The Penguin Jazz Guide (106 page)

Much of the drama on
Edge Of Time
comes from that crystalline voice swooping in and out of the winds. The title-track begins slow and abstractly, almost as if caught out of time itself and then the
rubato
begins to organize itself until the song runs along a big-band line that would satisfy Duke Ellington. The big piece of the album is the joyous and forthright ‘Enjoy This Day’, where subtle dissonance brings a hint of anxiety, almost foreboding, to an otherwise upbeat tune; Kenny Wheeler’s solo is superb, a foretaste of Azimuth’s sometimes uncanny empathy; Taylor’s harmonic awareness is evident throughout. In contrast, ‘Erebus, Son Of Chaos’ ought to be dark and brooding, but comes across as rather jolly. The only weak point is the brief ‘Songs For A Child’, though this pure-voice balladry has influenced some surprising artists since 1971.

EARL HINES
^&

Known as ‘Fatha’; born 28 December 1903, Duquesne, Pennsylvania; died 22 April 1983, Oakland, California

Piano

Earl Hines Plays Duke Ellington

New World NW 361/2 2CD

Hines (p solo). December 1971–April 1975.

Earl Hines said (1977):
‘Duke wrote good, but I still think I’m a prettier piano player.’

Made over a period of four years, these are much more than casual one-giant-nods-to-another records. Hines was cajoled by Stanley Dance into looking into many unfamiliar Ellington tunes and creating a memorial (Ellington died around the time of the final sessions) which is surely among the best tributes to the composer on record. Since Hines’s more aristocratic touches are close in feeling to Ellington’s own, there is an immediate affinity in such pieces as ‘Love You Madly’ and ‘Black And Tan Fantasy’. But Hines finds a wealth of new incident in warhorses such as ‘Mood Indigo’ and ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and he
turns ‘The Shepherd’ and ‘Black Butterfly’ into extravagant fantasies which go far beyond any of Ellington’s own revisionist approaches. Even a simple piece such as ‘C Jam Blues’ receives a fascinating, rhythmic treatment, and the voicings conjured up for ‘I’m Beginning To See The Light’ upset conventional wisdom about Ellingtonian interpretation. In his variety of resource, Hines also points up all the devices he passed on to Powell, Monk and virtually every other post-swing pianist. A memorable lesson, and a fine tribute to two great piano-players, spread over two hours of music. A second volume loses pace and interest, but Hines collectors will surely want both.

& See also
Earl Hines Collection: Piano Solos 1928–1940
(1928–1940; p. 34)

ARCHIE SHEPP
^&

Born 24 May 1937, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Tenor, soprano and alto saxophones, piano

Attica Blues

Verve 654414

Shepp; Roy Burrowes, Michael Ridley, Charles McGhee (t); Cal Massey (flhn); Clifford Thornton (c); Charles Stephens, Kiane Zawadi, Charles Greenlee (tb); Hakim Jami (euph); Marion Brown (as, fl, perc); Clarence White (as); Bill Robinson, Roland Alexander (ts); James Ware (bs); Dave Burrell, Walter Davis Jr (p); Cornell Dupree (g); Leroy Jenkins, John Blake, L. Shankar (vn); Ronald Lipscomb, Calo Scott (clo); Gerald Jemmott, Roland Wilson, Jimmy Garrison (b); Beaver Harris (d); Ollie Anderson, Jumma Santos, Nene DeFense (perc); Henry Hull (as Carl Hall), Joshie Armstead, Albertine Robinson, Joe Lee Wilson, Waheeda Massey (v); William Kunstler, Bartholomew Gray (narration). January 1972.

Archie Shepp said (1982):
‘Coming from where I do, and with the background I have, there were times when I thought I should be working as a lawyer, expressing social engagement in some more direct and practical way, but you see the fallacy of that: the idea that the one is practical and useful, and the other not?’

