The Penguin Jazz Guide (94 page)

Perhaps Brown’s best-known record is
Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun
, made for ECM in 1970 with Braxton, Corea, Andrew Cyrille, Bennie Maupin, Jeanne Lee and others, but its prominence is largely due to the top-drawer label, prestigious company and a fashionable flirtation with ‘little instruments’. Musically, there are better representations of Brown, early and later. The two ESP discs are among the best of that label’s mid-’60s heyday and in later years made such lovely records as
November Cotton Flower
and
Recollections
, the latter an album of solo saxophone pieces. He also recorded the exquisite
Songs Of Love And Regret
in duo with Waldron.

Curiously, Brown’s Impulse! records are routinely overlooked. There were two more after this one,
Geechee Recollections
and
Sweet Earth Flying
, but they came nearly a decade after
Three For Shepp.
The delay isn’t unduly sinister. In the wake of this, his first successful record, Brown took to the road, playing tirelessly but curbing his studio activities. Impulse!
had already released Shepp’s
Four For Trane
. This was explicitly intended as a companion project and its arresting opening – on the original only, for the reissue pointlessly reversed the order of tracks – establishes it as one of the most inventive in the label’s distinguished catalogue.

‘New Blue’ is indeed a reworking of blues harmony. Brown isn’t quite such a harmonic maverick as Ornette Coleman, but his ability to hear and make structural use of unusual intervals is insufficiently recognized. ‘Fortunato’ also pushes the envelope, perhaps the chewiest piece on the set. After a further Brown composition, ‘The Shadow Knows’, Shepp’s three pieces are played, with a different rhythm section. ‘Spooks’ is a remarkable, incendiary line, written and played in a style that is virtually undatable, but taking in everything from early march music to bebop. ‘West India’ works a second, very different variant on the blues, while the closing ‘Delicado’ unleashes the band in a way that resembles the inspired chaos of
Ascension
, but with a more dominant underlying pulse. Brief as it is at just 35 minutes,
Three For Shepp
is so densely packed with musical information that it takes many, many listens to deconstruct: a living lesson in musical history, a passionate manifesto for the future.

MCCOY TYNER
^&

Born Alfred McCoy Tyner, 11 December 1938, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; also briefly known as Sulaimon Saud

Piano, koto

The Real McCoy

Blue Note 97807-2

Tyner; Joe Henderson (ts); Ron Carter (b); Elvin Jones (d). April 1967.

Pianist Don Pullen said (1992):
‘All the younger guys – Herbie, Chick, everyone – come out of McCoy Tyner … if only they’d admit it.’

Tyner is the most influential pianist-composer in modern jazz, though given the current fetishization of Bill Evans, you’d be hard pressed to know it. Where sometimes Evans’s ‘legacy’ consists of little more than an essentially lyrical approach, Tyner is a main source for the quartal harmonies, pentatonic scales and other exotic voicings that now turn up in modern jazz, routinely and unacknowledged.

Tyner started his professional career with Benny Golson but hooked up with John Coltrane and provided the harmonic armature for the ‘classic’ Coltrane quartet. The group offered little outlet for Tyner’s own writing, though he did make a series of records for Impulse! while working for Trane, and the relationship ended sourly when Tyner found himself out of sympathy with the work of Coltrane’s late-period music; he once harshly dismissed it as ‘noise’. He had a difficult period after surrendering the piano stool to Alice Coltrane, even working for Ike and Tina Turner for a period, but an arrangement with Blue Note got him back into the studio.

There had been a gap of nearly two and a half years since the final Impulse! LP,
Plays Ellington
, which again shrewdly combined the Coltrane rhythm section with the work of a jazz master, the kind of date Bob Thiele required to offset his more adventurous releases. From the very first bars of
The Real McCoy
, his strength and individuality are clearly established. A left-hander, Tyner’s bass figures have a characteristic depth and weight, while his soloing has an emphatic, almost staccato quality that can, in less expressive moments, sound like a Morse dispatch of music rather than a fully achieved performance, but which usually communicates quite grandly.

At one level, this new group is simply the Coltrane quartet with Joe Henderson substituting for Coltrane, but with Tyner calling the tunes it sounds quite different: dynamics
are more varied, form is more finely articulated; and while the band pushes at the limits of tonality and metre alike, it never quite breaches them.

