The History of Jazz (23 page)

Henderson has often been criticized for his supposed inability, whether due to indifference or diffidence, to assume the leadership responsibilities that would have given his orchestra the public success it so richly deserved. In this regard, Henderson is typically compared to Duke Ellington, whose gift as a leader of musicians may have been as great as his instrumental acumen, or to Benny Goodman, who some years later would use Henderson’s arrangements as a building block in his own much greater popular acclaim. Yet if Henderson lacked the interpersonal skills necessary to run a band, one could hardly tell it by looking at the roster of musicians he attracted to his orchestra. Even Ellington, despite all his genius for eliciting the most from his eccentric group of players, pales in comparison to Henderson in this arena. Henderson’s reed section featured, for greater or lesser stints, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Chu Berry, and Benny Carter—one could plausibly argue that these were the five greatest saxophonists of their day. His brass players during these years included Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Henry “Red” Allen, Rex Stewart, Tommy Ladnier, Dickie Wells, J. C. Higginbotham, Joe Smith, Benny Morton, and Jimmy Harrison. Has any other jazz bandleader, of any era—even a Miles Davis, a Count Basie, an Art Blakey, or a Benny Goodman—been able to boast of a more illustrious set of alumni?

Yet the most powerful influence on the band came from none of these sources. More than any of these justly celebrated musicians, Don Redman served as a key force in transforming this working dance band into an influential link between the Jazz Age and the Swing Era. Without Redman, the Henderson orchestra might have remained a finishing school for talented soloists, but under his influence it became something more: the birthplace of a new jazz sound and a repository for an emerging aesthetic. Like Henderson, Redman was a college-educated Southerner who had found steady employment in the burgeoning New York jazz scene. In his native West Virginia, where he was born in 1900, Redman had garnered attention as a child prodigy who easily mastered the rudiments of a wide range of instruments— versatility that held him in good stead when he later undertook the blending of these different textures in his pathbreaking arrangements. In his early twenties, Redman went on the road with Billy Paige’s Broadway Syncopators, playing clarinet and saxophones in addition to writing band charts. This affiliation brought Redman to New York, where he met Henderson. Their collaboration began at studio sessions even before the formation of the Henderson orchestra. When the Roseland gig became available, Redman was enlisted to join the band.

Coleman Hawkins, destined to mature into one of the most important soloists in the history of jazz, was also present with the Henderson ensemble virtually from the start. The similarities in background between Hawkins, Redman, and Henderson are striking. Like the others, Hawkins was a newcomer to the Northeast—he was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on November 21, 1904—and had already pursued a musical education in an academic setting (perhaps informally: his official attendance at Washburn College, where he claimed to have studied harmony and composition, is not substantiated by school records). But the shared personality traits are even more striking than these biographical details. Diffident, professional, soft-spoken, wordly, disciplined, well-trained, fascinated by progressive trends in music—these qualities marked each of the three. Do we see here the emergence of a new type of jazz musician? Beiderbecke, the high school dropout who could barely read music; Armstrong, the juvenile delinquent, who refined his native talent at the Waif’s Home—these personality types, so indicative of the pioneers of New Orleans and Chicago, were now to be replaced by a new breed of player, the professional big band instrumentalist. Here was the jazz equivalent of the organization man. And at this point in time, the Henderson orchestra was the consummate organization.

Hawkins learned piano at age five and took up cello two years later. For his ninth birthday he received a saxophone, and by age twelve he was playing at school dances. In 1921, Hawkins went on the road with singer Mamie Smith, who one year earlier had achieved a huge success with “Crazy Blues,” a million-selling hit that initiated the craze for race records. Smith provided Hawkins with a number of opportunities: to perform in front of large crowds, to initiate his recording career (in May 1922), and to come to New York. But by the summer of 1923, Hawkins had left Smith and was recording with Henderson. While Redman did much of his work behind the scenes, crafting the band’s arrangements, Hawkins stood out on the bandstand as the group’s featured soloist, usually on tenor saxophone, but sometimes playing clarinet, C-melody saxophone, baritone saxophone, or bass saxophone.

