Section from chapter 1959: Giant Steps   [ return to introduction ]

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By Mervyn Cooke • 325 illustrations,
82 in full color • 256 pages • 8-1/2 x 8-1/2"
Cloth • ISBN 0-7892-0399-5 • U.S. $45.00
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Miles Davis "resisting arrest" in August 1959, an instance of alleged police brutality and racism that gained rapid and widespread publicity. [ view larger image ] (Corbis-Bettmann/UPI)
Changing Modes

Until the late 1950s all jazz performances were based on pre-set sequences of chords, referred to by musicians as the changes (i.e., changes of harmony). These harmonic sequences might be borrowed from well-known songs (standards), or be newly composed. In either case, a performance would normally begin with a statement of the original theme as a head, and be followed by a series of solo improvisations based on repetitions of the song's underlying harmonies (each solo being termed--rather confusingly--a chorus). A final statement of the head would bring the piece to a close. From the 1920s to the 1940s, the chordal vocabulary of jazz increased in complexity through the importation of more advanced harmonies (mostly borrowed from modern classical music), but the underlying structural principle of the "changes" remained constant.

This process was revised when Miles Davis (• p. 206), John Coltrane (• p. 160), Bill Evans (• p. 156) and others began to base some of their improvisations on scales rather than on chords. These were not the overworked major and minor scales familiar in earlier popular or classical music: they were the modes, which had provided the basis for music in medieval and renaissance times and which had been resurrected by composers such as Debussy (• p. 024) at the turn of the twentieth century. Instead of constructing a sequence of familiar chords, progressive jazz musicians now based large stretches of music on the limited pitches of a single mode. Contrast might be created by switching abruptly to a different mode in a later section of the piece. Famous early examples of this practice are heard in Miles Davis's 1958 album Milestones, and in certain tracks of the seminal Kind of Blue (1959).

The new modal approach had two important stylistic effects. First, the soloists were able to achieve more flexible melodic improvisations, being freed from the confines of strict harmonic schemes. Second, the essentially "static" nature of modal music (as opposed to the "dynamic" sense of progression created by the tension and relaxation inherent in any good sequence of chords) led to a contemplative mood in which pieces might be protracted to sometimes inordinate length.

Two further techniques emerged from modal jazz during the 1960s. As a compromise between the strict application of modes and more conventional harmonic schemes, pieces might be built up from repetitions of just two different chords (which rapidly became a sometimes irritating cliché). Then, with the emergence of jazz-rock fusion in the late 1960s and early 1970s (• p. 170), long stretches of modal music were animated by successions of riffs, often provided by the funky electric bass guitar.