Leseprobe Jazzforschung Jazz Research 50 51

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forschung / research
Vol. 50/51
JAZZ JOURNEYS
Edited by Christa Bruckner-Haring and André Doehring
I

Jazzforschung / Jazz Research
50/51
herausgegeben von
Christa Bruckner-Haring
André Doehring
für das Institut für Jazzforschung an der
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz (KUG)
und die Internationale Gesellschaft für Jazzforschung (IGJ)
edited by
Christa Bruckner-Haring
André Doehring
for the Institute for Jazz Research at the
University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG)
and the International Society for Jazz Research (ISJ)

Christa Bruckner-Haring ist Musikwissenschaftlerin mit Schwerpunkt Jazz- und
Popularmusikforschung und stellvertretende Leiterin des Instituts für Jazzforschung an
der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte
umfassen historische und soziokulturelle Untersuchungen sowie musikalische
Transkriptionen und Analysen von Jazz und populärer Musik.
André Doehring, Musikwissenschaftler und Soziologe, ist Professor für Jazz- und
Popularmusikforschung an der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz, wo
er das Institut für Jazzforschung leitet. Seine Forschung umfasst sozialgeschichtliche,
kulturelle, politische und mediale Aspekte von Jazz und populärer Musik sowie
musikalische Analyse.
Gemeinsam geben sie die Publikationsreihen Jazzforschung / Jazz Research und Beiträge zur
Jazzforschung / Studies in Jazz Research heraus.
Christa Bruckner-Haring is a musicologist specializing in jazz and popular music
research and deputy director of the Institute for Jazz Research at the University of Music
and Performing Arts Graz. Her research focuses on historical and sociocultural issues as
well as musical transcription and analysis of jazz and popular music.
André Doehring, musicologist and sociologist, is professor for jazz and popular music
research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz and director of the
Institute for Jazz Research. His research and publications focus on socio-historical,
cultural, political, and media aspects of jazz and popular music as well as musical analysis.
Together, they co-edit the publication series Jazzforschung / Jazz Research and Beiträge zur
Jazzforschung / Studies in Jazz Research.
Board of Reviewers
Ralf von Appen, Andrew Bain, Christopher Ballentine, Benjamin Burkhart, Gretchen
Carlson, Pedro Cravinho, Lawrence Davies, José Dias, Mario Dunkel, Petter Frost
Fadnes, Nicholas Gebhardt, Kai Ginkel, Ádám Havas, Charles Hersch, Bernd Hoffmann,
Bruce Johnson, Michael Kahr, Elisabeth Kappel, Franz Kerschbaumer, Harald Kisiedu,
Peter Klose, Franz Krieger, Walter van de Leur, Kristin McGee, George McKay, Haftor
Medbøe, Martin Pfleiderer, Nicolas Pillai, Lukas Proyer, Sarah Raine, Heli Reimann,
Loes Rusch, Philipp Schmickl, Floris Schuiling, Tom Sykes, Catherine Tackley, Tim Wall,
Tony Whyton, Kornél Zipernovszky

JAZZ JOURNEYS

JAZZFORSCHUNG / JAZZ RESEARCH 50/51
Alle Anfragen in Redaktionsangelegenheiten sind zu richten an das
Institut für Jazzforschung an der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz,
Leonhardstraße 15, A-8010 Graz.
E-Mail: jazzforschung@kug.ac.at
Mitglieder der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Jazzforschung erhalten die Publikation
kostenlos mit dem Beginn ihrer Mitgliedschaft.
All inquiries in editorial matters should be addressed to the
Institute for Jazz Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz,
Leonhardstraße 15, A-8010 Graz.
E-Mail: jazzforschung@kug.ac.at
Members of the International Society for Jazz Research receive this publication
free of charge beginning with the year of membership.
Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstützung von:
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz
Land Steiermark, Referat Wissenschaft und Forschung
Internationale Gesellschaft für Jazzforschung
Lektorat: Elisabeth Kappel, Benjamin Burkhart, Lukas Proyer
Englische Textkorrekturen: Susie Trenka
Covergestaltung und Satz: Nikola Stefanović
Cover: Collage aus zwei Posaunen und einem Posaunenkoffer aus dem Nachlass
Albert Mangelsdorffs. Fotografiert anlässlich der Pressekonferenz im Institut für
Stadtgeschichte zum Erwerb des Nachlasses, 2009.
Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt am Main (ISG FFM), S7Z Nr. 2014-28, Uwe Dettmar
© Hollitzer Verlag, Wien 2024
www.hollitzer.at
ISBN 978-3-99094-260-4
ISSN 0075-3572

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Contents
Vorwort / Foreword 7
Travel Stories: Metaphors of Journeying in Jazz
Alan Stanbridge 11
Musical Journeys to Iceland:
Foreign Impact on Local Music Life, 1920–1960
Þorbjörg Daphne Hall, Ásbjörg Jónsdóttir 47
Ambassador of the Blues:
Performing Diaspora with Memphis Slim in Europe
Lawrence Davies 65
Forecasting Influences of Israeli, Jewish, and Arab Music
on Israeli Jazz: Albert Piamenta and the First Israeli
Ethno-Jazz Record, Mezare Israel Yekabtzenu
Dan Cahn 91
The Historiography of Myths & the Racial Imagination:
Recontextualizing Joséphine Baker in the Jim Crow South
and the Third Reich
Kira Dralle 113
Jazz as a Way to Escape One’s Social “Destiny”:
Lessons from Professional Japanese Jazz Musicians
Marie Buscatto 133
No Jazz Without Festival?
Reconsidering the Festivalization of Jazz as Pilgrimage
Scott Currie 159
The Bad Plus Stravinsky: Metrical Displacement,
Segmentation, and Stratification in the Jazz Trio’s Original Works
Laura Emmery 179
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Jazz Journeys
The First Journey Back:
The International Youth Band, Newport 1958
Francesco Martinelli 207
Jazz Dance, Jazz Music, and Cultural Transference:
Changing Meanings of Jazz Across Generations
Harri Heinilä 225
Dig That Lick:
Exploring Patterns in Jazz with Computational Methods
Lucas Henry, Klaus Frieler, Gabriel Solis, Martin Pfleiderer,
Simon Dixon, Frank Höger, Tillman Weyde, Hélène-Camille Crayencour 249
Gladys Bentley: From “Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs”
to “Gender Nonconforming, Lesbian Superstar”
of the Harlem Renaissance
Magdalena Fuernkranz 273
Artistic Research in Jazz:
A Case Study in Jazz Composition for Large Ensemble
Emiliano Sampaio 293
Pyramids on the Red Square:
The Tours of the Kurt Edelhagen Orchestra behind
the Iron Curtain and to the Middle East (1964–1966)
Bernd Hoffmann 311
Lessons from the Studio Floor:
New Critical Approaches to Jazz Television
Nicolas Pillai 337
Contributors 357
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Vorwort
In Jazz Journeys geht es um den Einfluss von Reisen und Migration auf Jazz und
unser Verständnis dieser Musik. Auch das Buch selbst hat eine lange Reise hinter
sich: Geplant anlässlich des 50. Jubiläums der Internationalen Gesellschaft für
Jazzforschung (IGJ) und als Tagungsband der sechsten Rhythm Changes Konferenz
“Jazz Journeys”, die 2019 an der Universität für Musik und darstellende
Kunst Graz stattfand, hat es doch recht lange gedauert, bis wir die Abstracts und
vollständigen Artikel der über 200 Teilnehmer*innen beisammen hatten, diese
durch das Peer-Review-Verfahren bringen und die schließlich ausgewählten
Kapitel für die Publikation vorbereiten konnten. Pandemische Jahre und neugeborene
Familienmitglieder mögen zur Verzögerung dieser Reise beigetragen
haben, aber schließlich sind wir erfolgreich an unserem Ziel angekommen: ein
Buch zu präsentieren, das Forschung über Jazz an Orten und in Räumen enthält,
die bisher nicht auf der Landkarte der Jazzforschung verzeichnet waren.
Während wir dieses Vorwort schreiben, sind wir mit dem Auto und Zug in
Europa unterwegs, einem Kontinent, in dem unweit von Graz ein Krieg tobt.
Mobilität, das Reisen und Migration sind nicht nur wichtige Themen des Jazz
und der Jazzforschung, sondern auch in ihrer Bedeutung für die Art und Weise,
wie wir als Gesellschaft leben wollen, nicht zu unterschätzen. In einer Zeit, in
der Nationalismus und Populismus auf dem Vormarsch sind und freies Reisen
für viele Menschen ein zunehmend schwieriges Unterfangen wird, soll dieses
Buch dazu einladen, über die schönen, mitunter auch herausfordernden Aspekte
von unterschiedlichen Begegnungen im Jazz über Kontinente, Genre- oder
Geschlechtergrenzen hinweg zu reflektieren.
Wir danken allen Autor*innen sowie den Gutachter*innen für ihre Beiträge
zu diesem Buch und für ihre Geduld, wie auch dem Rhythm Changes Konferenzkomitee
für die wertvollen Anregungen und die stets gute Zusammenarbeit.
Darüber hinaus bedanken wir uns herzlich für die Unterstützung dieser Publikation
durch die Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz, die IGJ
und das Land Steiermark. Vor allem aber gilt unser Dank den Kolleg*innen des
Instituts für Jazzforschung, die uns redaktionell bei den umfangreichen Vorbereitungen
dieses Doppelbandes der Jazzforschung / Jazz Research eine große Hilfe
waren: Benjamin Burkhart, Elisabeth Kappel und Lukas Proyer. Ohne euch
wäre dieses Buch nicht möglich gewesen!
Christa Bruckner-Haring, André Doehring
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Jazz Journeys
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Foreword
Jazz Journeys is about the impact of travel and migration on jazz and on our understanding
of the music. The book itself has had a long journey, too: Planned in celebration
of the 50th anniversary of the International Society for Jazz Research (ISJ) and
as proceedings of the Sixth Rhythm Changes Conference “Jazz Journeys,” which
took place at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz in 2019, it took quite
a while to gather abstracts and full articles from the over 200 participants, organize
peer reviews, and prepare the selected chapters for publication. The pandemic years
and newborn family members may have played a role in the journey’s delay, too, but
we have finally arrived at our destination: to present original research about jazz in
places and spaces hitherto missing from the maps of jazz studies.
As we are writing this introduction on the road, travelling through Europe by
car and train with a war raging not far from Graz, it’s hard to overstate the importance
of mobility, travel, and migration – not just for jazz and jazz studies, but also for
the way we want to live as a society. With nationalism and populism on the upswing
and free travel becoming increasingly difficult for many, this book invites us to consider
both the beautiful and challenging aspects of people meeting across continents,
genres, and gender boundaries to play and enjoy jazz together.
We would like to thank all authors and peer reviewers for their contributions to
this book and for their patience, as well as the Rhythm Changes conference committee
for their valuable input and cooperation. Furthermore, we thank the University
of Music and Performing Arts Graz, the ISJ, and the State of Styria for supporting
this publication. Most of all, we are grateful for the editorial assistance we have received
from our colleagues at the Institute for Jazz Research during the extensive
preparations for this double issue of Jazzforschung / Jazz Research: Benjamin Burkhart,
Elisabeth Kappel, and Lukas Proyer. This book wouldn’t exist without you!
Christa Bruckner-Haring, André Doehring
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11

