Jazz developed as a Black music and ethnic/cultural expression. It is based on blues, West African reminisces, and field shouts, mixed with European parlor and band melodies, organized for performing dances and entertaining people. Bands provided entertainment and soulful expression for musicians who were sometimes serious, aloof, focused, and always dedicated to making original, innovative blends. But the great artful expression that emerged is modern jazz improvisation: the perfect blend of the skillful use of one’s imaginative expression and the logical navigation, negotiation, and composing of musical elements, such as form, melody, harmony, and rhythm. With jazz, there emerged a new identity: the jazz artist. As early as the 1920s—in the midst of some of the most damaging racial propaganda in Hollywood, including Amos ’n Andy—Black artistry refuted stereotypes by producing a class of respectable, skilled, educated artists whose work was recognized as genius.
An important phase of jazz as a recognized American form was its acceptance by elitist White musical circles. Internationally renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski, for example, had this to say:
Jazz has come to stay because it is an expression of the times, of the breathless, energetic, super active times in which we are living; it is useless to fight against it. The Negro musicians of America are playing a great part in this change. They have an open mind, and unbiased outlook. They are not hampered by conventions or traditions, and with their new ideas, their constant experiment, they are causing new blood to flow in the veins of music. They are pathfinders into new realms.1
Stokowski echoed the sentiments of composer Antonin Dvorˇák, who wrote in 1893 that the future music of America would be found in Negro melodies. Leonard Bernstein, arguing in his 1939 Harvard thesis for a new and vital American nationalism, wrote:
Negro jazz, Negro music, Negro Art, Negro melodic peculiarities, Negro scale variants, Negro poignancy, special Negro flavor, Negro timbre, Negro singing voice, Negro character, Negro species of melodic syncopation, Negro rhythmic patterns, Negro tone color, Negro manner, Negro harmonies and the Negro scale. The greatest single racial influence upon American music as a whole has been the Negro.
Jazz became the musical approach, style, language, and cultural identity associated with the new modernism in music culture, and improvisation became the great benchmark of excellence. The blues was initially vocal-based music and a form, style, and approach to playing. Jazz was first born out of the blues styling as instrumentalists emulated the vocal tradition, making the horns “speak” like a blues singer. While blues singing may well have represented traditional vernacular folk-based style, assimilated Black communities emerged in urban America and their interests dominated jazz.
The sentiment of what was called the “New Negro” was largely reflected in a manifesto by university professor and writer Alain Locke. The New Negro—modern, urban, and self-liberated—created the need for sophisticated forms that expressed these new identities. Segments of Black people felt, too, that vernacular music was “shameful.” This stemmed from their own struggles in navigating the map and maze of integration into White society. Despite this, jazz became the next highly stylized instrumental musical form, growing from the vernacular song traditions of the slave hollers, spirituals, blues, and ragtime.
By the end of the nineteenth century, jazz was an urban American music form that had fused with Western European harmonic developments. This cultural amalgamation resulted from the artistic individuality of Black musicians, and the sharing among American gigging musicians. Music historians ask the critical question: “Is jazz Black music?” Yes, it is. It grew directly from Black inquiry, need, and experimentation. But jazz was influenced by and resulted from an open cultural exchange among many communities—Black American, Western European, African, and more. All together, these bake and make this American tradition.
Jazz emerged as the popular voice of the new industrialized, “cultured,” and rich America. From the 1920s to the 1950s, this new American style helped to socialize the country in ways that, for the first time, made Black artistry and imagery acceptable. Again, the artistry of figures like Louis Armstrong as an early ambassador projected this American art and human-expressive style internationally. In modern life, “image” is everything. Before the New Negro jazz image, Blacks were portrayed in cartoons as monkeys, hairy dumb creatures, and happy, overweight cooking mammies. Jazz music allowed Black accomplishment and artistry to be exported internationally.
Jazz art became America’s popular music, which everybody danced to, loved, and dreamed. Of all the Black musical forms, jazz is the most highly developed from a craft perspective. Yet jazz also maintained most of the aesthetic, artistic standards and staples of the earlier forms, including improvisation, rhythmic dynamism, group interaction, and African-derived expressions of scoops, growls, and blued scale formations. In every way, jazz is an attempt to emulate Black vocal styling. Jazz is also “move and groove” music. It must swing.
One of the most respected, popular, and productive musicians to develop during the 1920s–1940s was the composer, pianist, and bandleader Duke Ellington (1899–1974). Born in Washington, D.C., he emerged in Harlem at the time of the Cotton Club (1927), a hot music and entertainment spot in New York that had a national radio broadcast. This helped Ellington gain national status as a music radio star at a time when New York was recognized as a cultural center of the world. Ellington also emerged during the height of the New Negro movement. Ralph Ellison would later write, “Even though few recognized it, such artists as Ellington and Louis Armstrong were the stewards of our vaunted American optimism and guardians against the creeping irrationality which ever plagues our form of society.”2 The music of Duke Ellington and his band represented the highest mark of musical excellence and artistry. His work and dedication to creating and cultivating high Black music forms made him the quintessential griot.
In this way, jazz, as seen through the work of Ellington and many other artists, heightened the image of Blacks as thinkers who were accomplished, respectable, and “cultured.” Jazz was also associated with the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance. By the 1920s, writers like James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke proclaimed Harlem an intense cultural community, promoting Black diversity, and holding the greatest promise for the revival of the arts and for a “crossroads of culture.” As Locke wrote, “In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is the race capital. The Negro celebrates the attainment of a significant and satisfactory new phase of group development.”3
Writers, artists, poets, playwrights, choreographers, and composers sought to prove the greatness of the Black race through arts and literature. As a musical and cultural figure, Duke Ellington emerged as a central icon.
The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.
—Paul Robeson, Here I Stand
Of all the artists from this period, no one better exemplifies the artistscholar-activist model than Paul Robeson. He was a singer, athlete, scholar, lawyer, and social activist who used his art to advocate for suffering people all over the world. His work and his presence as a Black artist and activist set the pattern for other Black artists, not only to accept the power and challenge of their work for art’s sake, but to speak the truth for the causes of people.
