An analysis of the bass playing of Scott LaFaro as part of the Bill Evans Trio 1959 - 1961

<p>Scott LaFaro is widely regarded as a highly interactive bass player, and within the context of the Bill Evans Trio it is commonly believed he was able to cast aside the traditional time keeping role of the jazz bassist. His considerable reputation seems to rest on this understanding, but as this exegesis aims to show, the general understanding of his legacy within jazz history is open to question More broadly, this exegesis highlights the fact that any claims about his legacy are supported by very limited analysis of his techniques and approaches, rendering any absolute portrayal of LaFaro misleading. This exegesis aims to provide a thorough analysis of LaFaro’s performances within the Bill Evans Trio. By analysing a representative sample of his work in that context, I hope to discover common techniques and traits that LaFaro employed on a regular basis and which characterise his unique approach to bass playing within a small jazz ensemble. With the identification of these characteristics, a clearer picture of Scott LaFaro can begin to emerge, as can a more accurate understanding of his legacy.</p>

An analysis of the bass playing of Scott LaFaro as part of the Bill Evans Trio 1959 - 1961

<p>Scott LaFaro is widely regarded as a highly interactive bass player, and within the context of the Bill Evans Trio it is commonly believed he was able to cast aside the traditional time keeping role of the jazz bassist. His considerable reputation seems to rest on this understanding, but as this exegesis aims to show, the general understanding of his legacy within jazz history is open to question More broadly, this exegesis highlights the fact that any claims about his legacy are supported by very limited analysis of his techniques and approaches, rendering any absolute portrayal of LaFaro misleading. This exegesis aims to provide a thorough analysis of LaFaro’s performances within the Bill Evans Trio. By analysing a representative sample of his work in that context, I hope to discover common techniques and traits that LaFaro employed on a regular basis and which characterise his unique approach to bass playing within a small jazz ensemble. With the identification of these characteristics, a clearer picture of Scott LaFaro can begin to emerge, as can a more accurate understanding of his legacy.</p>

Creativity in Jazz

<p>Common discourses around jazz generally acknowledge the centrality of creativity to the music, but scholarship on what precisely creativity is in jazz, and how it might best be enhanced is not well developed. Building on the important work in this area begun by scholars such as Ed Sarath and R. Keith Sawyer, I first investigate the extensive scholarly literature on creativity, drawing predominantly from social science and education contexts, and then apply some of the most relevant frameworks to jazz. These frameworks draw several key aspects of jazz practice into sharp relief, in particular the respective roles of individuals and ensembles and the ways they work in common, and the provenance of musical materials in creative jazz practice. With these key ideas acting as a theoretical lens, I view the historical practice of three unquestionably creative jazz musicians: Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. The choice of these musicians in particular is important because their example, when understood through the lens of creativity, in part authenticates some of the traditional tools by which we investigate jazz, historically, while at the same time pointing towards some different, less commonly discussed attributes. Most important, the creativity lens reveals important ways in which creative practice can be attributable to understandable procedures that are available to all accomplished musicians, not just a few “great men”. Thus my conclusions call into question more traditional modes of jazz history and criticism which, while acknowledging the music’s collective nature, tend to emphasise the roles of individuals as primary in jazz. Instead, my research suggests that creativity is best achieved in group contexts where diversely gifted participants work collaboratively in egalitarian, interactive, improvised settings. Individuals do make significant contributions to this mix, and in terms of creative advances in jazz – and in terms of achieving meaningful self-expression – the most important quality individual musicians can pursue is the development and expression of unique musical voices. In addition to improvised interactivity among unique individual voices, the adoption of musical materials from outside of jazz and their transformations (along with similar transformations of musical materials already common currency among jazz musicians) can be shown to serve both the expressive goals of musicians and propel jazz in creative and potentially fruitful directions. It is the improvised colloquy of such individual voices, transforming received and newly acquired musical materials in the service of self-expression, that contributed to the lasting allure of the music attributed to Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Saxophonist Jan Garbarek is proposed as a contemporary musician who has made use of all of these strategies in forging jazz music that demonstrates fidelity to the core processes of jazz while only provisionally embracing some of the style features of earlier forms of the music – style features that common jazz discourses have tended to emphasise at the expense of the processes that gave rise to them.</p>

