The Penguin Jazz Guide (86 page)

Be Bop Revisited

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD710

McPherson; Carmell Jones (t); Barry Harris (p); Nelson Boyd (b); Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath (d). November 1964.

Charles McPherson says:
‘I remember being really nervous and excited about having Carmell Jones and Barry Harris on the record. Also, the prospect of playing a “Be Bop Motif” was certainly daunting considering the level that Bird and Diz set for alto and trumpet ensemble. But I think it turned out well.’

McPherson credits the relatively unsung Barry Harris for his schooling in bebop, but it’s clear he’s also a Parker disciple and he did subsequently play some of the great man’s parts that couldn’t be taken from records in the Clint Eastwood film
Bird.
Of the second-generation players who allegedly took up Parker’s mantle – Stitt, Morgan, Jimmy Heath – McPherson is both most like the original and most characterfully himself, a paradox that isn’t easy to unpack but is easily demonstrated by reference to this fine session.

McPherson had started out on the demanding Detroit scene, only coming to New York at the end of the ’50s. Harris was a decade older, the perpetually underrated Carmell Jones, originally from Kansas City, just a few years older, with a reputation largely forged on the West Coast. At the time of this recording, the trumpeter was effectively in transit to Europe, where he worked for some time. McPherson himself had been working with Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop, an experience which undoubtedly influenced his original tack on bebop.

A glance at the track-list confirms that this isn’t a straightforward repertory record. McPherson’s variations on a Parker blues, placed in the middle of the set, represent both homage and declaration of independence. With nicely off-centre phrasing and a pleasingly cutting tone, he emerges as a fine middle-register improviser. On the other cuts, which include another Bird line (‘Si Si’), Fats Navarro’s ‘Nostalgia’, Bud Powell’s ‘Wail’ and Tadd Dameron’s ‘Hot House’ (hardly obvious choices, with the possible exception of the last), he and Harris find some intriguingly original routes through the changes. To some degree, the pianist is the hero of the set, but McPherson consistently raises his game whenever the chords turn wayward under him, and his unisons with Jones always bristle with expectation. Almost a decade on from Parker’s death, bop still sounds enterprisingly, even dangerously, new.

SAM RIVERS
^&

Born 25 September 1923 (some sources still cite 1930), Reno, Oklahoma

Tenor and soprano saxophones, flute

Fuchsia Swing Song

Blue Note 90413

Rivers; Jaki Byard (p); Ron Carter (b); Tony Williams (d). December 1964.

Sam Rivers said of Studio RivBea (1979):
‘We had two floors at 24 Bond Street, a main floor and the basement. We started out with music in the basement but I brought it up to the main floor and built some little balconies and other bits, so it was a real nice space. A lot of people played there at one time or another. It was a good place to work.’

Rivers studied composition and viola in Boston and played saxophone in local bands, backing R&B singers and show groups, though he also worked with Miles Davis (1964) and Cecil Taylor (1968–73). During the same period he was composing and leading his own bands and occasional sessions. His and wife Beatrice’s Studio RivBea became a focal point for New York jazz in the ’70s, and Sam has been one of the major teachers in American jazz.

Rivers’s debut on Blue Note was a shrewd attempt to blend marketable hard bop with an altogether more abstract and edgy approach to composition. The title-tune here might have made it on to jukeboxes, but the others, with the possible exception of the evergreen ‘Beatrice’ (dedicated to his then wife), are chewier fare. ‘Ellipsis’ is probably the telling title. For all the formidable chording and time-keeping of a vintage band, the tracks move in quite unexpected directions, both harmonically and rhythmically, and few of the tunes are genuinely memorable, which is why they haven’t turned up in other bandleaders’ songbooks.

& See also
Colors
(1982; p. 471),
Portrait
(1995; p. 592)

HARRY ARNOLD

Born Harry Arnold Persson, 7 August 1920, Hälsingborg, Sweden; died 11 February 1971, Stockholm, Sweden

Arranger, bandleader

Big Band 1964/65: Volumes 1 & 2

Dragon DRCD 379 / 382

Arnold; Nat Pavone, Weine Renliden, Gösta Nilsson, Bosse Broberg, Lars Färnlöf, Bengt-Arne Wallin, Lars Samuelsson, Bertil Lövgren, Jan Allan (t); Kenny Rupp, Andreas Skjold, George Vernon, Olle Holmquist, Gunnar Medberg (tb); Arne Domnérus, Rolf Bäckman, Bertil Erixon (as); Lennart Jansson, Claes Rosendahl, Bjarne Nerem, Rolf Blomqvist, Lennart Åberg, Rune Falk (reeds); Jan Johansson (p); Rune Gustafsson (g); Georg Riedel, Roman Dylag, Sture Åkerberg (b); Egil Johansen (d). December 1964–March 1965.

