The Penguin Jazz Guide (97 page)

Jefferson; Dave Burns (t); James Moody (ts, f); Barry Harris (p); Steve Davis (b); Bill English (d). September 1968.

Eddie Jefferson said (1977):
‘It was King Pleasure who recorded “Moody’s Mood For Love” first, so people thought he wrote it, but Pleasure – my man – he told folks it was me. Otherwise, I don’t imagine we’d be talking about this right now!’

Originally a dancer, Jefferson is little known among younger jazz fans, and various attempts to revive interest in ‘The Godfather Of Vocalese’ in recent years have fallen flat. There is a widespread belief that King Pleasure wrote the lyrics to ‘Moody’s Mood For Love’, a vocalized transcription of James Moody’s alto saxophone solo on ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’; Pleasure certainly made it a monster hit, but the song was Jefferson’s, as was the lyric for Hawkins’s ‘Body And Soul’.

The singer’s longest-standing partnership with saxophonist Moody was rekindled in the ’60s when Jefferson, who had been eclipsed by smoother talents like Jon Hendricks, staged something of a comeback. He made a few good records during the decade.
Letter From Home
in 1961 has a heavyweight line-up, with Clark Terry, Johnny Griffin, Junior Mance and others, all chipping in. Joe Zawinul is the pianist and his ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ is one of the highlights of
Body And Soul
, alongside a lively version of Miles’s ‘So What’. There’s still a certain resistance to vocalese – even fans who have overcome a suspicion of scat singing draw a line – but Jefferson’s musicianship is palpable on every track and his buoyant
delivery pushes through some slightly questionable lyrics. His end was dramatic and shocking, shot to death outside a nightclub in his home town.

GARY BURTON
^&

Born 23 January 1943, Anderson, Indiana

Vibraphone

Country Roads And Other Places

Koch Jazz 7854

Burton; Jerry Hahn (g); Steve Swallow (b); Roy Haynes (d). September 1968.

Gary Burton said (1983):
‘You know, back in those days, if you put something as simple as a major triad in a composition, that was taken as a sign you were playing rock or country, but certainly not jazz, which was more “difficult”. I was kind of intrigued by that, and by the possibility of making sophisticated jazz out of those very simple materials.’

Burton’s early recordings were driven by an ambition to synthesize jazz, rock and country music. At the same time, he was pioneering a four-mallet technique in vibes-playing which allowed him to play detailed lead-lines on top of rich but essentially simple harmonies, a major step on from Milt Jackson’s two-mallet approach and blues-derived improvisations. Though not a prolific composer, Burton has specialized in definitive realization of other composers’ work.

After a few relatively orthodox RCA dates, the work becomes more individual. From 1966,
Tennessee Firebird
is almost a country set. Perhaps too Nashville for some tastes, but think what Bill Frisell was doing to great critical acclaim three decades later, and most jazz purists will swallow their disdain for a record featuring Chet Atkins and Charlie McCoy.
Duster
, a year later, was one of the first jazz-rock records, and though it seems tame compared to later examples of the genre, it had impact, even if only as permission to mix rock beats and distorted guitar into a jazz performance. He recorded Carla Bley’s ‘dark opera without words’,
A Genuine Tong Funeral
, intended for full staging with costumes and lights but known only as a recorded piece, and one which yielded the often covered ‘Mother Of The Dead Man’. The CD reissue is augmented by
Lofty Fake Anagram
, which was long out of circulation, and while it lacks the energy and grace of
Country Roads
, it’s a tremendous showcase for Coryell.

Country Roads
is still a joy after more than 30 years. The playing is as fresh and unfettered as ever, and themes like ‘Family Joy’, ‘And On The Third Day’ and ‘Country Roads’ are delightfully nostalgic. The album marked the debut of Jerry Hahn – more evidence of Burton’s acuity at spotting guitar-players – who keeps his occasional excesses well under control and plays smooth lines with a lot of rhythmic pace. Burton is in excellent form, dancing on the bars, and then suddenly changing pace to accommodate the gracious sweep of ‘My Foolish Heart’ and ‘Wichita Breakdown’. There is even a small Ravel arrangement, but the main ‘other place’ – most citations of the album title omit its second half – is unquestionably jazz.

& See also
Hotel Hello
(1974; p. 411),
For Hamp, Red, Bags And Cal
(2000; p. 654)

ANTHONY BRAXTON
^&

Born 4 June 1945, Chicago, Illinois

Saxophones, clarinets, flutes, piano

For Alto

Delmark 420

Braxton (as solo). October 1968.

