Deep, dark, deliberate: here’s a bass player who, like Sirone (yesterday) and Malachi Favors (9/8/09), doesn’t run away from his instrument’s distinctive qualities. He revels in them.
William Parker, live, New York, 2009
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Want more? Here.
Here’s bassist/composer Sirone (AKA Norris Jones), who passed away last month (10/22) at the age of 69. The list of musicians he played with is long and deep—John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Dewey Redman, Cecil Taylor, et al. He was a member of the Revolutionary Ensemble, the critically acclaimed trio that also included violinist Leroy Jenkins.
This quartet performance, from last year, features an unusual mix of instruments: tenor saxophone, drums, bass, cello. How deeply felt is this music? Look at the smiles Sirone and cellist Nioka Workman exchange toward the end (8:35 and following).
Project L’Afrique Garde (with Sirone [bass], Nioka Workman [cello], Michael Wimberly [drums and percussion], Abdoulaye N’Diaye [tenor saxophone]), live, New York, 2008
For much of his life he wrestled with inner demons. Hospitalized repeatedly, he was treated with ECT (electroshock). But when he was seated at the piano, his fingers moved across the keyboard with the grace and elegance of a ballet dancer.
Bud Powell, “Anthropology,” live, Denmark (Copenhagen), 1962
**********
lagniappe
Bill Evans on Bud Powell
He was so expressive, such emotion flowed out of him! There are different kinds of emotion: there is the easy, superficial kind, and there is another kind, that doesn’t make you laugh or cry, that doesn’t make you feel anything but a sense of sheer perfection. It’s a feeling we sometimes get with Beethoven. . . . It’s not that it’s beautiful in the sense of pretty or brilliant, it’s something else, something much deeper. . . . If I had to choose one single musician for his artistic integrity, for the grandeur of his work, it would be Bud Powell. He was in a class by himself.—Bill Evans (in Francis Paudras, Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell [1986])
*****
Sonny Rollins on Bud Powell
(The way Sonny, trying to describe Bud’s playing, shakes his head—first at around 1:35, then again at around 3:30—says more than any words could.)
Here is the onliest Thelonious.
Thelonious Monk, “Epistrophy,” live (TV broadcast), Paris, 1966
*****
Thelonoius Monk, “’Round Midnight,” live (TV broadcast)
*****
You can tell a lot about Monk’s music—about the centrality of dance, about the interplay between melody and rhythm, about the way a melody’s irregular accents override the pulse (making the dance melodic)—just by watching, in the second performance, the way his right foot moves.
**********
lagniappe
He played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to be.
***
You had to see Monk to hear his music properly. The most important instrument in the group—whatever the format—was his body.
—Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1996)
Here’s more from the city where concert halls are made of asphalt.
Rebirth Brass Band, live, New Orleans, 2008
Here, just weeks before his own passing (from complications relating to lung cancer), Leroy Jenkins performs at a memorial service for saxophonist Dewey Redman.
Leroy Jenkins, live, New York (St. Peter’s Lutheran Church), 2007
**********
lagniappe
Regardless of where I go classically or whatever it is, I always try to maintain that Chicago blues thing. When I came up as a kid, I didn’t hear Mozart. I was hearing Louis Jordan and Billy Eckstine and B.B. King and Duke Ellington, jazz guys like that. That was what I was listening to. So I was fortunate in that way, being in a big city, seeing these people all the time, going to the Regal Theatre in Chicago. I saw ’em all, plus a movie!—Leroy Jenkins
*****
Since I didn’t seem to be welcome with so-called Jazz, I thought I would deal with ‘new music’ . . . . I don’t mind the labels; they can put the labels one right after the other, if it will get me work.—Leroy Jenkins (in George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music [2008])
*****
Talking to him [Leroy Jenkins], you forgot after awhile that jazz and classical music had ever had their differences, he flowed between them with such fluid ease.—Kyle Gann
*****
A dignified man so diminutive that he makes a violin appear large, [Leroy] Jenkins focused the listener’s attention not on what was absent—other musicians, multiple lines, an expansive tonal range—but on what was present. . . .
