The Penguin Jazz Guide (140 page)

The relation of parts to whole is far more confident than in times gone by and the solos are good largely because the writing is so acute. The concert recording – taped at the Montmartre in Copenhagen – manages to balance ‘live’ energy with studio precision and fullness of sound.

& See also
Escalator Over The Hill
(1968–1971; p. 357)

ART HODES
^&

Born 14 November 1904, Nikoliev, Ukraine, Russia; died 4 March 1993, Harvey, Illinois

Piano

Keepin’ Out Of Mischief Now

Candid CCD 79717

Hodes (p solo). November 1988.

Art Hodes said (1981):
‘Bebop? Avant-garde? Yeah, I heard of them. I also heard of these kids called the Bright Brothers – Wright Brothers? – who claim they can make you fly. It’ll never catch on, none of it.’

Hodes survived by
not
bending to the winds of fashion. Though over-represented as a solo performer in comparison with his group work, Hodes conjures some interesting variations on Jelly Roll Morton, his greatest single influence, on the November 1988
Pagin’ Mr Jelly
and
Mischief
(we marginally favour the latter) and this is perhaps the place for fans of either to start. Hodes’s only originals, the title-tune and the related ‘Mr Jelly Blues’, are virtually impossible to pick out from a session that sticks to only the most sanctified of early jazz tunes: the march ‘High Society’, ‘Wolverine Blues’, ‘Mr Jelly Lord’, ‘Winin’ Boy Blues’, ‘Buddy Bolden’s Blues’ and ‘The Pearls’. What’s wonderful about Hodes’s approach to this material, the Morton stuff in particular, is how
natural
he sounds. There’s no pressure or effort, no hint of pastiche, just straightforward playing of magnificent music on a decent piano.

& See also
The Jazz Record Story
(1943–1944; p. 90)

MAL WALDRON
^&

Born 16 August 1925 (not 1926), New York City; died 2 December 2002, Brussels, Belgium

Piano

No More Tears (For Lady Day)

Timeless TTD 328

Waldron; Paulo Cardoso (b); John Betsch (d). November 1988.

Saxophonist and duo collaborator George Haslam remembers:
‘He told me he found it trying that every interviewer started off with: “So, tell me about Billie Holiday.” Shortly afterwards I was within earshot when a journalist began: “So, Mal, what was it like with Billie Holiday?” Mal smiled and proceeded to describe how special she was. Typical Mal.’

Waldron spent the last almost 40 years of his life living and working in Europe. During that period he produced a vast number of recordings, often on very small labels, but with a bewildering array of collaborators and personnels. Late in life, he worked increasingly again with singers, including Abbey Lincoln and Jeanne Lee, Judi Silvano and others. He had actually contributed to a Billie Holiday tribute instrumental record as early as June 1957, around the beginning of his association with the singer, when he played on trumpeter Webster Young’s
For Lady
.

In later years, there was growing pressure, sometimes unwelcome, sometimes unavoidable, to return to some aspect of his relationship with Holiday. To his credit, Waldron usually approached such projects obliquely rather than as ‘songbook’ situations. His earlier Black Lion record
For Lady Day
combines songs she sang with tributes written by Waldron specifically to celebrate her, but for the most part they are Waldron records with only an incidental relationship to their ostensible subject.

That’s both the case and not with
No More Tears
. Almost 30 years after her death, one senses him trying – on the self-written title-track in particular, but also the subsequent ‘Melancholy Waltz’ – to come to terms with his own emotional involvement with a charismatic, indeed iconic, singer. His delivery is consistently thoughtful, the attack almost suspended in places, and it’s drummer John Betsch, an undersung star in modern jazz, who gives the set much of its backbone. Even when Waldron flirts with cliché on ‘Yesterdays’, ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ and ‘Alone Together’, his angle on the melody and chords is always unexpected, and sometimes, as on the last track, quite subversive.

