Jazz: History and Practice

A book that admits it failed

In 1867 three white abolitionists published Slave Songs of the United States, 136 songs collected mostly from the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia during and just after the Civil War. It is the first substantial printed collection of African American song, and it is famous partly for the confession in its own preface. The editors, William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison, wrote that the tones and turns they were hearing simply could not be caught in ordinary notation, that the voices slid and blended in ways their five lines and four spaces had no symbols for.

Hold on to that admission, because it is the honest starting point for this course. Everything jazz was made out of existed for decades before anyone could record it. The first phonograph recording of any kind dates from 1877; the first commercially issued record that anyone called jazz was made in 1917. So for the entire formative period of this music, our evidence is memoirs, sheet music, newspaper advertisements, and notation by people who said at the time that their notation was not working.

Key idea: The sound of early African American music was already escaping European notation in 1867, and the features that escaped it, bent pitch, rhythmic play against a beat, and heterophony, are precisely the features that became jazz.

Work song: rhythm that has a job to do

Start with the most functional music in the tradition. A work song coordinates physical labour. Men swinging axes in a line, or pulling a rail into place, or driving spikes, need to strike together, and a song sets the interval between strikes. That is not a metaphor. The tempo of the song is the tempo of the work, and the strong beat is the moment the tool lands.

Two consequences follow, and both matter for jazz. First, the beat in this tradition is a physical event before it is a musical one, which is why so much later African American music treats the beat as something you feel in the body rather than count in the head. Second, the leader is functionally different from the group. One voice, the caller, sets the pace and supplies the words; the others answer at a fixed place in the pattern. The leader can vary his line freely, because the group's answer is what keeps the timing.

John and Alan Lomax made field recordings of exactly this practice for the Library of Congress in the 1930s, in prison farms in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana, where the labour organisation of the plantation had survived intact. Those recordings are late evidence of an old practice, and they are the closest thing we have to hearing what the 1867 editors could not write down.

Call and response, and why it never goes away

Call and response is the single most durable structural habit in this whole history, so it is worth stating precisely. One musical statement, the call, is followed by a second, the response, which is made by a different voice or group. The response may be fixed while the call varies, which is the work-song arrangement, or the two may be roughly equal partners.

Now look at where it turns up later, and notice that you are looking at the same shape each time:

• A preacher's line and the congregation's answer, in a Black church service.
• A blues singer's sung line and the guitar or piano fill that answers it in the gaps at the end of each phrase.
• A big band's brass section playing a figure and the reed section answering it, which is the basic architecture of a swing arrangement.
• A soloist playing four bars and a drummer answering with four, the practice called trading fours, which you will meet properly in the bebop lessons.

Those four things happen in 1850, 1927, 1938 and 1947 respectively, and they are one device. When a swing arranger writes brass against reeds, he is not borrowing from church music as an ornament. He is using the organising principle the music was built on.

The ring shout

The ring shout is the practice that most clearly connects the American material to West and Central African precedent. Participants move counterclockwise in a circle, shuffling rather than crossing the feet, while others stand outside the ring singing and marking time by clapping and by striking the floor with a stick or a broom handle. The shuffling feet are themselves part of the percussion. It was religious practice, held after the formal service, and it was often disapproved of by both white observers and by Black clergy trained in European traditions.

Three features of the ring shout survive into jazz. Percussion is made by whatever is available, including the body and the floor. The rhythm is layered, with the clapping, the stick and the feet all marking different parts of the same cycle rather than all hitting the same beat. And the performance is participatory and open-ended rather than a fixed piece with a printed length. A jam session that runs for thirty choruses because the players are enjoying it is behaving the way a ring shout behaves.

The spiritual, and what happened to it in 1871

The spiritual is the sacred song of the enslaved and their descendants, and it is the branch of this tradition that reached white American and European audiences first. The route it took matters, because it changed what people thought the music was.

On 6 October 1871 nine students from Fisk University in Nashville, a school founded in 1866 for freed people, set out on a fundraising tour. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were nearly broke within weeks, then began to succeed, and by 1873 they were singing for Queen Victoria in London. They raised enough money to build Jubilee Hall, which still stands. But to reach those audiences they sang the spirituals in arranged, concert form: four-part harmony, controlled tone, fixed arrangements, no shouting, no clapping, no ring.

That is a real gain and a real loss at the same time. The gain is that the melodies entered the world repertory and were preserved. The loss is that the version the world learned had the participatory rhythm engineered out of it. When you read a nineteenth-century white listener describing spirituals as sweet and mournful, you are usually reading a description of the concert arrangement rather than of the practice in the praise house.

What matters here: Almost every early written and printed source for this music is a translation into European concert conventions, and the things the translation drops are the things jazz kept.

Blue notes: the pitches between the keys

Here is the first technical idea in the course, and it is the one that most often gets taught badly. A piano gives you twelve fixed pitches per octave. The vocal tradition described above does not treat pitch as a set of fixed steps at all. Singers approach a note from below and slide into it, sit slightly under it, or waver deliberately around it.

When that practice met European harmony, three scale degrees turned out to be where the flexibility concentrated: the third, the seventh, and to a lesser extent the fifth. These are the blue notes. In a piece in C, that means the region around E, around B, and around G. A guitarist gets at them by bending a string; a singer or a horn player by lipping or shading the pitch; a pianist, who cannot bend anything, fakes it by striking the flattened and natural versions together or in quick succession, which is why blues piano is full of crushed minor and major thirds.

The common textbook shortcut is to say a blue note is a flattened third or seventh. That is a useful first approximation and it is not quite true. The characteristic sound is not a different fixed pitch but a variable one, and the variation is expressive: how far under the note a player sits, and how long they take to arrive, is part of what they are saying. If you have ever wondered why a written-out transcription of a blues solo looks flat and dull on the page compared with the record, this is a large part of the reason.

Field holler and the solitary voice

The work song coordinates a group. The field holler, sometimes called the cry, does the opposite: it is a single unaccompanied voice, sung by one worker alone, with no fixed metre, long sustained notes, wide falls and slides, and often no words at all beyond a call to another worker across a distance. Because there is nobody to stay in time with, the holler is free to stretch and hang.

Put the holler beside the work song and you have, in miniature, a tension that runs through the whole of jazz. One side is strict, communal, danceable time. The other is a single voice taking liberties with that time. A jazz solo is both at once: a soloist stretching phrases across a beat that a rhythm section refuses to let go of. The technical name for the pleasure that produces is syncopation, and it is the reason so much of this music makes people move.

What the sources can and cannot tell you

Be careful about the chain of evidence for this lesson. We have printed collections from 1867 onward, made by people who said their notation was inadequate. We have minstrel-show sheet music, which is a white commercial distortion of Black practice and useless as direct testimony, though it does record that the practice existed and was being copied. We have memoirs written decades later by musicians recalling their youth. And we have field recordings from the 1930s of practices that were by then already old.

What we do not have is a recording of any of this from before 1900. Anyone who tells you exactly how a Georgia praise house sounded in 1850 is reconstructing, not reporting. The reconstruction is well founded, because the same practices were recorded later and the written descriptions agree with the later recordings in their essentials, but it is still a reconstruction, and this course will keep flagging where the evidence thins out.

Common misconceptions

• Jazz came from a single African source that survived intact. No single source, and nothing intact. The African contribution is real and structural, in rhythm, in call and response, in the treatment of pitch, but it arrived through centuries of enforced mixing with European harmony, hymnody, brass instruments and dance forms, in a specific set of American places.
• Spirituals were sad songs about heaven. Many are, and many are not. The repertory includes work songs adapted for worship, songs with double meanings about escape, and outright celebration. Reducing them to sorrow is a nineteenth-century concert-audience reading.
• A blue note is just a flattened third. That is a piano player's approximation of a sliding, variable pitch. The variability is the point.
• Notation can capture this music if you use enough symbols. The 1867 editors thought not, and every transcriber since has agreed. Notation records what is fixed. Most of what makes this tradition distinctive is what is not fixed.

Where this leaves us

• The written record of African American music starts in 1867 with a book whose editors said the notation was failing them.
• Work songs made rhythm functional and made the leader structurally different from the group.
• Call and response runs unbroken from the praise house to brass against reeds in a swing chart to a soloist trading fours with a drummer.
• The ring shout supplies layered body percussion and open-ended, participatory length.
• The Fisk Jubilee Singers preserved the spiritual melodies by arranging out the rhythm that made them what they were.
• Blue notes are variable pitches around the third, seventh and fifth, not fixed alternative notes.
• Nothing from before 1900 was recorded, so everything in this lesson is inference from written sources and later recordings.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Spiritual: African American music. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Work song. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Britannica. (n.d.). Blues. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
4. Library of Congress. (n.d.). Jazz research at the Library of Congress: Beginning your research. guides.loc.gov
5. Allen, W. F., Ware, C. P., and Garrison, L. M. (1867). Slave Songs of the United States. New York: A. Simpson and Company.
6. Southern, E. (1997). The Music of Black Americans: A History (3rd ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.

A knife on a guitar string, Tutwiler, Mississippi

W. C. Handy, a trained cornetist and bandleader, wrote in his 1941 autobiography that he had once fallen asleep waiting for a delayed train at Tutwiler, Mississippi, around 1903, and woke to find a ragged man beside him pressing a knife against the strings of a guitar and singing a single line over and over. Handy said he had never heard anything like it. He was thirty years old and a professional musician, and this was in his own state.

Handy went on to publish Memphis Blues in 1912 and St. Louis Blues in 1914, and to call himself the father of the blues, which he was not. What he actually did was more interesting and more consequential: he took an oral practice with loose bar counts and fitted it into printed sheet music with a fixed number of bars in a fixed order. Publishing regularised the blues. Recording, from 1920 onward, regularised it further. The tidy twelve-bar scheme you are about to learn is partly a product of the commerce that carried the music.

The point: The blues is both a feeling and a form, and the form got its standard shape from print and records, not from the tradition it came out of.

Building the twelve bars, one line at a time

Here is the whole structure, and it is worth building rather than memorising. Take a sung line. Repeat it. Then answer it with a different line that rhymes. That is the classic three-line blues shape, usually written AAB: statement, restatement, response.

Now give each of those three lines four bars of music. Three lines times four bars is twelve bars, and that is where the number comes from. The chords underneath do the same job the lines do: the first four bars sit on home, the second four move away, the last four come back and set up the next go round. In Roman numerals, where I is the home chord, IV is built on the fourth degree and V on the fifth, the basic scheme is this.

Bar	Chord	What is happening
1	I	First line sung
2	I (often IV)	continues
3	I	line finished
4	I	instrumental answer
5	IV	Second line sung, chord moves away from home
6	IV	continues
7	I	line finished, back home
8	I	instrumental answer
9	V	Third line sung, the highest tension in the form
10	IV	tension easing
11	I	resolved
12	I or V	instrumental turnaround, pushing into the next chorus

Put it in a key. In B flat, a common key for horn players, I is B flat, IV is E flat, and V is F. In C, it is C, F and G. Nothing else changes; the shape is the same in every key, which is why a band can call a blues in any key on the bandstand without a word of discussion beyond the key and the tempo.

Why the singer stops halfway through every phrase

Look again at bars 3 and 4, 7 and 8, 11 and 12. In each four-bar phrase the sung line occupies roughly the first half and then stops, leaving the second half open. That gap is not an accident of phrasing. It is the response slot from the last lesson, written into the form.

In a solo country blues the singer fills it themselves on the guitar. In a Bessie Smith record it is filled by a cornet or a piano. In a Kansas City band it is filled by a whole brass section. In a modern jazz performance, where there is no singer at all, the gap is simply absorbed into the soloist's line, but the underlying twelve bars still breathe in the same three-plus-three-plus-three-plus-three shape.

This is the first thing to listen for when you are trying to hear the form on a record with no words. Count four bars, four bars, four bars. Feel where the harmony leaves home at bar 5 and where the tension peaks at bar 9. Once you can feel bar 9 arriving, you can follow a blues through twenty choruses without losing your place.

The chorus, and what it means to take one

A word now that you will need for the rest of the course. One complete pass through the form is a chorus. In jazz this word does not mean the part everybody sings along to. It means one full cycle of the harmonic structure, twelve bars in a blues, thirty-two in most standards. A performance is measured in choruses. When a bandleader tells a saxophonist to take three, he means three complete passes through the form, thirty-six bars in a blues.

This is why a jazz record that sounds like free-flowing invention is in fact strictly counted. The soloist is improvising melody, but the harmonic ground under him is repeating on a fixed cycle that everyone in the band is counting, and the improvisation has to land with it. Losing the form on the bandstand is the classic public humiliation of jazz playing, and experienced musicians will tell you it is embarrassing precisely because it is so easy to hear.

Blue notes inside the form

Now bring the blue notes of the last lesson into the twelve bars. Over a blues in C, a player will use E flat and E natural, B flat and B natural, and often a G flat sliding into G. Collect the commonest of those choices into a scale and you get what is usually taught as the blues scale: the first, flattened third, fourth, flattened fifth, fifth and flattened seventh degrees. In C that is C, E flat, F, G flat, G and B flat.

Two warnings about that scale. First, it is a summary of a practice, not a rule; players constantly use notes outside it, and using nothing but the blues scale for a whole solo is a beginner's sound. Second, and more importantly, the interesting thing about a blue note is what a player does to it, not which pitch class it belongs to. A flattened third played dead centre on a piano is a colour. The same third scooped from underneath on a trombone is a gesture, and it is the gesture that carries the meaning.

Notice one consequence you can hear immediately. The flattened seventh, B flat in the key of C, is in the blues scale and also in the dominant seventh chord built on C. That is why blues players sit on dominant seventh chords for all three of I, IV and V, a thing that would be a harmony-class error in European practice and is simply correct here. A blues in C typically runs C7, F7 and G7 throughout.

Bessie Smith, February 1923

The blues reached the commercial record catalogue in August 1920, when the vaudeville singer Mamie Smith recorded Crazy Blues for OKeh. It sold in quantities nobody at the label had expected, and the industry promptly invented a category, race records, to sell Black performers to Black buyers. That category is where almost all the blues and much of the early jazz on record was issued.

Into that opening walked Bessie Smith, who made her first recordings for Columbia in February 1923, among them Downhearted Blues. Britannica reports sales of more than two million copies. She had a big voice, disliked microphones, and used the twelve-bar form with an unhurried authority that later singers measured themselves against. Gertrude Ma Rainey, older and from the tent-show circuit, recorded from the same year for Paramount. These are usually called the classic blues singers, and their records are the first large body of blues you can actually hear rather than read about.

Twelve bars is not the only blues

Do not let the neat table mislead you. Eight-bar and sixteen-bar blues forms are common and always were. Recorded country blues from the 1920s and 1930s is full of choruses that run thirteen and a half bars because the singer took an extra beat to breathe and the guitar simply waited. Those irregular bar counts are not mistakes; they are what a solo performer does when nobody else has to stay with him.

The twelve-bar standard became standard because ensembles need agreement. Once four or five people have to arrive at the same chord together, somebody has to decide how long each section lasts, and the printed and recorded versions decided it. When you hear a very regular twelve-bar blues, you are hearing a form that has been through the ensemble and the marketplace.

Common misconceptions

• Blues means sad. Plenty of blues is comic, defiant, boastful, or made for dancing. The word names a repertoire and a form as much as a mood.
• Every blues has twelve bars. Eight and sixteen bar forms are standard too, and early solo recordings often run irregular lengths. Twelve became the default once ensembles needed to agree.
• The chorus is the catchy bit. In jazz a chorus is one complete cycle of the form. Three choruses of a blues is thirty-six bars.
• W. C. Handy invented the blues. He published it and fixed its printed shape. The practice long preceded him, as he himself described.
• The blues scale is the set of notes you may use. It is a summary of common choices, and using only those notes produces a stiff, unidiomatic solo.

Putting it together

• Twelve bars comes from three sung lines of four bars each, in the AAB pattern of statement, restatement, response.
• Bars 1 to 4 stay home on I, bars 5 to 8 move to IV and back, bars 9 to 12 rise to V and resolve.
• The sung line fills roughly the first half of each phrase; the second half is a response slot, filled by guitar, piano, horn or a whole section.
• One complete pass through the form is a chorus, and jazz performances are counted in choruses.
• Blues practice uses dominant sevenths on I, IV and V, because the flattened seventh is part of the sound.
• The blues scale summarises common note choices; what a player does to a blue note matters more than which note it is.
• Mamie Smith in 1920 and Bessie Smith from 1923 put the blues on record and created the market that carried early jazz.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Blues: definition, artists, history, characteristics. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Bessie Smith. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Britannica. (n.d.). Ma Rainey. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
4. Library of Congress. (n.d.). National Jukebox: about this collection. loc.gov
5. Handy, W. C. (1941). Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (A. Bontemps, Ed.). New York: Macmillan.
6. Oliver, P. (1990). Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sedalia, Missouri, 1899: what is actually on the page

In 1899 a music dealer in Sedalia, Missouri, named John Stark published a piano piece by a young composer called Scott Joplin. Maple Leaf Rag went on to sell in numbers that made Joplin the first Black composer in America to earn a serious income from sheet music, and it started a national craze. Look at what is printed on the page and you can see the mechanism.

