A Disappointing Evening at SJFAZZ

Jazz pianist Orrin Evans (from the SFJAZZ Web page for last night’s performance)

Since I tend to be as hooked on the “standard” jazz piano trio (piano, bass, drums) as I am on its “classical cousin (piano, violin, cello), I was glad to have the opportunity to visit the Joe Henderson Lab in the SFJAZZ Center yesterday evening. Pianist Orrin Evans led the trio, performing with Robert Hurst on bass and drummer Mark Whitfield. Sadly, the encounter was not particular satisfying.

I suppose the reason was that, over the course of an hour of selections, Evans piano work never seemed to rise above the level of routine. Only an extended solo by Whitfield, towards the end of the set, made me sit up and take notice. Performing a piece he entitled “Feed the Fire,” he knew how the explore the full extent of his kit; and he unfolded a series of consistently engaging rhythm patterns with enviable fluidity. Mind you, Hurst also offered up a few inspired moments on his bass; but, for the most part, he seemed to be going about his business with that same sense of routine found in Evans’ work.

This was one of those evenings when my mind kept saying to me, “I’d rather be listening to….” Sadly, I could only fill in that blank with relatively distant memories of the past. As a result, I took refuge in the ghosts of such memorable pianists as Cecil Taylor (died April 5, 2018) and Ahmad Jamal (died April 16, 2023). As Kurt Vonnegut (died April 11, 2007) liked to say, “So it goes!”

Confusion Over a Historical Cecil Taylor Gig

courtesy of Lydia Liebman Promotions

This past November Oblivion Records “came out of retirement” to announce a new release entitled Cecil Taylor – The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert. For those suspicious of hyperbole, the return of Taylor was “legendary” because it had been preceded by five years of self-imposed recording exile, during which Taylor held Visiting Professor positions at Antioch College and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The release was “complete” because the concert began with a Taylor composition entitled “Autumn/Parade,” which was 88 minuets in duration. This was a quartet performance with Taylor joined by two of his Cecil Taylor Unit colleagues, Jimmy Lyons on alto saxophone and Andrew Cyrille on percussion, along with “newcomer” Sirone on bass. The announcement set the release date for this coming February 15, and the release was scheduled to include a 23-page booklet of useful background information.

However, the Internet is a land of unexpected events. This past January 11, Amazon.com created an MP3 download page for the three tracks on the album:

1. The quartet performance of “Autumn/Parade” lasting 88 minutes
2. The first part of “Spring of Two Blue-J’s,” a solo piano performance lasting a little more than a quarter of an hour
3. The second part of “Spring of Two Blue-J’s” performed by the entire quartet and lasting about 22 minutes

The Web page supported downloading both individual tracks and the entire album, and streamed listening was also available through a hyperlink to Amazon Music. A similar Web page for listening was created by Spotify. However, neither of these sites provided access to the accompanying booklet. Hopefully, this will change, at least on the Amazon download site, after the “official” release date on February 15.

Some may feel that 88 uninterrupted minutes of music is not for the faint of heart. On the other hand, those that share my interest in the operas of Richard Wagner will probably approach “Autumn/Parade” with a bit more confidence. Mind you, Taylor’s music is not as “thematic” as Wagner, nor does he draw upon the leitmotif technique to establish different dispositions. Having had the good fortune to observe Taylor in one of these extended performances (which happened to take place at Herbst Theatre), I was not particularly phased by lengthy duration, even in the absence of any “landmarks” that might distinguish beginning, middle, and end. I was simply content to “enjoy the ride,” which, on this recording, also meant dealing with the contributions from both Lyons and Cyrille. (I have to confess that I was much less aware of Sirone.)

Rather than worry about duration, I actually appreciated the affordances of this album. Listening to Taylor in Herbst, I had no idea when he would bring his solo performance to closure. My guess is that many in his Town Hall audience felt the same way about the concert beginning with “Autumn/Parade.” “Digital listening,” on the other hand, often allows the listener to monitor the duration with a better sense of how “now” is situated between “beginning” and “end.” For my part, I made it a point to listen to “Autumn/Parade” without the affordance of any “clock display;” and, in that setting, I enjoyed being reminded of my Herbst experience!

The Bleeding Edge: 4/15/2019

This will be another week when all but one of the relevant events have been taken into account:

• Once again things will be busiest at the Center for New Music with concerts taking place on April 18, 19, 20, and 21.
• Outsound Presents will offer its weekly LSG (Luggage Store Gallery) Creative Music Series concert on April 18.
• Adobe Books has added another concert for this month, this one taking place on April 19.
• Rova:Arts will present its Cecil Taylor tribute concert on April 20.
• The second tenth anniversary Monday Make-Out Session will take place on April 22.

That leaves one more event, presented by one of the “usual suspects” on the Bleeding Edge. Jazz trumpeter Kenny Warren is currently on tour from his base in New York City. He will visit Bird & Beckett Books and Records to give a single hour-long set. He will be joined by four local jazzmen, Raffi Garabedian on saxophone, Miles Wick on bass, and Jon Arkin on drums. This set will begin promptly at 9 p.m. on Friday, April 19. Donations will be appreciated. Bird & Beckett is located at 653 Chenery Street, a short walk from the Glen Park station for both Muni and BART.

Rova:Arts to Present Cecil Taylor Tribute Concert

Cecil Taylor at work with many of his resources (courtesy of Rova:Arts)

This site has done its best to keep up with performances in San Francisco that involve the members of the Rova Saxophone Quartet: Bruce Ackley, Larry Ochs, Steve Adams, and Jon Raskin. However, readers may not know about Rova:Arts, which is the ensemble’s administrative arm. Its primary responsibility involves arranging performances; but it has also enabled the commissioning of more than 30 new works for saxophone quartet from artists as aesthetically diverse as minimalist composers Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros, avant-garde composers Fred Frith and Anthony Braxton, experimental rock musician Lindsay Cooper, and jazz luminaries Jack DeJohnette and John Carter.

