The Penguin Jazz Guide (174 page)

DICK HYMAN

Born 8 March 1927, New York City

Piano, organ

Forgotten Dreams

Arbors ARCD 19248

Hyman; John Sheridan (p). January 2001.

Dick Hyman says:
‘John Sheridan and I find great value in this forgotten repertoire. It is often venturesome and at its best ingenious and touching, and reflects an era when the piano was uniquely revered.’

Dick Hyman has had a pretty paradoxical career. He studied with Teddy Wilson and in the ’40s was playing with both Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman. Working as a studio musician through much of the next two decades, he also recorded novelty tunes, under various pseudonyms, as well as Scott Joplin’s complete works. He loves early jazz, is an expert on the jazz piano tradition, can re-create pit-band orchestrations or ragtime arrangements to order – yet was also one of the first to record an album of tunes played on prototype synthesizers and has undertaken such quixotic projects as playing ‘A Child Is Born’ in the style of Cecil Taylor and Scott Joplin, and everyone in between.

The discography is as large, as eclectic and as full of surprises as this might suggest, but having dedicated himself to the legacy of most of the great piano improvisers, he has also stood up for the preterite, the neglected and mostly anonymous mass. Here Hyman and John Sheridan tackle the buried legacy of novelty piano, one of the last undiscovered corners of the jazz tradition. Now that everyone from Reginald Robinson to Morten Gunnar Larsen has worked over the ragtime tradition, where next but the vast and almost untapped resources of the likes of Zez Confrey, Rube Bloom, Billy Mayerl and Willie Eckstein? Those last two don’t figure here, but this record cried out for a sequel even before it was in the shops. Instead, they focus on Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith, Confrey, Bloom and Bob Zurke, with Bix’s ‘In A Mist’ and W. C. Polla’s ‘Dancing Tambourine’ to fill the gaps. This set works better than Hyman’s other two-piano dates because it’s less about improvising (which scarcely plays a role here) and more about the graceful juxtaposition of complementary parts. These are, rhythmically, carefully honed essays on very early swing and syncopation; harmonically, they’re dense with detail; but the melodies are so direct and wholesome, naïve in a pre-modern way, that some ideal balance is created which makes the results neither too knowing nor too gauche. Handsomely recorded, these forgotten dreams are, in their way, a daring revival.

ALEX CLINE

Born 4 January 1956, Los Angeles, California

Drums

The Constant Flame

Cryptogramophone 110

Cline; Vinny Golia (ss); Wayne Peet (ky); Nels Cline, G. E. Stinson (g); Jeff Gauthier (vn); Michael Elizondo (b); Peter Erskine (d); Brad Dutz (perc); Aina Kemanis (v); additional voices. January 2001.

Alex Cline says:
‘Conceived as a companion piece to
Sparks Fly Upward
and designed to feature guest artists,
The Constant Flame
was both deeply satisfying and bittersweet, as I knew it was to be our last recording together: Aina told me months earlier that she was retiring from music altogether. Despite recording material the group had never played before (and just two rehearsals), the experience was memorably smooth. However, having all the right people play the music in all the right ways and to have it captured, guided and made manifest by all the right people in the best ways imaginable couldn’t completely soothe my underlying sadness. It marked the end of an era for me.’

Alex is the twin brother of Nels Cline, who has experienced stardom as a member of Wilco. The brothers worked together initially, forming a group called Quartet Music with the brilliant bassist and composer Eric von Essen, but their musical courses have diverged somewhat since then. While Nels seeks out rockier terrain, Alex has pursued a music based around lush textures and thick, harmonic swirls – an unusual course for a percussionist, perhaps, although his vast kit of drums, cymbals, bells and percussive devices is as appropriate to melodic needs as much as to rhythmical ones.

