Quoting these words by legendary political activist Harriet Tubman, Joe McPhee introduces this album and announces the direction of the music. This is a political statement. He quotes these words in a quiet but firm voice and then his saxophone sings a lament, a heart-felt blues, that emanates black history. In his typical way McPhee raises the level of anger and frustration with torn lines, then he literally shouts “Keep going“ three times, as if he wanted to encourage his brothers and sisters not to lose hope. But Tubman’s words are not just a political statement, they also describe McPhee’s music. Whenever he seemed to be stuck, he tried something new, he has believed in the idea that there are musical areas that still have to be explored, that the boundaries have to be expanded. This has to do with a memorable incident in the past: John Coltrane’s funeral. McPhee was there, it was a horribly sad moment, but the service was also a glorious affirmation of everything Coltrane was - for McPhee the funeral was a celebration of life, in which Ornette Coleman’s classic trio of the Golden Circle period and Albert Ayler's band played. This experience - that even if something wonderful has ended, something new will arise - has influenced his music to this day.
In November Joe McPhee is going to celebrate his 80th birthday. If you see him, you think he’s just 65. The man is full of energy, mentally and physically. I will never forget a scene from a gig in Weikersheim two years ago, when he took a short run and jumped onto the stage. These days he's making more music than ever before, he seems to be on a never ending tour and he releases new albums constantly. One of his preferred contexts is the sax/drum duo, for example with Paal Nilsson-Love, Chris Corsano and Eli Keszler. That’s why it's strange that he has only worked once with Hamid Drake, obviously an ideal comrade-in-arms - on Emancipation Proclamation: A Real Statement Of Freedom (Okka Disk, 2000) -, although the two have played in Peter Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet. In February 2018 they finally found some time to record something new, and the new collaboration shows what we have missed. Keep Going combines the drummer's warm approach and unique sense of free swing with the saxophonist’s/ trumpeter's musicality and quest for social justice again. Five of the eight tracks directly refer to prominent figures of African-American history, social rights activists and politicians: the pieces are dedicated to Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Lucy Stone, John Robert Lewis and Barack Obama. Keep Going displays everything which makes Joe McPhee’s music so great. “Keep Going“, the title track, is the only one that highlights McPhee’s roots in blues and gospel so prominently. Pieces like “For Don't Let 'Em Drop Them Goddam Nukes On Us Lord“ and “Morning Star (for Lucy Stone)“ reach back to a 1960s- and 70s-tradition of free jazz, to musicians like Albert Ayler, Frank Lowe and Noah Howard. In these pieces McPhee hurls out angry, convulsive riffs, blurred, overblown messages, which are propelled by Drake’s nervous drum rolls. On three tracks, “Medgar / Malcolm / Martin“, “Makes Me Wanna Holler (For Representative John Lewis)“ and “Time Was (for Barack Hussein Obama)“ McPhee is on pocket trumpet. At one point in the latter piece he plays into an open gong, which adds otherworldly overtones to his music. This is the other side of his music, the introspective and meditative one, which is rather interested in sound excursion. All this is accompanied by Hamid Drake’s subtle and emphatic percussion, as usual deeply rooted in a black jazz tradition. On the one hand it perfectly supports McPhee’s traditional side, on the other hand it contrasts the experimental approach telling a very old story from a different angle.
Keep Going presents an attitude, it shows that free jazz can still be a political comment. It evokes the days of Sonny Rollins’s “Freedom Suite“, Charles Mingus “Fables of Faubus“ and John Coltrane’s “Alabama“. In these days, in which the situation of African Americans in the US seems to have become worse, it’s necessary.
On his last release for Clean Feed, 2017’s excellent
Random Acts of Order
, pianist Zack Clarke transmitted his unique musical vision by way of a
trio - double bassist Henry Fraser and drummer Dré Hočevar. On Mesophase, his latest, the ante has been significantly upped;
while Clarke himself handles piano and electronics, there is also Chris
Irvine (on cello), Charlotte Greve (on saxophone, clarinet, and flute),
Nick Dunston (on double bass), and Leonid Galaganov (on percussion,
waterphone, and shakuhachi). With this expanded lineup comes a more
exploratory and varied approach - drawing as it does from the wells of
process music, minimalism, and contemporary classical, Mesophase
slinks along at the outskirts of “jazz,” offering it a compulsory nod or
two (see: “Reticence”) without ever being completely beholden to its
conventions.