The left hand marches. It alternates a low bass note and a mid-register chord, on the beat, evenly, one two one two, exactly like the bass drum and the upper horns of a marching band. The right hand does something else entirely. Its accents fall in the gaps: on the second half of a beat, on the weak part of the bar, arriving just before or just after the left hand expects them. Two hands, two different rhythmic worlds, played by one person. That collision is syncopation, and ragtime is the first American music to build a whole repertory on it.

The form is a march. A classic rag has several sixteen-bar strains, each played twice, usually arranged as AABBACCDD, with a modulation to a related key partway through. It has no improvisation in it at all. Joplin wanted it played as written and at a moderate tempo, and put instructions to that effect on his covers.

Worth holding on to: Ragtime is a composed, notated, published music with syncopation in the right hand. Jazz took the syncopation and threw away the notation.

Why ragtime is not jazz, and why it matters that it is not

Students often collapse the two, and the collapse hides the interesting part. Compare them directly.

	Classic ragtime	Early jazz
Source of the notes	Written by a composer, played as printed	Improvised by the players, over an agreed outline
Form	Multi-strain march, AABBACCDD	One repeating chorus, played many times
Forces	Solo piano, or a band playing an arrangement	Small ensemble, each instrument with a distinct role
Rhythmic feel	Even eighth notes, syncopation written in	Uneven, long-short eighths, plus syncopation
Blue notes	Rare; the harmony is largely European	Central

Read across the table and you can see what New Orleans added to the ragtime it inherited: improvisation, the cyclical chorus, the ensemble division of labour, the uneven eighth-note feel, and the blues. Take any of those away and you have something else.

New Orleans: a particular city, not a general one

Jazz did not appear wherever Black and European music met in America. It appeared in one city, and the reasons are specific.

New Orleans had been French and then Spanish before it was American, and had a large, long-established community of French-speaking Creoles of colour, many of them property-owning, Catholic, and formally trained in European music. It had an unusually strong brass band culture: bands for parades, for advertising, for lodge and society funerals, where the band plays a dirge on the way to the cemetery and something joyful on the way back, followed by a crowd of dancers and hangers-on called the second line. It had Congo Square, where enslaved and free Black people had gathered on Sundays to dance and drum in a way permitted almost nowhere else in the United States. And it had a very large secondhand market in band instruments.

Then, in the 1890s, the tightening of segregation law reclassified Creoles of colour with Black New Orleanians generally. Downtown Creole musicians, many of whom read music fluently and played with a light, precise tone, found themselves pushed into the same bands and the same market as uptown Black musicians, many of whom did not read at all and played with a rougher, blues-inflected sound. Historians differ about how sharply to draw that line, but the meeting of a trained reading tradition with an unwritten blues tradition, in one small labour market, is a large part of the answer to why here.

From 1897 the city also had Storyville, a legally tolerated district of brothels and saloons where musicians could get paid work, mostly solo pianists rather than bands. It was closed in November 1917 under pressure from the Navy Department. You will often read that this closure sent jazz up the river to Chicago. Be sceptical of that; New Orleans musicians were already leaving for northern work, and the Great Migration was moving hundreds of thousands of Black southerners north for reasons that had nothing to do with a red-light district.

Buddy Bolden, and the record that does not exist

The cornetist Charles Buddy Bolden, born in 1877, led a band in New Orleans from around the mid-1890s. Every musician who heard him and later talked about it said the same things: enormous volume, a blues sound, and something new in the way he played dance music. He was committed to the state asylum at Jackson, Louisiana, in 1907, and died there in 1931. No recording of him is known to survive.

That absence is worth sitting with. The single most influential figure in the pre-history of the music is available to us only through other people's memories, recorded decades later, by which time the memories had been shaped by everything that came afterwards. This is the general condition of jazz before 1917, and it is why the first records, which arrive in the next lesson, matter so much and mislead so badly.

The ensemble: who does what

The New Orleans band is not a group of equals playing the same thing. It has a fixed division of labour, and once you know it you can hear it immediately on any record from the 1920s.

The front line carries the melody and the counterpoint:

• Cornet or trumpet plays the lead: the tune, in the middle of the texture, plainly enough that everyone else can orient around it.
• Clarinet plays above the lead, weaving faster running figures around it. This is the obbligato part.
• Trombone plays below, sliding between the important bass notes, filling out the harmony and marking the chord changes. The New Orleans habit of prominent slides gave the style the name tailgate trombone, from the players who sat on the tailgate of an advertising wagon so the slide had room.

The rhythm section supplies time and harmony: banjo or guitar chording on the beat, a tuba or string bass on the strong beats, drums, and often a piano. The rhythm section's job is not to be interesting. It is to be reliable, so that the front line can be interesting.

Collective improvisation, and how it avoids chaos

All three front-line instruments improvise at the same time. That sounds like a recipe for noise, and it is not, for three reasons.

First, each instrument occupies a different register, so the ear can separate them. Second, each has a different job, so they are not competing to do the same thing. Third, and most important, all three are improvising over the same agreed harmonic outline, usually a blues or a simple popular song form, so their notes fit together vertically even though nobody has written the parts.

The texture that results is polyphony: several independent melodic lines at once, none of them mere accompaniment. Test it the way you would test any polyphonic texture. Remove the cornet lead in your head, and ask whether the clarinet and trombone are still playing tunes. In a New Orleans band they are. In a swing band twenty years later, with the melody harmonised in a section, they are not.

Jelly Roll Morton writes it down

Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton was a New Orleans pianist, born around 1890, who claimed loudly and often that he had invented jazz in 1902. He did not. What he did do was work out how to combine composition with the New Orleans ensemble, and the results are the best evidence we have of what a well-drilled version of that music sounded like.

On 15 September 1926 in Chicago, Morton took a band billed as the Red Hot Peppers into a Victor studio and recorded Black Bottom Stomp. Listen to it as a piece of design. It has several strains, like a rag. It alternates written passages, solo breaks, and stretches of full collective improvisation. It changes key. It has a two-bar break where everything stops except one instrument, and then the band comes back in exactly together. None of that happens by accident; Morton rehearsed his bands hard and told the players what he wanted.

Morton is also a documentary source in his own right. In 1938 Alan Lomax recorded him at the Library of Congress talking, playing and singing his way through his memory of New Orleans music, over many hours. It is a self-serving account and an irreplaceable one, and it is the closest thing the pre-recording era has to a witness statement.

Common misconceptions

• Ragtime is early jazz. Ragtime is composed and notated with no improvisation. Jazz took its syncopation and added improvisation, the repeating chorus, the blues and an uneven eighth-note feel.
• The closing of Storyville in 1917 sent jazz to Chicago. Musicians were already going north for better-paid work, as part of a migration of hundreds of thousands of people driven by wages, violence and Jim Crow.
• Everyone in a New Orleans band improvises the same thing at once. They improvise different things at once, in different registers with different jobs, over one shared harmonic outline.
• Jelly Roll Morton invented jazz in 1902. He said so; it is not true. His real achievement was fusing composition with collective improvisation, which the Red Hot Peppers records demonstrate.
• We know what Buddy Bolden sounded like. No recording survives. Everything we have is recollection collected long afterwards.

The short version

• Ragtime, from Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag of 1899, is a notated multi-strain march with a marching left hand and a syncopated right hand.
• New Orleans supplied the specific conditions: a brass band culture, a trained Creole tradition and an unwritten blues tradition forced into one labour market, and steady paid work.
• Buddy Bolden is the central pre-recording figure and no recording of him exists.
• The New Orleans front line divides the work: cornet leads, clarinet decorates above, trombone anchors below.
• Collective improvisation works because the three lines differ in register, in job, and share one harmonic outline.
• Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers, from September 1926, show what happens when that ensemble is composed for and rehearsed.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Ragtime. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Scott Joplin. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Britannica. (n.d.). Jelly Roll Morton. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park: history and culture. nps.gov
5. Britannica. (n.d.). Jazz. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
6. Lomax, A. (1950). Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and Inventor of Jazz. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.

Twelve floors above West 38th Street

On 26 February 1917, in the Victor Talking Machine Company's studio on the twelfth floor of 46 West 38th Street in New York, five white musicians from New Orleans played into a recording horn. They were the Original Dixieland Jass Band: Nick LaRocca on cornet, Eddie Edwards on trombone, Larry Shields on clarinet, Henry Ragas on piano and Tony Sbarbaro on drums. They cut two sides, Dixie Jass Band One-Step and Livery Stable Blues. Victor issued them as catalogue number 18255 on 7 March 1917. That disc is generally taken to be the first jazz record commercially released, and it sold enormously.

Which raises a question this lesson exists to answer carefully. If the first jazz record was made by five white men, what does that tell you about where jazz came from?

The plausible wrong answer

Here is a chain of reasoning that sounds rigorous and is wrong at almost every link. It goes: the earliest surviving evidence is the best evidence; the earliest surviving jazz record is by a white band; therefore white musicians either invented jazz or at least were doing it first and best; and in any case, since we can hear the 1917 record and cannot hear anything earlier, this is what jazz sounded like at the time.

LaRocca himself spent much of his later life making versions of that argument. Let us take it apart link by link, because doing so teaches something general about how to use recorded evidence.

Link one: earliest surviving is not earliest existing

A record exists because a company decided to make it. In 1917 the American record industry was owned and run by white men who sold mainly to white buyers, and their sense of what was commercially safe shaped every choice about whom to put in front of a horn. The Original Dixieland Jass Band were playing at Reisenweber's, a fashionable restaurant near Columbus Circle, to a white clientele. That is not evidence of who played best. It is evidence of who was standing in the right room.

The dating of the first recordings by Black New Orleans musicians makes the point. Kid Ory's band recorded in Los Angeles in 1922, usually cited as the first recording by a Black New Orleans jazz band, five years after the ODJB. King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, with a young Louis Armstrong playing second cornet, recorded for Gennett in Richmond, Indiana, in April 1923, six years after. Nobody thinks Oliver started playing in 1923. The recording industry simply got to him last.

The core of it: A recording tells you what a company was willing to sell in a given year. Treating it as a survey of what was being played is a category error.

Link two: what the machine could not hear

Until 1925 there were no microphones and no amplifiers in commercial recording. Sound moved air, the air moved a diaphragm, the diaphragm moved a cutting stylus, and a groove appeared. Everything about the resulting record is shaped by that chain.

• Balance was physical. There were no faders. If you wanted the clarinet louder you moved the clarinettist closer to the horn. Bands stood in a wedge, loud instruments at the back, quiet ones nearly inside the bell.
• Drums were a problem. A bass drum could jump the stylus out of the groove, so drummers were often restricted to woodblocks, cymbals or a snare played lightly. What you hear of early jazz drumming is not what early jazz drumming was.
• Low frequencies barely registered. String bass recorded poorly, which is one reason tubas and bass saxophones appear on so many early sides. The instrument on the record may not be the instrument on the bandstand.
• Quiet singers vanished. The recording horn rewarded volume, which is part of why the great classic blues singers of the early 1920s were powerful, unamplified voices.

Every one of these is a distortion in a known direction, which is useful: you can correct for it. When you hear a 1923 side with a woodblock ticking away where a drum kit should be, you should not conclude that early jazz drummers played woodblocks.

Link three: three minutes

A ten-inch disc turning at about 78 revolutions per minute holds roughly three minutes of music per side. That constraint is not neutral. It decided the shape of jazz performance on record for thirty years.

Three minutes at a medium tempo is about three choruses of a thirty-two bar tune or five or six of a blues. There is no room for the fifteen-chorus solo that a musician might play in a dance hall at two in the morning. So the recorded repertoire is compressed: a statement of the theme, one or two brief solos, a return. Musicians learned to say things in eight bars. When Louis Armstrong plays four bars of introduction on a 1928 side, that economy is partly artistic choice and partly the physical length of a groove.

It also means that the recorded evidence systematically underrepresents extended improvisation, which is the thing jazz is supposedly about. The long solo becomes routinely audible only with the twelve-inch long-playing record, introduced in 1948 and general in jazz by the mid-1950s. When you get to Kind of Blue later in this course, remember that a nine-minute track was a technological possibility before it was an artistic one.

What the records do tell us

Having taken the argument apart, do not throw the evidence away. The early records are real documents and they support real claims.

They fix dates. We know for certain that a music being called jass, and then jazz, was commercially available in March 1917. They preserve repertoire: tune titles, keys, tempos, the actual chord progressions in use. They show the ensemble roles described in the last lesson, working, with cornet lead, clarinet above and trombone below. And by 1923 they let you compare directly: put an ODJB side next to a King Oliver Creole Jazz Band side and the difference in rhythmic feel, in blues phrasing and in tone is audible in seconds, which is itself an argument about who was doing what.

How to read a record as a document

Get into the habit of asking five questions about any recording named in this course, because they are the questions that separate hearing from knowing.

1. What date was it recorded? Not released. Bands change; a 1940 recording of a 1928 tune is evidence about 1940.
2. Who is actually playing? Personnel changes, and a famous name on the label may not be on the take.
3. Which take is this? Bands often recorded several attempts. Alternates were issued later and can differ substantially.
4. Was it recorded acoustically or electrically? Before or after 1925 tells you what you can trust about balance and drums.
5. Who released it, and to whom? A race-records issue and a mainstream pop issue reached different buyers and were made under different commercial assumptions.

Discographies exist precisely because these questions have answers. The Library of Congress National Jukebox, which streams thousands of Victor recordings from 1901 to 1925 free of charge, is a good place to hear how strange and how specific this material is.

Common misconceptions

• The first jazz record shows who invented jazz. It shows who a record company was willing to record in 1917. The two are unrelated.
• Early jazz drummers played woodblocks. They played kits. The horn could not take a bass drum, so the kit was cut down for the studio.
• Early jazz solos were short because the players had little to say. They were short because a ten-inch side holds about three minutes.
• Acoustic records are just low-fidelity versions of the real thing. They are systematically altered performances: different instrumentation, different balance, different length.
• Jass was a misspelling. It was one of several spellings in use before jazz settled; the band changed its own name from Jass to Jazz.

Looking back

• The Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded for Victor on 26 February 1917 and the disc, Victor 18255, was issued on 7 March.
• It is the first issued jazz record, which is a fact about the record industry, not about the origins of the music.
• Black New Orleans bands reached the studio years later: Kid Ory in Los Angeles in 1922, King Oliver in Richmond, Indiana, in April 1923.
• Acoustic recording, in use until 1925, dictated physical balance, suppressed drums and low frequencies, and rewarded loud voices.
• The three-minute side compressed jazz performance and hid extended improvisation until the long-playing record arrived.
• Records remain excellent evidence for dates, repertoire, ensemble roles and direct stylistic comparison, once you ask who, when, which take, how recorded and for which market.

Sources

1. Library of Congress. (2017, March). The first jazz recording: one hundred years later. Now See Hear! blog. blogs.loc.gov
2. Library of Congress. (n.d.). National Jukebox: about this collection. loc.gov
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Original Dixieland Jass Band. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Britannica. (n.d.). Jazz. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
5. Brooks, T., and Spottswood, R. (2004). Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Nine bars, alone

On 28 June 1928, in an OKeh studio in Chicago, Louis Armstrong began a record by playing entirely alone. No band, no beat, no chord underneath: a rising fanfare figure, then a cascade of triplets and dramatic leaps, unaccompanied, for about nine bars. Then the rhythm section comes in and the piece turns out to be an ordinary twelve-bar blues written by his old employer King Oliver.

The record is West End Blues, by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five: Armstrong on trumpet and voice, Fred Robinson on trombone, Jimmy Strong on clarinet, Earl Hines on piano, Mancy Carr on banjo and Zutty Singleton on drums. Nothing in the previous decade of recorded jazz starts like that. An opening cadenza is a thing a concert soloist does. Putting one on a blues record announces that the man playing it is not a member of an ensemble but a soloist with an ensemble behind him, and that announcement is the single largest change in the history of this music.

Remember: Before Armstrong, jazz is an ensemble music in which everyone improvises together. After him it is a soloist's music in which one player at a time speaks and the others support. Every lesson that follows assumes the second arrangement.

The whole record, chorus by chorus

Work through it as a procedure. It is a twelve-bar blues, five choruses, plus that introduction and a short coda, and each chorus does something different.

