The Penguin Jazz Guide (149 page)

Varner made a series of good records for Soul Note without as yet shaking the foundations, playing uneventful freebop and depending on satisfying solos to make a modest impact.
The Mystery Of Compassion
, though, was in a class by itself. Everything Varner loved went into the date, which was also ‘my first multi-tracked fat two-inch analog tape project’. Varner’s alarming juxtapositions make coherent sense without losing their capacity to surprise, and the other players respond with a passionate intensity which is rare even among these driven musicians. The central group is a quintet made up of Varner, Jackson, Rothenberg, Richmond and Rainey. On all-out barnstormers like ‘How Does Power Work?’ and ‘$1000 Hat’ they play with unstinting panache. ‘The Well’ is a concerto-like piece for Feldman, and ‘Death At The Right Time’ uses a tentet to create a bemusing recall of Coltrane’s
Ascension
. Varner’s own improvising has never been better – he actually makes the instrument assert its personal qualities – and he closes the record on a sombre antiphonal piece for low brass called ‘Prayer’ which makes a moving coda to the rest.

There were great things to come. Some days, 1996’s
Martian Heartache
seems better still, and Varner continued the run after leaving Soul Note, with superb records on New World (
The Window Up Above
) and on Omnitone (
Swimming
and
Second Communion
, the latter a remarkable meditation on Don Cherry’s masterpiece), but for us this one remains his masterpiece, a record we’ve returned to constantly.

HILTON RUIZ

Born 29 May 1952, New York City; died 6 June 2006, New Orleans, Louisiana

Piano

Manhattan Mambo

Telarc CD 83322

Ruiz; Charlie Sepulveda (t); Papo Vasquez (tb); David Sanchez (ts, perc); Andy Gonzalez (b, bell); Ignacio Berroa (d, perc); Joe Gonzalez, Giovanni Hidalgo (perc). April 1992.

Hilton Ruiz said (2001):
‘Jazz and classical music? Yes, they are different things and you can’t just pretend they’re the same. But that doesn’t mean you can’t master both of them. It just needs a different discipline.’

The title is an apposite one, because no one better illustrated the cultural melting pot of New York City, and in particular its naturalization of Latin music, than Hilton Ruiz. Ironically and tragically, he died after being found unconscious in the street in New Orleans where he had been working on a Hurrican Katrina benefit project; he had apparently been the victim of a fall rather than foul play.

Ruiz was a child prodigy of Puerto Rican descent who at one time seemed bent on a classical career, playing at Carnegie Hall when only eight years old. He worked with Freddie Hubbard for a time, and studied with Mary Lou Williams, but came to prominence with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, with whom he worked between 1974 and 1977. Ruiz’s desire to give jazz a Latin accent runs a little deeper than the usual south-of-the-border trimmings. Ruiz has a deep understanding of popular forms – samba,
soca
,
clave
– and makes them an integral element in his writing and reworking of standards and classics. The early Steeplechase
Piano Man
, made when he was just 23, is a terrific album, performed by a top-flight trio, with Buster Williams’s singing bass and Billy Higgins’s tuneful drums complementing his own two-handed style.

Manhattan Mambo
lines up three incandescent horn-players, all steeped in the idiom, to duck and dive over the rhythms and the thump of the piano. The basic language here is bop, though a luminously delivered version of John Coltrane’s ‘Impressions’ suggests he was also well-versed in later evolutions, and what one gets isn’t so much ‘Latin jazz’ in the usual Tex-Mex fusion way, but modern jazz heard and played through a very particular cultural filter. This isn’t simply a matter of super-added rhythm. The voicings are distinct and different, too, and there’s a sharp mind behind the arrangement of Perez Prado’s ‘Mambo Numero Cinco’ which opens the record. The definitive album by a prematurely lost master.

LEW TABACKIN
^&

Born 26 May 1940, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Tenor saxophone, flute

I’ll Be Seeing You

Concord CCD 4548

Tabackin; Benny Green (p); Peter Washington (b); Lewis Nash (d). April 1992.

