The Penguin Jazz Guide (89 page)

Pike began on drums and switched later. He worked the Coast for a time in the ’50s, then moved to New York and spent three years with Herbie Mann. The Dave Pike Set became popular in Germany, where he lived for several years. The Atlantic date is programmed as a jazz-meets-pop enterprise, yet there’s far more to enjoy than a glance at the cover (a space age air stewardess steered the album in a bachelor pad direction) might suggest. Terry may have been hired to lead the trumpet section, but he also gets in some typically puckish solos, and Pike himself sounds hungry just to be out front and to play on a record with his name on it. He’s heard on marimba throughout, and Hancock plays nothing but organ. They make a fine partnership on the keyboardist’s opening ‘Blind Man, Blind Man’. The pop covers are perfectly OK: strong melodies with good hooks and eventful chord sequences, so there’s nothing to fear here. It’s music with considerable integrity, some strong rhythmic interest (a basic Latin swing, with some freer elements) and a nicely balanced band.

BOOKER ERVIN

Born 31 October 1930, Denison, Texas; died 31 July 1970, New York City

Tenor saxophone

Lament For Booker Ervin

Enja 2054

Ervin; Kenny Drew, Horace Parlan (p); Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (b); Alan Dawson (d). October 1965, 1975.

Kenny Drew said (1979):
‘Booker had a big personality – which is perhaps why he got on so well with Mingus – but that time [in Berlin] he just blew. And then he blew some more. It might have been embarrassing, if it hadn’t been so good. I had trouble keeping up with him, and I was playing piano!’

Booker started out on trombone and carried over some of the brass instrument’s broad portamento effects into his reed work; he’s unmistakable as a result. He taught himself saxophone while in the services and instinctively veered towards the kind of blunt, blues-soaked sound of fellow Texans like Arnett Cobb and Illinois Jacquet. He had his big break with Mingus, who liked his raw, unaffected approach. The career was painfully short, but Booker packed a lot in.

He packed a lot into one evening when in Berlin in 1965 he made a stand against the limited time allocated to each musician at an all-star saxophone event by improvising for more than 27 minutes on ‘Blues For You’, a filibuster that equals Paul Gonsalves’s Newport monologue, and more than matches it for sheer intensity. He’s probably better known for the short series of ‘Book’ records he made in 1963 and 1964 for Bob Weinstock at Prestige. Ironically, they too now seem like an unstaunchable outpouring of musical ideas, thoughts, opinions, inchoate feelings. They’re a little shapelier than that in practice and the best of them (
The Freedom Book
) is a fine modern record, but all of it pales into insignificance alongside the 1965 concert appearance which occupies most of this record, hard, Texan blues playing at its best. To make up the weight, another Mingus alumnus, Horace Parlan, recorded a lament for Booker after his premature death and it appears alongside ‘Blues For You’ here, a small headstone for such a large talent.

LARRY YOUNG
^&

Also known as Khalid Yasin Abdul Aziz; born 7 October 1940, Newark, New Jersey; died 30 March 1978, New York City

Organ

Unity

Blue Note 56416-2

Young; Woody Shaw (t); Joe Henderson (ts); Elvin Jones (d). November 1965.

Drummer Tony Williams said (1991):
‘Larry reinvented the organ. It was a different instrument when he played it, and had that thing where you feel the player has never heard anyone else doing this: he’s working it out for himself, in complete freedom.’

Larry Young was the first Hammond player to shake off the pervasive influence of Jimmy Smith and begin the assimilation of John Coltrane’s harmonics to the disputed border territory between jazz and nascent rock. He was to achieve almost legendary status with bands like Tony Williams’s Lifetime and Love Cry Want, and on Miles Davis’s electronic masterpiece,
Bitches Brew
. On all three, and on one-off sessions like John McLaughlin’s
Devotion
, he traded on a wild, abstract expressionist approach, creating great billowing sheets of sound. It’s unfortunate that much of what survives of his work outside these groups is a throwback to the organ/guitar/drums jazz – he’d started out working in his father’s Newark night club – he was leaving behind at the end of the ’60s.