Born on April 9, 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey, Robeson was the youngest of five children. His father was a runaway slave who went on to graduate from Lincoln University, and his mother came from a family of Quakers who worked for the abolition of slavery. He came from a family familiar with hardship and with the determination to rise above it. In 1915, Robeson won a four-year academic scholarship to Rutgers University. In spite of open violence and racism expressed by teammates, Robeson won fifteen varsity letters in baseball, basketball, and track, and was twice named to the All American Football team. He was valedictorian of his graduating class in 1919. He chose to use his artistic talents in theater and music to promote African and African American history and culture. He is an early example and one of the greatest of the “race men.”
On stage in London, Robeson earned international critical acclaim for his lead role in Othello; he won the Donaldson Award for Best Acting Performance in 1944; he performed in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings as well as in the musical Showboat. He is known for changing the lines of the Showboat song “Old Man River” from “I’m tired of livin’ and ’feared of dyin’ . . . ” to a stronger and more dignified “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dying . . . ” His eleven films included Body and Soul (1925), Jericho (1937), and The Proud Valley (1940).
Robeson used his voice to promote Black artistic traditions, to share the cultures of other countries, and to benefit the social movements of the times in which he lived. He sang for peace and justice in twenty-five languages throughout the United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa. Robeson became known as a citizen of the world, as comfortable with the people of Moscow and Nairobi as with the people of Harlem. In 1933, he donated the proceeds of All God’s Chillun to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Germany.
In New York in 1939, he premiered in Earl Robinson’s Ballad for Ameri- cans, celebrating the multiethnic, multiracial face of America. It was greeted with the largest audience response for a radio program since Orson Welles’s famous War of the Worlds a year earlier. During the 1940s, Robeson continued to perform and speak out against racism in the United States and for peace among nations. In 1945, he headed an organization that challenged President Truman to support an antilynching law. In the late 1940s, when dissent was scarcely tolerated in the United States, Robeson openly questioned why African Americans should fight in the army of a government that tolerated racism.
Like numerous American artists speaking out during this time, he was accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of being a communist. Robeson saw this claim as an outright attack on the democratic rights of the many people like himself who worked for friendship with other nations and equal rights for all people. After he was condemned by the panel, 80 percent of his concerts were canceled. In 1949, his two outdoor concerts in Peekskill, New York, were attacked by White mobs while state police stood by. In response, Robeson declared, “I’m going to sing wherever the people want me to sing . . . and I won’t be frightened by crosses burning in Peekskill or anywhere else.”
In 1950, the U.S. government revoked Robeson’s passport, leading to an eight-year battle to secure it again. During those years, Robeson studied Chinese, met with Albert Einstein to discuss the prospects of world peace, published his autobiography Here I Stand, and sang at Carnegie Hall. In 1960, he made his last concert tour, to New Zealand and Australia. Suffering from ill health, he retired from public life in 1963 and died on January 23, 1976, at age seventy-seven, in Philadelphia. But his towering artistic presence and great model of artistic dignity, using his art to challenge, change, and inspire the world, made him one of the most pervasive American artists of the twentieth century.
Born April 9, 1877, Florence Smith Price was the first Black woman concert composer to reach national recognition. From Little Rock, she was the third child of James H. Smith, the first Black dentist in that city, who was also a published author, inventor, and civil rights advocate. Her mother, Florence Gulliver, was a schoolteacher and business woman as well as a singer and pianist. She taught elementary school, working for the Black-owned International Loan and Trust Company, purchasing a restaurant and selling real estate. This was an incredible feat for a Black woman in the nineteenth century. It’s easy to understand the productivity of a child reared in such a home. From an early age, Price was exposed to a progressive Black community that sponsored social, political, educational, and cultural events, drawing national Black figures to Little Rock. She attended the New England Conservatory of Music from 1903 to 1906, graduating with a degree in organ music and a teacher’s diploma in piano.
She taught at the Cotton-Plant Arkadelphia Academy until 1907 and Shorter College in Little Rock until 1910, later heading the music department at Clark University (1910–1912). After marrying Thomas Price, an attorney, she stopped teaching and established a private studio in her home. In 1927, the intolerable racial climate of Little Rock caused the family to move to Chicago, where Florence Price established herself as a concert pianist and composer. Major publishers began contracting her works—Theodore Presser, G. Schirmer, and Carl Fischer, to name a few. In 1932, Price won the Wanamaker Music Composition Contest for her Symphony in E.
The premiere of this piece by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in June 1933 signaled Price as the first African American woman to have a work produced by a major American orchestra. During her career, Price wrote over 300 compositions, including symphonies, concertos, chamber works, art songs, and settings of spirituals for voice and piano. Her best-known spiritual, “My Soul’s Been Anchored in De Lord,” has been performed by Ellabelle Davis, Marian Anderson, and Leontyne Price. WGN’s Radio Symphony Orchestra recorded many of her songs in the 1930s. Her instrumental music reflected the influence of her cultural themes, such as dance music with the southern plantation juba expressed in a classical form. She was one of the few women who characterized the high point of the New Negro movement, particularly in classical/concert music. Florence Price died in Chicago in 1953. She is remembered as a great American classical music composer, and the first great recognized Black American woman composer in the United States.
In 1930, William Grant Still created the singularly most recognizable and important work by a twentieth-century Black composer, The Afro- American Symphony. It is the first symphony based on the American blues form. Long known as the “Dean of American Negro Composers,” as well as one of America’s foremost composers, Still had the distinction of becoming a legend in his own lifetime. It is important to note that in the early days of the twentieth century, it was extremely rare for a Black man to gain wide acceptance in the European-based field of classical music. The title “Dean“ seems appropriate due to the great work and strides Still made to forge a Black voice deep into the identity of classical music.
Still was the first African American in the United States to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. He was also the first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States when, in 1936, he directed the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl. He was the first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the Deep South when, in 1955, he directed the New Orleans Philharmonic at Southern University. And he was the first Black to conduct a White radio orchestra in New York City. He was also the first to have an opera produced by a major U.S. company. In 1949, his Troubled Island was performed at the City Center of Music and Drama in New York City. He was also the first Black to have an opera televised over a national network. With all these firsts, Still was, clearly, a pioneer. In a larger sense, he pioneered because he was able to interest the greatest conductors of the day in his music, which was truly serious and had a definite American flavor. Still wrote hundreds of compositions—including operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber works, and arrangements of folk themes, especially Negro spirituals, plus instrumental, choral, and solo vocal works.
