Moody Blues
The decline of the big band
was belabored and cartoonish; it kept coming back long after it seemed to have
drawn its last breath. World War II is what really did it in, since the gas and
rubber shortages prevented large groups from going on the road. But once the
big band no longer played dance music, it morphed into some strange, decadent
forms--Stan Kenton's small municipalities with five trombones, for instance, or
intellectual ensembles like Boyd Raeburn's that magnified bebop's hustled
rhythms and tricky harmonies.
One
tradition that survived in altered form was that of the mood arranger, who went
from scoring music for big bands to orchestrating tone poems for individual
jazz artists. That role was honed to perfection by Gil Evans in his
collaborations with trumpet-player Miles Davis between 1957 and 1968--an
often-misunderstood body of work chronicled in a six-CD box set called Miles
Davis and Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Recordings , released this month.
Deluxe, semiclassical, and exotic, a hydroponic creature of the recording
studio, this music can't be understood simply as jazz. It's a lot more
complicated than that.
Gil Evans got his start in the early 1930s arranging for a
band in Stockton, Calif., which later made theme and incidental music for Bob
Hope's radio show. He could have gone the way of Henry Mancini, a dance-band
jazz pianist who realized that there would always be more money in Hollywood.
But instead, he walked the tightrope between commercial and art music. His
keenest influence was another composer, Claude Thornhill, who hired Evans to do
extra arrangements for his band. The music from that period was slow and
haunting, moving like someone trying not to sweat on a boiling day. It had no
vibrato and a lot of French horn, which would be combined with clarinets or
tubas in odd, hothouse-flower voicings.
Davis, on
the other hand, had been through small-group bebop in the '40s, and found it
too intense and inward; as he noted in his autobiography, he was struggling to
find a way to make bop sound "sweet." When he convened a nonet with Evans and
Gerry Mulligan's help in 1948, and recorded the music which would later be
released as Birth of the Cool , he was blending bebop with a reduced
vision of Claude Thornhill's instrumentation. This new sound prefigured white,
California cool jazz, but so had Billy Strayhorn's arrangements for Duke
Ellington through the '40s, and so had Lester Young's diaphanous tenor
saxophone playing with Count Basie even earlier. Davis always insisted that
"cool jazz" was as much (if not more) African-American as white music;
likewise, he never had any problem understanding that jazz was a form of
pop.
T >he duality of high art and mass sensibility is at the heart of
Miles Davis and Gil Evans . The three records at the core of the
set-- Miles Ahead , Porgy and Bess , and Sketches of
Spain --are music of fantasy, of dreaming. The drums, usually so central to
jazz, are for the most part rendered useless by the intricately accented horn
charts within the 19-piece ensemble sound. The orchestra gathers around the
soloist, rather than the soloist trying to ride the waves of the orchestra, and
every move is keyed to Davis' sighing sensibility. But the most impressive
moments, oddly enough, are Davis' tremulous theme readings, laid down as mere
suggestions, like soft, wet clay.
Evans'
arrangements were plotted like wily preparations for a siege. In the first 12
measures of "The Meaning
of the Blues," from Miles
Ahead , the contents of a rising
counterpoint behind Davis' melody keep mutating: French horn and trumpet give
way to oboe, which slides back into trumpets, and the progression into the
fourth measure, with nothing but the treble of muted trumpets in unison, feels
like an airplane taking off. (Its power as an organic whole is no accident:
Miles Ahead was recorded in bits and pieces, and "The Meaning of the
Blues" was the only full, unspliced ensemble performance on the album.)
"Bess, You Is My Woman
Now," from Porgy , has a brushed drum pattern underneath that keeps
shifting its emphasis from the first and third beats to the second and fourth,
constantly renewing a stirring chill. Sketches sets up processional
rhythms and rich, slow-motion harmonies behind Davis, and then slyly extends
trickles of harp or flute from the rest of the mass. It is music of painstaking
care, and the box set, with its alternate takes (including 10 different takes
and portions of "Springsville," from Ahead ) gives you an idea of how
Davis managed to protect an inchoate, subconscious quality in his trumpet
playing, session after session.
The records were received as instant masterpieces, in
breathless appreciations that couldn't begin to take in the complex way that
Miles and Gil had at once gone more commercial than Benny Goodman and yet
created some of the most deeply vulnerable American music around. But they
didn't transform jazz. Few musicians followed Evans' lead, though fragments of
his sound wash up here and there. His timbral combinations and unlikely
harmonies surface in the work of avant-garde jazz composers Butch Morris and
Franz Koglmann, as well as that of Maria Schneider, a composer and band leader
who was Evans' assistant for three years before his death in 1988. But since
it's mainly jazz educators and historians who grasp the significance of Evans,
you hear his music most often being played by repertory bands. One of the most
famous pieces of music ever to have emerged out of Sketches of Spain
isn't jazz at all. It's Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," with its flamenco
rhythm and cavernous studio sound.
It's
puzzling how midcult, how kitschy, some of this music sounds today. A quick
check into the sounds of its era reveals what the set's 198 pages of liner
notes don't--that 1959, the year Sketches of Spain was recorded, was
also the year The Soul of Spain by the mood orchestra 101 Strings hit
the Top 40. Living-room exoticism was in. Nearly every major label at the time
had its own Spanish "mood" act. MGM's was Jose Greco; ABC-Paramount's was
Montoya (with his "fiery Spanish gypsy guitars"); countless LPs promised
genuine bullfight music. Sketches , which some have taken as the high
point of Evans and Davis' collaboration, was also another chapter in a
mass-market gambit.
T >here are several differences between the 101 Strings album and
Sketches of Spain . Solos have no place in true mood music; they're too
unsettling and risky. And Evans and Davis' calculated rhythmic displacement is
a major jazz metaphor, one that more commercial composers would never try to
attain. On the other hand, the music on Miles and Gil is more about
sustaining a mood--and less about forward motion--than most of what we'd call
jazz.
The real point of mood-music
albums, though, is to let them work on you. Phil Schaap, the reissue producer
and editor for Miles Davis and Gil Evans , has made a fitting gesture
toward that end: He has provided a 6.5-second "pause track" on each CD, so that
you can reflect on what you've just heard. He writes that it's the first time
he's added such a track. Music that conjures up a sense of suspended time and a
still, suburban afterglow seems a perfect occasion for its debut.
