The Penguin Jazz Guide (116 page)

Weber learned cello as a boy but switched to bass and played part-time gigs while working in film and TV. Early associations with Wolfgang Dauner and Volker Kriegel led to his own composing and bandleading, and a long tenure with ECM from 1973. He was a pioneer in using bass with electronics, playing an adapted upright model. Weber’s masterpiece is essentially a period piece which nevertheless still seems modern. The sound of it seems almost absurdly opulent: bass passages and swimming keyboard textures that reverberate from the speakers, chords that seem to hum with huge overtones. The keyboard textures in particular are of a kind that will probably never be heard on record again. But there’s little prolixity or meandering in this music. Weber builds keenly around riffs and rhythmical figures, and solos – Mariano sounding piercingly exotic on the shenai, heartbreakingly intense on soprano – are perfectly ensconced within the sound-field. But the key element is the inspirational series of cross-rhythms and accents which Christensen delivers, in an extraordinary crescendo towards the close of ‘Sand-Glass’, a sprawling performance built from simple materials. And the leader’s own bass never sounded better.

PAT METHENY
^&

Born 12 August 1954, Lee’s Summit, Montana

Guitar

Bright Size Life

ECM 827133-2

Metheny; Jaco Pastorius (b); Bob Moses (d). December 1975.

Guitarist Martin Taylor says:
‘
Bright Size Life
was a turning point in jazz. Metheny took jazz into a direction that nobody else knew about. He’s a true visionary and undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the music.’

By the time he was 19 the Missourian had already been teaching at Berklee and playing with the Gary Burton group. He made a string of records for ECM and formed a hugely successful
touring group, with keyboardist Lyle Mays. He has built an audience in both the jazz and the rock camps, but never settles back into a comfortable style, always testing himself against new challenges, including a recent experiment in ‘Orchestrionics’, using mechanically operated instruments in tribute to the player-pianos and other homespun technologies of his childhood.

When he first appeared, as a coolly melodic electric guitarist for the ECM label, Metheny seemed content to drop his playing into whatever context it might find. The first two ECM albums are a little untypical – each depends more on its respective star bassist to give it some clout – but, like the ones that follow, these are highly crafted records full of hummable tunes, rendered with such high-grade production and sometimes over-sensitive musicianship that sometimes the impression is of amiability and no more. At this time Metheny favoured a clean, open tone with just enough electronic damping to take the music out of ‘classic’ jazz guitar feeling, but he clearly owed a great debt to such urban pastoralists as Jim Hall and Jimmy Raney, even if he seldom moved back to bebop licks.

& See also
Song X
(1985; p. 497)

Part 2:
1976–1980

GEORGE BENSON

Born 22 March 1943, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Guitar, voice

Breezin’

Warner Archive/Rhino 76713-2

Benson; Ronnie Foster, Jorge Dalto (ky); Phil Upchurch (g); Stanley Banks (b); Harvey Mason (d); Ralph McDonald (perc); strings. January 1976.

George Benson said (1996):
‘What’d I do? I used a couple of pedals, added some keyboards and electric bass and threw in the odd vocal. And they said I was a traitor to jazz! Find me the bit of paper I signed that said I was a citizen of “jazz”!’

Benson’s pop success tended to camouflage the fact that he is a brilliant musician. His first records were made when Wes Montgomery was alive and the acknowledged master of the style which Benson developed for his own ends: a rich, liquid tone, chunky octave chording and a careful sense of construction that makes every chorus tell its own story. At his best, Benson can fire off beautiful lines and ride on a 4/4 rhythm with almost insolent ease.

Breezin’
was the first jazz album to go platinum and sell a million copies, but more important was its reconciliation of Taylor’s pop-jazz approach with a small-group backing in which Benson could feel genuinely at home. Claus Ogerman’s arrangements are still fluffy, and the tunes are thin if not quite anodyne, but Benson and his tightly effective band get the most out of them and the blues are never far away in his playing. The new edition adds two extra tracks, one of which, ‘Shark Bite’, is tougher and less polite than the rest of the record. It’s worth remembering that this was Benson’s 20th record and it came in the middle of a decade whose musical values were not those even of the ’60s. He wasn’t selling out; he was keeping up.

