The Penguin Jazz Guide (172 page)

The gentleness of the debut evaporated on
Medicine Wheel
, a more assertively downtown album with a Knitting Factory aspect and marked by some notably pungent conceptions. A third record,
Third Eye
, consolidated the picture and paved the way for the bold sweep of
Riding The Nuclear Tiger
. The title-track has a vigorously contemporary feel, with unexpected elements of Techno thrown in. In sharp contrast is the Mingus-referencing ‘Love Chant Remix’, which shows how thoroughly Allison has brought his main influence up to date. The group now has a thoroughly seasoned feel and a desire to explore yet more new textures. The addition of an oud hadn’t made much impact on
Third Eye
but here pianist Kimbrough plays direct on open strings and prepares his piano with coins and fishing line for ‘Swiss Cheese D’ (it’s a basketball reference!), while on the 3/4 ‘Weazy’ saxophonist
Blake plays two horns simultaneously (but without sounding like Roland Kirk!). Horton has more than one bag to dip into: some of his statements are smokingly pungent, reminiscent of Booker Little, but he can also play with a melting simplicity. Blake is featured as a composer on ‘Harlem River Line’ and even gets the boss to drop out towards the end, which is some kind of grateful. Kimbrough, a seasoned leader in his own right, is always worth tracking on any of these discs. His parts, like Allison’s structures, are brilliant collages, which according to the leader only made sense when the layers were assembled. Perhaps the single cut along with the title-track that sums up everything is the one that follows it, ‘Jazz Scene Voyeur’: sounds like it might be one of John Zorn’s Naked City thrashes, but in fact it’s a wry and quite delicate thing that depends on careful call and response in a form Miles Davis would have understood and approved. Allison never shows off his understanding of jazz history. It’s always just there, among the contemporary references and artful boho stylings. Whatever the genre, this is strong new music.

SONNY ROLLINS
^&

Born Theodore Walter Rollins, 7 September 1930, New York City

Tenor saxophone

This Is What I Do

Milestone MCD-9310-2

Rollins; Clifton Anderson (tb); Stephen Scott (p); Bob Cranshaw (b); Perry Wilson, Jack DeJohnette (d). May–June 2000.

Sonny Rollins said (1990):
‘I consider it a privilege to have been part of this music and to have been able to play it so long. When I was away from jazz [1962 and 1968] I did wonder whether that was the end of the story. I used to think I had done
something
but not all I wanted. Here I am, still, and part of something that began with Louis Armstrong and Tatum and Waller. That’s a privilege. I hope I earned it.’

It’s a commonplace that jazz has for the most part lost its small legion of charismatic figures who have shouldered its great innovations, embodied its major advances. Who are the surviving giants? Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman … Sonny Rollins. If Taylor’s massive advances exemplify the jazz of a once and future era, Rollins belongs to a bygone golden age, an almost classical figure. He is, perhaps, jazz’s Sinatra, absolutely ‘traditional’, even conservative now, yet so enormously individual that he dictates his own space in his culture. He may have tried modish flavours from time to time, but if they didn’t fit with him he simply discarded them. Each new session is nothing more than a set’s worth of Rollins, blowing as lustily as he felt at that point. His bandsmen have included distinguished players – Stephen Scott is the best pianist he’s had for years, and DeJohnette, who plays on four of the six tracks, is hardly a mere sideman – but they are little more than framing devices for the saxophone.

More than ever, this set dismisses ornamentation. The studio sound is unsparing on the players, with a new immediacy in the mix: Rollins’s records of recent times have seldom sounded so close and alive. The material is
sui generis
: a new calypso, ‘Salvador’; a more-or-less blues, ‘Charles M’; a surprising memento of a nearly forgotten tenorman, ‘Did You Hear Harold Vick?’; and three improbable standards, two of them all but unknown to jazz repertory. He makes ‘Sweet Leilani’ into something approaching a gospel piece, and ‘The Moon Of Manakoora’, a choice to gladden the hearts of Dorothy Lamour fans, is fractious and regal. Here and throughout, the tenor tone has an almost crusty grandeur, the old supreme-steel sound mottled and scarred, but superbly resilient. His solos no longer sweep through numberless choruses, instead focusing around fragments of the material. The rhythmic chops have been hurt by the passage of time, perhaps, but there’s a compensating sense that
he’s phrasing everything to his own particular clock. If anything, he has gone back to the performer whose sets he always tried to catch after his own night’s work, Billie Holiday. ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square’, with the leader lagging imperiously behind the beat, might almost be a late-period Holiday interpretation. The others do their duty, and often handsomely. Scott gets off some shapely and even ingenious solos. Anderson is the patient colourist, and he has some nice muted work on ‘Charles M’. But nothing they do is anything other than an intermission, while we impatiently await the saxophonist’s return.
This Is What I Do
is unmistakable, and great Sonny Rollins.

