The Penguin Jazz Guide (158 page)

Like fellow Tennessean George Coleman, Lowe had little truck with the scorched-earth radicalism of his generation, constantly asserting an unfashionable interest in classic swing players like Chu Berry and proto-boppers like Don Byas. His career was cut short, so there’s less of Lowe on record than one might wish, which makes the survivors that bit more precious. There’s a good early ESP-Disk release and a superb Black Saint called
The Flam.
After that, it thins out. The dearth of albums also, to be fair, reflects the saxophonist’s diffidence and suspicion of the studio process. As often with CIMP discs, there’s a good deal of information on
Bodies & Soul
about the recording session. It seems Lowe was dissatisfied with many of the early takes on this date, re-recording pieces by Coltrane (‘Impressions’) and Don Cherry (‘Art Deco’) several times, seven times in one case, until he was satisfied.

The group’s as spare and stern as the great Ornette Coleman Trio of the ’60s, which Moffett also graced, though it’s the previously unrecorded Flood who’s the revelation. It’s a terrific recording, ideally caught in CIMP’s signature veritism. There is a lot of music here, with material by Pharoah Sanders and Ornette (‘Happy House’) in addition to the Coltrane and Cherry material and two original Lowe compositions dedicated to the trumpeter,
who had died the previous month. Listening again to ‘Impressions’ in full awareness of the pains Lowe took over it, and thinking why it opens the set, one has to conclude that the saxophonist wanted to demonstrate both respect for and distance from Coltrane’s and, later, Coleman’s language. By placing ‘Body And Soul’ last, he shows more clearly than ever before how much he sees himself standing on the shoulders of earlier giants. It’s a delicate performance, unaccompanied, lighter-toned and more intimate than Lowe often is.

Part 2:
1996–2000

MAKANDA KEN MCINTYRE

Born 7 September 1931, Boston, Massachusetts; died 13 June 2001, New York City

Alto saxophone, flute, oboe, bassoon, others

In The Wind: The Woodwind Quartets

Passin Thru 41220

McIntyre (overdubbed ss, as, ts, bs; f, af, bf; cl, acl, bcl; ob, ehn, bsn). October 1995, April 1996.

Ken McIntyre said (1985):
‘I feel like I’m outside. Even friends would say they didn’t understand what I was doing, and that pushes you inside yourself. I know I hear things differently to some, very high up. If you understand that and want that, I’m your man. If not, I’ll do my own thing.’

It remains McIntyre’s misfortune to be remembered chiefly for his brief association with Eric Dolphy. Early appearances suggest a musician deeply influenced by Parker, but sounding like his own man in the search for a language beyond the orthodoxies of bebop. With the like-minded Dolphy in tow, McIntyre made a more promising excursion on the well-named
Looking Ahead
, which in 1960 was one of the most progressive recordings of its time. With Dolphy’s rise, though, McIntyre seemed to recede from view and after
Year Of The Iron Sheep
for United Artists there wasn’t any continuity of recording. He made some interesting albums down the years, but only a Dolphy tribute project kept him in view at the start of the ’90s, a period when he also adopted his new first name.

Towards the end of his life, with fresh interest in the music of his early period, McIntyre enjoyed a resurgence.
In The Wind
is a quite astonishing curtain-call, posthumously released. The title is oddly moving, for however much artifice there necessarily is in overdubbing multiple horn parts, these 11 performances have an entirely natural and evanescent quality that suggests they happened spontaneously. In terms of instrumentation, the most familiar sounds here are those of the two saxophone quartets. ‘Puunti’ is a gentle calypso, initially stated by the soprano, but featuring the other horns in turn, with the baritone kicking in last with a weighty but still limber solo. ‘Black Sugar Cane’ is even more remarkable; hard to believe that Makanda had to co-ordinate the different solo parts in the studio. He opens with an old favourite, ‘Peas’N’Rice’, another Caribbean-flavoured line which has appeared throughout his career, but played here on clarinets. There’s another calypso – this time for flutes – in ‘Amy’. On this, the final cut of the set, McIntyre again varies the timbres and textures wonderfully, vocalizing and overblowing like Roland Kirk. The other flute pieces are more obviously lyrical, but their accessibility doesn’t in any way compromise the astonishing harmonic sophistication of ‘Blanche’ or ‘Charsee’. The double-reed cuts are the furthest from conventional jazz instrumentation, but they’re arguably the most swingingly
integrated things on the album. ‘Chitlins And Cavyah’ is raw and funky, while ‘Chasing The Sun’ sits among McIntyre’s neglected classics, with a harmonic freight that will take even quick-eared listeners some time to unravel.

