpeter's "Birth of the Cool" band (see No. 42 in the December issue). In this medley of Kurt Weill's "My Ship" and the Davis-Evans composition "Miles Ahead," Evans's subtly blended orchestral sonorities provide exquisite support for Davis, who is heard here on fl¸gelhorn, a larger-bored, warmer-sounding cousin of the trumpet. "My Ship/Miles Ahead" is on Miles Ahead (Columbia/Legacy CK-65121).   52. Count Basie Orchestra Splanky Unlike his prewar band, which heavily featured such soloists as the tenor saxophonist Lester Young (see No. 18 in the November issue and No. 34 in December), the orchestra led by William "Count" Basie from 1952 on was first and foremost an arranger's band, albeit one whose robust ensemble playing remains unrivaled to this day. The strongest soloist was Basie himself, and his terse piano style enlivens this medium-tempo blues by Neal Hefti (1922- ), an alumnus of Woody Herman's First Herd (see No. 33 in the December issue). Hefti's no-nonsense arrangements were central to Basie's postwar style, of which this is a quintessential example. "Splanky" is on The Complete Atomic Basie, a program of Hefti compositions generally regarded as the finest of Count Basie's later studio albums (Roulette CDP 7 93273 2).   1958 53. Ahmad Jamal Trio Ahmad's Blues Five gifted jazz pianistsóBrubeck, Garner, Oscar Peterson, George Shearing, and Ahmad Jamaló"crossed over" to attract large popular audiences in the 50's and early 60's. The most influential was Jamal (1930- ), who played show tunes in an airy, harmonically sophisticated style, beautifully accompanied by the veteran bassist Israel Crosby (1919-62) and the drummer Vernel Fournier (1928- ). Though many critics dismissed him as a lightweight popularizer, the Basie-like use of space and silence heard in "Ahmad's Blues" would soon become a hallmark of Miles Davis's bands. "Ahmad's Blues" is the title track of a CD compilation of sixteen live recordings by Jamal's trio (Chess GRD-803).   1959 54. Miles Davis Sextet So What By the end of the 50's, a growing number of jazz musicians found the harmonic obstacle courses of late bebop to be overly restrictive. Miles Davis, who had already been experimenting with a less cluttered ensemble style based on Jamal's playing, found its compositional equivalent in "So What," a deceptively simple riff tune in which the four soloistsóDavis, the alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley (1928-75), the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-67), and the pianist Bill Evans (1929-80)óimprovise not on regularly repeating harmonic sequences but on two scales located a half-step apart. This freer, more open approach was quickly adopted by younger players, and Kind of Blue, the album on which Davis and his soon-to-be-famous sidemen codified the new technique of "modal" improvisation, became and remained the single most influential album in the history of jazz. Kind of Blue, which includes "So What," has been in print ever since its original release (Columbia/Legacy CK-52861).   55. Charles Mingus Fables of Faubus Jazz composition has always been formally limitedóit exists chiefly to stimulate the imagination of the improviseróbut Charles Mingus (1922-79), a classically trained bebop bassist, devoted much of his career to composing ambitious pieces in which he adapted Duke Ellington's compositional techniques to a small-group context. Mingus was also one of the first jazz musicians to use his music to make political statements, and "Fables of Faubus," a sardonic, march-like piece whose title refers to Orval Faubus, then the segregationist governor of Arkansas, is a characteristically pungent example of his writing. "Fables of Faubus" is on Mingus Ah Um, which also contains such well-known Mingus compositions as "Better Git It in Your Soul" and "Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat" (Columbia/Legacy CK-66512). Mingus re-recorded it in 1960 as "Original Faubus Fables" with a four-piece group that included the avant-garde multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy (plus a set of inflammatory spoken lyrics that Mingus's producers at Columbia had been unwilling to include), but this more vivid version, originally released on the Candid LP Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, is currently out of print in the U.S.   56. Ornette Coleman Quartet Ramblin' The initial appearance of a true jazz avant-garde dates from the late 50's, when the self-taught alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman (1930- ) developed a radically new style of improvisation that dispensed with fixed harmonic sequences and regular structural periods. Though the peculiarities of Coleman's playing were as much the result of his lack of musical training as of any conscious attempt on his part to innovate, his natural gifts as an improviser allowed him to use his limitations as the basis for the idiom that came to be known as free jazz. "Ramblin'," which is very loosely based on the twelve-bar blues form, demonstrates Coleman's techniquesóas well as his deep roots in traditional bluesówith singular clarity. "Ramblin'" is on Change of the Century (Atlantic 7 81341-2).   