In contrast, those responsible for writing the music heard on our most treasured jazz recordings receive little credit, not only compared to the “great” composers of classical music, but also to the bandleaders and soloists who performed their arrangements and compositions. Many jazz listeners find this is explicable and natural. That is due to common assumptions about how jazz is made, and which parts of the performances are the most important.

This is the first installation in a series of posts I am unimaginatively calling “Jazz Myths.” By tackling these myths I hope to show how they distort narratives of jazz history, undermine the efforts of educators, and direct the creative efforts of young aspiring musicians down a few narrow paths (or, back them into a corner).

These myths tell us what jazz is and is not, what makes it “real” and “authentic.” They explain how the “essence of jazz” can be detected in two performances bearing virtually no identifiable stylistic similarities, and also how music sounding apparently like jazz is properly defined as jazz-influenced, but not the true item.

Are jazz arrangers really so underappreciated and understudied?

College jazz programs have long offered courses in arranging and composition, and in recent years, certain arrangers like Don Redman, Benny Carter, and Mary Lou Williams have begun to figure more prominently into jazz history writing. Thus, some may object to the generalization that arrangers are unappreciated. However, the ambivalence toward these musicians’ craft runs too deeply to be corrected by an obligatory mention in a history textbook. Consider how differently we attribute artistic credit for classical and jazz music. In the case of the former, when someone asks what music is playing, we respond, “Brahms,” or “Vivaldi.” We may sometimes mention the ensemble, soloist or conductor, if we know those details, but we would never neglect to name the composer. Contrast this with how jazz recordings are discussed. For example, I would not usually mention that Count Basie and his Orchestra’s rendition of “April in Paris” was arranged by “Wild” Bill Davis. In fact, I had no idea who was responsible for that arrangement, until just now, when I finally bothered to conduct a quick internet search. I’ve listened to the track dozens of times, acknowledged it as a definitive recording of the Count Basie oeuvre, but despite being an avid student of jazz history with a special interest jazz arranging, I was completely unaware of the name of the arranger. For most jazz listeners, it would never occur to them to try to find out.

If they did, they would likely discover a lot of unfamiliar names. Ever heard of Edgar Sampson, Jimmy Mundy, or “Sy” Oliver? Probably not, but you’ve definitely heard music they wrote. The most famous hit by Chick Webb’s band, “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” was composed by Sampson, who was at that time the principal arranger for the group. Benny Goodman’s megahit “Don’t Be That Way” was also an Edgar Sampson chart.  Jimmy Mundy was a prolific arranger who, over the course of a long career, wrote for dozens of orchestras including those of Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Artie Shaw, Harry James, and even the now-infamous Paul Whiteman. Two major orchestras of the Swing Era benefited from the distinctive style of “Sy” Oliver’s arrangements. First, he furnished Jimmie Lunceford hits such as “For Dancers Only,” “Ain’t She Sweet,” and others as the band rose to prominence. Later, he was poached by Tommy Dorsey, for whom he arranged the bulk of the band’s up-tempo charts. One of Oliver compositions for the Dorsey band was entitled “Opus One,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the numbering system used by classical composers.

How important were the arrangements to these classic jazz recordings? Very, considering that by and large, big bands like these performed from written parts, just like a classical orchestra. Well, not just like one. In a big band chart, there’s a bit more room for interpretation by performers than in typical orchestral repertoire. A peek at Count Basie’s piano parts would likely reveal large sections consisting only of chord symbols, with a simple instructions like “Fill” written above them. And you probably wouldn’t find any of Basie’s piano introductions in the scores. All of the rhythm section parts would likely to leave something to the discretion of the players. However, the band members playing 3rd trumpet, 2nd tenor, or bass trombone, would have found all the notes and articulations on the page in front of them.

Jazz history textbooks place considerable emphasis on the Count Basie band’s custom of playing “head charts.” These were riff-based arrangements conceived and memorized without being written. Famous examples include “One O’clock Jump” and “Jumpin’ at the Woodside.” In reality, the band’s reliance on head charts was quite short-lived. Even “Topsy,” recorded in the same year as “One O’clock Jump,” was arranged by Eddie Durham and Edgar Battle, two seasoned arrangers who in 1937 had already scored multiple hit records. Durham’s most famous composition “Sing, Sing, Sing” is one of the most recognizable tunes from the Swing Era.

As for small group jazz, it is possible to perform standard tunes without a written arrangement, but in most cases, that is not what one hears on classic albums like those by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Billie Holiday or Miles Davis. These performances may have allowed proportionately more time for improvised solos, but the musicians clearly valued their expertly crafted arrangements by Benny Golson, Benny Carter or Wayne Shorter. Dizzy Gillespie, one of the most prominent figures of the improvisation-forward bebop movement, was also a busy arranger during the late 1940s, selling charts to Woody Herman, as well as writing for his own groups, large and small.

Written music played a crucial role in every era of jazz history, and professional arrangers, though often uncredited, can be attributed to the bulk of canonized jazz recordings. The pages of jazz history are already full of the names of the bandleaders and soloists who performed the music, and yet little attention is paid to the musicians who wrote it. We should make a greater effort to understand the roles of these anonymous arrangers.