With its pastoral flute, burbling electronics, and snippets of birdsong,
“Curtains” is a shimmering introduction to Clarke’s sound-world. When a
series of convoluted piano figures finally burst through at the piece’s
mid-point, though, it’s as if the titular curtain has been furiously
brushed aside - while Galaganov’s busy percussion and Dunston’s rotund
bass-lines roil underneath, Greve switches to saxophone and sends out a
series of urgent, uneasy cries. As its title suggests, “Generative” is
largely devoid of a clear-cut theme or a straightforward progression -
Clarke’s aqueous electronics gurgle, Irvine’s cello whines, and Greve lets
loose a harrowing clarinet soliloquy. After a rather cacophonous crescendo,
the second half of the piece descends into a wash of digitized sound.
“Tilted” is similarly hard to grasp; listening to the first half is akin to
walking through a funhouse, with Clarke’s notes falling about in dizzying,
claustrophobic cascades and Greve sounding like she desperately wants to
find the exit. The second half is spacious and unsettling, especially the
way in which Irvine’s cello skitters wildly through Clarke’s blanket of
electronic noise. In “Infiltration,” similarly dense electronics threaten
to consume Irvine’s haunting lines, while “Assimilate” finds Clarke using
such sounds in more subtle ways - as jagged, slow-rolling pinpricks to cut
through Greve’s effervescent flute.
In the midst of all this, “Beggar” acts as something of a palette-cleanser,
with Clarke and Irvine engaged in a dialogue that is, when compared to the
dissonance of some of the other tracks, quite pretty. Likewise, “Reticence”
finds Clarke engaged in a pleasant romp of sorts, Dunston and Galaganov
accompanying him with free-wheeling rhythmic support. Greve’s pastoral
flute-work adds another layer of insouciant lightness. If not for the
barely-there sheathes of electronic sound that murmur disconcertingly in
the background, the piece wouldn’t be out of place playing in your local
café!
On Mesophase, the group’s ability to effortlessly juggle free-form
abstraction and, occasionally, more traditional modalities is admirable;
nevertheless, I found myself wishing that the players would “let loose”
more often. For the most part, they simmer and seethe, and I was left
longing for a more prolonged outburst or explosion. In any case, what
Clarke and his group have made here is equal parts enthralling and
unsettling, and it’s an excellent example of the ways in which electronics
can be used to shape and even distort the atmosphere produced by acoustic
instrumentation.
Singing Knives is one of those eclectic independent labels that deserve all the attention it can get. Coming out of Sheffield, UK, it has a small but very adventurous catalogue, you could describe it as a very typical (or certainly a-typical) child of the totally free second wave of British improvisers from the late 70’s and early 80’s. By owning a great part of the label’s catalogue, I’m pretty well steeped in drones, free jazz blowouts, folk experimentation and various improvisations. I definitely urge you to look them up!
Roman Nose’s first LP took a while in the making. The recordings that make the two vinyl sides were put on tape during autumn of 2014 and 2016. I’m easily led to think that the finances of the situation are the one to blame for this delay, as almost always. This new quartet consists of label’s head Jon Marshall on tapes and electronics, my current favorite double-bass player Otto Willberg, Sarah McWatt on flute, vocals and various others and Charlie Collins on drums, percussion and waterphone.
For some years now, centered around a rotation of musicians, Sheffield has been a hub of adventurous (thankfully not in the hip way that Wire would present it) experimentation and Singing Knives provides to all of us, living far and away from this idyllic city, a way to catch with the results. This LP is the latest statement. Having listened a lot to label’s group’s like Hunter Gracchus and Chora, I wasn’t surprised by the intensity of this recording or the way they build up their sound, second by second. When playing collectively (pretty much on the whole of the album) they tend to be loud and full of energy. Collins drumming works in two ways. It provides a very solid backbone to all the tracks, while it moves in different directions at once. He seems to be in a constant dialogue with all of his fellow musicians, either in pairs or (more often) as a quartet. Willberg’s double-bass is a humble and discreet presence (sometimes even inaudible) adjusting totally to the collective nature of the album. Marshall and McWatt fill the gaps and link the dots with their intensive and focused playing. During the many listens of the album, I often wondered how do they manage that and stay (or, at least, feel like ) really loose and playful. Maybe it is the interaction, which is always a promise of a great gig.
If I could nag a bit, I’d say that I heard a lot of crackles for a new record but since I’m not reviewing for discogs, I must admit that this is improvisational ethos for sounds is presented preferably live. So, guys, please come to Greece too.
Since David S. Ware passed away in 2012, the jazz world has had to deal
with a major loss. For about ten years Ware had to live with peritoneal
dialysis, because in 1999 he had been diagnosed with kidney failure and in
2009 the prospect of living on dialysis had finally reached its limits.
