This blog covers the music I play on my Live365 station: Jazz Note NSU. It is devoted to hard bop and avant garde jazz. Here I confess my faith: the center of genius in modern music is jazz; the center of genius in jazz is hard bop, and especially the body of music produced between the early 50's and the mid-60's. And at the center of it all is Miles Davis. This blog is especially aimed at readers who want to build a serious jazz library.
I have occasionally delved into the impossible task of classification. When you try to do something that can't be done, you will discover that you cannot do it. Still, the resulting errors are at least entertaining to myself.
Irène Schweizer is a Swiss pianist whom I discovered just tonight, after downloading her duet album with drummer Han Bennink. I haven't had time to digest the whole album yet, but the second cut is simply magnificent. Schweizer is described as a free jazz musician, but 'Verzweigelt' (desperation) seems to me to be a showpiece of avant garde. I like to keep classifications as neat as possible, and here is how I see the two sub-genres of jazz. Free jazz is improvising that is unencumbered (by melody, time signatures, etc.) either externally by an prearranged form or internally as the music proceeds. Avant garde is jazz that is fundamentally abstract, taking music apart and rearranging it according to the forms rather than the narrative. The two types of music are not exclusive; however, when some kind of story line emerges, it is more proper to call it avant garde. It seems to me that 'Verzweigelt' surely finds a story. While challenging, I think it is not that hard to follow and it is warm and compelling. The above is not so good a sample, but it's mighty fun to watch. I am also playing 'Eine andere Partie Tischtennis'.
Somehow Ken Vandermark manages to produce a steady stream of recordings despite the uncompromising character of his music. Not only is he unwilling to compromise in any commercial sense, he is unwilling compromise with ordinary jazz sensibilities. Any given Vandermark 5 album will have a range of compositions each of which challenges the mood and taste that might have been satisfied by the previous piece. Still, much of his work is firmly rooted in the common soil of blues-based jazz. A good case in point are the Free Jazz Classics, vol 1-4. Even the title of that series of live recordings is challenging. Free jazz conjures up a picture of musicians spontaneously conversing without the encumbrance of either a plan or a melody. What exactly could a "free jazz classic" possibly mean? The answer, of course, is that just because the original piece (say, by Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton) was free doesn't mean that it didn't produce both a plan and a melody that could be executed again. So is the repeat version really free itself? That is a bit beyond my grasp of musical metaphysics. I will only say that the Free Jazz Classics is a smashing collection of jazz performances. I am playing 'The Earth/Jerry/The Moon' and 'C.M.E./G Song' from vol. 2. The former is a Frank Wright composition, from Wright's album The Earth. The latter is a Julius Hemphill piece. Here is the lineup:
I am also playing 'The Earth' from the Frank Wright Trio album of that name. Here is the trio:
Frank Wright (ts)
Henry Grimes (b)
Tom Price (d)
Wright's horn here sounds a lot like Albert Ayler (though it is rather more coherent than was Ayler's style). It is an interesting study to compare the Vandermark version with Wright's original. Both are well worth your dime.
Roswell Rudd's ruddy trombone is a big part of the Avant Garde scene, or so I gather. I only recently discovered him, while crawling along the discography of Steve Lacy. I picked up Regeneration, a very interesting album with a very interesting cast. With Lacy's soprano sax on board, you would be expecting Page Four jazz. What you get is pretty straight Page Three bop. It's avant garde only in the squeaky, circus clown orchestra cum Thelonious monk sound of the instruments. I listened to it this afternoon while making out a test for my Constitutional Law students. It's very good jazz. There's a nice interview with Rudd at All About Jazz.
In addition to Rudd and Lacy, the album features Misha Mengelberg on piano (really good piano), Kent Carter on bass, and Han Bennink on drums. Strong Dutch accent. The music is Monk and Herbie Nichols. Nichols, I gather, was a contemporary of Monk's.
As I said, this music is p3 jazz, more akin to actual Monk hardbop than to the free jazz for which these guys are known. For a lark, compare it to this piece by Miles Davis. This is one of Mile's albums that never got the recognition it deserves. Coltrane and Hank Mobley play tenor sax on the disc, with Wynton Kelley on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and both Jimmy Cobb and Philly Joe Jones on drums.
