The Penguin Jazz Guide (164 page)

& See also
Homage To Charles Parker
(1979; p. 455)

GUY BARKER

Born 26 December 1957, Chiswick, London

Trumpet

What Love Is

Emarcy 558381

Barker; Jamie Talbot (cl, f, af); Perico Sambeat (as); Andy Panayi (f, af); David Hartley (p); Geoff Gascoyne (b); Gene Calderazzo (d); Sting (v); strings. November 1997.

Guy Barker remembers:
‘Richard [Cook] knew the label would want standards, but we talked about doing more unusual material, jazz ballads by Monk, Strayhorn and Jimmy Rowles, even an Ornette Coleman medley. “Crazy She Calls Me” wasn’t going right. Richard wanted to cut a section out, but [arranger] Colin Towns and I didn’t think there was anything wrong. The next day we did the piece the way Richard wanted it and immediately it felt different. Something just happened. Even the introduction felt different. It felt fantastic. I went back into the recording booth and Richard was sitting there with tears in his eyes. He bent his head and said: “That’s my favourite track.” ’

Barker’s standing as the doyen of Britain’s younger trumpeters has scarcely resulted in a flood of recordings under his own name. However, he has remained busy and has prevailed in recent years with some fine recording for the Provocateur label and with a self-produced Mozart-inspired project that won considerable critical acclaim. Barker’s early recordings appeared on Spotlite and Miles Music before he was picked up by Polygram, where his records were produced by the late Richard Cook. This one bespeaks growing confidence in both men, and in the working relationship. It’s an elegant record and all the more striking for blending in adventurous material among the standards. Opening with Rowles’s ‘The Peacocks’ immediately suggests its originality, but it is with ‘Monk’s Mood’ and the Ornette medley that it really takes shape. Barker is in inspired form and the strings play with understanding.

Barker would go on to even more adventurous work but this one stands apart and remains one of his finest moments.

ELTON DEAN

Born 28 October 1945, Nottingham, England; died 8 February 2006, London

Alto saxophone, saxello

Newsense

Slam CD 229

Dean; Jim Dvorak (t); Roswell Rudd, Paul Rutherford, Annie Whitehead (tb); Alex Maguire (p); Marcio Mattos (clo); Roberto Bellatalla (b); Mark Sanders (d). November 1997.

Elton Dean said (1997):
‘Ninesense was wonderful, like an old-fashioned touring band. We’d find ourselves driving round Norfolk, lost in the fog, looking for some little venue or college. There aren’t places like that to play any more. I loved it.’

He gifted part of his name to early blues associate Elton John, when they were both working for Long John Baldry (who supplied the other half), and took his inspiration from the saxophone heavyweights like Trane and Joe Henderson. Along the way, assisted by a vintage King saxello, a sort of curvy soprano, Dean created a sound all his own, tight-toned and highly expressive, that was always identifiable whether working in a neo-rock context or even when buried away in the free regiment of the London Improvisers Orchestra. His debut album, since revived by the splendid Cuneiform, was recorded while Dean was still with Soft Machine, made largely with fellow Softs. It was mainly improvised, though ‘Neo Caliban Grides’ was a band number. The washes of electric piano are reminiscent of Miles’s electric experiments, with Marc Charig’s plaintive cornet clinching the connection.

After leaving Soft Machine, Dean seemed to be everywhere, leading his own post-bop groups (and eventually Soft Heap), playing with Keith Tippett and Howard Riley, and turning up in almost every conceivable setting the UK offered. Recognition in America awaited the rediscovery of the old stuff by Cuneiform. One of the happiest periods was with the almost-big-band Ninesense, three pairs of horns plus rhythm and a book of strong anthemic tunes influenced by Tippett and the Brotherhood Of Breath. The group made one record for Ogun and some BBC tapes turned up a few years ago, still with the ill-fated Mongezi Feza in the line-up.

Not surprisingly, Dean tried to re-create the experience twenty years later. The new outfit was further fruit of Dean’s association with Roswell Rudd. The brass are excellent, with American-born Dvorak more than holding his own against the trombones, a tight, high sound that always sounds as if it might tear but never does. The paired bass and cello are very effective with Mattos’s wailing, mystical sound pushed well to the fore. He and Dean are the two most provocative and moving voices in the ensemble. Dean has rarely sounded as exuberant and joyous, and the improvised ‘Snap, Crackle And Pop’ with Rudd and Whitehead is a delight from start to finish.

