On a rainy night I finally encountered some of
my heroes from my youth, drummer Andrew Cyrille and bassist William Parker,
accompained by trumpet player Enrico Rava in an interesting concert in a full
occupied theatre in my city of birth. Not their first effort together, since
the three released a record in 2022 titled Too Blues for Cecil (Tum Records),
an hommage to pianist Cecil Taylor with whom under different circumstances the
three played together and played together in different occasions.
Andrew Cyrille, in effect, was one of the first
drummers to appear near the NY born pianist in two beautiful records by Blue
Note label who sanctioned the maturity for Taylor: Unit Structures and
Conquistador (both released in 1966). William Parker was part of the Cecil
Taylor Feel Trio along with drummer Tony Oxley – I had the opportunity to
listen to that trio: everyone was playing his own thing almost separately from
the other twos, but it all worked so fine together.
As far as Rava, finally, in 2022 was
distributed through
bandcamp a recording from 1984 originally recorded in Warsaw by an ensemble
comprising the Italian trumpet player and Taylor – and William Parker –
commanding one of his large ensembles he was famous for. But this is not the
only occasion the two played together: it’s only a good advice for you in order
to find out incredibly interesting music from the past.
A magnificent concert the one I attended
yesterday night, with a couple of Monk themes – Round About Midnight and
Straight No Chaser – put one in the middle, the other almost at the end of the
exhibition, echoing not only the pianist from Rocky Mount but also the phantom
of Miles Davis who recorded those themes, and the rest as pure improvisation.
Rava in a Miles mode with short sentences to which drummer and bassist
responded with their instrument.
Not a telepathic interplay as the one offered
by Mingus – the only bassist I can compare Parker, not by the techniques they
use but as far as feeling even if their personalities are far from each other –
bands, particularly drummer Dannie Richmond, but an intriguing way to underline
every phrase from one musician to another. At a certain point Rava made a
gesture with his hand indicating a circle to Cyrille, if this recalls something
in your mind.
Cyrille is able to create complex
polyrhithms, but in this occasion he also gave a lession in swinging to younger
drummers. Parker didn’t use that much his famous bow on his bass, only in few
point to underline the music in some passages. One might wonder where the
spiritual charisma from groups as In Order To Survive is finished – but the theme
from Criminals at the White House was beckoned yesterday night at a certain
point – but I believe it has been transformed into a new kindness.
Dense up to a certain point, but gentle as
Cyrille’s brushes on the skin of the drums, varied as you can exspect from
seasoned musicians, full of nuances and not only of thick textures, the music
did not pay hommage to the letter to the music of Cecil Taylor but was
nonetheless a sum of the experiences of the three musicians involved, and so an
indirect hommage to the late great pianist.
If I have to find a defect to what I heard,
this resides not in the music but in times. William Parker would subscribe the
phrase by Coltrane “I want to be a force for the good”, but with wars all
around the world these three musicians who were ‘only’ playing music were
seeming to me so small in comparison to what they have around in terms of
conflicts and climate change, as an example. But I believe if I had in mind
more than the music itself, this has to be credited to them, since music
yesterday night was still, as it has to be, more than just a sum of sounds.
It is almost a commonplace the fact that
“fusion”, born in the middle of the 1960s, burned itself after a fist and
beginning incredible, creative season leaving the most adventurous listeners
dry and thirsty becoming a catchy and more pop-rock oriented (i.e.: simplified)
style of music.
In fact, after the fist creative outputs
by the like of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock as On The Corner and Sextant,
after incredibly skilled musicians such as Jaco Pastorius, after creating a
music that mixed the principles of improvisation with instruments coming from
all over the world like Trilok Gurtu’s tablas and tampouras, “fusion” became a
label for sometimes easy to create and to play music, sometimes cerebral and
unproductive experimentations.
The same thing happened with post-rock at the
end of 1990s, with band such as Tortoise giving originally life to a music that
was funk but also hardcore punk – at least in spirit – but that degraded in few
years into a mere juxtaposition of different elements in order to find out the
most rare approach to various notes, instruments and styles of music.
A complete different path, reminiscent of the
famous Loft
Era we talked about in the past, is that of a leader of those faraway days,
violinist Jason Kao Hwang. While for more info on him we recommend another
review of one of his last year works, one of the most important issued in
these times, this new album titled Book Of Stories (True Sound Recordings,
2023) is played by the Critical Response Trio.
The trio features Hwang at electric violin, Anders Nilsson at electric guitar and Michael
T.A. Thompson at drums. The music is flavored with funk and reggae hints
and spices here and there, but the compositions, all by Hwang, are anyway adventurous
enough to be interesting for all fans of improvised music, even non idiomatic,
because the most recognizable parts are in a way ‘abstracted’ and conducted
into climaxes or moments of rest that are fully dynamics and that can bring the
listener a lot of fun, being a mix of the ‘mental’ approach of spontaneous
improvised music and the more enjoyable characteristics of popular music
without being ‘populistic’.
