The Penguin Jazz Guide (93 page)

Buddy Rich said (1976):
‘You look at an orchestral percussion-player. He gets to hit his tymps once every twenty minutes or so, or maybe waits all night to crash his cymbals for the big finale. The great thing about jazz is the drummer’s always busy and sometimes the star.’

A child performer in vaudeville, Rich was a bandleader by the time he was 11. He worked in many of the big swing bands of the ’30s and spent six years with Tommy Dorsey before leading his own group. When it foundered, he freelanced, sang and did some acting, and spent five years with Harry James, before re-forming a big band in 1966. Against the run of
the time, it was an international success, although heart problems interrupted an otherwise tireless working schedule. A ruthless man, though with a generous side, peerless in his technique.

The late ’60s were scarcely vintage times for big bands, but Rich, who was used to stopping at nothing, drove a limousine outfit through the period with concessions that didn’t really bother him much. They had items like ‘Uptight’ and ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ in the book, but they still played the likes of ‘In A Mellotone’ and ‘Sister Sadie’, and among the technique-laden sections there were players who could step out and play an individualist’s solo: Don Menza, Jay Corre, Bobby Shew and Art Pepper. There are a number of Pacific albums, nearly all taken from live dates, from Hollywood or Las Vegas, and since the band thrived in performance they are among Rich’s most characteristic testaments. There’s nothing subtle about the arranging or the musicianship: all is speed, bravado, intensity. Not to say that the band didn’t have different strokes at its disposal: some of the charts on
Swingin’ New Big Band
(by a variety of hands, including Oliver Nelson, Bill Holman and Phil Wilson) are as elegant as they are assertive. But Rich’s rule meant that the band had to fire on all cylinders and there were no pastel shades involved.

CECIL TAYLOR
^&

Born 15 March 1929 (some sources state 25 March and 1930), Long Island, New York

Piano, voice

Conquistador!

Blue Note 76749

Taylor; Bill Dixon (t); Jimmy Lyons (as); Cecil Taylor (p); Henry Grimes, Alan Silva (b); Andrew Cyrille (d). October 1966.

Cecil Taylor said (1983):
‘Mr Andrew Cyrille, he is part of my skin, and his rhythm is always in the dance with me. I dislike the term “jazz”. It’s a word that belongs in the brothel-houses. Duke Ellington called his music “Ellingtonia”. This music is mine, and American in the deepest sense. And there’s nothing “free” about it.’

An all but flawless record. Dark, difficult, unique, yet operating at an artful tangent to some of the other ‘difficult’ Blue Note music of the period, this is Taylor at his most devious. Dixon and Lyons are deployed as a kind of ‘classic’ Blue Note front line, while still playing music which, say, Freddie Hubbard and even Eric Dolphy would have found close to impossible. After a break from recording, Taylor had come to Blue Note to record
Unit Structures
, arguably the most demanding record the label ever put out and one that made explicit the language-forms that Taylor was to develop steadily through the next 30 years, in which individual monads of sound, phrases, clusters, single notes, generate patterns of energy through the music. Cyrille is key to the conception here, charged not with keeping time, but with the far more difficult task of demonstrating, moment to moment, that time is, indeed, relative and constantly mobile. It is the corollary to what Taylor is doing at the keyboard. There was nothing else like this at the time and arguably nothing like it since. Unlike any of the other great modernist experiments – Coltrane’s harmonics, Coleman’s ‘harmolodics’ – Taylor does not precede a comet’s tail of followers, and yet, ironically, a putative ‘Cecil Taylor influence’ is adduced every time a piano-player hits the keyboard robustly or plays an atonal cluster where one might expect to find a normative chord. It’s nonsense, and pernicious nonsense. It hasn’t done latter-day reputations any harm, but it steadily distances Taylor’s own music from any approximate understanding.

& See also
Jazz Advance
(1956; p. 191),
Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come
(1962; p. 289),
Celebrated Blazons
(1990; p. 541)

JOSEPH JARMAN

Born 14 September 1937, Pine Bluff, Arkansas

Alto saxophone, other instruments

Song For

Delmark DE-410

Jarman; Bill Brimfield (t); Fred Anderson (ts); Christopher Gaddy (p, mar); Charles Clark (b); Thurman Barker, Steve McCall (d). October–December 1966.

