The Penguin Jazz Guide (132 page)

Next came the albums for Gramavision.
Electric Outlet
was a false start: the band seems gimcracked around a dubious idea of highbrow pop-jazz, Sanborn and Anderson are there only for colour, and the attempted grooves are stiff and unyielding. But
Still Warm
solved matters at a stroke, and it’s odd that even some Scofield devotees seem unpersuaded of its considerable merits. Steve Swallow’s production clarified the sound without overpowering the fluidity of Scofield’s arrangements, Grolnick added thoughtful keyboard textures, and Jones and Hakim (colleagues from the Miles Davis band) were tight and funky without being relentlessly so. Scofield’s own playing here assumes a new authority: tones are richer, the hint of fuzz and sustain is perfectly integrated, and his solos are unflaggingly inventive: for a single sample, listen to the sharp, hotly articulated solo on ‘Picks And Pans’. But why settle for a single sample? The rest of the album is richly inflected and in places (on the opening ‘Techno’ and on ‘Protocol’) almost estranged and bordering on the sinister. What was still warm? The corpse of electric jazz? Or jazz itself? Whatever the answer, Scofield was on hand with a defibrillator.

& See also
Quiet
(1996; p. 601)

JOE BONNER

Born 20 April 1948, Rocky Mount, North Carolina

Piano

Suite For Chocolate

Steeplechase SCCD 31215

Bonner; Khan Jamal (vib); Jesper Lundgaard (b); Leroy Lowe (d). November 1985.

Joe Bonner says:
‘I shook hands with John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard ten days before he died. It was so beautiful. I could smell his aura, sense his presence. He hypnotized me.’

Whatever happened to …? It’s a question often asked of musicians who made a flurry of recordings over a short period of time and then seemed to vanish from the catalogues. The answer in Joe Bonner’s case is that he is once again self-exiled from the main jazz centres in New York City or Chicago and working with a new group called The Bonner Party in
Colorado. The pun on the tragic pioneering Donner–Reed Party isn’t accidental. Bonner has often seemed to clash – or more realistically, fail to fit in – with the jazz establishment. He is a man of strong personality, which reflects in his playing. As a youngster in North Carolina, having abandoned trumpet and tuba, he took to piano lessons, but disliked Chopin as being insufficiently ‘masculine’. On graduation, he made his way to New York and worked with Harold Vick (his ‘Winter Blossom’ appears as an extra track on
Suite For Chocolate
), fellow North Carolinan Max Roach, Roy Haynes, Pharoah Sanders and others on the fringes of the Coltrane circle. His most obvious influence on piano is McCoy Tyner, though Bonner’s modalism is of a more robust and emphatic sort, his attack always forceful and forward-leaning.

After a period with the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis big band, he stayed in Europe for a while, making a number of records for Steeplechase and Theresa (some of the latter reappearing on Evidence). For the latter, he made the ambitious
Impressions Of Copenhagen
, which made use of a string trio alongside the jazz group, and this interest in larger forms, fuller orchestration and suite-like structures gives a fair sense of his compositional priorities. The very first of the Steeplechases,
Parade
, is a fresh and joyous trio with bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Billy Higgins, but the one we return to most often is the later
Suite For Chocolate
, where the bop and modal languages are more thoroughly synthesized in the pianist’s exchanges with the still underrated Jamal.

Bonner – or maybe it was Nils Winther at Steeplechase – has a particular gift for the effective shaping of an album, making it more than merely a sequence of tracks. On
Parade
, he combined some tersely modal ideas with Charlie Parker’s ‘Au Privave’ (two fine versions on the CD), while on the later
New Beginnings
for Theresa (also his first dabble with electric piano) he reverted to Thad Jones’s ‘A Child Is Born’, but gave it a more sombre, less rhapsodic reading than is often the case.

