The Penguin Jazz Guide (136 page)

& See also
CLIFFORD JORDAN / JOHN GILMORE, Blowin’ In From Chicago
(1957; p. 205)

CHARLIE HADEN
^&

Born 6 August 1937, Shenandoah, Iowa

Double bass

Quartet West

Verve 831673-2

Haden; Ernie Watts (ts); Alan Broadbent (p); Billy Higgins (d). December 1986.

Composer and bassist Gavin Bryars says:
‘Those solid, resonant middle and low-register notes, with bang-in-the-middle intonation, have been with him from his earliest recordings with Ornette Coleman and have enhanced countless recordings.’

The Liberation Music Orchestra was an ambitious ad hoc venture. Haden’s diary had long been packed with dates for other leaders. The one thing seemingly not catered for was a regular, working small group. That changed with the formation of Quartet West, a lyrical ensemble featuring two unsung heroes of the mainstream, and with the recruitment of Larance Marable later a third; Higgins’s credentials are, of course, unimpeachable.

The first of the Quartet West discs is still the best. Haden wanted to recapture something of the musical atmosphere he had soaked up in childhood, when he had starred in a family radio show, but this is hardly a high-concept retro record in the way of the later and more mannered
Haunted Heart.
The 1986 record is in the style of the ’40s, beautifully and idiomatically played, but the inclusion of Ornette Coleman’s ‘The Blessing’ (admittedly as a CD bonus) and the presence of Higgins in the group means it’s hardly a bland exercise in nostalgia. In addition, Haden also looks forward to a later association, by programming a Pat Metheny theme first, the lovely ‘Hermitage’.

Watts and Broadbent are as aware of contemporary harmonics as one would expect, but they aren’t prepared to dismiss an older language either. Haden himself straddles the broad highway that runs from Jimmy Blanton to Jimmy Garrison, and some of the phrase shapes irresistibly recall Wilbur Ware. Even allowing for the crystalline quality of the record, who could with confidence have dated these performances of ‘Body And Soul’ or ‘My Foolish Heart’? ‘Taney County’ is a solo feature, an evocation of the days when he played and sang on the family show; the playing is firm, sure and very expressive.

& See also
Liberation Music Orchestra
(1969; p. 363),
Beneath The Missouri Sky
(1996; p. 600)

IRÈNE SCHWEIZER

Born 2 June 1941, Schaffhausen, Switzerland

Piano, drums

Irène Schweizer/Günter Sommer

Intakt CD 007

Schweizer; Günter ‘Baby’ Sommer (d). February 1987.

Irène Schweizer said (1990):
‘I love drummers and I love working with them. I play drums myself, too, whenever I get a chance. I suppose you could say I’m now an amateur, or a “hobby”, drummer.’

A pioneering figure in European free jazz, Schweizer founded her innovative trio in 1963 and has worked with most of the major modernists, yet her musical background – listening to dance bands in her father’s restaurant – never quite deserts her. Her style is complex, dense and intellectually generous. Distrust anyone who tries to sell you the notion that Schweizer is an avant-gardist, and implicitly ‘difficult’. She has a natural humanity, warmth and wit.

Fortunately, her work is well documented on the Intakt label, which she had a hand in establishing, and that mitigates the relative invisibility of her early work for FMP. Schweizer has almost inevitably been saddled with a ‘female Cecil Taylor’ tag, one that has been harder to shift as a result of her important sequence of duets with drummers, encounters which invite all manner of yin–yang nonsense. As a sometime percussionist herself, Schweizer makes instinctive guesses as to how her own keyboard language might meld with untuned instruments, but that is also a component of her other work in a variety of groups and as a solo pianist.

