Onetime boxy Toyota / WED 6-28-23 / Saxophonist who pioneered modal jazz, to fans / Classic collection from the magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction / Fabric derived from wood pulp / Stereotypical shout-out on a jumbotron

Constructor: Matt Fuchs and Victor Sloan

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: animals in things— familiar phrases that involve animals being "in" things, represented visually by said animal crossing said thing:

Theme answers:

• PARTRIDGE in a PEAR TREE (3D: With 14-Across, first (and last) gift of a seasonal song)
• FROG in one's THROAT (10D: With 15-Across, cause of some hoarseness)
• SNAKE  in the GRASS (30D: With 38-Across, hidden traitor)
• ANTS in one's PANTS (35D: With 42-Across, source of restless anticipation)
• BEE in one's BONNET (58D: With 62-Across, persistent little obsession)
• CANARY in the COAL MINE (44D: With 59-Across, harbinger of danger) 

Word of the Day: modal jazz (43A: Saxophonist who pioneered modal jazz, to fans (TRANE)) —

In musical parlance, the word “mode” simply means “scale”; it is often used to describe a scale other than major or minor. Our present-day major and minor scales derive from the “modes” of medieval music, which in turn derive from the music of ancient Greece. Modes were used as a resource by some relatively modern classical composers like Debussy and Bartok, who felt the need to go beyond traditional major/minor tonality. In the 1950s, jazz musicians also began to work with modal approaches.

The term “modal jazz” refers to improvisational music that is organized in a scalar (“horizontal”) way rather than in a chordal (“vertical”) manner. By de-emphasizing the role of chords, a modal approach forces the improviser to create interest by other means: melody, rhythm, timbre, and emotion. A modal piece will generally use chords, but the chords will be more or less derived from the prevailing mode. [...] Miles Davis, always a trend-setter in jazz, utilized this approach in his composition “Milestones” (1958), on the album of the same name. The structure of this tune is AABBA. The A sections are based on the G dorian scale; the B sections are based on the A aeolian scale (see “The Classical Modes,” below).

His next album, Kind of Blue (1959), is the definitive example of modal jazz, and was a pivotal moment in the evolution of jazz. [...] 

The modal approach was pursued further in subsequent recordings by Miles and by other jazz artists. John Coltrane’s work in the 1960s with pianist McCoy Tyner advanced the modal concept in an intense, even spiritual direction (e.g., his albums My Favorite Things, Impressions, A Love Supreme), and deeply affected the subsequent development of jazz. (Peter Spitzer, jazzstandards.com)

It does what it does, and then it keeps doing it. This seems like a clever concept, but it played really flat, and knowing the concept made all subsequent themers easy to uncover, and since the themers all ran in two directions, knowing the themers made whole sections of the puzzle easy to uncover. So it was a bit like a child's game, but instead of "What sound does the cow make?" or whatever, it was "What's the froggy in? What's the birdy in?" Etc. I cannot fault the execution–it's very theme-dense, and the fill holds up reasonably well under the circumstances. I also like, or at least don't mind at all, that the answers aren't perfectly symmetrical, or that the connecting words in the phrases are not all the same (i.e. "in a""in the""in one's"). The grid has been built specifically to isolate the themers into their own little sections, their own little habitats, and then each section has been carefully constructed around its themers. This is why you have such a segmented grid (those NE and SW corners are particularly dramatically cordoned off). So it's all very neat, but it was all very same-same, and ultimately very simple. I am impressed that they found enough animals in enough things in enough familiar phrases to make this one work out. A CAT in the CRADLE would've been remarkable (especially if you could've worked SILVER SPOON into the grid somewhere), and WOLF in SHEEP'S CLOTHING would've blown my mind. Maybe that's the issue I'm having—none of these animal phrases were big or bold. They were all very ordinary, with nothing rising to marquee-level material. [side note: I know CAT / CRADLE wouldn't have worked because of specific phrasing, just let me enjoy the song]