The History of Jazz (56 page)

Basie drew on an outstanding crop of writers, including Hefti, Ernie Wilkins, Frank Foster, Quincy Jones, Thad Jones, and Benny Carter. A wry sense of humor often pervaded these arrangements—as in the Count’s postwar warhorse “April in Paris,” arranged by Wild Bill Davis, with its fool-the-audience fake ending. The band’s charts were more richly textured than in the prewar years but were never so busy as to distract listeners from the talents of Basie’s star soloists. These were inevitably quite formidable: even during his bleakest days of the early 1950s, when Basie needed to downsize to a combo, he could still call on the services of Clark Terry, Wardell Gray, Buddy DeFranco, and Serge Chaloff. After resuming his big band, Basie carefully stocked his group with strong musical personalities. Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis was a gripping soloist, a modernist with deep roots in the jazz tradition, whose talents were often underappreciated during the age of Rollins and Coltrane. Brass player Thad Jones—brother of celebrated pianist Hank and drummer Elvin Jones— would later lead an important big band of his own, but in the 1950s and 1960s he provided crisp solos and top-notch charts to the Basie orchestra. Altoist and clarinetist Marshall Royal was also a member of a renowned jazz family—his brother, trumpeter Ernie Royal, had worked with Basie in 1946 and went on to play with Woody Herman, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, and Gil Evans. Marshall’s playing was enriched by a full and bittersweet alto tone and an understated sense of swing that contrasted with his hard-nosed character; a strict disciplinarian, Royal was given authority by Basie to instill musical order into the band, a role that he filled with zeal. Vocalist Joe Williams worked with Basie from 1954 to 1961, as well as for sporadic periods in later years, and earned particular notice for his 1955 performance of “Every Day I Have the Blues.” Blessed with a resonant, full-bodied voice, Williams forged a style built on a fusion of opposites, a heavy dose of blues and gospel roots varnished with an unflappable layer of supper-club elegance. Other stalwart members of postwar Basie bands included Frank Foster, Frank Wess, and the indefatigable Freddie Green, a pioneer of the Old Testament band whose affiliation with Basie would come to span a half-century.

A handful of other leaders pursued a similar vision of the big band in the modern age. Harry James’s unfairly neglected work from his later years found him fronting a hard-swinging band in a Basie mold, which he kept viable through Las Vegas appearances and dance engagements, supplemented by ocassional forays back East and overseas. Other big bands, such as those led by Les Brown or Doc Severinsen, found stability and a steady paycheck playing for television shows, where they gave viewers an occasional glimpse of the talent hidden in their ranks. But such longevity was rare in an age in which most jazz orchestras lasted weeks or months—or sometimes for a single record date—rather than years. Most of the major figures in modern jazz (Miles, Monk, Gillespie, Parker, Mingus) tried their hand at fronting larger ensembles at some point, but these were sporadic episodes in careers that flourished primarily in small-combo settings. Many prominent arrangers also turned to leading big bands in an effort to have their music heard, with results that were sometimes creative, but rarely financially sound. From 1952 to 1957, Eddie Sauter, who had made his name writing for Norvo, Goodman, and Shaw, teamed up with another big band alumnus, Bill Finegan, who had similarly worked with Dorsey and Miller. Their Sauter-Finegan band garnered recognition for its innovative use of unusual instruments and an expanded rhythm section.

In later years, other big band leaders (Don Ellis, Maynard Ferguson, Buddy Rich) prospered, for greater or longer periods, by tapping into new musical trends: rock, fusion, electronics, odd time signatures, and various popular or novelty forms of music aimed at younger audiences. Other bands survived by staying close to home, where regular or semiregular gigs helped pay the bills. These city bands (as opposed to the territory bands of earlier years) included Herb Pomeroy’s Boston-based unit, The Orchestra in Washington, DC, and Rob McConnell’s Boss Brass in Toronto. Los Angeles boasted an especially impressive array of hometown big bands that rarely ventured outside Southern California, including ensembles led by Gerald Wilson, Terry Gibbs, Roy Porter, Bob Florence, Marty Paich, Bill Holman, Bill Berry, Clare Fischer, and one co-led by Frank Capp and Nat Pierce. New York also saw a panoply of short-lived big bands, some playing original music, but many also serving as repertory groups focused on recreating jazz sounds from earlier decades.

