An Introduction to America’s Music

400 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II

MILES DAVIS AND MODERN TRENDS AFTER BEBOP

Another part of Parker’s legacy was the recognition that high technical skill

was needed to perform modern jazz. Yet some of those who dominated the

music’s second decade (1955–65), such as Thelonious Monk, John Lewis, Charles

Mingus, and Miles Davis, did not emphasize virtuoso technique. Monk, whose

roots as a pianist lay in the Harlem stride school, developed a performing

style that made the piano sound more percussive than fl owing. And the rhythm of

his lean-textured compositions is even more asymmetrical than Lester Young’s

or Charlie Parker’s.

John Lewis, like Monk a pianist-composer, made his mark as leader of the

Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ, with piano, vibraphone, bass, and drums), formed

in the early 1950s. Instead of relying chiefl y on improvising, Lewis combined

composition and improvisation in ways that repaid close listening, as in a concert

hall. In doing so, he brought order and form to the materials that brilliant fi rst-

generation bebop improvisers like Parker had discovered. The Modern Jazz Quartet,

with its relatively soft, introspective sound, opened the concert hall to a new kind

of jazz—cool jazz—akin to classical chamber music. And Lewis explored that link

further by composing Baroque-style “suites” and jazz fugues for the MJQ.

Charles Mingus rose to prominence as a bandleader, composer, and virtuoso

soloist on the most ungainly of solo instruments, the double bass. After pay-

ing his dues as a sideman for musicians as diverse as Louis Armstrong, Duke

Ellington, and Charlie Parker, Mingus made his mark as a bandleader with the

LP (long-playing record album) Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956), whose title track,

lasting more than ten minutes, combines blues licks, static harmonies, sud-

den changes of meter and tempo, and atonal group improvisations in a com-

plex whole that would prove infl uential on the free-jazz artists of the 1960s (see

chapter 18). The 1959 LP Mingus Ah Um showcases thick-textured compositions for

an eight-piece band including Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, an homage to Lester Young,

and “Fables of Faubus,” a scathing putdown of Arkansas governor Orval Fau-

bus, who in 1957 had forcibly opposed the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central

High School. Of the second-generation modern-jazz artists, Mingus stands out

for carrying forward the orchestral compositional techniques of Duke Ellington

while foregrounding a heightened political sensibility that would soon be heard

in the music of other jazz musicians, such as Max Roach’s 1960 Freedom Now Suite.

Miles Davis, another second-generation master, emerged in the latter 1940s

with a lyrical approach that contradicted the image of modern jazz as virtuoso

music. By 1954 he had discovered an intensely personal trumpet sound that

was often heard in tightly muted playing, close to the microphone. During the

1950s silence and space became basic to Davis’s musical vocabulary. The 1950s

also saw Davis’s collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, who supplemented the

traditional jazz combo with more solo instruments, including some not usually

associated with jazz, such as fl ute, French horn, and tuba. On their 1958 album

of songs from Gershwin’s opera Porg y and Bess, Evans’s colorful orchestrations

create an atmospheric setting for Davis’s moody, introspective solos, as on the

track Summertime (LG 16.3). W hereas Davis’s work with small combos captures

the sometimes competitive spirit of multiple soloists improvising in sequence,

his work with Evans puts the Harmon-muted sound of Davis’s trumpet front and

center, sharing the spotlight with no one.

Thelonious Monk

Modern Jazz Quartet

Charles Mingus

Miles Davis

LG 16.3

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