Born May 11, 1895, in Woodville, Mississippi, to parents who were teachers and musicians, Still was only a few months old when his father died and his mother took him to Little Rock, where she taught English in high school. There his musical education began with violin lessons from a private teacher, and with later inspiration from the Red Seal operatic recordings bought for him by his stepfather. At Wilberforce University, he took courses leading to a B.S. degree but spent most of his time conducting the band, learning to play various instruments, and making his initial attempts to compose and to orchestrate. His subsequent studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music were financed at first by a legacy from his father, and later by a scholarship established just for him by the faculty.
At the end of his college years, Still entered the world of popular music, playing in orchestras and orchestrating, working particularly with the violin, cello, and oboe. His employers included W. C. Handy, Donald Voorhees, Sophie Tucker, Paul Whiteman, Willard Robison, and Artie Shaw, and for several years he arranged and conducted the Deep River Hour over CBS and WOR. While in Boston, playing oboe in the Shuffle Along Orchestra, Still applied to study at the New England Conservatory with American composer George Chadwick, and he was again rewarded with a scholarship. Still also studied on an individual scholarship with the noted ultra-modern composer Edgard Varese.
Of particular interest was Still’s association with W. C. Handy. Still succeeded Fletcher Henderson as music director for Harry Pace’s Black Swan Records. He was in the heat and heart of the emerging race records and the Harlem Renaissance, creating music that was steeped in Black vernacular and American popular and classical music traditions.
In the 1920s, Still made his first appearances as a serious composer in New York and began a valued friendship with Howard Hanson of Rochester. Extended Guggenheim and Rosenwald Fellowships were given to him, as well as important commissions from the Columbia Broadcasting System, the New York World’s Fair, Paul Whiteman, the League of Composers, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and the American Accordionists Association. In 1944, with a work called “Festive Overture,” he won the Jubilee Prize of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for the best overture to celebrate its Jubilee season. In 1961, he received the prize offered by the U.S. Committee for the United Nations and the Aeolian Music Foundation for his orchestral work The Peaceful Land, cited as the best musical composition honoring the United Nations.
After receiving a master’s degree in music from Wilberforce in 1936, he earned honorary doctorates from Howard University, Oberlin College, Bates College, the University of Arkansas, Pepperdine University, the New England Conservatory of Music, the Peabody Conservatory, and the University of Southern California. There are few American symphonists who have received such acclaim and made such an imprint on American music traditions. William Grant Still singlehandedly wrote the codes for what it could mean to be a Black American composing artist in the classical music field.
The commercialization and mainstream acceptance of jazz led to a new form—swing, America’s popular dance music. Composer Duke Ellington’s 1932 hit is aptly titled “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” Swing became an all-meaningful code for Black music culture as an aesthetic prescription for the music. Black music to be of value must swing. During the Depression, the music helped to lift up America. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal took hold, clubs opened on 52nd Street in New York. NBC featured a weekly Saturday-night three-hour radio broadcast entitled Let’s Dance. America experienced a cultural upsurge, with music originally created in Black communities and sold as swing. Benny Goodman, a Jewish champion of Black music, became the “King of Swing.” The bands of Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, and Glenn Miller were among the best known of the hundreds of territory bands that roamed the United States during the period, playing jazz/swing music and creating a huge industry.
May 11, 1937, is a wonderful moment in music history: the “Battle of the Century,” as the Benny Goodman Band and the most famous New York Black Swing band, the Chick Webb Orchestra, “battled it out” at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. In some other ways, this was symbolic of the unspoken battle over cultural ownership. Who was the real master of swing, a White musician crowned King of Swing, or the accepted Black leader of the Black dance-hall band in Harlem? In addition to the records and radio programs to which people listened, it was in what Guthrie Ramsey calls the “cultural theaters” that the codes, styles, and conventions that shaped music culture were defined. Here, the band that “swung” the hardest and got the best people and dance response won. That night, the two warring swing bands battled and played. And the Chick Webb Orchestra won, a Black band, composed of those who created and then redefined swing on Black musical terms.
In the 1930s and into the 1940s, Kansas City became another great city for defining and shaping Black music. William “Count” Basie (1904–1984), a prodigy of the great piano songwriter and performer Fats Waller, would, like Duke Ellington, become one of the principal stars of the new swing era. Though born in New Jersey, Count Basie came to call Kansas City home. Kansas City had become a major rail town and stopping place, where politics, hustling, bustling, and “adult entertainment” thrived. Many musicians were drawn there for work in the entertainment houses. Kansas City not only produced an important list of major Black artists (Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, and Jimmy Rushing, among others), but it became a place where “jamming jazz” developed, the blues-grounded, big-band swing style known as jazz blues. This was a “riffing” and a kind of groove-oriented playing with the rhythm section. It was the music of Jo Jones, Walter Page, Freddie Green, and Basie.
The mayor of Kansas City at that time was a gangster named Tom Pendergrass. Territory bands, traveling big-band units, went from town to town, and Kansas City was a stop where Pendergrass allowed the music culture to thrive. Walter Page’s Blue Devils, the Bennie Moten Band, Andy Kirk and his Twelve Clouds of Joy are examples of Black working bands from which many future players were to emerge, and they spent time in Kansas City. Count Basie took over the Bennie Moten Band and soon became a regular music attraction, with his unique mixture of traditional jazz and a strong emphasis on the blues. Many southerners, first-generation migrants, had settled in Kansas City. Basie’s music helped keep the southern blues flavor alive. Soloists like the great jazz saxophonist Lester Young sat in the Basie band. Jimmy Rushing was the great vocalist.
Soon Pete Johnson, Albert Ammonds, and Mead Lux Lewis introduced boogie woogie, another influential piano style of the late 1930s and 1940s. Mary Lou Williams, who began in Kansas City, became known as the first lady of modern jazz. She became the pianist and arranger for the Andy Kirk Band. Charlie Parker came and played with the Jay McShann Band. Black bands prospered and perfected the Black codes for swing.