The step forward was dramatic.
Unity
is a modern jazz masterpiece. Whipped along by Jones’s ferocious drumming and Henderson’s meaty tenor, even on a soft-pedal tune like ‘Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise’. Young contributes nothing as a writer, which doesn’t in any way diminish the impact of his performance. Woody Shaw’s ‘The Moontrane’, ‘Zoltan’ and ‘Beyond All Limits’ are a measure of
his
under-regarded significance as a composer; the first of the three is the perfect test of Young’s absorption of Coltrane’s ideas, as he develops a rather obvious (if precocious – Shaw wrote it when he was just 18) sequence of harmonics into something that represents a genuine extension of the great saxophonist, not just a bland repetition.

& See also
Lifetime, (Turn It Over)
(1971; p. 374)

ORNETTE COLEMAN
^&

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

Alto and tenor saxophones, trumpet, violin

At The Golden Circle, Stockholm: Volumes 1 & 2

Blue Note 35518 / 35519

Coleman; David Izenzon (b); Charles Moffett (d). December 1965.

Ornette Coleman said (1983):
‘I don’t believe there’s any difference between an idea and an emotion. Music is language made up of notes and keys; written language is made up of letters which are the symbols of sounds, and they change between sounds the same way that the letters for notes can. All of this has a profound effect on us as human beings, which is why I say I’m not playing, I’m curing, and through the medium of language which is the only thing, apart from sex, which brings us together.’

Blue Note’s purchase on the modernist movement was uncomfortably peripheral: a single Coltrane release, a brief skirmish with Cecil Taylor’s fierce atonality, a single Eric Dolphy record, some diffidently handled work by Andrew Hill and Bobby Hutcherson, and a tentative, but in the event patiently sustained, engagement with Ornette. These sessions from
Sweden catch the trio at its peak: densely textured, dark-toned and fierce. Much has been made of Ornette’s lack of reliance on pianos, but it’s obvious from these sessions that Izenzon fulfils that function. The leader may not lean on chords and progressions, may even ‘hear’ the harmonic sequence differently, in line with his insistence that his C might not in functional terms be your C, but, as with Dewey Redman later, he needs an anchor. Coleman plays superbly throughout. Guess-the-next-note pieces like ‘European Echoes’ work less well than ‘Morning Song’ and ‘The Riddle’, and the obligatory fiddle-and-trumpet feature, ‘Snowflakes And Sunshine’, is unusually bland. ‘Faces And Places’ is typical of the way Ornette built a theme out of seemingly unrelated melodic cells, a honeycomb of sound without undue sweetness and without conventional symmetry. The sound is good for a club recording, faithful to the bass and to Moffett’s restless overdrive. The release in 2002 of the new editions of the Gyllene Cirkeln date added five alternative versions from other sets during the residency. In reality, they’re not so very different, perhaps a little flabbier; Ornette misfingers a couple of times and Izenzon has a couple of knocks on his fretboard which might easily have been ironed out. As historical documents, though, all these tracks are essential.

& See also
The Shape Of Jazz To Come
(1959, 1960; p. 245),
The Complete Science Fiction Sessions
(1971, 1972; p. 387),
Colors
(1996; p. 605)

DON CHERRY
^&

Born 18 November 1936, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; died 19 October 1995, Malaga, Spain

Pocket-trumpet, wooden flutes, doussn’gouni, piano, keyboards, miscellaneous instruments, voice

Complete Communion

Blue Note 22673

Cherry; Gato Barbieri (ts); Henry Grimes (b); Ed Blackwell (d). December 1965.

French horn-player Tom Varner recorded
Second Communion
in tribute to a hero:
‘Fall 1977, Boston. I’m a transfer student at New England Conservatory. My buddy, baritone-sax-player Jim Hartog, played me
Complete Communion
. It blew me away. It
swung
, and was abstract, focused, fresh, full of humour and life, joy and great beauty. It gave me direction in my life, as an improvising “weird” brass-player. Thank you, Don Cherry!’

Born in Oklahoma, Cherry played R&B before joining the classic Ornette Coleman quartet in the mid-’50s. After that he worked with John Coltrane and with the New York Contemporary Five. He visited Europe and subsequently retained a base there. Inveterate travel and non-stop listening led to extravagantly multicultural projects. He played Coleman’s music again in Old And New Dreams and with his former leader and turned up in guest situations, though hampered by various health problems.

