Jazz Movement in the 1960s
Jazz Movement in the 1960sThe Avant-Garde Movement in Jazz in the 1960's
The avant-garde movement in jazz in the 1960's was a period in music that was marked by several specific traits. The United States in the 60's was going through rapid changes socially, and having some major political changes also. In this paper, I would like to follow the development of the avant-garde movement, from the very causes of the movement to avant-garde from the "Modality" and "3rd Stream" periods, all the way through to the major innovators of the period. Also included in my discussion will be the social and political changes facing the nation in the 1960's, the philosophy that the avant-garde movement was based on, and the ways that musicians tested fellow musicians on the "validity" of this "free jazz" period.
In the 1960's the country saw a sweeping change in the social system. The strong family values of the 1950's began to become very "loose". The country was taking major strides in its development. It was said that "The 1960's was a decade where old values went up in smoke and new sounds symbolized a new state of mind (Time Video)." As the country changed so rapidly, there were both high and low spots in history. For example, the country came together and watched as Neil Armstrong landed an American space craft on the moon, and his words "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" still can bring chills to those who watched live as he took his first steps onto the lunar soil. However, the country also suffered several great losses, and had some hardships.
The 60's were still a time of racial injustice, toward blacks and nearly all minorities. For some reason, the white Americans were able to fly to the moon, but they still could not realize that people with a different skin color were no different from them. Several people made a move to change this in the 1960's, and a man named Martin Luther King, Jr. Came to the forefront of the civil rights movement. As blacks and minorities began to push harder and harder for their civil rights, the scene became filled with tension, and Americans watched on television as racial violence erupted in Birmingham, Alabama. In a span of just 5 days over 2,500 blacks were arrested, showing that equality was still quite a way in the future. In a great loss to all Americans, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. During his lifetime, however, he was able to influence millions, leading a march on Washington, D.C. in August 1963, and he saw both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 pass through congress and become laws.
The country saw another great American in the 1960's: John F. Kennedy. As the country was enjoying a rather prosperous beginning of the decade, the young and good-looking Kennedy held the presidency. Kennedy was charismatic, and brought hopes of good times to the nation, and promised our advancing as the dominant world power over Russia. Unfortunately, like King, Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. The deaths of these two men held the country together in one common emotion... grief.
Another problem facing the nation in the 1960's was the Vietnam War.
"The Vietnam War was highly unpopular with the American people. Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson lost the election to Republican Richard M. Nixon. Young people carried on anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Chicago. The high expenditures for war influenced inflation that gripped our country. In the mid 1960's we saw the construction industry hard hit as war spending drove up mortgage interest rates. By the early 1970's, the inflation was the worst the nation had experienced since the years just after World War II (Encyclopedia Americana V.28, 112h)."
There were more changes sweeping the nation, in the sounds of the changing music industry. The smooth sounds in mainstream music of the early 1960's began to fall to the rock-and-roll music of the mid 1960's. This led to a society of young people that turned to a freer lifestyle, and increased drug use, and eventually a major event bringing together a large group of young Americans to show their disapproval with the "traditional" America, and the one they preferred, at the Woodstock Festival. In jazz, the music styles also changed with the feelings of the nation.
The previous periods of jazz music, "Modality" and "3rd Stream", were somewhat along the lines of customary jazz. In fact, 3rd Stream was mostly just a combination of classical music and traditional jazz. However, the changing society in the 1960's brought in a new style to jazz: Avant-Garde.
Avant-Garde was referred to as somewhat of a revolution in music. "Composers who are making the most daring and bold attempts to explore new and different ways of producing music are known as avant-garde composers. Avant-garde is a French term referring to the leaders of an artistic movement and their works (McGehee 318)." Jazz music had enjoyed increased exposure in the 1950's. Jazz could commonly be found on television programs, and commercials. "Jazz also found its way into the film industry. Jazz provided background music and also provided the basic theme for a series of feature films (Feather 51)."
Avant-garde jazz is based on a certain philosophy, that the music was duplicating and reflecting the American society (Dr. Davis, lecture). From my personal experience with avant-garde jazz, you never hear the melody, only clashing harmonies. The music sounds very brassy and loud, which leads from the fact that avant-garde jazz used music from traditional East Indian culture. It also almost always carries a central theme music being heavily improvised. A good way to describe how improvisation works is: "Improvisation is the ability to create new music spontaneously. Improvisation raises the role of the soloist from just a performer and imitator of others to a composer as well (Tirro, Information Finder, World Book)."
Musicians in the avant-garde period designed a rather tight set of criteria on what they would consider to be "valid" avant-garde jazz. The first criterion was that the music had to have variety. This is demonstrated by the many different instruments that played in a piece, and the mixing of the different sounds. However, that may make one believe that it was totally unstructured, or random, which was not the case. The musicians also looked for technical proficiency, and some evidence of a solid form and structure. They also considered avant-garde jazz to be a rather emotional form of jazz, and they said the music had to "move you". Additionally, they looked for the music to have an element of spirituality. This did not necessarily mean it had to show beliefs in typical American Christianity, but rather some sort of translation of the artist's personal feelings and beliefs. The important thing to remember was that jazz was still not mainstream, so they did not expect the messages delivered and felt from these performances to follow the standards put into place by white, middle-class society. The final characteristic they looked for was artistic integrity, or the ability for the artist to come up with new ideas and styles to play avant-garde jazz.
