Jazz Music Club

With folk music, country and bluegrass incubating over roughly the same a period of time as jazz after it’s move to major cities, there’s really only a single reason as to why the music hadn’t been embraced in a similar fashion. There were shifts in those genre’s as well, though.

Again, it’s difficult to pin point the immergence of a singular style of music, but most frequently Bill Monroe is referenced as the first bluegrass band leader. Reared in Rosine, Kentucky, Monroe developed a music taste largely based on the music he heard in church. What’s interesting to note, though, is the fact that Monroe always credited a man named Arnold Schultz, a local day laborer, adept at both fiddle and guitar, for influencing his work on the mandolin².

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Sometimes having chops and playing with a buncha important band leaders doesn’t really matter. Of course, the timing of one’s career has as much to do with success as anything else. One might be the most talented performer in a particular mode, but be incapable of finding an appropriate audience to put it all on display for.

This doesn’t necessarily apply to Junior Cook – no one’s going to argue that he was a once in a life time kind of player. Adept, perhaps, but nothing approaching shocking. He was a talented  tenor player, though. That’s not up for debate. His tone falls closer to Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins as opposed to the Lester Young school. But regardless of that, Cook just sprung up at a time when the genre was becoming engorged with players.

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It’s difficult to figure out why some sidemen never made it as date leaders. There’s really an unending list of players who worked for years behind folks as popular as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk while just never being capable of capturing the occasional transcendent moments in their bosses work without ‘em. Probably most disappointing is Charlie Rouse, who can and should be considered one of the better equipped sax players from the be bop era. In following Monk around on those odd notes, Rouse should have become adept enough at composing as to record a long player that was not just engaging to hear, but also a commercially viable product. It just didn’t happen.

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The soul jazz genre doesn’t offer up to many different traits as to greatly differentiate from one player to the next. And especially when an organ is concerned, it’s anyone’s guess as to whose playing apart from those so deeply imbued with background information as to render one a liner note.

With Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff and Brother Jack McDuff functioning as the players who basically decided how the organ was going to function in the genre, it’d be easy to relegate every other performer to second tier status. That’s not necessarily void of merit, but the fact that so many people took part in this mostly late ‘60s and ‘70s based explosion of recording, the perspective’s a bit reductive.

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