Section	Who	What to listen for
Introduction	Trumpet alone	An unaccompanied cadenza, no fixed beat, leaps and triplets. Nothing to count against.
Chorus 1	Trumpet with rhythm	The tune itself, stated straight but with the phrasing already lagging behind and then catching the beat.
Chorus 2	Trombone	A solo over sparse accompaniment. Notice the drums here are cymbal and hand percussion, not a kit at full strength.
Chorus 3	Clarinet and voice	Call and response: low clarinet phrases answered by Armstrong singing wordless syllables. This is scat, and it is call and response from Lesson 1, one man taking both parts.
Chorus 4	Piano	Earl Hines solo, single-line right hand phrased like a horn rather than like stride piano.
Chorus 5	Trumpet with band	Armstrong holds one high note for roughly four bars, then breaks out of it into a rapid descending figure. The band answers underneath.
Coda	Piano, then band	A brief ending flourish rather than a return to the theme.

Notice how much of what you learned in Lesson 2 is doing work here. It is twelve bars, five times, in the same key, with the same chords. All the variety comes from who is playing and what they choose. That is the standard architecture of a jazz performance and you have just seen it fully formed in 1928.

The held note, and why it is not a stunt

The most-discussed four bars in early jazz are the ones at the start of the fifth chorus, where Armstrong plays a single high note and simply sustains it while the harmony moves underneath. Trumpet players notice the endurance. The musically interesting part is what it does to time.

By holding still through bars that are supposed to contain melodic activity, Armstrong creates an enormous tension, and then releases it all at once with a torrent of fast notes. He has, in effect, rewritten the twelve-bar form as a single dramatic arc rather than four-plus-four-plus-four. That is a composer's move made in real time, and it is why musicians talk about this chorus rather than merely admiring it.

Swing eighths: the thing you cannot notate

Here is the rhythmic idea underneath everything Armstrong does. Written music divides a beat into two equal halves. Jazz players do not play them equal. They play the first half longer and the second half shorter, roughly but not exactly in a two-to-one ratio, and they place the short note late. The result is the loping, forward-leaning feel called swing eighths.

The ratio is not fixed. It flattens toward even at very fast tempos and stretches toward a hard long-short at slow ones, and different players sit differently. Ragtime, notated and played as written, has even eighths; that is a large part of why a rag sounds stiff to modern ears next to a 1928 jazz record with identical notes on the page.

Armstrong is where this becomes systematic. Compare his playing on the King Oliver sides of 1923 with the Hot Fives of 1926 to 1928 and you can hear the phrasing loosen: entries pushed a fraction late, phrases running across the barline instead of stopping neatly at it, accents landing between beats. Musicians in the 1930s did not copy his notes so much as his time.

Getting there: 1922 to 1928 in six steps

The career explains the change, so take it in order.

1. 1922. Armstrong leaves New Orleans for Chicago to join King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band as second cornet, playing harmony under his mentor.
2. April 1923. That band records for Gennett in Richmond, Indiana. Armstrong is audibly excellent and audibly subordinate: this is collective ensemble music.
3. Autumn 1924. He moves to New York to join Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, a big band reading arrangements. The Henderson musicians, by their own later accounts, had to rethink how they phrased after hearing him.
4. 1925. He returns to Chicago and begins recording under his own name. The first Hot Five session is on 12 November 1925, with Kid Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano and Johnny St. Cyr on banjo.
5. 1926 to 1927. The Hot Five and the enlarged Hot Seven produce a run of records in which the solo grows: Cornet Chop Suey, Potato Head Blues, Struttin' with Some Barbecue, Hotter Than That.
6. 1928. With Earl Hines, the band's texture changes again, and West End Blues arrives.

Stop-time, and what a soloist needs

One device deserves its own paragraph because it shows the ensemble reorganising itself around the soloist. In stop-time, the band stops playing continuously and instead punches a single chord at fixed intervals, usually once every two bars, while the soloist keeps going through the gaps.

The stop-time chorus in Potato Head Blues, recorded in 1927, is the classic case. Take away the continuous rhythm and two things happen. The soloist is exposed, with no accompaniment to hide inside. And the soloist becomes responsible for the time: the audience now hears the beat through his phrasing rather than through the banjo. A band that plays stop-time is a band that trusts one player completely, and that is not how the New Orleans ensemble of 1917 was organised.

Why this matters: Stop-time is the ensemble admitting, in its own arrangement, that the interesting event is one person.

Scat, and a story to be careful with

Scat singing is wordless improvised vocal, using syllables chosen for their sound rather than their meaning. Armstrong's Heebie Jeebies, recorded in February 1926, is the record usually credited with making it popular.

The story you will hear is that Armstrong dropped the lyric sheet mid-take and improvised syllables to cover, and OKeh liked it and kept it. It is a good story and it is very probably not what happened. Wordless vocal improvisation existed in performance before that record, and the accident tale looks like publicity that hardened into fact. Treat it as an example of a general problem: jazz history is full of charming origin anecdotes, told years later, that survive because they are memorable rather than because they are documented.

What was lost

Do not tell this as pure progress. Something real went when the soloist took over.

New Orleans collective improvisation is a genuinely polyphonic music in which three people invent independent lines simultaneously and make them fit. That is difficult, and it produces a dense, busy texture that no later jazz style reproduces. Once the solo becomes central, the other horns stop inventing and start accompanying, and by the swing era they are reading written parts. The music gained a soloist's expressive range and lost a collective one. Some of the arguments you will meet in the free jazz lesson forty years later are attempts to get the collective texture back.

Common misconceptions

• Armstrong invented the jazz solo. Solos existed before him. What he did was make the solo the organising event of a performance and give it a rhythmic language that other players adopted wholesale.
• Swing eighths are triplet rhythms. The long-short ratio is variable, tempo-dependent and player-dependent. Writing it as a triplet figure is a rough approximation used because notation has nothing better.
• He dropped the lyrics and invented scat by accident. A publicity story. Wordless vocal improvisation predates the record.
• Later big band jazz simply improved on New Orleans jazz. It traded collective polyphony for a soloist and a written ensemble. That is a trade, not an upgrade.
• West End Blues is complicated music. It is a twelve-bar blues played five times. Everything in it comes from what the players choose to do inside a very simple frame.

What to carry forward

• West End Blues, recorded 28 June 1928, opens with an unaccompanied trumpet cadenza and then runs five choruses of a twelve-bar blues plus a coda.
• The fifth chorus, with its long held note released into a rush of fast notes, reshapes the twelve-bar form into a single arc.
• Swing eighths are uneven, forward-leaning subdivisions of the beat, variable with tempo and player, and Armstrong is where they become systematic.
• His path runs Oliver in 1922, the Gennett sessions of April 1923, Henderson in New York from autumn 1924, the Hot Five from 12 November 1925, and the 1928 sides with Earl Hines.
• Stop-time and scat both show the ensemble reorganising itself around one improvising voice.
• The gain is a soloist's expressive range; the loss is the collective polyphony of the New Orleans front line.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Louis Armstrong. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Jazz. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Library of Congress. (n.d.). Complete National Recording Registry listing. National Recording Preservation Board. loc.gov
4. Smithsonian Institution. (n.d.). Smithsonian Jazz. National Museum of American History. americanhistory.si.edu
5. Schuller, G. (1968). Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. New York: Oxford University Press.
6. Giddins, G. (1988). Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong. New York: Doubleday.

Los Angeles, 21 August 1935

Benny Goodman's orchestra had spent the summer of 1935 driving across the United States playing to indifferent rooms. By the time they reached the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles the tour had been close to a failure. They opened the night with safe stock arrangements and the crowd stood about. Then, in the accounts the musicians gave afterwards, the band gave up on caution and pulled out the hot arrangements Fletcher Henderson had written for them, and the room erupted.

Two things had made that possible. Goodman's band had been on a national radio series, Let's Dance, from December 1934, broadcast late enough in the evening that West Coast listeners heard it at a convenient hour, so the Palomar audience already knew the material. And the arrangements themselves were the work of a Black bandleader and arranger, Fletcher Henderson, whose own orchestra had been playing this way in New York for a decade. The Swing Era is usually dated from that night, and the two conditions of that night, national broadcasting and Black arrangements played by a white band, are most of what the era was.

Four beats instead of two

Start with the sound, because the business follows from it. A New Orleans band of the early 1920s has a two-beat rhythm: tuba or bass on beats one and three, banjo chording with them, a heavy alternation you could march to. A swing band of the 1930s has a four-beat rhythm, and the difference is not subtle.

Role	New Orleans, c. 1923	Swing, c. 1937
Bass	Tuba, on beats 1 and 3	String bass walking one note per beat, all four
Chords	Banjo, on 1 and 3	Guitar, four even strokes to the bar, quiet and dry
Drums	Woodblocks and press rolls, snare-led	Steady pattern on hi-hat or ride cymbal, bass drum felt more than heard
Piano	Stride, left hand covering the bass	Comping: chords placed between the beats, bass left to the bassist
Overall feel	Bouncing, marching, oom-pah	Flowing, forward-moving, no obvious downbeat thump

The walking bass is the engine. One note per beat, mostly stepwise, connecting each chord to the next, so the harmony is spelled out as a moving line rather than thumped as a root. Once the bassist covers all four beats, nobody else needs to. The pianist's left hand is freed, the drummer stops marking the beat with the bass drum and moves the time up to a cymbal, and the whole texture lifts off the floor.

In short: Swing is what happens rhythmically when the bass takes over responsibility for the beat and everyone else is released to do something more interesting.

Comping

The word comping is short for accompanying, and it names the specific thing a jazz pianist or guitarist does behind a soloist: playing chords in irregular, syncopated placements rather than in a steady pattern. Good comping does three jobs at once. It states the harmony so the soloist knows where the form is. It answers what the soloist plays, which is call and response again. And it leaves silence, because a chord on every beat gives the soloist nothing to play against.

You can hear the whole history of jazz piano in how comping changes: stride in the 1920s, where the left hand is the rhythm section; Count Basie in the late 1930s, whose comping is so sparse it is famous for what it omits; bebop in the 1940s, where the chords get denser and more irregular.

The thirty-two bar chorus

Blues is one of the two forms this music runs on. The other is the thirty-two bar popular song, which arrived from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and became the jazz repertory known as standards.

The commonest layout is AABA: four eight-bar sections. A is the main strain. It is played, repeated, then a contrasting eight-bar section called the bridge takes the music somewhere else harmonically, and A returns to finish.

Section	Bars	Function
A	1 to 8	Main strain, ends unresolved
A	9 to 16	Same strain, ending resolved
B, the bridge	17 to 24	Contrast: new harmony, often a different key area, released back to A
A	25 to 32	Return and close

Musicians also call the bridge the release or the channel. Learn to hear it, because it is the easiest landmark in the form: when the harmony suddenly stops sounding like the tune and heads somewhere else, you are at bar 17, and you have sixteen bars left.

George Gershwin's I Got Rhythm, from the 1930 show Girl Crazy, is the single most important AABA tune in jazz, because its chord sequence became a shared frame that hundreds of later pieces were written over. Musicians call that sequence rhythm changes, and you will meet it again in the bebop lesson.

Head, solos, head

Now assemble a performance. Almost every jazz recording you will hear for the next fifty years follows the same plan, and once you know it you can predict what is coming.

1. Introduction. Often four or eight bars, sometimes taken from the end of the tune.
2. The head. One chorus stating the theme, straight or lightly arranged. This is the only part of the performance that is the composition.
3. Solos. One player at a time improvises over the same chorus, repeated as many times as needed. Each soloist may take one chorus or several. The rhythm section keeps the form.
4. Trading. Optionally, soloists alternate short segments, most often four bars each, which is called trading fours. Trading with the drummer is standard, and it is the call and response of Lesson 1 in modern dress.
5. The head again. The theme returns, often louder and fuller. In a big band the final chorus may be a written shout chorus, the arranger's climax.
6. Ending. A tag, a held chord, or a written coda.

What matters here: A jazz performance is a fixed harmonic cycle repeated many times, with a written frame at each end. Improvisation happens inside a structure that everyone is counting.

Sections, riffs and the arranger

A swing orchestra is not a New Orleans band with more people in it. It is organised into sections: saxophones, trumpets, trombones, rhythm. Within a section the players do not improvise independently; they play written parts, harmonised, moving in the same rhythm, so that four saxophones sound like one thickened instrument.

Don Redman, writing for Fletcher Henderson from the early 1920s, is usually credited with working out the basic grammar: set the sections against each other in call and response, let a section play a harmonised passage in unison rhythm, and leave holes for a soloist. A riff, a short phrase repeated over changing harmony, becomes the standard raw material because it is easy for a section to play tightly and easy for an audience to hold on to.

The consequence is that the arranger becomes a composer. What distinguishes one swing band from another is not usually the tune, since everybody played the same hits, but the chart: who wrote it, how the sections are deployed, where the solos sit, what the shout chorus does.

Swing as an industry

Now the business, which is the part most survey courses skip. Between roughly 1935 and 1945 this music was American popular music, and the scale was industrial.

• Ballrooms and one-nighters. Bands travelled constantly, playing a different town every night, often hundreds of miles apart, in buses.
• Radio remotes. A network line from a hotel ballroom carried a band nationally for free. National fame was a broadcasting product.
• Jukeboxes. Coin-operated players spread through the 1930s and created demand for records in bars and diners that had no live band.
• Territory bands. Dozens of regional orchestras worked circuits in the Southwest, Midwest and South, and this is where a great many players trained.
• Song publishing and film. Bands were promotional vehicles for songs, and appeared in short films and features.

Who got paid

The industry was segregated in every dimension: which bands could play which venues, which hotels would house them on the road, which audiences could sit where, which agencies would book them. Black bands played the best-paying white venues rarely and often could not eat or sleep in the towns where they had just performed.

The clearest single illustration is the one we started with. Fletcher Henderson wrote the arrangements. Benny Goodman was crowned the King of Swing. Both men were serious musicians and Goodman paid Henderson for the work, and Goodman also did something few white bandleaders did: he hired the pianist Teddy Wilson in 1935 and the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton in 1936 into his small groups, putting integrated ensembles in front of paying audiences at real commercial risk. Both things are true. The money and the title flowed to the white bandleader; the writing and much of the innovation came from Black musicians; and the man at the centre of the arrangement was also one of the few who broke the colour line on his own bandstand.

Bottom line: Swing was the only period when jazz was the mainstream popular music of the United States, and the terms on which it was popular were set by a segregated entertainment business.

Common misconceptions

• Swing bands did not improvise. They improvised constantly, inside written frames. The arrangement leaves holes and the soloists fill them.
• Swing means fast and loud. Swing is a rhythmic organisation, chiefly a four-beat feel with a walking bass. Slow swing exists and is common.
• The bridge is a solo section. The bridge is the contrasting third eight bars of an AABA chorus, part of the form, present in every chorus including the head.
• The head is the beginning of the tune. The head is the whole theme statement, one full chorus, and it comes back at the end.
• Goodman stole Henderson's music. He bought and credited the arrangements. The injustice is structural, in who could headline and who could tour where, not a private theft.

Pulling it together

• The Palomar Ballroom, 21 August 1935, is the conventional start of the Swing Era, and it depended on national radio and on Fletcher Henderson's arrangements.
• Swing rhythm is four beats to the bar with a walking bass, dry guitar chording, time on a cymbal, and piano comping between the beats.
• Comping means placing chords irregularly to state harmony, answer the soloist, and leave silence.
• The thirty-two bar AABA chorus, with its bridge at bar 17, is the other form jazz runs on beside the blues.
• A performance runs introduction, head, solos, optional trading fours, head again, ending.
• Sections replace collective improvisation, which turns the arranger into the composer of the band's identity.
• Radio, ballrooms and jukeboxes made swing an industry, and segregation decided who profited from it.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Swing: description, artists, and facts. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Benny Goodman. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Britannica. (n.d.). Jazz. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
4. Smithsonian Institution. (n.d.). Smithsonian Jazz: collections and archives. National Museum of American History. americanhistory.si.edu
5. Schuller, G. (1989). The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945. New York: Oxford University Press.
6. Erenberg, L. A. (1998). Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chicago, 6 March 1940

Duke Ellington's orchestra recorded a piece called Ko-Ko for Victor in Chicago on 6 March 1940. It runs under three minutes and it is a twelve-bar blues in E flat minor, which on paper is the plainest material in this course. What comes out of the speaker is not plain at all.

It opens with baritone saxophone and tom-toms holding a dark pedal underneath, then a valve trombone states a theme over it. Then a trombone with a plunger mute takes two choruses, growling and talking, while the reeds move underneath in slow chromatic slabs. The bass steps forward and plays a solo break, which in 1940 a bass did not do. The saxophones climb into a passage of pure texture, and the piece ends the way it started, back in the dark. Twelve bars, seven times, and nothing about it sounds like anybody else.

Key idea: Ellington's material is often ordinary, a blues or a thirty-two bar song. What is extraordinary is the scoring, and the scoring depends on exactly which human beings are in the room.

