Some Astounding Tenor Playing

I've been listening to the Mosaic 7-CD box set The Complete Blue Note Andrew Hill Sessions 1963-66 on my iTunes and have been astounded by the saxophone playing on these records. Not new to my ears, but hearing this all in one place has made me sit up wide-eyed and take notice. On these records, pianist Andrew Hill’s small groups featured three of the most astonishing tenor saxophonists ever – Joe Henderson, John Gilmore, and Sam Rivers – pretty much defining “Inside-Outside” playing. All the more astounding considering these recordings were made while John Coltrane was still alive, knowing that Coltrane’s sound and approach has so dominated post-60’s tenor saxophony. 

Rudy Van Gelder’s recordings, which set a high quality benchmark, bring the sound to life, sounding as fresh as if recorded this morning although going on fifty years old. It really says something about the level of Andrew Hill’s musicianship that he was able to attract these three as sidemen. It is nearly impossible to sustain this level of creative intensity and although Andrew played some superb music and was much recognized and awarded later in life, his subsequent recordings never again reached this pinnacle. 

Joe Henderson – the small, introverted man with a big sound – is the best known of the three saxophonists and by far the most widely heard. Personally I took his playing for granted when younger since he could be heard on so many mid-60’s Blue Notes, and I didn't really appreciate him until I saw him perform on the Grant Park main stage at the Chicago Jazz festival back in the mid-1990’s. Somehow seeing him live made me understand the connection between the man and the sound and I have listened to every note of his I can find since then. The paradigm of inside-outside playing. 

John Gilmore – Sun Ra’s tenor saxophonist for more than two decades – to the best of my knowledge never recorded a date as a leader (although he co-led 1957’s Blowin’ In From Chicago with Clifford Jordan). All the more surprising considering that he is someone that John Coltrane looked up to for inspiration and innovation during Trane’s spirit-searching days of the early 60’s. He can be found here and there as a sideman outside of his prolific recordings with Sun Ra’s groups – notably on Paul Bley’s Turning Point, McCoy Tyner’s Today and Tomorrow on Impulse and even on one Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers session. Here is a video of that session on YouTube – Gilmore in a conservative business suit and Lee Morgan sporting a really bad haircut. 

Sam Rivers – one year departed at this point and still under-recognized. Sam’s own mid-60’s Blue Note sessions are a peak of tenor saxophone playing on their own – the final CD in the Andrew Hill box was in the can when originally recorded and first released under Sam Rivers’ name in the 1970’s as part of a “two-fer” LP – Sam was at a peak of recognition at that time. Sam had played with Miles Davis for a short while prior to the Andrew Hill session, in Miles’ band after George Coleman and just before Wayne Shorter. Sam recorded on Miles in Tokyo and the more recently released Kyoto sessions from the same 1964 Japan tour. To me, these sessions sound better than Miles in Berlin from the next year with Shorter on tenor, but apparently Sam was too wild even for Miles! Maybe too advanced at the time. 

Get hold of the Andrew Hill box on Mosaic if you can, or any of the individual Blue Note CDs if you can’t find the box. The saxophone playing on these mid-1960’s sessions has never been surpassed.

Bill of Goods

I will be heading back to Africa soon and will have some more interesting things to post. In the interim, I am writing one of my periodic musings (i.e. rants) about the music scene. Here goes...

We have been sold a bill of goods that music is perpetually evolving. Today's is better than yesterday's, more advanced. It's not true. I learned the conventional wisdom in school, that you can trace the evolution of jazz in a straight line from Armstrong to Parker to Coltrane. An overall trend towards ever-increasing sophistication in rhythm and harmony. You could fill a library with books analyzing the history of the music from New Orleans to Swing to Bop to Cool to Hard Bop to Modal to Freedom as if one style follows directly, naturally, from its predecessor and obviates the need to go back. In reality, things stagnated after Ornette, Trane, Ayler, Taylor, and the Art Ensemble, and the creative scene of my younger days has long ago been snuffed out by musical Reaganomics. Today you need a Master's Degree in performance to play jazz so your fellow musicians won't give you "the ray", and the University of the Streets has been shuttered for all intents and purposes. 

I was listening to Sam Rivers on my iPod the other day and had an epiphany of sorts. Listening to Sam play his tenor on Fuschia Swing Song (tunes written as far back as the late 50's), I heard him play so much music on his SML in 1965 that I realized NOBODY HAS EVER GOTTEN BEYOND THAT. Listen to Ellipsis. SHEEE-IT. Sam himself never got beyond that. 

My recent experiences in Africa reinforce the plateau state of yet another musical style, Afrobeat. Fela Kuti has been gone for 15 years and the music has not advanced much since then. Yes, there has been a Broadway play cheesifying his life and there are Afrobeat revival bands in the US, Europe, and Japan, but who wants to listen to a revival band made of copyists who learned their instruments in school when you can go back and listen to one of Fela's original records or his original band and offspring? His son Femi has been flirting with rap and hip-hop which I hope is just a way to make money and not a serious musical direction - because that music just can't compare. By my reckoning hip-hop has dominated commercial pop music longer than rock 'n roll at this point, even in Fela's home country of Nigeria, and musically I can't figure out why. Can't be about the music. Must be about the commercial. 

