Cool but Hot
The piano's effect on modern jazz....
The piano, its presence or absence, played a big role in the development of modern jazz. But it’s not so much the piano itself that was important, rather the freedom found by musicians while playing it or by not having it played at all.
The Blue Rider by Kandinsky is perhaps unremarkable, but it represented an important milestone in artistic transition from impressionism to modern abstract art of which he was one of the pioneers. In the same way, I think Earl Hines and Gerry Mulligan used the piano to begin a similar artistic transition in modern Jazz. Ultimately, like Kandinsky, they used their medium as an expression of personal and artistic freedom.
For Earl “Fatha” Hines and Gerry Mulligan, the piano played a huge role in their pursuit of freedom; however, in vastly different ways. Earl Hines set the piano free from the traditional role of the rhythm section, allowing “his” sound to be heard above the band. On the other hand, in Gerry Mulligan’s Quartet the piano was noticeably absent in order to loosen the constraints of chord changes, allowing more freedom to deliver creative, less restricted dialogue.
I first heard Earl “Fatha” Hines in 1985 while standing in the DJ booth at the KAZU radio station in Pacific Grove, California, a small town right next to Monterey. Here’s how I got there…..
In the Summer of 1984, after graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point, I left NYC and traveled down to Airborne school in North Carolina. After Airborne school, I drove down to New Orleans for a quick stop at the World’s Fair and then up to Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, where I started Field Artillery Officer Basic Course. I liked Lawton and listened mostly to county music. I did go down to Dallas a couple times to hear some blues - I remember seeing John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers and Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets. From Lawton, it was on to Monterey, California to attend the Defense Language Institute in Presidio of Monterey. I was there to study Dutch. It would be here, in Monterey, that I got my first taste of both Earl Hines and West Coast Jazz.
I was a disc-jockey at Pacific Grove’s 90.3 KAZU radio station (Here's a good article showing the studio while I was there). I know this is about my Jazz journey, but truth be told, at this time in my life I was actually a bigger blues fan. Back in Greenwich village, I used to stick around the Blue Note after the last shows for Ted Curson’s open Jam Session. I am a harmonica player and Ted, of course, was a trumpet player – he was Charlie Mingus’ trumpet player for many years. He was a great guy. I’d go down there enough that when he saw me he’d call me up and we’d play Stormy Monday together. I had learned to disk-jockey while at West Point’s WKDT. One night, I played Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side and my Tactical Officer called me at the station while the song was playing and told me, “Cadet King, don’t play that kind of music anymore!” Well, at least I know he liked my show….
KAZU was looking for a one hour Saturday afternoon fill-in for their normal DJ on the weekends for a few months. I walked in and they hired me.
One of the DJs was a blues, Gospel, and R&B musicologist extraordinaire. He played everything from old 78RPMs to the Neville Brothers. I was particularly interested in his 78s.
He liked to play this song by Earl Hines from 1939:
He told me about a guy that lived on a farm out in Salinas. One of the buildings there was filled with 78RPM records. He told me he’d bring me along next time he went out there, but before I had that chance, my language school was over and I was on my way to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam….
In the pre-war period and even into the 1950s, the main inspiration of all jazz pianists was Earl Hines. Dizzy Gillespie said, “There were individual variations but the style of …the modern piano came from Earl Hines.”
Chicago was the music center of America in the early 1920s when Earl Hines hit town. “I came through with an Eastern-style piano that was different” he recalled to Ralph Gleason, a San Francisco music critic.
“My style was actually based on two pianists in Pittsburgh - Jim Fellman who had a terrific left hand, and Jonny Watters, out of Toledo, Ohio - where Art Tatum came from - who had a terrific right hand. They both liked different types of drinks. Fellman liked chewing tobacco and beer and Watters liked gin and Camel cigarettes. So out of my $15 a week I’d get them up in the room, one every other day, buy them what they liked to show me how they did it.”
It was in Chicago that Hines teamed up with another youngster, Cornet-playing Louis Armstrong, fresh up from New Orleans.
But before Earl joined Louie, he cut this solo track for Okeh records (and dig the video on this one):
No one was playing piano like this in 1928.
Here’s another classic with Hines playing piano in Jimmie Noone’s Apex Club Orchestra again from May 1928, which is probably my favorite Hines solo:
When people think of early Jazz music, of course, Louie Armstrong’s Hot Five and Seven groups come to mind. But for me, I think of Earl Hines. I think it was Earl’s piano that really made Louie’s bands move. If you listen to Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions, the cuts after Earl joined is when the band shines - I think Earl makes the band really come alive. Earl Hines freed the piano from the rhythm section and gave it a voice all its own. You can really hear it in the Jimmie Noone’s song above - listen for that piano above the band “trumpet style” during the first part of the song before his solo.
Here’s another good example from Muggles also from 1928:
For those interested in a bonus track, I love this song and video - it really brings back the feel of pre-depression America: Earl Hines and his Orchestra's Sister Kate
Now, a must watch! Carve out 30 minutes and get ready to learn from the “Fatha” of modern piano. After a short trio tune, the man himself takes us from Ragtime to the modern piano style he created. Earl Hines says it much better than I ever could in this TV recording from KQED San Francisco:
For more, check this 1975 Earl Hines documentary.
A friend of mine Luis and I worked at the now closed Wessex Books in Menlo Park, California. We’d often argue the merits of Stan Kenton as we wrestled for control of the bookstore’s sound system. Luis couldn’t take the over-production of Kenton’s band. While I could not argue that, I respected Kenton and could put on some gems that would put him a little at ease. Like this one arranged by Bill Russo:
Or this one with the great Anita O’Day:
And one more for you Luis:
Or this 1958 classic with strings more on the lush side - I’m a sucker for this:
But even with all these, if Gerry Mulligan were here next to me and I asked him what he thought of Kenton’s bands, he’d agree with Luis….
