THIRD STREAM, which more overtly blended jazz with Western classical music than other forms of jazz. Much of the early work of bassist Charles Mingus, such as the 1954 release, “Minor Intrusion,” is considered to be Third Stream. (Though you will also enjoy later, bluesier Mingus, such as “Devil Blues,” which we can see him and his band perform live at Monteaux in 1975.)
Here are twelve essential third stream performances.
BIG BAND BLUES/”JUMP BLUES”:
“Jump” blues took the basic spirit and rhythms of boogie woogie and transformed them into a popular style of energetic, highly danceable music. While some big bands of the ’40s and ’50s played songs in the the jump blues style, most jump blues ensembles were a bit smaller–six or seven performers, featuring just three horns, especially a tenor saxophone and a rhythm section, rather than sixteen or more performers in a big band–and therefore less expensive to hire at swing dances and at nightclubs.
[Watch big band blues vocalist JIMMY RUSHING perform “Going to Chicago” with Benny Goodman’s big band supporting him. | Watch vibe player LIONEL HAMPTON and his band performing, “Flying Home” in 1957 |
[wpspoiler name=”Thelonious Monk performs Straight No Chaser in 1965″ open=”true” style=”aatw-video”][/wpspoiler] In the 1940s a new jazz style called “Bebop” emerged somewhat as a counter-movement to Big Band. Bebop ensembles were small–five or six musicians at most, most often featuring drums, bass, piano, trumpet and sax–and performed complicated arrangements that often featured irregular rhythms. These compositions were fascinating to hear but were not made for the dance hall.
Bepop’s virtuosic musicians communicated with each other and with audiences through fast and frenzied improvisation. Trumpeter DIZZY GILLESPIE–he of the amazingly stretchable cheeks and alto saxophone player CHARLIE “BIRD” PARKER, who first came to epitomize the intellectual/”hipster”/artist of the Beat Generation, then, sadly, the intellectual/”hipster”/artist who succumbed to substance abuse (PBS introduces you to
the life and times of Charlie Parker), pioneered bebop, taking advantage of the improvisational freedom the style afforded them as instrumentalists to bring the deep emotion of the blues back into jazz. Other jazz pioneers like idiosyncratic pianist and “High Priest of Bebop” THELONIOUS MONK advanced the genre with their unpredictable compositions. [Learn about Monk by watching the documentary “Straight, No Chaser.”|
Bebop as a jazz form came to maturity in the 1960s and then morphed and developed into other subgenres. For example, musicians like ART BLAKEY and the THE JAZZ MESSENGERS added a groovy, slightly more danceable edge to Bebop, weaving blues and gospel into their tunes. This genre became known as “Hard Bop.” Jazz heavyweights MILES DAVIS and JOHN COLTRANE, as well as trailblazing jazz guitarist WES MONTGOMERY, adopted this style and continued to harden the bop.
[Charlie Parker’s 1945 “Ko-ko” is widely considered to be the first bebop recording. (Dizzy
Gillespie joins him on trumpet.) | Watch Charlie Parker on alto sax and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet perform “Hot House” in 1952 | Watch the Theonious Monk Quintet perform Monk’s composition, “Straight, No Chaser” in 1965 | Watch Art Blakey (on drums) and the Jazz Messengers performing Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” live in 1958 | Listen to John Coltrane’s hard bop classic, “Moment’s Notice” | Watch Miles Davis perform bebop classic, “Walkin” in 1967 | Watch Wes Montgomery’s wonderful performance of “I Love Blues“]
Bebop was primarily instrumental but every so often musicians sang their melodies, or variations on their melodies, in an improvised form of singing that mimicked their instruments. This type of singing, known as “SCAT,” uses vocables to play with and even enhance the melody. Among the conflicting accounts of the origin of the term “bebop,” is a theory posits that “be” and “bop” were common scat syllables that often appeared together. Popular band leaders like CAB CALLOWAY used scat as a way to involve the audience in the vocal part of his compositions often through call and response. Jazz vocalists like ELLA FITZGERALD developed their own version of scat singing, using the voice to imitate jazz instruments.
In class we’re going to try a little scat singing, improvising sounds, imitating instruments and calling and responding ’til the cows come home.
