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If by "serious" you mean "an expectation of virtuosity", then I'd agree. But who gets excited by that? And there were plenty of guys who could get around before then.
Do you think all that stuff sprung full blown, like Athena, from the forehead of Zeus? If there weren’t cats like Armstrong there would be no bebop. Perhaps modern art began with Picasso, but he studied the centuries before. No old art no modern art. Besides, Armstrong pioneered a lot of techniques, like soloing… Here from The Louis Armstrong Jazz Band website…
“But what about solos? It was Louis Armstrong who’s strong lip and great ear lead him to improvise solos above and beyond anyone of his time. And to top that off, he knew when to do it, and when not to do it. That’s a talent unto itself.
So the next time you here a band playing swing ensemble jazz and then one of the musicians takes a solo, think of Louis Armstrong. He started that style of Louis Armstrong Jazz' over 100 years ago, and it's still one of the most popular forms today!”
There’s more to the history of bebop than fast tempos and asymmetrical lines. Sure, musicians break new ground…, frequently, in fact. That’s what Louis did in the 20s and Bird listened to his likes… a lot.
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It’s interesting to hear some of the earlier pioneers of bebop talk about its origins, and many of them have said bebop was played by musicians a long time before there was a word for it - after hours ‘cutting contests’ in clubs were the places where swing-era players grew bebop.
The irony with Satchmo is that many bebop players cite him as an influence, but he was always vocal about his dislike of bebop.
I can agree with @Lady_App_titude in so far as, prior to bebop, jazz (in this case, the swing era) was primarily played for the entertainment of white folk.
Bebop is really when the musicians themselves became artists.
But even before then, the likes of Duke Ellington were writing pieces specifically for the musicians in his band (to compliment and show off their individual styles and abilities) so there was already some degree of personal artistic expression and re-interpretation going on.
And Duke’s tunes were a huge influence on those that were born in Harlem (the ubiquitous ‘Take the A Train’ and its augmented fourths being an obvious example).
The comment about Satchmo is irrefutable.
Plus you can add Sidney Bechet as being the main reason Trane reintroduced the soprano sax to the jazz lexicon after decades of being ignored.
And I almost forgot Django/Grappelli, whose Hot Club influenced European music long before bebop and continues to today.
I don’t think the history of jazz supports your hypothesis.
I said LESS important, not UNimportant. Technically, I don't do "favorites," because it would go on forever and it changes every day. But, if we're talking about a core starting point, like for a new listener...
Bird, Miles, Trane.
Yes, of course Bird built upon Lester Young, and Armstrong.. And he would have been the first person to tell you that. And yes there's all kinds of great stuff to eventually dig back into, going all the way back to Ragtime… Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bix, Jellyroll Morton, Benny Moten, Young, Hawkins, Duke.. Meade Lux Lewis (!) and so on. (And of course I love the Hot Club French scene, Django/Grappelli .. a whole other world!) But then you’ll have an endless list.
Bebop, Bird/Diz was the breakthrough.
Get a couple of Bird albums, a couple of Miles albums, and a couple of Trane albums. Work your way back/forward from there. In fact, you could start with Miles and you’ll bump into all of it!
I would suggest the Bird Dial and Savoy albums (In my day it was on vinyl, the Very Best of Bird, etc. Don’t know how they are packaged today.) For Miles, Kinda Blue and Workin and Steamin, and maybe then Four and More. Trane: Giant Steps, Coltrane Jazz, Blue Trane..
And of course, even post-bop (hard bop, modal jazz, avant grade) there is so much… Monk, Mingus, Rollins, Clifford Brown, Joe Henderson.. on and on.
And then there’s electric and fusion stuff starting to happen in the 60s and into the 70s..
But trying to focus in on the most essential.
This is why I hated the Ken Burns Jazz doc, because he followed Winton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch and those guys put too much emphasis on Duke and Armstrong and swing and dixieland, etc. Yes, great stuff, important. Disproportionally covered, IMO. The genius breakthrough moment came with Bird.
Bird, Miles, Trane. Love lots of other stuff. Just don't have as much use for it.
Just my opinion. Don’t care what others think. I’m right.
The audience became whiter during the swing era as musicians moved to northern cities, but jazz certainly wasn’t played exclusively for white audiences. Prior to the 20s it probably didn’t have much in the way of white audiences at all.
I’m well read on the history of jazz, but am always happy to be corrected.
As far as understand it, during the swing era (interwar period) it was primarily for entertainment. Played by ‘negroes’ for the moneyed white folk who could no longer spend their money on legal alcohol.
Prior to this jazz didn’t really exist outside of Louisiana.
@Lady_App_titude, sorry, I don’t really get where you’re coming from. I spent hundreds of hours singing with Bird’s Dial solos… but I also spent hundreds of hours singing with Billie Holiday and Armstrong. They were all equivalent influences and joys for me… and, frankly, timeless. If you listen to my music,I think you can hear all of them and more.