Writing for people, not for instruments

Most composers write for the trumpet. Ellington wrote for Cootie Williams, and if Cootie Williams left, the part changed. This is the single most important thing to understand about him, and it explains most of what is peculiar in his work.

Consider the voices he had available in 1940. Johnny Hodges played alto saxophone with a gliding, portamento sweetness nobody else has matched. Harry Carney played baritone saxophone with a huge, dark, centred tone and anchored the whole reed section for decades. Joe Nanton, called Tricky Sam, played trombone with a rubber plunger and a small mute together, producing the vocalised growl usually described as the wah-wah sound. Barney Bigard played clarinet with a liquid New Orleans woodiness. Juan Tizol played valve trombone, an unusual instrument with a smoother, more even tone than a slide.

Ellington scored these players against each other in combinations that no theory textbook recommends: a clarinet placed below trumpets, a muted trumpet doubled with a saxophone, three-part chords voiced across three different families of instrument so that the result has no ordinary orchestral name. Billy Strayhorn called the result the Ellington effect, and pointed out that it was not a technique that could be lifted out and applied elsewhere, because it was specific to those men.

The mechanism has a cost, and Ellington paid it. The pieces are not fully portable. A modern repertory orchestra playing Ko-Ko from a transcription plays the notes and cannot reproduce Nanton's plunger, because the plunger sound was Nanton, not the notation.

The Cotton Club, December 1927

Ellington's orchestra began a residency at the Cotton Club in Harlem in December 1927 and held it, on and off, into 1931. The engagement made him nationally famous, largely through a radio wire that broadcast the band from the club.

The Cotton Club is also a plain illustration of the terms on which this music succeeded. It was a club in Harlem with Black performers and a whites-only audience, decorated with plantation and jungle imagery, selling a fantasy of exotic Blackness to well-off white New Yorkers. Ellington wrote music for floor shows built on that fantasy, and the growling brass style he developed there is still called jungle style.

What do you do with that? Two things at once, without cancelling either. The commercial frame was demeaning and Ellington worked inside it because it paid and it broadcast. And the music he wrote inside it is not a compromise: the sound he built for those floor shows is the foundation of everything he did for the next forty years, and he spent much of his later career deliberately writing extended works on African American historical subjects, which reads as a long argument with the very frame that had made him.

Three minutes, and the fight against it

You met the ten-inch side in Lesson 4. For a bandleader it is a constraint. For a composer with ambitions beyond dance music it is a wall, and Ellington spent thirty years going at it.

• Compression. The first answer is to make three minutes carry more. Ko-Ko is the model: seven choruses of a blues, each differently scored, with no wasted bar.
• Two sides. Creole Rhapsody, recorded in 1931, spilled across both sides of a disc, which was a commercial risk because a listener had to get up and flip it.
• Four sides. Reminiscing in Tempo, in 1935, ran across four sides of two discs, and critics complained.
• The concert hall. On 23 January 1943 he presented Black, Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall, a work of roughly three quarters of an hour subtitled a tone parallel to the history of the American Negro. The reviews were mixed and some were hostile, and the criticism came from both directions: too long and formless for the jazz critics, insufficiently symphonic for the classical ones.

Hold on to that double criticism. It is what happens to any musician who works between two established categories, and it recurs almost word for word around fusion in the 1970s.

Billy Strayhorn

In 1939 a young pianist and writer named Billy Strayhorn joined Ellington and stayed until his death in 1967. He wrote Take the A Train, recorded on 15 February 1941, which became the band's theme and is one of the most-played tunes in jazz.

The collaboration is famously hard to disentangle. The two men worked so closely, and credited each other so casually, that scholars still argue over the authorship of individual passages. That opacity is itself informative: it tells you that Ellington's compositional practice was social rather than solitary, which is precisely the thing that makes people uneasy about calling him a composer in the usual sense.

The Blanton and Webster band, 1940 to 1942

The orchestra of these years is usually reckoned his best, and it is named after two arrivals. Jimmy Blanton, a young bassist who joined in late 1939, played the double bass as a melodic solo instrument with a clean attack and real intonation, which changed what everyone thought a bass was for. Ben Webster brought a big, breathy tenor saxophone, capable of both roughness and extraordinary tenderness.

The band recorded a run of three-minute pieces in 1940 and 1941 that includes Ko-Ko, Concerto for Cootie, Cotton Tail, Harlem Air Shaft and In a Mellotone. Blanton fell ill and died in 1942, at twenty-three. If you want a single starting point for Ellington on record, this is it.

The dispute: composer or bandleader?

Here are two serious positions, and the evidence each rests on.

Ellington is a composer, and the band is his instrument. The scoring decisions are his. The pieces have form, harmonic design and long-range shape that no amount of improvising produces by accident. He wrote continuously for nearly fifty years, including suites, sacred concerts and film scores, and he kept the orchestra on the road partly at his own expense in order to have it available. Nobody says Berlioz was not a composer because he needed an orchestra.

Ellington is a bandleader whose men wrote much of the music. Themes came out of rehearsal and out of players noodling; Bubber Miley supplied central material in the late 1920s, Juan Tizol wrote Caravan, Strayhorn's contribution is entangled beyond separation, and Ellington was often credited alone. Compositional credit in the record business was a financial matter, and the financial arrangements favoured the leader.

The strongest evidence for the first position is what happens when other bands play Ellington charts, which is that they sound like other bands. The strongest evidence for the second is documentary: the sketches, the rehearsal accounts and the credit disputes are real. Most historians now hold both, describing his method as composition-through-orchestra, a practice with no clean parallel in European music and no reason to be judged by its categories.

The upshot: The awkwardness of calling Ellington a composer is a fact about the word, not a deficiency in the music.

Recognition, late and grudging

In 1965 the Pulitzer Prize music jury recommended a special citation for Ellington, then sixty-six years old and about forty years into the work. The Pulitzer advisory board declined to give it. Two jurors resigned. Ellington's public response was a joke about fate not wanting him to become famous too young. In 1999, twenty-five years after his death, the Pulitzer board awarded him a posthumous special citation.

Common misconceptions

• Ellington wrote for instruments and his players executed the parts. He wrote for named individuals, and rewrote when personnel changed.
• Jungle style was a musical primitivism Ellington believed in. It was a sound developed for the floor shows of a whites-only Harlem club, which he then used for his own purposes for four decades.
• Ellington's music is complicated because the forms are unusual. The forms are often a plain blues or a thirty-two bar song. The complexity is in the scoring.
• Black, Brown and Beige was a success. The 1943 Carnegie Hall reception was mixed to hostile, criticised as too formless for jazz and not symphonic enough for concert music.
• He won the Pulitzer Prize. The board refused the jury's recommendation in 1965; the posthumous special citation came in 1999.

What you now know

• Ko-Ko, recorded 6 March 1940, is a twelve-bar blues in E flat minor whose interest lies entirely in how it is scored.
• Ellington composed for the specific sounds of Hodges, Carney, Nanton, Bigard, Tizol and Williams, which Strayhorn called the Ellington effect.
• The Cotton Club residency from December 1927 brought national fame through radio, on the terms of a whites-only club selling exotic imagery.
• He fought the three-minute side by compression, by two-sided and four-sided works, and finally by the concert hall with Black, Brown and Beige in January 1943.
• Billy Strayhorn, from 1939, wrote Take the A Train and collaborated so closely that authorship is often undecidable.
• The Blanton and Webster band of 1940 to 1942 is the usual starting point on record.
• The composer-or-bandleader argument is best resolved by describing his method as composition through an orchestra of named individuals.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Duke Ellington. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Smithsonian Institution. (n.d.). Duke Ellington: jazz legend and cultural icon. si.edu
3. Smithsonian Institution. (n.d.). Smithsonian Jazz: collections and archives. National Museum of American History. americanhistory.si.edu
4. Britannica. (n.d.). Cotton Club. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
5. Hasse, J. E. (1993). Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington. New York: Simon and Schuster.
6. Tucker, M. (Ed.). (1993). The Duke Ellington Reader. New York: Oxford University Press.

Four sides for Savoy, 26 November 1945

On 26 November 1945 a group billed on the label as Charlie Parker's Reboppers recorded four sides for Savoy in New York. Parker played alto saxophone. Dizzy Gillespie was there on trumpet, and on piano for part of the date. Curly Russell played bass, Max Roach played drums, and a nineteen-year-old Miles Davis played trumpet on the slower titles. One of the four sides was called Ko-Ko.

Play it directly after Ellington's Ko-Ko from the last lesson, which was cut five years earlier, and the difference is almost violent. Ellington's is a twelve-bar blues at a walking tempo, seven choruses of orchestral colour. Parker's is built on the sixty-four bar form of Ray Noble's Cherokee, taken at a tempo no dance band would attempt, with a written introduction that is not the tune at all, two choruses of alto saxophone in nearly unbroken eighth notes, a drum solo, and then the introduction played again on the way out. It is over in under three minutes. Nobody is dancing.

Notice what is missing: the melody of Cherokee is never stated. The band plays the harmony of somebody else's song and supplies everything else itself. Hold that thought, because it turns out to be a legal fact as much as a musical one.

The point: Bebop is not swing played faster. It is a different relationship between the players and the song, in which the chord sequence is raw material and the melody is disposable.

Where the line came from: Kansas City and Lester Young

Bebop did not appear from nowhere in 1945, and the clearest ancestor is a tenor saxophonist from Mississippi by way of Kansas City. On 9 November 1936, in Chicago, five men billed as Jones-Smith Incorporated recorded for Vocalion: Carl Smith on trumpet, Count Basie on piano, Walter Page on bass, Jo Jones on drums, and Lester Young on tenor. Young's two choruses on Oh, Lady Be Good are the first thing in this course that sounds like a modern jazz solo.

What is modern about it? Three things. His tone is light and dry, without the wide vibrato that Coleman Hawkins had made standard on the instrument. He phrases in long lines that run across the four-bar and eight-bar joints of the form instead of stopping politely at them. And he builds his solo out of melodic ideas that develop, rather than out of ornamented statements of the tune.

Behind him is the other Kansas City inheritance. Basie's rhythm section of the late 1930s, with Freddie Green on guitar, Walter Page on bass and Jo Jones on drums, played time so evenly and so lightly that it was nicknamed the All American Rhythm Section. Jones in particular moved the pulse off the bass drum and onto the hi-hat, opening and closing it on two and four. That is one step away from what bebop drummers would do next.

Kansas City also supplied a working culture. Under the Pendergast machine the city's clubs ran late and mostly unmolested through Prohibition and the Depression, and the jam session, in which players sat in and took chorus after chorus on a shared tune, was the local school. Charlie Parker grew up inside it. He was born in 1920 in Kansas City, Kansas, and raised across the river in Kansas City, Missouri, and he learned by trying to survive on bandstands where the competition was the curriculum.

Minton's, and a war that stopped the tape

By 1940 and 1941 the experimenting had moved to Harlem. Minton's Playhouse on West 118th Street, managed by the former bandleader Teddy Hill, had a house band that at various points included Kenny Clarke on drums and Thelonious Monk on piano, and a Monday night policy that brought the working musicians in after their own jobs finished. Monroe's Uptown House did something similar.

Here is the hole in the evidence, and it is a big one. On 1 August 1942 the American Federation of Musicians began a strike against the record companies over royalties from broadcasting and jukeboxes, and its members stopped making commercial recordings. Decca and Capitol settled in 1943; RCA Victor and Columbia held out until November 1944. So the formative period of bebop, the two years when the language was being worked out in Harlem after hours, is almost entirely undocumented on commercial record. What survives is a handful of amateur discs cut at Minton's by a jazz-loving engineer, plus the memory of the people who were there. When the recording ban lifted, bebop arrived on record already formed, which is part of why it struck listeners as an ambush rather than a development.

Under the melody: what actually changed

Now the machinery. You already know the ii-V-I from the swing lesson: in C, that is D minor seventh to G seventh to C major. Bebop did four things to it.

1. It reached higher into the chord. A swing melody tends to sit on the notes of the basic four-note chord, the root, third, fifth and seventh. Bebop melodies sit on the extensions above that: the ninth, the eleventh, the thirteenth, and the altered versions of them, the flattened ninth and the sharpened eleventh. Over G7, the note A flat is the flattened ninth. In 1935 it would have sounded like a mistake. In 1945 it is where the phrase lands.

2. It multiplied the chords. Where a swing arrangement might hold one chord for two bars, a bebop head inserts passing chords and extra ii-V pairs so that the harmony moves twice as often. Two chords per bar at a fast tempo is a serious demand on a soloist, and it is the reason bebop rewarded practice in a way earlier styles did not.

3. It substituted. The most useful single device is the tritone substitution, and it is worth working through slowly because it looks like magic and is not.

Chord	Its four notes	The interval that decides everything
G7	G, B, D, F	B and F, six semitones apart
D flat 7	D flat, F, A flat, C flat (which is B)	F and B again, the same two notes

The tritone, B against F, is what makes a dominant seventh chord feel like it must move. Both chords contain it. So D flat seventh can stand in for G seventh, and the bass line walking down to C becomes D, D flat, C: a chromatic slide instead of a leap. Play the two chords one after the other on any keyboard and you will hear that they are close relatives wearing different roots.

4. It thought in scales as well as chords. Once the harmony moves this fast, a player cannot pick each note out of each chord in real time. Bebop players internalised a scale for each chord, so that a chord symbol calls up a whole set of available notes with a characteristic added passing tone. This chord-scale habit is the seed of what will grow into modal jazz in Lesson 11, and it is why bebop, for all its density, is the beginning of a road that leads to harmonic simplicity.

The contrafact, and why it was also a business decision

A contrafact is a new melody written over the chord sequence of an existing song. Bebop is full of them.

New head	Borrowed harmony	Credited to
Ornithology	How High the Moon	Charlie Parker and Benny Harris
Anthropology	I Got Rhythm	Parker and Gillespie
Hot House	What Is This Thing Called Love	Tadd Dameron
Groovin' High	Whispering	Dizzy Gillespie
Donna Lee	Back Home Again in Indiana	credited to Parker, also claimed by Miles Davis

There are three reasons this practice took hold, and they pull together rather than against each other. Musically, a borrowed sequence is a set of changes every working player already knows, so a new tune can be counted off at a jam session with no rehearsal. Artistically, writing a fast, angular head over a familiar sequence is a way of announcing that the old song's melody was the least interesting thing about it. And commercially, under United States copyright practice a chord progression is not protected in the way a melody is, so a new tune over old changes belonged to whoever wrote the new tune. Parker and Gillespie were paid as composers for music built on other people's harmony, entirely legally.

The most heavily borrowed sequence of all is the thirty-two bar AABA of George Gershwin's I Got Rhythm, which musicians simply call rhythm changes. You met it in Lesson 6. If you learn one harmonic sequence in this course, learn that one and the twelve-bar blues; between them they account for an enormous share of the repertoire.

The rhythm section is rebuilt

Bebop's rhythm section is a different machine from a swing rhythm section, and the changes are specific.

• Time moves to the ride cymbal. Kenny Clarke, and then Max Roach, kept the pulse on the ride cymbal with a repeating pattern rather than on the bass drum. A cymbal rings, so the time it keeps is continuous rather than thudded out. Everything above it gets lighter.
• The bass drum drops bombs. Freed from marking every beat, the bass drum became an accent instrument, punching irregularly against the soloist. Drummers called it dropping bombs, and older bandleaders hated it.
• The left hand empties out. Bud Powell took Parker's language to the piano: long single-note lines in the right hand, and in the left hand not stride patterns but sparse two-note or three-note shapes, often just the third and the seventh of the chord, stabbed in at unpredictable moments. Since the bassist is playing the roots, the pianist does not need them.
• The bass walks, fast. Four notes to the bar at 250 or 300 beats a minute is athletic work, and it makes the bassist the only member of the group who never gets to rest.
• Trading fours becomes standard. Horns and drummer alternate four-bar segments near the end of a performance. It is the call and response of Lesson 1, at speed, with the drummer finally given something to say.

Why this matters: The soloist did not simply get busier. The whole group was rebalanced so that a single improvising line could be heard against a texture that comments rather than accompanies.

Why the dancers left

Between 1945 and 1950 jazz stopped being American popular dance music. That is the single largest change in this course and it has more than one cause.

The music itself is part of it. A sixty-four bar form at 300 beats a minute with the melody omitted is not a dance number. But the economics moved first. Big bands were expensive: sixteen musicians, a bus, arrangements, a payroll. Wartime petrol rationing and the draft broke touring schedules. A small group of five could work a club on 52nd Street for a fraction of the cost, which is why the Three Deuces and the Onyx became the centre of the music while the ballrooms shrank.

Historians also point to a federal excise tax of twenty per cent, levied from 1944 on receipts at venues that offered dancing or floor shows, which gave club owners a direct financial reason to book listening rooms rather than dance halls. How much weight that tax deserves is argued about, and you should treat it as one pressure among several rather than the cause. What is not in doubt is the outcome: by 1950 the audience for this music sat down, and jazz began the long move from popular entertainment towards art music that the last lesson of this course will follow to its conclusion.

