The use of musical modes based on scales rather than sequences of chords as the basis of improvisation, an approach first championed by composer and theoretician George Russell, made an immediate impact after Miles Davis applied it over the course of his 1959 album Kind of Blue.
These simultaneous developments indicate how difficult it had become to pigeonhole jazz into specific time or stylistic periods. By the end of the 1950s, the emergence of other new ideas would only compound the challenge. The use of musical modes based on scales rather than sequences of chords as the basis of improvisation, an approach first championed by composer and theoretician George Russell, made an immediate impact after Miles Davis applied it over the course of his 1959 album Kind of Blue. Another landmark album of the period, Time Out by the quartet of pianist Dave Brubeck, expanded jazz’s rhythmic horizons beyond the standard 4/4 swing and waltz tempos to such then-exotic time signatures as 5/4 and 9/8. Alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman eliminated harmonic progression altogether in the music of his quartet, spawning the notion of “free jazz.” Pianist Cecil Taylor took the concept of freedom even further, as song forms, fixed rhythms, and the hierarchy of soloist and accompanist were abandoned in his kinetic creations. Many of these developments were reflected in the music of tenor and soprano saxophonist John Coltrane, whose evolution during the decade before his premature death in 1967 added a personal sense of quest for spirituality and self-improvement to a music now known, for lack of a more precise metaphor, as “the new thing.”