More importantly, I think someone new to jazz isn’t interested so much in the seismic events of jazz history (a timeline on which Louis’ and Billie’s contributions would have equal richter numbers as Parker and Trane. Rather, I believe they want to hear music that gets to them. Isn’t it possible that a new listener is moved MORE by Billie and Lester Young playing together than Bird and Diz? Might they not need to hear these older greats to get to an appreciation of the later cats?
Perhaps you are making an intellectual argument. But think of the bebop stereotype. Jazz clubs with cool, mostly white, chicks and cats smoking and snapping their fingers to musicians on drugs. Digging the idea of how cool they were almost as much as they were digging the music. Louis was music for the masses… both black and white.
And people could fucking dance to it!
Of course you can have your opinion. My opinion is if I were stuck on the proverbial deserted island and could have only one record it sure as shit wouldn’t be Bird.
As far as the member who commented on African Americans solely creating music for Caucasian audiences… I find that remark incomprehensible.
"[D]uring the swing era…it was primarily for entertainment" - most music is primarily for entertainment. Did you mean it was primarily for dancing? And if the assertion is that it was primarily for the entertainment of white people, what were Black audiences enjoying at that time? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Beethoven.
In reply to both of the above, very reasonable questions:
1. I never asserted that jazz was ‘created’ for white audiences
2. I never asserted that black audiences were not listening to jazz.
Both of these assertions are untrue.
And by ‘entertainment’ I mean dancing in the company of others along to a live band. On this I should have been clearer.
Most of the jazz records made in this era (and therefore the music we have recourse to) were done by bands and bandleaders who made their living performing for white audiences. Not saying that there weren’t tonnes of largely forgotten groups who played the speakeasies to black crowds after the whites had gone home, but way fewer of them had the opportunity to get their tunes down on wax.
From bebop onwards jazz musicians were less concerned with making people dance and more concerned with the music itself in terms of composing/performing pieces for listening.
Apologies for any misunderstanding caused. But you do have to be careful in these forums that you read carefully what someone has written and not, sometimes incorrectly, extrapolating from it.
I'm thinking like a musician. What use would a musician of today have for jazz? Improvisation! And harmony. That's where the breakthrough occurred with Bird and Diz ... freedom ... spontaneous invention over existing harmonies. And you need to understand the extended harmony of jazz in order to improvise.
Modern musicians grow up with music in an electrified world. Electric Miles is a starting point, and from there you bump into all those great sidemen, Herbie, Chick, etc... And what the hell are these guys doing? How are they able to freely invent incredible melodies on the spot like that? You work your way back and you hit Trane, and then Bird, and that's where you can spend years learning.
Yes, lots of other stuff ... But bottomline, you asked for my favorites, and that in turn makes me think of where I would point a fellow musician looking to expand ... And, thus: Bird, Miles, Trane.
But most musicians don’t start with bebop when learning jazz - they often start with blues-based jazz, then work through standards as played in the swing era. Bebop at that point might be optional, as harmony and improvisation will have already been acquired.
@Lady_App_titude, it's just a fun discussion, but yes, it’s about favorites, not the history of jazz influencers. Buuut…. how can you begin to talk about jazz improvisation without recognizing that Louis was improvising when the only creations Bird made were filling his diapers.
Most people think of Hello Dolly and It’s a Wonderful World when they think of Armstrong, but the reality is that his Hot Five and Hot Seven (with a female piano player) were innovative and groundbreaking recordings in the art of improvisation. Beyond that, improvisation is certainly nothing new. The music of almost any culture… including the music of 18th century white European males had elements of improvisation. Chopin was a consummate improviser in the 19th.
Even if we limit it to jazz, you had at least twenty years of solid improvising before Bird came along.
I mean, take a listen to Charlie Christian, who died before Bird even got going…
“Charles Henry Christian was an American swing and jazz guitarist. Christian was an important early performer on the electric guitar and a key figure in the development of bebop and cool jazz. He gained national exposure as a member of the Benny Goodman Sextet and Orchestra from August 1939 to June 1941.” Wikipedia
But, hey, stick to your guns. I have always posited that the opinions of jazz musicians are a substitute for dollars in the bank. From that perspective we’re rich.
Not forgetting Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, both in their most infleuential prime well pre-bebop.
Because the average musician can grok what is going on in that stuff (or a Billie Holiday tune) fairly quickly. But with bebop it takes you deeper. Concepts and techniques that are revolutionary.
And that is exactly the wrong approach that I would recommend avoiding.
It’s like if a musician asked me what is my favorite rock musician (and GAWD pleeze, let’s not start down that tunnel!), I would give them a Hendrix album, or maybe Led Zeppelin. Yes, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc., but you can circle back to that later. And once they are listening to it, they won’t want/need listen to it over and over.
You can’t get to Ornette (maybe you don’t want to — whether it’s progress or de-evolution is debatable) but to get there, you have to go through Bird, Miles, Trane. Armstrong and Ellington, not so much.
@Lady_App_titude, I think you’re missing the point that most people listen to music to have a good/poignant/meditative time. You don’t need a degree in musicology to know what you like. And musical interests evolve naturally.