KEN PEPLOWSKI

Born 23 May 1959, Cleveland, Ohio

Clarinet, tenor saxophone

Grenadilla

Concord CCD 4809

Peplowski; Kenny Davern (cl); Marty Ehrlich (cl, bcl); J. D. Parran (cbcl); Scott Robinson (acl); Ben Aronov (p); Howard Alden (g); Greg Cohen (b); Chuck Redd (d). December 1997.

Ken Peplowski says (2005):
‘I have a love affair with the clarinet. It isn’t just a saxophonist’s “double”. It’s a quite different instrument and it deserves to be treated that way. I don’t just practise; I
really
practise, and in a pretty structured way.’

Peplowski is already a veteran of the swing-repertory school which has kept that stream of American jazz robust through some very lean times, but he is also a player who, like his fellow clarinettist Kenny Davern, isn’t afraid to venture into free territory when called upon. Peplowski grew up in Cleveland and started his career young, playing in polka groups, before working with the posthumous Tommy Dorsey band, and with Benny Goodman, before his idol’s death in 1986.

Like a number of the catalogue’s stars, he has a very big discography on Concord, but much of it fell foul of corporate ‘rationalization’, a situation Peplowski openly regrets. They’re all worth looking for, but
Grenadilla
stands out on a number of counts. It might seem perverse to choose a record that reflects a less familiar side of his playing personality, but it is a powerful and ambitious record, too little recognized as such on first release.

Grenadilla is the wood from which the majority of quality clarinets are made. Like any other rainforest tree, it is endangered, and Peplowski dedicates this remarkable album to its preservation. Perhaps even more importantly, though, he makes the record an expression of his own desire to preserve jazz tradition even as he pushes it forward creatively. Here, the guests represent wildly different aspects of contemporary clarinet-playing.

Working together for the first time, Peplowski and the veteran Kenny Davern combine on the New Orleans Rhythm Kings’ ‘Farewell Blues’, a tune first recorded in 1922. Davern’s calm delivery complements Peplowski’s own characteristically fervid statement; he has seldom sounded more like Benny Goodman’s modernist descendant. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Marty Ehrlich’s ‘The Reconsidered Blues’ and ‘The Soul In The Wood’ and Greg Cohen’s brief, powerful ‘Variations’, on which Parran, Robinson and Ehrlich again guest. At first blush, Ehrlich might seem the arch-modernist, but his moody clarinet and bass clarinet, and Parran’s subterranean contrabass instrument, are put to quite traditional ends. Peplowski has a nice way of making musicians reveal their roots.

The rest of the original writing is credited to Ben Aronov, who continues to surprise. He is the composer of the two quartet tracks and the opening ‘Benny’s Pennies’ (no real relation to the Tristano number), on which Alden makes the first of several strong contributions. At the end of the album, ‘Farewell Blues’ is sandwiched between two classics which show the guitarist and the leader at their intuitive best: Victor Herbert’s ‘Indian Summer’ and, done as a drummerless, pianoless trio, ‘Cry Me A River’. An exquisite end to a remarkable album.

KENNY DREW JR

Born 14 June 1958, New York City

Piano

Passionata

Arkadia 70561

Drew; Peter Washington (b); Lewis Nash (d); strings. January 1998.

Kenny Drew Jr said (1991):
‘My first gig was courtesy of [pianist] John Hicks who heard me play, liked what he heard and asked me to sub for him at a date where he could only play the first half. When I got there, I realized the piano was missing keys and had busted strings. I got through it and, as well as surviving, was given a cheque for $35 … which bounced. Welcome to the jazz life!’

The fruit rarely falls far from the tree, but Drew Jr is a very different fellow to his father. He’s a tough-minded and clearly spoken proponent of creative values in jazz and, one dares say, a more adventurous stylist than Kenny Sr. Inevitably, the discographical record is patchy, with a lot of early material out of circulation and only to be found on Japanese and European
imprints and in specialist stores. But it’s worth seeking out. Kenny’s pianism is brisk, effective and unmistakably modern.