Lew Tabackin said (1991):
‘When I was starting out, everyone sounded like Coltrane, and what I didn’t want to be was a white man playing bad Coltrane, so I listened to everyone else and tried to find my own route. I didn’t want to be a good tenor saxophonist who played bad flute – plenty of them around – so I worked at that, too.’

Still an outrageously underrated saxophonist, Tabackin actually derives more from the great swing masters – especially Ben Webster and Don Byas, though he says Coleman Hawkins proved to be beyond him – than he does to the modern movement. However, the strong infusion of Asian ideas that has developed in parallel with his wife Toshiko Akiyoshi and in the big band they have co-led has bled through from his highly distinctive flute work into his saxophone-playing as well.

Tabackin’s own discography – aside, that is, from the co-led big band – is surprisingly large and of consistently high quality. There is a Rollins-like exposition of melody, but the harmonic approach is all his own, sometimes reminiscent of Joe Farrell’s thwarted experiments but without the emphasis on quartal harmony. Tabackin tackles a couple of obvious saxophone icons, Coltrane’s rarely covered ‘Wise One’ and the glorious Johnny Hodges feature ‘Isfahan’, which allows him to explore a measure of the Eastern modality he brings to his work on both flute and tenor. The group is behind him all the way and Green’s chord colours are especially effective on the slower numbers. Why is Tabackin not better known or more widely appreciated? Well, he’s an understated player, and resolutely undramatic. It takes time, even for this masterly album, to get to the heart of what he does.

& See also
TOSHIKO AKIYOSHI, Toshiko Akiyoshi–Lew Tabackin Big Band
(1974–1976; p. 427)

TOMMY SMITH

Born 27 April 1967, Edinburgh, Scotland

Tenor saxophone

Paris

Blue Note CDP 780612

Smith; Guy Barker (t); Julian Argüelles (ss, as); Jason Rebello (p); Mick Hutton (b); Jeremy Stacy (d). May 1992.

Tommy Smith says:
‘I hated my first Blue Note record,
Step By Step
. It was terrible, especially the sound. The company was unhappy that I used unknown British colleagues on the next two records; they wanted superstars. But I thought
Paris
was strong and diverse and still do. We had a ball in the studio, playing Coltrane’s “Transition” really loud to stoke the fire within. Blue Note never released the record in the USA, which I found strange. A few months after its European release I was canned.’

Saddled with quite unreasonable expectations when he emerged as a 15-year-old, Smith has done the most difficult thing of all in surviving the ‘prodigy’ label and continuing to develop as a mature artist. He is now a major force in British jazz and in jazz education, heading a much respected youth jazz orchestra which has proved to be a crucible for talent similar to his own. But Smith’s importance as a figurehead has tended to blur two important recognitions: that he is now a saxophone soloist of magisterial presence and emotional depth, but also that this intensity was always present, albeit initially buried under a sometimes over-eager and self-absorbed virtuosity.

Though its circumstances were somewhat damaging for Smith, as he explains above,
Paris
was a record of the very highest quality. Smith had been living in Paris for two years, with ‘too much time on my hands’, and the music on the record reflects a period spent studying and writing, but also inspired by the city. It was, however, recorded in London with ECM engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug, who gives Smith and his colleagues a big, expansive sound with a lot of atmosphere and detail.

The perversity of Blue Note’s decision to drop Smith’s contract after four records was that he grew in stature with each one. The debut
Step By Step
, with Mitchel Forman, John Scofield, Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette was a cruel mismatch, but its poor quality has nothing to do with any lack of authority on Smith’s part. Musically and sonically, it simply sounds like a dialogue of the deaf.
Standards
, which followed, was an attempt to mainstream the young signing, still only 24. It’s a more than listenable record, as is
Peeping Tom.
But
Paris
is in a different class altogether. The music is blunt, immediate and subtly modulated. Only on the long ‘Phraseology’ and the closing ‘Occidentalism’ does Smith lapse into showy technical rhetoric. The other long track, ‘Day Light’, is as fresh a theme as Smith has ever written, topped by a solo that reaches a new plane of maturity.

