Five Recordings to Get Into the Outside

Today’s piece is specifically written for those who don’t fully embrace free jazz. I have a lot of friends who say they “just don’t get it” when I put on some far-out Sun Ra and even some who say Thelonious Monk sounds like a beginning piano student. I’ve compiled a brief list of recordings that hopefully can help ease these people into the world of free jazz, help them find their way out.

 

1. “So What” from Kind of Blue by Miles Davis

If you own only one jazz record, it’s Kind of Blue. Kind of Blue is the record everyone gets to get into jazz, with good reason. Miles Davis was a driving force behind at least three major jazz movements (cool jazz, modal jazz, and fusion), and Kind of Blue is one of his most beautiful records. It has very little dissonance, which, unfortunately turns it into background dinner music all too often. Kind of Blue was the first widely appreciated modal jazz recording. The term “modal” comes from the archaic church modes, which were used in early chant, before harmony was developed in the west. Modal jazz refers to the fact that the musicians improvise over these established modes, the major and minor scales with slight variations, instead of improvising over chord changes.

This makes a lot more sense in the context of jazz history. Before the 1950s, the dominant trend in jazz was bebop (the punk rock of jazz). Bebop tunes are generally always based on frequent chord changes, over which the musicians would fly in their solos. For example, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps came out the same year as Kind of Blue (on which Coltrane also played, of course). Giant Steps’s legacy is now that it has some of the hardest chord changes to play over of any commonly played jazz standard. Coltrane, and Charlie Parker before him, made theirs names playing fast tunes with a lot of chords. Miles Davis, on the other hand, wasn’t interested in playing super fast technical passages in his bands. Kind of Blue successfully created a subgenre of jazz, free of restrictive chord changes, and almost free of harmony. Listen to “So What” to hear how, after a free, yet subdued, introduction, pianist Bill Evans and bassist Paul Chambers play the same chord for 16 bars in a row, one different chord for 8, and then return to the original chord for 8 more. As the form repeats, they effectively play the same chord for 24 bars in a row with a short interruption before doing so again. Even though the musicians all play within the modes, the abandonment of traditional harmony is one key element of free jazz.