Been takin’ a break for some writin’ of a non-blog vari­ety, so I’ve been MIA for a cou­pla days. I fig­ure it’s time once again to enjoy some blog-ly good­ness. Mmmm-mmm! That’s good blog!

After my recent vis­its to the past, re: The Decline and Fall of Colum­bia Jazz, I’m inspired to write about some more recent stuff. I’ll use the next few posts as shoutouts to some musi­cians new to me, whose CDs just crossed my very messy desk. Today’s shoutout-ee is Chicago-based trum­peter Josh Berman. 

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In his notes to Chicago-based trum­peter Josh Berman’s Old Idea (Del­mark), writer Kevin White­head makes a pretty big deal about how the 34-year-old Berman is kinda long-in-the-tooth to be mak­ing his lead­er­ship debut. I guess he’s got a point – no sooner do kids toss out their paci­fier do they pick up a horn and make a record these days.

I’m think­ing a rea­son­able wait can be worth it, espe­cially when the music is as cre­ative, mature, and well-formed as this. Berman is joined by tenor sax­o­phon­ist Keefe (“Whoa Nelly!”) Jack­son, vibra­phon­ist Jason Adasiewicz, bassist Anton Hatwich, and drum­mer Nori Tanaka in a cool-ish set that reminds me more than a lit­tle bit of the stuff vibist Teddy Charles did with Shorty Rogers and Jimmy Giuf­fre in the early fifties. [High praise, indeed. The Charles band’s 1953 album Col­lab­o­ra­tion West is a clas­sic doc­u­ment of exper­i­men­tal jazz, pre-Ornette.]

Of course, a lot’s hap­pened since the Charles/Rogers/Giuffre sides were waxed, and Berman’s taken it all in. Old Idea is a relaxed, just-as-tight-as-it-needs-to-be ses­sion incor­po­rat­ing swing­ing modal vamps, obscure or non-existent tonal­ity, pointil­list col­lec­tiv­ity, and cre­ative use of  tim­bre. The solos are hap­pen­ing. Both Berman and Jack­son pay close atten­tion to what they’re say­ing, together and apart. Adasiewicz is a taste­ful, inven­tive soloist and savvy accom­pa­nist. Bassist Hatwich and drum­mer Tanaka swing gen­tly but firmly and are gen­er­ous with space. The per­for­mance is simul­ta­ne­ously spon­ta­neous and well-thought-out, and – like all the best jazz – rooted in the present. Good stuff.

Chris Rich at Bril­liant Cor­ners did some­thing I basi­cally stink at, which is to make sense of some­thing that requires the use of words like  “merg­ers” and “acqui­si­tions.” His sub­ject is the busi­ness behind the decline of Colum­bia Jazz, the once-great label I spent the last few posts mourn­ing and exco­ri­at­ing in equal parts. It’s a great read, highly recommended.

This is the final install­ment of my three-part lament mourn­ing the direc­tion taken by the once-great Colum­bia records begin­ning in the early 1980s, focus­ing on some of my favorite CBS jazz albums of that era. Part One dealt with alto sax­o­phon­ist Arthur Blythe’s Illu­sions, Part Two with gui­tarist James Blood Ulmer’s Free Lanc­ing. Today’s sub­ject is my favorite Weather Report album, 1980’s Night Pas­sage.

Cash talked every bit as loudly in the ‘80s as it does today, so despite the impend­ing con­ser­v­a­tive zeit­geist, Weather Report’s place at Colum­bia was secure. In 1980 the group must surely have been one of the jazz division’s big­ger money-makers, so its pro­cliv­ity to sub­vert con­ven­tion pre­sum­ably wasn’t held against it.

Weather Report was made up of for­mer Can­non­ball Adder­ley, Miles Davis, and Stan Ken­ton side­men, and a young jazz bassist of sur­pass­ing cre­ativ­ity and skill (the fact that he played an elec­tric axe couldn’t obscure his inher­ent jazz­i­ness). The band’s pedi­gree was impec­ca­ble, so even as it incor­po­rated synths, sonic effects, and an occa­sional back­beat, no one seri­ously thought of call­ing their music any­thing but jazz — no one but the musi­cians them­selves, per­haps, who were mul­ti­fac­eted and vision­ary and almost cer­tainly dis­in­ter­ested in cre­at­ing any­thing that could be described in such sim­ple terms.

In 1980, Colum­bia had thank­fully not yet given-up on inno­va­tion. That would come soon enough. For its part, Weather Report was unaf­fected by the label’s turn to the right. It broke-up in 1986, just before Colum­bia declared alle­giance to bop, finally and more-or-less irrevocably.

