The Penguin Jazz Guide (125 page)

JAMES NEWTON

Born 1 May 1953, Los Angeles, California

Flute, alto flute, bass flute

Axum

ECM 8350192

Newton (f, af, bf solo). August 1981.

James Newton says:
‘I arrived in Europe one month before the recording, and practised between eight and 16 hours each day at a friend’s house on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, effort that was matched in the studio by Manfred Eicher’s attention to detail and concentration. I was absorbed by Jacques Mercier’s book
Ethiopian Magic Scrolls
that provided most of the inspiration for the works on the recording.’

Raised in California, Newton studied with Buddy Collette and dabbled in both funk and the avant-garde before devoting himself exclusively to flute. He characteristically projects a strong, very exact classical line, but he modifies it with various extended techniques, including multiphonics, flutter tonguing and toneless blowing. He’s also a thinking musician, whose cultural purview is impressively wide. One of the first contemporary players to foster a direct Eric Dolphy influence, Newton started out as a multi-instrumentalist but gave up alto saxophone and bass clarinet towards the end of the ’70s. As a virtuoso flautist, he has worked in both formal and improvised contexts and has developed a wholly original means of vocalizing while he plays. This is by no means new (Roland Kirk was exceptionally proficient at it), but Newton has taken the technique far beyond unisons and harmonies to a point where he can sing contrapuntally against his own flute line. The results are
frequently dazzling, as on the African-influenced
Axum
. Newton’s vocalizations allow his pieces to develop with unprecedented depth, and his tone in all registers is quite remarkable. It’s not clear how or to what extent these pieces are built on predetermined structures, but they all sound logical, directed and ‘finished’, almost as if each piece has a specific ritual function in some lost communion.

CHICO FREEMAN

Born Earl Lavon Freeman Jr, 17 July 1949, Chicago, Illinois

Tenor saxophone

Destiny’s Dance

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 799

Freeman; Wynton Marsalis (t); Bobby Hutcherson (vib); Dennis Moorman (p); Cecil McBee (b); Ronnie Burrage (d); Paulinho Da Costa (perc). October 1981.

Producer John Koenig says:
‘I remember picking Wynton up at the airport and I think the first or second thing he said to me was that he’d heard the album I’d just made with Joe Henderson. He said he was particularly excited to play with Bobby Hutcherson, whom he hadn’t met before. We had a rehearsal at SIR the day before the session. It turned out it was Wynton’s 20th birthday. Ronnie was excited by the quality of the sound – the album was recorded in the legendary Ocean Way studio B – and it’s always nice when musicians can’t complain we haven’t got their sound right. Because of the rehearsal, and in spite of the complexity of the tunes, it went smoothly. Bobby, Ronnie and Cecil couldn’t have been more solid and I guess that cohesiveness is evident because Chico and Wynton had a nice solid base and it showed in the playing.’

Von Freeman’s son is a Coltrane-influenced modernist – advanced harmonics, circular breathing, overblown notes – who none the less remains loyal to the basic principles of Chicago jazz. He has flirted with free jazz and with funk and fusion in his Brainstorm group but sounds at his best in front of a small group playing modern repertory, which allows him to exploit a formidable technique.

Destiny’s Dance is one of the great jazz records of the ’80s. The presence of Hutcherson, the premier vibraharpist of the day and a giant of an improviser, is a huge part of it, and Wynton is playing straightforwardly and with all his fire on his four tracks. Da Costa is a guest on one. Once again it seems odd to pitch Hutcherson up against a piano-player, and one of limited if perfectly serviceable talent, except that Moorman respects his space and the sound is so smoothly crafted that there is a lot of room around both, good separation and none of the muddiness that ruins such encounters. The material is all original and all strongly idiomatic, allowing Freeman to air his growing repertoire of playing techniques; again, though, technique never takes the place of musicality. The key tracks are the title-piece and ‘Embracing Oneness’, a moving dedication to Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.

