Imagine: a small basement apartment in Manhattan, the late 1940s. After a night of playing for nightclubs, a group of young jazz musicians walk three blocks to this apartment, sit down and discuss, propose, suppose, formulate, predict, innovate. About what? About the very future of jazz, no less. This is the apartment of Gil Evans, and the party members include Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, Lee Konitz, and of course, Miles Davis. Davis had encountered these gatherings at the house of Evans after leaving Charlie Parker’s band, in which he played for many years. Davis was looking for a fresh start, a way to move forward, to innovate. He found kindred spirits night after night in Evans’ apartment, as ideas began to swirl and take shape.

               To understand their discussions and the conclusions that followed, we have to go back in time about twenty years. Back then, one of the biggest popular sensations was none other than the Broadway stage musical. Fantastically talented composers such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter wrote music for hit after hit on the stage, building off impressionistic and twentieth century compositions. At the same time, in New Orleans, a new style of playing music was forming – large bands of brass and woodwinds, with backing rhythm, playing bouncy, improvisational music that combined African rhythms and European melodies. What began to happen is that Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, or someone else would write a hit musical number. The New Orleans bands would snap up that composition and record their own version in their own style, often garnering a hit. Seeing the popularity of these recordings, the Broadway composers would try to emulate that style, and a sort of feedback loop emerged, eventually developing the music into what we now know as “swing” and “jazz”. By the 1930s, the most popular jazz musician by far was Louis Armstrong, who, in addition to being an eminent American Icon, laid the foundations for jazz improvisation and style.  It’s hard to understate just how important Armstrong is – so much more than the guy who smiles wide and sings “What a Wonderful World.”

               By the early 40s, swing and jazz were wildly popular, with Duke Ellington and Count Basie cranking out standard after classic standard. The crowd went wild for jazz especially for dancing purposes in clubs. However, a new movement, just as important was about to be born. Young Charlie Parker, a saxophonist, became infatuated with the playing style of Lester Young in Count Basie’s band. Traditionally, players would improvise along the melody of the standard tune, but Young often felt free to wander off and play his own ideas before eventually returning to the melody with the rest of the band. Parker began to experiment with this himself, and moving to New York, found others like him – Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and many others. These musicians experimented wildly, using unorthodox melodies and harmonies, strange chord progressions, time changes, and fast tempos. Complicated, improvised solos were a huge part of this new style, starting to be known as bebop. The traditional “big band” was often cut down to a quintet or quartet. A basic standard tune was played, and then each member of the band was allowed solo improvisation.

Originally, none of the musicians that played bebop ever thought that it would catch on. It was much more of an experimental personal project than something to build a career on. Nevertheless, little by little, interest in these players grew, and bebop became more and more popular. Parker released many recordings during his tragically short life, some of which are bebop renditions of those classic standards I mention above. Bebop was at the height of its wildness and weirdness when Miles Davis considered the core elements, complex solos and harmonies, and sought to smooth out its rough edges. And that brings us back to Gil Evans’ apartment in the late 1940s. Taking inspiration from everything from Charlie Parker to Claude Debussy, as well as the growing popularity of modern art in general, Davis prepared to brew another revolution in jazz. Rather than high-speed, wild improvisation, the idea was for a group of musicians to perform some laid back sessions with more detailed, complex arrangements courtesy of Evans.

               Here is evident is one problem with this blog, as wonderful as it is. There’s simply so much to cover. It took me a long time to listen to enough jazz to understand how these ideas developed over time. The progression of jazz over the years is just as interesting as the progression of popular recorded music in general. This could just be a blog about jazz, and without a doubt in my future posts, I will do jazz a grave injustice, failing to include or talk about musicians or recordings I ought to have. All I can do is encourage you, if you are very interested in jazz, to explore it more on your own. We will be talking lots of jazz in the immediate future, but for now, I want to give you three collections of recordings that should help us all understand the foundations of jazz.

The first is Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. Armstrong’s trumpet is jazz’s backbone, or at least many of its vertebrae. There are plenty of best-of compilations to get yourself into his early playing.

The second is Charlie Parker’s Savoy and Dial recordings. You don’t have to listen to them all – they amount to about three hours of material, but “Yardbird Suite”, “Donna Lee”, and “Now’s the Time”, are some of the most important original standards of the bebop era.

The third is Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool, the compilation of the session recorded by the Miles Davis Nonet, the story of which I have outlined above. We’re going to be talking about a lot of jazz in the future, and it’s really helpful to at least have a general idea of how jazz came to be in the early days of recorded music.  Miles Davis’ contribution, especially, is important. You’ll notice how the compositions on Birth of the Cool are much more detailed, nuanced, and intentional, while still allowing room for improvisation. The sessions were played with a nonet, an unusually large band for bebop jazz, and the tempos are slower as well. This sense of “wall-to-wall” composition arrangement would help define Davis’ career (and in turn jazz itself) for the years to come. As we get into the jazz of the 1950s, the hard bop and the cool jazz, keep Davis in mind as just as much composer as performer.

I know for a fact that I cannot do jazz justice – but hopefully, in the future weeks, I can avoid doing it injustice as we continue along, tracing the paths of music through the years and decades.