The Penguin Jazz Guide (103 page)

This set brings together two contrasting recordings from rather earlier, reflecting a straight jazz approach and a freer element which he developed under Ornette’s influence. ‘Meet In Berlin’ is Zoller at his most heavyweight, with the folksy burr in his tone turned up to match Hancock’s electric accompaniment. ‘Gypsy Cry’ itself draws on folk sources and may be a response to the Hungarian rising of 1956; there is what sounds like an ironic quote from the Soviet anthem. ‘Wild Wild Wes’ is a straight tribute to Montgomery and Zoller at his most open and unshaded. These are records that have appealed to acid jazz DJs, with warm, danceable grooves (‘Sweet Hustler’) and some unexpectedly lateral chill-out moments amid the freer tracks.

WILD BILL DAVISON

Born 5 January 1906, Defiance, Ohio; died 14 November 1989, Santa Barbara, California

Cornet

Jazz On A Saturday Afternoon: Volumes 1 & 2

Jazzology 37 / 38

Davison; Wray Thomas (tb); Herman Foretich (cl); Ernie Carson (p, c); Mike Hein (d). June 1970.

Wild Bill Davison said (1983):
‘I’ve been told I have to give up the hooch, so these days I try to get everyone else to do my share as well. Exactly like running a jazz band!’

The man from Defiance always sounded as if he’d slung the town sign round his neck. His cornet-playing was a delightful mixture of high, lyrical phrases and challenging growls, with a very distinctive terminal shake on specific cadences. An independently minded man and musician, he never sounded comfortable as a Condonite, and belonged instead to a fraternity of footloose jazz men happy to criss-cross the country, playing wherever there was a spot.

The title of one Jazzology disc,
Just A Gig
, may reveal more than intended, because Bill would roll up pretty much anywhere he could play and was keen to record as often as there was a tape to hand. Obviously, as age and fame mounted, that got easier, even if he didn’t. The 1976 with-strings date
Sweet And Lovely
is the sound of a man spitting on an expensive, immaculately woven carpet. The Atlanta Jazz Society invited him over for a blow in the summer of 1970. Bill rolled up, found the boys could play some and let rip one of his very best dates of the period. It’s not an adventurous programme, but the playing is top notch and the local fellows seem elevated by Bill’s presence. Carson even gets out his own cornet and joins in on ‘Royal Garden Blues’. Along with ‘Big Butter And Egg Man’, it’s the pick of the
Volume 1
tracks, with ‘Jazz Me Blues’ making a strong opening to the second set. This is jazz at the pointed end of the music, raw, unglamorous, local but with the excitement of a distinguished visitor putting everyone on his mettle. It’s great.

JOE ZAWINUL
^&

Born 7 July 1932, Vienna, Austria; died 11 September 2007, Vienna, Austria

Piano, keyboards

Zawinul

Sony 81375

Zawinul; Jimmy Owens, Woody Shaw (t); Wayne Shorter, Earl Turbinton (ss); George Davis, Hubert Laws (f); Herbie Hancock (p); Walter Booker, Miroslav Vitous (b); Joe Chambers, Billy Hart, David Lee (d); Jack DeJohnette (hca, perc). 1970.

Joe Zawinul said (1995):
‘I make melodies in the bass. That’s where it is with me. I have a ****ing killer left hand.’

Perhaps the key thing about Joe Zawinul is that he started out as an accordion-player. It allowed him, when he came to piano, to swap hands and let the real melodic action happen in a place where normally one would expect to hear nothing but comping. Almost all the great Weather Report lines were great bass lines. Zawinul grew up in a working class area and retained a tough, street kid’s demeanour which makes a nonsense of attempts to portray Weather Report’s music as cerebral or ethereal. After working with Hans Koller he came to America and studied at Berklee. He worked with Dinah Washington, Maynard Ferguson and Cannonball Adderley; you can just glimpse him in the Clint Eastwood movie
Play Misty for Me
, already playing the electric keyboards he made his own and which brought him to the attention of Miles Davis. ‘In A Silent Way’ was a Zawinul composition and he was very much a component of Miles’s electric evolution, bringing what the trumpeter recognized as a different rhythmic sense to the music.