Nevertheless, the Clines have continued to work together on a project-by-project basis. Alex struck a purple patch at the end of the ’90s with a sequence of three very powerful records. Made in 1998,
Sparks Fly Upward
is packed with ethereal beauty.
The Other Shore
is a trio with Jeff Gauthier and G. E. Stinson, a set of music that pretty much dispenses with any vestige of conventional swing in favour of a music that seems to hover, substantially but ungraspably, in front of the listener. With violin and heavily processed guitar dominating, Cline’s percussion devices, which include kantele, autoharp and other exotica, have very little to do with establishing metre and more to do with sustaining an overall mood. The ending is extraordinary, slowing almost to stasis and delivered in a hushed and almost reverential tone: ‘Nothing To Teach’.

The addition of saxophone, bass and keyboards, extra percussion and the reintroduction of vocalist Aina Kemanis and other voices lends
The Constant Flame
a more familiar profile but also a ritual quality of farewell. Producer Peter Erskine creates a rich and varied sonic landscape. The title-piece is dedicated to a former boss, clarinettist John Carter, and shows how thoroughly Cline has learned how to combine organized structure with improvisatory freedom. Other tracks are also personal dedications: ‘Bridge’ is for the adventurous pop vocalist David Sylvian; ‘Evening Bell’ is for Toru Takemitsu and marked by a Zen-like spareness. Cline is at his most urgent on the opening ‘Paramita’, written for Don Cherry; heavyweight drumming gives way to kantele and synthesized backgrounds. Kemanis is used to great and economical effect, ending the set with a delightful ‘Benediction’, which is spiritual but resolutely unsolemn. The music has a gently climactic quality, marking the end of something, but without sentimentality.

HENRY THREADGILL
^&

Born 15 February 1944, Chicago, Illinois

Alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet, flute

Everybody’s Mouth’s A Book

PI 1

Threadgill; Brandon Ross (g); Bryan Carrott (vib, mar); Stomu Takeishi (b); Dafnis Prieto (d). February 2001.

Henry Threadgill said (1989):
‘Ornette Coleman reinvented melody, by taking it back to the values of traditional jazz. It’s the way the bass-line moves, and moulds itself to the other voices. That was an important idea for me.’

Threadgill’s most inventive album for ten years was released simultaneously with
Up Popped The Two Lips
, which featured a different group, called Zoo-Id. This one goes out as Make Your Move. The latter is an amplified unit, hinged on Brandon Ross’s and Stomu Takeishi’s electric guitars and sounding not unlike a freaked-out version of Ornette’s Prime Time, if such a thing is imaginable. The writing is as quirky and cranky as ever, with some delirious playing from the leader on alto and flute. ‘Don’t Turn Around’ is amazing, a headlong flurry of sound from start to finish but governed as ever by Henry’s unquantifiable musical vision. There’s a lot of wild funk here, on ‘Don’t Turn Around’ and ‘Shake It Off’, tracks that sound as if they might have gone through Funkadelic hands on a particularly weird day. Carrott’s vibes-playing is delightfully eccentric, and it’s Takeishi again who provides the specific gravity, delivering a deceptively crude line that constantly floats free. Threadgill’s own playing has become simpler over the years, with much less emphasis on multi-instrumentalism. The group has become his main expressive vehicle.

& See also
Rag, Bush And All
(1988; p. 526)

JASON MORAN

Born 21 January 1975, Houston, Texas

Piano

Black Stars

Blue Note 32922-2

Moran; Sam Rivers (ts); Tarus Mateen (b); Nasheet Waits (d). March 2001.

Jason Moran says:
‘I wanted to open my music by having a guest, and could think of no one better than Sam Rivers. My teachers, Andrew Hill and Jaki Byard, worked with him extensively. I loved his ability to exist as a free improviser
and
as a member of Dizzy’s ’80s group. He immediately entered our landscape with confidence, and gave us the energy to plough behind him. I think his work on “Foot Under Foot” and on “Sound It Out” are my favourites for sheer intensity and precision.’

