How ironic: The most distinctly American musical form is also the one least understood by the nation that created it.
Ever since the 1950s, listeners in Europe and Japan have embraced the jazz/blues tradition more readily than Americans, who often seem mystified about this music. Perhaps that’s because fans outside the States have studied jazz and blues more assiduously, eagerly snapping up all the latest recordings, reissues, videotapes, books, magazines and the like.
Whether that has to do with America’s tragic racial past or the sophistication of the music (or both) is open to debate.
But surely any listener with an open mind and a background in the jazz/blues legacy can learn to decode the music (by “blues” we refer not to the electrified blues of the modern era but to the earliest recorded examples of the root music).
HOW TO LISTEN
Whether you’re sitting in a club or spinning a CD at home, it’s essential to dispense with a pop-music mentality: The best jazz and blues music is not designed to be instantly accessible (thus don’t expect a thumping backbeat or instantly digestible message). This music is not about merely stating a musical idea but about developing it. For the listener, the pleasure is in finding the central musical themes and tracing their evolution during a performance. Beginners will find that repeated hearings will help enormously, making certain chord changes familiar to the ear and rendering intricate melodic ideas easier to understand.
Recordings
– “The Jelly Roll Morton Centennial: His Complete Victor Recordings” (5-CD boxed set on RCA/Bluebird).
Many listeners think of jazz as an improvised music, but composed works also have been integral to the jazz tradition. The music included here represents not only the pinnacle of pianist-composer Jelly Roll Morton’s career (in Chicago in the 1920s) but sets the tone for music yet to come by Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Wynton Marsalis.
– “Louis Armstrong: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1923-1934” (4-CD boxed set on Columbia/Legacy). Though the origins of jazz predate trumpeter Louis Armstrong, he was the artist who transformed the music into a soloist’s art. Listen to his sublime cadenzas, stratospheric high notes and ineffably poetic exchanges with pianist Earl Hines, and you will understand why every jazz musician thereafter wanted to stand stage center and play like Satchmo.
– “Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings” (2-CD boxed set on Columbia).
Early blues were far more sophisticated than modern- day imitators would have listeners believe, as this critical set from 1930s singer-songwriter Robert Johnson attests.
– “The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books” (10-CD boxed set on Verve).
No artist sums up the evolution of jazz singing more idiomatically than Ella Fitzgerald, whose work reached its apex in the “Song Book” albums she recorded for Norman Granz. In blues, ballads, bebop and beyond, Fitzgerald shows astonishing technical command and sensuality of phrase.
– “Billie Holiday: The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945-1959” (10-CD boxed set on Verve).
The sublime Lady Day taught the world that great jazz singing does not require melodic embellishment or intricate chord changes. In fact, her finest work (captured here in the last years of her life) represents jazz singing at its most honest and unadorned.
– “Duke Ellington: The Carnegie Hall Concerts” (Prestige).
Duke Ellington proved equally persuasive in short works and long ones, though it’s his sprawling, quasi-orchestral pieces that represent a high point in the art of jazz composition. This recording contains his “Black, Brown and Beige,” an epic piece, in its only complete recording by Ellington’s band.
– “Charlie Parker: Jazz at Massey Hall” (Original Jazz Classics).
What does “bebop” mean? This fabled 1953 concert answers the question with the fury of its rhythms, the audacity of its harmonies and the freewheeling spirit of its improvisations. Altoist Charlie Parker performs with several other founding fathers of bebop: trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Bud Powell, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach.
– Miles Davis: “Birth of the Cool” (Capitol); “Kind of Blue” (Columbia/Legacy); “Sketches of Spain” (Columbia/Legacy). Trumpeter Miles Davis changed the course of jazz several times over, yielding several masterpieces along the way. The sleek lines and melodic understatement of “Birth of the Cool,” the modal (meaning non-chordal) musical vocabulary of “Kind of Blue” and the quasi-orchestral writing of the Gil Evans-Miles Davis collaboration “Sketches of Spain” have been studied, developed and refined by jazz musicians ever since.
– “John Coltrane: My Favorite Things” (Atlantic). The full impact of saxophonist John Coltrane’s music with its ferocity, spirituality, transcendental technique and rarefied harmonic language has yet to be understood, 30 years after his death. Yet this recording touches on all these elements, particularly in the famous, incantatory title track.
– “Ornette Coleman: Beauty Is a Rare Thing/The Complete Atlantic Recordings” (6-CD boxed set on Rhino).
Jazz visionary Ornette Coleman opened up new vocabularies of sound with albums such as “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” “This Is Our Music” and “Free Jazz,” all included here. Coleman’s music may have ranged from the sublimely melodic to the seemingly anarchic, but it showed jazz artists how to improvise without relying on traditional Western harmony and standard meters.
– “Art Ensemble of Chicago: The Art Ensemble” (5-CD boxed set on Nessa). No group of musicians crystallizes the musical breakthroughs of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians better than the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whose innovative work in 1967-68 is documented in this pivotal set. The sense of discovery that Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman and others express as they experiment with bells, whistles, chants and other non-traditional tools makes for music that is as disarming as it is revolutionary.
PUBLICATIONS
– “Mister Jelly Roll” by Alan Lomax (Pantheon).
A definitive biography of self-proclaimed inventor of jazz Jelly Roll Morton.
“Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans” and “Swing That Music” by Louis Armstrong (Da Capo)
Vivid recollections from the most influential creator in jazz.
– “Duke Ellington: Music is My Mistress” by Duke Ellington (Da Capo) One of the most frank, evocative and literary autobiographies in jazz.
– “Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development” by Gunther Schuller (Oxford) A revelatory analysis of the birth of jazz.
– “The Power of Black Music” by Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (Oxford)
An unprecedented chronicle of the evolution of black music through the ages.
– Down Beat: The world’s most revered jazz magazine.
VIDEOS AND FEATURE FILMS
– “The Sound of Jazz” (Vintage Jazz Classics Video). Possibly the most famous televised jazz show, this 1957 broadcast on CBS featured Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Pee Wee Russell, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge and other jazz royalty.
– “Round Midnight” The best jazz movie ever filmed stars tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon and captures the melancholy, pain and triumphs of the jazz life. (Pictured above in background.)
– “Let’s Get Lost” Here’s a haunting look at the tragic times of trumpeter Chet Baker.
– “Stormy Weather” This film includes radiant performances by Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller and others.
LOCAL ACTS
Chicagoans don’t have to venture out of town to hear great artistry, with several local giants routinely playing neighborhood clubs. Don’t miss tenor saxophonists Von Freeman, Ari Brown and Eddie Johnson; pianist Willie Pickens; drummer Wilbur Campbell; bandleader William Russo and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble; and any band affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The AACM is admired around the world for bringing a daring new approach to jazz beginning in the ’60s. Today, bandleaders such as Malachi Thompson, Ernest Dawkins and Ed Wilkerson Jr., embrace the AACM’s philosophy of applying ancient African tradition to radical new sounds.
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More on the internet
For a multimedia presentation on this installment and a look at the previous essentials, go to: chicago.tribune.com
