The Penguin Jazz Guide (157 page)

JANE IRA BLOOM

Born 1955, Boston, Massachusetts

Soprano saxophone, electronics

The Nearness

Arabesque AJ0120

Bloom; Kenny Wheeler (t, flhn); Julian Priester (tb); Fred Hersch (p); Bobby Previte (d). July 1995.

Jane Ira Bloom remembers:
‘We recorded
The Nearness
in one of the worst summer heat waves in NYC. First the studio air conditioning went out. Then the independent mix controls went on the fritz, so we would end up recording the entire album with a single headphone mix. At one point, we canned the headphones altogether and recorded on radar ears alone!’

It’s an instrument that claims a very particular loyalty from its exponents, but there are still very few soprano specialists around. Bloom went to Yale and Berklee, before moving to New York and settling on the straight horn. She ran her own Outline label for a while, and seems to have revived it recently. Some of her work in the ’80s – including a couple of quickly deleted Columbias – suggest that she may have become disenchanted with straight-ahead jazz, but her spare, considered delivery, eschewing vibrato and sentimentality alike, resembles nothing else in contemporary jazz.

Bloom made an impressive return to form in the early ’90s with a new Arabesque contract.
Art And Aviation
was intended to suggest a concept of flying through dark skies and the music does indeed soar and glide. It introduced a partnership with Kenny Wheeler, who’s in terrific form, the two horns so confident in formation that there are unintended gasps at every turn. It’s quite frosty music, and the touches of live electronics suggest some high-atmosphere event, but this is all to the good on an otherwise overheated and earthbound scene.

The surprise card on
Nearness
is Priester and, with no electronics and several standards in the programme, this might have been an orthodox blowing record. Instead, Bloom recasts every melody and form in refreshing ways. The originals are typically thoughtful: ‘Flat6 Bop’ puts a complex harmonic idea inside a rawly exciting
ostinato
form, and ‘The All-Diesel Kitchen Of Tomorrow’ has a Zappa-like quality that goes beyond the title. Incredibly, she finds something new to do with ‘Round Midnight’, here done as a sober dance for the horns. The ballads ‘The Nearness Of You’ and ‘In The Wee Small Hours’ are almost spoken, with cadences of melody soft enough to suggest music drifting down from the stars. Wheeler is irresistible, the rhythm section marvellous, and the original ‘It’s A Corrugated World’ keeps navel-gazing at bay. Why’s she not better known?

NED ROTHENBERG

Born 15 September 1956, Boston, Massachusetts

Reeds

Power Lines

New World NW 80476

Rothenberg; Dave Douglas (t); Josh Roseman (tb); Kenny Berger (bs, bcl); Mark Feldman (vn); Ruth Siegler (vla); Erik Friedlander (clo); Mark Dresser (b); Michael Sarin (d); Glen Velez (frame d). August 1995.

Ned Rothenberg says:
‘I’m tremendously proud of
Power Lines
, but sorry that I couldn’t make more music with this aggregation. It took a number of factors falling into place, a generous commission for the composition, the availability of a superb group of players, and a golden age at New World, with serious budgets for projects like this. The engineer, James Farber, did a superb job of giving transparency to this multi-layered music.’

A charter member of the New Winds ensemble, Rothenberg has embraced many branches of the music, from Dolphy-influenced post-bop to formal composition and solo improvisation. He is one of the few Westerners to sound convincing on shakuhachi. Rothenberg refers to solo improvisation – of which he has released some particularly interesting examples on the Tzadik
Lumina Recordings
and the Leo
The Crux –
but here he is with a much larger group that allows him to continue those experiments in a responsive and beautifully modulated musical environment.

