The Penguin Jazz Guide (170 page)

& See also
Study – Witch Gong Game II/10
(1994; p. 579);
LONDON JAZZ COMPOSERS’ ORCHESTRA, Ode
(1972; p. 393)

MUNDELL LOWE

Born 21 April 1922, Laurel, Mississippi

Guitar

When Lights Are Lowe

Acoustic Music 3191190

Lowe; Hendrik Meurkens (vib); Chris Berger (b); Mark Taylor (d). 1999.

Mundell Lowe says:
‘Mr Benny Carter was a long-time friend of mine. I always wanted to record “When Lights Are Low” to put to truth Miles Davis’s mistake that he never fixed. Miles recorded the wrong bridge. When I recorded the song, Mr Carter called to thank me for using the right one.’

Lowe started out playing both Dixieland and country music, but worked in swing for a time, including a postwar stint with Mary Lou Williams, before becoming a staff arranger at NBC. Studio and TV work dominated much of his career, but he always kept a jazz side going and made a number of fine records that highlight his cool, restrained tone and delivery.

Given that Lowe was rising 80,
When Lights Are Lowe
was never likely to be a great stylistic revelation or a sudden swerve into electronic noise. What it delivers in every track is crisply executed jazz, oscillating between bop and swing and always providing some new insight into a mostly standards programme: ‘Lady Be Good’ brings out the best in the partnership with regular collaborator Meurkens, who’s an undervalued exponent of his instrument, and the opening ‘Star Eyes’ sums up a whole history of approaches to that lovely song. The title-track does indeed get the bridge right, but more importantly it creates a delightful gloaming atmosphere that is still full of laughter and warmth. An exceptional album by a talent whose reputation has been turned down too low for too many years. Time to cast a stronger light on Mundell Lowe.

WILLIAM PARKER
^&

Born 10 January 1952, New York City

Double bass

Mayor Of Punkville

Aum Fidelity 15 2CD

Parker; Roy Campbell (t, flhn); Lewis ‘Flip’ Barnes, Richard Rodriguez (t); Masahiko Kono, Alex Lodico, Steve Swell (tb); Chris Jonas (ss); Ori Kaplan (as); Charles Waters (as, cl); David Sewelson (bs); Cooper-Moore (p); Dave Hofstra (b, tba); Andrew Baker (d); Aleta Hayes (v). July–November 1999.

William Parker said (1999):
‘You know why jazz and improvised music are marginalized? Why great musicians are playing to a handful of people in a cellar still? Because we lost the support of the community. We lost any sense that this music belongs to a community. We can’t blame anyone else for that. We just have to try to get it back.’

The bassist’s work with the Improvisers Collective led directly to the foundation of the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, which has become one of the most compelling large units on the scene and this remarkable performance clinches Parker as a composer of large-scale dramatic works. The title-piece and the equally long ‘I Can’t Believe I Am Here’ are structured around deceptively simple ideas, melodic cells and simple
ostinati
which open up improvising possibilities for the soloists. Parker includes two curious ‘interludes’ which sound like rehearsal material, but with ‘Three Steps To Noh Mountain’ he demonstrates a capacity for jewel-like perfection and a pristine logic, even in a small span. There is so
much to admire here that it’s virtually impossible to single out tracks, but, along with those already mentioned, ‘Oglala Eclipse’ and the closing ‘Anthem’ are outstanding.

& See also
Through Acceptance Of The Mystery Peace
(1974, 1979; p. 409)

ANDREW HILL
^&

Born Andrew Hille, 30 June 1937, Chicago, Illinois; died 20 April 2007, Jersey City, New Jersey

Piano

Dusk

Palmetto 2057

Hill; Ron Horton (t); Marty Ehrlich, Gregory Tardy (reeds); Scott Colley (b); Billy Drummond (d). October 1999.

