The Penguin Jazz Guide (124 page)

One of the definitive characteristics of the trio’s sound is a dry, unswinging rhythm, and a seeming avoidance of the usual theme-and-variations, harmonic approach of jazz. Tarasov avoids a settled groove in favour of a light, springy metre that can move in almost any direction or in none. There is no conventional bass, though Ganelin makes distinctive use of the basset, a small keyboard instrument which mimics the sound of a string bass, but in a flat and uninflected way.

After 1980 the Ganelin Trio were able to perform on a world stage, making an important appearance in London in 1984 that divided musicians and critics, but provided overtime for the KGB abroad. Overground, if not in any sense officially sanctioned, the group seemed to make less sense and while there was fine work to come, and not least a notably sunlit American performance, the tense, subversive logic of the
samizdat
years had gone. The trio disbanded when Ganelin emigrated to Israel, and while there was to be a later reunion, the Ganelin Trio felt very much part of a history that was over. The great records endure, though.

THE ’80s

If the story of each succeeding jazz decade has been one of stylistic innovation – or regression – meeting the challenge of new recording technologies, then the narrative of the ’80s can be reduced quite straightforwardly to neo-traditionalism – or neo-conservatism – and the compact disc.

Jazz underwent a certain renaissance in the ’80s. The scorched-earth tactics of punk had left popular music in a curiously bewildered state. At all the majors, A&R men, who had lost money and credibility during the punk spasm, were actively casting about for a new music to promote. As often in such circumstances, jazz was available as a ready-made product, and the early ’80s saw what was billed as a jazz boom. In the US, it was spearheaded by a serious young trumpet-player called Wynton Marsalis, who was signed up by Miles Davis’s label, Columbia, but with a musical message diametrically opposite to Miles’s. With Dr Stanley Crouch at his shoulder – not since Clement Greenberg had steered Jackson Pollock’s painting hand was there such a close relationship between an American artist and his ideologue – Marsalis preached a return to the purity of early jazz, rejecting all dalliances with funk, pop, rock and soul, and thus implicitly rejecting Miles’s recent legacy at Columbia, which had flared darkly in the mid-’70s with two dark slabs of sound,
Agharta
and
Pangaea
, recorded in Japan and considered only releasable there. Following his return to partial health and activity, Miles decamped to Warner Bros, leaving Wynton (whom the older man famously snubbed onstage in Montreal early in the following decade) to contribute to both the label’s jazz and its classical wings.

The new conservatism wasn’t quite like the ’40s revival, in the sense that nothing lost had been rediscovered. What happened was closer to a renewal of emphasis on the core values of jazz: melody, swing, blues tonality, individual expression within a tightly organized ensemble music. Bebop became fashionable again. In the UK, young men who would otherwise have been playing reggae, ska and soul were dressed up in suits and marketed as the ‘new black British jazz’, an implicit acknowledgement that jazz in the UK had been largely (though far from exclusively) a white preserve.

In Europe the Eastern frontier seemed suddenly to have rolled back. The Western discovery of the Ganelin Trio – brought out of the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc in
samizdat
form and released by Leo Feigin – was a curious dance of wild enthusiasm and considerable resistance, the group’s strange theatrical approach quite alien to the determinedly unhistrionic style of most jazz at the time, but in that way almost shamingly faithful to the primitive origins of jazz as a subversive, ironic, explosive music that mimicked official culture in order to debunk it.

The documentary low fidelity of the early Ganelin Trio recordings also set them apart from the growing sophistication of jazz recording. Digital techniques and the capacity to record jazz – like commercial music – on a number of manipulable channels were mixed blessings to a form that relies to some degree on spontaneity and real-time responsiveness. While some of the signature labels of the time did continue to dabble in multi-tracking and editing (which lost its physical dimension with the introduction of digital techniques), the overwhelming preference in jazz was for ‘live’ or ‘as live’ recording, with performances recorded in real-time. For some, the introduction of digital sound robbed the music of warmth, and vinyl records persisted longer and more faithfully in jazz than elsewhere in the industry.

