Kenny Mathieson - Cookin: Hard Bop and Soul Jazz 1954-65

Kenny Mathieson is the author of Giant Steps: Bebop and The Creators of Modern Jazz 19451965, also published by Canongate Books. He was born near Glasgow, and now lives in the Highlands of Scotland. He studied American and English Literature at the University of East Anglia, graduating with a BA (First Class) in 1978, and a PhD in 1983. He has been a freelance writer since 1982, and writes on jazz, classical and folk music for several publications. He has contributed to numerous reference books, and to Masters of Jazz Guitar (Balafon Books/Miller Freeman). He edited and co-wrote Celtic Music A Listeners Guide (Backbeat UK/Miller Freeman, 2001).

First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

Published simultaneously in the United States of America and Canada

Copyright Kenny Mathieson 2002, 2012

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 85786 620 2
eISBN 978 0 85786 616 5

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books

www.canongate.tv

Cookin is the second in a sequence of books which began with Giant Steps: Bebop and The Creators of Modern Jazz, 19451965. It follows a similar format, but with the necessity to include many more musicians, inevitably does so at shorter length for any given individual. Even allowing for that increased scope, some readers will inevitably find their favourites given what they consider to be short measure, or worse, passed over altogether. I am aware of the claims of some musicians (especially pianists and rhythm players, and also organists) who have been dealt with only in passing, but I have chosen the players who I consider to have made the most significant contributions to the stream of jazz we know as hard bop in the nominal period which the book covers (19541965), although I have allowed it to leak chronologically where appropriate.

One obvious omission requires specific justification. The name of Jackie McLean is conspicuous by its absence on the contents page, although he figures frequently in the course of the book. While McLean cut his teeth in bebop and was a prominent contributor to the emergence of hard bop, I have deliberately chosen to withhold my discussion of his work for the next book in the series, which will look at the extensions of bop in the early and mid 1960s, in modal and other directions (free jazz, however, will be topic of a different book). McLean seems to me an excellent bridge into that development, and also made what I believe to be the most exciting and innovative music of his career in those years. Accordingly, I have reserved any detailed examination of his music for that volume. Several other musicians who might also have figured here, such as Hampton Hawes and Harold Land, have also been reserved for another book.

In terms of purely practical changes, I have chosen to list recordings at the end of each chapter rather than, as in Giant Steps, at the end of the book. I have chosen to limit the recordings listed under individual artists to a cut-off point of the late 1960s, although later discs may be cited within the respective chapters, along with boxed sets. Sadly, a listing is not a guarantee of current availability. The Selected Reading list remains at the end of the book, and details of all books mentioned in the text can be found there. For the benefit of those who bought Giant Steps, it also includes some titles more directly relevant to that book which have appeared or been reissued since its publication. They include new biographies of Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown and Charles Mingus, among others. All books mentioned in the text are included in the listing.

I am grateful once again for the support of the publisher, and in particular to Jamie Byng, Colin McLear and Mark Stanton. Valuable advice and comment has also been forthcoming from a number of individuals, including the various (generally kindly) reviewers of Giant Steps, but particular thanks are due to Chris Sheridan.

Last, but definitely not least, this one is dedicated to my wife, Maggie, who, as the song says, is my one and only love. Apart from jazz, of course.

Kenny Mathieson

June 2001

At the time I completed Cookin in 2001, it was the intention of both myself and Canongate to produce a subsequent book referred to in my foreword. For a variety of reasons and the author rather than the publisher bears the responsibility that book was never written. Since it is not possible to remove mention of it from this new edition of Cookin, I wished both to explain that situation, and to include what would have been the first chapter of that book, on alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, as the final chapter of this book. My thanks to Canongate for enabling this addition.

Kenny Mathieson

Hard Bop was Cookin. Hard bop was Smokin. Hard bop was Steamin. Sometimes it was only Strollin or Struttin, and occasionally it was even Relaxin, but mostly it was Burnin. Those titles say a lot about the music, and maybe even more about the attitude that lay behind the music. Sure, some of those incendiary metaphors were down to marketing hype, but deeper down this was a music which both reflected and invited a visceral, passionate response as well as a cerebral, intellectual one. The combination of earthy, driving urgency inherited from blues, gospel and rhythm and blues roots with the harmonic and polyrhythmic complexity of bebop provided the formula which ignited hard bop, and established the music as the new jazz mainstream right up to the present day.

This is not the place to discuss the retro versus innovation debate (the so-called jazz wars) which lies at the heart of the current jazz scene, where bop has moved into what many see as a static, no longer developing repertory role, thereby choking innovation (for a summary of the arguments, see Eric Nisensons Blue and Tom Piazzas Blues Up and Down, not to mention the acres of print generated by the reception of Ken Burnss documentary, Jazz).

Jazz without creative innovation is a music in peril, but that does not mean that its history has to be discarded like so much used waste. New discs in various shades of bop styles continue to dominate the jazz release schedules, and while many of them offer little that is new or distinctive, many of the players taking up the music are still finding fresh things in it. Indeed, no jazz style has yet been exhausted, and while we wait in vain for a new earth-shattering leap which might propel jazz into a new phase, there is still much to savour in what is being done.

Hard bop (or its so-called neo-bop descendants) as a repertory music in the current era is a very different beast from the music addressed in this book. In the second half of the 1950s, hard bop was still in the process of creation as a form, and reflected the urgent, urban, often troubled lives of the musicians who played it.

It was plugged much more directly into the everyday life and culture of the mainly black communities which nurtured these players, and was heard on neighbourhood jukeboxes and clubs as part of the spectrum of the popular music of the day. By the mid-1960s, this vital connection with the community was fading fast there were new kids on the block to reflect the contemporary realities of black (and white) life, not only in jazz, but also in pop, rock, soul and funk.