The History of Jazz Has Instantly Expanded
As far as commercial holidays go, Record Store Day is a virtuous occasion, because recorded music is among the wonders of the world, and the survival of physical media is crucial to the future of art. In the realm of jazz, the holiday’s hero is the producer Zev Feldman, who is responsible for a long and transformative run of releases from previously unavailable archival sources. To mark the latest Record Store Day (April 18th), working with a variety of labels, he has brought forth treasures that both deepen the history of jazz and expand the art form’s imaginative range. Three of the new sets (also available on CD and via digital download on April 24th) offer revelatory experiences of musicians whom I’ve been listening to for half a century—Cecil Taylor, Ahmad Jamal, and Joe Henderson. Delightful old recordings are rediscovered year in and year out, but it is rare for new entries in extensive discographies to feel instantly canonical.
The albums by Jamal and Henderson are from the nineteen-seventies, a time when jazz was in crisis—and their performances, both recorded in concert at the same venue (Chicago’s Jazz Showcase), present personal responses to the artists’ own situations and to the state of the music at large. As for Taylor’s recording, from the late sixties, it defines a bold advance in jazz that nevertheless reconnects with the music’s traditions.
Ahmad Jamal, “At the Jazz Showcase: Live in Chicago”
Resonance Records
Jamal started his recording career in 1951 with a style of piano playing so unusual that it was often grossly misunderstood and underestimated (including, in 1958, in the pages of The New Yorker). Eschewing the profusion and complexity of the era’s bebop pianists (foremost, Bud Powell), Jamal played sparely, creating arrangements for trios that served as backdrops for his improvisations of stark strokes and elegant gestures, sharp punctuations and witty melodic distillations. He neither accompanied other soloists nor had wind-instrument sidemen in his band. But, by the mid-sixties, Jamal’s style changed. Working with a new, looser generation of drummers, he went from restrained to overflowing, playing denser and more emphatically expressive solos, albeit without sacrificing wit or melody. That transformation came at a cost: in the late fifties, Jamal had enjoyed great commercial success, but in the next decade his popularity waned. The trouble wasn’t his alone. Rock was supplanting the show-tune-based Great American Songbook—Jamal’s prime source—as the musical mainstream, and by the seventies popular jazz was heavily tinged with “fusion” elements (electric instruments, borrowings from rock and R. & B.) that often came at the expense of improvised solos. Jamal acceded to the trend and made several electric-based albums in pop modes that ranged from funk to easy listening. But the new album, “At the Jazz Showcase: Live in Chicago,” features live performances from March of 1976 that sound like a revolt against commercial concessions.
Classic American pop songs figure in the album, which also starts with an original composition by Jamal, “Ahmad’s Song.” Like many of the numbers here, it opens with a florid, rhapsodic piano introduction, before the drummer Frank Gant (with whom he’d been playing for a decade) and the bassist John Heard join in and kick things into high gear. What follows is an electrifying outburst of energy, as Jamal pushes the tempo, pulls it back to cascading cadenzas, tosses in quotes from other jazz and pop tunes, unleashes carillons of thunder. The second track, Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa-nova “Wave,” features a similarly dazzling virtuosic variety of phrases and riffs—a skipping and rocking eight-note motto that brings cheers from the audience, rapid two-handed chopping figures up the keyboard, crashing dissonances, swirl and bluster, lyrical whispers. Jamal’s exuberant solos give rise to a wondrous, paradoxical divergence: he flaunts a distinctive art of decomposition, breaking melodies down into small motifs that he both obsessively repeats and cleverly varies, yet he also keeps melody central, punctuating the improvisations with recognizable fragments of the basic tune, like signposts amid his free associations.
Fans of Jamal’s spare and firmly arranged recordings may struggle to recognize him in the teeming exuberance of this album. What unifies the two modes is the precision of Jamal’s discrete musical gestures, and his art of contrasts—how he moves in both periods, with jolting abruptness, from whispers to roars, from touches to torrents and back. If his early recordings isolate these gestures and surround them with musical space, separating the foreground of his piano from the background of his rhythm arrangements, the new recording brings background and foreground crashing together. To borrow an analogy from visual art, the finish of paint on the earlier recordings is thin, close to the canvas; here, it’s built up thickly. If there’s something Mondrian-like in his earlier, starker sense of musical geometry, at the Jazz Showcase he paints over the sharp lines with a van Gogh-esque impasto. In recent years, Feldman has put out three great albums of Jamal’s nineteen-sixties live recordings that chart the pianist’s transition to these more expansive styles. The new release marks the fullest flowering of them that I’ve heard.
Joe Henderson, “Consonance: Live at the Jazz Showcase”
Resonance Records
Henderson’s career launched later than Jamal’s but bore certain similarities. In the early sixties, Henderson, a tenor saxophonist, emerged as a modernist on the edges of mainstream jazz, where fervent but finger-snapping hard bop met the avant garde. He recorded with such illustrious musicians as Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Woody Shaw, Lee Morgan, Horace Silver, Grant Green, and John Coltrane’s longtime bandmates McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones. In the early seventies, Henderson released such tough-minded albums as “At the Lighthouse” and “In Japan” but also made commercially tinged, fusion-based recordings (such as “Black Narcissus” and “Canyon Lady”). At the time of the Chicago gig, in February, 1978, he hadn’t been in the studio as a bandleader in nearly three years.
