The Penguin Jazz Guide (160 page)

KENNY DAVERN

Born 7 January 1935, Huntington, New York; died 12 December 2006, Sandia, New Mexico

Clarinet, soprano saxophone

Breezin’ Along

Arbors ARCD 19170

Davern; Bucky Pizzarelli, Howard Alden (g); Greg Cohen (b); Tony DeNicola (d). June 1996.

Kenny Davern said:
‘All my teachers did was give me a lot of things I didn’t need to know. I learned music – and everyone should learn music – by listening. Otherwise, you’re standing there in the middle of the band, knowing everything, but not able to play.’

Davern had claims to being the major clarinettist in jazz, having forsaken the soprano saxophone (‘I play soprano once a year and it takes only a few moments to confirm that I made the right decision’). It did, however, provide him with a good platform during otherwise dark days for jazz when he co-fronted Soprano Summit with Bob Wilber in the ’70s. Though associated at various times with avant-garde projects, Davern remained true to older loyalties and waved the flag for New Orleans jazz at a time when modernism reigned. As obituaries pointed out, Davern might have been working with Steve Lacy in the ’80s but he made his recording debut in 1954 with Jack Teagarden.

It’s a relatively extensive discography, but the Arbors records gave Davern the bright, uncluttered sound his light, nimble delivery required and the late discs are generally terrific.
Breezin’ Along
is a peach, though. Pizzarelli and Alden make a great team, driving the fast numbers and softly suggesting the harmonic detail in the slower ones. Davern measures the material with an almost insouciant virtuosity: two Beiderbecke chestnuts, ‘Since My Best Girl Turned Me Down’ and ‘Jazz Me Blues’, are super, but ‘Baby, Won’t You Please
Come Home’ is Kenny at his peak. Sometimes his note choices are unexpected, but only the unwary would assume this was any sign of the avant-garde peeping through. Kenny was playing with Red Allen at 16 and most of his language still dates back to players of that generation, including the ‘out of tune’ snaps, altissimo endings and almost toneless phrases, many of them most effectively deployed in the stripped-down situations Davern liked as rhythmic devices. A lyrical player, though, and always a joy to hear.

KURT ROSENWINKEL

Born 28 October 1970, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Guitar

East Coast Love Affair

Fresh Sound New Talent FSNT 016

Rosenwinkel; Avishai Cohen (b); Jorge Rossy (d). July 1996.

Pat Metheny said (2004):
‘He’s one of the younger guitarists I most admire, not just for his technique. His whole approach is just right.’

A ubiquitous presence on the New York club scene of the late ’90s, Rosenwinkel is one of those rare musicians whose rise from sideman to leader status has been earned rather than merely taken as a matter of routine course. He got a break working with his teacher, Gary Burton, and has been building on that. His busy diary probably gets in the way of developing projects of his own, but he has ideas to burn and will certainly prevail, even if the move up to Verve did him no obvious favours.

There’s already a substantial body of recorded work, but we still return to the first album, the first of two live sets he has put up; a later one, on ArtistShare, was recorded at the Village Vanguard. The debut has a beautiful feel – the three men were recorded in Small’s Club, where Rosenwinkel has had a regular gig, and the sound of the record is close, almost humid. The interplay lifts the material to a high level of invention – when they fade ‘All Or Nothing At All’, it sounds as though they could have gone on in that groove for hours yet. Rosenwinkel plays with a clean, almost classical sound and his melody-lines are spacious and paced to suit whatever tempo they’ve chosen – he never seems to feel he has to rush through his phrases. The title-piece suggests a composer who’s not working outside his comfort zone yet, but time will tell. Cohen and Rossy are just as generous of spirit on a very enjoyable set. It’s certainly more successful than the subsequent Criss Cross
Intuit
, which is all right but basically uneventful bebop, as that provenance would suggest. Rosenwinkel, though, could make Dixieland sound modern and remains a man to watch.

