The Penguin Jazz Guide (127 page)

Classics
gathers all his best-known songs in a reissue of two LPs made for Omnisound. Sparsely but crisply presented by the trio, here are the prototype versions of such Frishberg favourites as ‘I’m Hip’ (co-written with Bob Dorough), ‘My Attorney Bernie’, ‘Slappin’ The Cakes On Me’, ‘Old Kentucky Ham’ and ‘Do You Miss New York?’, bittersweet odes which he is very good at investing with both warmth and wryness. Frishberg views America and Americana from a unique perspective, somewhere between Woody Allen and Edward Hopper. Only Mose Allison and, on his day, Bob Dorough have as successfully blended jazz wit with formal elegance.

BORAH BERGMAN

Born 13 December 1933, New York City

Piano

A New Frontier

Soul Note 121030

Bergman (p solo). January 1983.

Borah Bergman said (1996):
‘
Don’t
compare me to Cecil Taylor. It’s not even helpful to mention his name negatively. We have quite different approaches in every way. He works at things till they come out. I don’t do that. He phrases on the beat; I phrase off the beat, like a jazz musician.’

Over the years Bergman has broken down any residual distinction between left- and right-hand functions in piano-playing. For a time, he concentrated exclusively on playing with his left hand in order to build up strength, suppleness and right-brain co-ordination. His astonishing solo performances recall the ‘two pianists’ illusion associated with Art Tatum, though in a more fragmentary and disorderly sound-world. Stride, ragtime, bebop and Tristano’s cool/free approach are also part of Bergman’s background.

On the two large-scale pieces which make up
A New Frontier
he sets up huge whirling shapes with each hand, which then engage in confrontational dialogue. There is something slightly mechanistic about the playing on ‘Night Circus’ that makes one think of the player-piano pieces of Conlon Nancarrow, but this is eliminated on the remarkable ‘Time For Intensity’, a more richly coloured pair of contrasting pieces, the second of which, ‘Webs And Whirlpools’, is quite astonishing.

If one can still talk in terms of ‘technique’ in the presence of music like this, then Bergman’s technique is probably the equal of any figure in the music, on any instrument, and at just about any period. To that degree, it seems overdetermining, almost inhuman, and yet what one senses constantly from these improvisations is a rich humanity coming through the ‘virtuosity’.

CRAIG HARRIS

Born 10 September 1953 (some sources give 1954), Hempstead, New York

Trombone

Black Bone

Soul Note 121055

Harris; George Adams (ts); Donald Smith (p); Fred Hopkins (b); Charli Persip (d). January 1983.

Craig Harris says:
‘Being in Australia with Abdullah Ibrahim made a huge impression, hearing people play the didjeridu, an instrument that’s been around for thousands of years; just a tube and breath. You can see what that might have inspired in me.’

Prominent credits with Sun Ra, Abdullah Ibrahim, Henry Threadgill and David Murray have all been warmly acknowledged, but Harris’s own work with Tailgaters’ Tales and other line-ups that attempt to bridge jazz and funk have met with more resistance, perhaps because modern audiences are so hung up on saxophones, with trumpets as second best, they don’t appreciate his instrument.

Harris plays in a strong, highly vocalized style which draws directly on the innovations of former Mingus sideman Jimmy Knepper, and on players like Grachan Moncur III and Roswell Rudd, who, in reaction to the trombone’s recent desuetude, have gone back to the New Orleans and Dixieland traditions in an attempt to restore and revise the instrument’s ‘natural’ idiom. This early set finds him in genial post-bop company. Adams was the perfect partner in any modern/traditional synthesis, and the rhythm section is rock-solid on such pieces as ‘Conjure Man’ and ‘Song For Psychedelic Souls’, which could almost have been by Roland Kirk. Excellent.

KEITH JARRETT
^&

Born 8 May 1945, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Piano, soprano saxophone, other instruments

Standards: Volume 1

ECM 1737344

Jarrett; Gary Peacock (b); Jack DeJohnette (d). January 1983.

