Where have we been? We started with Old School jazz, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Henry Allen. Then we zipped ahead a couple decades to hear the very different blues of Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and Frank Foster, blues shorn of much of the funk, but not the juice. The juice is always in the performer, not the specifications of the tune. Then we went back to fill-in the interval. Duke Ellington and Count Basie aren’t so far from Louis Armstrong but they work with the full force of a big band and so have more sonic resources and have to devote more attention to scheming out the course of a performance.
Then Charlie Parker showed us what happens when you fill the blues up with a zillion chord changes. Can you push that any further without the form collapsing in on itself? Monk increased melodic angularity to the point where the melody split into two streams. Mingus turned the form back on itself into an endless loop. How does it end? Miles washed all that away in the radical simplification of “All Blues.”
Now we’re going to continue on with John Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.”; jump off the deep end – well, not quite – with Ornette Coleman’s “Broad Way Blues”; and become a snake swallowing its own tail with Hannibal Lokumbe.
John Coltrane: Mr. P.C.
John Coltrane is a tenor saxophonist who came up in the late 1940s on through the 1950s and apprenticed with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. That is to say, he came up as a bebopper, learning that style inside-out. Through his work with Davis he got ready to move on. That’s what we see him doing in “Mr. P.C.”, from his Giant Steps album, which was released early in 1960. He’s poised at the precipice.
Giant Steps came out at roughly the same time as Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), on which Coltrane played. The title tune, “Giant Steps,” is known for its difficult chord changes to be taken at a furious tempo. “Mr. P.C.” – named after Coltrane’s long-time bass player, Paul Chambers – is just as fast, perhaps faster, but the chord changes are more tractable. It’s a 12-bar blues in a minor key, which is common enough, but not so common as blues in a major key (though we should keep in mind that the blues tonality, if you will, is neither major nor minor, but something else). The fact that it is in a minor key puts it within the ambit of the modal jazz on Kind of Blue and which Coltrane would embrace whole-heartedly soon thereafter.
Let’s listen:
Coltrane starts right on the melody, which takes a standard blues form:
1) The first 4-bar phrase consists of a 2-bar phrase that goes up and then comes back down (bars 1 & 2); it is followed by a 4-note phrase in the third bar, which alternates on two pitches.
2) The second 4-bar phrase repeats the opening 2-bars, but transposes them up, to follow the shift in harmony (bars 5 & 6); it is followed by the same phrase we heard in bar 3, and on the same pitches.
3) The phrase in bars 9 and 10 is different from the one in 1 and 2, 5 and 6, but return to that same 4-note phrase in bar 11.
Easy-peasy.
Coltrane plays the melody twice and them launches into a solo (0:22). Listen closely for phrases that he repeats at various points in the solo. Listen as well for the parts where he hangs on a dissonant note (e.g. 0:28, 0:43, 0:49, etc.) and where he plays little (and not so little) runs that go chromatic (e.g. 0:34). There’s a nice cry at 2:26. In the next chorus plays rapid arpeggios (starting at 2:37) down and up and down and up for eight bars or so; there are more rapid runs in the next chorus (starting at 2:53). He’s building up a head of steam. Trane finishes his last chorus with the melody (3:18). He’s signaling that he’s done. Now Tommy Flanagan gets a piano solo – forgive me if I don’t offer some play-by-play; I’m burnt out. At 4:54 Trane starts to trade fours (that is, four bar phrases) with the drummer, Art Taylor. We return to the head at 6:25, for two choruses, and we’re out.
Ornette Coleman: Broad Way Blues
Ornette Coleman is an alto saxophonist and is Coltrane’s contemporary, a couple years younger. But, while Trane was based on the East Coast, Coleman matured out West, in Los Angeles. Nor did he apprentice in bebop. He created his own apprenticeship. Thus when he came East in 1959 no one knew what he was doing. He played a plastic alto sax and his compatriot, Don Cherry, played a funny looking little pocket trumpet. Are these guys for real, playing toy instruments and music that don’t make no sense no how. Sheesh! Yes, they’re for real. Some people dug them strait off, others had to warm up, and some never did.
He recorded “Broad Way Blues” in 1968 on New York is Now. It’s not a blues in any conventional way of thinking about such matters. And yet, in a somewhat less conventional way, it’s as all blues as “All Blues,” if not more so. Why don’t you give it a listen and see if it makes sense to you:
Make sense? Yes? No? Maybe? Or perhaps you did not try to make sense of it and it just sounded wonderful, though perhaps a bit sideways.