Next month Rova:Arts will produce Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!, a special tribute concert in honor of the avant-garde jazz composer, pianist, and poet Cecil Taylor, who died on April 5 of last year. Last year Rova presented their first tribute to Taylor, a concert entitled Air. Next month’s affair will be more extensive and involve many more performers.

Rova’s primary contribution will be a reworking of Taylor’s Dark to Themselves, an album-length composition. For this endeavor they will be joined by four additional players, guitarists Jean-Paul Bourelly and Henry Kaiser, drummer Dan Robinson, and Jason Hoopes on bass. Rova has expanded its resources in the past, and these enlarged groups have performed under the name Orkestrova. In addition the duo B. combo of Lisa Mezzacappa on bass and Jason Levis on percussion will present excerpts from Mezzacappa’s transcription of Taylor’s album Air Above Mountains. The program will then conclude with a second duo performance, coupling reed player Oluyemi with vocalist Ijeoma Thomas. They will present interpretations of Taylor’s poetry, as well as original works.

This tribute concert will be given only one performance, beginning at 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 20. The venue will be CounterPulse, which is located near Union Square at 80 Turk Street, just West of where Mason Street intersects Market Street. General admission will be $20, and students and seniors will be admitted for $15. There is also a special Patron of the Arts rate of $35. Tickets may be purchased online through the CounterPulse Secure Ticket Portal, and the Box Office will open at 7:15 p.m.

Rova’s Mixed Memorial for Cecil Taylor

Last night at the Center for New Music, the Rova Saxophone Quartet presented a program entitled AIR: A Tribute to Cecil Taylor. Each of the members of the group, Bruce Ackley, Larry Ochs, Steve Adams, and Jon Raskin, took an improvisation set with one or more invited guest artists; and the quartet as a whole played a movement from Ochs’ Certain Space, which he had dedicated to Taylor. As might be guessed, there was considerable variation in the approaches to improvisation, with the result that the composed offering was the most consistently satisfying one. This was not surprising, since Taylor’s instrument was the piano; and none of the evening’s guest artists played any sort of keyboard instrument.

At the very least, the absence of a piano entailed a significant lack of those factors that made Cecil Taylor sound like Cecil Taylor, so to speak. As Adam Shatz observed in his NYR Daily obituary (cited yesterday on this site), the core of Taylor’s style and rhetoric emerged through building blocks of massive tone clusters, which took Henry Cowell’s percussive methods and elevated them not just to a higher level but beyond the planet’s gravitational pull. One could almost think of Taylor as being a bit like a race car driver, always “tinkering with the engine” to figure out how to produce ever more notes per second. (That metaphor is far from gratuitous, by the way. A quintet session that Taylor recorded with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Chuck Israels on bass, and Louis Hays on drums on October 13, 1958 was released under the title Hard Driving Jazz; and the currently available CD of this material shows the blurred image of a speeding race car on the cover.)

from Amazon.com

Yet, all of the intensity of Taylor’s clusters was crafted around a scrupulous sense of precision. He seldom used pedals, since that would blur the significance of the individual sounding tones. Indeed, no matter how dense the cluster, Taylor himself declared that he was always focused on the significance of every note. Indeed, it may have been in the interest of allowing every note to have its say that Taylor tended to eschew any sense of a consistent metric pulse, instead letting his thematic content (if you can call it that) unfold through jagged rhythms leaving the listener in suspense as to what would happen next and when it would happen.

Out of fairness to Rova, then, it must be said that most of this does not translate easily (if at all) to the wind family. The satisfaction that arose from the Certain Space excerpt came from Ochs’ ability to grasp the significance of Taylor’s approach to rhythm and then find just the right way to translate that approach to suit four saxophone players. That attentiveness to rhythmic eccentricity also provided the driving force behind Ochs’ improvisation, for which he was joined only by drummer Donald Robinson. Playing together, the two of them could summon up that same awe-inspiring sense of precision that Taylor could bring to his piano.

It should also be noted, as an aside, that Ochs seemed to use his improvisation to acknowledge that brief partnership that Taylor had with Coltrane. If his saxophone could not summon up a tone cluster, it could still revel in the arrhythmic wailing found at the beginning of “The Father And The Son And The Holy Ghost,” the first track of Coltrane’s Meditations album. It was hard to imagine that this was an accidental gesture. I prefer to think of it as the spirit behind Taylor’s keyboard work emerging through the spirituality of Coltrane’s rhetoric.

None of the remaining improvisations convincingly tapped into Taylor in either spirit or flesh. Working with Adams, Clark Coolidge recited texts that he had written spontaneously while listening to Taylor recordings. Adams put his saxophones aside in favor of an alto flute for this set, and his deep and dark sonorities were perfectly complemented by Lisa Mezzacappa’s bass work. However, Coolidge’s diction, even with the assistance of a microphone, was just not up to snuff to allow his verbal free associations to have much impact. If anything, they tended to interfere with the moody qualities of Adams’ duo work with Mezzacappa, a performance that reminded one of Taylor’s quieter side without ever trying to imitate what he did at the keyboard in such moments.

