The Penguin Jazz Guide (134 page)

Rimington has had a strange career: a stalwart with Ken Colyer, a transplantation to Louisiana, where he became a bosom friend of Capt. John Handy, a flirtation with jazz-rock and now occasional sightings in sundry pick-up groups, like this one. This Progressive album – and a similarly titled sequel – features him exclusively on alto, where he sounds like Handy but phrases as if he were brother to Johnny Hodges: the result is a queer hybrid, soaked in a woozy kind of romanticism. Engagingly done, although the sound-mix (with the piano in the distance, the drums right up front) doesn’t assist. They’re all short, punchy tracks, with only ‘Don’t Blame Me’ aspiring to any length, though there’s also an overlong ‘Reach Out To Jesus’ which might well have been trimmed or dropped. It’s a generous set and a nice insight into Sammy’s alto-playing, which we continue to think is more interesting than his clarinet.

PALLE MIKKELBORG

Born 6 March 1941, Copenhagen, Denmark

Trumpet

Heart To Heart

Storyville SLPCD 4114

Mikkelborg; Kenneth Knudsen (ky); Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (b). 1986.

Palle Mikkelborg remembers:
‘The reaction we got was unusual in our world! At a huge music festival in Denmark – this was in the days when people were still allowed to smoke – the audience all took out their lighters when we played “Imagine”. It became our “hit” number for the whole time the group was together.’

Born in occupied Denmark, Mikkelborg taught himself trumpet and turned professional while still a teenager. He for a time ran the Radiojazzgruppen and worked with other big bands. His best-known small groups were Entrance, which lasted almost until the above recording was made, and a trio with Thomas Clausen and NHØP before this group was formed. Subsequently, he was best known for having written a large-scale ‘concerto’,
Aura
, for Miles Davis, and other works in classical forms. Mikkelborg’s rather melancholy trumpet sound is obviously influenced by Miles, but his use of echo, live multitracking and other devices points in another direction, and when one hears him at length Chet Baker and even Howard McGhee sound like more probable sources.

Heart To Heart
has been a favourite of ours for nearly 25 years. It starts with an
unashamed nod to Miles, though played with a clear, brassy resonance that is all Mikkelborg’s own. Fortunately, perhaps, it doesn’t set a tone for the set, which is quite varied in temper, though mainly in a meditative mood. Knudsen’s keyboard structures are always effective and robustly put together and NHØP is beautifully recorded for once, bringing that big, singing tone out into the foreground. This isn’t just a beautiful record, but a highly effective recording that makes the most of the players’ strengths.

EDWARD VESALA

Born Martti Juhani Vesala, 15 February 1945, Mäntyharju, Finland; died 4 December 1999, Helsinki, Finland

Drums, percussion

Lumi

ECM 831517 2

Vesala; Esko Heikkinen (t, picc t); Tom Bildo (tb, tba); Pentti Lahti (as, bs, f); Jorma Tapio (as, cl, bcl, f); Tapani Rinne (ts, ss, cl, bcl); Kari Heinilä (ts, ss, f); Raoul Björkenheim (g); Taito Vainio (acc); Iro Haarla (hp); Häkä (b). June 1986

Edward Vesala’s widow, pianist/harpist Iro Haarla, remembers:
‘Edward searched long for musicians who fitted his vision of music. His discipline was strict, maybe harsh, but he gave them faith and they delivered more than they knew they could. Rehearsals and recording sessions combined different emotions: severity, love, humour – the spirit of Edward’s music.’

Born in a remote, rural part of Finland – a landscape which audibly influenced his later work – Vesala trained as an orchestral percussionist at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki but became involved in the European free-jazz scene, establishing contact with trumpeter Tomasz Stańko and saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, and making some early recordings that reflected a fascination – shared by Stańko – with slow-moving but inwardly detailed harmonics and rhythm in jazz, an interest much influenced by Miles Davis. Though he featured on the wider European scene, Vesala also established his own record label (confusingly called Leo, but nothing to do with Leo Feigin’s UK-based imprint of the same name) and began to conduct workshops in improvisation to which he gave the name Sound & Fury.

