asd

I responded to PH seperately as he 1) came the closest in what i was asking for by giving a name and then providing a subset of players; 2) backed up his assertions; 3) and reminded ME of a name I had forgotten in my formualtion of tenor players.

Let me respond to the rest of you--and also thank you for responding!!

1) Wardell Grey's life ended much too soon and the time he had was largely spent in the Basie band. His conception, again to my ears, was out of Lester Young/Coleman Hawkins and he was staring to embrace the modernism of bop, largely through Dexter Gorden, before he died. Check out the Grey/Gorden tenor album now probably out of print.

2) The idea of Don Cherry/Bill Dixon, and someone mentioned Lester Bowie, is perhaps a fruitful path. In musing over this idea that I presented, I was tempted to go this route myself: Giving Don Cherry as the standout: then proceeding to list players such as Bill Dixon, Lester Bowie, Hannible marvin Peterson, Paul Smoker, Bakida Carrol, Butch Morris, et al. Then something seemed fishy to me. While I have heard all of these players, waht i seemed to do was righfully pick Don Cherry, then proceed to list all of the outsters who sort of came to my mind. If I were presenting a paper today, I realized that it would be impossible for me to list the actual atributes of the subset in relation to Don Cherry other than that they all played "against the grain." Now that's pretty lame of me. I'm just not that familiar enough with those players to claim lieage although a case, with reserch and dedicated listening and transcribing, might be made.

3) While aborant to many, the smooth jazz contingent of players is an very interesting idea to me. The only problem I find here is that it is motivated by financial renumeration (I don't have a problem with that BTW) and in actuality, the players, in many cases, are "masked"; that is, they are actually part of a "tradition" that they deny in their playing and development a "style" to make money. Chris Botti is surely an excellent example.

4) Another area is the whole "west coast" situation (actually most of the so called west coast scene was as a result of the migration of east coast players to the west, and not an indiginous west coast development, some will argue.)

I'll try to present something:

Originally, I thought of three players: Miles, Cherry and Jones.

With Cherry, I could not find a subset I could intellectually support as I have described above. With Jones, the same thing, and as I deliniated in my note to PH. With Miles, I felt that I had hit on something, but it reached a dead end, making me think that what has happened in the Tenor Sax world has not happened in the trumpet world. But I'll provide my embyonic ideas on the Miles configuration.

Miles, with Birth of the Cool, both socialogically and to some extent musically (and without doubt commercially) suggested a "new" direction (more from the players on the date, the arrangements, but not necessarily his playing but perhaps his inflective approach to that session.) Players like Chet Baker capitalized on this "way of so called playing" and with Chet, a sparse highly emotive style evolved, The Mulligan/Baker sessions concritized this move away from the tradtion of the time (Clifford, Hardman, Sullimam (sp), Byrd, emerging Booker and Freddie) This "spare" style was picked up by Thmas Stanko, Enrico Rava, (and other Europeans but the irony is that I am writing to you from Europe and am away from my materials and am trying to rember things from my head--not smart after 50!! Please forgive.) Then I started to think about KD and his Quiet Kenny album of 1959 and Kenny was always so effective as a "quiet" player--as well as a transitional figure between bop and the modernists of the 60s. And then I had to stop--because rather then subsets, I realized that I was dealing with the multi-faceted nature of these palyers and not an exclusive style of approaching the music--which the tenor sax players I listed had done, and do to this day.

FWIW