The title of Moran’s Blue Note debut was
Soundtrack To Human Motion
, which despite various media attempts to correct to ‘emotion’ give a strong clue to this brilliant young musician. What he’s about – as with many of the most interesting young players in this precinct – is the momentum and the dynamic of his music as much as its body-weight of ‘feeling’. Some of the pieces on the first record are self-consciously hip and trickily built, as if Moran was concerned that he might be seen not to present strong enough meat for a top dog like Greg Osby to work on. And then there’s ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ and a piece called ‘Retrograde’, inspired by playing an Andrew Hill LP backwards. But there’s nothing much wrong with showing off when you are this talented. The follow-up record was almost as good, and so was
Black Stars
, and so was the one after that,
Modernistic
, and the next again. It was only with 2006’s disappointing
Artist In Residence
that Moran seemed willing to show any human frailty, and even it was better than most pianists’ crowning achievement.

By 2000, Moran had shaped a trio of quite breathtaking empathy and intensity, in which his sometimes mystifying complexities seemed to fit and function.
Black Stars
brings off the coup of enlisting paterfamilias Sam Rivers. His presence is almost a bonus in what’s otherwise a hard, detailed, highly achieved trio record, but there are moments, especially on the strong opening ‘Foot Under Foot’, when it sounds a little like a Rivers disc and it’s a tribute to the pianist’s compositional strength and character that he keeps the project focused on his contemporary agenda. Moran goes back to an ancient piece of Ellington, ‘Kinda Dukish’, and mingles it with the here-and-now, ‘Draw The Light Out’ and ‘Gangsterism On A River’. Where some pianists impose themselves on their material by spinning out ever more fanciful embroidery, Moran already seems to be seeking essences and irreducible core matter. Nothing here goes on for very long; every piece is brilliantly finished.

KEITH JARRETT
^&

Born 8 May 1945, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Piano, soprano saxophone, other instruments

Always Let Me Go

ECM 1800/01 2CD

Jarrett; Gary Peacock (b); Jack DeJohnette (d). April 2001.

Keith Jarrett said (2002):
‘When I think about this period in our music, I – funnily enough – think about bebop. That’s what it makes me think of. It’s not the notes, or the harmony, or anything in the rhythm. It’s a sense that we are playing energy, not playing with it, or using it to play the “material”, but
playing energy
.’

In 1990, the Standards Trio took a new direction.
Changeless
contained original material which is deeply subversive of jazz as a system of improvisation on ‘the changes’. Typically, Jarrett invests the term with quite new aesthetic and philosophical considerations. On
Changeless
, there are no chord progressions at all; the trio improvises each section in a single key, somewhat in the manner of an Indian raga. The results are impressive and thought-provoking. With
Inside Out
in 2000, Jarrett’s interest in free playing, always evident, evolved again. Here, instead of simply abandoning changes, Jarrett and the trio abandoned all thought of predetermined structure. To some degree, this was instinct with the spontaneous approach of the group, but it was applied with even more rigour.

Always Let Me Go
was recorded live in Japan, where Jarrett has played to rapt attention throughout his career. The philosophy is the same as on
Inside Out
, a free programme without standards or structures decided beforehand. Jarrett has described the music as a ‘volcanic eruption’, but that suggests something messier and more haphazard than this. Or it works if one accepts that the trio delivers pure magma, without the dust, smoke and noise. Jarrett is in exceptionally fiery form and Peacock rages quietly during some of the more intense passages. As so often, though, it’s DeJohnette who gives shape and form to the music, constantly revealing himself as the complete musician rather than merely a timekeeper. It’s an exceptional recording as well, vivid, detailed and with a sense of real presence. Jarrett sounds intimate, almost confidential, in quieter passages, while the trio delivers a massive sound when playing full out. The opening ‘Hearts In Space’ is a full half-hour of intense trio improvisation, ranging from taut blues and boogie passages to more abstract shapes. ‘Waves’ is longer still and eclectic in terms of stylistic reference. Jarrett even seems to impersonate Bud Powell at one point. Interspersed are much shorter tracks, like the roistering ‘Paradox’, which touches on similar areas, and the tiny ‘The River’, which Jarrett plays solo. The last three tracks might not seem to be first-choice inclusions but none the less, as a document of Jarrett’s almost 150th performance in Japan, this is impeccable.

& See also
El Juicio (The Judgement)
(1971; p. 386),
The Köln Concert
(1975; p. 418),
Standards: Volume 1
(1983; p. 474)