The History of Jazz (59 page)

But Getz’s tenor work, for all its beauty, was only part of the reason for the public’s warm response to the bossa nova. Jobim’s compositions, with their mixture of impressionist harmonies, distinctive melodies, and bittersweet lyrics, rank among the finest popular songs of the era. In time “The Girl from Ipanema” became an overplayed cocktail lounge anthem. But Jobim’s entire body of work is distinguished by dozens of outstanding pieces, and his name is not out of place alongside those of Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers, and Porter in the pantheon of those who made art song out of pop tunes. João Gilberto was the perfect performer of this music. His gently stuttering guitar beat epitomized the bossa rhythm, and his whispering vocals pushed the cool aesthetic to its extreme. No singer in any idiom has ever sung with a more relaxed delivery (especially remarkable given his phrasing—seemingly so antithetical to jazz—on top of or ahead of the beat). Even Chet Baker’s cooing vocals, reportedly a model for Gilberto, sound sassy by comparison. But, in a surprising twist, João’s wife, Astrud Gilberto, provided the most famous vocal on the
Getz/Gilberto
album, launching her own career with her work on “The Girl from Ipanema.” Astrud went on to perform with Getz’s working band and make her own name as a lead act—a striking turnaround for a woman who had not been a professional singer before her “Ipanema” success. João, in contrast, became increasingly reclusive with the passing years, rarely granting interviews or appearing in public. After the mid-1960s, he made only a handful of records. But his beguiling 1991 release
João
and
João Voz e Violão
from 2000 showed that his style had changed little with the intervening years, despite the fluctuating fashions in pop, jazz, and Brazilian music.

Getz, for his part, would never again sell so many records. But he rarely looked back to the bossa in later years, preferring to return to mainstream jazz with a series of top-notch bands. His quartet with Chick Corea helped pave the way for Corea’s own chart-climbing career and produced a major musical statement with the
Sweet Rain
recording. Later bands with Joanne Brackeen, Albert Dailey, Andy LaVerne, Jim McNeely, and Kenny Barron continued in this tradition and maintained a consistently high level of quality, as did Getz’s guest recording projects with Jimmy Rowles, Bill Evans, Diane Schuur, and others. In his final years, before his death from liver cancer in 1991, Getz was able to free himself from his long-standing addiction to drugs and alcohol, and find a new career mentoring younger musicians as artist-in-residence at Stanford University.

For a time in the early 1950s, Getz and many other leaders of the cool movement resided on the West Coast. Here cool jazz was in the ascendancy and its leading advocates enjoyed frequent opportunities to perform and record. This marked a stark change from the late 1940s, when a small but talented group of mostly black bebop players, schooled in the clubs and after-hours spots of Central Avenue, had dominated the modern jazz scene in Los Angeles. In many instances, these players maintained their allegiance to bop in later years, but with less financial success than their cool school compatriots—or when compared with the Californians (such as Charles Mingus or Eric Dolphy) who made the smart move to New York. Los Angeles–based saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Teddy Edwards, and Wardell Gray rank among the finest soloists of their generation, and all three played a seldom acknowledged role in defining a distinctive bop sound for the tenor sax, liberated from the Hawkins mannerisms displayed on most early modern jazz tenor outings. Of these three, only Gordon would go on to enjoy widespread fame, albeit after twenty years of relative obscurity. His early recordings for Savoy from the mid-1940s and infrequent releases during the 1950s demonstrate Gordon’s freewheeling energy and his bellowing foghorn tone—one of the most distinctive signature sounds in modern jazz—while later sessions for Blue Note present the mature statements of a major soloist. Few were listening, however, and Gordon moved overseas, where he spent most of the 1960s and 1970s. Only upon his return to the United States in 1976 did the tenorist, now in his mid-fifties, begin receiving the accolades and rewards his contributions warranted. Altoist Frank Morgan had an even longer wait before seeing his career blossom. His recordings from the early 1950s reveal a precocious player with formidable technique. But drug problems would sideline him until the late 1970s, and not until the mid-1980s would he enjoy the chance to record extensively and demonstrate the full scope of his abilities. Altoist Sonny Criss and pianist Hampton Hawes had played with Parker during his West Coast sojourn and developed into outstanding bop players in their own right, but both remained mostly local heroes, seldom gigging outside of California and gaining only grudging respect from the mostly East Coast–based critical establishment. Many other gifted players—Harold Land, Curtis Counce, Dupree Bolton, Frank Butler, Carl Perkins, Pony Poindexter, Roy Porter—met similar fates. Often personal problems, mostly drug-related, contributed to the hardships faced by these promising talents. But all of them also suffered from being African American and committed to a harder-edged bop sound at a time when cool jazz played by white musicians was the dominant jazz style on the West Coast.

