The Penguin Jazz Guide (115 page)

& See also
Complete Communion
(1965; p. 325)

BILLY HARPER

Born 17 January 1943, Houston, Texas

Tenor saxophone

Black Saint

Black Saint 120001

Harper; Virgil Jones (t); Joe Bonner (p); David Friesen (b); Malcolm Pinson (d). July 1975.

Black Saint/Soul Note founder Giovanni Bonandrini says:
‘It was my first recording in the studio of my very good friend Giancarlo Barigozzi. It was the LP era and we could only have about 22 minutes per side to get the best natural sound. It was also the first time I met Billy Harper. We had been in touch by mail and had planned to record in Milan while he was on tour. Billy Harper and Sun Ra are the two most deeply religious musicians I ever met. You can sense that from Billy’s titles, but also from the music.’

Initially influenced by Sonny Rollins, but increasingly by Coltrane, Harper earned his chops playing in church before going on to work with Art Blakey, Max Roach and Gil Evans, for whom he wrote ‘Priestess’ and ‘Thoroughbred’, two of the best modern-jazz compositions in the book. His gifts as a writer and his big saxophone sound should have made him a star, but the breakthrough never quite came and the majors stayed away, even when many of Harper’s contemporaries were being rediscovered. Like many of his countrymen, Harper had to look to Europe for recognition, and to the Black Saint/Soul Note stable (he inaugurated both imprints) for recording opportunities.

Black Saint
is still the album people associate with Harper, a strong, eclectic blend of blues, hard-edged rock patterns and the by now familiar preaching style. Jones and Bonner are greatly admired in Europe, too, and the pianist makes his mark on the record from the very start with his tersely romantic approach and elastic chord-patterns. There is a lot of blues in Harper’s sound and a gospelly roll to his best pieces – it comes over in ‘Priestess’ – and on
Black Saint
he marries it all to a joyous, spiritual quality that’s signalled at the very
beginning with ‘Dance, Eternal Spirits, Dance’, a mysterious waltz that seems to come out of some timeless space. ‘Croquet Ballet’ also has a dancing quality, but the real substance of the date is the very long ‘Call Of The Wild And Peaceful Heart’, which occupied the original second side. Harper never surpassed it and it also contains some of Joe Bonner’s most exciting work on record. A genuine classic and, given Black Saint/Soul Note’s importance in documenting creative Americans over the next three decades, an epoch in modern jazz.

MARY LOU WILLIAMS
^&

Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs (later Burley), 8 May 1910, Atlanta, Georgia; died 28 May 1981, Durham, North Carolina

Piano

Free Spirits

Steeplechase SCCD 31043

Williams; Buster Williams (b); Mickey Roker (d). July 1975.

Mary Lou Williams said (1975):
‘Bop is the real modern jazz. Playing in smooth eighth notes was fine for the swing era and composing with 12 tones is fine for classical musicians. Bop, though, is a new language and the real means of expression for American jazz musicians.’

In later years, Williams devoted much time to composing large-scale masses and other sacred pieces, and was much involved with charity work. She was increasingly recognized as an important composer/arranger and as a piano-player, though a planned summit with Cecil Taylor fell out disastrously, two large egos colliding. Williams did continue to enjoy small-group play and some of her best music was made in this form, even if it didn’t address her larger intentions.

As a straightforward performance,
Free Spirits
is a much better record than a number of others from around the same period. Williams’s health was still robust (it began to break down towards the end of the ’70s) and her playing is much sharper and surer, also more relaxed and swinging. Typically, she mixes standards (‘Temptation’, ‘Surrey With The Fringe On Top’) with jazz staples (Miles’s ‘All Blues’, Bobby Timmons’s gospel-tinged ‘Dat Dere’) and her own work, ‘Ode To Saint Cecilie’, ‘Gloria’, ‘Blues For Timme’, unexpectedly adding two John Stubblefield compositions (two takes each of ‘Baby Man’ and ‘Free Spirits’) and a promising ‘Pale Blue’ by bassist Buster Williams, who provides a perfect complement to her light left hand.

& See also
The Zodiac Suite
(1945; p. 100)

HARRY ‘SWEETS’ EDISON

Born 10 October 1915, Columbus, Ohio; died 27 July 1999, Columbus, Ohio

Trumpet

Just Friends

Black & Blue 918

Edison; Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis (ts); Gerry Wiggins (p); Major Holley (b); Oliver Jackson (d). July 1975.

