The Penguin Jazz Guide (128 page)

Anyone who only listened to Michel Petrucciani on record would have needed to know that he was physically handicapped with a rare bone complaint called osteogenesis imperfecta, which, as it sounds, stunted his growth. Diminutive though he was, Petrucciani had a big heart and a formidable technique. He began playing with his father and brother, moved to Paris in his teens and thence to the USA in 1982, where he sought out Charles Lloyd and
persuaded him to perform again. The relationship coincided with the revival of Blue Note records and the news interest in Lloyd’s return and the young Frenchman’s remarkable triumph over adversity stimulated both careers.

There’s a freshness and quicksilver virtuosity about Michel Petrucciani’s early records which is entirely captivating. He made six albums for the independent Owl Label, some of which material was gathered together for reissue after his death, as well as some Concord recording, repackaged by Blue Note as
100 Hearts.
His technique is formidable by this stage but it’s all in the service of the song. The title-tune is a deliriously beautiful thing, and helped establish Petrucciani as one of the great romantic virtuosos in the jazz of his time, and more than two decades later it still sounds wonderfully fresh and alive. His own ‘Three Forgotten Magic Words’ was a key part of his set at the time – there’s a great version on a live set from the Village Vanguard – and this one sets it down in definitive form. He opens the set with Ornette Coleman’s blues-drenched ‘Turnaround’, and wrests it away from all the other piano-players (even the peerless Hampton Hawes) who have programmed it. Charlie Haden’s ‘Silence’ on the same set suggests what Petrucciani had been listening to around this time. He makes a silvery thing of Sonny Rollins’s ‘St Thomas’ and then weaves together Bill Evans’s ‘Very Early’, ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’, ‘All the Things You Are’ and ‘A Child Is Born’ in one glorious medley. There were many more records, but few reached the perfection of this. Would we have admired him as much if he had been six foot two? Not a whit less.

GRAHAM COLLIER

Born James Graham Collier, 21 February 1937, Tynemouth, Northumberland, England

Double bass, composer

Hoarded Dreams

Cuneiform RUNE 252

Collier; Ted Curson (t); Henry Lowther, Manfred Schoof, Tomasz Stańko, Kenny Wheeler (t, flhn); Connie Bauer, Malcolm Griffiths, Eje Thelin (tb); Dave Powell (tba); Art Themen (ss, ts); Juhani Aaltonen (as, ts); Geoff Warren (as, af); Matthias Schubert (ts, ob); John Surman (bs, cl, bcl); Roger Dean (p, ky); John Schroder, Ed Speight (g); Paul Bridge (b); Ashley Brown (d). June 1983.

Graham Collier says:
‘All those great improvisers gathered together: a composer’s hoarded dream, you might say.’

A major composer on the British scene, even if he has spent large periods of time away from the country, Collier was the first of his countrymen to study at the Berklee School of Music. His musical career began, like so many others of his generation, in an army band, originally as a trumpet-player. He later played with the Jimmy Dorsey orchestra, but after graduating he returned to the UK to form the workshop/collective/ensemble he called Graham Collier Music, which was dedicated to performing his own ambitious but deeply swinging music. Unlike many, perhaps most of his generation of British players, Collier didn’t go overboard for either fusion or freedom. He incorporated elements of the former, but while many of his contemporaries dived into jazz-rock, Collier went back to examine aspects of ’50s modal jazz which he considered had not been exhausted or fully exploited. He created a significant body of small-group music on record, of which
Deep Dark Blue Centre
,
Down Another Road
and
Mosaics
are perhaps the most satisfying. He also turned to large-scale composition later in life, producing such wonderful scores as the
Charles River Fragments
,
Winter Oranges
and
Bread And Circuses.

Hoarded Dreams
sits chronologically in the middle of the story. It isn’t necessarily
Collier’s masterwork. More fully realized work followed and some of
Hoarded Dreams
’ allure undoubtedly comes from its cast-of-thousands personnel. Confidently achieved work followed in later years, but the performance of
Hoarded Dreams
(which, strictly speaking, is the name of the orchestra) at the much loved Bracknell Jazz Festival was a piquant and now nostalgic moment for British jazz fans.