He began most of . . . [his pieces] with a simple melodic statement that sang. Then he would veer off into gradually accelerating repetitions of two-, three-, and four-note patterns. Unlike a horn player, he never had to stop for breath, so these patterns could go on and on. Out of them would emerge long, winding bursts of melody, like swallows taking flight through a swarm of bees. . . .
A master colorist, Jenkins called forth a seemingly limitless array of sounds, from singing to fluttering to stinging to rasping to wheezing. But what was even more impressive that the variety and virtuosity of his playing was its logic and coherence. . . .
Jenkins’ HotHouse set readily calls to mind Richard Goode’s magnificent recent performance at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall of five Beethoven piano sonatas. Neither musician spoke a word to the audience, but neither seemed remote. Both played so wholeheartedly that they virtually disappeared in the music. Both are virtuosos who put their virtuosity entirely at the service of the music, never exploiting it simply for effect. Both played music that often pitted a coming-apart-at-the-seams emotional intensity against an ultimately prevailing clarity and order. Perhaps one day, solo jazz concerts of the caliber of Jenkins’ will be met with the same degree of anticipation and excitement that performances of Beethoven piano sonatas by artists such as Goode typically receive today.— “Flying Solo” (review of Leroy Jenkins, solo performance, HotHouse, 10/21/1994), Chicago Reader, 10/28/1994 (yeah, I’m cannibalizing myself here)
*****
[After Jenkins died a] private service was held in . . . [his] adopted New York City, at the Judson Church on West 4th and Thompson. . . . Various forms of appreciation, spoken, danced, and played, came from Muhal Richard Abrams, Alvin Singleton, Henry Threadgill . . . Jerome Cooper, Anthony Braxton . . . and Joseph Jarman. The attendees at the service, from Ornette Coleman to ‘Blue’ Gene Tyrany, reflected a complex multiethnic crosscut of the New York experimental music scene, and Leroy’s lifelong embodiment of those ideals.
Someone who was at Leroy’s bedside the night before his passing told me that at one point, he suddenly awakened and announced to everyone what he wanted at his memorial: ‘Improvisation . . . and white horses.’ He paused for effect. Then, seeing a group of quizzical faces, he added, laughing, ‘Just kidding.’
Later, he awoke again and exclaimed, ‘Well, I’m ready to go—where are the horses?’—George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008)
How to be both solid and fluid, both fat and delicate. How to make the beat breathe. These are things that, as a child, Philly Joe Jones began to learn while dancing—tap-dancing. Just watch the way Thelonious Monk, listening to this solo, rocks back and forth (1:25-1:50), as if he’s about to break into a little dance himself.
Philly Joe Jones, live (with Thelonious Monk), 1959
**********
lagniappe
He [Philly Joe Jones] breathed our history as/his walking beat . . . . The Man/So Hip/A City/Took/His/Name.—Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones, in Eulogies [1996])
Here the World Saxophone Quartet brings it all back home, performing in the high school gymnasium in Lovejoy (AKA Brooklyn), Illinois, a little town (with an interesting history) near St. Louis, where baritone sax player Hamiet Bluiett, now in his 60s, grew up. (If you have time for only one of these clips, check out Part 3, where everyone, including the kids, gets down with the O’Jays’ “For The Love Of Money.”)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
*****
For another take on the first of these pieces (“Hattie Wall”)—this one featuring Bill T. Jones, dancer/choreographer extraodinaire—go here.
Delicacy and drive: they aren’t often found in equal measure. They are here.
Don Pullen & the African-Brazilian Connection, “El Matador,” live, Japan, 1992
**********
lagniappe
All the music you’ve ever heard in your life is somewhere in your head.—Don Pullen
The other night, when I saw Sheila Jordan (9/28/09 post), she dedicated a number to Ella: “No one else could scat like that.”
Ella Fitzgerald, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” TV performance, 1974
(One of the great things about music is that it gives you a chance to get to know some great people—like, for instance, Linda Van Dyke, reed player, teacher, person extraordinaire, who sent me this clip.)
music clip of the day 