A number of signal events marked the shift from hot to cool on the Coast. Gerry Mulligan’s relocation to California after the completion of the Davis Nonet sessions created a direct link to the fertile East Coast cool movement. In addition, a host of former Stan Kenton sidemen, now settled in Southern California, fueled the progressive tendencies of this music, each with greater or lesser ties to the cool aesthetic. The Lighthouse, a Hermosa Beach jazz club, which had formerly featured some of the more bop-oriented black players, became a regular performance venue for many of these ex-Kentonians. The Lighthouse evolved into a public workshop for emerging jazz trends on the Coast, with a panoply of players (Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre, Bob Cooper, Bud Shank, Shelly Manne, and many others) pursuing a diverse range of styles, from laid-back to leading-edge. The worst of this music settled for an easy banality, an aural dose of laudanum, but more often the Lighthouse crew tapped into the freewheeling creative currents of the time.

Perhaps even more important than clubs like the Lighthouse were the independent record companies on the West Coast, notably Les Koenig’s Contemporary label, Richard Bock’s Pacific label, and the Weiss brothers’ Fantasy outfit. They recorded and promoted the new music and, in response to their efforts, West Coast jazz gained an international following and emerged as a viable alternative to the hegemony of East Coast models of improvisation and composition. Larger entertainment companies would gradually come to dominate the California music business during this period, with everyone from Walt Disney to MGM seeing recordings as a profitable diversification move. Capitol Records in Hollywood would enter the big leagues with its quasi-monopoly on sophisticated pop, as sung by Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Nancy Wilson, the Kingston Trio, and other name acts. But the jazz renaissance of the 1950s was promoted primarily by smaller outfits, entrepreneurial businesses built on the growing national reputations of the local jazz players. There is little glamour in the story of these companies— Max and Sol Weiss, for example, started off running a record pressing plant and only got into the music business to maintain the throughput of vinyl and shellac—but without the intervention of such entrepreneurs, West Coast jazz might never have experienced this halcyon era.

Although the movement was never as monolithic as the term suggested, a certain convergence of aesthetic values could be seen in many of the West Coast recordings. The music was often highly structured, rebelling against the simple head charts of East Coast modern jazz and reflecting a formalism that contrasted sharply with the spontaneity of bebop. Counterpoint and other devices of formal composition figured prominently in the music. Larger ensembles—octets, nonets, tentettes— continued to thrive in West Coast jazz circles, long after big horn sections had become an endangered species elsewhere. Unusual instruments were also embraced with enthusiasm, and many of them—such as flute and flugelhorn—eventually came to be widely used in the jazz world. Relaxed tempos and unhurried improvisations were trademarks of the scene, and the music often luxuriated in a warm romanticism and melodic sweetness that was far afield from the bop paradigm. Although the West Coast sound has often been criticized as overly stylized and conventional, the work of many leaders of the movement—Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Giuffre, Shelly Manne, Shorty Rogers, Dave Brubeck—reveals the exact opposite: a playful curiosity and a desire to experiment and broaden the scope of jazz music were the calling cards of their efforts. It was perhaps this very openness to new sounds that allowed many later leaders of the jazz avant-garde—Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Paul Bley—to hone their styles while resident on the Coast.

Gerry Mulligan’s stint in California lasted only a few years, but it marked a turning point in the baritone saxophonist’s career. He came to Los Angeles as a relatively unheralded player, and left as a major jazz star. Building on his work as composer-arranger with the Davis Nonet, Mulligan wrote charts for the Kenton band and later undertook seminal recordings with his own large ensemble. But Mulligan’s most celebrated efforts from this period were in the context of a pared-down quartet. Not only did Mulligan prove that he could write effectively without a full unit of horn players, but he even discarded the piano in this minimalist combo. In a series of memorable performances—“Bernie’s Tune,” “Line for Lyons,” “Lullaby of the Leaves,” “My Funny Valentine,” and others—Mulligan exploited the potential of this limited instrumentation to the fullest through a variety of techniques: counterpoint between the two horns; use of the bass and drums as melodic voices;
sotto voce
bass lines with the sax or trumpet; and stark variations in pulse and phrasing, ranging from Dixieland two-steps to swinging fours to pointillistic bop beats. The media soon picked up on the novelty of the “pianoless quartet,” with a write-up in
Time
magazine exerting particular impact. Before long, patrons were lining up around the block to see the band in performance.