Parker himself did not survive the decade by much. He took the new music to Billy Berg's club in Los Angeles in December 1945, where it was received badly; he stayed on the coast after Gillespie went home, collapsed during a recording session for Dial in July 1946, and spent six months committed to Camarillo State Hospital, an episode he later turned into a tune called Relaxin' at Camarillo. He died in New York on 12 March 1955, aged thirty-four.

Common misconceptions

• Bebop is swing played faster. Tempo is the least of it. The changes are harmonic, formal and social.
• Bebop musicians made up new chord progressions. Overwhelmingly they borrowed existing ones and wrote new melodies over them.
• Bebop was invented at a single club on a single night. It was worked out over several years in Harlem after-hours rooms, in Kansas City jam sessions before that, and on the bandstands of big bands the players were still employed by.
• The recording ban of 1942 to 1944 is a footnote. It removed the documentary record of exactly the period when the style was forming.
• Audiences abandoned jazz because bebop was difficult. The tax, the draft, petrol rationing and the cost of a sixteen-piece payroll were doing their own work at the same time.

The takeaway

• Charlie Parker's Ko-Ko, recorded 26 November 1945 with Gillespie, Russell and Roach, uses the harmony of Cherokee and never states its melody.
• Lester Young's 1936 solo on Oh, Lady Be Good, and the Basie rhythm section behind it, are the direct ancestors of the bebop line and the bebop pulse.
• The style formed at Minton's Playhouse and similar rooms from about 1940, during a recording ban that ran from August 1942 into late 1944.
• Harmonically: extensions and alterations, faster harmonic rhythm, inserted ii-V pairs, and tritone substitution, in which D flat seventh replaces G seventh because both contain B and F.
• A contrafact is a new melody over borrowed changes, and it was profitable because progressions are not protected the way melodies are.
• The rhythm section moved time to the ride cymbal, freed the bass drum for accents, emptied the pianist's left hand, and made trading fours routine.
• Jazz stopped being dance music for musical, economic and regulatory reasons at once.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Bebop. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Charlie Parker. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Britannica. (n.d.). Dizzy Gillespie. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
4. National Jazz Museum in Harlem. (n.d.). About the museum and its Harlem jazz collections. jazzmuseuminharlem.org
5. DeVeaux, S. (1997). The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

A tuba in a Capitol studio, 21 January 1949

On 21 January 1949 a nine-piece band led by the twenty-two-year-old Miles Davis recorded four sides for Capitol in New York. It went back on 22 April 1949 and again on 9 March 1950. Twelve sides in all. Capitol issued them as singles, sold few, and eight years later gathered them onto a twelve-inch LP with the title Birth of the Cool, which is how almost everyone has met them since.

The startling thing on the first hearing is not the playing. It is the instrumentation. Along with the expected trumpet, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, piano, bass and drums, there is a trombone, a French horn and a tuba. A French horn is a symphony instrument. A tuba in 1949 was a museum piece in jazz, the thing New Orleans bands had used for bass before the string bass took over, and here it is playing inner harmony lines. Nobody had scored a jazz group this way.

Worth holding on to: The nonet was chosen to be the smallest ensemble that could still produce the colours of a full big band, so that the writing of a Gil Evans arrangement could survive in a group of nine.

Nine voices, and the reason for each one

Think of the standard swing orchestra of Lesson 6: four or five trumpets, three or four trombones, five reeds, plus rhythm. Around sixteen players. The nonet keeps one representative of each colour and adds two the big band did not have.

Voice	What it is doing
Trumpet, trombone	The brass, reduced to one each, so no section can shout
French horn	A soft, round tone that blends brass into reeds instead of separating them
Tuba	The bottom of the wind chord, sustaining under the ensemble rather than marking beats
Alto and baritone saxophone	The reeds, spread as far apart in range as two horns can manage
Piano, bass, drums	Rhythm, playing quietly and often without the drummer's ride pattern

Listen to Boplicity, arranged by Gil Evans, or Israel, written and arranged by Johnny Carisi, and count the number of moments when you cannot say which instrument you are hearing. That ambiguity is the goal. Evans voiced across families exactly as Ellington did, but at a whisper and with a horn that Ellington did not have.

The band came out of a workshop rather than a business plan. Gil Evans lived in a one-room basement flat behind a Chinese laundry on West 55th Street in Manhattan, and through 1948 it functioned as a salon where Davis, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, Carisi, Lee Konitz and others argued about arranging. Mulligan, Evans, Lewis and Carisi wrote the charts. The band played one short engagement, at the Royal Roost in September 1948, and otherwise existed only for the three recording dates.

Point by point: bebop and cool

The word cool is a poor description of a musical practice, so here is what actually differs. Both columns describe recordings made within four years of each other by musicians who often played on each other's dates.

Dimension	Bebop, roughly 1945	Cool, roughly 1949 to 1955
Group	Quintet: two horns plus rhythm	Nonet, or an unusual small group such as a pianoless quartet
Tone	Hard attack, wide expressive range, strong vibrato on some instruments	Light, dry, little vibrato, an even surface
Dynamics	Loud, with sudden accents	Held down, with the ensemble often quieter than the soloist
Writing	A head at each end, everything between improvised	Extended written passages between and under the solos
Tempo	Frequently very fast	Medium and slow more often than fast
Harmony	Dense, fast-moving, heavily altered	Similar vocabulary, moving more slowly, with more space around it
Rhythm section	Bombs, ride cymbal, active comping	Brushes, restraint, sometimes no piano at all

What the table shows is that cool is not a rejection of bebop's harmony. Konitz and Mulligan play bebop chord vocabulary. What changed is the surface: the volume, the attack, the amount written down, and the assumption that a soloist should sound like a man shouting over traffic.

Lennie Tristano, who got somewhere else first

Before you accept the tidy story that cool was the calm answer to bebop, put a 1949 Capitol session next to it. The pianist Lennie Tristano, blind from early childhood and a formidable teacher, took a group including Lee Konitz on alto, Warne Marsh on tenor and Billy Bauer on guitar into the studio and recorded two pieces, Intuition and Digression, with no agreed chord sequence, no set tempo and no written melody. The players simply began and listened.

Capitol was baffled and the sides were barely promoted. But this is collectively improvised music without a harmonic map, recorded eleven years before Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz and ten before Coleman's New York arrival, made by the musicians the histories file under cool. Keep it in mind for Lesson 13: the neat sequence in which free jazz arrives as a rupture in 1959 is a story imposed afterwards.

The pianoless quartet, Los Angeles, 1952

Gerry Mulligan moved to Los Angeles and in 1952 formed a quartet with Chet Baker on trumpet, Bob Whitlock and later Carson Smith on bass, and Chico Hamilton and later others on drums. It had no piano. The group worked at the Haig, a small club opposite the Ambassador Hotel, and its records sold in numbers that jazz of this kind had not previously reached.

Removing the piano is a genuine musical experiment, so work out its consequences before reading on. What does a piano actually do in a small group? It states the harmony, it fills the space, and it supplies a cushion for the soloist. Take it away and three things must change.

• The bass has to imply the chords by itself. A walking line that outlines the third and the seventh becomes not merely tasteful but structural, because nothing else is telling the listener where the harmony is.
• The two horns start playing counterpoint. With the middle of the texture empty, Mulligan's baritone plays lines against Baker's trumpet instead of resting behind it. Both play harmony parts and both improvise, often at once.
• The listener has more to do. Nothing spells out the chord on each downbeat, so the ear has to hold the sequence in memory. Some listeners find the result airy and some find it thin, and both reactions are responses to the same missing instrument.

Notice that the collective, contrapuntal front line is the New Orleans texture of Lesson 3, at low volume and in a modern harmonic language. Very little in this history is thrown away for good.

Brubeck, and doing arithmetic in public

Dave Brubeck studied composition with Darius Milhaud and brought concert-hall habits into jazz, including a fondness for metres jazz did not use. In 1959 his quartet, with Paul Desmond on alto, Eugene Wright on bass and Joe Morello on drums, recorded the album Time Out for Columbia. Every piece on it is in an unusual metre. It became one of the best-selling jazz albums ever made.

Two pieces are worth counting for yourself. Take Five, written by Desmond, is in five beats to the bar, grouped three plus two, and you can hear the group in the piano vamp: ONE two three FOUR five. Blue Rondo a la Turk is in nine, grouped two plus two plus two plus three, which is a rhythm found in Turkish and Balkan music and which Brubeck said he heard from street musicians in Istanbul. Count nine beats and put a small accent at 1, 3, 5 and 7 and you have it.

Brubeck was on the cover of Time magazine on 8 November 1954, an honour that had gone to only one jazz musician before him, and he was uncomfortable about it, since he thought Duke Ellington deserved it first. He also refused, repeatedly, to replace Eugene Wright, who was Black, when southern venues demanded a white bassist, and cancelled dates rather than do so.

Who the West Coast label left out

By the mid-1950s the record industry was selling something it called West Coast jazz: light, arranged, mostly white, photographed in the sun. The trouble with the label is not that the music was bad. It is that Los Angeles had a much larger jazz life than the label described.

Central Avenue in South Los Angeles had been a dense jazz district since the 1920s, and the musicians who came out of it and worked there include Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Hampton Hawes, Charles Mingus, Buddy Collette and Eric Dolphy. None of them fits the sunlit publicity photograph, and the hard-driving music most of them played is generally filed under a different heading in Lesson 10.

The mechanism that produced the difference was not taste. Los Angeles had two musicians' unions: Local 47 for white players and Local 767 for Black players. Union membership controlled access to the well-paid studio work in film and television, and that work was effectively closed to Black musicians. Buddy Collette became the first Black musician in a Los Angeles network staff orchestra in 1951, on Groucho Marx's television programme, and he then led the campaign, with Marl Young, Mingus and others, that merged the two locals in 1953. When you read that West Coast jazz was a white style, you are reading the musical consequence of who was allowed into the studios.

In short: Style labels record the record business as much as the music, and this one recorded a segregated labour market.

Common misconceptions

• Cool jazz means unemotional jazz. It names a set of choices about tone, volume and writing, not a temperature of feeling. Chet Baker's ballads are not unemotional.
• Birth of the Cool was an influential hit. The 1949 and 1950 singles sold poorly. The influence dates largely from the 1957 LP compilation and from the arrangers' later careers.
• Cool was white and hard bop was Black. The nonet included Black and white musicians, and John Lewis and Miles Davis are central to it. The racial pattern in the West Coast studio scene is real but it is about hiring, not about who could play what.
• Free improvisation began in 1959. Tristano's Intuition and Digression were recorded in 1949 with no chords, metre or theme agreed in advance.
• Take Five is in an unplayable metre. Five beats grouped three plus two is countable within a minute of trying, and every child who has clapped along to it has proved the point.

Summing up

• The Miles Davis Nonet recorded twelve sides for Capitol on 21 January 1949, 22 April 1949 and 9 March 1950, released together as Birth of the Cool in 1957.
• Its nine instruments, including French horn and tuba, were chosen to give one arranger's colours in a group small enough to be affordable.
• Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis and Johnny Carisi wrote the charts, out of Evans's basement flat on West 55th Street.
• Cool keeps bebop's harmony and changes its surface: lighter tone, lower volume, more writing, slower tempos.
• Lennie Tristano recorded free improvisation without chords or metre in 1949, a decade before the free jazz argument.
• Mulligan's pianoless quartet with Chet Baker, from 1952, forced the bass to carry the harmony and returned the front line to counterpoint.
• Brubeck's Time Out, 1959, put five and nine beats to the bar in front of a mass audience.
• The West Coast label described a labour market: Los Angeles had segregated musicians' unions until Local 47 and Local 767 merged in 1953.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Cool jazz. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Miles Davis. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Britannica. (n.d.). Dave Brubeck. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Birth of the Cool. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Gioia, T. (1992). West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960. New York: Oxford University Press.

Birdland, 21 February 1954

On the night of 21 February 1954 a quintet led by the drummer Art Blakey played Birdland on Broadway while Blue Note recorded it. Clifford Brown was on trumpet, Lou Donaldson on alto saxophone, Horace Silver on piano and Curly Russell on bass. The two LPs that came out of it are called A Night at Birdland, and the audience on them is audible: people shout, the announcer works the room, and the band plays hard enough to be heard over it.

Now the puzzle. Bebop had just spent ten years making jazz harmonically harder. It piled up extensions and substitutions, doubled the harmonic rhythm, and turned the melody into something disposable. So why does the most important development of the following decade go the other way, back towards the twelve-bar blues, towards melodies you can whistle, and towards the beat of a church congregation?

The lazy answer is that hard bop was bebop plus a backbeat, a simplification for people who could not follow. That answer is wrong in a way worth tracing, because the reasons for the turn are audible in the music itself.

Start with who was listening

Between 1940 and 1960 several million Black Americans moved out of the rural South to Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland and New York, the later phase of the Great Migration. They arrived with the music of the South and they arrived into cities that had their own. On the radio and on jukeboxes, rhythm and blues was selling: a strong backbeat, a shouted vocal, a saxophone that honked.

Bebop had been a musicians' music played in small clubs for a mostly seated audience, and by 1954 that audience included a substantial number of white college students and critics. Hard bop's musicians, most of them Black and most of them from the urban North or the migrated South, were making music for a different room: neighbourhood clubs, bars with a jukebox, an audience that had heard gospel that morning and rhythm and blues all week.

So what?: The turn towards blues and church music was not a retreat from difficulty. It was a decision about whose ear the music was aimed at.

What the church actually contributed

People say hard bop sounds gospel-influenced and stop there. Here are the specific devices, so that you can hear them rather than agree with them.

The plagal cadence. European harmony, and bebop with it, closes with the dominant: the V chord pulling to the I, which is the ii-V-I you already know. Church music closes differently, moving from the IV chord straight to the I. In F, that is B flat to F. Sing the two syllables of the word amen to those two chords and you have named the cadence: it is called the amen cadence for exactly that reason. It does not pull, it settles. Play a ii-V-I in F, then play B flat to F, and listen for the difference between an arrival that was forced and one that was allowed.

Compound time. Much gospel is in twelve-eight, meaning four beats to the bar, each divided into three rather than two. Count it as ONE and a TWO and a THREE and a FOUR and a. That rolling triplet feel under a slow tempo is one of the most recognisable sounds in the style, and it is what Blakey does behind a slow blues.

Call and response as the tune itself. Bobby Timmons wrote Moanin' for the Jazz Messengers in 1958, and its head is literally a call and a response: the piano plays a four-bar phrase, the horns answer with a short amen figure, four times over. That is the preacher and the congregation of Lesson 1, transferred to a quintet.

Pentatonic and minor blues melody. Hard bop heads tend to use five-note scales and blues inflection rather than the chromatic angularity of a bebop head. Compare the melody of Moanin' with the melody of Donna Lee and you are comparing something a room can sing back with something a room cannot.

The word funky. By the mid-1950s musicians were using funky as high praise, meaning earthy, blues-rooted, unpolished on purpose. It is the exact opposite of the vocabulary that had been attached to cool.

Blakey's finishing school

Horace Silver and Art Blakey founded the Jazz Messengers as a cooperative in 1954 and 1955; Silver left in 1956 with most of the band, and Blakey kept the name and ran it until his death in 1990. That is roughly thirty-five years of one institution, and it worked as a training system: a young player joined at twenty, wrote for the book, learned to lead a set in front of an audience, and left to start his own group.

The list of people who passed through includes Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Bobby Timmons, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Woody Shaw, Keith Jarrett, and, in the 1980s, Wynton and Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard. Blakey's practice was to make the newest member the musical director. It is not a coincidence that the argument of Lesson 15 about jazz education and repertory begins in a band that was already an apprenticeship system.

Silver, for his part, wrote tunes that entered the permanent repertoire: The Preacher, Doodlin', and later Song for My Father, recorded in 1964, whose bass figure grew out of the Cape Verdean music of his father's family and a trip to Brazil.

Blue Note as a working method

A great deal of what we call hard bop is on one label, and that is not an accident of taste. Blue Note was run by two German emigres, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, and it did four things that other labels did not do consistently.

• It paid for rehearsal. Musicians were booked and paid for a rehearsal day before the session. Most labels paid only for the recording date, so most records of the period are first meetings sight-reading. Blue Note records sound arranged because they were.
• It used one engineer and one room. Rudy Van Gelder recorded first in his parents' living room in Hackensack, New Jersey, and from 1959 in a purpose-built studio at Englewood Cliffs. The consistency of sound across hundreds of records, especially the weight of the drums and the presence of the piano, is his.
• It let musicians write. Sessions were built around originals by the leader and the sidemen rather than around standards, which is why so many hard bop compositions survive as repertoire.
• It looked like something. Wolff photographed the sessions and Reid Miles designed the covers, using the photographs, heavy sans-serif type and two or three colours. The visual identity is part of why the catalogue is still in print.

