The Penguin Jazz Guide (173 page)

‘Appreciation’ and the encore, ‘Aftermath’, are showpieces for piano and rhythm. The latter, unusually, is the only Jamal composition on the set, though recent years have seen him concentrate ever more fixedly on reinvented standards and less on original fare. It would have been good to get George back on for one last hurrah, but it was Jamal’s night and it would be hard to better
À L’Olympia
.

& See also
At The Pershing / Complete Live At The Pershing Lounge
(1958; p. 221)

ERNST REIJSEGER

Born 13 November 1934, Naarden, Netherlands

Cello

I Love You So Much It Hurts

Winter & Winter 910 077 2

Reijseger; Franco D’Andrea (p). 2000.

Percussionist Gerry Hemingway says:
‘Ernst is something we don’t have too many positive examples of any more, a musician with huge ears who is also a natural showman, conjuring up the wonderful virtuosity of the vaudeville era through his humour, incisive rhythmic command and sophisticated use of extended techniques.’

Unlike fellow cellist Tristan Honsinger, Reijseger has never committed himself absolutely to abstract music and has always retained a measure of melody and euphony in his cello-playing. He has been associated with projects as various as Clusone 3 and the Gerry Hemingway group and always brings a combination of solid technique and a kind of playful libertinism to whatever music is on the agenda.

His diversity is almost a philosophical position, as if he meets the world through the medium of music: one might find him collaborating one minute with a Senegalese poet (Mola Sylla) and the next working with film director Werner Herzog. Given that range, the duets with D’Andrea are more conventional in form, at first hearing at least. They sit somewhat in the line of horn/piano duets, which can be one of the laziest situations in improvised music. There is nothing conventional or lazy about the playing, though. ‘In A Sentimental Mood’ and ‘Night And Day’ start proceedings on relatively familiar ground, though the rest of the album ranges more freely and eclectically. Reijseger seems to concentrate on keeping his cello within the range of a tenor singing voice, which heightens the songbook feel of the record. D’Andrea solos sparingly and often with affecting reticence, but no mistaking the emotion.

AVISHAI COHEN

Born 22 April 1971, Kibbutz Kabri, Israel

Double bass, bass guitar, piano

Colors

Stretch 9031

Cohen; Steve Davis, Avi Lebovich (tb); Jimmy Greene (ss, f); Jason Lindner (p); Amos Hoffman (g, oud); Jeff Ballard (d, perc); Yagil Baras (b); Antonio Sanchez (d); Claudia Acuña (v); string quartet. December 2000.

Avishai Cohen says:
‘
Colors
was a very natural recording: once we started recording, it was like playing a good live show.’

Confusingly, there is another Avishai Cohen, who plays trumpet. For the moment, this one is the star. There’s an understandable assumption that Cohen did service in the Chick Corea group and was given a chance to record on Stretch by way of thanks. In reality, the recording came first and the chance to play with Chick after that, which is more remarkable.

Cohen returned to the double bass after doing different service, in the Israeli military. He’d begun as a bass guitarist and studied music in Jerusalem before moving to the US. The debut record,
Adama
, showed great confidence; bright compositional ideas, sometimes in intriguingly stripped-down settings and with label boss Corea, Brad Mehldau and Danilo Perez on hand to provide a touch of class.

Colors
took Cohen’s career into a new dimension. The writing is bright and thoughtful, the arrangements (with trombones, soprano saxophone and string quartet on the title-track) full-voiced and the improvisation impressively difficult to separate from written passages. Some of the melodies might well be from one of John Zorn’s ‘radical Jewish culture’ projects for Tzadik, though there is nothing ideological about Cohen’s work and no special plead-ing in his playing, which sounds light and free and very much in the line of American bass-playing defined by Paul Chambers. Yagil Baras takes over bass-playing duties when Cohen is otherwise engaged. All 13 songs are originals, though ‘IB4U’ is co-credited to Avi Levobich, and there isn’t a weak or formulaic moment on the set.

