The Penguin Jazz Guide (168 page)

The zenith no sooner reached, Svensson was drowned in a scuba accident off the coast near Stockholm. He was just 44. Posthumously released material suggests he was only hitting his stride as a composer and performer.

TRYGVE SEIM

Born 25 April 1971, Oslo, Norway

Tenor and soprano saxophones

Different Rivers

ECM 159521-2

Seim; Arve Henriksen (t, v, trumpophone); Øyvind Braekke (tb); Hild Sofie Tafjord (frhn); Nils Jansen (sno, bsx, cbcl); Håvard Lund (cl, bcl); Stian Carstensen (acc); Bernt Simen Lund, Morten Hannisdal (clo); David Gald (tba); Per Oddvar Johansen, Paal Nilssen-Love (d); Sidsel Endresen (v). 1998–1999.

Trygve Seim says:
‘The interesting thing is to reach a place where the music under the solos is quite carefully written but the solos are quite free, but to leave no sign of the join between those two.’

Seim’s debut is little short of amazing and heralds the arrival of a new star. Not since Edward Vesala’s
Lumi
has there been such a riveting opening to an ECM session as ‘Sorrows’. Seim’s music seems to follow a direct route from the great early discs by Garbarek, Arild Andersen and Vesala. There are no guitars and no keyboards; Seim is interested in human breath, the sound in wind instruments. In the magnificent ‘Ulrika Dans’, he leads nine musicians through a carefully shaded score that’s a small masterpiece of writing for horns, hoisted aloft by Johansen’s brilliant drum part and illuminated by the leader’s own tenor solo. He seems to have a knack for making a band sound conversational and ritualistic at the same moment. ‘Different Rivers’ itself is a splicing of two versions of the same piece, with the musicians doubling on different instruments, a seamless montage which seems different on every hearing. In the stately procession of ‘Breathe’, over Sidsel Endresen’s recitation, everything is sublimated into long cathedral chords that suggest a never-ending echo.

DAVID S. WARE

Born 7 November 1949, Plainfield, New Jersey

Tenor saxophone

Live In The World

Thirsty Ear THI 57153.2 3CD

Ware; Matthew Shipp (p); William Parker (b); Susie Ibarra, Hamid Drake, Guillermo E. Brown (d). 1998–2003.

David S. Ware said (2006):
‘That’s the advice my mother gave me: “Go see the world.” I’ve tried to do that, and I think about those words all the time, and do good by them and by her.’

Ware grew up in New Jersey, attended Berklee for a couple of years at the end of the ’60s and then formed his own group, Apogee, before moving to New York City. He has worked extensively with drummer Andrew Cyrille and with Cyrille’s mentor, Cecil Taylor. He drove taxis for a while before moving back into music and recording a good number of albums under his own name, all of them in a fierce, modernist style that makes much use of overblowing and multiphonics. The Ayler influence is evident but Ware’s ‘fire music’ is often more thoughtful and considered than first appears. He pointed to another, less obvious influence when in 2002 he revisited Sonny Rollins’s barely pioneered 1958 masterpiece
The Freedom Suite.

Live In The World
was more than a touring compilation, but a major statement. The title can be read two ways, as a straightforward description of these live dates from Switzerland and Italy, but also as an injunction not to overlook the near-at-hand. For all his mysticism Ware is profoundly committed to the basic mechanics of the music. There’s some older material here – ‘Elder’s Path’ from the Silkheart
Passage To Music
, ‘Co Co Cana’ from the mid-’90s – but the approach has changed almost as much as the titles. ‘Freedom Suite’ is a later, more universalized attempt on the same ground as the 1995
Dao
. ‘The Way We Were’ has been a Ware staple since his Columbia debut,
Go See The World
. Much of the rest calls on a shared pool of ideas and structures that have been worked on many times by the group. Shipp fulfils his usual function, bending and splitting the harmonics in exactly the same way the percussionists multiply the rhythms. Parker stands his ground, and both pianist and bassist are richly featured on the second and third parts of ‘Freedom Suite’.