This way, compared with the previous Hwang
release in duo with J.A. Deane, the album offers the listener another face of
the instrumentalist and composer way of understanding and exercise creativity,
likewise interesting and daring. Powered by the experience of the musicians
involved (Anders Nilssen played guitar with William Parker, Paquito D’Rivera,
Elliott Sharp and Ken Filiano among the many others, while Michael T.A.
Thompson was a solid drummer for musicians such as Charles Gayle, Joe McPhee,
Matthew Shipp, Henry Grimes and John Patitucci), the record is solid enough to
make you want to listen to it more than once.
The album opens with The Power of Many in the
Soul of One. Violin phrases, and subsequent silences, are interspersed with
rhythmic outbursts while the guitar arpeggios embellish Hwang phrases. A sense
of urgency and, together with it, a meditative quality, are mixing together in
what seem to be an attempt to create a dramatic peak that abruptly diminishes
into a more introspective, even if electrical, interaction.
A pedal change atmosphere leaving then space to
a beautiful drum solo, after which electric guitar explodes in different
rhythmic approaces on an atonal basis. After the guitar express itself in full,
it’s time for the effected violin to recall all the musicians involved into a
more meditative mood, played almost until the end of the track. Many nuances
and the overall approach makes you think about the Loft Era music, but played
through a more contemporary vision.
Music continues with Upside Circle Down, and
more than of the Lofts it it reminiscent of the first AACM experiments – I’m
thinking in particular to the first releases in the 1970s by Anthony Braxton
with Dave Holland on cello or Kenny Wheeler on fluegelhorn. Brief assertions
are interspersed with silence, inviting people to listen to the music and
themselves more carefully, but the drums’ almost funky groove creates a first
difference, almost a new idea of “fusion”, and a recontextualization of
experimental music from the end of the 1960s.
Guitar arpeggios create a magical atmosphere,
as you can listen through works such different but with a similar emotional
approach as In A Silent Way by Miles Davis and Andrew Cyrille’s Lebroba –
notably with two pairly sensitive guitarists as Nilssen like John McLaughlin
and Bill Frisell. A Silent Ghost Follows is a slightly shorter composition
introduced by the colors of mallets and a contemporary claim by the violin,
making us remember Anthony Braxton again or the AEoC.
This time the use of different pitches – the
violin looks for very high notes, the guitar opens up to middle tones –
captures the listener, again carried in a past era still harbinger of stimuli
for the future – the violin creates almost modern electronic textures into the
solid structure we depicted. Dragon Carved into Bone takes the same matter on
another temperature, with violin soloing on higher pitches and drums depicting
a more bustling sonorous landscape, while the guitar gently deconstructs a
melody into parts and pieces so to rebuild them together in another,
interesting shape.
More quiet parts are alternating with denser
structures, while drums nod to some reggae/dub or blues rhythms. Last piece,
Friends Forever, is an hommage to the musicians that in the past gave shape to
the music here present, through ages and through all the difficulties that
didn’t prevented anyway many of them from creating beauty. The piece is the
most melodical of the lotto, even if doesn’t lack the blues scrape but also the
sweetness typical of the genre.
Living on the other side of the ocean, I’m not
completely aware of what Hwang and friends future steps will be. For the
moment, enjoying this music is an unexpected gift that deserves to be shared
with fans of improvisation. The album has been released on June 30 this year
and is available also through the artist Bandcamp
page.
I have to admit it, this album comes in
the right moment in my shelves. A few time ago I bought for my collection a
double CD titled “Electronic Music – It Started Here ...” published by the
label Not Now, devoted to the reissue of old material in every field of
contemporary music, from the 1920s blues to jazz to contemporary music, and
this double CD was very interesting for me because it comprised two different
ideas of dealing with electronic sound.
On one hand you had people devoted to
abstractness, or with experimenting with new structurres if you want, as
Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Schaeffer, on the other hand you had composers
like Ray Cathode who used electronic sounds to surround piano melodies and Dick
Jackobs who loved to reproduce the melody of the famous italian song Volare.
This almost schizoid abyss and difference
between this two kind of idea of contemporary music helped me in understanding
how insidious is for a musician to write or execute electronic music. This
style of music can be the most volatile, the most abstract, and while a
composer as John Cage argued that musicians could help human beings in having a
new familiarity with everyday noise of a city life, it is true that electronic
and experimental music need some anchor points in order to not fear the
abstractness, or newness, they carry with themselves.
That’s why I truly believe Qi Gong, an
interesting way people from the Far East tried to discipline the body of men,
was a real inspiration form for J. A. “Dino” Deane, one of those figures you
feel a profound interest for when you meet their work. J. A. Deane was devoted
to electronic music and sound manipulation until his recent death in 2021, long
before this album was completed by his collaborator Jason Kao Hwang. But let’s
start from the beginning.
