The Penguin Jazz Guide (129 page)

& See also
Ode To Life
(1993; p. 570)

VIENNA ART ORCHESTRA

Formed 1977

Orchestra

The Minimalism Of Erik Satie

hatOLOGY 560

Bumi Fian, Hannes Kottek (t, flhn); Christian Radovan (tb); Harry Sokal (ss, ts, f); Wolfgang Puschnig (bcl, as, sno, f); Roman Schwaller (ts, cl); Woody Schabata (vib); John Sass (tba); Wolfgang Reisinger (perc); Lauren Newton (v); Matthias Rüegg (cond). September 1983–March 1984.

Mathias Rüegg said (1985):
‘The earliest jazz musicians took material from church, from the theatre and from working songs, but they also took ideas from classical music. In putting that all back together, we’re not doing anything very new.’

The brainchild of composer and arranger Matthias Rüegg, VAO synthesize jazz and 20th-century compositional language, avant-garde and vernacular; a convocation of soloists rather than a conventional big band. The Satie project is a classic of its era – though in some ways its impact has been dispersed by subsequent work by others, it remains a benchmark recording. Most of the tracks briefly articulate a Satie theme before proceeding to work variations on it. The orchestral voicings are bright and spare, with most of the space devoted to solo material. The most remarkable sections are devoted to essays on
Vexations
, which are by a ‘minimalist’ VAO – only Lauren Newton, in a Berberian-derived
vocalise
, Roman Schwaller’s tenor sax and Wolfgang Puschnig on bass clarinet, each duetting with vibesman Woody Schabata, who maintains a steady chordal pulse below. The closing passage with Puschnig, easily his finest hour on record, is extraordinary.

Later records have tackled everyone from Strauss to Duke Ellington, but there are more groups around now doing this kind of work. When they garner praise, it’s only fair to point out that VAO were first in the field.

EMILY REMLER

Born 18 September 1957, New York City; died 4 May 1990, Sydney, Australia

Guitar

Transitions

Concord CCD 4236

Remler; John D’Earth (t); Eddie Gomez (b); Bob Moses (d). October 1983.

Guitarist Deirdre Cartwright says:
‘I’ve no idea what she might have done had she lived, but it would have been remarkable. We all learned from Emily.’

Emily Remler’s early death was a profound shock, not just because it came suddenly or hastened by heroin use, but also because it left a very strong sense of what might have been. In truth, Remler’s career might have gone any number of ways. At the time of her death, she had just released a first album of pop-jazz, ominously entitled
This Is Me
, and she continued to diversify in other ways, working with blues groups, in Broadway shows and with other artists, including David Benoit and fellow guitarist Larry Coryell. But while Remler was not in any obvious way an innovator, one had a sense listening to her that there was another dimension, another creative personality, lying in wait. Whether it would ever have emerged, or been sublimated in more conventional situations, is the teaser and it has energized a minor cult round Remler’s music and personality since 1990.

Her best joke about herself presupposed that other personality: inside the nice Jewish girl from New York was a burly black man with a big calloused thumb. Remler’s music was muscular hard bop, deeply influenced by Wes Montgomery, by no means tinged with obvious femininity, but always with a sense of something not yet delivered. Her final studio album for Concord was explicitly a tribute to Montgomery. The stylish
East To Wes
acquired an aura because it was her final record and because it featured such a superior group, with Hank Jones, Buster Williams and Marvin ‘Smitty’ Smith, but for all its glories – not least a rare latter-day reading of Claude Thornhill’s lovely ‘Snowfall’ – it is a less creative record than the earlier pair of
Transitions
and
Catwalk
, made with a relatively unusual line-up that featured guitar and trumpet as the two lead voices.

