The Penguin Jazz Guide (100 page)

ABDULLAH IBRAHIM
^&

Born Adolphe (Dollar) Johannes Brand, also known as Xahur, 9 October 1934, Cape Town, South Africa

Piano, flute, voice

African Sketchbook

Enja ENJ 2026

Ibrahim (p, f solo). May 1969.

Abdullah Ibrahim said (1993):
‘I’ve studied martial arts for many years and there’s a concept called
omote
, which is about the hidden and the obvious. Most people concentrate on the obvious but accept there’s a small proportion of life that remains mysterious. We reverse that, pretty much dispense with the obvious and concentrate on the mystery.’

As Dollar Brand, he had been a member of the pioneering Jazz Epistles, but he left South Africa after Sharpeville, settling first in Europe, then the United States. It was in Europe, though, that he met up with his first influence, Duke Ellington (Monk was the other), who arranged for him to make a first recording. The Dukeish tinges have not quite disappeared but Ibrahim is utterly distinctive, percussive with rocking bass tone
ostinati
and stabbing right-hand figures.

Much of the material here, including ‘The Dream’, ‘The Aloe And The Wildrose’ and ‘Hamba Khale’ (the last of these reprised at the end of the session), is familiar enough from the period. The playing is notably dark and chastened, but the engineers at Radio Bern have given him a big rich sound, with a lot of resonance round the flute part. In later years, Ibrahim said that he did not listen to other music. That’s already implicit here. He seems so self-determining that on those occasions when he stumbles across pianistic clichés, one senses he isn’t aware of them as such, but they have simply emerged in the process of improvisation. Brand seems to be known as Xahur at this period, perhaps a transitional stage in his conversion.

& See also
Yarona
(1995; p. 587)

AMALGAM
^&

Formed 1967

Group

Prayer For Peace

FMR 109/No Business NBLP16 LP

Trevor Watts (as); Jeff Cline, Barry Guy (b); John Stevens (d). May 1969.

Trevor Watts remembers:
‘I can’t remember much about the recording session, except that it was the best studio I’d been in so far. What I do recall was my uncertainty at the worth of the project. I was always unsure in my younger days, something that held me back a little. This recording is constantly being asked about. A friend of mine thinks it’s one of the best British jazz recordings ever. I said: “What? Only
British?”
’

The original Amalgam created some of the most stirring improvised music ever heard in Britain. The classic
Prayer For Peace
opens on an Ornette-like dirge in C minor before opening out into total freedom. Watts’s wailing alto figures sound like a Celtic folk-theme sounded across a heavy bass pedal. There’s no clear metre, but a sense of underlying pulse, and Stevens at points seems to speed and slow the underlying pattern. The remaining tracks would be anti-climactic if they were not so good. The three-part ‘Judy’s Smile’ builds into a suite of majesty and power, and doesn’t in any way suggest three ‘takes’ of the same material. Here again, Stevens is a key element in the music, but so too is Cline, who appears on everything but the title-track, his big round sound an anchor point at the middle of things. He died in 2009 and a limited vinyl reissue of the record, projected for 2010, is dedicated to his memory. Guy is perhaps a more resonant harmonic player. The change of tone is immediately evident on ‘Prayer For Peace’ and Guy’s ghost melodies, a feature of his own later work, are clearly in evidence, spectral figures that seem to emerge out of overtones rather than attacks.

Hereafter, Amalgam evolved into a more beat-driven outfit, in keeping with Watts’s growing interest in African music. A new association with drummer Liam Genockey proved to be even longer lasting than that with Stevens, and while the music is quite different, and certainly less melancholic than
Prayer For Peace
, it is possible to hear continuities.

& See also
SPONTANEOUS MUSIC ENSEMBLE, Quintessence
(1973–1974; p. 406);
TREVOR WATTS, Trevor Watts And The Celebration Band
(2001; p. 664)

MANFRED SCHOOF

Born 6 April 1936, Magdeburg, Germany

Trumpet

European Echoes

Atavistic/Unheard Music Series ALP232

Schoof; Enrico Rava, Hugh Steinmetz (t); Paul Rutherford (tb); Peter Brötzmann, Gerd Dudek, Evan Parker (ss, ts); Fred Van Hove, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Irène Schweizer (p); Derek Bailey (g); Arjen Gorter, Peter Kowald, Buschi Niebergall (b); Han Bennink, Pierre Favre (d). June 1969.

