WHY JAZZ HAPPENED

Behind the Birth of the Cool
How the rise of suburbs and the long-playing record shaped the development of Bebop and West Coast jazz.

Between 1942 and 1972, jazz changed more than it had in all the years before, or would in all the years after. When this period began, Miles Davis was a high-school student, moonlighting in St. Louis dance bands; as it ended, he had become the avatar of a blend of jazz and deep funk that only made real sense to listeners on hard drugs. In between, Davis traced a line from a kind of swing-rooted music heard on "Au Privave," an early number cut as a Charlie Parker sideman, into dalliances with classical forms, R&B and electrified sounds. (click below to read more)



The question of why jazz went from a practical art geared toward accompanying dancers to a performative one aimed at contemplative listeners is one that has engaged a lot of smart writers and historians. Marc Myers, a frequent Journal contributor, has made a serious contribution to that discussion with "Why Jazz Happened," a social history of midcentury jazz that connects changes in style to changes in the music industry, and in American culture at large.

It isn't obvious that such disparate factors as the GI Bill, or urban planners in Southern California deciding to build their highways along certain routes, contributed to the records that are still revered today. As Mr. Myers shows, though, it's likely so. Dave Brubeck and other jazz players returning from service during World War II took advantage of the chance for formal conservatory study in huge numbers, quite directly affecting their music. Similarly, the practical difficulty of getting together for casual jam sessions in sprawling Los Angeles—as opposed to densely populated New York—led to a cleaner, more rehearsed style.

Mr. Myers's strongest work ties the development of the music to the travails of the recording industry. In 1942, musicians' unions, viewing radio as a grave threat to players who relied on wages from live performance, called what was in all but name a strike against "radio's most profitable source of content: the record industry." Though musicians still performed live on the radio, no instrumentalists recorded for a period of two years: Record labels released long-buried songs from their back catalogs; singers recorded with a-capella backing. When Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and their peers developed bop, they did so out of the earshot of the general public, as no recordings could be made.

The strike was settled piecemeal, with one consequence being that a business dominated by enormous companies like Columbia and RCA Victor splintered. By 1945, there were 130 record companies, all hungry for salable product. It was the obscure Continental Records that first got Parker and Gillespie together to record; small labels like Dial and Savoy captured Parker's most lasting work, definitive versions of songs like "Ko-Ko" and "Ornithology."

Mr. Myers also shows how Columbia's 1948 introduction of the long-playing record gave Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus the chance to express their full genius in the late 1950s. Previously musicians had been limited to what they could do in about three minutes, the length that fit onto one side of a 78-RPM single. As the new format gained purchase in the early 1950s, record companies, desperate to convince listeners to buy the expensive equipment required to play LPs, turned to long-form jazz improvisations. Royalty structures made it more profitable for record labels to produce albums with fewer, longer songs rather than more short ones.

All this contributed to an environment in which it made perfect sense to put serious improvisational musicians in the studio as often as possible, and encourage them to go as long as they'd like. Thus Monk, who in the late 1940s was forced to fit his impossibly complicated ideas into brief three-minute singles, was by 1957 producing LPs like "Monk's Music," on which John Coltrane played saxophone solos so long they couldn't have been released to the public a decade before. There is no determinism in any of this: Mr. Myers no more credits Columbia's technicians for what Monk did than a film historian would credit Edison for the works of Georges Méliès. But by acknowledging that art happens in a commercial context, Mr. Myers captures aspects of the music's history that are too frequently ignored.

There are points where the link Mr. Myers seeks to prove between climate and art can seem a bit strained—his contention that the uncompromising avant-gardism of mid-1960s Chicago musicians was a product of the city's strife, for instance. The book also ends on a slightly unsatisfying note, as he offers no narrative related to the decline of recorded jazz's peak quite as compelling or logical as that related to its rise. Probably the best explanation is that as rock music captured the youth market, then itself became more complex, it offered listeners many of the pleasures of jazz without making the same strenuous demands, and so took its broad audience. But there is another book in the answer to this question.

But Mr. Myers rightly defines jazz as an art form shaped by "the blues, a deep feeling for the poetry of the music, and a burning desire by musicians to stand out through improvisation." There were several decades when those characteristics, which are as alive today as they were 100 years ago, took on startlingly new forms seemingly every year, and were captured on record in a way they weren't before and haven't been since. If you want to know why, this book is as good a place as any to start.