(left) Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, 1947 and (right) Lennie Tristano’s band, about 1949. (continued from part 1) In 1948, Miles Davis began jamming with baritone saxophonist and arranger Gerry Mulligan, just freed from the Gene Krupa band, alto player Lee Konitz, late of Claude Thornhill’s Orchestra, and Thornhill’s arranger, Gil Evans. They formed the […]
We love movies. Hell, we love movies almost as much as we love music. But unlike creative American forms such as jazz, rock and country, movies are no more dead or alive today than they’ve ever been, which bodes well for cinema’s future. Or sounds its death knell. Whatever. We love ’em regardless. Combining these […]
We threatened to continue this diatribe, and so we will. Our contention is that creative American music all seemed to die at roughly the same time around 1980. We don’t mean that it disappeared. We simply mean that genres like jazz, country and rock all stopped evolving and either became repertory, classical forms, like jazz, […]
We mentioned in our last post that individual style, wherein a musician’s general sound is so unique and recognizable as to be unmistakably his alone, is a dead commodity in modern American music. We went on to say that one of the most fruitful periods and environments for this sort of individuality was that transitional […]