The Penguin Jazz Guide (135 page)

Blake has a remarkable body of recordings, from
The Newest Sound Around
with Jeanne Lee, through the solo
Painted Rhythms
in 1985 with its Sephardic elements, to group performances and duos with an unlikely array of musicians, including saxophonists Houston Person (a tribute to Mahalia Jackson) and Anthony Braxton. The records are consistently fascinating but every now and then Blake delivers himself of a masterpiece.
The Short Life Of Barbara Monk
is a truly marvellous album, and it makes Blake’s apparent unwillingness to work in ensemble settings all the more surprising. The first part ends with the title-piece, dedicated to Thelonious Monk’s daughter, Barbara, who died of cancer in 1984. It’s a complex and moving composition that shifts effortlessly between a bright lyricism and an edgy premonition; Blake plays beautifully, and his interplay with the young but supremely confident group is a revelation. Ford came through the jazz programme at the Conservatory and is already a singular voice.

A death also lies behind the closing track on part two. ‘Pourquoi Laurent?’ expresses both a hurt need to understand and a calm desire to heal, written in the face of French jazz critic Laurent Goddet’s suicide. ‘Impresario Of Death’ is equally disturbing but so intelligently constructed as to resolve its inner contradiction perfectly. ‘Vradiazi’, by the Greek composer Theodorakis, is a favourite of Blake’s, as is the Sephardic melody ‘Una Matica De Ruda’ (two eye-blink takes), which also features on
Painted Rhythms 2
. To lighten the mix a little, there are astonishing versions of Stan Kenton’s theme, ‘Artistry In Rhythm’, and, as an unexpected opener, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’. Blake’s favoured Falcone Concert Grand sounds in perfect shape.

& See also
All That Is Tied
(2005; p. 707)

SONNY FORTUNE

Born Cornelius Fortune, 19 May 1939, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Alto, tenor and soprano saxophones

Great Friends

Evidence ECD 22225

Fortune; Billy Harper (ts); Stanley Cowell (p); Reggie Workman (b); Billy Hart (d). July 1986.

Sonny Fortune says:
‘It was in Paris. We were on tour. And all I can say is all of those guys are still great friends!’

Though not perhaps a household name and not a composer of any note, Sonny Fortune has worked with Miles Davis and with both Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner. He started out in Coltrane’s home town, mostly playing R&B, but only came to New York after Trane’s death, playing mostly alto, but occasionally diversifying on other horns. It was a little time before he made any impact as a leader, putting out a debut record on the musician-run Strata East, but not attracting much industry notice until Blue Note belatedly signed him a couple of decades later.

Great Friends
is one of those rare supergroup, chance meeting on the road records that stands up as something other than a gig souvenir. It is, in fact, a studio recording, made
at Sysmo in Paris and originally only available in Europe on Black & Blue, a label whose generosity to visiting Americans afforded many their only recording opportunities of the ’70s and ’80s. It’s a collaborative disc, and Fortune is no more prominently featured than anyone else, and Cowell and Workman pick up most of the composition credits. But it’s Sonny’s pungent saxophone on ‘Awakening’ (his only writing credit) that brings the set to such a satisfying climax. Harper, a great hero across Europe, sets up the finish with his own ‘Insight’, a number that provides Hart with one of his best solos on record. Cowell, as ever, is magnificent, playing solid comps and teetering figures on the perversely titled ‘Equipoise’.

A decade on, Fortune had another flurry of fine recording, with a couple more records for Blue Note,
A Better Understanding
and
From Now On
, and offered his own homage to a saxophone forebear,
In The Spirit Of John Coltrane
, which actually reflected the lineage less well than something like ‘Cal Massey’ on
Great Friends
. It may not strictly be Sonny’s record, but it has a magic that overrides mere ownership.

EVAN PARKER
^&

Born 5 April 1944, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England

Tenor and soprano saxophones

The Snake Decides

psi 02.09

Parker (ss solo). 1986.

Evan Parker says:
‘Michael Gerzon was a special human being. He chose the church in Oxford, set up a concert for the evening and recorded me in the afternoon for what became the record. Since he died it has become accepted that he was about 30 years ahead of all the other audio engineers in seeing the implications of the switch to digital recording. His commitment to improvised music was part of that same visionary quality.’