Compact discs offered the possibility of putting more than an hour of music on a single record. Given that many classic LP releases came in at precisely half that duration, there was briefly the possibility that major label reissue programmes would involve doubling up
LPs on a single compact disc. Unfortunately, the business chose to go in another direction, padding out classic records with ‘bonus tracks’, ‘alternates’ and sometimes even studio noise (all material which, as Rudy Van Gelder pointed out, the artist and producer had deemed substandard or unreleasable). As a means of study, having five or six ‘takes’ of a familiar tune – say, John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ – was an obvious plus for the student, but once the practice was established labels found it impossible to reissue a classic LP without augmenting it with often spurious material. Ironically, in the following decade and after, as recordings of the LP era began to slip out of copyright, the practice of issuing what had once been called ‘twofers’ did come back into play, though usually only on budget labels.

CD duration had a (mostly negative) impact on new recording as well. Where an artist and producer might once have selected the very best 35 or 40 minutes of music from a session, now the tendency was to include everything that had been done, and if there was not sufficient good new writing, to record a couple of standards or repertory pieces as makeweights. More very definitely does not mean better. We have inveighed against the practice for years, but it is now unstoppable and the possibility of anyone – fan, critic, A&R man – keeping pace with new recording has long since gone. To repeat: the problem is not the number of new records being released, which can only be welcome, even if many do not pass through basic quality control, but their duration.

The symbolic drama of jazz in the ’80s was acted out between Wynton and Miles, the polite, educated spokesman of traditionalism against the prince of darkness, air versus electricity. It was, of course, a marketing and media invention. Marsalis was capable of expressing raw violence, Miles increasingly reverted to the blues; Marsalis’s deviations from ‘the tradition’ were often far more glaring than Miles’s apparent, but not actual, rejection of it. Those who like to search for endings were presented with another
terminus ad quem
when Miles Davis died in 1991, exhausted but still ostensibly moving forward. If the history of jazz could be told in the life-stories of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, there was no surviving figure of comparable stature and longevity to extend that deceptively apostolic lineage. Jazz fragmented in the ’80s, often creatively, sometimes confusingly, but always to someone’s advantage. It became, before the term had been coined, a world music.

Part 1:
1981–1985

MARK MURPHY
^&

Born 14 March 1932, Fulton, New York

Voice

Bop For Kerouac

Muse MCD 5253

Murphy; Richie Cole (as); Bill Hays (ky); Bruce Forman (g, ky); Luther Hughes, Bob Magnusson (b); Jeff Hamilton, Roy McCurdy (d). March 1981.

Mark Murphy said (1986):
‘Times hadn’t been easy for vocal jazz, but it was coming back, partly thanks to Eddie Jefferson, and when I got a call from Richie Cole [who’d been with Jefferson when he was gunned down in 1979] it seemed like a good time to take a step back into jazz singing.’

Murphy was away from singing for a while. He taught instead, and he was missed by those who love his scatting. That’s to hint that not everyone does. There are many far more recent
records than this, but
Bop For Kerouac
, with its blessed, Beat sensibility is as far down the line as most uncommitted listeners will go. The voice of later years has some burrs and roughnesses that often work to Mark’s benefit, but here he comes on alongside Cole as a tough, streetwise horn-player, whipping through ‘Boplicity’, his own version of ‘Bongo Beep’ and an altogether surprising ‘Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat’ with a swagger. ‘Down St Thomas Way’ and ‘Ballad Of The Sad Young Men’ make for an extraordinary climax. It’s as camp as a row of tents, of course, but Murphy is still able to blow almost every other male jazz singer before Kurt Elling off the map.

& See also
Crazy Rhythm
(1956–1958; p. 186)

BILLY BANG

Born William Vincent Walker, 20 September 1947, Mobile, Alabama

Violin

Rainbow Gladiator

Soul Note 121016-2

Bang; Charles Tyler (as, bs); Michele Rosewoman (p); Wilber Morris (b); Dennis Charles (d). June 1981.