Jason Kao Hwang is an important figure in the
field of improvised music. His art speaks loud outside of the barriers we put
on art forms because we feel we can understand them better that way. In an old
review for a reissue on double CD of old and complete recordings by one of his
first bands, The Committments, featuring a young William Parker, I
wrote in my language that that music was “indespensible, vital music, an
expression of the human at its best like few others”.
Mr Hwang, a first generation descendant of
chinese immigrants, has been raised near Chicago and partecipated very actively
at the first season of the New York loft scene held by Sam Rivers. His music
was a bridge between the AACM school and the New York sound, fusing them
together in his playing both violin and viola. In a way, he continued
experimenting in the tradition of other great players of string insturments
like the late Leroy Jenkins.
Very active in the field of improvised music
since the 1980s, with this last output Uncharted Faith he poses his idea and
practice of music at high peaks of creativeness thanks also to his
collaboration with J. A. Deane. After Deane lost her wife Colleen Mulvihill in
2019, he left Denver in order to live in rural Cortez, Colorado. There he
finished a book titled “Becoming Music, Conduction and Improvisation as forms
of Qi Gong”.
Deane sent one copy of his book to Hwang in
2020. Hwang answered sending Deane copies of his music, and the two decided to
collaborate despite the pandemics. Hwang in this album plays a Tucker Barrett
solid-body violin, while Deane, who died before the album was ended,
contributes electronics such as Sensei Morph touch controller, Spacecraft
granular synthesizer software and Akai MPC Live Digital Audio Workstation.
Just to go back at the beginning of this
review, the album is in the tradition of great experimention with sound, but in
a way it is also concrete. In fact Hwang violin is filtered or played, I cannot
tell precisely but this is the impression, through a wah wah pedal like that of
Hendrix or Miles Davis during the 1970s, plus echo effects (but it can be also
Deane post-production). I cited Miles Davis not by chance because the first
thing I thought listening to Parallel Universe, the CD first track, was that of
listening to an abstract rendition of On The Corner.
Miles Davis during the 1970 was not only
exploring with timbres and colors from rock amplification, he also tried to
change the structure of music, asking for help to his collaborator Paul
Buckmaster who suggested him to use modular, i.e. repetitive, structures taken
from Karlheinz Stockhausen and Indian music. Davis did it his own way, taking
bass figures from funk after listening to Sly Stone music in particular but
taking it all to a more abstract level.
Not dissimilarly here, we have on the first
track of the album a distorted violin surrounded by small electronic sounds the
same way Davis played his muted and distorted trumpet surrounded by bass, three
drums and electric guitars. Hwang is not playing a direct melody and is not
mimicking Jenkins’ trills and vibratos, but he’s finding his own way to
communicate in a more abstract, but also very concrete, world of electronic
sounds: he tries to win the battle against abstractness, and possibly he and
Deane has won this battle.
On Singularity, the collateral electronic
sounds are not following or preceeding the violin, but kind of dancing around
it. There are moments in which you hear the violin alone, as a moment in which
you recollect your ideas, then you are pushed again in the flux of music where
some small sounds are used as percussions in order to give a more vivid
rendition to the violin’s ‘quasi-melodies’.
Crossing the Horizon is one of those pieces of
music in which you cannot tell what is the analogic source for music and what
is the electronic one, and this is his charm: the music has a great variety not
only as far as sound used, but also as far as volumes and colors. Sometimes
this piece of music reminds me of Laurie Anderson when she was playing a violin
without strings and with a tape recorded at their place, but no voice emerges
from Hwang, only abstract shapes.
In Shamans of Light you can almost feel a
strange organ depicting a liturgic armosphere, while the violin, here a little
bit more material than in the other tracks, at a certain point explodes and
leaves you with the sensation of a transfiguration. Speaking in Tongues is a
title that makes me think of texts I was reading about Albert Ayler many years
ago, that idea of many horns playing different things together at once, but what
we have here are different layers of sound, from a small melodic background to
the violin, effected as in the first track.
Finally, the long, almost 20 minutes of
Uncharted Faith start with small electronic and violin sounds developing into
almost musique concrète and what in pop music is called a wall of sound, with
the violin expressing a mysterious chant and the electronics answering with
what can seem a ‘fire of sound’, with small percussions in the AACM tradition
and after them a strange organ or piano, pushing the music on more concrete
territories without losing that aerial and abstract quality.
A record that grows undoubtely one listening
after the other, Uncharted Faith is a great attempt to push the boundaries of
improvised and electronic music forward, in territories that in other hands
could result more tricky, but that in Deane and Hwang practice are for sure
thrilling and demanding. If you decide to committ, they will leave you
satisfied and wanting for more.
Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane at the Village Gate 1961
"Whatever I'd say
would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by
knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever
known, as a man, a friend, and a musician." (John Coltrane)
48 years after his death, Eric
Dolphy’s discography is available almost in its entirety, and if his first
wide appearance on a book is possibly an interview reported on
1971 in Black
Nationalism and the Revolution in Music by American Marxist historian
Frank Kofsky, in 2008 Guillome Belhomme issued his Eric Dolphy (Le Mot et Le Reste, ser. Formes).
Four years
before Sardinian Festival ‘Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz’ issued, in
partnership with the cultural association Punta Giara, Tender
Warrior: L’eredità di Eric Dolphy, accompanied by a CD containing a
previously unissued Strenght and Unity
along with other tracks featuring Tim Berne, Tiziano Tononi’s Nexus, MatthewShipp and David S. Ware. Again, in 2006 Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz
Orchestra, featuring trumpeter Axel Doerner, sinewaver Sachiko M., baritonist
Mats Gustaffson, multireedist Alfred Harth and circuit bender Toshimaru
Nakamura ferried Dolphy’s last creative effort on a new perspective.
On the
other hand, as the record butifully testify, it seems that Los Angeles
multi-reedist’s music is badly suitable for a mere re-enactment: if you start to
listen to a record as Out There (Prestige,
1961) you’ll find out how much his concept and practice of music is far out, as we’ll see.
"When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again." (Eric Dolphy)
Los Angeles, 1954. Saxophonist John Coltrane was
loosing his engagement with Johnny Hodges. Before the tenorist got rid of his
drugs habits later on in 1957, deeply involving himself in developing his new
music, he experienced the difficulties of handling a career between self
destructive pushes and more creative efforts, even way before being hired and
fired by Miles Davis more than once.
That was
the first occasion the saxophonist met Dolphy, who lented him enough money to leave and get
on the West Coast. On same year's September, Trane was playing again with the local Mop
Dudley and his Collates, at the cross of 13th and Poplar, Philadelphia, trying to
managing his musician’s career as a freelancer. In 1959 John’s cousin, Mary, moved to New York, being into a
relationship with trombonist Charles Greenlee. They lived in a house in
Brooklyn, on 245, Carlton Avenue, belonging to Slide Hampton.
In that
house lived for a while also trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, guitarist Wes
Montgomery, saxophonist Eric Dolphy and Richard ‘The Prophet’ Jennings, a
painter responsible for Dolphy’s first albums surrealistic covers. Dolphy’s influence
on the more famous fellow became evident with time. At a certain
point, Coltrane stopped playing soprano, and started playing flute (as on the
album Expressions, Impulse!, 1965) so
to enrich his palette of colours.
But
influences and relationships between Coltrane and Dolphy, despite their strong
friendship, reciprocal esteem and artistic partnership, were of a different
nature in comparison with the coherent flowing of one’s music into the other
that had place with Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus with the altoist. Nonetheless,
they were important and rich of fully enjoyable results. Trane and Dolphy first
session was on May 23, 1961, for the tenor first Impulse! album, Africa/Brass.
An attempt
to epithomize Trane’s efforts to date with his new quartet, with Jones polyrhythms,
the bass of Reggie Workman doubled by Paul Chambers and Art Davis on the Africa takes, and the orchestra (featuring
trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Booker Little, trombonist Julian Priester, Eric
Dolphy on alto, flute and bass clarinet, and Pat Patrick on baritone saxophone)
enriching the quartet sound with a brassy, warm touch, it was followed by
another pair of records that same year.
On the
original Africa/Brass sleeve notes,
the arrangements provided for Greensleeves
were attributed to Dolphy, but, as McCoy Tyner explained (R. Coleman, The Real McCoy, Melody Maker, Jul. 18,
1964), Coltrane asked the pianist to write them down, while Dolphy was ‘copying my voicings’. All the arrangements were
coming out of Tyner’s compings.
John
Coltrane himself confirmed this last version (Clouzet/Delorme, Entretien avec John Coltrane, 1963). In
fact, as Eric himself reported, “John
thought of this sound. He wanted brass, he wanted baritone horns, he wanted that
mellow sound and power”. But the only soloists on the sessions recorded by Creed Taylor at the Rudy
Van Gelder studios were the quartet members, with the brass section (including
Dolphy) limited to orchestral accompaniment on the background.
The second
take of Africa
is provided by some counterpoint going towards a more expressionistic attitude;
even the double basses are underlining some passages with strong bowed
interventions. The piece, focused entirely on a pedal point bass, more than on
the beat and the classical 4/4 propulsion, was given a different
plasticity, and is part of the constant evolution of Coltrane’s music.