The ‘symphony for improvisers’ tag was more than a metaphor for Cherry. On his first recordings after leaving the Ornette Coleman quartet, Cherry dabbled with the idea of structuring whole LP sides round two, three or more symphonic subjects which the players could reprise and vary at will, and in real time. The most explicit approach was on
Symphony For Improvisers
, recorded nine months after
Complete Communion.
Apart from the often overlooked
The Avant-Garde
with John Coltrane, the latter was his first recording as leader.

The aim – and this may be significant given how little attention, from engineers, let alone critics, the other members of the classic Ornette Coleman quartet actually received – is to give each member of the group an equal role in the improvising process, to let the simple thematic material roll round the ensemble in the freest way. It is, as yet, an experimental aesthetic, which accounts for the raw immediacy of the set and its successor. Barbieri, whom Cherry met during their respective Italian sojourns, is at his most unfettered
and Ayler-like, vocalizing intensely through the horn and producing chordal effects when the horns are in unison. Grimes was poorly audible on the original LP but he comes through strongly on the reissues and one tends to listen to him now, knowing how extraordinary his future story was.

& See also
Brown Rice
(1975; p. 424)

KRZYSZTOF KOMEDA

Born Krzysztof Trzcinski, 8 April 1931, Poznan, Poland; died 23 April 1969, Warsaw, Poland

Piano

Astigmatic

Harkit HKRCD 8158

Komeda; Tomasz Stańko (t); Zbigniew Namysłowski (as); Günter Lenz (b); Rune Carlsson (d). December 1965.

Tomasz Stańko says:
‘It was my first professional production, a year after recruitment to Komeda’s band. A regal line-up, and I was only 21. I’ll never forget that night at the National Philharmonic Hall in Warsaw. One could still sense the evening concert, but Komeda, with his back slightly hunched, was already embarking us on his music, and in a way known only to himself was introducing his world of sounds. That’s how he created the feeling that he wanted to keep throughout the date. One night. The great
“Svantetic” fresh after the evening gig
,
“Astigmatic”, and the future worldwide hit of
“Kattorna”, which I keep playing until now.’

Komeda is the Lost Leader of Polish jazz, but increasingly recognized now beyond his homeland as an important modern composer. His writing is more compelling than his playing, which was capable but not particularly distinctive in terms of attack and solo building, and for much of his short life he was better known for the film scores he wrote (latterly as Christopher Komeda) for his friend Roman Polanski, as well as for Ingmar Bergman, Henning Carlsen and others. His work on Polanski’s
Rosemary’s Baby
came shortly before his death. Komeda, who was an ear, nose and throat doctor who changed his name to throw off the Communist authorities, was severely injured in a car accident in California and subsequently returned to Poland, where he died within the year.

In 1956 he made his musical debut at a small, semi-official jazz festival at the coastal town of Sopot in Poland, the forerunner to the now annual Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw. There is some early work made for a ballet staged at Cracow Engineering College, and some jazz pieces that combine classical influences with an indefinably ‘Polish’ element, darkly romantic but quite severe. They suggest a musician with a clear but idiosyncratic understanding of American jazz, and also a composer with a wonderful gift for suggestive musical drama.

Even with this background,
Astigmatic
comes somewhat out of the blue. It is one of the finest jazz albums ever made in Europe, and we envy anyone who can come to it fresh. It is a record that never fails to repay close attention, and has an engrossing emotional charge that is almost physical. ‘Kattorna’ and ‘Svantetic’, as well as the title-track, have a dark logic, and a harmonic progression that departs in significant ways from American models. Stańko’s tone is lustrous and intense and the great Namysłowski projects his complex bop-derived lines in phrases that link together like pieces of DNA into living wholes. One misses him on the live version, where again the spotlight falls on Stańko. As ever, Komeda is a presence and a unifying element rather than a commanding soloist. The studio sound favours his rather unemphatic touch, and he certainly had a better piano in Warsaw than on the road – there is a powerful live version, available on the Power Bros label – though, listening again to the concert version, we wonder if the instrument wasn’t tuned a little dark. Deliberately? There is no indication that tape speed is the problem, but it raises the interesting possibility that Komeda was already experimenting with the kind
of detuning and pure sound that would resurface on
Rosemary’s Baby
, a film that reasserts the tragic aura that seemed to hang round Polanski and his circle.