This Day in Jazz History (Birth of John Coltrane, Saxophonist Supreme)

Sept. 23, 1926— John Coltrane, a saxophonist, bandleader, and composer who, after overcoming a heroin addiction in his early 30s, achieved a spiritual awakening that fueled his subsequent jazz masterpieces, was born in Hamlet, NC.

Early on, the musical promise of this country boy was recognized by a bandleader only four months his senior: Miles Davis. But six years of dependence on heroin and alcohol turned Coltrane into an unsteady, unreliable member of the Davis quintet, leading to his abrupt ouster.

The way back nine months later into the good graces of the bandleader he called “Teacher” was harrowing: locking himself in his mother’s room in Philadelphia and, without medication or medical assistance, quitting his chemical dependence cold turkey.

For the decade remaining before he died of liver cancer, “Trane” gave thanks to God for his liberation from drugs, and sought a purity in sound that mirrored his ecstatic spiritual vision.

Particularly in albums like the Grammy-nominated A Love Supreme (1965), listeners discerned a spiritual path of devotion and redemption, open to all. In fact, for more than half a century, the African Orthodox Church, founded by Black Episcopalians critical of what they saw as racism in the larger denomination, has even officially canonized him, naming its San Francisco house of worship in his honor.

Not everyone felt well-disposed towards the even greater religious intensity his work assumed in the last couple of years of Coltrane’s life. Critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, for all his appreciation of the musician’s early work, dismissed his late ventures as “naive submission to actual noise and incompetence.”

But few would deny that Coltrane was relentlessly dedicated to practicing his craft, as well as pursuing a musical question as unexpected as his spiritual one.

“Sheets of sound” is how Downbeat jazz critic Ira Gitler described the vertical improvisational style emanating from Coltrane’s saxophone—dense layers of scales, modes and keys over an entire progression. It proved extremely influential. 

But Coltrane was uninterested in repeating himself, and his devotees could hardly keep up with his innovations over the course of the 25 albums he released as a bandleader in his abbreviated lifespan.

Even with the Great American Songbook, the corpus of popular standards that jazz has plumbed for years, Coltrane created something unique with his 1961 interpretation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things.” He transformed that approximately three-minute chestnut from The Sound of Music into what Sam Stephenson called, in a 2014 blog post for The Paris Review, “a thirteen-minute warhorse of dominion.”

Like Davis, Coltrane was connected to the area of New Jersey where I live: Bergen County, NJ. Together they worked Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet in autumn 1956 at the Hackensack home studio of legendary jazz recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Leading his own band, Coltrane created three albums in Van Gelder’s later Englewood Cliffs studio, including, most notably, A Love Supreme.

(For a good, concise summary of Coltrane at his zenith, I recommend Patrick Jarenwattananon’s September 2010 blog post on—what else?—“Your Blog Supreme.”)

Photo of the Day: Better the Sax Man Than the Tax Man

Yesterday, having paid my debt to Uncle Sam, I happened to be in New York’s Duffy Square when I came upon the fellow you see here.

In contrast to the costumed characters that have come to populate (or, if you prefer, litter) this center of the Manhattan entertainment world, this musician was intent not on sight but on sound, blowing sweet notes into the rapidly warming air. 

It felt like such a blessing and relief, amid the high temperatures and the annual presence of the IRS, that I just had to take his photo.

This Day in Jazz History (Birth of Tenor Sax Titan Coleman Hawkins)

Nov. 21, 1904— Coleman Hawkins, who became the first important tenor saxophonist with his mastery of the art of vertical improvisation, was born in St. Joseph, MO.

The circumstances of Hawkins’ birth were infinitely fungible in his telling, including its location (on an ocean liner) and time (as much as eight years after the event). 

Even his formal musical education could be fudged, with biographers unable to document claims that he attended Washburn College in Topeka or the University of Chicago.