That left both Ackley and Raskin, who seemed more attentive to doing their own thing than in relating that thing to Taylor. Ackley offered some provocative licks in the rather unbalanced company of Andy Strain on trombone and Karl Evangelista, doing his best to get his guitar amplification to hold its own above the fray. Raskin, on the other hand, engaged in some blood-curdling call-and-response with Darren Johnson on trumpet (playing an instrument that he calls his “peace cannon”). Safa Shokrai provided some highly active bass work behind the two of them, but it never emerged as its own unique contribution to the mix. Vijay Anderson’s drum work was capable, but too steady to be mistaken for anything referring to Taylor.

Mezzacappa Transcribes Cecil Taylor with Awesome Results

Last night’s Monday Make-Out at the Make Out Room began with a 45-minute set taken by duoB, consisting of Lisa Mezzacappa on bass and Jason Levis on drums. As regular readers probably know, the Monday Make-Out is a monthly offering of jamming at its most adventurous covering small-group music that ranges from free jazz improvisations at their most spontaneous to inventive, and usually daring, experiments in the use of charts. Last night provided an excellent opportunity to experience Mezzacappa at her most ambitious.

The offering was one of those they-said-it-couldn’t-be-done undertakings. Mezzacappa announced that the duo would play a transcription of a Cecil Taylor performance in Vienna, presumably the one that took placed with the Cecil Taylor Unit on November 7, 1987. For that gig the Unit included Thurman Barker on marimba and drums, William Parker on bass, Carlos Ward on alto saxophone and flute, and Leroy Jenkins on violin. In  her review for AllMusic, Stacia Proefrock described the recording as a “hurricane of an album that extends for more than 71 minutes.”

Mezzacappa’s act of transcription therefore also included a generous amount of filtering, probably focusing, for the most part, on Taylor’s piano work and his interplay with Barker’s drums. Even with that reduction however, Taylor’s music is what information theorists would call “information-rich.” Proefrock’s hurricane metaphor perfectly captures the extent to which Taylor can pack an almost innumerable quantity of events into even a few seconds of time. This was a skill that he had been cultivating since the Fifties, a time when he was well aware that Karlheinz Stockhausen was making similar demands of piano recitalists.

Given the limitations in physical material, duoB’s ability to capture the turbulence of Taylor’s “hurricane” was nothing short of awesome. One could be forgiven for just sitting there gaping and wondering where all those notes were coming from. To the extent that listeners in Vienna probably reacted the same way, it would be fair to say that, whatever the limitations may have been, Mezzacappa’s transcription was a faithful one.

Mind you, one has to be careful about that concept of “fidelity” where Taylor is concerned. At an exhibit at the Whitney Museum a few years ago, one could appreciate that Taylor’s approach to notation was as complex and “information-rich” as his approach to performance:

Display of Cecil Taylor score pages at the Whitney Museum (from the Open Source Twitter feed)

He also elaborated on this matter in the documentary Imagine the Sound, in which he discussed some of his “scores” while Ron Mann was filming. In all probability last night’s transcription was primarily a product on highly focused listening, perhaps even coupled with episode-by-episode efforts to reproduce was had been captured by the hearing process. Even this would be a challenge, however, since, while one is aware of different approaches to music-making as the piece evolves, it would be unfair to claim that there was an “episodic” structure to last night’s 45-minute offering.

To be fair, however, the Make Out Room was far from the best place in which the audience would be able to listen as attentively to duoB as Mezzacappa had listened to the recording of that Vienna performance. The place is a bar; and, while there is a “stage area” set aside for performers and audience, even the most aggressive music-making needs to contend with a fair amount of ambient noise. This does not serve well when one is dealing with the intense precision of Taylor’s musical gestures; but, for the most part, the amplification equipment went a long way to satisfy the interests of those who had come primarily to listen to the music.

Nevertheless, one must hope that last night was the first of several performances, if not an ongoing process of refining Mezzacappa’s transcription efforts. This is music-making that deserves a setting in which listeners who take their jazz seriously can engage their full powers of concentration. One might even wonder how Taylor himself would approach Mezzacappa’s efforts as a listening experience. My guess is that he would readily take it for what it was and allow himself to be drawn into it, exactly the same as many of the more attentive members of last night’s audience.

Andrew Cyrille Makes his ECM Leader Debut

This past Friday ECM released a new recording on which jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille appeared as leader for the first time. The other members of the group, known collectively as the Andrew Cyrille Quartet (what else?) are Bill Frisell on guitar, Ben Street on bass, and Richard Teitelbaum on both synthesizer and piano. The title of the album is The Declaration of Musical Independence, which seems to be justified by Street’s booklet notes.

Street’s essay begins with the following sentence:

As the 21st century began, Elliott Carter strongly indicted the musical world of the 20th, pointing out that we had become enmeshed completely and needlessly in steady, even time signatures deriving from military applications, to the exclusion of any other understanding of musical flow.

With all due respect to a composer whose innovative contributions to the concert repertoire cannot be overestimated, I must express a certain amount of regret that Carter never pried himself out of those concert halls to check out some of “farthest-out” jazz clubs in Manhattan. To choose just one example that is particularly relevant to this new recording, I find it impossible to believe that Carter would have made such a sweeping generalization had he put some time into listening to Cecil Taylor.

I first came to recognize Cyrille’s name through his work with Taylor; and, since the beginning of this decade, I have been following with great interest his contributions to the Trio 3 collective, in which he performs with Oliver Lake on saxophone and Reggie Workman on bass. Come to think of it, I would guess that Carter was not aware of at least one other member of Cyrille’s new quartet. Had he been bold enough to expose himself to the world of live electronic music that was brewing back in the Sixties, he might have encountered Musica Elettronica Viva, which Teitelbaum co-founded along with Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski. Teitelbaum was also a sideman for some of the pioneering recordings that Anthony Braxton made on the Arista label, where Teitelbaum himself pioneered the practice of jamming on a Moog synthesizer, rather than using it to make tape music. These diverse backgrounds all add up to the proposition that, if the title of the album refers to independence from the “even time signatures” that Carter cited, then independence had already been declared about half a century before this new album was released!

