The Penguin Jazz Guide (142 page)

He started out with Art Studio, a catalytic presence on the Italian new-music scene, and has also been a member of Italian Instabile Orchestra. However, Actis Dato’s most original contributions have been as a small-group leader with his Actis Band, Brasserie Trio and Atipico Trio, a figure unusually happy to submerge his own creative leadership to the needs of the group.

He’s most at home on baritone and bass clarinet, a volatile and unpredictable player with a compensating instinct for timing and the structure of a solo. He writes themes that suggest some bridging-point between jazz, Balkan and other folk musics.
Ankara Twist
features a long-standing quartet: no harmony player, so the understanding between Dato and Ponzo has to be complete and confident. These are mostly short pieces and there are a lot of them. At first one might wish to hear some developed in a more conventional way, but Dato is closer to Albert Ayler than he is to John Coltrane: extended harmonic improvisation isn’t his thing. Once that’s understood, it’s clear that even tracks as condensed as ‘Scottix’ and ‘Brutti Anatroccoli’ are full of coiled invention. That isn’t to say this imagination doesn’t function over a longer span. His improvisations on ‘Zambesi’ and ‘Caronte’ are graceful and pungent by turns.
Ankara Twist
offers a rapid tour round Italy’s cultural penumbra; if one needs fresh ears to appreciate it, it’s never wasted effort to dispense with presuppositions, even for a moment or two.

ANDY SHEPPARD

Born 20 January 1957, Warminster, Wiltshire, England

Tenor and soprano saxophones, flute

Soft On The Inside

Antilles ANCD 8751

Sheppard; Claude Deppa (t); Kevin Robinson (t, flhn); Gary Valente (tb); Chris Biscoe (ss, as, ts); Pete Hurt (ts, bcl); Steve Lodder, Dave Buxton (ky); Mano Ventura (g); Ernst Reijseger (clo); Pete Maxfield (b); Han Bennink, Simon Gore (d). November 1989.

Andy Sheppard said (1990):
‘There’s a fear of big-band music around, even Carla Bley’s, as if somehow it’s necessarily more conservative than small-group music. I find it very strange and very limiting, though money’s the real issue.’

Sheppard came to some prominence in the ’70s bands Sphere and Spirit Level, before spending time in Paris, returning in time to catch star status in the ’80s jazz boom. His reputation settled down in the ’90s, with film and TV projects and small-group work with Steve Lodder, and since then he has been most often seen as a member of Carla Bley’s touring small groups and big bands.

Sheppard was much more fully formed as a player than most of the other new stars when the ’80s boom put jazz in the spotlight and so, consequently and perversely, he has been less appreciated since. A short period with Blue Note – is there any other kind for British artists? – in the ’90s allowed him to put out the intriguing
Rhythm Method
and
Delivery Suite
, but it was clear that some of his best work was already in the past and rendered doubly distant by the disappearance of the Antilles catalogue. At time of writing, he has been taken up at last by ECM, but despite a promising start it remains to be seen where that will go.

Sheppard’s best album is boldly arranged, with many of the instruments paired with an opposite, bringing the univocal immediacy and rhythmic suppleness of his basic sextet to his first venture in big-band scoring. Sheppard had worked with both Carla Bley and George Russell’s European band and draws elements of his scoring and a new melodic obliqueness from the experience. ‘Carla Carla Carla Carla’ makes one debt clear, calling on Lodder for a wry accordion-like synth solo. ‘Rebecca’s Silk Stockings’ turns a Morse message from the brass into another freewheeling blow that is topped only by the percussive batter of ‘Adventures In The Rave Trade’, a finely conceived whole-side two-parter that marks a real step in Sheppard’s compositional progress. Outstanding among the soloists are Robinson (‘Carla’ and ‘Rave Trade’), Reijseger (‘Soft On The Inside’), Deppa (‘Silk Stockings’) and Valente, another Bley man, on the opening of ‘Rave Trade’. The sound is big but rather compressed towards the middle. A video version used to be available, but we lost ours years ago.

