The Penguin Jazz Guide (144 page)

The first three records were a joyous ragbag of cover versions, bristling originals and complexities.
Dial E
delivered Sonny Rollins’s ‘Doxy’ as an outlandish shuffle. Gershon has the chutzpah to take apart ‘Brilliant Corners’; and the extravagantly extended ‘17 December’ is a pungent E/O manifesto.
Radium
ran a live gamut from a tragedian’s version of ‘Willow Weep For Me’ to a madcap distillation of ‘Nutty’ and ‘Ode To Billie Joe’, with Roscoe
Mitchell’s ‘Odwallah’ as a bonus.
The Half-Life Of Desire
expanded the palette with Medeski’s arrival; this brilliant keyboardist has a sure grasp of which electronics will and which won’t work in a neo-trad context. Rock and ‘world’ musics get only a modest look-in in this group’s work; its material comes largely from within jazz language itself. Yet it still manages to cover the King Crimson metal blow-out ‘Red’ and tamper with Miles Davis’s ‘Circle In The Round’ on the same record.

The Calculus Of Pleasure
, part live and part studio, and with a brand new rhythm section, is a contemporary masterwork, brilliant and perverse (as the Caravaggio cover possibly signals). There is an astonishing arrangement of Horace Silver’s ‘Ecaroh’, previously a piano trio tune, and a sour, lavish update of Benny Golson’s ‘Whisper Not’ which is an object lesson in renewing stale jazz repertory. Julius Hemphill’s ‘The Hard Blues’ also comes in for a grandly decadent interpretation, with brass and reeds fattening up the harmonies. This leaves five originals from within the band’s own ranks.

CECIL TAYLOR
^&

Born 15 March 1929 (some sources state 25 March and 1930), Long Island, New York

Piano, voice

Celebrated Blazons

FMP CD 58

Taylor; William Parker (b); Tony Oxley (d). June 1990.

Tony Herrington, publisher of
The Wire
, says:
‘His music is partly an art of quotation and recontextualization. His improvisations draw from a vast library of fragments – established phrases, motifs, licks and riffs; favourite intervals, inversions and voicings – which he summons into the here and now each time he solos, reconfiguring and recombining them, impacting them at great speed and with immense force. This is why listening to a solo can bring forth sensations of déjà vu and alienation simultaneously. The familiar is made strange by being rendered in shockingly new conjunctions.’

Tony Oxley is probably the best time drummer on the planet at the moment, which was true even before the death of Elvin Jones. It raises the old litmus question of swing
vis-à-vis
Taylor’s music, since his ever-widening horizons sound more in touch with and touched by jazz tradition than ever, even at a time when he might as likely recite verse – a strange Mayan variant on Charles Olson’s ‘composition by field’ prosody – or dance around the space created by the piano as attack the keyboard immediately. Oxley’s drumming is a more European flavour than anything Taylor’s other regular drummers have created, yet it only serves to emphasize the huge rhythmic resources of the leader’s own playing. Where Cyrille’s magnificent breakers would sometimes obscure the keyboard, Oxley’s playing – a unique blend of lumpen momentum and detailed percussive colour – reveals more of it. Parker, too, is coming into his own, deflecting off what the others do while speaking his own piece. Nearly an hour of music, and, as long as one abandons any narrow construction of the term, it swings.

& See also
Jazz Advance
(1956; p. 191),
Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come
(1962; p. 289),
Conquistador!
(1966; p. 339)

SUN RA
^&

Born Herman Sonny Blount (also known as Sonny Bourke, Le Sony’r Ra), 22 May 1914, Birmingham, Alabama; died 30 May 1993, Birmingham, Alabama

Piano, space organ, keyboards

Mayan Temples

Black Saint 120121

Sun Ra; Ahmed Abdullah, Michael Ray (t, v); Tyrone Hill (tb); Noel Scott (as); Marshall Allen (as, f); John Gilmore (ts, perc); James Jackson (bsn, perc); Jothan Callins (b); Clifford Barbaro, Earl ‘Buster’ Smith (d); Ron McBee, Elson Nascimento Santos, Jorge Silva (perc); June Tyson (v). July 1990.

