That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

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Part II: Jazz Greats and Great Jazz: An Evolutionary Riff
� Stan Kenton (1911–1979): Kenton was one of jazz’s most popular and
controversial figures of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Scorned by swing and
bop purists for playing dissonant, unconventional pieces, Kenton used
as many as 24 players (compared with 17 in a conventional big band).
Today, he is regarded as one of the most important modern bandleaders.
Kenton augmented his big band with extra brass, violins, or percussion,
and he built a reputation for offbeat compositions, provocative arrangements,
and great soloists.
� Claude Thornhill (1909–1969): Emerging as the leader of Claude
Thornhill and His Orchestra during the late 1940s, Thornhill was a
pianist and arranger whose orchestral recordings combined his love of
bebop and classical music. As compared with the big, brassy sound of
some big bands, Thornhill’s trademark was an understated sound with
arrangements that had his orchestra playing chords with the notes
spread among various sections. Thornhill’s use of french horn, bass clarinet,
and tuba during the 1940s inspired Miles Davis’s 1949 Birth of the
Cool (Capitol), with arrangements by Thornhill’s protégé, Gil Evans.
To sample Thornhill’s unusual hybrid music, get a copy of Snowfall (ASV
Living Era). The music ranges from “Hungarian Dance No. 5” and “Arab
Dance” (from The Nutcracker) to bebop tunes like Charlie Parker’s
“Donna Lee.”
Branching Off Bebop into
Hard Bop and Cool Jazz
Jazz headed in new directions during the 1950s, with hard bop refining elements
of bebop and cool jazz offering a minimalist alternative.
� Hard bop, developed primarily in New York City, was a bluesy, driving,
stripped-down variant of bebop, made mostly by black musicians.
� Cool jazz was lighter, lyrical, intricately arranged, sometimes influenced
by classical music.
I cover both of these offshoots of bebop in the following sections. I also discuss
an important musician who crossed between hard bop and cool jazz:
Miles Davis.
New York and hard bop
Some hard boppers were graduates of 1940s bebop, including drummer Art
Blakey and tenor saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon. Others
were relative newcomers searching for new sounds. The new generation