Lesser Known Trumpeters

Dave Douglas' Greenleaf Music blog referenced a nice, informative post about some of the great, but lesser known, trumpeter players through the years. It's on a blog called Curt's Jazz Cafe. It's worth checking out; one of them, Louis Smith, I wasn't familiar with.

A Great Time for Jazz

There was a recent post in JazzCorner's Speakeasy Forum that stated that "The players in New York are too busy slinging old hash around at Smalls or bellowing to the rafters at the Stone, while everybody else seems more fascinated by beeps and blips—you know, "texture"—than music." 

I agree to a point, but right now is an incredibly fertile time for Jazz that combines composition with improvisation in interesting ways. Some of the players who I think are emblematic of this area are Taylor Ho Bynum, Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock, Kris Davis, Satoko Fujii, Myra Melford (note how many are women), John Hebert, Tyshawn Sorey, Ken Filiano, Harris Eisenstadt, Liberty Ellman, Russ Lossing, Adam Lane, Matt Bauder, Nate Wooley, John Hollenbeck, Tomas Fujiwara (note how many are drummers), Tony Malaby and Peter Evans. I'm sure I've left many people out as well. 

There was a recent post in that same Forum about the meaning of Third Stream Music. I think a lot of what these artists produce could be considered a new type of Third Stream, one that integrates many types of musics with jazz and creates an organic blend in which the elements mesh seamlessly. 

This is a great time to love Jazz, even if it puts a strain on your wallet!

Recent Passings

They say deaths come in threes, but it seems like many notable people in and out of the jazz world have passed away recently. In addition to George Russell, drummer Rashied Ali and multi-reedist Joe Maneri recently left us. Ali is probably the better known musician, due to his work with John Coltrane on Concert in Japan and, most famously, Interstellar Space shortly before Coltrane passed away in 1967. His approach to free rhythms solidified and extended what had been started by Sunny Murray, Andrew Cyrille and Milford Graves.

Joe Maneri, a Boston-area legend, was a one-of-a-kind voice who played alto, tenor, clarinet and piano. He is best-known for pioneering micro-tonal playing, which divides the octave into 72 tones rather than the 12-tone equal temperment system found in most Western music. He was a long-time faculty member of the New England Conservatory of Music and counted Matthew Shipp among his students.

Joe experienced a renewal of interest in his music starting in the 90's, based partly on the emergence of his son, Mat, as a bright new voice on violin and viola. Maneri recorded for both Leo and ECM; his albums with Mat and bassist Barre Phillips, Tales of Rohnlief and Angles of Repose, are a good place to start an exploration of his music, as is the duet album with Mat, Blessed, also on ECM. Once you immerse yourself in their world, the albums have a strange beauty to them underneath a dissonant exterior.

(Waiting For The) Flood

Right now I am righteously digging Flood, a Japanese Sony release from Herbie Hancock that contains parts of two concerts he gave in Tokyo in 1974. The set lists are from his Headhunters, Thrust and Man-Child albums, with the exception of Maiden Voyage, and the band is all-star: Bennie Maupin, Paul Jackson, Mike Clark, Bill Summers and Blackbird McKnight.

When I first got this (as a two-CD set a few years ago), I liked it OK but it didn't really get to me. For some reason I pulled it out a couple of days ago and it just burns! For me the highlights are Bennie Maupin's solos on tenor and soprano. He is one of my all-time favorites with his ability to play the blues like no other and go outside without sounding like a Trane clone. I also love the tone he gets on all his horns.

If I were to knit-pick I'd say a couple of Hancock's solos go on a little too long, but overall this band is tight and works it. If you like the best kind of fusion, then get this.

In Praise of Sam Rivers

The Destination Out blog has a nice post about Sam Rivers, including three trio tracks from his 1975 album Hues. As a teenager in the 70's, I visited my local record store and bought Rivers' Involution, which was part of the Blue Note Reissue Series. That record and Andrew Hill's One For One, also part of the series, just blew me away. As much as I liked Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane, the intensity of Rivers' tone and his compositions just reached me like no other tenor player. The fact that he wrote his own exercises also appealed to me. 

I had a chance to see him with the University of North Texas big band about 6-7 years ago and they did a great job with his charts. As Destination Out states, Sam Rivers should be much better known than he is.

Goin' to Kansas City

Count Basie's Kansas City Suite was one of the first big band records I bought when I was starting to listen to jazz. It was one-half of a two-record set on Roulette Records (Roulette RE-124) that also featured Easin' It. At the time (the early '70's),  Roulette was making a lot of their back catalog available as part of their Echoes of an Era series. Others that I picked up along the way included a set that provided my first exposure to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Putting this on the turntable for the first time in probably 30 years really brought back the rush that I felt when I was discovering jazz. I knew that Count Basie was a big name, but I didn't know where to begin when I bought the album. Even with my limited knowledge at the time, I knew when I got it home and saw the recording date was 1960 that it wasn't from the golden era of the  big bands. Regardless, Kansas City Suite is classic, bluesy Basie. The Suite was composed and arranged by Benny Carter, who never actually played with the band. The ten tracks have a vaguely familiar feel now that I've listened to a lot of jazz, but the writing and playing are top-notch. This edition of the Orchestra included Snooky Young, Thad Jones, Marshall Royal, Frank Wess, Frank Foster and of course Freddie Green.

