Bop

Milton Jackson (born January 1, 1923, in Detroit; died October 9, 1999, in New York) was an American jazz vibraphonist nicknamed “Bags.” He studied guitar at seven and piano at eleven. At Miller High School he played drums and timpani, violin, and sang in the choir. At 16, he toured professionally with the gospel quartet the Evangelist Singers. That year, after hearing Lionel Hampton play with Benny Goodman’s band, he switched to vibraphone.

In 1945, Dizzy Gillespie hired Jackson for his sextet and later his big band. He also performed with Woody Herman, Howard McGhee, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and others. Gillespie’s band included a small group of Jackson, pianist John Lewis, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Kenny Clarke. Around 1950 they became an independent group, first called the Milt Jackson Quartet. When Percy Heath replaced Ray Brown in 1952, they took the name Modern Jazz Quartet.

From 1950 to 1974, the Modern Jazz Quartet was one of the most important chamber-jazz groups, bringing Baroque counterpoint and blues improvisation into one framework. Jackson’s vibraphone supplied its most voice-like solo sound. After the group disbanded in 1974, he focused on his solo career; the quartet reunited in 1981 and continued into the 1990s.

Jackson’s landmark solo albums span several labels. Atlantic’s Plenty, Plenty Soul (1957), with Cannonball Adderley, Horace Silver, and others, pushes the slow twelve-bar blues to its limit. Bags & Flutes (1959) pairs flute and vibraphone; Bags Meets Wes! (1962), with Wes Montgomery, is a classic dialogue between guitar and vibes; and CTI’s Sunflower (1973) places Jackson’s solos alongside Don Sebesky’s string arrangements.

Miles Davis recorded Jackson’s “Bags’ Groove” as the title track of a landmark album, while “Bluesology” became a signature Modern Jazz Quartet tune. Jackson died in New York in 1999, aged 76. On the vibraphone, he was the link between Lionel Hampton and Bobby Hutcherson.

Kenny Clarke (born January 9, 1914, in Pittsburgh; died January 26, 1985, in Paris), nicknamed “Klook” or “Klook-a-mop,” was an American jazz drummer and one of the founders of modern jazz drumming. He taught himself drums as a young man in Pittsburgh, then toured in swing bands with Roy Eldridge, Teddy Hill, Edgar Hayes, and others during the 1930s, developing a light, precise touch.

In 1939 and 1940, at Minton’s Playhouse in New York, Clarke experimented with new musical language alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian, and Charlie Parker. He shifted the pulse from the bass drum to the ride cymbal and hi-hat, using the bass drum mainly for accents—a technique later called “dropping bombs.” This approach turned drumming from timekeeping into conversation, became a bebop standard, and established Clarke as a defining figure in modern jazz drumming.

After military service from 1943 to 1946, Clarke formed the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1951 with John Lewis, Milt Jackson, and Ray Brown, recording with the group through 1955. In 1955 and 1956, he made Kenny Clarke (MG 12006) and Klook’s Clique (MG 12065) for Savoy. These small-group recordings are among the most representative bebop documents released under his own name.

Clarke moved to Paris in 1956 and took part in Miles Davis’s European tour that year. In 1961, he and Belgian pianist Francy Boland formed the Kenny Clarke–Francy Boland Big Band, which continued through 1972. The group became a major force in European big-band jazz and provided European musicians with sustained opportunities to work and record.

In later life, Clarke lived in Montreuil outside Paris and continued teaching, performing, and recording. He died in Paris in 1985. When drummers talk about time on the ride cymbal today, they usually trace the source back to him.

Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver (born September 2, 1928, in Norwalk, Connecticut; died there on June 18, 2014) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader. His father was from Cape Verde, and his mother had Irish and African ancestry. Silver began teaching himself piano at home; as a teenager he played saxophone and piano in bars, drawing initially on boogie-woogie and blues.

In 1950, Silver joined Stan Getz’s quartet and toured with the band. The following year he began recording trio sessions for Blue Note with drummer Art Blakey and bassist Gene Ramey. In 1953, he and Blakey co-founded the Jazz Messengers. Early recordings such as “The Preacher” and “Doodlin’” helped define the hard-bop style. Silver left the Messengers in 1956 to form his own quintet, with trumpeter Blue Mitchell, tenor saxophonist Junior Cook, bassist Gene Taylor, and drummer Louis Hayes.