Bassist Richard Davis said (1987):
‘This happened way back earlier but it tells you something about Sun Ra, several things maybe. We were playing in this club and there was a guy drunk in a booth, head rolling about all over the place, drooling, just about conscious. Sun Ra nodded at me and then nodded toward him and started playing these really weird sounds on his keyboard. I was staring at his hands, but he nodded again toward the drunk guy and he was up, alert and looking hard toward us, apparently sober. The power of Sun Ra music!’

In later years, the Sun Ra discography increasingly became a kind of touring record, with concerts recorded on the fly, and often with no more audio fidelity than those early El Saturn recordings. There was a degree of repetitiveness in the material as well, familiar chants, familiar/unfamiliar oddity of instrumentation, and mixed in with the Henderson-like big-band swing occasional inspired moments of surprise, like the sets devoted to Walt Disney themes.

As Francis Davis points out in his liner-note, this studio session restores the emphasis to Sun Ra’s piano-playing. Illness would shortly curtail his ability to play acoustic keyboards this crisply. His introductions and leads are absolutely in the line of Ellington, and the voicings are supple, open-ended and often quietly ambiguous, leaving considerable emphasis on the soloists. As always, Gilmore is a giant and Marshall Allen’s searing solo on ‘Prelude To Stargazers’ is a model of controlled fury. Ra re-records ‘El Is A Sound Of Joy’ (from
Supersonic Jazz
), a late-’50s theme that sounds completely contemporary and brings a freshness and simplicity to ‘Alone Together’ that is quite breathtaking. ‘Discipline No. 1’ is a lovely ballad, illustrating Sun Ra’s ability to give simple material an unexpected rhythmic profile (Davis rightly points to the example of Mingus in this case) and the closing ‘Sunset On The Night On The River Nile’ is one of his very best space anthems. Few Sun Ra albums give a better sense of his extraordinary versatility.

& See also
Jazz In Silhouette
(1958; p. 230),
The Magic City
(1965; p. 328)

MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS

Born 19 September 1930, Chicago, Illinois

Piano

Blu Blu Blu

Black Saint 120117

Abrams; Joel Brandon (whistle); Jack Walrath (t); Alfred Patterson (tb); Mark Taylor (frhn); Joe Daley (tba); John Purcell (as, f, bcl); Bob DeBellis (as, cl, bcl); David Fiuczynski (g); Lindsey Horne, Brad Jones (b); Warren Smith (vib, tim); Thurman Barker (d). November 1990.

Bassist Brad Jones says:
‘On the first day of rehearsal. I kept hearing a mysterious sound playing the intricate lead melody. At first, I thought it was a synthesizer-player out of my sight-line. Then I noticed a gentleman sitting in front of the saxophones with a microphone directly in front of his puckered lips, whistling one of Muhal’s difficult melodies with perfect intonation. It was Joel Brandon, who just recently passed away. I can’t remember what I said to him after the rehearsal – I guess a lot of dumbfounded marvelling – but what really threw me was talking to Muhal after Joel had left and learning that he didn’t whistle by blowing outward. He blew inward!’

There is no reliable means of measuring ‘influence’. If there were, Abrams would sit very high indeed in the canon. Like any catalyst, he seems remarkably unchanged by the forces he has set in motion. He has no ‘style’ of his own – that is his great strength – but remains a free agent in a current of Black and European idioms, from stride to serialism. Trombonist George Lewis credits him with giving a generation of black musicians – Chicagoans most obviously – permission to attempt anything in music.

A local legend, he founded the Experimental Band in 1960 and co-founded the legendary Association For The Advancement Of Creative Musicians, of which he became first president. Perhaps inevitably, Abrams’s own work has been significantly undervalued. His piano-playing comes out of bebop – Bud Powell rather than Monk – but is rarely foregrounded. There are solo performances but they are little remarked and it’s Abrams’s ensemble writing and leading that seem to define him.