In Kansas City’s “jamming jazz” sessions, musicians jammed on the blues and jazz standards well into the next morning. In this band context, there rose the soloists of the great Black big bands. Duke Ellington’s band, for example, contained Rex Stewart, Joe Nanton, Barney Bigard, Paul Gonsalves, Bubber Miley, Ray Nance, Cootie Williams, Harry Carney, Jimmy Blanton, Freddie Guy, Lonnie Johnson, Cat Anderson, Johnny Hodges, and Ben Webster. Billie Holiday emerged as a unique soloist with a completely original style and approach to singing. She helped to create the identity of “the modern lady” as a singer. Other Black bands from this period included those of Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, Andy Kirk, Billy Eckstine, Lucky Millender, Lionel Hampton, Erskine Hawkins, and Chick Webb.
As jazz music developed after the Harlem Renaissance, it began to be “its own self,” a music apart from commercial entertainment, and a music seen as “art.” Bebop represented a Black sophisticated, liberated, smart, and stylish art with attitude, a social philosophy and dress. As bebop developed, it became difficult to trace what was happening with Black music, and to isolate Black music culture from American music culture. Driven by economics, global relations, technology, and a tremendous number of exchanges, innovations, and experiments by many artists—Black, White, and international— music became an amalgamation of many influences.
As fast as artists created, there were markets demanding the next thing. American music follows the trends of society, but music pacifies society as well. There became, with the post-WWII capitalistic surge, the need for “cultural diversions.” During this time, popular culture became firmly cemented as part of the American entertainment industry. Music-making simply became a part of the social matrix.
The jazz art had become the “most sophisticated” or refined of the forms within the Black arts continuum. There are several reasons for this. Because it is instrumental music, it requires a great amount of technical craft and facility. In addition, it is a form associated with accompanying and emulating Black vocal style. Further, it placed a premium on an artist focusing on expression and craft, on interpreting and performing simultaneously and at rapid speeds. It left its vernacular folk form and developed into a hybrid of other cultural perspectives, erupting during a time of great social awareness, as America searched for cultural identity. To probe through this art in even more philosophical ways, jazz forms, as they developed later, could further be described as:
The jazz musician provides a great example of an artist at the highest level. In hearing the advanced soloist, one has the sense of what it “costs” to speak. In some profound way, improvisation emphasizes why it is dehumanizing to have the liberty of speech somehow taken away. There is this great sense of the importance of “saying something.”
This is likened to the Black church experience where a parishioner may shout out to a preacher, “Ahh, you saying something now.” The opportunity to speak is not taken for granted, and the solo is the great benchmark of the jazz artist’s ability. Black music, especially in jazz, is so very profound in this way because it relies on one’s lived experience for its meaning and the quality of its expressiveness. As Charlie Parker often said, “Music is your own experience. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” Popular music attained the heightened sense of an individual’s artistic expression from the jazz musician, especially the beboppers, the grandfather of hip hop.
As with the earlier vernacular Black music, jazz is the continued attempt to emulate the sound of the Black voice. Vocalist-musician extraordinaire Sarah Vaughan was the next great style/voice, and continuation of the modern woman in the art form from the bebop era after Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. She was to bop what Bessie Smith was to blues, what Ella was to swing, and what Billie Holiday was to setting the new image and sound to the first years of the modern age of jazz. Vaughan was the definitive diva and a pianist, too. These women represent the “sound” jazz is attempting to reach. But the bebop approach was a cultural movement within jazz, complete with a new aesthetic, language, and even a dress code. And as Miles Davis put it, “The movement was like reading a textbook to the future of jazz music.”
At the start of World War II, younger Black musicians were left at home to fight discrimination and forge their identities. It was during this time, particularly in the performing venues where they hung out, that bebop emerged. It is of note that this early emergence was not really recorded, due to two factors:
This situation meant that we have relatively few recorded performances of the bebop style of the early 1940s. This continued until the war ended, in 1945.
In the 1940s, “the Street,” 52nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, featured Art Tatum, Oscar Pettiford, Coleman Hawkins, and more. But uptown Harlem was where the Black musicians lived and hung out and where the new music originated. Musician Teddy Hill managed Minton’s Playhouse on 118th Street in Harlem, and this is one of the major spots where bebop was experimented on and worked. Minton’s, Monroe’s Uptown House—these spots and others gave free food to musicians who came to play their own “nonphony music.” Henry Minton was the first Black union member in New York and believed in helping musicians. Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke, Thelonious Monk, and others created at Minton’s the new music called bebop. The Billy Eckstine Band, believed to be the first bebop big band, had critical players, including Miles Davis, Kenny Durham, Bird, Dizzy, Art Blakey, Sonny Stitt, Dexter Gordon, J. J. Johnson, and Sarah Vaughan. And the exchange of ideas among these musicians defined the musical codes that set the pace for modern Black popular music at this time.
Classic bop dominated in 1945–1949, so Charlie Parker, born in 1920, was twenty-five at the start of this movement, and Dizzy Gillespie, born 1917, was twenty-eight. These young artists are the principal definers of the bebop style codes. Bop was a “surprise music,” an underground movement made by the younger Black musicians in Harlem. Bop was a musical revolution marked by several shifts in approaches to jazz. Bebop could be heard in scat singing and was really a name for the rhythmic way the musical phrases ended. In swing, there were little or no solos and most of the music was written to highlight arrangers’ work for dance. Big-band improvisers based their solos off of sweet melodies, whereas bop solos were based on a working knowledge of the chord changes. The emphasis is on the soloist’s inventive fluidity, moving through the changes and turnarounds. Coleman Hawkins, the first great sax jazz soloist, in 1939 recorded a remarkable solo on the standard “Body and Soul,” and it was the great early “pointing the way” example of modern jazz performance improvisation. Many bebop composers took old jazz swing standards and rewrote them with hipper melodies, altering the chord changes. Titles obviously were poetic attempts to be slick, offbeat, hep, and a rethinking of the old guard. The boppers wanted their work to be for musicians and for the music.
All this came out of an atomic bomb attack—the idea of traversing the divide between a younger and older generation, through approach, style, values. The music had broken, harder-edged phrases, dislocated rhythms. There were fractured ballads and the deconstruction of standard tunes reconstructed. Their emphasis was on blues tonality and altering, by extension, the harmonic vocabulary. To the older generation, it all sounded frantic, neurotic, and sped up. These younger musicians were rewriting the musical/cultural codes.