As a composer, Silver wrote much of hard bop’s core repertoire, including “Nica’s Dream,” “Señor Blues,” “Sister Sadie,” “Filthy McNasty,” “The Jody Grind,” and “Song for My Father.” He visited Brazil in 1964; the following year’s Song for My Father honors his father with a Cape Verdean-style rhythm. The piano motif in the title track was later echoed in Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” His early-1970s United States of Mind trilogy brought lyrics, funk rhythms, and his philosophical reflections together across a set of albums.

In the 1980s, Silver founded the Silveto label and released music combining meditation with autobiographical narration. In the 1990s, he returned to Blue Note and Impulse! for The Hardbop Grandpop and A Prescription for the Blues. The National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master in 1995. He died in Norwalk in 2014, aged 85.

Maxwell Lemuel Roach (born January 10, 1924, in Newland, North Carolina; died August 15, 2007, in New York) was an American jazz drummer, composer, and educator. He grew up in Brooklyn’s Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood, where he encountered percussion in church gospel music and parade bands. As a teenager he performed in Harlem clubs, then studied timpani and percussion with Henry Adler at the Manhattan School of Music and also studied composition.

By the mid-1940s, Roach was a central bebop drummer. His recordings and performances with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk transformed the drums from a timekeeping instrument into a participant in melodic and harmonic conversation. In 1952, he co-founded Debut Records with Charles Mingus. The label’s 1953 release Jazz at Massey Hall documents one of their performances. From 1954 to 1956, Roach led a quintet with trumpeter Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, pianist Richie Powell, and bassist George Morrow, a model of hard bop. After Brown died in a 1956 car accident, Roach continued with trumpeters Kenny Dorham and Booker Little.

We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (1960) is his most important work. With lyrics by Oscar Brown Jr. and vocals by his wife Abbey Lincoln, and featuring Coleman Hawkins, Booker Little, Eric Dolphy, Julian Priester, and Nigerian drummer Michael Olatunji, the five-part suite depicts a history from enslavement to liberation. It is a landmark recording linking jazz with the civil rights movement. Percussion Bitter Sweet (1961) continued that direction; in 1962, Roach recorded the trio album Money Jungle with Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.

Beginning in 1972, Roach taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. That year he formed M’Boom, an ensemble made entirely of percussionists, and wrote works including It’s Time for voice, choir, and jazz ensemble. He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1984, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1988, and was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame. He died in New York in 2007, aged 83.

Oscar Emmanuel Peterson (born August 15, 1925, in Montreal; died December 23, 2007, in Mississauga, Ontario) was a Canadian jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader. His father, Daniel Peterson, worked as a railway porter and was the family’s first music teacher. Oscar received rigorous classical training from Hungarian-born pianist Paul de Marky, then, after winning amateur competitions as a teenager, performed in clubs and on radio in Montreal and Toronto.

In 1949, producer Norman Granz arranged for Peterson to appear at Carnegie Hall with Jazz at the Philharmonic, and he became famous overnight. He then formed a duo with bassist Ray Brown and, in 1952, his first trio with guitarist Barney Kessel, later replaced by Herb Ellis. In 1953, he recorded a series of “songbook” albums for Clef and Mercury devoted to Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and Irving Berlin, reinterpreting the American popular songbook in a trio setting.

By the late 1950s, the trio had settled into piano, bass, and drums, with Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen. Night Train (1963) and We Get Requests (1965) are representative recordings. His signature language paired a steady left-hand swing with dense right-hand octaves and fast scales. He also worked extensively with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, saxophonist Stan Getz, and singer Ella Fitzgerald, and wrote original works including “Hymn to Freedom” and Canadiana Suite.

Peterson won eight Grammy Awards, was appointed to the Order of Canada, and was named an NEA Jazz Master. A stroke later limited his right-hand movement, but he continued performing and recording with his left hand. He died in 2007. Concordia University’s concert hall in Montreal bears his name, and his recordings remain standard study material for jazz pianists.