1961 57. Bill Evans Trio Some Other Time In 1959, Bill Evans organized a trio in which his sidemen, the bassist Scott LaFaro (1936-61) and the drummer Paul Motian (1931- ), abandoned the regular statement of the beat customary among rhythm-section players, instead improvising simultaneously with Evans in an ensemble technique first used by Coleman and Jimmy Giuffre. Evans's lyrical solos, employing the harmonic language of Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin, had already put him on the map as a major soloist; the free contrapuntal interplay of his trio, which can be heard in Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time," recorded live at New York's Village Vanguard in 1961, definitively established him as the most significant jazz pianist after Bud Powell. "Some Other Time" is on Waltz for Debby (Riverside/Original Jazz Classics OJCCD-210-2).   58. Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band All About Rosie Simultaneously with the emergence of modal improvisation and free jazz, several musicians sought to import compositional techniques derived from classical music into a jazz context. Among them was George Russell (1923- ), whose best pieces display a formal control and harmonic complexity comparable to that of modern classical music; in his "All About Rosie" (1957), composition and improvisation are fully integrated, but the results are still jazz of the purest and most swinging kind. Russell later rescored "All About Rosie" for the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band, a twelve-piece ensemble in which the baritone saxophonist-composer (see Nos. 42 and 45 in the December issue) attempted to combine the drive and textural variety of a big band with the flexibility of his small groups. This ensemble, featuring the arrangements of Bob Brookmeyer, Al Cohn, and Gary McFarland, was the finest big band of its day. Gerry Mulligan: Jazz Masters 36 (Verve 314 523 342-2) is an excellent anthology of performances by the Concert Jazz Band, including "All About Rosie."   59. Benny Carter and His Orchestra Blue Star Many major jazz musicians of the swing era were still playing in the 60's and 70's, and some remained at the top of their form well into middle age and beyond. Over time, the differences between their playing and that of the beboppers were subsumed into a lingua franca called mainstream jazz. One of the finest examples of this phenomenon is Benny Carter's suave recording of his own "Blue Star," in which the alto saxophonist-composer (see No. 27 in the December issue) is accompanied by an octet whose other members included the legendary tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins (see Nos. 24 and 27 in the December issue); the second-generation bebop saxophonists Phil Woods and Charlie Rouse; and Jimmy Garrison, John Coltrane's bassist (see below under No. 60). "Blue Star" is on Further Definitions (Impulse IMPD-229). 1964 60. John Coltrane Quartet Crescent After Kind of Blue, John Coltrane left Miles Davis to lead his own bands, subsequently becoming the preeminent saxophonist of his generation. Coltrane's extended solos, based on the repetition and transformation of short musical motifs, reflected the influence of free jazz, though the playing of his "classic" quartet, which also included the pianist McCoy Tyner (1938- ), the bassist Jimmy Garrison (1934-76), and the drummer Elvin Jones (1927- ), remained rooted in modal improvisation. "Crescent," a Coltrane original that opens with an incantatory, out-of-tempo recitative followed by a series of solos underpinned by Jones's churning polyrhythms, is a typical example of how the quartet played in the studio (the saxophonist's solos were much longer in public performance). "Crescent" is the title track of one of the Coltrane Quartet's most popular albums (Impulse IMPD-200).   1965 61. Miles Davis Quintet Footprints The quintet that Miles Davis led from 1965 to 1968 was less notable for his own playingómarvelous though it wasóthan for the contributions of his younger sidemen. The tenor saxophonist-composer Wayne Shorter (1933- ) wrote many of the striking compositions performed by the group, while the pianist Herbie Hancock (1940- ), the bassist Ron Carter (1937- ), and the drummer Tony Williams (1945-97) forged a startlingly flexible ensemble style that took the innovations of the Bill Evans Trio several steps further. "Footsteps," a haunting Shorter blues in 6/4 time, shows how the Davis quintet deconstructed the elements of bebop and modal improvisation into an abstract yet accessible style whose echoes continue to be heard in contemporary small-group jazz playing. "Footprints" is on Miles Smiles (Columbia/Legacy CK-65682).   