Anthony Braxton said (1993):
‘The alto saxophone is my piano. At a solo concert I could play one piece on flute, one on a bass saxophone, or a clarinet, but there is a challenge to playing language type music on one instrument, and that happens to be the one I am most familiar with, right from the beginning.’

Few modern musicians have been so extensively documented or been so controversial. Braxton joined the AACM in Chicago and emerged as a free-jazz experimenter who claims influences as far afield as the cool, white saxophone sound of Paul Desmond and Warne Marsh, the doo-wop/old town music of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and the cosmic vision of Sun Ra. The Braxton discography is vast and still growing apace, perhaps the most complete documentation of any improvising artist ever. It ranges in scope from solo saxophone performances to more or less orthodox jazz combos to huge orchestral and operatic projects, the latter based on Braxton’s evolving cosmology/mythography, which is admixed equally of African sources and science fiction. He is, depending on perspective, an intensely puzzling figure whose theories border on obscurantism or a sublimely direct communicator who has taken the trouble to articulate his practices in a way few ‘jazz’ musicians have done. His music divides to some extent into procedural periods, but essentially he deals with the same material(s) as most improvising musicians, small, cellular structures which, though numbered as individual compositions, are readily carried over from one performance to the next, creating dense palimpsests of sound.

It all comes down in the end, though, to a man standing alone playing an alto saxophone, though 40 years ago that itself seemed a radical undertaking, if it wasn’t dismissed as a kind of high-end busking. Braxton had made an earlier showing on Delmark in 1968 (recorded then, at least), the year of presumptive revolutions, with
Three Compositions Of New Jazz
but it was
For Alto
that declared an epoch in modern jazz. Here Braxton virtually deconstructs his instrument. The piece dedicated to John Cage moves into areas where the saxophone is no longer played idiomatically or even identifiably but creates its own sound-world, very much in accordance with Cagean philosophy. Instrumentality of a conventional sort has been dispensed with. Bent notes, smears, trills and tongue-slaps are by no means new in jazz; indeed they have always been part of the jazz musician’s dialect. What Braxton does here is to make them the basis of a new language, but one that is somehow still in contact with Charlie Parker, Paul Desmond, Johnny Hodges, familiar and reliable aspects of jazz language.

There are moments when he appears to invoke and to subvert the structure of the blues, and it is possible to hear the whole of
For Alto
as a radical gloss on that form. But it’s no mere musicological exercise; nor is it polemic. Braxton creates a highly personal drama and one that was to provide the template for much of what he was to do subsequently.
For Alto
is one of the genuinely important American recordings, still powerfully listenable and endlessly fascinating.

& See also
New York, Fall 1974
(1974; p. 416),
Creative Orchestra Music
(1976; p. 431),
Quartet (London / … Birmingham / … Coventry) 1985
(1985; p. 495),
Nine Compositions (Iridium) 2006
(2006; p. 714)

ALAN SILVA

Born 22 January 1939, Bermuda

Double bass, cello, other instruments

Skillfullness

ESP 1091

Silva; Becky Friend (f, v); Mike Ephron (p, org); Dave Burrell (p); Karl Berger (vib); Barry Altschul (d); Lawrence Cooke (perc). 1968.

Alan Silva said (2007):
‘I thought about ways to conduct free improvisation. I’d watched what Sun Ra did, but my model was John Coltrane’s
Ascension
… the things that Coltrane
didn’t
do there. The first ten minutes of that changed everything, but if he’d gone straight on with the collective improvisation, there might have been nothing left for me to do!’

A remarkable, complete musician, Silva took up double bass only after studying trumpet with Donald Byrd for several years, as well as violin and piano. In later years, he gave up bass playing for synthesizer, but at bottom Silva was always a composer/leader, whether working in unstructured idioms with the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble or with his own Celestrial [sic] Communication Orchestra. Some of this was, of course, inspired by Sun Ra, but that diminishes the originality of Silva’s music.

It is a chaotic discography and often available only in limited editions or obscure reissues, but this early record, made just before Silva left the US for Europe and released in 1970, sums up his musical vision. The opening ‘Skillfullness’ has Silva playing piano, violin and cello and vocalizing rapturously. Karl Berger’s vibraphone-playing is revelatory, quite outside anything else being done at the time on that instrument or any other, and Becky Friend’s flute helps give the piece an otherworldly and almost weightless air. For all the hippy fantasies of rock and the space operas emerging on the fringes of jazz, nothing of the time quite captures its spirit – ethereal but grounded in sophisticated intelligence and high technical skill – quite as well.

