Musicon / Musical education / Jazz was important once..
-Jazz was important once..
Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue attacked harmony; instead of following the convention of improvising on chord changes (that is, the underlying harmony in a tune), Davis gave his players specifically composed scales to solo on, a strategy that made the playing both freer and more melodic. Take Five and the rest of Time Out took on rhythm, shattering the hegemony of four-beat swing with melodies set in 5/4, 9/8 and other exotic time signatures.
The revolution didn’t end there, either. In New York, on May 5, 1959, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane — who mere weeks before had been in the studio with Davis, recording the second side of Kind of Blue — cut Giant Steps , a breakneck exercise in polytonality that is perhaps the most carefully studied recording in jazz.
A few weeks later in Los Angeles, the Ornette Coleman Quartet began recording what would become The Shape of Jazz to Come . Coleman believed that improvisation shouldn’t be constrained by chord changes and that jazz should focus on the feeling within a tune, not on its structure or harmonic grammar. By the time Coleman’s group opened at New York’s Five Spot, later that year, “free jazz” had become the focus of fierce debate both within and outside the jazz community.
For starters, jazz was still being taken seriously back then – and not just by jazz fans. As late as 1964, Time magazine still considered jazz important enough to put pianist Thelonious Monk on the cover. Once pop culture took over, jazz – like high art and even modernism itself – got pushed to the margins.
From Globe and Mail; excerpts, edited by Musicon. Read complete.