episode one (pt1)
JAZZ IN ROCK (Pt 1)
MODAL JAZZ: FROM MILES DAVIS TO RADIOHEAD
featuring
Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Radiohead, Talk Talk, Lady Blackbird, Joni Mitchell, Robert Wyatt and Soft Machine, Iggy Pop & Outkast
Jazz in Rock (pt 1) Modal Jazz
Modal jazz is the coolest jazz, created by the coolest black artist, Miles Davis. Its influence was huge and still heard today, from the coolest new jazz artists to rock bands like Radiohead and Talk Talk.
Modal jazz is also responsible for the two best-selling jazz albums of all time.
Life in the 1950s
On December 1, 1955, an African American woman named Rosa Parks was riding a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver told her to give up her seat to a white man. Parks refused and was arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation ordinances, which mandated that Black passengers sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats for white riders if the front seats were full. Parks, later explained: “I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.”
SEE: Rosa Parks sat in the front of a bus after the Supreme Court ruled segregation illegal on the Alabama bus system.
In jazz, in the late 1950s, the top players were becoming bored of bop jazz. Rock-n-roll and soul music were beginning to take over the mainstream. They wanted to create something new…
There was an urge to move away from the over-familiar chord progressions of bop to develop new approaches to harmonic movement. Modal jazz makes use of musical modes instead of relying on one tonal center used across each piece. It allows for more space, individual interpretation and beauty of sound.
The legends of modal jazz
Modal jazz became massive from Miles Davis’s ‘Kind of Blue’. It grew through follow-up albums and gigs from Davis and two other jazz geniuses who played with him on the album, saxophonist John Coltrane and pianist Bill Evans.
MILES DAVIS
Miles Davis is the ultimate jazz icon, at the forefront of many jazz genres. In late 50s he became obsessed with the idea of space in music but not wishing to use highly arranged frameworks. He had to wait for pianist Bill Evans to join his band before the way became clear. Davis and Evans devised open-ended tunes which used just one or two related scales and which left the improviser with all the choices and decisions to be made, their only limits then being their own imaginations.
Miles thrived in this new atmosphere, bringing his fierce lyricism to the fore and creating a string of masterpiece albums, including Kind of Blue and, with arranger Gil Evans, Sketches of Spain.
WATCH: Miles Davis with one of the most famous modal jazz tracks, ‘So What’ from his own ‘Kind Of Blue’.
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, became the best-selling jazz album of all time. Even today, it remains in the upper reaches of the jazz charts.
BILL EVANS
Other than ‘Kind of Blue’, Bill Evans wrote over sixty amazing, beautiful jazz pieces and recorded over fifty albums. His trademark rhythmically independent, "singing" melodic, beautiful lines have influenced almost every jazz pianist since. Over his career, he received 31 Grammy nominations and was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame.
He grew up with an abusive, gambling, heavy drinking father and became very close to his older brother Harry. When the family escaped their father, he would watch and join Harry having piano lessons. They were 5 and 7. He always thought Harry was the better player but developed his playing in college, until he joined the army, which became a traumatic experience, leading to nightmares as people criticised his playing. He lost confidence and began using recreational drugs,
After leaving the Army he began the jazz career alongside many of NY’s greatest jazz musicians. His confidence was never intact though, and soft drugs turned into heroin addiction. He had numerous women in his life, with a black partner he had problems booking in hotels since most did not allow inter-racial couples. A waitress he was with for twelve years (and both drug addicts) until she died by suicide under a NY subway train. And finally another waitress, 28 years his younger, with whom he had a relationship until his death.
He was an avid reader of philosophy and fascinated with Eastern religions and philosophies, but the drugs took their toll and he became unrecognisable. In 1979, his brother Harry, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, shot himself, he was 52.
The following year Evans recorded his last studio album, ‘We Will Meet Again’, featuring a composition of the same name, written for his brother. The album won a Grammy award. He managed to kick his heroin habit but only to become addicted to cocaine. He quit his treatment for chronic hepatitis, friends claimed his brother’s death made him clear in his mind that he would die himself in a short time. After being in bed for several days with stomach pains he went to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and died that afternoon. He was 51.
LISTEN: Bill Evans perform the completely improvised, most beautiful, modal jazz piano work, ‘Peace piece’
WATCH: ‘The universal mind of Bill Evans’. An amazing documentary on the creative process with his brother Harry.
JOHN COLTRANE
‘Kind of Blue’s’ Saxophonist John Coltrane, originally a bebopper, enthusiastically embraced modal jazz and, with his classic quartet of 1960-65 rewrote the rule books for all of modern jazz, outstripping Miles Davis in the process. Coltrane would even take popular tunes, such as 'My Favorite Things' and re-cast them, stripping them to the modes at their heart and improvising for hours on end on that basis. His overwhelming influence was felt across all of jazz, fusion, funk and progressive rock for decades afterwards. Even today, many people's idea of a jazz tune comes down to John Coltrane’s approach to it.
WATCH: John Coltrane perform a modal jazz-inspired, 20-minute version of ‘My favourite things’.
‘A Love Supreme’ is John Coltrane's defining album. Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about it is designed for maximum emotional impact. It is the second best-selling jazz album of all time.
Black Ivy: A Revolt in modal jazz Style
Modal jazz soundtracked a period in American history when Black men across the country adopted clothing seen by many as the preserve of a privileged elite and made it subversive, edgy and cool.
From Miles Davis to Sidney Poitier, black leaders adopted the clothing of a privileged elite, re-invented Ivy and Prep fashion and made it their own as it became the dominant look of the time.
From jazz musicians, visual artists and poets to unassuming architects, philosophers and writers, a generation of men took the classic Ivy Look and made it cool, edgy and unpredictable in ways that continue to influence today's modern menswear.