If this is ‘avant-garde jazz’, bring it on! Rothenberg plays hard
ostinati
runs so long and complex you suspect he must be fitted with gills. Five beautifully extended tracks conclude with the 20-minute-plus ‘In The Rotation’, which builds to a whooping climax that brings everyone in. The start’s every bit as good, with ‘Hidalgo’ calling the band in like a trumpeter at a corrida. Berger gives it all a solid bottom end, allowing Dresser to improvise more freely
than he might otherwise. As he would time and again in future years, Rothenberg gets the strings fully involved and insists that they swing and stomp, too, rather than simply adding colour-washes in the background. Sarin’s a great drummer for this kind of project, but Velez adds a special dimension on his two tracks. For some listeners and critics, unaccompanied playing provides a quick listening fix (not so true for the performer!), with no need to consider overlapping lines, textures and tonalities.
The Crux
is a tremendous record, but
Power Lines
is on a different order of scale.

JACK WALRATH

Born 5 May 1946, Stuart, Florida

Trumpet

Solidarity

ACT 9241

Walrath; Ralph Reichert (sax); Buggy Braune (p); Christian Havel (g, v); Andreas Henze (b); Joris Dudli (d). August 1995.

Jack Walrath said (1987):
‘Mingus taught me that there’s no point knowing the music if you can’t also hear it, and you’ll notice I didn’t say “play it” or “give it some expression”. You have to hear it, and good hearing is a kind of energy you can detect in a band, an active presence.’

Walrath is a brassy, upfront kind of trumpet man and has been a stalwart in some strong repertory bands. He has terrific technique, strong ideas and great humour (with a particular obsession for horror films) but has been so busy over the years that he’s made surprisingly little impact as a leader. He has tended to bury himself away in collective groups – Revival and Change being two early examples, the Masters of Suspense a more recent one – or in the hard-school of the Mingus band, where he served for five demanding years in the mid- to late ’70s. In addition, he popped up in Europe, playing with the likes of Spirit Level and the majority of his records are on European labels: Steeplechase, TCB and ACT.

Solidarity
is a blues-soaked and – as Jack points out – very American-sounding recording that could again almost be a Mingus offshoot. Reichert’s father owns the Hamburg club where the recording was made; it’s an atmospheric place and a strong, smouldering set. The two-part ‘Hamburg Concerto’ and the title-track bespeak anew Walrath’s ability to give long forms the immediacy and the visceral punch of a simple blues, while ‘Hot-Dog For Lunch’, ‘Political Suicide’ and ‘Psychotic Indifference’ underline his more capricious and satirical side. Reichert claims joint honours, and his father’s production yields up a sound which favours the horns over the rest of the group – not overwhelmingly so, but with a definite edge. America’s loss; Europe’s gain.

KENNY GARRETT

Born 10 October 1960, Detroit, Michigan

Alto saxophone

Triology

Warner Bros 9 45731

Garrett; Kiyoshi Kitagawa, Charnett Moffett (b); Brian Blade (d). 1995.

To be spoken in a hoarse, papery whisper:
‘Kid, you sound like you’re wearing Sonny Stitt’s dirty drawers.’

Miles Davis’s pungent summing-up is typically accurate. Garrett’s characteristic sound does not simply follow the familiar ‘Charlie Parker line’ but proposes other ways out of bebop, and in particular Stitt’s more elongated phrasing and more literal take on the blues. Garrett’s father was an amateur musician and though he has a solid music education, young Kenny gained his skills working on the local scene, including an R&B stint with organist Lymon Woodward. His major break, of course, was the stint with Miles, during which Garrett seemed to be treated with more respect and consideration than most of Miles’s latter-day saxophone-players.

Garrett made a strong debut with a record on Criss Cross, but then made a promising switch to Atlantic, who were again promoting creative jazz. His first major-label recordings
Prisoner Of Love
and
African Exchange Student
made an impact but were scarcely around long enough for the majority of hard-bop fans to catch up. Garrett moved again, to Warners, and after a promising start (
Black Hope
) and a disappointing sequel (
Threshold
) delivered the record everyone knew he was capable of.

