Four Jazz Lives

Introduction to the New Edition

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION The Sixties, when Four Lives in the Bebop Business was written , were as wide open as American culture has been during my sixty-seven years. The Sixties were a garden ofcontroversy, and, indeed, the decade remains controversial today among historians and social critics. Writers ofthe Right see the period as disruptive and divisive. Writers of the Left see it as liberating and progressive. For those ofus who were involvedwith the arts and social action of the time, the Sixties were the good old days. In 1966, the year Four Lives was published, many of the cause movements that are now assumed to be enduring parts in the American chorus were in their early stages ofdevelopment. Modern feminism was beginning to be broadly spoken, like an esoteric new language, and was thought to be seditious even by men on the Left, who were having difficulty accepting that it was more than a fad. The writings of Rachel Carlson and other environmentalists were instilling a concern for earth, air, and water into the consciousness of a generation. The nuclear disarmament movement had propagated a pacifism that became [ viii] Introduction to the New Edition explosive after U.S. combat troops arrived in Vietnam in 1965. Resistance to that war was radical in 1966, though the universal draft later seemed to recruit more antiwar activists than it did soldiers. Then there was the civil rights movement that inspired so many jazz compositions during the Sixties. The Warren Supreme Court had rendered its pivotal decision in the case of Brown vs. Board ofEducation of Topeka twelve years earlier, and the massive civil (sometimes called "human") rights movement that it stimulatedwas everywhere. In 1966, Martin Luther King was leading the so-called Meredith march in support of the integration ofthe law school ofthe University ofMississippi. It was during this march that the term black power-though coined years earlier in another context by Richard Wright-was broadcast. A heightened militance was further indicated by the election of Stokeley Carmichael to the head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. The eloquent cultural nationalist Malcolm X had left the Nation ofIslam to speak to and for a rising number ofnorthern African-American activists. Confrontation of the establishment and its standards inspired a fierce antimaterialism. Settlers in lower Manhattan (especially Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, the latter beingwhere Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Jackie McLean lived) and the other artists' enclaves ofthe city professed a high idealism for their causes, their way of living, their art. A certain shared alienation was the bond. An author in the New York Times MagaZine wrote, "Ifyou can imagine calling the police for any reason whatsoever, you have left the Lower East Side." I do not mean to beatify the twenty to forty year olds who populated the scene. There was a great deal of superficiality; a great deal ofvacant hanging out; more bad art than good; and, worst ofall, a lot ofdrugs. The propagation ofa narcotic culture was, for me, the most regrettable aspect ofthe times. Introduction to the New Edition [ ix ] All of the features of the period were expressed in music. There were several modernist approaches to music making that assaulted the enduring traditional styles. Chance, aleatory, and electronic compositions were heard in the various venues that presented modem Western concert music. Jimi Hendricks led a new wave ofrock and rollers who experimented with improvisation and recording techniques. As contemporaryestheticians apply the term rrwdemism to twentieth-century aficionados who treated jazz as serious music and accepted its cultural base, so could a large folk movement that let middle class kids pitch traditional grassroots music in a contemporary key be called modernist . And a genuine avant-gardejumpedout ofthe conventions ofhard bop with radical new approaches to jazz improvisation. The new jazz musicians wanted to break down tonal centers , well-defined chordal progressions, pat rhythms-any structures that they found inhibiting. Even bandstand comportment was changing. Sun Ra, the pianist and composer, dressed his band in costumes thatwere intended to suggest that the musicians were space travelers from ancient Egypt, with lights in their bonnets and incense in their hands. The vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson told me about a gig with John Handy, the great alto saxophonist: 'We were playing this tune that John wrote about the way that the Alabama policemen had set their dogs on the demonstrators. I played my solo...