The Penguin Jazz Guide (84 page)

Zeitlin’s wider reputation was only restored when he made a Maybeck Hall recital for Concord in 1992. Medical work kept him from the studios for a time, but it was his creative ambition rather than a full patient list that eclipsed the work, which was too restless and exploratory to sustain a consistent career. In retrospect, he is one of the most important stylists and composers of the time, and mercifully still playing today.

& See also
Slickrock
(2003; p. 687)

ANDREW HILL
^&

Born Andrew Hille, 30 June 1937, Chicago, Illinois; died 20 April 2007, Jersey City, New Jersey

Piano

Point Of Departure

Blue Note 9364

Hill; Kenny Dorham (t); Eric Dolphy (as, f, bcl); Joe Henderson (ts); Richard Davis (b); Tony Williams (d). March 1964.

Andrew Hill said (2000):
‘It came together almost on its own. I’d talked to Eric about doing something. Charles Lloyd was supposed to play tenor, but he pulled out. And then Tony Williams arrived in town and was being talked about. I took the idea to Blue Note and they bought it. That was it. There was no sense of drama: just a date.’

Born in Chicago (and not Haiti as sometimes reported), Hill drew on a Caribbean ancestry and always sounds torn between cultures – on the one hand analytical, on the other powerfully visceral. Much of the writing has a minor-key feel, even if the tonality doesn’t put it that way, and there are always hints of island rhythm – sometimes one overlapping another – in the best of the compositions. After making a couple of mid-’50s trio records, Hill slipped from sight for a time, as far as the studios are concerned, but jumped quickly back into focus with the release of his first Blue Note album
Black Fire
, which immediately established him as the Toussaint l’Ouverture of modern jazz, incendiary, highly intelligent, unpredictable. He is both kin to and very unlike Thelonious Monk. Blue Note was to be his berth for the next few years and then again following his resurgence after 2000, but it’s clear that as with other innovative artists (Bobby Hutcherson, say, Cecil Taylor, or Ornette Coleman) the label didn’t quite know what to do with Hill. It’s significant that some of his best sessions only appeared for the first time in the ’00s, as
Passing Ships
and
Dance Of Death
.

Commercial considerations invariably had to be balanced against artistic enterprise, and to some degree that is true of Hill’s work itself, in which dissonant elements are forever in dialogue with a dancing, almost physical quality. It’s always difficult to place, neither
orthodox bop nor hard bop, nor ‘avant-garde’. The pianist’s aim seems to be to find new ways of speaking within an understood language. He probes restlessly, as often as not looking for new tone colours as for a new approach to chord changes.

Point Of Departure
is one of the very great jazz albums of the ’60s and is now available with bonus takes of three of its five compositions. Hill’s writing and arranging skills matured dramatically with
Point Of Departure
. Nowhere is his determination to build on the example of Monk clearer than on the punningly titled ‘New Monastery’. Hill’s solo, like that on the long previous track, ‘Refuge’, is constructed out of literally dozens of subtle shifts in the time-signature, most of them too subliminal to be strictly counted. Typically, Hill is prepared to hold the basic beat himself and to allow Williams to range very freely. The rejected take is less secure rhythmically, and while Hill’s solo is full of interesting material, the ‘bonus’ take adds little to the album’s impact. Only the alternate take of ‘Flight 19’ contains much of moment. Of the issued tracks, ‘Spectrum’ is the one disappointment, too self-conscious an attempt to run a gamut of emotions and instrumental colours; an extraordinary 5/4 passage for the horns almost saves the day. Henderson at first glance doesn’t quite fit, but his solos on ‘Spectrum’ and ‘Refuge’ are exemplary and in the first case superior to Dolphy’s rather insubstantial delivery. The mood of the session switches dramatically on the final ‘Dedication’, a dirge with a beautiful structure that represents the sharpest contrast to the rattling progress of the previous ‘Flight 19’ and brings the set full circle. Rightly revered,
Point Of Departure
isn’t so far ahead of Hill’s other work, but it has at least been consistently available.