1970 62. Gary Burton and Keith Jarrett Moonchild/In Your Quiet Place Starting in the late 60's, many younger jazz musicians incorporated aspects of rock and other styles of popular music into their playing. In 1967, Gary Burton (1943- ), a lyrical yet virtuosic vibraharpist who had previously worked as a country-and-western session player in Nashville, formed a quartet whose imaginative recordings were among the earliest examples of this amalgam; three years later, he recorded with the pianist Keith Jarrett (1945- ), whose equally virtuosic playing reflected a comparably wide variety of interests, including gospel music. "Moonchild/In Your Quiet Place," a graceful ballad by Jarrett, synthesizes these diverse influences with exceptional assurance. Burton pursued a broadly similar approach in his later quartets and quintets, while Jarrett, following a brief stint with Miles Davis, established himself as a hugely (and deservedly) popular solo artist, alternating between jazz of various kinds and classical music. "Moonchild/In Your Quiet Place" is on Gary Burton & Keith Jarrett (Rhino R2-71594).   1972 63. Stan Getz 500 Miles High Miles Davis added electric instruments to his band in 1969 and adopted the rock-influenced style soon to be known as fusion jazz; several Davis alumni then started similar groups of their own, and a handful of older musicians alsobegan experimenting with fusion. One of them was the tenor saxophonist Stan Getz (1927-91), a Lester Young disciple who developed into a highly individual soloist in his own right. Getz had long been interested in new musical stylesóhe was one of the first American musicians to explore the Brazilian idiom called bossa novaóand in 1972 he hired the pianist-composer Chick Corea (1941- ), who had previously worked for Davis, and put together a quintet to perform Corea's Latin-style compositions, including the surging "500 Miles High." Corea played electric piano with the group, which also included Tony Williams on drums and the Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira (1941- ). Corea and Moreira later left Getz to form Return to Forever, one of the best-known fusion bands of the 70's. "500 Miles High" is on Captain Marvel (Koch Jazz KOC-CD-7864).   1974 64. Modern Jazz Quartet Django Except for Getz and Davis, most older jazz musicians shunned fusion, continuing to work in more traditional styles. A case in point was the Modern Jazz Quartet, the longest-lived small group in jazz, which was playing even better in 1974 than it had been twenty years earlier. Led by the pianist-composer John Lewis (1920- ), the MJQ, as the group was known, sought to bring compositional rigor to bebop, using Lewis's elegant, classically influenced pieces as vehicles for the billowing vibraharp solos of Milt Jackson (1923-99). "Django," a swinging minor-key lament written in memory of Django Reinhardt (see No. 16 in the November issue), is Lewis's most popular composition, and this lively version, recorded at a 1974 Lincoln Center concert, captures the MJQ at something close to its best. "Django" is on The Complete Last Concert, together with other noteworthy Lewis compositions such as "The Golden Striker" and "Skating in Central Park" (Atlantic 61976-2, two CD's). An even better version can be heard on the 1960 album European Concert, currently out of print in the U.S. 1977 65. Weather Report Birdland Fusion was in part a response to the proliferating complexity of avant-garde jazz, which many musicians believed was further alienating the fast-shrinking audience of jazz fans. As a result, many of the Miles Davis alumni who started groups of their own chose to play in an overtly popular style (though not Keith Jarrett or Davis himself, whose brand of "fusion" was actually less accessible than his earlier work). They included Wayne Shorter and the pianist-composer Joe Zawinul (1932- ), who left Davis to start Weather Report, a group whose synthesizer-dominated albums had a strong rock flavor; indeed, the catchy melody and high-stepping beat of Zawinul's "Birdland" actually gave it a brief run on the pop-music charts, though the heavily overdubbed instrumental textures are far from simple-minded. This Is Jazz: Weather Report (Columbia/Legacy CK-64627) contains "Birdland" and eight other performances by Weather Report.   