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The form is so tight and so simple that players led by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Guiffre and others have abandoned it to hunt down a more satisfying freedom. Coleman and Guiffre both now play atonal jazz, and Miles Davis defected with his discovery of the "interlude," a four-or eight-bar figure laced into a song between phrases. Davis sometimes plays one dominant chord throughout a 16-bar interlude, making only rhythmic variations. Elvin Jones, the most richly inventive of the modern drummers, plays highly abstract polyrhythms that leave the old eight-to-the-bar style of jazz drumming far behind.
Enriched by such experimentation, the true spirit of jazz still belongs to its players, not to composers who study the form at the distance of a good conservatory. Leonard Bernstein has captured the sound of its blue notes—the appoggiatura tones that mimic the human voice in lament—and others have used its reiterated play-song melodies. But even among jazzmen, the only composer who has consistently written good jazz for orchestral players without merely repeating George Gershwin is Duke Ellington, and Ellington's "classical jazz" swings only because it is safe, sensual music. "We're going to do this thing," he has said in a little lecture on swinging, "until your pulse and my pulse are the same." His genius is mainly in his knowledge of the dynamic range of orchestral instruments.
Ellington's compositions for jazz band and orchestra usually stay within a concerto grosso form that lets the band handle the jazz, while the orchestra plays its own fiddle. After a recent Ellington concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Jazz Critic Leonard Feather coolly dissected the Duke's Night Creatures concerto: "Ellington played jazz, and the orchestra played classical music. If you put rubies and diamonds on the same string, you don't have a necklace of novel stones—just diamonds and rubies."
Some day someone may actually teach symphony orchestras how to swing; but short of that improbable achievement, the highest moments in jazz will still belong to working jazzmen whose own free sound is their best and clearest standard.