The Penguin Jazz Guide (137 page)

SIR ROLAND HANNA

Born 10 February 1932, Detroit, Michigan; died 13 November 2002, Hackensack, New Jersey

Piano

Persia My Dear

DIW 8015

Hanna; Richard Davis (b); Freddie Waits (d). August 1987.

Sir Roland Hanna said (1985):
‘I played concerts for high school kids in Liberia, as part of their education. The president, Mr William Tubman, gave me a knighthood. I like “Sir Roland”. You don’t get that kind of recognition in the US.’

Bud Powell was the single most important influence, but the Detroit man also took careful note of Teddy Wilson and of his fellow townsman Tommy Flanagan. He is, in fact, another in the run of great Detroit piano-players. He worked with Mingus, with the Jones–Lewis orchestra and others, and had a hand in starting the New York Jazz Quartet. His own recordings are not widely celebrated, and are scattered over an array of labels.

This DIW date is the best by some distance, done in good sound with a cracking bass and drums combination in Davis and Waits. He’s still recognizably the piano-player who recorded the
Destry Rides Again
music at the end of the ’50s, exact but not buttoned up, harmonically fluid over a solid architecture, and interested in melody. The trio functions very comfortably as a unit, and these late DIW recordings are a fine reminder once again of what a loss Freddie Waits was.

CHARLES BRACKEEN

Born 1940, White’s Chapel, Oklahoma

Tenor and soprano saxophones

Worshippers Come Nigh

Silkheart SHCD 111

Brackeen; Olu Dara (c); Fred Hopkins (b); Andrew Cyrille (d, perc); Dennis Gonzalez (perc). November 1987.

Trumpeter Dennis González said (1992):
‘He’s had more obituaries than anyone I know, 25 years of them. I found him mowing lawns in Los Angeles. He said that was the only way he could earn a living.’

Though initially strongly influenced by Ornette Coleman, Brackeen created his own intense sound and a style that, in parallel to Coleman’s, combined primitivism with profound sophistication. Much admired by fellow musicians, he remains little known to the jazz public. He was married for a time to the pianist JoAnne Grogan (Brackeen) and raised four children.

Apart from a 1968 disc,
Rhythm X
, for Strata East with three quarters of the Ornette Coleman group, Brackeen was a stranger to the studios until in 1986 the managing director of the Swedish label Silkheart persuaded the reclusive saxophonist to record again. In contrast to most reed-players active at the time, Coltrane wasn’t the main influence. The stop-start melodic stutter of ‘Three Monks Suite’ on
Bannar
, the first Silkheart disc, is immediately reminiscent of Ornette, while ‘Allah’ on the same album recalls Ayler. Brackeen favours a high, slightly pinched tone; his soprano frequently resembles a clarinet, and his tenor work often disappears into the altissimo range. Interestingly, ‘Three Monks Suite’ is wholly composed and Brackeen only really lets rip as a soloist on ‘Story’, a limping melody with enough tightly packed musical information to fuel two superb solos from the horns.

González is a fine, emotive trumpeter, but he lacks the blowtorch urgency of Dara’s more hotly pitched cornet on the third Silkheart;
Attainment
was recorded at the same time. ‘Worshippers Come Nigh’ is an exciting jazz piece. ‘Bannar’ confusingly finds its way onto this session rather than the one named after it. ‘Ible’ and ‘Cing Kong’ are also free-jazz classics and both lean heavily on Hopkins and Cyrille to steer them out of potential chaos. The ride is exhilarating and Brackeen’s lead is a consistent revelation. Casual listeners might hazard a remote guess at Dewey Redman, but he lacks Dewey’s normalizing approach to the harmony and tends to plunge straight for the spots where the material looks weakest, always managing to create a convincing statement out of the scantest materials.

PHIL WOODS
^&

Born 2 November 1931, Springfield, Massachusetts

Alto saxophone

Bop Stew

Concord CCD 4345

Woods; Tom Harrell (t); Hal Galper (p); Steve Gilmore (b); Bill Goodwin (d). November 1987.

