The Penguin Jazz Guide (123 page)

CLARK TERRY
^&

Born 14 December 1920, St Louis, Missouri

Trumpet, flugelhorn

Memories Of Duke

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 604

Terry; Joe Pass (g); Jack Wilson (p); Ray Brown (b); Frank Severino (d). March 1980.

Clark Terry says:
‘Duke came to see me in my hotel in Chicago when I was still working with Basie – he’d been scouting me around for a time – and when he got out of the elevator, [Basie’s guitar-player] Freddie Green opened the door to his room just opposite the elevator and just said: “Uh, oh” and closed his door. Nothing more was said, but that night on the stand, he came up to me and kind of looked off in the distance and said: “Man, you be a fool if you
don’t
!” And that’s how I came to work for Duke Ellington.’

An obvious bit of curation, really, but exquisitely done, and one of Terry’s best records of later years. The flugelhorn, which he picked up as a main improvising voice while working in the Ellington band, is ripe but exact, and Terry’s familiarity with the material is pretty obvious, even if some of these pieces weren’t associated with him at the time. Apart from the leader, the revelation of the date is Jack Wilson, a pianist who without indulging in Ducal mannerisms manages to convey some essence of the great man’s small groups. There’s an easy, never florid quality to his accompaniments and on every track he delivers the architecture of the song in blueprint form, unadorned but in clear perspective. It’s the perfect platform for Terry. The interplay between Pass and Brown touches unsuspected areas of ‘Cotton Tail’ and ‘Sophisticated Lady’, and though Severino might have been
dispensed with for at least a couple of the softer tracks, the overall sound is excellent and it’s Clark’s happiest latter-day (though he was still going three decades later!) recording.

& See also
Serenade To A Bus Seat
(1957; p. 206),
Color Changes
(1960; p. 260)

JULIUS HEMPHILL

Born ?1940, Fort Worth, Texas; died 2 April 1995

Alto saxophone

Flat-Out Jump Suite

Black Saint 120040

Hemphill; Olu Dara (t); Abdul Wadud (clo); Warren Smith (perc). June 1980.

Saxophonist and friend Tim Berne said (1997):
‘People said he came out of Ornette, but that was laziness, just because he came from Texas and didn’t much play the changes. He was about so much more than that – everyone from Parker to Cannonball, and with something of his own in there always.’

Hemphill was chief composer for the
World Saxophone Quartet
(see p. 456), and his signature style was lean – some said ‘raw’ when his Texas roots were showing – and often drastically pared down. Hemphill was not only a ludicrously underrated composer, despite his influence on Tim Berne and others, but he was also fascinated by other performance dimensions in jazz, inventing a complex
alter ego
in the form of Roy Boyé/Blue Boyé, and experimenting with ‘audiorama’ and with costumes on stage. In part this came from his experience working the R&B circuit with the likes of Ike Turner, which he did before moving to Missouri and joining the Black Artists Guild.

Like Dolphy, his alto sound was piercing and intensely vocalized, and always locked into clear musical logics. Hemphill often favoured cello as an alternative harmony instrument, frequently working in duo or group situations with Abdul Wadud, somewhat similar to Dolphy’s collaborations with Ron Carter. At first hearing,
Flat-Out Jump Suite
sounds more abstract than Hemphill’s later output, but builds to a rousing funk climax on ‘Body’. Hemphill intones the title to each part as it begins, starting with the soft, percussion-led figures of ‘Ear’, plunging into the complexities of ‘Mind’ (which is dominated by Wadud) and then picking up a more continuous rhythm with ‘Heart’, on which Hemphill begins to string together his light, slightly floating textures into a more continuous, jazz-based improvisation. On the original LP, ‘Mind, Part 2’ opened the second side with a brief coda to the long central piece. It makes more sense as an integral drum solo, typically understated. It is, until the very end, a remarkably quiet album that requires some concentration. Dara uses his mute a good deal and otherwise plays quite softly. Hemphill seems to play a wooden flute and gives his saxophone a soft-edged quality that is very attractive.

DAVID MURRAY
^&

Born 19 February 1955, Berkeley, California

Tenor saxophone, bass clarinet

Ming

Black Saint 120045

Murray; Olu Dara (t); Lawrence ‘Butch’ Morris (c); George E. Lewis (tb); Henry Threadgill (as); Anthony Davis (p); Wilber Morris (b); Steve McCall (d, perc). July 1980.

David Murray said (1989):
‘Ornette Coleman told me that strange things happen round the tenor saxophone. Really strange things … like raised spirits.’

His mother was a gospel piano-player, but Murray was alerted to modern jazz by Stanley Crouch and Arthur Blythe. He moved to New York at the start of his 20s and became involved in the loft scene there. His first major exposure was as a member of the World Saxophone Quartet. His signature style is an iron-hard sound, often in the middle and lower register, and a mixture of bebop, swing and free elements, alternated with boogie and funk. Once embarked on his recording career, Murray seemed unstoppable and by the end of the ’00s had appeared on more than 200 records, many of them his own. In recent years, Murray has diversified into other forms and endeavours, working with writers Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed and Ntozake Shange, collaborating with African musicians, following up a lifelong interest in song, even contemplating opera, while running his own imprint, but for most of his fans there is a special quality to the work of the ’80s.

Some might say that the best jazz record of the decade came along before it was properly under way.
Ming
is an astonishing record, a virtual compression of three generations of improvised music into 40 minutes of entirely original jazz, played by a perfectly balanced, tensely sprung octet. The brasses are tight but so individual in tone and timbre one hears every component. As second horn, Threadgill is a Lord of Misrule. The opening ‘Fast Life’ has a hectic quality reminiscent of another of Murray’s household gods, Charles Mingus. ‘Jasvan’ is a swirling ‘Boston’ waltz that gives most of the band, led off by the marvellous Lewis, ample solo space. ‘Ming’ is a sweet ballad which follows on from the troubling, almost schizophrenic ‘The Hill’, a piece that occupies a central place in Murray’s output. The tenor sound is, as usual, closer to that of the great swing masters than the main run of post-bop players. Ironically, what is distinctive about Murray’s saxophone sound is often best gauged by listening to his fleet, light-toned bass clarinet.

Home
followed from the same group and perhaps touches heights
Ming
doesn’t quite reach, and there are moments on
The Hill
from 1986 which suggest classic status for it, too, but over the stretch the earlier album prevails. A stainless modern masterpiece.

& See also
Dark Star
(1996; p. 598);
WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET, W.S.Q.
(1980; p. 456)

BENNY WATERS

Born 23 January 1902, Brighton, Maryland; died 11 August 1998, Columbia, Maryland

Tenor saxophone

When You’re Smiling

Hep 2010

Waters; Roy Williams (tb); Joe Temperley (bs); Alex Shaw (p); Ron Mathewson (b); Martin Drew (d). August 1980.

Hep boss Alastair Robertson says:
‘I decided on the date after hearing Benny and Roy playing together at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival. Ronnie Scott was in town, so I was able to grab Ron and Martin. Local piano hero Alex Shaw made up the rhythm. The night before the event I got hold of Joe Temperley. A studio was available and without the least semblance of rehearsal the band launched into a freewheeling joyous set. It shouldn’t have worked but it did and that’s jazz.’

Waters was an indomitable personality, among the oldest practising jazzmen, and though his later records tended to be too accommodating for a man who doesn’t like to act his age, there is much vigorous work on clarinet and alto. Like Benny Carter or Doc Cheatham, he sounds like a survivor from another age, raising his voice among us with few concessions to
his surroundings. His tone, vibrato and delivery are antiquarian, but none of this suggests frailty, more an enduring style.