Thanks to a donor Ware received a kidney transplantation and returned to
the stage only five months after he underwent surgery. What also helped him
was the fact that he dedicated his life to meditation (he came into contact
with it in the early 1970s), which helped him recovering. What is more,
meditating and looking for transcendence have not only been key features in
his life but also in his music, it’s where his inspiration to explore music
came from. David S. Ware was always looking for the divine.
That’s why The Balance, the album title, is just perfect. Ware was
constantly looking for a balance in this life, which was the basis to
create the jubilant music he played. Another form of balance was the
Onecept trio Ware formed in 2009, the name being concept, a reference to
his idea of life and music. “Rhythm-Harmony-Melody, Carbon-Hydrogen-Oxygen, A-U-M“, as AUM Fidelity label owner Steven Joerg puts it. Who better to
invite for such a trio than his long-time collaborator William Parker on
bass and drummer icon Warren Smith (he played for Gil Evans, Julius
Hemphill and Muhal Richard Abrams, among many others).
The trio gathered for studio sessions in December 2009 and the result of
these sessions,
Onecept, was finally released by AUM in 2011. The Balance now captures
the trio’s Vision Fest 2010 performance, Ware’s first time back on stage
with a bandsince his kidney transplant the previous May. As an
extra, the album also presents the four remaining Onecept studio
out-takes: “Kama“, “Virtue“, “Bodhissatva“, and “Gnavah“.
But certainly the center of this album is the live performance, which is
split into three pieces: “Vision Suite 2010 part 1 - 3“. Like Onecept it’s one of Ware’s rare entirely improvised outings and
what you get is a best-of of his playing. Ware tends to shape his lines
from series of short, forceful outbursts, his tone is ripe and full, warm
and clear. This results in passages of great tenderness, transcendence and
introspection. One could easily understand that the audience freaks out at
the end of the concert when all the qualities of this excellent band have been
displayed.
Ware leads the way, he controls the improvisation with extremely long
lasting sounds, which he creates with circular breathing and which are like
a signal to Parker and Smith. At the end of these sounds bass and drums
fall into the music like a torrent (e.g. after two minutes when Smith and
Parker only enter the improvisation or after four minutes when the
introduction is over). These tones are like leitmotifs, providing
orientation before something new emerges. Another feature are Ware's
blatantly overblown passages, he stretches the tone sequences to the
extreme as if he was blowing a balloon to just before bursting, which Smith
also supports with whipping blows on the snare. Another striking feature is
the fact that Ware, Parker and Smith take turns: usually two players
follows rather bumpy musical path, while the third one takes over a more
continuous, almost swinging part (in Ware’s case it can also be a bluesy
melody). Both Smith’s and Parker’s support for Ware is very percussive and
propulsive, in an almost orchestral sense.
If there has been a successor to John Coltrane’s throne, it has always been
David S. Ware for me. That’s why I miss his music so much. But, as Ware
puts it at the end of the gig, “we all have to pass on, but we all come
back, too; everybody’s gotta go, but everybody’s gotta be born, too.“ I’m
already looking forward to the next release of the archives, which Steven
Joerg has promised to release in November 2019, on David Ware’s 70th
birthday. Until then, listen to The Balance, take it in, breathe,
feel free to absorb it, immerse in it. It’s just wonderful.
I sat with these records for many months, attempting to pierce the veil, as it were. Not because British pianist Laura Cole’s music is obscure; on the contrary, her composition style is quite direct and open. Instead, I’ve been taking the time to pierce my personal veil, to pass through my initial surface impressions—extremely positive—to try and reach the core of Cole’s music. To call Cole merely thoughtful does a disservice to the purpose and message of her music: instrumental to her work is a mutually supportive community that strives and struggles collectively, raising each other up like sparks.
This year, Cole released two dramatically different albums. Enough is Cole’s first solo piano album, spanning two discs: “This Is Water,” a collection of compositions by thirteen different artists; and “As Warm As the Sun,” thirteen compositions and improvisations by Cole. The Two Fridas, a double album featuring Cole’s octet Metamorphic, with Kerry Andrews on vocals, Chris Williams on alto, John Martin on tenor and soprano, Ollie Dover on bass clarinet, Seth Bennett and Ruth Goller on bass, Johnny Hunter on drums, and Cole on vocals, piano, and Rhodes.
Despite the difference in sound between the two groups, the singularity of Cole’s musical voice clearly marks both. Metamorphic has been termed a folk/jazz group, though I think that designation may be a little misleading, depending on how you read those genres. It seems one only in the sense that John Stevens and Dave Holland’s 1960s-70s work was folkish. In fact, Stevens seems an important landmark in making one’s way through Cole’s music. Much of Metamorphic’s music brings to mind the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, especially the lengthy improvisations that emerge throughout this album. This is partly due to Hunter’s skittering, percussive style that’s reminiscent of Stevens’s sometimes loose, open playing. But also, there’s a clear through-line to draw from Stevens to Cole and Bennett’s roles in Julie Tippetts and Martin Archer’s ensemble, and that connection seems more pronounced on The Two Fridas than on past albums. Take “Charcole I” and “Charcole II,” two recordings of the same poem, on which Cole takes the lead vocal and the group performs radical, occasionally spiky improvisations.