From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis band stood out as the most celebrated and polished of the New York big bands. Started in late 1965 as a rehearsal group, the band secured a Monday night gig at the Village Vanguard the following February. The sidemen were paid a meager 17 dollars for their services (increased to 18 dollars after they proved their drawing power)—roughly the same, in absolute dollars, as the major big band leaders had paid their sidemen during the Great Depression. Despite the low wages, Jones and Lewis attracted many of the finest New York players and writers to their band. The reed section featured Joe Farrell and Eddie Daniels and, in later days, Billy Harper and Gregory Herbert, playing alongside seasoned veterans such as Pepper Adams, Jerry Dodgion, and Jerome Richardson. The brass sections could rely on leader Jones, as well as (at various points in the band’s history) trombonists Bob Brookmeyer and Jimmy Knepper, and trumpeters Snooky Young, Jon Faddis, Marvin Stamm, and Bill Berry. Drummer Lewis anchored a solid rhythm section that combined the elegant piano stylings of Thad’s brother Hank Jones (and, in later days, Roland Hanna, Walter Norris, Harold Danko, and Jim McNeely) with the bass lines of Richard Davis (and, in the early 1970s, George Mraz).

The impeccable musicianship of the band was supported by an outstanding library of arrangements. Leader Jones brought with him a number of charts he had written for Count Basie. His writing spanned a wide range of moods, from the tenderest lullaby waltz “A Child Is Born” to the hardest-edged New York workout “Central Park North.” Bob Brookmeyer also contributed a number of major works, including a series of stunning reworkings of some of the oldest jazz standards such as “St. Louis Blues” (composed in 1914), “Willow Tree” (from 1928), and “Willow Weep for Me” (written in 1932). Jones left the band in early 1979 to take on a position as leader of the Danish Radio Orchestra in Copenhagen. For the next decade, Mel Lewis continued to lead a big band on Monday nights at the Vanguard, playing his last gig with the group only a few weeks before his death in February 1990. But the ensemble overcame this blow as well, surviving in the form of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, a cooperative effort that maintained the once-a-week tradition at Manhattan’s most venerated jazz nightspot.

The only major challenge to the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis Orchestra’s preeminence as the leading mainstream large ensemble during the 1970s came from another city band with two leaders: the Toshiko Akiyoshi–Lew Tabackin Big Band, which flourished on the West Coast from 1973 to 1982. Akiyoshi was an unusual presence in the jazz world: an Asian woman, born in China and reared in Japan, who made her reputation in a field previously dominated by American males. A skilled pianist in a Bud Powell vein, Akiyoshi wrote almost the entire book for the band, often drawing on her Japanese heritage in the same manner that Scott Joplin and Duke Ellington extracted art music from their African American roots. Her work was especially skilled in its subtle and versatile use of the reed section. Members doubled on several horns— collectively they were reportedly capable of playing seventeen instruments. On “The First Night,” for example, Akiyoshi created harmonies voiced for five flutes, while on “American Ballad” she combined two flutes with two clarinets and bass clarinet. The most formidable member of the section was Akiyoshi’s husband and coleader Lew Tabackin, whose contributions emphasized his classically tinged flute playing and his Rollins-inspired tenor efforts. The band also benefited from the underrated talents of Bobby Shew, a fluid soloist on trumpet and flugelhorn, who combined impeccable technique with a glorious, slightly out-of-focus tone. After moving to New York in 1982, Akiyoshi started another band with new players, although Tabackin continued to be featured as star soloist. Akiyoshi finally disbanded the larger unit in 2003, but the body of work she put together during this thirty-year run stands out both for its artistry and its defiance of the economic constraints that made such longevity the exception rather than the rule for big bands in the modern era.

Akiyoshi’s example was not an isolated one. Maria Schneider provides an interesting case study in both the financial and creative ferment of the early twenty-first-century jazz scene. Schneider has persisted in the face of constant challenges, honing her craft and building her audience on a half-dozen leader dates of the highest caliber. Yet, despite Grammy awards and recurring appearances at the top of polls ranking contemporary composers and arrangers, she has never enjoyed a contract with a major label, and in recent years has relied on subsidies from fans, in an innovative cost-sharing arrangement pioneered by the ArtistShare label. What a turnaround from the Swing Era, when the big band was home to the best-paid musicians in America and offered the most secure employment!