Triology
is a very special record, made with Garrett’s working trio (Moffett’s on a couple of tracks). Garrett is still content to play standards and repertoire pieces, and he brings fresh angles to Brubeck’s ‘In Your Own Sweet Way’ and the old warhorse ‘Giant Steps’, which he plays with a respectful insouciance; his major encounter with Coltrane was still to come, in the following year’s
Pursuance
. He also includes dedications to Joe Henderson and Sonny Rollins, suggesting a more discursive and linear approach to his line. The saxophone tone is not quite as hard and forthright as on some of the early records, but what one notices more than anything is a newly mature reticence. Garrett never overpacks his line. There’s refreshingly little ego on show, and
Triology
suggests the work of a young master musician who knows his place in the tradition.

JOE MANERI

Born 9 February 1927, Brooklyn, New York; died 24 August 2009, Boston, Massachusetts

Alto saxophone, clarinet

Three Men Walking

ECM 531023-2

Maneri; Joe Morris (g); Mat Maneri (vn). October–November 1995.

Joe Maneri said (1996):
‘I didn’t do so well at school. I had disabilities with regular schooling, but my refuge – or revenge – was to make up my own languages. In
there
, I knew everything and could do anything.’

Maneri was ‘discovered’ only rather late in his career. He learned clarinet as a youngster and played with a succession of dance and other bands, often incorporating elements of Greek
syrto
, Turkish and klezmer music. After the war, he began studying 12-tone music and experimenting with microtones. He made some recordings at the start of the ’60s, which have been reissued, but pretty much dropped from sight after that. In 1970, he was appointed to the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music and published
Preliminary Studies in the Virtual Pitch Continuum
, still the essential book on microtonality.

Maneri’s coming-out as a
bona fide
star was at the 1992 Montreal Jazz Festival, where he appeared alongside Paul Bley, an old associate from New York days. The buzz was immediate, and comparisons were made – somewhat misleadingly – to Ornette Coleman’s controversial emergence 35 years before. There are parallels, but the differences are obvious and more important.

As with Hal Russell, Maneri’s belated apotheosis was confirmed by a call from ECM. It was apparently Bley, that tireless and selfless talent scout, who put the label in touch. The acoustic is all wrong, but Maneri sounds wonderful in this context. He had been working
extensively with his violinist son Mat, but also in a quartet with Randy Peterson and John Lockwood. The
Three Men Walking
line-up has a different dimension. The album title comes from a Giacometti sculpture of three attenuated figures, insecurely attached to the ground and heading off in different directions, yet for the moment bound to the same patch of earth. It’s a lovely visual echo of music that is both airy and earthy, solid and insubstantial, jazz and something else. As with other ECM sessions of this vintage, the group breaks down into its constituents. Joe opens on unaccompanied clarinet, a sound harder and darker than Giuffre’s, though superficially similar. The group improvisations, ‘Bird’s [
sic
] In The Belfry’, ‘Three Men Walking’ and ‘Arc And Point’, are exceptional, but the features for Mat and Joe are equally impressive, underlining the different idioms and responses at work in this material. While Mat seems resolutely committed to his father’s idiom, often using the lower end of his six-string electric violin as the bass and percussion voice, Morris often sounds detached and even remote – but companionably so, the most errant of those three bronze men. The one standard in the book at this point, ‘What’s New’, was a revelation in performance and is again here, richly rethought and brightly played. ‘For Josef Schmid’ is a little bouquet to the man who taught Joe the ‘Schoenberg method’.

Maneri went on to introduce his private poetic language on a later ECM date,
Tales Of Rohnlief
, on which he and Mat worked with bassist Barre Phillips, but one can hear that sensibility at work here. Listening to
Three Men Walking
is like wakening suddenly in a foreign country, with strange voices and musical sounds: exhilarating and frightening by turns.

FRANK LOWE

Born 24 June 1943, Memphis, Tennessee; died 19 September 2003, New York City

Tenor saxophone

Bodies & Soul

CIMP 104

Lowe; Tim Flood (b); Charles Moffett (d). November 1995.

Frank Lowe said (1984):
‘Soon as that mic is switched on, then I get real nervous. It’s not that I think I’m going to make a
mistake
, or that some cat ain’t going to
like
what I do. It’s not that. It’s because I think: that’s my life going down on that little strip of stuff. That’s my
life
, man!’