Harry Edison said (1984):
‘I don’t think Jaws and I play the same way at all; never did. I think we were pretty much like opposites, but oil and vinegar that could combine into something tastier than each one on his own. That’s why it worked so long.’

A much-loved elder statesman of jazz in the two decades before his death, ‘Sweets’ had served his time in umpteen territory bands before joining Basie and becoming one of those jazz soloists who is identifiable from the very first note. The nickname refers to his sound, not a taste for sugar. He made surprisingly few records of his own and many of them shared the limelight with someone else – Ben Webster or Lockjaw Davis – on which occasions he was quite happy to take the rear seat. Edison’s solos were always full of invention, right to the very last, and it’s a pity that so many of the best of them have to be filleted out of jam situations and guest spots.

He hadn’t made a record for ten years when Black & Blue, devoted sponsors of American players in France, came in with a spot for him in 1975. Davis had become a regular partner and the perfect foil to Harry’s softly burnished tone. ‘There Is No Greater Love’ is the standout track on a fairly standard roster of material, which includes a couple of run-through originals got together for the session. Wiggins, Holley and Jackson do their business briskly and without fuss and there’s a job-well-done feel to the whole proceedings. A duo record with Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines was made for the label at around the same time; it’s also worth having.

TOSHIKO AKIYOSHI

Born 12 December 1929, Liaoyang, Manchuria

Piano

The Toshiko Akiyoshi–Lew Tabackin Big Band

Novus ND 83 106

Akiyoshi; Lew Tabackin (ts, f, picc); Stu Blumberg, Richard Cooper, Steve Huffstetter, John Madrid, Lynn Nicholson, Mike Price (t); Bobby Shew (t, flhn); Charlie Loper, Bruce Paulson, Bill Reichenbach, Jim Sawyer, Britt Woodman (tb); Bill Teele (btb); Gary Foster (ss, as, f, acl); Dick Spencer (as, f, cl); Tom Peterson (ss, as, ts, f, cl); Bill Perkins (ss, bs, f, cl, bcl); Don Baldwin, Gene Cherico (b); Peter Donald (d); Kisaku Katada (kotsuzumi); Yataki Yazaki (ohtsuzumi); Tokuku Kaga (v); collective personnel. April 1974, February & March 1975, January, February & June 1976.

Toshiko Akiyoshi said (1991):
‘I came to America thinking I’d learn all there was to learn and then go home and show it to everyone there. And then you realize you haven’t learned very much after all, and you just have to keep going.’

Though considered one of the finest big-band composers and arrangers since Duke Ellington (who profoundly influenced her), Toshiko Akiyoshi is still not fully recognized and much of her best and most ambitious work has been deleted. This compilation of her mid-’70s band, co-led with second husband Lew Tabackin, is remarkable in its almost total concentration on her own compositional output: no standards or pop tunes. The middle years of the decade marked a dramatic new development in her writing, and an increased interest in her own remarkable cultural heritage.

At the end of the Second World War, Akiyoshi’s immigrant parents were forced to return to Japan, settling in Beppu. The city, on the southern island of Kyūshū, was occupied by American forces, giving Toshiko her first extended exposure to Western music. Having started piano lessons at the age of seven and abandoned plans for a medical career, she began playing in a local club. She was discovered there by Oscar Peterson, who was touring Japan, and the Canadian pianist persuaded Norman Granz to record her. Two years later, in 1955, Akiyoshi applied to the Berklee School of Music and was accepted on a scholarship. While in Boston, she met alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano. They married in 1959 and formed a quartet, recorded the following years by the Candid label. She also worked with Charles Mingus.

Though she recorded with a big band in 1965, as Toshiko Mariano, Akiyoshi returned to
Japan for a period in the mid-’60s and it was only after returning to the US that she began to incorporate elements of Asian music into her work, an approach apparently inspired by Duke Ellington’s naturalization of African sounds. Having married tenor saxophonist Tabackin and worked with him in a small group, Akiyoshi established a big band in California in 1972.