Keith Jarrett said (1986):
‘We don’t plan ahead of time, so we don’t know what we might play on a given night, but these songs are part of a shared language and spirit, and in some way what we pick answers the mood of the room and the group. It’s both very precise and very indefinable.’

In January 1983, at New York’s Power Station studio, Jarrett, Peacock and DeJohnette set down 14 tracks, the majority of them based on show tune standards, which significantly redefined contemporary piano trio jazz and began a process of documentation that has continued to this day, to an almost unfollowable extent. The Standards Trio is one of the music’s iconic groupings. Jarrett’s approach to standards is nothing if not individual; for all his obvious respect and affection for the material, he consistently goes his own way. These are trio dates, though; Peacock’s firmly harmonic bass and DeJohnette’s imaginative drumming centre every track. It doesn’t always come off. There are moments throughout the sequence which are simply flat and uninspired, but one senses that the group is working through or towards something. In the LP era, these would have been edited out. In the CD era there is room for fuller documentation. In the case of Keith Jarrett, even the least successful recordings yield up fascinating musical information and one wouldn’t want this music filleted and edited for polish. ‘God Bless The Child’ drags its slow length along, but there’s a gloriously spontaneous-sounding ‘Meaning Of The Blues’ and a divine ‘All The Things You Are’. Many of these interpretations acquire fresh and cumulative significance as the series advances, almost as if each new convocation of the trio retrospectively alters the nuance of its predecessors.

& See also
El Juicio (The Judgement)
(1971; p. 386),
The Köln Concert
(1975; p. 418),
Always Let Me Go
(2001; p. 663)

AMINA CLAUDINE MYERS

Born 21 March 1942, Blackwell, Arkansas

Piano, organ

Salutes Bessie Smith

Leo CDLR 103

Myers; Cecil McBee (b); Jimmie Lovelace (d). February 1983.

Amina Claudine Myers said (1990):
‘Where I was growing up, little black girls didn’t study classical piano, but it got me noticed and when I went to Dallas, and to a vacation bible school there, it was me who could play the Baptist and Methodist hymns. That went deep.’

Amina has forged her own hybrid of jazz, soul, gospel and blues, combined with a strong infusion of the avant-garde. Predictably, she has been largely ignored by the major labels and has recorded mainly in Europe. Even so, the discography is far skinnier than it ought to be, and natural selection has thinned the output to just the Bessie Smith homage on Leo and an exactly contemporary trio date for Black Saint called
The Circle Of Time
with Don Pate and Thurman Barker. She has, however, appeared in various situations, with Muhal Richard Abrams, Charlie Haden and others, and is a very considerable artist whose
experiments with pipe organ and operatic singing in a jazz context deserve to have been more widely disseminated.

Myers had kicked off the soon to be influential Leo label with an album called
Song For Mother E
, which teamed her with percussionist Pheeroan akLaff but no bass-player. McBee is always a strong presence and, freed from the normal requirement to keep time and anchor the chords, he creates some pungent figures. Without attempting to pastiche the great blues singer, Myers gets inside Bessie Smith’s music completely. Apart from the closing ‘Straight To You’ and ‘African Blues’, all the material is Smith’s, handled with reverence and respect and without the vulgarisms some musicians feel it’s necessary to bring to Bessie’s noble art. Myers’s keyboard touch is strong and mostly functional, her improvisations logical but by no means predictable. One wonders why she isn’t better known: the unavoidable conclusion is a shaming one.

JAMES BLOOD ULMER

Born 2 February 1942, St Matthews, South Carolina

Guitar

Odyssey

Columbia 485101

Ulmer; Charles Burnham (vn); Warren Benbow (d). March–May 1983.

James Blood Ulmer said (1992):
‘Ornette told me I was a natural harmolodic player. I guess what that means is that everything I do is musical. I don’t want to see any part of life that isn’t somehow set to music. That’s what he does.’