This became the name of the recording and touring ensemble he sustained to the end of his life. His association with the ECM label began in 1972 on Jan Garbarek’s
Tryptikon.
Six years later, he made the first of six records under his own name for Manfred Eicher, starting with
Nan Madol
. Opinions vary quite sharply as to which is the best of these. Wider media notice for the pointedly polemic title of 1991’s
Ode To The Death Of Jazz
(Vesala’s response to the rise of Wynton Marsalis and the neo-conservative wing in contemporary jazz) makes it a favourite contender. Others speak up for the subsequent
Invisible Storm
or
Nordic Gallery.
This one, though, remains our firm favourite.

Lumi
means snow, but it is also the name of Vesala and Haarla’s daughter. Everything about it is exquisitely crafted, composition, studio sound, design, but the haunting cover image of a shrouded,
golem
-like figure on a lonely road is belied to some degree by the playfulness of some of the material, particularly ‘Fingo’, which reflects the curious Finnish appetite for tango dancing, and ‘Calypso Bulbosa’. That said, the album’s most striking tracks are a new, subtly voiced version of ‘The Wind’, originally made with Stańko in 1974, and the wonderful static harmony of ‘Frozen Melody’, on which Vesala works variations on a descending repetition of four notes of the same pitch.

One might say that Iro Haarla’s harp-playing stands in the same relation to the leader’s conception as Alice Coltrane’s did to her husband’s. Unfortunately, the parallel was hammered
home all too literally when Vesala died suddenly of heart failure, aged just 54. Haarla has gone on to forge a fascinating independent career as harpist and pianist, but it is her work here, at the heart of an ensemble that seems to have its own inner rhythm, dictated by Vesala’s Billy Higgins-like drumming but also distinct from it, that represents her most striking contribution so far to contemporary jazz. Vesala’s own project was sometimes dismissed as dry, unimpassioned and contentless, a musical equivalent of Bertolt Brecht’s sour (but obliquely perceptive) impression of the bilingual Finns as a people silent in two languages. Vesala’s first tongue was jazz, but there were folk and classical inputs as well, idiosyncratically mixed. His posthumous reputation outside his homeland is somewhat depressed. Even the most casual return visit to
Lumi
restores him: a record as quietly exhilarating as new-fallen snow.

JOE ZAWINUL
^&

Born 7 July 1932, Vienna, Austria; died 11 September 2007, Vienna, Austria

Piano, keyboards

Di-a-lects

Sony Legacy 508493

Zawinul; Bobby McFerrin, Carl Anderson, Dee Dee Bellson, Alfie Silas (v). June 1986.

Joe Zawinul said (1995):
‘The way I work is I find a melody, I add a little bit on top; then another little bit, and then another, till there are all these layers. Then I want voices, for this is music for people, not
the
people, or
my
people, just people.’

When Weather Report came to an end after
Procession
and
Sportin’ Life
, and arguably some way after the group’s real creative end, Zawinul tried for a time to keep the franchise going with a group called Weather Update. But it was increasingly clear that any post-Shorter project was by definition a Zawinul project, and though there was for a time a touring Zawinul syndicate, this remarkable record went out under his surname only (same as the title of the 1970 Atlantic) and with only minimal contribution from other hands; actually a vocal quartet led by Bobby McFerrin.

Zawinul’s world music concerns were regarded with some suspicion by jazz purists. Interestingly the front cover of
Di-a-lects
shows every continent except the Americas, and many felt that this new initiative touched on every aspect of contemporary music except jazz. The charge is poorly drawn up, because at the root of every line here is a sense of rhythm and harmony that goes back to Zawinul’s very first soul-jazz projects in the US. He had by this time devised a highly distinctive keyboard attack – only Can’s Irmin Schmidt plays in a remotely similar way – and an approach to analog synthesizers that invested electronic sound with a warmth and humanity rarely achieved by other players.