Stanbridge: Travel Stories
Travel Stories: Metaphors of Journeying in Jazz
Alan Stanbridge
Abstract
Throughout its often complex and contested history, jazz has been metaphorized
in a variety of ways. But it is perhaps the metaphor of the journey that has been
the most prevalent and persistent in the history of jazz, with jazz performers
consistently drawing inspiration from metaphors and allegories of travelling,
of voyaging, of wayfaring, of exploring, of border-crossing. Beyond issues of
touring, life on the road, and the iconography of transportation, the broader
metaphors of the journey, of travelling, and of exploration have been common
themes in jazz discourse, especially as expressed in album titles, employed to signify
new musical styles and approaches, and new forms of experimentation and
innovation. Jazz has also engaged with the iconography of space and space travel,
which was often employed by artists and record labels as an indicator of modish
topicality and ‘futuristic’ ambitions. A common thread running throughout
these metaphorical concepts is that they have most often been associated with
teleological, goal-directed narratives in which allegories of journeying and exploring
almost inevitably involve affirmative visions of arrival and discovery.
Against this background, the article concludes with a brief consideration of those
metaphors that might be regarded as corollaries or complements to these linear
narratives, acknowledging a less tidy but perhaps more nuanced conceptualization
of creativity and originality – namely, metaphors of paths not followed, of
roads not taken, of unexpected detours, of unexplored regions.
Introduction: Metaphorical Concepts and Discursive Tropes
In their seminal work Metaphors We Live By (2003), first published in 1980,
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson deny the status of metaphor as simply a rhetorical
flourish or a poetic device, arguing that “the human conceptual system is
metaphorically structured and defined,” and suggesting that metaphors need to
be understood in terms of “metaphorical concepts” (Lakoff / Johnson 2003: 6).
In their 2003 Afterword to the original text, they highlight the high stakes involved
(and note that the term ‘high stakes’ is itself a metaphor, employed here
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Jazz Journeys
virtually unthinkingly, thereby serving to confirm their thesis): “How we think
metaphorically matters. It can determine questions of war and peace, economic
policy, and legal decisions, as well as the mundane choices of everyday life”
(ibid.: 243). 1
Throughout its often complex and contested history, jazz has been metaphorized
in a variety of ways. One of the earliest metaphors applied to jazz in
the early part of the 20th century was that of jazz as a contagion, as a social ill, as
an incitement to debauchery (see, for example, Lawson-Peebles 2013; Faulkner
2015 [1921]). From the 1930s to the 1960s, the metaphorical links between jazz
and deviance were manifested in a common discursive trope found in journalism,
literature, film, and television (Lopes 2005). By the 1960s, this trope of
deviance had faded from public consciousness and was replaced by a variety of
often curious and overlapping discourses and metaphors: jazz as storytelling and
narrative (Monson 1996; Bjerstedt 2015); jazz as a representation of democracy
(Sanchirico 2015; Crist 2009); jazz as a marketing tool (Laver 2015); jazz as a
model of business practice (Prouty 2013); and jazz as a potent symbol of neoliberalism
(Chapman 2018; Laver 2014).
But it is perhaps the metaphor of the journey – one of the most fundamental
of metaphorical concepts, often structuring our lives in terms of linear, goal-directed
narratives of progress and achievement – that has been the most prevalent
and persistent in the history of jazz, with jazz performers consistently drawing
inspiration from metaphors and allegories of travelling, of voyaging, of wayfaring,
of exploring, of border-crossing. The sheer volume of relevant examples
makes it impossible to address them all in detail in this short article, although I
have attempted to highlight some of the more interesting instances, observing
salient metaphorical themes, discursive tropes, and conceptual narratives.
Jazz on the Road
For the vast majority of working jazz musicians, the metaphor of the journey
also has profoundly real implications. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the
theme of travelling has featured extensively in the history and discourses of jazz,
in ways that often blur or conflate the real, the fictional, and the metaphorical
– tendencies that are evident in the recurring chronicles and iconography
of jazz, as reflected in album cover art, album titles, composition titles, and
1 This article is a substantially revised, expanded, and retitled version of a keynote Closing
Address given at Jazz Journeys, the Sixth Rhythm Changes Conference held at the University
of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria, in April 2019. Many thanks to Christa Bruckner-Haring
and André Doehring for the initial invitation.
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Stanbridge: Travel Stories
critical commentary, as well as in occasional musical elements. In the 1950s, the
idea of travelling, especially internationally, could still connote glamour and
sophistication, with Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly with Me (1958) offering only the
most obvious discursive and musical illustration. The jazz equivalent of Sinatra’s
influential album can be found in Quincy Jones’s Around the World (1961), with
Quincy indulging in more than a few musical travelogue stereotypes, accompanied
by a quintessentially 1960s ‘exotic’ cover featuring three reclining women,
each with a world globe. Stan Kenton’s Road Show (1959) offers a less fanciful but
still celebratory account of life on the road for the typical jazz musician, documenting
a concert at Purdue University as part of a five-week cross-country tour
on the band bus. More recent examples include the Willem Breuker Kollektief’s
self-explanatory Celebrating 25 Years on the Road (1999), and Jean Derome’s Carnets
de voyage (1995), in which he observes that his ‘travel diaries’ have been “composed
almost entirely while on tour; in trains, train stations, airports, airplanes
and hotel rooms” (1995). 2
Luggage iconography, in the form of suitcases, travel bags, baggage tags, and
travel stickers, has been a recurring motif in jazz album covers and titles: Horace
Parlan’s Headin’ South (1960) shows the pianist with suitcase in hand and, somewhat
perversely, an arrow pointing east; the wryly amusing cover of Shirley
Horn’s Travelin’ Light (1965) finds the vocalist/pianist waiting at an airport with
an enormous pile of suitcases and bags; and the cover of pianist Ray Bryant’s
Gotta Travel On (1966) offers a lively collage of travel stickers and baggage tags.
The cover of English multi-instrumentalist Tubby Hayes’s Tubbs’ Tours (1964)
features a small photograph of Hayes, accompanied by a baggage tag, a fake
passport stamp, and a suitcase covered in travel stickers, against which is leaning
a tenor saxophone and flute, with vibraphone mallets nestling in the suitcase
handle. Despite the iconography, this “imagined musical travelogue” was recorded
at London’s Philips Studios in Marble Arch, and Hayes biographer Simon
Spillet has noted: “It was all a gimmick, of course. If anyone had been expecting
a sort of prototypical world-music from Hayes and co., they would have been
disappointed to find each journey starting firmly from Gerrard Street [the initial
location of Ronnie Scott’s London jazz club]” (Spillet 2015: 185).
The Jazz Ambassador program was an American State Department project,
which involved touring American jazz musicians around the world in the 1950s
and 1960s, ostensibly promoting American culture and democracy during the
Cold War. 3 The controversial program, organized by a governmental agency in
2 The cover artwork of all the record albums mentioned in this article can be viewed on my
website, which also has a link for the Travel Stories Playlist, hosted on Spotify and containing
the vast majority of the musical examples addressed in the text. See alanstanbridge.com.
3 See, for example, Von Eschen (2006) and Davenport (2009).
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Jazz Journeys
Fig. 1. Cover of Dave Brubeck Quartet, Jazz Impressions of Eurasia (1958)
a still racially segregated United States, began in March 1956, with Dizzy Gillespie’s
big band touring to Greece, Iran, and Turkey, as well as to South America in
July of the same year. Later tours involved Benny Goodman (1956–57 and 1962),
Dave Brubeck (1958), Louis Armstrong (1960–61), and Duke Ellington (1963),
among others. In some cases, these tours produced related albums, which offer a
treasure trove of travelling tropes, including: Gillespie’s World Statesman (1956)
and Dizzy in Greece (1957), the latter featuring Dizzy in traditional Greek dress
on the steps of an imagined Parthenon; 4 Brubeck’s Jazz Impressions of Eurasia
4 The photograph is credited to Herman Leonard, although there is no record of him having
travelled with the band, leading Darren Mueller to conclude that the cover photo “was likely
taken in the United States after the tour” (Mueller 2016: 257).
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Stanbridge: Travel Stories
(1958), picturing Dave in front of the tail section of a Pan Am airliner, modelling
a turban, while being helped by two flight attendants as he wrestles with
five Pan Am flight bags full of swag (figure 1); 5 Benny Goodman in Moscow (1962),
with Benny posing in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square; and Ellington’s
Far East Suite (1967), with a front cover illustration that features Duke’s head
in a colorful montage of mosques, minarets, elephants, and jet planes. Of these
examples, it is worthwhile noting that only the Goodman album was actually
recorded on tour, while the Gillespie, Brubeck, and Ellington albums were recorded
after the fact, in New York City. 6
The United States was not the only country to engage in jazz diplomacy, however,
and the album Carnet de Routes (1995), by the French trio of Aldo Romano,
Louis Sclavis, and Henri Texier, celebrates two tours, to Central and West Africa
in 1990 and 1993, sponsored by the French Ministry of Cooperation. Photographer
Guy Le Querrec is credited as a fourth member of the touring party,
documenting the tours for the 96-page booklet – literally the visual ‘road diary’ –
that accompanies the CD, although, like most of the American examples above,
the actual recordings on the album were made after the tours, in Amiens in 1994
and 1995. 7
Do the Locomotion
The history of jazz, in common with the broader history of Western popular
culture, has been filled with references to modes of transportation, in which
notions of travelling and mobility are both metaphorized and made explicit.
Train and railroad imagery has been ubiquitous throughout the history of popular
music, with the train often signifying mobility, progress, freedom, and
escape. Jazz has provided a number of notable examples, with locomotion encoded
not only in tune titles but also in musical gestures, imitating the sounds
and rhythms of train travel: “Honky Tonk Train Blues” (1929) by Meade Lux
5 Brubeck’s vigorous critique of the program was expressed in musical form in The Real Ambassadors
(1962a), in collaboration with Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong.
6 Recent work on the jazz diaspora and transnationalism is also highly relevant here, given
that tropes of journeying, travelling, and border-crossing – both literal and metaphorical –
are fundamental elements in any such concepts. See, for example, Atkins (2003) and Johnson
(2020).
7 Notwithstanding the potentially problematic postcolonial tensions involved in musicians touring
under the auspices of the French government to several countries that were formerly French colonies,
Kevin McNeilly adopts a cautiously optimistic perspective on these complex and contested
issues. See/hear McNeilly’s presentation at the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium in September
2013: https://flowfissuremesh.com/2013/10/21/audio-carnets-de-routes-improvisees.
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Jazz Journeys
Lewis; “Rail Rhythm,” heard in the short sound film Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho
(Waller, 1934); “Chattanooga Choo Choo” by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon,
famously recorded by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra (1941); “Night Train” by
Jimmy Forrest (1952), recorded by Oscar Peterson on Night Train (1963), and
the World Saxophone Quartet on Rhythm and Blues (1989), among many others;
Louis Armstrong’s version of the traditional song “This Train” on his album
Louis and the Good Book (1958); 8 and Thelonious Monk’s “Locomotive,” which
appears on both Monk (1958) and Straight, No Chaser (1967), and which, as Monk
biographer Robin Kelley observes, “rhythmically and melodically captures the
motion of the old steam engines steadily chugging” (Kelley 2009: 168). 9
In particular, Duke Ellington was famous for his train pieces, which can
be found throughout his lengthy career, reflecting his preferred mode of travel,
which, in the prewar years, involved the orchestra touring in their privately
owned Pullman cars. Ellington told English critic Derek Jewell that the rhythmic
patterns of his famous composition “Reminiscing in Tempo” (1935a; 1935b) were
“all caught up in the rhythm and motion of the train dashing through the South”
(qtd. in Jewell 1977: 56), and many of his pieces, and those by collaborator Billy
Strayhorn, highlight this preoccupation, both material and metaphorical, with
locomotion: “Daybreak Express” (1933); “Take the ‘A’ Train” (1941); “Across the
Track Blues” (1941); “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” (1947); “Build That Railroad
(Sing That Song)” (1951); “Track 360” (2004), recorded in 1958; “The Old Circus
Train Turn-Around Blues” (1967); and “Loco Madi” (1976). This last piece forms
part of one of Ellington’s final extended compositions, The Uwis Suite, dedicated
to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for hosting a week-long celebration of
Ellington’s work in June 1972. The piece prompted critic Stanley Dance to observe
that it represents “yet another testimony to Ellington’s abiding fascination
with trains,” and he goes on to scale new metaphorical heights: “Some of his
trains reached their destination and stopped with squealing brakes but this is closer
to his general picture – trains no end, shuffling, hooting and wailing across the
great plains, and fading into the American night” (1976).
The covers of many jazz albums from the 1950s onwards are rich sources of
train iconography, sometimes involving intriguing back stories. For example,
the cover and title track of James Moody’s album Last Train from Overbrook (1958)
chronicles Moody’s departure, in September 1958, from the Overbrook psychiatric
hospital in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, where he had voluntarily committed
8 See/hear also the delightfully idiosyncratic version of this song by Alice Coltrane (on Wurlitzer
organ in a trio with Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette) on her album Translinear Light
(2004).
9 See/hear also “Little Rootie Tootie” on Thelonious Monk Trio (1956), dedicated to Monk’s son,
in which a distinctive rhythmic figure imitates a train whistle.
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Stanbridge: Travel Stories
Fig. 2. Cover of James Moody, Last Train from Overbrook (1958)
himself six months earlier to tackle the alcoholism that had derailed (sorry...)
his career. Photographer Vytas Valaitis contributed the twilight cover image
of a speeding train superimposed on a railway stockyard, with the squiggles of
light and the expanding typography lending the impression of speed (figure 2).
In his liner notes for the reissued album, Bob Blumenthal characterizes the title
track as “a train blues par excellence with its rich saxophones and piston-driven
brass” (Blumenthal 1996: 11), and the piece fades with Moody, on tenor saxophone
over a chugging rhythm, bidding farewell to the institution with a stylized
imitation of a train whistle. Recalling a central motif of the Great Depression
– namely, jobless men riding the rails in search of work, shelter, and food
– freight train imagery is exploited on the cover of Jimmy Smith’s Midnight
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Jazz Journeys
Special (1961), which shows the organist hanging from a ladder on the side of a
B&O (Baltimore and Ohio Railroad) freight car, although Smith makes a rather
unconvincing hobo, with his sensible suitcase, trendy cap, smart-casual attire,
and his jacket thrown insouciantly over his shoulder.
Locomotive themes and iconography have continued to be prevalent in the
world of jazz, and of particular note among more recent examples is Wynton
Marsalis’s Big Train (1999), written for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra as a
celebration of train travel by its musical director who self-confessedly “hates
f lying.” 10 Drawing inspiration primarily from Ellington, the piece is an impressionistic
50-minute suite for big band, with section titles that include “All
Aboard,” “Smokestack Shuffle,” “Dining Car,” and “The Caboose,” and the
cover of the album features an African American child in overalls posed in front
of a steam engine. 11 Given the scale of the piece and the distinctive qualities of its
artistic forebears, it remains curiously unmemorable – “an ambitious piece that
seemed to be half an hour too long” (Watrous 1998: B7), opined Peter Watrous
in his New York Times review of a live performance – with Marsalis, in an often
tiresome musical pastiche, wheeling out all the available train clichés. Worst of
all, however, in their shared enthusiasm for train travel, both Marsalis (1999)
and his collaborator Stanley Crouch (1999) were moved to compose what one
might call prose poems for the CD booklet. 12
If, for figures such as Marsalis and Crouch, the train continues to occupy
a rather idealized position in American folklore, then the lowly bus must be
regarded as something of a poor relation. Notwithstanding this rather unromanticized
status, and as the Kenton example above illustrates, buses have been
central to the lives of many touring jazz musicians – a centrality that has been
portrayed on several jazz album covers. The cover of Wingy Manone’s On the
Jazzband Bus (1962), for example, sports a memorable illustration by Paula Powers,
showing the Dixieland trumpeter posing in front of a bus owned by the “Blood-
10 See https://wyntonmarsalis.org/discography/title/big-train.
11 On the basis of a Facebook post, we are presumably meant to read the child as the young
Wynton: https://www.facebook.com/wyntonmarsalis/posts/music-mondaythe-caboose-isthe-last-section-of-big-train-which-is-over-40-minute/10152582158067976/.
12 Before departing the train section, it is worth noting that John Coltrane’s surname prompted
many Trane/train references, although they never, to my knowledge, involved any train iconography.
Examples include: The Last Trane (1965), recorded 1957–58, documenting Coltrane’s
final studio sessions for Prestige, and including the track “Slowtrane”; Blue Train (1957) which,
in addition to the title track, includes Coltrane’s composition “Locomotion” (not to be confused
with Monk’s “Locomotive”); Soultrane (1958); “Chasin’ the Trane” on Live at the Village
Vanguard (1962); Duke Ellington’s “Take the Coltrane” on Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
(1963); and Oliver Nelson’s tribute piece “Trane Whistle” (1961) on the Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis
album of the same name. The list should also include the documentary film Trane Tracks:
The Legacy of John Coltrane (n.n. 2005).
19