All in all, a record to savour over time, and a fitting memorial to a genuine original who diverted his talent to helping others.

DAVID MURRAY
^&

Born 19 February 1955, Berkeley, California

Tenor saxophone, bass clarinet

Dark Star

Astor Place TCD 4002

Murray; Omar Kabir, Hugh Ragin, James Zollar (t); Craig Harris (tb); Robert Irving III (p, org, syn); Bob Weir (g); Fred Hopkins (b); Renzell Merritt (d). January 1996.

David Murray said (1997):
‘Listen, I’m an American – a Californian – born 1955. How could I
not
respond to the Grateful Dead. What does it have to do with
jazz
? What did George Gershwin have to do – really – with jazz? There’s no difference.’

It was David Crosby who described the Grateful Dead’s music as ‘Electronic Dixieland’ and there were few jazz musicians more attuned to the idea of a continuum of American music, into and out of African-American strains, than David Murray. It is on the face of it odd that the Dead’s long, free-form jams on what were essentially country and blues themes should ever have seemed different from, let alone antithetical to, modern jazz. Jazz coverage of Jimi Hendrix’s music – by Gil Evans and others – opened the doors.

Listening to this tribute, recorded not long after Jerry Garcia’s death, it’s not hard to see what Crosby means, and the only surprise is that no one had thought of turning to the Dead’s long, floating lines and open-ended aesthetic before. The material is far from predictable. It includes things like the traditional ‘Samson And Delilah’ and Bob Weir’s ‘One More Saturday Night’ but saves the real joys for what was the vocal entry on ‘Dark Star’. In keeping with the Dead’s own philosophy, there is more emphasis on group interplay than on soloing as such, though Murray does tend to dominate the foreground, sounding ever more like one of the swing-era masters, effortlessly melodic but increasingly spare and unhurried. It might be argued that a record where he pays homage to other composers does disservice to his own writing, but Murray was at a point of transition here, having set down some of the best jazz themes of recent times in his ’80s work and not yet embarked on the new cross-cultural journey that took him through the start of the new millennium. The group is tight and loose in all the right places. Sometimes the brasses don’t seem quite right, but that has more to do with their position in the mix than anything else. Bob Weir is on hand for ‘Shoulda Had Been Me’ to add a seal of approval.

& See also
Ming
(1980; p. 458);
WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET, W.S.Q.
(1980; p. 456)

TOMASZ STAŃKO
^&

Born 11 July 1942, Rzeszów, Poland

Trumpet

Leosia

ECM 531693-2

Stańko; Bobo Stenson (p); Anders Jormin (b); Tony Oxley (d). January 1996.

Tomasz Stańko says:
‘
Leosia
is one of my most beloved albums. I recorded it just after the passing of my mother, who friends nicknamed “Leosia”, and there is something about passing on it, a reverie on existence and love. I grieved her death very profoundly and I think it shows in the music – in the bleak “Morning Heavy Song”, the redefined “Hungry Howl” that we first played with Edward Vesala, and a symbol of my personal philosophy “Die Weisheit Von Le Comte Lautréamont”. A bleak production, and very typical for me.’

Stańko’s imagination is fired as much by words and by visual images as by music. He is certainly not confined to jazz formulae, and at first hearing his music might seem to have more kinship with the abstract experimentalism of the Polish avant-garde than with orthodox or even free jazz. This is deceptive, for the trumpeter is deeply versed in the defining elements of jazz. His first big influence was Chet Baker, he says, though subsequently Miles Davis would become almost as important.

