The Penguin Jazz Guide (87 page)

& See also
Giant Steps
(1959; p. 248),
Ascension
(1965; p. 321)

BLUE NOTES
^&

Formed 1962

Group

Live In South Africa, 1964

Ogun OGCD 007

Mongezi Feza (t); Dudu Pukwana (as); Nick Moyake (ts); Chris McGregor (p); Johnny Mbizo Dyani (b); Louis Moholo (d); other musicians. 1964.

Ogun co-founder Hazel Miller says:
‘They came here, lived here and died here, in exile. Not even after Nelson Mandela’s release were they able to return to their beloved country. Along the way, though, they supported the ANC and freedom with their music. Unforgettable, but too readily forgotten.’

The group was founded in the year of the Sharpeville massacre, a mixed-race group (McGregor was white) playing jazz in Durban. Not long after these recordings were made, the legendary Blue Notes went to the Saint-Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival and never returned, eventually making their way into permanent exile, mostly in England. There, one by one, they ailed and died, broken by rain and a climate of neglect and distrust, but still having produced some of the most powerful and moving music of the time. The early group was more stylistically mixed than hindsight suggested. This is essentially a swing band, playing mostly in common time and with very few bop accents. Moholo (now the only survivor) mainly keeps it straight and the solos are delivered without much of the boiling dissonance that was to be a feature of later groups like Pukwana’s Spear and Zila. It’s idle now to speculate how the Blue Notes might have evolved if they’d stayed in the Cape or in a more liberal climate. As the set progresses, a mixture of McGregor and Pukwana tunes (they take the bulk of the solo space, too) with ‘I Cover The Waterfront’ featuring a Gonsalves-like Moyake, it becomes possible to hear some intimations of the later style. Pukwana’s ‘B My Dear’ has a tender plangency and the tune remained in everyone’s repertoire for the next four decades. Feza is less assertive than one expects, nor is the sound pristine, but this still marks an important historical release and the closing ‘Dorkay House’ delivers raw excitement.

& See also
BROTHERHOOD OF BREATH, Live At Willisau
(1973; p. 403)

DON FRIEDMAN

Born 4 May 1935, San Francisco, California

Piano

Dreams And Explorations

Original Jazz Classics OJC 1907

Friedman; Attila Zoller (g); Dick Kniss (b); Dick Berk (d). 1964.

Don Friedman said (1999):
‘I met Attila in 1959. We were both interested in free playing, attracted by those atonal sounds and by any possible means of breaking out of bebop.’

For a time, Don Friedman had the distinction of being the last piano-player used by Ornette Coleman, but he has other, more relevant claims to fame. After studying classical piano, he set to work on the burgeoning West Coast scene, playing with Chet Baker, Jimmy Giuffre, Charles Lloyd, Shorty Rogers and many others, bringing aspects of the Bill Evans style, and incorporating elements of 12-tone technique and freedom. Attila Zoller proved to be a highly sympathetic collaborator, making two fine albums with Friedman in the mid-1960s and providing a welcome second lead voice. There are a couple of standards on this 1964 date, but otherwise most of the music is original, on the ‘Explorations’ half of the record performed spontaneously, without predetermined structures. With sympathetic rhythm sections, Friedman and Zoller create a jazz which flirts with freedom and often runs on contrapuntal – even confrontational – lines, hotter than a Tristano school date, but with something of that doctrine. After four unsparing themes on
Dreams And Explorations
, it comes almost as a relief when they tackle the melody of John Carisi’s ‘Israel’, which isn’t a tune to coast on.

GIORGIO GASLINI

Born 22 October 1929, Milan, Italy

Piano

L’Integrale; Anthologia Cronologica: Volumes 3 & 4

Soul Note 121352/3-2 2CD

Gaslini; Don Cherry, Enrico Rava (t); Dino Piana (tb); Lorenzo Nardini (sno); Steve Lacy (ss); Gianni Bedori (as, ts, bs, f, picc); Gato Barbieri (ts); Eros Ferraresi, Mario Macchio (vn); Enrico Fiorini (vla); Dino Bazzano (clo); Bruno Crovetto, Kent Carter, Jean-François Jenny-Clark (b); Franco Tonani, Gianni Cazzola (d); orchestra, choir. 1964–1968.

