The Penguin Jazz Guide (167 page)

A Cloud Of Black Birds
isn’t a grand spiritual statement in the usual sense. It has no totalizing philosophy and offers no promise of redemption. But as a creative statement, it has immense and immediate presence.

& See also
No Vertigo
(1995; p. 590)

VON FREEMAN

Born Earl Lavon Freeman Sr, 3 October 1922, Chicago, Illinois

Tenor saxophone

75th Birthday Celebration

Half Note Records 4903 2

Freeman; Chico Freeman (ts); Willie Pickens (p); Brian Sandstrom (b); Robert Shy (d); Dianne Reeves (v). July 1998.

Von Freeman said (1997):
‘What’s the Chicago saxophone sound? Tough … tough and very windy!’

For a long time he seemed very much in the shadow of his son, Chico – guitarist George Freeman is Von’s brother – and he spent a lot of time away from jazz altogether. In his 50s, though, he returned to the fold and since then has created a body of eccentrically clustered but virile Chicago swing. While Chico has explored sometimes baffling extremes of free jazz and neo-funk, Von Freeman has stuck with a curious downhome style that occasionally makes his saxophone sound as if it is held together with rubber bands and sealing wax. Von was 50 before he made his debut as leader. Roland Kirk produced it for Atlantic. There wasn’t exactly a rush of records after that, and Von is now one of those older stars who has been in the studios more often since he reached pension age than he was before. A little like Ellis Marsalis, he also found himself making records with his better-known son and not infrequently cutting him in the process.

The 75th birthday album came a year late, but the idea was sparked by an appearance by Von and Chico, alongside George, at the Chicago Jazz Festival the year before; drummer Bruz Freeman, another brother, stayed home in Hawaii, but remarkably Von’s mother, almost 100, was there in spirit, listening to the show go out on radio.

Having honoured the old man back home, Chico’s idea was to give him a further party in New York at the Blue Note, and the record is a document of two summer nights with Chico’s group there. The material is pretty much out of the book – ‘Softly, As In A Morning
Sunrise’, ‘There Is No Greater Love’ and ‘Lover Man’ – but they also do Chico’s delightful ‘To Hear A Teardrop In The Rain’. It’s great to hear the Freemans playing together, as it always is, the lad all fabulous technique and gleaming speed, the dad content with pedal power and guile, but still getting there ahead as often as not. Dianne Reeves does a pretty guest spot on ‘Comes Love’, but since it’s placed early in the set, it doesn’t really change its character, which is thoughtful, driving saxophone improvisation, culminating in Newk’s ‘Tenor Madness’.

IAIN BALLAMY

Born 20 February 1964, Guildford, Surrey, England

Tenor saxophone

Food

Feral Records ASFA 101

Ballamy; Arve Henriksen (t, v, elec); Mats Eilertsen (b); Thomas Strønen (d, perc). July 1998.

Iain Ballamy recalls:
‘Food is the only band I have ever been in that could either clear the room or transport people en masse to another place. This recording was from our first ever concerts, at the Molde Jazz Festival in Norway. Two girls who were clearly struggling with the music got up to leave. At that precise moment the band suddenly stopped dead for no particular reason and I cried: “Come back – I think I love you …” then BANG! we carried on playing!’

Loose Tubes was the talent pool for white British jazz in the ’80s, but it became something of a jail for those of its members who weren’t prepared to sit their finals and move on. Ballamy always sounded like a man who wanted to learn as well as blow. Unfortunately, early solo albums came and went, including the excellent debut,
Balloon Man
, and the strikingly chastened
All Men Amen.
Band commitments, including a stint with guitarist Billy Jenkins’s Voice Of God Collective, coupled with some personal misfortune, and the usual shabby treatment of creative musicians by ‘the industry’ meant that his own career seemed to go on the back-burner for periods of time.

Food
was a complete surprise, and a very delightful one. It was the first release on the Feral imprint which Ballamy set up with Dave McKean, and it also documents what was a very close and creative musical association, one that didn’t necessarily, or at all, tick all the current ‘industry’ boxes. Ballamy’s Norwegian colleagues create an entirely new environment for him: rich, tense, not necessarily comfortable. Strønen and Henriksen in particular have proved to be provocative collaborators, allowing Ballamy to place his notes not with more care but perhaps with a more anarchic and daring philosophy of improvisation. At moments, particularly on a track like ‘Strange Burn’, the music harks back to the British free jazz of the late ’60s, which is another of Ballamy’s sources. Recorded live to two-track, the sound is very raw and immediate, with Eilertsen’s bass foregrounded and plenty of roomy ambience. The tracks are attractively spare, with a stark quality to the horns (Henriksen occasionally plays more than one trumpet simultaneously) that implies a much bigger sound-world than is actually present. A decade after its first release,
Food
sounds bigger and better with every listen.