Afterthoughts As it happens, the jazz musicians who wholeheartedly embraced fusion could hold on to their popular audiences only by watering down their music to the point of vapidity; though most of the more blatant popularizers eventually backtracked, their later work lacked the focus and concentration that had originally brought them fame. But jazz itself had entered a period of drift and uncertainty by the late 70's, and the failure of fusion to thrive was but one symptom of this malaise. Jazz has always been stylistically diverse. Still, at any given moment it has tended to be dominated by a single prevailing style (Dixieland, big-band swing, small-group bebop) as well as by a style-setting giant (Armstrong, Parker, Davis). Moreover, all varieties of jazz prior to 1960 shared a common musical vocabulary that succeeded over time in assimilating such seemingly incompatible idioms as bebop and bossa nova, thus making it possible for Stan Getz to record with Chick Corea, or Benny Goodman with Wardell Gray and Fats Navarro. But the rise of free jazz and abstract modal improvisation led to a rupture in the ongoing jazz tradition, and soon thereafter to what the critic Max Harrison would describe in 1980 as "a postmodernist phase: all styles, the music of all periods, are, it seems, valid . . . jazz no longer has a lingua franca." In practice, older mainstream players stopped trying to assimilate post-Coltrane developments, while avant-gardists showed little interest in earlier kinds of jazz; at the same time, listeners began to turn away in large numbers, preferring newer, less demanding styles of popular music. This latter development led many observers to speculate about the possible death of jazz. As Warren Leight wrote in the last scene of Side Man, his eloquent play about a group of aging jazz musicians: These guys are not even an endangered species anymore. It's too late. There are no more big bands, no more territory bands. No more nonets, or tentets. No more 60 weeks a year on the road. . . . When they go, that'll be it. No one will even understand what they were doing. A 50-year blip on the screen. But these words, imagined to have been spoken in 1985, have proved premature. What happened instead was that jazz entered a long-overdue neoclassical phase. A new generation of players, many of them following the example of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, chose to embrace earlier, more immediately accessible styles, and the jazz repertory movement, in which big bands perform the music of composers like Duke Ellington in the same way that a symphony orchestra plays Mozart or Stravinsky, simultaneously began to attract the attention of established arts institutions. In New York, for example, both Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall now sponsor publicly funded jazz repertory programs. It remains to be seen whether neoclassicismóespecially the fundamentally derivative kind practiced by Marsalis and his followersócan supply sufficient creative energy to sustain jazz's living tradition, or to inspire new "master innovators" (in Harrison's phrase). Certainly no such figure has emerged since the death of John Coltrane. But with the decline of interest in free jazz and fusionóa phenomenon not dissimilar to the simultaneous demise of the classical-music avant-gardeóit appears possible that the mainstream style, with its unparalleled capacity for assimilation, is now in the process of reasserting its primacy as the lingua franca of jazz.   Whatever the future brings, the invention, efflorescence, and maturing of jazz remain one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena of the century just past. And thanks to the timely invention of the phonograph, the music of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Coltrane and their contemporaries, which would otherwise have been lost, has instead been preserved for all time. But does their music deserve to be so preserved? Is it, in other words, of permanent interest, like the music of Mozart and Stravinsky? The question is begged by the increasing tendency of journalists and musicians to refer to jazz as "America's classical music," a phrase coined by the critic Grover Sales. The words are not without meaningóthey properly emphasize the fact that jazz, unlike classical music, is indigenous to Americaóbut their effect on critical discourse has nevertheless been mischievous. For one thing, America already has a classical music of its ownóthe music of such composers as Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, and Charles Ivesóand to praise jazz at the expense of these composers' achievements is tendentious at best, invidious at worst. Moreover, the phrase completely slights the large body of American popular song composed in this century, whose claim on our attention is at least as substantial as that of jazz. Beyond this, it seems to me self-evident that in any direct comparison between the two musics, jazz must necessarily come up short. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who has (surprisingly enough) written penetratingly about jazz, discussed this problem in his 1959 book, The Jazz Scene: Jazz is little music and not big music, in the same sense as lyrics are little poetry and epics big poetry. . . . Limitation of scope and relative smallness of scale do not make an art less good or true or beautiful. They do, however, put certain artistic achievements out of its reach. . . . If we ask: has jazz produced anything like the Beethoven Ninth, or the Bach B-Minor Mass, or Don Giovanni, the answer must be a flat no. But it is no less evident that within its admittedly narrow compass, jazz at its best is one of the most expressive forms of music that Western culture has yet produced. And while comparisons with classical music must be made with extreme caution, surely it is safe to say that such recordings as "West End Blues," "Ko-Ko," or "Parker's Mood" embody the profoundest of human emotions no less truly than a Schubert song or a Chopin nocturne. I therefore feel secure in predicting that the recorded masterpieces of jazz's first centuryómany of which are to be found in this listówill continue to be heard and enjoyed so long as music itself retains its hold on our hearts and minds. All of the CD's mentioned in this article can be purchased on line at www.commentarymagazine.com. TERRY TEACHOUT, COMMENTARY'S music critic, is a contributor to Time magazine. He worked as a jazz bassist in Kansas City from 1979 to 1983.

JAZZ BIOS Printer Friendly Version Lives of the (Jazz) Artists by Terry Teachout October 2002 ALL ART is in some sense autobiographical, if only because it is self-expressive—a fact that many artists are understandably reluctant to admit. Jazz musicians, however, are more forthright than others about the extra-musical matters reflected in their work, sometimes even to the point of suggesting an intimate connection between the sound of their music and the personalities of the men and women who make it: The selfish or shallow person might be a great musician technically, but he'll be so involved with himself that his playing will lack warmth, intensity, beauty, and won't be deeply felt by the listener. . . . A person that lets the other guy take the first solo, and when he plays behind a soloist plays only to enhance him, that's the guy that will care about his wife and children and will be courteous in his everyday contact with people. The speaker is the alto saxophonist Art Pepper, writing in his 1979 memoir Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper. The naiveté of Pepper's assertion is underlined by the fact that his book is the unintentionally revealing tale of a drug addict and small-time thief whose personal behavior bordered on the sociopathic, but who also happened to be one of the outstanding jazz soloists of the 1950's. But what is significant about Pepper's view of the relationship between art and personality is not that it is naive, but that he took the trouble to write it down—or, to be exact, to dictate it to his wife Laurie. For Pepper was one of a comparatively small number of famous jazz musicians to have published an autobiography, and Straight Life is one of the few such books to be more than superficially illuminating about its subject. As a rule, jazz memoirs leave the reader asking more questions than they answer, and too often the questions they do answer are of interest only to their authors' ardent fans. For this reason, the publication of A Jazz Odyssey: The Life of Oscar Peterson, written by Peterson in collaboration with the literary scholar and jazz journalist Richard Palmer, is a noteworthy occasion.1 It would have been so in any case, since Peterson is one of the most admired (if controversial) pianists in the history of jazz. But A Jazz Odyssey is exceptional not because Peterson has written a "tell-all" chronicle of his life in jazz but because he has chosen to write a very different sort of book, in the process challenging the tacit assumptions on which the vast majority of jazz autobiographies have been based. WHILE IT is not uncommon for novelists and poets to write autobiographies, other artists are less likely to produce accounts of their life and work. More often, their writings consist of criticism, as in the case of Fairfield Porter, a great American painter who was also one of the finest art critics of the 20th century. A number of nonverbal artists, among them Mozart, Delacroix, and Van Gogh, have left behind either lengthy diaries or large runs of correspondence. But I can think of only two truly distinguished autobiographies written without assistance by indisputably major creative artists working in nonverbal media: Hector Berlioz's Memoirs (1870) and Paul Taylor's Private Domain: An Autobiography (1987).2 The situation is no different in jazz. Prior to World War II, it was unusual for jazz musicians to have gone to