He bears his father’s name, but was raised by relatives, so any direct influence can only have been through records, or by conscious effort a little later. It wasn’t until the end of the ’90s that Kenny Jr began to programme his father’s work prominently.
Passionata
is a full-scale tribute, titled after an unfinished song, played here for the first time. The set also includes Drew Sr material like ‘Dark Beauty’, one of the old man’s finest compositions, and standards that he must have played a thousand times. There’s even a delightful reading of ‘Hush-a-Bye’, a European lullaby that Kenny Sr apparently enjoyed and which seems to ghost into a couple of his improvisations in the Steeplechase years. These are fresh interpretations, though; ‘Summertime’ is given a classical spin and other tracks veer from the expected line. This is certainly the most accommodating and inventive trio Kenny has worked with. Washington has an enormous range and a capacity for free, full melody alongside a strong, sure beat, leaving Nash to embellish and elaborate. The strings are arranged by Bob Belden, unobtrusive, idiomatic and cleanly registered.

DAVE DOUGLAS
^&

Born 24 March 1963, Montclair, New Jersey

Trumpet

Convergence

Soul Note 121316-2

Douglas; Mark Feldman (vn); Erik Friedlander (clo); Drew Gress (b); Michael Sarin (d). January 1998.

Pianist Michael Jefry Stevens, with Douglas the main composer for the Mosaic Sextet, says:
‘I met Dave around 1985. He was probably 19 and walked into a jam session I led every Sunday afternoon at the now defunct Seventh Avenue South jazz club in the West Village, owned by the Brecker Brothers. This innocent-looking kid proceeded to walk up onto the stage (uninvited) and played his ass off. The rest, as they say, is history …’

… and that history has taken Douglas into some remarkable musical situations. The whole course of his career has been about assuming permission to tackle whatever music appeals to him, whether it is standards jazz, classical modernism or southern European folk music, and to use music as a vehicle for social and political ideas. Douglas’s youthful confidence had more to do with vision than innocence.

It might seem perverse to select another Douglas record from the ’90s when in the following decade he continued to make remarkable albums, and launched his own Greenleaf label. However,
Convergence
is in every way exceptional. This is the same band that made
Parallel Worlds
and
Five
, with the single change of Drew Gress for Mark Dresser. No surprise by this stage in the game to find Douglas programming ‘Desseins Éternels’ from Olivier Messiaen’s organ work
La Nativité du seigneur
, and following it with Weill’s ‘Bilbao Song’. The trumpeter claims he first heard the Messiaen piece in a blindfold test set by a friend, and thought it was ‘Joe Zawinul, early Weather Report’, which attests to a sharp ear, for the French composer’s strong bass pedals are very similar to Zawinul’s signature procedure. The two key tracks here are a farewell to drummer Tony Williams, a perfect illustration of Douglas’s ability to invest long form with real significance, and ‘Meeting At Infinity’, which indirectly gives the album its title and underlines how Douglas likes to have separate musical lines converge only virtually, leaving them to their own instrumental logic.
Convergence
is an important work, a strong synthesis of past approaches, with a tantalizing hint of new directions.

& See also
Constellations
(1995; p. 588)

GREG OSBY

Born 3 August 1960, St Louis, Missouri

Alto saxophone

Banned In New York

Blue Note 496860 2

Osby; Jason Moran (p, org); Atsushi Ozada (b); Rodney Green (d). January 1998.

Greg Osby says:
‘
Banned In New York
was my attempt to capture the true and more realistic essence of my touring band without the polish that a “staged” live recording offers. It was documented with a single minidisc recorder and no announcement to the audience (or to the band) was made. A pure, no-frills, untampered, anti-production.’

Osby studied in Washington DC, and at Berklee before moving to New York and becoming a prime mover in M-Base. That period and the early records that came after it now seem distractions from his mature work. Dabbling in rap and hip-hop was
de rigueur
at the period and he already had a background in R&B and funk, but it isn’t work that stands the test of time. There were strong statements along the way, like
Zero
and
New Directions
, but occasionally Osby looked like a man hampered rather than encouraged by major-label attention.