The Penguin Jazz Guide (145 page)

This is the latter-day group that Hamilton calls Euphoria. By the time he recorded
Arroyo
, he had been in the business four decades, worked as Lena Horne’s drummer and tasted a bit of commercial success (
The Sweet Smell of Success
) in movie music. Much later press copy emphasized his relationship with Dolphy over his own music, and two years later the same group – almost – made
My Panamanian Friend
in homage to the departed, whose family were originally from Panama.

Though it’s as far in style as it is in years from the ’50s quintet, there are clear lines of continuity. Hamilton’s preference for a guitarist over a piano-player helps free up the drums, allowing Hamilton to experiment with melodic improvisation. Typically, DeNigris is given considerable prominence – much as Jim Hall, Larry Coryell and John Abercrombie were at different times – with Person assigned a colourist’s role.

The long opening ‘Alone Together’ is a vibrantly inventive version of a chestnut. Hamilton’s polyrhythms open the tune to half a dozen new directions and Washington produces some of his best work of the set. The other standard, Lester Young’s and Jon Hendricks’s ‘Tickle Toe’, has the drummer scatting with the same relaxed abandon he applies to his kit. His writing on ‘Sorta New’, ‘Cosa Succede?’ and the intriguingly titled ‘Taunts Of An Indian
Maiden’ is still full of ideas, exploiting band textures to the full. DeNigris and Person both claim at least one writing credit, and the guitarist’s ‘Stop’ is ambitious and unsettling. A strong statement by one of the music’s most creative presences.

& See also
Live At The Strollers
(1955; p. 163)

MEREDITH D’AMBROSIO

Born 1941, Boston, Massachusetts

Voice, piano

Love Is Not A Game

Sunnyside SSCD 1051

d’Ambrosio; Eddie Higgins (p); Rufus Reid (b); Keith Copeland (d). December 1990.

Meredith d’Ambrosio said (1992):
‘I think I was drawn to Bill [Evans] because both of us were deeply, deeply shy, not natural performers at all. But I hang on everything he did, every sound he made, as if they were messages from somewhere else! I felt something similar meeting John Coltrane. I didn’t find him difficult or awkward, probably because he sensed similar things in me, but I just didn’t feel ready to go on that tour.’

D’Ambrosio’s is a remarkable story, and she tells it with engaging frankness. Being star-crossed in her younger years has allowed her to sing romantic songs with a convincing plainness. She studied at Schillinger House for a time and was taken up by Roger Kellaway and Maynard Ferguson. She even turned down an opportunity to tour Japan with John Coltrane on his final tour to the Far East. Subsequently married to the late pianist Eddie Higgins, she has turned out a steady sequence of fine vocal albums, though she has had a parallel career in art, creating pictures in eggshell mosaic and dabbling in other forms. Her piano-playing isn’t negligible, but it took second place as long as Higgins was around.

We are convinced that her masterpiece may be 2004’s
Wishing On The Moon
, but the earlier record draws us back inexorably. Tomorrow, it might be
Lost In His Arms
,
Little Jazz Bird
or
South To A Warmer Place
, or any one of the other dozen records she has put out between the late ’70s and now: subtly beautiful records, all. She was influenced by Bill Evans and is often thought to represent in vocal form what he did at the keyboard. However, much of her thinking about music was shaped by the British pianist Pat Smythe, who exerted a little-discussed influence on Evans; d’Ambrosio met him at the New York home of Richard Rodney Bennett.

An exceptional series of records for Sunnyside – how many artists are so consistently favoured by one label? – went to a new level in 1985 with
It’s Your Dance
, arguably her most fully realized record. The voice is too small for jazz virtuosity, but she achieves a different authenticity through economies of scale.
South To A Warmer Place
continues the run and is always a good place to start with d’Ambrosio, not least for Lou Colombo’s Bobby Hackett-like brass.
Love Is Not A Game
is packed with memorable treatments: J. J. Johnson’s ‘Lament’, Denny Zeitlin’s ‘Quiet Now’, as well as ‘Young and Foolish’, which is almost unbearably personal, and ‘Autumn Serenade’. On ‘Oh Look At Me Now’, she starts a new practice by extending the song into a coda which has her composing new lyrics for a variation on the tune. It’s an approach she carried over, with somewhat mixed success, on
Shadowland
, where five of the 12 tunes have improvised tailpieces. She always sounds best on more introspective material, but it communicates at a very direct level. One doesn’t feel the need to go in search of her.