In recent years, Collier has written about his desire to take improvised music off the page. One of the remarkable things about
Hoarded Dreams
, and perhaps only equalled by Charles Mingus, is the seamlessness of written material and improvisation. The international personnel each receives a solo spot and it’s invidious to pick out favourites. The trumpeters steal it to some extent, with Lowther stunning in ‘Part Two’, Stańko in ‘Part Five’, and fine interventions from Schoof and Curson elsewhere. The trombones, Bauer in particular, also have a field day. The piece flows with indivisible logic. So natural are some of the transitions that they can only be scored and yet the piece as a whole is marked by spontaneity and controlled power. There are technical flaws, if one listens close enough and with a curmudgeonly spirit, but they become part of its striking humanity. Without an overt political or social programme, it still delivers an expression of togetherness and individuality in ideal balance that is hard to beat.

Collier’s dream-hoard is rich, sometimes strange and entirely free of British whimsy. A lastingly satisfying experience.

KENNY BARRON

Born 9 June 1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Piano

Green Chimneys

Criss Cross 1008

Barron; Buster Williams (b); Ben Riley (d). July 1983.

Kenny Barron said (1992):
‘There was music in the house constantly at home. I had two brothers and two sisters – I was the kid – and piano was compulsory! But, you know, the radio was on all the time, and that’s how you pick up music. I sometimes write something down and wonder if it isn’t something I heard when I was young.’

Saxophonist Bill Barron’s younger brother was a phenomenally talented youngster who developed into a graceful and gracious soloist, the perfect sideman, but also a leader of genuine presence and authority. Barron spent four years working with Dizzy Gillespie and had a stint with Yusef Lateef. One can detect the residue of both respectively in his long-term interest in Latin/African-Cuban music and in his openness to unusual tonalities, though some of that must have rubbed off from his brother. Barron also had experience accompanying singers and there is always a nice balance in his work between functional spareness and a more expressive dimension.

It is hard to pick out just one work from such a varied body of recording, but
Green Chimneys
is a perennial. Barron’s extended exploration of ‘There Is No Greater Love’ is masterly, nearly 12 minutes of fine improvisation that keeps the song constantly in view. The two Monk tunes – ‘Straight, No Chaser’ is the other – are confidently despatched, with some nice variations on the melody of the title-piece. The reissue has two versions of ‘Time Was’, a relative rarity that might well have been the kicking-off point for another record entirely. The trio sounds tight, well-organized and thoroughly familiar with the material. It isn’t an unduly dramatic record and there is nothing particularly radical about its language, but it knocks into a cocked hat most of the piano trios of today.

PAUL RUTHERFORD
^&

Born 29 February 1940, London; died 5 August 2007, London

Trombone, euphonium

Gheim

Emanem 4107

Rutherford; Paul Rogers (b); Nigel Morris (d). July and December 1983.

Emanem founder and producer Martin Davidson says:
‘Rutherford’s swings between hilarity and depression tended to alienate people; otherwise I’m sure he would have been recognized as one of the leading “first generation” improvisers. The records show that, personality aside, he was one of the all-time greats. Too bad he had to die in frustrated poverty.’

Rutherford’s later discography includes further brilliant solo performances, the astonishing overdubbed
Neuph
, where he improvises against double-speed recordings of his own trombone pushed up into cornet range, and the similarly conceived electronic programmings of 2004’s
Iskra
³
. Apart from his work with the London Improvisers Orchestra, a shambolic and, one suspects, ego-fraught convention of British players, of which he was usually the most interesting component, and his work with the Free Jazz Quartet, it is harder to find Rutherford in a group context under his own leadership. Though Emanem is his more familiar abode,
Gheim
actually first appeared on the Ogun imprint. The original set included the whole of a trio performance at the Bracknell Jazz Festival, caught in analogue but beautifully detailed. The opening piece weighs in at over half an hour, a long, steadily evolving idea from Rutherford that constantly hints at jazz models without a single discernible quote or allusion.