Sonny Rollins, and improvising on a theme rather than on chords

On 22 June 1956, at Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, Sonny Rollins recorded Saxophone Colossus for Prestige with Tommy Flanagan on piano, Doug Watkins on bass and Max Roach on drums. It contains St. Thomas, a calypso, and a slow blues in B flat called Blue 7.

Two years later the composer and critic Gunther Schuller published an essay in The Jazz Review analysing Blue 7 bar by bar, and made a claim that has organised arguments about improvisation ever since. Rollins, he showed, was not simply running the chords. He took a small melodic figure and worked it: inverted it, stretched it, cut it down, brought it back in a different register, so that a fifteen-minute improvisation had the thematic coherence of a composed piece.

Here is the practical distinction, and you can hear it in any solo you like.

	Running the changes	Thematic improvisation
Where the material comes from	The chord of the moment and its scale	A short motif, developed across many chords
What holds it together	The harmonic sequence	Recognisable transformations of the motif
What goes wrong when it fails	Correct but shapeless line playing	Repetition without development

Schuller's argument was also a claim about status: if an improvisation can be shown to have thematic structure, it can be discussed in the terms used for composed music. Some later writers have objected that this quietly makes European composition the standard of value, and that is a fair objection. Both things can be true. The analysis is accurate, and the reason it was written when it was is that jazz was arguing for its own seriousness.

The organ trio, and the hit that changed the label

Soul jazz is hard bop's more commercial branch, and its central instrument is the Hammond organ, especially the B-3 model with its rotating Leslie speaker. Jimmy Smith recorded for Blue Note from 1956 and established the format: organ, guitar and drums, with the organist playing the bass line on the foot pedals or with the left hand. That is three musicians producing a full four-part texture, which is why organ trios could work small clubs profitably. The Sermon!, recorded in 1957 and 1958, is the model, and the title tells you where the music thinks it comes from.

Then two records crossed over. Lee Morgan recorded The Sidewinder on 21 December 1963: a twenty-four bar blues over a boogaloo groove, with a bass figure that repeats and a beat closer to rhythm and blues than to swing. It sold in numbers Blue Note had never seen and appeared on the pop album chart. Three years later the Cannonball Adderley Quintet recorded Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, written by their Austrian pianist Joe Zawinul, in front of an invited audience; it reached the top twenty of the American pop singles chart in 1967.

The consequence was predictable and it is worth knowing about, because it complicates the story of an authentic style. Blue Note began asking artists to open albums with a track like The Sidewinder, and a good deal of mid-1960s soul jazz is a formula being filled in. The same commercial pressure that had made the style possible started to standardise it. Zawinul, incidentally, is about to reappear in Lesson 14 playing electric piano for Miles Davis.

The core of it: Hard bop is what happens when musicians with bebop technique aim it at the audience, the church and the blues that bebop had left behind, and soul jazz is what happens when that aim finds a chart position.

Common misconceptions

• Hard bop is simplified bebop for people who could not keep up. The players are the same generation and often the same people; the simplification is a choice about audience and material, not a limit of technique.
• Hard bop and cool are two racially separate musics. Careers cross constantly, and Miles Davis is central to both stories.
• Blue Note sounded good because of the musicians alone. Paid rehearsals and one engineer in one room are a large part of it.
• Soul jazz was a commercial corruption of hard bop. It came out of the same church and blues sources; what commerce did was standardise it after The Sidewinder sold.
• Thematic improvisation means playing the tune. It means developing a small motif across the harmony, which is different from stating a melody.

What to remember

• A Night at Birdland, recorded 21 February 1954 with Blakey, Clifford Brown, Lou Donaldson, Horace Silver and Curly Russell, is a convenient starting date for the style.
• The turn to blues and gospel followed the audience created by the Great Migration and by rhythm and blues on the radio.
• The church supplied the plagal cadence, compound twelve-eight time, call and response heads such as Moanin', and pentatonic melody.
• Blakey's Jazz Messengers ran from the mid-1950s to 1990 as an apprenticeship system with a very long alumni list.
• Blue Note paid for rehearsals, used Rudy Van Gelder for the sound and Reid Miles for the covers, and recorded originals rather than standards.
• Gunther Schuller's 1958 analysis of Rollins's Blue 7 named thematic improvisation and used it to argue for jazz as serious music.
• Soul jazz built on the Hammond B-3 organ trio; The Sidewinder in 1963 and Mercy, Mercy, Mercy in 1966 pulled the style towards a formula.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Hard bop. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Art Blakey. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Britannica. (n.d.). Sonny Rollins. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
4. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Collections and exhibitions on African American music. Smithsonian Institution. nmaahc.si.edu
5. Rosenthal, D. H. (1992). Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965. New York: Oxford University Press.

A page of scales where the chord symbols should be

Columbia recorded in a converted Greek Orthodox church on East 30th Street in Manhattan, a room with a high ceiling and a long natural decay. On 2 March 1959 six musicians assembled there for a Miles Davis session: Davis on trumpet, Julian Adderley, known as Cannonball, on alto saxophone, John Coltrane on tenor, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums. Wynton Kelly came in to play piano on one number.

What Davis handed them was not a set of parts. It was a page of sketches: a melody, and in place of the usual grid of chord symbols, a small number of scales, with an instruction about how many bars to stay on each. Some of the musicians were seeing the material for the first time. Almost everything on the finished record is a first or second take.

They came back on 22 April and recorded two more pieces. The five together were released in August 1959 as Kind of Blue. It has been the best-selling jazz album in the world for decades, it is certified multi-platinum, and it sits in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. It is also the clearest demonstration in the repertoire of a technical idea, which is what this lesson is really about.

The problem bebop left behind

Go back to Lesson 8 for a moment. Bebop made the harmony move fast: two chords a bar, extra ii-V pairs inserted, substitutions on top. A soloist in that world is doing something close to navigation. Every beat or two the map changes, and the job is to keep producing melody while landing on notes that fit the chord arriving underneath.

By the late 1950s Davis had decided this was a trap. His complaint, made in interviews at the time, was that with so many chords the only way to fill the space was with more notes, and that players were running patterns because there was no room to think. He wanted, in his phrase, fewer chords and more space to do something with them.

So consider the experiment. Take away the chord sequence. Give the soloist one scale and sixteen bars. What happens?

Key idea: Removing the chords does not make improvising easier. It removes the scaffolding that was making the solo hold together, and hands the whole responsibility for shape to the player.

What a mode actually is

The word sounds forbidding and the idea is simple. Play the white notes of a piano from C to C and you have the major scale, which in this vocabulary is called Ionian. Now play the same white notes but start and finish on D. The notes are identical. The pattern of tones and semitones relative to your new home note is not, and the result sounds different: minor, but not quite the minor you expect.

Start on	Name	Character against the major scale
C	Ionian	The major scale itself
D	Dorian	Minor, but with a raised sixth degree
E	Phrygian	Minor, with a flattened second; a Spanish colour
F	Lydian	Major, with a raised fourth
G	Mixolydian	Major, with a flattened seventh; the dominant scale
A	Aeolian	The natural minor scale
B	Locrian	Minor, with a flattened second and fifth; unstable

D Dorian, then, is D E F G A B C. Compare it with D natural minor, which is D E F G A B flat C. One note differs: the sixth degree is B natural rather than B flat. That single raised note is why Dorian sounds minor without sounding mournful, and it is the sound of an enormous amount of the music in the rest of this course.

The change in thinking is called the chord-scale relationship. In bebop the chord is the fact and the scale is a tool for getting between chords. In modal playing the scale is the fact and any chord is just a handful of notes lifted out of it. That reversal is the whole idea.

So What, in thirty-two bars

The first piece on the record has a form you already know. It is thirty-two bars, AABA, exactly the shape of Lesson 6, and it is built like this:

• Bars 1 to 16: D Dorian, for two eight-bar A sections.
• Bars 17 to 24: the bridge, which moves the same material up a semitone to E flat Dorian.
• Bars 25 to 32: back to D Dorian.

Two scales. That is the entire harmonic content of a nine-minute performance. The bridge is not a modulation in the classical sense at all; it is the identical pattern shifted up one semitone, which is the plainest possible way to create contrast without introducing a chord sequence.

The other unusual thing is who plays the melody. Paul Chambers states the theme on the double bass, and the piano and horns answer it with a two-chord figure, a call and its response with the instruments' normal roles reversed. When Davis, Coltrane, Adderley and Evans solo, each of them has sixteen bars of one scale, eight of another, and eight of the first, over and over.

What the pianist does when there are no changes

If you are the pianist and the harmony is a scale, the ordinary comping vocabulary is a problem. Voicings built in thirds spell out a specific chord, and spelling out a specific chord is precisely what nobody wants.

Bill Evans's solution, in the answering figure of So What, is to stack fourths instead. From the bottom: E, A, D, G, then B. Four notes a perfect fourth apart, with a major third on top. Musicians simply call it the So What chord. Because fourths do not imply a root the way thirds do, the voicing states the mode without pinning it to a chord, and it has been in every jazz pianist's hands ever since. Play it and then play an ordinary D minor seventh in thirds, and listen to how much more the second one tells you.

The other four pieces, and what each one tests

Piece	Material	What it is for
Freddie Freeloader	A twelve-bar blues in B flat, with Wynton Kelly at the piano	Proof that the record is not an experiment against the tradition: the plainest form in jazz, played straight
Blue in Green	A circular ten-bar form, slow, harmonically ambiguous	The one piece with real chord movement, and the one whose authorship Bill Evans disputed with Davis for years
All Blues	A twelve-bar blues in G, in six-eight, over a rocking piano and bass figure	Modal colour applied to the blues, showing the two ideas are compatible
Flamenco Sketches	Five scales in sequence, each held for as long as the soloist wants	The furthest step: even the number of bars is handed to the improviser

Look at what that programme does. Two of the five pieces are twelve-bar blues. The album that supposedly abolished chord sequences contains more blues than anything else, which should tell you that modal jazz was an addition to the toolkit and not a replacement of it.

Where the idea came from

Nothing here began in 1959. Three earlier things matter.

In 1953 the composer and theorist George Russell published The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, the first substantial theoretical book by a jazz musician. Its argument, put crudely, is that the Lydian scale rather than the major scale is the natural centre of gravity for tonal music, and that chords should be understood as arising from scales rather than the other way round. Davis knew Russell and knew the book.

In December 1957, in Paris, Davis recorded the soundtrack for Louis Malle's film Elevator to the Gallows with three French musicians and the drummer Kenny Clarke. He gave them sketches and scales, and they improvised while the film was projected on a screen in the studio. Much of that score is modal a year and a half before Kind of Blue.

In early 1958 Davis recorded an album called Milestones, whose title track is thirty-two bars AABA with the A sections sitting on one scale and the bridge on another. It is usually described as Dorian in the A sections and Aeolian in the bridge. That is the modal principle already fully working, with the same sextet minus Bill Evans.

Evans matters to the story beyond his playing. He had studied and thought about impressionist harmony, he introduced Davis to music that treated a chord as a colour rather than as a function, and his own solo piece Peace Piece, recorded in 1958, hovers over a repeating two-chord figure in a way that Flamenco Sketches plainly descends from. Evans also wrote the album's liner note, a short essay comparing the sessions to a Japanese painting technique in which the artist works on thin paper and cannot hesitate or correct, because a hesitation shows.

Harder, not easier

Here is the point students most often miss. With one scale for sixteen bars, everything that used to hold a solo together is gone. There is no chord change to mark bar 9, nothing to tell the listener where you are in the form, and no harmonic event to make an idea sound resolved.

So the improviser has to supply structure from somewhere else: from motif and its development, which you met with Sonny Rollins in the last lesson; from rhythm, by placing phrases against the beat in ways that create tension; from register, by climbing; and from density, by playing more or fewer notes. Listen to Coltrane and Adderley take the same sixteen bars of D Dorian on So What and you hear two different answers to the same problem, Adderley staying blues-rooted and songlike, Coltrane already running long strings of notes through the scale and pushing at its edges.

Remember: Modal jazz is not defined by playing scales. It is defined by slow harmonic rhythm, which is what forces the improviser to build shape out of something other than chord changes.

Common misconceptions

• Modal jazz means no chords. Chords are still played. They arise from the scale and change rarely, which is a different thing from absence.
• Modal jazz is easier because there is less to learn. Fewer chords remove the scaffolding, so the soloist has to generate form personally.
• Kind of Blue abandoned the blues. Two of its five pieces are twelve-bar blues.
• The modes were invented by jazz musicians in the 1950s. They are far older; what was new was using one of them as the stable ground for extended improvisation.
• The record was carefully rehearsed. The musicians were largely reading sketches on the day, and most of what was issued is a first or second take.

Where this leaves us

• Kind of Blue was recorded on 2 March and 22 April 1959 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio by Davis, Adderley, Coltrane, Evans, Chambers and Cobb, with Wynton Kelly on Freddie Freeloader.
• A mode is a scale defined by which degree you treat as home; D Dorian is the white notes from D, minor with a raised sixth.
• The chord-scale relationship reverses bebop's priorities: the scale is the material and chords are drawn from it.
• So What is thirty-two bars AABA on two scales, D Dorian and E flat Dorian, with the bass stating the theme.
• The So What voicing stacks perfect fourths with a major third on top, stating a mode without naming a chord.
• The idea has a history: George Russell's 1953 book, the Elevator to the Gallows session of December 1957, and the title track of Milestones in 1958.
• Slow harmonic rhythm makes improvising harder, because motif, rhythm, register and density must now carry the form.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Kind of Blue. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Bill Evans. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Library of Congress. (n.d.). National Recording Registry. National Recording Preservation Board. loc.gov
4. Kahn, A. (2000). Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. New York: Da Capo Press.
5. Russell, G. (1953). The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. New York: Concept Publishing Company.

The Five Spot, summer 1957

In the summer of 1957 Thelonious Monk opened a long engagement at the Five Spot Cafe on Cooper Square in New York, with a quartet whose tenor saxophonist was a thirty-year-old from North Carolina named John Coltrane. Coltrane had just been sacked. Miles Davis, whose quintet he had joined in 1955, had fired him in the spring for unreliability caused by heroin and alcohol.

Two things happened to Coltrane that year. He stopped using heroin, an experience he later described in religious terms in a note printed on the cover of one of his own records. And he spent months every night beside a musician whose compositions are full of unexpected intervals and gaps, and who reportedly told him to play through the difficulty rather than around it. When Coltrane rejoined Davis at the end of the year, he was a different player.

Why this matters: Coltrane is the clearest case in jazz of a musician who developed by deliberate, documented work rather than by early gift, which is why his career is a good place to watch technique and purpose change each other.

The apprenticeship

He was born on 23 September 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, and grew up in High Point. Both his grandfathers were African Methodist Episcopal Zion ministers, a detail worth keeping. In 1943 the family moved to Philadelphia. He played in a navy band in Hawaii in 1945 and 1946, then worked through the standard apprenticeships available to a young saxophonist: the rhythm and blues bands of Eddie Vinson and Earl Bostic, where the job was to honk and please a crowd; Dizzy Gillespie's big band and then his small group from 1949 to 1951; and Johnny Hodges, the Ellington altoist of Lesson 7, in 1953 and 1954.

That is nine years of employment before anyone thought of him as important. When Davis hired him in 1955 for the quintet with Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones, the critics were unimpressed; his tone was rough and his lines sometimes fell apart. Almost every recording of Coltrane after 1957 is the sound of a man practising in public.

Sheets of sound

In 1958 the critic Ira Gitler, writing a liner note, described what Coltrane was then doing as sheets of sound. The phrase stuck because it is accurate as a description of the effect, but it is worth knowing what produces it.

Coltrane was superimposing extra harmony on the chords underneath. Where the band played one chord for two bars, he would imply a chain of substitute chords inside it, and to state each one he would run through it in rapid arpeggios, five, six or seven notes to the beat, faster than the ear can separate. The result does not sound like a melodic line at all. It sounds like a smear of harmony, a chord poured out horizontally.

Notice that this is the exact opposite of the direction Miles Davis was taking at the same moment. Davis's answer to bebop's density was fewer chords. Coltrane's first answer was more chords: to fill every available space with harmonic information. The two men made Kind of Blue together in 1959 while pursuing opposite solutions, which is one reason the record has the tension it has.

Giant Steps: dividing the octave into three

On 4 and 5 May 1959, weeks after the second Kind of Blue date, Coltrane recorded his own album for Atlantic with Tommy Flanagan on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Art Taylor on drums. The title track has been a rite of passage for jazz musicians ever since.

Here is the technical idea, and it is a genuinely elegant one. Ordinary tonal music moves by fourths and fifths: the ii-V-I of Lesson 6 circulates that way, and so does almost every standard. Coltrane instead moved by major thirds. Three major thirds stacked on top of each other make an octave exactly, so a piece can have three equally spaced key centres instead of one.