It sounded that way to me. When I tried to count it out, I got lost. So I looked at the sheet music. 22-bars long. That’s not a blues form, it’s not a 32-bar standard, it’s not made of 4-bar phrases (adding up to, say, 16 bars). And there are some bars in there that don’t count out to four beats; they’re in six. When solo they – Dewey Redman joins Ornette on tenor – time undergoes a different discipline, courtesy of Elvin Jones.
Let’s take it easy. I’ve been doing this for a while and my brain is running low on the neuro-transmitters that make for quick shifts of concentration. So I’m going to minimize my attempts get timings for you. But I’ll do this much: The melody starts at the beginning. That descending line at about 0:13 – the first one in the tune – is in six. We play a quick cyclic flurry across the bar and land on two quarter notes to end the first part of the head. We return to the opening figure at about 0:17, at bar 14, to begin the second part of the head. The descending line at 0:21 is in 6. We jump to come down in the next bar, up for a bar, and down for two. We’re at the end of the head. Starting at 0:28 we go around again, then into solos, where everything is up for grabs.
So listen and grab some why don’t you. Coleman is endlessly lyrical, no?
Those rising figures are standard blues figures. That, if nothing else, justifies the blues in the title. There are other blues figures in the head. Are there any non-blues figures?
Here’s where I’m going with this. The blues happened at the confluence of two very different musical traditions, one from Western Europe and the other from West Africa. The result is sui generis. Jazz is like that as well. Think of the blues element as that that exists in this music and not in the musics for which it comes. It’s the hybrid vigor that grounds the music in American soil.
Do I really believe that analytical paradiddle? Well...it probably won’t pass musicological scrutiny. But I’m sticking with it anyhow, for now. Perhaps we should forget all this and just listen to the music.
Hannibal Lokumbe: Homemade Jam
Hannibal Lokumbe is a trumpet player and composer from Texas who has played with Roland Kirk, Gil Evans, Frank Foster, Roy Haynes and Pharoah Sanders, amaong others. He also has composed works for choir and for symphony orchestra – African Portraits was performed and recorded with the Chicago Symphony. It’s an astonishing piece of music, though maybe at bit ragged around the edges. Deal with it.
I do believe that the worthies of the Pulitzer Prize committee should award some kind of prize to Hannibal. In my opinion he’s as interesting a composer as that other trumpet player. I mean no disrespect. Wynton Marsalis is a fine player, composer, and band leader. But he hasn’t led no army across no Alps on no elephants! I’m just sayin’. Yes, I understand you prized Ornette Coleman, Henry Threadgill, and Anthony Davis and you gave posthumous awards to Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane. Thank you very much. But Hannibal ain’t dead, not yet. (Don’t let the dreadlocks put you off.) Get on it.
Which is what we’re going to do. I’m not sure just what’s going on in this video, though, given the ferocity of the music, it doesn’t much matter. YouTube lists it as “Soul Man Sam with Hannibal Lokumbe at the Fat Cat Lounge.” The Fat Cat Lounge is in Smithville, Texas, which is where Hannibal is from. So I’m assuming he’s playing with musicians he knows well, and in front of an audience of friends and family. It certainly appears that way.
I don’t know whether or not this is a band that Soul Man Sam performs with regularly, perhaps touring the area, or maybe they’re the house band at the Fat Cat. Perhaps it’s just a bunch of guys he gathered together for a weekend gig. Whatever. But I’m pretty sure it’s his band, not Hannibal’s, because this isn’t the kind of band Hannibal plays with regularly. He’s sitting in for the night.
But as you can hear, they get along fine. They’re playing the blues, which they all know and love. Soul Man Sam and the guys play pretty standard down-home blues. Hannibal burns the sky with Coltrane-inspired trumpet flames.
As the video starts, we’re already in progress. I don’t know what tune this is, if any specific tune at all, though the fragments of lyrics I catch sound familiar enough. This is a medium-up blues shuffle. Hear that nice rolling 12/8 bassline. It sounds like Hannibal just got started. Listen to him throw some shakes and flutter-tonguing in there. Then Soulman Sam takes the vocal for a chorus, with Hannibal playing backing figures. And...well...you can hear well enough what’s going on.
But why’d I stick this one at the end of the series, after Ornette “avant-garde” Coleman, no less? Because Hannibal has deep avant-garde proclivities. And yet he’s perfectly comfortable in this setting, a down-home blues.
If it’s good enough for Hannibal “Stompin’ the Alps” Lokumbe, it’s good enough for me.
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This is the sixth post in my series, “Tell me about the blues.” The series is tagged with the label, tell me blues.
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