His real musical development needed no embellishment. Encouraged from an early age by his mother, a pianist and organist, Hawkins tackled the piano by age five, the cello at seven, and (an outgrowth in range and color), the tenor sax at nine. He was a natural musical talent.

In adulthood, he interacted with a galaxy of jazz talent across four decades, from Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson (whose band he joined) in 1924 to Sonny Rollins in the mid-1960s. Through vertical improvisation, he showed how to use his chosen instrument—which had earlier taken a supporting role to clarinets in jazz bands—to weave chords in a progression to improvise, rather than doing so through scales.

But the first decade in that time was spent learning the tenor sax thoroughly enough to make it do his bidding, while the last half decade was a remorseless physical decline. For all practical purposes, then, the height of his influence extended from the Thirties through the Fifties.

The year 1939 may have represented his zenith with his rendition of “Body and Soul.” Though the Eddie Hayman-Johnny Green composition had attracted attention since its release in 1930, Hawkins’ performance helped make it a standard, opening up manifold interpretations even within its strictly instrumental format.

What was especially noteworthy was how, after the first two bars, Hawkins largely dispensed with the melody in favor of a riff and variations. (“It’s Coleman Hawkins superimposed on Johnny Green, if you will,” the composer told Fred Hall in a January 1986 interview that was later collected in an anthology edited by Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz.)

Having already inspired the likes of Lester Young and Ben Webster by disclosing how the unique, full-bodied sound of the tenor sax, Hawkins quickly also recognized its potential through the fast tempos, complex chord progressions and improvisational lines of bebop.

It was Hawkins who in 1944 made the first recording of young Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody ‘n’ You” (see this blog post from the independent public radio station KUVO) and Hawkins who in that same year employed pianist-composer Thelonious Monk as part of his quartet.

In his younger years, even with his short, compact frame, Hawkins dominated virtually every room where he was present with his dapper attire, attractive dates, and cosmopolitan manner.

By the mid-1960s, as his increased drinking affected his appearance, Hawkins looked more like a jazz Methuselah. In a Spring 1998 reminiscence in The Antioch Review, jazz historian and critic Gary Giddins described his physical impact in a 1966 performance at New York’s Village Vanguard:

“The grizzled, full-bearded patriarch still looked sharp and slightly forbidding, even if he had receded a bit into his tailored gray silk-mohair. He gazed over the crowd with sad but alert eyes, his tight-lipped smile implying bemusement and perhaps disdain. When he greeted someone between sets, his voice was stately and deep, a match for his sound on tenor. He exuded dignity.”

Quote of the Day (Timmy Fisher, on the ‘Rich History’ of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’)

“If you played a musical instrument as a child, it's likely that you learnt ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ The melody is a gift for beginners: cheery, repetitive, largely stepwise. The words, meanwhile, are easy to adapt, making it a favourite for group singalongs. You'll hear it passed around campfires or belted from football terraces. Indeed, few songs in the western world are better known — a fact recognised by the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006 when it was awarded ‘Towering Song’ status for having ‘influenced our culture in a unique way over many years.’ But, unlike ‘Happy Birthday to You’, ‘Over the Rainbow’ or any of the other 19 songs recognised in this way, ‘When the Saints’ has no standard version and no known composer—just a rich history of transformation.”—Music critic, editor, and podcaster Timmy Fisher, “The Life of a Song: ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’” The Financial Times, May 18-19, 2024

Fisher traces this classic American song past the jazz rendition that Louis Armstrong popularized, even beyond its first recording in 1923 by the New York gospel group, the Paramount Jubilee Singers, back to—if you can believe it—the plainchant “In Paradisum,” which became part of the Catholic requiem mass after being written down sometime between 996 and 1011.

Now, I’m not going to argue with Fisher’s credentials as a well-informed music maven. But I can assure him that nothing in the “rich history of transformation” he mentions compares to the rendition of this song on the sideline of football games played by St. Cecilia High School (what else did you expect?) in Englewood, NJ.