& See also
Saxophone Colossus
(1956; p. 188),
A Night At The Village Vanguard
(1957; p. 216)

GARY BURTON
^&

Born 23 January 1943, Anderson, Indiana

Vibraphone

For Hamp, Red, Bags And Cal

Concord CCD 4941

Burton; Mulgrew Miller, Makoto Ozone, Danilo Perez (p); Russell Malone (g); Christian McBride, John Patitucci (b); Lewis Nash (d); Luis Quintero (perc). May–June 2000.

Gary Burton said (1993):
‘I like to give all the instruments an equal role. My first model for a group was a classical string quartet, with an equality among the voices. I’m always thinking in terms of a band, rather than just three or four guys who can accompany me. And that affects my choices very significantly.’

This is Gary’s most explicit tribute to his great ancestors on the vibraphone. At a time when such homages were ten-a-penny, an easy A&R option for labels still querulous about the possibility of ‘selling’ jazz, this one stands out. Each of the great names is represented by two or three tunes, and while no special effort is made to reproduce their style, the spirit of the ancestors imbues the record. ‘Flying Home’ is maybe the best example, a breezy, swinging performance that recalls Hamp’s classic years. ‘Django’ and ‘Bags’ Groove’ are for Jackson, of course, and are wonderfully adept, but it is the sheer strangeness of Red Norvo’s ‘Dance Of The Octopus’ at the end of the record that is likely to send even uncommitted listeners back to the start. Gary can rarely have been recorded so well, and the different groups are bedded in round him intimately but with enough space to keep the voices individual and strong.

& See also
Country Roads And Other Places
(1968; p. 355),
Hotel Hello
(1974; p. 411)

CHRIS POTTER

Born 1 January 1971, Chicago, Illinois

Tenor, alto and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet, flutes

Gratitude

Verve 549433-2

Potter; Kevin Hays (p); Scott Colley (b); Brian Blade (d). September 2000.

Chris Potter said (2001):
‘I heard musicians say: “I was influenced by the Coltrane of this or that period, but I’ve moved beyond that now …”, and I realized that I couldn’t divide up what Coltrane meant to me into periods, and certainly couldn’t say that I was done with any of it!’

Potter has grown into one of the major saxophonists of today. His astonishingly confident and full-blooded debut on Criss Cross in 1992 showed his prowess with any one of his chosen horns, and there’s amazingly little to choose between his alto- (which he’s subsequently all but given up) and tenor-playing. Both of them are muscular in the post-bop manner but full of surprising stylistic twists that make one think of both Parker’s generation and the elegant elaborations of Benny Carter and Hodges.

Potter made some good records for Gerry Teekens at Criss Cross, but he sounded as if the hard-bop ethos – never doctrinaire enough to be an ideology, but certainly the house style – was holding him back a little. If Potter’s major-label move held any fears for him, you wouldn’t know from this confident sprint through the history of jazz saxophone, conceived as a salute to a string of masters old and new. Some of the jumping around from horn to horn – he gets through six of them here, including a debut on Chinese wood flute – underlines that this would be a record pitched as a coming-out, even after all those listed above. It’s still rather coolly conceived, too. The opening dedication to Coltrane, ‘The Source’, avoids the master’s grandest gestures and scales him down to a pocket-sized blues that is both cheekily reductive and completely respectful, and ‘Sun King’ is Rollins refracted through ‘an odd-meter context’ that needs all four men to keep their eye unswervingly on the pulse. There are tributes, too, to Wayne Shorter (‘Eurydice’) and Lester Young (‘The Visitor’). Here, and in the best of the session (at a few key points Potter’s concept gets away from him; he brings little of interest to the Parker piece, ‘Star Eyes’, and the flute tune ‘Vox Humana’ sits oddly with the rest), one gets the exultant feel of players at the top of their game, working within a mutually understood language that isn’t yet closed to surprise. Hays, who’s been somewhat in shadow since his Blue Note albums, performs well, and Colley and Blade are top-notch.