Mind you, such an extensive historical legacy does not, in any way, detract from the experience of listening to this new album. If anything, it enhances it. Just as Anton Webern lectured on how the “new music” that he was making, as well as that of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, could be traced back to past music-making practices, the music-making practices captured on The Declaration of Musical Independence can be traced back for even more than half a century, at least as far back as the sources that were influencing Thelonious Monk, many of whom are given generous discussion in Robin D. G. Kelly’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.

In all fairness it should be observed that all four members of the quartet participated in the composition of one or more of eight of the nine tracks on this recording. The opening track, “Coltrane Time,” is described by Cyrille as “a piece written by John Coltrane that he never recorded.” However, Coltrane’s drummer Rashied Ali learned it and taught it to Milton Graves, who shared it with Cyrille when they recorded the Dialogue of the Drums album. This is a perfect example of what can happen when a drummer has the courage to depart from a steady beat; and, because Coltrane died in 1967, we really are talking about Carter having missed out on things about half a century before he put his discontent into words!

Nevertheless, the title “Coltrane Time” may confuse some serious jazz mavens. Coltrane Time is actually the name of a United Artists Records Coltrane album that was originally issued under Taylor’s name as Hard Driving Jazz in mono and Stereo Drive in stereo. There is now a Hard Driving Jazz CD with the four tracks that Coltrane recorded with Taylor’s quartet (before Cyrille was playing with Taylor), along with six “bonus” tracks. Coltrane is not credited as having composed any of those four tracks. Two are standards, one is by Kenny Dorham, and one is by Chuck Israels. However, the “Coltrane Time” that Cyrille performs has more to do with Coltrane’s interest in the complex rhythms of Indian music than with the “free” rhythms that Taylor was exploring.

One of the compositions that is overlooked by the booklet notes deserves some attention, Bill Frisell’s “Kaddish.” This is based on a major multimedia interpretation of Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name, which I saw at the SFJAZZ Center in April of 2013. By all rights this counts as chamber music for which Frisell conducted an ensemble consisting of Ron Miles on trumpet, Curtis Fowlkes on trombone, Doug Wieselman on clarinet and bass clarinet, Jenny Scheinman on violin, Hank Roberts on cello, Kenny Wollensen on drums, and Robin Holcomb on piano, doubling as vocalist. There were also two actors, Hal Willner as “Ginsberg’s voice” and Chloe Webb reading quoted passages of Ginsberg’s dying mother Naomi.

This piece probably has the steadiest rhythm of the album. It is basically a guitar solo that, like the Kaddish prayer itself, amounts to an incantation of mourning. Street provides what (in the spirit of the original chamber music conception of the composition) amounts to a continuo; and, as the piece progresses, Teitelbaum uses a synthesizer to color the texture, but only slightly so. Cyrille is present only in a few low rumblings. This basically works as a highly distilled recollection of what had initially been a far grander musical conception. While that distillation does little to evoke Ginsberg’s poetry, it is almost painfully effective as an “alternative incantation” of the Kaddish prayer.

Palmetto Records will Release a New Live Recording of Fred Hersch at the Village Vanguard

Jazz pianist Fred Hersch (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

This Friday Palmetto Records will release a new recording entitled Sunday Night at the Vanguard, for which Amazon is currently taking pre-orders. The title refers to a session at the Village Vanguard in New York that took place this past March 27 featuring jazz pianist Fred Hersch leading a trio whose other members were John Hébert on bass and Eric McPherson on drums. Hersch has been a frequent visitor to my home town of San Francisco, most often appearing in concerts organized by San Francisco Performances (SFP), the most recent of which took place about a month before the recorded Vanguard session and presented the same trio.

One has to be careful in applying the adjective “cerebral” to jazz. Many think of the bad old days of the Third Stream movement, when Gunther Schuller tried to build a bridge between his experiences with some of the most adventurous composers of the twentieth century, particularly those coming up to speed following the Second World War, with his hands-on experiences of playing in equally adventurous jazz combos. (Schuller played French horn at the March 9, 1950 recording session for Birth of the Cool for the tracks that included the standard “Darn That Dream,” Miles Davis’ “Deception,” and Gerry Mulligan’s “Rocker.”) Others think of the introspective intensity that can be found in the recordings of pianists such as Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and Cecil Taylor.

Hersch does not fall into either of these categories. However, he shares with pianists like Monk, Evans, and Taylor a keen sense of focused attention to every note he draws from his keyboard. He is not shy about taking familiar tropes from the bebop era as points of departure, but he never seems to have trouble conveying them in new directions. Thus, as I discovered at his last SFP gig, it is very difficult to listen to Hersch in performance without sitting on the edge of your seat, hanging on every phrase trying to figure out where he will next take his melodic lines. That may be the key to his cerebrations: Hersch approaches his keyboard as a pianist well-versed in counterpoint. Thus, he can let his bass player worry about establishing any sense of harmonic progression while he allows his melodic lines to superimpose and interleave in any number of imaginative ways.