The conclusion from all this is that music definitely does not evolve in a straight line, and at present the creative music world is at a plateau. The result of obsession with too much technology - the hardware and not the software. The lack of live gigs has driven performing musicians into academia where they teach what can be documented, reproduced, and tested - that's why so many of today's horn players sound like John Coltrane ca. 1960 and none sound like Ornette or Ayler; originality is dissed rather than respected. Can you play your horn at Grade 8? Who cares? Did Tina Brooks pass his exam before recording True Blue? Music cannot be separated from its social context and that is why creative music has stagnated. The social milieu that created Bird and Trane no longer exists; we can only listen to their recordings, transcribe, analyze, and reproduce the sound. A society that measures your worth by how fancy your hand phone is doesn't have much space for musical innovation. 

One thing I have learned is that making music is actually a social process and something big is missing if you only concentrate on the technical. Music cannot be separated from its environment. Did you download that from the cloud and play it on your iPad? Was that a D7m5 or did Diz use another enharmonic spelling? Was that an E natural or an F flat? Do your ears care?

Loss of Another Saxophone Great

Unfortunate news is that Red Holloway passed away this week at the age of 84. The tenor saxophone world has lost another great player and living link to giants of the past. Red was an alumnus of Chicago's fabled DuSable High. This link is a nice tribute to Red with a detailed biography.

Seems like most of the players I really like are in their 70s and 80s now. Last year we lost Sam Rivers and Fred Anderson. We can only hope for the continued good health of the elder statesmen of the saxophone – Sonny, Ornette, Vonski, Yusef Lateef the most prominent among them. This is one music that offers constant paths to growth and the best players just keep getting better as they get older.

Who's on My Turntable (or CD Player or iPod)

Surprise, all horn players.

Basic everyday vocabulary: 
Coleman Hawkins
Lester Young
Charlie Parker
Dexter Gordon
John Coltrane
Sonny Rollins (*)
Ornette Coleman (*)

And onward, I'm sure I'm inadvertently leaving some out:
Billy Harper (*)
Booker Ervin
Budd Johnson
Charles Brackeen (*)
Chris Potter (*)
Dewey Redman
Eddie Harris
Edward Wilkerson (*)
Ellery Eskelin (*)
Eric Dolphy
Frank Lowe
Fred Anderson
Gene Ammons
Jemeel Moondoc (*)
Joe Harriott
Joe Henderson
John Gilmore
John Tchicai (*)
Julius Hemphill
Kalaparusha (*)
Ken Vandermark (*)
Lucky Thompson
Odean Pope (*)
Paul Gonsalves
Paul Jeffrey (*)
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Rob Brown (*)
Sam Rivers
Sean Bergin (*)
Tina Brooks
Tony Malaby (*)
Von Freeman (*)

(*) These guys are still around; seek them out and support their performances.

Motivated to Play...by the Music

My personal preferences in music have been formed around the tradition of creative improvised music that is never played the same way twice. I love a good rhythm and a great horn solo and the spontaneous interplay of multiple improvisers. 

Most of my great experiences playing music came after the age of 50. Past the age when Pres and Jug had already left us. An age when cave men would have been long dead, and past a man’s life expectancy in many of the world’s poorest countries today. I never seriously considered playing music professionally full-time since most all the world’s improvising musicians are near destitute – see the heart wrenching video about Kalaparusha 'That's not a horn, it's a starvation box' that appeared on the Guardian web site in 2010 to prove it. Lester Bowie once said that at the height of The Art Ensemble’s worldwide fame, he earned less than his mailman. The great Sam Rivers – whose playing was too advanced for Miles in the 60’s – admitted that he only had two years of steady work in his whole life, and that was when he played in Dizzy’s band in the 80’s (Dizzy, as essential as he is, had more or less stopped innovating by the late 1940’s whereas Sam never stopped). 

As much as I love music, I never had the stomach to teach 8-year-olds forced to take lessons by their dragon mothers who dream of their child on stage at Carnegie Hall, like some of my bandstand compatriots must do to earn a living. Live gigs are few these days when anyone can twiddle up instant entertainment on their hand phone, and good gigs where the creative improvising musician can have full artistic control are even fewer. But those are the gigs we focus on and yes they do exist. I am playing for the creative outlet the music provides, the feeling of flow that can only be achieved through fully-engaged high-performance endeavours (such as race car driving or equestrian sports), to be in the rare mental space created by guys like Sonny, Pres, Mex, Rahsaan, Booker Ervin, Fred Anderson and others sung and unsung, to be behind a bent piece of brass that is one of the most genius inventions of mankind, to be where nobody can get between me and what comes out the other end of the tube, and to preserve and proliferate the tradition of creative improvisation with utter truth and honesty. Maybe even contribute something however small. Oh yes, and for the joy of music. Music needs to be fun; it is not meant to be a painful, complicated, academic experience.