[Listen to Cab Calloway sing “The Scat Song” and also “Zaz Zuh Zaz,” which sounds a whole lot like the more lyrically bawdy, and more famous, “Minnie the Moocher” | Watch Ella Fitzgerald perform her scat-arific “One Note Samba” in 1969, a version of which we’ll hear in class.]
The emergence of Dixieland jazz in the 1920s inspired larger bands to form and develop more extensive and standardized arrangements of Dixieland songs. These big bands–which became known, conveniently, as “Big Bands”–were composed of ten or more musicians who sat or stood in rows while they were performing, much more like
musicians in Western Classical orchestras than those of the free-flowing Dixieland ensembles.
Because of their numbers the bands often grouped their instrumentalists together, breaking the band into three sections:
— BRASS (trumpets, trombones)
— REEDS (clarinets, saxophones)
— RHYTHM (drums, bass, piano and eventually guitar)
From the mid-’30s on big bands played a kind of music called “swing,” which was bounding, rhythmic and was meant to inspire people to dance…and dance they did!!
Even during the darkest days of World War II–maybe because the days were so dark–American youth flocked to nightclubs and danced with wild abandon. In the process
they developed steps like the Lindy Hop, which developed in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a big band-era interpretation of the Charleston, which itself was a signature dance of the ’20s. The Lindy Hop is an exuberant partner dance characterized by a
“swing out,” during which partners flail outward away from each other and then flail just as enthusiastically back, all the while each holding the other’s hand. The dance is playful and acrobatic, and thrives on improvisation. Check out this contemporary Lindy Hop competition. Holy cow! (Also check out examples of swing dances like the Balboa as performed in the 1943 short film, “Maharaja: With Hal & Betty Takier,” the Collegiate shag
and the St. Louis shag.)
A side note: though “jitterbug” has come to be accepted as a term that refers to a wide variety of swing dances, echnically “jitterbug” is not a form of swing dance, but is actually a term that refers to someone who dances a swing dance–i.e., “that Jay Sand is a real jitterbug!” Band leader Cab Calloway is believed to have coined the term when he described swing dancers by saying, “They look like a bunch of jitterbugs out there on the floor.” That said, if you want to “learn how to jitterbug” you absolutely must watch “Groovie Movie” from 1944.
“The Swing Era” lasted for almost two decades, throughout the ’30s and ’40s, during which thousands of big bands performed all over the United States, featuring America’s
best jazz musicians, both white and African-American–though rarely in the same bands. Band leaders like PAUL WHITEMAN, who some revere as “The King of Jazz,” but who others criticize as a Western classical orchestra leader who co-opted African-American
music, BENNY GOODMAN and DUKE ELLINGTON developed enthusiastic followings in the U.S. and remained popular internationally through the ’60s.
[Watch Paul Whiteman’s orchestra in an early performance (1928), featuring coronet player Bix Beiderbecke (A link mainly for grownups: Learn the sad story Bix Beiderbecke in “Wake Up Bix“) | Watch Benny Goodman perform “Sing Sing Sing” at Carnegie Hall in 1955]
After World War II big band music became even more popular, giving a war-weary nation the opportunity to enjoy itself through dance. Those who weren’t able to make it to “big city” dance clubs would listen to big band radio broadcasts from ballrooms in New York City like the Savoy and Roseland. Band leaders like TOMMY DORSEY, GLENN MILLER and COUNT BASIE, and vocalists like BILLIE HOLLIDAY, ELLA FITZGERALD and FRANK SINATRA were as popular at the rock stars of today.
[Watch Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra play “Bugle Call Rag” and “Ole Miss” in 1940 | Watch Glenn Miller and his orchestra perform one of their greatest hits, “In the Mood,” in
1941| Watch Count Basie’s band featuring Joe Williams on “The Kraft Music Hall” performing “Blee Blop Blues” and “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home.” The music starts at 1:39 after the vintage Kraft ad | Watch Billie Holliday and Louis Armstrong perform “The Blues Are Brewin’” | Watch Ella Fitzgerald sing “For Once in My Life” live in Berlin in 1968 | Watch Frank “The Chairman of the Board” Sinatra at the top of his game, performing, “That’s Life.”]