BUD SHANK
^&

Born Clifford Everett Shank Jr, 27 May 1926, Dayton, Ohio; died 2 April 2009, Tucson, Arizona

Alto saxophone

Lost In The Stars

Fresh Sound FSRCD 18

Shank; Lou Levy (p). December 1990.

Bud Shank said (1985):
‘Great jazz only comes from knowing your instrument inside out and knowing the material better than the man who wrote it. You read these editorial pieces saying “new this!” and “new that!” and then you listen to the music and it’s old stuff badly understood and worse played. I don’t want to seem like a total conservative but there are no revolutions in jazz, just steady progress into the past!’

Later in life, a little like Lee Konitz, Shank showed more of an interest in bebop. It remains present as harmonic colour in much of the later work, even if it doesn’t seem to affect his intonation or phrasing. It’s part of what gives
Lost In The Stars
its unique edge. The album’s a Sinatra songbook, marked by the quirky brilliance of Levy and by Shank’s attractive alto sound, which sounds as if it’s been in and out of retirement as often as the man himself. ‘This Love Of Mine’, a much overlooked standard, is played with just the right balance of sentiment and cynicism. Levy delivers something majestically solitary on ‘Spring Is Here’, hope and loss in perfect balance, while Shank saves one of his best ever solos for the title-track. There isn’t much else to say about the record, other than that it is the most lyrically beautiful performance we’ve heard in what is often a lazy format; saxophone and piano can often get sloppy, but this one is a model of long preparation and intimate knowledge.

& See also
Jazz in Hollywood
(1954; p. 154)

THE ’90s

In the winter 1973 issue of
Tri Quarterly
magazine, the literarary critic Philip Stevick published an influential essay called ‘Sheherazade runs out of plots, keeps on talking – the king, intrigued, listens’ which suggested that realistic fiction had come to an end, to be replaced by a form of fabulation in which word-spinning took the place of conventional narrative. Around the same time, the novelist Ronald Sukenick published a collection called (and you have to wait for the full title)
The Death of the Novel and Other Stories.
The implication in both was clear: that even if the 19th-century novel was ‘dead’, there was still a lot of imaginative work to be done, either on the corpse or on its tomb-slab. Sighs of relief all round.

Roughly the same thing happened to jazz around the turn of the ’90s. The death in 1991 of Miles Davis, who had appeared to abolish jazz – the term and most of the identifying features – from his work two decades before, in fact, around the time Stevick was writing, seemed epochal. The impression was reinforced when two influential European musicians, trumpeter Franz Koglmann and percussionist Edward Vesala, suggested that jazz, too, might be ‘dead’. Vesala put out an
Ode On The Death Of Jazz.
Koglmann brought forward an interesting parallel with the baroque in classical music, suggesting that the style was ‘dead’, in the sense of having no new technical permutations to explore, by the time J. S. Bach came along, and yet there would be a clear consensus that Bach was the pinnacle of what we call ‘the baroque’. Why not the same scenario with jazz?

John Coltrane had pushed harmony to the limits. Free jazz and free music had broken down the familiar components into sometimes unrecognizable parts. The music no longer seemed geographically, culturally or ethnically specific. Creative jazz flourished – albeit on a small and usually uncommercial scale – everywhere and everywhere drew something from the fostering culture. A Rastafarian trumpeter migrated to Iceland. Sami
joiks
appeared in a jazz context, where Broadway tunes might once have done. The familiar shape of the jazz group – a horn or two, a piano, a bass violin and a drum kit – had started to break down. Improvisers toted a bewildering array of instruments. Anthony Braxton singlehandedly brought the poor cousins of the saxophone family out of retirement and some of the obscurer clarinets, too.