ALBERT MANGELSDORFF

Born 5 September 1928, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; died 25 July 2005, Frankfurt am Main

Trombone

Trombonliness

Sackville SKCD 2011

Mangelsdorff (tb solo). January & March 1976.

Saxophonist Emil Mangelsdorff said (1992):
‘It’s maybe something that only a brother would say, but you can always tell it’s Albert playing, instantly. There is no one else with that sound on the trombone. He has many followers, but he doesn’t have a “school”, because no one sounds quite like him.’

Mangelsdorff came of age in the American-occupied zone of postwar Germany, and his first performances were to servicemen, who seem to have exposed him to recent developments in jazz. He acquired an enthusiasm for the music from his saxophonist brother Emil and, as a precocious teenager, had taken part in the wartime jazz underground in Frankfurt. Though he retained a big-hearted sound and some elements of classic swing, his main innovations – shared with the younger Briton Paul Rutherford – were in the area of multiphonics, the ability to play more than one tone simultaneously. Mangelsdorff never went as far into free music as Rutherford or their fellow instrumentalist George E. Lewis and some listeners, coming to his music for the first time, are surprised by how little some of it accords with usual assumptions about the ‘avant-garde’. Mangelsdorff’s solo performances were striking for their logic and order as they were for their bold approach to timbre and tonality.

ANTHONY BRAXTON
^&

Born 4 June 1945, Chicago, Illinois

Saxophones, clarinets, flutes, piano

Creative Orchestra Music 1976

Arista AL 4080 / Mosaic MD8 242

Braxton; Kenny Wheeler, Cecil Bridgewater, Jon Faddis (t); George E. Lewis, Garrett List (tb); Earl McIntyre, Jack Jeffers (btb); Jonathan Dorn (tba); Roscoe Mitchell (ss, as, bs); Seldon Powell (as, cl, f); Ron Bridgewater (ts, cl); Bruce Johnstone (bs, bcl); Muhal Richard Abrams, Frederic Rzewski (p); Karl Berger (vib, xy, perc) Richard Teitelbaum (syn); Dave Holland (b); Warren Smith (d, b mar, perc); Barry Altschul, Philip Wilson (perc); Leo Smith (cond, t). February 1976.

George E. Lewis says:
‘There was tension in the studio. Everybody knew that something special was happening that New York hadn’t seen coming. In the AACM we had been doing this for years, but it scared some of the others. A new kind of musician had come, and people had to deal with it.’

Listeners at the time wondered how ‘creative orchestra music’ might be different from big-band jazz and turned it down unheard with utmost prejudice. Ironically, much of the music here is turned towards Ellington, in something like the way – albeit from a different direction – that Miles Davis’s music of a slightly earlier period was turned towards Ellington. In the years immediately following Duke’s death, he seemed the biggest single challenge and benchmark in African-American music, and several times on this extraordinary recording one hears the orchestra, which included a number of more obviously mainstream players like Faddis, run a spectrum of Ducal sounds from the early ‘jungle music’ to the elegant world music of the late suites.

‘Composition No. 51’ is a wildly exciting chart that evokes Ellington and Fletcher Henderson, and by extension the Sun Ra Arkestra. It swings madly. ‘No. 56’ is in stark contrast, a slower, fogbound journey round a primeval swamp with the emphasis on clarinets and a roster of soloists that never quite breaks the sonic surface. ‘No. 58’ is in the realm of John Philip Sousa, an important ancestor for Braxton, while ‘No. 55’ goes back to something like the big-band music of the opening, but in a jagged, blocky way in which huge, awkward vamps are interspersed by solos that have only an uncertain and remote connection (by the usual standards of harmony and rhythm) to the ‘head’ material.