He studied in Boston before spending several years from 1925 with Charlie Johnson, then with Fletcher Henderson, Claude Hopkins, Jimmie Lunceford and others through the ’30s and ’40s. From 1955 he was mostly in Europe, touring relentlessly. A number of British recordings, made when Waters was a mere lad and only pushing 80, are likeable stuff.
When You’re Smiling
is prime British mainstream, courtesy of Williams, Temperley and the rhythm section, and even without Waters there would be plenty to listen to. Benny is in grand spirits on the title-piece and Williams has three features where he makes trombone-playing seem like the easiest thing on earth.

ART PEPPER
^&

Born 1 September 1925, Gardenia, California; died 1 June 1982, Panorama City, California

Alto saxophone, clarinet

Winter Moon

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 677

Pepper; Stanley Cowell (p); Howard Roberts (g); Cecil McBee (b); Carl Burnett (d); strings. September 1980.

Laurie Pepper remembered (1998):
‘Art had one layer of skin less than most people. It allowed him to play like that, but off the stand everything got to him. He was very fragile, felt things far more intensely and personally than most people do.’

Finally rehabilitated at Synano, Pepper made a comeback record in 1975 and gradually forged a new career as a surviving master of West Coast bebop alto. The later records for Galaxy are in some ways all of a piece, and it’s rather appropriate that the Fantasy group chose to issue a colossal boxed set of the whole output. It’s a vast and surprisingly playable archive; most such monuments seldom come off the shelf, but Pepper’s resilience, febrile invention and consistency of commitment make this music endure far beyond expectations.

The best of the single albums should be in all collections.
Straight Life
appeals because of the romantic title and the return of a favourite theme.
Winter Moon
puts off those who react viscerally to the ‘with strings’ format. They shouldn’t. It’s a profoundly beautiful record which far surpasses the norm for this kind of session, and Pepper uncorks one of his greatest solos against the rhapsodic sweep of Bill Holman’s arrangement on ‘Our Song’. The Hoagy Carmichael title-track is also exquisitely done, with a soft bounce in the metre, and even the love theme from
The Eyes of Laura Mars
(a tune known as ‘The Prisoner’) has an expressive grace. Art’s tone is peerless and the group do everything they can to enhance the beauty of his playing. The strings sound part of the process, rather than added on.

Art was active pretty much to the end of his life, but always under duress and only viable with the loyal support of Laurie. She stands in this book for all the women (and some men) who nursed troubled genius, sometimes literally, sometimes simply and in the modern usage by ‘being there’.

& See also
Meets The Rhythm Section
(1957; p. 200)

GANELIN TRIO

Formed 1971

Group

Ancora Da Capo

Leo CDLR 108

Vyacheslav (Slava) Ganelin (p, g, basset, perc); Vladimir Chekasin (as, ts, cl, ob, v); Vladimir Tarasov (d, perc). October–November 1980.

Producer and label boss Leo Feigin remembers:
‘This was the first ever performance of the Ganelin Trio in the West, at the Berliner Jazz Tage. Encores were prohibited at this festival. However, after a 20-minute standing ovation the artistic director of the festival, Joachim Berendt, had to throw in the towel and allow the trio to play an encore.’

The Ganelin Trio made
fin de siècle
music, a mysterious, provocative collage of jazz, 20th-century composition, primitive technologies and ironic theatricals. The trio’s first recordings had some of the allure of the clandestine, smuggled
samizdat
documents, though in fact the early
Con Anima
, originally released by the official Soviet label Melodiya, was a decent, if flawed, recording.

The group’s masterpiece,
Ancora Da Capo
, brings together part one of that suite, recorded at the Autumn Rhythms Festival in Leningrad, with a recording of part two, made a few weeks earlier in Berlin. This was a breakthrough occasion. The Ganelin Trio were publicly hailed by Joachim Ernst Berendt, and their reputation in the West began. The exact history of the tapes is complicated, as with the mighty
Catalogue
, covertly recorded in East Germany in April 1979 and smuggled to the West, but suffice it to say that the work has a monolithic intensity which condenses everything the group was about: a shining expressiveness, dense, passionate playing, humour and, underlying it all, an ironclad discipline.