Creativity in Jazz

<p>Common discourses around jazz generally acknowledge the centrality of creativity to the music, but scholarship on what precisely creativity is in jazz, and how it might best be enhanced is not well developed. Building on the important work in this area begun by scholars such as Ed Sarath and R. Keith Sawyer, I first investigate the extensive scholarly literature on creativity, drawing predominantly from social science and education contexts, and then apply some of the most relevant frameworks to jazz. These frameworks draw several key aspects of jazz practice into sharp relief, in particular the respective roles of individuals and ensembles and the ways they work in common, and the provenance of musical materials in creative jazz practice. With these key ideas acting as a theoretical lens, I view the historical practice of three unquestionably creative jazz musicians: Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. The choice of these musicians in particular is important because their example, when understood through the lens of creativity, in part authenticates some of the traditional tools by which we investigate jazz, historically, while at the same time pointing towards some different, less commonly discussed attributes. Most important, the creativity lens reveals important ways in which creative practice can be attributable to understandable procedures that are available to all accomplished musicians, not just a few “great men”. Thus my conclusions call into question more traditional modes of jazz history and criticism which, while acknowledging the music’s collective nature, tend to emphasise the roles of individuals as primary in jazz. Instead, my research suggests that creativity is best achieved in group contexts where diversely gifted participants work collaboratively in egalitarian, interactive, improvised settings. Individuals do make significant contributions to this mix, and in terms of creative advances in jazz – and in terms of achieving meaningful self-expression – the most important quality individual musicians can pursue is the development and expression of unique musical voices. In addition to improvised interactivity among unique individual voices, the adoption of musical materials from outside of jazz and their transformations (along with similar transformations of musical materials already common currency among jazz musicians) can be shown to serve both the expressive goals of musicians and propel jazz in creative and potentially fruitful directions. It is the improvised colloquy of such individual voices, transforming received and newly acquired musical materials in the service of self-expression, that contributed to the lasting allure of the music attributed to Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Saxophonist Jan Garbarek is proposed as a contemporary musician who has made use of all of these strategies in forging jazz music that demonstrates fidelity to the core processes of jazz while only provisionally embracing some of the style features of earlier forms of the music – style features that common jazz discourses have tended to emphasise at the expense of the processes that gave rise to them.</p>

THE IMPORTANCE OF 1959-1967 PERIOD IN JAZZ HISTORY

The focus of this study is on the history of jazz music between 1959 and 1967. The 1950s was a period of intense creativity in jazz, defined by emerging styles such as third stream, cool jazz and hard bop. The end of that decade, 1959, is considered to be a watershed year in which some of jazz’s most influential recordings were made and also effected the free jazz movement, which dominated until 1967, known as the "year that jazz music died". Therefore, 1959 becomes a bridge between the stylistic homogeneity of first half of the century and an outpouring of creativity in the second half. The echoes of the pre-fusion period 1959-1967 are still influential on the musical output of jazz in the twenty first century. This study aims to convey the variety of jazz styles between 1950 and 1967 by looking at the foundational elements that create the musical understanding of these styles by means of a descriptive methodology. Keywords: Jazz, Free Jazz, Hard Bop, 1959, Third Stream, Cool Jazz, Avant-Garde

Jazz Music and Its Choreographies of Listening

Through an interrogation of hybrid social dance/jazz concert events held in Atlanta in 1938, this chapter presents the book’s guiding questions and methods, which also stem from the author’s own experience as a social jazz dancer. Applying Susan Foster’s model of choreography as a broadly applicable analytic for the socially reinforced structuring of movement in space, it asks how and why jazz audiences’ default listening postures have moved from standing and dancing to relatively motionless sitting and listening. Exploring this question requires a critical, reflective look at the role of bodies in intellectual and aesthetic hierarchies and the complex webs of desire and anxiety that have shaped American institutional cultures’ conflicted relationships with music, with dance, and with all things corporeal. Critiquing the valorization of transcendence and universalism in American aesthetic discourses and in jazz music history specifically, this chapter advances an embodied approach to jazz history where dance becomes a point of entry into stories that de-center the pillars upon which jazz music’s canonic historical and ideological narratives rest. Following choreographer/folklorist Mura Dehn’s description of social jazz dancing, this book thus advances a perspective that operates “between the beats” of jazz history’s canonic time-spaces, seeking to focus on dancing and musicking as practices that begin within the body and to dig into the complex and messy viscera underneath the skin of those narratives that form the so-called jazz tradition.

“A Fine Art in Danger”

During the 1950s and 1960s, jazz music became solidly entrenched in America’s institutions of high art patronage as the music’s most prestigious venues shifted from popular clubs and ballrooms to concert halls and upscale summer festivals, most notably the Newport Jazz Festival. While for most professional jazz dancers, this period marked a time when the work “dried up,” there were several lindy hop and rhythm tap dancers who managed to access these spaces through their relationships with jazz historian Marshall Stearns. Stearns was a key player in the adoption of jazz history as an academic subject and an advocate for the serious study of Black vernacular dance. This chapter asks why Stearns’s efforts to “legitimize” and institutionalize jazz dance largely failed, given that his similar advocacy for jazz music clearly succeeded. It argues that Stearns’s folkloric conceptualization of “vernacular jazz dance” fell short of the successful “consensus narrative” he built for jazz music in that concertized adaptations of Black vernacular dance practices by choreographers such as Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey were not legible to Stearns as contiguous extensions of the traditional folk and popular dance forms he problematically fetishized as dying folk art in need of preservation. The discursive barrier Stearns built between the worlds of vernacular and concert dance, while intended to safeguard from cultural appropriation so-called authentic or vernacular jazz dance forms, ultimately reinforced primitivist narratives that discursively foreclosed many possibilities for dance as a vital creative partner in jazz music’s present or future.