BILL DIXON
^&

Born 25 October 1925, Nantucket, Massachusetts

Trumpet

November 1981

Soul Note 121038

Dixon; Mario Pavone, Alan Silva (b); Laurence Cook (d). November 1981.

Bill Dixon says:
‘
November 1981
included work that was recorded in Zurich while on tour, as well as a studio recording in Milan. The group had performed well on the road, “breaking in” some of the material and they played even better in the studio. It was a great event for me. I did what I set out to do compositionally and in terms of performance, with musicians who were all equal to the tasks at hand.’

Dixon’s first important associations were with Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp, fellow members of the Jazz Composers’ Guild and in Shepp’s case a fellow member of the New York Contemporary Five. In 1964, the trumpeter organized the October Revolution In Jazz, the New Thing’s equivalent of the Armory Show. He has been an important educator, largely at the Bennington College in Vermont, from which he retired in 1996. Woefully overlooked through most of his most productive years, Dixon has enjoyed some late attention for the large-scale works of the ’00s, but his earlier work remains relatively little-known.

At the beginning of his career, Dixon made a number of solo trumpet recordings, largely of necessity, though they remain an important key to his slightly jagged style and thought.
November 1981
is his small-group masterpiece, patiently conceived and executed, and generously proportioned. Dixon likes to build his ideas around silence, but these statuesque themes also use rich drones provided by the bass-player; a subsequent LP deployed three contrabassists. As ever, the trumpet is used quite sparingly, with the opening ‘Webern’ (less than a minute and a half) there to underline his use of the
Klangfarbenmelodie
device whereby different instruments play different parts of the line and in which timbre and colour are structural principles and not just decoration. Music as concentrated as ‘Penthesilea’ or the ‘Llaattiinnoo Suite’, performed live, requires certain adjustments of musical expectation, but they are consistently satisfying and producer Giovanni Bonandrini (who provided a lifeline to creative American musicians for two otherwise sparse decades) provides a generous, albeit intimate, sound which suits Dixon very well indeed.

& See also
Vade Mecum / Vade Mecum II
(1993; p. 574)

BOB WILBER

Born 15 March 1928, New York City

Soprano saxophone, clarinet

On The Road

Jazzology JCD-214

Wilber; Glenn Zottola (t); Mark Shane (p); Mike Peters (g, bj); Len Skeat (b); Butch Miles (d); Joanne ‘Pug’ Horton (v). November 1981.

Bob Wilber said (1991):
‘I met Sidney Bechet in 1944 at the Pied Piper club in Greenwich Village, sitting with a big Great Dane puppy. I told him I played soprano saxophone – that seemed to interest him, because there weren’t too many of us around – but that my mouth and lips were sore with so much practising. “You gotta have a callous,” said Sidney, and that was my first lesson!’

Once upon a time everyone tried to play soprano sax like Sidney Bechet. Now that everyone tries to play soprano like either Coltrane or Steve Lacy, Bob Wilber seems something of a throwback. Since he actually played with Bechet and has done more than anyone to keep that master’s music in circulation, there’s no ‘authenticity’ problem here. Wilber still seeks the wide, singing tone of his mentor, but he long since became his own man, and even where there is a specific homage – as in
On The Road
, which was made by his band, Bechet Legacy – he still sounds like himself. It’s a fine salute and one that uncovers some nice rarities, though inevitably ‘Oh, Lady Be Good’ and ‘Summertime’ (a couple of takes) are pushed well up-front. The delightful Pug does a couple of nice vocals, but the emphasis is very
much on recapturing the spirit of Bechet’s solos without pastiching them. Wilber’s clarinet-playing is somewhat underrated and it’s perhaps a pity that it never got more coverage. His other group, of course, was Soprano Summit, a popular double-act on the small horn with Kenny Davern, launched in otherwise dark days for straight-ahead jazz. Those records are a lot of fun, too, and probably the best of them is
Live At The Iliana Jazz Club
from 1976.