One hears something of that on the earliest records Zawinul made in the US. Even generic soul jazz on
Money In The Pocket
and early ‘world music’/crossover material on
The Rise And Fall Of The Third Stream
(now available as a twofer) sound different in Zawinul’s hands. His attack is unlike anyone else’s and this allowed him to invest electric keyboards – particularly analog instruments – with real personality and expressive power.

The eponymous Atlantic album with its haunting sepia cover – a huge close-up of Zawinul’s sombre face – was made the year that Weather Report was formed and a year after Zawinul took part in the
In A Silent Way
sessions.
Zawinul
is a beautiful record. Subtitled
‘Music for two electric pianos, jazz flute, trumpet, soprano saxophone, two contrabasses and percussion’, it nods in the direction of his conservatory past almost as much as it anticipates the experiments in fusion music. Woody Shaw’s echoplexed trumpet strongly recalls Miles (who contributes a liner-note) but, with Vitous handling one of the bass parts and Shorter replacing the little-known Turbinton on ‘Double Image’, the original Weather Report is already in place.
I Sing The Body Electric
, the group’s second disc, was to include a live-in-Japan version of ‘Doctor Honoris Causa’, a piece with a complex history but here presented as a tribute to Zawinul’s keyboard twin, Dr Herbie Hancock. Here it gets a much more measured reading, less frenetic and intense, more floating and indefinite, as in ‘His Last Journey’, where the electric piano’s ability to imitate tolling bells (another Weather Report favourite) is exploited to great effect. Not just because Shorter is present, ‘Double Image’ is the track that most clearly points forward. The brief ‘Arrival In New York’ is an aural impression of the immigrant wharves; not far removed from Mingus’s ‘Foggy Day’ on
Pithecanthropus Erectus
, it underlines an interest in pure sound, ‘human sound’ as Zawinul would have put it. The next decade would see him take a giant step in that direction.

& See also
Di-a-lects
(1986; p. 503);
WEATHER REPORT, Mysterious Traveller
(1974; p. 408)

THE ’70s:

A curious decade in jazz. The music wasn’t much valued by the industry, as far as new recordings and young artists were concerned, and many of them had to make a sidestep into jazz-rock, and from there onto the slippery slope that led to the dreaded ‘fusion’, pop-jazz and ultimately light jazz, which casts no light whatsoever. However, some of the greatest stars of jazz lived and worked on into the ’70s: Louis Armstrong (just), Duke Ellington (a curtain call), Miles Davis (problematically), Count Basie, Sonny Rollins, Oscar Peterson and enough others to clinch it as the music of the long haul rather than shooting-star brevity of a pop career. A whole phalanx of mainstream giants spent the decade touring on Norman Granz’s Jazz At The Philharmonic ticket. These musicians had enough momentum and sheer charisma to survive the industry’s indifference, and in turn they gave work to the younger and up-and-coming.

There were other energies at work, and for the first time the centre of gravity seemed to tilt away from the United States and towards Europe. For a start, there was a substantial population of American musicians living in exile in France and Scandinavia. During the course of the decade, the impetus of jazz recording switched (it’s a hefty generalization, but check the provenance of what follows) from large American labels to independent European imprints. ECM was established in 1969, the Black Saint/Soul Note axis followed in Italy, hat ART soon came along in Switzerland (originally as a means of recording multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee), while in France Black & Blue provided much-needed recording exposure for mainstreamers, visiting Ellingtonians and blues men.

The emphasis of many of these labels was refreshingly innovative rather than conservative. In time, ECM established its own culture, a style of music that embraced European modern classicism as much as it did bebop-derived jazz. It also provided an outlet for other, regional aesthetics, and one began to find different vernacular elements creeping into the music, most notably in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe and Russia (which still laboured under Communist domination), but also in the UK, where in parallel a new improvising aesthetic was emerging.