Selecting just one record from his later years is virtually impossible. The duos with Lacy, Haslam, Brown and others all command attention, as do group records like
The Git-Go
and
The Seagulls Of Kristiansund
. This one, though, holds us in thrall. It’s by no means a throwaway performance, done with an eye to the market, but one of his most profound statements.

& See also
Mal/4
(1958; p. 226)

HENRY THREADGILL
^&

Born 15 February 1944, Chicago, Illinois

Alto and tenor saxophones, clarinet, flute

Rag, Bush And All

Novus 3502

Threadgill; Ted Daniels (t, flhn); Bill Lowe (btb); Dierdre Murray (clo); Fred Hopkins (b); Newman Baker, Reggie Nicholson (d). December 1988.

Henry Threadgill said (1989):
‘Where AACM was strong and gave strength was that it wasn’t possible to be interested in just jazz, or just jazz since Coltrane, or since bebop. You were allowed to, and thus expected to, listen to just about everything, including Stockhausen and Varèse, blues, field music, singers, opera …’

The free-for-all theatricality of the Art Ensemble Of Chicago was out of favour in the more hidebound ’80s, subordinated to a revival of interest in form. Classically trained and an inventive composer, Threadgill did sterling service with Air, another of the legendary groups to grow out of the AACM proving ground, and one distinguished by an interest in early jazz and its procedures. He is not an effusive soloist, putting more emphasis on unusual ensemble arrangements that have effectively eroded the old hierarchy of lead, harmony and rhythm instruments. Threadgill habitually used low brasses (sometimes instead of string bass, as in the early jazz groups), twinned drummers, and sometimes electric guitarists as well, somewhat in the manner of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time; Dierdre Murray’s cello was another key ingredient.

The first records for RCA,
You Know The Number
and
Easily Slip Into Another World
, sound matted and slightly chaotic, though the production is at fault here, for Threadgill’s arrangements seem admirably open-textured.
Rag, Bush And All
stands out as one of the finest achievements of the later ’80s. Uncategorizable, it shifts the emphasis away from smaller-scale blowing tunes to generously proportioned themes which gradually reveal, as on the opening ‘Off The Rag’ and the long ‘Sweet Holy Rag’, a firm structural logic. ‘Gift’ sings solemn praises and ‘Dancin’ With A Monkey’ is pure African-surrealism, soundtrack music for an Amos Tutuola novel.

Threadgill’s later groups, Very Very Circus and Make Your Move, continued in this adventurous direction and delivered out-there music that resists ‘avant-garde’ classification without ever getting seriously danceable. He’s a one-off.

& See also
Everybody’s Mouth’s A Book
(2001; p. 662)

TOMMY FLANAGAN

Born 16 March 1930, Detroit, Michigan; died 16 November 2001, New York City

Piano

Jazz Poet

Timeless TTD 301

Flanagan; George Mraz (b); Kenny Washington (d). January 1989.

Tommy Flanagan said (1987):
‘Poetry, pictures, people, places … especially people and places, I guess … music can’t just be about music … it has to be about all those other things as well.’

Tommy Flanagan is, if you will, the link between John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald. He stumbled on ‘Giant Steps’ – though no more than the man who wrote it – and he shaped some of Ella’s most beautiful ballads. The combination of harmonic sophistication and an ability to set moods like no other pianist of his generation. Flanagan came up in the tough Detroit school before coming to New York after his military service. He quickly became a dependable presence in the studios, to the extent that his own creativity was somewhat restricted. Some good albums appeared on Prestige, including
Overseas
and
The Cats
, a label all-star date that yielded some of Coltrane’s first significant solos. After his skirmish with ‘Giant Steps’, Flanagan began working for Ella, and stayed with her with one three-year break for 15 years.