The result is that none of the tracks on this album allow for what we might call “casual” listening. Even when the tune is as familiar as Richard Rodgers’ “A Cockeyed Optimist,” Hersch cooks up a rhetoric that is as remote from the pablum of a Broadway show tune as was John Coltrane’s take on “My Favorite Things.” Furthermore, even if we know that Sunday Night at the Vanguard is a “produced recording,” the attentive listeners among us can still reconstruct some feeling of the spontaneity of the session that had been captured for reproduction. The virtue of this album resides less in its “documentation” of a club date than in the extent to which the attentive listener can begin to imagine having been there at the Vanguard marveling at the in-the-moment immediacy of it all.

Jason Robinson returns to San Francisco to play in the sfSoundSalonSeries

Last night the sfSoundSalonSeries of concerts at the Center for New Music presented the return to San Francisco of saxophonist and composer Jason Robinson. The evening was divided into two sets. In the first Robinson presented four of his compositions, playing tenor saxophone in a front line with Darren Johnston on trumpet and Steve Adams alternating among sopranino, alto, and baritone saxophones. Rhythm was provided by Robinson’s long-time collaborator Scott Walton on bass and Vijay Anderson on drums. The second set then turned to improvised explorations with the group joined by Tim Perkis on electronics.

When two sets are so different, there is always a risk that the experiences of the second set will blur the memory of the first. This was an evening in which there was so much imaginative diversity in that first set that it pushed the limit of what I would be able to hold in memory. Had I been more familiar with Robinson’s work, I might have appreciated any cross-fertilization between his composing and his improvising; but last night was a “first contact” experience. Thus, I decided to content myself with the challenge of accounting for that experience strictly on the basis of the first set.

Robinson kept his chatter to a minimum. The closest he came to acknowledging influences was to note that “Vicissitudes” was dedicated to Marco Eneidi and Mel Graves, both Bay Area jazzmen. Eneidi died this past May 24, while Graves had died on November 8, 2008. Each of them had taken adventurous approaches to making music, Eneidi through the early influence of Cecil Taylor and Graves, whose interest in John Coltrane eventually led to a “memorial composition” entitled “Three Impressions.” Commissioned by the San Francisco Jazz Festival in 1987, the performance included the Kronos Quartet, as well as Joe Henderson, Denny Zeitlin, and Bobby Hutcherson.

One with the right listening background might have sensed the presence of Taylor in “Vicissitudes.” Robinson has a firm command of sharply-defined but uneven rhythmic patterns. Indeed, throughout the entire first set some of the most stirring moments would come when all three front-line horns would energetically declaim a jagged melody line in either unison or parallel octaves. (In the opening selection, “Corvus,” the octaves extended in both directions from Robinson’s tenor, up to Johnston’s trumpet and down to Adams’ baritone.) If the rhythms of these melodic incantations recalled Taylor, their enunciation through both saxophones and trumpet also suggested a nod or two to Ornette Coleman. These “themes” provided the milestones for each of the pieces, between which each of the individual members of Robinson’s group would stake out his own territory.

For those who do not consult (or need to consult) the dictionary, the noun “vicissitude” usually refers to a change of fortune with negative connotations. While there was no suggestion of an unfortunate turn of events in “Vicissitudes,” the idea of bad fortune lurked in some of Robinson’s other titles. “Persephone’s Scream” was the most explicit and the most sinister. There was less unison in this piece and more uninhibited wailing, presumably depicting Persephone when she had wandered too far from her mother’s garden and was snatched by Hades, who carried her down to his underworld realm to serve there as his wife. Another piece was entitled “Tiresian Symmetry.” While Robinson only mentioned Tiresias’ changes in body form, those who know their Sophocles know that Tiresias was the blind seer summoned by Oedipus in his investigation into the cause of the plague in Thebes. Tiresias’ “testimony” marks the beginning of Oedipus’ downfall.

There was even another reference to such investigations in the opening selection. “Corvus” is the Latin for “crow,” which has its own connotations. However, Robinson introduced the work as having been inspired by Tom Selleck’s performances in Magnum, P.I. One certainly got the sense that this was music for action scenes; but the connection between Magnum’s investigations and those of Oedipus were left unacknowledged (with good reason)! The fact is that, if there were more than a few dark elements in any of the literary connotations, the music itself was energetically upbeat and consistently so. The result was a highly satisfying hour of uninhibited free-blowing jazz that can make venturing out to that “bleeding edge” such a pleasure. 

Finding the Right Framework for Jazz

I find that I have been casting a broader net in writing about jazz on Examiner.com.  It certainly is not that there is not enough to cover in the “traditional classical” domain;  nor do I think it has to do with a need to ride my jazz-as-chamber-music-by-other-means hobby horse more often.  Rather, I think it has to do with my fundamental precept that all listening can only take place in the context of other listening experiences, so I like to keep my contexts both broad and flexible.

One result of my activities is that I sometimes get interesting feedback from those people primarily in the jazz world.  There are, of course, the ones who figure that I don't know what the hell I’m talking about because my mind is cluttered with too much thinking about classical music.  Every now and then, however, I get some feedback to the effect that I am writing at both greater length and depth than most jazz writers do.  I take that as a positive sign.  When I wrote about the SFJAZZ performance by Michel Camilo and his trio this past weekend, it was natural to evoke names from different corners of jazz history (Art Tatum, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor) to illustrate the breadth of Camilo’s imaginative inventiveness.  On the other hand it also made sense to add Morton Feldman to that mix, not so much because Camilo’s piano solos sounded like Feldman as because he had a way of dwelling on the sonorities of individual notes that struck me as a perfectly valid reflection of Feldman’s aesthetic.