Evan Parker says:
‘Manfred has his name on some of the key early documents. There was the legendary track “Eisen Perceptions” and, importantly for me,
European Echoes
, which consolidated the relationship with the Continent (as we used to call it) for Paul, Derek Bailey and me. The stories of the quintet’s time in Paris at the Chat Qui Pêche, playing warming-up sets for Donald Byrd and sleeping on floors, still move me. Manfred is one of the originals.’

A key figure on the European free scene, Schoof played with Gunter Hampel and the George Russell Orchestra, as well as less structured formations. Though it’s a challenging and sometimes uncomfortable listen, the record that launched the Free Musik Produktion label
is obviously a historical document as well as a remarkable performance. It’s a record that struggles manfully against the recording values of the time. The larger ensembles come across as undifferentiated blocks of sound from which individual contributions are hard to separate. Given Schoof’s orchestral style – a hybrid of Richard Strauss and Karlheinz Stockhausen – this may be a description rather than a criticism. There are moments of great beauty, as when Derek Bailey uses his swell pedal to mimic an entire orchestral section or when Schlippenbach, Fred Van Hove and Irène Schweizer play a seemingly scored section towards the end of what was the first LP side, a passage that anticipates some of Barry Guy’s later work with Schweizer and the London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra. Schoof is a major figure in German music, as an educator, administrator and interpreter of classical repertoire, including the revered Zimmermann, but it’s a pity that his contribution to improvised music isn’t better remembered.

MAXINE SULLIVAN

Born Marietta Williams, 13 May 1911, Homestead, Pennsylvania; died 17 April 1987, New York City

Voice, valve trombone, flugelhorn

Close As Pages In A Book

Audiophile 203

Sullivan; Bob Wilber (ss, cl); Bernie Leighton (p); George Duvivier (b); Gus Johnson Jr (d). June 1969.

Maxine Sullivan said (1980):
‘I claim my little spot of fame. I sang on Broadway in
Swinging The Dream
, which was Shakespeare put to jazz. “Darn That Dream” was my spot, and it became a standard after that. Whenever I hear it, I always call out: “That’s
my
song!” ’

A wonderful character, with a still underrated ability to make a song her own by the subtlest variation of a line or lyric, Sullivan started a craze for jazzing folk material when Claude Thornhill did arrangements of a couple of Scottish songs for her. ‘Loch Lomond’ was the novelty hit which launched her career. The song (and ‘Darling Nellie Gray’, ‘It Was A Lover And His Lass’ and so forth) still works, because of Sullivan’s transparent, almost ghostly singing. She didn’t really swing her material so much as give it a lilting quality, floating it on phrasing that was measured and controlled without sounding excessively polite. Her version of ‘St Louis Blues’ sounds mousy next to a voice like Bessie Smith’s, but the demure melancholy with which she invests it is surprisingly compelling. She subsequently worked with her husband John Kirby, Benny Goodman and others, then as a solo, before retiring to be a nurse during the ’50s.

She came back around 1960 and kept singing (and sometimes playing valve trombone and flugelhorn) until her very last days. She had the final word on the folk song/Jacobean stuff with
Sullivan Shakespeare
in 1971, at what was a pretty good vintage for her. Her manner didn’t change much, but, as recording improved, her intimate style and meticulous delivery sounded as classic as any of the great jazz singers. In her 70s there was inevitably a decline in the strength of her voice, but careful production ensured that her albums sounded very good. This record was long a collectors’ favourite in its original Monmouth-Evergreen livery. The dozen songs, which inevitably include ‘Loch Lomond’ and ‘Darn That Dream’, are perfectly delivered – thoughtful, graceful, introspective without being introverted, this is peerless jazz singing, and the accompaniments by Wilber and his team are as
simpatico
as one could wish.

ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO

Formed 1966

Group

A Jackson In Your House / Message To Our Folks

Charly-Snapper 509

Lester Bowie (t); Joseph Jarman (sax, perc); Roscoe Mitchell (sax, perc); Malachi Mahgostut Favors (b). June–August 1969.

