The Penguin Jazz Guide (185 page)

LOUIS SCLAVIS
^&

Born 2 February 1953, Lyons, France

Clarinet, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone

L’Imparfait Des Langues

ECM 1954

Sclavis; Marc Baron (as); Paul Brousseau (ky, g); Maxime Delpierre (g); François Merville (d). April 2005.

Louis Sclavis said (2004):
‘Words and language come to me and then recede. I write things down in a notebook and then lose the notebook, but by being lost the words acquire some importance in the music that follows, I think.’

Having set out his vision of an ‘imaginary folklore’ in music in the ’80s, Sclavis in the next decade established a core ensemble of players around violinist Dominique Pifarély, bassist Bruno Chevillon and drummer François Merville, though not a regular group, and signed up with the ECM label to produce a string of highly original and successful albums that were like nothing else of the time.
Les Violences De Rameau, Napoli’s Walls
and
L’Affrontement Des Prétendants
are all marvellous records, but in 2005 and with a new group, Sclavis created something exceptional.

Enjoying a new-found openness in his approach, Sclavis decided to take on a new commission from the Spring Arts Festival in Monte Carlo with an almost entirely new band. Merville is the only one here who has served much time with Sclavis. Baron is a ferociously talented 23-year-old, while Delpierre has a buzz-saw guitar style very different to anything else in the previous Sclavis canon. It would have seemed perverse to give a group convened in this way very formal charts, so Sclavis set about writing basic themes and ideas
that would challenge his improvisational imagination in new ways. Ironically, the death of Prince Rainier led to the cancellation of the Monaco festival, so Sclavis took his group and new charts into the studio instead. It’s a powerful, very spontaneous performance, some of it deliberately sketchy, but featuring some fascinating ideas that might be blues, might be folk tunes, might also be classical tone rows, all transformed by a mint-fresh ensemble. Many of the tracks are quite short and some have noted a resemblance – perfectly convincing – to early Soft Machine in the rhythms and song-like forms. It’s a near-perfect record, whatever its provenance, and testimony to Sclavis’s importance to jazz composition in the new decade. ‘Le Verbe’ is a classic.

& See also
Clarinettes
(1984, 1985; p. 489)

STEFANO BATTAGLIA

Born 1965, Milan, Italy

Piano

Re: Pasolini

ECM 1998-99 2CD

Battaglia; Michael Gassman (t); Mirco Mariottini (cl); Dominique Pifarély (vn); Vincent Courtois, Aya Shimura (clo); Bruno Chevillon, Salvatore Maiore (b); Roberto Dani, Michele Rabbia (d). April–July 2005.

Stefano Battaglia says:
‘Pasolini was the complete artist, because he brought opposites together and united them without losing their separate character: the sacred and profane, different art forms, images and words, academic culture and popular culture. He is the model for this music, not just its dedication.’

Classically trained, and also active in that realm, Battaglia moves between free and post-bop structures with a rare elegance. His joining the ECM label put a deeper focus on his music.
The Book Of Jazz
was an encyclopedic survey of the major composers, neither deconstructions, nor reinventions, but rather interpretations of such elegant understanding that they seem to reposition the originals and remove all the spurious authority of authorship.

Which brings us neatly round to Pasolini, whose sense of personal identity always hovered on the edge of extinction. Pasolini’s terrible murder remains an unanswered question in Italian culture, largely in that it snuffed out a writer, film-maker, political activist, poet and thinker who seemed to embody much of the Italianness of contemporary Italian culture in its most contradictory forms. Over two discs, Battaglia tries to give the life and work some kind of musical correlative. He opens with a wonderful song dedicated to Pasolini’s muse, Laura Betti, continues with evocations of the Italian countryside as viewed through the prism of Pasolini’s verse, and using a sextet with strongly canonical connotations establishes a dialogue between the formal and improvised, (neo-)classical and romantic elements of Pasolini’s art.

