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!”

Ahmad Jamal Trio Performances in Seattle

Ahmad Jamal on the cover of the first of the two albums to be discussed

Tomorrow the new Jazz Detective label produced by Zev Feldman will release two double-CD albums of previously unreleased live recordings by master jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal. Both albums have the title Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse, citing the club in Seattle where all of the recordings were made. Recordings for the first album were made in June of 1963 and March and April of 1964. Those in the second release were made in March and October of 1965 and September of 1966. For those that cannot wait, both hyperlinks currently lead to Amazon.com Web pages that will process pre-orders.

As I have previously observed, “Jamal is the only artist I have listened to on both coasts, at the Iridium club in Manhattan and in Herbst Theatre here in San Francisco.” My memory is a bit fuzzy in these matters; but I suspect these were both trio performances, the same as all of the Penthouse gigs. In 1964 and 1965 Jamal was joined by Jamil Nasser on bass and Chuck Lampkin on drums. In 1963 Jamal and Lampkin were joined by Richard Evans on bass, and Evans composed pieces for some of the performances in both 1963 and 1964. After March of 1965 Lampkin was followed by two different drummers, Vernel Fournier in the following October and Frank Gant in 1966. Over the course of all of these concerts, there were ample opportunities for both bass and drum solos, particularly in the more familiar standards.

With only a few exceptions, the individual tracks cover a generous duration. Jamal himself is consistently inventive, even when approaching the most familiar standards. He sets a high bar for his colleagues, but the interplay that unfolds on just about every trio offering leads the attentive listener down any number of adventurous paths. Listening to him in Herbst was particularly mind-blowing, leading me to suggest to the man sitting next to me that there was more than a little bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen in Jamal’s solo improvisations. That man ran into me at a later concert. He said he had approached Jamal after the Herbst concert, raising Stockhausen’s name. Jamal seems to have acknowledged that composer’s influence! However, the Seattle gigs predate my Herbst encounter by about 40 years. Do not expect any suggestions of Stockhausen on these new albums, but Ludwig van Beethoven is definitely lurking in Jamal’s take on “I Didn’t Know What Time it Was,” which began the set on March 18, 1965!

By now I have come to expect that every new Jamal release will lead my listening down new pathways. Given the abundance of content on these two albums, I would say that I am just beginning to get my head around what Jamal was doing at a time when I was presenting my own radio program of twentieth-century music on the campus radio station at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was just becoming aware of Jamal through the jazz broadcasters for that station, so my path of awareness has been a long one. However, it was only after the turn of the century that I started making serious efforts to tune in to his inventiveness (with a little help from Beethoven and Stockhausen).

Now I can revisit what he was doing during my own distant past, and it would be fair to say that I have come away with considerable satisfaction with all of the tracks on both of these new albums!

Jazz Village to Release New Ahmad Jamal Album

courtesy of PIAS

Exactly one week from today Jazz Village will release Ballades, the latest album from pianist Ahmad Jamal, now at the age of 88. With the exception of three tracks, this is a solo album; and I was a bit surprised to see in the background material on the Amazon.com Web page that this was “something Jamal has never done before.” It is not that I disagree with the claim. However, to the best of my knowledge, Jamal is the only artist I have listened to on both coasts, at the Iridium club in Manhattan and in Herbst Theatre here in San Francisco. Both of those performances were solo gigs, and I have come to expect that Jamal has a wealth of inventiveness to explore without any backup. (The three tracks that are not solo involve only James Cammack on bass.) As usual Amazon is processing pre-orders through that aforementioned Web page.

Only three of the ten tracks on the album are Jamal originals: “Marseille,” “Because I Love You,” and “Whisperings.” The others sample different periods in songbook history, all providing first-rate platforms for Jamal’s prodigious (and frequently unorthodox) approaches to embellishment. When I heard him at Herbst, however, I was struck by his ability to incorporate the sorts of polyrhythms I might encounter in drum-work, often in passages that would depart from any secure sense of a tonal center. Just as there are any number of works by Karlheinz Stockhausen that show clear signs of having jazz influences, I found myself wondering if Jamal had much Stockhausen in his own collection of recordings!

I have to confess, however, that, where some standards are concerned, I find it difficult to get beyond some particular take on the tune that left a deep and indelible impression. On Ballades that tune is “I Should Care,” the 1944 joint effort of Axel Stordahl, Paul Weston, and Sammy Cahn. The Wikipedia page lists any number of vocal and instrumental treatments of that song.

When it comes to a solid straightforward account, I suppose I shall always go with the 1949 recording that Johnny Hartman made with Dizzy Gillespie’s band (with instrumental arrangement by Gillespie himself). On the other hand the most mind-bending recording would have to come from the 1957 solo session that Thelonious Monk had with Riverside for the album that would be released as Thelonious Himself. Monk’s rhythms are so eccentric that one has to wonder if he was thinking about some other tune while playing “I Should Care,” almost as if he was trying to take the title as literally as possible!

As can be seen above, this is not intended to criticize Jamal’s own rhythmic inventiveness. On this album he ventures into unorthodox rhythms in his treatment of Bob Haggart’s tune, “What’s New?” Indeed, he is already in arcane territory during an introduction that takes its own sweet time before getting around to the first phrase of the song itself. Ironically, the tune was first written as an instrumental selection (with a different title) in 1938 for Bob Crosby’s group, featuring a trumpet solo for Billy Butterfield.