Blu Blu Blu
was his tenth recording for Italian label Black Saint, an association that kept the American avant-garde in view. Given the quality of his output, it is hard to select just one album, but this one remains essential. It continues Abrams’s effort to integrate avant-garde procedures with the most nourishing aspects of Black vernacular, particularly the blues. The title-piece is a dedication to Muddy Waters, played without much development. The whole set, though, is almost hijacked by the remarkable Brandon (who also worked with David Murray); his high, bird-like tones are surreally beautiful and ‘One For The Whistler’ is a
tour de force.
Abrams really gets going as a pianist only on the final ‘Stretch Time’, leaving most of the foreground to a tonally varied and adventurous band. Fiuczynski’s guitar initially sounds out of place, but he is an extraordinary technician. Of the brasses, Walrath is the unchallenged star: punchy, accurate and full of drollery. Barker takes control of the engine room. Abrams is an important figure in the history of the music. One wouldn’t want to stop with this record. He needs to be explored in depth.

GARY BARTZ

Born 26 September 1940, Baltimore, Maryland

Alto, soprano and sopranino saxophones, clarinet, flute, wood flute, percussion

There Goes The Neighborhood!

Candid CCD 79506

Bartz; Kenny Barron (p); Ray Drummond (b); Ben Riley (d). November 1990.

Gary Bartz said (1991):
‘The thing for my generation was to find your own voice. If someone wanted Cannonball Adderley that was who they called. They didn’t call me and ask me to sound like Cannonball. That’s where the work lies, but once you find that voice, that is who you are. Literally who you are.’

Bartz modified the usual tendency for instrumentalists to be influenced by the dominant saxophone sound of the day. As well as hitching his star to Charlie Parker’s wagon, as he did in early days, he was later equally affected by brass-players, mainly Lee Morgan and Grachan Moncur III, with whom he studied. He came to notice with Max Roach’s group and his precocious talents won him a place in the Jazz Messengers, though by this time Bartz had already formed his Ntu Troop, a group which changed rapidly in style over succeeding years. At the start of the ’70s he was recruited to Miles Davis’s electric band, a prominent gig which did much to harden up what was already a strong interest in Afro-funk.

On alto, Bartz still has traces of Charlie Parker bebop, but his sound is nothing like Jackie McLean’s or Sonny Criss’s or any other contender for the keys of the kingdom. There’s an anguished wail in it, but also a defiant weight of delivery, with distinct, emphatic phrasing. Bartz’s own early records were admired, and some still crop up in acid-jazz contexts, but it wasn’t until the end of the ’80s that he appeared to come through as a distinctive
leader, a moment in jazz history when bebop language became more prominently viable and a basic idiom.

There Goes The Neighbourhood!
is Gary’s finest hour. The opening ‘Racism’ is a boiling blues, an original played with an increasingly noticeable Coltrane inflexion. The first of two Tadd Dameron compositions, ‘On A Misty Night’ was originally recorded in the mid-’50s in a band that included Coltrane; the mid-point of the set is a severe interpretation of ‘Impressions’. Bartz’s homage isn’t limited to a growing repertoire of anguished cries and dissonant transpositions. He has also paid attention to how the younger Coltrane framed a solo; working against the trajectory of Dameron’s theme, but sitting comfortably inside the beat, he constructs an ascending line that culminates each time in a beautifully placed false note. The result is as lovely as it is unsettling.

Johnny Mercer’s ‘Laura’ receives a serene and stately reading, with Drummond featured. Bartz’s coda restatement is masterful. He tackles ‘Impressions’ in the most boiled-down way, with only minimal rhythmic support, concentrating on the basics. Barron returns to the foreground for ‘I’ve Never Been In Love’ and the closing ‘Flight Path’, his own composition. Throughout, his touch is light but definite, freeing his accompaniments of any excess baggage.

Though Charles McPherson and Bobby Watson have previously laid claim to Parker’s alto crown, Bartz appears to have come into his kingdom at last. A superb album; recorded live at Birdland, it’s well balanced and free from extraneous noise.

CHICO HAMILTON
^&

Born Foreststorn Hamilton, 21 September 1921, Los Angeles, California

Drums

Arroyo

Soul Note 121241

Hamilton; Eric Person (as, ss); Cary DeNigris (g); Reggie Washington (b). December 1990.

Chico Hamilton said (1993):
‘I never really knew whether Eric [Dolphy] was taken too soon or whether he had done all he came here to do. From my own point of view, I value each new day as offering something else. It would have been a waste if I had not been allowed to carry on all these years. I feel blessed by life,
euphoric
.’