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THE INSTRUMENTS, THE SOUNDS, THE PERFORMERS |
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sionally, but little or no jazz influence is discernible in the Symphony. Graas also has written a symphony, parts of which have been heard in his various Decca albums (Jazz Studio 3, Jazz Lab, etc.), but his empirical knowledge of jazz has been much wider than S emitter's and his works for the most part embody its characteristics, including occasional freedom for improvisation.
The second current direction of modern jazz writing represents an attempt to grow from within the natural resources of jazz, with little or no recourse to atonality and with frequent references (in wider voicings and with greater harmonic scope) to the basic styles of Fletcher Henderson (reflected in Bill Holman's work for Kenton) and to the Basie tradition, respected in many of the works of Ernie Wilkins, Al Cohn and Manny Albam. Among the other popular contemporary writers, Shorty Rogers sometimes shows a superficial glibness of construction and lack of plunging emotional warmth, especially in his larger-scale works, but many of the original pieces for his quintet and other small combos have a healthily swinging simplicity. Gerry Mulligan, whose career as an arranger has taken second place as a consequence of his success as an instrumentalist in recent years, is another modernist who refuses to break faith with the tonal jazz traditions; some of his works, along with Rogers', have succeeded in making the Kenton band swing where most others have failed.
Quincy Jones, among the youngest and most promising of the new crop of arrangers, has suffered from a problem that has faced several of the better jazz writers during the recording gold rush of recent years: the demands on his time have been so excessive that he has indited a quantity of work with which the quality could not keep pace. Yet in his own album (This Is How I Feel About Jazz) there is reflected the philosophy he expressed during a forum at the Newport Jazz Festival; the preference for a natural growth of jazz instead of a forced or blueprinted development. Jones' work is a brilliant illustration of this approach.
There has been in much of the more advanced writing during the past few years a tendency to draw so heavily from outside sources that the results have lost, partially or entirely, the magic essence that gave jazz its status as an unique American art: the |
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