Joseph Jarman said (1989):
‘Lester was the doctor, the scientist in his white coat. Roscoe was the professor or businessman. Malachi and I, and Don, were the shamen, the magical figures with painted faces. It’s not something you find in Western culture now and that’s why it was so powerful.’

It’s a cliché, but not so far from the truth, that the Art Ensemble can’t really be appreciated on record. Certainly, the visual impact of the group was a major aspect of its long appeal, but over the years we’ve found the discs satisfying enough.
Listening to
– as opposed to merely watching – the Art Ensemble has always helped clarify the group’s subtly signified satire of both black and white culture, a process that offers due respect to both traditions. Any overemphasis on the group’s self-presentation, without a due understanding of its other aesthetics, runs the risk of making the Art Ensemble seem clownish or, that cliché of African-American studies, ‘tricksterish’. The group began around what developed into the AACM in Chicago, originally with Bowie, Mitchell and Favors, adding Jarman as a more or less regular member and Moye only later, in Paris, where the band apparently came up with their name when asked for one by journalists. So runs one version of the story, but the members, with Richard Abrams’s encouragement, were already synthesizing aspects of post-bop jazz with European art music and other aspects of black vernacular and sanctified music, so the ‘Art Ensemble’ tag was far from ironic.

The choice of these very early sets might be controversial because Moye is not yet in the band, but they have seemed to us down the years the most successful representations on record of the Art Ensemble’s attempted syncretism of styles. There are, to be sure, more polished sessions and certainly better recorded ones, but there is a thoughtful excitement and sense of brimming uncertainty about these early sessions that hasn’t dimmed with the passing years, even as more recent records have started to sound shopworn and timewarped.

The original (French) release of both LPs was subheaded ‘A.A.C.M. Great Black Music’ and it documents the quartet’s early effort to get away from the ‘jazz’ tag and create a new synthetic genre. Since all four members play additional instruments, the absence of a drummer isn’t strongly felt, though at times the pulse is a little unvarying. Any sense that the Art Ensemble was a shambolic free-for-all should be quashed by ‘Get In Line’ on
A Jackson In Your House
. Not even James Brown and Prince ever got a group so crisply on the button.

GUNTER HAMPEL

Born 31 August 1937, Göttingen, Germany

Vibraphone, piano, reeds

The 8th Of July 1969

Birth CD 001

Hampel; Anthony Braxton (sno, ss, as, f, cbcl); Willem Breuker (ss, as, ts, bcl); Arjen Gorter (b) Steve McCall (d); Jeanne Lee (v). July 1969.

Gunter Hampel says:
‘Jazz was born when the great rhythms of African pentatonic music culture met the 12-tone octave of European music. I simply repeated that process in 1969: my group, assembled with three Afro-American exponents, started a new concept of music-making in renewing the ingredients of jazz and setting new levels of group play. That process carries on to this day.’

Göttingen was occupied by US troops during Hampel’s formative years and it was through Willis Conover’s Voice of America broadcasts – revered in Europe – that he came across jazz for the first time. He formed a jazz group while still a teenager, and seemed to dabble in various classic and modern styles. After military service and training as an architect, he veered towards music again and was playing professionally in his early 20s. In 1964, he formed the Heartplants group with trumpeter Manfred Schoof and pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach, but later in the decade began to associate more with visiting and exiled Americans, including vocalist Jeanne Lee, who became his wife.

A figure of extraordinary self-reliance and creative doggedness, Hampel has largely stood apart from other developments, continuing to put out his own music, often under the name Galaxie Dream Band, on his home label Birth, whose catalogue is huge but only partly transferred to CD. The first LP to be remastered was this remarkable transatlantic encounter. Hampel had recorded before, an early set with Heartplants and then the somewhat unsatisfactory
Music From Europe
for ESP-Disk. The 1969 date, recorded in Baarn in the Netherlands, is strictly speaking a collaborative date, though issued under Hampel’s name. As so often at this period, when so many American musicians were based in Europe, it points to essential differences in philosophy and practice, though in this case these are less obvious than in, say, Braxton’s later London performances with Derek Bailey, who eschewed melody, harmony, groove with equal thoroughness.