It’s an exhilarating record, not at all forbidding, and still after more than 30 years one of the best things Braxton ever did on the larger scale. In time to come, finding and funding large orchestras of seasoned players capable of delivering this music became ever more difficult. As Braxton’s projects grew in magnitude – and even non-jazz people knew him as the guy who wanted to put jazz orchestras on orbiting space stations – his resources, for the moment at least, shrank.

& See also
For Alto
(1968; p. 355),
New York, Fall 1974
(1974; p. 416),
Quartet (London / … Birmingham / … Coventry) 1985
(1985; p. 495),
Nine Compositions (Iridium) 2006
(2006; p. 714)

MILT JACKSON
^&

Born 1 January 1923, Detroit, Michigan; died 9 October 1999, New York City

Vibraphone

At The Kosei Nenkin

Pablo 26

Jackson; Teddy Edwards (ts); Cedar Walton (p); Ray Brown (b); Billy Higgins (d). March 1976.

Norman Granz said (1982):
‘Vibes isn’t the easiest instrument to take on the road, but Milt seemed to have an appetite for touring at that time, and I never knew him to play any less than excellently and sometimes inspirationally.’

Jackson’s signing to Pablo brought forth a flood of albums. Just as he did with Count Basie, Granz basically set Milt up in the studio and let him go, which means that all these records are solidly entertaining without ever quite going the extra distance and becoming a classic. Some of the live dates are actually much better, though the run of Pablos at the time had something of the processional about them.

This sounds like a proper group, up and ready to swing and with a basic emphasis on bop and the blues. ‘Birk’s Works’ is a nod to old boss Dizzy Gillespie, who was also hoofing the festival boards at the time, while Miles Davis’s ‘All Blues’ takes a more searching line on the theme than was usual at that date. ‘St Thomas’ is happy music, however you play it, and this was an evident crowd-pleaser. Edwards always sounds slightly huffy on dates like this and never quite gets where he’s going on his solos, but the rest of the group falls into place around him and the gaps are never evident. It may not seem in the front rank of Jackson albums, but we’ve found it consistently excellent and with real staying power, where many records of this era sound like casual encounters or gig souvenirs.

& See also
Wizard Of The Vibes
(1948–1952, p. 118),
Bags Meets Wes
(1961; p. 281);
MODERN JAZZ QUARTET, Dedicated To Connie
(1960; p. 254),
The Complete Last Concert
(1974; p. 417)

BARRE PHILLIPS

Born 27 October 1934, San Francisco, California

Double bass

Mountainscapes

ECM 843167-2

Phillips; John Surman (bs, ss, bcl, syn); John Abercrombie (g); Dieter Feichtner (syn); Stu Martin (d). March 1976.

Barre Phillips said (1993):
‘With John Surman, it was nearly all improvised, two voices polyphonically. I hear what he’s doing from the point of view of my instrument. He hears me from the point of view of his. It’s something that allows you to work instinctively with the music you can hear in your head and that’s very powerful.’

Inspired by Ornette Coleman, the San Franciscan moved east in 1962, thence to Europe. His
Journal Violone
was the first-ever solo bass record and he continued to document this hard, lonely discipline in later years as well. Phillips’s first album of solo bass improvisations was originally intended as material for an electronic score, but composer Max Schubel thought the bass parts stood more than adequately on their own. Nearly 25 years later, Phillips produced an album which does make significant use of electronic processing of instrumental performance, but
Aquarian Rain
suggests that Schubel’s instincts were right in the first place.

It’s galling to note that Phillips’s very best record is still out of the ECM catalogue. The solo
Call Me When You Get There
from 1983, with its lyrical journeyings and unfussy philosophical musings, covers similar musical territory to the much earlier but almost equally fine
Mountainscapes
, a suite of subliminally interrelated pieces which demonstrate the astonishing transformations visited on basic musical perspectives by very slight changes in the angle of vision. All three members of The Trio are present here, and the empathy is very obvious. Abercrombie doesn’t sound like a spare part; his ability to play for the group is never in question, and Feichtner’s synth parts – instinct with Phillips’s lasting interest in electronic sound – are very much in place. It’s a beautiful record, worth revisiting.