In many ways, The Two Fridas calls to mind recent chamber-vocal albums by pianists Kaja Draksler and Cathlene Pineda. I had a chance to review Draksler’s octet album , but we did not write up Pineda’s Passing: A California Suite. All three artists create music that explores issues of motherhood and feminism, art and creativity, and the role of an individual within a community (there’s that inescapable word again!). And so when Cole interpolates “Little Wing” and “Lonely Woman” into “Little Woman, Lonely Wing,” the deftness of her composing places her nicely in line with Draksler and Pineda, two pianists who can be equally irreverent and moving.
What’s fascinating about Enough is the many ways Cole brings her community into a recording of solo piano. On the first album, “The Is Water” (its title referencing David Foster Wallace’s famous speech of the same name), Cole arranges and performs a set of compositions mostly from fellow players. To get a clear picture of the range, it’s worth sharing the full list of composers: Martin Archer, Seth Bennett, Miles Davis, Ruth Goller, Nikki Iles, Sarah Jewell, Kim Macari, Robert Mitchell, Corey Mwamba, Julie Tippetts, Chris Williams, Alex Wilson, and Jason Yarde. Cole’s arrangements, and the warm, close recording by Spencer Cozens, brings each piece to life, her playing at times reminiscent of Don Pullen or Myra Melford.
Tracks like “Outgoing Vessels” and the bracing “The Two Fridas”—or the lengthy “forgotten letters; Bereft; Tears: bright grey” and “Digging for Memories”—take listeners to some deep spaces, inspiring and conveying both contemplation and introspection. The very slight difference between external and internal reflection implied there says much about Cole’s music: there is a consistent inside/outside perspective. One gets the feeling that Cole is both working through something and guiding us along, progressing towards a fuller understanding of ourselves and the world. Again, I’m reminded of Stevens, of the gentleness of even the most angular and challenging of SME’s recordings. Cole, like Stevens, makes it seem easy to be this open, but as close listeners, we know nothing is that simple.
Surprisingly, French innovative and most experienced masters of free-improvisation - double bass player Joëlle Léandre and guitarist Marc Ducret - have not recorded together before their meeting at the gallery 19PaulFort in Paris, in May, this year. The two must have criss-crossed each other’s long, winding, and genre-binding roads many times before, but began performing together for the first time only last year. Finally, Chez Hélène completes both discographies with this just and much needed duo.
The album was recorded live, captured beautifully by Léandre’s trusted sound engineer, Jean-Marc Foussat, who mixed and mastered the recording and also photographed this duo flaying for the front cover. The album is titled after a famous poem of Edgar Allan Poe, “To Helen”, written in honor of Jane Stanard, the mother of a childhood friend, and celebrating the nurturing power of all women.
And, indeed, there is a strong sense of mutual nutrition in this duo that absolves common differences of gender, masculinity or feminine identity. Léandre and Ducret converse like two attentive, tireless searchers, standing close to each other.. Both have strong personalities and are passionate about their trade but very eager and curious to experience and learn more from their colleague. At first, on the opening piece “Observation”, both are still hesitant and respectful, attempting to set some playful but inventive ground rules. But already on the second piece, “Ponctuation”, both Léandre and Ducret dare more, injecting more energy and and take more risks as both tease each other with nervous, confrontational strategies.
The third piece “Vibration” begins with a solo from Léandre but soon Ducret intervenes with provocative, metallic attacks, challenging her to counter his aggressive tones. Léandre sticks to her contemplative course and manages to channel Ducret into her quiet, sonic territories. Léandre and Ducret completes each on the last and best realized duet, “Invocation”. On this piece both dive deep into a dense, free-associative and highly invigorating interplay, that still succeeds to sound intimate and compassionate despite its powerful intensity.
More, please. Much more from this beautiful, right stuff.
John Butcher has used special spaces to create the right resonance for his instrument, Jean-Luc Guionnet has used instruments to make people appreciate space better, and this album is possibly a mix of both. In 2014, Larry Ochs was invited to perform in a private cave in the south of France that contained some 150 prehistoric rock paintings. It took some time before the actual recording was made, and Ochs insisted to have a drummer with him, and Gerald Cleaver took up the challenge. You can read the full story of the performance in the cave on Larry Ochs' website, a story of uncertainty, challenges and doubts, but also of great music.
