The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz (75 page)

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Authors: Tom Piazza

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BOOK: The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
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harmonizing like the reed section of a big band, sometimes even playing counterpoint with himself. As has been said many times, what at first was regarded as something of a gimmick came to be seen for what it was - the honest musical expression of a phenomenally gifted player.
Kirk was a strong, big-toned tenor player, with definite roots in rhythm and blues as well as jazz; he spelled the big horn with passages played on his two other reed instruments, the manzello and the stritch, as well as flute, on which he was an innovator. He wasn't necessarily the most melodically inventive of saxophonists, but his music was always highly charged, spiritually and emotionally. It had humor and a wide range of moods, and he knew more about the music's history than many musicians and writers. The quality of his recordings varies widely, but the best of them are kaleidoscopes of deeply human emotions and images.
Of Kirk's available recordings, the ones that give the broadest and most jazz-based sense of his playing are
Rip, Rig and Panic
(EmArcy 832-164-2) and
We Free Kings
(Mercury 826 455-2). Both sets have a wide variety of repertoire and approach.
Rip, Rig and Panic
, recorded in 1965, is perhaps the more interesting; Kirk is accompanied by pianist Jaki Byard, who is as much of an eclectic as Kirk was, capable of taking the music through its various historical periods as well as out into spaceville. Both men have a strong streak of gallows humor. The group is rounded out by bassist Richard Davis and drummer Elvin Jones. "No Tonic Pres" is an exciting, up-tempo blues with an ambiguous key center, on which Kirk takes off like a bull set loose in the streets, careening off of Jones's accents; in the middle of Byard's solo, the band stops and Byard launches into some unaccompanied stride piano. It's that kind of session. Kirk states the melody of "From Bechet, Byas, and Fats" on the high-pitched stritch (reminiscent of Sidney Bechet's soprano saxophone), then goes on another tenor rampage, using circular breathing techniques that allow him to play continuously where most others would have to stop for a breath, achieving a sort of extension of Coltrane's sheets of sound effect. In the middle of one of those sorties he ingeniously incorporates the accents Elvin Jones is playing into his line. The album is full of interesting material, including some nonmusical sounds patched in for a kind of dreamlike narrative effect.
We Free Kings
, from 1961, is somewhat more conventional. It is also a quartet session, using either Hank Jones or Richard Wyands on piano. The opener, "Three for the Festival," is an up-tempo, minor-key blues that Kirk plays on three horns at once; during his solo he switches to flute. Here and on "You Did It, You Did It" he shows the technique he added to flute playing, a way of combining sung vocal lines with the actual flute notes. He exhumes Charlie
 
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Parker's rarely done "Blue for Alice" and the pop tune "Moon Song," one of pianist Art Tatum's favorites. This set,
Rip, Rig and Panic
, and everything else Kirk recorded for Mercury are available in a deluxe set from Polygram.
Kirk's Work
(Prestige/OJC-459) is a nice quartet set with organist Jack McDuff, bassist Joe Benjamin, and drummer Art Taylor, generally in a more straight-ahead, blues-dominated groove than the two previously mentioned sets. In the middle of certain solos, Kirk inserts sax-section riffs with all three horns playing simultaneously, often using these brief interludes as excuses to change horns, in a kind of spontaneous one-man big-band head arrangement.
Introducing Roland Kirk
(MCA/Chess CHD-91551) is a good 1960 date on which the reed man is paired with multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan, who plays mainly trumpet here. Again, this is a fairly straight-ahead set, with a variety of material: a shuffle blues, an unusually slow version of "Our Love Is Here to Stay," which doubles in tempo, and several cookers.
In the late 1960s and 1970s Kirk began to incorporate a wider range of musics into what could be called his act, including some rock and funk elements and some good old vaudeville aspects. His recordings and performances were in actuality an early form of performance art, combining Kirk's spontaneous raps, quick changes of idiom, and broad humor - sometimes successfully, sometimes not. One of his most popular albums is
The Inflated Tear
(Atlantic 7 90045-2), a grab bag of blues, sing-song flute tunes, even a self-duet on Duke Ellington's "Creole Love Call." But his unique personality and sensibility are given their freest rein on
The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color
(Atlantic 1674-2), a wild melange of tape overdubs, commentary from Kirk, rock, funk, and even Kirk himself playing trumpet in a pastiche of Miles Davis's style on "Bye Bye Blackbird." It's interesting, but this kind of project depended on the personal projection of Kirk; to me, it hasn't stood up that well as the years have passed.
 
