What Made 1959 Such a Landmark Year for Jazz?
Miles, Coltrane and Others Spurred an explosion of Jazz Innovation
Aug 11, 2009
Given the industry's fondness for celebrating anniversaries, budding jazz buffs may have gotten the inkling by now that something big happened to jazz in 1959. But what? And why?
Jazz was ripe for revolution in the waning years of the 1950s. Bebop and its fresh approach to scales and improvisation had been around long enough to attain a type of orthodoxy, inviting a new round of upstart thinking.
Rock 'n' roll hadn't cemented its lock on young imaginations yet, so jazz could still attract plenty of audience and performer attention. The Civil Rights movement was starting to bubble up, encouraging new approaches to identity and free expression. Intellectuals still had a fair degree of stature.
Fresh Ideas for Jazz Composition Take Hold
The climate was just right for musicians to latch on to radical new ideas, such as George Russell's notions of "modal" composition, which emphasized the fifth note in the octave, an interval that happens to have inherent drama.
One of the happy outcomes was "Kind of Blue" by trumpeter Miles Davis, a breakthrough both in terms of composition and popular recognition. Widely acknowledged as the best-selling jazz album of all time, the 1959 landmark made complex melodic theories sound engagingly simple by emphasizing catchy riffs and a precise economy of playing.
One of the sidemen on that record, saxophonist John Coltrane, had some breakthroughs of his own that year with "Giant Steps," an album whose dense solos continue to inspire and challenge artists today.
Experimenting With Time and Beat in Jazz
Pianist Dave Brubeck, meanwhile, took his inspiration from modern classical musicians, who encouraged him to experiment with time signatures. The fruition was "Time Out," which included "Blue Rondo ala Turk" and the title tune, a bona-fide jukebox hit. Each of the album's songs used creative alternatives to the standard 4/4 beat, yet each had a toe-tapping bounce that required no intellectualizing to appreciate.
Further afield, bassist Charles Mingus incorporated influences from other African-American music traditions and a fierce sense of social justice on "Mingus Ah Um." The album's standout track, "Fables of Faubus," is a sharp poke at the Arkansas governor who fought to keep schools there segregated.
Sax player Ornette Coleman took even greater liberties with "The Shape of Jazz to Come," a founding statement of the "Free Jazz" movement, which believed in absolutely unrestrained self-expression over any formal rules of composition.
Great Work from Jazz Traditionalists
Other great 1959 albums didn't re-invent jazz tradition as much as distill and perfect what was already there. Ella Fitzgerald released her five-disc review of the Gershwin songbook, still a defining statement on the art of jazz vocals. Duke Ellington composed the brilliant soundtrack for "Anatomy of a Murder."
Pianist Thelonious Monk kept bebop fresh with "5 By Monk By Five" and a series of landmark concerts at New York's Town Hall. Guitarist Wes Montgomery, the dominant jazz figure on that instrument for decades, made his recording debut.
Jazz has continued to evolve and inspire since then, but 1959's dazzlingly condensed burst of creativity remains unequalled in this and most other art forms.
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