An Introduction to America’s Music

443

gospel-tinged rhythms of hard bop. Saxophonist Ornette Coleman and pianist

Cecil Taylor pioneered free jazz, which abandoned traditional tunes, repeating

chord progressions, and a regular pulse in favor of avant-garde experiments in

total freedom that enthralled a small group of devotees but left more-traditional

jazz fans scratching their heads. Avant-gardists such as Archie Shepp and Albert

Ayler connected free jazz to progressive political and spiritual movements,

linked musical authenticity to ethnic pride, and found audiences who shared

their ideologies and came to appreciate their musical radicalism.

One innovative jazz style did, however, win favor with a larger audience.

In the late 1950s Miles Davis had begun to develop a new style that rejected the

complex, rapidly changing harmonies of bebop and replaced them with long,

harmonically static stretches based on a single scale or mode. This modal jazz

fi lled the entirety of his 1959 album Kind of Blue, which eventually became one of

the best-selling jazz albums of all time. The opening track, So What, is a lengthy

improvisation on an original Davis tune that, cast in thirty-two-bar aaa'a form,

discards traditional chord progressions in favor of a single scale, the Dorian

mode, which fi lls the three a sections, the only contrast being a modulation up

a half step in the a' section or bridge. The result is an expansive music with solos

that emphasize melodic play rather than tracing harmonic progressions.

One of the musicians on Kind of Blue was tenor saxophonist John Coltrane,

who already was emerging as a signifi cant artist in his own right. His 1960 album

Giant Steps featured a title track that, in contrast to modal jazz, pushed the har-

monic complexity of bebop to an unprecedented extreme. The quick tempo and

complex chord changes of Giant Steps remain a standard benchmark for impro-

vising jazz musicians today.

Coltrane’s most popular recording was a modal jazz interpretation of “My

Favorite Things” (LG 18.1), a show tune from The Sound of Music. Released in 1961,

this record revived interest in the soprano sax, hitherto associated chiefl y

with the traditional New Orleans jazzman Sidney Bechet. Coltrane’s “My Favor-

ite Things” was also the fi rst well-known jazz waltz, with three beats, instead of

the pop song’s usual four, to the bar. Richard Rodgers’s minor-key song is in the

unusual pattern aaa'b (the th i rd a is in the major and ends differently from the

previous two), with each section comprising sixteen bars, double the usual num-

ber because of the tempo and brevity of the waltz bars. Coltrane’s quartet simpli-

fi es this to aaa'a and fl attens out the harmony, so that the entire performance is

built on an E drone.

The combination of modal jazz

(with its long stretches of harmonic

stasis), the minor key (still fairly

unusual in jazz), and the nasal wail-

ing of the soprano sax (suggestive

of the Indian oboe-like shenai) has

caused some critics to consider

this record to be an early step in

an East-West musical hybridization

that began in the 1960s. The fi rst of

several times Coltrane recorded the

tune, this version stretches out for

thirteen minutes on LP. The album

CHAPTER 18 | JAZZ IN THE 1960s

modal jazz

John Coltrane

LG 18.1

John Coltrane on His Musical Goals

M

y music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith,

my knowledge, my being.... When you begin to see the

possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for

people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups.... I want

to speak to their souls.

In their own words

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