The Penguin Jazz Guide (159 page)

Writer Mick Carlon remembers:
‘Ruby Braff was once pulled out of a coma by a Louis Armstrong recording. “That’s the second time Pops saved my life,” he said. When was the first? “The first time I heard his music.” ’

After a long period of neglect, coinciding with the rise of rock and the jazz avant-garde, Braff began to be recognized again as the real thing and the last four decades of his life were a blur of activity, slowed only somewhat towards the end by pulmonary problems.

Armstrong was always the single greatest influence on Braff’s playing, and this nicely crafted tribute shows some of the ways. The group is a mixture of the great-and-good and relative unknowns, but the playing is of the highest quality. Though Joe Wilder is around for only a single track, the long ‘Royal Garden Blues’, he brings such colour and vibrancy to it as to colour the whole album. The opening take on ‘I Never Knew (Where Roses Grew)’ sets the tone for a richly varied session that ends on the theme tune (‘When It’s Sleepy Time Down South’) and on a point of rest. At a stroke, Armstrong’s music is before us again, not as a museum piece but as the permanent revolution of modern music, a volatile source that few tapped as courageously and as feelingly as Braff.

& See also
2 x 2
(1955; p. 165)

CHARLIE HADEN
^&

Born 6 August 1937, Shenandoah, Iowa

Double bass

Beneath The Missouri Sky (Short Stories)

Verve 537130-2

Haden; Pat Metheny (g, sitar). 1996.

Composer and bassist Gavin Bryars says:
‘Charlie Haden’s bass is the most instantly recognizable in all jazz. His many duo collaborations represent his best work.’

This sold like SnoCones in the desert, prompting the inevitable canard that it wasn’t ‘really’ a jazz record at all. The truth is, as Gavin Bryars has stated, that much of Haden’s most distinctive work has been in duo situations, where he is an equal voice in the musical partnership. His partners have included Chris Anderson, Kenny Barron, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Egberto Gismonti, Hampton Hawes, Keith Jarrett, John Taylor … which hardly sounds as though he coasts through these situations.

Metheny has proved to be an adventurous collaborator down the years and this session with an old friend never lapses into the merely conversational. The original intention was to record a set of acoustic duets, but these have been embellished with guitar overdubs and with Metheny’s previously unveiled acoustic guitar/sitar. At the heart of the set, two tunes dedicated to Haden’s late parents: Roy Acuff’s country classic ‘The Precious Jewel’ (which strikingly resembles one of Bill Frisell’s Americana projects, dense with overdubbing) and the traditional ‘He’s Gone Away’. Also in the line-up, Jim Webb’s ‘The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress’ and two themes from the movie
Cinema Paradiso
. It’s easy enough to dismiss this music as undemanding, pastelly and soft-focus, but in fact the alien element is the bop idiom that keeps surfacing. As ever, it’s formidably disciplined, and there’s a hint of rock only just under the surface.

& See also
Liberation Music Orchestra
(1969; p. 363),
Quartet West
(1986; p. 509)

JOHN SCOFIELD
^&

Born 26 December 1951, Dayton, Ohio

Guitar

Quiet

Verve 533185-2

Scofield; Randy Brecker (t, flhn); Wayne Shorter (ts); Charles Pillow (f, cor, ts); Lawrence Feldman (f, ts); John Clark, Fred Griffin (frhn); Roger Rosenberg (bcl); Howard Johnson (bs, tba); Steve Swallow (b); Bill Stewart, Duduka Fonseca (d). April 1996.

John Scofield says:
‘This was the only time I used acoustic guitar. What I really wanted to do was write for horns … and I was lucky to get Wayne Shorter on board!’

Scofield’s transfer to Blue Note moved his career and his music substantially forward, but nobody was staying at that great old imprint for long any more and Sco moved on again, but only after making the excellent
Hand Jive
and
Groove Elation
, which confirmed the label’s apparent conviction that the best sex comes when the relationship is almost over. These were funky records, so what happened when the guitarist threw in his lot with Verve was a bit of a surprise.