The question is: can you hear the cave? The question is how it affects two musicians to play music deep underground in a slippery and rocky and risky place, without audience, in a small circle of light surrounded by total darkness, no air movement, a constant cool temperature and a high level of moisture, and in the presence of the artifacts of people who visited this cave some 24,000 years ago, and created art. You hear it. You can hear the cave.
Ochs describes a difference with playing in a huge enclosed space such as a cathedral, which dominates and rules the sound and its resonance: "In the cave, the cave didn’t rule. It allowed us to take all kinds of improvised angles; it was rather an equal partner, and a generous one at that since, at least speaking for myself, the cave made everything easier, and I felt like everything sounded good, physically speaking, at least". The album has eight tracks of free improvisation, with a sound that really goes deep, catching at the same time the existential 'angst' that our long-term ancestors must have felt in the place: fear, reverence, and the need for a collective sonic effort to express oneself and to control whatever powers rule the place: by praying and chanting and demonstrating submission, by asking for strength and health. Music as expression and as a sacrificial offering. The need for art in its most brutal, simple and authentic form. The cave participates, not only as a closed humid sound box that resonates, but also as a bridge, as a witness to something timeless, a kind of universal human sound. Ochs and Cleaver capture that brilliantly. There are no pyrotechnics here, no fireworks, no artificial things. They respect the place, they use the space, they invite the cave to join. Some pieces are raw and violent, trance-inducing, painful yammerings or ferocious howls and thundering percussion. On one track, Cleaver uses only bells, because there is no need to be all over the place. The only thing is to be real, and to connect: the reeds and the drums, the musicians and the cave, the past and the present, the humans and the gods. Two instruments offering music with many dimensions.
I cannot say that, prior to writing this article, I was familiar with the Argentinian scene. I can now say that this ignorance was sorely to my detriment. NendoDango Records is playing an instrumental role in documenting the careers of exciting artists out of Buenos Aires. This music demonstrates vibrancy and creativity at the highest level.
Paula Shocron - Los Vínculos (NendoDango, 2018) *****
Generally, when I review albums, I like to go in cold for the first listen, without reading the liner notes. You can imagine my surprise when, upon putting on Los Vínculos, I was greeted by a quiet and warbling recording of the aria from J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. As it turns out, this album is a dialogue between present-day Shocron and a series of recordings of a young Shocron practicing the Goldberg Variations. Hence, the title can be translated to “the links” or “the ties” between the present and the past.
The concept is truly brilliant, and the practice recordings are strangely contemporary. While they are certainly Bach, they are also full of repetitions, as Shocron practices passages in search of perfection. They are replete with silences, as she stops and reviews a phrase. They are, furthermore, permeated by everyday noises and anything but audiophile. Shocron heightens the unusual character of these recordings through sonic manipulations, including what sounds like a low-pass filter on El Recuerdo and fast-forwards on Caos. The result is endlessly fascinating and strangely compelling.
Present-day Shocron’s playing is similarly stellar. At some points, present and past Shocrons play separately, inviting her to compose what are essentially new movements within the Goldberg Variations. At other times, the two play together, ushering in dizzying moments of four-handed counterpoint. On probably my favorite track on the album, El Espacio, Shocron fills the awkward gaps in her practice recording with faint extended technique noises. Her playing extends from barely audible strums inside the piano to bombastic, fiery passages. I never quite know what to expect, and I am grateful for that fact.
When thinking about piano overdubbing in the jazz tradition, my mind immediately goes to Bill Evans’s Conversations with Myself. Similarly, Brad Mehldau’s After Bach is a dialogue between a contemporary jazz pianist and J.S. Bach. The nature of Shocron’s conversations on Los Vínculos, however, is entirely different. Sometimes, when revisiting a place I went to in my childhood, I am shocked that there is any continuity between that person and the one who now writes this article. Shocron creates a beautiful artistic statement out of this cognitive—and now musical—dissonance.
Luis Conde, Paula Shocron, Cecilia Quinteros, Andrew Drury, Pablo Díaz - Geograficciones (NendoDango, 2018) ****½
Luis Conde, alto saxophone & clarinet
Paula Shocron, piano
Cecilia Quinteros, cello
Andrew Drury, drums & percussion
Pablo Díaz, percussion
Geograficciones documents an exchange between some of the most exciting artists from the Buenos Aires scene and American percussionist Andrew Drury, an interaction made possible by a partnership between NendoDango, Different Track Recordings and the Continuum Culture & Arts International Cultural Exchange program. The music develops in fascinating and unusual ways that remind me of the experience of exploring a new environment. Perhaps, the title, a portmanteau of the Spanish words for “geography” and “fiction” makes sense in this context.