Veteran Voice of America jazz presenter Willis Conover said (1984):
‘If you’d played Harry Arnold’s music to an American musician or jazz critic, they always assumed it was one of the big American bands. It saddens me a little – though I maybe had a hand in perpetuating it – that some of these guys always played second fiddle to Americans.’

Harry Arnold learned a bit of clarinet, but trained himself as an arranger and seems to have come into his mature voice all at once. His Swedish big band of the late ’50s and early ’60s was almost good enough to pass off as an American outfit and Quincy Jones spent some time with them, reflecting that quality.

Arnold’s American recordings languish in obscurity, but Lars Westin of Dragon has done his usual excellent job in bringing back these almost forgotten dates. The label’s reissue programme also showcases the mark one edition of the Orchestra from 1956 to 1958, both in the studio and in concert, with arrangements mostly by Arnold but also Gösta Theselius and Bengt Hallberg. At this point the Orchestra was still basically copping American moves, but less than a decade on it had developed a more singular identity. Jan Johansson, Georg Riedel and Pete Jacques all contributed arrangements and the reed section acquired a rich and unique sonority. ‘If You Could See Me Now’ is a showpiece for Domnérus; Jacques offers a trim, clever reading of Ornette’s ‘Tomorrow Is The Question’; there is some folk material adapted by Wallin; and Johansson offers offbeat ideas. The second disc unfolds with one memorable theme after another. Astonishingly, this stuff wasn’t released at the time.

WAYNE SHORTER
^&

Born 25 August 1933, Newark, New Jersey

Tenor and soprano saxophones

Speak No Evil

Blue Note 99001

Shorter; Freddie Hubbard (t); Herbie Hancock (p); Ron Carter (b); Elvin Jones (d). December 1964.

Soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome says:
‘When I hear Wayne Shorter’s music from the Blue Note period it really reinforces the idea that “less is more”. His compositions are a weird juxtaposition of high art and simple folk music that’s unpredictable yet very catchy.’

Anyone who has encountered Shorter only as co-leader of Weather Report will know him primarily as a colourist, contributing short and often enigmatic brush-strokes to the group’s carefully textured canvases. They may not recognize him as the formidable heir of Rollins and Coltrane (scale up and re-pitch those brief soprano saxophone statements, and the lineage becomes clear). They will emphatically not know him as a composer. As Weather Report’s musical identity consolidated, Joe Zawinul largely took over as writer. However, much as Shorter’s elided ‘solos’ (in a group that didn’t really believe in solos, or believed in nothing else) still retained the imprint of a more developed idiom, so his compositions for the early records – ‘Tears’ and ‘Eurydice’ in particular – convey in essence the virtues that make him one of the most significant composers in modern jazz, whose merits have been recognized by fellow players as far apart as Art Blakey, Miles Davis (‘ESP’, ‘Dolores’, ‘Pee Wee’, ‘Nefertiti’) and Kirk Lightsey (a challenging tribute album).

Known as ‘Mr Weird’ in high school, Shorter cultivated an oblique and typically asymmetrical approach to the bop idiom. His five years with the Jazz Messengers are marked by an aggressive synthesis of his two main models, but with an increasingly noticeable tendency to break down his phrasing and solo construction into unfamiliar mathematical subdivisions. Working with Miles Davis between 1964 and 1970 (a period that coincides with his most productive phase as a solo recording artist), he moved towards a more meditative and melancholy style – with an increasing dependence on the soprano saxophone. Shorter’s recordings at this time relate directly to his work on Miles’s
In A Silent Way
and to his work with Weather Report over the following decade.

For us,
Speak No Evil
is not just Shorter’s most satisfying record, but also one of the best of its period. The understanding with Hancock was total and telepathic, two harmonic adventurers on the loose at a moment when, with John Coltrane still around as a tutelary genius, the rules of jazz improvisation were susceptible to almost endless interrogation. This album created a template for a host of imitators, but so far no one has ever produced a like recording with such strength
and
internal balance. There has always been some controversy about Freddie Hubbard’s role on the session, with detractors claiming that, unlike Shorter, the trumpeter was still working the hand dealt him in the Messengers and was too hot and urgent to suit Shorter’s growing structural sophistication. In fact, the two blend astonishingly well, combining Hubbard’s own instinctive exuberance on ‘Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum’ with something of the leader’s own darker conception; interestingly, Shorter responds in kind, adding curious timbral effects to one of his most straight-ahead solos on the record. As with the later
Adam’s Apple
, much of the interest lies in the writing. Shorter has suggested that ‘Dance Cadaverous’ was suggested by Sibelius’s ‘Valse Triste’ (which he plays on
The Soothsayer
). ‘Infant Eyes’ is compounded of disconcerting nine-measure phrases that suggest a fractured nursery rhyme, and the title-piece pushes the soloists into degrees of harmonic and rhythmic freedom that would not normally have been tolerated in a hard-bop context. Set
Speak No Evil
alongside Eric Dolphy’s more obviously ‘revolutionary’
Out To Lunch!
, recorded by Blue Note earlier the same year, and it’s clear that Shorter claims the same freedoms, giving his rhythm section licence to work counter to the line of the melody
and freeing the melodic Hancock from merely chordal duties. It’s harder to reconstruct how alien some of Shorter’s procedures were because, by and large, he does remain within the bounds of post-bop harmony, but it’s still clear that this is a classic.

& See also
Alegría
(2002; p. 676)

JOHN COLTRANE
^&

Born 23 September 1926, Hamlet, North Carolina; died 17 July 1967, Huntington, New York

Tenor, soprano and alto saxophones, flute

A Love Supreme

Impulse! 051155-2

Coltrane; McCoy Tyner (p); Jimmy Garrison (b); Elvin Jones (d). December 1964.

Drummer Elvin Jones said (1984):
‘At the studio, John kept taking a piece of paper out of his pocket and reading it over. I couldn’t make out what it had to do with the music, but it was the poem that he printed on the cover of that record, and I guess it
was
the music.’

The first records in Coltrane’s career as a leader were the work of a man who had submerged himself in heroin and alcohol and who had mortgaged his physical health as a result. In reinventing himself technically, he also seemed to take on a new – or rediscovered – spirituality which expressed itself musically when simple materials generated torrents of harmonic and expressive detail. This is quintessentially true of
A Love Supreme
. Its foundations seem almost childishly slight, and yet what one hears is a majestic outpouring of sound, a preacher’s voice, ecstatic but also authoritative. It is not a piece that can be separated from the creator’s intentions and programme. Coltrane explicitly stated that the final movement, ‘Psalm’, should be understood as an instrumental expression of the text that was printed on the sleeve. The rest has the pace of a liturgical act. ‘Acknowledgement’ begins with a sweeping fanfare that will return at the close. A sonorous eight-bar theme creates the background to the four simple notes – ‘A love su-preme’ – which have become some of the most familiar in modern jazz. Stated by Garrison, they are reworked and varied through the scale by Coltrane, whose solo defies categorization. The overdubbed vocal chant is husky, strangely moving, and seems to occupy a different space and imprint from the hectic movement of the rhythm section. If this was to be Garrison’s finest hour with the group, it is probably Jones’s as well. ‘Resolution’ stokes the emotion. Coltrane’s entry has an almost violent impact, and in LP days it was difficult to find the resolve to flip the disc over and essay the other side, even though it is clear that the music is left hanging, still bereft of the other sort of resolution. ‘Pursuance’ takes us into the dark wood, a troubled, mid-life moment. From now until the end, the rhythms are anxious, fractured, unsure. Horn and piano stagger like pilgrims from one brief point of rest to another. The closing ‘Psalm’ has an almost symphonic richness, culminating in a final ‘Amen’, a two-note figure in which a second saxophone (said to be Archie Shepp’s) joins Coltrane. A partial restatement of the opening fanfare provides a reminder of the road travelled and also of the circularity of all such journeys. The story of the making of
A Love Supreme
has been told in Ashley Kahn’s fine book, which coincided with the release of a long-awaited deluxe edition of the record. This provides a further insight into what went on in the studio during the making of the studio album, including two sextet cuts with Shepp and Davis, who are thanked on the original album but aren’t heard. These are alternate versions of ‘Resolution’ and ‘Acknowledgement’. The larger group doesn’t bring anything significant to light that isn’t in the original piece. More interesting is the inclusion of the quartet’s performance of
A Love Supreme
at the much-bootlegged Antibes Festival of July 1965. This was a relatively rare occurrence; Coltrane only rarely played the music again, which suggests either that he
considered the LP version (credited to him alone, rather than the quartet) definitive or that it occupied a less central place in his thinking than usually thought. Having awaited the revelation of the deluxe edition, we find no further epiphanies in it. Even extreme familiarity fails to tarnish
A Love Supreme
. It is without precedent and parallel, and though it must also be one of the best-known jazz records of all time, it somehow remains remote from critical pigeonholing.