Totally free playing has never played a large part on the Polish scene and even when the setting is abstract there is still an underlying jazz ‘feel’, expressible both as a pulse and as dimly familiar harmonies and structures. Though some important records for long-time collaborator Edward Vesala’s Leo Records in Finland have not appeared on CD, the even earlier
Music For K
is still around, a forceful, sometimes inchoate session, but one which reconnects the trumpeter to his first gigs with Krzysztof Komeda’s group in 1965.

After a period in the wildereness, Stańko was taken up by ECM records and given the kind of studio sound his fragile trumpet and quietly inflected music deserve. To date, there hasn’t been a disappointing session for the imprint, but
Leosia
is one of the finest jazz records of recent times, a work of immense creative concentration made by a band at the peak of its powers. Stańko has probably played better, and the later
Litania
is the critics’ favourite, but never with such instinctive support from his colleagues. As was the norm with ECM sessions at this time, considerable emphasis is put on the component members of the ensemble and on subdivisions of the basic group. Oxley, Jormin and Stenson are the begetters of ‘Trinity’ and bassist and drummer collaborate on the similarly constructed ‘Brace’. ‘No Bass Trio’ is self-explanatory, and very fine, but the real action comes around these tracks, on the numbers drawn from an earlier Power Bros album,
Bossanossa
, and on the long title-piece, which ends the album on a creative high, a long, perfectly weighted theme that seems to have no beginning or end.

& See also
KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA, Astigmatic
(1965; p. 326)

PHIL MINTON

Born 2 November 1940, Torquay, Devon, England

Voice, trumpet

A Doughnut In One Hand

FMP CD 91

Minton (v solo). January 1996.

Phil Minton says:
‘The Friends Meeting House in Welwyn Garden City was the most friendly, generous and responsive of spaces. Each part of the room I sang in seemed to have a different personality, and I felt it enjoyed the vibrations as much as I did.’

Minton worked with Mike Westbrook, initially as a trumpeter and still within a recognizable jazz idiom, but gradually his unique vocal skills came to the fore. He is a stunning vocal improviser, with a tonal and timbral range that seems quite uncanny, moving between choirboy falsetto and feral growls in an instant. His partnership with Maggie Nicols and Julie Tippetts (as Voice) was an indication of how vital free-vocal music was in Britain; other associations – with percussionist Roger Turner – were no less creative.

Minton has an impressive body of recordings, some in unaccompanied situations.
A Doughnut In Both Hands
gathers together work inspired by the literature of the First World War and other pieces, including a tiny dedication to revolutionist Emma Goldman. ‘Cenotaph’ and ‘Wreath’ are only three quarters of a minute apiece, but overflowing with pain and pride, anger and redemption, and painfully up to date. The ‘doughnut’ title was to crop up again in 1996. This category-stretching return to solo singing has no intrinsic relation to the earlier disc. Now one doughnut short, Minton also has a spare hand free to conduct himself through a disciplined and rigorous sequence of miniatures, 30 tracks in an hour of spectacular vocal acrobatics.

Relations between groups of pieces – ‘Dough Songs’, ‘Para Songs’, songs about ‘drainage’ and a Mr Wilkins, and ‘Tip Head’ – are never made entirely explicit, but by sequencing the CD differently one gets a strong impression of areas of concern approached and developed organically and then reordered to create a fractured narrative. The voice has seldom been better and Minton’s use of space and microphone distance (the only kind of processing on the record) adds dimensions that are entirely unexpected. It isn’t easy listening, but once one grasps the relationship between Minton’s highly refined art and the cracked, artless singing of pub amateurs, workmen and tramps, it has a Beckettian purity and warmth. Whatever its lineage, it is unmissable.

RUBY BRAFF
^&

Born 16 March 1927, Boston, Massachusetts; died 9 February 2003, Chatham, Massachusetts

Cornet

Being With You: Ruby Braff Remembers Louis Armstrong

Arbors ARCD 19163

Braff; Joe Wilder (flhn); Jon-Erik Kellso (c); Dan Barrett (tb); Scott Robinson (bs, cl); Jerry Jerome (ts); Bucky Pizzarelli (g); Johnny Varro (p); Bob Haggart (b); Jim Gwin (d). April 1996.