Shepp’s other Impulse! records after
Four For Trane
have always been admired:
Mama Too Tight
,
The Way Ahead
; as has
Yasmina, A Black Woman
, which was released in France. Comparatively neglected is
Attica Blues.
Often characterized – unheard – as a Mingus-like scream of rage against the authorities who bloodily quelled America’s most infamous prison riot, this is actually a much subtler record than that, and that might perversely be why it has dropped from sight for so long. Shepp alternates slow mournful ballads with funkier numbers that reflect things going on elsewhere in black music, and while this isn’t
On The Corner
, it’s certainly closer to that aesthetic than anything he attempted in the previous decade. ‘Steam’ became a regular item in his later sets; sung here by Joe Lee Wilson, it has a curiously archaic quality, a sign perhaps that Shepp was turning his back on the scorched-earth radicalism of the ’60s. The more explicit agendas are articulated by civil rights attorney Kunstler but the more effective vocal elements are more oblique, like Cal Massey’s daughter’s touching delivery on ‘Quiet Dawn’. A great album, long overlooked.

& See also
Four For Trane
(1964; p. 306),
Looking At Bird
(1980; p. 456)

MCCOY TYNER
^&

Born Alfred McCoy Tyner, 11 December 1938, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; also briefly known as Sulaimon Saud

Piano, koto

Sahara

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 311

Tyner; Sonny Fortune (ss, as, f); Calvin Hill (b, perc); Alphonse Mouzon (d, t, f). January 1972.

McCoy Tyner said:
‘We were always talking about how jazz came out of the African experience and into the American experience. I tried to ask: “What does that actually
sound
like?” ’

After leaving Blue Note, Tyner’s career floundered for a time. His first release for Milestone (now reissued as an OJC) was a poll-winning record which established his course for the ’70s. Tyner had long been interested in non-Western musical traditions and in a percussive approach to the piano keyboard. On ‘Valley Of Life’ he deploys koto as more than a colour device, as elsewhere he was to show a facility on Appalachian dulcimer. Tyner has always chosen drummers of a particular, perhaps unexpected, type. Most recently, he has been working again with his townsman Eric Gravátt, whose early work, for Tyner and for Weather Report, can only be described as violent. Mouzon couldn’t have played the way he does here but for Elvin Jones, yet his choked cymbals and relentless emphasis of the beat are very different from Jones’s polyrhythmic swells. Anyone familiar with Mouzon’s fusion work of the period will be astonished by his performance here. Fortune plays with uproarious power and velocity, and his solo on ‘Rebirth’ is electrifying; but his is essentially a decorative role, while the pianist drives and dominates the music. The group acts as the opposing face to Cecil Taylor’s brand of energy music: controlled by harmonic and metrical ground-rules, nobody flies for freedom, but there is a compensating jubilation in the leader’s mighty utterance. ‘Sahara’ and ‘Ebony Queen’ best express that here, although the piano solo, ‘A Prayer For My Family’, is a useful oasis of calm. Later Tyner records would be better engineered and realized, but this one remains excitingly fresh and a record of lasting influence.

& See also
The Real McCoy
(1967; p. 343),
Soliloquy
(1991; p. 548)

PAT MARTINO

Born Pat Azzara, 25 August 1944, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Guitar

Footprints

Savoy Jazz 17252

Martino; Bobby Rose (g); Richard Davis (b); Billy Higgins (d). March 1972.

Pat Martino said (1999):
‘
Footprints
paid tribute to the influence of Wes Montgomery. I played things that made me think of him, I suppose, and thinking about what he did, rather than just copying the octaves thing, was important to the way my music came together. It’s quite undefinable, but very real.’

The title of Pat Martino’s 2006 album
Remember
has to be considered ironic. Though it refers to the legacy of Wes Montgomery, it also offers a reminder that after 1980 Martino had to relearn guitar-playing after suffering an aneurysm and having life-saving surgery. He did so largely by listening to his own old recordings. He’d spent considerable time in earlier years working with organ trios and in soul-jazz, but his solo work was markedly original, indebted, but not in thrall, to Montgomery. Playing
Footprints
up against the 2006 record doesn’t really help establish a clear comparison between ‘early’ and ‘later’ styles. Martino has always been quite an advanced musical thinker, with an interest in Stockhausen and in forms of fusion. His 1970 album
Desperado
found him on 12-string electric in a situation somewhat reminiscent of Tony Williams’s Lifetime; by no means an aberration, for all the records flirt in some way with unconventional forms.