Bebop, after World War II, was in full swing, especially once the recording ban was lifted. Charlie “Yardbird” Parker—“Bird”—became the first great genius of the new bebop style. He had a new approach to playing because he brought the blues from Kansas City. The glue that held bebop together was the phrasing, and as writer Stanley Crouch noted, Bird brought the “pyrotechnics.” Parker’s friend Dizzy Gillespie was the great teacher and apostle of the style. Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk became, among others, the great pianists of the style.
Born in 1920, Parker came to New York in 1939 in search of his idol, Art Tatum. By 1942, Parker joined the revolutionary Earl Hines Band, which included Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, and Billy Eckstine. The “jamming on ideas” began here. A younger Miles Davis even sat in when the Band was in St. Louis. It’s easy to see how the new thinking, ideas, and bebop approach spread among the musicians.
Parker, after hearing the jazz song “Cherokee,” began to discover new melodic improvisations based on chord changes from “the inside.” Beboppers changed tempos, melodic and harmonic alterations, and rhythmic extensions, but Parker brought two other things: blues-based riffing from Kansas City and his fluidity of phrasing at rapid tempos. His harmonic invention/revolution was to impose a new melodic conception, building improvisation on acute chord structures he heard extended above the minor and dominant altered 7th chords, giving him a fluidity, dexterity, and choral clarity, specifically in improvisation. The invention in this propelled him and the beboppers way out in front in terms of the old standard of playing around the chord arpeggiation. Musically, they extended the conventional harmonies of jazz with extensive use of 9ths, 11ths, flatted 5ths, 13ths, and stacked polychords. Arpeggiations became a science with the beboppers. You could hear the changes rapidly in their solos, putting the emphasis on the mind and art of the individuals as thinking musicians. This again projected the self-made, free-thinking artist who also happened to be a free-thinking, freely acting Black man in a White-dominated world.
Beboppers rebelled against the jazz establishment of the 1940s, and especially against swing. In their eyes, Black music had been co-opted by a largely White mechanism (clubs and the recording industry), giving jobs and credit to White musicians. They noted that the art of jazz improvisation, another Black innovation, had to take a back seat to stock arrangements. They saw hypocrisy in fighting fascism in World War II with a segregated army. They were also aware of the pay-scale injustice experienced by Black musicians.
Culturally they decided to wear berets and hip, bright colors. Some wore zoot suits—created by Hal Fox, and featuring padded shoulders, high waists, and long jackets. They turned their backs to the audience and created the language of “hep,” to confound the uncool. They picked up the tempos, playing the tunes faster than the standard dance-band tempos, and they made 16th notes and triplets the normative phrasing motif. And they often remade existing tunes, changed the titles, inserted radically invested angular, bebop melodies. They believed they were being released from the “tyranny of popular taste,” as a commentator in Ken Burns’s documentary Jazz points out.
The beboppers believed in inspired, inventive approaches that were revolutionary. Bebop is the first great artist revolution in Black music, and jam sessions like those at Minton’s really became the model of the place where new Black music brewed. In 1952, Downbeat, the nation’s lead jazz periodical, named Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker the best sax and trumpet players. This was monumental. In many ways, it is easy to see that bebop meant “rebels,” and that it asserted new models of Black music that forged a generation’s identity.
For any great artistic movement, we cannot talk about ideas and creativity without discussing the relationships between musicians and their mentors. Maintaining codes is about passing on musical ideas and values, and in this mix there were many great artists, teachers, and personalities who were champions of the music and the culture. There is no greater example of all of this than the person and artistry of Mary Lou Williams, who was thought to be the first lady of modern jazz—and that is not only because she was a woman, but also because she seemed to deserve a regal title. Born in Atlanta in 1910, she moved at a young age to Pittsburgh, a very musical city. A child prodigy, Williams began playing spirituals and ragtime at the age of four. By six, she was entertaining at picnics and dances. In Pittsburgh, she was known as the “little piano girl.” As a young woman, she toured the TOBA (Theater Owners Booking Agency) circuit and, in 1928, joined the Synco Jazzers in Oklahoma City.
Andy Kirk and his Twelve Clouds of Joy, a well-known ensemble, relocated to Kansas City in 1929. Through contacts, Williams joined the Clouds, first as an arranger and later as a pianist. In 1931, she became a full-time member of the band, where she stayed until 1942. Williams played such a key role that she was known as “the lady who swings the band.” In addition to her duties with the Kirk band, she provided arrangements for Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, and Tommy Dorsey. Her arrangement of “Trumpets No End” became a staple chart of the Ellington band. Due to her gifting and personality, she earned the admiration and respect of the music community. Williams combined the native languages of the blues, boogie woogie, and stride piano. As the 1940s progressed, she became a mentor to the emerging generation of beboppers, becoming close with Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and many others. In addition to mentoring musicians, Williams became a champion of women in jazz, recording with several all-women groups. At one point, she also became a visible spokesperson for jazz as a radio figure hosting her own show.
In 1946, the New York Philharmonic performed at Carnegie Hall three movements from her composition Zodiac Suite. From 1952 to 1954, Williams performed extensively in Europe. Then, in 1954, she retired from music to pursue religious and charitable interests. She became active musically again throughout the 1960s and 1970s, leading her own groups in New York clubs, composing sacred works for jazz orchestra and voices, and devoting much of her time to teaching. In 1970, as a solo pianist, and providing her own commentary, she recorded The History of Jazz. Mary Lou Williams maintained the bebopper’s modernist approach for most of her career, but her playing attained a level of complexity and dissonance that rivaled avant-garde jazz pianisms of the time, without losing an underlying blues feeling. The blues coding and the Kansas City imprint defined her aesthetic.
Williams grew toward an even deeper appreciation of her role as shaper of bebop and mentor when she pursued her spiritual musical quest later in life. She had a varied spiritual journey that included preaching at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Moving toward the Catholic Church, she conducted her first Catholic Mass, written entirely in jazz music form. She said, “One reason I came out here again is the sound I hear in modern jazz. They’re disturbed and crazy. They’re neurotic as if the Negro was pulling away from his heritage in music. You have to love when you play. So I’ve decided to show them, make them hear the soul.” She called this, “God’s music,” the music that heals the soul.
Mary Lou Williams taught at Duke University as an artist-in-residence from 1977 until her death in 1981 at the age of seventy-one. In 1983, Duke University established the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, which today stands as a campus symbol for Black American creativity.
