Top 10 Jazz Ironies

Like the music itself, the history of jazz is loaded with irony. Stuff happens for strange reasons, or there are coincidences that are spring-loaded with unsaid meaning and hidden messages. Sometimes it's the space that says more than the notes. If irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom, as French poet Anatole France once said, then let me share with you a little of both. [Photo by Helen Levitt]

Here are 10 jazz ironies:

1. Cool was born on the East Coast (1948). Hard bop came to prominence on the West Coast (1954).

2. Art Tatum and George Shearing, two of the most technically gifted pianists of the late 1940s, couldn't see the keyboard.

3. Bebop—a radical form of mid-1940s jazz—took hold by applying new melody lines to the chord changes of familiar Tin Pan Alley tunes.

4. The bossa nova—Brazil's intoxicating beat of the late 1950s and 1960s—was a fusing of home-grown samba and West Coast jazz.

5. The decision by swing era legend Red Norvo to form a vibes-guitar-bass trio in 1950 inadvertently kicked off West Coast cool. When the Red Norvo Trio went into The Haig in July 1952, there was no need for Los Angeles club owner John Bennett to rent a grand piano for the extended gig. Bennett offered to roll in a cheap studio upright for the other group due to play on Norvo's night off. But Gerry Mulligan waved Bennett off, giving birth to the piano-less quartet.

6. Bebop's anthem, Cherokee, was written by Ray Noble, a British bandleader.

7. The first song simply titled Jazz was written by Chico O'Farrill and recorded by Machito and His Orchestra in 1948. The song Swing was recorded by English bandleader Bert Ambrose and His Orchestra in 1936. 

8. In the spring of 1956, the U.S. State Department began  sending African-American jazz musicians abroad on tours to tout the virtues of democracy—despite bus-riding and public-dining restrictions imposed on blacks throughout the South.

9. The American Federation of Musicians' strike of 1942 was called to protect big band musicians from growing incursions by records, radio and jukeboxes. Instead of preserving the big bands, the AFM strike resulted in the rise of dozens of independent record labels and small-group jazz. [Pictured: AFM president James Petrillo]

10. Despite being recorded just months after Miles Davis' mostly modal Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck's Time Out! was not released by Columbia until 1961 for fear that the album's unusual meters would not sell.

Comments

[Michael Steinman]

Perhaps all art is chased by ironies, but jazz seems more prone to them, given its precarious hold on the public imagination and its even more precarious economic status. These are very perceptive, very sad, very funny: you might, dear Marc, do a monthly list of them. I think it would be a long long time before you would get to the end of the jar of Ironies.

Cheers and thanks for comin' through the wry --

[Larry Kart]

What do you have in mind with "Hard Bop came into prominence on the West Coast (1954)"?

I would say that the first unmistakable and widely influential Hard Bop recording was Art Blakey's "A Night at Birdland," with Clifford Brown, Lou Donaldson, and Horace Silver, rec. Feb. 21, 1954, this preceded by Silver's first trio recordings from 1953. Arguably, the roots of the style begin with Bud Powell's "Bouncing With Bud"/ "Dance of the Infidels" date, with Navarro, Rollins, and Haynes, from Aug. 9, 1949.

[Agustín Pérez Gasco]

Marc

There's an OKeh recording of a song called "The Swing" from March 16, 1924 by Johnny de Droit and his New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, coupled with "New Orleans Blues" by the same group. Here's yet another jazz irony: swing and New Orleans.

Regards,
Agustín

[Don Brown]

In point 6, Marc, you call Ray Noble's "Cherokee" bebop's anthem. Well, I guess it could be considered one of the anthems, but as a jazz lover who grew up during the bop years I still remember everyone referring to "How High the Moon" as 'the national anthem of bebop'. Countless bop 'originals' were based on the chord progressions of Nancy Hamilton's song and it seemed to be the number one favorite for jamming and cutting contests.