His own career blossomed somewhat after that, and for the rest of his life Flanagan was a busy performer, playing a fortnight residency every year at the Village Vanguard, picking up the prestigious Jazzpar prize in Europe and becoming revered in Japan. It’s hard to pick out one representative Flanagan record, and tempting to suggest (an old critical cop-out)
that his best work was for other people.
Jazz Poet
is the most convincing candidate. Made just over a decade after leaving Ella, and with a trio perfectly attuned to his artistry, its title is a fair description of the man; a beautifully judged and perfectly performed record that repays frequent listening. A few years before, Flanagan had recorded a tribute to Coltrane, playing several of the tunes from
Giant Steps
. Here, that harmonic language is still present but not so overt, and fed back into things like Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Raincheck’, ‘Caravan’, ‘Willow Weep For Me’ and a quite unexpected reading of ‘St Louis Blues’. Mraz’s countermelodies and fills are flawless and Washington plays musically and declines to muscle in. Up-and-coming piano trios – and there are plenty of them, God knows – would do worse than to devote a rehearsal afternoon to listening to this.

DON GROLNICK

Born 23 September 1947, Brooklyn, New York; died 1 July 2006, New York City

Piano, keyboards

The Complete Blue Note Recordings

Blue Note 57197

Grolnick; Randy Brecker (t); Barry Rogers, Steve Turre (tb); Michael Brecker, Joe Lovano (ts); Bob Mintzer, Marty Ehrlich (bcl); Dave Holland (b); Peter Erskine, Bill Stewart (d); collective personnel. February 1989, September 1992.

Don Grolnick’s widow, Jeanne O’Connor, says:
‘Don used to talk about how he liked the simultaneous horn-playing in traditional Dixieland music, and he tried to bring that feel to the modern jazz idiom. “One thing I love about Mingus’s parts for horns,” he once said, “is the way they sound improvised, even though they’re written.” At these sessions, he encouraged the players to “mess around” with the parts – how they got from one note to the other was up to them.’

In the late ’80s, after a successful career working with pop stars like Steely Dan, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, Don Grolnick decided to return to his first love and make an acoustic jazz record. He’d already put out an album of sophisticated fusion –
Hearts And Numbers
on Hip Pocket – which utilized some of the personnel he would deploy for his second coming as a jazz musician, but there was a huge jump in quality between that shiny first record and
Weaver Of Dreams
, the first of two Blue Note albums made before his very untimely death.

In this edition of the
Guide
, we’ve mostly tried to avoid including compilation albums and box sets, but Grolnick’s Blue Note oeuvre is so much of a piece and so consistent in quality that it merits inclusion as a single work. On both records, Grolnick directed a starry personnel with exemplary finesse, letting each man test the weight of the music in his own way.
Weaver Of Dreams
reworked ‘I Want To Be Happy’ from the ground up in a way that recalls the analytical revisionism of George Russell’s ’50s small groups, but the cutting neo-bop of ‘Nothing Personal’ and clear-eyed balladry of ‘Persimmons’ are wholly contemporary. And there’s always an added extra. ‘Or Come Fog’ works some spooky variations on ‘Come Rain Or Come Shine’, with just a minimum of studio manipulation, and apparently one musician told a delighted Grolnick that ‘Taglioni’ could be the national anthem of a yet to be discovered planet. There was, indeed, an unearthly or otherworldly tinge to some of this music.

Nighttown
was, if anything, even better. The title-track, with its stunningly beautiful muted trumpet solo, is revered by young jazz composers as a yardstick against which to measure their own efforts and ‘Heart of Darkness’ absolutely blazes by. As before, the best music is often where Grolnick references the tradition. His brilliant update on ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’ is a recurring surprise. Randy Brecker (who with Holland is the
only player common to both dates), Turre and Lovano play to their best, but it’s Ehrlich’s bass clarinet which provides the key voice. Grolnick never sets out to be a virtuoso leader; his input is the writing and arranging, but the piano plays a wise and effective role, more than merely composer’s comping.

SCOTT HAMILTON
^&

Born 12 September 1954, Providence, Rhode Island

Tenor saxophone

Plays Ballads

Concord CCD 4386

Hamilton; John Bunch (p); Chris Flory (g); Phil Flanigan (b); Chuck Riggs (d). March 1989.