Ware himself ventures less often into the altissimo range than he used to. One of the more obvious differences between the 1998 material and the Italian tapes five years later is how even and contained his articulation has become. There’s no less fury, but his lines have become much less abstract. It was cynically assumed, and we were guilty of it, that the more ‘inside’ approach on Ware’s disappointing final Columbia record,
Surrendered
, was at the behest of the label. It may well be that he was moving in that direction entirely on his
own account. By the same token, Guillermo Brown’s unemphatic performance – compared to Edwards’s tymps and bells, Ibarra’s delightful exuberance – was probably just what was ordered. He fulfils that impression here, and the clincher is when the third CD plays out with a bonus track from the earlier line-up, at Chiasso in 1998.

It was David’s mother who gave him the title
Go See The World
. That was her blessing and mission for him when he was a baby. He said farewell to her on 2001’s
Corridors & Parallels
with ‘Mother, May You Rest In Bliss’, and here he takes that promise on one more step.

JOHN LEWIS
^&

Born 3 May 1920, LaGrange, Illinois; died 29 March 2001, New York City

Piano

Evolution

Atlantic 7567-83211-2

Lewis (p solo). January 1999.

John Lewis said (1999):
‘The Modern Jazz Quartet fed my interest in group playing. When that ended I played more on my own, partly because I hadn’t done as much of that as I might have wanted, partly because that close relationship wasn’t there any more. But they’re different things. One isn’t a reaction to the other.’

Lewis was one of the last senior survivors of the bebop era, and this marvellous solo album underscores what an extraordinary figure he was in jazz for over 50 years. As a composer, he is mysteriously neglected when it comes to source material for other players, but perhaps only Lewis’s Lewis really hits the mark. He revisits five of his own favourites, and each is an affectionate new look at an old friend: ‘Django’, for instance, is elegantly recast around a left-hand bass that sounds almost like a tango. ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ and ‘Cherokee’ are sketches that suggest a summing-up of both swing and bebop. ‘Afternoon In Paris’ muses on his lifelong affinity with the old world. Moving yet wonderfully fresh and unaffected, this is a consummate recital by the master.

Hardly any less masterful, generous or absorbing, the second part of what sadly proved to be Lewis’s farewell sessions is as fine as the first. Though he has support from other hands on
Evolution II
, mostly it’s all about what’s going on at the piano – and that includes ‘One! Of Parker’s Moods’, his final thoughts on the blues; ‘That! Afternoon In Paris’, a delightful revision of an old favourite; and another look at ‘Django’, the tango feel of the previous encounter here cleverly evolved into something else.

& See also
Golden Striker / Jazz Abstractions
(1960; p. 253);
MODERN JAZZ QUARTET, Dedicated To Connie
(1960; p. 254),
The Complete Last Concert
(1974; p. 417)

WYNTON MARSALIS
^&

Born 18 October 1961, New Orleans, Louisiana

Trumpet

Standard Time: Volume 6 – Mr Jelly Lord

Columbia CK 69872

Marsalis; Lucien Barbarin (tb); Wycliffe Gordon (tb, tba, t); Wessell Anderson (as); Victor Goines (ss, ts, cl); Michael White (cl); Harry Connick Jr, Eric Lewis, Danilo Perez, Eric Reed (p); Donald Vappie (bj, g); Reginald Veal (b); Herlin Riley (d). January 1999 (December 1993).

Wynton Marsalis said (1990):
‘I don’t think what I propose is conservative. I think it’s democratic and that is what America is supposed to be. The New Orleans jazz was about community and mutual help. You had the right to express yourself, but you had the obligation to help someone else do that, too, and sound good doing it.’

Marsalis started to make regular forays back into the tradition in 1986 with the first of the
Standard Time
records. Over the next dozen years, he kept returning to the idea, even diverting enough from his apparent comfort zone to cover a set of Thelonious Monk material.
Mr Jelly Lord
was one of the more elaborate set-ups. It’s a flawed record in some respects, with too much packed in, but it’s a perfect snapshot of Marsalis’s musical thinking in action and aside from all the media buzz.

Sometimes even Wynton must wish Stanley Crouch would keep his mouth shut. Likening these modern – but unmodernized – versions of Jelly Roll Morton tunes to actor/director Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean films isn’t necessarily the most helpful imprimatur. As it turns out, Wynton’s performance needs no Mortonesque hyperbole. There is no attempt to lend these astonishing compositions any false grandeur; they have quite enough as it is.