The marriage of the cerebral and the romantic was one of the odd, endearing qualities of West Coast jazz. In the case of the Mulligan quartet, the latter ingredient was provided mostly by trumpeter Chet Baker. There were many limitations to Baker the musician—his range was narrow, his reading skills poor, his technique so-so, his interest in composition almost nil—but as a soloist he deservedly ranks among the finest of his generation. His instinct for melodic development was uncanny, and his improvised lines captured a touching poignancy. Movie-star looks only added to Baker’s drawing power, and in time he could challenge Mulligan as a leading jazz star. Unlike the baritonist, Baker had little interest in the more experimental currents of West Coast jazz; most of his career was spent playing and replaying the standards—recording trademark songs, in particular “My Funny Valentine,” so often that the estate of Richard Rodgers should put up a statue in the trumpeter’s honor. This conservatism would have served as the death knell for a lesser talent, but Baker proved capable of making even the most threadbare tune sound fresh and new. In time, he branched out as a jazz singer, and though his work in this vein was more stylized than his trumpet playing, it too embodied a heartfelt incisiveness that belied its matter-of-fact conversational delivery. After the breakup of the Mulligan quartet, Baker established himself as a bandleader in his own right. His life and times were always turbulent—drug problems and their legal consequences were constant traveling companions—but his music was a center of stability in the widening gyre. Baker’s boyish looks eventually came to be replaced by a grim reaper’s visage, haggard and wrinkled, old well before its time. But the trumpeter persisted through it all—even the loss of his teeth in a drug-related beating could only halt his career temporarily—and his last years found him recording prolifically and still capable of moments of greatness. Baker’s Tokyo concert captured on film less than twelve months before his death on May 13, 1988—from a mysterious fall from an Amsterdam hotel window—revealed that this musician had lost none of his melodic inventiveness. And, strange to say, the music in those final days captured a sweetness and architectonic order strikingly at odds with Baker’s dissolute life.

Alto saxophonist Art Pepper embodied a similar contradiction between the man and his music. But in the case of Pepper, his style eventually came to resemble his personality—honest, imploring, assertive, unapologetic. This marked a major change from the teenage altoist who had joined the Stan Kenton band in 1943, brandishing a soft, almost feminine tone, a relaxed improviser whose shimmering solos danced above the roaring brass of the band. His early work—“Art Pepper” with the Kenton band, “Over the Rainbow” with Shorty Rogers—bespoke a nursery school innocence. But this placid surface could quickly be set into turbulent motion by Pepper’s rapidfire technique and dazzling ear for improvisation. Pepper seemed poised to establish himself as one of the leading jazz soloists of his day and a major protagonist of West Coast jazz, but drug addiction and its resulting complications, both penal and personal, troubled him for the next two decades. By the late 1950s, his playing had taken on a more probing quality, the sugary tone now offering a biting aftertaste. Some of Pepper’s finest recordings date from these years:
Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section
finds the altoist borrowing Miles Davis’s sidemen for a classic encounter; on
Art Pepper Plus Eleven
his lithe sax work propels the bop-oriented Marty Paich arrangements; his sessions with pianist Carl Perkins, little known for many years due to their initial release on tape format, rank among the finest combo sides of the period. But during the 1960s, Pepper almost entirely disappeared from the scene. While in prison he came under the sway of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and engaged in the musical equivalent of psychotherapy, dissecting and reassembling his style with these new influences grafted onto the old. For a time the process was awkward and unsure, but there were few listeners to notice: even when on the outside, Pepper struggled to find an audience in the Age of Aquarius. He took a sideman gig with the Buddy Rich band for a spell and even contemplated retiring from music to pursue a desk job. During his lengthy involvement with Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program, Pepper managed to integrate these new influences into an amazing whole, a predatory alto attack with a soft, vulnerable underbelly. The lyricism of his 1950s work was still evident, but his playing had become much freer, his tonal palette more varied, his creativity less fettered by the chord changes. A series of exceptional albums for the Galaxy and Contemporary labels documented this transformation and enabled Pepper to mount a major comeback after more than a decade of semiobscurity. On the late ballad “Patricia” he adds a searing coda to the performance that both celebrates and subverts cool jazz with its penetrating cries and whispers. His engagement at the Village Vanguard, with drummer Elvin Jones in the band, found him at such a high level of inspiration that his record company eventually released all of the tapes, hours of performance at a fever pitch. Other late recordings of live performances—in Japan or in the States— reinforced his now-ascendant reputation. Yet the passion of this music seemed at odds with the altoist’s advanced years and failing health. Shortly before his death in 1982, Pepper published his autobiography,
Straight Life
, matching in prose the unflinching candor of his playing.