The second piece, ‘Solestrial Communications Number One’, marks Silva’s first documented attempt to ‘conduct’ an improvisation, a forerunner of the ‘conductions’ of Butch Morris and others, but again very much influenced by Sun Ra’s gestural direction and reminiscent of Miles Davis’s evolving Zen master approach to leadership, where changes in stance or expression might suggest a change of direction in the music. This is very much a
Zeitgeist
record, but much more interesting than a mere historical document. The quality of concentration and playing from the group – Silva does not perform on this track – is staggering. Burrell’s instinctive polytonality and polystylistics are just right for Silva’s music and Altschul’s drumming compresses huge amounts of vernacular culture, from fife and drum bands to marches to Elvin Jones. It’s a brief record, just those two tracks, but an essential one.

CARLA BLEY
^&

Born Carla Borg, 11 May 1938, Oakland, California

Piano, keyboards

Escalator Over The Hill

JCOA/ECM 839 310 2 2CD

Bley; Michael Mantler (t, vtb, p); Enrico Rava, Michael Snow (t); Don Cherry (t, f, perc, v); Sam Burtis, Jimmy Knepper, Roswell Rudd (tb); Jack Jeffers (btb); Bob Carlisle, Sharon Freeman (frhn); John Buckingham, Howard Johnson (tba); Peggy Imig, Perry Robinson (cl); Souren Baronian (cl, dumbec); Jimmy Lyons, Dewey Redman (as); Gato Barbieri (ts); Chris Woods (bs); Sam Brown, John McLaughlin (g); Karl Berger (vib); Don Preston (syn, v); Jack Bruce (b, v solo); Charlie Haden, Ron McClure, Richard Youngstein (b); Leroy Jenkins (vn); Nancy Newton (vla); Calo Scott (clo); Bill Morimando (bells); Paul Motian (d); Roger Dawson (perc); Jane Blackstone, Paul Jones, Sheila Jordan, Jeanne Lee, Timothy Marquand, Tod Papageorge, Linda Ronstadt, Bob Stewart, Viva (v solo); Jonathan Cott, Steve Gebhardt, Tyrus Gerlach, Eileen Hale, Rosalind Hupp (v). November 1968–June 1971.

Carla Bley says:
‘I used every musician I knew for the cast. I even used some people I didn’t know; all they had to do was ask to be in it and I said: “Of course you can.” At one point I needed some extra chorus voices quickly so I went out on the street in front of the studio and enlisted passers-by.’

Carla Bley was, unusually, recognized first as a composer – Gary Burton performed her
Genuine Tong Funeral
to great acclaim and became with second husband Michael Mantler co-leader of the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association. The JCOA label transformed into Watt, which has put out all her recordings since, including duos with long-term partner Steve Swallow, small groups, big and very big bands. Somewhat like first husband Paul Bley, she is deeply versed in all aspects of jazz language and uses that knowledge to subvert expectations. Her compositions are typically dense, harmonically subtle or ambiguous and almost always written with key improvisers in mind.

In our cynical youth we suggested that
Escalator Over The Hill
was a terrific record to have heard but not so good for actually listening to. And yet it has remained with us for nearly 40 years, admired – and listened to – like few other new works of its period. Its faults are manifest: an impenetrable libretto by poet Paul Haines, outsize and ungainly, and yet packed with tremendous music and an aura all its own. Whatever a ‘chronotransduction’ is, it is more closely related to the non-linear, associative cinema of avant-garde film-makers Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas (at whose Cinémathèque some sessions were recorded) than to any musical parallel. The repetitious dialogue is influenced by Gertrude Stein and it’s perhaps best to take Stein’s Alice-in-Wonderland advice and treat everything as meaning precisely what one chooses it to mean. Musically, it’s a patchwork of raucous big-band themes like the opening ‘Hotel Overture’, which has fine solos from Barbieri, Robinson, Haden and Rudd, heavy rock numbers like the apocalyptic ‘Rawalpindi Blues’ (McLaughlin, Bruce, Motian), ethnic themes from Don Cherry’s Desert Band, and mysterious, ring-modulated ‘dream sequences’. There is an element of recitative that, as with most opera recordings, most listeners will prefer to skip, since it doesn’t advance understanding of the ‘plot’, and it’s probably best to treat
Escalator
as a compilation of individual pieces with dispensable continuity. It was almost certainly
A Genuine Tong Funeral
rather than
Escalator
that established Bley’s mature musical idiom, but as the years have rolled by this strange work has secured a unique place in the musical landscape, and one we visit surprisingly often.