JOHN ELLIS

Born 13 April 1974, Raleigh, North Carolina

Tenor saxophone

Roots, Branches & Leaves

Fresh Sound New Talent FSNTCD124

Ellis; Nicholas Payton (t); Aaron Goldberg (p); Roland Guerin (b); Jason Marsalis (d); Bilal Oliver (v). October 2000.

John Ellis says:
‘It was recorded to ADAT at Word Of Mouth in New Orleans, by Tim Stambaugh, who had to leave during the second day for a rehearsal, leaving his assistant to handle things. ADAT requires two VHS tapes to be synchronized – which is why this was a transitional technology. The machine froze while Tim was gone, and that’s when we realized his assistant didn’t know how to work the machine, and couldn’t help us fix it. That was the only day we had Bilal with us, and as the clock ticked, we panicked. Somehow we got things cranked up again, but most of Bilal’s stuff ended up as a first take, a race against the clock.’

A deft composer, Ellis has worked with guitarist Charlie Hunter but seems destined to make his own way. The debut is a strange and magical record. It begins with a recording of Ellis’s grandmother singing ‘John Brown’s Gun’, from which the opening track emerges. Vocalist Oliver is involved here, and later on ‘Nowny Dreams’ and ‘The Lonely Jesus’. We’ve not heard anything quite like this music, and with Goldberg switching to Fender Rhodes here and there and Payton making a couple of guest appearances (on ‘Ed’ and ‘Who’, the two jazziest cuts) the music is rich and varied. Ellis himself isn’t earth-shaking as a saxophone-player; his role here is mainly as composer/auteur of a fascinating aural experience
that’s equivalent to looking at an exhibition of photos, old and new, coloured and sepia, familiar things and unknown portraits. Lovely.

AHMAD JAMAL
^&

Born 2 July 1930, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Piano

À L’Olympia

Dreyfus FDM 36629 2

Jamal; George Coleman (ts); James Cammack (b); Idris Muhammad (d). November 2000.

Former nightclub owner Jean-Paul Allais says:
‘I grew up listening to
At The Pershing
and could sing every solo on it. I didn’t get to see Ahmad Jamal for real till that night, and the sound was exactly the same, but even stronger. It felt like being on Olympus, not just at L’Olympia.’

Jamal was an honoured figure in Europe through the ’90s, playing a sophisticated jazz that went down particularly well in France. Marking his 70th birthday with another concert in Paris, Jamal doesn’t lie back and enjoy the occasion but seems bent on delivering a performance to rival the celebrated
At The Pershing
. That he does so – and royally – is partly down to the magisterial presence of big George Coleman, whose solo on ‘How Deep Is The Ocean’ is one of the finest of his distinguished career, solidly engineered and delicately crafted. Jamal responds with one of several toughly lyrical solos.

Jamal’s style hasn’t changed much over the years, but any appearance of a new toughness shouldn’t be confused with the crudity that comes with declining technique. Jamal has acquired muscle. Where once he made solos out of spiderweb and spun sugar, now they’re of fine, tensile steel. The set gives early notice of intent with a long, pungent performance of ‘The Night Has A Thousand Eyes’ and Jamal astonishes with a brilliantly inventive uptempo introduction to ‘Autumn Leaves’; a classic reinvented. Coleman creeps in slyly from off-mic and together they no more than tag the familiar melody before taking it off in new directions. Muhammad’s drumming, which elsewhere is businesslike and orderly, makes a substantial contribution. ‘My Foolish Heart’ is more straightforwardly melodic, but Coleman brings a gentle stridency to his solo, popping his pads softly here and there, which gives the tune a new poignancy.