Giorgio Gaslini says:
‘È per questo che mi sento profondamente legato da affetto, amicizia e riconoscenza al fondatore Giovanni Bonandrini e a suo figlio Flavio per tutto quanto hanno fatto nel far conoscere il mio lavoro di una vita di musica, e in particolare per questo
Integrale
– che sta proseguendo oggi a opera della nuova proprietaria, la Cam Jazz Record di Roma. Ascoltando il percorso artistico che dal 1948 ad oggi mi rappresenta è possibile vivere e comprendere i passaggi di anno in anno di una ricerca musicale sia di forme che di contenuti che mi ha accompagnato e mi accompagna sino ad oggi. Forse testimonianza del tempo in cui viviamo.’

Only a performer and composer whose stated aim is ‘total music’, a grand unified synthesis of jazz, serialism, pop, classical forms and electro-acoustic procedures, could possibly relate with equal ease to Thelonious Monk, Robert Schumann and Albert Ayler, as Gaslini did on successive records for Soul Note. One of the most distinguished players in the Italian jazz lineage, he studied composition in Milan, and composed and conducted into the early ’60s, before forming a jazz quartet, which performed in factories and hospitals in an effort to bring jazz to a new audience. He has also written opera and other large-scale works. The Ayler and Monk records are deeply impressive, but for the best measure of Gaslini’s skills as a composer, one has to turn to the documentation of his own music undertaken by Soul Note in several volumes.

Volumes 3 and 4
perhaps stands out for the non-specialist listener for the presence of such revered international figures as Barbieri, Carter, Cherry, Jenny-Clark and Rava, but it is in no other way superior to the rest of the sequence, which is one of the most remarkable and intellectually generous documentations of a living artist we have come across.
Newcomers might be recommended to start with some of the later records, but the reference points provided by these celebrated names are a way into Gaslini’s remarkable sound-world. ‘Dodici Canzoni D’Amore’ sets a dozen Italian love songs to a treatment by Gaslini’s group and a small string ensemble. The shabby recording doesn’t help, and there are a few curious touches, such as an uncredited organ which makes theremin-like sounds here and there. Gaslini says that he gave the piano the responsibility for pathos, while the others handled the atmosphere. It’s a curious but beguiling piece. His score for the film
Un Amore
takes up the rest of disc 3: the quartet with orchestra and choir. If the orchestral parts sound very like vintage Morricone, that may be because they’re men of like mind; either way, this is lightweight.

The fourth disc revives his most celebrated piece of the period, ‘New Feelings’, with Cherry, Lacy, Barbieri, Jenny-Clark and some Italian homeboys. As a clash of serialism and free playing, it has its awkward moments and, since Gaslini wrote the basic score only the night before, it’s scarcely a well-prepared scenario; but all the players must have embraced the occasion, since the enthusiasm of the playing endures. Back to the quartet for ‘La Stagione Incantata’, a four-seasons suite: Bedori in particular sounds as if he’s been liberated by his work on ‘New Feelings’, and in long form Gaslini makes increasing use of space, texture and astringent melodic variation.

HERBIE HANCOCK
^&

Born 12 April 1940, Chicago, Illinois

Piano, keyboards

Maiden Voyage

Blue Note 95331

Hancock; Freddie Hubbard (t); George Coleman (ts); Ron Carter (b); Tony Williams (d). March 1965.

Herbie Hancock said (1992):
‘I’m not interested in virtuosity as an end in itself. What interests me is what the music projects, in terms of drama and emotion. What I have that’s maybe different to other players is a certain touch, which I recognize even in musicians who’ve been listening to me.’

One of the most significant composers in modern jazz, the creator of ‘Watermelon Man’ and ‘Dolphin Dance’ as well as the unforgettable ‘Rockit’, the Chicagoan was a child prodigy, playing Mozart as a youngster. He’s understandably wary of that designation, particularly as he heads towards his 70th year, but it sticks. Following master’s work at the Manhattan School of Music, Hancock made his professional debut with Coleman Hawkins. He signed up with trumpeter Donald Byrd and came to the attention of Alfred Lion at Blue Note, who agreed to allow the 22-year-old to record with a horn-led group. Made in 1962 with Freddie Hubbard and Dexter Gordon,
Takin’ Off
is already mature and poised. Some fine records followed, notably the adventurous
Empyrean Isles
and some unmatched compositions, like ‘Blind Man, Blind Man’, but it was
Maiden Voyage
that established him as a major presence.

