Frank Zappa once told an audience during a jazz-influenced song, "Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny."
Jazz undoubtedly provides a large variety of aromas that the fan finds enticing or repulsive depending on individual tastes. MVD Entertainment Group seeks to explore one area of taste with its release of Jazz Shots from the West Coast, a three-volume series of DVDs of live performances culled from television broadcasts and jazz festivals and club performances. The focus is largely on artists associated with what became known as "West Coast jazz."
Like so much of music, words cannot really describe West Coast jazz for the uninitiated. Yet once you gain even a passing familiarity, you know it when you hear it. It is a derivation of bebop and a direct descendant of cool. Both cool and the West Coast sound (and there always has been a debate whether the West Coast sound is separate from our part of cool) are smoother, more lyrical expressions of bebop. Yet this series shows the broad range of the artists from the West Coast.
For example, Disc 1, released in June, opens with a piece by Art Pepper, a performer well within the West Coast sound. Yet the tune, "D. Section," is much more in the free jazz or post-bop style than the West Coast idiom. Yet the very next performer is Chet Baker, the trumpet player many would view as an epitome of the West Coast school. Like the West Coast sound itself, most of the performances on the three discs, the latter two released this month, are by smaller ensembles. Still, there is also the powerful big band, almost Hollywood sound, of Stan Kenton's mellephonium orchestra. Likewise, there is the more straightforward jazz sound from artists like Wes Montgomery.
Inclusion of the Kenton performances on Disc 3 is indicative of how the series blends icons of the genre with others. Kenton, for example, would not necessarily be considered a member of the West Coast sound. Soloists in his early bands, however, went on to become some of the luminaries in the subgenre. Similarly, saxophonist Lester Young, one of the founders of the cool sound, has two songs on Disc 2. The notes to the DVD specifically note that, although Young may not be part and parcel of the West Coast, he is included "due to his especially strong influence on the generations of saxophonists from that Coast."
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