The Penguin Jazz Guide (121 page)

Pianist Pule Pheto is an often forgotten connecting figure between Moholo’s earlier and later work, a fine rhythmic player with his own idiosyncratic harmonic language. He made a fine piano/drums duet record with Moholo but also appears on the early
Bush Fire!
and returns on
Bra Louis – Bra Tebs
, which is now reissued with the earlier
Spirits Rejoice!
It’s an invigorating pairing, showing how Moholo’s music continued to evolve from the free interpretations of township jazz on the first disc to something much more sophisticated, but still darkly funky, on the second. There’s some relatively straight-ahead stuff on ‘Amaxesha Osizi’ but Dyani’s ‘Ithi-gqi’ belies its glorious sauntering line with a fearsome line from Parker. Mongezi Feza’s ‘You Ain’t Gonna Know Me, ’Cos You Think You Know Me’ is a tender reminiscence of the departed trumpeter’s brilliance. It ends on a traditional ‘Wedding Hymn’. On the later record, Deppa, Yarde and Delius aren’t yet players with the range and subtlety of their seniors, but they play with admirable concentration. The unifying factors are Moholo’s formidable metrics and elemental passion, one of the defining sounds of modern jazz.

& See also
BLUE NOTES, Live In South Africa, 1964
(1964; p. 315)

JACK DEJOHNETTE

Born 9 August 1942, Chicago, Illinois

Drums, percussion, piano

Special Edition

ECM 827694-2

DeJohnette; David Murray (ts, bcl); Arthur Blythe (as); Peter Warren (b, clo). March 1979.

Saxophonist and sometime duo partner John Surman says:
‘Jack has boundless curiosity. Every time I meet him to play he has some new piece of percussion equipment in his drum kit and is constantly working with drum and cymbal companies to change the sound of the instrument.’

What sets this extraordinary musician apart from the common run isn’t the sheer bulk of his output but its vivid musicality. Everything he does is marked with intelligence, controlled fire and an enviable instinct for both texture and form. An early album,
The DeJohnette Complex
, was recorded a mere month after his first studio date with Miles Davis, for whom he played on
Bitches Brew
, having played with Coltrane and Jackie McLean. DeJohnette studied classical piano as a child and is still a formidable keyboard-player, as witness his
Piano Album
. However, it is as a drummer that most listeners know him, and the same values apply there; his time sense is completely instinctive, but one feels him playing melodically rather than motorically or even metrically. The pulse is everything, but DeJohnette also has something of Sunny Murray’s ability to make the kit (which he varies to need) sound like a single instrument.

Remarkably,
Special Edition
was something like DeJohnette’s twelfth album, but for some reason – perhaps owing to the rather functional titles:
Album
,
Album
or
Piano Album
– they never seemed to establish a strong market presence. The group here could hardly have been bettered at the time: Black Arthur Blythe at his most soulful, David Murray in staggeringly good form on bass clarinet for the opening ‘One For Eric’. DeJohnette plays piano where needed, and on ‘Zoot Suite’ makes a great case for melodica as a convincing improviser’s instrument; it’s a delightful line and a perfect illustration of Jack’s ability to make a straight-four beat sound much richer and more complex. Coltrane’s ‘Central Park West’, on which the composer did not solo, gets a suitably quiet and almost elegiac treatment, Murray again superb on bass clarinet. ‘Journey To The Twin Planet’ is a freely improvised piece round a basic freebop idea, but it also points forward to DeJohnette’s spiritual music of the ’90s and ’00s, by which time it had lost its rough exterior, but also much of its affirmative energy. Make no mistake, this is a great jazz record, not merely a Buggins’ turn for the drummer.

SAL MOSCA

Born 27 April 1927, Mount Vernon, New York; died 28 July 2007, White Plains, New York

Piano

A Concert

Jazz Records JR-8

Mosca (p solo). June 1979.

Sal Mosca said (1982):
‘Lennie [Tristano] was also pushing [Svatislav] Richter records at me. He dug Richter. I liked a more romantic sound, like [Vladimir] Horowitz. I heard this one Horowitz record, playing Mozart, and it sounded like Harlem stride! He used to go see Tatum – Horowitz, that is, not Mozart! – did you know that?’