Stanbridge: Travel Stories
hound Bus Co.” alongside a large pile of luggage and instrument cases. An equally
striking illustration, by cartoonist Scott Taber, graces the cover of Cal Tjader’s
Latino con Cal Tjader (1962), with the band travelling on a “3rd class bus for 1st
class musicians,” which is headed for Tjaderville. And on Bob Brookmeyer’s
Kansas City Revisited (1958), photographer Alex Singer and designer Paul Bacon
adopt a novel approach, with the cover showing the trombonist’s profile reflected
in the side mirror of a Greyhound bus, for which the company receives a
name-check in the album credits.
On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American woman, was arrested
for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery,
Alabama, prompting a year-long bus boycott by the Black community and a
lawsuit by the NAACP challenging bus segregation, which was ultimately ruled
unconstitutional in November 1956. Recorded in April 1957, trumpeter Clark
Terry’s album Serenade to a Bus Seat (1957) is often cited as a commentary on the
Montgomery bus boycott, with, for example, Richard Cook and Brian Morton
in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD stating that the title track represents “a tribute
to civil-rights activist Rosa Parks” (Cook / Morton 2004: 1559). This characterization
proves to be erroneous, however, with the motivation behind the
piece being somewhat more mundane, as producer Orrin Keepnews indicates in
his liner notes: “Clark suggests, with an ironic smile, that this [the album title,
Serenade to a Bus Seat] is ‘the story of my life,’ for the bus referred to is the kind
that big bands use on the road” (1957) – a mode of transportation that Terry
was very familiar with, having spent many years touring with the big bands of
Count Basie (1948–1951) and Duke Ellington (1951–1959). In a 2010 interview,
Terry confirmed the humbler, apolitical meaning behind the album title, stating
“It wasn’t intended as a tribute to Rosa Parks” (Terry 2010), thereby highlighting
the quotidian realities of life on the road for the working jazz musician.
Public transportation has made occasional appearances on album covers,
most notably, perhaps, on Thelonious Alone in San Francisco (1959), which pictures
Monk on the running board of one of the city’s famous cable cars, which also
feature on Freddy Redd’s San Francisco Suite (1958) and Cal Tjader’s San Francisco
Moods (1958) – in the latter case as a blurred background to a shot of a woman’s
legs (in a cover design that, incorporating a little 1950s high-heeled sexism,
is somewhat reminiscent of Sonny Clark’s classic Cool Struttin’, released in the
same year). A London double-decker bus appears on the cover of Derek Bailey
and Evan Parker’s The London Concert (1975), with the advert on the side of the
iconic red vehicle promising us “a different world.” On the back cover of the
album, Derek and Evan are shown waiting innocently at a bus stop, their fellow
travellers blissfully unaware of the different world that this duo conspired to
create.
20