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The Piano
Pianists
Jazz piano exists in something of its own orbit; it is equally an accompanying instrument that functions as part of the group's rhythm section, a solo voice within the group that can make its own melodic solo variations during a group's performance, and a self-sufficient solo instrument, capable of providing both lead and accompaniment, harmony and rhythm.
The piano is, in a way, the cerebral cortex of the jazz group, coordinating the activities of the different elements of the band. It functions this way because of its unique nature as both a percussion instrument (the piano's sound is produced by striking, however softly, keys which then cause hammers to strike strings located inside the piano) and a harmonic instrument capable of playing chords (and thereby outlining the harmony of a song) or a melody - or many melodies at the same time. In practice, these aspects - the percussive, the harmonic, and the melodic - never function separately. In jazz, melody almost always has a strongly percussive quality; the accenting within the melody or melodies sets up a rhythmic pattern that gives the drummer something to play off of, much as a poet's deliberate use of a pattern of accented syllables sets up a rhythmic pattern in a poem. Moreover, these accented notes also have an important harmonic function, often serving as signposts in a melodic line to tell us where we are harmonically.
The piano is at the center of this complex network of harmonic and rhythmic significance in a jazz group. During another instrument's solo, the pianist
 
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keeps up an ongoing commentary on what the soloist plays, in keeping with the call-and-response quality of a jazz group's interaction; the pianist comments harmonically, as well as rhythmically, on what the soloist plays by echoing or answering the soloist's accents.
But this dialogue with the soloist is only part of what the pianist is thinking about; as part of the rhythm section, the piano carries on separate but related relationships with both the bass and the drums. You will often hear a pianist and a drummer set up a little pattern of accents behind a soloist (for an example of this, listen closely to the way pianist Red Garland and drummer Philly Joe Jones play behind the soloists on "Two Bass Hit" on the Miles Davis album
Milestones
[Columbia CK 40837]). And the pianist also has to be thinking about what the bassist is playing, so that they agree harmonically on the route to be taken through a song's chordal steeplechase.
Unaccompanied piano presents its own challenges. The solo pianist needs to be able to maintain a pulse whether or not he or she is actually spelling it out; he or she needs tremendous harmonic knowledge in order to keep the performance from becoming boring, an orchestrator's sense of balance and density, a juggler's coordination, a basketball coach's ability to think in simultaneous lines, phenomenal stamina, and the concentration of a stunt pilot. The solo jazz piano is like a jazz group in microcosm; often, especially in dance-oriented styles like stride and boogie-woogie, a pianist can develop the same kind of call-and-response effect, the making of complex shapes out of simple repeated phrases, of a big band in full roar.
Perhaps for this reason, many of jazz's preeminent composers and orchestrators - Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk are the most obvious examples - have been pianists. Many of jazz's most important pianists are discussed in the Ensembles section because their greatest significance was the effect they had on the ensemble concept in the music.
Anyone looking for an overview of the jazz piano will be well served by the Smithsonian's four-CD set
Jazz Piano
; almost all the major figures are represented, from Jelly Roll Morton through Fats Waller, Earl Hines, Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, and Herbie Hancock. The seventy-eight-page accompanying booklet is full of expert commentary by the late Martin Williams, one of the deans of jazz criticism, and pianist Dick Katz. Like
The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, Jazz Piano
covers a lot of ground in a dauntingly small space, managing to give a meaningful view of a complex subject. A useful, if much less comprehensive, set is
Classic Jazz Piano
(RCA/Bluebird 6754-2-RB), which is weighted toward styles that developed before bebop.
 