Sure, you could go straight for the desired end result, but I don’t think it’s going to work well for most people, as learning theory and technique is pretty much always a stepped process.
I might want to learn Jimmy Page solos or open tuning chord progressions, but I’ll probably be more successful if I get some underlying principles under my belt first. Enter Chuck Berry…
Duke Ellington is 3.2 beer; Sarah Vaughn a fine glass of wine. Charlie Parker is acid.
Louis Armstrong is a landline. Miles Davis is an iPad.
Frankly, I think there's too much emphasis put on Bebop in jazz. There's a lot to be said for keeping music listenable and accessible, and while I love me some Bird/Trane/etc., a lot of that music can be alienating. This isn't to denigrate the style or argue about it's ever-present and eternal influence - it is absolutely true that music was never the same afterwards. But let me put this forth - so what?
In the early 20th Century, orchestral music went through a transformation via folks like Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Edgard Varese, etc. who moved away from traditional structures, tonalities and concepts into what became "Avant Garde". This music is FANTASTICALLY intelligent and complex. But personally I find a lot of it very hard to listen to. It feels as though these composers got so into their own heads and their own "methods" that they forgot about music being something that people want to listen to, rather than think about.
I feel that there's a fair amount of Bebop that also falls into this same category - it gets SO heady that it becomes nigh-unlistenable. I'm all for analysis, being clever, musicianship, etc. but at the same time I like to tap my foot and sing along. It's amazing that these boundaries/traditions were broken, limits and glass ceilings shattered, envelopes pushed. I just don't always want to LISTEN to that process.
This may not be a popular opinion - it's just mine, others likely feel differently. But that's a large reason of why I gravitate away from bop to other styles of jazz that are a bit more grounded.
Herbie Hancock’s „Headhunters“ started it all for me. A friend gave me that record and I remember listening to it over and over again because I couldn’t believe what I was listening to. I sold most of my CDs and Records after that and started collecting Jazz records. And later Soul and Funk.
That was 30 years ago and I am still into Jazz like on day one.
I was a serious record collector back in the 90s and me and my friends even started a monthly club night where we played our latest findings. Mostly US or European Artists.
A few artists that come to my mind: John Coltrane, Sahib Shihab, Pharoa Sanders, Wolfgang Dauner, Dave Pike Set, Jimmy Smith, Ivan Boogaloo Joe Jones, Melvin Sparks, Dieter Reith, Cannonball Adderley, Peter Herbolzheimer, Thelonius Monk, Grant Green, Miles Davis, Mongo Santamaria, Cal Tjader, Mark Murphy, Charly Antollini, Roy Ayers etc.
Labels like Blue Note Records, Impulse, Prestige, Fantasy, MPS, Polydor, Strata East, Black Jazz and lots of obscure stuff.
I love all the artists mentioned besides a handful I’ve not heard or heard of yet - to keep it short and sweet I’m just gonna mention who my current favorite Jazz musician is- the young Armenian piano virtuoso Tigran Hamasayan... This guy is simply incredible and unique and very polyrhythmic too -well worth checking out for those not familiar.
First time I heard ‘Free Jazz’ by Ornette Coleman I was blown away. The concept of free jazz might not be for everyone, but when it’s done well I’m just dumbstruck by the incredible levels of musicianship involved.
Nah, this is bad musicology. There is nothing new in bop harmony that can’t be found in earlier jazz. Nothing. The innovation of bop was the rhythm. And the most avant aspects of that didn’t last very long at all, having been smoothed out by the early 50s.
I didn't say that the harmony was new. I said you had to understand the underlying harmony in order to be able to improvise like that over it. One is drawn into it by the flashy soloing, but learning the chords underneath is an additional benefit.
Once again, the way i read this question was one musician who doesn't know jazz asking another one to recommend stuff, the good stuff. In my mind, this implies someone from pop or rock background looking to expand beyond the simpler triads, melodies, and rhythms of popular music. At least that's how it was when I first got into jazz. I asked a friend, and he recommended certain Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane records. From those three key artists, one learns about jazz chords, progression, modes, improvisation, etc. -- in short the essence of jazz.
Bebop was what elevated jazz above a popular form toward greater virtuosity and invention. However, I'm not saying bebop alone is the ultimate anything, but it was a breakthrough that set things off in new directions, and it is a great place where a musician can learn. Every jazz musician knows Ornithology, Scrapple From The Apple, Night In Tunisia, Donna Lee, and so on. But Bird's career, though relatively brief, was more than just bebop, as he strove to continually expand his horizons into Afro-Cuban, and orchestral instrumentation, etc. But the main figure I would recommend is Miles Davis, because through him and his many sideman one encounters basically all the major figures at the vanguard of jazz from bebop in the 40s to fusion in the 70s, and beyond.
Currently?
Anoushka Shankar.
I could add more to list and eventually I may do but right now she’s hitting all the right points.
As well as being an amazing classically trained sitar player her improvisations are awesome.