The opening ‘Passion Dance’ is a definitive Tyner composition: structured round a single key but pounding through a metre which the leader noted as ‘evoking ritual and trance-like states’, it gathers power through the piano and saxophone statements until it sounds ready to explode; yet the concluding regrouping and subsequent variations are resolved immaculately. ‘Contemplation’, ‘Four By Five’ and ‘Search For Peace’ explore this brinkmanship further, through 3/4, 4/4 and 5/4 rhythms and fragments of melody which are enough to fuel all of the band’s manoeuvres. Henderson is superbly resolute in avoiding cliché, Carter and Jones work with dramatic compatibility, and Tyner’s own playing exults in some of his discoveries learned over the previous three years. His grand pedal-chords and fluttering right-hand lines establish the classic patterns of call and response which have dominated his manner ever since, and the sound he gets is peculiarly translucent, enabling one to hear through the clusters and follow all of his complex lines. A modern classic, now available in near-ideal sound.

& See also
Sahara
(1972; p. 391),
Soliloquy
(1991; p. 548)

JOHN HANDY

Born 3 February 1933, Dallas, Texas

Alto saxophone

New View!

Koch CD 7811-2

Handy; Bobby Hutcherson (vib); Pat Martino (g); Albert Stinson (b); Doug Sides (d). June 1967.

John Handy said (1982):
‘There was a little thing I did with the reed, a flutter of the tongue that produced a tremolo and made the saxophone sound like a string instrument. Apart from Roland Kirk, I haven’t heard anyone who can do it, and that’s not being vain!’

Not to be confused with Captain John Handy, this Handy was born in Dallas and moved to Oakland in his early teens. He recorded with Charles Mingus, briefly but including ‘Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat’ on
Mingus Ah Um
, and later had a hit with ‘Hard Work’, in an R&B vein, but has continued to experiment in new situations, including some fascinating work with Indian musicians, which has continued up until 2006’s
Musical Dreamland.

Handy’s career went through various incarnations, but
New View!
is Handy’s masterpiece. The opening ‘Naima’, performed in the last month of composer John Coltrane’s life, has a particular synchronicity, and a flavour that the unusual instrumentation hammers home. The real plus, though, is the restoration to full length of ‘Tears Of Ole Miss (Anatomy Of A Riot)’, which now comes in at an impressive half-hour. Also on the album is ‘A Little Quiet’, which shows John Hammond’s gifts as a producer, the live mix balanced with genuine taste. Handy’s high, keening voice has rarely been heard to better advantage.

CEDAR WALTON

Born 17 January 1934, Dallas, Texas

Piano

Cedar!

Original Jazz Classics OJCCD 462

Walton; Kenny Dorham (t); Junior Cook (ts); Leroy Vinnegar (b); Billy Higgins (d). July 1967.

Cedar Walton said (1984):
‘Working with the Messengers was tough, but great training. Sometimes I’d get back from something and hadn’t even unpacked when Art [Blakey] called to say we were off again. It keeps you on your toes.’

Walton has only slowly been recognized as a significant jazz composer. After a stint in the military, the Dallas-born Walton worked with Kenny Dorham and J. J. Johnson before joining (and later rejoining) the Jazz Messengers. He also served a tour as house pianist for the Prestige label. He has a confident feel for the blues but favours a kind of angular lyricism. Tunes like ‘Bolivia’, ‘Ojos De Rojo’, ‘Maestro’ and ‘Ugetsu’ rival McCoy Tyner’s work for sophisticated inventiveness. Some of the material on
Cedar!
can also be found on a later compilation,
Cedar Walton Plays Cedar Walton
, but that disc misses a fine trio, ‘My Ship’, which is one of the highlights of the earlier years. There are only a couple of quintet selections, and for the most part Dorham and Cook are used alternately when the composition calls for a horn. ‘Turquoise Twice’ and ‘Head And Shoulders’ are by no means as well known as the Walton compositions mentioned above, but they’re quality pieces and deserve wider circulation. He’s a difficult fellow to pin down. The songs are expressive enough, but it’s their functional elements that are impressive, full of solid harmonic thinking and nicely argued resolutions that mostly don’t seem at all predictable, or even possible. Some will favour the later work, with Clifford Jordan in Magic Triangle or some of the ’90s records that highlighted recent writing, but it’s our view that Walton was at his best and most typical when younger, only succumbing to influences later in his career.