Of the tracks on
Footprints
only ‘Road Song’ is directly associated with Wes, but one
can readily imagine him being attracted to the Wayne Shorter title-piece, with its aery blues aura and almost other-worldly quality. Martino rarely plays like Wes, and actually uses octaves only quite sparingly, but the older guitarist’s spirit does seem to hover round tracks like ‘What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life?’, ‘Insensatez’ and even the opening ‘The Visit’, the only Martino original. The band is wonderful, of course, but it’s the leader’s crisp, easy playing that makes the record, which isn’t just a good jazz guitar disc and not just a good Wes Montgomery tribute but an ideal example of how an artist can be creative by thinking about the example of a predecessor rather than simply copying his trademark songs and devices.

LONDON JAZZ COMPOSERS’ ORCHESTRA
^&

Founded 1970

Ensemble

Ode

Intakt CD 041 2CD

Barry Guy (b, leader); Harry Beckett, Dave Holdsworth (t); Marc Charig (c); Mike Gibbs, Paul Nieman, Paul Rutherford (tb); Dick Hart (tba); Trevor Watts (as, ss); Mike Osborne, Bernard Living (as); Alan Wakeman, Evan Parker (ts, ss); Bob Downes (ts, b); Karl Jenkins (bs, ob); Howard Riley (p); Derek Bailey (g); Jeff Clyne, Chris Laurence (b); Tony Oxley (perc); Buxton Orr (cond). April 1972.

LJCO founder Barry Guy says:
‘
Ode
was the start of a life’s journey. The musicians ranged over the jazz spectrum, so the composition had to embrace individual creative spirits whilst offering a cohesive compositional strategy. Its success is testimony to the Herculean efforts of conductor Buxton Orr, who managed to convince sceptical musicians that a complex score could sit comfortably with open improvisation.’

Barry Guy’s seminal ensemble of new-music and free-improvisation figures has followed a fascinating trajectory through several quite different musical philosophies. After the recording of
Ode
, for instance, Guy tried to introduce some more composed pieces, which caused friction with the free improvisers, who regarded this as bad faith. The orchestra’s subsequent history has taken in both composed and free elements, works by other hands and a variety of idioms. Modelled somewhat on American trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler’s Jazz Composers Orchestra, LJCO has proved to be more durable and creatively more than just an umbrella organization for progressive players.

It rests squarely on the vision of a leader who, in an age of hyper-specialization and stylistic antagonism, has managed to draw strength and inspiration from across a vast musical spectrum: improvisation, atonal composition, baroque music, jazz.
Ode
was Guy’s attempt to integrate improvisation within the textures and dimensions of orchestral music. Conductor Buxton Orr was his composition professor. It is a grand success and remains a key text in contemporary improvisation on a large scale.
Ode
has been repeatedly referred to as a manifesto, and as a beginning to a long process of exploration. With a quarter-century’s hindsight there is nothing tentative, polemical or ideological about it. Guy’s conviction that the individual capacities of improvised music had been developed disproportionately better than those of ensemble playing is best reinforced here by his triumphant solution to the problem. It’s not longhair or Third Stream music. The horns play with bite, the rhythm section keeps the music highly elastic and there are enough passages of roaring big-band music to keep an adventurous Kenton fan on the edge of his seat. Arguably better, arguably more ambitious and more finished works were to follow, but
Ode
has a great historical significance.

& See also
BARRY GUY, Study – Witch Gong Game II/10
(1994; p. 579),
Odyssey
(1999; p. 644)

AL HIBBLER
^&

Born 16 August 1915, Tyro, Mississippi; died 24 April 2001, Chicago, Illinois

Voice

A Meeting Of The Times

Warner Brothers 81227-3689-2

Hibbler; Rahsaan Roland Kirk (ts, manzello, stritch, cl, f); Hank Jones, Lonnie Liston Smith (p); Ron Carter, Major Holley (b); Oliver Jackson, Charles Crosby (d); Leon Thomas (v). March 1972, September 1966.