West Coast jazz has no real beginning and no specific founder. It's a sound that evolved from a range of musical influences—including Lester Young's relaxed sound on the tenor saxophone, Count Basie's swing and classical counterpoint. But West Coast jazz is also a product of experiences, including the vastness and tranquilizing effect of the Pacific Ocean, the exhilaration of car culture, and the optimism of suburbia.
When I interviewed Howard Rumsey in 2009, the bassist who managed The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, Calif., home of West Coast jazz jam sessions in the 1950s, told me the chief architects of the music were Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne and Gerry Mulligan. All were East Coast transplants who made expansive use of harmony and round-robin soloing in compact groups. Early on, the sound of West Coast jazz was a more laid-back form of bebop, or, as Howard told me, "It's the music of happy—in a hurry."
We know that the properties that define West Coast jazz—zig-zagging melody lines, dry-roasted solos and tight harmony configurations—were pretty much in place by 1951 on Shorty Rogers' Modern Sounds album for Capitol. But where did the sound on this album come from? What's the genesis? Let me take a stab at it.
If we assume Shorty Rogers (above) had the greatest influence on shaping the early West Coast jazz sound, then we need to track his footprints back from Modern Sounds. During the late 1940s, Rogers was in Woody Hermans' band, specifically the one in 1947 that recorded Jimmy Giuffre's Four Brothers. This reed-centric, highly melodic recording was harmony-rich but it didn't really carry the architecture of West Coast jazz. Instead, it was more of a bebop line fleshed out with saxes.
By January 1950, Rogers joined Stan Kenton, where he found an orchestra with much more power and muscle for his arranging style. In February '50, the band recorded Rogers' arrangement of Jolly Rogers, which had inklings of his ascending and descending progressions that would mark his sound...
But here, the music was more like a snapping electrical cable than the cubist structure that would become Rogers' hallmark sound. Not until September '50, with Kenton's recording of Rogers' Round Robin, do we start to hear the West Coast jazz sound emerge. Where Jolly Rogers is blistering, Round Robin is more focused on its geometry. There are plenty of high-note fireworks thanks to Maynard Ferguson's trumpet, but they are used merely for splash and punctuation. What dominates is the seductive descending progression and stop-time figures that would be used often by Rogers in the years that followed. We also hear more relaxed solos by Rogers on trumpet, Bob Cooper on tenor sax, Art Pepper on alto sax and Don Bagley on bass...
Compare Round Robin with Apropos from Rogers' Modern Sounds album, recorded in October '51. By then, the West Coast sound was formed. Though Mulligan wouldn't be on the West Coast until the following year, when he formed his pianoless quartet, the octet format pioneered by Rogers (and several years earlier by Dave Brubeck in San Francisco) would become the most efficient ensemble size to handle the new West Coast jazz style....
So, West Coast jazz starts with Shorty Rogers' inventive arrangement of Round Robin for Stan Kenton in 1950. While the sound might not have fully congealed at the time, all the ingredients were in place, including sighing relay-race solos. All that remained was for Rogers to downsize the orchestra to eight players and hit the new style's sweet spot.