Will this make a difference to jazz lovers?  Quite honestly, I know no more about those who go to SFJAZZ events than I do about those who pay good money for a seat in Davies Symphony Hall and then only seem to care about how loud they shout “Bravo!” at the end.  I suppose one reason why I prefer jazz in Herbst Theatre to any club setting is that Herbst is more conducive to listening than any club is.  Charles Mingus used to be very fussy about receiving respectful attention at a club gig;  but I am not sure how high the listening priority is for most club-goers.  The real point is that today’s jazz holds up to serious listening at the same level as a chamber music recital in Herbst or a symphony concert in Davies.  It may be that most folks at any of these venues do not care about this very much;  but it is nice to discover, from time to time, that my stuff gets read by those who do care.

Trivializing Wagner?

Since I often make a point of writing about jazz as “chamber music by other means,” I should be pleased when others who focus on the classical side make the move into jazz.  However, when Ivan Hewitt decided to write about the Wayne Shorter Quartet’s performance at the Barbican for the London Telegraph, his account seemed more directed at the classical set than the jazz aficionados.  Declaring Shorter to be “the Wagner of jazz” on the basis of an 80-minute set beginning with a 40-minute composition comes across like a distortion of both Richard Wagner and Shorter in equal measure.  Hewitt seemed to rest his case on extended duration and Shorter’s use of “pithy motifs,” which seems to indicate that his understanding of both Wagner and jazz practices is seriously limited.

Shorter is hardly the first to work on an extended scale of duration.  My guess is that he, himself, would acknowledge a debt to John Coltrane, who always seemed to move his improvisations into yet another take on whatever tune he happened to be playing, just because he felt he had more to say about it.  On the less tune-based side we have some of the more extended abstract efforts from Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman.  The bottom line is that none of this is about duration;  it is about, as Karlheinz Stockhausen put it, “how time passes” over the course of that duration.  Hewitt never seems be able to account for how Shorter’s Barbican gig came off as a listening experience, possibly because Hewitt just did not have that experience.

"That Must be the Answer"

My Coltrane listening seems to be progressing backwards in time, moving from the Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings of the "Classic Quartet" of John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones back to the Heavyweight Champion anthology of all of the recordings he made for Atlantic. Many things happened over this relatively short period of sessions, the first of which was on January 15, 1959 and the last on October 24, 1960, a span of less than two years. I have already written about the "Coltrane-Flanagan connection," which was established during this period and flourished in May of 1959, particularly in the recording the tracks for Giant Steps. However, another connection began to emerge later that year when, on November 28, 1959, Town Hall (in Manhattan) offered what may have been the most intriguing program in the history of jazz performance. Here, according to Lewis Porter's John Coltrane: His Life and Music, are the groups that assembled for this event:

1. A quartet led by Coltrane
2. A group led by Ornette Coleman
3. A group led by Cecil Taylor
4. A group led by Thelonious Monk
5. A quartet led by Count Basie with Elvin Jones on drums
6. The Art Farmer/Benny Golson Jazztet with McCoy Tyner on piano

If ever there were an event to prepare the rest of the world (or at least New York) for the changes that were emerging in jazz, this was it!

Porter does not give the specifics regarding who played what. We might get some clues by checking discographies; but I am more interested in the impact that Coleman had on Coltrane, since this is almost two years before Atlantic released Coleman's Free Jazz recording, which probably planted at least some of the seeds that would later blossom in Coltrane's "Ascension" recording session. In this respect it is interesting to read Porter's citation of an interview Coltrane gave to Benoit Quersin, in which he said of Coleman:

I'm following his lead. He's done a lot to open my eyes to what can be done.

Porter's citation continues:

I feel indebted to him, myself. Because, actually, when he came along, I was so far in this thing [“Giant Steps” chords], I didn’t know where I was going to go next. And I don’t know if I would have thought about just abandoning the chord system or not. I probably wouldn’t have thought of that at all. And he came along doing it, and I heard it, I said, "Well, that must be the answer."

If we view the history of music in terms of which paths are taken and how those paths cultivate our ability to listen, then the individual histories of composers, whether in the settings of "serious music" or jazz, seem to be oriented around the question as Coltrane formulated it: Where do I go next? Some decide to cultivate further the "turf" they have already occupied; and I would not wish to imply that their work is of lesser value for their "lack of motion." However, those that choose to "go" often make choices that astonish and/or discourage us. Think of Igor Stravinsky. His move from Russian nationalism to neoclassicism won him much acclaim, while his decision to experiment with serial music elicited little more than groping perplexity (and some bitterness from the strongest acolytes of Arnold Schoenberg).

Coltrane never seemed to worry if others were perplexed by his choices of where to go next. There is certainly no questioning the sincerity of his interest in what Coleman was doing and the extent to which Coltrane saw an "answer" in Coleman's work. Within six months of the Town Hall evening, he had arranged two recording sessions at Atlantic in which he worked with Coleman associates Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell to record three of Coleman's compositions, along with one of Cherry's and a performance of Monk's "Bemsha Swing" for good measure. Atlantic released the resulting album as The Avant-Garde: John Coltrane & Don Cherry, but not until April of 1966, which is to say after their release of Coleman's Free Jazz and impulse!'s release of Ascension! Indeed, it almost seems as if it was only after the idea of a jazz avant-garde had been established by Free Jazz and Ascension that Atlantic worked up the courage to release material they had recorded almost six years earlier; but, for all of their good intentions, Atlantic was never in the business of making music but only in the business of making money from distributing it! Nevertheless, those business decisions are now part of an ancient history that most have forgotten. What endures is the music, and it is as alive as it was when things were first coming to a boil at Town Hall in 1959.