Jazz Journeys
Hard Driving Jazz
In the world of popular music, the automobile has been a ubiquitous presence,
easily rivalling the history of train references outlined above, from Jimmy
Liggins’s “Cadillac Boogie” (1948) and Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” (1951) to
Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” (1983) and Taylor Swift’s “Getaway Car” (2017).
In the jazz world, however, the car has rarely been addressed musically, tending
to function simply in terms of iconography, particularly in album cover design,
pairing leading-edge cars and leading-edge jazz in shared tropes of sophistication,
power, movement, risk, and exhilaration.
At its most obvious, the metaphorical links have been made explicit with
images of racing cars: for example, on the cover of Pee Wee Russell’s New
Groove (1962), the clarinetist is pictured at the wheel of a Ferrari Testa Rosa;
and on Randy Weston’s Trio and Solo (1957), the pianist is seen standing in front
of a Frazer Nash Les Mans Replica. 13 At its most confusing, the links between
motor racing and featured artist are less than obvious, as in the original release
of Cecil Taylor’s Hard Driving Jazz (1959b). 14 Although Taylor’s complex, often
challenging music might seem to have little in common with Grand Prix motor
racing (other than perhaps somewhat tenuous metaphors of speed and power),
the cover features a blurred photograph of a racing car, credited on the rear of
the original LP to Tom Burnside, a celebrated automotive sports photographer
(figure 3). The image is of an Aston Martin DBR2, driven by American racer
George Constantine – known as “The Flying Greek” – in competition at the
Formula Libre USAC Road Racing Championship held at Watkins Glen racetrack
in upstate New York on 28 September 1958. 15
By all accounts, the recording session for Hard Driving Jazz was an unhappy
affair, with a quintet including Taylor, saxophonist John Coltrane, trumpeter
13 Riverside Records, which released the Weston album, is famous for recording some of the
leading figures in modern jazz of the 1950s and 1960s, although co-founder Bill Grauer Jr. was
also a motor racing and sports car enthusiast, and beginning with Sounds of Sebring: 1956 Grand
Prix of Endurance (Various Artists 1956) the label released over 40 albums capturing the sounds
of vintage cars, along with race commentaries and interviews with racing car drivers.
14 This mono album was also known, in its stereo version, as Stereo Drive (Taylor 1959c), with the
same cover image, and was later reissued under Coltrane’s name as Coltrane Time (1963), with
a photograph of Coltrane on the cover.
15 Burnside donated his personal archive of over 40,000 negatives and prints to the Revs Institute
in Naples, Florida. My sincere thanks to Chris Stephensen, former Digital Projects Assistant
Librarian at the Revs Institute, for identifying this car and then going on to provide invaluable
assistance in identifying many of the automobiles featured in this section. This aspect of my
research would have been virtually impossible without his specialist knowledge and enthusiastic
input. (See https://revsinstitute.org/; https://library.revsinstitute.org/usac-internationalformula-libre-grand-prix-watkins-glen/175660.)
21

