1959 in Music

A frozen bus and a coin in the air The Winter Dance Party tour is twenty-four cities in twenty-four days across the frozen upper Midwest, no days off. The bus heater breaks. Drummer Carl Bunch gets hospitalized for frostbitten feet. At the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Buddy Holly charters a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza to fly ahead to the next stop. Three seats, four people who want them. The Big Bopper, sick with the flu, talks Waylon Jennings out of his seat. Ritchie Valens, who is afraid of flying, flips a coin with Tommy Allsup for the last one and wins. The plane takes off just before 1 AM on February 3 into light snow, a twenty-one-year-old pilot certified only for visual flight at the controls. It crashes into a cornfield five miles from the airport. Holly is twenty-two. Valens is seventeen. He has been recording for eight months.

One stroke, no correction Miles Davis gives his musicians scales instead of chord changes and tells them to play. Two sessions at Columbia's 30th Street Studio, a converted church with a fifty-foot ceiling, produce Kind of Blue. The sextet includes John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, and Bill Evans, who worked up the compositional sketches with Davis only hours before the first session. Almost everything is a first take. Evans writes the liner notes and compares the method to a Japanese painting technique: the artist works on thin parchment with a single brushstroke, no correction possible. The album will sell over six million copies and still moves five thousand a week more than sixty years later.

Twelve minutes to fill in Brownsville, Pennsylvania Ray Charles has played every song he knows and still has twelve minutes of stage time left. He sits down at the Wurlitzer electric piano he carries on tour, improvises a blues riff, and tells his backing singers, the Raeletts, to repeat whatever he says. The call-and-response builds until the crowd rushes the stage. He records the result at Atlantic's studio in February, live with no overdubs, on the second eight-track Ampex tape machine ever manufactured. Radio stations ban it because the moaning sounds like sex. It becomes Atlantic's best-selling single and the record that bridges gospel, blues, and R&B into something new.

A white plastic saxophone at the Five Spot Ornette Coleman can't afford a brass horn, so he plays a white plastic Grafton alto saxophone he bought in 1954. His quartet has no piano, no chord changes, no conventional harmony. When the group opens a residency at the Five Spot Cafe in November, Leonard Bernstein comes. The Modern Jazz Quartet comes. Max Roach comes, follows Coleman into the kitchen, and punches him in the mouth. Atlantic Records titles his album The Shape of Jazz to Come. Some people think it's genius. Others think it's a hoax. Nobody ignores it.

$800 and a snowstorm to Owosso Berry Gordy borrows eight hundred dollars from his family's savings fund and starts Tamla Records in January. He wanted to call it Tammy, after the Debbie Reynolds song, but the name is taken. He buys a two-family house on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, moves his family upstairs, and builds a recording studio on the first floor. The first Tamla 45s are pressed in Owosso, Michigan, and Gordy and Smokey Robinson drive through a snowstorm to pick up the boxes. The first single is Come to Me by Marv Johnson. Within a year, the building has a sign out front: Hitsville U.S.A.

Five violins and a cello where the saxophones used to be The Drifters record There Goes My Baby at Atlantic Studios with a string arrangement by Stan Applebaum: five violins, one cello, timpani, and a Latin-inflected baion beat. It is the first R&B record to use a full orchestral string section. Ben E. King, singing lead for the first time with the group, has a voice that sits right on top of the strings instead of fighting through horns. The record reaches number one R&B and number two pop, and it opens a door that leads directly to the girl group sound and the Wall of Sound.

Five-four time and a label that didn't want it Columbia's marketing executives tell Dave Brubeck that Time Out will fail because the odd time signatures are unsuitable for dancing. They agree to release it only after Brubeck records a conventional album first. Paul Desmond writes Take Five in 5/4 time, built on a two-chord vamp in E-flat minor. The band struggles in the studio to play it without dropping beats. Time Out becomes the first jazz album to sell a million copies. Take Five becomes the first jazz single to sell a million copies. The executives had predicted failure for every reason that made it a sensation.

Three hundred DJs and two different fates After the quiz show scandals, Congress turns its attention to radio. Over three hundred disc jockeys admit to accepting payments from record labels for airplay. Alan Freed, the DJ who did more than anyone to bring Black music to white teenagers, refuses to sign a sworn oath that he never took money for playing records, calling it a violation of his self-respect. ABC fires him immediately. Dick Clark, who owns interests in music publishing, record labels, and distribution companies, divests everything before testifying and is called a fine young man by the committee chairman. Freed dies broke at forty-three. Clark hosts American Bandstand for decades.

Nine weeks of Mack the Knife Bobby Darin records Mack the Knife in about three takes, modulating up a semitone with every verse starting from the third. The arrangement swings hard: Don Lamond on drums, Milt Hinton on bass, Doc Severinsen on trumpet. It reaches number one on October 5 and stays there for nine weeks, the longest run of the year. Frank Sinatra calls it the definitive version. At the second Grammy Awards in November, Darin wins Record of the Year and becomes the first recipient of the Best New Artist award.

The first folk festival at Newport George Wein, who runs the Newport Jazz Festival, notices younger crowds showing up for folk acts and organizes the first Newport Folk Festival in July. Pete Seeger, Odetta, Earl Scruggs, and the Kingston Trio play for thirteen thousand people at Freebody Park. Under pressure from fans wanting to leave early, Wein bumps Scruggs down the bill to give the Kingston Trio a better slot, infuriating folk purists. The commercial folk revival and its arguments about authenticity are both now fully underway.

The year jazz broke everything Between March and December, five jazz albums are recorded that will all end up in the Library of Congress: Kind of Blue, Time Out, The Shape of Jazz to Come, Mingus Ah Um, and Giant Steps. Mingus writes Fables of Faubus as a protest against the Arkansas governor who blocked school desegregation; Columbia refuses to let him record the lyrics, so it goes out as an instrumental. Coltrane's Giant Steps sessions happen two weeks after the final Kind of Blue date, the same tenor saxophonist on both records playing music that could not be more different. All five albums are recorded within a few miles of each other in New York.