Ulmer sang gospel, played in funk groups, and then studied with Art Blakey and Ornette Coleman in turn; the former influence is often understated by commentators on his music, but it is certainly there. He’s too abrasive and too uncompromising a figure to appear as a casual guest on other people’s records too often (though he did do some important touring with Ornette), so Ulmer has tended to put his diverse energies into different ‘name’ projects: Music Revelation Ensemble, Third Rail, Blues Experience; the character of each can just about be deduced from the titles. After
Tales Of Captain Black
and the celebrated
Are You Glad To Be In America?
some of his work moved towards the black-rock of Living Color or towards straight blues, but Ulmer’s jazz chops are always strongly in evidence.

Often described as a student of Ornette’s ‘harmolodics’ – which dispenses with the normal hierarchy of ‘lead’ and ‘rhythm’ instruments, allowing free harmonic interchange at all levels of a group – Ulmer had actually started to devise similar ideas independently. In the late ’60s he played with organists Hank Marr and Big John Patton, promoting a harsh modern derivative of soul-jazz. His work with drummer Rashied Ali (who rejoined one of the more abstract of Ulmer’s late-’80s bands, Original Phalanx/Phalanx) brought him to the attention of Ornette Coleman. Ulmer’s contract with Columbia petered out after three albums. This, the final one with the label, is a classic New York record of the period. Given a beefy, upfront sound (at last), Ulmer slimmed his group down to a bassless trio, added the almost shamanistic sound of Charles Burnham’s fiddle, and set the group to rock and roll over eight rootsy chunks of American music. ‘Church’ and ‘Little Red House’ reach back to gospel, blues and country dance as transmogrified into electrical storms, the whine of the violin mingling with the bite and twang of Ulmer’s chording to superb effect. ‘Are You Glad To Be In America?’ from the 1980 record reappears as a kind of slow lament. The essential Ulmer record.

BRANFORD MARSALIS

Born 26 August 1960, Beaux Bridge, Louisiana

Tenor and soprano saxophones

Scenes In The City

Columbia 468458-2

Marsalis; John Longo (t); Robin Eubanks (tb); Mulgrew Miller (p); Ray Drummond, Ron Carter, Charnett Moffett, Phil Bowler (b); Marvin ‘Smitty’ Smith, Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts (d). April–November 1983.

Branford Marsalis said (1992):
‘I wasn’t originally that drawn to jazz, but when I was 19 I went to see my brother [Wynton] with the Jazz Messengers and something just went
click
: the idea of being up there in a suit, playing your own thing, but playing with other members of a group where the music, not some singer, was the focus. All that seemed very powerful.’

The eldest Marsalis brother started on alto saxophone and joined the Jazz Messengers in 1981. After a period in brother Wynton’s group, he has been his own man in various jazz, pop, TV and film situations ever since, as well as teaching and doing A&R work for Columbia. Articulate, hip, funny, Branford was almost as ubiquitous a figure as his trumpeter sibling in the ’80s and ’90s. His tenor-playing is stonily powerful in the Rollins tradition, and he has stuck by the bigger horn on most of his solo records, with soprano a definite second.

Branford seemed to put most of what he knew and cared about into his first record. Borrowing a Charles Mingus theme for the title and one of the tracks, he stated ambitions over and beyond the usual hard-bop range. His own compositions are more workmanlike and he wisely leans on Mulgrew Miller and Kenny Kirkland for additional material. At this time, CD still wasn’t a possibility for recording, but one senses that the LP is a little padded. Given what riches could be stuffed into a Blue Note album whose duration was only half an hour, and this from just two days of recording,
Scenes
does peter out before its time. At its best, though, it is imperious and a sharp reminder that the elder brother had some distance on Wynton at the start of their careers, at least. They quarrelled over Branford’s dalliance with pop acts like Sting, and one suspects the saxophonist was never quite as committed to a playing career. Even so, this debut is a high-point in the decade.

MICHEL PETRUCCIANI

Born 28 December 1962, Orange, France; died 6 January 1999, New York City

Piano

100 Hearts

Blue Note 538329-2

Petrucciani (p solo). June 1983.

Michel Petrucciani said (1984):
‘I like to be part of a band, and really part of a band, not just a leader with sidemen, but it’s great to play solo. I like to communicate, as directly as in pop song, and it’s easier to do that when it’s just you and the audience.’