It was more than about clothes, it was also about freedom, both individual and collective, a generation of people challenging the status quo, struggling for racial equality and their civil rights.
The influence of modal jazz
In rock music…
JONI MITCHELL was directly influenced by Charlie Mingus’s modal period and even ended up making an album with him. whilst jazz legend, Herbie Hancock released a version of Joni’s ‘Both Sides Now’ with Brittany Howard.
ROBERT WYATT AND HIS BAND SOFT MACHINE
Prog rock bands like Soft Machine, Gong, King Crimson and the Grateful Dead were really influenced by modal jazz. It is very apparent in their long tracks and improvisations.
WATCH: Soft Machine live at a 1969 jazz festival
IGGY POP
Iggy Pop has always been a jazz fan and started incorporating it into his music through jazz saxophonist, Steve Mackay’s presence on the second Iggy and the Stooges album ‘Funhouse’.
LISTEN: Iggy on ‘Loneliness Road’ with Jamie Saft’s jazz trio.
TALK TALK
Mark Hollis led pop/rock band Talk talk to two successful albums before letting his love for modal jazz take control on two further albums and his one solo album.
Hollis attributed his use of silence in music to a fascination with jazz. He liked music constructed with more room than it physically demanded. That way, he observed, you could hear every little movement, the way guitar strings vibrate as a note dies out; the raspy, winding sound of a long exhale into a harmonica. Hollis sang quietly, he considered volume in the spatial sense.
Having parted acrimoniously with EMI Hollis signed to the venerable jazz label Verve.
Hollis was quoted as saying at the time, “I wanted to make a record where you can’t hear when it has been made. Two albums that I really like are Sketches Of Spain and Porgy And Bess, records that Miles Davis made with Gil Evans. They used arrangements and a loose manner of playing for a clear atmosphere and suggestiveness. I wanted to create that as well.”
WATCH: Talk Talk perform ‘I believe in you’.
LISTEN: Hollis also recorded an unreleased, 14 minute piano piece inspired by Bill Evans, under the pseudonym John Cope.
In Hip hop
Andre 3000 of Outkast led the way with their version of John Coltrane’s ‘My favourite things’ on their grammy award-winning album ‘Speakerboxx’.
Andre also recorded an unreleased, improvised 17 minute, clarinet and piano piece ‘Look ma no hands’, with pianist James Blake.
LISTEN: Andre 3000 with ‘Look ma no hands’
Modal jazz today
RADIOHEAD
Radiohead are one of the most important and influential rock bands that have arisen in the last thirty years. However, their incredibly unique sound owes a lot more to jazz than most of their fans realise.
Members of Radiohead have admitted that the band has been heavily influenced by the style, compositions, and nonconformist philosophy of Miles Davis. The most extensive manifestation of this reverence is the fact that the biggest influence on Radiohead’s pivotal 1997 album ‘OK Computer’ was Davis’s 1969 landmark double album ‘Bitches Brew’.
Other jazz musicians that have heavily influenced the band include bassist Charles Mingus, iconic saxophonist John Coltrane and his wife Alice and the avant-garde group the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
‘Pyramid Song’ off of 2001’s ‘Amnesiac’ album was in fact based directly on the Mingus song ‘Freedom’, an important foundational example of jazz poetry from the classic 1963 album ‘Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus’.
the trumpet player is the famous comedian and musician Humphrey Littleton
WATCH: Radiohead performing ‘Life in a glasshouse with British jazz legend Humphrey Littleton.
Radiohead singer, Thom Yorke, composed the soundtrack to the movie ‘Motherless Brooklyn’, including the jazz track ‘Daily Battles’. Wynton Marsalis recorded a version with his quartet.
WATCH: ‘Daily battles’ by Wynton Marsalis.
Radiohead appear to be in a constant dialogue with the jazz community. If Miles Davis is one of the band’s prime influences, they in turn receive acknowledgement from some of the most respected jazz musicians in today’s scene with a surprising number of covers. It is probably safe to say that recently Radiohead has become the rock band that garners the most attention from the jazz community.
Perhaps the most profound example comes from Robert Glasper, a highly respected pianist and an eager pioneer of fusing jazz with other genres, since his collaborators have included Mos Def and Bilal. Glasper wrote a bass-drums-piano arrangement that set Radiohead’s ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ under the melody of Herbie Hancock’s jazz standard ‘Maiden Voyage’, creating a vivid instance of direct and intimate discussion and flawless integration between jazz and rock.
WATCH: Robert Glasper perform ‘Maiden Voyage / Everything In Its Right Place’.
The stream of jazz musicians who have covered Radiohead is long. The Bad Plus, a trio known for their eccentric re-workings of rock songs recorded a version of ‘Karma Police’. Modern saxophone icon Chris Potter recorded a version of ‘Morning Bell’. New Orleans trumpeter Christian Scott created his own version of Thom Yorke’s ‘The Eraser’. Brad Melhdau, a prolific jazz pianist, has played and recorded numerous covers of Radiohead songs, among them a solo piano version of ‘Paranoid Android’, and a particularly moving version of ‘Exit Music (For a Film)’.
WATCH: A 12 track playlist of jazz artists covering Radiohead tracks
LADY BLACKBIRD
Lady Blackbird (with a name and an album titled after Nina Simone’s civil rights protest song) produced one of the most highly rated jazz albums of 2021. It featured both Miles Davis’s pianist, Deron Johnson and the track ‘Fix You’ is a version of Bill Even’s masterpiece ‘Peace piece’ with Lady Blackbird singing new lyrics over it.
WATCH: Lady Blackbird perform ‘Fix you’ (at 11.30min)
END
‘Cool modal jazz’ episode soundtrack
Some great modal jazz albums
