The Penguin Jazz Guide (113 page)

Almost inevitably, eight years later, fans were tearing the cellophane off
Together Again
and the MJQ story picked up afresh until Connie Kay’s death, and then Jackson’s brought to an end the ‘Beatles get back together’ scenarios.

& See also
Dedicated To Connie
(1960; p. 254);
JOHN LEWIS, Golden Striker / Jazz Abstractions
(1960; p. 253),
Evolution
(1999; p. 638)

HARRY MILLER

Born 25 April 1941, Cape Town, South Africa; died 16 December 1983, Netherlands

Double bass

The Collection

Ogun HMCD 1/2/3 3CD

Miller; Marc Charig (c, ahn); Malcolm Griffiths, Radu Malfatti, Wolter Wierbos (tb); Mike Osborne (as); Trevor Watts (ss, as); Willem Breuker (ts, bcl); Sean Bergin (ts); Keith Tippett (p); Louis Moholo (d); Julie Tippetts (v). 1974–March 1983.

Hazel Miller remembers:
‘Harry arrived in the UK before the Blue Notes, along with his childhood friend Manfred Mann. He was overjoyed when his fellow countrymen arrived and he could take his music out into shared territory with them. His partnership with Louis Moholo as the great rhythm team is legendary. He was 110 per cent musician.’

Miller worked in R&B with Manfred Mann and gigged with trad star Alex Welsh before shipping out on cruise liners to New York, where he experienced modern jazz at first hand. Thereafter he became a key figure on the British modernist scene, working with most of the major figures and, via his and Hazel Miller’s Ogun label, vigorously promoting the music of South African exiles in London and others. His early death, in a road accident while on tour, was a tragedy for British music.

Miller was an inspirational presence wherever he played, a musician who spoke entirely in his own voice, and with a quiet passion. The gentleness of his solo bass on
Children At Play
was perfectly at ease with the rhythmic intensity of his section-work on group albums like
Down South
or
Family Affair
, which he made with his group Isipingo. Most of his records as leader were released on the label he helped found, and
The Collection
has been put together with loving care by Hazel Miller and John Jack, keepers of the flame. In addition to the three albums already mentioned, the set includes
Bracknell Breakdown
, a set of duets with trombonist Radu Malfatti, and
In Conference
, with the two-saxophone front line of Trevor Watts and Willem Breuker. The box also includes a booklet of photographs and the memories of friends and fellow players.

The best measure of Harry’s gifts can be had from the solo record, which has overdubbed flute and percussion parts, played over a rolling township beat that conveyed Harry’s profound immersion in the musics of his native country. As with many of the South African exiles in Britain, he found the transition from settled grooves to free music perfectly congenial, and his out-of-tempo work on
Bracknell Breakdown
and
Down South
(made during the last year of his life and the only record not released on Ogun) is suggestive of a player who worked to a deeper, inner rhythm. He always had a special understanding with trombonists, perhaps drawn to that low, vocalized tonality, and some of his best work was in the company of Malfatti, Wierbos and Griffiths.

Through this set, ‘Aitchy’ lives.

KEITH JARRETT
^&

Born 8 May 1945, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Piano, soprano saxophone, other instruments

The Köln Concert

ECM 810067-2 2CD

Jarrett (p solo). January 1975.

Jarrett’s biographer, Ian Carr, said (1994):
‘He is no longer playing merely at a conscious level, but in something like the state of grace Bill Evans entered on some of his improvisations. Even if [
The Köln Concert
] wasn’t made in the near ideal circumstances Evans enjoyed at the Village Vanguard, it’s easily in that league and perhaps even beyond it. Transcendent music.’

An epochal record in modern jazz. Made in conditions of exceptional difficulty – not least an audibly unsatisfactory piano and some of the health problems that have dogged the pianist for many years – but Jarrett not for the last time makes a virtue of adversity, carving out huge slabs of music with a rare intensity. His instrument does sound off-puttingly bad-tempered, and even an amateur piano-player could tell where the problem keys were, but his concentration on the middle register throughout the performance creates a hypnotic effect that is still entrancing listeners more than 30 years later.
The Köln Concert
is not just that rare thing, a best-selling jazz record, but that even rarer one, a record whose immense popularity isn’t occasioned by a watered-down or compromised performance.