FRANZ KOGLMANN

Born 1947, Mödling, Austria

Trumpet, flugelhorn

A White Line

hat ART 6048

Koglmann; Jean-Christoph Mastnak (frhn); Raoul Herget (tba); Mario Arcadi (ob); Tony Coe (cl, ts); Paul Bley (p); Burkhard Stangl (g); Helmut Federle (acc); Klaus Koch (b); Gerry Hemingway (d); Gustav Bauer (cond). November 1989.

Franz Koglmann says:
‘
A White Line
was the attempt to explore whether there was something like a white line of jazz history. Unsurprisingly, the endeavour was accused of being racist. But the world being what it is: scandal is only detrimental to those who do not have it. And, much to my surprise, “white line” was used as a technical term in literature not long thereafter.’

For a short time, Franz Koglmann looked set to be as violently controversial in jazz circles as another, earlier Austrian was in European politics. Bizarrely, and absurdly, the trumpeter was accused of the musical equivalent of white supremacism, bleaching jazz of its African-American origins. One might say it travels from Bix Beiderbecke to Chet Baker, taking in Shorty Rogers on the way. Most heinous, Koglmann was suspected of trying to strip jazz of its defining ‘swing’ and substituting a pedestrian metre redolent of 20th-century classical modernism (Anton von Webern would be the bogey-figure here).

Koglmann’s ideas were unquestionably controversial, asserting that at the end of the 20th century jazz had entered an academic late phase, exhausting most harmonic possibilities – from ‘seventh chords to atonality’ – and had passed through what Koglmann calls
the ‘afterglow’ of expression. This was, of course, widely read as another funeral address over the corpse of jazz, but, as Koglmann pointed out, by the time J. S. Bach came along the baroque was effectively ‘dead’ as a style. Just as Bach created some of the highlights of the music, so, Koglmann suggested, there was no reason to think that jazz might not yet yield some revelatory music on its own terms, but more significantly had infused the general musical culture with specific new values, like individual sound and phrasing (not hitherto a characteristic of classical performance) and a free-floating groove. These, according to Koglmann, lived on as ‘particulate matter in international pop and serious music’.

His personal response, articulated in a fine series of records for hat ART and subsequently his own Between the Lines label, was to create a body of music that takes its parchment-like tone and dry sound-world as much from classical forms as from cool jazz. The presence of Ran Blake on an earlier Koglmann record,
Orte Der Geometrie
, might suggest some Third Stream situation, but for all his referencing of classicism, and the literary and plastic arts, Koglmann is actually much closer to jazz than that. In exploring ‘the tradition’ – and in this regard unlike Anthony Braxton – Koglmann has generally gone for the work of jazz outsiders. The manifesto-like
About Yesterday’s Ezzthetics
from 1987 is a homage to George Russell. The obscure pianist Richard Twardzik’s ‘The Fable Of Mabel’ appears on
A White Line
, as does the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s ‘At The Jazz Band Ball’, a tune rarely called for, other than by trad and revivalist players, and almost never by ‘progressive’ musicians.

At some level,
A White Line
’s nonet personnel is a nod to
The Birth Of The Cool
, but with that quiet formalism grafted onto Paul Bley’s brand of musical freedom. Koglmann had included John Carisi’s ‘Israel’ on
Orte Der Geometrie
and programmes Gil Evans’s ‘Jambangle’ and Gerry Mulligan’s ‘Festive Minor’ here, but alongside two free-form ideas of the pianist’s. Gerry Hemingway, who began himself to explore formal composition around this time, is the ideal percussionist for the date, but he is used only sparingly, and not at all like a conventional jazz drummer. Koglmann’s own sound can best be described as bleakly sentimental, but scaled up one can imagine a Kenton brass section playing some of these lines. Coe’s romanticism is more overt, but his clarinet-playing in particular has strong roots in chamber music. The additional brasses, foundation sound of the group Koglmann called his Pipetet on the following year’s
The Art Of Memory
, are generally asked to play with a solemn exactness.