Miles Davis and Gil Evans in Columbia Studios, 1959
This
evolution will lead Coltrane around 1964 and 1965 to a constant decreasing of the use of chord
progressions, while the use of bass pedal points was becoming the most part of the music structure. This direction is a consequence of Trane’s partnership with
Miles Davis since 1958 – producing notably records like Milestones (Columbia, 1959) and Kind of Blue (Columbia, 1959). Here, the trumpeter and the pianist/composer were
developing modality, in short a way to get out of the bebop harmonic complexity
and to enjoy a new, wider and freer melodic framing, using modes instead of
chord changes as a framework for the compositions.
While
further developments of music led free jazz to focus towards polyphony as far
as approaching the melody, Davis’ Kind of
Blue and Trane’s Impressions (Impulse!,
1961)are considered the first
accomplished results of the modal approach, and even if the concept was firstly developed by pianist
George Russell, with whom Davis had some discussions even before his 1949
sessions for the album Birth of the Cool,
it’s interesting that, if Miles Davis from 1968 onwards pushed forward the use of
rhythmic patterns and colors shifting of On
The Corner, working also extensively on pedal points as Coltrane from 1961
on, the music of Eric Dolphy moves from different territories.
This is
clearly audible trough a listening to Coltrane’s India,
recorded live at the Village Vanguard on November 3, 1961, and released on the
album Impressions. While
Garrison, Tyner and Workman are providing sparse punctuations centered around a
G major, echoing a tampoura-like drone, Trane solo on soprano is following a
modal-rooted horizontal development, in some way forcing Dolphy to let off his
intervallic practice on his bass clarinet.
Unluckily,
Dolphy interventions with Coltrane’s quartet as also on the Live at the Village Vanguard
rendition of Spiritual, opening track
for the album recorded on the NY club, taste more or less like sketches, if taken
on their own complex. Dolphy was gifted with a beautiful, rough and warm voice,
making out of him the perfect partner for the likes of Charles Mingus and
Ornette Coleman, but Trane’s music, even if their meetings are fully enjoyable
and organic, having nothing of a pure mashup, they are far from a full,
complete integration of their directions and further developments of composition and improvisation.
Elvin Jones and Eric Dolphy
“That's got to be Eric Dolphy - nobody else could sound that bad! The next time I see him I'm going to step on his foot. You print that. I think he's ridiculous. He's a sad motherfucker. […] It's a sad record, and it's the record company's fault again. I didn't like the trumpet player's tone, and he don't do nothing. The running is all right if you're going to play that way, like Freddie Hubbard or Lee Morgan; but you've got to inject something, and you've got to have the rhythm section along; you just can't keep on playing all eighth notes. The piano player's sad. You have to think when you play; you have to help each other - you just can't play for yourself. You've got to play with whomever you're playing. If I'm playing with Basie, I'm going to try to help what he's doing - that particular feeling.”
(Miles Davis on Eric Dolphy Mary Ann, from the album Far Cry - Blindfold test by Leonard Feather, on Downbeat, June 1964)
Miles Davis with Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums
It is
improper to say that Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy never met musically, or that
they were two complete different worlds. Ron Carter, Davis bassist on his second quintet, played
cello on Out There. On Dolphy’s
recognized masterpiece Out To Lunch!
(Blue Note, 1964), the drummer is Tony Williams – as on Andrew Hill Point of Departure, another recognized
milestone of Bue Note's mid-'60s modernistic approach to post-bop. And Herbie Hancock
is on piano on the previous year live album The
Illinois Concert (Blue Note, 1963).
Thelonious Monk at the Town Hall, NY, 1959
On a book
published in Italy on 2004 (“Tender
Warrior – L’eredità di Eric Dolphy”, 2004), Italian journalist Claudio Sessa made a brilliant
comparison between Dolphy and Thelonious Monk: “Monk is for bebop what Dolphy was to free jazz; both are
substantially foreigners to the ‘genres’ they are generally associated with,
even if they use some grammar elements and above all they love to work side by
side with their major representative figures, recognizing their instrumental
and expressive abilities, compatibles with their difficult aesthetics.”.
Miles Davis reenactment of ‘Round About Midnight’ on his first 1954 Columbia record testify a similar effort to push himself ahead of the common bebop aesthetics and chops, a common ground that is really helpful to understand, through a
comparison of the way Davis and Dolphy were using the same sidemen, their further
developments.
Take for
instance Eighty One, from Miles Davis
E.S.P. album (Columbia, 1965), that is also the starting
point for Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage
composition. At this moment in time, Davis’ music is developing involving rhythm shiftings, and if on Nefertiti, a
couple of years later, his trumpet and Wayne Shorter’s tenor saxophone are repeating the melody, while drums, piano and bass are drawing
continuously changing layers of different colors, anticipating the innovations
that will lead him to develop a music in which rhythm patterns and their
permutations will definitely replace harmony and melody as its primal coordinates the same way
composer Karlheinz Stockhausen did with his Telemusik
and Mixtur, on this 1965 piece Tony
Williams rhythmic shiftings between bogaloo and swing, over which Davis draw
his statements passing sinuously through them, are an anticipation of those further
developments.