From Brahms to Coltrane

Having completed my "ascent of Mount Brahms" by way of the Brilliant Classics' collection of the complete works of Johannes Brahms, I find that my listening habits have now led me to the Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings of the "Classic Quartet" of John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. I do not find this shift in gears to be either eccentric or idiosyncratic. I have already written about the extent to which Coltrane's capacity for improvisation reflects all the way back to the talents of Johann Sebastian Bach; and, in the context of those who continue to look for the "progressive" in Brahms, I continue to write about the ways in which one may identify a relationship between Ives and Brahms. Certainly Ives was more inclined to melt the wax in your ears than Brahms ever was; and that alone enabled him to prepare us to listen to Coltrane, even if Coltrane himself seems to have had no exposure to Ives' music. Ultimately, however, the real lesson is how the very concept of "progressive" must, itself, "progress" with the passing of time; and, if the progressivism of Bach, Brahms, and Ives has informed our ability to listen to Coltrane, that ability now informs our listening to the extended explorations of the likes of Cecil Taylor.

In the midst of all that progressivism, however, I was reminded that one of the movements of Coltrane's Meditations was entitled "Consequences," one of the most heavily used labels on this blog. As we know from Lewis Porter's biography, there was no shortage of demons that Coltrane had to confront during his life; and most of those confrontations led to consequences. When Coltrane found that a personal sense of faith could inform his own approach to composition as much as it had informed Bach's, the music itself became more personal. Thus, the movements of Meditations are very much personal spiritual reflections on their "topics," such as love, compassion, joy, and consequences. Whether or not listening to Coltrane can help us to be more mindful of the consequences of our own actions is highly debatable, but I do not think that Coltrane wanted to be perceived as a teacher in such matters. Rather, he chose to bare his soul to us, allowing us to "meditate" on its many facets; and, in so doing, each listener might then be in a better position to so meditate on his own soul. Thus, since I continue to argue that this is a time when we should all be thinking more about consequences, we all might get something out of listening to more Coltrane!

Speaking of Coltrane …

Going out for an errand this morning, I realized that this was the first day of the year that San Francisco felt like spring and that this deserved some sort of ritual celebration. So it was that I decided to play the first disc in the two-disc impulse! set, The Major Works of John Coltrane. This is the disc that couples the first "edition" of "Ascension" with "Om." I suspect that this was as much a need to clear my head of all of that bad science being done in Coltrane's name as it was to get beyond a winter of discontent with a rogue strain of flu and an even more rogue strain of the American political process. This is not to recant on the healing power of Mozart, particularly where that flu was involved; but Coltrane is an entirely different manner of beast.

Indeed, Coltrane's approach to free jazz is very much a "rough beast," as Yeats put it; but it is hardly one that "Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born." As I had previously written, free jazz did not originate with Coltrane; but Coltrane moved to free jazz from a position of mass appeal (much of which derived from his take on "My Favorite Things") that the earliest pioneers (Lenny Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh) did not enjoy. What Coltrane did share with Tristano and his disciples was an intense, if not obsessive, drive towards a continual improvement of technique, in both the mechanics of execution and the conception of the material to be executed. Thus, neither Tristano nor Coltrane "slouched" their way into free jazz; they strode boldly into this unknown region, knowing full well that they would be sustained by the technique they had cultivated.

In terms of my own listening skills, I think it is important that I encountered "Ascension" at a time of intense interest in Anton Webern. Indeed, one of my music teachers had even set the task of composing a piece (which, in the Webern spirit, did not have to be particularly long) based on a bare minimum of intervals. As a result the first thing that struck me about "Ascension" was the minimality of the motif (five notes) that triggered off almost forty minutes of uninterrupted (expect for having to flip the vinyl disk) free blowing. Lord only knows what Coltrane would have thought of this Webern connection. From Lewis Porter's John Coltrane: His Life and Music, I learned that Coltrane disliked being associated with Arnold Schoenberg, because he felt that Schoenberg was more occupied with systems than with music. If he listened to Webern at all, Porter gave no account of that experience.

On the other hand Coltrane always seemed to take a positive view of experimentation, as much by others as with his own efforts. Thus he was a great supporter of Albert Ayler and even did a recording session with Cecil Taylor (which did not include any of Taylor's own compositions). I suspect that Coltrane's approach to free jazz involved what I recently called "a propagation of faith that takes place whenever musicians perform before an audience, the faith that music can achieve bonds of understanding that are beyond the reach of words," which is particularly consistent with the spirituality of "Om."

Another way to approach "Ascension" is as a return swing of a pendulum. Six months before the "Ascension" recording session, Coltrane had recorded A Love Supreme, a four-movement suite of, as Porter demonstrated, highly intricate compositional skill. Having worked with improvisational passages that kept getting longer and longer, it was not surprising that Coltrane would eventually arrive at such a large-scale work. Having done so, however, he then seemed to cut the ties to the constraints of the composed score, thus the need to fall back to a single five-note motif; the challenge was then to sustain that same large-scale duration without explicit charts to guide the way.

The San Francisco Jazz Festival has made it a point to program ten-year anniversary performances of "Ascension." The only one I heard was in 2005; and it was extremely (I might even say painfully) disappointing. It was a reminder of just how strong a foundation of technique was demanded of the eleven musicians who convened in the Van Gelder Studio on June 28, 1965. It is probably true that none of the other performers were quite as obsessive about technique as Coltrane was, but they all possessed imposing levels of skill that was sorely lacking among all the 2005 San Francisco performers. This fortieth anniversary therefore reminded us that free jazz is, and never has been, an easy matter. It is the ultimately testimony to John Dewey's conviction that art is, and can only be perceived as, a product of experience. If the experience is weak, what passes for art will be even weaker. On the other hand, when the experience is strong and sure, as was the case with the "Ascension" sessions, the result can create an impression that will endure for a lifetime and well deserves the celebration of a "rite of spring."