Like just about every major tenor saxophonist of his generation, Henderson was influenced by Coltrane, but Henderson absorbed that influence and transformed it into a mark of his own originality. He took on essential elements of Coltrane’s sound—the long low-note honks and growls and high-pitched screeches and wails—and he was inspired by Coltrane’s vehemence, how his energies from deep within seemed to burst out with reckless, self-revealing fervor. Yet where Coltrane is a natural complexifier, piling chords on chords and notes on notes and creating colossal intricacies even within jaunty phrases, Henderson is a simplifier, planing the harmonic field in order to dash ahead all the more ebulliently. Coltrane builds vertically, layering and intertwining the music into elaborately interlocking spirals; Henderson hurls out details and dashes through them, creating sonic landscapes for his relentless improvisational travels.
Notably, the first track on the new album, “Mr. P.C.,” is a Coltrane composition, an assertive romp that, a minute and a half in, already conjures a sense of having gone far fast. With buzzing and droning, wild high rasps and moans, fragmented and juddering phrases, roars and screams and split notes, beelike buzzing and hectic squalling, Henderson offers the sound-world of the avant-garde underpinned by songful riffs and a foot-stomping beat. At times, as in his solo on his own composition “Inner Urge,” these sound-shredding elements reach strident extremes untempered by thee rhythmic accompaniments of his bandmates—the pianist Joanne Brackeen, the bassist Steve Rodby, and the drummer Danny Spencer—who are keenly responsive partners in the high-spirited clamor.
Henderson also offers one of the most beautiful and unusual renditions of the classic modernist ballad “ ’Round Midnight” that I’ve ever heard. It starts with his unaccompanied solo saxophone; then, joined by the rest of the quartet, he bumps the tempo up to a bouncy stride and offers solos with thrilling velocity and intensity to match. He ends another ballad, “Good Morning Heartache,” with another free and unaccompanied cadenza that dives into the wild zone, buzzing and yodeling. I’ve listened to many of Henderson’s albums from early in his career through the seventies, and long beyond. The new one is what I’d play for a Martian who wanted to know the power and the freedom of Henderson’s art.
Cecil Taylor Unit, “Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts”
Elemental Music
Taylor, of course, is one of the prime creators of so-called free jazz, a genre largely defined by atonality, collective improvisation, ferocious intensity, and the absence of a foot-tapping beat. But the idiom’s paradoxes—and its deep roots in classic jazz—are reflected in the title of his composition “Fragments of a Dedication to Duke Ellington,” which fills the entirety of this two-disk album. The recording, from Paris on November 3, 1969, is by a quartet featuring two of Taylor’s longtime collaborators, the drummer Andrew Cyrille (who’s still active and recording) and the alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, along with Sam Rivers—one of the prime free-jazz recording artists in his own right—on tenor and soprano saxes and flute. The group offers two separate performances of the same composition—one, from the afternoon set, and the other, from the evening. This is the first official release of the recordings, and hearing them is an ecstatic experience.
I’ve long thought of the great jazz musicians synesthetically, in terms of their implicit connections to other art forms. Taylor’s music has always struck me as bound with dance, for reasons that also help explain his deep connection to Ellington, beyond the similarities of their percussive piano styles and their efforts to create original group sounds. For much of Ellington’s career, his band was a dance band, playing in night clubs and at social gatherings which weren’t principally concerts, and his compositions and arrangements were designed to set people in motion. Taylor didn’t make his career playing for dancers (though he did, in 1990, accompany a choreographed dance performance), yet his music does much the same thing, in radically different ways that take a bit of teasing out. Taylor’s way of playing the piano evokes dance in its gestures, and he provokes the same effect from the entire group. At the keyboard, he doesn’t swing; he lurches and glides, leaps and thrusts and spins and jitters, unleashing torrents of notes at astounding speed, fragmenting his rhythms to their vanishing point. His free music manages to be intensely rhythmic nonethelesss, in a way that’s radically different from the familiar beats of foot-tapping jazz. His performances channel metabolic undulations, akin to breathing with the whole body, and they are liable to get even listeners in their seats, at home, moving along. By the end, a listener should feel not only exhilarated but also exhausted.
My only complaint about the new album is that the two versions of “Fragments”are presented in reverse chronological order—starting with the evening set, which runs forty-nine minutes, and followed by the afternoon one, which is nearly twice as long. The shorter version, heard first on the first disk, feels rushed; though the musicians are all inspired, the results feel somewhat unvaried. In the longer one, the quartet’s members have more solos and develop a wider range of moods, revealing the great variety that emerges from their relatively homogeneous and immensely complex style. It’s a grand, rich, and mighty experience—and the shorter rendition suggests that the quartet knew that they couldn’t top it or match it in such short order.
What the briefer version also lacks is the sense of stamina, of athleticism that’s at the heart of Taylor’s music. He was lean and in shape, as the album’s booklet and cover photos attest, and he remained so throughout his career. (I saw him, when he was nearing eighty, play with whirlwind thunder for an hour and a half, without interruption, amid the holy racket of his fifteen-to-twenty-piece big band.) Taylor’s music has a heroic, monumental sense of time; it occupies time the way that a staged spectacle occupies space, and, as a result, the forty-nine-minute evening set of “Fragments” seems slight, whereas the hour-and-a-half-plus version, for all its mind-wrenching and body-seizing intensity, fits properly in its dimensions. Taylor, who’d already made eleven studio albums, starting in 1956, hadn’t recorded any since October, 1966. As great as many of them are– notably, the last of that group, “Conquistador!”—this Paris concert is the earliest recording yet released to reveal the vast scope of his ambitions. ♦