Five years
before, on August 15, 1960, Eric Dolphy, Ron Carter on cello, bassist George
Duvivier and drummer Roy Haynes recorded at Van Gelder Studio Out There, second Dolphy’s album as a
leader. While the previous Outward Bound (Prestige,
1960) was still featuring the standard bebop line up (two horns, bass, drums
and piano), containing also some standards as On Green Dolphin Street and Glad
to be Unhappy, its follow up features four original compositions, mingusian
Eclipse, Out There composed by both multireedist and bassist, Randy Weston’s
Sketches of Melba and Hale Smith’s –
a composer Dolphy was particularly impressed with since when playing with Chico
Hamilton – Feathers, gifted by a
guitar-like cello accompanying the flute.
If with the
previous record Dolphy still showed to own a practice of harmonic intervals that is a
full octave wider than Charlie Parker’s, gaining because of his restructuralist attitude comparisons by music journalists with Ornette Coleman he would be bug with very soon, Out There sees Cuernavaca’s born bassist influence becoming heavy,
without the album balance being compromise. One month before, on July 13,
Dolphy was playing at the Antibes Jazz Festival in Juan-Les-Pins, France, with a quintet featuring Mingus, Ted Curson on trumpet, Booker Ervin on tenor, Dennie Richmond on drums and featuring Bud Powell on piano as special guest, anticipating with
his bass clarinet solo on What Love his
spectacularly fitting, abstract, harsh, abrasive and almost humorous approach
to the October 20 sessions issued by Candid on Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus.
Clifford Jordan, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Dannie Richmond, 1964
Sparse
tracks of this approach are available through second Dolphy’s effort as a
leader on The Baron, a composition
dedicated to the fellow, with Haynes and Duvivier pulsing around a vamp figure while Eric’s bass
clarinet and Carter’s arco are following each other. Eclipse, a composition Mingus recorded for the first time on a 1953
Debut album, was originally written for Billie Holiday as a response to Strange Fruit; refused by the
singer, the piece is melodically convoluted, and reminds of Schoenberg’s chromaticisms.
In his entirety, Out There is a
fearless and atypical exploration of tonality since the opening, daring
title-track thorugh the lyrical, gritty harshness of Feathers’ intro.
“There is so much to be gained by examining
Eric Dolphy specifically as a composer. […] Certainly, his efforts as an
improviser and instrumental performer are interwoven, and ultimately
inseparable, with his activities in composition. […] he worked with a
remarkably broad vocabulary, […] His compositions show arguably a greater
interest the potential of form and structure than that of non-structured
environments.”
(Graham Connah, Eric Dolphy, The Composer)
Born in Los Angeles, a city that
since the end of WWII hosted composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinskji,
in his youth Eric Dolphy shared a junior college bandstand with minimalist
composer La Monte Young.
In his compositions he was taking the classic blues and AABA forms together
with twelve-tone row and odd metered repeating vamps. G.W., from Outward Bound
(Prestige, 1960) opens with a major 7th interval, resulting from a
combination of an A-flat in the bass with a G played by alto sax and a F-sharp
played by trumpet.
A
polychord, or a standard major chord with an extra dissonant note, an
exploration of unorthodox harmonies putting him on the same level of George Russell and Don Ellis in a period in which Ornette Coleman was putting the
stress on the primacy of melody. Dolphy on his own, as Graham Connah underlined
in his writing, is something of an ‘expansionist’, using intervals paying
attention to their invertability and multifunctionality, and at the same time
an indicator of his interest in the sounds of nature, as clearly audible by the
way he plays the flute.
Influenced also
by Italian contemporary flutist Severino Gazzelloni, met during Darmstadt summer
courses and one of the favorite interpreters of composer Luciano
Berio – we’re on the ground of post-serialism, with Berio’s 1958 Sequenza for solo flute as one of its
accomplished, virtuosistic examples – Dolphy’s interest in free jazz,
orchestral development of modality – see Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth (Impulse!, 1961), and contemporary avant garde music shows a restless and
feverish research for the right instrument to express his music in the most proper way: “I want to say more on my
horn, than I ever could through ordinary speech”.
Founded in
NYC in 1960 as subsidiary of Cadence, and featuring writer and civil libertarian NatHenthoff as A&R manager and co-designer for the album covers with
photographer Frank Gauna, Candid Label was the pure expression of the jazz
avant-garde and of the civil right movements of the decade. Max Roach’s We Insist: Freedom Now! Suite, Cecil
Taylor and Steve Lacy important albums were documented as Abbey Lincoln, Booker
Little, Booker Ervin efforts, before Candid’s closing in 1961. Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (Candid, 1960) can be considered as
an important, accomplished step ahead in the development of bassist approach to small combos as Atlantic 1956 Pithecanthropus Erectus.