That said,
Di-a-lects
has been seriously underrated by jazz critics, mostly, one suspects, because too few of them have actually listened to it. ‘Waiting For The Rain’ is a brilliant invention, full of harmonic drama. The following ‘Zeebop’ really does give bebop a ‘world’ twist and does so at full charge. And for sheer, dancing delight, ‘Carnivilito’ matches anything in the Weather Report canon. The voices speak, as Zawinul’s music often does, of unknown crowds and masses, a shared complicity in making music as a social process. A home-made record that speaks of and to the world,
Di-a-lects
still exerts a powerful influence, even on those who have only heard
of
it.

& See also
Zawinul
(1970; p. 379);
WEATHER REPORT, Mysterious Traveller
(1973, 1974; p. 408)

COURTNEY PINE

Born 18 March 1964, London

Tenor and soprano saxophones, other instruments

Journey To The Urge Within

Island CID 9846

Pine; Kevin Robinson (t); Ray Carless (bs); Julian Joseph (p); Roy Carter (ky); Orphy Robinson (vib); Martin Taylor (g); Gary Crosby (b); Mark Mondesir (d); Ian Mussington (perc); Susaye Greene, Cleveland Watkiss (v). July–August 1986.

Courtney Pine said (1995):
‘Jazz is a kind of ghetto, or it’s maybe like an exclusive club where the members get away with murder because they make the rules and they have the jazz writers out there waiting to enforce the rules, like referees.’

Pine’s debut album marks something of an epoch in British jazz, the emergence of a new, young generation of black players, strenuously and somewhat crudely marketed as such. Since the appearance of the album and following the usual label shenanigans, Pine moved steadily away from straight-ahead, bop-based jazz (if he was ever securely there in the first place) to involve himself in a range of musics, from ska and reggae to hip-hop and post-rock, becoming in the process a kind of godfather figure (or maybe it’s more avuncular than that) to a second generation of players. His stewardship of Jazz Warriors was an important catalyst.

His importance is inestimable, and as a result his first record, which now has to be sought out, is difficult to estimate with any accuracy. The first point to make is that Pine didn’t start with jazz and drift to reggae. It was the other way around and his experiences with Clint Eastwood and General Saint are audible on
Journey
. He was and is a saxophonist of clear and outstanding capabilities and his own contribution to the record is of consistently high quality. It does, however, serve as a kind of sampler to young jazz talent and in many cases Pine is let down not so much by the lack of skill in his players (for they are all highly professional) but by their desire to be heard. ‘Children Of The Ghetto’ became a minor chart hit. The better stuff includes the opening ‘Miss Interpret’ and ‘I Believe’, and there are nice, thoughtful covers of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Dolores’ and Horace Silver’s ‘Peace’. A couple of bonus tracks added later included Coltrane’s ‘Big Nick’, which suggests a more abrasive side that has rarely surfaced since. There are other good moments and the sense of a group of musicians seizing their time is palpable, but inexperience and fragmentation take their toll. Keeping one’s ears firmly homed onto the saxophone is the key to appreciating this one.

RAN BLAKE
^&

Born 20 April 1935, Springfield, Massachusetts

Piano

The Short Life Of Barbara Monk

Soul Note 121127

Blake; Ricky Ford (ts); Ed Felson (b); Jon Hazilla (d). August 1986.

Ran Blake said (2002):
‘I worked as a waiter at the Jazz Gallery. I was canned for dropping a tray, right in front of Sidney Poitier and James Baldwin. I got taken back but busted down to kitchen duty, where I was taught to make fried rice for Thelonious Monk. I was [Monk’s patron and companion] Nica de Koenigswarter’s favourite waiter. She’d roll up at midnight in her Bentley and I’d be back out front.’

Blake studied at Bard and Lenox, and started working in duo partnership with singer Jeanne Lee (who apparently said he reminded her of Art Tatum). He is renowned as a teacher at the New England Conservatory and exponent of the Third Stream, and his musical story is a fascinating one. His abiding interests include the ecstatic music of the evangelical churches, the great jazz singers (but particularly Chris Connor, Sarah Vaughan and Abbey Lincoln), Sephardic music and
film noir.
Indeed, he describes himself in terms that suggest less a composer/musician than a cinema
auteur
, ‘storyboarding’ in his improvisations.