WARREN VACHÉ

Born 21 February 1951, Rahway, New Jersey

Cornet, flugelhorn

2gether

Nagel Heyer 2011

Vaché; Bill Charlap (p). December 2000.

Warren Vaché says:
‘Bill and I recorded it in a day at a studio in Connecticut. Recording a duet is challenging work. I think I sprained my brain concentrating. Charlap as usual tossed off some brilliant playing. Aside from a couple of heated disagreements of what the melody does where, it was a joy to do. After a couple of years, the result of those disagreements is the most valuable part of the recording for me.’

The son of bassist Warren Sr and elder brother of clarinettist Allan, Vaché came to prominence re-creating the solos of Bix Beiderbecke and ever since has been addicted to the backward glance. He is one of the leading swing players of the last couple of decades and is arguably the first cornetist since Ruby Braff (with whom he has shared a couple of labels over the years) to try to build on the example of Pops. But whereas Ruby is always incisive, pugnacious and sometimes downright filthy, Vaché has a curiously mild approach to swing which takes time to work its undoubted magic. He has the facility to play extremes of pitch very quietly and with estimable control, but for the longest time seemed to us an excellent technician who had little of moment to say.

All this changed when in 1981 he recorded
Iridescence
, a gorgeous jazz record whose mellow exterior, with Vaché’s creamy tone, disguised some powerful jazz playing. And from there it just got better, with excellent sets for the British Zephyr label and a nice outing with brother Allan called
Mrs Vaché’s Boys.

2gether
is an unqualified delight. ‘We wanted to play some nice old tunes, and at tempos you don’t hear any more. Guys I admire did it – maybe it’s because nobody dances.’ Vaché’s remarks recall an era in jazz now gone, as does the music – except, then or now, it was rarely played with as much finesse, joyous invention and unassuming charm as this. Many of these pieces are as close to perfection as you can imagine a duet could ever be. Warren’s tone, whether tightly muted or luxuriously open, speaks directly to the listener, and his playing has taken on a mantle which goes back past Braff and Hackett, maybe to Armstrong himself. Yet it’s modern music – there’s no whiff of mustiness, or stale old repertory here. Charlap, who can seem like a merely fail-safe executant on some records, is equally inspired, turning in swinging accompaniments at every tempo, every line logical but never falling in quite the place you expect. Few contemporary mainstream records have given us such pleasure.

THE RECENT SCENE
2001–2010

By the close of our survey, jazz has passed its hypothetical centenary. It is clear that the music had been around and had evolved in significant ways before anyone thought to put it down. As we’ve seen, many of the earliest recordings may distort the picture by presenting the music in a misleadingly polite or formal way. Some romantics still nurse the hope that the legendary cylinder recording said to have been made by Buddy Bolden, the
Ur
-hero of jazz and the source of many of its most problematic mythologies (Bolden spent the last years of his life in an insane asylum, living on unheard until 1931, by which time jazz was poised for its next evolutionary step), will be uncovered in some abandoned cellar. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, there were those who predicted that the music of some previously lost, antediluvian period might float up in the floodwaters. As things turned out, the reconstruction did help refocus attention on New Orleans’s vivid musical culture, though at a human cost few would consider worth the gain.

Even 90 years into its
recorded
history, it is music that presents a double face at every step. No one has quite determined – and nor should they – whether jazz is an art or a branch of entertainment (as if the two were incompatible), whether it is essentially radical or conservative in spirit, a music of freedom and individualism or a music that celebrates the collective above all. For much of the last 15 to 20 years, there has been an ongoing argument as to whether jazz is any longer an exclusively American let alone an African-American music. For our part, we consider such discussions perilous at best, absurd at worst. Anyone who argues that the centre of gravity in jazz has switched from the United States to Europe is either
parti pris
or else deluded. America, and particularly the great metropolitan centres – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles – remain the crucible of much that is vital and innovative in the music. European, Asian, African and Australasian contributions are important and welcomed, but they are still essentially footnotes to the main drama and will remain so for the conceivable future. There is probably more creative jazz in New York City on a given night than in most European countries in many, many weeks and months, and it serves no wider purpose to argue any other position.