State of the Horn, One Player's View

Playing sax is a never ending learning process. Most of the players I like are way older than me – the recently passed Sam Rivers was close to 90, Fred Anderson was in his late 70’s when he left, Ornette and Sonny are now 80, Vonski is about 88 now and still going.

Since my school days the music in many ways has transformed from a vibrant, free, expressive art form to a stodgy, academic, ossified craft you learn in class by studying method books based on John Coltrane’s 1959 approach, an approach he himself rapidly advanced away from. So-called jazz can now be “graded” and there are “jazz competitions” with monetary prizes awarded. I've never understood how an art form founded in self expression could be treated as a competition like weight lifting or horse racing.

Ornette is back to being considered radical again more than 50 years after he established the mainstream. Learning jazz is now mostly “take a random mathematical pattern like 1-3-6-5, memorize it in every key, then play it as fast as you can”. Harmonic complexity is treated as the only value worth striving for; formulaically twiddling up and down chords at high speed is what makes you a good horn player. The more complicated the better. Memorizing solos, other people’s solos, is mandatory (but only those that slavishly follow chord changes, the kind of music the pioneers abandoned in the late 50’s, mainly because formulas can be replicated but creativity cannot). The conventional wisdom after 30 years of musical Reaganomics is that music is like speech – you imitate your mother to learn to speak, so you must imitate other musicians to play jazz. An inaccurate analogy – I learned to speak from my mother but my voice sounds nothing like hers, I never needed to ape her voice pitch, emphasis, and inflection to speak, and I never had to copy her exact words, grammar, and syntax to be understood. There is still a pocket of creativity in the music today but it is small and the giants are leaving us one by one. Much of what I hear labelled “jazz” is corporate pap and the word is close to becoming meaningless since many uncritical listeners confuse lounge music that incorporates a bit of syncopation and a blue note or two with the creative storm that stems from the tradition of Pops, Pres, Bird, Miles, Trane, and Ornette. Where I live it is difficult to hear a horn at all.

My Musical Biography, Part 3

The 1970’s were the height of the New York loft scene; a live show costs just a couple of bucks in those days and most places did not clear the floor between sets. I used to take the train frequently to NYC, where my Lab School best friend Gilbert lived. Gilbert loved music and had the world’s largest record collection but he never had any musical talent himself (his amazing talents lie elsewhere - he is now a world-renowned artist, see http://www.gilberthsiao.blogspot.com/). I guess we have that in common, no innate musical talent. I used to go hear live music all the time – Studio Rivbea and the Tin Palace come to mind. Once I walked across lower Manhattan blowing my alto in the street the whole way; when we walked in front of Ali’s Alley, Rashied Ali himself came out to see what the commotion was – can you imagine doing that in post-Giuliani NYC? Probably get locked up.

Some of the greats I’ve had the fortune to see and hear live: Miles Davis (his pre-retirement electric band with Sonny Fortune and Pete Cosey), Charles Mingus (with George Adams and Danny Rich-man; Mingus cussed me out with some racial epithets when I naively tried to say hello between sets in Montreal), Dexter Gordon (once with Woody Shaw on trumpet; Dexter was a real gentleman), Dizzy Gillespie (who was interested in my wife and not the least bit in me), Sam Rivers (at Rivbea), Sonny Rollins (in Philly where I sat so close I could’ve shined his shoes), Leroy Jenkins (at the recording session for his JCOA album), Clark Terry (I interviewed him for WHRB), Archie Shepp (I interviewed him for WHRB and got to hang out with him and Dave Burrell in their hotel; he certainly never showed any hostility towards white people to me), James Moody (in Terre Haute!), McCoy Tyner (maybe his best band with Junie Booth and Azar Lawrence), Kalaparusha (I had, and still have, a real taste for the AACM), Muhal Richard Abrams, Ornette Coleman with Prime Time, towering Randy Weston, Max Roach (with the fabulous Billy Harper on tenor), Dewey Redman (whose music puts his much more highly touted son to shame), Julius Hemphill (Tim Berne was his manager at the time and sent me some unreleased cassettes of Julius), David Murray (the saxophone prodigy of the day, not much older than me), Jimmy McGriff, Lou Donaldson, Ray Charles, Pepper Adams (in Munich’s famed Domocile), Chicago’s great Fred Anderson, Joe Henderson (whose introverted style I never really understood until I saw him in person), Jackie McLean (one of his last concerts), Cecil Taylor (who plays the piano like he has three hands), Paul Quinichette at the West End, Art Blakey (not one of his best bands unfortunately) and Sun Ra and James Brown multiple times…JB twice with Wilson Pickett on the bill. My favorite is Vonski Von Freeman who instructed me that “Music is not mathematics.”

Someone I didn’t see…Rahsaan…one of the dumbest things I ever did in my life. Big Dave called me to come down to Bloomington and see Rahsaan at the Bluebird and I was too lazy to make the hour drive by myself. Rahsaan died that night after the concert. Big Dave is gone now too.