We have picked one of the duo records, not as representative or necessarily the ‘best’, though certainly the playing relationship with Baby Sommer has a mischievous quality that sets it apart. The other percussionists involved in the series are Louis Moholo, Andrew Cyrille, Han Bennink and Pierre Favre, and the work with the last of these is also worthy of special attention. They are quite various in approach, though it seems clear that the Europeans are much closer in basic conception to Schweizer than Moholo and Cyrille, as one might expect. Sommer and Favre are melodic players, moving round the kit much as she moves across the keyboard. Moholo creates a network of cross-rhythms that Schweizer herself likens to Elvin Jones’s playing with Coltrane, but there is nothing to build on it, and one is left with an impression of two artists working at right angles, making beautiful sounds but in isolation one from the other. With Favre, the level of interaction is such that one almost seems to be hearing a meta-instrument, a source of sound which is neither one voice nor the other, but a genuine synthesis of the two. With Sommer, the connection is more dialectical, but the result is still entirely sympathetic: two voices in conjunction, mutually responsive. Andrew Cyrille was a long-standing collaborator of Cecil Taylor’s and is a leader in his own right. It is difficult to gauge what is wrong on this session. One senses that Schweizer is very aware of the Taylor lineage and deliberately tries to steer away from it, though the clusters and clumped runs she falls into are immediately and inescapably redolent of the American pianist. This remarkable series was completed (for the moment) in 1990 with the Bennink session. Hearing it somewhat later suggests more consistency than difference. Schweizer never for a moment diverges from her robust, assured approach. It is her playing partners who are required to rethink their language.

TOM HARRELL

Born 16 June 1946, Urbana, Illinois

Trumpet, flugelhorn

Visions

Contemporary C 14063

Harrell; George Robert (as); Joe Lovano (ts, ss); Bob Berg, David Liebman (ss); Cheryl Pyle (f); Niels Lan Doky (p); John Abercrombie (g, g-syn); Ray Drummond, Charlie Haden, Reggie Johnson (b); Bill Goodwin, Billy Hart, Paul Motian, Adam Nussbaum (d). April 1987–April 1990.

Tom Harrell said (1990):
‘Music lets me transcend my ego and get beyond the suffering and the distraction. It’s true, you know: you maybe do have to suffer for art, even if it’s just that suffering is a kind of excitement.’

Hearing Tom Harrell on record is a very different experience to seeing him in a club situation. He has suffered from – or lived with – schizophrenia for many years. Off-stage, or simply when not playing, he is deeply withdrawn and uneasy, often retreating into corners for comfort. (It should be noted that the interview quoted above was conducted while Harrell stood in a gloomy corner, facing into an open cupboard, with his back to the microphone and interviewer.) However, when Harrell puts the trumpet to his lips, some psychic wire goes live and animation flows through him. The sound that flows out is strong, often romantically lyrical but equally often with a burning edge unmatched by any trumpet-player of his generation. Since it is our brief to review records, the personal context may seem irrelevant, but it simply increases the wonder of Harrell’s achievement.

He is one of the finest harmonic improvisers in jazz today, often proposing resolutions which seem illogical, even impossible, but are always made both to work and to work in service of the song. The fierce tone adopted for faster numbers gives way to a round, liquid tone on ballads, but it’s important not to caricature Harrel as an avatar of Chet Baker, with incremental psychic damage. His work, miraculously, gives off little air of introspection, even when it is quietest and most stilled. It communicates.

Visions
gathers the tracings of a purple patch, an album of supposed ‘leftovers’ from the contract with Contemporary. It documents a span during which Harrell recovered some of the snap and pointed delivery people noted during his sojourn with Horace Silver. Every now and then, as on ‘Visions Of Gaudi’ with Liebman and Abercrombie, he delivers something that is as hard-edged and as finely detailed as mosaic. ‘Autumn View’ comes closer than most to self-revelation, but the central figure slips away into the mist. Harrell spends most of the album on flugelhorn, but ‘Suspended View’, with Berg on soprano, is a trumpet performance of magical skill, fleeting, ambiguous and endlessly replayable. It is hard to see why any of these tracks were not previously released. Even as a scattering, they have authority, indeed a fragile majesty.

KEITH TIPPETT

Born Keith Tippetts, 25 August 1947, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England

Piano

Mujician III (August Air)

FMP CD 12

Tippett (p solo). June 1987.

Keith Tippett said (1986):
‘I changed my name because I got tired of seeing “Keith Tippett’s group” on posters, when they couldn’t get the apostrophe in the right place. Seemed simpler just to change.’

A remarkable figure, who for much of his career has turned his back on commercial success and with his wife, Julie Tippetts (she retains the original spelling of the name), has absorbed himself in free music, diversifying into composition in later years. Perversely, he remains best known in some quarters for recordings he made with prog-rock band King Crimson, and, if not for that, then for his ultra-big band Centipede (50 pairs of legs) and its one recording,
Septober Energy
, which continues to enjoy a cult following.

