That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

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Part II: Jazz Greats and Great Jazz: An Evolutionary Riff
Northern cool: The San Francisco Bay Area
Although some top Bay Area jazz players moved
to New York to seek their fortunes, Dave Brubeck,
who was born in the Bay Area city of Concord,
stayed home and became a national phenomenon.
San Francisco’s cool jazz benefited from its
association with the emerging Beat scene, centered
on North Beach cafes and bookstores like
City Lights and poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Allan Ginsburg, and Michael McClure. The scene
was fictionalized in Jack Kerouac’s classical Beat
novel On the Road.
Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Bay
Area scene was dominated by traditional jazz
revival bands like Lu Watters Yerba Buena Jazz
Band. Area clubs included the famous Blackhawk
in San Francisco, where several musicians including
Miles Davis recorded live albums. The
Blackhawk was a showcase for both New
Yorkers like Davis and locals like Brubeck, his collaborator,
saxophonist Paul Desmond, and vibraphonist
Cal Tjader (for more on Tjader and his
special brand of Latin jazz, see Chapter 9).
Although San Francisco never equaled Chicago,
Los Angeles, New Orleans, or New York with
the size of its scene, the Bay Area produced
artists like Brubeck and Tjader who made signature
contributions to the West Coast sound.
Dave Brubeck
Beginning in the 1950s, pianist Dave Brubeck (born 1920) offered a brainy
alternative to mellow cool jazz and driving hard bop. Brubeck studied with
modernist classical composer Darius Milhaud, and performed classical music
influences in his jazz. Some of Brubeck’s improvised music leans toward classical,
with dark, graceful chord changes and melodies so carefully crafted
they sound as if they are composed.
Brubeck made the cover of Time magazine in 1954, and his recording of Take
Five, written by and co-starring saxophonist Paul Desmond, is probably the
best known jazz tune ever. Brubeck also composes religious music, and he’s
one of the few players to fuse jazz with classical strings in a successful way,
as heard on Brubeck Plays Bernstein (Sony).
Bill Evans
For pure emotional power, it’s hard to beat Bill Evans (1912–1980), a member
of Miles Davis’s late ’50s sextet that also included saxophonists John Coltrane
(see Chapter 8 for more about him) and Cannonball Adderley. Like Dave
Brubeck, Evans created music that fused classical music with jazz. As with
Brubeck, you can hear the classical influence in beautifully composed or
improvised melodies and harmonies. Sadly, some of the same, dark emotions
that fed Evans’ music also led him into drug abuse, which ended his life
prematurely.