At the zenith of my alma mater’s gridiron glory, stretching from Vince Lombardi’s start as a football coach to a couple of years before it closed in 1986, “Saints” cheerleaders would lead the packed stadium with syncopated hand clapping and shouts as fans sensed victory.

I can assure Fisher that, no matter what he might believe, nothing before in the history of this much-played song could compare to the groundswell of glorious noise on these occasions—and, at this increasingly late stage in my life, I doubt that anything from now on ever will.

Quote of the Day (Jazzman Sonny Rollins, With Good Life Advice)

“No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.”—Retired jazz saxophone master Sonny Rollins, The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, edited by Sam V.H. Reese (2024)

(The accompanying photo of Sonny Rollins was taken July 17, 2009, by Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden.)

Quote of the Day (Gunther Schuller, on the Exuberant ‘Creative Imagination’ of Sarah Vaughan)

“Sarah's creative imagination is exuberant. I have worked with Sarah Vaughan, I have accompanied her, and can vouch for the fact that she never repeats herself or sings a song the same way twice. Whether she is using what we call a paraphrase improvisation—an enhancement of the melody where the melody is still recognizable—or whether she uses the harmonic changes as the basis of the song to improvise totally new melodies or gestures, Sarah Vaughan is always totally inventive. It is a restless compulsion to create, to reshape, to search. For her a song—even a mediocre one—is merely a point of departure from which she proceeds to invent, a skeleton which she proceeds to flesh out.”— American composer, conductor, horn player, historian, educator, publisher, and jazz musician Gunther Schuller (1925-2015), “The Divine Sarah,” in Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (1989)

Today marks the centennial of the Newark, NJ-born jazz singer and pianist Sarah Vaughan (1925-1990), “Sassy” or “The Divine One” to her legion of fans. I blogged on her in this post from a decade ago, but her artistry is such that I thought she deserved another.

In this post seven years ago from the blog“Largehearted Boy,” music historian Elaine M. Hayes discussed six songs that shaped her biography Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan.

(The image accompanying this post is an August 1946 photograph of Sarah Vaughan at Café Society in New York, from the William P. Gottlieb Collection of the Library of Congress.)

This Day in Music History (Birth of Dave Brubeck, ‘West Coast Jazz’ Pioneer)

Dec. 6, 1920—Dave Brubeck, a pianist, bandleader and composer who over a six-decade career epitomized the cool sounds of “West Coast Jazz,” was born in Concord, Calif.

Brubeck became the center of this Northern California-centered musical movement through his attempts to create a modern jazz sound that incorporated the advanced compositional techniques of French composer Darius Milhaud. His friendships with and advocacy for Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, and Cal Tjader placed him at the epicenter of West Coast Jazz.

Brubeck may be most recognized in his own right for a song written by the alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Paul Desmond. Since its 1959 release, “Take Five” has become the biggest-selling jazz single ever, with the album on which it appears, Time Out, earning the distinction of being the first jazz record to go gold. Their interplay--Desmond, with a sound he likened to a dry martini, and Brubeck with his propulsive large chords--is especially remarkable on this recording.

Though Brubeck took piano lessons with his mother at age four and his two older brothers were also professional musicians, his future livelihood, let alone his fame and long life, was by no means assured. He gave up the piano at age 11 to concentrate on rodeo roping, and the following year, when the Brubecks moved to the foothills of the Sierras, he began to work with his father on the family’s 45,000-acre cattle ranch.

Even when the lure of the piano lured him away from his intention of majoring in veterinary medicine, a hitch developed in his new plans. His inability to read music was discovered by the dean of the music conservatory, who only relented on his threat not to graduate him when younger teachers protested that he could write great counterpoint and when Brubeck promised “never to teach and embarrass the conservatory,” the future jazz great said in a 1999 interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross.

In a 1973 humorous essay for the British magazine Punch, “How Jazz Came to the Orange County State Fair,” Desmond observed that one consequence of Brubeck’s ranch upbringing was a concern for “which way the hole slopes.” That same sense of the physical environment was paralleled by awareness of the musical landscape.