Key centre	Distance from the previous one
B	the starting point
G	a major third below B
E flat	a major third below G
B again	a major third below E flat, closing the circle

Giant Steps runs through those three centres, each approached by its own two-chord ii-V, at a tempo close to 290 beats a minute and roughly two chords per bar. Every solution a player has memorised for the standard repertoire is useless, because the key changes every two beats and never settles anywhere long enough to be a key. Tommy Flanagan, an outstanding pianist, is audibly struggling on the released take, and generations of students have kept him company. The related piece Countdown takes the same device and imposes it on the changes of an existing tune, Miles Davis's Tune Up, which is a contrafact in reverse: the harmony rewritten under a familiar shape rather than a melody written over a familiar harmony.

Then, having built the hardest chord sequence in the repertoire, Coltrane essentially abandoned that road.

The other road: one chord, twenty minutes

On 21 October 1960 he recorded a version of My Favorite Things, a waltz from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music, which had opened the year before. He played it on soprano saxophone, an instrument nobody in modern jazz was using, in a rocking three-four vamp, with the band holding a single chord for long stretches while he built and built. It ran nearly fourteen minutes and it became the most popular record he ever made.

Set the two side by side and you have the whole of Coltrane's middle period. Giant Steps is maximum harmony. My Favorite Things is minimum harmony held for a very long time. Both are ways of getting past the same problem: what a soloist does when the ordinary machinery of chord changes has stopped generating interest.

The Classic Quartet, and what Elvin Jones did

By late 1961 the group was settled: McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums. It lasted until 1965 and it is one of the most studied ensembles in the music.

Tyner built his comping out of quartal voicings, the stacked fourths you met in the last lesson, and out of pentatonic figures with a heavy left hand on the root. That gave Coltrane a modal ground that was rich but harmonically open.

Elvin Jones is the harder thing to describe and the more important. A swing drummer keeps a line of time. Jones plays a field. He states three-against-four almost continuously, with the ride cymbal implying triplets while the left hand and bass drum place accents that suggest a different metre running underneath, so that the pulse is unmistakable but its subdivision is permanently ambiguous. The effect is turbulent and completely steady at the same time, and it is why the quartet can play twenty minutes on one chord without the time going slack. Count four slowly and clap three evenly across the same span: that friction, sustained and varied for an hour a night, is his contribution.

A Love Supreme, 9 December 1964

On 9 December 1964 the quartet went to Rudy Van Gelder's studio at Englewood Cliffs and recorded a four-part suite in a single evening. It was released in early 1965 and has sold in figures no other record of its kind approaches.

• Acknowledgement. Garrison plays a four-note bass figure. Coltrane states it, then plays it in one key after another, moving it through many transpositions without changing its shape, until the motif has been asserted from every direction. Then he sings the title over it, several times, in a plain unaccompanied voice.
• Resolution. A strong, declarative theme, played hard, with Tyner and Jones at full weight.
• Pursuance. A fast minor blues, opening with a long drum solo. Note that the blues of Lesson 2 is still doing structural work here, twelve bars at a time, inside a devotional suite.
• Psalm. Coltrane printed a devotional poem in the album's packaging, and in this movement he plays it: not a setting of the words but a wordless recitation, the saxophone following the poem's syllables phrase by phrase. If you read the printed text while the movement plays, you can follow along line by line.

The transposing of the motif in the first movement is the same procedure as thematic improvisation from Lesson 10, taken to its limit: one idea, examined from every available angle, with the harmony bending to accommodate it rather than the other way round.

The last two years, and the argument

The trouble had started earlier. In November 1961 the critic John Tynan, writing in Down Beat, described what Coltrane and Eric Dolphy were playing as anti-jazz. It was a serious charge in the largest jazz magazine in America, and the magazine subsequently gave both musicians space to answer it. The recordings that provoked it, from the Village Vanguard in November 1961, include a long tenor performance on a blues in which Coltrane simply keeps going, past the point where a solo would conventionally end.

After A Love Supreme he moved further. On 28 June 1965 he recorded Ascension, a single long collective improvisation for eleven musicians, which is essentially the free jazz of the next lesson performed by the most commercially successful musician in the idiom. Tyner left at the end of 1965 and Elvin Jones early in 1966, both saying in effect that they could no longer hear themselves or find a role. Alice Coltrane replaced Tyner on piano and Rashied Ali replaced Jones on drums, playing a pulse so dispersed that it barely functions as metre. In February 1967 Coltrane recorded an album of saxophone and drums alone.

He died on 17 July 1967 in Huntington, New York, of liver cancer. He was forty. Within two years a congregation in San Francisco had been founded in his name, and it exists today as an African Orthodox church, which is an unusual afterlife for a jazz musician and not an accident: the last decade of his work was explicitly religious, and a substantial part of his audience heard it that way.

Bottom line: Coltrane pursued two opposite technical strategies, saturating the harmony and then emptying it, and both were attempts to make a single improvised line carry more than it had been asked to carry before.

Common misconceptions

• Coltrane was a prodigy. He worked as a sideman for roughly nine years, was criticised in print into his early thirties, and changed decisively at thirty.
• Sheets of sound means playing fast for its own sake. It is the audible result of superimposing extra chords and arpeggiating each one, which is a harmonic device before it is a display of speed.
• Giant Steps is hard because it is fast. The difficulty is that the key centre moves by major thirds every two beats, so no memorised phrase stays correct for long.
• A Love Supreme is free jazz. Its third movement is a twelve-bar minor blues, and the whole suite is structured; Ascension, six months later, is where the free playing arrives.
• The Classic Quartet broke up because of a quarrel. Tyner and Jones described a musical problem: as the density increased they could no longer hear what their own parts were for.

Recap

• Coltrane, born 23 September 1926, served a long apprenticeship in rhythm and blues bands and with Gillespie and Hodges before joining Miles Davis in 1955.
• 1957 was the hinge: dismissed by Davis, he stopped using heroin and spent months at the Five Spot in Thelonious Monk's quartet.
• Sheets of sound, named by Ira Gitler in 1958, describes rapid arpeggiation of superimposed substitute chords.
• Giant Steps, recorded 4 and 5 May 1959, moves through three key centres a major third apart, B, G and E flat, at roughly two chords a bar.
• My Favorite Things, recorded 21 October 1960 on soprano saxophone, takes the opposite road: a vamp held for minutes at a time.
• The Classic Quartet with Tyner, Garrison and Elvin Jones ran to 1965; Jones's continuous three-against-four is what keeps a one-chord performance alive.
• A Love Supreme, recorded 9 December 1964, has four movements, a motif transposed through many keys, and a final wordless recitation of a printed poem.
• He was called anti-jazz in Down Beat in 1961, recorded Ascension in June 1965, and died on 17 July 1967 at forty.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). John Coltrane. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Britannica. (n.d.). McCoy Tyner. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). A Love Supreme. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Porter, L. (1998). John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
5. Kahn, A. (2002). A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album. New York: Viking.

A two-week booking that ran for months

On 17 November 1959 a quartet from Los Angeles opened at the Five Spot Cafe, the same small room on Cooper Square where Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane had worked two years earlier. The leader was a twenty-nine-year-old alto saxophonist from Fort Worth named Ornette Coleman, playing a white plastic saxophone he had bought because it was cheap. With him were Don Cherry on a small pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. The booking was for two weeks. It ran for months.

What happened in that room is one of the few genuine scandals in this history. Musicians came in from other gigs to hear it and left in opposite states. Leonard Bernstein was enthusiastic in public. Established players, including musicians whose own work had been called incomprehensible twenty years earlier, said flatly that they could not hear what was going on and doubted there was anything to hear. The argument that started on Cooper Square has still not been settled, and this lesson is about why not.

What was actually removed

Begin with the thing most descriptions get wrong. Coleman did not abolish melody, form or pulse. Play Lonely Woman, the first track of The Shape of Jazz to Come, recorded on 22 May 1959, and here is what you hear.

Drums enter first at a fast tempo. The bass plays slow, deliberate double stops at a completely different rate. Then alto and trumpet state a written melody, in unison and slightly out of tune with each other, that is memorable enough to hum after one hearing. It is a tune, played as a head, exactly as in Lesson 6. What follows is a solo, and then the head returns at the end.

So the head-solos-head architecture is intact. What has gone is one specific thing: the chord sequence underneath. There is no fixed harmonic grid that the soloist must fit, no piano stating chords, no cycle repeating every thirty-two bars. Coleman's group improvises on the melody, on its mood and its intervals, and moves the key when the phrase wants to move, with Haden following the soloist rather than laying down a road for him.

That single removal changes everybody's job.

Role	In a hard bop quintet	In Coleman's quartet
Piano	States the harmony, comps behind the soloist	Absent, because there is no harmony to state
Bass	Walks the roots of a known sequence	Listens and responds; may double the line, may imply a key, may drop out
Drums	Keeps time, marks the form	Keeps energy and shape; there is no form to mark
Soloist	Makes melody that fits the chords arriving	Makes melody that has to justify itself, since nothing else supports it

What matters here: Free jazz removed the harmonic grid, not the tune and not the group. Everything difficult about it follows from that one subtraction.

Free Jazz, 21 December 1960

A year later Coleman took eight musicians into a studio and recorded a single continuous improvisation lasting about thirty-seven minutes, released as Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Two quartets played at once, one in each stereo channel: Coleman, Don Cherry, Scott LaFaro and Billy Higgins on the left; Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell on the right. There are brief written passages to mark sections, and otherwise the players negotiate in real time, one taking a lead while the other seven comment.

The cover carried a Jackson Pollock painting, White Light, which was a deliberate claim: this is action painting in sound, the record of a process rather than the execution of a plan. The title gave the movement its name.

You should know that eight people improvising at once has an obvious precedent, and it is in Lesson 3. The New Orleans front line played collectively too. The difference is the absence of a shared harmonic map, which in 1917 was the thing that kept collective improvisation from becoming noise.

Not one music but several

The label covers musicians who had little in common beyond what they had dispensed with.

• Cecil Taylor came from a conservatory training and treated the piano as a percussion instrument, playing dense clusters at extreme speed with almost no reference to functional harmony. His Jazz Advance appeared in 1956, three years before Coleman reached New York, and his music is built from small cells worked at enormous length.
• Albert Ayler went in the opposite direction melodically. His themes are simple, like hymns, marches and folk songs, and he played them with a huge vibrato and a deliberately distorted tone, splitting notes and overblowing. Spiritual Unity, recorded on 10 July 1964 with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray, is the record to start with.
• Sun Ra, born Herman Blount in Alabama, led a large ensemble called the Arkestra from Chicago and later Philadelphia, released records on his own Saturn label, dressed the band in robes and headdresses, and built a cosmology in which he came from Saturn. The music runs from big band swing arrangements to early synthesizer noise, sometimes within one set.
• The AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, was founded in Chicago in May 1965 by Muhal Richard Abrams and others as a self-run organisation: it presented its own concerts, taught free classes for young people on the South Side and organised its members' work outside the club system. Out of it came the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whose slogan, Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future, is a claim about lineage rather than a rejection of it. The AACM's music uses silence and small sounds as much as density, which is a long way from Coleman.

The case against

The hostile position was not simply that the music was unpleasant. It had a structure, and it is worth stating properly.

The charge was that jazz is a discipline defined by playing meaningfully within constraints, and that removing the constraints removes the achievement. If a wrong note is impossible, the argument runs, then a right note is meaningless, and the listener has no way to tell mastery from incapacity. Critics pointed at intonation and asked whether unison passages were out of tune deliberately. Working musicians pointed out that they had spent years learning to negotiate Cherokee at speed and that the new players had not, in some cases, demonstrated they could. In November 1961 Down Beat published John Tynan's charge of anti-jazz, aimed at Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, and the word circulated for years afterwards.

There was also a serious formal objection: that an hour of continuous free playing produces no memorable events, because memory works by comparison, and comparison needs recurrence. Whatever you think of the conclusion, the premise is a real fact about listening.

The case for

The defence came from several directions at once.

The historical argument: every stage of this music has removed a constraint that the previous stage thought essential. New Orleans polyphony gave way to the soloist, swing regularity to bebop's substitutions, bebop's chord sequences to modal jazz's scales. Free jazz continues the sequence, and Coltrane, the most respected musician alive at the time, moved in that direction himself with Ascension in June 1965, which is difficult to explain if the music were merely incompetence.

The technical argument: the constraint that was removed was European harmony specifically. Pitch bending, timbral distortion and collective improvisation are not the absence of tradition but a return to the tradition of Lesson 1, in which pitch was flexible and the group played together. Ayler's overblown tone is a field holler at maximum amplification.

The political argument, which was made loudest and mattered most at the time: the music arrived alongside the civil rights movement and the Black Arts movement, and its advocates, above all Amiri Baraka, writing then as LeRoi Jones in Blues People in 1963 and Black Music in 1967, presented it as Black artists reclaiming control of a Black music from an industry and a critical establishment that had never been theirs. Archie Shepp's records of the period carry titles that dedicate the music to political figures. On this reading, demanding that the players demonstrate mastery of the standard repertoire first was itself the position under attack.

The economics made the political point concrete. Free players lost club work, because clubs sell drinks to people who want to hear something familiar. In the first days of October 1964 the trumpeter Bill Dixon organised four days of concerts at the Cellar Cafe in New York, billed as the October Revolution in Jazz, because the musicians could not get booked elsewhere; the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild came out of it. Many of the musicians spent long periods working in Europe, where audiences and state-funded radio orchestras were more receptive.

What actually happened afterwards

Neither side won, which is the honest answer, and the reason is that the question was badly posed. Free jazz did not replace the rest of the music: by 1970 the commercial centre of jazz was somewhere else entirely, as the next lesson describes. But its devices were absorbed almost everywhere. Players who never made a free record use free passages inside structured pieces, take a tune out of tempo, or let a solo leave the key and come back.

Coleman himself kept working, formed an electric band called Prime Time in the 1970s, and described his theory of playing with a word of his own, harmolodics, in terms that resisted definition. In 2007 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which is the same committee that had refused Duke Ellington in 1965 and that will appear again in the last lesson of this course.

The upshot: The dispute is not really about whether the music is good. It is about whether jazz is defined by its constraints or by its history of removing them, and that question does not have a technical answer.

Common misconceptions

• Free jazz has no written material. Coleman's records are full of tunes, stated in unison at the start and repeated at the end.
• Free jazz has no pulse. Much of it swings hard; Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell are propulsive drummers. The dispersed pulse of the later Coltrane groups is one option, not the definition.
• It began in 1959. Lennie Tristano recorded free improvisation in 1949, and Cecil Taylor was recording by 1956.
• It is one style. Coleman, Taylor, Ayler, Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago have very little in common with each other musically.
• The players could not handle conventional material. Coleman had years of rhythm and blues work behind him, and the members of these groups recorded plenty of conventional music before and after.

The short version

• Ornette Coleman's quartet opened at the Five Spot on 17 November 1959 and split the New York jazz world.
• What his group removed was the fixed chord sequence; the written head, the group and often the pulse remained.
• The Shape of Jazz to Come, recorded 22 May 1959 with Cherry, Haden and Higgins, is the clearest demonstration.
• Free Jazz, recorded 21 December 1960, is thirty-seven minutes by a double quartet split across the stereo channels, with a Jackson Pollock painting on the cover.
• The label covers musicians as different as Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and the AACM, founded in Chicago in May 1965.
• The case against rests on constraint as the source of meaning; the case for rests on historical continuity, on non-European precedent, and on Black artistic self-determination.
• The music lost club work, produced self-organised concerts such as the October Revolution in Jazz in 1964, and sent many players to Europe.
• Its devices were absorbed into mainstream practice even though the style itself never became commercially central.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Free jazz. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Ornette Coleman. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Britannica. (n.d.). Cecil Taylor. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Litweiler, J. (1984). The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958. New York: William Morrow.
6. Jones, L. (1963). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow.

Twelve musicians and three electric pianos

The Woodstock festival ended on 18 August 1969. On 19 August, in a Columbia studio in New York, Miles Davis began three days of recording with a band of roughly a dozen musicians. Wayne Shorter played soprano saxophone and Bennie Maupin bass clarinet. There were two and sometimes three electric pianos at once, played by Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul and Larry Young. John McLaughlin played electric guitar, Dave Holland and Harvey Brooks played basses, and Jack DeJohnette and Lenny White played drums with additional percussionists alongside them.

The result, issued the following spring as the double album Bitches Brew, sold better than any jazz record Davis had made. Within a year he was playing the Fillmore East, opening for rock bands, and in August 1970 he played the Isle of Wight festival in front of a crowd of a size no jazz musician had faced.

Start from the wrong answer

The usual summary is that fusion is jazz played on electric instruments. That definition is easy to remember and it fails immediately, so it is a useful thing to break.