Wynton’s playing has rarely sounded so relaxed and so raw. Even his cover-picture, looking tired, slumped astride a packing crate and resting an elbow on his instrument, suggests a measure of artisanly relaxation, like a man just coming off shift rather than a man waiting backstage at Carnegie Hall. ‘The Pearls’ and ‘Dead Man Blues’ see him reach levels of expression that will astonish even admirers.

Perez and Connick have cameo parts only, but the basic line-up is by now a familiar one. We have never been persuaded by the clarinet-playing of Dr Michael White, which sounds a quarter-note sharp, but the two trombone-players are majestically idiomatic and the saxophonists never sound as if they are on day-release from Bebop Academy. Our only faint quibble would be the drumming of Herlin Riley, which occasionally seems anachronistic.

A must for blindfold tests of the future is track 15. On 6 December 1993, Wynton and pianist Eric Reed went to the Edison National Historic Site at West Orange, New Jersey, and recorded ‘Tom Cat Blues’ direct to a wax cylinder. The result is still unmistakably Marsalis, but the old technology helps provide a ghostly coda to a remarkable record.

& See also
J Mood
(1985; p. 496),
Live At The House Of Tribes
(2002; p. 677)

STEFON HARRIS

Born 23 March 1973, Albany, New York

Vibraphone, marimba

BlackActionFigure

Blue Note 99546 2

Harris; Steve Turre (tb); Greg Osby (as); Gary Thomas (ts, af); Jason Moran (p); Tarus Mateen (b); Eric Harland (d). February 1999.

Stefon Harris said (2000):
‘I actually prefer the sound of the marimba on uptempo tunes, though I wouldn’t forsake the vibes for a ballad. I like to move across the instrument, rather than play linear solos, and the marimba gives me something there.’

Harris quickly showed a highly developed musical personality. His original intention was to be an orchestral player and there is substantial ambition in his work as the recent
Grand Unification Theory
might suggest. The debut album,
A Cloud Of Red Dust
, is interestingly structured. Rather than a sequence of discrete tracks, Harris has woven them together with short interludes to create an almost continuous suite. It grips the attention from the very start and flags only very briefly, with a June Gardner vocal feature. Some of the shorter
pieces are quirky and playful, but Harris’s most characteristic sound is a flowing lyricism, grafted onto a swinging shuffle beat, a combination of metres that is always threatening to fall apart but never quite does.

BlackActionFigure
builds on the strengths of its predecessor. As before, the writing is strong and archetypal, vindicating Harris’s idealist belief that all music pre-exists and is merely transcribed. ‘The Alchemist’ and the stately ‘Chorale’ which follows are perfect illustrations of this: timeless-sounding compositions with a strange mnemonic quality. It isn’t often you come away from a contemporary jazz album humming the tunes; perhaps this is why Harris got a Grammy nomination. This has the odd effect of making the album’s two standards, ‘There Is No Greater Love’ and ‘You Stepped Out Of A Dream’, sound brand-new by comparison, particularly when the soloing takes them so far from the starting-point. The only other repertory piece is a version of Onaje Allan Gumbs’s ‘Collage’.

SILVER LEAF JAZZ BAND

Formed c.1993

Group

New Orleans Wiggle

GHB BCD-347

Chris Tyle (c, v); Orange Kellin (cl); Steve Pistorius (p); John Gill (d). 1999.

George Melly said (1998):
‘ “Authentic” is the most dangerous word in this business because it implies comparison with a standard we cannot know anything about. We know how some of the New Orleans groups sounded when they were cleaned up, given new clothes and teeth and stuck into a studio, but that’s hardly the same. “Honest” recording of New Orleans music is better. I’d even settle for “sincere”. But not “authentic”.’

Chris Tyle leads this group of New Orleans wannabes. Even though the group is based in the city, few of them are authentic NO musicians, and followers of this axis of traditional players will recognize many of the names. They got off to a somewhat ordinary start with
Streets And Scenes Of Old New Orleans
: the best numbers are the more obscure pieces, including several by Johnny Wiggs. The subsequent Jelly Roll Morton set,
Jelly’s Best Jam
, is much more like the right thing: a shrewd blend of familiar and less hackneyed Morton titles is arranged with enough élan to sidestep mere copycat tactics, and the inclusion of four of Morton’s 1938 piano solos offers a ghostly echo of the master’s presence.