The Classical Tinge Part 7: Thirds and Fourths DAVE JONES continues his series on the relationship between classical

music and jazz

Dave Brubeck studied fugue and orchestration with the French classi­cal composer Darius Milhaud (one of

the group of French composers known as Les Six) in California in the late 1940s, and this, together with his penchant for the use of odd time signatures in his tunes such as Take Five and the classical form of Blue Rondo A La Turk from his 1959 album Time Out, leads one to believe that he must have heard and been influenced by the music of Stravinsky and Bartok amongst others. In later life he concentrated on orchestral and choral works, in contrast with his earlier work for jazz quartet.

In 1956, John Lewis and Gunther Schuller were the founders of the Jazz and Classical Music Society, which was an attempt to bring the two idioms closer together in the shape of what has since become known as Schuller's Third Stream. Richard Williams (2009) comments: " . .. the compositions represented honourable attempts to create a worthwhile synthesis, but there was some­thing too self-consciously solemn about this music - brows were too furrowed, per­haps - and the movement as a whole failed to catch the public's imagination ... One of the men loosely associated with the Third Stream movement was George Russell, who had been a regular participant in the con­versations in Gil Evans's apartment in the late 1940s."

Russell's 1948 composition A Bird In Igor 's Yard reflected Charlie Parker and Igor

• Stravinsky's mutual respect . for one another's work. Russell became influential in jazz mainly via his 1953 Lydian Chro­matic Concept Of Tonal Organisation. Ingrid Monson (1998) describes it thus: "George

Russell took a central principle of Western music theory - the circle of f1fths - and developed a theory of tonal organisation adapted to the particular needs of jazz improvisers striving to attain a 'modem sound' in the wake of the harmonic inven­tiveness of bebop. In so doing he developed a theoretical underpinning for what later was termed as 'modal jazz', earning the respect of several of the principal f1gures of jazz of the time, including Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Art Farmer, and John Coltrane."

Perhaps superftcially, Russell's theoretical concepts tended to be more successfully dis­seminated via the music of others rather than his own compositions, but Russell said: "I thought that Kind Of Blue was beautiful music, of course. But I also thought that a lot of modal jazz that came out of it was a little simplistic ... That kind of thing was only a part of what I intended with the

George Russell: 'Kind Of Blue was beautiful music, but that kind of thing was only a part of what I intended with the theory. It should have opened up all kinds of new possibilities to musicians, not produced monotony'

theory. It should have opened up all kinds of new possibilities to musicians, not pro­duced monotony." DeVeaux and Giddins (2009) noted that "Russell remained a con­troversial f1gure; the Jazz at Lincoln Center

· program in New York notoriously refused to book him on the grounds that his orchestra included electric bass."

In modal jazz, one of the main flavours in a chordal sense is quartal voici ng, which is a means of producing chords via "stacked up" chains of fourths to generate unresolved harmonic tension. Erik Satie's early use of this technique in 1891 (see the Classical Tinge Part 6 (i) in JJ Vol. 67 No. 6) would appear to predate Bela Bartok's initial use, as Bartok would only have been 10 years of age at the time. On the other side of the Atlantic, American composer Charles Ives used quartal harmony in The Cage ( 1 906), which also predates Bartok and the Second Viennese School.

So, it seems that in the classical world Satie got there ftrst with quartal harmony, fol-

16 JAZZ JOURNAL THE CLASSICAL TINGE

lowed by Ives. But who got there flfSt with quartal harmony in jazz? Well, there are hints of it in the music of Jelly Roll Morton and Art Tatum, but not in the more concep­tual sense of providing unresolved tension in harmony. Billy Strayhorn's compositions and arrangements exhibit a more deliber­ate-sounding use of quanal harmony than Morton and Tatum, but there doesn't seem to be much recorded evidence of him per­forming in smaller bands prior to the 1960s, where he's likely to have had the opportu­nity to use quartal harmony extensively in a more improvisational setting.

This leaves us with a few other possibilities, including Bill Evans, the lesser known Richie Powell (Bud Powell's brother) and Dick Twardzik. (See JJ Vol. 67 No. 5 for Gordon Jack's article on Twardzik.) How­ever, like anything in music, the move towards fourths shouldn't and probably wouldn 't have been a competition, and these pianists may not have known one another or been aware of each other's play­ing, based as they were in different and rea­sonably distant cities.

Powell and Twardzik were born in the same year and had similarly short lives. Evans, although born slightly earlier, was a slow­bum in terms of becoming publicly heard and known and it's difficult to fmd evidence of his developing the style while Twardzik and Powell were still alive.

McCoy Tyner's work in the 1960s is often seen as the benchmark of the fully inte­grated use of quartal harmony as part of a highly distinctive piano sound. There are claims that he said his mature style was influenced by Richie Powell 's use of fourths to form chords, and you can at least hear pairs of fourths in Powell's left-hand, but not in the way that Tyner ultimately utilises them. Powell and Tyner were neighbours at one point in Philadelphia, but judging by the recordings and available information (which isn't a great deal), it is Twardzik who sounds most like the blueprint for what Tyner and then Corea, Hancock, Mulgrew Miller and Kenny Kirkland and others did with quartal harmony in jazz.