Test it. Charlie Christian played an amplified guitar with Benny Goodman in 1939. Jimmy Smith's Hammond organ, in Lesson 10, is an electric instrument and nobody calls his records fusion. Miles Davis's own Miles in the Sky, from 1968, has Herbie Hancock on electric piano and is still recognisably a modern jazz quintet record. Electricity had been in this music for thirty years before anybody needed a new word.

So the instruments cannot be the definition. Take them away and ask what is left, and four things turn out to be doing the work.

One: the eighth notes stop swinging

This is the change that a listener hears first, even if they cannot name it. In Lesson 5 you met swing eighths: a pair of eighth notes played long-short, closer to a triplet than to two equal halves. Rock and funk do not do this. Their eighth notes are even, both halves the same length, and the snare drum lands hard on beats two and four.

Count along with any hard bop record and then with Chameleon from Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters, recorded in 1973, and the difference is not subtle. Everything else follows from it: even eighths make a groove that repeats rather than a pulse that flows, and a repeating groove wants a bass figure rather than a walking line.

Two: the vamp replaces the chorus

For every style so far in this course, the unit has been the chorus: a fixed number of bars, repeated, with soloists counted in choruses. Fusion largely abandons that. A piece sits on a bass figure, sometimes one chord, sometimes two alternating, for as long as it takes, and sections change when the band decides to change them.

Notice where that comes from. A vamp is a mode held. The harmonic stillness of Lesson 11 is exactly what fusion inherited, and Joe Zawinul, who wrote the soul jazz hit Mercy, Mercy, Mercy in 1966 and who is on both In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, is a good illustration of how short the road was from one to the other.

Key idea: Fusion is not modal jazz plus electricity by coincidence. Static harmony is what made rock rhythm and jazz improvising compatible in the first place.

Three: the studio becomes an instrument

This is the change students most often miss, and it is the most consequential. Until the late 1960s a jazz record documented a performance. From In a Silent Way, recorded on 18 February 1969, it stopped doing that.

The producer Teo Macero recorded hours of playing and then cut the tape. He removed passages, repeated others, spliced sections in a new order and added echo. Whole stretches of the released records exist only as edits: a passage appears, disappears, and returns at the end of the side because Macero physically spliced a copy of it there. The musicians in the room did not play the piece you hear. They supplied material out of which the piece was assembled.

That is a working method from rock and from electronic music, and it changes what a jazz record is. Compare it with Lesson 4: in 1917 a record was a three-minute performance captured by an acoustic horn, with everything the machine could not hear left out. By 1969 the record is the composition and the performance is the raw material.

Four: volume, and the room

Amplification is not just louder. A saxophone competing with a stack of amplifiers must play differently, and a drummer working against an electric bass through a large rig hits harder and simplifies. The venues changed with the volume: from clubs seating a hundred and fifty to halls and festivals seating thousands, which changes the economics, the repertoire and how much a solo can rely on detail.

	Hard bop, roughly 1958	Fusion, roughly 1973
Eighth notes	Swung, long-short	Even
Unit of form	The chorus, counted in bars	The vamp, ended by decision
Bass	Walking quarter notes, acoustic	A repeating figure, electric
Harmony	Chords moving every bar or two	One or two chords held
The record	A document of a take	An assembly of edited tape
Venue	A club with tables	A hall or a festival field

The bands the sessions produced

Almost everyone in the Bitches Brew studio led a fusion group within three years.

• Weather Report, formed in 1970 by Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, was the longest lived and the most collective; its records use synthesizers as orchestral colour, and after the electric bassist Jaco Pastorius joined in 1976 it produced Heavy Weather, from 1977, and the piece Birdland, named for the club in Lesson 10.
• The Mahavishnu Orchestra, formed by John McLaughlin in 1971, took the loudest and fastest road: distorted guitar, violin, odd metres such as seven and nine beats to the bar, and unison lines played at high speed by guitar and violin together.
• Return to Forever, led by Chick Corea from 1972, began with Brazilian rhythms and acoustic textures and turned electric the following year.
• The Headhunters, Herbie Hancock's band of 1973, went furthest towards funk. Head Hunters is built on Paul Jackson's bass figures and Hancock's clavinet, and it sold in quantities that made it one of the best-selling jazz albums ever released.

The sell-out charge, and the answer

The objection came quickly and it is the same objection that had greeted Ellington's Carnegie Hall works in 1943 and free jazz in 1961, which should make you suspicious of it. It ran: this is jazz stripped of the things that made it jazz, harmonic sophistication and swing, in exchange for record sales.

The defence has two parts, and both are worth taking seriously.

The economic part is simply true. In 1970 a successful rock album sold in numbers a successful jazz album could not approach, and the venues paid accordingly. Musicians who had spent fifteen years in clubs took the work that existed. Nobody in this history has ever been in a position to ignore money, and the story of Lesson 6 is that the swing era was an industry before it was a style.

The musical part is Davis's own. His argument, made repeatedly in interviews and in his autobiography, was that the audience he cared about, young Black listeners, had gone to Sly Stone, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, and that a music which could not speak to them had made itself irrelevant. Read against Lesson 10, where hard bop turned towards the church and the jukebox for exactly the same reason, the move looks less like a break and more like a habit.

What the charge does capture is what happened next. By the late 1970s a large amount of what was sold as fusion had lost the improvising and kept the surface, and the smooth jazz format that grew from it is a genuine simplification. The distance between Bitches Brew and an instrumental radio hit is real. It is just not a distance that any single decision created.

In short: Fusion changed the rhythm, the form and the way a record was made, and it did so for reasons that were half aesthetic and half commercial, which has been true of every change in this course.

Common misconceptions

• Fusion means jazz with electric instruments. Charlie Christian was amplified in 1939 and Jimmy Smith's organ is electric; the changes that matter are rhythmic, formal and technological.
• Bitches Brew was a live performance. Teo Macero assembled the released album from edited tape, and much of what you hear was never played in that order.
• Fusion abandoned harmony. It inherited the static harmony of modal jazz, which is a choice rather than an absence.
• Miles Davis invented fusion in 1969. Tony Williams's Lifetime, with McLaughlin and Larry Young, was working in 1969 too, and Davis's own electric records begin in 1968.
• Fusion and smooth jazz are the same thing. The commercial radio format grew out of fusion by removing most of the improvising, which is a change of kind.

What to carry forward

• Bitches Brew was recorded from 19 August 1969, the day after Woodstock ended, with a dozen musicians and several electric keyboards at once.
• Electric instruments do not define fusion; even eighth notes, the vamp, tape editing and volume do.
• The vamp is a mode held, so fusion's harmony descends directly from Kind of Blue.
• Teo Macero built In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew by cutting and splicing tape, making the record a composition rather than a document.
• Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever and the Headhunters all came out of those sessions or their personnel.
• The sell-out charge repeats an argument already made against Ellington in 1943 and free jazz in 1961.
• Davis's answer was that his audience had moved to Sly Stone, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, which is the same reasoning that produced hard bop.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Bitches Brew. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Britannica. (n.d.). Herbie Hancock. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
3. Britannica. (n.d.). Chick Corea. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
4. Davis, M., with Troupe, Q. (1989). Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster.
5. Nicholson, S. (1998). Jazz-Rock: A History. New York: Schirmer Books.

A trumpeter wins in two categories

At the Grammy ceremony in February 1984 a twenty-two-year-old trumpeter from New Orleans won awards for both a jazz recording and a classical one. Nobody had done that before. He did it again the following year. His name was Wynton Marsalis, he had come out of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, the apprenticeship system of Lesson 10, and over the next two decades he became the most powerful figure in American jazz, not only as a player but as an administrator, an educator and an advocate of a specific idea about what jazz is.

That idea, and the reaction against it, is the last argument this course has to describe. It is also the argument in which everything else you have learned gets used as evidence by both sides.

What institutionalisation actually consisted of

The word sounds abstract. It is not: it is a list of dated institutions, and the list is the story.

Year	What happened
1947	North Texas State established the first degree programme in jazz studies at an American university
1973	The Smithsonian issued the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, compiled by Martin Williams: a canon in a box
1982	The National Endowment for the Arts created the Jazz Masters fellowships, its highest honour in the field
1987	Lincoln Center added a three-concert summer jazz series to an institution built around an opera house and a philharmonic
1990	The Smithsonian founded its own Jazz Masterworks Orchestra to perform the repertoire
1996	Jazz at Lincoln Center became a full constituent of Lincoln Center, alongside the opera and the ballet
1997	Marsalis won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for the oratorio Blood on the Fields, the first jazz work to do so
2004	Frederick P. Rose Hall opened in New York, the first performance complex built for jazz

Set that beside Lesson 7, where the Pulitzer board refused Duke Ellington in 1965, and Lesson 13, where free players organised their own concerts in a cafe in 1964 because nobody would book them. In forty years the music went from having no institutional standing to having a purpose-built hall on Columbus Circle. That is a real gain, and it came with conditions.

The neoclassical case, at its strongest

The position associated with Marsalis and with the writers Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch is not merely conservative taste. It is an argument, and it goes roughly like this.

Jazz is a specific tradition with identifiable materials: blues feeling, swing rhythm, the negotiated relationship between an individual improviser and a group. Those materials are an achievement of African American culture, developed over a century, and they are what makes the music what it is rather than something else. A music that abandons swing and the blues may be good music, but calling it jazz empties the word.

The practical consequence follows. If jazz is a tradition, it needs what other traditions have: a repertoire that is performed rather than only recorded, orchestras to perform it, archives, teaching, and standards. A conservatoire student learns Beethoven before writing symphonies; a jazz student should learn Armstrong, Ellington and Parker before deciding what to discard. Murray's Stomping the Blues, from 1976, makes the underlying cultural argument, and Marsalis built an institution on it.

Worth holding on to: The neoclassical position is a claim about ownership as much as about style: that a Black American art form was entitled to the same preservation, funding and prestige that European music had always received.

The case against, at its strongest

The objections are of several kinds and they do not all come from the same people.

The first is about the definition's consequences. If blues and swing are necessary conditions, then a very large amount of what the musicians themselves considered jazz falls outside the boundary: most of Miles Davis's last twenty years, Herbie Hancock's best-selling album, the whole of Cecil Taylor, the AACM, Weather Report, and much of the European music that ECM had been releasing from Munich since 1969, including Keith Jarrett's solo concert in Cologne on 24 January 1975, which sold more copies than any solo piano record in the music's history. A definition that excludes that much is doing something other than describing.

The second is about how a canon behaves once it exists. Repertory orchestras play written arrangements of old records. Degree programmes examine what can be graded, which favours harmonic knowledge and transcription over the qualities that made the records worth transcribing. Students learn to play correctly in a style that was made by people breaking rules. Critics of jazz education have argued for decades that it produces technically formidable players with interchangeable voices, and the criticism has enough truth in it to sting.

The third is about power. By the 1990s a small number of institutions controlled a large share of the money, the bookings and the prizes, and their definition determined who received them.

January 2001, on television

The argument reached the general public through Ken Burns's documentary series Jazz, broadcast by PBS in January 2001: ten episodes, roughly nineteen hours, with Marsalis and Crouch among its principal on-screen commentators.

The reaction is instructive. The series was widely praised for its first two thirds and widely attacked for its last hour, which compressed the previous forty years into a brief and largely dismissive segment: fusion treated as a wrong turn, free jazz handled quickly, and the story resolving into Marsalis's arrival as a restoration. Roughly half the music this module covers was, in effect, an epilogue.

What that shows is not that the film was dishonest. It is that a narrative history has to decide what the story is for, and this one decided the story ended in the recovery of a tradition. A different film could have decided that the story is one of continuous rule-breaking, and it would have ended somewhere else entirely.

What kept happening anyway

While the argument ran, musicians went on working, and the last thirty years have been more varied than either side predicted.

• Steve Coleman and the M-Base musicians in Brooklyn built improvised music on complex cyclic rhythms from the mid-1980s.
• Maria Schneider took the Ellington and Gil Evans line of large-ensemble composition forward and won repeated Grammy awards for it.
• Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer and Cecile McLorin Salvant have all received MacArthur fellowships, which puts jazz musicians among the recipients of the most prestigious general arts award in the country.
• Robert Glasper's Black Radio, in 2012, worked the border with hip hop and rhythm and blues, and won a Grammy in an rhythm and blues category rather than a jazz one.
• Esperanza Spalding won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2011, the first jazz musician to do so, over much better-known pop nominees.
• Kamasi Washington's The Epic, three hours long and released in 2015, found a young audience largely outside the jazz apparatus.
• A London scene around Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Ezra Collective connected jazz to Caribbean and West African rhythm and to club culture; Ezra Collective won the Mercury Prize in 2023.

Notice that several of these musicians were trained in exactly the degree programmes the critics complain about, and that several of them do things the neoclassical definition excludes. The institution and the rule-breaking turn out not to be opposites.

How a jam session works, which is the course in miniature

Finish with the practice, because the argument above is settled in rooms rather than in essays. Walk into a jam session anywhere in the world tonight and this is what happens.

Somebody calls a tune. Not a piece of sheet music: a title, a key and a tempo. Autumn Leaves in G minor, medium up. Everyone is expected to know it, or to know it well enough. The shared repertoire lives partly in a book called the Real Book, which began in the mid-1970s as an unauthorised collection of lead sheets compiled by students at Berklee, was copied and sold illegally for thirty years, and was finally published legally from 2004. A canon assembled by students photocopying each other is a fair emblem of how this music actually transmits.

The head. The horns play the melody once through the form, in unison or in harmony, with the rhythm section comping behind. This is the practice of Lesson 6 and it has not changed since 1935.

Solos, counted in choruses. Players take turns, each improvising over the same repeating form, for as many choruses as they can justify. The pianist and guitarist comp, the bass walks, the drummer plays time and responds. A soloist signals the end by playing something conclusive; the next one comes in at the top of the next chorus.

Trading. Near the end the horns trade fours with the drummer: four bars each, alternating, all the way around the form. Sometimes eights, sometimes twos if the group is showing off. This is call and response from Lesson 1, unbroken since the work song.

The head out. The melody returns, once, and the piece ends, often on a tag, a short repeated cadence that lets the band land together.

Every element in that description has a date in this course. Collective playing and call and response from the nineteenth century; blues form and blue notes from the 1900s; the chorus and the AABA from the swing era; comping and the ride cymbal from bebop; chord-scale thinking from 1959. A jam session in 2026 is the accumulated practice of a hundred and twenty years, run by four people who have never met.

The point: The tradition is not preserved mainly in halls and syllabuses. It is preserved in a set of shared procedures that let strangers make coherent music together on ten seconds' notice, and those procedures are what this course has been teaching you all along.

Common misconceptions

• Jazz education began with Jazz at Lincoln Center. The first university degree programme dates from 1947, and Blakey's band was an apprenticeship system before that.
• The neoclassical position is simply nostalgia. It is an argument about cultural ownership and about what a tradition needs in order to survive as a living practice.
• Institutions killed the music. The most inventive musicians of the last twenty years frequently came through conservatoires, and several hold the fellowships and prizes the institutions award.
• Ken Burns's Jazz was simply wrong. It was a narrative that chose an ending, and the criticism is about that choice rather than about its facts.
• Jazz died commercially and became a museum art. Its commercial share is small, but records by Glasper, Washington, Spalding and the London players have reached audiences that no repertory concert reaches.

Pulling it together

• Wynton Marsalis won Grammy awards in jazz and classical categories in the same year, first in February 1984, and became the central figure in the institutionalisation of jazz.
• The institutions have dates: a degree programme in 1947, the Smithsonian collection in 1973, the NEA Jazz Masters in 1982, Lincoln Center from 1987 and 1996, the Pulitzer in 1997, Rose Hall in 2004.
• The neoclassical argument makes blues feeling and swing definitional, and treats jazz as a tradition owed the preservation European music receives.
• Against it: the definition excludes an enormous amount of what musicians did, canons reward the gradeable, and a few institutions came to control the money.
• Ken Burns's Jazz, broadcast in January 2001, put the argument on television and compressed forty years into its final hour.
• The music continued regardless, from M-Base and Maria Schneider to Glasper, Spalding, Kamasi Washington and the London scene.
• A jam session runs on called tunes, a head, solos counted in choruses, trading fours and a head out, which is the whole practical content of this course in one set.

Sources

1. Britannica. (n.d.). Wynton Marsalis. Encyclopaedia Britannica. britannica.com
2. Jazz at Lincoln Center. (n.d.). About Jazz at Lincoln Center. jazz.org
3. National Endowment for the Arts. (n.d.). NEA Jazz Masters. arts.gov
4. Smithsonian Institution. (n.d.). Smithsonian Jazz. National Museum of American History. americanhistory.si.edu
5. Giddins, G., and DeVeaux, S. (2009). Jazz. New York: W. W. Norton.
6. Murray, A. (1976). Stomping the Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill.