The Penguin Jazz Guide (177 page)

Bauer’s brother Johannes is also a trombone-player and they have worked together, in duo and in larger improvising ensembles. Conrad actually began well away from jazz, as an R&B and soul guitarist, then bassist, and singer, coming to the trombone through trumpet lessons. On his main instrument, he became a key player in the small group of East German improvisers at work from the end of the ’60s.

Bauer is a remarkable solo performer, tailoring his improvisations to the shape and resonance of a room or studio. The unaccompanied
Hummelsummen
and the later, magnificent
Der Gelbe Klang
are remarkable records, but it would be misleading to play down Bauer’s ensemble work.
Between Heaven And Earth
is an improvised set of such concentration it is difficult to believe that there are no predetermined structures. Recorded just a few months before Peter Kowald’s premature death, this captures the bassist with two of his most sympathetic collaborators, perhaps united by years spent on the ‘wrong’ side of the Iron Curtain. The 11 improvisations are so titled and organized as to suggest a progress through life from birth to rebirth. Bauer is the dominant voice, but both Kowald and Sommer are so attuned to this idiom that one hears a group rather than individuals. Right in the middle of the set, ‘Travelling’ and ‘Loving’ represent its emotional core, intense and quietly fiery improvisations that would be hard to improve upon.

ADAM LANE

Born 22 September 1968, Brooklyn, New York

Double bass

New Magical Kingdom

Clean Feed CF 052

Lane; Darren Johnston (t); Jeff Chan (ts); Aaron Bennett (sax); John Finkbeiner (g); Lynn Johnston (b); Vijay Anderson (d). 2001–2004.

Adam Lane says:
‘I remember that I wore my Mötörhead T-shirt to both sessions and many of the gigs leading up to the recordings to remind the fellas and myself that we weren’t just a one-dimensional jazz ensemble.’

Lane may yet have to slug it out with Ben Allison for the title of most interesting bassist-leader since Mingus. He divides his time between East and West coasts and between an unforgiving improv approach, heard on a number of Cadence/CIMP discs, and a more considered and structured language.

It may be the kiss of death to describe a contemporary record as ‘important’, but Lane’s septet is working towards a new ensemble sound that picks up the challenge of Mingus’s Jazz Workshops and propels it in a new direction. There are tinges of rock here and there, sometimes not all that well judged, but for the most part this is subtle, sophisticated jazz, shaped with impressive authority by the bassist and unlike the usual sense of good, fair and average tracks, shaped into a coherent whole.

Lane has some roots in bop, as ‘Avenue X’ suggests, but he also throws some Caribbean shapes on ‘The Schnube’ and some more free-form elements elsewhere. The opening ‘In The Centre Of The Earth, Looking For Mike’ has an epic cast, presumably designed to showcase his Full Throttle Orchestra to best advantage. To some degree, the album feels like a cushioned box and wrapping for ‘Sienna’, easily the most beautiful ‘ballad’ by a contemporary jazz composer and a piece that combines beauty with a certain real-life toughness that makes it doubly compelling. This isn’t an accidental ‘hit’ but the culmination of an impressive phase of work. Lane seems a patient fellow and while those CIMP discs have a rough-and-ready exterior, they too are a privileged glimpse of a composer and leader who’s bound to make a serious mark.

DEREK BAILEY
^&

Born 29 January 1930, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England; died 25 December 2005, London

Guitar

Ballads / Standards

Tzadik TZ 7007 / 7620

Bailey (g solo). January & March 2002.

Saxophonist Tony Bevan says:
‘The thing most people would find surprising about Derek – given a reputation for iconoclasm – was
how much he loved music
. More than anybody I’ve ever met. Just not the sort of music he was supposed to like. He was always telling me about some small band that he’d caught in some tiny bar. He even went to check out the village brass band at my local. I suppose that love of his art is the only way to explain his extraordinary achievements, and his great integrity.’

The idea of Derek Bailey playing standards only seemed absurd to those who didn’t understand his background. Vernacular music was in his bloodstream. Bailey’s language never came off a blank page but existed in the presence of a vast reservoir of blues, swing, bop, free and, yes, ballads. These projects were suggested by Tzadik executive producer John
Zorn, and they’re quite wonderful. Bailey approaches a dozen themes (two versions each of ‘Gone With The Wind’ and ‘Rockin’ Chair’) with an awkward tenderness, hinting at the melody rather than stating it and certainly not troubling himself over-much with the changes, though it’s clear from ‘Body And Soul’ that he knows them inside out. Hearing these performances offers a salutary lesson when listening to other musicians who move from relatively free situations to fusion or pop: it isn’t necessarily easier or less creative to play in this way. On the
Standards
set, he does things like ‘When Your Liver Has Gone’ and keeps even further away from familiar melody than with the ballads, but the skeleton of the song is there. The delicacy of his playing is astonishing, and there is something profoundly moving about the whole set, almost like hearing Samuel Beckett sit down in a bar snug to sing old Irish songs.

& See also
Solo Guitar: Volume 1
(1971; p. 382);
SPONTANEOUS MUSIC ENSEMBLE, Quintessence
(1973–1974; p. 406)

GERALD WILSON

Born 4 September 1918, Shelby, Mississippi

Trumpet, bandleader

New York, New Sound

Mack Avenue MAC 1009

Clark Terry (t, flhn); Jimmy Owens, Eddie Henderson, Jon Faddis, Frank Greene, Sean Jones (t); Benny Powell, Luis Bonilla, Dennis Wilson (tb); Douglas Purviance (tb, btb); Jesse Davis (as); Jerry Dodgion (f, as); Jimmy Heath (ts); Frank Wess (f, ts); Jay Brandford (bs); Kenny Barron, Renee Rosnes (p); Anthony Wilson, Oscar Castro-Neves (g); Bob Cranshaw, Trey Henry, Larry Ridley (b); Lewis Nash, Stix Hooper (d); Lenny Castro (perc). 2002.

Gerald Wilson said (2002):
‘With the Lunceford band, Edwin Wilcox used to say: “You have 12 notes to play around with. Make sure you use them all.” I’ve pretty much followed that advice. I like harmony and I like it to be full of notes.’

One of Eric Dolphy’s first compositions was a swaggering thing called ‘G.W.’, a tribute to one of the liveliest and most creative spirits on the West Coast. Gerald Wilson joined the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra just around the time America joined the Second World War. After a stint in the navy, the talented young trumpeter and composer decided to form his own band. It was a progressive outfit, whose faintly experimental air has long since been eclipsed by Stan Kenton’s more abrasive approach, but the early recordings are full of interest.

A brilliant and charismatic bandleader, Wilson has enjoyed great longevity and in the ’90s and ’00s started to come into his own as a composer. In his 80s, Wilson was writing the best music of his career, still visiting new places to have his work played, and it was a marvellous initiative by Stix Hooper’s Mack Avenue label to record this all-star collective swinging through some of his material. The big piece is a comprehensive revision of his 1997 ‘Theme For Monterey’ (which had been done for the 40th anniversary Monterey Jazz Festival), but there are other Wilson favourites such as ‘Blues For Yna Yna’, and the orchestra bristle through these vintage charts in a mercurial high gear. How much longer anyone will be able to assemble a band which has the likes of Jimmy Heath, Clark Terry and Frank Wess sitting alongside Jesse Davis and Renee Rosnes is impossible to say, but this is a meeting of generations working together on some of the masterpieces of modern big-band writing and creating a record any jazz lover should be delighted to hear.

KALAPARUSH(A) MAURICE MCINTYRE

Born 24 March 1936, Clarksville, Arkansas

Tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, percussion

Morning Song

Delmark 553

McIntyre; Jesse Dulman (tba); Ravish Momin (d). September 2002.

Ravish Momin says:
‘Kalaparush’s playing can be virtuosically fierce or intensely lyrical. Having a heartfelt romanticism at his musical centre-of-gravity, he’s able to spin endlessly creative variations on the melody, often making daringly angular rhythmic shifts and intervallic leaps.’

