The Penguin Jazz Guide (108 page)

This was by no means the end of the McLean story. He continued making records until the turn of 2000, returning to Blue Note towards the end of his life. Needless to say, all are listenable, even if none quite reaches the heights. This was one of the great jazz lives and stories and it’s celebrated here with nuance and grace.

& See also
New Soil
(1959; p. 238)

STEVE LACY
^&

Born Steven Lackritz, 23 July 1934, New York City; died 4 June 2004, Boston, Massachusetts

Soprano saxophone

Weal & Woe

Emanem 4004

Lacy; Steve Potts (as, ss); Irène Aëbi (v, vla, clo); Kent Carter (b); Oliver Johnson (d). August 1972, January 1973.

Emanem curator Martin Davidson remembers:
‘Lacy carried the solo tapes round Europe trying unsuccessfully to interest record labels. Their brilliant outrageousness inspired me to start one of my own. Unfortunately, Lacy’s subsequent playing was rarely as adventurous. The strident anti-war message of
The Woe
also managed to alienate other record labels.’

Anthony Braxton’s
For Alto
opened up for saxophone-players the possibility of solo, unaccompanied performance. The earlier half of
Weal & Woe
documents Lacy’s first-ever foray in the form, a solo soprano saxophone performance, made in the fine acoustic of a deconsecrated church/theatre in Avignon. Just four years after Braxton’s
tour de force
it is fascinating to hear Lacy take a very different course, sinuously melodic, less antagonistic in attack than Braxton but no less percussive and definite, and no less willing to superimpose different rhythmic shapes over a basic line.

The Woe
was Lacy’s powerful anti-war suite. It was recorded the night before the peace treaty with Vietnam was signed, with sound-effect cassettes of aerial and ground warfare playing in the studio in real time. Interestingly, this solitary performance of the piece wasn’t released for a further six years, as a Quark LP. Given that it is a studio recording, and even given the difficulty of balancing found sounds against the instruments, the sound isn’t altogether friendly to Aëbi in particular and some of the quieter saxophone passages are not well registered. However, nothing detracts from the power of the music. Other musicians, notably Billy Bang, registered horror and protest at events in South-East Asia, but the violinist’s Vietnam records were made long after the event. Lacy’s may have come on the last night of the war, but its horror and absurdity are more robustly signified in
The Woe
: a remarkable work.

& See also
The Straight Horn Of Steve Lacy
(1960; p. 260),
5 x Monk 5 x Lacy
(1994; p. 580)

WOODY SHAW

Born Herman Shaw II, 24 December 1944, Laurinburg, North Carolina; died 10 May 1989, New York City

Trumpet

Song Of Songs

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 1893-2

Shaw; Emmanuel Boyd (ts, f); Bennie Maupin, Ramon Morris (ts); George Cables (p); Henry Franklin (b); Woodrow Theus II (d). September 1972.

Pianist Mulgrew Miller said (1999):
‘You can always tell Woody. He used to combine major and minor thirds in the chord, plus other things that make him recognizable. It’s too quick to say he used “pentatonic” scales, or “fourths”. It’s subtler than that.’

Woody made his recording debut with Eric Dolphy at the age of 19 in what are usually thought of as the
Iron Man/Jitterbug Waltz
sessions. One reviewer was convinced that ‘Woody Sho’’ was a
nom de session
for Freddie Hubbard, inexplicably when you listen to his
Navarro- and Morgan-inspired attack and phrasing. It was Dolphy who taught Woody to play ‘inside and outside at the same time’, but it was listening to the classics that awakened a player with perfect pitch to the subtler nuances of harmony. Like all imaginative Americans, Woody was violently stretched between opposites and inexorably drawn to the things and the places that would destroy him. Europe drew him for all the usual non-musical reasons, but there is a sense, too, that Woody’s foreshortened career represented a sustained fugue from the racially constrained job description of the ‘jazz musician’.