Pianist Jason Moran says:
‘I became a student of Andrew’s during the rehearsal for
Dusk
. I went to Baldwin piano studios, and Andrew was there with his band rehearsing the song “15/8”. Andrew dances and stumbles around that intoxicating bass-line for the first three and a half minutes of the piece. This is his signature. He is free with his inner rhythm. It’s as if what he’s playing is more of a comment about the rhythm of the bass and drums, and not just a solo that sits on top of the bass and drums. It’s his dialect, and it takes a while to translate.’

Dusk
was warmly, even rapturously received on its release, less for its content than because a major African-American composer seemed at last able to come out of the shadows. It’s a record that requires time to assimilate and it’s worth bearing in mind that here was an artist who had recorded very little, relative to his stature and to the density of Blue Note documentation, for two decades.

Hill had presented some of the material already, and it can be found on a quite obscure solo record called
Les Trinitaires.
There are solo tracks on
Dusk
as well. ‘Tough Love’ and ‘Formulaic’ feature the pianist on his own; both are quirky and idiosyncratic, but curiously remote. ‘Sept’ and ‘15/8’ are inward-leaning exercises in metre, the debate conducted within the band, so not as communicative as we normally expect such a thing to be. There’s not much that is emotionally involving in either of them, but perhaps that’s intended; in later life, Hill adopted a curiously detached stance, as if to indicate that he was equally unimpressed by the canonization of past work and the overdue recognition that greeted his ‘comeback’. The long opening ‘Dusk’ is about the best thing on the record, built over a long, looping bass-line, knotted harmony from the horns and urgent little excursions like bat-flight. ‘ML’ is a typical Hill waltz. There is also a heartfelt tribute to the late Thomas Chapin, ‘T.C.’, which features Ehrlich and Tardy on what sound like bass clarinets, though none are listed on the sleeve.

The apparent programme to the record is Jean Toomer’s Harlem Renaissance classic
Cane
, but its enigmatic lyricism is replaced by something drier and more abstract. Hill’s health broke down not long after
Dusk
was recorded, and though there were other albums to come, they never quite captured him at his best. Here at least, there is clear confirmation that he was one of the leading composers in the music.

& See also
Point Of Departure
(1964; p. 303)

STEVE KUHN

Born 24 March 1938, Brooklyn, New York

Piano

The Best Things

Reservoir 162

Kuhn; David Finck (b); Billy Drummond (d); Luciana Souza (v). December 1999.

Steve Kuhn said (2001):
‘Bill Evans turned me around, in a different way to Coltrane. Coltrane showed me a life where music was first and last. Bill Evans showed me that technique was nothing if there wasn’t something of yourself behind it.’

A piano pupil of the celebrated Margaret Chaloff, then a student at Harvard and the Lenox School, Kuhn worked the New York scene from the late ’50s and was John Coltrane’s first pianist in what became the classic quartet. He lived in Stockholm in the late ’60s, accompanying Sheila Jordan and leading his own groups. His recording career started with a curious country-and-western-meets-jazz album co-led with Toshiko Akiyoshi and has more recently returned to the Coltrane repertoire.

Kuhn struck a rich seam with Reservoir, and his trio records for the label find him playing some of the best jazz of his career and are modern jazz pianism at its best. The earliest of the three of them is the most easily overlooked, but it is a more than competent and often very thoughtful session that paves the way for the achievement of
Countdown
. Opening with a Coltrane composition (the title-track) was a stroke of genius and the inclusion of Steve Swallow’s ‘Wrong Together’ – the two Steves seem like creative soulmates and apparently it was Swallow who persuaded Kuhn to do more writing – is the clincher.

Steve kicks off
The Best Things
, the most recent of the group, with a chestnut, ‘The Best Things In Life Are Free’, but manages to transform it, as he does Parker’s ‘Confirmation’, which reduces the outline to fragments and reassembles them, and the following ‘Poem For #15’, which takes every second of its ten-plus minutes to unravel. ‘Two By Two’ is an interesting contemporary blues, not Kuhn’s usual style, its threatened resolutions always second-guessed by the composer. The vocalist is used to add some wordless tone-colours to ‘Adagio’, but by then the set has been firmly clinched. An artist in his pomp, overdue some serious attention.