Joseph Jarman said (1988):
‘When Charles [Clark] and Christopher [Gaddy] passed [in 1968 and 1969] I was down a long way, very depressed. But Roscoe, who’d been a friend at school, he asked me to come and play with him and Lester [Bowie] and Malachi [Favors]. When we went to Europe, they said: “What is the name of this band?” We looked at one another and said: “The Art Ensemble Of Chicago”.’

Jarman was neither a square peg nor a makeweight in the Art Ensemble, but he remains perhaps the least known and appreciated. He was the first to leave the Ensemble in the ’90s, but his work since is scattered and often under other leaders and he has devoted much of his time since to teaching martial arts.

Song For
is relatively typical of the open-eared ethos of the AACM players, marked out by a striking use of space and silence, blending vernacular forms with avant-garde procedures. Intercut with neo-Dada recitations, some of the tracks lack formal shape and seem to proceed in an almost ritual way. The supporting performers, with the exception of the drummers, are not always up to scratch, though Clark produces some wonderfully sonorous bass on ‘Adam’s Rib’. The long tracks – ‘Non-Cognitive Aspects Of The City’, ‘Song For’ and a second and longer unissued take of Fred Anderson’s excellent ‘Little Fox Run’ with its skittering marimba patterns – pall slightly on repeated hearings.

Within three years, Jarman had become a permanent member of the Art Ensemble, but he continued to make occasional recordings under his own name, for Delmark again, India Navigation and Black Saint. While they all deserve reassessment, none quite comes up to the spontaneity and magic of the debut.

CHICK COREA
^&

Born Armando Anthony Corea, 12 June 1941, Chelsea, Massachusetts

Piano, keyboards

Tones For Joan’s Bones

Atlantic 75352

Corea; Stuart Blumberg, Woody Shaw (t); Joe Farrell (ts, f); Steve Swallow (b); Joe Chambers (d). November–December 1966.

Chick Corea said (1992):
‘You know, it wasn’t like the business today. I didn’t feel any pressure to make a record of my own and it happened when it happened. It was more important to keep working. Now it’s about building up a
discography
. I’m glad I didn’t have that pressure.’

Corea is a pianist and composer of remarkable range and energy, combining a free-ish jazz idiom with a heavy Latin component and an interest in more formal structures. Massachusetts-born, he has a Latin background, which has tinged a body of music that has embraced fusion, Bartók-influenced composition and free jazz. He is a consummately expressive player with a complex intellectual stance; he is committed to Scientology, and some of his later work draws on that belief system’s curious (to outsiders) mythology, but it is a mark of
Corea’s brilliance as a composer that even work written to an utterly hermetic narrative programme is always joyously accessible to sceptical outsiders.

Corea’s stated ambition was to assimilate the ‘dancing’ qualities of jazz and folk musics to the more disciplined structures of classical music. He has written a half-dozen classic melodies, notably the much-covered ‘La Fiesta’, ‘Return To Forever’ and ‘Tones For Joan’s Bones’. Given that he had already been playing for 20 years, there is no reason to regard
Tones
as the work of a prodigy. Under no particular pressure to record as a leader, he approached the first session, produced by Herbie Mann, with a very relaxed attitude. That is evident in every track. The title-piece is a jazz classic and the opening ‘Litha’ deserves to be better known. Corea’s classical interests are evident in the brief ‘Trio For Flute, Bassoon And Piano’, which is very different from the extended hard-bop idiom of the rest of the set. Chick already sounds very much his own man and in possession of every resource that he was to exploit in future years. The writing is crisp and assured, with a gutsy swing. Tunes like ‘Sundance’, ‘Converge’ and ‘The Brain’ are embryonic Corea, but far from undeveloped. The band is brilliantly coloured, deep blues and shouting reds, and the remainder of the rhythm section as effective as any on the scene.

Arguably, the later trios with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes (
Now He Sings, Now He Sobs
) and with Circle colleagues Dave Holland and Barry Altschul (
The Song Of Singing
and
A.R.C.
) are maturer and more satisfying performances, and certainly the
Is
sessions for Blue Note in 1969 were more ambitious, but this is the early Corea record we return to most frequently: a young master, already fully formed.