For example, Brubeck traced his inspiration for polyrhythm (i.e., playing more than one rhythm in the same piece) back to working on his father’s ranch, when he imagined the sounds most compatible with the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. And the exotic time signatures he heard in Turkish street music and multi-rhythmic African traditions while on tour led to his quartet’s commercial zenith, Take Five—a musical direction his record company accepted only reluctantly.

These journeys abroad would take on moral as well as musical dimensions. As early as World War II, while he was serving in General George Patton’s army, Brubeck led an integrated band. In 1960, at the height of his popularity, he took an even more public stand against racism, as he canceled a 25-date tour of colleges and universities across the American South that had banned the quartet’s bassist, Eugene Wright. (The background for this controversy is examined in a spring 2019 essay by Kelsey A. K. Klotz in Daedalus.)

Over time, spirituality became an increasing concern for Brubeck. Much of this was manifested in the 1960s and 1970s, when he found in Biblical texts the inspiration for works that addressed racial justice (e.g., the toccata Truth Is Fallen in 1971). But a decisive moment came in 1979, as a result of a commission from Our Sunday Visitor Magazine to compose a Mass. The powerful feeling of creativity he experienced not only resulted in To Hope! A Celebration, but in his conversion to Roman Catholic. (For an account of Brubeck’s musical evolution, see Michael Sherwin's 2003 essay "Jazz Goes Back to Church" in the Jesuit publication America.)

Honors came Brubeck’s way from early to late in his career. In 1954, he became only the second jazz performer (after Louis Armstrong) to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine. In the decade before his death in 2012 (a day shy of his 92^nd birthday), he received a Living Legacy Jazz Award from the Kennedy Center; a Lifetime Achievement Award from the London Symphony Orchestra; and the Kennedy Center Award from President Obama. He may have derived some of his greatest personal satisfaction, however, by performing with sons Darius, Chris and Dan—also professional musicians—starting in the 1970s.

(For a recent discussion of Brubeck music being released in time for the centennial of his birth, see this blog post for the magazine Jazz Times.)

(The image accompanying this post is “Portrait of Dave Brubeck”, with sheet music as backdrop, taken by Carl Van Vechten, Oct. 8, 1954. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection.)

Quote of the Day (Stanley Crouch, on How Charlie Parker ‘Defined His Generation’ of Jazz)

“[His] musical gifts made it possible for [Charlie] Parker to evolve from an inept alto saxophonist, a laughingstock in his middle teens, to a virtuoso of all-encompassing talent who, by the age of twenty-five, exhibited an unprecedented command of his instrument. His prodigious facility was used not only for exhibition or revenge, moreover, but primarily for the expression of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic inventions, at velocities that extended the intimidating relationship of thought and action that forms the mastery of improvisation in jazz. In the process, Parker defined his generation: He provided the mortar for the bricks of fresh harmony that Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie were making, he supplied linear substance and an eighth note triplet approach to phrasing that was perfectly right for the looser style of drumming that Kenny Clarke had invented.”— African-American poet, novelist, musical and cultural commentator, and biographer Stanley Crouch, “Bird Land: Charlie Parker, Clint Eastwood, and America,” in Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (2006)

Charlie Parker, the nonpareil saxophonist and composer who helped pioneer the postwar bebop movement in jazz, was born 100 years ago today in Kansas City, KS.

I have written before on “Bird,” including on his subordinate role in the first recording session of former group member Miles Davis and his early death. But I wanted to post again in a way that captures concisely what he meant to the evolution of jazz as an art form. Crouch’s passage above fulfills that nicely, I think.