Stanbridge: Travel Stories
Fig. 3. Cover of the Cecil Taylor Quintet, Hard Driving Jazz (1959)
Kenny Dorham, bassist Chuck Israels, and drummer Louis Hayes. 16 Taylor had
requested trumpeter Ted Curson for the date, who he felt was a “much more
contemporary trumpet player” and better suited to his music, but United Artists
insisted on Dorham, who was contracted with the label and regarded as a bigger
name. During the session, Dorham complained openly about Taylor’s “way-out
music,” and after recording the first tune, in Taylor’s own words, the “entire
session [...] completely degenerated” (qtd. in Spellman 1966: 69–70). It seems
strangely – perhaps metaphorically – appropriate, then, that the results summa-
16 In addition to a couple of standards, the album includes two automobile-themed originals:
“Double Clutching” by Israels and “Shifting Down” by Dorham.
22

Jazz Journeys
ry for the 1958 Watkins Glen race lists George Constantine’s performance in his
Aston Martin as follows: “Result: did not finish (Blown head gasket).” 17
In a brief essay on Reid Miles, designer of almost 500 covers for the Blue
Note record label, Felix Cromey notes that, in the 1960s, “changes in the consumer
world brought about an era of design classics, amongst them the E-Type
Jaguar sports car,” and he argues that the “car motif,” coupled with the distinctive
use of typography and graphics, was perhaps “the culmination of the design
traits most associated with Blue Note through the Fifties and Sixties” (Cromey
1991: 7). Although Cromey maybe overstates the case – the car motif represents
a relatively small percentage of Blue Note album cover design, with a greater
emphasis on musician portraiture and/or pure graphics – there is no doubt that
the automobile represents a significant element, not only in Blue Note design,
but also in jazz album cover design more generally.
As Cromey’s comments suggest, the E-Type Jaguar was a notable presence
on American album covers of the period, most memorably, perhaps, on Donald
Byrd’s A New Perspective (1964), 18 although it remains the only Blue Note cover
to feature an E-Type, which also appears on Count Basie’s On My Way & Shoutin’
Again! (1962), Maynard Ferguson’s “Straightaway” Jazz Themes (1961), and
the English EP version of Jimmy Smith Plays the Blues (1965). Other Jaguar models
appear on Bonnie Baker’s Oh Johnny! (1958) (XK140), Jimmy Smith’s Crazy!
Baby (1960) (XK150), and Donald Byrd’s The Cat Walk (1962) (Mark II), and the
spoked wheel of a Jaguar features on Smith’s I’m Movin’ On (1967). Mel Tormé,
a well-known collector of antique cars, is pictured with an SS Jaguar 100 on the
cover of Mel Tormé at the Crescendo (1957), and a collage of small photographs of
primarily English racing and sports cars (including Jaguar, Austin-Healey, and
MG marques) make up an image of Tormé’s head on Mel Tormé and the Marty
Paich Dek-Tette (1956).
The European sports car theme continues on Cannonball Adderley’s Sophisticated
Swing (1957), Donald Byrd’s Off to the Races (1958), and Jimmy Smith’s Livin’
It Up (1968), all of which feature Mercedes-Benz models (the 300S, 190SL, and
W111, respectively), with album titles and covers that link classy cars with classy
lifestyles and classy jazz. And the examples continue: the cover of Vido Musso’s
The Swingin’st (1956) shows a female model at the wheel of an Austin-Healy 3000,
complete with band gear; Jazz Winds from a New Direction (1961) finds Hank Garland
posing in an MG MGA Roadster; and on Christmas Cookin’ (1966), Santa (a.k.a.
17 See https://www.racingsportscars.com/photo/Watkins_Glen-1958-09-28.html.
18 The Byrd album cover is parodied fairly accurately on English organist James Taylor’s Hammond-Ology:
The Best of the James Taylor Quartet (2001) and less accurately on American rapper
Tone Lōc’s Lōc-ed After Dark (1989), which employs a Jaguar model without the headlight
covers, likely the XK-E, the North American version of the E-Type.
23

Stanbridge: Travel Stories
Jimmy Smith) delivers presents in an Alfa Romeo Spider 1600 Duetto. It was not
only sports cars that were featured, however, and the cover image of Swingin’ in
Sweden (1958) by Jimmy Raney and George Wallington finds them seated on the
front wings of a very practical but strangely funky Volvo PV444. And the trusty
Rolls Royce Silver Cloud – surely one of the quintessential symbols of elite Englishness
– graces the covers of Howard Rumsey’s Jazz Rolls Royce (1958) and the
Ray Brown/Jimmy Rowles duo album As Good as It Gets (1978). 19
The most curious, and perhaps somewhat paradoxical, aspect of this traffic
jam of automobile iconography is that it was primarily British, and more broadly
European, sports cars that were regarded as having the appropriate signifying
potential in the visual representation of what would eventually be characterized,
in rather jingoistic fashion, as “America’s classical music.” 20 Partial explanation
for this strange phenomenon is offered in what Steven Morewood describes as
the “mystique attached to classic British sports cars” (Morewood 1998: 135),
which he identifies as particularly prevalent in the decades following World
War II, when the vast percentage of the output of many English car manufacturers
went to overseas markets: “The appearance of ‘the most feline of all Jaguars’,
the XK120, in 1949 added further impetus to the export drive with no less than
85 per cent of the 12,000 manufactured until 1954 being shipped abroad, most
of them across the Atlantic [...] and two-thirds of the Jaguar E-types produced
between 1961 and 1974 went abroad, primarily to American states” (ibid.: 146).
In contrast to this emphasis on European cars, a number of American jazz
artists remain more patriotic in their cover choices, with Dexter Gordon’s American
Classic (1982) featuring, well, an American classic, in the shape of a 1937
Cord Phaeton. Further examples of American car iconography include: two generations
of the Ford Thunderbird, featured on Joe Howard’s Something Smooth
(1955) and Bobby Hutcherson’s Cruisin’ the ’Bird (1988); the Ford Mustang pictured
on Kai Winding’s Modern Country (1964); and the Dodge Dart on the cover
of Here We Come (1961) by The Three Sounds. But it is perhaps the Cadillac that
represents the most significant American car choice in terms of album artwork.
As Ken McLeod has suggested, Dizzy Gillespie’s “Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac”
(1967) should be read not simply as a parody of the original spiritual but as
“a telling comment on the place of the car in black popular culture” (McLeod
19 The original cover of Miles Davis’s Jack Johnson (1971), the soundtrack for a documentary on
the boxer, features an illustration of Johnson and five elegantly dressed women in what appears
to be a Rolls Royce, although it is not identifiable as a specific model. Johnson, the first African
American heavyweight boxing champion, was a sports car enthusiast who “acquired a sizable
collection of autos, including many of the leading U.S. and European makes” (Runstedtler
2012: 31).
20 See Sales (1984) and Taylor (1986).
24

