West Coast Jazz - Sound

Sound

West Coast jazz sometimes featured a rhythm section that omitted the use of a piano, guitar, or any chordal instrument, tending to a more open and freer sound, popularized by the famous record by Gerry Mulligan The Original Quartet with Chet Baker (Blue Note, 1998). Another characteristic is the inclusion of non-standard jazz instruments like the French horn and tuba. Gil Evans' classic arrangement on the Birth of the Cool album featured these instruments at a time when the West Coast style was emerging. The sound can be thought as a reaction to the franticness and complexity some listeners found in bebop.

Read more about this topic:  West Coast Jazz

Famous quotes containing the word sound:

    The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions. But there is also, it seems to me, a moment at which democracy must prove its capacity to act. Every man has a right to be heard; but no man has the right to strangle democracy with a single set of vocal chords.
    Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)

    A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    He hath a heart as sound as a bell and his tongue is the clapper, for what his heart thinks, his tongue speaks.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)