The Side Men

A better view of the Second Great Quintet can be established by looking over the output of the group's sidemen in the period of its existence. Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams all released albums as leaders during their stint in the band, and Ron Carter can be found on countless Blue Note albums throughout the 60's. These releases show the band members released from the creative direction of Davis, free to pursue their own interests. Simultaneously, the music on these albums provides a control group for understanding the music of Davis during this period.

Both Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage and Empyrean Isles predate Shorter's involvement in the band, and both essentially recreate the band of Miles Davis with the trumpeter replaced by the then up-and-coming Freddie Hubbard. Both also show Hancock's experiments with the mixture of modal and free jazz. Maiden Voyage has rightly come to be considered one of the greatest jazz albums of the 60's. Filled with all-original material, the playing on this album is remarkable for its fluidity in style. The texture of the music changes fro solo to solo, and the impression of a larger compositional structure is suggested when the pieces are considered from beginning to end; this is especially true on the more modal pieces “Maiden Voyage” and “Survival of the Fittest”.

While at times more adventurous than Maiden Voyage – it played home to the entirely improvised piece “The Egg” – Empyrean Isles was the first appearance of the now-popular tune “Canteloupe Island”. The band was reduced to a quartet for this album, leaving Freddie Hubbard as the only horn player. With only four tracks on the album, the music makes up in intensity what it lacks in length. The other two songs, “Olilqui Valley” and “One-Finger Snap” continue to explore modal composition, putting long harmonic stretches up against fast moving chords. Some of Hubbard's finest playing can be found in his solos on this album.

Tony Williams released two notable albums in this time period, Life Time and Spring. While reviews of these albums remain mixed even today, they are important for hearing the creative directions of the then-18-year-old drummer. Both feature all-star casts, with Spring being the only album to contain both Sam Rivers and Wayne Shorter. The music found on these albums remains in the hard-bop/free jazz style of the bands that Williams was playing in at this point in his career, and while none of his compositions are ground-breaking, it's worth hearing the drummer in this setting before he veered off into his other interests, more pop-influenced interests.

On the other hand, Wayne Shorter's acoustic releases from the 1960's have become canonical jazz albums and some of the most influential recordings made after World War II. I've already discussed his compositions in detail, so I'll just cover these briefly. In order, these albums are Night Dreamer, JuJu, Speak No Evil, the Soothsayer, The All Seeing Eye, Adam's Apple, and Schizophrenia. Each has its own flavor, with a general movement from pentatonic, popular music in the earlier albums to dark, chromatic music in the later ones. Ensembles vary from album to album as well, with the most notable example being the band on JuJu: McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Jimmy Garrison from the John Coltrane Quartet filled in as Shorter's rhythm section, making any references to the other tenor player in Shorter's music even stronger.

Ron Carter recorded few albums as a leader in this period, but together with Jimmy Garrison and Richard Davis, he filled the bass role on a vast majority of the albums released in the 1960's. The recordings of all of these band members are worth investigating, still readily available, and most often fairly low in price. Each of them also played too many roles as sidemen to really list off, but together with their own releases, the four of them did much to shape the sound of the younger generation of jazz musicians recording in the 60's.

Freedom Jazz Dance, part 1

But while the music they played was markedly different from the music of their peers, what really set the Second Great Quintet apart – as you'll find to be the case with any great group of musicians in any genre – was the way they played this music. By the time the group reached its final state in 1965, free jazz and its advocates had already been on the scene for at least five years. Ornette Coleman's prophetically titled album The Shape of Jazz to Come was released in 1959, and Eric Dolphy's late masterpiece Out to Lunch – which featured Tony Williams on the drum set – came out in 1964, a year before the Quintet's first release, E.S.P. The effects of this musical revolution were numerous and far-reaching, but in short, it worked to level the roles of the individuals in a jazz combo; roles that were largely secondary – the bass and drums for instance – began to push their way forward in the ensemble, interacting more freely with the soloists and quite simply just playing more and louder than they had in the past. As early as 1961, pianist Bill Evans was implementing these ideas in his piano trio, creating a more fluid and organic music that still centered around traditional repertoire.

Miles Davis's position on free jazz was considerably more complex than the other musicians of the day. He publicly denounced musicians like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, even criticized the later music of John Coltrane, a person whom he held in only the highest regards. But it's also clear that he wasn't on the same side as the critics that were attacking these musicians in all of the jazz publications of the day. It's important to remember that, first and foremost, Davis was a professional, popular musician, and while he always attested to his artistic integrity (and rightly so), the mind of the audience was always accounted for in his musical visions. On some level, this means that Davis must reconsider the use of musical new musical devices before he uses them in his music, finding a suitable way to fuse the progressive and the traditional, meaning that some delay in adoption of new techniques would be reasonable. At the same time though, the ethos of free jazz had always been present in the music of Davis: he always had the most bombastic drummers around and structured his groups around the sound of these players. Similarly, his love of country blues added a certain flexibility to his music, both rhythmically and tonally. Still, the music of the Second Great Quintet differs greatly from the rough, bluesy music of the First Quintet.

In 1965, Davis found himself surrounded by musicians of a generation that followed his own, the youngest being his freakishly talented drummer who maintained an obsession with the experimental. To these players, free jazz was not a music that came to replace their style, but the music which they came of age in. Consequently, that their playing referred to a freer style was the result of their own emerging musical voice, not a personal transition. This meant that if Davis wanted to have the best players on the scene in his group, he'd have to both accept their personal styles and learn to adapt to them. And, as can be seen in the music they made, he was apparently quite happy to do so. His own lines became far more chromatic, and while he more or less continued to play to the chords, the paths he began to take from chord tone to chord tone became far more complex. Throughout his autobiography, he speaks enthusiastically about this band, highlighting the talents and playing of all its members. Whatever prejudices Davis had against free jazz obviously didn't apply to his own group.