In the ’50s big band fell increasingly out of favor as genres that focused on individual musicians like bebop, cool jazz and even rock became more popular. (Though Benny Goodman was certainly still all the rage in the Netherlands in 1959.) Some bands adapted, weaving these new forms into their compositions, but for the most part the big bands that continued primarily kept playing the greatest hits of the ’30s and ’40s. Big band drummer BUDDY RICH, who started with Tommy Dorsey’s band in the ’40s, was one of the more popular band leaders of the time, backing “comeback”
recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, though he did play the majority of his late career big band shows at colleges and high school gyms rather than in dance clubs.
[Watch Buddy Rich perform with a not-so-big band on The Lenny Bruce Show in 1959 | Watch Buddy Rich drum like crazy with the Muppets in 1980]
By the early 1920s blues and ragtime had fused with the exciting local brass band tradition that had developed in New Orleans become a new form known as “Dixieland” (or sometimes “Hot Jazz.”) Most Dixieland music is instrumental and features basic arrangements of songs that musicians in a group repeat over and over while each instrumentalist takes a turn improvising a solo in turn. Dixieland requires its musicians to be accomplished performers, but it’s far from stodgy and demure. Dixieland is enlivening, playful and FUN.
A Dixieland group might include a banjo, piano, stand-up bass, drums or tuba to keep the bouncy, upbeat tempo going and a clarinet and/or brass instruments like the trumpet, trombone and saxophone to play intertwining melodies. The musicians maintain the structure of the composition but cherish the opportunity to explore.
Dixieland jazz was most popular in the ’20s when musicians like pianist JELLY ROLL MORTON, trombonist “KID” ORY and New Orleans-born trumpet player and band leader LOUIS ARMSTRONG were all actively composing and/or performing, but the music, now often referred to as “traditional jazz” or “trad jazz,” has remained a fixture of the New Orleans jazz scene–and, apparently, of Croatia’s Špancirfest Varaždin–ever since.
[Listen to Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers perform “Hyena Stomp” in 1927 | Watch “Kid” Ory’s band perform “Tiger Rag” in 1959 | Watch Louis Armstrong and his Dixieland band play “Canal Street Blues” in 1962]
Porro began as a variant of Cumbia but has developed into a distinct form of music and dance. The style originated as folk music from Colombia’s Caribbean region but has developed into a public and celebratory music and couple/ballroom dance. Some of the most energizing porro ensembles are composed of brass, brass and more brass–trumpets, trombones and tubas aplenty.
COUNTRY: Colombia
KEY INSTRUMENTS: Bombo, Clarinet, Gaita flutes, Snare drum, Trombone, Trumpet, Tuba
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COUNTRY: Martinique
Drum biguine vs. orchestrated biguine.
[wpspoiler name=”Danzon la Bella Cubana” open=”true” style=”aatw-video”][/wpspoiler]
COUNTRY: Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico (U.S.)
In the 1790s, French colonists fleeing the Haitian Revolution settled in Cuba and brought with them the Contradanza, which was a “sequence dance,” in which people danced together to make particular figures. By the 1850s the classical Contradanza, danced primarily in Havana by upper and upper-middle class “Europeanized” Cubans, was known as “DANZÓN.” By the early 1900s former slaves had begun to do the contradanza, infusing it with the syncopated “cinquillo” rhythm, bringing it out of the socialites’ dance halls and “into the street.” Over time, the contradanza in 2/4 (see the Everything is a Drum rhythm guide for an intro to time signatures) grew not only into the danzón, but also into the popular habanera rhythm. The contradanza in 6/8 eventually helped form the clave. About danzón | Lord Tiger’s introduction to danzón | A Cuban flute danzón | Cuba: Rhythm in Motion | An introduction to danzón styles via YouTube
Formal Cuban dance music of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Danzón drew its main inspiration from European sequence dances like the contradanza, though it added some African instruments like the timbales and the guiro.
Later, danzón ensembles called charangas added cello, flute and pianos. About danzón | A Cuban flute danzón
[Information about morna coming soon.]
Choro is a type of instrumental “lament” that originated in Rio in the 19th century. The original choro trio consisted of a flute, guitar and cavaquinho (which actually looks like a small, four-stringed guitar). Samba and bossa nova eventually replaced choro as Brazil’s main musical form, but amateur choro circles called “rodas de choro” kept it alive. Today it is undergoing somewhat of a revival.
COUNTRY: Brazil
KEY INSTRUMENTS: flute, guitar, cavaquinho
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