Jazz Journeys
2020: 61), with the Cadillac representing “the epitome of aspirational car ownership
for both black and white” (ibid.: 64). Revealingly, however, although the
cover of Hank Mobley’s A Caddy for Daddy (1966) features an African American
female model standing on the hood of a Cadillac Coupe de Ville, Ira Gitler concludes
his liner notes by highlighting the cultural and symbolic hierarchy that
still existed between American and European automobiles: “A Caddy for Daddy?
This man deserves a Mercedes!” (1966). 21
European jazz musicians have exploited the car motif much less frequently
than their American counterparts, and sometimes with a markedly different
emphasis, although the sports car remains a common theme, as on the cover
of Jack Bruce’s Things We Like (1970), an instrumental album featuring Dick
Heckstall-Smith, John McLaughlin, and Jon Hiseman, which finds Jack picnicking
with his dog friends in front of a Ferrari Daytona. In contrast to the
sports car symbolism, however, the English tendency toward self-deprecation is
clearly evident on the cover of saxophonist and composer Johnny Dankworth’s
Jazz Routes (1960) – rather than posing with a sexy E-Type Jaguar or a racy
Mercedes-Benz 190 SL, a somewhat wistful Dankworth is pictured leaning on
a considerably more modest Renault Dauphine, famous as one of Europe’s first
economy cars, with a track on the album, “Dauphine Blues,” dedicated to this
popular automotive underdog. Fifty-five years later, a similar ‘little car that
could’ approach was apparent on the cover of Bums (2015) by the Slovenian/
Dutch duo Feecho, named after the nickname of the Serbian-made Zastava 750,
which was based on the Fiat 600.
Planes and Boats and Bikes (and Horses Too)
The iconography of flight and air travel features less than one might expect on
jazz album covers, given the realities of international touring, although, in addition
to the aforementioned Brubeck album (1958), notable examples include: Lionel
Hampton’s Flying Home (1956); Bobby Hackett’s Coast Concert (1956); Stan Getz in
Stockholm (1958); On Tour with the New Glenn Miller Orchestra (1959); The High-Flying
Trumpet of Al Hirt (1964); Thelonious Monk’s Solo Monk (1965); Gabor Szabo’s
Nightflight (1976); Ernestine Anderson’s Live from Concord to London (1978); and Chris
Potter’s Transatlantic (2010). The album Chet Baker in Europe: Jazz Tour of the NATO
Countries (1956a) documents an eight-month tour by the trumpeter and succeeds in
blurring the line between the real and the fictional, with the liner note explaining
21 Cadillacs also feature on the covers of Roy Haynes’s Just Us (1960) and Jimmy McGriff’s Outside
Looking In (1978), and on his album Joyride (1965), saxophonist Stanley Turrentine appears
reflected in the headlight unit of a Cadillac Eldorado.
25

Stanbridge: Travel Stories
that the tour log on the back cover of the album, which appears to be written in the
first person by Baker, is “admittedly a second-hand one constructed from letters to
his friends and the magazine Down Beat” (McFarland 1956).
And although the back cover features a photograph of Baker at the foot of
a set of PAA (Pan American Airways) steps, waving to an unseen crowd, the
picture on the front cover shows a man (face hidden, but whose hair styling
suggests it might be Baker) embracing a smiling woman in front of the tail section
of a PAA passenger plane, the man holding a trumpet case covered in travel
stickers. Photographer William Claxton has revealed the element of subterfuge
involved: “Chet Baker had won so many popularity polls and awards by this
time in 1956 that he was invited to tour Europe. But Dick Bock, the president of
Pacific Jazz, didn’t feel that he could afford to send me to photograph him in Europe.
So, when it came to creating a record cover for him, I had to shoot a cover
that implied Chet’s homecoming. As you can see, you cannot actually recognize
the man as being Chet Baker. No, they were models I had hired. The plane was
a DC-6 provided by Pan Am” (Claxton / Nemekata 1992: 36).
Images of the sea and sailing are relatively rare on jazz albums, but a few
examples are especially noteworthy. The cover of Chet Baker and Crew (1956b)
appears to offer a stereotypical vision of the relaxed, footloose West Coast lifestyle,
with the quintet enjoying a sailing trip off the California coast. But if
Chet’s flying exploits were partly fictionalized, another explanation by William
Claxton reveals a similarly concocted story about the trumpeter’s sailing adventures:
“In my constant quest for ‘new’ ideas for record cover themes, I decided
to put Chet and his ‘crew’ aboard a friend’s yacht in Santa Monica Bay. These
musicians were a little stunned by the situation because none of them had ever
been on a sailing boat before, and being jazz musicians, they rarely saw the early
bright sunlight” (Claxton / Nemekata 1992: 14). The Arrival of Victor Feldman
(1958) was the first American album as a leader by the titular English pianist and
vibes player, who had relocated to Los Angeles from his native London in July
1957. The cover shows the intrepid Englishman, in full formal morning dress,
top hat in hand, giving a Churchillian ‘V’ sign (which, graphically, spells the ‘V’
of ‘Victor’), having just arrived on the Californian coastline in his wooden rowboat
(which would, of course, have made his trip from England especially arduous).
He is being helped ashore by bassist Scott La Faro (in his recording debut)
and drummer (and photographer) Stan Levey, both dressed casually in t-shirts
and slacks and wearing white sailor’s caps. The name of the boat, Contemporary
C3549, doubles as the catalogue number of the album (figure 4). It was a good
period for album cover design. 22
22 The name of the boat and the catalogue number changed appropriately with subsequent reissues.
26

Jazz Journeys
Fig. 4. Cover of Victor Feldman, The Arrival of Victor Feldman (1958)
On Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage (1965), the cover image of a blurred sailing
boat by Reid Miles is only part of the overall concept, which Hancock explains
in his liner note: “The sea has often stirred the imagination of creative minds
involved in all spheres of art … This music attempts to capture its vastness and
majesty” (Hancock 1965). The five compositions on the album, including the title
track, “The Eye of the Hurricane,” and “Dolphin Dance,” all address sea-related
themes, and, in sharp contrast to the typical critic-authored essay, the additional
liner note by Nora Kelly adds an impressionistic air to the proceedings.
Perhaps the most famous, and most famously controversial, example of seafaring
iconography in jazz is the initial cover of Miles Davis’s Miles Ahead (1957),
his first collaboration with arranger Gil Evans. In a design decision as confound-
27

Stanbridge: Travel Stories
ing as that of putting an Aston Martin racing car on the cover of a Cecil Taylor
album, the marketing department at Columbia Records apparently felt that a
photograph of an elegant white woman in a splendid sweater and spectacular
hat, on a sailing boat, accompanied by a white boy, would be the perfect image
to represent Davis’s music. Understandably upset, Davis confronted producer
George Avakian – “Why a white woman? he asked George. Why not a black
woman” (Szwed 2002: 143–144) – which led to Avakian agreeing to substitute
the more familiar cover image of Miles playing trumpet (despite the fact that he
plays flugelhorn throughout the album), although up to 100,000 copies of the
original album were sold before the cover change was made. Ultimately, this incident
led to Davis urging Columbia to market his music in a more appropriate
manner: “All I tell ’em to do is to sell the music black, not to put no white girls
on the cover with no pants on and stuff like that. Sell it black” (qtd. in Smith
2010: 18; italics in original).
Motor bikes and scooters make occasional appearances on jazz album covers:
Gary McFarland and Gabor Szabo are pictured on Yamaha motor bikes on
the cover of Simpático (1966), which includes the Szabo tune “Yamaha Mama”;
on Maynard Ferguson’s Ridin’ High (1968), he is pictured on the south slopes
of Mount Royal on a borrowed Honda CB160, courtesy of Bently’s Cycle &
Sports of Montreal; and on the repackaged version of Bunky Green and Wynton
Kelly’s 1965 recording My Baby (1981), a white female model poses on a Honda
motor bike. The Vespa scooter, an icon of Italian style and design, was a popular
cover choice: a trendy white couple are pictured on a Vespa on the cover of
Sonny Criss’s Go Man! (1956); on the cover of Basie Rides Again! (1957), before
he graduated to an E-Type Jaguar a few years later, Count Basie has to make
do with a Vespa; and, most spectacularly of all, on the cover of his Music for the
Sensational Sixties (1958), Don Elliott is pictured flying through space on a Vespa,
playing a mellophone. And on the cover of Jazz Raga (1967), we find Gabor
Szabo again, this time seated on a Lambretta 150 Special, serenading – on sitar,
of course – his snazzily dressed female companion, also atop a 150. 23
Horses are fairly rare in the iconography of jazz, although a horse-drawn
carriage appears on the cover of George Wallington’s Jazz for the Carriage Trade
(1956), with the quintet, featuring Phil Woods and Donald Byrd, posing slightly
awkwardly on said carriage. The term “carriage trade” originally referred to
wealthy clientele who arrived at their destinations in private carriages, and in
his liner notes Ira Gitler suggests, equally awkwardly, that the “discerning lis-
23 Bicycles are fairly uncommon on jazz albums, although the covers of both Dexter Gordon’s
Gettin’ Around (1966) and Bennie Maupin’s Slow Traffic to the Right (1977) picture the saxophonists
on bikes, while the duo album Tandem (1977) has illustrations of Mike Osborne and Stan
Tracey perched on the seats of an imaginary tandem bicycle.
28