VINNY GOLIA

Born 3 January 1946 (not 1956, as in many sources), New York City

Reeds

Sfumato

Clean Feed CF036

Golia; Bobby Bradford (t); Ken Filiano (b); Alex Cline (d). August 1998.

Vinny Golia says:
‘We were in the studio very late at night and I was amazed at how Bobby, a bit older than the rest, was constantly coming up with these great solos during the improvisation sections. How did he do that! Also Ken Filiano, constantly upbeat and remarkably present in his ideas and focus. Although late, about three or four in the morning, these guys all gave it their all on every take. Later I found out that the original masters were lost and the CD was made from rough mixes. Amazing!’

It is some testament to Vinny Golia’s enormous energy and willingness to work with young adventurous musicians (the Cline twins, Wayne Peet, John Rapson) that his age is often given at a decade less than the actual chronology. Formerly a painter, he switched to full-time music in 1971 and since then has been the Boswell of the West Coast improvising underground, creating a body of work not much remarked in the orthodox histories but every bit as interesting as anything coming out of New York.

A genuine multi-instrumentalist, Golia has in recent years spent some time recording sets of
Music For Like Instruments
(the E-flat saxophones, the flutes, and so on), issuing these remarkable documents, as he does with much of the work he is involved with, on the influential Nine Winds label. He also gives employment to some of the more challenging members of the wind family, most recently the mighty tubax, which indeed sounds remarkably like Chewbacca on a grouchy day.

Some of Golia’s most interesting record releases have been with his Large Ensemble –
Pilgrimage To Obscurity
,
Decennium Dans Axlan
,
Commemoration –
but these tend to minimize his impact as a solo reed voice.
Sfumato
– and the exactly contemporary
Lineage
with the same group – remains our favourite incarnation. Along with some astonishing group improvisations – listen to Golia’s flute tussling with Bradford on a tribute to Albert Ayler – the Clean Feed, recorded in Portugal, where the group was playing at a festival, also features some terrific pre-composed material, with ‘All Together Now’ an especially good outing for Vinny’s bass clarinet. As ever, when Bradford is involved, or when one hears this kind of line-up, the classic Ornette Coleman quartet is conjured up. These guys have taken the language on a generation, though.

Lineage
confirms that. It’s a release on the home label and, as with the Portuguese CD, it documents a generous conversation among old friends. The cadences of the playing on both have a well-worn and settled quality: it’s a music not of surprise but of supportive empathy. The pleasures come in the skill and grace which these experts use as they go into free space.

REBECCA KILGORE

Born 24 September 1948, Waltham, Massachusetts

Voice

Rebecca Kilgore

Jump JCD 12-22

Kilgore; Dan Barrett (c, tb); Bob Reitmeier (cl, ts); Keith Ingham (p). October 1998.

Rebecca Kilgore says:
‘Regarding that first 1998 recording on Jump, I remember wondering if the group would suffer for not having a bass, but not so. Keith covered it all, and the impromptu horn-lines that Bob and Dan came up with were superb, and it all worked.’

Becky Kilgore isn’t a profound singer, at least not in the way we understand Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan to be, but she has enormous charm and a sweet control over her material. Previously a computer programmer, she took up singing part-time in 1980 and worked in and around Portland, Oregon. She now sings full-time and specializes in vintage repertory. Her first records find her matched with one of Dan Barrett’s swing groups, and they sparkle on his canny arrangements of standards and obscurities. If it all sounds a fraction precise and calculated, it must be because this kind of repertory date has become a commonplace in its craft and sunny expertise.

Appropriate that this Jump CD was recorded at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild. The music is sheer unpretentious class, as close to perfect as a repertory CD can be. Barrett and Ingham confect little arrangements for 18 songs, of which only ‘Just You, Just Me’ could be called even close to hackneyed, and Becky’s clear, melodious voice sings through the lyrics without any trace of routine. She finds a poignancy in ‘Very Good Advice’ which makes one wonder why this song is so obscure, and even the cutesy ‘Ain’t We Got Fun’ has a dignity about it. And the instrumentalists are in superb fettle.