Phil Woods says:
‘I think
Bop Stew
is the classic of the Concord period.’

It’s rare that a festival record receives such high praise – Woods himself seems to single it out – and an even tougher call given the unstinting high quality of his work down the years. This is, though, a special date. Recorded live at the 1987 Fujitsu–Concord festival in Japan, where Woods is something of a hero, it features a seasoned band working at the highest level, and there’s an additional treat in Woods’s clarinet feature on ‘Poor Butterfly’.

Galper and Harrell, in their different ways, are both generally regarded as lyrical, reflective players, but it’s clear from this that their more introspective and troublous material is built on solid bop foundations. The pianist contributes the title-tune, and shows his deftness with the changes. ‘Dreamsville’ is pitched just right, with terrific energy coming off the group, and while it falls away in precision a bit after ‘Poor Butterfly’ – a studio producer would probably have asked for ‘Yes, There Is A C.O.T.A.’ – the playing has such brio only a philistine would have stopped it. They play out on Phil’s theme ‘How’s Your Mama?’ It isn’t a long record, by present-day standards, but by our estimate there’s more vivid bop per minute here than you’ll find anywhere else in the catalogue.

& See also
Phil & Quill
(1957; p. 204)

FRANK MORGAN
^&

Born 23 December 1933, Minneapolis, Minnesota; died 14 December 2007, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Alto saxophone

Reflections

Original Jazz Classics OJC 1046

Morgan; Joe Henderson (ts); Bobby Hutcherson (vib); Mulgrew Miller (p); Ron Carter (b); Al Foster (d). January 1988.

Frank Morgan said (1989):
‘It was music that allowed me to survive jail, and specifically my saxophone. If I got to despairing, I could take it out and it seemed to stand for hope of some sort, though whether that was hope for me or just hope for the world, I don’t know.’

After 30 years off the scene, Morgan came back, seemingly untarnished and sounding very much as he had in earlier days. San Quentin is a tough woodshed, but he prevailed and the latter-day albums have a calm authority and likeable warmth.
Easy Living
was a remarkably poised album for a man who had been away from the world for so long, but the best of the Indian summer records was
Reflections.

Billed as an All-Stars date, it does lean heavily on the other principals, Henderson, Hutcherson and Miller, but not to Frank’s detriment. The decision to go with mostly new material was a good one. Miller’s ‘Old Bowl, New Grits’ is a line made for Morgan’s homely voice and he delivers a wry statement. Monk’s ‘Reflections’ engages his blues tone while ‘Sonnymoon For Two’, the only other repertory piece in the release version, is a good bop workout. The meat of the record is in Hutcherson’s ‘Starting Over’ and Henderson’s glorious ‘Black Narcissus’, on which the horns mesh beautifully. A bonus performance of ‘Caravan’ on the CD reissue almost steals the show. Though it might by then have seemed an almost routine date for Morgan, it’s an exceptional performance from all concerned and there’s evidence that the band found him a moving and inspirational presence.

& See also
Gene Norman Presents Frank Morgan
(1955; p. 167)

HERB ROBERTSON

Born 21 February 1951, Plainfield, New Jersey

Trumpet, flugelhorn, other instruments

Shades of Bud Powell

Winter & Winter 919019

Robertson; Brian Lynch (t); Robin Eubanks (tb); Vincent Chancey (frhn); Bob Stewart (tba); Joey Baron (d). January 1988.

Herb Robertson says:
‘I remember bringing in the hand-copied scores and parts to the session and finishing up the written music just before we started recording. The main comment from all involved was … “Where’s the Bud Powell?!” I responded: “It’s in there; mixed up and discombobulated backwards and forwards. You’ll hear it, guys.” And they did …’

A maverick presence on a whole range of downtown projects, Robertson often gives the impression that he only took up the trumpet that afternoon and discovered he had an aptitude for it. His tone is raw, breathy and of a sort to make orthodox brass-teachers throw themselves out of upper-storey windows. However, he’s never less than wholly musical and his tight, often pinched sound, which often sounds as if it’s coming from a pocket- or piccolo-trumpet, is instantly attractive. He studied at Berklee, played in rock and jazz bands as a young professional but became closely associated with saxophonist Tim Berne at the beginning of the ’80s and that seemed to demarcate his musical contacts for a time. Robertson, though, can turn his hand to almost anything and his own records are strikingly individual.