Having already tried numerous settings for Blue Note, Scofield’s Verve debut was different again. Playing acoustic guitar exclusively is one departure; setting it against the mournful sound of low brass and woodsy reeds is another. The horn charts are just witty enough to inject a certain wryness and just eerie enough to lend a sometimes other-worldly air to the likes of ‘After The Fact’. The addition of Shorter, playing his now unaccustomed tenor on three tracks, seems like an unlikely bonus, but he fits in uncannily well. Scofield’s own playing is made to seem less conspicuous by his playing acoustic, yet it lends a
certain piquancy to his improvising. And then there is Swallow, co-producing and seeming to direct much of the playing with high, light bass-lines of the utmost ingenuity and relevance. The result comes close to Scofield’s finest hour.

& See also
Still Warm
(1985; p. 493)

SONNY SIMMONS
^&

Born 4 August 1933, Sicily Island, Louisiana

Alto saxophone, English horn

Transcendence

CIMP 113

Simmons; Michael Marcus (stritch, manzello); Charles Moffett (d). April 1996.

Producer Robert Rusch says:
‘During one of the takes, I passed a note to engineer Marc Rusch saying: “Is this as good as I think it is?” He just nodded. The next day we all went to the listening room to revisit the previous night’s work. Mr Simmons turned to me and said: “Caesar” (which is what he called me), “I don’t know where we go from here. How can we do better?” It was a transcendent moment.’

The only record issued under Sonny Simmons’s name between 1970 and 1990 is a 1982 West Wind session called
Backwoods Suite
, with Michael Marcus and Billy Higgins, though there are a couple of on-the-fly live dates as well. How could a musician and composer so original and remarkable simply slip through the net? Part of the answer is that Simmons has always favoured working with community musicians and out of range of the ‘industry’, but the neglect is still inexplicable. There were a couple of small-label things at the start of the next decade, recorded with local musicians, before the estimable Bob Rusch fixed up a session at CIMP, an imprint that puts a premium on faithful audio documentation of improvised music.

Transcendence
is a challenging listen. Marcus’s adoption of manzello and stritch (instruments associated with Roland Kirk) and the lack of a harmony instrument mean that these solos, duos and trios are played out on the edge, and with no recognized paths back. The sleeve-notes say something about the saxophonist’s resolve and intensity, revealing the strained circumstances of both sessions, and the bloody virulence of the playing can at times seem as exhausting to listen to as it was to perform. Moffett’s swing- and jazz-time are one leavening agent; the lovely sound of Marcus’s horns intertwining with Simmons is another. Sonny plays unaccompanied alto on ‘Geraldine’s Dream’, but his ‘Nuclear Fission’ is more typical of the session, which also introduces ‘Cosmosomatics’, later adapted as a group name.

A second disc,
Judgement Day
, was issued from a subsequent session, with Sonny on tenor and Marcus doubling on the thin-voiced C-melody saxophone, but the addition of a bass-player contributes less than one might expect. Of the two, it’s
Transcendence
that earns its title.

& See also
Music From The Spheres
(1966; p. 341)

JOE MCPHEE

Born 3 November 1939, Miami, Florida

Trumpet, tenor saxophone, valve trombone, other instruments

As Serious As Your Life

hatOLOGY 514

McPhee (ts, t, p solo). May 1996.

Joe McPhee says:
‘
As Serious As Your Life
is, of course, a tribute to Valerie Wilmer’s marvellous book and the musicians she championed, but more personally it is a tribute to my father. It was he who gave me the gift of music and he had recently passed away.’

A deep thinker as well as a passionate musician, McPhee is a rare exponent of both brass and woodwind instruments, doubling on trumpet and saxophone on many of his records, using other horns as circumstance dictates. He developed his musical learning in the military, exposed to the traditional jazz which has always profoundly affected his work. He emerged as a significant player with the 1969 album
Underground Railroad
on the CjR label he co-founded. Other rarities from that period have re-emerged in recent years. Perhaps the two great intellectual wakenings of his life were his reading of Edward De Bono’s heterodox psychological theories, which led to McPhee’s ‘Po’ aesthetic, and his meeting with radical composer Pauline Oliveros, whose philosophy of Deep Listening chimed strongly with his own ideas.

