The Penguin Jazz Guide (190 page)

MIKE REED

Born 26 May 1974, Bielefeld, Germany

Drums

Last Year’s Ghost

482 Music 1055

Reed; Greg Ward (as); Jason Adasiewicz (vib); Tomeka Reid (clo); Josh Abrams (b). 2007.

Mike Reed says:
‘The recordings started in 2005 and completed in 2006. The original sessions were lost and also included tracks with Jeff Parker and Jim Baker. The actual record was my best attempt to salvage what would have been the record. The title, which has many meanings, also alludes to the lost, or “ghost”, recordings of the year before.’

Reed’s a fascinating figure in that he deploys large elements of freedom within what’s essentially a contemporary post-modal jazz idiom, or perhaps vice versa. He is the kind of musician who makes things happen around him, a member of groups led by fellow Chicagoans Josh Berman and Rob Mazurek, leader of his own Loose Assembly (as in
Last Year’s Ghost
) and People, Places & Things, but also the founder of Emerging Improvisers Organization, a body which supports creative music in the Chicago area.

Reed put out
In The Context Of
with 482 Music in 2005, using a group that included such local luminaries as flautist Nicole Mitchell and guitarist Jeff Parker. It was a record full of intrigue and intricacy, but still reaching, and our first reaction to the shorter improvised pieces on
Last Year’s Ghost
was that they were primers to the group’s language rather than fully achieved tracks. Listening again in the knowledge that the whole record is a re-creation of something earlier and lost repositions listening and makes these pieces sound more integral with the rest. The band has a new, alert sound: Reid’s cello provides a fascinating new improvising voice, Ward is terse and arresting, while Adasiewicz has proved to be among the most interesting young players on his instrument in years. ‘The Entire State Of Florida’ shows how much the group is embedded in old Chicago blues-jazz. The folk melody of ‘Temporary States’ leads directly into the double waltz-time of ‘Ghost Writer’, the best single track, while ‘Day Of The Dead’ conjures up a strange dreamy space. Reed closes in that same displaced vein: ‘Dreaming With Jill’ is an avant-garde ballad, none the less lovely for its disturbing undercurrents. If ever a contemporary record grows with familiarity, this is it.

MICHAEL MUSILLAMI

Born 28 July 1953, Sacramento, California

Guitar

The Treatment

Playscape PSR#050607 CD/DVD

Musillami; Mark Feldman (vn); Joe Fonda (b); George Schuller (d). May 2007.

Michael Musillami says:
‘This was a landmark release for two reasons. It was only the first time we had added a fourth member to the complete programme. It was also a way to give a gentle nod to my old departed friend, Thomas Chapin. Thomas brought Mark Feldman to my attention on his “and strings” release
Haywire
and I promised myself then that Mark and I would work together in future.’

Originally inspired by rock, Musillami took lessons with the charismatic Joe Diorio and started out playing a mixture of R&B and more straight-ahead jazz before, having moved east, he hooked up with Thomas Chapin, Mario Pavone and others round the Hillside Club in Waterbury, Connecticut. One interesting influence that the guitarist claims is Bill Barron, and his themes certainly manage to revise conventional forms in the way that Barron’s compositions often would. That, along with the company of Chapin’s cohort of savvy young innovators, gave Musillami a sound that is in some superficial way conventional enough but always brimming with unexpected harmonic possibilities and unclichéd melodic ideas.

The Playscape label took its name from a band Musillami was going out with around 1999, when he established his imprint. It’s an elegant operation, with a solid contemporary list, and it has given the guitarist an outlet for his own work. After the excellent
Perception
,
Those Times
and
Dachau
came
The Treatment
, easily the best of the bunch. The live DVD performance of three of the pieces was recorded in Connecticut three days before the studio recording. There are, we suppose, a few rough edges, but it’s a delight to have so much more of this remarkable music. Musillami’s in great form, but it’s Feldman who steals the show. His quotation from ‘Surrey With The Fringe On Top’ in the middle of ‘Brooms’ is a sign of how quickly he’s thinking and his articulation is needle-sharp all the way. ‘Human Conditions’ has him playing mostly pizzicato, an extraordinary effect when combined with guitar and bass. ‘Stark Beauty’ is exactly what it says it is. Musillami has come on in bounds even since the last record, not least in his ability to integrate a new voice into the trio. This one is a minor modern classic.