The first track, “Now” begins with quiet conversations between percussion and prepared piano. I love Shocron’s playing here, which explores the timbral and rhythmic possibilities of a single note. As with much of the album, the music is often extremely quiet. It forces us to listen to the breathtaking impact of small textural changes. Quinteros joins on cello and demonstrates her supreme command of the instrument’s range and upper registers. Conde only begins playing about two minutes into the track in a stunning entrance, bringing with him power and intensity, as well restraint.
One of my favorite tracks, “Sur”, alternates between breathtakingly quiet interactions between cello and percussion and more bombastic piano-led passages. As with elsewhere on the album, the music develops as though through its own internal logic. Often, the changes are barely perceptible, and yet they are still profound and undeniable.
This powerful improvised music constantly surprises. It strikes a difficult balance between the most minute sensitivity and inflammatory intensity. It is a journey worth taking.
Yves Arques, Miguel Crozzoli - Drops of Sun (NendoDango, 2018) ****
Among the albums reviewed here, Drops of Sun is possibly the most melodically-driven. That is not, however, to say that timbre does not also play a key role in its musically development. I was at first hard-pressed to believe that there were only two musicians playing, Miguel Crozzoli on saxophone and Yves Arques on piano and “elements” (including prepared piano and percussion).
At least according to the track titles, the album seems to follow a process of spiritual awakening. It begins with an exploration of a drone note that both sets the tone and establishes a harmonic center. As the album progresses, however, it moves further away from more traditional modes of musical development. On “Whispering truths of unknown durations”, the music grows quieter, characterized often by breaths into the horn and timbral work by Arques until it concludes with a gong hit.
On “Until consciousness fall apart, overwhelmed by its limitless reality,” the music returns to some of its prior harmonic spaces but with newfound intensity and sonic potential. It resolves in “Letting all be dreams to be dreamed”, where Crozzoli’s beautiful tone brings new expression out of the horn until it lilts quietly away, accompanied by the high harmonic registers of the piano. The impression it leaves is lasting.
As regular readers know, 'the Bridge' series, is an initiative which creates ad hoc bands of American and French musicians. Escape Lane are Jeff Parker on guitar, Ben Lamar Gay on cornet, Joachim Florent on bass, and Denis Fournier on drums. The original band, formed by drummer Denis Fournier had Marquis Hill on trumpet, but he who was not available for the 2017 tour in Europe, and hence for their sophomore album.
The vinyl edition is twice a little over twenty minutes long, as you can expect, and a real joy from beginning to end. The French rhythm section turns the fully improvised concert into a rythmic post-boppish performance, joyous and intense at the same time, with sad bluesy overtones, especially at the end of the first side which continues on the second side, with a very moving trumpet solo by Lamar Gay.
But our attention goes to Jeff Parker, a very eclectic and versatile guitarist, who is as comfortable in traditional jazz guitar, and modern jazz as he is with the post-rock of Tortoise and the post-jazz of the Chicago Underground Quartet/Orchestra. On this album he again demonstrates his skills, as a solid accompaniment for the rest of the band, with wah-wah funky ideas and atmospheric moments on the second side of the album, but more importantly with a wonderful slow and equally bluesy solo on the first side. He is one of those guitarist who prefer precision and phrasing over speed. There is no showing off, no need to do anything but make great music.
And that makes this entire performance so great: it's nothing spectacular, not ground-breaking, but you listen to it as if you are part of the audience. It's intimate - with the occasional hesitation and a sound quality that is not always perfect, and maybe that's even an advantage, like old blues music where authenticity gets priority over sophistication - and the four musician go deep in their jazz history to bring a performance that is at the same time fun to listen to, modern, entertaining and very moving, with lots of space for individual soloing, which accentuates even more the strong collective interaction.
Last year’s archival releases included John Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album a previously unknown 1963
session; however, Eric Dolphy: Musical Prophet, essentially a
reissue of recordings from the same year, may have a certain priority. The
sessions that originally produced Conversations and Iron Man (now supplemented with a CD of alternate takes, two takes
of the previously unissued “Muses for Richard Davis” and the formerly released but misidentified “A Personal Statement” by Bob James with Dolphy and
countertenor David Schwartz), marked a unique opportunity
for Dolphy to document something of the breadth of his musical interests,
with the freedom to record originals and standards in settings that ranged
from solos and duets to groups of five to ten pieces.
Eric Dolphy led one of jazz history’s truncated lives; like Clifford Brown,
Scott La Faro and Booker Little, he died shockingly early in his career.