Preparing for Ornette Coleman

This past summer SFJAZZ, the organization behind the semiannual San Francisco Jazz Festival, approached me through electronic mail with a request to participate in a survey. I do not know if this was because or in spite of the fact that I had not purchased any tickets from them for a couple of years, but I hoped that the survey would give me the opportunity to vent my displeasure with their offerings. It did, which meant that I was able to make the two points that I felt were most important:

1. For the most part their offerings ran the gamut from lame to insipid. I realize that SFJAZZ cannot take all of the blame for this. I agree with Gary Giddins' arguments as to why jazz just is not what it used to be. I have felt that way for at least fifteen years when, in a conversation, I happened to remark that the only saxophonists who interested me were now dead.
2. Too many of the events take place in the Nob Hill Masonic Center. This may not be the absolutely worst place to go for serious listening to music of any kind, but it is definitely a major contender. Again the fault does not lie entirely with SFJAZZ, since, if they are to get even close to making budgetary ends meet, they need at least one venue that will hold a large audience.

To some extent my complaints may be a variation on the joke Woody Allen tells in Annie Hall about the two old ladies at a resort in the Catskills. The first says, "The food here is really terrible," to which the second replies, "Yes, and the portions are so small!"

I suppose what matters to me most is that Igor Stravinsky's injunction about the need to be a good listener, which I have cited in so many contexts, is equally applicable when it comes to jazz. This is particularly evident when we read documents about Lennie Tristano's approach to teaching jazz improvisation, which put considerable emphasis on listening to recordings of major jazz solos and then reproducing by ear, either by playing or singing what one had heard. Unfortunately, Stravinsky was probably not a particularly good listener of the jazz of his day, at least if we are to judge him by his efforts to invoke a "jazzy spirit" in some of his own compositions. Most of those works have merits of their own; but it would not surprise me to learn that Stravinsky, himself, had to live with the cold truth that "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."

As a "reward" for the hard line I took in participating in the SFJAZZ survey, I was informed that I had "won" two complimentary tickets to the current Festival. I was given several options, most of which reflected that the Festival organizers either disagreed with or ignored my first point. However, Ornette Coleman was one of the options; so I made it clear to SFJAZZ that this was the only option that interested me. If tickets were not available, then they could just not bother with "rewarding" me, since making those two points was all that really mattered to me. However, the tickets were available; so tonight I shall once again brave the ghastly setting of the Masonic Center in search of another good listening experience.

I have been listening to Coleman for quite some time, going all the way back to when I heard him bring his trio to perform at MIT. This was not long after he had decided to perform some of his work on violin. Since then I have built up a modest collection of CDs (including the Atlantic anthology); and my ears keep making progress in finding their way around his work.

The San Francisco Chronicle tried to do some advance work in last Sunday's "Datebook." The result was not quite as aggravating as many of the classical and opera reviews that I tend to read there, but I am not sure that it contributed very much to the cause of good listening. Coleman is primarily associated with the "free jazz" movement, since Free Jazz was the title of the Atlantic recording that was released in September of 1961. The basic idea was that, while improvisation had traditionally been a matter of spinning out embellishments on a familiar tune (often so elaborate that the tune was barely recognized), a "free" improvisation would dispense with having any such tune as a foundation (however far in the background it may have receded). Historically speaking, Lenny Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh were already experimenting with doing this sort of thing about fifteen years before Atlantic released this recording; and, to be fair about my own listening history, my first taste of this technique came when I heard the impulse! recording of John Coltrane's "Ascension," recorded at a session in June of 1965. The Chronicle piece, on the other hand, tended to concentrate on comparing Coleman with Cecil Taylor, basically arguing that Coleman was easier to take because his notes were not as densely packed as Taylor's and they tended to play out in more "melodic" lines.

I would take this as a serious injustice to both Coleman and Taylor, but I think it illustrates why listening to free jazz is more challenging than listening to even the most highly embellished bebop solos. Once you kick away all the foundations, then you are, literally, free to take your playing anywhere you want. From an analytic point of view, this means that what you play is really only informed by your past experiences of playing and listening, whatever they may have been. Tristano, Taylor, Coleman, and Coltrane all had widely differing experiences. It makes little sense to compare them, nor to assume that my past experiences in listening to any of them will help me very much when I listen to Coleman tonight.

Does this mean that we really cannot be a good listener at a "live" performance of free jazz, whoever its creators may be? Does it all fly by too fast for our cognitive capabilities to keep up with it? To the extent that we may never tease out all the intricate interplay of detail that we can find in Wagner, this is probably the case; but who expects to hear Wagner at any jazz performance? (Yes, I know that Gerry Mulligan was good enough to tack the opening bassoon solo from Le Sacre on to the end of one of his improvisations; but listening to Stravinsky was not the point of that gig!) Nevertheless, I believe that our listening can still be guided by that medieval trivium that I continue to invoke. The logic may involve little more than a chain of spontaneous associations "in the moment;" but the performers have enough command of what they are doing to recognize the difference between the embellishing and the embellished and render a grammatical prioritizing of what they are playing. Finally, the issue of rhetoric is no different than it is in any other performance, addressing the problem of how to both attract and then hold the listener's attention, whether by devices of musical invention or by performances gestures that facilitate the ear finding its way around such a "free space." These three elements always guide us, whether through a microscopic moment captured by Webern or the impetuous forty-minute "ride" of the Atlantic Free Jazz recording; so they will be with me (as usual) when I hear Coleman "live" for the first time since my student days.