Jazz is the product of a postmodern horizontal world. Never satisfied with the current models, it epitomizes Charles Taylor's optimism by continually searching for new ones. If jazz itself has a universal value, it is that of the search. As performer-oriented music with an emphasis on improvisation, jazz is about finding one's self and expressing that self to others through a unique voice. The conflict between these two aspects--the finding and the expressing--is central to the development of jazz music and musicians. The variety of responses to this conflict can be seen in the history of the music since bebop and in the lives of musicians Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

During the early 1940s, a small group of musicians including Charlie "Bird" Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, and Kenny Clarke created bebop while jamming after hours at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem. Bebop was a reaction to audience-driven swing. Its musicians were "trying to raise the quality of jazz from the level of utilitarian dance music to that of a chamber art form...[and] the status of the jazz performer from entertainer to artist."1 Unlike the simplistic swing music, bebop was fast and complex, requiring technical proficiency. Drummer Kenny Clarke explains, "We'd play Epistrophy or I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm just to keep the other guys off the stand, because we knew they couldn't make those chord changes. We kept the riff-raff out and built our clique on new chords."2

Bebop was an important reminder that the "self" aspect of jazz had been neglected for way too long while musicians played the exceedingly popular swing. Yet when the swing audiences and many other jazz musicians originally rejected the new music, its musicians in turn further rejected the audience, creating a separate bebop subculture and community. Jazz historian Frank Tirro writes, "[t]hese outcasts developed a number of characteristics, most of which were nonmusical, that set them apart from the rest of the world: language, dress, habitat, behavior...Jazz performers were already on an island; bopsters built a raft and moved ashore." One of these characteristics was the widespread use of heroin, much of it stemming from Charlie Parker. Though Bird himself said he played much better when he was clean, and urged others to avoid the habit, many younger musicians became addicts anyway trying to play as well as Bird. His entry in the Encyclopedia of Jazz reads:

Charlie Parker is one of the few jazzmen who can be said to have given dignity and meaning to the abused word "genius." It was his desire to devote his life to the translation of everything he saw and heard into terms of musical beauty. Though it was his inspiration, his soul and warmth that earned him an international reputation, and although he had little formal training, he was a man of amazing technical skill, a fast reader and a gifted composer-arranger...

In bringing the art of improvisation to a new peak of maturity, Parker had an inestimable influence on jazz musicians regardless of what instrument they played. From the mid-'40s on, it was almost impossible for any new jazzman anywhere in the world to escape reflecting to some degree, consciously or unconsciously, a Parker influence; his work set a new standard on every level: harmonic, tonal, rhythmic, and melodic.3

Translating this into the terminology of Charles Taylor, one can understand bebop and Charlie Parker as a horizon of significance for the world of modern jazz. According to Taylor, "[w]hen we come to understand what it is to define ourselves, to determine in what our originality consists, we see that we have to take as background some sense of what is significant. Defining myself means finding what is significant in my difference from others...I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter."4 In the 1940s, Charlie Parker and bebop radically altered the concept of jazz and became a significant part of that background. Future musicians could accept or reject what had happened but they could not ignore it. Cool jazz and hard bop, and the later avant garde styles of modal, free, and fusion jazz, all emerged from the horizon of Bird and bop.

Cool jazz was the first new style to emerge. Bebop had been a hot style with an expressive tone and timbral effects. In the 1950s, some musicians--notably Stan Getz, Miles Davis, and Lenny Tristano--felt that the hot style was distracting. They wanted the audience to listen to the complexity of the improvisations. Devoid of emotion, the music known by its cool tone was inspired by the intellect.

Hard bop was a reaction to both cool jazz and bebop. Its musicians, conscious that the sophistication of those two styles limited the size of their audience, set out to develop a new sound more people would like and understand. Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver, and Art Blakey were among the leaders of this movement. They developed a musically regressive style involving repeated riffs, simple solos and harmonies, and vamps. Hard bop was a hot and soulful style, laden with timbral effects and the vitality missing from cool jazz. There was no commonly accepted mainstream jazz anymore, and so it had become more difficult for musicians to make a living; its appeal to a larger audience made hard bop a financially sensible music for a financially unstable time.

