December 31, 1959
Ahmad Jamal, 1959
New Year’s Eve 1959 was as fruitful as New Year’s Eve 1958 — the night with which this project began. In New York, you could see Sarah Vaughan at the Waldorf or Sammy Davis, Jr. at the Copa (if you were loaded), Count Basie and Joe Williams at Birdland, Dizzy Gillespie — “evoking, from his homemade speaking tube, the wondrous sounds of a world yet to come,” as the New Yorker described it — at the Metropole, Ornette Coleman in his revolutionary run at the Five Spot with Randy Weston as support, Horace Silver (“experimenting to see what will make the human nervous system dissolve,” another New Yorker-ism) at the Jazz Gallery, Earl Hines at the Embers, Ernestine Anderson at the Apollo and hundreds more musicians remembered and forgotten making up the soundtrack to the end of one heady decade.
The best summary of the decade written by its contemporaries, that I’ve found, came from Stanley Robertson of the Los Angeles Sentinel — a former editor at Ebony who returned to newspaper work while pursuing a pioneering career in TV.
60 years later, most of his assertions and observations are just as relevant. If I had been more organized (an evergreen caveat), I would have read them at the beginning of the year and not at the end — but the fact is, at the beginning of the year I had only a tenuous grasp of just how much information and insight I was about to uncover.
Throughout the course of this project, I’ve been asked — understandably — why. 1959 is only a cliche within a relatively intimate group of jazz heads; outside of their poo-poo-ing (anything but rehashing Kind of Blue and Dave Brubeck again, am I right?) and, of course, Fred Kaplan’s under-read tome, it’s mostly anonymous. Essentially, if you know about its significance in jazz you’re weary of it, and if you don’t it seems completely random.
But the idea of a 1959 jazz timeline was one that I couldn’t shake. Yes, great records; yes, jazz history. But around those pillars of the music was so much blank space. Blank space that I realized I had the tools to fill — books and archives and music and Google — even if only for myself. There was simply too much material waiting to be put in some sort of discernible order, too much incredible music that begged a different kind of context and background — one based less on how the music sounded and more on the environment in which it was made, and who was listening. I figured I may as well try, not anticipating in the slightest that I would actually make it to the end of the year — much less that anyone would care either way. But, crazily enough, here I am, and here you are.
What I’ve learned could (and hopefully will?) fill a book. The most surprising parts should have been the least surprising — the profound impact of racism, sexism and homophobia on what music got heard and how. Race in particular — again, duh — lies at the very core of American music history, and thus jazz history. To me, it goes both ways — jazz’s central role in American cultural history gets undersold precisely because it is Black music.
New York wasn’t technically segregated, but the kinds of jazz you might hear on 125th Street and below 14th Street might as well have been from different worlds. The stuff that white people listened to is the stuff that we still talk about; the stuff that Black people listened to is generally presented as secondary — a reality that is obviously perverse given the fact jazz is and has always been Black music. Miles existed somewhere in between, as he was wont to; the fact that he was beaten by the NYPD immediately after releasing the most enduring jazz album — perhaps the album that truly launched the LP era? — ever will never not make me tear up. This is the crux of the whole thing: Who gets to be important? Why is jazz niche — still more often understood as a lusty cliche than an actual artistic movement — and not at the center of our understanding of 20th Century American intellectual and creative life? Racism, obviously.
The jazz that was huge in 1959 tended towards two quite disparate poles: strange big band music made by white bands for white audiences that sounds flatly jarring to listen to today, and music by Black jazz artists who were uninterested in pleasing (mostly) white critics — music that was deemed by those critics to be redundant or sentimental or trite. Ahmad Jamal, sitting cheerily at the top of this post, is a case study of the latter phenomenon. Without actually having the numbers, I would hazard a guess that he was the top selling jazz artist (who anyone still listens to today) of 1959. “Poinciana” was running jukeboxes, and the success of At The Pershing inspired the rapidfire release of half a dozen more LPs.
But Jamal is not generally cited as one of the canonical artists of 1959, or of jazz. Neither are Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan, who had their biggest hits (”What a Diff’rence A Day Made,” “Unforgettable,” “Broken-Hearted Melody”) in 1959. Same story with Erroll Garner, who sold out Carnegie Hall in 1959. Same with Ramsey Lewis, who spent all year on the Billboard charts with his remarkable album Down To Earth, as well as Jimmy Smith, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Shirley Scott, and many others. Ray Charles, in his completely idiosyncratic way, was plucking the friendliest parts from jazz and placing them into era-defining pop music.
The difference isn’t in the quality of the music, it’s in who was listening.
Some people have asked if I’m going to continue this project with 1960. The answer is no, because I have an actual job and about 500 other projects of similarly ambitious scale that I would like to tackle. But I hope that if you enjoyed it, you might use it as a way to look at the music you listen to differently. There is so much more to know about each of the records I posted here, and all the ones I didn’t post — we live in a time of literally unprecedented amounts of information, and this period was particularly well-documented. So listen to the albums, but then check the Wikipedia page to find the other albums, and look at the liner notes to see where the Wikipedia page is wrong, and read some old magazines and newspapers to see where the liner notes were wrong, and find some live performance that people even crazier than I am have dug up and posted. All it takes is a little curiosity, and the surprises are so worth it.
In any event, thank you so much for following along and happy hunting! I, for one, can’t wait to hear all the great new music coming in the next decade.