The second disc, featuring players most closely associated with Louis Sclavis (Pifarély, again), has a more agitated and improvisational quality, culminating in the bleak sonics of ‘Ostia’, where Pasolini was gruesomely murdered on the beach. Following that, there is only a brief musical headstone and then silence. A demanding listen over two long discs, but absolutely essential modern music; whether all of it jazz or not hardly seems the issue.

ROBERT GLASPER

Born 1978, Houston, Texas

Piano

Canvas

Blue Note 77130

Glasper; Mark Turner (ts); Vincente Archer (b); Damion Reid (d); Bilal (v). May 2005.

Robert Glasper says:
‘I did my first record for Fresh Sound, and basically the feeling was “It’s Fresh Sound; no one’s going to hear that.” I treated it as a gig. You can’t do that on Blue Note, so that record was very much about the compositions, and thinking about them.’

It’s encouraging to find Blue Note still signing artists like Robert Glasper.
Canvas
is a fine record, basically an orthodox, but by no means dull, piano trio with some guest spots, and it sounds very much as if he’s conceived it as a white space on which to inscribe some of his strongest thoughts. His mother was the distinguished gospel and blues singer Kim Yvette Glasper, and Glasper studied at the High School for the Performing Arts in his home town, so there’s a lot of heredity and training pushing from behind.

On the Blue Note debut, he has a close, at moments almost uncanny, understanding with Archer and Reid that allows the group to move efficiently, sometimes startlingly, as on the well-named ‘Rise And Shine’, but above all as a unit. Archer often takes a strong initiative and pulls the line away from the piano; Reed responds in kind, giving the whole a centrifugal – or just plain fugal – character that is highly appealing. The title-track has a rich palette as well but the surprises come later, in the tiny ‘Centelude’ and on ‘Chant’, where Bilal’s wordless vocalizing serves as a horn part. Turner also thickens up the mix, but while the variety is welcome, there’s nothing wrong with what Glasper and his two stalwarts are doing. The only non-original is Herbie Hancock’s ‘Riot’.

MARIO PAVONE

Born 11 November 1940, Waterbury, Connecticut

Double bass

Deez To Blues

Playscape 050505

Pavone; Steven Bernstein (t, slide t); Howard Johnson (tba, bcl, bs); Peter Madsen (p); Charles Burnham (vn); Michael Sarin (d). May 2005.

Mario Pavone remembers:
‘It was recorded on the Mexican celebration of “Cinquo de Mayo” and early in George W. Bush’s disastrous second term. Bernstein and Burnham cracked us up all day with jokes, quips and asides, where to order the upside-down cakes, a reference to my description of the compositional intent. Later, the humour and the vibrant colours of the music knocked me out.’

It was going to John Coltrane’s funeral that persuaded Pavone to make music his career. He had trained as an engineer and taken contrabass lessons with Bertram Turetzky, and was already gigging quite extensively when he had his epiphany. Pavone has a big, ringing sound and a seemingly bottomless supply of ideas. A regular in the late Thomas Chapin’s trio (he recorded a moving tribute after the saxophonist’s early death), he has also worked with Bill Dixon, Anthony Braxton and Paul Bley. One distinctive feature of his own albums has been the prominence given to trombone or other low brass. Unlike so many of the dashed-off themes that pass for contemporary jazz ‘compositions’, Pavone’s are built from the ground up, with solid foundations and durable architecture. The engineering background hasn’t been thrown away.

Even after a dozen fine records, he still wouldn’t have been on many non-New Yorkers’ list of most important contemporary composer-leaders, but it’s hard to think who else has
delivered so much consistently high-quality new jazz since the turn of the decade. This is his masterpiece to date, not so much a return to the ‘old’ sound of the septet
Song For
or the fiercely engaged
Sharpeville
but an affirmation of its continuing potential. The richness of the voicings on ‘Xapo’ and ‘Zines’ is immediately intoxicating, though it takes a couple of hearings to pick up on Pavone’s compositional subtleties. It’s an exquisitely voiced ensemble, with trumpet, Johnson’s horns and violin all given distinct roles, but combining with the bass to produce a thick, rich ensemble stew. Through it all, Pavone throbs, sings, keeps time, marches and dances. An essential contemporary record.