college—some had little or no formal schooling of any kind—and while many were capable of speaking memorably about their art, only a handful attempted to write about it. The exceptions included the alto saxophonist Paul Desmond and the pianists Marian McPartland and Dick Wellstood, all of whom were gifted writers of prose. But these aside, only three well-known jazz musicians—Mel Tormé, Artie Shaw, and Louis Armstrong—have published memoirs written without the aid of a ghostwriter, and their efforts suggest some of the limitations of jazz autobiography.3 Tormé, a popular singer whose work became increasingly jazz-oriented from the 1950's on, was also a part-time writer whose books included The Other Side of the Rainbow (1970), a reminiscence of his relationship with Judy Garland; Traps, the Drum Wonder (1991), a biography-memoir of the drummer Buddy Rich; and My Singing Teachers (1994), a collection of critical essays about other singers. But his most ambitious literary undertaking was It Wasn't All Velvet (1988), a breezily written 384-page autobiography full of well-told show-business anecdotes. Unfortunately, the book was intended for a popular audience, and thus had more to say about Tormé's love life than about his singing. In The Trouble with Cinderella: An Outline of Identity (1952), by contrast, the clarinetist-bandleader Artie Shaw scrupulously avoided the subject of his much-publicized marriages to Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. Indeed, Shaw's autobiography is unique among jazz memoirs in its aspirations to literary seriousness. (Two years after it appeared, Shaw retired from music to devote himself to writing.) But while it contains penetrating discussions of musical issues, the bulk of The Trouble with Cinderella is devoted to Shaw's attempt to catalogue and analyze the devastating effects of what he calls "$ucce$$" on an ill-educated musician who at the age of twenty-eight suddenly found himself one of the most famous men in America. Hence, as its author intended, the book is of interest primarily as a study in the psychology of celebrity. Louis Armstrong's Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954), the best autobiography to be published by a major jazz musician, has even less to say about music than The Trouble with Cinderella and It Wasn't All Velvet, albeit for a different reason. Beyond the simple pleasures of childhood reminiscence, Armstrong's chief purpose in telling the story of his Horatio Alger-like youth is to pay homage to the 19th-century ethic of individual responsibility and deferred gratification that made it possible for him to escape the abject poverty into which he was born: I don't want anyone to feel I'm posing as a plaster saint. Like everyone I have my faults, but I always have believed in making an honest living. I was determined to play my horn against all odds, and I had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so. ALL THREE of these books are stylishly and compellingly written, and would be engaging even to a reader who knew little of jazz. Beyond their literary appeal, however, they are no less significant as primary historical sources—the only full-length autobiographies that present the reminiscences of important jazz musicians in wholly or essentially unmediated form. It is thus all the more disappointing that, in Satchmo as in his other writings, Armstrong spends so little time talking about the actual process of music-making. And to turn to the ghostwritten autobiographies produced by other leading jazz musicians is to be similarly disappointed, and worse. Because we do not know to what extent their nominal "authors" have been responsible for their contents, their value as primary source material is questionable; nor can they be considered true works of literary art. Even in the presence of so gracefully poetic a narrative as the soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet's Treat It Gentle (1960, with Joan Reid, Desmond Flower, and John Ciardi), or so seemingly individual a "voice" as that heard in the guitarist-bandleader Eddie Condon's We Called It Music (1947, with Thomas Sugrue), one inevitably wonders how much credit is deserved by the ghostwriter.4 In any event, what is usually on display in these books is a bland, unrevealing voice that fails to convince on any level. Benny Goodman's The Kingdom of Swing (1939, with Irving Kolodin), Duke Ellington's Music Is My Mistress (1973, with Stanley Dance), and Count Basie's Good Morning Blues (1985, with Albert Murray) shed little light on the inner lives of their nominal authors, and still less on the music made by those remarkable men. No doubt, in some cases, they themselves were either inarticulate or unintrospective. But the problem this presents has often been compounded by the fact that most jazz memoirs are