CLIFFORD THORNTON

Born 6 September 1936, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 25 November 1989, Geneva, Switzerland

Valve trombone, trumpet

Freedom & Unity

Atavistic Unheard Music ACP/UMS 225

Thornton; New Art Ensemble, including Joe McPhee (t); Jimmy Garrison (b). July 1967.

Joe McPhee remembers:
‘That recording was extraordinarily important for me. Clifford invited me to participate and in July of 1967 we began rehearsals in an apartment on Barrow St, New York, just across the hall from the apartment of Ornette Coleman, though I didn’t know that at the time. There came a knock on the door and there was Ornette offering me the use of his trumpet. That’s all I played at the time and he heard me practising. I almost dropped dead from shock – my god had come to earth. He was off to Fort Worth and he said just put it back in the room when you’re finished. I tried a few notes, but was too overwhelmed!’

The underrated, perhaps almost forgotten Thornton studied with Donald Byrd and worked for a time with tubist Ray Draper, but Coltrane was his real master.
Freedom & Unity
was apparently recorded the day after John Coltrane’s funeral, and with Jimmy Garrison present it must have seemed like an apostolic moment. If this was the point where Albert Ayler took up the mantle and set about restoring the relationship between avant-garde jazz, R&B and older, more primitive forms, then Clifford Thornton seemed anxious to go in the other direction. The obvious later parallel might be Anthony Braxton; both taught at Wesleyan. Thompson’s fleet, almost sinuous trombone style was like nothing else at the time, but the instrument wasn’t fashionable and he remained a somewhat peripheral figure. John Corbett has rescued
Freedom & Unity
from obscurity, and now Thornton’s other fine record,
The Panther And The Lash
, has put in an unexpected reappearance. Joe McPhee made his recording debut with Thornton’s 1967 group.

Later, in France, Thornton experimented with African-traditional materials and became
known as an important educator, but he was suspected of membership of the Black Panthers and deported; he died later in Switzerland. It might be thought that his political agendas are dated now, but this music stands up strongly against anything else of the time and its reissue restores his almost vanished reputation.

DON ELLIS

Born 25 July 1934, Los Angeles, California; died 17 December 1978, Hollywood, California

Trumpet

Electric Bath

Columbia CK 65522

Ellis; Bob Harmon, Glenn Stuart, Ed Warren, Alan Weight (t); Ron Meyers, David Sanchez, Terry Woodson (tb); Reuben Leon, Joe Roccisano (as, ss, f); Ira Schulman (ts, f, picc, cl); Ron Starr (ts, f, cl); John Magruder (bs, f, bcl); Mike Lang (p, ky); Ray Neapolitan (b, sitar); Frank De La Rosa (b); Dave Parlato (b); Steve Bohannon (d); Alan Estes, Mark Stevens, Chino Valdes (perc). September 1967.

Physician Bill Anderson remembers:
‘I was at that Monterey concert when I was a med student and playing jazz trumpet on the side. The band were playing sevens and nines and at one point I made it nineteens. It was crazy! I heard that he had heart problems, an arrhythmia, and always wondered if there was some obscure connection.’

‘I believe in making use of as wide a range of expressive techniques as possible,’ said Ellis, who never lost sight of his own challenging credo. He used a four-valve trumpet at one time and was still bent on developing a ‘superbone’, the ultimate brass instrument, at the time of his early death from a heart attack. Ellis had his groups playing in extreme time-signatures, the like of which hadn’t been seen since Percy Grainger, who of course was something of a California personality. Ellis helpfully pops up with a breakdown of the 19-beat figure at the start of his big band’s legendary 1966 Monterey appearance: ‘33 222 1 222 … of course, that’s just the area code!’ He was serious about what he did, though. Everything about Ellis’s band was distinctive. He fielded three basses and three percussionists, played his quarter-tone trumpet, and performed programmed jazz tunes with names like ‘Passacaglia And Fugue’ and ‘Concerto For Trumpet’, none of which was mere gimmickry. Monterey MC Jimmy Lyons compares the impact of the band to that of the Stan Kenton Orchestra. That to some ears might sound two-edged, but, like Kenton, Ellis manages to combine intellectual sophistication and visceral impact.