Quote of the Day (Jazzman Sonny Rollins, on the Need to ‘Live Your Life Now in a Positive Way’)

‘I can hear music that elevates me, but on the other hand there’s martial music that’s made to make people go to war. So music is neutral. It has nothing to do with ethics. Music is not on the same level as trying to understand life. We’re here for 80-something years. One lifetime is not enough to get it right. I’ll be back in another body. I’m not interested in trying to get that technical about that because I don’t need to know. What I need to know is that being a person who understands that giving is better than getting is the proper way to live. Live your life now in a positive way. Help people if you can. Don’t hurt people. That works perfectly for me, man.”—Retired jazz saxophone master Sonny Rollins quoted in David Marchese, “Sonny Rollins, on Whether Great Musicians Make Good People,” The New York Times Magazine, Mar. 1, 2020

(Photo of Sonny Rollins taken July 17, 2009, by Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden.)

Quote of the Day (Piano Great Bill Evans, on Jazz)

"Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to me an element that makes his music jazz." — Jazz pianist-composer Bill Evans (1929-1980), quoted in Bill Lees, “The Poet: Bill Evans,” in Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism From 1919 to Now, edited by Robert Gottlieb (1996)

Quote of the Day (Miles Davis, on How He Was ‘Always Thinking About Creating’)

“Nothing is out of the question the way I live my life. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning. That’s when it starts – when I wake up and see the first light. Then, I’m grateful, and I can’t wait to wake up, because there’s something to do and try everyday. Everyday I find something creative to do with my life.” — American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer Miles Davis (1926-1991) with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (1990)

Quote of the Day (John McWhorter, on Scott Joplin’s Brand of Ragtime)

“The elegant ragtime pieces Joplin wrote better than anyone else are as difficult to play as they are lovely to hear. This had kept them a minority taste among pianists even in their prime, and today they are even less accessible given that ever fewer people play the piano. For the amateur instrumentalist, the 20th century became the age of the guitar, and in a music history class of 23 I recently taught, not a single one of the students had ever played the piano. Moreover, Joplin’s rags are gorgeous but not ‘hot,’ and the rock sensibility dominant since the 1970s makes it hard for most to connect with music that has so little “swagger” as some might put it these days. Ragtime’s descendant, jazz, differs from it partly in having exactly that ‘jamming’ essence and thus reaches the modern ear more easily; ragtime sounds like juice and cookies in contrast. The ’70s were the tail end of the time when pop music was often couched in melody and harmony elaborate enough that, for example, one could render it on a piano (Chicago; Earth, Wind & Fire; Billy Joel). I highly suspect that if used on the soundtrack of a hit movie today, Joplin’s music, even though largely unheard today, would barely occasion notice beyond a few musicians and musicologists.”— John McWhorter, “The Rag Man,” The American Interest, Volume 12, Number 2, 2016

I suspect that there are many people like me who had never heard of Scott Joplin until Marvin Hamlisch used the "King of Ragtime’s" piece “The Entertainer” as the unforgettable background music to the 1973 Best Picture Oscar winner, “The Sting.” That soundtrack wasn’t the only reason why interest in the pianist-composer revived (Jeremy Rifkin’s musicological sleuthing and E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime played their role, too), but it did give provide irresistible momentum to that awareness. 

Joplin—believed to have been born 150 years ago today in Linden, Texas—could have used more of that attention in the last decade or so of his life. Fairly or not, he privately complained that Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” was heavily indebted to his own work. Moreover, he was bitterly disappointed in the unsuccessful dream project of his last decade, Treemonisha, the first grand opera composed by an African American. 

He died in 1917 of syphilis, and was a wreck in the last couple of years before that. Jazz pianist Eubie Blake recalled seeing him taunted by other musicians to play: “So pitiful. He was so far gone with the dog (syphilis) and he sounded like a little child tryin' to pick out a tune."

It would take 50 years after his death for him to be noticed, he told friends. That turned out to be almost exactly on the mark, as recordings by Rifkin, Gunther Schuller, and the soundtrack for The Sting brought renewed recognition. Most remarkably, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1976 for Treemonisha.