Woody’s best-known composition was premiered on Larry Young’s Blue Note classic,
Unity
. His own version of ‘The Moontrane’ is on the Muse album of that name, and has been only irregularly available. Shaw was unlucky in his recording career, though he had a brief flurry in the ’80s which came too late to save him. A poor manager, permanently disorganized and suffering from
retinitis pigmentosa
, to which he was losing his sight, Shaw fell under a subway train in New York, perhaps deliberately.

Song Of Songs
was his second record as leader. Wonderful it is, but also undeniably timelocked, heavily dependent on George Cables’s electric piano effects; yet swinging and propulsive, and replete with Shaw’s characteristically shifting chromaticism. Woody’s four compositions are still not fully assimilated, and not many contemporary players would attempt something as sardonic as ‘The Goat And The Archer’. Redundant as it may be to make the point again, had Shaw been picked up by a sensitive label and producer at this point, afforded the players and the studio time his exacting concept demanded, then who knows what he might have achieved. As it is, this and
The Moontrane
were the best things he did until the brief starburst of the ’80s.

CHICK COREA
^&

Born Armando Anthony Corea, 12 June 1941, Chelsea, Massachusetts

Piano, keyboards

Light As A Feather

Verve 557115-2 2CD

Corea; Joe Farrell (ss, f); Stanley Clarke (b); Airto Moreira (d, perc); Flora Purim (v, perc). October 1972.

Flora Purim said (1989):
‘I met Chick at Walter Booker’s apartment and next day he asked me to sing “What Game Shall We Play Today”. A beautiful song.’

Corea recorded
Return To Forever
for ECM with the same personnel eight months earlier, and would subsequently use the name for his fusion group. The language was still jazz, though, even if the electric sound that came in with
Bitches Brew
and other records of the period is increasingly evident; Corea and Moreira had been involved with Miles’s electric evolution. Interestingly enough, the influence of Bud Powell (more formally acknowledged later) and, even more, Horace Silver is still obvious in these delicately swinging sessions.

Return To Forever
perturbed the bebop mafia, as Flora Purim explains. The arrival of 17-year-old Stanley Clarke was similar in impact – musically positive, critically negative – to that of the teenage Michael Henderson in Miles’s group. The inclusion of ‘Crystal Silence’ and ‘What Game Shall We Play Today?’ gave the LP some crossover appeal, but the jazz component was solid on ‘Return To Forever’ itself and the majestic climax of ‘Sometime Ago/La Fiesta’ with its abstract elements and flamenco tinges.
Return
wasn’t released in the US for some time, so
Light As A Feather
was effectively the group debut, and the first to use the band name.

Thistledown it may be in some regards, but it’s a perennial favourite. Repackaged with extra tracks from the sessions, including several versions of ‘What Game Shall We Play?’, it is still Chick’s most engagingly approachable record. The leader bounces joyously and
unselfconsciously throughout, transforming relatively simple themes like ‘500 Miles High’, ‘Captain Marvel’, and the ubiquitous ‘Spain’ and ‘Children’s Song’ into grand dancing processions. Purim’s vocalizing is a perfect complement to Farrell’s still underrated improvising, packed with quartal harmonies and unexpected note choices. Neville Potter’s lyrics to ‘You’re Everything’ would bring a tear to a glass eye, but Purim is most effective when following her own agenda on the title-track. An album almost impossible to dislike.

& See also
Tones For Joan’s Bones
(1966; p. 340),
Rendezvous In New York
(2001; p. 667)

DAVE HOLLAND
^&

Born 1 October 1946, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England

Double bass, cello

Conference Of The Birds

ECM 829373-2

Holland; Anthony Braxton, Sam Rivers (reeds, f); Barry Altschul (d, perc). November 1972.

Dave Holland says:
‘My first recording as a leader. The band consisted of three of the members of the Circle quartet that had recently disbanded, Anthony Braxton, Barry Altschul and myself. Barry and I had also been working with Sam Rivers. Some of the music had been written for Circle but not recorded; I added a few new compositions. We rehearsed and then performed two nights at Sam’s Studio Rivbea and the next day went into the studio and recorded the music in a five-hour session.’