Miles Davis, born in 1926, represents the next wave of artistry beyond Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams. In many ways, he was the protégé of the beboppers Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Through Miles Davis, we are able to grasp another movement in jazz, as the form evolved and moved closer to the American cultural center. Davis was a trumpeter, a conceptualist, and one of the principal players to emerge in New York in the 1940s and to be recognized as a major leader and shaper of jazz culture. But he was surrounded and influenced by the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and schools of players following throughout the 1950s and well into the 1970s, including Cannonball Adderley (1928–1975), John Coltrane (1926–1966), Wayne Shorter (b. 1933), Herbie Hancock (b. 1940), and Tony Williams (1940–1997). Together these voices, along with the media, propelled the artistic emergence of the Black art forms of bebop and several derivative jazz styles.
Miles Davis represents the quintessential or most characteristic example of the art form as culture and as style. While Davis was not always “the originator” of the aesthetic movements and manifestos of bebop, cool school, modal, and fusion, his contributions to and participation in these movements made him a seminal figure. The bebop movement represented a break with the “audience pleasing” commerciality of the swing bands represented by Ellington and Basie. Davis, Parker, and Gillespie were in the forefront of the cool school movement (1949–1955). This represented a break with the fast, complicated, musician-orientated approach of bebop. The cool school approach to playing jazz was less excited and less busy than bebop. It was a smoother, more detached and reflective sound. Davis’s Birth of the Cool was recorded in 1955. The grouping of instruments included a French horn and tuba, but no piano, giving it a more European, chamber-music sound. Davis not only organized the unique ensemble to record and project this new approach, but he also made for himself a projected “cool” media image which characterized his public persona until his death.
The large orchestrations in Davis’s recordings—including Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), and Sketches of Spain (1959)—were by arranger Gil Evans. These foreshadowed the “third stream,” the mixing of formal European large-range ideas and jazz music with the avant-garde tendencies in concert music seen in the later experiments by Gunther Schuller and the Modern Jazz Quartet.
Modal jazz, yet another stylistic development within jazz, as exemplified on Davis’s Kind of Blue (1960), was another attempt to move away from the density represented in his orchestral experiments and in mainstream jazz. In Miles’s words, “The music had gotten thick. . . . I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from conventional strings of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation . . . fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them.”
In his classic quintet period, Davis surrounded himself with younger players, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. They formed a refined, sophisticated performing unit. These recordings, during 1963–1968, provided a model for group excellence that became the staple for modern jazz performance. There was a return to making music that was “in tune” with the social movements of the times. Prior to this period, Davis had traveled frequently to Paris, where he visited the home of social activist and author James Baldwin. Davis often spoke of his rising concern for the social plight of Black people in the United States.
Davis’s album Bitches Brew was a turn away from wearing the “establishment suit” to wearing dashikis and afros, and creating fusion music. Fusion, or rock-jazz, brought a hardened electric edge, forging at once artistic expression with the social rage of the 1960s and the technological experiments of the period. In this way, Miles’s experiments looked to incorporate what was going on in popular rock, exemplified in artists like Jimi Hendrix and Sly & the Family Stone. It was a turn toward the impulses of the younger generation, which had become devoted to rock and roll and the protest music of the period.
Davis attracted and inspired a new generation of younger, inventive musicians: Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana, Chick Corea, and others. The six principle fusion bands to emerge from these experiments with young players were Headhunters (Hancock), Weather Report (Zawinul, Shorter), Mahavishnu Orchestra (McLaughlin), Return to Forever (Corea), Lifetime (Williams), and Santana (Santana). A final stage from about the late 1970s until his death was his emergence and belief in adopting the stylistic and aesthetic resources of popular culture, including pop, urban contemporary, and finally hip hop. His new young model for artistic excellence? Prince.
From Davis’s emergence in New York’s bebop rage in 1944 until his death in 1991, his creative career spanned nearly fifty years. For many, he represents the emergence of jazz as a cultural style. This refers to the way that he approached jazz, the sound of his horn (the wispy/airy sound of the stemless Harmon mute), the use of “cool” phrasing, relaxed nonspeedy playing, the use of media to project the image of the hipster, dress and attitude. Davis became the most commercially successful jazz artist of his generation. Black musicians becoming millionaires was proof that the art form had reached an important place in the societal configuration of success, marketability, and cultural stability.
In 1947, Chano Pozo, a Cuban songwriter, dancer, entertainer, and conga player, helped to insert another element into modern jazz: an Afro-Cuban styling which brought the musical culture of jazz back face-to-face with its African identity. After hearing great Cuban bands, Dizzy Gillespie decided to bring conga drums into his band, and Pozo was the player who cemented this. Just as blues brought jazz back to itself with Basie’s Kansas City sound, in 1955 the Jazz Messengers—with members like Lee Morgan, Bobbie Timmons, Wayne Shorter—wanted to bring jazz “back home” to its African ethnic heritage. The musicians called this music “hard or soul bop.” An example would be tunes like “Dat Dere,” “Home Cooking,” “Lester Left Town,” “Boy, What a Night,” and “Grits and Gravy.” The idea here was to keep jazz “Black and culturally coded.”
Creative movements always unearth innovators, memorable personalities we associate with the spirit, values, and ideas of a time. Thelonious Monk, because of the sheer uniqueness of his performance and compositional approach to playing, is clearly one of the most innovative voices to come out of the post-bop period, remaining a potent force in more progressive jazz until the 1970s. His Five Spot performances, Town Hall concerts, and subsequent albums and European tours provided a rich recording legacy. In Monk’s music, the tonal structure from chord to chord is sometimes unpredictable, so one’s base as a listener is constantly shifting. Monk was a pianist, a composer of extraordinary originality, with an uncanny individuality that was probably the most distinctive sound in American jazz.
Born in North Carolina in 1917, he moved to New York with his mother and sister. As a teenager, he was a pianist for a traveling evangelist. In 1941, he joined the revolution at Minton’s as house pianist. His eccentric dress, speech, and mannerisms raise the question about how we can appreciate and interpret his originality and artistry. He was described as “purely given originality and gift,” and the associations as “Monk,” withdrawn into his own world, point toward the markings of “otherness.” As one of the most outstanding voices in the post-bop period, he was extremely influential for the musicians who would define modern jazz in the late 1950s, 1960s, and beyond.