Cool jazz and hard bop epitomized the conflict between the finding and the expressing, between the self and the community. Cool jazz was a "self" music, stretching the limits of its musicians intellectually, creatively, and technically in the search for a greater truth, art, and personal voice. Hard bop forewent that search, concentrating on the "to others" part of "finding and expressing one's self to others." It was willing to simplify the music in order to appeal to a wider community. Taylor might argue that the ideal jazz is a balance between these two choices, but that balance is difficult to find and maintain. It is precisely the struggle which keeps jazz so vibrant.

Ultimately there does seem to be a balance when looking at the broad whole of jazz. Each extreme style is counteracted by an opposite, and so the development of jazz resembles the motion of a pendulum, from swing to bebop and cool jazz to hard bop, and then in the avant garde from modal and free jazz to fusion.

The avant garde movement began in the 1960s. Frank Tirro describes the decade's jazz as "a mirror of society, reflecting the grief, anger, frustration, and inner chaos of a people treading water in a violent sea."5 At the end of the 1950s, John Coltrane's piece Giant Steps had taken the traditional method of improvising on harmonies as far as it could go technically, matching a different chord to each note. A new kind of musical thinking was needed, and in 1959 Miles Davis gathered Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb into the studio to record Kind of Blue, a monumental introduction to modal jazz. Rather than using the harmony, modal jazz improvises in melodic cells. Since there are no chord changes in the improvisation, the music often has a feeling of stasis. Miles realized that this made the music less accessible to many listeners, and so he occasionally used modal shifts, which reminded one of chord changes. After Kind of Blue, Miles moved on and Trane (John Coltrane's nickname) continued the exploration of modal jazz. Trane had been studying Indian music, which was both modal and religious; he abandoned modal shifts and took the music to new heights.

Free jazz developed almost simultaneously with modal jazz. This music, which began with Ornette Coleman, also avoided chord changes in the improvisation, but unlike modal jazz its sound was usually atonal and dissonant. Free jazz musicians did not all approach the music in the same way. Some, like Coleman, tried to retain some elements of traditional music, such as the theme and a steady beat, so as not to completely alienate the listener. Archie Shepp was part of the Black militant school of free jazz, which concentrated on the communication of emotion. Anthony Braxton tried to show the connection to classical avant garde.

Musicians were listening to Trane, who had already proven himself in the tradition, but Ornette Coleman had not paid his dues. Miles Davis expressed a common attitude toward Coleman in his autobiography: "I don't know what's wrong with him. For him--a sax player--to pick up a trumpet and violin like that and just think he can play them with no kind of training is disrespectful toward all those people who play them well. And then to sit up and pontificate about them when he doesn't know what he's talking about is not cool, man."6 Although Miles wouldn't have understood the terminology, his anger at Coleman was because the saxophonist was ignoring the horizons of jazz significance. Yet both free and modal jazz were emphasizing the self before the community, and in the 1970s fusion jazz would swing back the other way.

The primary innovator of fusion jazz--also known as jazz rock--was Miles Davis, but the music was taken further by Weather Report and by John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Fusion was known for the electric medium and a complex yet accessible sound. Like the other avant garde styles, it didn't use chord changes, but the music sounded more tonal because of frequent vamps (repeated bass patterns) and a steady rock-like beat. This was important because jazz wasn't selling and rock's popularity was ever-increasing, as seen by 1969's Woodstock. Miles reacted by agreeing to become the opening act for the Greatful Dead, and his recording of Bitches Brew became the largest selling album in jazz history. Weather Report, founded by Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul, was a fusion of free jazz and rock, emphasizing group improvisation. McLaughlin, like Trane, had an interest in Indian music and spirituality which he brought to the electric medium. The horizon of significance for these groups had expanded to include the other avant garde styles as well as bebop. The music would shift again in the 1980s, as Wynton Marsalis brought the return of a more traditional sound.

The searching development of jazz can be seen by examining the evolution not only of its styles but also of its individual musicians. The great influence of trumpeter Miles Davis and saxophonist John Coltrane on the future of jazz is undeniable, but it is their unique-yet-universal searches which made that so. Coltrane explained in an interview,

overall, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener of one of the many wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe. That's what music is to me--it's just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that's been given to us, and here's an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That's what I would like to do. I think that's one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we all try to do it in some way. The musician's is through his music.

