A Different Way to Look at Jazz History

I have a theory about jazz history: The conceptual breakthroughs, the new ways of playing, are created by horn players. But those breakthroughs are then fleshed out into new harmonic systems by pianists.

In the ‘20s, New Orleans trumpeter King Oliver invented a new way of combining ragtime, blues and march music into a syncopated sound soon called “jass,” then jazz. And that city’s pianist Jelly Roll Morton then organized the possibilities of that sound into a larger architecture. Later that same decade, another New Orleans trumpeter Louis Armstrong pushed things further, and the D.C. pianist Duke Ellington translated that innovation into a broader format. When Lester Young came up with a new kind of melodic blues in the ‘30s, Count Basie built a new house around them.

Saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie created bebop in the 1940s, and pianist Bud Powell fills in the gaps. Trumpeter Miles Davis mixed cool jazz and modal music into jazz impressionism in the 1950s, and his pianist Bill Evans created a framework for it. Saxophonists John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman pioneered free jazz and pianists McCoy Tyner and Andrew Hill followed up. Saxophonist Charles Lloyd created a kind of jazz-folk in the mid-‘60s, and his pianist Keith Jarrett made the most of it. Davis created jazz-rock in the late ‘60s, and his keyboardists Joe Zawinul and Herbie Hancock worked out its potential. Saxophonists David Murray and Steve Coleman invented post-modern jazz, and pianists Don Pullen and Jason Moran made sense of the implications.

Of course, this framework is an oversimplification that leaves out many important artists and trends. But it does provide a stripped-down template for understanding the music’s evolution. It also highlights the dynamic interaction between horn players and keyboardists. Horn players mostly play single-note lines, which facilitate the discovery of a new voice, a sharper scalpel to cut through the conventional web of doing things. Keyboardists can play as many as 10 notes at a time, and that gives them a leg up on creating new harmonies, new structures, new webs. The horns innovate and the keys consolidate.

Some of the names above are better known than others. Andrew Hill, for example, is a major figure in this history who rarely gets his due. Like Randy Weston and Abdullah Ibrahim, Hill is one of the great composer-pianists of the 20th century. He used the boundary-pushing elements of Coltrane and Coleman not as ends in themselves but as a means to create an emotional impact, as a new musical vocabulary that could be integrated into the old.

His reputation gets a boost with an expanded and remastered version of his late-career highlight, the 2002 big-band session, A Beautiful Day, now reissued as A Beautiful Day, Revisited. Recorded live at Manhattan’s Birdland, the original LP had Hill leading a 16-member jazz orchestra through music that walked the no man’s land between notation and improvisation, between dissonance and consonance, between polyrhythms and elastic time.

That album has now been refurbished with a clarifying remix, an unabridged version of the set-closer, “11/8,” and the addition of an astounding, 16-minute alternate take of the title track. The result is a sound that transforms the individualism of Trane and Coleman into congregational music-making, where multiple parts are woven into a whole. There’s a lot of great playing on the album, especially by tenor saxophonist Greg Tardy, but the main attractions are the elegant compositions and the arrangements that allow the music to seemingly spin out of control without ever quite doing so. That sense of trying to both reflect and heal a world falling apart made it the perfect kick-off for the new century. It hasn’t grown any less relevant.

Zev Feldman, the self-described “Jazz Detective,” has just released his 12th package of previously unreleased recordings by Bill Evans. For die-hard fans, the variations this pianist brought to his repertoire, almost always in a trio setting, are endlessly fascinating, as he never played any piece the same way twice. This release, Bill Evans in Norway: The Konigsberg Concert, is taken from a 1970 summertime festival with his late-career trio of bassist Eddie Gómez and Marty Morell. As the notes explain, Evans had recently weaned himself off heroin with a methadone treatment, and his tempos and attack were livelier than usual—for him, that is, not compared to most jazz musicians. Like his former employer Davis, Evans had a knack for redeeming the romantic sweetness of so many ballad standards with a needed drop of tartness.

Earlier this year, Charles Lloyd released one of the year’s best albums, The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, a reunion with one of our greatest pianists, Jason Moran, and Wayne Shorter’s last drummer, Brian Blade. Lloyd wrote all 15 numbers (four of them with Moran), but the tunes make knowing nods to Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, gospel music and the NAACP. These nods reinforce the title’s message: We have seen hard times before, and we will endure this rough patch too. Keith Jarrett first made his name as the pianist on the Charles Lloyd Quartet’s 1966 album Forest Flower, one of the best-selling jazz recordings of all time. Jarrett switched from acoustic to electric keyboards to play with Davis and then back to acoustic to launch a solo career that was consistently productive from 1971 till 2020, when a stroke brought it to an end.