According to historian Gunther Schuller, Monk propelled the language beyond the traditional chord systems and pushed it like the European avantgarde movements to the edge, toward nontonality—toward music without any fixed tonal center. This artistic freedom helped to institute a social sensibility that helped Black musicians shrug off their dependence on the older, strictly vernacular forms. Many post-boppers were heard to say, “We don’t care if you don’t listen.” This musician-orientated experimentation continued to manifest itself in creative voices throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and with the advent of Black social consciousness during the civil rights era and later.
Ornette Coleman arrived in New York in 1959 and began a movement known as free jazz. “Jazz must be free,” said Coleman. He provided the debate about what was now jazz. “The pattern for the tune will be forgotten, and the tune itself will be the pattern.” The free jazz movement emphasized distance from commercial jazz movements at the time, particularly cool jazz. Some called it avant-garde jazz or action jazz because of its emphasis on rhythmic energy and vitality. In 1960, Coleman released Free Jazz, from which the movement’s name emerged. He saw free jazz as the foundation, the center of interest and activity: the melodic line, free rhythmic association and complexity, the invention after the statement of line, the communal, artistic engagement of the ensemble to sustain creative environment, the absence of stacked harmonic dominance, heterophony as primacy. This was the great break back into Black music culture, back to communal expression and invention at the root of the African call, back to free rhythmic complexity and the idea of master drummer, griot, ensemble music-making.
Whereas Charlie Parker got his artistic epiphany from listening to the possibilities of extending structures within and above the harmonic changes, Coleman heard jazz as being completely freed from harmonic constrictions, and he saw the more inventive atmosphere of line development providing an entire world and vocabulary for his new approaches.
In 1959, the Ornette Coleman Group had a several-week engagement at the Five Spot in New York. This was a seminal time in jazz history: Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue in March and April 1959; Coltrane recorded Giant Steps in April and May 1959; Ornette Coleman recorded The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1960. But sadly, both Billie Holiday and Lester Young died in 1959.
Hard bop and free jazz, the next Black musical movements, were attempts by musicians to reestablish the dominance of the rhythms of Black music, rhythms that had been clearly homogenized in the cool school movement, which was now largely dominated by White jazz players. Hard bop players, in particular, insisted on the heavy reliance of the vernacular sounds of the blues, and even gospel, as in saxophonist Cannonball Adderley’s piece “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” composed by Joe Zawinul. In free jazz, there was also a focus on African identity, ethnic aesthetics and instruments, free improvisation, and collective group improvisation. Other characteristics were the absence of tonality and predetermined chords, loose structural design, suspension of regular beats of time signature, and fragmented melodic textures rather than dependence on melody. While there were many artists who took in various strains of these movements, several individuals and groups stand out: John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Richard Muhal Abrams, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and later Charles Mingus.
Formed in 1965, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which emerged full-blown in 1969, was created from and out of support from the AACM. This collective of musicians began to experiment actively, formed a record company, and found a base for concert support and scholarship. The Art Ensemble of Chicago’s motto was “Great Black Music—Ancient to Modern.” This signaled a real understanding among musicians that a continuum of styles, approaches, and cultural and aesthetic conventions had been upheld in African American experience and substantiated a cultural forum and identity in creative music.
In my music, I speak of unknown things, impossible things, ancient things, potential things. No two songs tell the same story. History is only his-story. You haven’t heard my story yet, my story is different from “his” story, not a part of history. My story is endless, it never repeats itself. Why should it? A sunset doesn’t repeat itself, nature never repeats itself, why should I?
—Sun Ra
Born May 22, 1914, as Herman Poole Blount, in Birmingham, Alabama, composer, bandleader, mystic, and philosopher Sun Ra was the original modern galactic groove master, complete with forward, free, creative music, electronics, and costumes. He placed himself at the center of creativity and projected his work as a vehicle of interplanetary truths through music. He excelled in his rhetoric about cosmic philosophy as much as his notions about the truth-seeking aspect of art. He also renamed himself Ra (or Le Sonny Ra), after the Ethiopian God of the Sun. His mother had named him Herman after the famous Afro-centric magician Black Herman, who was said to be able to raise people from the dead, and who was an associate of Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington.
A precocious youth, Sun Ra was playing piano, sight reading, and transcribing big-band arrangements by ear at age twelve, and he was deeply impressed by Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller. He was a straight-A student and a voracious reader. In Birmingham, the library of the Mason Lodge was open to Blacks. Its eclectic collection of philosophies made a big imprint on Sun Ra’s early thinking. As a teen, he was playing professionally, and in high school, he studied under a well-respected disciplinarian band instructor who had trained many Birmingham musicians. Sun Ra was his high school class valedictorian and was awarded a full scholarship to Alabama A&M University, where he majored in music, studying composition, orchestration, and music theory, but he dropped out after a year. He claimed that he had received a vision in a dream, was taken up to Saturn, and was told by the Saturn beings to speak “only through his music.”
After he left college, he became a well-respected, dedicated, and devoted musician. He rearranged his family home into a studio, where he rehearsed with his band and traded philosophy and music lessons. He visited daily the local piano music store, where he copied music and swapped ideas with the music teachers there. After rejecting a World War II draft notice as a conscientious objector, he was assigned to a Civilian Public Service camp, but as he refused that assignment as well, he was arrested and jailed in 1942. After yet another appeal, he was released. The judge declared that Sun Ra was both “a psychopathic personality” and “a well-educated colored intellectual.” Sun Ra returned to Birmingham, reforming his band. In 1945, he migrated to Chicago. In this new environment, he was hired to play and write arrangements for his idol, Fletcher Henderson. He also performed briefly with Coleman Hawkins and Stuff Smith. His interest in philosophy continued, as did his interest in Black nationalism. He came to espouse the notion that Egyptian and Black greatness was suppressed by European education and history.
In 1952, he established the Space Trio and attracted established musicians, notably Marshal Allen and John Gilmore. This group created a book club, exchanged ideas and readings, created pamphlets, and formed an independent label, Saturn Records. During this time, they began wearing Egyptian-based costumes and headpieces. They also inserted science fiction themes into their music. Their musical innovations fused bebop with soul, electronic instruments, and vernacular Black music, as well as the spoken word, dance, and visuals.