McPhee has many recordings, featuring many permutations of instruments, but it seems only appropriate to include one of his great hat ART dates, not just because it is a remarkable record, but because the label was established (in 1975) by Swiss businessman Werner X. Uehlinger specifically to put out McPhee’s music, some 14 records between 1970’s
Black Magic Man
and this.

McPhee has identified 1996 as an important transitional year, a point at which he looks back and forwards, with the oneiric logic that dominates the ‘Project Dream Keeper’ sequence. Working alone and with ambient sound welcomed rather than edited out, he creates a body of work which is as evocative and expressive as anything he has ever made. ‘Tok’ is a Coltrane-influenced tenor piece which harks back to the earlier solo performance. ‘Conlon In The Land Of Ra’ documents an imaginary meeting between Sun Ra and the radical composer Conlon Nancarrow. Dedicated to Marilyn Crispell, Coltrane’s ‘After The Rain’ is a piano solo played on the house piano of the Village Gate jazz club and played with the sustain pedal depressed throughout, giving it a floating, fugitive quality. On ‘The Man I Love’, McPhee brings a highly personal focus to the Gershwin standard, a similar tonality and language to the two parts of ‘As Serious As Your Life’, named after an important book by British jazz writer and photographer Val Wilmer. As well as these, there is the opening ‘Death Of Miles Davis’, a heartfelt tribute, and ‘Haiku Study #1’, a sketch for work developed later in duets with violinist David Prentice.

JAMES CARTER

Born 3 January 1969, Detroit, Michigan

Soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and f-mezzo saxophones, bass and contrabass clarinets, flute

Conversin’ With The Elders

Atlantic 7567 82908

Carter; Lester Bowie, Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison (t); Larry Smith (as); Buddy Tate (ts, cl); Hamiet Bluiett (bs); Craig Taborn (p); Jaribu Shahid (b); Tani Tabbal (d). June 1996.

Cecil Taylor said (2002):
‘That music is alive! I almost cried. He plays one sound,
aah!
and walks off; another sound,
eeh!
and walks off again. But when he confronts that sound, that new sound out of rhythm and blues, there is such passion. His life is there.’

From those initials much was expected; not miracles perhaps, but certainly something special. Carter’s coming out was rapturously received and almost everything since has been fascinating. He arrived in the unlikely packaging of the Tough Young Tenors. It was an inspired idea to throw Carter up against those ancestral voices and with a programme that takes in swing to bop and beyond to the contemporary avant-garde. Both guests and material come from out of a past not always so very distant, but certainly very different from the scene the young man inherited. Carter’s loyalty to Shahid, Tabal and Taborn is exemplary, and they form a unified background for the guest spots.

The most venerable, chronologically speaking, are Edison and Tate, and ‘Lester Leaps In’ and ‘Centrepiece’ with Sweets and ‘Moten Swing’ and ‘Blue Creek’, the latter with Buddy on clarinet, are convincingly, supremely authentic. The paired altos on ‘Parker’s Mood’ almost cancel each other out, so rigorously do they observe the master’s cadence, and Smith – heard, as all the guests are, through the left channel – doesn’t seem to want to bust loose. A hometown legend, the Detroiter has very few recording credits to his name. The set kicks off, wonderfully but rather deceptively, with Bowie’s ‘Freereggaehibop’, on which his entire armoury of rips, snorts, smears and impossibly low-register vocalizations are used. Appropriately, he comes back to round off the album with ‘Atitled Valse’, but by then the honours have already been secured by Bluiett and by two fantastic baritone duets, on Coltrane’s ‘Naima’ and, more boldly, on Anthony Braxton’s march-metred ‘Composition 40Q’, one of the more approachable themes in the Braxton canon, but still a startling piece to cover.

Carter is playing with dazzling confidence and restrained power. His early tendency to over-emphasize the attack has given way to a breathily intimate sound which can be scaled up or down in keeping with the material. His multi-instrumentalism is so much in service to the song that one scarcely notices the switch while understanding instinctively that such-and-such a tune could only be played that way on that horn. That’s the sign of a master.