In 1968, the 21-year-old Holland recorded
Karyobin
with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and
Filles De Kilimanjaro
with Miles Davis. Even given that most bassists have a wide and varied CV, this is a pretty broad musical spectrum to pack into a few months. Holland has been spoken of in the same breath as the legendary Scott LaFaro: he shares the American’s bright, exact intonation, incredible hand-speed and utter musicality. It isn’t fanciful to suggest that he is the finest bassist/composer since Charles Mingus and until the as yet untested likes of Adam Lane and Ben Allison came along.

If he had never made another record as leader,
Conference Of The Birds
would still stand out as a quiet masterpiece. The title-piece, marked out by Altschul’s marimba figures and the two reedmen interweaving basket-tight, was inspired by the morning chorus outside Holland’s London flat, not the Persian mystical poem. But mystical much of the music is; indivisible and almost impossible to render verbally. On flutes, Rivers and Braxton are hard to separate; on saxophones, much easier. Altschul is at his very best and Holland’s own part is subtly nuanced.

& See also
Extended Play
(2001; p. 671)

MARIAN MCPARTLAND

Born Margaret Marian Turner, 20 March 1918, Slough, Berkshire, England

Piano

Contrasts

Jazz Alliance TJA2-12044-2 2CD

McPartland; Jimmy McPartland (c, v); Vic Dickenson, Hank Berger (tb); Jack Maheu (cl); Buddy Tate (ts, bs); Michael Moore, Rusty Gilder (b); Gus Johnson, Larry Bell, Mike Berger, Joe Corsello (d). November 1972–June 1973.

Marian McPartland said (1992):
‘I started playing professionally in 1938 when a man called Billy Mayerl heard me play and asked me to join his touring group, which was a kind of novelty orchestra featuring four pianos! It was a bit of a change after studying at the Guildhall!’

Marian married trumpeter Jimmy McPartland in 1945 and moved to the US, working for a time as a soloist in Chicago but also working a long residency at New York’s Hickory House in the ’50s. She’s now best known for her long-running
Piano Jazz
recitals on PBS.

Marian’s lengthy discography begins in the early ’50s but she has been unjustly neglected by reissues as far as her music from that period is concerned. So we have to start in 1973, with the two discs we have previously listed as
A Sentimental Journey
and
Music Of Alec Wilder
. The former offers a lovely memento of two engagements by bands led by Jimmy, with Marian on piano and two entertaining front lines. Jack Maheu blends a spiralling virtuosity with Pee Wee-type licks, Tate is reliable (and picks up the baritone here and there), Dickenson is absolutely himself (his ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’ is priceless) and Jimmy leads with typical aplomb.

The Wilder programme is one of the great single-composer recitals and it should be far better known than it is. McPartland has been intensely involved in Alec Wilder’s difficult, bittersweet music for decades and she gets closer to the heart of it than any jazz player ever has. ‘Jazz Waltz For A Friend’, the first track, was written for her, and several of the other pieces have scarcely been touched by other improvisers. The five pieces with the lone support of Michael Moore are wonderfully lyrical and searching, and though the remaining five with Gilder and Corsello are a shade less involving, it is a memorable occasion. The only regret must be that she didn’t play Wilder’s unforgettable ‘Where Do You Go?’ at the date.

ALEXANDER VON SCHLIPPENBACH
^&

Born 7 April 1938, Berlin, Germany

Piano

Pakistani Pomade

Atavistic 240

Schlippenbach; Evan Parker (ss, ts); Paul Lovens (d). November 1972.

Evan Parker says:
‘It started as a working title – something with a special smell. Alex insisted on using it despite my PC protestations. I guess we all three knew that we had a chemistry that was working but I doubt we thought it would still be working 40 years later. Atoms, molecules and stable compounds … we learned to bottle the volatility.’