The word everyone was reaching for, and to their credit rejecting, was ‘post-modern’. Jazz seemed to have stumbled into the condition of post-modernism without intending to. Styles were collapsed and conflated. It was no longer possible to tell whether something was ‘avant-garde’ or ‘traditional’. We once were submitted a record review in which a new American recording was described as ‘avant-traditional’. Seriousness and self-expression of the kind that had been mandatory during the bop and hard-bop era gave way to a new kind of playfulness, wry, sardonic, self-conscious, technically astute but insouciantly so. After Coltrane in particular, virtuosity was at a discount, though Braxton, Evan Parker, others, maintained its market value in improvised music.

Nobody quite knew what jazz was and what it was for as the ’90s gathered. But what became clear was that – much like the cartoon character whose legs start to spin ever more wildly when he realizes there is no ground under his feet – jazz musicians were not going to let jitters of self-definition keep them from making and recording music. New CDs flew out of the studios, workshops and factories, an exponential proliferation that meant for the first time in the music’s history it was not possible to hear jazz entire and whole, a situation that was unsettling not just for jazz critics, but for that hard to pin down and notionally embattled constituency, the jazz audience, as well. The best of times? the worst of times? Both, perhaps …

Part 1:
1991–1995

BOBBY PREVITE

Born 16 July 1957: ‘I was born in Niagara Falls, New York, in one of the summers between 1951 and 1961’

Drums

Weather Clear, Track Fast

Enja ENJ 6082

Previte; Graham Haynes (c); Robin Eubanks (tb); Don Byron (cl, bcl); Marty Ehrlich (as, f, cl, bcl); Anthony Davis, Steve Gaboury (p); Anthony Cox (b). January 1991.

Bobby Previte says:
‘We were supposed to start in the morning, and we were setting up when Cox, coming from Kingston, called to say that 87 was a total parking lot, and he had no idea when he would arrive. Instead of having everyone wait and the energy slowly dissipate, I sent everyone home, went out to a movie (Brian DePalma I think), and reconvened at night. Rough start, but it all worked out.’

Previte’s drumming has an engagingly loose, unfettered quality that effectively camouflages just how accurate a timekeeper he is. In the nearly 25 years since he began recording under his own name – enthusiasts may remember the splendid
Bump The Renaissance
from 1985 with Tom Varner and Lenny Pickett – he has shown an ability to function in all sorts of contexts, drawing on musics outside jazz, stamping everything with wry personality.

The records often sound like soundtracks to an imaginary movie, with a multiplicity of characters, an enigmatic storyline and no particular axe to grind.
Claude’s Late Morning
and
Empty Suits
from 1988 and 1990 were very much in that vein.
Weather Clear, Track Fast
– which became Previte’s band name – was more obviously a jazz album. The tunes are more stretched out and developed, leaving ample space for improvised passages. There’s a racetrack theme going on, and the seven tracks feel somewhat like a unified suite, with the speciality ‘Quinella’ (Gaboury from the drummer’s Empty Suits band in for Davis) tacked on at the beginning like an overture. Previte works the same pungent magic with the metre on the title-track and the closing ‘Weather Cloudy, Track Slow’, but the real rhythmic
tour de force
is the long ‘Traffic Along The Rail’, one of the best pieces Bobby has committed to record.

Byron plays an expansive role, but he’s overshadowed by the always resourceful Ehrlich, who has a bewildering array of voices at his disposal, always managing to sound like a 40-a-day man, whether playing raw bop saxophone, bronchial bass clarinet or winded flute. Cox more than makes up for his initial tardiness with a rock-solid performance. Haynes and Eubanks complete a terrific line-up and contribute substantially to what was one of the first great jazz records of the ’90s.

MCCOY TYNER
^&

Born Alfred McCoy Tyner, 11 December 1938, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; also briefly known as Sulaimon Saud

Piano, koto

Soliloquy

Blue Note 796429-2

Tyner (p solo). February 1991.

McCoy Tyner said (1994):
‘Music is an expression of love for others and of communication with them. And that sometimes comes out most strongly when you are playing alone.’