MARK FELDMAN

Born 17 July 1955, Chicago, Illinois

Violin

What Exit

ECM 9876537

Feldman; John Taylor (p); Anders Jormin (b); Tom Rainey (d). June 2005.

Mark Feldman says:
‘
What Exit
was my first “jazz” recording leading my own group, playing my own music. I was 50 years old when I recorded it. In the next 25 years or so I have decided to procrastinate less and be more ambitious.’

Feldman might seem like a late starter in jazz terms. He certainly wasn’t a late starter as a musician, already playing bars as a teenager, having picked up the violin in childhood. He moved to Nashville and worked on scores of country sessions there before removing to New York, where he became a significant downtowner. He was a member of the Arcado string trio, the only significant rival to the String Trio Of New York.

As he implies, there’s precious little under his own name, and certainly nothing that sat easily in a ‘jazz’ bag.
Music For Violin Alone
was a solo set for John Zorn’s Tzadik in 1994, a programme with a strong new-music tinge. There was also a 1997 record called
Chromatic Persuaders
, which featured a superb interpretation of Scott LaFaro’s ‘Gloria’s Step’, but Feldman, who’s since recorded brilliant work in a jazz context with guitarist Michael Musillami and others, doesn’t seem to regard this as a jazz date, or his date, or worth mentioning; it did initially appear on a very small label.

What Exit
was worth the wait. Feldman doesn’t so much bathe in the wonderful sound Manfred Eicher and engineer James Farber lay out for him as rise to the challenge of it. Feldman’s violin has become a compelling improvisational voice and the huge opening ‘Arcade’ is a virtuoso exploration of musical space. Nothing else on the record quite matches up to it, either in scale or in beauty, though the small title-piece is the perfect finish and the double-stopped dirge of ‘Elegy’ is pretty unforgettable. Taylor sounds more unguarded than usual and Jormin and Rainey find a real empathy, with the drummer particularly responsive to his leader’s moves.

RAN BLAKE
^&

Born 20 April 1935, Springfield, Massachusetts

Piano

All That Is Tied

Tompkins Square TSO1965

Blake (p solo). 2005.

Ran Blake said (2005):
‘Am I in the film or am I directing the film? All I know is that when I’m at the piano and improvising, what I’m really doing is storyboarding, and doing it in real time. I don’t write film music because I don’t write well, but I can turn down the light and let the images flicker.’

Blake was 70 when this was made. He had released some 35 albums, but this was his first proper solo disc for some time. It is a quiet masterpiece, marked by the same almost mystical approach to harmony and melody that has marked recent projects. It is wrong to call Blake an eclectic. He assimilates his influences and passions too thoroughly for that. The opening track here, actually written by producer Jonah Kraut, opens quietly, almost musingly, before breaking off a huge, complex discord. Like the remainder of the album, the track remains quiet, contemplative and patient, gradually working through the ramifications of Blake’s astonishing grasp of harmony. ‘Thursday’ seems to quote ‘Lover Man’ towards the end, leaving the listener with the thought that perhaps the whole thing had been a meditation on those changes from the start; probably not, but Blake’s mind works in widening circles of association. ‘Impresario Of Death’ is magnificently moody and intense, but with a Messiaen-like delicacy. The only moment where the pace picks up significantly is on ‘Church Of Latter Rain Christian Fellowship’, whose gospelly roll is deeply infectious. A magnificent record from an American master.

& See also
The Short Life Of Barbara Monk
(1986; p. 504)

MATTHEW SHIPP

Born 7 December 1960, Wilmington, Delaware

Piano, keyboards

One

Thirsty Ear THE 57166

Shipp (p solo). August 2005.

Matthew Shipp says:
‘This was a return to recording acoustic jazz after my electro improv CDs. It was cool to rediscover the joy of acoustic jazz. The session had a freshness for that reason. The only problem I remember is before the session the piano tuner sat playing a bunch of Chick Corea tunes as if trying to impress me with it and it took a little time in the session to get those out of my head.’