Towards the end of the previous decade, a very specific cohort of British jazz musicians made a rapid evolution out of ‘free jazz’ (though some denied the term any validity) and towards ‘free music’ or ‘free improvisation’ (which conservative critics were inclined to think had nothing whatever to do with jazz, or more extremely nothing to do with music; the more articulate splutterers were apt to reach for Robert Frost’s line about playing tennis with the net down). Though initially this new music was very much restricted to a small audience of London club goers (though that suggests a kind of hedonism that didn’t play much part in the free-music scene), it was extensively documented by small labels and its legacy and influence have been disproportionate. Almost all the senior figures on that scene – guitarist Derek Bailey, saxophonist Evan Parker, trombonist Paul Rutherford, percussionists John Stevens and Eddie Prévost – were to be internationally recognized, which is as much as to say they worked a great deal more often abroad than at home, establishing a powerful improvising network on continental Europe and subsequently with American improvisers (particularly Chicagoans). For the moment, though, and despite the welcome anomaly of major label attention (actually the attention of individuals working at major labels) for the likes of percussionist Tony Oxley and pianist Howard Riley (see 1966–1970, above), the records made by these musicians and like-minded visitors such as saxophonist Steve Lacy remained the preserve of a small coterie of enthusiasts and writers.

Sharing many of the same personnel, but energized by a group of South African exiles in London, a new and vigorous post-bop style also prevailed in Britain, its excitements still
unparalleled, though such opinions are sceptically received by those who weren’t there. London is a different kind of melting-pot to New York and has a different kind of colonial history to negotiate, but its fusion of styles – ‘fusion’ became a bad word, but in its precise meaning, it’s the only one that fits – is still not given due prominence in the histories of modern jazz.

There were some mostly unwelcome new sounds in the jazz of the ’70s. The electric bass became ubiquitous for a while, though some of the finest double bassists – Ron Carter, Bob Cranshaw, Dave Holland – managed to make a convincing noise with an amplified instrument. Electric keyboards also became the norm, though here the difficulty of articulating with a recognizably individual ‘touch’ meant that the sound of one Fender Rhodes being played was much like the sound of any other. Drummers were more inclined than before to play a steady backbeat, even when the horn-players were improvising quite freely and there was a widening gulf between innovators like Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea (in the US) or Ian Carr and Nucleus, or Soft Machine, in the UK, and the army of epigones who found ‘jazz-rock’ easier to play and more likely to drum up an audience than bebop.

Anyone prepared to dismiss the ’70s as a lost era in jazz should be aware of how much of the jazz recording of the period has been eclipsed. The output of the Muse label – formed in 1972 by Joe Fields, later with Don Schlitten – has not been securely available since, despite various attempts at reissue. Similarly with Schlitten’s Xanadu imprint, which did steady service in documenting post-bop and mainstream music, but which is, for the moment at least, locked away on ageing LP stock and known only to collectors of a certain age.

The only significant (or was it?) technical development of the time as far as music carriers were concerned turned out to be the ugliest and least resilient of all. When the
Penguin Guide
was first published, we were required to review a certain amount of music on ‘cassette’, a medium that robbed the music of any nuance, buried it in hiss, ‘wow’ and ‘flutter’ (how perversely nostalgic the words now seem!) and unwound in black, shining skeins if one looked askance at it. Cassettes were only useful for listening in the car, though the simultaneous availability of cheap, portable recording equipment meant that enthusiasts were soon making their own C-90s – private-use bootlegs – with hand-held equipment that could be secreted under a club table. A surreptitious expression and a dim red light through the tablecloth were the giveaways. This, though, goes somewhat ahead of the story, to an era when ‘personal’ listening went a step beyond ‘home’ listening, evolving in a generation from the Walkman to the seemingly Alexandrian iPod, on which unimaginable quantities of music can be stored. But not listened to with pleasure, given the compression.

All this, in a gallant attempt to suggest that if the ’70s seem like a bleak time for jazz, there were bright patches, signs of innovative continuity and still, despite it all, some vestige of quality control in audio fidelity. It may have been a silver age, but it was not yet leaden and there are some genuinely remarkable survivals and debuts …

Part 1:
1971–1975

DEREK BAILEY
^&

Born 29 January 1930, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England; died 25 December 2005, London