We have, however, loyally documented some of the best jazz coming out of the UK and the other European countries, and we have dipped a toe into other waters as well, though scarcely enough to satisfy an Australian fan, say, or a Hungarian. The internet has brought these burgeoning ‘scenes’ closer to hand than they could possibly have been before, but it remains difficult to get a sense of an overall scene without spending time with it or ideally in it. The sense of connectedness that the World Wide Web has brought is largely illusory. One can very easily order up a CD by a Finnish musician, one working quietly in Akron or Cleveland, and one whose beat is the Tokyo club scene, but these, like ethnic food, are often little more than exotic flavours that vary the diet.

It is our unfashionable contention that jazz remains an American music with valuable manifestations in other countries and cultures. It is also still very much a minority music. Our efforts to see it accorded more media attention have, we hope, never gone as far as to suggest that jazz is somehow superior to or more important than other musical cultures. This is plain nonsense and a kind of aggressive special pleading that has done the music no service. That said, we do not consider it a badge of honour that jazz is enjoyed by the few. It is simply in the nature of the music. It is, as Richard Cook has elsewhere put it, a long game, five-day cricket rather than the brightly coloured 20-over variety Richard disliked. Its practice involves dedication, small reward and a certain cosmic stoicism and humour. Which is why in this final section of the
Guide
you will find as many senior figures approaching the end of their lives as you will bright young talents starting out on their playing careers. It is
not always the case that older musicians produce the best work and we have tired of hearing that this or that visiting American is ‘at the peak of his powers’, when clearly he was at the peak of his powers in 1959, when he was neglected or derided by the mainstream media. However, unlike pop culture, where novelty and youth are part of both medium and message, lack of years does not always connote freshness and energy.

It is our settled opinion that the jazz of the first decade of the 21st century is in no way inferior to that of the great past. It is in many respects a very different music, but not because it has made peace with other parts of the musical culture – classical, pop, ‘world’ music – but because it has become more itself. Younger artists have insisted on performing their own music rather than ‘standards’ or repertory, or they have established a new canon of standards – Radiohead, Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake instead of George Gershwin, Vernon Duke and Richard Rodgers – and no musician of an earlier decade would be surprised to learn that this was the case. Jazz has always responded to the surrounding culture as well as to its own internal dictates. Indeed, the periods where it has not have often been those when the music seemed to mark time, though such has been the speed of its evolution that jazz has never ossified.

It would be tempting to suggest that in 2010 jazz is on the verge of a new technological shift, with downloaded music taking the place of the long-dominant CD. So far, this has not been the case. The CD is an ideal vehicle for jazz, though the emphasis on packed durations remains questionable. Jazz’s greatest single problem at the moment isn’t the lack of an audience – there is always a sufficient audience – but the sheer weight of the back catalogue, which in the early years of the decade proliferated at an alarming rate. Having gone through periods of extinction, jazz culture is now Alexandrian, with almost everything in the music’s history (exceptions noted in earlier chapters) commercially available, not always well-mastered, often poorly annotated, sometimes of questionable provenance but challengingly in the public domain.

What follows is our sense of what has been most exciting and consistently enjoyable over the last ten years. By definition we have heard this music much less often and carried it with us through fewer of life’s changes than the music of previous decades, but after so many years listening to jazz with close attention and unflagging passion, we like to think we know good from average, and that we might be able to flag up the great among the good.

Needless to say, some of the records reviewed below were only made and released after Richard Cook’s premature passing. They were and are listened to as if he were still around, two pairs of ears being a better sytem of quality control than monaural listening. For us, the most poignant aspect of his passing is that he is not here to share that moment when track one engages and the counter starts to tick off the seconds on what might be music for the ages…