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Stomps and Joys
From its beginnings, jazz piano has been contrapuntal in nature and has used the instrument's percussive qualities to bring out the call-and-response and polyrhythmic aspects of the music. The earliest players tended to set up rhythmic expectations with the left hand, then use the right hand to play shifting patterns off against the underlying pattern. This created a drama of tension and release that was often specifically designed to encourage dancing.
Jelly Roll Morton, whose work is discussed in some depth in the Ensembles section, was one of the most important early pianists to record. His 1923 piano solos, available on
Jelly Roll Morton 1923/24
(Milestone MCD-47018-2), are a very high level example of early jazz piano, with strong roots in the structures of ragtime but incorporating many of the compositional elements of jazz, such as breaks, riffs, and shout choruses. You can hear how his left hand mostly alternates between bass notes and chords, creating a momentum and a set of expectations against which his right hand plays endless intriguing variations. The same could be said, in the abstract, for stride piano and boogie-woogie, except that the nature of what each hand plays is quite different.
For an example of the Spanish tinge that Morton said was indispensable to jazz, listen to his "New Orleans Joys" and "Tia Juana," on which the left hand plays a rhumba beat instead of the alternating bass/chord, bass/chord pattern; Morton plays some extremely ingenious variations with his right hand here. In other places in this set, his left hand incorporates what amounts to a countermelody in the bass, sometimes imitating the trombone part in a typical New Orleans ensemble (a good example of this is "Kansas City Stomp"). In all cases, Morton sets up a tension between the rhythmic pull of the left hand and the right. Morton's solos and band performances on the slightly later
The Pearls
(RCA/Bluebird 6588-2-RB) and on the monumental, for-collectors-only
The Jelly Roll Morton Centennial
(RCA/Bluebird 2361-2-RB) are also classic examples of his style.
A treasure trove of Morton's piano playing, including his examples of how jazz developed out of earlier forms of music, is Rounder's four-disc series of Morton's 1938 recordings for the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress Recordings, Volume 1
(
Kansas City Stomp
) (Rounder 1091) has his famous illustration of how "Tiger Rag" evolved from a French quadrille, as well as versions of "Maple Leaf Rag" played in different styles.
Volume 2
(
Anamule Dance
) (Rounder 1092) has the charming title track but is generally the lightest of the four on essential pianistics.
Volume 3
(
The Pearls
) (Rounder 1093) contains a version of the title tune, one of Morton's greatest compositions, as well as
 
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other Morton standards like "King Porter Stomp" and "Wolverine Blues."
Volume 4 (Winin' Boy Blues)
(Rounder 1094) has his definitive illustrations of the Spanish tinge, especially "The Crave," and his study in "advanced" chords called "Freakish.'' One thing to be aware of here is that many of the performances are incomplete; when Morton recorded these, the piano and vocal sections often grew naturally out of Morton's reminiscences, and it is too bad that these aren't present. It is not uncommon for tunes to cut off in mid-chorus. For the serious-minded student, it's not that much of a problem, but if you are listening for enjoyment primarily, it can be annoying.
Volumes 3
and
4
are probably the easiest to listen to in this respect.
Stride
Stride piano, as practiced largely in New York City by pianists like James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, and Fats Waller, somewhat resembles Jelly Roll Morton's playing, incorporating as it does the bass/chord, bass/chord way of keeping time in the left hand, but it has a different rhythmic emphasis, a more headlong forward propulsion. This comes from a slightly different way of accenting. In the bass/chord, bass/chord pattern, Morton tended to accent the bass note; the stride players tended to accent the beat that the chord falls on. Musicians would say that Morton tended to accent one and three, the stride players two and four, out of every group of four beats.
For an example of stride piano at its best, check out the 1929 "Handful of Keys" on the Fats Waller set
The Joint Is Jumpin'
(RCA/Bluebird 6288-2-RB). You can hear how Waller's left hand keeps up a bouncing tempo by alternating bass notes with chords, while his right hand plays swinging, repeated riffs in both single notes and chords. Sometimes, instead of a simple bass note in the left hand, Waller (like most stride pianists) plays the interval of a tenth with his pinky and thumb, giving a fuller sound than just the bass note. Listen, too, for the way Waller sometimes constructs a countermelody in the bass. The combined shapes of the left-hand rhythm and the right-hand riffs create an exciting series of patterns, the way a juggler's simple actions combine to produce a complicated total effect. Much of the pleasure in this style lies in listening for the way the pianist varies the patterns he sets up. Waller's other recordings are discussed in the Ensembles section, where he is also discussed as the fine band pianist that he was. If you really like the stride style and want to study his playing in depth, the two-CD set
Fats Waller Piano Solos
-
Turn On the Heat
(RCA/Bluebird 2482-2-RB) is essential.
Waller was the best-known stride pianist by virtue of his great showmanship, songwriting, and singing ability, but anyone with a taste for this style must listen to some of the older men he learned from, especially James P.

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