The set opens expansively with ‘Under The Big Sky’ but then immediately moves into more ambiguous tonal territory with ‘Where Did You Go?’. There are African elements to some of the pieces, with Vick’s piece standing as a quiet interlude in the middle of the CD. ‘Chocolate’ and ‘Blues For Chocolate’ work some interesting thematic variations and again here the empathy between Jamal and Bonner is very striking, with the vibist producing ringing passages laden with rich overtones. Bonner isn’t all hustle and bustle, but his lyrical and elegiac passages all have a definite edge and urgency. He’s a difficult fellow to pin down, but his pianism – often surprisingly light in attack – is highly distinctive and he deserves a renewed place among the major figures of contemporary piano jazz.

JOE HENDERSON
^&

Born 24 April 1937, Lima, Ohio; died 30 June 2001, San Francisco, California

Tenor saxophone

The State Of The Tenor: Volumes 1 & 2

Blue Note 828779-2 2CD

Henderson; Ron Carter (b); Al Foster (d). November 1985.

Joe Henderson said (1992):
‘I dislike repetition. I even set myself the exercise of starting a phrase on a different note in the bar, changing the rhythm and the speed of the phrase. I regard it as a betrayal to play the same thing twice.’

Although they had a mixed reception on their release, these records now sound as authoritative as their titles suggest. Henderson hadn’t recorded as a leader for some time, and this was his return to the label where he commenced his career, but there is nothing hesitant or
routine about the playing here. Carter and Foster provide detailed support – the dates were carefully prepared, the themes meticulously chosen and rehearsed, before the recordings were made at New York’s Village Vanguard – and the bassist in particular is as inventive as the nominal leader. Henderson takes an occasional wrong turning, noted perhaps in a recourse to a favourite lick or two, which he then flurriedly rejects, but he functions mainly at the highest level. The intelligent choice of themes – from Silver, Monk, Mingus, Parker and others, none of them over-familiar – prises a rare multiplicity of phrase-shapes and rhythmical variations out of the tenorman: as a single instance, listen to his manipulations of the beat on Mingus’s ‘Portrait’ (on
Volume 2
), with their accompanying subtleties of tone and attack. The sententious title might seem more worthy of a Congressional report, but it’s amply justified: tenor-playing was never more senatorial.

& See also
Page One
(1963; p. 295)

ANTHONY BRAXTON
^&

Born 4 June 1945, Chicago, Illinois

Saxophones, clarinets, flutes, piano

Quartet (London / … Birmingham / … Coventry) 1985

Leo CD LR 200/201 / 202/203 / 204/205 (all 2CD)

Braxton; Marilyn Crispell (p); Mark Dresser (b); Gerry Hemingway (d). November 1985.

Anthony Braxton said (1985):
‘If I could speak to Eric Dolphy now I know we would understand one another, though he never enjoyed a group like this who understood his philosophy and his direction. We are in the same lineage and imbued with the same spirit, though.’

For all his compositions for amplified shovels, 100 tubas and galactically dispersed orchestras, the core of Braxton’s conception at this period remains the conventional jazz quartet. The touring group of 1984–5 was of remarkable vintage and Crispell’s piano-playing was one of its outstanding features. There are unauthorized recordings of this band in circulation, but the Leo sets are absolutely legitimate, and pretty nearly exhaustive; the CDs offer good-quality transfers of the original boxed set, six sides of quite remarkable music that, in conjunction with the other quartet sessions, confirm Braxton’s often stated but outwardly improbable interest in the Lennie Tristano school, and in particular the superb harmonic improvisation of Warne Marsh. Those who followed the 1985 British tour may argue about the respective merits of different nights and locations, but there really isn’t much to separate the London, Coventry and Birmingham sets for the non-specialist. Record sleeves – and Graham Lock’s Boswellian notes – offer a breakdown of the compositions performed and their sequence, but it’s worth noting how often they are collaged with ‘Composition No. 96’, the ‘multiple-line’ orchestral piece which serves as a main reference point for the Coventry date. Lock also discusses a range of subjects with Braxton: Frankie Lymon, Coltrane, Warne Marsh, chess, the blues, the nature of music itself.