ORNETTE COLEMAN
^&

Born Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman, 9 March 1930, Fort Worth, Texas

Alto and tenor saxophones, trumpet, violin

Colors

Verve/Harmolodic 537789

Coleman; Joachim Kühn (p). August 1996.

Ornette Coleman said (1983):
‘A piano gets in the way.’

Coleman’s contract with Verve, albeit under his own Harmolodics imprint, didn’t set off a tide of later recordings. In fact, the flow of material has been slower than ever. It was initially a surprise when the duo album with Joachim Kühn was announced, initially because he was a piano-player, and Coleman had shown little enthusiasm for keyboards since he
worked with Walter Norris and Don Friedman years before. The same year as
Colors
, though, he did also work with Geri Allen, so yet again the mould was broken, or had never been that entire in the first place. In addition, by any standard, Kühn seemed an ideal duo partner. There are few more sophisticated and few more heterodox harmonic thinkers around and, whatever else, the encounter promised to spark off some interesting conflicts of style, the German’s ethereal classicism (if you hear it that way) against Ornette’s ‘jazz’ roots.

It’s interesting to compare their encounter with another, almost contemporary Verve release, the
1
+
1
duo by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, which is pipe-and-slippers compared to this restless, searching set, recorded live in Germany, at the Leipzig Opera. Kühn had recorded in a duo context before, with CMP in-house genius Walter Quintus, and with guitarist Jan Akkerman. Both times he demonstrated a responsive intelligence that thrives on harmonic ambiguity and on a suspension of conventional harmonic resolutions. The record opens in relatively straight-ahead fashion with ‘Faxing’, which is more unexpected for the pianist’s part than Ornette’s. He’s in more familiar territory on ‘Three Ways To One’, which might almost be a through-composed chamber piece. All the tracks, relatively short by live-performance standards, were written specially for the date. ‘Refills’, ‘Story Writing’ and ‘Night Plans’ are the most substantial pieces, though most of the detail comes from Kühn rather than Ornette. A wholly unexpected meeting of minds.

& See also
The Shape Of Jazz To Come
(1959, 1960; p. 245),
At The Golden Circle, Stockholm
(1965; p. 324),
The Complete Science Fiction Sessions
(1971, 1972; p. 387)

ELLERY ESKELIN

Born 16 August 1959, Wichita, Kansas

Tenor saxophone

One Great Day

hatOLOGY 502

Eskelin; Andrea Parkins (acc, sampler); Jim Black (d). September 1996.

Ellery Eskelin says:
‘What should rightly have been a disaster – a location recording made in a room with strange acoustics using questionable equipment run by an engineer with peculiar attitudes about the whole affair – miraculously turned out to be one of our best-sounding recordings!’

Eskelin stands apart from the throng. He has a querulous tone and likes to stretch phrases into elongated shapes that follow a logic all their own. He was raised in Baltimore from an early age and studied at Kenton Orchestra summer schools, but despite the fact that his father was the cultish songwriter Rodd Keith the main early musical influence was his mother, Bobbie Lee, who played organ and led her own groups.

After a bunch of earlier records, some of which have disappeared into the void, Eskelin convened this unusual trio for a 1994 record called
Jazz Trash.
Its roots in sax-and-organ soul-jazz aren’t difficult to excavate, but typically Eskelin grafted new ideas and procedures onto the basic stock. On that first meeting, he created a record which is undeniably interesting, but doesn’t quite make the next step. He appeared again with Parkins on
Green Bermudas
, his most out-there and uncategorizable disc, on which the saxophonist decorates her oddball array of sampled sounds (singalong pop, varispeed drums, chunks of Eskelin himself from
Premonition
) with some of his sparsest playing. A lot of it feels like experimental bits and bites, at least until the two long tracks which close the record, each a testing dialogue.

