The Penguin Jazz Guide (101 page)

Hampel, schooled in a classical tradition, is always the melodist and clearly well versed in the American jazz tradition. Even when the music seems chaotic, he imposes a certain order. The first piece, ‘We Move’, is effectively a buoyant song-setting for Jeanne Lee, and it makes for an unexpectedly accessible opening. The CD adds a couple of alternate versions of this piece, each sufficiently different to recast both the piece and the album. On ‘Morning Song’ Braxton is more volatile, importing altissimo screams and tearing phrases that threaten to float free of the rest of the group. The very long third piece is much more coherent in approach, with all three horn-players on bass (or contrabass) clarinets, a tonality and timbre that give ‘Crepuscule’ an appropriately dark and occluded cast.

A generous and open-hearted player, whose vibraphone work in particular always sounds like it’s for the group rather than for individual show. That said, Hampel is often an exciting soloist on the instrument, somewhat reminiscent of Khan Jamal among the new wave of American vibists. An important catalyst on the European scene, Hampel is also widely admired by US musicians, but hasn’t yet made the breakthrough to the wider audience his large body of work deserves.

WARNE MARSH
^&

Born 26 October 1927, Los Angeles, California; died 18 December 1987, Hollywood, California

Tenor saxophone

Ne Plus UItra

hatOLOGY 603

Marsh; Gary Foster (as); Dave Parlato (b); John Tirabasso (d). September & October 1969.

Warne Marsh said (1980):
‘I think about Bach a lot, not so much the counterpoint and harmony but the simple fact that we know so little about where that music came from, what is was for. Classical people make a fetish of it but most of those things are just a skeleton; we have to put the flesh on it. Same with jazz. I don’t see any distinction between a piece of Bach and a standard chord sequence.’

This was Marsh’s first name recording for almost ten years and it first appeared on the Revelation label. It was taped on two separate occasions at Herrick Chapel Lounge, Occidental College, LA, with just the opening ‘You Stepped Out Of A Dream’ from the earlier date. Apart from Foster, who makes a convincing stand-in for Lee Konitz, the group isn’t at all well-known, but Parlato and Tirabasso seem to know what they’re about and when the music goes free on the long improvised ‘Touch And Go’, they’re right there. Marsh’s tenor has little of the machine-tooled quality one tends to listen for. It’s as human and expressive a voice as almost any other major practitioner of comparable background and here and there a resemblance to Rollins is detectable. There’s a tiny taste of Bach’s ‘Two-Part Invention No. 13’ at the end as if to say: ‘Dry and classical? Us?’, but for the most part the set is devoted to Tristano themes, ‘Lennie’s Pennies’ and ‘317 E. 22nd’, with a nice reading of Konitz’s ‘Subconscious-Lee’ to round it out. Marsh plays with warmth and fire.

& See also
Music For Prancing
(1957; p. 214),
Star Highs
(1982; p. 470)

MICHAEL GIBBS

Born 25 September 1937, Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe)

Trombone, composer

Michael Gibbs / Tanglewood ’63

Vocalion CDSML 142

Gibbs; John Wilbraham (picc t); Harry Beckett, Nigel Carter, Ian Hamer, Henry Lowther, Maurice Miller, Derek Watkins, Kenny Wheeler (t, flhn); Malcolm Griffiths, Cliff Hardie, David Horler, Bobby Lambe, Chris Pyne (tb); Maurice Gee, Ken Goldy, Ray Premru (btb); Jim Buck Jr, Nicholas Busch, Alan Civil, Valerie Smith (frhn); Martin Fry, Dick Hart, Alf Reece (tba); Duncan Lamont, Mike Osborne, Tony Roberts, Alan Skidmore, Brian Smith, Stan Sulzmann, John Surman, Barbara Thompson, Ray Warleigh (reeds); Gordon Beck, Bob Cornford, Mike Pyne, John Taylor (ky); Ray Russell, Chris Spedding (g); Roy Babbington, Jack Bruce, Jeff Clyne, Brian Odgers (b); John Marshall, Tony Oxley, Clive Thacker (d); Frank Ricotti (perc, vib). September & December 1969; November & December 1970.

Michael Gibbs says:
‘We recorded
Michael Gibbs
at Decca Studios in West Hampstead and I remember, whilst walking in the corridors, passing Benjamin Britten, who was also recording there!’