written by collaborators who are not themselves trained musicians. It is hard enough for musicians to describe what they do in nontechnical language. When laymen attempt to elicit such descriptions from them, the results are almost always unspecific and opaque, as in Duke Ellington's tribute to Sidney Bechet: Bechet to me was the very epitome of jazz. He represented and executed everything that had to do with the beauty of it all, and everything he played in his whole life was completely original. . . . He was truly a great man, and no one has ever been able to play like him. Small wonder, then, that the best parts of most jazz autobiographies often have little or nothing to do with jazz per se. It is true that when Art Pepper tells us about doing hard time in San Quentin, or Miles Davis describes how he was beaten by racist policemen outside a New York nightclub, we are hearing about experiences that may have been of the utmost relevance to their work. But the experiences themselves were not specifically musical, and it is left to the reader to speculate on the elusive alchemy by which they were transformed into art. IN RECENT years, several books about jazz have presented first-person reminiscence in a different format, one more closely resembling the oral-history interviews conducted by academic scholars. A good example is Burt Korall's newly published Drummin' Men—The Heartbeat of Jazz: The Bebop Years, a collection of critical essays about jazz drummers of the 1940's and 1950's into which Korall has incorporated lengthy excerpts from interviews with musicians of the period.5 Himself a trained drummer, Korall is musically much more comprehending than the average jazz journalist, and his use of interview material adds immediacy to his vivid descriptions of the playing of such key figures as Kenny Clarke, Mel Lewis, Shelly Manne, and Max Roach. Books like Drummin' Men are without question an improvement on the oddly faceless "memoirs" that dominate the first-person literature of jazz. Yet in the end, there is no substitute for the convincingly written full-length autobiography, whether ghosted or not, a fact of which we are reminded by Oscar Peterson's A Jazz Odyssey. At seventy-seven, Peterson remains an ambiguous figure, admired by audiences and most (though not all) musicians but held in something approaching contempt by many (though not most) critics. The first world-class jazz soloist to be born and trained in Canada, he made his U.S. debut at Carnegie Hall in 1949, immediately establishing himself as a florid, hard-swinging pianist with a highly developed virtuoso technique derived from extensive classical study.6 Long a fixture at Norman Granz's popular Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts, he eventually became a star in his own right, though such critics as Whitney Balliett and Max Harrison (as well as Miles Davis, the most influential jazz musician of the 1950's) dismissed his playing as glib and superficial. Peterson, however, has little to say about his critics in A Jazz Odyssey, or about his sometimes tempestuous private life. Instead, he concentrates for the most part on specifically musical matters, which he explores in considerable detail. This preference for making musical points affects even his keenly observed portraits of other artists, as in the book's delightful vignette of the night the tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips was misguided enough to take on Ella Fitzgerald, famous for her unsparing competitiveness in jam-session settings, or Peterson's discussion of Fred Astaire, with whom he recorded in 1952. In the latter case, Peterson goes beyond the mere evocation of a movie star's off-stage personality to tell us about Astaire's approach to singing: Dancing, his time was so strict that he could make an accompaniment sound early or late; his vocal time, however, was very loose, uninhibited, and unmeasured. I found the best way to accompany him was to give him a long harmonic chord-cushion and let him take his natural liberties with metronomic time. . . . For all his rhythmic feel, Fred was not naturally attuned to jazz phrasing, and it was at times perilously easy to throw him via the wrong intro or a misplaced fill. We learned to gauge our ad-lib lines around and behind him very carefully, giving him enough time to hear his place of reentry coming up; we also stuck firmly to the normal harmonic clusters, as any kind of "modern" dissonance could phase [sic] him or make him worried about his own intonation. I quote this passage at length both because it is characteristic of Peterson's approach and because it is uncharacteristic of jazz autobiography in general. Despite his gifts as a raconteur, Peterson is not a natural writer—his ghostwritten prose is too often stiff and ostentatious—but when he speaks of