Though the Birmingham set reaches a hectic climax with an encore performance of ‘Kelvin 40(O)’, the Coventry set benefits from the interview material, but also from the most sheerly beautiful performance in Braxton’s entire recorded output, the peaceful clarinet music on ‘Composition No. 40(N)’ that ends the first set.

& See also
For Alto
(1968; p. 355),
New York, Fall 1974
(1974; p. 416),
Creative Orchestra Music
(1976; p. 431),
Nine Compositions (Iridium) 2006
(2006; p. 714)

DAVID LIEBMAN
^&

Born 4 September 1946, Brooklyn, New York

Tenor and soprano saxophones

The Loneliness Of A Long-Distance Runner

CMP CD 24

Liebman (ss solo, overdubbed). November–December 1985.

Dave Liebman says:
‘This is my favourite recording for a few reasons. It is solo soprano sax so I am completely responsible for the outcome. It involved the most composition I have ever done for a recording. Personally, this was a crucial stage of my life having just turned 40, the passing of my father and getting married. It was also my first recording with a true master engineer, Walter Quintus, without whom it would never have come off.’

The metaphor here resonates strongly with our own insistence that jazz is a long game, played out over a whole lifespan and using as its material the stuff of life itself. Liebman was to return to this material and approach many years later on the hatOLOGY set
The Distance Runner
, and it relates in form if not substance to the solo improvisation on
The Tree
, but here the music is laid out as if in representation of a marathon and all its foregoing preparation. Liebman provides detailed notes relating the music to the underlying programme and as long as one continues to think metaphorically and resists any temptation to allow the music to become pictorial or literal, it’s a helpful exercise (!) to follow them. Certain themes, including a figure that might have come from one of Ornette Coleman’s dirges, recur through the music, unifying the sequence and restating the loneliness theme. Some passages are multiply overdubbed to give the impression of a saxophone ensemble, but the most impressive moments are when Liebman is heard alone, the still sound of his soprano constantly redolent of Coltrane but also quite distinct from that language: more linear, more aware of the weight of each note, rather than the headlong succession of notes, and in the end more personal. This is a meditative record, but not without its strenuous aspects, and it stands as a minor classic.

& See also
Drum Ode
(1974; p. 411);
QUEST, Redemption
(2005; p. 710)

WYNTON MARSALIS
^&

Born 18 October 1961, New Orleans, Louisiana

Trumpet

J Mood

Columbia CK 40308

Marsalis; Marcus Roberts (p); Robert Leslie Hurst III (b); Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts (d). December 1985.

Wynton Marsalis said (1990):
‘You know, at first I wasn’t very keen on playing trumpet, and certainly not practising all I should. I was convinced that I’d get that ring round my lips from the mouthpiece and that girls wouldn’t like me!’

The most controversial figure in modern jazz: overpraised (arguably), maligned (mostly for things he has never said or done), endlessly burdened with misleading copy. What a weight of expectation and responsibility fell on Wynton Marsalis’s shoulders. At 20, not quite overnight, he became the nominated leader and mouthpiece of a new traditionalism in jazz. In Stanley Crouch he had his
éminence noire
, an able polemicist and spokesman with a voice as ringingly clear as Marsalis’s trumpet.

A front-line role in the Jazz Messengers obviously doesn’t constitute obscurity, but there
was a dramatic turn from gifted apprentice to star-in-waiting. In 1981, he parted company from Art Blakey, with the boss’s blessing, went on the road with a quartet, and immediately laid claim to the then discarded mantle of Miles Davis, who later spurned the young pretender at a bizarre showdown in Canada. Marsalis took over from Miles at Columbia as the iconic trumpeter of his generation, and made it his business (with Crouch’s eloquent support) to decry the electrification and commercialization of jazz which his predecessor seemed now to represent.

He was thrown into a studio with Miles’s one-time rhythm section and came out unscathed. It became clear, though, that Marsalis wanted to shape his own constituency of musicians and by the time of the epochal
J Mood
, one of the finest jazz records of modern times, he had attained something like that.