The Penguin Jazz Guide (122 page)

In 1979, Blythe signed with Columbia and produced what became one of the masterpieces of modern jazz.
Lenox Avenue Breakdown
is a superlative piece of imaginative instrumentation, similar in sound to a fine earlier India Navigation live set, but with the lighter and more complex sound of James Newton’s flute backing the leader’s extraordinary blues wail. There is scarcely a flat moment on the album, despite all four pieces being built round relatively static and repetitive ideas. Stewart’s long solo on the title-piece is one of the few genuinely important tuba statements in jazz, a nimble sermon that promises storms and sunshine. McBee has his moment on ‘Slidin’ Through’, and Blythe himself saves his main contribution for the final track, the Eastern-sounding ‘Odessa’, on which he cries like a
muezzin
, a
cantor
and a storefront Salvationist, all in one impeccably structured arc. DeJohnette came of age with this record, playing with fire and authority, and with the sophisticated understanding of how rhythm and melody can combine. His own
Special Edition
, which included Blythe, was recorded the same year. His work behind Blythe on that final track deserves the closest attention. The other key element to the sound is Ulmer, who in those days was also moving comfortably between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ projects. There were more fine albums to come, but then Blythe’s wind went, and he seemed lost. Much of his work in intervening years was in a pop vein, a watered-down version of the deep, urban groove he found on this great record and would rediscover in due course.

BETTY CARTER
^&

Born Lillie Mae Jones, 16 May 1930 (some sources give 1929), Flint, Michigan; died 26 September 1998, Brooklyn, New York

Voice

The Audience With Betty Carter

Verve 835684 2CD

Carter; John Hicks (p); Curtis Lundy (b); Kenny Washington (d). December 1979.

Betty Carter said (1995):
‘ “Jazz” isn’t a word that opens any doors. The business people don’t hear it knock and just hope it will go away. But me, I’ve got my foot in the door, and as long as I’m here, it stays open.’

Carter could sound becalmed in a studio. The title here is double-edged, because she needed a crowd to bounce off. Over a decade on from the comeback
Inside Betty Carter
, she works the room with consummate skill, sliding from the slightly squeaky
faux naïf
mannerisms that prompted Hampton to call her ‘Betty Bebop’ (after cartoon character Betty Boop) to soaring climbs up off the bottom that wouldn’t disgrace Sarah Vaughan. It’s a long album and one that requires a bit of time spent on it. The opening piece, ‘Sound (Movin’ On)’, is a staggering 25 minutes in length. ‘The Trolley Song’ is an orthodox swinger, but who else would have thought of handling Carlos Garnett’s ‘Caribbean Sun’ in this way, and who else is capable of giving ‘Everything I Have Is Yours’ a drench of irony? The pace changes on disc two and one’s first instinct might be that Carter has run out of steam. Emphatically not so. ‘Can’t We Talk It Over?’ medleyed with ‘Either It’s Over Or It Isn’t’ and later ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most’ are remarkable (re)inventions, subtle and deeply coded.

& See also
Finally
(1969; p. 372)

MAX ROACH
^&

Born 10 January 1924, New Land, North Carolina; died 16 August 2007, New York City

Drums

Historic Concerts

Soul Note 121100 2CD

Roach; Cecil Taylor (p). December 1979.

Cecil Taylor said (1998):
‘It was a phenomenon, playing with Mr Roach in front of all those people. Ten thousand of them listening to two of us. It was as if two angry prophets had finally managed to get together a crowd. We maybe wondered for a moment whether it would be more eloquent to stay quiet!’