Jarrett’s latest release is The Old Country, which gathers up leftover tracks from a 1992 evening of live performances at the Pennsylvania nightclub that supplied the title to the original 1994 release, At the Deer Head Inn. It was a one-night-only show for this trio of Jarrett, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian, and this second helping of that music is an invaluable gift. Motian, who was Bill Evans’s first trio drummer and Jarrett’s drummer of choice for most of the ‘70s, had a gift for implying the pulse as he colored the music with brushes, cymbals and unexpected accents. Jarrett responds to Motian’s floating sense of rhythm with an increased lyricism. Six show tunes are joined by Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” and Nat Adderley’s title tune. The result is a reprise of Jarrett and Motian’s original connection, but their maturity borne of experience gives every musical decision new weight.

Steve Coleman is not well known outside the jazz world, but he is one of the music’s greatest active composer/bandleaders. As the prime mover behind Brooklyn’s M-Base movement of the ‘80s, alto saxophonist Coleman developed a groundbreaking method of creating musical modules with distinct melodies and rhythm patterns—often in unusual time signatures—and then layering them and overlapping them in dizzying patterns. This only works if the individual modules are as catchy and as adept at borrowing from all kinds of music as Coleman’s are—and only if one has trained a group of musicians who can hold onto their own modules no matter what is going on around them.

Trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson and drummer Sean Rickman have been working with Coleman for years, and they instinctively know how to play his tricky compositions. Bassist Rich Brown is new to the quartet, Steve Coleman and Five Elements, but he fits in well on the recent album, PolyTropos/Of Many Turns. {cq} Each of the two CDs is taken from a different concert in France this past March with only three of the 14 compositions repeated from one CD to the other.

The songs and medleys sometimes stretch past the 13-minute mark, but the music justifies the length by the constant arrival of surprise. This is cutting-edge music, but at the same time it’s extremely listenable once one stops listening for the familiar 4/4 or 6/8 patterns and gives into the new juxtapositions. Each player’s part matches up differently with the others every time through the form. It’s like a kaleidoscope: the colored bits of glass remain the same, but they create a new picture with each turn of the tube.

Who will be the next horn player to pave a new direction in jazz? My bet is on another alto saxophonist, Immanuel Wilkins, who has a Monk-like aptitude for constructing themes and variations that are tuneful enough for nodding along while at the same time following no predictable path. He does this by subjecting the music’s deepest roots in the blues and gospel to the most modernist techniques, creating vocal-like horn lines over fractured bar lengths and harmonies.

On his third full-length album, he tries to translate his vocal-like melodies to actual human singers. Such a gambit has often been a stumbling block for jazz composers who try to marry cliched words to exotic music. But like Charles Mingus’s collaboration with Joni Mitchell, Wilkins has found a lyricist in Amanda McDoom, who avoids simplistic slogans and platitudes and reinforces the elusive mysteries of instrumental music. One sometimes wishes for more imagery and less abstraction, but she never dumbs down the songs.

Four of the songs are handled by Cecile McLorin Salvant, the most exciting vocalist in jazz today—and not a bad songwriter herself. Here she sings McDoom’s words and Wilkins’ music as if she’s in a duet with the saxophone, echoing its breathy warmth and feeding material for improvisation. There’s a tendency for vocal tracks to push the instrumentalists into supporting roles, but Wilkins and his co-producer Meshell Ndegeocello create a more egalitarian atmosphere, where the vocals function as additional instruments, and where the instruments function as additional voices. Listen for guest Marvin Sewell’s bluesy guitar at the end of the album.

Who will be the keyboardist who consolidates the innovations of this horn player? It’s too early to tell yet, but one strong candidate is Micah Thomas, the longtime pianist in Wilkins’ combo. On Blues Blood, Thomas plays the gospel chords and blues changes that anchor the music in the past and then adds the kind of solos that push it into the future. On his recent solo album, Mountains, Thomas stakes his claim with compositions and arrangements that are an all-instrumental, thickly layered version of Wilkins’ sound.

Joining Thomas are two bandmates from the Wilkins Quartet—drummer Kweku Sumbry and Wilkins himself—plus bassist Kanoa Mendenhall and three more horn players: tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover, trumpeter Adam O’Farrill and trombonist Caleb Smith. Echoing Andrew Hill’s sextet recording on the classic Point of Departure, Thomas uses his four horns like a choir that he drives forward with dense chords and tangential runs as if leading a church service in the Twilight Zone. Wilkins turns in some indelible solos, but like many pianists before him, Thomas wraps the horn player in a brand new wardrobe.