& See also
Dusk
(1999; p. 646)

STAN GETZ
^&

Born 2 February 1927, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 6 June 1991, Malibu, California

Tenor saxophone

Nobody Else But Me

Verve 521660-2

Getz; Gary Burton (vib); Gene Cherico (b); Joe Hunt (d). March 1964.

Club owner Ronnie Scott presented Getz in London in March and April 1964, when the American appeared with the Scott house band. Then and later, it wasn’t an entirely easy relationship, as Ronnie told audiences:
‘I’ve got a bit of a slipped disc. I got it bending over backwards, trying to please Stan Getz!’

With the umpteen-selling
Jazz Samba
and
Getz/Gilberto
, Stan became a major crossover star and to this day those smooth bossa nova stylings can be heard shimmying across wine bars and restaurants. Success had some unintended consequences, not least the withdrawal of
Nobody Else But Me
, shelved lest it interfere with the commercial success of the bossa records.

Unreleased for 30 years, it’s a marvel (to adapt the name of a later album with Chick Corea). Amazingly, this – the only studio recording by a group that was a popular concert attraction – is lush and romantic, with the backbone of a master improviser’s intelligence. Burton contributes ‘6-Nix-Pix-Flix’ and opens up the harmonic base just enough to give Stan clear, lucid space for his solos. ‘Summertime’ is a classic, ‘Waltz For A Lovely Wife’ is rapture, but there’s nothing less than great here and for once one doesn’t feel it’s just Stan-and-rhythm but a group where every member was attuned to the concept and where the leader, in his later years famously ‘difficult’ on tour and often brutally rebarbative in manner, seemed to respect his underlings.

& See also
The Complete Roost Recordings
(1950–1954; p. 127),
Focus
(1961; p. 277)

ALBERT AYLER
^&

Born 13 July 1936, Cleveland, Ohio; died between 5 and 25 November 1970, New York City

Tenor, alto and soprano saxophones

Spiritual Unity

Esp-Disk 1002

Ayler; Gary Peacock (b); Sunny Murray (d). July 1964.

Gary Peacock said (1984):
‘I could never quite understand some of the things written about Albert’s music. They seemed to miss the point, some essence. Then I listened to some of the records again and that’s it: they just don’t capture all of it; there was so much more to Albert than the records give you. Perhaps if he were alive today …’

Ayler’s music has been the object of endless debate. It is now generally understood to be a highly personal amalgam of New Orleans brass, rhythm and blues and some of the more extreme timbral innovations of the ’60s New Thing. His death in the East River in 1970 sparked a posthumous cult and some degree of paranoia about the circumstances, but the reality was that Ayler, who had been suffering from depression for some time, simply decided to end his own life. His brother Don, a significantly underrated player, also suffered from a psychiatric disorder and was hospitalized for a long period. Ayler grew up in Cleveland, played R&B on alto as a teenager, then switched to tenor during army service. He went to Sweden in 1962 and began his recording career in Scandinavia, returning to the US after a year and subsequently recording the classic records that established him as a rival to Coltrane for the tenor saxophone crown, though his approach was completely different.

The poet Ted Joans likened the impact of this trio to hearing someone scream the word ‘fuck’ on Easter Sunday in St Patrick’s Cathedral. Subjectively, there may be some validity in this, but it makes a nonsense of what was actually going on in this group. The intensity of interaction among the three individuals, their attentiveness to what the others were doing, ruled out any such gesture. It is, in short, affirmative music. Even amid the noise, the 1964 Ayler trio was quintessentially a listening band, locked in a personal struggle which it is possible only to observe, awe-struck, from the side-lines. The discography is studded with inaccuracy, with themes misidentified on records, the same title used for different tracks and different titles for the same track: a mess, in short. Ayler, Peacock and Murray had been playing the
Spiritual Unity
material for some time, and earlier versions of a couple of these tracks, ‘Ghosts’ and ‘The Wizard’, were taped at the Cellar Café almost a month earlier on 14 June 1964. Intriguingly, only a few months before that, Ayler had recorded cover versions of traditional material (‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, ‘Ol’ Man River’ and others) at the Atlantic studios in New York, material released as
Swing Low, Sweet Spiritual
and
Goin’ Home.
Heard in that context, it is impossible to consider
Spiritual Unity
as anything other than an extension of vernacular themes, played in an ecstatic manner typical of the African-American churches. Brief as it is, it remains a record of immitigable power and authority, but there is humour under the surface and a humanity that is rarely acknowledged.