Gerry Mulligan was instrumental in the album most consider seminal in the history of cool jazz, The Birth Of Cool. However, after these recordings he was broke and needing a job. Down on his luck, he hitchhiked across country to California with his girlfriend Gail Madden. Gail was from LA and had connections to Kenton through Bob Graettinger, who was working for Kenton. She got Kenton to buy some of Mulligan’s arrangements. Interestingly, here’s what Mulligan said about Kenton, “I hated what that band stood for because it was like the final evolution of wrongly taken points. The way the band kept growing…. It was symbolic to me of the end of the dance band. It was so pretentious. It was the last straw.” But it helped pay the bills for a while and did help him build some credibility in LA.
To help make ends meet, Mulligan played some marathon sessions at the Lighthouse.
Before long, his fortunes began to turn when he landed a job on the Monday-night session at The Haig, a small club (actually a converted bungalow) on Wilshire Boulevard.
These sessions featured a rotating group of high quality LA musicians like Sonny Criss, Ernie Royal, Jimmy Rowles, and Red Mitchell to name a few. One of the musicians to sit in was Chet Baker, who had gained local fame when he was chosen by Charlie Parker for a quintet Parker was fronting during a visit to the Coast.
I think the The Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker was important for two main reasons. First of all, it was fun. Gerry Mulligan was interested in making music that was fun to play and fun to listen to. Secondly, and more importantly, it was pianoless. “The idea of a band without a piano is not new”, he wrote in the liner notes introducing his first Pacific Jazz album:
He goes on, “The Very first jazz bands didn’t use them (how could they? They were either marching or riding in wagons.)” Here’s a reprint of a portion of the liner notes, which I think is important to understand the quartet’s basic concept:
“I consider the string bass to be the basis of the sound of the group; the foundation on which the soloist builds his line, the main thread around which two horns weave their contrapuntal interplay. It is possible with two voices to imply the sound of or impart the feeling of any chord or series of chords as Bach shows us so thoroughly and enjoyably in his inventions.
When a piano is used in a group it necessarily plays the dominant role; the horns and bass must tune to it as it cannot tune to them, making it the dominant tonality. The piano’s accepted function of constantly stating the chords of the progression makes the solo horn a slave to the whims of the piano player. The soloist is forced to adapt his line to the changes and alternations made by pianist in the chords of the progression.
It is obvious that the bass does not possess as wide range of volume and dynamic possibilities as drums and horns. It is therefore necessary to keep the overall volume in proportion to that of the bass in order to achieve an integrated group sound.”
The piano’s accepted function of constantly stating the chords of a progression makes the solo horn a slave to the whims of the piano player. That is the real key and what allows musicians more freedom to deliver that creative, less restricted dialogue.
Here’s what they sound like:
I think Mulligan’s pianoless quartet’s greatest influence was on Ornette Coleman. Ornette was in LA during the high point of the Mulligan Quartet. And in 1958 when he was finally given the chance to release his first recordings on Something Else!!!!, they shocked the Jazz world.
Something Else!!!! is one of Rolling Stone’s 40 Most Groundbreaking Albums of All Time. They write:
"Free jazz" starts here, more or less. The saxophonist would get much further out (what's that piano doing here?) but his first recording session established a new concept of improvisation: rather than expressing themselves within traditional song structures, musicians would have to act like spontaneous composers responding to what the other players had done. But Coleman came up on the R&B circuit, and if Something Else!!!! was more forward-thinking than much contemporary jazz it was also bluesier. One of Ornette Coleman's greatest insights was that sometimes the most avant-garde music is also the truest to its roots, that you can demolish traditional musical architecture without abandoning the sounds that made those traditions once feel so alive.”
Notice the piano bashing right out of the gate. Most likely, Contemporary records mandated a piano player for Ornette’s debut album. But he would abandon it on his second Contemporary album and then again on all his future Atlantic albums. We will spend more time on Ornette Coleman later on in our journey….
To further the claim of Mulligan’s influence on Coleman, we should take note of what Richard Cook & Brian Morton wrote in their The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD:
“In his short story, Entropy, the novelist Thomas Pynchon takes Mulligan’s early-1950’s piano-less quartets with Chet Baker as a crux of post modernism, improvisation without the safety net of predictable chords.
The revisionist argument was that Mulligan attempted the experiment simply because he had to work in a club with no piano.
The true version is that there was a piano, albeit an inadequate one, but he was already experimenting with a much more arranged sound for small groups (to which the baritone saxophone was particularly adaptable) and the absence of a decent keyboard was merely an additional spur….
Mulligan’s piano-less quartet is one of the epochal jazz groups, even if it had no such aspirations, formed for nothing more than a regular gig at The Haig….
In retrospect, it’s the simplest pleasures which have made the music endure: the uncomplicated swing of the various rhythm sections, the piquant contrast of amiably gruff baritone saxophone and shyly melodious trumpet….
Cool but hot, slick but never too clever, these are some of the most pleasurable records of their time.”
It was indeed cool but hot. That is exactly right!
Here’s what Ornette Coleman’s pianoless quartet sounded like in 1960:
My brief stay in Monterey sparked an interest in West Coast Jazz that I would rekindle when I returned to Monterey after my time in the service. But for the moment, I was on a plane to The Netherlands. Next week, we’ll pick up my journey on the other side of the pond….
This edition of my newsletter is dedicated to a great friend and brother in California - a real American classic.
If you like what you’ve been reading and hearing so far on our journey, please share my newsletter with others - just hit the “Share” button at the bottom of the page.
Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….
Until then, keep on walking….
Love this, keep it up!