Curated by North Star Sounds co-host Jon Greenbaum
Ethan Iverson, the former pianist of The Bad Plus, is a prolific writer and his Substack blog, Transitional Technology, consistently illuminates critical aspects of the jazz world and provides thought provoking analysis. Highly recommended.
Surprisingly however, his latest missive has been published in The Nation.
The article, Jazz Off The Record, begins, “Sometime in the late 1960s or early ’70s, Lee Morgan bought his girlfriend Helen Moore a gun. ‘It’s for your protection,’ he told her.”
If you’re familiar with Morgan’s life, you can probably feel the weight of Iverson’s opener.
The article is notable because it provides a historical context for Morgan’s murder at Slugs Saloon. Iverson uses the recent release of Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs (featuring McCoy Tyner, Joe Henderson Jack DeJohnette and Henry Grimes) as a jumping off point to sketch out the parameters, players and importance of the Slugs scene.
Iverson points to McCoy Tyner’s preference for suspended chords during this period as an important harmonic characteristic of the Slugs scene/era:
More than Davis and perhaps even more than Coltrane, Tyner is the true architect of what followed. His signature harmonic device, the fourth chord, was disseminated on Coltrane’s hit recording of “My Favorite Things” in 1961 and widely adopted overnight. Lacking the note that would make a chord either major or minor, fourth chords have a mysterious stasis, refusing to commit to the system of tonality that defined European art music. The effect was both ancient and contemporary: a circle of stones, lit by fire, right next to a jet plane.
Free jazz had already defied convention in a different way, going back to Ornette Coleman’s breakthrough The Shape of Jazz to Come, also from 1959. In free jazz, as practiced by Coleman, Taylor, and Ayler—all of whom played Slugs’ as well—conventional tonality was replaced with varying degrees of dissonance. (Coleman sang wrong-note folksong, Taylor supplied a wall of atonality, and Ayler’s extended techniques could erase pitch altogether.) But modal and atonal sensibilities coexisted almost from the beginning. In 1961, when Coltrane began touring as a leader, the second horn was Eric Dolphy, who offered endless angularity in the most outré free jazz manner. Their successors carried this dialectic into synthesis. On any given night at Slugs’, you might have heard the pianist playing a spiritual modal chord, the horns wailing in fierce atonal dissonance, and the swinging drums making them become one.
The sidebar to the article, A Listener’s Guide to Jazz From 1964–1972, is guaranteed to steer you to one or more albums from this era that you might not be familiar with (or need to revisit). For convenience there’s a Spotify playlist.
The Nation requires a subscription, and, depending on your browser, you should be able to access the article merely by offering up your email address.