Although jazz was still not considered to be mainstream, it was in a different situation than in previous periods. "Jazz, by the onset of the 1960's, had earned unprecedented artistic recognition as well as economic security. It had taken a long time, and there were still several areas in which an improvement in the esthetic approach to the music was desperately needed. Jazz, at the end of it's sixth decade, recognized at last as America's one true native contribution to the arts, was clearly within reach of the two goals towards which it had been striving with so little success for many frustrating years: security and maturity (Feather 51)." Again showing the revolutionary and emotional spirit of jazz and the surprising success of the avant-garde period is the following quote; "For a time it seemed as if experimentation and revolution might lead to musical anarchy, but by the 1970's the avant-garde had once again begun to draw on the rich tradition of jazz, with world folk music as an additional source (Collier's Encyclopedia 518)."
Outside the United States, jazz was becoming more popular, and continued to gain popularity throughout the avant-garde period. The rest of the world respected jazz, because it was one of the few original contributions that the United States made to the worlds of art and music. London, England became the center for Jazz outside of the U.S., as had previously been Stockholm, Sweden and Paris, France during earlier periods. The sounds of jazz also spread throughout Asia, Africa, and South America, as these foreign cultures saw an expression of this radical American culture being expressed through the music, and it was a way for them to become "Americanized" on a small level. To show the new expansion of jazz and how it finally became more accepted by Americans and the world during this period and through today is the following quote from a book entitled "Jazz", by Langston Huges. "Today, jazz is recognized as an original American art form. It is taught for credit in hundreds of universities. Special festivals are staged in countries all over the world - even in Communist Poland and Russia, where jazz was once illegal (82)."
In the period of avant-garde jazz many people made contributions, both large and small, to the period. One of the major innovators was named Ornet Coleman. Coleman was considered the leader or major innovator of the avant-garde period by the critics of the time. In 1960, Coleman released a "free jazz" album, which critics say was when the "free jazz" and "avant-garde" movement came to the forefront. Coleman played alto saxophone, as well as the trumpet and violin.
Another major innovator was Eric Dolphy. While the critics considered Coleman the best, Dolphy was considered the best by his fellow musicians. The musicians playing at the time said that Dolphy played better, with more traditional styles being used in the "free jazz". He played mainly the alto saxophone, but the also played the flute and bass clarinet.
Yet another man who made immense impacts on the jazz world through several periods of time was John Coltrane. "It is said that Coltrane would often play the same chord three or four different ways within a single measure, or would overlap chords before the intended change was supposed to occur. Later Miles Davis would pay tribute to this style. (John Coltrane Page)." Many people consider John Coltrane to be one of the best jazz musicians ever, and he had a major role in the development of avant-garde jazz. He played the tenor saxophone, and played with the bands of Miles Davis and other jazz legends. It is said also that "The overwhelming power Coltrane displayed throughout his career carried over to his arrangements and composition, (John Coltrane Page)" showing that he could not only play well, but also had the education in music to be able to successfully read and write music, unlike so many musicians of the time. Since the form was so free and improvisational, a musician could get along quite well without being able to read music, as long as he or she had an "ear" for the music. Unfortunately, John Coltrane came to his untimely death during the avant-garde period. "Coltrane's final album was "Expression," on which he played flute while fellow tenor Pharoah Sanders played piccolo. This eerie album is similar to Coltrane's final years, in which the horizons he explored were known only to him (if even him). When John Coltrane died of liver failure at the age of forty on July 17, 1967, he was still misunderstood and underappreciated (John Coltrane Page)." Today, John Coltrane is recieving the attention and credit that he has long been owed by the public and the critics, and his music is among my personal favorites.
Other leaders in the avant-garde period included pianist Cecil Taylor, bassist Charles Mingus, and trumpeter Don Cherry. Each had their unique style of play, and they had various degrees of success.
Then the slowing of the revolutionary spirit of the 1960's began to come to an end, with global problems facing the nation in the 1970's. The age of this free, improvisational jazz expressing the feelings of the nation in times of rejoice and mourning was coming to a close rather quickly. Social problems such as unemployment and the oil crisis made Americans move back to a more traditional lifestyle. "Within a few years of Coltrane's passing, the storm quieted. By the early 1970's, it had become clear that the period of rapid and sometimes almost overpowering change in jazz had come to an end. In its place came a period of what might be called 'peaceful coexistence' of many kinds of jazz (Ploski 1199-1200)." So came the end to the avant-garde period, but in our historical remembrance of it, we can never forget the emotions and feelings of this time period so highlighted with changes and the "loosening" of traditional America's style of life.
Works Cited
Davis, Dr. Nathan. Quotes taken from material covered in lecture.
Feather, Leonard. The New Edition of The Encyclopedia of Jazz. New York:
Horizon Press, 1960
Huges, Langston. Jazz. Revised ed. New York: Franklin Watts, 1982.
Internet. John Coltrane Page. http://www.duke.edu/~jlk8/jazz/jazz.html
"Jazz." Collier's Encyclopedia. Vol. 13, 1984 ed.
"Jazz." The Encyclopedia Americana: International Edition. Vol.15, 1982 ed.
McGehee, Thomasine C. People and Music. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc.,
1973
Ploski, Harry and James Williams, editors. Reference Library of Black America.
5 vols. New York: Afro-American Press, 1990.
"Time Remembers: The Years and Events that Shaped Our World." Time Video
Library. Time, Inc. 1991
Tirro, Frank. "Jazz." Information Finder by World Book. 1994 ed.