Roads Less Travelled

In the forty years since his death Eric Dolphy's career has taken on a kind of substance that it never had in his lifetime. Partly this is due to the course jazz has taken within those forty years, one of the end results of which is a scene that in many ways is more conservative now ...

The last article in this series discussed the most significant strand in the recording history of Sonny Criss , a musician who was unjustly neglected during his lifetime. By contrast, Art Pepper might have been overexposed during his. If so, then this was a process helped in no small part by his autobiography1 in which he ...

There have sometimes been itinerant qualities to the jazz musician's life, not only in terms of where they've lived, but also where and when they recorded. Sonny Criss spent the best part of his life in Los Angeles, and the sad fact is that the devotion he showed not only to the city and its people ...

By the end of the 1930s both the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands had established signature styles of music making that were in some respects antithetical. Whilst the latter was dependent on composition as an integral part of its musical output -and arguably no-one before or since has married composition and the making of jazz ...

The cultural life of post-war West Germany was always subject to significant American influence, and though this may seem surprising on the surface it says a lot about American hegemony in this period and the means through which it was acheived. Julian Cope has quite rightly highlighted the presence of American service personnel as a agent ...

By March of 1965, when the first of the Village Vanguard recordings were made, Albert Ayler's career as a leader was less that five years old. He'd covered a lot of ground. It was also only thirteen years since he'd worked in Little Walter's band, yet in that time he'd moved as far away from the ...

Although the jazz vocabulary is undoubtedly American in origin, with the passing of time and the evolution jazz has arguably become a pejorative term for the making of improvised music. The improvisational element reaches its logical conclusion in music that is freely improvised, that is to say music that is free of all predetermined elements and ...

By March of 1965, when the first of the Greenwich Village recordings were made, Albert Ayler's career as a leader was less than five years old. He'd covered a lot of ground. It was also only thirteen years since he'd worked in Little Walter's band, yet in that time he'd moved as far away from the ...

As discussed in the last article in this series, the dissemination of jazz on record, together with the abilities of musicians from outside of the USA, ensured that the jazz language was relatively quickly assimilated on a large scale. So far as the British jazz scene was concerned, the Jamaican trumpeter Dizzy Reece, born January 5, ...

Any 'golden age' is always questionable, but in the period 1967-71 the British band Soft Machine are reckoned to have enjoyed such an age, and releases on the Cuneiform and Hux labels make the case. The band was built around keyboard player Mike Ratledge, bassist Hugh Hopper, and drummer/vocalist Robert Wyatt. Reed player Elton Dean was ...

A certain view of jazz history has us believe that responsibility for the evolution of the music lies exclusively in American hands. This is both too deterministic and a slight upon the music's power to move and to influence. As early as the late 1930s European players were making innovations of their own at the same ...