What are the factors that have led to deemphasizing the roles of arrangers in jazz history?

Jazz critics, educators and historians have repeatedly and energetically contended that jazz is not like classical music, that it is made differently, and that its quality cannot be measured by the same criteria or values. They’ve had some good reasons for doing so. For one thing, emphasizing these distinctions was once regarded as imperative to securing society’s acknowledgement of jazz as a significant African-American art form. Also, there are plenty of musical elements important to jazz for which there was no preexisting model in classical music theory to adequately discuss. But, this evangelical campaign to obliterate all comparisons between jazz and classical music has tended to discourage analysis entirely, as often as it has promoted independent systems of evaluation. A persistent theme in jazz criticism and history writing maintains that “authentic” jazz can be detected by its “essence,” which is palpable, but eludes definition. Circumlocution and abstraction are safe ways to talk about jazz without offending anyone, but they should not be confused with scholarship, and are of no pedagogical utility. For most listeners, the particulars of how jazz is made remain shrouded in mystery, and that is not entirely by accident.

Jazz musicians have, from the beginning, exploited the public’s perception that the music was spontaneously improvised. Part of this was shrewd marketing. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band (who, although they were certainly not the first jazz band, were nevertheless the catalyst through which jazz became a global sensation) played arrangements from memory, but took every opportunity to encourage the mistaken impression that the performances were made up on the spot. For black jazz musicians, racism was a major factor. Even before the first jazz recordings were made, James Reese Europe’s band memorized its arrangements in an effort to set their white patrons more at ease by portraying their musical talents as intuitive, rather than presenting the cultivated appearance of reading from sheet music. When jazz emerged in the early 20th century, white American society was not comfortable with the idea of black musicians reading sheet music, much less prepared to acknowledge black composers as serious artists whose craft was essentially comparable to Bach’s and Beethoven’s.

Unless you are an early jazz aficionado, you’ve probably never heard of banjoist Eddie Condon. Nevertheless, the ideologies espoused by Condon and a particular group of white jazz musicians historians have dubbed the Austin High Gang, exercise an outsized influence on jazz history narratives through their published memoirs. In his autobiography, Condon recalls his attitude toward the music of his contemporary, and soon-to-be employer Red Nichols: “The music is planned. Jazz can’t be scored,” he complained. It wasn’t true that Nichols’ records didn’t include improvisation, but Condon’s group held a dogmatic belief that their loose, blues-based Chicago style was superior and somehow, more authentic, than the type favored in New York at that time. Jazz historians have predominantly taken the Chicagoans’ side on this matter, citing the relocation of Louis Armstrong from Chicago to New York as a turning point in which the stuffy, over-arranged New York style was overtaken and legitimized by the Chicago influence. Armstrong’s immense rise in popularity during the early 1930s did impact jazz musicians everywhere, but the subsequent direction of the music hardly went the way of these Chicagoans. Instead, arrangers became even more important to the music, including Armstrong’s.

What are the costs of undervaluing or allowing arrangers to go unmentioned entirely?

Don’t get me wrong, I love improvisation. The proportion of my life I’ve dedicated to it makes me a total eccentric. But, I am forced to ask, is it possible that the jazz community loves improvisation a little too much? As long as jazz history is told through a perspective that categorically assigns the greatest importance to spontaneity, it may be inevitable that arrangers like Sampson, Oliver, or Mundy, whose written music captured the attention of popular audiences for decades, will disappear into the background.

To jazz education and the vitality of the music, one risk is that we may expect aspects of our own performances to be successfully improvised based on a misunderstanding of what music in the past was actually arranged. Many young jazz musicians learn to improvise in a jam-session environment, where the arrangement of the melodies, as well as solos, are necessarily extemporized. Some, like Eddie Condon, learn to mistrust preparation of all kinds: not only the ambiguously taboo practice of planning out solos, but also arrangements and rehearsals. Their cavalier method can produce some satisfying music, but never anything as neat and catchy as a Horace Silver chart. If they wish to emulate their favorite artists, but believe they must do so spontaneously, it can only end in frustration.

For historians and educators, we may also unknowingly perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes of the past. The expectation of white American society was that black musicians would display innate—not cultivated—musical talents. The savant was more acceptable than the philosopher. Women were not welcomed to the stage in any capacity except as a vocalist. Their talents were often utilized as arrangers, and the credit went largely to male bandleaders.

There is at least one arranger in jazz history whose reputation is a notable exception to the rule. The veneration of pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader Duke Ellington comes as near to that of the “great” composers of Western Classical music. The quality of works in Ellington’s output is exceptional, but as a composer and arranger, his occupation was not substantively different from any of the little known arrangers I’ve mentioned in this article. The Western Classical tradition has found room in their canon for more than one genius composer— surely jazz can do the same. I believe Ellington provides a useful model for how to discuss the roles of arrangers and composers in jazz history.

In the course of my research for this article, I was amused to stumble across a Cab Calloway recording I had never heard before, entitled “The Lone Arranger.” You can listen it on YouTube or Spotify, but good luck finding the name of the arranger…

… (It was Benny Carter—one of my personal heroes, and my all-time favorite arranger).