In keeping with the Tristano spirit, Mosca shunned the limelight and regarded jazz as a spiritual avocation rather than a day-job. Having studied with the master for nearly a decade, Mosca became in turn a devoted teacher, just another thing that kept him away from the clubs, though he did briefly play with Charlie Parker and other first-generation beboppers. Like Glenn Gould, he preferred the hermetic atmosphere of the recording studio, though he declined most contractual blandishments. This monastic existence denied the world a fleet, accurate, complex player, whose solos were far from without feeling.

Belatedly released in 1990,
A Concert
is a rare example of one of the leading followers of Lennie Tristano in a solo situation, and in front of an enthusiastic audience who clearly
share a sense of occasion. Because Mosca has made so few recordings, his appearances always seem eventful and, despite the dour atmosphere of the CD – which settles for the grimmest monochrome packaging and presentation, a characteristic refusal to distract from the music’s inner qualities – it is played electrically. Though most of the tunes are ‘originals’, they usually follow the standard Tristano-ite practice of an abstruse variation on a standard. Mosca’s approach is formidably varied, both from piece to piece and within individual treatments. ‘Co-Play’, which starts as a relatively simple variation on ‘Sweet And Lovely’, becomes a labyrinthine investigation of the properties of the song, and ‘That Time’ turns ‘That Old Feeling’ into a fantasy on a number of kinds of jazz rhythm. Sometimes he plays it straight, but unexpectedly so: ‘Prelude To A Kiss’ has voicings more dense than in any authentic Ellington version. Always he is prodigiously inventive: while the music sometimes takes on a painstaking quality, Mosca’s spontaneity is genuine enough to pack the programme with surprises.

JEANNE LEE

Born 29 January 1939, New York City; died 25 October 2000, Tijuana, Mexico

Voice

Freedom Of The Universe

Birth LP 030

Lee; Gunter Hampel (bcl, vib, etc). 1979.

Gunter Hampel says:
‘In 1980, Jeanne and I had a duo concert in East Berlin: a huge, excited audience – encores. Our children Ruomi and Cavana played hide and seek with their favourite
Muppet Show
guest artist Dizzy Gillespie in the dressing room. When we left the stage to make room for Dizzy‘s band he smilingly blocked our way and said: “You are continuing
our music
beyond our
horizons
!” He then hugged us, blew a fanfare, and talked so long he almost forgot he had his own concert to do.’

Lee was a dance student at Bard College when she met pianist Ran Blake and formed a duo partnership with him. Their 1961 record
The Newest Sound Around
, mostly recorded in slow rhythms, documents her very accurate singing and boldness with a lyric, but was perhaps more important to Blake’s development as a composer fascinated by hymn tunes, movie music and the Third Stream. Lee married the German multi-instrumentalist Gunter Hampel and made many records with him, starting with a key 1969 performance that also involved Anthony Braxton.

The duo record, made in Woodstock and New York, is the high-point of their creative relationship. They did not perform songs, as such, but what might almost be esperantist messages from another civilization, little snatches of ethereal grace. Hampel’s musicianship is entirely
sui generis
and as such considerably underrated, but it is Lee’s unique voice, floating almost magically up and down the scale, in and out of focus as far as strict semantic logic is concerned, that makes this record and indeed any that involved her, so special. So little of her work survives in commercial form that a major reassessment is now long overdue.

RAYMOND BURKE

Born 6 June 1904, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 21 March 1986, New Orleans, Louisiana

Clarinet

Raymond Burke And Cie Frazier With Butch Thompson In New Orleans

504 CDS 27

Burke; Butch Thompson (p); Cie Frazier (d). August 1979.

Dr Sal Bridger met Raymond Burke before his death and quoted him as saying:
‘Grew up in N’Orleans, had my place here, my friends and my clarinet. Never felt any need to go work in Chicago, any place like that.’

Burke played home-made instruments as a boy, and worked in New Orleans for most of his life, through revivalism and beyond. His clarinet-playing stands squarely in the line of the New Orleans masters: he had the sweet-toned delivery of Willie Humphrey but could be as elaborate and blues-inflected as Johnny Dodds when he wished. An American Music issue of Burke’s Speakeasy Boys and other personnels is really for scholars only. Most of the tracks come from 1949 acetates (they turned up in a New Orleans flea market in 1993) by a band from which Burke stands out; Wooden Joe Nicholas is weak and Joe Avery’s trombone is so inept even the liner-notes describe his sound as ‘ratty’. The loudest person in these terrible transfers is guitarist Johnny St Cyr! The other tracks are even more obscure: a couple of duets with pianist Woodrow Rousell, and a few things with the Hartman and Cass bands (personnels unknown).