In 1983, Remler was just a few years out of Berklee, married to pianist Monty Alexander (the union was dissolved a year later) and beginning to show signs of real originality as an artist. Of the two, and despite the fact that
Catwalk
featured nothing but original compositions, we favour the earlier disc. On
Transitions
, her instinct for fine, unexplored melody led her to Duke Ellington’s rarely covered ‘Searchin’’ and to Keith Jarrett’s ‘Coral’,
as well as Sam Jones’s ‘Dal Sasser’, which is almost never called for. Her own ‘Nunca Mas’ and the beautifully constructed title-track offer perfect vehicles for D’Earth’s crisp, punchy solos and Remler’s own more expansive bop lines. In the absence of a pianist – Jones again and James Williams had worked on her first Concord dates – Remler is called on to fill in the harmonic picture, but does so with a remarkably open touch, moving the title-track’s already elusive tonalities ever further out of reach. Moses is a master drummer, often content to establish an underlying pulse rather than a strict metre, which suits Remler’s elastic phrasing very well indeed. Gomez is only ever as good as the company he keeps and here it and he are very good indeed. All round, it’s a remarkable performance and contributes to one of the very best guitar jazz records of the decade.

LEE KONITZ
^&

Born 12 October 1927, Chicago, Illinois

Alto and soprano saxophones

Star Eyes: Hamburg 1983

hatOLOGY 518

Konitz; Martial Solal (p). November 1983.

Lee Konitz said (1992):
‘Familiarity is not a good thing when you’re improvising. If I hear myself playing something I recognize, I stop and lay out for a few measures.’

Given his level of activity it should hardly be surprising to encounter Konitz in the company of … anyone you might mention, but this was an association that wouldn’t necessarily have been high on anyone’s list, for all the eminence of the partners. It’s a quite remarkable record and an inexhaustible resource for anyone studying jazz harmony and the language of improvisation. In Solal’s hands, even ‘Cherokee’, tucked away at the end of the set, seems reinvented, but it’s the duo’s approach to ‘Star Eyes’, ‘It’s You’ and even ‘Subconscious-Lee’ that startles. Solal stays well inside the tune in terms of chordal patterns and basic trajectory, but his harmonies are so rich and ambiguous that Konitz is initially obliged to work his way back to the source before taking the theme out as he would normally do. There’s also a reading of that old staple ‘Body And Soul’ which prompts an immediate return to Coleman Hawkins, who momentarily seems one-dimensional by comparison, though, of course, Hawkins’s great solo is there as well, buried in the piano part.

& See also
Subconscious-Lee
(1949–1950; p. 118),
Motion
(1961; p. 278)

STRING TRIO OF NEW YORK

Formed 1977

Group

Rebirth Of A Feeling

Black Saint 120068

Billy Bang (vn, yokobue, f); James Emery (g, soprano g, mand); John Lindberg (b). November 1983.

James Emery says:
‘At some point in the life of an ensemble, there comes a time, after the excitement of initial discovery has run its course, when the group will either continue to move forward or break up.
Rebirth Of A Feeling
came after just such a period; after a cooling-off cycle, we found that there was new music to be brought forth, hence the title.’

It’s different now, of course, but at the end of the ’70s there weren’t many string groups in modern jazz and there was a certain prejudice that any ensemble constituted on the lines of the String Trio Of New York was historically inauthentic and likely to be involved in some kind of suspect Third Stream project. Where was the saxophone? Piano? Drums? In fact, the very earliest ‘jazz’ or proto-jazz groups were probably string ensembles, portable and flexible units that could alternate between playing European sheet music for the residents of the big house and dance music for the workers. Any further suspicion that STNY might lean towards longhair music should have been stamped out by the presence of founder member Billy Bang, who along with fellow violinist Leroy Jenkins kept the instrument’s voice alive in the American avant-garde of the ’60s and ’70s.