If genius is the sustained application of intelligence, then Evan Parker merits the epithet. Over 30 years he has laid down a body of work which is both virtuosic in terms of saxophone technique and profoundly resistant to ‘instrumentalism’; it is both abstract and rooted, deeply tinged with the English philosophical and scientific tradition. Parker has made significant contributions to improvising collectives like the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and the London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra; but he is perhaps best known as a solo improviser, usually on soprano saxophone. His ability to create complex overtone series by overblowing generates music of formidable intellectual challenge, but there is also a gruff immediacy to much of his work that makes it instantly … available is probably a safer word than accessible. It’s not unusual to hear reviewers point out that behind his spectral explorations stands the ghost of John Coltrane, but it’s worth saying that behind Coltrane stand two generations of saxophone improvisers (Hawkins, Young, Rollins, Gonsalves) and their impact on Parker shouldn’t be ignored either.

After the fascinating solo essays
Monoceros
and
Six Of One
, recorded in the late ’70s,
The Snake Decides
is a great record. Parker himself pays tribute to recording engineer Michael Gerzon, which tempts us to describe it as a
great recording
, but the inescapable truth is that Gerzon was simply the only man in Britain whose ears were as highly tuned to the highest harmonic levels as Parker’s own. The record is a subtly inflected document of a moment in which Parker takes the language experiments of the previous two decades and compresses them into one flowing and involving performance. The sonority is incredibly varied, and Parker’s ability to sound 32nd harmonics and above demands a reciprocal talent on the technical side. The miracle of
The Snake Decides
is that everything is registered and everything is registered cleanly and faithfully. Listened to on headphones, it can create the
impression that you are actually inside an instrument, listening not just to produced sound but to all its accidentals as well. It remains an essential document of modern music, and anyone interested in its progress should hear
The Snake Decides
at least once.

& See also
50th Birthday Concert
(1994; p. 582),
The Moment’s Energy
(2007; p. 728);
SPONTANEOUS MUSIC ENSEMBLE, Quintessence
(1973–1974; p. 406)

JOANNE BRACKEEN

Also given as Joanne; born JoAnne Grogan, 26 July 1938, Ventura, California

Piano

Fi-Fi Goes To Heaven

Concord CCD 4316

Brackeen; Terence Blanchard (t); Branford Marsalis (as); Cecil McBee (b); Al Foster (d). August 1986.

JoAnne Brackeen said (1988):
‘I never really thought about being a “woman in jazz”, not until they started writing about it and putting on concerts supposedly to redress the balance. I just got on with playing, though I always sort of knew that if I was to succeed, I had to be very, very good to get the spot ahead of a man.’

Brackeen occupies an interesting footnote in jazz history as the only female Jazz Messenger, but her reputation shouldn’t be consigned to the trivia box. She is a remarkable improviser whose grasp of challenging material is always sure and self-determined. Sadly, much of her extensive discography is no longer available and even a good stint on Concord is now hard to collect.

The best of the Concords is
Fi-Fi Goes To Heaven
, made around the time her ex-husband, Charles Brackeen, was coming out of retirement and making records for Silkheart. Her solo recital at Maybeck Hall might afford a better guide to her pianism, but Brackeen is a superb group player, and in Cecil McBee has found a bass-player who perfectly complements her right-biased approach to the keyboard. There’s plenty of weight in her chording none the less, and even the standards here – ‘Stardust’, ‘I Hear A Rhapsody’ and Jobim’s ‘Zingaro’ – are delivered with a weighty authority. Her playful side comes out on ‘Fi-Fi Goes To Heaven’, but one suspects that Brackeen likes to tease her listeners with the prospect of something lightweight and airily swinging, only to deliver a knock-out punch. The set is also distinguished by Branford Marsalis’s appearance on alto, his first instrument but one that has played next to no part in his mature career. He’s very convincing on it, though initially hard to place. There are some nice Brazilian touches here and there, fruits of a trip to South America with Stan Getz, but Brackeen’s ‘Latin stylings’ are typically unorthodox, with the weight put far back in the bar, which gives the rhythm an unexpected drop in the middle.