While the
latter was characterized by altoist Jackie Mc Lean as Mingus creative and
fulfilling alter ego, listening to the former is clearly evident that Eric
Dolphy changed over; if the
transfiguration of a classic Gershwin tune as A Foggy Day (In San Francisco) on the 1956 record features the two
horns mimicking the traffic of the Big Apple, on the independently recorded new
album the standard What is this Thing
called Love becomes What Love,
whose pairing melody by Ted Curson and Dolphy develops into a meditative,
Spanish-tiged lyrical trumpet solo, surrounded by bass and alto clarinet
counterpoint, before being driven into one of the Mingus' favorite treatments.
Tempo suddenly fastens and then freezes, or stops, leaving the soloists free in turn to insert diverting phrases, short, ironic quotes out of different songs, or affordances typical of
Mingus modus operandi in which some phrases are taken from one section into
another, and one of the most vivid dialogues between Dolphy and Mingus, both trying to
imitate the human voice.
Folk Forms, at his second recording after the three
months before performance featured on Live
at the Antibes (posthumously issued by Atlantic in 1979 and presenting a still progressing integration between the two musicians moods and characters), makes clear Mingus
idea of polyphony, that similarly to the New Orleans’ doesn’t have a primary
reference voice and is overflowing straight to the solos, always developed as a
dialogue or having another instrument on the background. Not by chance the twos were so much similar that with time their performances together will be more and more deeply marked by an almost telepathic feeling and aim sharing.
Two months
after this sessions, and Eric Dolphy is taking part, accompanied by Don Cherry
and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, bassists Scott La Faro and Charlie Haden, and
with Ed Backwell and Billy Higgins behind the drums, to the A&R Studio terms that will lead to Ornette Coleman’s
masterpiece Free Jazz, issued by
Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun brothers label on September 1961.
Originally
provided by a beautiful clapper cover containing a reproduction of Jackson
Pollock’s White Light, the 37 minutes
of collective improvisation on the record have more than a similarity with the painter’s
dripping techniques. Pollock used to let the colors flow directly from the
brushes on the canvas layed down to the floor, trying to give a balance to what
was under his direct control – his body, and the dripping itself, the gravity
and the way the canvas was soaking the color.
During the
sessions, Ornette Coleman divided the musicians in two quartets, taking Cherry,
LaFaro and Higgins by his side, while prividing before playing the musicians some reference points through which let the music flow.
As Gunther Schuller explains in his liner notes for the 1998 reissue of the
record, Free Jazz is composed by six
major sections flowing without interruption. Coleman, in order to lead each
section, devised three types of ideas: “1)
a brassy, atonal polyphonic flourish, heard at the very beginning of the
performance and again several times toward the end; 2) a sustained atonal,
multivoiced choralelike series of notes; 3) a unison ensemble line […] the
musicians were admonished to avoid any recognizable elements sneaking in – tune
fragments, quotations, tonal reminiscences, familiar riffs”.
Don Cherry with Ornette Coleman at the Five Spots, November 1959
While every
musician is at the same time leading and supporting the music – what Ornette
referred to as ‘harmonic unison’ – with the bassist walking on the middle (LaFaro)
and low (Haden) registries, listening to the first take of the recording it is
clearly audible that, after the collective entry, Eric Dolphy’s bass clarinet
is more coherent with his usual harmonic and timbric clichés, as we heard through
his previous works. Listening to the master take after that, it is almost
surprising how much his inflections and tonalities have become almost
‘harmolodic’. His journey through music shows how much his penetrability to his
partners music can easily and amazingly turn into suppleness without any lack
of personal expressivity.
It’s time
to get back some months. It is July 16, and Rudy Van Gelder is about to record
live, at the Five Spot – the same club that in 1957 hosted Thelonious Monk with
John Coltrane, and first NY meetings of Don Cherry with Ornette in 1959 – a quintet featuring Eric Dolphy with Booker Little on trumpet,
Mal Waldron on piano, Richard Davis on bass and Ed Blackwell on drums.
Dolphy had
left Mingus groups some months before, while his sharing the lights with Coltrane led both to be in charge with Down Beat columnist Leonard Feather of being ‘anti-jazz’. And if the two musicians will answer directly from the
columns of April 1962 issue of the magazine, this summer 1961’s was Dolphy’s
first regular enlistment since then. Shared through three different records by
Prestige (At the Five Spot Voll. 1 & 2, and Memorial Album), the music contained here is an attempt to
summarize Dolphy’s previous experiences nowadays.