Having a second saxophonist in the ensemble seems to help Smith along; his voicings on the opening ‘Dischord’ are subtle and wry. Argüelles is a wonderfully poised player, but doesn’t carry his baritone for this date, which is a pity. The only other quibble is that Rebello is sometimes a touch florid when what is called for is something of the thump of a Stan Tracey, another Briton who enjoyed mixed fortunes with Blue Note at this time.

Smith returned to Scotland following the demise of his American contract, signed up with local label Linn and began again the process of building a strong recording relationship, which he did on 2000’s excellent
Blue Smith
. After that, he founded his own Spartacus imprint. No one missed the barb in the title.

GIANLUIGI TROVESI

Born 1944, Nembro, Italy

Alto and soprano saxophones, clarinets, other winds

From G To G

Soul Note 121231-2

Trovesi; Pino Minafra (t, flhn, didjeridu, v); Rodolfo Migliardi (tb, tba); Marco Remondini (clo); Roberto Bonati, Marco Micheli (b); Vittorio Marinoni (d); Fulvio Maras (perc). May 1992.

Gianluigi Trovesi says:
‘
From G To G
può essere inteso anche come un giro intorno al ricco microcosmo dell’intervallo di ottava, come un
ricercare
e un
toccare
, secondo le dizioni antiche, emozioni e regioni del sapere musicale, con la rapidità e la rapacità che è propria del tempo in cui vivo e faccio musica. L’incontro tra tensioni armoniche estreme e la caricatura affettuosa del jazz d’antan; il dialogo tra Bartok e Stravinskij e un mediterraneo onirico e immaginario; le affinità imprevedibili tra asimmetrici ritmi balcanici e gli effetti d’eco della polifonia rinascimentale: sono questi alcuni dei vocaboli di un dialogo che mette in conto anche lo scontro, il contrasto, l’imprevisto.’

Trovesi is a key figure in Italy’s new jazz, as performer, composer and organizer. He became known as a member of Giorgio Gaslini’s small group and as a key fixer with the Italian Instabile Orchestra. His work is a deeply personal exploration of the frontiers of jazz, classical music and Italian vernacular music. An adaptable instrumentalist, he is less distinctive in terms of sound than in the quality of his ideas. Even on an unfamiliar instrument, one is often able to pick him out from the sheer daring and beauty of the idea.

From G To G
is a small classic. Without sacrificing any of his intensities, Trovesi has created a colourful, unpredictable, brilliant marshalling of devices drawn from jazz and far beyond. While there are hints of Italian folk music and remote echoes of ancient masters of Italian composition, the synthesis leads inexorably to a real Italian jazz. ‘Herbop’ uses two themes which are split and reshaped continuously through 18 minutes of music, soloists and ensemble set in perfect balance. ‘Now I Can’ and ‘Hercab’ are satirical without being heavy-handed and without losing an underlying severity which Trovesi uses to pare off any fat in the music. But the finest piece is probably ‘From G To G’ itself, a long, serenely effective dirge in memory of a friend, with a memorable solo from Minafra. The brass-player turns in some of his most lucid work here, Migliardi is rumbustious on tuba and urgently expressive on trombone, but it’s Trovesi himself who leads from the front, his alto solos elegantly moving forward from Dolphy and Coleman into a sonority that again suggests the tradition of Italian song.

JOSHUA REDMAN

Born 1 February 1969, Berkeley, California

Tenor saxophone

Joshua Redman

Warner Bros 945242-2

Redman; Kevin Hays, Mike LeDonne (p); Christian McBride, Paul LaDuca (b); Gregory Hutchinson, Clarence Penn, Kenny Washington (d). May & September 1992.

Joshua Redman says:
‘This session kind of caught me by surprise. The thought of recording an album as a leader had never really occurred to me, so I was woefully unprepared. Before this, I had only written one song in my entire life. I had no original material. I cobbled together five tunes in the month leading up the date.’

He could easily be a tenor-player of an older generation, but for the sharp, knowing delivery and occasional latter-day references in the solos. Winner of the 1991 Thelonious Monk competition, Dewey Redman’s son – who didn’t grow up with his father, so there is no early influence there – became a figurehead for the young American jazz movement of the ’90s, largely preferring straight-ahead settings and a purist approach to recording.