The Composer at his Horn: Part 2

But for those who want to learn and learn from Shorter's songs, the technical aspects of his compositions are important. The biggest diversions from traditional jazz writing that appear in his music come in his harmonic structures. First, he makes frequent use of altered seven chords, sometimes replacing nearly all of the typical chords you'd find on a lead sheet. Chords like the lydian chord (maj7#11), the lydian augmented chord (maj7#5), the dorian chord (-6/9), the phrygian chord (7sus4b9) and entire families of altered dominants (7b5, 7#5, 9#11, etc.) appear in every song he wrote for the Miles Davis Quintet. He was not the first composer in jazz to use these chords – Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk beat him to the punch by decades – but he was the first to write music that centered around the colors of these chords.

These various chords – which could easily be referred to as modal chords – call for the improvisor to play in a specific mode, rather than the more flexible major 7 and minor 7 chords. There is some influence of Europe here: the music of Debussy and Ravel was largely based around these alternate scales. But if you look at a book of Debussy preludes, you'll find that he used almost exclusively triads and extended dominant chords (mainly 9 chord and 13 chords), with only a few minor 7 chords and rarely a major 7 chord. Like Debussy though, Shorter avoided the V to I cadence in most of his songs, creating a similar endless feeling to the music.

These modal chords also look back to the landmark recordings of Milestones and Kind of Blue, but the modal songs on these albums were built on only one or two chords. What sets the music of Shorter apart from these early modal jazz compositions is the rapid shifting of modes. Whereas the first sixteen measures of “So What” used the D dorian mode, only the first measure of “Nefertiti” uses the Ab lydian scale. For the performer, this means a shift in thinking from both the tonal and early modal methods of playing. Often with Shorter's songs, it's necessary to dispense with the idea of key entirely. In the ballad “Iris”, the first three chords – F-9, Emaj7#11, and F#maj7#11 – have no realistic relationship to one another. The soloist must begin to consider each measure as a modal area and switch between the necessary scales as the next chord arrives (some modern jazz theory books approach all improvising in the same style, saying to play dorian on a ii chord, mixolydian on a V chord, etc. but these tend to be modes of the home key rather than scales distant from one another). In some respects, this makes improvising on these songs much more difficult, as there's no home key to act as a point of reference for the soloist. But learning to improvise in these song forms quickly improves one's ability to play traditional standards, as the soloist must began to conceptualize the chord changes as a sequence of chord tones rather than movement inside a single scale, allowing them to highlight the chords tones with more ease on a song like “Stella By Starlight”.

For the most part, Shorter only wrote in this style during his employment with Miles Davis. His solo albums from the late 60's became looser in form and more harmonically ambiguous, ultimately leading to the free jazz found in “Odyssey of Iska” (it looks like this album was just re-released on an on-demand level by Amazon.com. It has been out of print for some time now) and “Super Nova”. But the pieces written during this period were highly influential in their time, and remain so today. Many of the songs written by the other members of the band during this period – Tony Williams's “Pee Wee”, Herbie Hancock's “The Sorcerer”, Davis's own “Circle” – owe much to Shorter's ideas. And along with John Coltrane's “Giant Steps”, his songs remain a bench-mark in ability for students of jazz.

Listening:

E.S.P.
Nefertiti
The Sorcerer

The Composer at his Horn: Part 1

The body of material Wayne Shorter created during his stint with the Miles Davis band brought a number of innovations to small-group jazz writing. As noted previously, until Shorter's entrance into the Miles Davis Quintet, the vast majority of Davis's repertoire consisted of what we now refer to as jazz standards: Stella By Starlight, Round Midnight, On Green Dolphin Street, My Funny Valentine, etc. Following the release of E.S.P. – the first album recorded by the Second Great Quintet – would record only original music, largely written by Shorter, though augmented by pieces written by all of the other band members, including Davis. It's easy to overlook the significance of this today; before this group, few post-bop bands played mostly original works, preferring instead to differentiate themselves through interpretation of standards. Of the bands that did prefer to write their own music – those lead by Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, and Art Blakey – Shorter's name appears on the roster of one. Prior to talking about the technical details of the music though, it is important to make note of his greatest strengths: his ability to maintain multiple compositional personalities.

If you look at the songs Shorter wrote throughout the 60's – E.S.P, Yes Or No, Sincerely Diana, and El Gaucho as some examples – it wouldn't be a stretch to think they were the products of different writers. Shorter had the ability to write music that exemplified his surroundings. For Art Blakey, he wrote modernistic blues and latin pieces that allowed the drummer to maintain his both earthy and commercial roots while remaining relevant in the forward-looking jazz world of the 60's. On his early solo albums, he showed a personality that fused the pentatonic-based musics of John Coltrane and the popular music world. Finally, when writing for Miles Davis, Shorter created dark, expressionistic portraits of the trumpeter, providing the brooding atmospheres that Davis already had the ability to turn a simple standard in to. The importance of this is the philosophy of composition it portrays in Shorter. This wide variety of styles displays a writer concerned more with the overall effect of a piece than the fine details of it; while Shorter established many new harmonic standards in jazz writing, it was his attention to overall concept that put him so far ahead of his contemporaries. Moreover, as he broke accepted harmonic rules with the intention of the overall effect and mood, the changes he made were a result of dedication to general concept.