West Coast Jazz is Nowhere

A great many people are fairly certain that an important new school of jazz music has come into being recently -- but the fact is that to date nobody has been able to define it.

This new, "phantom" brand of jazz has been labeled starkly, "West Coast Jazz." Actually, there is no such thing as West Coast Jazz. It's a fallacy, a myth.

Just, how or why or when this myth was started isn't known. But that it's a myth, is certain. Ask a California jazz man just what, exactly, the component parts of "West Coast Jazz" are. He couldn't tell you. There's no one who can. You can't define something that doesn't exist.

The truth and mythology of West Coast jazz have been so inextricably entwined that a good many fans and critics are mistaking one for another. Let's take a closer look at the western jazz scene and see if we can't do some sorting:

Myth -- The West Coast is an important spawning place for progressive jazz musicians.

Truth -- With the exception of a few like pianist Dave Brubeck and trumpeter Chet Baker, all the modern sounds out West are being made by Eastern musicians who've moved there.

(Some of the migratory modernists include Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax; Shorty Rogers, trumpet; Art Pepper, alto sax; Shelly Manne, drums; Teddy Charles, vibes; Wardell Gray, tenor sax; Al Haig, piano; Max Roach, drums; and Stan Getz, tenor sax. There are others.)

Myth -- West Coast jazz fans are "cooler" than Midwestern and Eastern fans, more appreciative of good jazz.

Truth -- To the contrary, West Coast fans display a shocking lack of musical discrimination. They'll applaud just as fervidly for Big Jay McNeely's caterwauling tenor sax as the wonderful silk-soft murmuring of Paul Desmond's alto -- and sigh ecstatically to both, "Crazy, man, crazy..."

Wardell Gray, a swinging tenor saxist who spent a lot of time with Count Basie's band before making the trek West four years ago, put it this way: "In the East the audiences are very critical. They hear enough good musicians -- the best, naturally -- and they put you down if you don't play the right notes. But out West the fans just aren't musically aware. And you frustrate yourself out there, trying to play the right notes and not being appreciated when you do."

Myth -- The West is an important laboratory for jazz experimentation, and much jazz progress is being made there.

Truth -- Except for Brubeck, Baker and the Eastern cats who migrated there, the level of Western jazz has not yet reached that of Boston and New York.

Vibraphonist Teddy Charles, a serious, well-schooled jazz veteran who splits his time between the two coasts, says that the young West Coasters are "five or six years" behind the Eastern level of development.

As a possible explanation for this cultural lag, Charles points to the easy living, "goof-off" environment in Southern California and the absence of the intense competition that exists in the East, where a musician has the entire jazz repertoire down pat or is "axed for his inexperience."

Wardell Gray says the five or six year discrepancy between the Eastern level of jazz and the Western follows from the fact that the "center of cultural activity" in the United States is situated in the East. "With the East the center for art, ballet and the legitimate theatre," Gray says, "it's not surprising that jazz, too, is more technically advanced there."

Gray adds: "When something happens in New York it's a long time before it gets to California. It might take five or six months before anybody brings it out there. You can't just read about it and pick it up: you have to see it and come in contact with it -- absorb it. And that takes time."

Perhaps the length of time it takes the West to absorb jazz concepts originating in the East has something to do with the fact that the West has not yet produced a jazz "style" that can be called truly its own.

Western jazz is in a state of flux--testing, adapting and discarding constantly the new jazz ideas that flow from the East. Because of this constant change, the jazz picture in the West is anything but one of consistency: to the contrary, it's jumbled, kaleidoscopic.

You have jazz on the Pacific Coast that soothes and jazz that sears, jazz that is prudent and jazz that is passionate. For every smooth sender there (continued on page 43) west coast jazz (continued from page 9) is a hectic howler. For every Coaster who plays from the head, there's one who plays from the guts.

Putting savage, bombastic Big Jay McNeely (tenor sax, Hollywood) at one extreme and shy, reticent Dave Brubeck (piano, San Francisco) at the other, you'll find that the rest of the Western cats fall somewhere in between. It is just a declaration of fact to say the West Coast harbors musicians playing practically every known variety of jazz music.

A look at some of the leaders in Western jazz will indicate that there are more contrasts than similitudes in the kind of music they play:

Chet Baker -- Chet (born Chesney H.) is a 24-year-old trumpet player and vocalist who won both the Down Beat and Metronome 1953 music awards as number-one trumpeter, making an unbelievably swift rise to the top. (In 1952, for example, he was twentieth in the Metronome poll.)

Chet's playing is light, fast and sugar-sweet. He plays and sings with quiet delicacy, building his beautiful, often highly-complicated solos with extreme care. He says jazz should be "logical, lyrical and fluent." He believes a jazz solo should "tell a story, not be merely a string of unconnected phrases."

Dave Brubeck -- Dave Brubeck and his quartet (Brubeck, piano; Paul Desmond, alto sax; Ron Crotty, bass; Joe Dodge, drums) drew a lot of favorable attention last year as an important part of the modern jazz movement. Brubeck is a jazz experimentalist, merging classical ideas with those of jazz. Brubeck makes wide use of the fugue in his jazz solos, often reminding one of Chopin, Beethoven or Bach. His powers of improvisation are great -- and equally great are Paul Desmond's. The two of them improvising together against the soft, strident pulsation of the bass and drums is a thing breath-taking to hear. The sounds are subtle and subdued -- Brubeck's jazz is truly "cool" jazz.

Brubeck describes his idea of jazz as "an improvised music based on classical harmony and African rhythms. The challenge is to improvise on the melody, using traditional music ideas but not sacrificing the drive and the beat of early jazz."