Jazz Journeys
tener helps to comprise the ‘carriage trade’ of jazz” (1956). Similarly, but hardly
constituting a trend, the cover of Dexter Gordon’s Doin’ Allright (1961) pictures
West Coast-based Gordon enjoying the city sights from a horse-drawn carriage
(with the horse, sadly, unseen) on a New York trip for his first Blue Note recording
session. And although it probably seemed like a good idea at the time,
the cover of an earlier Gordon album, Dexter Rides Again (1958), a compilation
of his recordings for Savoy, also has an equestrian theme, featuring a random
white dude on a horse with a tenor saxophone slung over his shoulder. Even if
it wasn’t (and one has no evidence to suggest that it was), one likes to think that
the cover of Slim Gaillard Rides Again! (1959), released the following year and
picturing Slim on a magnificent carousel horse, was a direct parodic response to
the absurdity of the Gordon cover. Horses also make an appearance on the cover
of Dave Pell’s Swingin’ in the Ol’ Corral (1956), which I can say with confidence
was a parodic element in the overall theme of the album, featuring jazz versions
of country songs. 24 And in an almost inevitable response to his nickname, on
the cover of saxophonist ‘Pony’ Poindexter’s album Pony’s Express (1962) we find
Pony riding on a pony. 25
New Directions
Beyond issues of touring, life on the road, and the iconography of transportation,
the broader metaphors of the journey, of travelling, and of exploration
have been common themes in jazz discourse, especially as expressed in album
titles, employed to signify new musical styles and approaches, and new forms
of experimentation and innovation. The examples are multiple, and a less than
comprehensive list might include the following: New Directions (1953) by Teddy
Charles; Explorations (1953) by Teo Macero; Further Explorations (1958) by Horace
Silver; Looking Ahead! (1959a) by Cecil Taylor; Explorations (1961) by Bill Evans;
The Quest (1962) by Mal Waldron; Destination ... Out! (1964) by Jackie McLean;
Point of Departure (1964) by Andrew Hill; The Way Ahead (1968) by Archie Shepp;
New Directions (1978) by Jack DeJohnette; The Journey (1992) by Keith Tippett
and Mujician; Voyager (1993) by George Lewis; Further Explorations by Chick
Corea (2012); and Uncharted Territories (2018) by Dave Holland.
24 See Stanbridge (2023: 103–106).
25 On the cover of the reissued version of this album on the Jazz Images label (2018), we find Pony
riding on the running board of a San Francisco cable car in a photograph by William Claxton,
who was also responsible for the image on the cover of Thelonious Alone in San Francisco (1959).
29

Stanbridge: Travel Stories
In some cases, the metaphorical imagery of titles such as these is pursued
further in liner notes and critical commentary. At its clumsiest, in the notes for
Ken McIntyre’s Looking Ahead (1961), Ira Gitler struggles to extend the metaphor:
“Life marches on and jazz, which expresses some of the verities of life,
also does some walking forward of its own. With Ken McIntyre as the left lens
and Eric Dolphy as the right, here is a pair of binoculars to be used for Looking
Ahead” (1961). Somewhat less inelegantly, if equally prosaically, in his liner
notes for Lee Morgan’s Search for the New Land (1966), Nat Hentoff similarly pursues
the allegorical imaginings: “As his searching continues, he is likely to find
more and more new lands” (1966). And in his notes for Wayne Shorter’s Odyssey
of Iska (1971), Leonard Feather applauds “the sense of searching and finding that
he [Shorter] and each of his sidemen invested in Odyssey of Iska, itself one of the
most adventurous voyages of discovery in Shorter’s burgeoning career” (1971).
Saxophonist Charles Lloyd’s Journey Within (1967) successfully captures the
spirit of the late 1960s, recorded before a youthful and enthusiastic crowd at
San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, characterized in Billboard magazine as
the “home of psychedelic rock” (n.n. 1967). Notwithstanding its apparently
inward-looking title, which might be read as a reference to the then-current
American enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, Lloyd’s flute feature on the title track
is a rather expansive, outward-looking affair, anticipating the range of influences
that would later coalesce into so-called World Music. In his liner notes,
producer George Avakian observes the “exotic lines” chanted by Keith Jarrett
and Jack DeJohnette on this piece, accompanied by DeJohnette on shehnai, or
Indian flute, and he goes on to chronicle the group’s globe-trotting itinerary,
encompassing 18 countries in 18 months (1967).
In his own notes for The Baptised Traveller (1969), drummer and composer
Tony Oxley highlights the extent to which the metaphor of journeying informed
his creative approach: “What I have tried to express here is man’s constant
search for improvement and spiritual contentment. This takes the form
of an imaginary journey. The first theme ‘Crossing’ illustrates the impatience
with ones [sic] present environment and setting forth for new horizons” (1969).
One of the more recent examples of this metaphor can be found on Journey to
the Mountain of Forever (2017), a lavish double album by English duo Binker and
Moses, augmented on the second disc by a range of guests including Evan Parker
and Byron Wallen. The album offers evocative cover art worthy of the best of
1970s progressive rock, and a spiritual pilgrimage in music that recalls at times
the ecstatic work of John Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders, accompanied by appropriately
redolent track titles, including “The Departure,” “Echoes from the
Other Side of the Mountain,” “Entering the Infinite,” and “At the Feet of the
Mountain of Forever.”
30

Jazz Journeys
Fig. 5. Cover of Johnny Dankworth and his Orchestra, Journey into Jazz (1956)
The metaphor of the journey has also been employed in a more didactic sense,
as on Journey into Jazz (1956) by Johnny Dankworth (figure 5). In his liner notes,
Dankworth observes that the album “presents two very different facets of our
organization,” with the first side of the original LP containing “honest-to-goodness
big band jazz,” while the lengthy piece on the second side, “Itinerary of
an Orchestra,” was “inspired by the need in the sphere of big band jazz for a
work similar in purpose to Benjamin Britten’s ‘Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’;
it sets out, in other words, to provide the uninitiated with an opportunity
of hearing all the instruments and most of the tone colours connected with
a jazz combination of our size” (Dankworth 1956). Dankworth also includes a
spoken introductory track on the LP, rich in metaphorical train imagery: “We
31