Bang’s membership was relatively short and his place has been taken by a succession of others – Regina Carter, Diane Monroe, Rob Thomas – who have each brought something distinctive to STNY’s brand of jazz, which has proved to be very durable and remarkably resistant to ‘guest’ intrusions. But so distinctive was Billy’s approach, intense, folksy, muscular, but capable of real lyricism and quite different from Jenkins’s more angular and dissonant style, that the trio’s early Black Saints remain their most cherished discs. Some enthusiasts felt that with
Area Code 212
, recorded in November 1980, and with
Common Goal
, recorded exactly a year later, STNY had reached a peak it would never recapture. As Emery attests, there was a period of detachment, when the members concentrated on other projects, but the String Trio Of New York has always been a genuine group rather than a pragmatic alliance and after the members skipped one autumnal session it became clear that the unifying forces were greater than those keeping them apart.

Rebirth Of A Feeling
claims the attention more than any of the previous or even the excellent later discs. As ever, the writing is democratically credited, with two compositions apiece by Emery and Bang, and the long and brooding ‘Utility Grey’ from the bassist. Bang’s ‘Penguins An’ Other Strange Birds’ is gloriously wacky and driven by some terrific interplay. His other piece, ‘Karottenkopf’, is an obscurely troubling piece that sounds as if it ought to be lighter-hearted than it is. Emery kicks off the session with ‘Open Up’ and clinches his mastery of writing for this group with the ‘Ephemera Trilogy’. His guitar-playing, as ever, balances hardscrabble rhythms with musing
rubato
lines quite unlike any others in the contemporary guitar literature. He’s a formidable composer and this is a remarkable record. There was one more to go before Bang moved on, and it completed a creative cycle, but we’ve always favoured
Rebirth
as the best place to start, where they restarted.

JIMMY KNEPPER

Born 22 November 1927, Los Angeles, California; died 14 June 2003, Triadelphia, West Virginia

Trombone

I Dream Too Much

Soul Note 121092

Knepper; John Eckert (t); John Clark (frhn); Roland Hanna (p); George Mraz (b); Billy Hart (d). February–March 1984.

Trombonist and singer Eric Felten recalls:
‘If Knepper’s articulation sounds muffled at times, recall that Jimmy made his name with Charles Mingus. The bass-player, in one of his psychotic rages, punched Jimmy in the mouth, knocking out his front teeth. Whenever I played with Jimmy, his pre-gig routine included gluing in his upper dentures with extra adhesive. It is a measure of his remarkable musicianship that Knepper found a way to clear that hurdle.’

The young James Knepper made very rapid progress on his instrument and was playing professionally in his teens, working in a number of big bands. He had a stormy stint with Charles
Mingus, which caused lasting damage, and his later years were clouded by neurological illness. However, along the way Knepper created some lastingly beautiful jazz, including a few fine records under his own name, most of them still relatively little known.

Knepper had an astonishingly agile technique (based on altered slide positions) which allowed him to play extremely fast lines with considerable legato, more like a saxophonist than a brass-player. Eric Felten recalls that as a young man Knepper followed Charlie Parker round the clubs, taping his solos for study. Doing so allowed him to avoid the dominant J. J. Johnson style – Felten points to Lawrence Brown as a more likely source – and to develop the swing idiom in a direction that was thoroughly modern and contemporary, with a bright, punchy tone. The fight with Mingus drove him out of active jazz performance for some time, and much of the next decade was spent in relative obscurity.

He made a strong return with
Cunningbird
for Steeplechase in 1976. His active career was largely in Europe at this time, as a member of the Jones–Lewis big band and his later recordings were also all for European labels.
I Dream Too Much
opens with a long, faintly sardonic reading of the standard, with some delightful voicing for the three brasses. A subtle and crafty soloist, Knepper brings those qualities to his writing as well. ‘Sixpence’, the first of three originals, has an unpredictable slow bounce to the melody. ‘Under The Sun’ and, particularly, ‘Beholden’ are more complex and the meat of the album is to be found there, with Knepper’s delightful slip-horn phrasing constantly at work in the solos. Hanna comps beautifully throughout and is rewarded with an airing of his ‘If I Say I’m Sorry’, a tune that contributes to the album’s bittersweet mien. It’s an understated classic.

MIKE WESTBROOK

Born 21 March 1936, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England

Piano, tuba

On Duke’s Birthday

Voiceprint JPVP138