Teddy Charles -- Charles, a front rank vibes-man, has been described as one of modern music's "most severe critics, wryest commentators and devoted leaders." He's played with Benny Goodman, Buddy De Franco, Artie Shaw and others. When he's not studying composition in the East, he plays in pick-up and recording groups on the West Coast.

Charles is an Easterner by birth, and he's concerned with the state of Western jazz. He believes young West Coast cats do a lot of "wailing" (swinging) and depressingly little "wigging" (thinking). His concept of an ideal jazz exponent is one who does a little of each -- a "wail-wigger."

Wardell Gray -- Tenor saxist Gray has played with modernists and stompers alike on the West Coast, and his own jazz style is a combination of the kind of music each group represents -- Wardell's a thinker, but he's a swinger too.

Perhaps more than any other, Wardell symbolizes the synthesis of myriad styles that could make up a unified Western Jazz -- he's played with the cool Coasters (Shorty Rogers, Stan Getz, Teddy Charles, etc.) and hot ones (Dexter Gordon, Vido Musso, Charles Shavers, etc.). He does most of his cool playing in the clubs in and around Hollywood (The Clef, The Lighthouse, The Californian) and his hot playing in Gene Norman's "Just Jazz" concerts (the Pacific Coast counterpart of Norman Granz' "Jazz at the Philharmonic").

Gray thinks his arrangement of playing both hot and cool jazz is ideal. "I like to create, but I like to swing too. Out here, we've got radicals at both ends of the jazz thermometer -- Mulligan and his 'pure art' theories and McNeely and his supersonic honking. I guess you could call the Pacific Coast the melting pot of jazz -- and a lot of cats, like myself, are very happily in the middle of it."

Big Jay McNeely -- Big Jay is a burly, robust L. A.-born jazz man who delights in making his tenor sax groan, growl, grumble, grunt, howl, rasp, rock, scream, screech, squeal, whistle, wiggle, wobble and explode. His tone is guttural and his music is blood-red with emotion and frenzy. When he performs, he stomps his feet, shakes his shoulders and wags his head. Holding his instrument like some medieval weapon, he hops, leaps, crawls and lies flat on his back on the stage -- blowing his horn lustily all the while. Comparing his music to that of Brubeck is like comparing a H-bomb blast with an intricately constructed mobile.

McNeely explains: "I was a serious cat once. I was eager to learn all about the niceties of sound and the complexities of musical structure. And I dug the modern cats in the East -- Parker, Tristano, Powel, all them cats. But I found out that the big money was elsewhere. People want to be excited. And that's what I try to give them -- excitement. It's as simple as all that."

Gerry Mulligan -- Gerry is an intense young jazz baritone-saxist, composer and arranger who moved West two years ago after serving his apprenticeship in the East, in Philadelphia and New York. Mulligan is what they call a "jazz purist." He detests commercialism of any kind--won't tolerate the shaping of his highly experimental sounds to suit the musical tastes of his audience. His often belligerent attitude (recently he told an audience he'd walk off the stand if they didn't "quiet down" and listen to his music) has caused fellow jazz musicians some concern. Most jazz men feel that sympathetic cash customers are necessary if jazz is going to grow and that insulting an audience only gives jazz and the people who play it a bad name.

Last year Mulligan drew a lot of critical attention as an important jazz modernist by eliminating the piano and the guitar from his West Coast combos. (His most famous combo was a quartet featuring himself on sax, Chet Baker, trumpet; Carson Smith, bass; and Chico Hamilton, drums.) The resultant sounds were lighter and more fluid than any yet heard. And, with the vibrato minimized and the confining chordal base of the piano gone, the soloists were afforded more freedom in their improvising. The sound of Mulligan's pungent saxaphone or Baker's honeyed trumpet (or both) against the gentle punching of the streamlined rhythm section was fresh, invigorating--the jazz line was pushed forward a little--previously hidden jazz horizons were glimpsed.

Mulligan frowns on West Coasters who are not totally sincere about their music. He believes jazz--good jazz, pure (continued on page 48) West Coast Jazz (continued from page 43) jazz--to be "the rational expression of deep, sometimes searing emotion." To achieve this jazz ideal, Gerry feels that a complete "wedding of mind and soul" is needed.

Shorty Rogers -- Shorty (Milton) Rogers is a sharp-eyed, winsome and tremendously aware jazz musician. Most of his trumpet playing, arranging and composing has been done in the East (he has played and written for Red Norvo, Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman and Stan Kenton), but when the nucleus of the Kenton band (Rogers, trumpet; Bob Cooper, tenor sax; Art Pepper, alto sax; Shelly Manne, drums) quit en masse and moved West two years ago, Shorty quickly became a vital figure in the jazz avant-garde there.

Rogers' music is distinguished by an unprecedented and uncanny mixture of Afro-Cuban rhythms with light, often humorous scoring for brass and reeds. His music is surprising, sometimes frenetic -- but never gets out of control.

Truly, the West is the melting pot of jazz -- a sizzling concoction of raucous jazz (McNeely), classical jazz (Brubeck), swinging-thinking jazz (Charles, Gray), experimental jazz (Baker, Mulligan) and neo-Afro-Cuban jazz (Rogers). And, how then, given this diverse collection, can it be said that there is a pure, homogeneous West Coast "school" of jazz?

Naturally, it can't. Not yet, anyway.

Big Jay McNeely ... a grunt, a howl, a squeal.

Baker and Mulligan ... pungence and honey against streamlined rhythm.

Dave Brubeck ... cool jazz, like an intricately constructed mobile.