Though Dolphy managed to get to 36 while the others made it to their
mid-twenties at best, he had only emerged from the shadows of Watts and
Charlie Parker around 1958 when he was 30 years old. In the next few years
he would be an indispensable figure in the free jazz revolution. A singular
presence on: Charles Mingus’sCharles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus; George Russell’s Outer View, Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz; and John
Coltrane’s major works of 1961, Africa/Brass, Olé and the Village Vanguard Recordings. Dolphy was a key figure in the making
of all of them, on some the precipitating figure. For Mingus and Russell,
among the most formally visionary composers of the era, Dolphy seemed to
become their voice; for Coleman and Coltrane, the highly distinct and
central horns of the time, Dolphy managed the strange trick of being
utterly distinct—both more and less traditional
than either—from both.
After he moved to New York in 1959, Dolphy began to record with great
frequency. His first recordings as leader were with Prestige, the label
recording him as both sideman and leader, usually in relatively
conventional quintets (only Out There, a quartet with Ron Carter
on cello, deviated from the norm). The label was still releasing live
recordings from the Five Spot and European venues in 1964 when Dolphy died.
The only studio recordings he made under his own name between Far Cry (December 21, 1960) and Out to Lunch (Feb. 25,
1964) were these sessions from July 1 and 3, 1963, supervised by Alan
Douglas for the FM label. It is the greatest concentrated body of his own
music that Dolphy ever recorded, and only circumstances of release and
copyright have kept it from being recognized as such.
Producer Alan Douglas was a genuine visionary who made great jazz records,
sometimes by simply putting together great musicians. A year before the
Dolphy sessions he had produced Bill Evans and Jim Hall’s Undercurrents and the Ellington-Mingus-Roach Money Jungle
. This would apparently be the only time that Dolphy recorded his own music
without to some extent fitting into a record company’s favored format. The
first day’s recording was a session of duets with Richard Davis, producing
enough material for an LP, a brilliant, ground breaking duet LP, a
format that would be unlikely to appear in the Prestige and Blue Note
catalogues and that here stretches both the language of the instruments and
improvisation itself.
Two days later, Dolphy gathered 11 musicians in groupings from quintet to tentet to record pieces ranging from Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz” to
Dolphy’s own raw and explosive “Iron Man” and “Burning Spear.” While
Prestige and Blue Note seem to have avoided recording standards, Dolphy
relished them, and here he gets to cover several, including “Alone
Together” and “Come Sunday” with Davis and an unaccompanied solo version of
“Love Me” with startling leaps between registers and keening end to end
runs (among Dolphy’s great performances of standards is a version of
“Stormy Weather” with Mingus that presses expressionism to psychodrama).
* * *
Time interacts in numerous ways with our perception of a piece of music:
the circumstances—macro and micro—of our first
and subsequent hearings; the duration and intensity of our listening; the
seemingly ceaseless improvisation of memory. In a different way, there’s
also the specific impact in time and a work’s general reception, its scale
and assessment. For me, these Eric Dolphy recordings, essentially based on
two original LPs, Conversations, released in 1963, and Iron Man, released in 1968, have different degrees of
significance.
I heard Conversations when it was initially released, late in 1963
or early 1964. It would be the first record I ever reviewed. I gave it to
John Norris, the editor-publisher of Coda to consider. He didn’t
print it, explaining that Coda only reviewed records sent to them
for review, but I was enlisted as a regular writer. Had the teeming horns
of Iron Man appeared around the same time, I’m pretty sure I would
have responded even more enthusiastically, the way I had toFree Jazz, the way I would to New York Eye and Ear Control, but I suspect FM (a minor label that
released commercial folk music and mainstream jazz singer Chris Connor) was
putting out the least “exceptional” material, just as they couldn’t figure
out how to get an “outside” jazz record to its audience, given that Coda was just part of a larger scene, a welter of regional,
marginal, committed outlets that FM wasn’t linked to (and that ESP
would discover so magnificently a year later).
The significance of marketing now comes full circle with the three CDs and
extensive booklet of the Resonance reissue. Dolphy is now a “Genius
Rediscovered” on the cover of DownBeat, a major event in jazz
media that need “mainstream” geniuses even if, like Dolphy, they were
driven out of America 55 years ago, a musical brother to Bird and partner
to birds, admired by Garvin Bushell—present on these recordings--who had
played with Jelly Roll Morton, yet derided in the jazz press as
“anti-jazz.” It would be nice, however, if there wasn’t something a little
reactionary about this package, nice if there were a little room for a fact
checker or a reality checker in the deluxe packaging.