PAUL SMOKER

Born 8 May 1941, Muncie, Indiana

Trumpet

Alone

Sound Aspects sas 018

Smoker; Ron Rohovit (b); Phil Haynes (d). August 1986.

Percussionist Harris Eisenstadt on Paul Smoker:
‘At a recording session together in 2003, after a particularly arduous second take of a tricky head, I marvelled at Paul’s technical precision, impassioned playing and incredible stamina. “You only live once,” he answered wryly.’

When Paul Smoker was a child, his family moved to Davenport, Iowa, the hometown of Bix Beiderbecke. Smoker’s lure to the trumpet, though, was Harry James, heard on the radio. He’s a highly educated musician, with a strong interest in the modern trumpet literature, and has worked for much of his life as an educator, two factors that have perhaps conspired to saddle him with an ‘academic’ reputation. In reality, Smoker seems to have absorbed elements of most of the trumpet greats: Armstrong’s openheartedness and technical grace, Clifford Brown’s clarion simplicity, Don Cherry’s folkish chortle, even something of Don Ellis’s complexity.

With these influences, Smoker plays free-form jazz of surpassing thoughtfulness. Though by no means averse to tackling standards, he creates a lot of his own material, cleaving to quasi-classical forms rather than blues progressions, and playing mostly with a tight, rather correct diction, though he has a ready supply of rips, wails and smeared tones at his disposal. As throughout Smoker’s work, the dynamics on
Alone
are almost self-consciously varied, with one track segueing into another, giving the whole a suite-like feel. Working without a harmony instrument and with only occasional stabs at pedal notes from Smoker, the ‘rhythm section’ – so much more than that here – is given an unusually active function, making the set an object lesson in group improvisation. ‘Mingus Amongus’ may suggest one model for this, and the gesture isn’t simply perfunctory and verbal; Smoker understands the roots of the Mingus aesthetic, and even manages to sound like Johnny Coles at one point. On ‘Prelude’, Rohovit bows long, hold-steady notes over whispering percussion (Haynes often works at the boundaries of audibility) until the trumpet enters, sounding as if its last duties were Hummel or Haydn. The standards – Armstrong’s ‘Cornet Chop Suey’ and Ellington’s ‘Caravan’ – are imaginatively stitched in, and the performance gives off an aura of quiet power which isn’t quite achieved on the more eclectic and ironic material on
Mississippi River Rat
and
Come Rain Or Come Shine
, the former recorded in 1984, the latter from the same sessions as
Alone.
It continues to stand out as one of the forgotten records of the ’80s and a major jazz statement, by no means as dry and abstract as Smoker’s professorial reputation might suggest.

CLIFFORD JORDAN
^&

Born 2 September 1931, Chicago, Illinois; died 27 March 1993, New York City

Tenor saxophone

Royal Ballads

Criss Cross 1025

Jordan; Kevin O’Connell (p); Ed Howard (b); Vernell Fournier (d). December 1986.

Clifford Jordan said (1988):
‘Every saxophone-player wants to play pretty sometimes. Even John Coltrane wanted to do that. There’s nothing better than playing ballads. It’s hard work, but it takes you places you didn’t know about in yourself.’

Jordan made many terrific records:
Spellbound
in 1960,
Bearcat
two years later, subsequent things like
The Glass Bead Game
, a number of live recordings with the Magic Triangle group (Cedar Walton, Sam Jones, Billy Higgins) and even a record exploring the influence of Leadbelly. No one seems to value his ballad playing, and consequently some of the later work is overlooked.

Down the years, he perfected a ballad style that was strikingly reminiscent of Wardell Gray’s (an influence he shared with John Gilmore).
Royal Ballads
is a lovely record; if it steers close to easy listening on occasion, a more attentive hearing uncovers all manner of subtleties and harmonic shifts. The opening ‘Lush Life’ is almost lost in Fournier’s constant cymbal-spray, but the drummer – who has worked to great effect with Ahmad Jamal – is a great ballad player and every bit as adept as Jordan at varying an apparently sleepy beat
with odd, out-of-synch metres and quiet paradiddles. As Jordan quotes ‘Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat’ on the original ‘Royal Blues’, Fournier squeezes the tempo almost subliminally, so that the reference evades identification as the mind subconsciously readjusts to the beat. Subtle and intelligent jazz.