It has also been tussled over. Revisionists argue that it is glib and superficial, but that somehow makes accessibility and communicativeness sound like a defect. By any measure, it’s a colossal achievement from a man still just 24 years old. It is a quiet record, which also may work against it, likened by Joachim Berendt to Debussy’s
La Mer
. Coleman plays with delicate understatement and Hancock never puts a foot wrong. No great surprise that the chemistry was so good: with the obvious exception of Hubbard, this was Miles’s group. The title-track, ‘The Eye Of The Hurricane’ and ‘Dolphin Dance’ are all securely established in the canon, but even the less well-known tracks, including ‘Survival Of The Fittest’, the most developed theme of the set, are of sterling quality, and Hancock’s playing on them
is sure-footed, timbrally inventive and wonderfully logical without yielding to predictable cadences. It belongs in the very first rank of modern jazz records.

& See also
Head Hunters
(1973; p. 405)

BREW MOORE

Born Milton Aubrey Moore, 26 March 1924, Indianola, Mississippi; died 19 August 1973, Copenhagen, Denmark

Tenor saxophone

I Should Care

Steeplechase SCCD 36019

Moore; Atli Bjørn (p); Benny Nielsen (b); William Schiøpffe (d). April 1965.

Zoot Sims said (1980):
‘Brew was the most faithful of the Pres disciples. Hell, he even held his saxophone the same way, and he thought anyone who didn’t just hadn’t learned yet.’

Moore was a terrific but star-crossed tenor-player, at his best as good as Getz and Sims but never able to get a career together as they did. He started out in New York, then spent some time on the West Coast before trying his luck in Europe. There’s only a relatively small number of surviving recordings, though every now and then that distinctive ‘grey’ voice – Young-like, but obviously not Lester – floats up from a larger ensemble where he’s in small print. This Steeplechase album is a surviving memento from a stay in Copenhagen, a sequel to
If I Had You
. There’s a sub-genre of jazz like this: exiled American playing with competent, maybe star-struck European rhythm section, spinning out long, long solos that bespeak loss, defiance, an imperious superiority in technique. Those who heard him at the time say this nicely recorded set, from a radio broadcast, doesn’t catch him at his best. If so, there must have been some legendary Moore nights at the Jazzhus Montmartre. The opening blues isn’t much more than a blowing line, but ‘Manny’s Tune’ and ‘In A Mellotone’ inspire long, beautifully crafted statements, the kind of thing that, apart from his other foibles, made Brew the toast of Copenhagen. The city turned out to be his nemesis: Moore died when he fell down some stairs there in 1973.

RAMSEY LEWIS

Born 27 May 1935, Chicago, Illinois

Piano

The In Crowd

Universal 9545

Lewis; Eldee Young (b); Redd Holt (d). May 1965.

Ramsey Lewis said (1999):
‘We talked about a lot of names for the group, like The Spiders and The Bugs – I’d been in The Cleffs before that – but Daddy-O Bailey, the DJ who really pushed our music, came up with the Ramsey Lewis Trio, and that’s how we went out.’

Like George Benson’s, Lewis’s genuine jazz gift has been periodically overtaken by commercial success. He’s a musician who genuinely thinks beyond category and seems to regard jazz as simply part of a continuum with R&B, gospel (a particular influence and interest), blues and pop. None the less,
The In Crowd
, which launched him as a chart star in 1965, is still an eminently listenable record. If its status with jazz fans is less secure than,
say, Ahmad Jamal’s legendary Pershing Lounge recordings from the previous decade, then the reason is probably contextual rather than intrinsic to the music. Lewis’s hit came at a time when pop – and particularly the invasion of America by British bands – was at its peak, and Lewis’s music reflected that.

The trio had been recording for nearly ten years when
The In Crowd
came out, mostly for Argo and latterly Chess. It was taped at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington DC, and sees Lewis appropriating not only the title-theme, but also pop material like ‘You Been Talkin’ ’Bout Me Baby’, the themes from
Black Orpheus
and
Spartacus
, and Jobim’s ‘Felicidade’. Some reissues have crammed in material from earlier and later, but the original record, as is usually the case, stands up just fine on its own. Lewis’s Nat Cole-like playing has its distinctive aspects and his swaying rhythmic approach is easily identified. Bassist Eldee Young rarely gets much credit, but his Slam Stewart style vocalizing was an important aspect of the album’s success. Lewis went on to make many, many more records, moving into gospel territory later in life. To some degree,
The In Crowd
is a period piece, but it’s a very good one and it stands up well even now.