& See also
Light As A Feather
(1972; p. 399),
Rendezvous In New York
(2001; p. 667)

SONNY SIMMONS
^&

Born 4 August 1933, Sicily Island, Louisiana

Alto saxophone, English horn

Music From The Spheres

Abraxa/ESP 103

Simmons; Barbara Donald (t); Bert Wilson (ts); Michael Cohn (p); Joony Booth (b); James Zitro (d). December 1966.

Clarinettist Michael Marcus later formed The Cosmosamatics with Simmons:
‘I remember during one of my first gigs with Sonny in San Francisco in the ’80s, while the band was in the high state of improvisation, Sonny stopped the band suddenly, turned and whispered to everyone: “Have a fit!” ’

Simmons remains one of the most underrated figures in the music, perhaps because of his devotion to his first instrument, the cor anglais, which makes him seem something of a novelty turn. In fact, he produced, almost uniquely, a very convincing form of free jazz on the double-reeded horn, even while he was pursuing a line similar to, but harmonically and timbrally different from, Dolphy’s on the alto saxophone. If there were just one figure of the modern era we would hope to ease into the spotlight, it is the man from Louisiana. He went to California as a youngster, learned saxophone, and was soon playing in Prince Lasha’s group.

Like everyone else who knocked on Bernard Stollman’s door, Simmons was given an ESP recording date. Like most of them, it isn’t in pristine sound, but in Simmons’s case it was the beginning of an important association that saw him record a good deal of material for the label, and later some illuminating interviews that are included in a fine
Complete ESP-Disk Recordings
package, which is essential listening for anyone who wants to understand the modern movement. The debut record
Staying On The Watch
announced the arrival
of a fine composer, working in a free-modal idiom that sometimes sounds like a liberated version of what McCoy Tyner was doing at the same time, but with an added layer of spectral ideas.

Some admirers favour
Firebirds
, made for Contemporary a year later, but
Music From The Spheres
is the best primer to Simmons the composer/improviser. Just four tracks: ‘Resolutions’ builds on a nicely counterpointed line for alto (no cor on this one) and Barbara Donald’s sinewy trumpet. ‘Zarak’s Symphony’ develops a structure out of tiny, dissonant fragments, a process that makes the ‘let’s have a fit’ blow-out that follows a much less chaotic beast than might appear. ‘Balladia’ might almost be something of Prince Lasha’s, or more remotely, Ornette Coleman’s. Again, it’s a finely wrought line for the horns, but with a significant intervention by Cohen, who seems to rewrite the whole thing and pass it back to the boss, like a presidential speechwriter. ‘Dolphy’s Days’ adds Wilson’s tenor and another layer of complexity, and it’s only here that the sound lets the music down.

& See also
Transcendence
(1996; p. 602)

MARION BROWN

Born 8 September 1935, Atlanta, Georgia

Alto saxophone

Three For Shepp

Impulse! AS 9139

Brown; Grachan Moncur III (tb); Dave Burrell, Stanley Cowell (p); Norris Jones (Sirone) (b); Bobby Capp, Beaver Harris (d). December 1966.

Marion Brown says (1986):
‘Recording was different in those days. You basically just went and hung out with people, got to know them, got them interested in you, and then it happened. That’s how it worked with ESP and Impulse!’

Few contemporary musicians have delved more deeply into the sources of jazz music than Marion Brown. During the ’70s, he researched African instruments and black marching bands at Wesleyan University, and he has always been an important mentor and educator in the music, specializing in teaching children how to construct and play their own instruments. Inevitably, this has meant that his own voice – and a very distinctive one it is: deceptively frail and unusually pitched – has not been heard as often as his stature suggests. Ill-health over the last two decades has limited his activities greatly. But consider that Brown’s first recording date on coming to New York from Atlanta in 1965 was Coltrane’s titanic
Ascension
, and that he has recorded since with Bill Dixon, Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Chick Corea, Gunter Hampel (a long-time association) and Mal Waldron, and his importance becomes more evident.