Arranging Bud Powell for a brass ensemble was a genius idea that works brilliantly and yields one of Robertson’s own best recorded performances. His level of playing here is almost uncanny as he makes the horn sing on ‘Un Poco Loco’, ‘Hallucinations’ and others. As he suggests, the original themes are inverted and cleverly concealed in the arrangements, often only emerging in
Klangfarben
style, played fragmentarily by different instruments. As always, he gets strong support from the other members of the Brass Ensemble and Baron’s drumming is a joy. The set ends with Robertson’s own meditation on Bud. It might conceivably have gone first in the running order, since it acts almost as an overture, with mosaic elements of Powell’s language beaded together into a fine, and extended, whole.

CASSANDRA WILSON

Born 4 December 1955, Jackson, Mississippi

Voice

Blue Skies

Winter & Winter 919018-2

Wilson; Mulgrew Miller (p); Lonnie Plaxico (b); Terri Lyne Carrington (d). February 1988.

Cassandra Wilson said (1993):
‘You have to know a song before you can sing it, and I mean
really
know it: what the words mean, what the chords do, who has sung it before and what they’ve done with it. Only when you get all that together are you ready to sing even the simplest one.’

Wilson emerged in the ’80s as a peripheral member of the so-called M-Base group of New York musicians. Following a number of records for JMT, she signed to Blue Note and scored major successes with her first releases for the label, making a name that threatened to stretch beyond the jazz community.

Wilson’s early records contain all the seeds of the success she has enjoyed at Blue Note, but with one exception they rarely cohere as albums of any particularity or sustained success.
Blue Skies
was the least typical but easily the best of her JMT records, since reissued on Winter & Winter: though made up entirely of standards (something she didn’t attempt again until 2007’s
Loverly
) with a conventional rhythm section, the recital finds Wilson investing the likes of ‘Shall We Dance?’ with a wholly unfamiliar range of inflexions and melodic extensions which is captivating. Her third-person version of ‘Sweet Lorraine’ is peculiarly dark and compelling and, while some of the songs drift a little too far off base, it’s a remarkable record.

ART FARMER
^&

Born 21 August 1928, Council Bluffs, Iowa; died 4 October 1999, New York City

Trumpet, flugelhorn

Blame It On My Youth

Contemporary CCD 14042

Farmer; Clifford Jordan (ss, ts); James Williams (p); Rufus Reid (b); Victor Lewis (d). February 1988.

Art Farmer said (1991):
‘I’m not interested in just getting to the next note as quickly as possible. If the note you’re playing isn’t exactly the right one, played just right, then there’s nowhere to go until you do get it right.’

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Farmer continued to record right through the ’70s. Firmly based in Europe, he continued a majestic output, mostly on non-American labels but also through Creed Taylor’s CTI. Many of his countrymen started to enjoy a renaissance
in the following decade, but Art was there already, an elder statesman almost before his time and thanks to regular work with the Clarke–Boland band and others never obliged to scuffle.

As he entered his 60s, he was playing better than ever, now focused entirely on the flugelhorn – he later experimented with a hybrid ‘flumpet’ – and with a delivery that, for all its burnish, could also present a fast, intricate line without fluff or fudge. The albums he made for Contemporary between January 1987 and April 1989 marked a career high, speaking as eloquently as any record on behalf of the generation of players who followed the first boppers yet can still make modern music with a contemporary rhythm section. Marvin ‘Smitty’ Smith was the favoured drummer, but Victor Lewis on the middle record was subtler and gave higher polish.

Something To Live For
, dedicated to Billy Strayhorn’s music, was a little doleful on the ballads but is otherwise perfectly pitched. The later
Ph.D
benefited from a guest appearance by Kenny Burrell (and shared with the others the exquisite production touch of Helen Keane) but it doesn’t come up to quite the same standard.