& See also
El Juicio (The Judgement)
(1971; p. 386),
Standards: Volume 1
(1983; p. 474),
Always Let Me Go
(2001; p. 663)

SOS

Formed 1973

Group

SOS

Ogun OGCD019

Alan Skidmore (ts, d, perc); Mike Osborne (as, perc); John Surman (ss, bs, bcl, syn). January & February 1975.

Alan Skidmore remembers:
‘All three of us had been doing our own thing, but we had worked together from time to time and knew we had an affinity. Then I had a horrendous car accident and was laid up for three months. Mike Osborne also had his own health problems. John Surman was in constant touch, and it was his suggestion, while visiting me in hospital, that we should form a trio. I’ll always be grateful for that.’

There are few musical formats duller than the classical saxophone quartet, but the form has a surprisingly robust jazz history: World, 29th Street, ROVA, Position Alpha, Scotland’s Hung Drawn – quartets that have made significant contributions to ideas of jazz ensemble, and without succumbing to classical formalities. SOS got round the problem of fielding only three saxophones by having John Surman programme some moody and highly effective synth patches, anticipating the kind of multitracked solo project he had sketched with
Westering Home
in 1972 and would bring to mature expression with
Upon Reflection
, recorded in 1979 for ECM. The other inspiration was to put Alan Skidmore – always a percussionist
manqué
– at the drumkit for a couple of numbers. The basic formula, though, was a set of unison
ostinati
, often with folkish themes, out of which one or other member would swoop off on a solo foray. This is evident on the opening ‘Country Dance’, which sounds exactly like that, while the diversified instrumentation is showcased on ‘Wherever I Am’. All three players bring a different kind of intensity: Skidmore’s Coltrane-tinged harmonics, Surman’s already distinctive blend of traditional forms, church music and free jazz, Osborne’s singing tone and highly emotional articulation. Surman’s electronics were apparently recorded in February, after the main session. There’s certainly no sense that the horns are following a backing track; the interplay is elastic and spontaneous. It’s a great pity that there isn’t some unreleased material to stretch the original session beyond the enchanting ‘Calypso’
but given how fondly the original LP was remembered, a whole generation of jazz fans was simply grateful to have a playable copy again. There was to be no follow-up record, which only adds to
SOS
’s enduring appeal.

MILES DAVIS
^&

Born 26 May 1926, Alton, Illinois; died 28 September 1991, Santa Monica, California

Trumpet, flugelhorn, organ

Agharta

Columbia 467897 2CD

Davis; Sonny Fortune (as, ss, f); Pete Cosey (g, syn, perc); Reggie Lucas (g); Michael Henderson (b); Al Foster (d); Mtume (perc). February 1975.

Miles’s biographer, Ian Carr, said (1990):
‘His lip is strong on those recordings, but there’s a desperate quality to them as well. He sounds mournful to me, more sad than defiant or celebratory; but you marvel at the power.’

After
Bitches Brew
, Miles Davis was a different kind of ‘jazz’ musician; after
Jack Johnson
and
On The Corner
, different again. But if it was hard to square the man who made those records with the Miles of
E.S.P.
,
Sorcerer
and
Nefertiti
, it was virtually impossible to reconcile the universally admired Miles Davis of
Kind Of Blue
with the chthonic monster of
Agharta
and its companion record,
Pangaea
. Here was a Miles who had left bebop pretty much behind, gone over almost completely to electric instruments and to some degree (and for whatever reason, medical or musical) ‘given up’ trumpet-playing. The hip problems – cue bad joke: ‘Miles was so cool, even his surgery was hip’ – had recurred, and with them some unfortunate psychological issues. This may seem a perverse place to take leave of Miles Davis, with 15 years of work still ahead of him and such obvious beauties as ‘Time After Time’ and ‘Human Nature’ passed over in silence. It may even seem a faddish choice, a sop to the rock, metal and noise constituency who in the ’90s and ’00s accepted these records as ancestral texts.