Today the saxophone is not only an accepted and popular band instrument, but to many listeners represents the quintessential sound of jazz. This was far from the case during the years in which Hawkins mastered his craft. The saxophone family was still in its infancy, virtually unknown in the symphonic world, and relegated primarily to military bands. The Belgian instrument maker Antoine-Joseph “Adolphe” Sax had patented the horn in Paris in 1846. But Sax, despite his zeal for invention (his inspirations also include the saxhorn, saxtuba, saxotromba, and even the saxocannon, his neglected contribution to the Crimean War campaign), gained little financial benefit from his efforts and died in poverty in 1894. But the intrinsic advantages of his most famous instrument—it was easy to learn, forgiving in its tone production, and relatively inexpensive to make with its simple metal body attached to a conventional clarinet-type mouthpiece—proved decisive in the long run. By the early years of the twentieth century, the saxophone had established itself as an important instrumental voice, first in military bands and later in popular and jazz ensembles. The only thing lacking was a tradition and an accepted body of playing techniques.

This was provided, in large part, by Hawkins. Certainly there had been earlier jazz saxophonists; Hawkins himself was quick to give credit to largely forgotten figures such as Stump Evans, Prince Robinson, and Happy Caldwell. And Sidney Bechet, as we have seen, had also made important early contributions to the saxophone tradition in jazz. Even so, at the start of Hawkins’s career the saxophone had yet to match the role of the cornet or clarinet as an important jazz solo voice. Years later, many devotees of New Orleans style would grumble that the death knell for “pure” jazz was sounded when the saxophonists took over the music. Blame Mr. Hawkins for that palace coup. In particular, the tenor saxophone held an especially insignificant role in jazz before Hawkins’s influential advocacy. Rudy Wiedoeft had recorded on the C melody saxophone as early as 1916, while Frank Trumbauer’s later work on that instrument was also very influential in its day. Given these predecessors, as well as the rich clarinet tradition in New Orleans and Chicago bands, few would have predicted, at the time, that the tenor would become the dominant saxophone voice in jazz—indeed, even Hawkins had begun by playing the C melody sax. Without his later championing of the tenor, with its heavier and more dominating presence, the later evolution of the jazz reed tradition might have unfolded far differently.

Yet Hawkins’s impact extended even more to the sound and fury of the tenor, not merely its selection as a jazz instrument. This was an important achievement. Prior to Hawkins, the saxophone’s versatility and the absence of role models from classical music were as much a curse as a blessing. For better or worse, the tenor sax lacked a correct sound, an accepted way of tone production. Whinnying noises, smears, slap-tonguing, barks, growls, novelty effects—the strangest assortment of sounds were all part of the shared vocabulary of the pre-Hawkins saxophone idiom. In the wake of the first generation of clarinet and C melody sax players, the reed tradition in jazz had favored a lighter sound, with a greater emphasis on ornamentation and patterns than on robust push-the-band improvisation. But by the time Hawkins had finished his redefinition of the instrument, a streamlined jazz tenor sax sound had been forged, one that remained dominant for the next forty years, and retains considerable influence to this day. For good reason he is often lauded as the father of tenor sax.

Even with Redman and Hawkins on board, the earliest recordings of Henderson’s band are lackluster. The arrangements are simple, sticking close to the model set by King Oliver (whose influence looms large on these sides) and the other New Orleans pioneers, while the improvised sections of the music are often repetitive and unimaginative, with only an occasional phrase or hot break to indicate the potential of the band’s soloists. But in the months following Henderson’s opening at the Club Alabam, a number of changes can be heard: the band adds more players; its sound gets denser and more complex; the performances become tighter and more focused. The group still has not abandoned its allegiance to formulas associated with New Orleans jazz, especially in terms of rhythmic conception and solo construction, but already the barest indications of a different paradigm—more arranged, more harmonically sophisticated—can be heard in incipient form. And even the lingering influence of the New Orleans style was not without its value in this new setting—a perspicacious listener can hear the later battling exchanges of sections in a jazz big band anticipated in the dueling counterpoint of individual horns in the traditional jazz of Oliver and other Crescent City pioneers.