ISHMAEL WADADA LEO SMITH
^&

Born 18 December 1941, Leland, Mississippi

Trumpet

Golden Quartet

Tzadik TZ 7604

Smith; Anthony Davis (p); Malachi Favors (b); Jack DeJohnette (d). January 2000.

Wadada Leo Smith says:
‘I wanted to create an ensemble of master composers/performers who would perform my music in the quartet form, which has all the condition of an orchestra, and is the purest, most complete unit in all music.’

In the spring of 1995 Smith unveiled a large-scale, multi-ensemble piece called
Odwira
. It was the clearest sign of how far he had moved from small-group improvisation to a new conception of himself as a composer, albeit a heterodox one. Recent years have seen him personally and musically involved with Oriental culture, which bears on the work in philosophical rather than strictly sonic or timbral ways. In other words, Smith is still playing jazz music, but within sight of two powerful camps, and receiving emissaries from both.

The association with Tzadik both reflects and extends this situation and the recorded work of recent years has seen him issue some of his most vibrant work for two decades. On ‘Celestial Sky And All The Magic’, Smith demonstrates again how much he owes to
Miles Davis (mute very much in place), but also how far he has travelled beyond. His muted introduction is as delicately moving as his rapid-fire exposition on ‘America’s Third Century Spiritual Awakening’ is rousing. The opening ‘DeJohnette’ is a Milesian tribute to a band member and affords the drummer lots of space to spread out and show his wares. Jack is an utterly compelling soloist and his ability to understand where Smith is coming from generates the key relationship of the set. Davis is sympathetic enough, but he doesn’t quite have the chops to equal Smith. ‘America’s Third Century Spiritual Awakening’ is brimming with urgency and excitement: an anthem for the Obama years?

& See also
Divine Love
(1978; p. 446)

RANDY SANDKE

Born 23 May 1949, Chicago, Illinois

Trumpet

Inside Out

Nagel Heyer 2025

Sandke; Ray Anderson, Wycliffe Gordon (tb); Ken Peplowski (cl, ts); Marty Ehrlich (ss, cl, bcl, af); Scott Robinson (ss, bs, cbsx, bcl, f, theremin); Uri Caine (p); Greg Cohen (b); Dennis Mackrel (d). January 2000.

Randy Sandke says:
‘The Inside Out Band was a coming together of musicians associated with two different musical camps: mainstream and the New York downtown new music scene. In reality, our mutual respect and desire to create fresh and exciting music erased any supposed barriers that critics are fond of imposing.’

Born in Chicago, Sandke followed the music of idols such as Bix and Louis and seemed bound for a trumpet career on his own account, when he developed throat problems that required surgery. Sandke worked for ASCAP and played guitar for a time but began playing jazz again and found himself in demand in swing/mainstream circles. In the ’90s he took on an ambassadorial role for the styles he loved, but also recorded more
outré
material on his own records.

Had
Inside Out
been released by a major American label it would most likely have been greeted with all kinds of ballyhoo. Instead, Sandke’s audacious project, aligning himself and Peplowski alongside the likes of Ehrlich, Anderson and Caine, thereby lining up the new mainstream and New York’s downtown side by side, barely got a mention in most parts of the jazz press. Sandke put in three of his own tunes and scored ‘Creole Love Call’, but he also got everyone else to contribute a tune and the compatibility of the playing, even when the music’s kicking at doors which some of these players don’t care to open, is wonderful. As an ensemble they get a gorgeous sound, the reeds making up a voluptuously rich range and the rarity of two trombones in a nine-piece band also makes its mark. One or two of the pieces are more jokey than good-humoured – Gordon’s ‘Sam Bone’ is just a bit of nonsense for himself and Anderson – but Ehrlich’s ‘Like I Said’, Sandke’s ‘Inside Out’ and Cohen’s ‘Trapianti Di Scimmia’ alone make the record special.

MATS GUSTAFSSON

Born 29 October 1964, Umeå, Sweden

Baritone saxophone, other saxophones, fluteophone

The Thing