Jazz

Most of what happened up until this time in small group playing had come down from Louis Armstrong through Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins to Dizzy and Bird, and bebop had basically come from that. What everybody was playing in 1958 had mostly come out of bebop. Birth of the Cool had gone somewhat in another direction, but it had mainly come out of what Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn had already done; it just made the music "whiter", so that white people could digest it better. And then the other records I made, like "Walkin'" and "Blue 'n' Boogie" – which the critics called hard bop – had only gone back to the blues and some of the things that Bird and Dizzy had done. It was great music, well played and everything, but the musical ideas and concepts had mostly been already done; it just had a little more space in it.

Of all the stuff I had done with a small group, what we did on Modern Jazz Giants came closest to what I wanted to do now, that kind of stretched-out sound we got there on "Bags' Groove," "The Man I Love," "Swing Spring". Now, in bebop, the music had a lot of notes in it. Diz and Bird played a lot of real fast notes and chords changes because that's the way they heard everything; that's the way their voices were: fast, up in the upper register. Their concept of music was more rather than less.

I personally wanted to cut the notes down, because I've always felt that most musicians play way too much for too long (although I put up with it with Trane because he played so good and I used to just love hearing him play). But I didn't hear music like that. I heard it in the middle and lower registers, and so did Coltrane. We had to do something suited for what we did best, for our own voices.

When you're a kid and your first millennium falls on you – when you get in a groove that you know is right for you, find a way of expressing something deep down and know it's your way – it makes you bubble up inside. But it's hard to tell others about it. It's all locked up inside you, in a kind of mental prison. Then, once in a million years, somebody like Bix comes along and you know the same millennium is upon him to, it's the same with him as it is with you. That gives you the courage of your convictions – all of a sudden you know you aren't plodding around in circles in a wilderness. No wonder jazz musicians have off-center perspective on the world. You can't blame them for walking around with a superior air, partly because they're plain lonely and partly because they know they've got hold of something good, a straight slant on things, and yet nobody understands it. A Bix Beiderbecke will.

The essence of jazz is not in the blue notes – not in fact in anything that can be written down and played by rote. When one says that it is in effect an improvised music, the conclusion might sensibly be that this refers to the melody alone, or the melodic line in relation to the cords on which it is based. However, in jazz, improvisation begins – for the blowing instruments – with the breath, the vibrato; and breath and blowing combined to manipulate – always sensitive to certain canons of unwritten tradition – the tone itself, the rhythm and the instrumental timbre.

SHELLY'S MANNE-HOLE