At the end of the ’70s, Roach recorded a number of duet concerts and sessions with saxophonist Anthony Braxton and with pianists Abdullah Ibrahim and Cecil Taylor. They are, inevitably, mixed in quality. The duos with Braxton, for instance, often sound still and combative rather than dialectical. By contrast, the summit with Taylor, recorded at the McMillin Theater at Columbia University, is still exhilarating. Both men warm up in their respective corners, before launching into a huge, 40-minute fantasy that sees neither surrendering a whit of individuality. As was noted at the time, it was the perfect occasion to test the cliché about Roach the melodic percussionist and Taylor the percussive pianist and, like all successful sound-bites, it proves to be both helpful and misleading. For much of the opening duet, Roach fulfils a conventional drummer’s role, sustaining a time-feel, accelerating and arresting the pace of development, filling and embellishing; it is Taylor who creates the grandly insane melodies that spring away for whole minutes at a time.
The second segment unravels more than a little, and there are symptoms of weariness in Roach’s soloing. A recorded interview with the participants makes this a valuable historical document.

& See also
Alone Together
(1956–1960; p. 191),
We Insist! Freedom Now Suite
(1960; p. 258)

GEORGE E. LEWIS
^&

Born 14 July 1952, Chicago, Illinois

Trombones, sousaphone, tuba, computer

Homage To Charles Parker

Black Saint 120029

Lewis; Roscoe Mitchell (as, ss, bs, cassette recorder); Douglas Ewart (cl, bcl, sno, f, bsn, cassette recorder, perc); Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Davis (p); Richard Teitelbaum (syn); Leroy Jenkins (vn, vla); Abdul Wadud (clo). 1979.

George E. Lewis says:
‘We were doing Afro/Euro-American experimentalism. In
Homage
, minimalism, electronics and Coltrane’s
Peace On Earth
got remixed into a kind of fragility, and that Feldman-like grid for “Blues” showed that bodies and histories are what really matter. However it looked on paper, if you didn’t know the blues you couldn’t play it.’

Lewis taught himself improvisation while still in his early teens by transcribing Lester Young solos for trombone. He later studied formally at Yale, but his real musical education was with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, whose ethos and aesthetics have remained with him and whose historian he has subsequently become. Growing up in a period marked by the dominance of the saxophone, he continued to take saxophone-players as his primary models; close association with Anthony Braxton, Douglas Ewart, Roscoe Mitchell and other AACM members probably reinforced that influence. His singing
legato
is still reminiscent of Pres, but also of virtually all the evolutionary stages of John Coltrane’s style. Lewis habitually plays either with intense and surprisingly gentle lyricism or with a deconstructive fury. In his free improvisations, Lewis often dismantled his horn to get at new sound-colours locked away in its component parts, and this interest in sound beyond conventional instrumental sound led him to experiment with computers, and increasingly with interactive cyber-technology like his own Voyager system.

Lewis’s recording career began in the mid-’70s with a
Solo Trombone Album
on the Sackville label and participation in some of Anthony Braxton’s most adventurous early projects. But he was already interested in the possibilities of electronic and computer sound and these came together with impressive coherence on ‘Blues’ and ‘Homage To Charles Parker’, the two halves of Lewis’s most important recording till the ’90s. The music extends and synthesizes elements Lewis had been exploring for some years, combining improvisation with predetermined structures in a completely relaxed and confident way, but also reintroducing a strong programmatic element to otherwise abstract music. ‘Blues’ consists of four independent diatonic ‘choruses’ of absolute simplicity which are played in shifting configurations by the four musicians. Despite the fact that there are no conventional resolutions and no predictable coincidence of material, the piece evokes order as much as freedom. Although none of the material conforms to the blues, its ‘feel’ is unmistakable and authentic. If ‘Blues’ is a triumphant extension of the black tradition in music, ‘Homage To Charles Parker’ concerns itself intimately with the saxophonist’s putative afterlife and musical real-presence. There is a long opening section on electronics, synthesizers and cymbals which evokes Parker’s ‘reality’. It gradually yields place to a series of apparently discontinuous solos on saxophone, piano and finally with no ensemble backing beyond
the synthesizer sounds, which recast and project Parker’s life and language. There are no explicit bebop references and, indeed, the piece seems to serve as a healing response to the fractures that separated bop from the earlier history of black American music, of which it was also the apotheosis. The music is calm and almost stately, occasionally suggesting a chorale. Lewis’s concluding statements are both unbearably plangent and forcefully intelligent. In their refusal of tragedy, they also have to be seen as political statements.