music, the results have a clarity and specificity rarely found in books of this genre. And unlike most jazz memoirists, he is even willing to be critical of other players, including some of the most admired musicians in jazz. Peterson's analysis of the "uneven and unfinished" playing of the bebop pianist Bud Powell, for instance, cuts sharply against the grain of conventional critical wisdom, and whether or not one agrees with his conclusions, they merit scrutiny not only in their own right but for the perspective they offer on his own remarkable technical achievements. Most valuable of all are Peterson's discussions of the groups with which he himself has been associated, especially the much-admired trio he led from 1953 to 1958 with Herb Ellis on guitar and Ray Brown on bass: I was able to initiate musical directives via my playing that would indicate to Ray and Herb exactly how much rhythmic steam I wanted behind me. . . . [M]y articulation on the piano would sometimes deepen, thereby indicating the need for a heavier "walking" type of time behind me. Another enabling device was the repeat of a definitive rhythmic figure that would serve as a gathering point for all of us. Many times, were you to be close enough to the Trio on stage, you would hear Ray say something like "O.K., Herb, let's tighten him up!" Passages like these make an implicit point about the nature of autobiography. A memoirist need not be capable of turning his life's story into a work of literary art to produce a book of permanent value. But that book will succeed only to the extent that it tells us about his work—the sole claim an artist has on the attention of posterity. Otherwise, it amounts to little more than gossip. A Jazz Odyssey is far from artful (though never less than readable), but I can think of no other jazz autobiography that has made the mysteries of music-making so readily accessible to the lay reader. Even those who dislike Oscar Peterson's playing will find his book informative—surely a near-unprecedented achievement. The result is a memorable contribution to the literature of jazz, and one can only hope that other musicians interested in telling their stories, whether on paper or into a tape recorder, will take it as a model. 1 Continuum, 382 pp., $29.95. 2 To this list one might also add Virgil Thomson's Virgil Thomson (1966) and the autobiographical writings of the American composer Ned Rorem, though Thomson now seems likely to be remembered more for his criticism than for his music. 3 The bassist-composer Charles Mingus wrote a third-person memoir, Beneath the Underdog (1971), which reportedly underwent drastic editing prior to publication. In addition, a number of less widely known jazz musicians have written excellent autobiographies, among them the pianist Don Asher's Notes from a Battered Grand (1992) and the bassist Bill Crow's From Birdland to Broadway (1992). No less satisfying in their unpretentious way are some of the better ghostwritten memoirs by journeyman players with no pretense to literary talent: the clarinetist Barney Bigard's With Louis and the Duke (1986, with Barry Martyn), the pianist Hampton Hawes's Raise Up Off Me (1974, with Don Asher), the trumpeter Max Kaminsky's Jazz Band (1963, with V.E. Hughes), the bassist-manager John Levy's Men, Women, and Girl Singers (2000, with Devra Hall), and the tenor saxophonist Arthur Rollini's Thirty Years With the Big Bands (1987, with Barbara Gideon, Mary Fritchie, and Elizabeth Buley). 4 In the case of Miles Davis's Miles: The Autobiography (1989, with Quincy Troupe), serious questions of authenticity have been raised by critics and scholars, while other ghostwritten jazz memoirs, most notably Billie Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues (1956, with William Dufty), are now generally acknowledged to be substantially inauthentic. 5 Oxford University Press, 308 pp., $35.00. Of similar interest is Korall's Drummin' Men—The Heartbeat of Jazz: The Swing Years, originally published in 1990, which will be reissued by Oxford in November. 6 Among the best of Peterson's many albums currently available on CD are The Oscar Peterson Trio at Zardi's, recorded live in 1955 with the guitarist Herb Ellis and the bassist Ray Brown (Pablo 2PACD-2620-118-2, two CD's); Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio, recorded in 1957 with Ellis, Brown, and the tenor saxophonist Stan Getz (Verve 827 826-2); Night Train, recorded in 1962 with Brown and the drummer Ed Thigpen (Verve 821 724-2); and My Favorite Instrument, an album of unaccompanied piano solos recorded in 1968 (Verve 821 843-2). Terry Teachout, the music critic of Commentary, is the author of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, forthcoming in November from HarperCollins. Printer Friendly Version Copyright 2002 Commentary Magazine