Booker
Little, that sadly died on October that same year and is present with Dolphy
on his Candid’s Out Front (1961) release,
was recognized, also for the efforts of Nat Hentoff, as an innovator on his instrument, through a practice of dissonance as a device
to widen the boundaries of the sound itself, in that a huge influence on contemporary players like Roy Campbell. Mal Waldron, a long time associate
with Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus, and later on widely appreciated as the
perfect partner for Steve Lacy’s angular soprano saxophone, is playing here in
a way that, since the opening Fire Waltz,
a composition of his own, put him directly on the same lineage of Monk –
another proof of his mastery is the piano itself, mostly out of tune, Mal ran
into the club, but that through the decades has become one of the many delights of
this recordings.
Ed Blackwell with Charlie Haden
Richard
Davis (Ahmad Jamal, Don Shirley, Sarah Vaughan) will be present moreover on Dolphy’s masterpiece, Out To
Lunch! and Andrew Hill’s Point of
Departure (Blue Note, 1964). If his presence outside of the jazz world is
guarantee through providing ‘the greatest bass ever hear on a rock album’
(Greil Marcus) to Van Morrison’s Astral
Weeks, his activity will lead him to be teacher of William Parker, a solid
reality of today’s avant garde jazz world. Through tracks like The Prophet, a composition from Dolphy’s
first record as a leader – interesting the comparison with Roy Haynes melodic
rendition of rhythms, and Little’s Aggression,
Blackwell particular melting of African polyrhithms, New Orleans and bebop gives reason to Ornette Coleman in choosing him as first pulse of his arson records The Shape of Jazz to Come and This is Our Music (both Atlantic, 1960)and to trumpeter Don Cherry for the beautiful duet albums Mu 1st & 2nd part (BYG Actuel, 1969), in which the drummer deepend his coloristic approach to melody and rhythm through a broader use of small and ethnic percussions.
“Dolphy pursued freedom through a run in with a
structure to prowl, to climb over, to shatter. The same with the rhythm” (Marcello Piras)
Related Discogarphy
John
Coltrane, Africa/Brass (Impulse!,
1961)
John
Coltrane, Impressions (Impulse!,
1961)
John
Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard
(Impulse!, 1961)
Eric
Dolphy, Outward Bound (Prestige,
1960)
Eric
Dolphy, Out There (Prestige, 1961)
Eric
Dolphy, At the Five Spot, Vol.1
(Prestige, 1961)
Eric
Dolphy, At the Five Spot, Vol. 2
(Prestige, 1961)
Eric Dolphy
and Booker Little, Memorial Album
(Prestige, 1961)
Ornette
Coleman Double Quartet, Free Jazz
(Atlantic, 1961)
Charles
Mingus, Pithecanthropus Erectus (Atlantic, 1956)
Charles
Mingus, Charles Mingus presents Charles
Mingus (Candid, 1960)
Charles
Mingus, Mingus at Antibes
(Atlantic, 1979)
Miles
Davis, E.S.P. (Columbia, 1965)
Miles
Davis, Nefertiti (Columbia, 1967)
Related Bibliography
Lewis
Porter, John Coltrane His Life and Music
(The Michigan American Music Series, 1998)
VA, Tender Warrior
L’eredità Musicale di Eric Dolphy (Associazione Culturale Punta Giara, 2005)
Stefano Zenni, Charles
Mingus Polifonie dell’Universo Afroamericano (Stampa Alternativa Nuovi
Equilibri, 2002)
“I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing . . . the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood.” (John Coltrane)
Esiste un punto di contatto tra la perdita e la consapevolezza? Esiste una qualche forma artistica che abbia mostrato una specie di presentificazione del dolore nel momento stesso in cui tende verso l'esplorazione di nuove forme?
Ascolti India, ad esempio, e ti domandi cosa mai avrà pensato Ravi Shankar (di cui il sassofonista di Seattle era un fervente ammiratore). Sicuramente sarà rimasto turbato.
Ascolti Meditations, e senti che nessun altro musicista ha incarnato quella pienezza dello spirito che non è mai appartenuta alle religioni occidentali.
Ascolti un brano come Dearly Beloved e improvvisamente capisci.
Ascolti i dischi realizzati con Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, e pensi che in fondo solo quella vecchia volpe di Miles ha saputo sfruttare il suo stato nascente, indirizzarlo, mischiarcisi.
Mai capace di essere altro da se stesso, Trane, nel bene e nel male. Icona già in vita, si è trovato al crocevia di tutta una serie di discorsi musicali e culturali: l'avanguardia, la fede, i cambiamenti. Li ha attraversati tutti senza lasciarsi, in fondo, determinare da nessuno di essi. Eccedendoli, in senso antropologico.
Perché non esiste la banalità del bene: non solo per raggiungerlo, ma anche solo per desiderarlo, occorrono almeno tre movimenti, quelli che dànno il titolo al suo disco più famoso.