Stanbridge: Travel Stories
think our ‘Itinerary of an Orchestra’ requires a little explanation. It’s meant to
be an excursion into the sounds of jazz. It’s a circular tour, finishing just where
it began, and visiting several main line stations with a few whistle-stops in between”
(ibid.).
Space Is the Place
The launch of Sputnik 1, Earth’s first artificial satellite, by the Soviet Union
in October 1957 marked the beginning of the Space Age, which, over the next
couple of decades, became an enormously popular cultural motif, influencing
design, fashion, film, and music. Jazz was hardly immune to the iconography of
space and space travel, which was often employed by artists and record labels as
an indicator of modish topicality and ‘futuristic’ ambitions. A number of album
titles and covers of the period reflect these metaphorical themes, including, for
example: Charlie Barnet’s Hop on the Skyliner (1955); Lou Donaldson’s Lou Takes
Off (1958), which includes the track “Sputnik”; Sam Lazar’s Space Flight (1960);
Booker Ervin’s The Space Book (1965); and Harold Vick’s Straight Up (1967). The
classic cover of Curtis Counce’s Exploring the Future (1958) is worthy of special
mention here, picturing the fearless bandleader in an orange spacesuit (but with
no helmet), holding his double bass while floating in outer space (figure 6). 26
In addition to saxophonist Harold Land’s title track, the album includes three
space-themed compositions by pianist Elmo Hope: “Into the Orbit,” “Race for
Space,” and “The Countdown.”
Even Duke Ellington got in on the Space Age act, putting together a ninepiece
band he called Duke Ellington’s Spacemen and releasing an album entitled
The Cosmic Scene (1958), which included a new Ellington composition, “Spacemen,”
a feature for trumpeter Clark Terry. The music is typically elegant, if
considerably less futuristic than the band name and album title might lead one
to believe, although the liner notes by producer Irving Townsend are worth the
price of admission: “As for why these nine should be called ‘Spacemen,’ historians
of jazz will have to make up their own reasons. Duke used the word as the
first American satellite settled into orbit, and, perhaps with plans to supply the
jazz on trips to the moon, he is merely being practical about the size band that
will fit into a rocket ship. Himself excluded, of course. For, unless his travel
26 An article and photograph from the 31 May 1958 edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, reprinted in
the CD booklet for the 1996 reissue of the album on Boplicity, reveals that the spacesuit did,
in fact, include an elaborate fishbowl helmet. A more recent example of spacesuit iconography
can be found on Bill Frisell’s Guitar in the Space Age! (2014), an album of cover versions of 1960s
songs, including “Reflections from the Moon” by Speedy West and “Telstar” by the Tornados.
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Jazz Journeys
Fig. 6. Cover of the Curtis Counce Quintet, Exploring the Future (1958)
habits change, Duke Ellington will go to the moon by train” (1958). Two years
later, an Ellington/Strayhorn composition lent its name to the Ellington album
Blues in Orbit (1960), although this piece should not be confused with the George
Russell composition of the same name, which originally appeared on The Stratus
Seekers (1962), and which, in a 1971 performance by the Gil Evans Orchestra,
became the title track of Evans’s Blues in Orbit (1980).
In common with the discourses of journeying highlighted above, the
Space Age themes in covers and titles are often continued in accompanying
commentary. On Art Blakey’s Hard Drive (1957) – a title that would have worked
just as well with automobile imagery or a portrait of Blakey at the drums –
the cover image of a space rocket is accompanied by the tagline “Out of this
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Stanbridge: Travel Stories
world … and the next world too,” although neither the tune titles nor liner
notes continue the outer space motif. The opposite tendency is evident on Clark
Terry’s In Orbit (1958), recorded a month or so after his mission as one of Duke
Ellington’s Spacemen, which includes Terry’s title tune and Orrin Keepnews’s
liner note – “as the title In Orbit should suggest, it was all way out there with
the satellites, and swinging” (1958) – although the cover offers no Space Age
iconography, opting instead for an admittedly vertiginous but resolutely terrestrial
photograph of Mies van der Rohe’s newly completed Seagram Building on
Park Avenue.
The cover of George Russell’s Jazz in the Space Age (1960) features a series of
spheres against a colorful, abstract background, with the spheres containing the
album title and credits. Russell’s compositions include “Chromatic Universe,”
“Dimensions,” and “Waltz from Outer Space,” and Burt Korall announces in the
opening sentence of his liner notes: “This album points the way to the future”
(Korall 1960). With its title, its dedication to “Lieut. Col. John H. Glenn, Jr.”
(the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth), and opening and closing tracks
named “Countdown” and “Back to Earth,” Dave Brubeck’s Countdown: Time in
Outer Space (1962b) clearly avails itself of prevalent Space Age themes, but, in
common with the Clark Terry cover above, eschews any related iconography,
opting instead for a reproduction of Orange and Black Wall, a piece by the American
Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline. 27
While the various examples above can be understood as simply reflecting
and responding to the zeitgeist of the period, some instances of the space motif
have a considerably more serious intent. In the case of the late work of John
Coltrane, for example, rather than invoking popular visions of astronauts and
space rockets, the titles of a series of posthumous albums – Cosmic Music (1969),
Sun Ship (1971), Interstellar Space (1974), Stellar Regions (1995) – are evidence of a profound
spirituality. Some commentators have claimed the late work of Coltrane
as an early example of Afrofuturism in jazz, which would subsequently find
expression in the fusion music of Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and Weather
Report, among many others – for example, the cover of Hancock’s Thrust (1974)
finds him seated at the controls/keyboard of a spaceship, exploring alien territory;
Return to Forever’s Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy (1973) includes tracks entitled
“After the Cosmic Rain” and “Theme to the Mothership”; and an intriguing
line can be drawn from Weather Report’s I Sing the Body Electric (1972) through
Mysterious Traveller (1974) to Wayne Shorter’s Emanon (2018), which comes com-
27 This is partly explained, however, by Brubeck’s fondness for featuring artwork on the covers
of his “Time” series which, in addition to the Kline, included paintings by Neil Fujita, Joan
Miró, and Sam Francis.
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Jazz Journeys
plete with a 74-page sci-fi graphic novel. 28 A more recent example of the Afrofuturist
spirit can be found in the work of Kamasi Washington, with the cover
of the sprawling triple album The Epic (2015) featuring the saxophonist posing
against an astral backdrop.
But the most obvious, most elaborate, and most sustained example of the
space motif in jazz is found in the work of the composer, keyboard player,
bandleader, and all-round mystic Sun Ra, who led his Arkestra over a 40-year
period, recording “at least 1,000 compositions on over 120 albums” (Szwed
1997: xvii), with titles including The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra (1962), Secrets
of the Sun (1965), Planet Earth (1966), We Travel the Space Ways (1967a), Interstellar
Low Ways (1967b), and Space Is the Place (1973). Although the elaborate Space Age
trappings of Sun Ra’s particular brand of Afrofuturism have been interpreted by
some observers as merely amusingly idiosyncratic, the Black activism inherent
in his work has been highlighted by Ra biographer John Szwed: commenting on
the discourse of space that dominates Sun Ra’s rhetoric, Szwed has argued that,
for Sun Ra, “space was both a metaphor of exclusion and reterritorialization,
of claiming the ‘outside’ as one’s own, of tying a revised and corrected past to
a claimed future. Space was also a metaphor which transvalues the dominant
terms so that they become aberrant, a minority position, while the terms of the
outside, the beyond, the margins, become the standard” (Szwed 1997: 140).
A similar conceptual approach is evident on Charles Earland’s Leaving This
Planet (1974), with a cover illustration by saxophonist Dave Hubbard that pictures
the bandleader, in a NASA outfit, at the curved keyboard/control unit
(to which is connected a levitating child’s head) of what is presumably a spaceship.
The album includes compositions entitled “Warp Factor 8,” “Asteroid,”
and “Mason’s Galaxy,” and on the title track Rudy Copeland sings “I’m gonna
leave this planet, with all the trouble that’s in it,” expressing a common Afrofuturist
escapist theme, also found, for example, on a series of George Clinton-led
Funkadelic and Parliament albums, most notably Mothership Connection (1975).
Conclusion: Paths Not Followed
It is clear from the various examples highlighted above that tropes of journeying,
travelling, and exploring have been important and powerful metaphorical
concepts in the history and development of jazz, whether expressed visually (in
the form of album cover art work), textually (in album titles, composition titles,
28 I have always enjoyed the conceit of imagining that the strange craft streaking across the sky
on the cover of Mysterious Traveller was piloted by the alien/cyborg figure on the cover of I Sing
the Body Electric.
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Stanbridge: Travel Stories
and critical commentary), or musically (most notably in the imitation of train
sounds, but also in recourse to traditional musical stereotypes). The reference
points for these metaphors range widely from images of life on the road and
romanticized perspectives on modes of transportation to notions of innovation
and progress and futuristic parables of space travel. A common thread running
throughout these metaphorical concepts is that they have most often been associated
with teleological, goal-directed narratives in which allegories of journeying
and exploring almost inevitably involve affirmative visions of arrival and
discovery. But the history of jazz criticism is littered with negative assessments
of those artists who have allegedly failed to complete their metaphorical journeys,
expressed in equally metaphorical terms: they took wrong turns, they
made missteps, they lost their way, they explored blind alleys.
Against this background, it is interesting to pause to consider those metaphors
that might be regarded as corollaries or complements to these linear narratives,
acknowledging a less tidy but perhaps more nuanced conceptualization of creativity
and originality – namely, metaphors of paths not followed, of roads not
taken, of unexpected detours, of unexplored regions. In The Essential Jazz Records,
Volume 2: From Modernism to Postmodernism (Harrison et al. 2000), the authors include
a section entitled “Paths Not Followed” (which I have shamelessly borrowed
for my subheading), highlighting “potentially major developments that were not
followed up” (ibid.: 623), and featuring work by the Dave Brubeck Octet, Red
Norvo, Gil Melle, Duane Tatro, Don Ellis, André Hodeir, David Mack, and Pavel
Blatný. 29 The list is intriguing and suggestive, with the authors eschewing negative
metaphors of dead ends and wrong turnings in favor of the considerably more
positive notion of paths not followed, which connotes explorations still to be completed
and discoveries still to be made, with Eric Thacker finding it hard to abstain
from the journeying metaphor: “Norvo has figured as a space-time traveller with
a renewable season ticket valid for several forms of transport” (ibid.: 625).
Despite such occasional metaphorical extravagance, the authors – Thacker,
Max Harrison, and Stuart Nicholson – offer thoughtful, probing reviews of
their chosen subjects, providing convincing rejoinders to often blinkered criticism,
such as Scott Yanow’s dismissive review in the All Music Guide of Tatro’s
Jazz for Moderns (1956): “This CD reissue has composer Duane Tatro’s only album
as a leader, and it is easy to hear why his services were not more in demand.
Tatro’s 11 originals have overarranged ensembles, plenty of humorless disso-
29 In addition to recordings by Tatro, Mack, and Blatný, addressed further below, the section
includes reviews of the following albums, all of which are highly recommended: Dave Brubeck
Octet (1956); Music to Listen to Red Norvo By (1957); Gil Melle’s Primitive Modern (1956); Don
Ellis’s How Time Passes (1961); and André Hodeir’s Jazz et Jazz/Les Tripes au Soleil (1988), recorded
1952–1960.
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