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 hills are alive with the sound of music.”
—Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960)
“Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settlements. Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry.... Our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The mastery of one’s phonemes may be compared to the violinist’s mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor’s renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.”
—W.V. Quine (b. 1908)