The set is arguably most important for an early glimpse of bassist Rogers, with whom Rutherford went on to make the duo
Rogues
in 1988. He’s already possessed of a powerful technique, solid and percussive, full of trombone-like slides and jazzy figures but driven by an idiosyncratic logic that is still yielding impressive results. Morris is probably better known as a fusion drummer, but his unmetrical playing is equally effective and the kit has a full share in proceedings.

Bracknell MC Lol Coxhill said there would be no encores, but a few months after the summer gig the same trio was recorded in the studio: three previously unissued tracks and a valuable glimpse on ‘Prindalf’ of Rutherford’s second-string euphonium work. It’s unmistakably the same voice but with a solidity that sometimes overpowers the bassist, who cranks out a steadily unravelling ostinato in response. Rutherford’s other great gift is a sense of humour. The trombone has obvious slapstick potential, but you’ll come away from this smiling at the sheer joy he takes in making those beautiful, human, inhuman sounds.

& See also
The Gentle Harm Of The Bourgeoisie
(1974; p. 415)

DON PULLEN
^&

Born 25 December 1941, Roanoke, Virginia; died 22 April 1995, East Orange, New Jersey

Piano

Evidence Of Things Unseen

Black Saint 120080

Pullen (p solo). September 1983.

Saxophonist and collaborator Jane Bunnett remembers:
‘People looked at Don as a tough, non-compromising musician, and he was, but he was also sensitive, generous and kind. When you spent time with him, he was yours completely. He had a wicked sense of humour. I remember playing him a Charles Ives recording and he responded with “He’s stealing some of my shit!!” ’

Don Pullen’s solo records demand comparison with Cecil Taylor’s, and for once the parallels are valid. Pullen’s traditionalism is more obvious, but the apparent structural conservatism is more appearance than fact, a function of his interest in boogie rather than Bartók. Pullen grew up around music, but only studied in depth when he hooked up with Muhal Richard Abrams. He had a mixed apprenticeship, working with the Jazz Messengers (briefly), with multi-instrumentalist Giuseppi Logan, one of the more obscure of the New Thing musicians, but also in R&B groups (which added organ to his armoury), and it was that mixture of rawness and sophistication that brought him to the attention of Charles Mingus. Those same qualities also came out in a long-standing group co-led with saxophonist George Adams, whose own premature death – Pullen’s was to follow – inspired a later album,
Ode To Life
.

An earlier
Solo Piano Album
, plainly so called and issued on Sackville, reinforces an impression of Pullen as a performer interested in large masses of sound, sometimes to the detriment of forward progress. That in turn led him back to the organ. Pullen always insisted that far from his organ-playing impacting on his pianism, it was the other way around. A duo record with Don Moye of the Art Ensemble is a dark and neglected classic, piled up with sustained chords and swirling textures.

Evidence Of Things Unseen
is by far the best of his solo discs. It is a record that very deliberately observes the pendulum-swing of African-American music between rage and joy, pain and acceptance. Pullen was always capable of deep personal sympathy, and it’s no coincidence that two of these rolling themes are dedications to individuals, but he was also gifted with a more generalized generosity, as in the tone-poem for an imaginary fan ‘Big Alice’, originally written for the Mingus group but not released until later. The trajectory of
Evidence Of Things Unseen
, from the long title-track, through ‘Victory Song’, ‘Un Beginning’ and ‘Perseverance’, to the tiny ‘Rejoice’ at the end, is absolutely typical of Pullen’s work. The piano sound is sometimes thick and heavy, a device Pullen got from his sustain and damper pedals, which allowed him to generate subordinate drones underneath his line; like Taylor, he was a dancer at the keyboard. Made while the Pullen–Adams group was still active, the record has something of the R&B energy of that great outfit, but retains something, too, of the abstract. His work became ever more rhythmically active and subtle, and in his last years he devoted much time to exploring Native American and Brazilian materials. His early death from lymphoma came right on top of the premiere of his ambitious
Sacred Common Ground.