In 1961, they all left Chicago, traveling to Montreal and landing in New York. Due to the high cost of rent, they lived together and began a regular stint at Slugs Salon in 1966. This became Ra’s home for eighteen months straight, every Monday night, and on and off for the next several years. Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Heath, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey, and numerous musicians began to frequent Slugs. Notable artists such as Dizzy and Monk encouraged Sun Ra. The group’s first tour in 1968 included thirty musicians, dancers, singers, and even fire-eaters. The staging and lighting were elaborate. All of this was before George Clinton and Earth, Wind & Fire, who also based their art and philosophy on intergalactic, futuristic Egyptian costumes and popular, semispiritual philosophies.
Regarding the music business and its effect on musicians, Sun Ra commented, “The chaos on this planet is due to the music the musicians are playing that they are forced to play by some who just think of money, who don’t realize that music is a spiritual language and represents the people of Earth. When musicians are compelled to play anything, it goes straight to the throne of the creator of the universe, and that is how he sees you, according to your music. Because music is a universal language, and what musicians play is what goes to the creator as your personal ambassador, and your personal nemesis.”
Sun Ra’s work received impressive reviews and was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1969, a major mainstream visibility moment. Following this, he was invited to France, Germany, the United Kingdom, even to Egypt. In 1971, he was invited to serve as an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, teaching a course entitled “The Black Man in the Cosmos.” In 1978, he appeared on Saturday Night Live. During the 1980s, his popularity waned, but there were some appearances over the decade, culminating with a first-time television interview on NBC’s Night Watch. More European engagements, college residencies, collaboration with famed composer conceptualist John Cage, and a stint at Dartmouth College followed. By the early 1990s, Ra was showing signs of aging and ailing health. After surviving a stroke in 1990, he returned to Birmingham, where he contracted pneumonia and died on May 30, 1993. But Sun Ra remained—like Henderson, Ellington, and Count Basie—one of the last surviving band leaders to conduct an ensemble that lasted almost four decades, an unbelievable feat in modern American pop culture.
The main thing for a musician is to give the listener a picture of the wonderful things he sees in the universe.
—John Coltrane
“I think that the majority of musicians are interested in truth,” John Coltrane has said. “They’ve got to be because saying a music thing is a truth. If you play a music statement, it’s a valid statement, that’s truth right there. In order to play those kinds of things, you’ve got to live as much truth as you possibly can.” As we consider what it means to be an artist, we must look at the work of John Coltrane, an “explorer,” and one of the greatest innovators in modern music. In the history of popular music, few musicians illicit the respect and admiration from musicians, the music industry, and the buying public as John Coltrane does. His superb musicianship, his sense of mission and deep spirituality, his dedication to finding meaning and connections between music and the world all mark his identity as an innovator in “sounding and representations.” His philosophy, his demeanor, his spirit, and the resulting music provide a great example of the idea that musicianship is a “priesthood, not a pastime.”
The work that most characterizes this is his 1964 album A Love Supreme, a project devoted to the exploration of jazz as an inner expression and as a gift from the creator. The album, he said, came to him through inspiration. After a week of composing in isolation, he said that the music came down to him like God came to “Moses on the mountain.” The record is divided into four parts: “Acknowledgment,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm.” In the album notes, he writes, “This album is a humble offering . . . an attempt to say, Thank you, God, through our work.”
John William Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, in 1926, and he died in 1967, of lung cancer. He was just forty years old. His grandfather was a preacher, and Coltrane was brought up in the Black church. His father died when Coltrane was a boy. After he graduated from high school, the family moved to Philadelphia, where he was awarded scholarships in music composition. He was drafted and fought in World War II. After his return in 1945, he played in r&b bands. In the late 1940s, he became inspired by the new movement of bebop, and he played with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, and Earl Bostic. He played for nearly a year in 1957 with Thelonious Monk at the historic Five Spot Club. Trapped in a cycle of drinking and drugs, including heroin, in 1957 he claimed to have “a spiritual awakening.” In 1960, he formed his classic quartet with Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison, and McCoy Tyner. He signed with Impulse in 1961.
In 1960, Coltrane also had a huge commercial hit with the movie tune “My Favorite Things.” This provided him and jazz broad exposure. Until his tragic death in 1967, he recorded many albums with his “second line-up,” the ensemble Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Saunders, and Ali Rashid. Coltrane investigated the music of India, Brazil, and Africa. During all of this, he developed a startling approach to harmonic, chord/scale techniques, one begun by Charlie Parker, that set patterns for the highest level of musicianship, and improvisation.
The true measure of an artist’s work is not in popularity or sales. It is in the impressions left behind and the impact that work has on fellow artists. Coltrane’s wife, Alice, remarked, “If it’s possible through sound to realize truth, that is the essence of his search, and discovery experimentations and exploration. There is a feeling in his music that goes beyond the musical realm. His music represents expression that was meditative, and lasting.”
For drummer Jeff Watts, Coltrane had “the cry of the American Church in his tone.” As another musician stated, Coltrane’s music “testifies like a preacher.” Coltrane recognized his church upbringing, his mature adult devotion to search and study, and the fulfillment of his calling as an artist. These define the reasons for his spiritual character. His intensity, “dignified solemnity of purpose,” brought legions of musicians to “believe in themselves and their own creative nature,” as Keith Shadwick wrote in Jazz: Legends of Style.4 Branford Marsalis said of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme that it was “about the expression of the Blues, it is the subtext of the piece, which is not just about sadness but profound understanding in how the music moves beyond complaining but to understanding life.”
In this blues-jazz-spiritual way, as some have suggested, Coltrane and jazz performers met the existential challenge with a sarcastic, witty moan, with poem and form that trapped angst and released it artfully. Coltrane’s study of religion, blues, and Eastern and African music infused his own music with probing solos. The great Indian musician Ravi Shankar discussed musical statements that matched various states of consciousness. Frequency patterns and vibrations are connected to the psyche and are rooted in universal structures. Coltrane’s works suggest Indian philosophy played out musically in drone tones, songs, rhythms, and modality.
Giant Steps, Ohm, Africa, Ascension, Alabama, Dear Lord, Peace, and A Love Supreme all reflect Coltrane’s commitment to the idea that music is an essentially spiritual and contextually social experience. Coltrane’s work suggests that the truth can be found in dedicated sound. His work exemplifies artistry: the significance of the “doing of the music itself,” music’s ability to transcend market value and connect deeply with human experience, shaping the way people live and think.