While Tippett’s small-group work and occasional large ensemble projects (like Ark) are always compelling and his collaborations with wife Julie are among the most beautiful recorded works of recent time, he’s still best heard as a solo performer. It may turn out that the three
Mujician
albums made for FMP during the ’80s (the word was his daughter’s childish version of her father’s vocation and became the name of his collaborative improvising group with Paul Dunmall, Paul Rogers and Tony Levin) will be regarded as among the most self-consistent and beautiful solo improvisations of the decade and a significant
reprogramming of the language of piano. Tippett has always insisted that listeners should not concern themselves with how particular sounds are made in his performances, but absorb themselves in what he clearly sees as a spontaneous expressive process in which ‘technique’ is not separable from the more instinctual aspects of the music. In addition to now relatively conventional practices like playing ‘inside’, he makes use of distinctive sound-altering devices, such as laying soft wood blocks on the strings, producing zither and koto effects. Though there are similarities, this is very different from John Cage’s use of ‘prepared piano’. Cage’s effects, once installed, are immutable; Tippett’s are spontaneous and flexible.

The long ‘August Air’ is one of the essential performances of the decade. It seems to complete a cycle whose development can only be experienced and intuited, not rationalized. The transfer of the two first Mujician discs to CD allows the sequence to be heard as a whole and, though a goodly span of time separates the three records, they make sense heard as a continuous sequence, an extended dialogue with the piano and with Tippett’s musical sources.

MARILYN CRISPELL

Born Marilyn Braune, 30 March 1947, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Piano

For Coltrane

Leo CDLR 195

Crispell (p solo). July 1987.

Marilyn Crispell remembers:
‘I was living alone. I didn’t have much at all. And then someone played me
A Love Supreme
. And that just seemed to change everything, right from that moment.’

There are few critical shorthands more dead-eared than the assumption that any piano-player who favours heavy, knotted clusters and passages of extreme dissonance must be labouring under a ‘Cecil Taylor influence’. Borah Bergman has been so labelled, quite ludicrously, and so, too, has Marilyn Crispell, despite strong protestations by both. Apparently wiser voices have pointed out that John Coltrane is actually Crispell’s main influence – very few of them note that she grew up in Trane’s home town – but she does, indeed, admire Taylor and has learned much from him, as her tribute piece ‘Au Chanteur Qui Danse’ (to be found on the nearly contemporary Victo CD
Labyrinths
) warmly acknowledges. What exactly she takes from each, and thence what makes her such a powerful and interesting keyboard improviser, is best judged by this remarkable concert set from London in the summer of 1987, when Crispell supported Alice Coltrane and her sons with a solo set dedicated to Alices’s late husband.

Crispell learned piano as a child at the Peabody in Baltimore and later studied at the New England School of Music. She married and for a time gave up playing to concentrate on a medical career, but following a divorce and the epiphany of
A Love Supreme
she resumed her musical activities and came to prominence as a member of Anthony Braxton’s most celebrated quartet.
For Coltrane
came two years after the Braxton tour. Crispell already had a couple of solo and duo recitals in catalogue, notably
Rhythms Hung In Undrawn Sky
and
And Your Ivory Voice Sings
for Leo.

Solo performances by Crispell are dramatic, harmonically tense and wholly absorbing. In London, Crispell opens with a torrid ‘Dear Lord’ that has never been as generously admired as the more obviously romantic and billowing ‘After The Rain’ that closes the show. Crispell clearly responds to Coltrane as a melodist as well as a harmonic improviser, but what’s really
important about this recital is the piece called ‘Coltrane Time’, derived from rhythmic cells on which the saxophonist had been experimenting before his death and which had apparently been given to Crispell by Andrew Cyrille. She also improvises a series of ‘collages’ in memory of the great saxophonist. Only the title is at fault, for these do not sound like pasted-together forms but organic upgrowths from a deep place in her musical imagination. Crispell made many subsequent records, but even if this one can be categorized as ‘early’ it is the work of a mature artist already at the height of her powers, engaged with a profound modern tradition.