Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.
That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.
Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964
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I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake(in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)
Wobbly and splayed, this performance of the Jobim classic sounds more like a soundtrack for my life than the silky Getz/Gilberto original ever could.
Ran Blake, “The Girl From Ipanema”
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Stan Getz/Astrud Gilberto (with a very young Gary Burton on vibes), “The Girl From Ipanema” (1964 [charted at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100]; this is from the 1964 movie “Get Yourself A College Girl”)
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mail
The immediacy of the e-world never ceases to amaze. After posting yesterday’s clip, I sent Sam Newsome an email—I’d happened upon his e-address at his website—to let him know that his music was being featured here. A few hours later, this was in my e-mailbox: “Thanks, Richard. It looks like I’m in good company. Peace, S”
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reading table
On this Thanksgiving Day, here’s a favorite quote.
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.—Henry James
Yeah, the format might seem a little strange: soprano saxophone, unaccompanied. But Monk’s musical language—its tangy mix of geometric elegance and off-kilter bluesiness—is rarely spoken this eloquently.
Sam Newsome, Thelonious Monk Medley, live, 2008
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The clarity and logic of his [Thelonious Monk’s] work might have been compared with the craft of an architect. Each phrase, each fragment, each plump chord had its exact place in his musicial structure.—Mimi Clar (in Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original[2009])
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‘All jazz musicians are mathematicians unconsciously’ was a favorite theory of Monk’s.—Randy Weston (in Deborah Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace [2007])
While living in New York for a few months in the early 1970s (after my first year of college), I often heard Bill Evans at a place in Greenwich Village, the Top of the Gate, where, for the price of a beer, you could linger all night. Hunched over the piano, he looked at times as if he was about to fall inside and disappear.
Bill Evans, “My Foolish Heart,” live (TV broadcast), Sweden, 1964
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Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau: the list of piano players who wouldn’t sound the way they do but for Bill Evans, whose approach to harmony made him the most influential piano player in jazz since Bud Powell, goes on and on and on.
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The ‘open’ voicings that [Bill] Evans used [i.e., leaving out a chord’s root note] were not new . . . . They had been there in ‘classical’ music since the early part of the century, since Bartok and Stravinsky. But they were new to jazz, and they opened up melody and flow in new ways.—Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition(2d ed. 1983)
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Bill [Evans] had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.
—Miles Davis (in Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography [1989])
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.
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.
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])
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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.)
Thelonious Monk, “Epistrophy,” live (TV broadcast), Paris, 1966
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Thelonoius Monk, “’Round Midnight,” live (TV broadcast)
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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.
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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.
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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, 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
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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
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Since I didn’t seem to bewelcome 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])
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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
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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)
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[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)
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