The story of each major innovator in the music’s history-Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Coleman-repeats this truism. And much of the irony of jazz is that, for all its celebration of the individual soloist, it remains a music of ensembles. With few exceptions, the nature of jazz performance requires group interaction of the highest level. In this regard, jazz music is radically different from painting or literature or other mediums in which individuals work alone, in which the influence of others is felt at a distance, as part of a cultural context. They rightly call our attention to the symbiotic relationship between the harmonic and rhythmic underpinnings of the music, epitomized in the work of jazz pianists, and the evolution of the monophonic improvised lines, best exemplified in the play of the horns. These generalizations, as clumsy as they are-and they are all too easy to criticize-still catch a broad truth. The music of Bud Powell, we are told, translated the advances of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to the jazz keyboard. The pianism of Ellington is praised for representing a microcosm of his orchestral works. Earl Hines is said to have developed a “trumpet style” in response to Armstrong’s innovations. As it is commonly told, the history of jazz piano mirrors the evolution of the music as a whole.