More than any other event, Henderson’s hiring of Louis Armstrong in 1924 served as a catalyst in accelerating the band’s evolution. Comparisons of Armstrong’s solo work with Hawkins’s on performances from 1924 and 1925 such as “Money Blues,” “Go ‘Long Mule,” “How Come You Do Me Like You Do?,” or “Carolina Stomp” show how much the cornetist had to teach—and, equally, how much the saxophonist still had to learn. In this setting, Hawkins gradually softened the rough edges of his phrasing and smoothed out the rhythmic flow of his playing. By the time of his influential performance on “The Stampede” from the spring of 1926, Hawkins was showing the first glimmerings of the self-assurance and fluidity that would distinguish his mature work. Hawkins was only twenty-one years old at the time, but this recording already served to generate a great deal of interest among his contemporaries. And not only with reed players—trumpeter Roy Eldridge learned this solo note for note and played it at an early audition. However, the finishing touches on Hawkins’s musical education would come three years later when the saxophonist heard Art Tatum during a Henderson road trip through Ohio. Inspired by this chance encounter, Hawkins further reconfigured his approach to the horn, incorporating harmonic concepts learned from the pianist.

Don Redman’s growth during this period is, if anything, even more remarkable. Yet his was the type of progress marked by continual refinement and steady improvement, rather than overnight breakthroughs. Even before Redman, the more savvy dance bandleaders had drawn on jazz elements in crafting their arrangements. Art Hickman’s San Francisco–based dance band, which came to New York in 1919, attracted attention for its use of saxophone section playing, while Paul Whiteman could count on Bill Challis, Matty Malneck, Tom Satterfield, and Ferde Grofé (who had earlier worked for Hickman) to provide forward-looking jazz-oriented charts. Meanwhile, other bandleaders, such Vincent Lopez and Paul Specht, were tapping into the growing demand for a more polished, high-society type of jazz orchestra.
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Yet the hotter, more potent style crafted slowly and painstakingly by Redman during these years would come to exert the most direct and decisive influence on the evolution of the jazz big band.

Redman’s arrangement of “Dicty Blues” from the summer of 1923 already captures the essential quality of the new style: namely, the grouping of reed and brass instruments into separate sections, and their use as foils for each other. Over the next several years, Redman and Henderson would explore a wider and wider range of techniques that built on this simple principle. Interweaving, dueling, engaging in call-and-response forms, alternating between supporting and dominant roles, sometimes combining in thickly textured block chords—these varied possibilities of section writing are now taken for granted by jazz listeners, and in many instances have become overworked clichés. But in these early days of the Henderson band, they cut through the tired formulas of New Orleans and Chicago jazz, which had relied almost exclusively on contrasting monophonic voices, and presented a new building block for jazz: the section, rather than the instrumentalist. Locking together with the precision and discipline of military regiments on an advance, the combined sections could achieve musical results far beyond the scope of the earlier small combos.

The nature of the sections also evolved with the passage of time. Clarinet trios may have been used before in vaudeville shows and sweet bands, but they took on a new energy when pitted against brass trios in the Henderson band. Yet this innovation proved to be only a starting point. The use of saxophones, less shrill than the clarinets and better suited for articulating rich mid-and lower-range harmonies, gradually emerged as the dominant force in the reed section. Brass trios grew into whole brass sections that could subdivide into separate trumpet and trombone units, each able to work separately or in conjunction with the other. The rhythm instruments also began taking shape as a separate section. Piano, tuba (later replaced by the string bass), drums, banjo (later replaced by guitar)—their roles within the group became more specialized, more focused on linking together, providing rhythmic momentum for the band, and a sonic cushion for section work and solos.

Armstrong’s greatest impact may have been on the rhythmic component of Redman’s chart writing. A more supple sense of timing begins to appear in his arrangements during this period. They become hotter, more syncopated. Plodding, on-the-beat phrases are replaced by more vibrant excursions, reflecting in the written parts the same dynamism that distinguished Armstrong’s ad-lib horn lines. The symphonic jazz aspirations of Whiteman, an early model for Redman, slowly give way to a different standard in which the hot solo provides the raw material for the arrangement. In an odd reversal of the classical tradition, written parts were now made to sound like improvisations, especially in their phrasing and fanciful use of melodic material; the only difference was that these solo-like lines were now fleshed out and given harmonic depth in the full-blown polyphony of the horn section. On this basis, a more fervent dialogue between the brass and reed sections takes root.