One Great Day
restores the
Jazz Trash
situation; Black’s compendium of jazz, rock and free rhythms is spontaneously exciting; Parkins conjures unpredictable shapes out of her
instrument; Eskelin plays with real physicality, seeming to grab and twist the sound as it emerges from his horn. ‘Vertical Hold’ is an astonishing piece that like the title-track seems to weave together a freebop sensibility with a warped version of television music (presumably what the title means) and does so with a kind of playful seriousness. The inclusion of Roland Kirk’s ‘The Inflated Tear’ is a useful pointer to the kind of aesthetic this trio pursues. Black is a percussion giant who frequently gives his skins a rest and finds other ways of making sounds. On ‘Fallen Angel’, our pick of the tracks, he sounds as if he might be picking out the swaying rhythm on a suitcase, while Eskelin emotes elegiacally and Parkins toys with dance measures:
sardana
? Or something closer to home?

Eskelin takes enormous pains with sound, treating the studio like a fourth member of the group. However difficult the circumstances of the recording, it’s a near-flawless disc by one of the undersung leaders and underexposed groups of the last 20 years.

ROVA
^&

Formed 1977

Group

Bingo

Victo CD 056

Bruce Ackley, Steve Adams, Larry Ochs, Jon Raskin (sax). September 1996.

Larry Ochs says:
‘
Bingo
sums up our plan of attack in the ’90s. We admired the British improvised music scene and with grant support from Meet The Composer we were able to get Barry Guy to write his first version of
Witch Gong Game
for us; the beautiful score hangs in both Raskin’s and my homes. I always loved playing the opening sopranino solo in Lindsay Cooper’s “Face In The Crowd”, even though the tuning was always an issue!’

An American all-saxophone group, its name derived from the surname initials of the players, although Andrew Voigt has been replaced by Steve Adams (ROAA would be harder to pronounce). Though their music seeks an exact balance between composition and improvisation, and they have over 30 years created an extensive body of remarkable music for saxophone quartet, they have lately been written for extensively by many different composers. As Larry Ochs points out,
Bingo
is not representative of the major works composed by himself and bandmates Adams and Raskin, but together with the preceding
Ptow!
and
Resistance
on Victo it offers a spectrum of ROVA music ranging from free improvisation and structured improvisation to composition for improvisers. That said, Ochs’s piece ‘Initials’ is one of the strongest in the group’s collective history, and it sits beautifully alongside two pieces by Lindsay Cooper, two versions of Barry Guy’s ‘Witch Gong Game’ and Fred Frith’s ‘Water Under The Bridge’, their presence here a striking tribute to ROVA’s interest in British improvisation/composition.

The album opens with Cooper’s intricate ‘Face In The Crowd’, which is delivered with perfect dynamics by the quartet. If it stands as a kind of symphonic tone-poem for quartet, then the first, short version of the Barry Guy piece is almost a concerto for baritone, with Raskin backed by written saxophone parts from the others. Frith’s standing as a fine contemporary composer still doesn’t go unquestioned, but the piece here – dedicated to Jimmy Giuffre – should dispel any doubt. It’s audibly part of some larger design, but it stands impressively on its own, breezily present and evanescent by turns. It also sets up the long – 25-minute – version of ‘Witch Gong Game’, which is the set’s climax.

As the culmination of a trilogy,
Bingo
completes the card, but ROVA is a group best heard in bulk and anyone intrigued by this should scroll back to the early records and on to the collaborations of recent years, of which more below …

& See also
Electric Ascension
(2003; p. 686)

JESSICA WILLIAMS

Born 17 March 1948, Baltimore, Maryland

Piano

Jessica’s Blues

Jazz Focus JFCD 014 / 018

Williams; Jay Thomas (t, ts, f); Jeff Johnson (b); Mel Brown (d). October 1996.

Jessica Williams says:
‘That session was hard. Jay was incredible, but the bass-player and drummer were fighting. Remembering what Duke said about dealing with hostile machinations in the band, I put his theory to work, getting them so riled they wanted blood. I said to Jeff: “The drummer says you’re dragging” and then to Mel: “The bass-player says you’re slowing the time down.” After that, each tried to outplay the other, scowling and grunting and glaring. They’re good friends now but they sure were mad at that session, and that’s why it
burns
– that time is
aggressive
! Just like I wanted it.’