Burke made it through the revivalist period and was still playing and playing well in his mid-70s. This 504 record is more like the way Burke should be remembered, his understated delivery the mark of a man whose unassuming approach to his art has helped it endure. The music is nothing much: a battery of tunes, played at more or less the same tempo, with Frazier marking out a steady pulse and Thompson comping and taking easy-going solos. Some are New Orleans rarities like A. J. Piron’s ‘I Want Somebody To Love’, ‘Gypsy Love Song’ and ‘Oh Daddy’. On a hot day, with a julep to hand, this can sound like the very heart of jazz.

STEVE SWALLOW

Born 4 October 1940, Fair Lawn, New Jersey

Bass guitar

Home

ECM 513424-2

Swallow; David Liebman (ss, ts); Steve Kuhn (p); Lyle Mays (syn); Bob Moses (d); Sheila Jordan (v). September 1979.

Steve Swallow says:
‘In the mid-’70s I was struck by writer’s block. To circumvent it I taped several poems by Robert Creeley to my upright piano and stared at them for hours. Inevitably, they suggested musical phrases and provoked the songs on
Home
. Recently I found myself similarly afflicted, and turned once again to Bob Creeley. For a second time, his poems worked to loosen the dreaded block’s hold, resulting in the album
So There
.’

Swallow is one of the most accomplished bassists of recent times, and a bass guitar specialist who invests that instrument with real individuality. A generous spirit, he has often sublimated his own musical vision in the service of others, not least his partner Carla Bley, and when he does record, the results are musicianly and thoughtful, but sometimes suggest he’s not that bothered about them, preferring other dimensions of the business.

Swallow’s earliest showings were with Paul Bley and Jimmy Giuffre, but he then worked with Stan Getz and Gary Burton for the remainder of the ’60s, spending some time in California before returning east and switching from double bass to bass guitar as his sole instrument. Though he does nothing so crass as to play ‘lead bass’, Swallow’s light intense
sound is always prominent in an ensemble, favouring upscale lines and arresting melodic interventions.

Robert Creeley’s poems are tiny snapshots of ordinariness that deliver their meanings precisely and without embellishment. Much the way Swallow plays. On first hearing we wondered whether there was too much going on in these arrangements, and whether it mightn’t have been more effective to deliver the songs with just voice, bass and piano, but their scoring never overpowers, Liebman’s playing is judged to perfection and Mays and Moses, both capable of wayward moments, help create a background for ‘Nowhere One’, ‘In the Fall’, ‘Midnight’ and the others which has just the right blend of sunlight and shade, ordinariness, and a sense of some existential slippage and loss. A quiet, glorious album.

ARTHUR BLYTHE

Also known as Black Arthur; born 5 July 1940, Los Angeles, California

Alto saxophone

Lenox Avenue Breakdown

Koch KOC CD 7871

Blythe; Bob Stewart (tba); James Newton (f); James Blood Ulmer (g); Cecil McBee (b); Jack DeJohnette (d); Guilherme Franco (perc). 1979.

Arthur Blythe said (1989):
‘Columbia were looking for something different, but not too different, something they could sell. I insisted on making the kind of music I wanted, but with the promise that it wasn’t going to be too out there. It was a relationship. It went to and fro.’

Blythe was raised in San Diego, but moved back to his native LA at the beginning of the ’60s and became involved with visionary pianist/composer Horace Tapscott. Blythe worked with Chico Hamilton, Gil Evans and others and only began his own recording career when he was nearly 40. Columbia records attempted to groom him for stardom, but Blythe’s avant-gardism, which combined elements of post-bop jazz conveying the passionate immediacy of the early pioneers with elements of non-Western harmony and rhythm, was muted. Blythe has always experimented with the sound of the basic jazz group, reintroducing the tuba as a bass instrument and often using non-kit percussion. He was an erratic presence, unwilling to surrender his most radical ideas, but also desperately searching for wider recognition.