GONZALO RUBALCABA

Born 27 May 1963, Havana, Cuba

Piano, keyboards

Avatar

Blue Note 8418

Rubalcaba; Mike Rodriguez (t, flhn); Yosvany Terry (ss, as, ts); Matt Brewer (b); Marcus Gilmore (d). May & June 2007.

Saxophonist and Cuban music specialist Jane Bunnett says:
‘During the powerful changes that took place in jazz from 1959 to the 1970s (African influence and powerful polyrhythms) the American embargo left Cuba out of the party. But that influence is always there and it could yet have a seismic effect on American jazz.’

A Cuban émigré pianist, Rubalcaba created a minor sensation with his early appearances and was quickly signed up by Blue Note, for whom he recorded through the ’90s. He’s perhaps the most singular of those Cuban musicians who have made an impact on the American jazz scene of late. While he plays with as much grandstanding power as any of his countrymen, there is a compensating lightness of touch which one sometimes misses in the perpetually ebullient tone of most Cuban jazz.

After a run of excellent records for the label, brilliant but sometimes lacking in emotion, it sounds like Rubalcaba has taken a deep breath before this one and let the feeling come through. It’s still a technically dazzling performance but ‘This Is It’ and ‘Hip Side’ (both written by the brilliant Terry) lift the music onto a new level, astute but liberated from merely technical concerns. The long, long ‘Aspiring To Normalcy’, by Brewer, is another clever line. Horace Silver’s ‘Peace’ implies another line of descent for Rubalcaba, whose own ‘Infantil’ sounds like a gloss on Silver’s work. The rising star of the band is Rodriguez, who has touches of everyone from Booker Little to Woody Shaw and sounds as if he could walk into a Messengers date tomorrow and blow everyone away.

NICOLE MITCHELL

Born 17 February 1967, Syracuse, New York

Flute

Xenogenesis Suite

Firehouse 12 FH12-04-01-006

Mitchell; David Young (t); David Boykin (ts); Tomeka Reid (clo); Justin Dillard (p); Josh Abrams (b); Marcus Evans (d); Avreeayl Ra (perc); Mankwe Ndosi (v). June 2007.

Nicole Mitchell says:
‘
Xenogenesis Suite
is a science fiction-inspired composition. My goal was to explore the emotional process of fear, which Octavia Butler’s book
Dawn
developed through her character Lillith, who was plucked from the earth and brought into an alien environment. Facing fear head on is a human experience that we all may feel in the moments before real transformation.’

Currently co-president of AACM and 2006’s Chicagoan of the Year, Mitchell has made a considerable splash with her Black Earth Ensemble, whose music is not so much a throwback to 40 years ago as a strong reminder of how much has moved forward in cultural politics. Some of the creative ethos is still the same though, and there is no mistaking the power and ambition of Mitchell’s writing. Her flute-playing has an instantly compelling quality, as distinctive and arresting as a speaking voice, and on ‘Wonder’, the opening track of this remarkable sequence, she establishes a musical environment in which almost anything seems possible. Science fiction has often in the past provided a stimulus to creative jazz but those narrative energies have not been prominently engaged in recent years and Mitchell’s use of Octavia Butler is bold and self-determined.

The ensemble is tightly disciplined but still free to explore the dimensions of Mitchell’s big idea on their own individual terms. Mankwe Ndosi has a more specialized role than the others, but the combination of flute, voice and cello is what gives this incarnation of BEE its special character, those and the terrific combination of Evans’s drums and Avreeayl Ra’s percussion. One suspects that Mitchell, who already has a substantial discography and one breakthrough record,
Black Unstoppable
, is an important voice for the future and an unstoppable force in Chicago and beyond.