Though it is often said that the orchestra, rather than the piano, is her real instrument, her unaccompanied intro to ‘Studio J’ (originally on the 1976 LP
Insights
) suggests a formidable keyboard stylist. Her genius, though, lies in orchestration, with a highly distinctive use of multi-part harmony. The Akiyoshi/Tabackin bands used an unusually large range of instruments (including some ‘ethnic’ effects), but particularly various in the range of reeds and flutes. In his useful liner-note, Leonard Feather points to the combination of Bill Perkins’s baritone and Tabackin’s piccolo on ‘Quadrille, Anyone?’

Akiyoshi’s part-writing is imaginative and challenging, often stepping outside conventional tonality. ‘Children In The Temple Ground’, with its distinctive vocals, and ‘The First Time’ both come (like ‘Quadrille, Anyone?’) from the slightly earlier
Long Yellow Road
LP, perhaps the most self-consciously ‘Eastern’ of the records. Throughout her career, willingly and otherwise, Akiyoshi has been drawn to historical and political subject matter. In 1986, she recorded material written to celebrate the centenary of the Statue of Liberty. In 1999, she was pressed, over her initial reservation, to write music inspired by the Hiroshima bombing. Earlier, she had written a moving piece for the Japanese children crippled and brain-damaged by mercury poisoning at Minimata. Perhaps the most affecting of the tracks here are ‘Kogun’, dedicated to the Japanese soldier who didn’t know the war had ended, and the skilful linking of ‘Since Perry’ (a reference to the American naval commodore who ‘opened up’ Japan to Western influence, though only at the point of naval guns) with Tabackin’s exquisite ‘Yet Another Tear’, these from the 1976 live record
Road Time
. There is also a beautiful ‘American Ballad’, as reminder that Akiyoshi’s cultural loyalties are complex and in a constant state of playful contention.

These are important recordings, both in the evolution of big-band jazz and in the naturalization of ‘Oriental’ procedures and timbres into American music. They deserve to be more widely appreciated.

TERJE RYPDAL

Born 23 August 1947, Oslo, Norway

Guitar, soprano saxophone, keyboards

Odyssey

ECM 835355

Rypdal; Torbjorn Sunde (tb); Brynjolf Blix (org); Sveinung Hovensjø (b); Svein Christiansen (d). August 1975.

Guitarist Bill Frisell said (1986):
‘Long before I had any association with ECM, Terje Rypdal’s music seemed like the way guitar-playing could go in jazz. I think everyone who played the instrument was affected by it.’

Rypdal – which is pronounced ‘roop-dal’, incidentally – started out in rock, much influenced by Jimi Hendrix, but he came under George Russell’s wing and that period of study shaped him considerably as a performer and composer, latterly of classical pieces that on closer examination are an extension of the heady, ethereal jazz impressionism of earlier days.

The cover of
Odyssey
, with a guitar-slung Rypdal sitting on the tailgate of a loaded Transit van, suggests that he might come from the Rory Gallagher end of rock and indeed some of the music is crunchingly heavy, a welcome change from the floaty
Whenever I Seem To Be Far Away
, which came out on ECM the year before. But even when the dynamics are
extreme, Rypdal’s sophistication is evident. There are long passages on ‘Midnite’, ‘Adagio’ and ‘Farewell’ which might be offcuts from a forgotten Miles Davis date. In fact, one of Rypdal’s early compositions, on the eponymous first ECM album (he’d played on Garbarek’s
Afric Pepperbird
previously) is named after a muttered comment of Miles’s on
Bitches Brew
: ‘Keep it like that. Tight.’ The guitar is cranked up high and there’s a Santana-like sustain to some of the single-line solo passages, but the harmonics are entirely his own and very elusive, which is why this record, and others of the time, manage to sound fresh even now.

EBERHARD WEBER

Born 22 January 1940, Stuttgart, Germany

Double bass, cello, keyboards

Yellow Fields

ECM 843205-2

Weber; Charlie Mariano (ss, shenai); Rainer Brüninghaus (ky); Jon Christensen (d). September 1975.

Eberhard Weber said (1991):
‘It is a difficult instrument with which to lead. Even Charles Mingus couldn’t lead with his bass, which is why his ego got so large. But electricity allows me to be heard at the front of the group, so that has made a difference. But – like Mingus, only quieter – I like to lead with ideas rather than sound.’