Listening to this as a teenager transported me to New York, to a mysterious world that I was just discovering and imagining. It was a nice way to spend part of an afternoon getting acquainted with it again.

Some Bid'ness

I'm in the process of listening to albums that I haven't played in literally years, and I pulled Julius Hemphill's 'Coon Bid'ness (Arista Freedom) from the shelf this morning. I always liked Julius' alto, but I had forgotten how great the compositions are on this recording. They defy easy categorization, and share a fascination with timbre and a sense of occasional whimsy with the AACM membership. The line-up is pretty great too: (Black) Arthur Blythe, Hamiett Bluiett, Baikida E. J. Carroll, Abdul Wadud on the funkiest cello you'll ever hear, Barry Altschul, Philip Wilson.

The Hard Blues, indeed.

I Like Conflict

The album, that is. (rim shot!) I'm speaking of altoist Jimmy Woods' 1963 album Conflict, recorded for the Contemporary label and featuring an impressive lineup of Harold Land on tenor, Carmell Jones on trumpet, Andrew Hill on piano, George Tucker on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. This was only Woods' second session as a leader but it would prove to be his last, for reasons of which I'm unaware.

Conflict features six Woods originals; he also arranged all the selections. I originally bought the album used (for $35.00, gulp) when I was going through my obsessive Hill collecting phase. Hill certainly doesn't disappoint: Even though it was early in his career, his unique approach to rhythm and harmony are a positive disruption to the bop-influenced compositions. But Woods impresses as well, as he has an urgent, keening quality to his solos that set him apart from the pack. His tart tone and intervallic leaps, particularly on Apart Together and Look to Your Heart, remind me of Eric Dolphy, and in spots, mid-70s Braxton.

Doe anyone know what happened to him? Seems a shame he didn't record more.

A Tribute to Tribute

There's an interesting thread over at the ECM Forum on JazzCorner.com about overlooked gems on that label, records that received little fanfare when they were first released. One of my nominations is drummer Paul Motian's Tribute (ECM 1048), issued in 1975 and featuring Carlos Ward on alto sax, Sam Brown and Paul Metzke on guitars, and Charlie Haden on bass. I bought the album new for $5.79 (!) and I love the combination of Ornette's influence and the deep but free groove that Motian and Haden set up. It's some of my favorite Haden, helped in part by the great bass sound achieved by engineer Tony May.

Fortunately, it has been reissued on CD and is available on ECM's site.

8/05/09 What I'm Listening To

Sonny Clark, Sonny's Crib

Sonny Rollins, The Bridge

Bobby Hutcherson, The Kicker

Bobby Hutcherson, Dialogue

Hancock, et al, In Concert Volume 1

A Sad Day

I learned that George Russell, composer and pianist, passed away last night at the age of 86. He created the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which influenced Miles Davis' and John Coltrane's use of modes, and the system has been called "the only original theory to come from jazz".

His string of mid-50s albums for Riverside highlighted his original compositional sense and his outstanding arrangements for small groups. The mid- 60s Live at Beethoven Hall albums for the German MPS label featured Don Cherry and are some of my absolute favorites to this day. His reworking of classics like Round Midnight demonstrate how the Lydian Concept changes a musician's approach to the relationship between scales and chords.

During the sixties he worked frequently in Europe, particularly Sweden, and his recordings feature some of the earliest work from future ECM mainstays Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal and Jon Christensen. He returned to the United States, taught at the New England Conservatory of Music, and released big band albums like The African Game on Blue Note. In the eighties he formed the Living Time Orchestra with a pool of international musicians. This chapter of his career is his least interesting, in my opinion, as the rock influences sound a little corny and overdone to these ears.

Nonetheless, George Russell was an relatively unsung giant in the jazz world, and I will be listening to his work for years to come.

The Good Old Days

Like a lot of jazz fans, I buy most of my CDs through mail order, but back in the day (the day being when we actually had things called record stores) I also bought from brick-and-mortar outfits to support their efforts. For example, the Tower store here in Dallas had a surprisingly good jazz section. There was just no substitute for browsing, finding something unexpected, and taking it home that day.

This is surely a case of beating a dead horse, but I find it incredibly sad that I can’t go out on my day off and buy a copy of one of the new ECMs (Parker, Sclavis, Vitous) anywhere in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex.  An area of several million people, and no one carries this stuff anymore!

New Releases We’ll See in 20 Years

The Hits: The Very Best of Evan Parker and the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble

Steve Reynolds Collector’s Edition of Mujician’s Colours Fulfilled with inflatable Paul Dunmall doll

Sine Wave Sonata for test pattern and no-output ironing board (Erstwhile)

Diana Krall and Mats Gustafsson: Love Songs

And on the Fox Network Times (formerly the New York Times) Bestseller’s List:

How I Killed Jass Music by Jon Abbey

In Praise of Patrick Gleeson

The "fusion" movement of the late 60's/70's was a mixed bag, with innovations in rhythm, tonal palettes and the use of electronics charting a new path yet standing alongside indulgent excesses that today you might be embarrassed to admit you listened to (Romantic Warrior, anyone?) 