Jamal shares with Monk such a broad capacity for inventiveness that each album-listening occasion is almost guaranteed to turn up one or more twists in treatment that had eluded prior listenings. Nevertheless, there is usually an undercurrent in Jamal that is not as provocatively disruptive as what one encounters on a Monk track. This is not to dismiss Jamal as being too smooth. It is simply to observe that there are any number of directions that invention can follow, and Jamal has put a distinctive stamp on his own particular paths.

The Legacy of Honoring "The Sound Itself"

The proposition that, as serious listeners, we should think more in terms of our experiences of "the sound itself," rather than in terms of any abstraction of those sounds through notation, has been an ongoing theme of interest, not only on this platform but also in my writing for Examiner.com. Indeed, last month in that latter forum, I invoked this concept with respect to two composers whose work would be featured this month: George Benjamin, who will be hosted by the San Francisco Symphony as part of their Project San Francisco Series, and Michael Jarrell, who will be featured as a composer at the next concert by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and as an orchestrator of Claude Debussy's piano etudes by the San Francisco Symphony. Thus, I was not surprised (and rather pleased) to discover in my reading of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D. G. Kelley, that Monk was another composer whose work was intimately wrapped up in this nature of "the sound itself."

The source of my discovery was a profile of Monk by Herbie Nichols, demonstrating that some of the most astute writing about making music comes from an author familiar with making music on equally intimate terms. Here is a passage of Nichols' text that Kelley quotes:

His eyes light up when he speaks of instrumentalists getting the right ‘sounds’ out of their instruments. He is forever searching for better ‘sounds,’ as he loves to say. He doesn’t seek these effects elsewhere. He creates them at his Klein piano. This way of thinking throughout the years has resulted in the creation of a system of playing which is the strangest I have heard and may someday revolutionize the art of swing piano playing.

Kelley's interest in this passage is clearly grounded in his own experience, since he invokes this idea of "the sound itself" in the "Prelude" to his book to explain how his interest in Monk was first sparked:

I became completely obsessed with Monk’s sound, his clang-clang sound of surprise, rich with deafening silences, dissonances, and harmonic ambiguities.

In Kelley's case that sound came from a recording of "Evidence," released on Riverside and taken from a performance at The Five Spot in New York City on August 7, 1958, with Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, Roy Haynes on drums, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik, about a dozen years after Nichols' profile had appeared in print.

My own first encounter with Monk recordings probably took place either during or just before my freshman year. That was a time when I was more obsessed with "the emancipation of the dissonance" than I was with the possibility that a search for better sounds might have been the motivation for that emancipation. Thus, I was more interested in the theoretical insights of Arnold Schoenberg and those who followed his path than I was in putting the scores off to the side and just concentrating on the listening experience. Put another way, I was spending so much time on the logic behind Monk's own approach to dissonance to appreciate that its fundamental impact was rhetorical.

These days the question is not whether or not dissonance has been emancipated but whether we, as listeners, have been emancipated from the theoretical thinking of the last century that subordinated the rhetorical to the logical. Thus emancipated, we can listen to Schoenberg and Monk as situated on the same "terrain" of musical discourse, just as (to draw upon another one of my examples) we can listen to Karlheinz Stockhausen and Ahmad Jamal. This reflects one of the lessons that Randy Weston took away from the experience of being Monk's student, which is, as Kelley put it, the need "to be wary of false distinctions between 'modern' and 'traditional.'" It's all music; and the experience always comes down to that same capacity for listening that, hopefully, we have built up since our first encounters with music.

A Reflective Practitioner of Jazz

Most of what I have written about the reflective practice of making or listening to music has drawn upon the classical repertoire, primarily because this repertoire was the source of the data in Donald Schön's field work in this domain. Last night, however, I had the pleasure of listening to a true Jazz Master (authenticated by the NEA), who provided excellent (and stimulating) examples of reflection-in-action with regard to both performance and listening. The Master is Ahmad Jamal; and, as I wrote in my Examiner.com review, he is a composer who, like Ornette Coleman, seems to have latched on to Karlheinz Stockhausen's "moment" style of composition and made it his own. Using this review to think through this hypothesis was great fun, but I still have to be honest about the fact that it was little more than hypothesis.

However, I happened to share this hypothesis with the guys sitting with my in my box in Herbst Theatre. One of them went backstage after the show, asked Jamal if he had been listening to Stockhausen, and reported back to me through electronic mail. His quote of Jamal's reply was:

Yeah, and I been listening to everybody

Jamal then added:

Lately, I've been mostly listening to myself.

I took this as an affirmation of Jamal's fundamentally reflective approach to his practices of both making and listening to music (including his own).

This adds further fuel to my fire that any "theory of listening to music" must be grounded in Schön's principle of reflection-in-action. We can only "elevate ourselves from the sensory experience of hearing to the more cognitive nature of listening," as I wrote on Friday, if we can tap into the reflective nature of what we hear. This is why I often try to identify autobiographical elements in compositions, even those works as abstract as the preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach and Dmitri Shostakovich. Jamal, too, was autobiographical in his decision to perform the fifty-year-old "Poinciana," the work that is probably still most closely associated with his name. However, as I wrote in my review, rather than reviving memories of his fifty-year-old recording, he approached the tune "in a far more deconstructed way." Here is how I explained that point while, at the same time, establishing his connection to Stockhausen's "moment" style:

By assuming that we all remember "how it used to go," he can now extract individual "moments" from the tune, putting each one under a microscope, so to speak, and examining it from a variety of different angles before moving on to another "moment."

Thus, last night's performance was a synthesis of reflective listening and reflective performance. Listening to himself was an important element, but just as important was that he had a good strategy for selecting his listening matter! Perhaps this new insight into Jamal's reflection-in-action will reflect back on my ongoing effort to listen to Coleman's Free Jazz session!