JOHN CARTER

Born 24 September 1929, Fort Worth, Texas; died 31 March 1991, Inglewood, California

Clarinet, alto and tenor saxophones, flute

Dauwhe

Black Saint 120057

Carter; Bobby Bradford (c); Charles Owens (ss, cl, ob); James Newton (f); Red Callender (tba); Roberto Miguel Miranda (b); William Jeffrey (d); Luis Peralta (perc). February & March 1982.

Clarinettist François Houle says:
‘John Carter gave the clarinet a role in free jazz. His collaboration with Bobby Bradford stands as one of the most significant pairings in the history of the music, up there with Coltrane and Dolphy, Coleman and Cherry, and his later records on Gramavision put the clarinet at the forefront of the creative music scene, inspiring a new generation of players to dedicate themselves to its potentials. I’m thinking of Marty Ehrlich, Vinny Golia, Ab Baars, Michael Moore …’

Another of the extraordinary cohort of creative players who came out of Fort Worth, Carter played with Ornette Coleman in the ’40s, then moved West in 1961 after a period of a dozen years working in the public schools system. He joined up with Bobby Bradford and together, in 1964, they founded the New Art Jazz Ensemble, one of a number of quietly influential groups that give the lie to received notions about ‘West Coast jazz’. They made
Seeking
, a remarkable record and the pairing with Bradford is perhaps more easily comparable to the Coleman/Cherry axis when Carter
isn’t
playing clarinet.

For the rest, there isn’t as much on record as one might expect from such a richly talented musician. His dedication to teaching restricted his activities, but there was little sustained enthusiasm from the music business. It’s significant that one of the most important Carter records is a shaky live tape of Carter and Bradford in concert in Worcester, Massachusetts, together with a cassette of studio work from California from three years before in 1979. Not much for such a major figure.

Fortunately, and typically, Black Saint stepped into the breach. In the decade before his death, Carter worked at a multi-part sequence of suites called
Roots And Folklore: Episodes In The Development Of American Folk Music
. Little of it remains in print, but the opening sketches are wonderful.
Dauwhe
, which represents African origins, is strongly articulate and marked by some excellent playing, from Newton in particular. It’s difficult to trace a clear thematic connection between the pieces, but the progress from the long opening ‘Dauwhe’ to the ‘Mating Ritual’ that ends the record (on a definite note of suspension) is a fascinating one. Arguably it isn’t as strong a record as
Castles Of Ghana
or
Fields
and
Shadows On A Wall
(the other Gramavision chapters of
Roots And Folklore
), but it has more natural sound and has stood the test of time very much better.

SARAH VAUGHAN
^&

Born 27 March 1924, Newark, New Jersey; died 3 April 1990, Los Angeles, California

Voice

Crazy And Mixed Up

Pablo 2312-137

Vaughan; Sir Roland Hanna (p); Joe Pass (g); Andy Simpkins (b); Harold Jones (d). March 1982.

Sarah Vaughan said (1980):
‘My range is bigger than it was when I was 20. That was a very untrained voice, back then, and a nervous little girl singing with it. I guess that just opening up has done for me what years of training might do for another singer. I’m grateful for it, either way.’

Vaughan’s Pablo albums will endure as some of her most finely crafted music.
How Long Has This Been Going On?
introduced a new note of seriousness into her recording career after several years of indifferent efforts and a seemingly careless approach to the studios. The voice has never been better or more closely recorded, and the picked session players and uniformly strong material make these albums the most consistent of her career. The two
Duke Ellington
albums gave her – at last – the opportunity to stamp her identity on the greatest of jazz songbooks, and while there are a few disappointments on them, as on
How Long
, both discs stand as a worthy counterpoint to Fitzgerald’s celebrated Ellington collaboration.
Copacabana
is a neglected album, with the sparest of accompaniments to support the great, glowing voice, and the bossa/samba material proving unexpectedly strong for Vaughan.
Crazy And Mixed Up
is perhaps the best of all. It’s not a long set – indeed, it’s disappointingly short given the standard of the material – but no one should quibble about being short-changed, for this, like most of the others of this period, is an ideally paced and delivered set of standards with the most sympathetic of accompaniments. Sassie’s art was never more concentratedly presented.