Though the two musicians were the same age, Trane found his voice much later. He began on the alto sax, greatly influenced by Charlie Parker. When he switched to the tenor sax to join Eddie Vinson's band, "a wider area of listening opened up for me...on tenor I found there was no one man whose ideas were so dominant as Charlie's on alto. Therefore, I drew from all the men I heard during this period on tenor...."7 His growth was hindered, however, by a heroin addiction.

Heroin was a problem for both Miles and Trane, and both men eventually kicked the habit cold turkey. Miles asserted that his habit did not stem from his idol Charlie Parker but was rather the result of a period of depression in his life. The drugs fit his lifestyle and his personality; he was a man with an attitude, a man who spent the time not performing hanging out in clubs and with fellow musicians until the wee hours of the morning; he never rehearsed. Even after Miles quit heroin, he still drank and used cocaine. Trane was a very different person; when he wasn't performing, he was rehearsing his band, or practicing on his own, or studying. When he kicked his habit in 1957, shortly after being fired from Miles' band, he had a religious experience that profoundly affected his life.

With the support of his wife and mother, John Coltrane spent a week alone in his room, fasting from everything but water. He later described being touched by God during the time, and dedicated his recording of A Love Supreme to his Lord. "My goal," Coltrane said, "is to live the truly religious life, and express it through my music. If you live it, when you play there's no problem because the music is part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am, my faith, my knowledge, my being."8

This was the beginning of Trane's "quest," as writer Eric Nisenson calls it. Nisenson describes further: "Coltrane's quest was undoubtedly legitimate, for it touched all the areas of his life...[his] sense of religion was never dogmatic, however. He never said in what form he perceived God...he saw in his vision of God a unity of all people and all things. All paths that led to the Absolute, ultimate reality, were equally valid."9 It is fascinating to try to understand Coltrane here in terms of the horizontal and vertical models of the world. The concept of all paths being valid clearly embodies the horizontal model. Yet the idea that God is the ultimate goal is unmistakably a value from the vertical. What John Coltrane was doing, then, was synthesizing the two. God is the goal, his music said, but the way to God is through the self.

Shortly after this, two things happened. Coltrane formed his own quartet, and he rejoined Miles Davis in a recording session which resulted in Kind of Blue. This was the beginning of Coltrane's explorations of modal jazz.

Miles was the one who instigated that particular recording, but Miles wasn't the kind of musician who would stick with one type of music for very long. This wasn't impatience; rather, Miles Davis was the musical version of a computer hacker. He would be remembered for his innovations. In his life he would found cool, modal, and fusion jazz, and he would collaborate with arranger Gil Evans on the monumental recordings of Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain. Like many musicians, Miles understood that one couldn't play with the same group for too long without getting repetitive and losing the creative edge. Yet Miles went a step further; he surrounded himself with younger musicians. He explains in his autobiography, "[o]ne of the reasons I like playing with a lot of young musicians today is because I find that a lot of old jazz musicians are lazy motherfuckers, resisting change and holding on to the old ways because they are too lazy to try something different...Bebop was about change, about evolution. It wasn't about standing still and becoming safe. If anyone wants to keep creating they have to be about change. Living is an adventure and a challenge."10

Miles' values were definitely a part of the horizontal world. He didn't prefer one style or musician over another; he strove to play whatever was in his head at the time. He focused on the present. He never kept musicians in his band once he couldn't use their sound anymore, and often when a band disbanded, the sidemen--Coltrane, for example--would form their own groups to explore the ideas further while Miles himself moved on.

After kicking his habit, Coltrane became very interested in music of the Third World, and particularly that of India and Africa. African music was integral to its society, expressing "everything from religious beliefs to the need for war."11 Trane's drummer Elvin Jones was a master at the dense polyrhythms that were at the heart of this music. Indian music was also important to its society, and the "Indian musician is thought of as being something more like a priest or a shaman than an entertainer...Metaphysically, the physical vibrations of musical sounds (nada) were inextricably connected with the spiritual world....12 John Coltrane applied these concepts to his chosen form of jazz, still the only form which allowed him such free, extensive, improvised, solos.

Jazz is a language of its own. Individual pieces can be talked about, musicians and critics can be quoted, parallels can be drawn, but ultimately the music speaks better than its translation into words. The search for self and community has played an integral part of the development of the postmodern horizontal world of jazz. With the background of this paper, the reader can now turn to more primary sources--documented recordings and live performances--to hear for himself the multitude of sounds that have been and will be created as part of this search.