eBay Guides - West Coast Jazz

West Coast Jazz - What It Is, Where It Came From...by Rick Narcisso

Jazz music during the War years went Big Band, mainly to meet the country's cultural need for dance music. At the end of the War, the Bebop movement began. This freeer genre of jazz grew and "Bop" came into its own, carried on the backs of free-form luminaries such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and Charlie Parker. After all, the country was technologically and culturally changing at a dramatic pace... Jazz was simply following along. Bop was best served live, with smaller groups usually featuring a sax or trumpet, where soaring solos could last up to a half-hour. It became the thinking man's music, especially in New York City and the Northeast.

Then Miles Davis exploded on the jazz scene in 1949. He, along with his arranger Gil Evans, recorded "The Birth Of The Cool." Miles would do much toward creating subgenres and new sounds in jazz over the next 40 years. But the "Cool" sessions and the resulting album were an instant classic that had a new take on Bebop that took advantage of Davis' smooth trumpet sound. And it was a huge hit in California. At least for a while in the 50s and 60s, this sound established a solid coastal West Coast jazz camp. The West Coast sound was characterized by a relaxing sound with more structured charts than Bop, but without the rigid full orchestra sound and uptempo formulas of the Swing Era.

The success of Miles' landmark album and Capital Records' desire to jump on the band-wagon, resulted in many other West Coast artists signing record contracts -- The West Coast Jazz Movement was full steam ahead. Capital was located in Los Angeles, as opposed to Blue Note Records - the major label of Bop at the time - located in New York. Also jumping on board was the Pacific Jazz record label, whose recordings today, ironically, are owned by Blue Note. The nice result of this is that many of the Pacific recordings of the West Coast/Cool sound's glory years are not lost. They are now available on CD through Blue Note. Fantasy Records in the San Francisco Bay Area emerged with numerous records from Dave Brubeck and Vince Guaraldi. And when L.A.'s Shorty Rogers found employment with Hollywood studios, and the native San Franciscan Guaraldi scored the "Peanuts" cartoon specials, the West Coast style was heard around the world in films and on TV.

There was a surge in albums from West Coast artists like Brubeck, Rogers, Guaraldi, Chet Baker, Davis' "Cool" protoge Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Conte Candoli, Bud Shank, Art Pepper and many others. "Cool Jazz" gave birth to a new movement and tag: "West Coast Jazz." Getz had a huge record with that exact title in 1955 that cemented the term into the Jazz lexicon. But today, we think of the artists, geography of the performances, and its mellow style to define West Coast Jazz.

There is an interesting but controversial wrinkle to West Coast Jazz that is rarely talked or written about. Many of its star performers were white, while many of the Bop stars of the day were African-American. Was there a racial element to the advent of West Coast? Probably not, it's just that there were more white musicians in California at the time than black musicians. Even so, some Jazz purists dismiss the West Coast Movement and its red-headed stepchild, "Smooth Jazz" as commonplace and mellow, emotionally restrained and musically too-refined. Even Miles seemed to distance himself from it all in his later years.

The bottom line is this: the musicians. arrangers, composers, producers, and labels associated with West Coast Jazz have profoundly influenced the music we listen to today. ***written by Rick Narcisso 2006***

Recommended book: "West Coast Jazz-Modern Jazz in California 1945 to 1960" by Ted Gioia.