Jazz & Me - Part 2 - What do you mean “modal?”

Jazz can be trying on the ear because it has a harmonic complexity that is foreign to most musical ears. To put it another way, jazz arranges chords in ways that go against the grain of the unwritten rules that govern most rock, pop, country or classical music. Listening to jazz often left me feeling lost for precisely this reason.

In its early heyday from the 1920s to mid-1940s, it was fundamentally dance music played by large orchestras. It was the backdrop to folks lindy-hopping while they enjoyed illegal alcoholic beverages during Prohibition or joined dance marathons to forget about the misery of the Depression. The music that accompanies gangster films set in the 1920s. After the end of World War II, the country changed and so did the music. Sprawling big-band ensembles were whittled down into quartets or quintets of the era of bebop, which was less about dancing than virtuosic soloing of saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzie Gillespie. This is the sort of complexity that people tend to think of when they think of jazz, and precisely the sort that I find can leave the amateur listener feeling lost.

One example of this dizzying complexity is John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, a seminal work that left no doubt about the musical genius that was this saxophone colossus. Its melody is built over 24 consecutive chord changes and was recorded at such a blistering tempo that his phenomenally talented sidemen, including McCoy Tyner, struggled to keep up.

LINK

This song pushed the boundaries of what jazz could do. It’s hard not to admire its hard-charging energy and breathtaking ambitious. I do, however, think this is a tough starting place for a person not familiar with the genre.

Modal jazz takes almost the exact opposite approach. It takes one or two harmonies and stretches them out over a long period of time in an almost drone-like fashion which, perhaps absurdly, can remind me of Gregorian chant or early medieval religious music. This gives the jazz soloist a different canvass to paint on and leaves the listener with less navigation to do. The melodies that overlay it can be quite complex, but simplicity of its harmonies for me make it an easy landing spot for someone who’s proverbially coming in from out of town.

Listen to the opening bars of Chain Reaction by saxophonist Hank Mobley:

Or Joe Henderson’s A Shade of Jade:

Or Wayne Shorter’s Lost:

This style was pioneered by Miles Davis with his 1959 album Kind of Blue, and is unmistakable in Coltrane’s spiritually-driven album A Love Supreme. But for my money the folks who really explored it and expanded on it are my Holy Trinity of McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter (I’ve come to feel like I’m on a first-name basis with them). By the end of the 1960s, jazz had moved in other directions and so had these three musicians. But this sound still comes out in contemporary jazz music, even if it’s just one song on a given album. I hear it come up, for example, in the music of trumpet player Dave Douglass or the early work of bassist Esperanza Spalding.

Over the last couple of years, I’d stumble across songs like these and start adding them to my Jazz Favorites playlist. Eventually I started wanting to know why they were appealing to me and what was similar about them. This got to be the space where I felt “at home” in jazz. It’s certainly not the only kind of jazz I like, but it’s one the one I most readily understand why I like.

The following posts in this series have links to more of music, but you can also listen to some of my favorite songs from this era via this Youtube playlist.