CUONG VU

Born 19 September 1969, Saigon, Vietnam

Trumpet, voice

Vu-Tet

ArtistShare 0073

Vu; Chris Speed (ts, cl); Stomu Takeishi (b); Ted Poor (d). July 2007.

Cuong Vu says:
‘Recording in Mexico City was an excuse for Stomu, Ted and I to gorge ourselves on some seriously kick-ass Mexican food with our new buddies. Chris Speed refused to take advice about what
not
to eat (street vendor food and raw lettuce) and got food poisoning that started to “cripple” him right as he played the last notes of “Never, Ever, Ever”, the last take of the record.’

The son of a Vietnamese pop singer mother and multi-instrumentalist father, Vu moved to Seattle when he was six. He swapped saxophone for trumpet and developed a remarkably powerful voice. In style, his recorded work ranges freely between Miles-influenced impressionism and a species of advanced rock, with a few more abstract soundscapes interspersed. He was always going to have to go some to improve on the debut record,
Bound
, which was one of our favourite contemporary records till
Vu-Tet
hove into view.

The quartet immediately sounds like a working group, evidenced by the improvised intro to the disc. That gives place to ‘Accelerated Thoughts’, a post-bop, post-jazz rush that re-establishes the close empathy between Vu and Speed. ‘Solitary Confinement’ dispels its own initial melancholia with some finely affirmative playing. ‘Never, Ever, Ever’ has a twitchy quality (and now we know why) but maintains a fine group discipline. The only oddity is the neo-traditionalist groove of ‘I Promise’ right at the end, but if this is Vu pointing to a possible future direction, bring it on.

EVAN PARKER
^&

Born 5 April 1944, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England

Tenor and soprano saxophones

The Moment’s Energy

ECM 1774798

Parker; Peter Evans (t); Ned Rothenberg (cl, bcl, shakuhachi); Agusti Fernández (p, prepared p); Kô Ishikawa (sho); Philipp Wachsmann (vn, elec); Barry Guy (b); Paul Lytton (perc); Richard Barrett, Lawrence Casserley, Walter Prati, Joel Ryan, Marco Vecchi (elec). November 2007.

Evan Parker says:
‘This is the closest I’ve come to how it must be to make a film.’

In the mid-’90s, to no one’s great surprise, Evan Parker began to work with electronics, using the vastly underrated Philipp Wachsmann and soundmen Walter Prati and Marco Vecchi to create a sonic environment in which the levels of harmonic information the saxophonist attained on his solo saxophone recitals were suddenly and exponentially increased. More surprising was how quickly the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble became a permanent part of Parker’s language-group, bringing in the brilliant Lawrence Casserley and, as occasion dictated, musicians from electronics ensemble Furt and from other musical traditions.

The culminating achievement of the Ensemble was a commission from the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in England, a composed piece for improvising ensemble that delivered a work of unparalleled sophistication and presence. Parker acknowledges the role played by the commissioning body, engineer Steve Lowe, producer Steve Lake and the ECM label, and clearly the sound-world of the piece is determined to a broad extent by the individual performers, but it is Parker’s imagination – capacious, responsive, but in no way totalizing – that makes the piece so successful.

Given the size of the ensemble and the technical resources on hand, it is a surprisingly restrained and even in places almost reticent work. It harnesses energy rather than dissipating it. There are extremely forceful passages – ‘Part IV’ is an immense free chorale and the closing ‘Part VII’ borders on the apocalyptic – but the overall tone is outstandingly calm and centred. British ‘free improvisation’, if the term still deserves currency and the nationalist attribution makes any sense of what is an international project, has travelled a great distance since its emergence in the late ’60s. Though some might cite the Ensemble’s transatlantic collaboration with Roscoe Mitchell as a greater achievement, this remarkable collaborative work is its masterpiece.

& See also
The Snake Decides
(1986; p. 506),
50th Birthday Concert
(1994; p. 582);
SPONTANEOUS MUSIC ENSEMBLE, Quintessence
(1973–1974; p. 406)

LARRY OCHS

Born 3 May 1949, New York City