Schneider, who was born in Windom, Minnesota in 1960, benefited early in her career from the mentoring of Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer, and her own mature work reflects the varied tonal colors and relaxed fluency with the jazz vocabulary of these past masters. She marries her deftly painted soundscapes with sweeping melodies and a heart-on-sleeve emotional immediacy that would have made her a star of Tin Pan Alley in an earlier day. But she also makes bold moves in plotting the structure and texture of her compositions, revealing fresh possibilities in the venerable big band tradition. Perhaps the best comparison point here is not previous jazz orchestra leaders, but classical composers such as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin who manged to be both progressive and popular in their day, pushing ahead with visionary works that didn’t require a conservatory degree to appreciate their appeal. On performances such as “Evanescence” (from the 1992 album of the same name), “Three Romances” (from
Concert in the Garden
), and “Cerulean Skies” and “The Pretty Road” (from the 2007 ArtistShare release
Sky Blue
), Schneider has established herself as a modern-day heir of Ellington and Evans, able to put her personal stamp on charts where she somehow balances the intricacies of her often through-composed music with an affable tunefulness that few of her contemporaries can match. Indeed, these pieces would stand out if played on an upright piano in your grandma’s parlor, although her rich orchestral palette makes them especially suited for the big band idiom. It is one of the tragedies of jazz in the new millennium that an artist such as Schneider has been forced to scuffle to keep her big band music alive, yet it is also testimony to her persistence and the flexibility allowed by new business models in jazz that she has risen to the top of her field despite an economic and cultural enviroment inhospitable to big band jazz.

Schneider’s influence can be detected in the work of other promising bandleaders of the new millennium, such as Darcy James Argue (who adds more rock flavor to his charts) and Joseph C. Phillips Jr. (who incorporates large doses of minimalism). Yet for most jazz musicians and fans in the twenty-first century, the big band is more a tool of historical pedagogy than a means of artistic expression. This is not an entirely new situation—ever since Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert, the idea of using larger groups to tell the history of jazz has found favor. But today this historical approach has become a predominant force in shaping the way musicians and the listening public view big band music. Illustrious institutions—the Smithsonian, Carnegie Hall, and especially Jazz at Lincoln Center—play an ever-expanding role in defining the role of larger ensembles in jazz music. But the single biggest source of big band music in contemporary America is the college campus, where student big bands, some even capable of matching professional ensembles in their standards of musicianship, are an entry point into the art form for a large number of teenagers and young adults. This is one area of growth in a shrinking idiom, but its impact may be felt more as a support in preserving the traditions of the music rather than charting its future course. Perhaps the jazz big band will travel the same path as the symphony orchestra, with bandleaders treating the presentation of older works as their primary function.

But can this situation really be surprising given the changed circumstances in the jazz world? In recent years—for the first time in the history of the music—most of the major pioneers in the development of jazz are mere names in history books and on CD covers; and even those who have firsthand experience of having heard these masters in the flesh are now a dwindling group. In the absence of those who developed and refined the conventions of big band music, the sustainability of the rich tradition created by these innovators depends very much on institutions to promulgate and preserve their legacy. To lament this shift is as pointless as bemoaning the fact that so many jazz big bands today are resident in high schools and colleges. These are signs of jazz’s success in entering the mainstream culture, not symptoms of failure. The pedagogy of jazz is not the problem—unless it dominates our attention so much that creative work of the present day is stifled. By the same token, discarding or ignoring the music’s history is no solution. The jazz tradition in general, and big band jazz in particular—if they are to survive in any meaningful way as a cultural force—will require a healthy dose of this very same supercharged historical consciousness.

The only danger—and a very real one—is that our respect for the past comes to blind us to the needs of the present. Coming to grips with that second task, one of defining and addressing current needs, for which jazz and the other arts can act as a kind of salve, is beyond the scope of the present historical endeavor. By definition, it comes at the point where any historical project ends. But readers should be advised: this question of present needs and the future history of jazz is never far away from our discussion and will continue to lurk quietly behind the scenes during the concluding sections of this work. For in the jazz world—itself a microcosm of broader artistic trends—the social and aesthetic role of the music has become increasingly uncertain in the modern era, as conflicting visions of the purpose of art clash and styles grow more fragmented. In this charged atmosphere, all agendas become suspect, and even the concept of a history of the music, with the sort of stately chronological unfolding that we associate with such narratives, is not beyond debate.