SPIKE ROBINSON

Born Henry Berthold Robinson, 16 January 1930, Kenosha, Wisconsin; died 29 October 2001, Writtle, Essex, England

Tenor saxophone

The CTS Session

Hep CD 2098

Robinson; John Williams (p); Louis Stewart (g); Bill Crow (b); Pete Cater (d). October 1998.

Hep producer Alastair Robertson says:
‘The night before, his precious vintage Elkhart saxophone was stolen from his car. Most other players would have justifiably called off but Spike borrowed a horn and mouthpiece and played the date as the consummate artiste and professional he was.’

An American who came to Britain on a navy posting in 1951, Robinson liked the place and became a frequent visitor. He passed away in Britain in 2001. Although he played tenor subsequently, Robinson was an altoman entirely under Parker’s spell when he made some early tracks in London in 1951. His switch to tenor may have deprived us of a fine Bird-man, but his command of the bigger horn is scarcely less impressive on what were comeback recordings. His models were Getz, Sims and – at the insistence of some – Brew Moore, but Robinson was deft enough to make the comparisons sound fully absorbed. Working as an engineer, Spike didn’t become a full-time musician till he was past 50.

There are two fine live CDs from Chester’s in Southend, recorded during a 1984 visit, and Hep built up a strong relationship with the saxophonist, putting out another half-dozen excellent records, more than matching in quality the albums Spike made for Capri. The best of the Heps came when Spike was nearing 70. The idea was a Stan Getz tribute date with a version of Stan’s old rhythm section, but drummer Frank Isola took ill and was replaced (successfully) by Pete Cater. In addition, Robinson’s tenor was stolen on tour in Britain. There’s no edge and no sense of problems afoot in the playing. Spike’s light, by now seemingly effortless approach lets him glide over ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ as if it were no more substantial than smoke. Stewart makes a few well-judged appearances on acoustic guitar, a nice variation of sound. Robinson played as he was: generously, humorously and with understated intelligence.

ESBJÖRN SVENSSON

Born 14 April 1964, Västerås, Sweden; died 14 June 2008, Ingarö, Sweden

Piano

From Gagarin’s Point Of View

ACT 9005-2

Svensson; Dan Berglund (b); Magnus Öström (d). May–November 1998.

Esbjörn Svensson said (1999):
‘I think sometimes “improvisation” becomes a bit of a fetish. It’s what the music is all about, but it’s not the only thing it’s about and if you don’t have strong compositions, it’s just exercises. So that’s what I work at: melodies you’ll remember tomorrow after the gig.’

Svensson was working the local Stockholm scene by the mid-’80s, but his trio, originally named for him but ultimately given collective status as E.S.T., was to become one of the leading jazz groups of the ’90s and ’00s. His early records are comparatively modest, but he was already telling an attractive story at the piano. The music on them was lightly impressionistic post-bop, nodding at Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio but scaling down the grand gestures to a more manageable size. The trio play together in a loose but cleanly focused way that gives a degree of relaxation to themes which might sound merely uptight.

By the end of the decade, working in comparative isolation in Stockholm, he was producing piano trio records ready to take on the best of whatever the rest of the jazz world could retaliate with. Recorded in 1997,
Winter In Venice
sustains the Jarrett comparison but takes the music on to a new level.
From Gagarin’s Point Of View
– the title is taken from a performance marking in a piano piece by the Brythonic composer Ronald Stevenson – continues in the same vein, perhaps even more inventively. If jazz musicians are going to effect any kind of rapprochement with rock or dance music, then one way might be via the kind of fusion which the trio suggests in ‘Dodge The Dodo’, where Öström plays a sort of hip-hop beat at the kit and Svensson still lets the melodious theme determine the end result. It’s just one of 11 diverse, ingenious compositions. The shaping of these episodes into a sequence may strike some as a bit too artful, but it’s the act of musicians who are of a generation that knows about their vast range of options and still want to play acoustic jazz. At any rate, Svensson does more than enough here to show why, along with such performers as Jason Moran, Guus Janssen, Yosuke Yamashita and Brad Mehldau, he helped to keep the piano trio situation full of new music.