The Drummer had to change his entire approach to the elements in his ‘Kit’:
1. The Bass Drum was used infrequently but accurately to propel the soloist
2. The rhythmic center shifted from the bass drum to the Ride Cymbal
3. The snare provided accents tied to the melodic rhythm.
The Piano/Bass/Guitar:
1. The Bass assumed the responsibility for defining the pulse - again, it is NOT stated but truly defined
2. Enabled the Pianist to free the left hand for chordal punctuations and the right hand for a fast and complicated melodic or improvisation line (Basie’s style gives ample precedence for this)
3. Bass and guitar become solo instruments in their own right - with the introduction of the Amplifier
4. The Bass was freed from the Root-5th line and able to weave freely through the complex harmonies
5. (Jimmy Blanton is credited with this development).
The Rhythm Section Unit:
1. The section began to work to assist the soloist, NOT keep the time
2. The ability “to ‘feed’ the soloist with the correct ‘beside the beat’ punctuations became the determining factor for the successful rhythm section musician”.
Tanner and Gerow give the dates 1954 - 1963 for the ‘Funky’ period. Actually, the Funky Style was an offshoot of the Hard Bop School. Originally a piano style attributed to Horace Silver, it is characterized “by slow or medium blues, played hard on the beat, with all the feeling and expression characteristic of the old blues”
[Berendt] and later with gospel influences - a ‘soul’ style different but with the same roots as the Pop music Soul.
Hard Bop which dominated the second half of the ‘50’s was centered in New York City. Berendt states: “…the purest bop, enriched by a greater knowledge of harmonic fundamentals and a greater degree of instrumental-technical perfection.”
It should be noted - among the players already mentioned within this Style - that early John Coltrane can be listed among them.
In summarizing this period, Marshall Sterns stated: “Indeed, modern jazz as played in New York by Art Blakey and his Messengers,…has never lost its fire. The harmonies of cool jazz - and bop - were taken over, the posture of resignation disappeared, the light sound remained, but the music always has a biting sharpness. In a word: It has changed, but fundamentally it remained ‘hot’ and ‘swinging’.”
All of the stylistic changes brought by the Cool/Hard Bop Schools stem from the advent of Bop. When the music no longer functioned as dance music and became a concert Art Music it did not have to state the Rhythmic pulse for a dancing audience - the time could become as fluid, free, and the harmonies as complex as the Art factor demanded. It also centered the attention of both audience and musicians on the creation of Art - in an improvisatory music that attention is necessarily centered on the Improviser. But, above all else, one must realize that Hard Bop and Cool are two manifestations of the same immediate post Swing musical trends - many of characteristics are shared and both Hard Bop and Cool musicians had elements of both in their playing styles.
A recent NewsWeek article included a chart on music market share for the various genres of recorded music. The Jazz share was 3.0% - Classical was 2.9%. It seems the Artistic leap brought about by the emergence of Bop has relegated Jazz to the Artistic Marketplace - and a comparable marketshare. This transformation from a functional popular music to an ‘Art Music’ was a logical progression for the Jazz genre - one also reflected in the influences mentioned by Charlie Parker. In naming his favorite musicians he mentioned Brahms, Schoenberg, Ellington, Hindemith, and Stravinsky. At a very basic level, what the musics shared was an adaption to a modern culture and a modern world - a striving for the music to reflect the time and place both existed in and of the people involved with these musics to express and reflect that time and place.
Music is a living language and responds to new circumstances in a constant evolution to reflect, relate, and express the time and place it exists in. But change is never easy - it requires the Artist and Audience to constantly learn a new musical language and actively explore the musical art utilizing this new musical language. It is not an easy process - it is one which consistantly meets with resistance. The new must be explored to become comprehensible and the accepted previous norms realized as not rules but ‘accepted norms’ for another time and place.
This resistance to the new is not new - for it has accompanied every change in the musical language: • Boethius [an accoustical theroitician c.480-524]: “Music was chaste and modest so long as it was played on simpler instruments, but since it has come to be played in a variety of manners and confusedly, it has lost the mode of gravity and virtue and fallen almost to baseness.” • Jacob of Liege [regarding the Ars Antiqua and the Ars Nova c. 1425]: “Music was originally discreet, seemly, simple, masculine, and of good morals. Have not the moderns rendered it lascivious beyond measure?”
• G.M. Artuse [composer and theorist 1600]: ”They are so enamored of themselves as to think it within their power to corrupt, spoil, and ruin the good rules handed down in former times by so many theorists and excellent musicians.”
• August von Kotzebue [German dramatist 1806]: “The Overture to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio was performed recently, and all impartial musicians and music lovers were in complete agreement that never was anything written in music so incoherent, shrill, muddled, and utterly shocking to the ear.”
• Henry Pleasants [author of the Agony of Modern Music 1955]: “Serious music is a dead art. The vein which for threehundred years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded spectators picking through the slag pile.”
These quotes are from the Joseph Machlis text “Introduction to Contemporary Music” It is the source for my research for this part of the series. The subject area is the Modern Western Concert Tradition - but the concepts are relevant for any contemporary art music in our modern society. I originally turned to the book to get some information on the influences Parker metioned - as I read, I realized that Jazz not only shared some very broad similiarities with this music but also the changes in musical elements. Both were seeking a new expressive musical language - a language that was discriptive of a modern society.
Machlis mentions Rules and the Artist. What he in essence says is that the rules of artisic creation are not broken for the sheer joy of breaking them. These rules are used to achieve freedom of action wihin a self-imposed frame and when these rules are rejected it is because they have ceased to be meaningful. It is not the concept of ‘rules’ which changes but a search for new rules reflecting the new time and place - a search to make music expressive of this new time and place.
To start this exploration of the ‘new’ musical elements one must understand the Yin and Yang of Art - any work of art, regardless of medium, exists on two basic levels: the Formal vs the Expressive. Both of these impulses are always present throughout the history of Art - at times one will predominate over the other. That predominace is a matter of degree - but always ‘in the mix’. Which of these is the major influence has immediate effects on the elements of the Artistic Medium. These elements are shaped by the predominate artistic impulse and in turn shape the Medium to reflect that impulse.
The Formal seeks above all to safeguard the purity of form. It reflects the values of order, lucidity, and restraint. It seeks a purity of style and proportion, striving to bring perfection to what already exists. The Artist achieves a certain measure of detachment from the artwork and expresses himself through symbols that have achieved a universal validity. The Expressive is concerned with the expression of emotion. It exalts the unique character of the artists personal reactions, striving always for the most dirct expression of emotion. It is a rebellion against the Tradiltional, valuing passionate utterance above perfection or form - an art of sensual enchantment. To these formal and expressive aspects, Nietzsche ascribed two images - that of Apollo, god of Light and Harmonious Proportions and Dionysus, god of Wine, Ecstasy, and Intoxification. For the Western Concert Tradition, the shift from the Dionysian to the Apollian became one of the gestures of the new music of the 20th Century - but what of the Jazz Idiom.