The Soundalikes

Avant-garde Plays Its Way To Stylistic Corner

December 07, 1986|By Larry Kart, Entertainment writer.

Almost from the first, jazz has been a music of personal lyricism, a way of expressing through sound what it means to be you.

And while that is not everything jazz is, individual instrumental storytelling has been so much a part of the music for so many years that it is difficult to imagine what jazz might be like if that drive toward self-expression were not at the heart of it.

But perhaps one doesn`t have to imagine that anymore, because today almost every technically adept young player sounds quite a bit like every other one, to the point where each instrumentalist seems to be working in a more-or-less generic style--the tenor saxophonists paying homage to John Coltrane, the trumpeters to Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard, the pianists to Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, the bass players to Scott LaFaro and so forth.

Especially distressing to those who recall the days when every good player could be identified almost from the first note, this trend toward stylistic sameness has been on the rise since the early 1960s, when the music of Coltrane, Evans and others became profoundly influential.

But even though it might seem that dominant stylists always generate a horde of faceless imitators, in jazz that hasn`t always been the case.

In the mid-1930s, for instance, almost every jazz trumpeter of merit

(indeed, almost every jazz instrumentalist) was touched by the music of Louis Armstrong.

But so many Armstrong-influenced trumpet players went on to develop their own personal styles that a list of their names could run on for many pages:

Roy Eldridge, Bunny Berigan, Cootie Williams, Buck Clayton, Bill Coleman, Rex Stewart, Bobby Stark, Red Allen, Harry James, Charlie Shavers, Joe Thomas, Frankie Newton, Shad Collins, Harold Baker, Dud Bascomb, Emmett Berry, Billy Butterfield, Doc Cheatham, Harry Edison, Bobby Hackett, Hot Lips Page, Ray Nance Smith and so forth.

And the same is true of tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young and alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, who came up with strikingly individual styles that still left room for their vast number of disciples to find their own tones of voice.

So how did the music of Armstrong, Hawkins, Young and Hodges manage to stimulate, rather than limit, the growth of personal jazz ``speech``? And why does the music of today`s widely influential figures seem to have the opposite effect?

Well, Armstrong and the rest of jazz` first great role models gave their disciples a special sort of musical-emotional information, outlining possibilities that virtually begged to be filled in.

First there was the fact of swing, which Armstrong brought to life so vividly that he almost seemed to have invented it. And in the emotional realm, the intense personal feeling that Armstrong poured into every note couldn`t help but encourage his disciples to strive for a similar nobility and power.

In fact Roy Eldridge summed up the whole magical procedure when he recalled his first in-person encounter with Armstrong`s music, which took place in 1932.

``I was a young cat, and I was very fast,`` Eldridge said, ``but I wasn`t telling any kind of story. I sat through the first show and didn`t think Louis was so extraordinary, but in the second show he played `Chinatown.` He started out like a new book, building and building, chorus after chorus, and finally reaching a full climax--right, clean and clear.

``The rhythm was rocking and Louis had that sound going along with it, building the thing the whole time instead of just playing in a straight line, until everybody was standing up, including me. So I started to feel that if I could combine speed with melodic development while continuing to build, to tell a story, I could create something musical of my own that the public would like.``

Notice, in particular, Eldridge`s ``he started out like a new book``--for even though that phrase literally refers to the zeal with which Armstrong began to play, it is easy to see how the newness of this ``book`` convinced Eldridge that he could create one of his own.

Important, too, was what might be called the ``centrality`` of Armstrong`s music, and of Hawkins` and Hodges` as well--a firmly rooted sense of emotional balance and joyful well-being that left plenty of room on either side for more eccentric variations. (Eldridge`s taste for sheer excitement came close to delirium at times, while off in another corner Harry Edison was able to cultivate a vein of sly musical irony.)

But the centrality and balance that Armstrong and the other giants of his era brought to jazz was of necessity a threatened state.

The beauty of Lester Young`s solos, for instance, cannot be separated from their shadowy obliqueness; while alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, the key figure of the bebop era, produced a music of such extreme emotional turbulence that it still has the power to amaze and shock.