& See also
Endless Shout
(1997; p. 619)

ARCHIE SHEPP
^&

Born 24 May 1937, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Tenor, soprano and alto saxophones, piano

Looking At Bird

Steeplechase SCCD 31149

Shepp; Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (b). February 1980.

Archie Shepp said (1982):
‘As a man, Bird still belongs to the prehistory of our music. In some respects his social situation was further removed than Louis Armstrong’s was, however radical his music seemed to be.’

Shepp prefers to consider bebop as the baroque period of African-American classical music. Given the brutal accretions of his approach, it’s an accurate but still slightly misleading designation. His Parker readings are irregular pearls with a raw, slightly meretricious beauty. In the past, we questioned their standing as serious examinations of the tradition but these interpretations stand up well and their prettiness doesn’t in any way deaden the importance of Shepp’s approach, which is always contentious, whatever the context. What’s immediately clear is that Shepp – somewhat like Miles Davis – isn’t a natural bopper and he sounds curiously uneasy playing the main themes of ‘Ornithology’ and ‘Yardbird Suite’, as if they really were ancient survivals of a forgotten language. However, he does explore them more thoroughly than we were previously minded to admit. There is a rather better version of ‘Now’s The Time’ on the later
I Didn’t Know About You
. The great NHØP cut his teeth on this repertoire and sounds completely at home with it, bouncing and singing through a more or less predictable roster of bebop anthems.

& See also
Four For Trane
(1964; p. 306),
Attica Blues
(1972; p. 391)

WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET

Formed 1977

Group

W.S.Q.

Black Saint 120046

Hamiet Bluiett (bs, f, af, acl); Julius Hemphill (f, ss, as); Oliver Lake (ss, ts, as, f); David Murray (ts, bcl). March 1980.

David Murray said (1992):
‘I sometimes thought of it as a vocal group, like some street corner, old-town, doo-wop kind of thing, with myself as the lead tenor – in my dreams, anyhow.’

No permutation of instruments can be more sheerly tedious than four saxophones together. Good saxophone quartets are rare; great ones can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
The level of musicianship rises exponentially when saxes are exposed in this way. A band section can muddle through pretty much together. In front of a supportive rhythm section, a single horn or pair of horns can cover up shortcomings that are ruthlessly exposed when four are put together with no other input. For as many years as anyone cares to remember, the World Saxophone Quartet has been the market-leader, rivalled only at the avant-garde end of the spectrum by ROVA.

Jaw-dropping in a club or concert situation, WSQ have often been slightly less compelling on record, but there are exceptions and the group’s ability to follow complex changes without a harmony instrument and to swing mightily without a bass or percussion lead is highly impressive whatever the medium.

The debut album (also Black Saint) was not particularly well recorded but it helped establish the group’s identity as adventurous composer/improvisers who could offer great swinging ensembles and remarkable duo and trio divisions of the basic instrumentation. The armoury of reeds was pretty modest to begin with, but increasingly after 1978 all four members began to ‘double’ on more exotic specimens, with Bluiett’s alto clarinet and Murray’s bass clarinet both lending significant variations of tonality and texture. The baritonist always likes to play towards the top end of his range and this frees the group of the whumping ‘bass’ that afflicts many sax quartets. ‘Scared Sheetless’ from the first album gives a fair impression of its not altogether serious appropriation of free-jazz devices. ‘R&B’ on the second album plays with genre in a friendlier and more ironic way.

The best of the earlier records,
W.S.Q.
is dominated by a long suite that blends jazz and popular elements with considerable ingenuity and real improvisational fire. ‘The Key’ and ‘Ballad For Eddie Jefferson’ are perhaps the most enjoyable elements, but Hemphill’s distinctive ‘Plainsong’ and ‘Connections’ confirmed his standing as the group’s main composer, the closing ‘Fast Life’ (a nice parallel to what Murray was doing under his own name at the time) is as fine a curtain-piece as the group has recorded.