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JAZZ INFLUENCES
"What is past is prologue." Applied to jazz, Will Shakespeare’s ancient maxim finds proof in such unlikely realities as a prominent rock drummer's admission that his favorite listening these days is his Louis Armstrong record collection. That may seem quite a leap but Louis' influence is just that pervasive. Listen to trumpet players as diverse as Buck Clayton, Bobby Hackett, Roy Eldridge, and Dizzy Gillespie and you will hear Louis in all of them. Singers from Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, to the great Billy Eckstine and beyond, fell under Satchmo's spell. And the marvel of it all is that they carried their own musical identity clearly and creatively, while doing so.
Jazz saxophone styles were pretty much set in the 1930's by the two tenor sax giants, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. Virtually every big band tenor soloist, black and white, followed the big toned, romantic style of Hawkins, until Lester's light sound later dominated the horn's character via Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, altoist Paul Desmond (Dave Brubeck's Take Five), and all the players of the "cool school."
Charlie Parker's mid 1940's explosion set a fiery new direction, spawning a legion of mostly brilliant bop imitators in a reprise of the earlier domination of the clarinet by Benny Goodman. Goodman's imitators were also of a high order, like Louis' disciples, achieving marked individuality despite their derivativeness. Listen to Peanuts Hucko and Edmond Hall for contrasts in the "Goodman style. Of course, even Benny had his influences. New Orleans jazz was blessed with superb clarinetists, and Jimmie Noone was prominent in Chicago when Goodman was a teenager there. He also likely heard Johnny Dodds and Barney Bigard. And there were many others.
Chicago, in fact, produced its own influential "school" of jazz playing whose prominent exponents included Pee Wee Russell, Eddie Condon, Joe Marsala, and Bud Freeman. Their "local" influence was cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, whose stunning sound was an influence on, amazingly, Lester Young, and by extension Miles Davis, Chet Baker, and Art Farmer. It is not beyond logic to consider Bix and his sax playing partner, Frank Trambauer, as the first "cool" jazz players.
After Parker, whose own influences were the important Kansas City blues and riff styles of that town, Lester Young and the brilliant pianist Art Tatum, the influences of John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Thelonius Monk so remarkably broadened the scope and language of jazz that it is now a rich amalgam of styles from widely divergent sources. Jazz thrives and continues to expand its language, becoming as international as our existence in the modern world.
- Bob Sparkman
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