Here’s a passage from an excerpt from a 2008 McCoy Tyner interview with
John Kruth discussing the addition of Dolphy to the Coltrane quartet:
“Jimmy, Elvin and I felt that we had built something and were still on that
journey. We didn’t exactly understand where John was going in terms of
adding Eric…Olé was one of the highlights of Eric’s presence.” In
the daily hive of performance, it’s unlikely that a working musician will
be intensely aware of chronology, especially 50 years later, but someone
writing about the era might have some idea of the Coltrane band’s
evolution. At the beginning of 1961, Steve Davis was still the quartet’s
bassist. He was soon replaced by Reggie Workman who appeared consistently
until the end of the year. Art Davis frequently appeared as a second
bassist and was on Olé (recorded May 25) along with Dolphy
(famously identified as “George Lane”), Freddie Hubbard, Workman and Davis.
That same month (two days before), Coltrane, Dolphy and Tyner were
recording portions Africa/Brass and putting scores together, with
chords provided by Tyner and orchestration and conducting by Dolphy. On May
23, Paul Chambers was the second bassist; on the second session, June 7, it
was Art Davis. “Jimmy” (Garrison) begins alternating with Workman during
the marathon October-November stay at the Village Vanguard, but Workman is
the bassist on the fall ‘61 European tour that included Dolphy and bassist
on the last 1961 Impulse studio date (earmarked for Ballads). When
did Jimmy Garrison have time to resent Dolphy’s sudden intrusion?
Robin D.G. Kelley’s detailed notes refer to a Fort Worth tenor saxophonist
named Dewey Redmond, perhaps the father of the more famous Joshua
“Redmond”? Much of the booklet consists of a long string of short
interviews in which reed player after reed player, from Sonny Rollins to
David Liebman, expresses great admiration for the practice regimen required
for Dolphy to maintain his technique on his three very different
instruments. Few--Marty Ehrlich among them--seem keenly aware that Dolphy
was producing extraordinary music. Joe Chambers takes the opportunity to
recall the endorsement of Stanley Crouch, of himself, not Dolphy
particularly, (“The avant-garde was really what you were doing”) as opposed
to the music Chambers refers to with “not to name names, but that certain
other people who were known as revolutionaries were playing.”
A brief biography of another interview subject (the sole European) bears
quoting: “Han Bennink is a Dutch jazz drummer who has performed with a
number of American jazz greats in the 1960s including Dexter Gordon and
Sonny Rollins.” Notice the weird tense, “has performed…in the 1960s,” as if
the decade is still here. Not to trouble anyone with the idea that there is
any post-Dolphy music out there, but what, one might ask, has Bennink done lately, in, say, the 55 years since Dolphy died?
I don’t think I’m flattering the FJB readership by assuming anyone reading
this has a pretty clear idea, from a half-century of the ICP to perhaps
thousands of ad hoc formations including almost every major figure in free
jazz and the free improvisation movement. But of course, Dolphy’s music,
for many of us, wasn’t an end but prophecy that has fed much music since,
embodying what Evan Parker named so succinctly in an album title “The
Ericle of Dolphi.”
This conservative presentation echoes what happened to Dolphy and FM
records the first time around. Conversations emphasizes the
compositions of others, the small groups and the abstract interplay of
Dolphy and Davis. There’s joy in Prince Lasha’s “Music Matador,” a
Caribbean explosion with Dolphy’s bass clarinet whooping over the riffing
woodwinds of Lasha, Sonny Simmons and Clifford Jordan, and it continues
with “Jitterbug Waltz” with Bobby Hutcherson and an 18-year-old Woody Shaw
making his recording debut. The second side of the LP presents Dolphy’s
solo on “Love Me,” and an extended duet between bass clarinet and Richard
Davis’s bass on “Alone Together” an astonishingly “free” duet that well
might, with the Giuffre 3’s Free Fall, stand as a signal
achievement of third stream and free jazz finding a common ground that
continues to develop.
The music becomes far more intense with Iron Man and the
appearance of the nonet and tentet (likely Dolphy’s only opportunity for
large-scale orchestration following his brilliant beginnings with
Coltrane’s Africa), but Iron Man didn’t get to reveal its
riches until 1968, four years after Dolphy’s death, when record bins were
stuffed with 1961 “Memorial” recordings, three years after the release ofOut to Lunch, as many years after Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity and Sun Ra’s more challenging music, even a couple
of years after the release of Coltrane’s Ascension, the kind of
saxophone maelstrom that Iron Man foreshadowed. None of Dolphy’s
1963 work will ever be commonplace, but in the rapidly evolving musical
language of the times, Iron Man arrived in an utterly different
context than that in which it was recorded, his radically visionary work
seemingly only current.
Though this significant part of Dolphy’s music was effectively taken out of
the active dialogue of ‘60s free jazz (it’s unlikely that the big band ever
appeared publicly), that it’s now available, in one place, with its
alternates and optimal sound, should still be celebrated.