Someone I think is due for more recognition is Dr. Patrick Gleeson, who was part of Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi group that recorded Crossings for Warner Bros. and Sextant for Columbia. If memory serves, I believe he taught Herbie about the synthesizer. He is also an integral presence on Julian Priester's overlooked Love, Love, which I think is a fusion classic. If you haven't checked that album out, which ECM re-released on CD, it's worth your time.

He seemed to disappear for awhile, but he and Bennie Maupin put out Driving While Black in 1998. It's ironic that the advances in keyboard technology and sequencing make him a little more generic sounding than his earlier analog work. I see that he released Jazz Criminal in 2007 with Jim Lang, who appears to be a studio keyboard player. Anyone heard this?

My Earliest Braxton Memory

I believe the first time I heard Anthony Braxton was while listening to Willis Conover's Voice of America broadcast one morning before school, around '73 or '74. I had heard of Braxton, but I think this was before New York Fall 1974 came out, which was my formal introduction to his music.

The broadcast was a tape from the Newport Jazz Festival, one of those all-star jams where they play a theme, a seemingly endless parade of soloists follow, and then the theme is restated. Braxton just cut through like a knife with his uniquely angular phrasing, and he got the biggest ovation from the crowd. 

Does anyone know the specifics of this performance? I don't think it's ever been released.

First Take: Satoko Fujii/Myra Melford, Under The Water

Libra 202-024

Satoko Fujii, piano

Myra Melford, piano

I've been a longtime fan of both Ms. Fujii and Ms. Melford's work, but I had a moment's hesitation before I ordered this CD. Could they mesh their approaches and create something special? Would this be a case of "two great tastes that taste great together"? (My apologies to Reese's, and whoever's reading this.) I needn't have worried; to say Under The Water exceeded my expectations is putting it mildly.

Recorded live at Maybeck Studio in Berkeley, CA by the redoubtable Myles Boisen, the program consists of three duets and one solo performance from each artist. The solos are tremendous; you would expect that. It's the duets that just knocked me out. There's no meandering going on here, no sense of each feeling the other out. Fujii and Melford have a single-mindedness and sense of direction that's astonishing. At times it sounds like one very, very good pianist is playing and it's hard to separate the contributions. 

As soon as the CD finished, I couldn't wait to hear it again. One of the very best I've heard this year.

The Curious Case of Steve Kuhn

ECM Records has announced that they will be releasing a new recording from Steve Kuhn with Joe Lovano on 7/07/09 called Mostly Coltrane. I'm somewhat looking forward to hearing this, but Mr. Kuhn has been a frustrating figure to me for many years.

In the 70's, he released Trance, a wonderful album from a time when, as a friend once stated, "Every album ECM released was a classic." It was a unique fusion of jazz and classical music, with a dash of Kuhn's wry sense of humor. If memory serves, he went on to record a couple of more albums for ECM and then his output seemed to drop off.

I saw him with a trio at the Village Vanguard in New York in the mid-eighties and he put me to sleep. Every once in a while I've come across a CD of his, but they seemed to be standards-based, which struck me as curious because I liked his original compositions so much. I have his ECM CD Remembering Tomorrow, which again seemed a little lifeless to me, but I'm glad he's back with a new one on the label that's released his best work.

If anyone has opinions on the ECM albums he released in the late-seventies, Motility and Non-Fiction, please post a comment.

5/31/09 What I'm Listening To

George Russell, The Essence of...

Ellery Eskelin, One Great Night - Live

Wayne Shorter, Etc.

Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band, disc 2

Unintentionally Amusing Reviews

It's admittedly a challenge to try to describe sound to someone who hasn't heard what you're hearing, but I still get a giggle when I read certain record reviews. Recently I came across a couple on the All About Jazz site that caught my attention.

First up, from Raul d'Gama Rose's review of Revolutions, a large ensemble recording by Jim Beard:

"Beard is first and foremost a composer of the highest artistic skill. His approach to music is primarily through the classic elements of song. This gives every composition a form. He must then shape the form by twisting the melody and imbuing it with challenging harmonies so that it can take on a shape and life of its own."

OK, I'm not a musician, but isn't that what most composers do (at least those working within any kind of traditional Western framework)?

Later, in the same review:

"Beard's music here is down to earth and echoes with the memory of events that may have been memorable at one time."

Ahh, Memories...(cue the Cat's soundtrack)

Then we have Glen Astarita's review of Live by Marteau Rouge with Evan Parker: 

"The foursome generates a sense of urgency amid intriguing dialogues and streaming treatments, and strikes an asymmetrical balance, awash with lucid imagery, that spans catastrophic events and hardcore noise-shaping motifs."

Ummm...what?

Does anyone else ever react in a similar fashion, or do I just need more coffee?

5/26/09 What I'm Listening To

Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band, disc 1

Ellery Eskelin, Ten

Tina Brooks, Minor Move

The Pixies, Doolittle