At first blush, McIntyre is a fairly orthodox New Thing modernist, exploiting Coltrane’s extended harmony and the hands-on, little-instrument approach which was the AACM aesthetic. He also prefers open-textured, spacious music to the multi-note approach of some of his saxophone peers. His early albums for Delmark,
Humility In The Light Of The Creator
and
Forces And Blessings
, find him in Aylerish mode, with elements of Coltrane’s harmonic approach and a Chicagoan rough-and-readiness in the group aesthetic. There wasn’t much of note to report after that – other than a good Black Saint record from 1979 – until he started recording with a fascinating pianoless trio called The Light. They made a fine session for CIMP, and another for Entropy Stereo, and then Kalaparush went back to Delmark for the 2002 record.

Despite the silliness of titles like ‘Symphony No. 1’, this is a set in which blues, bebop, raw field shouts and more abstract classical forms all seem to have contributed to an extraordinary musical alloy. There is a further and better version of ‘I Don’t Have An Answer …’, which suggests how much the group has evolved. ‘In My Morning Song’ and ‘Morning’ contain some hints that he has been studying Indian raga (not improbable with Momin in the group) and these pieces, while still approximately located in the blues, have a transcultural feel that is most beguiling. At nearly 70, the saxophonist seems to be coming into a new phase of creativity, warm and personal but with a preacher’s fire.

JOHN TAYLOR

Born 25 September 1942, Manchester, Lancashire, England

Piano

Rosslyn

ECM 1599

Taylor; Marc Johnson (b); Joey Baron (d). April 2002.

Pianist Mal Waldron said (1990):
‘His harmonic sense is very refined and he knows the classics, but he has a voice all of his own. I’d say it was an English pastoral sound, but it has a lot more going for it than that.’

John Taylor arrived in London in 1964 and began leading his own groups as well as recording with others on the modern scene. Never an entirely comfortable free player, he evolved towards an impressionistic style reminiscent in part of Bill Evans but with its own distinctive, almost folkish cadence. In 1977, he co-formed Azimuth with ex-wife Norma Winstone and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. They recorded on ECM, but while Wheeler became a regular on that label, putting out a good deal of small- and large-group material, Taylor and Winstone were for the moment passed over as far as individual projects were concerned. That was put right in 2002 with Taylor’s magnificent
Rosslyn.

One rather hoped that, having a former Bill Evans bassman in the trio, Taylor might
consider programming some Evans material, particularly given that he has been compared to the American many times. In fact, what one gets is a set that is Evans-like in temperament rather than content. Taylor doesn’t pack this first solo set for ECM with original material, but brings in compositions by Ralph Towner (the lovely ‘Tramonto’) and Kenny Wheeler (‘Ma Bel’) as well as a standard, ‘How Deep Is The Ocean’, to which he gives a slyly Jarrett-like spin. His original themes, each of them with a folkish tinge, are swung much harder by this group than one imagines would be the case with British sidemen, and Taylor seems to be lighter in spirit and faster in response here than on previous records. However, all
Rosslyn
really does is clinch his pedigree as one of the finest pianists in Europe (and he spends much of his time in Europe rather than England).

THE BAD PLUS

Formed 1990

Group

Give

Columbia 510666

Ethan Iverson (p); Reid Anderson (b); David King (d). October 2002.

Ethan Iverson said (2003):
‘There’s a certain rulebook in jazz and from time to time I like to quote from those rules, just to show I know them, but for the most part I keep well away from anything that sounds like “jazz”. And if that upsets some listeners, hey, I think that’s a good thing.’

You don’t expect the stately trinity of piano/bass/drums to qualify as a power trio but that’s what happened with The Bad Plus, who came along at exactly the right moment, riding on the bow-wave of a plethora of polite, Bill Evans-inspired piano trios, and basically blew them all away with a riot of self-determined sounds and styles. On the Fresh Sound debut, Iverson, Anderson and ‘certifiable Midwestern drum star’ King got at a group of originals, one standard (‘Blue Moon’) and two pop tunes. Abba’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ is a textbook example of the jazz transformation of an uneventful melody, and Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (which the others forced Iverson to learn!) is a glorious, helter-skelter set-piece, the tune stirred and thickened by the pianist’s voicings while King swings them off the stand.