It bears repeating: Miles’s trumpet-playing on these bruising, unconscionable records is of the highest and most adventurous order, not the desperate posturing of a sick and cynical man, or one who has ‘given up’ his main voice. The use of a wah-wah pedal is subtle, creating surges and ebbs in a harmonically static line, allowing Miles to build huge melismatic variations. The problem with these dates isn’t the trumpeter but the band: Fortune gets the point, and plays some startlingly good solo material, but doesn’t have to do much; Henderson tends to plod, even within his technically limited role; and the two guitarists go off on long, rock-god solos that are almost laughably tame and blustery when set alongside Miles’s knife-fighter attacks. Yet, even at their most intense and freaked-out, Cosey and Lucas do little more than lay out an electric carpet, or carrier-deck, for Miles’s own contributions. To the perennial question of how much creative authority he has ceded, the answer here is: very little, if any.

The music on
Agharta
and
Pangaea
was recorded at two performances at the Festival Hall in Osaka in February 1975. Unlike the studio albums with Macero, these are unmistakably unedited. A re-run ‘Maishya’ and a long edit from the
Jack Johnson
theme retrospectively clinch the experiments of
Live–Evil
and
Get Up With It
. The idiom incorporates Stockhausen’s conception of a ‘world music’ that moves like creeping tectonic plates (‘Pangaea’ and ‘Gondwana’ are the names palaeo-geographers give to the primeval super-continents) to African-American popular forms, though it’s clear that Sly Stone has been left as far behind as bebop. ‘Gondwana’ is the most coherent performance on either album. It opens on Fortune’s delicate flute and proceeds trance-like, with Miles’s central trumpet
episode bracketed by shimmering organ outlines and sullen, percussive stabs. Key centres are only notional and deceptive; most of the rhythmic activity takes place along a single axis, but with considerable variation in the intensity and coloration of the pulse; the ‘solos’ are continuous and inseparable from the main thrust of the music. Although admittedly problematic and unsoftened by time, these no longer seem quite as forbidding as on first appearance. How could the man who made
Kind Of Blue
make
Agharta
? One might as well ask how the Scott Walker who had crooned ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’ could also have made
Tilt
, or – to push the absurdity full way – how the Louis Armstrong of ‘Potato Head Blues’ could have made ‘Hello Dolly’. It isn’t a rhetorical question and in the answer lies much of the history of recent jazz.

& See also
The Complete Birth Of The Cool
(1948–1950; p. 121),
Miles Ahead
(1957; p. 208),
Kind Of Blue
(1959; p. 232),
The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel
(1965; p. 331),
In A Silent Way
(1969; p. 361)

GATO BARBIERI

Born Leandro Barbieri, 28 November 1932, Rosario, Argentina

Tenor saxophone, percussion, voice

Chapter 4: Alive In New York

Impulse! 4274

Barbieri; Howard Johnson (flhn, tba, bcl); Eddie Martinez (ky); Paul Metzke (g); Ron Carter (b); Portinho (d). February 1975.

Saxophonist David Liebman said (1990):
‘He’s a very underrated saxophone-player. That vocalized tone and his control when playing altissimo, those are quite influential with younger players, except mostly critics assume it’s coming from Albert Ayler.’

The intense, vocalized sound and upper-register screams can easily tip over into self-parody (perhaps not helped by having his image copied as the model for the Muppet character Zoot), but Barbieri remains a greatly underrated figure whose innovations have been eclipsed by pop and film projects. He moved to Buenos Aires in his teens and began his professional career in Lalo Schifrin’s orchestra. He then switched to tenor and after a period on the European avant-garde scene, working with Don Cherry, Enrico Rava and others, he began to create his own distinctive hybrid of jazz and South American folk forms.