NOTEWORTHY PROGRESSION
Quite a few years ago, after World War II, I started hearing, and using, the term “Progressive jazz” It held a certain note of promise for many of us in music work of that period ....even an avenue of possible growth.
The term “jazz:” had been, by that time, practically annihilated and had become a meaningless word to many. In the popular mind of many people, jazz was any music that wasn't classical, religious, Hawaiian, Latin-American or Hillbilly was progressive jazz. The new music mode was largely instrumental - which seemed to hold promise. The basic structure of thee smaller units was usually string bass, guitar, drums and several combinations of melodic instruments.
Those of us actively engaged in pop music fields, thought of jazz as being best remembered by Dixieland combos of the 1920's and later. There was a phase before that, during and afterwords, which put jazz on a grander basis with orchestras such as Coon Sanders and his Night Hawks, the early versions of Paul Whitman's Orchestra and others larger, showier groups. Pop music had gone “big time “, and more so after 1926 when the record companies learned how to produce more than one record copy of a song at a time. And the record business took off on it own demanded consideration by more and more musicians. It was largely because of this recording advancement that we have physical evidence that some outstanding talents were a part of the jazz movement as it existed and mutated.
As music became more nationwide and varied, the term jazz was shunted aside. We came to refer to pop music, dance music, songs which became known as “ballads”. Earlier, that name was used in classifying a certain style of story-tellings songs as by that name was restricted to our hillbillies – who son ceased to exist and became known as “country singers” “country and wested, “cowboys”ands on PBS “Ethnic”or “Folk “singers. We had , for a time, such personalities as Ella Fitzgerald with here combination of many traits of both the old and the new in her distinctive style of scat singing. Musicians of “The Big Band” era tended to re-form as small units - trios, quartets - as an adjunct to the big band. They played individualized jazz-oriented music In a sense it was “musician's music” It was performed skillfully and when such small tailings started waging the big band dogs “progressive jazz” was born.
It, as did jazz, mutated swiftly and virtually ceased to exist save as a “term”. Once the electric guitar took over the musical scene like a giant kudzu vine, conventional music was doomed to a period of almost total eclipse.
This, too, shall pass.
A.L.M. August 20, 2003 [c511wds]