Few recording careers have got off to such a glorious start as Mike Gibbs’s. The opening moments of ‘Family Joy, Oh Boy!’ on the eponymous debut could split clouds. Gibbs had come to Britain from his native Rhodesia via Berklee, where he studied with Herb Pomeroy. A very few gigs later he was being talked about as the most vibrant new talent on the scene. Gibbs has the gift that all great leaders of big bands seem to require: that of making complex and daring ideas seem natural and inevitable. In these early records he fused advanced harmonic ideas with a groove that drew on Ellington, Gil and Miles, and rock. Having Jack Bruce and Chris Spedding both play bass guitars on one track was a stroke of genius, and the addition of piccolo trumpet and French horns gives the ensemble a unique cast.

As he demonstrated on
Tanglewood ’63
, Gibbs could move from sun-kissed delight to moonstruck melancholy in a moment. Something about the voicing of the horns – Gibbs was a (reluctant) trombonist – marked him down as an individualist. He rarely asks for stratospheric playing, concentrating on the middle register. ‘Sojourn’, which follows ‘Tanglewood ’63’ and the appended ‘functional’ fanfare, is a lonely stroll through a rich musical landscape.

The first album pays some dues – to Stan Getz, John Dankworth, Bob Moses and Gary Burton – but it is utterly individual in conception and execution. Gibbs’s charts look challenging, but he has the gift of making difficult passage-work sound coherent and expressive. ‘Sweet Rain’, ‘Throb’ and ‘And On The Third Day’ are classics of British jazz. Surman, Warleigh and Skidmore solo on the first and last, joined on ‘Third Day’ by Mike Osborne and trombonist Chris Pyne for an exuberant finale that brings a wonderful album to a climax.

The end of
Tanglewood ’63
is no less joyous, a long feature for guitarist Spedding over a richly textured rhythm, held together by Roy Babbington’s bass guitar, a near-perfect marriage of rock and jazz that was to be Gibbs’s staple for years to come, even when the idea of fusion was in retreat. A whole generation of British jazz fans cut their teeth on these records.

BARRY HARRIS

Born 15 December 1929, Detroit, Michigan

Piano

Magnificent!

Original Jazz Classics OJC 1026

Harris; Ron Carter (b); Leroy Williams (d). November 1969.

Barry Harris said:
‘Jazz is my vocation, and I feel that unless you make it your vocation, you can’t really quite appreciate it. I try to say that to students and look them in the eye, to see what’s coming back. If there’s nothing, they probably won’t make it, no matter how “good” they are.’

The career of Barry Harris suggests a self-effacing man for, although he is among the most accomplished and authentic of second-generation bebop pianists and an admired teacher, his name has rarely excited more than quiet respect. One of the Detroit school of pianists which includes Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones, and his style suggests Bud Powell as an original mentor, yet a slowed-down, considered version of Powell’s tumultuous manner. Despite the tempos, Harris gets the same dark timbres from the keyboard.

His records are unjustly little-known. There is no singleton masterpiece, just a sequence of graceful, satisfying sessions which suggest that Harris has been less interested in posterity via recordings and more in what he can give to jazz by example and study. He is himself one of the music’s great teachers. It’s hard to argue with the title of the 1969 album. Turning 40, Harris is musing on his uncluttered bebop roots in ‘Bean And The Boys’ and seeing how far he can push the envelope in the ingenious fresh voicings of ‘Ah-Leu-Cha’, in which Carter is a willing partner. ‘Just Open Your Heart’ is a Monkian original that Harris subjects to a playful twist. ‘Dexterity’ takes us back to first-generation bebop, but again Harris casts it in a darker, more evasive setting. A neglected classic of its day.

BETTY CARTER
^&

Born Lillie Mae Jones, 16 May 1930 (some sources give 1929), Flint, Michigan; died 26 September 1998, Brooklyn, New York

Voice

Finally

Roulette Jazz 53332

Carter; Norman Simmons (p); Lisle Atkinson (b); Al Harewood (d). December 1969.

Betty Carter said (1995):
‘Most real jazz singing starts in church. Those are the only voices that are going to make it in jazz, to get above the racket, those big voices, full of soul.’

The most challenging of all female jazz singers, both artistically and personally, ‘Betty Bebop’ sang with Lionel Hampton in the ’40s, then broke off to raise a family. Returning in 1969 she became the most demanding and virtuosic of jazz singers, her touring groups little academies for young players, and until her unexpected death she maintained a ferocious appetite for performing.