Billy Bang said (1984):
‘Some musicians don’t make much of a thing of records, but for me that was my progress, right there, my life laid out. Each record was an attempt to do more and better than the last.’

He played drums with his college friend Arlo Guthrie, then served in Vietnam (which was so gruelling he suppressed the experience for more than 20 years) and began playing seriously relatively late, drawing inspiration from Ramsay Ameen and Leroy Jenkins but also from the swing violin of Stuff Smith. His characteristic sound is combative, sometimes harsh, but always melodic. He worked for a time with Sun Ra, became a figure on the New York loft scene and was a founder member of the String Trio Of New York.

Rainbow Gladiator
is a terrific record, bright, percussive and packed with ideas. The group has a unique and immediately identifiable sound, especially when Tyler is playing baritone, and this has to count as one of Rosewoman’s best early recordings. The violinist’s articulation is as precise as ever and ranges from a huge, raw vibrato and a lighter, dry, almost bleached effect. The title-track opens the album on a high; almost a quarter of an hour in length, it doesn’t let up for a moment. Everything else is a good deal shorter. ‘Ebony Minstrel Man’, ‘Broken Strings’ and ‘Bang’s Bounce’ are less than five minutes each, but they show how comfortable Bang is with song forms: a dedication to Laurel Van Horn, ‘Yaa – Woman Born On Thursday’, is extraordinary.

Bang eventually came to terms with his Vietnam experience in musical form, but those records are dark and difficult. For musicianship and expressive personality,
Rainbow Gladiator
is still his finest statement.

LESTER BOWIE

Born 11 October 1941, Frederick, Maryland; died 8 November 1999, New York City

Trumpet

The Great Pretender

ECM 829369

Bowie; Hamiet Bluiett (bs); Donald Smith (ky); Fred Williams (b); Phillip Wilson (d); Fontella Bass, David Peaston (v). June 1981.

Former Paris club manager Jean-Paul Allais remembers:
‘One night when the Brass Fantasy were playing, a man collapsed in the foyer. Lester was going past in his white medical coat and this guy’s wife grabbed at him and screamed: “Please help us!” Lester took a look at the guy – who was basically OK – and said: “Come on, man, get up and dance!” He could see the woman looking at him strangely. “It’s OK, I’m a
j
-
a
-
z
-
z
doctor.” ’

There’s only an apparent paradox in Bowie’s commitment to both the avant-garde and the pop-fuelled exuberance of Brass Fantasy, to the radical deconstructions of the AACM era and the buoyant sway of ‘The Great Pretender’. Bowie perceived no tension between the two. He had a profound understanding of black music history, recognizing that the ‘avant-garde’ smears and growls of contemporary trumpet-players had their roots in the classic jazz of Bubber Miley and others, and that the line between experiment and entertainment was narrower than the usual critical ideology allowed. Lester’s career began on the R&B circuit, but after his move to Chicago he became involved in the musical explorations being carried out by Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian and others, and it was here he met Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman and Malachi Favors, the core of the future Art Ensemble.

Among his records apart from the
Art Ensemble
(see p. 369), it is hard to choose between this and the 1978 quintet
The 5th Power
with Arthur Blythe and Amina Claudine Myers. Bowie’s reinterpretation of the Buck Ram hit ‘The Great Pretender’ has its clownish elements, but the playing and singing are at a very high level. Just when the track seems ready to stall, Hamiet Bluiett takes the melody by the horns and charges it through into a hectic waltz. The gospel elements of
The 5th Power
are here as well, but somehow better assimilated, and when Bowie attempts a calypso – he had lived in Jamaica for a period – on ‘Rios Negroes’, it’s stunningly effective. The elongated title-track, which comes first in the programme, actually gives a strange sense of the set’s emotional dynamic, for some of the later tunes, including ‘When The Doom (Moon) Comes Over The Mountain …’ and ‘Oh, How The Ghost Sings’, are actually quite sombre and after that downbeat ending it’s worth tracking back to explore the hidden complexities of the bravura title-piece. Along with its dark twin,
The 5th Power
, this one marks his finest (solo) hour.