| Summary: | The last part of this series dedicated to West Coast Jazz, this style which marked a wonderful rejection of conventions and cherished instrumental combinations, is dedicated to musicians who experimented with all kinds of risks in a more sensual style than that of bebop. Alongside Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne and Gerry Mulligan - Jimmy Giuffre, the author of the famous "Four Brothers" theme, was one of the catalysts of the West Coast style. In a rather surprising way, he associates free form with the necessity of form and shapes innovations that will seduce his peers in an abstract form. He presents here, in a trio with his friend guitarist Jim Hall, another central figure of West Coast jazz who can be found elsewhere in quartet with trumpeter Art Farmer, a very beautiful theme rooted in the colors of his native Texas: "The train & the Rain." Playing successively the baritone sax, the alto sax, and the clarinet, he illuminates his speech with impressionistic touches. Other experimenters who will have a definite impact on musicians in California: Dave Brubeck and Stan Kenton. If Brubeck's compositions are sometimes naive, he skilfully innovates with the form as in the essential Take Five. With its paradoxical patchworks and an often grandiloquent side, Stan Kenton's large band, which was a veritable conservatory of arrangers and instrumentalists who would establish the codes of West Coast jazz, left no one indifferent. The brilliant Hampton Hawes, with his very controversial personality, was the favorite pianist of the West Coast musicians with whom he frequently recorded. Philippe Lesage.
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