The mood is that of Claudio Magris’s writing about Trieste, a place somehow outside of familiar history and outside of conventional time. Vienna might seem a more obvious location, and while the Viennese schools, first and second, both play a part here, those dominant traditions seem to have been circumvented. There is nothing decadent, effete or even elegiac about Koglmann’s music. For all his apparent resistance to swing, there is a strong and very witty pulse to these tracks. Though a brief sound sample of the title-track, which opens the album, might persuade a casual listener that he is hearing a piece of modernist art-music, no one will retain that impression for long.
A White Line
conveys its message with sly and insidious sophistication. Its original themes are ear-worms, hard to banish. Even its standard performances, such as a limpid ‘Out Of Nowhere’, stand alongside more canonical versions. Coming at decade’s end, it is one of the key records of the ’80s and one of the most satisfying of the period to return to. As Koglmann concedes, a carefully stoked furore over the ‘white line’ gave way rather quickly to guilty emulation.
A White Line
points forward to many of the ideas and procedures that became commonplace, though rarely so well executed, during the following decade’s flowering of creative music.

GARY THOMAS

Born 10 June 1961, Baltimore, Maryland

Tenor saxophone, flute

While The Gate Is Open

Winter & Winter 919037

Thomas; Greg Osby (as); Kevin Eubanks (g); Anthony Cox, Dave Holland (b); Dennis Chambers (d). November 1989.

Jack DeJohnette said (1990):
‘Gary is a highly intelligent musician, but also a highly intelligent man. The two things don’t always go together, but when they do, you always get a certain added value, more depth in the music.’

Thomas was one of the most assertive and acerbic of the M-Base musicians, with a punchy, insistent tone that is most forceful on his own records but which has also contributed materially to records by other leaders, including Uri Caine, Peter Herborn and John McLaughlin. He was exceptionally good with Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition group. Thomas’s first record for the newly founded W&W label wisely attempted to do no more than consolidate the sound he had been trading in for years at JMT. As if to prove it, the early JMTs have been reissued and the first of them,
By Any Means Necessary
, is the archetypal M-Base record, rhythmically rugged, harmonically subtler than it sounds at first, ultimately less alienated from the post-bop mainstream than you might think. The surprise on
While The Gate Is Open
was that Thomas, seemingly so resistant to anything not as fresh as today’s papers, was still willing to work with standards. His readings of ‘Epistrophy’ and ‘Star Eyes’ are wonderfully engaging and this work was streets ahead of the polystylistic shambles of his somewhat later and much-praised
The Kold Kage.

JIM SNIDERO

Born 29 May 1958, Redwood City, California

Alto saxophone

Blue Afternoon

Criss Cross 1072

Snidero; Brian Lynch (t); Benny Green (p); Peter Washington (b); Marvin ‘Smitty’ Smith (d). December 1989.

Jim Snidero says of
Blue Afternoon
:
‘It kind of capsulized a period in the ’80s when I often collaborated with Brian Lynch, Benny Green and others. We all appreciated the tradition but tried to infuse it with what was happening at that moment. Though it’s probably not as polished as my later work, it has plenty of youthful exuberance.’

Snidero kept busy after making the
de rigueur
transition to New York when he had completed his studies in Texas. He comes out of a bop idiom, and has a substantial CV of band associations, including a stint in the Sinatra orchestra, as well as a tough facility at all levels and speeds. We were told the title of the debut Criss Cross
Mixed Bag
wasn’t to be taken too literally, or not in the negative sense at least, but it was just that: a terrific band, same as this one with the exception of Tain Watts for Smith, and it tried to do too much at once. A couple of further recordings on the Italian Red label gave a better account of Snidero as a working musician and then this one came along.

Youthful exuberance it still has, and while the leader hadn’t yet shaved off the tango-dancer moustache, he had put a maturer check on some of his showier moves. The two opening cuts, ‘Enforcement’ and ‘Forethought’, were more than just conventional blowing lines, and set the group some interesting harmonic terrain to cross. Lynch contributed ‘The Trifle’, which isn’t, but somehow manages to divert the session a little. After that, though, Snidero absolutely nails Waldron’s peerless ‘Soul Eyes’ and Shorter’s ‘Infant Eyes’ and pushes an energetic record to a very satisfying conclusion. Arguably there were better discs later, on Milestone and Savant, but it’s the balance of ambition and energy that makes
Blue Afternoon
so attractive.

HORACE TAPSCOTT

Born 6 April 1934, Houston, Texas; died 27 or 29 February 1999, Los Angeles, California