She quickly transcended the ‘bop vocalist’ tag and created a style that combined the fluent, improvisational grace of an alto saxophone with an uncanny accuracy of diction. Even when her weighting of a lyric is almost surreal, its significance is utterly explicit and sarcastically subversive. The latter quality has allowed her to skate on the thin ice of quite banal standard material, much of which has acquired a veneer of seriousness from nowadays being heard only as instrumentals; ‘Body And Soul’ on
Finally
is the obvious example, medleyed with ‘Heart And Soul’ on this 1969 live album, taped at New York’s Judson Hall.

Some of the pieces on
Finally
are left deliberately raw. ‘Girl Talk’ is wild, but what is she thinking about as she sings ‘The Sun Died’ or ‘You’re A Sweetheart’? With Carter the charge of emotion isn’t always obvious. What these sides consistently demonstrate is a stock-in-trade ability to reshape a song so radically that it becomes something quite new which retains only a few subtle reminders of its original. A process similar, in other words, to the contrafacts on standard material made by the bebop pioneers, but with the added complication of words which overturn expectations of what female jazz singers might be expected to say.

& See also
The Audience With Betty Carter
(1979; p. 454)

AMM

Formed 1965

Improvising ensemble

Laminal

Matchless MRCD 31 3CD

Cornelius Cardew (p, clo); Lou Gare (ts, vn); Christopher Hobbs, Eddie Prévost (perc); Keith Rowe (g, elec); John Tilbury (p). December 1969, February 1982, May 1994.

Eddie Prévost comments:
‘For me the 1982 Great Hall performance has verve and excitement unencumbered by any conscious articles of faith. Tilbury’s pianism at its most uninhibited. Rowe fearless and risking more than perhaps he has done since. He probably won’t agree. Me? I too am energetic and searching, more like Ed Shaughnessy or Frank Butler than I have ever been before or since! I still get members of that audience reminding me how the short-wave radio messages Keith conjured out of the ether set a menacing background to our finale.’

In a dense and difficult book called
Noise
(
Bruits
), the French cultural theorist Jacques Attali identifies four main stages in the political economy of music, culminating in a final utopian phase which Attali calls composition. This is a music ‘beyond exchange … performed for the musician’s own enjoyment, as self-communication, fundamentally outside all other communication, as self-transcendence, a solitary, egotistical, noncommercial act’. It’s an argument and a model that applies well to the music of AMM, who for three and a half decades have stood outside every commercial and critical nexus and continued to make powerfully creative music. We quibble with ‘egotistical’, for it is almost axiomatic of ‘AMMusic’ (no other category exists) that ego is effectively suspended. AMM’s origin lies in the British free-jazz movement – an ancestry shared with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and one
which resurfaced when the group was reduced to just saxophonist Lou Gare and drummer Eddie Prévost, the only constant member – but the political and philosophical instincts of the founding members quickly dictated its transformation into an improvising collective in which process rather than gesture was important and which redefined the growing division in new music between performers and audience. Early AMM performances were conducted in the dark and often deliberately blurred starting and finishing times.

Though ‘beyond exchange’ and defined entirely by the context and the collective understanding of the changing membership, the music has enjoyed a second life on record. The advent of CD meant that for the first time whole performances could be issued without breaks or editing, and Prévost has used his own Matchless imprint to document the group’s early and ongoing history, starting with early classics like
The Crypt
but also including this very important historical survey, issued to celebrate AMM’s 30th anniversary.

In a note to
The Crypt
, Prévost points out that
Jazz Journal
once identified the group as the ‘Cornelius Cardew Quartet’, a nonsensical and ironic attribution on all sorts of counts.
Laminal
usefully begins with an early performance with the problematic composer in the line-up. Cardew’s later commitment to militant Albanian communism seems out of tenor with AMM’s libertarian discipline, but he was an important member and catalyst. This is music which rejects instrumentalism. It matters very little after a few minutes of any performance who is playing what, particularly when conventional technique is almost entirely overthrown. In later years, as can be heard in the later performances on
Laminal
, Prévost was to return to something that demonstrated at least a kinship with jazz drumming, and Tilbury’s piano-playing is more conventionally linear and expressive than Cardew’s. Rowe is perhaps the key to the sound-world. He is credited as ‘guitarist’, but only in the most deconstructionist sense, laying the instrument flat on a table and manipulating feedback, overtones, percussive effects and accidentals, using the instrument as a sound source without a playing history.