More than a dollop is what you will get if you get your ears around Eric Dolphy: The Complete Prestige Recordings. This box set consists of 9 discs, and when you have got it you have by God got Dolphy. It doesn't include his most famous recording, Out to Lunch. But it does include Far Cry, perhaps his second most famous album. Far Cry is what first interested me in Dolphy.
The Prestige Box also includes the justly famous Five Spot sessions, with trumpeter Booker Little. The latter might be Dolphy's finest hour. The Prestige Box has a lot more. About six complete albums, by my count, with a lot of pieces from other stuff, like four cuts from Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis' Trane Whistle. It also has Ron Carter's Where?, and Mal Waldron's The Quest. Oh, and there are two discs with Oliver Nelson as lead.
That is a lot of solid if frequently challenging jazz. I have written before of the problems that jazz box sets present to the collector. One new problem is very evident here: when the collection includes several sets recorded under someone else's name, they get scattered all over your iTunes library. In this case I decided to change the album information on the tracks to reflect what was originally issued, and file it under the leader's name. This means that I have several partial albums, since no tracks were included from the Lockjaw Davis disc that Dolphy wasn't on. It's really great that I can pop a disc into my computer and iTunes will get the track names for me. But we really need some better conventions for file tags.
Dolphy had a short but magnificent career. His first recording listed on the Jazz Discography Project is in 1948, when he was twenty. He died in 1964 from undiagnosed diabetes. In between, he records a lot of very basic music, and shows up on a lot of seminal discs by other jazz giants. He is on Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth, George Russel's Ezz-Thetics, and Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard and the Africa/Brass Sessions. He was equally adept at the alto saxophone, the flute, and the bass clarinet.
I think it was the latter that should have been in his funeral boat when it was shoved out to sea. The deeply hollow sound, sucking up all reality around it, was what Dolphy was about. He is clearly associated with free jazz, and sits behind Ornett Coleman on, well, Free Jazz. Dolphy's Out to Lunch is a basic document of that movement. It's pretty chaotic and occasionally down right mysterious. Almost all of it has the character of a machine producing a lot of noise as it does one is not quite sure what. But I find I can listen to it now with interest.
Dolphy was clearly a genius of improvisation. He has a persistant fondness for a slightly sour, unexpected sound; but his compositional weaving mostly produces a tapestry that is coherent and compelling. I have loaded three Dolphy pieces onto the current drop.io site.
One is the title number from Far Cry. Dolphy's opening presents the sound mentioned, but the tune as a whole is mainstream hardbop. Booker Little plays trumpet, Jackie Byard piano, Ron Carter bass, with Roy Haines on drums. "Fire Waltz" is a classic Dolphy composition, recorded at one of his live sessions at the Five Spot Cafe. Booker Little again on trumpet, Mal Waldron on piano, Richard Davis on bass, and Ed Blackwell on drums. Waldron's solo is especially worthy of note. Live at the Five Spot 1&2, and the Memorial Album, might be Dolphy's best recordings.
"God Bless the Child" is a solo piece, with Dolphy playing the bass clarinet, also recorded in 1961 at the Five Spot. It is included on a hodge podge album, Here and There, which is all in the Prestige box. Dolphy spins the powerful, buzzing and sqeaking horn so fast at times, it's a wonder he wasn't being followed by storm chasers. But then he spins it out slow and thoughtful, as if to wonder what all the action was about.
Eric Dolphy is worth investing in. I can recommend without reservation: Far Cry, Live at the Five Spot 1&2, and The Memorial Album. One more recording that in the box set but, mysteriously, doesn't appear in the Penguin Guide, is Mal Waldron's The Quest. Booker Ervin is on that one, and that can't be bad. A fine version of "Fire Waltz" is also there.
There are two stories about Dolphy's death. One has it that he collapsed into a diabetic coma in his hotel room, and died from insulin shock at the hospital. Another is that he collapsed on stage, and when they brought him to the hospital, the doctors assumed it was drugs. They left him in bed to sleep it off. If the latter is true, chalk up one more jazz fatality to heroin.