& See also
Live In Greenwich Village
(1965–1967; p. 332)

TED CURSON

Born 3 June 1935, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Trumpet

Tears For Dolphy

DA Black Lion BLCD 8747612

Curson; Bill Barron (ts, cl); Herb Bushler (b); Dick Berk (d). August 1964.

Ted Curson said (1987):
‘Miles Davis heard me play when I was a teenage kid, maybe 16. He gave me his card and said: “Come and see me.” I put it in my pocket, did nothing about it. Then after I got out of school and went to New York, I called him. “Ted Curson? That little kid from Philly? I’ve been waiting for you for three years!” ’

Curson’s big break wasn’t with Miles, as it happened, but with Charles Mingus, whom he joined in 1959. He later co-led a group with saxophonist Bill Barron before moving to Europe, returning to the US in 1976. There have been a good number of records down the years, starting with
Plenty Of Horn
in 1961, but apart from ‘Tears For Dolphy’ (he worked with the saxophonist for some months in the Mingus band) few of his fine compositions are widely known.

The fiery bassist hadn’t hired a trumpet-player – apart from Richard Williams and, equally briefly, Don Ellis – when he took on the 24-year-old, some testimony to his skill and application at the time. Curson betrays a certain Miles Davis influence, but his work is in curious ways closer to that of Thad Jones, with a strong, long-lined lyrical quality. On pocket trumpet, the most obvious lineage is Rex Stewart, and there are shades of Fats Navarro as well. But this tends to diminish Curson’s individuality; he sounds like no one much but himself.

Tears For Dolphy
was recorded a month or so after the death of its dedicatee, and there is a raw sorrow in the title-tune that was less evident in later versions. This reissue also includes material recorded at the same time but released as
Flip Top
, so it’s a generous duration for a record of the period. Barron provides solid support and chips in with four strong charts, including the Dolphy-ish ‘7/4 Funny Time’ and ‘Desolation’. The rhythm section is very solid, but it’s Curson’s high, slightly old-fashioned sound on the small trumpet that commands attention. ‘Kassim’ and ‘Searchin’ For The Blues’ – why has no one else put these in the band book? – are the other highlights.

ARCHIE SHEPP
^&

Born 24 May 1937, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Tenor, soprano and alto saxophones, piano

Four For Trane

Impulse! 051218-2

Shepp; Alan Shorter (t); Roswell Rudd (tb); John Tchicai (as); Reggie Workman (b); Charles Moffett (d). August 1964.

Archie Shepp said (1987):
‘Coltrane was a preacher on his horn. Of course his music carried a message, but the message was in the music rather than added to it. I play the blues. I tell stories that don’t necessarily need words, but they are narratives of our people all the same.’

One of the major intellectuals of modern jazz. A passionate and articulate spokesman for the music, Shepp is also a significant playwright. His early saxophone style resembled Ben Webster with a carborundum edge, but – like Pharoah Sanders – the approach has grown gentler and more lyrical down the years. Archie Shepp once declared himself something ‘worse than a romantic, I’m a sentimentalist.’ Shepp has tended to be a theoretician of his own work, often expressing his intentions and motivations in off-puttingly glib and aphoristic language. He has, though, consistently seen himself as an educator and communicator rather than an entertainer and is one of the few African-American artists who has effected any sort of convincing synthesis between black music and the less comfortable verbal experiments of poets like LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka). The dialectic between
sentiment and protest in Shepp’s work is matched by an interplay between music and words which, though more obvious, is also harder to assess. A playwright who also wrote a good deal of influential stage music, Shepp devised a musical style that might be called dramatic or, at worst and later in his career, histrionic.