Weather Report had been a Colum­bia main­stay since the release of its eponymously-titled debut album in 1971. Built prin­ci­pally around key­boardist Joe Zaw­inul and sax­o­phon­ist Wayne Shorter, the band took as its start­ing point Miles’ elec­tronic exper­i­ments (includ­ing notably 1970s Bitches Brew, on which both men played). Although WR’s early work had a strong Free Jazz com­po­nent, Zaw­inul and Shorter were com­posers by nature. It was inevitable that the loose, impro­vi­sa­tional nature of their first record­ings—Weather Report, I Sing the Body Elec­tric—morph into some­thing more structured.

As the band moved in a more groove-oriented direc­tion, elec­tric bassist Alphonso John­son replaced acoustic bassist Miroslav Vitous. In 1976, John­son was sup­planted by the late, great Jaco Pas­to­rius, who could play any­thing required of a bassist in a jazz group, from free to funk to straight-ahead to things other bass play­ers (acoustic or elec­tric) wouldn’t – couldn’t – have dreamed of.

The drum chair remained in flux until 1978, when for­mer Kenton-ite Peter Ersk­ine signed-on for an extended stay. The band also used a sec­ond per­cus­sion­ist much of the time; in 1980, that role was filled by Robert Thomas, Jr. The two con­stants were, of course, the bril­liant Zaw­inul and Shorter.

The per­son­nel changes accom­pa­nied a trend toward in-the-pocket mate­r­ial, which — com­bined with an over­all impro­vi­sa­tional genius, mas­terly com­po­si­tions, and once-in-a-lifetime chem­istry — resulted in a pop­u­lar­ity that was fairly remark­able for a jazz group at the time, espe­cially one so uncom­pro­mis­ingly cre­ative. That renown prob­a­bly peaked with 1977’s seri­ously groov­ing Black Mar­ket, but was still at a high level in 1980, the year the band released its tenth album, Night Pas­sage.

Curt Bianchi’s won­der­ful online source, Weather Report: The Anno­tated Discog­ra­phy, quotes Robert Thomas, Jr. in 2000 call­ing Night Pas­sage “The most incred­i­ble album [Zaw­inul] ever made. Noth­ing else comes close. Noth­ing.” Of course, Thomas has some­thing of a vested inter­est in the mat­ter, being the per­cus­sion­ist on the album and all, but Night has always been my favorite WR album, and it was reput­edly a favorite of Zawinul’s, as well.

Except for one track, Night Pas­sage was recorded live in the stu­dio over two nights, in front of an audi­ence of 250 peo­ple. The music kicks in a way some of its pre­vi­ous overdub-heavy stu­dio efforts could not. The band plays with the same energy it dis­played on the pre­vi­ous year’s con­cert album, 8:3o, but instead of that record’s “great­est hits” pre­sen­ta­tion, Night Pas­sage con­sists of new com­po­si­tions — or, in the case of Pastorius’s “Three Views of a Secret” and Duke Ellington’s “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” inspired cov­ers of tunes they’d never before recorded. Night also ben­e­fits from a cleaner sound and less over-the-top show­man­ship (I’m look­ing at you Mr. Pas­to­rius or would be if you hadn’t com­mit­ted suicide-by-bouncer twenty-two years ago you freakin’ self-destructive genius damn you what’d ya have to go and do that for?).

The album begins with the Zawinul-written title track, a swing­ing shuf­fle of such har­monic, rhyth­mic, and struc­tural sophistication/complexity as to give lie to the sug­ges­tion of jazz’s con­ser­v­a­tive ele­ment that all fusion is nec­es­sar­ily intel­lec­tual and emo­tional pab­u­lum aimed at the eter­nal ado­les­cent. Zaw­inul took care to com­pose the thorny bass part, which entwines itself with the jagged, start-and-stop melody, played in uni­son by Shorter on tenor and the com­poser on syn­the­sizer. The form even­tu­ally smooths into a repet­i­tive “Nefertiti”-like melodic iter­a­tion, beneath which the rhythm sec­tion burns ever hot­ter. The fade that ends the track is a bit of a cheat, but the fresh, unpre­dictable nature of the music — the way it takes the raw mate­r­ial of jazz and molds it into some­thing unique, never before heard — makes up for the slightly unsat­is­fy­ing finish.

Emo­tional volatil­ity cou­pled with the a rare abil­ity to expand upon the eru­di­tion of bebop and merge it with mod­ern ele­ments of sound and rhythm are cru­cial to the band’s suc­cess.  The great Wayne Shorter wrote the book on that with his com­po­si­tions for Miles and his solo work in the ‘60s.  He’s irre­place­able here, even though his alter­nately stut­ter­ing and con­tentious impro­vi­sa­tions are famously brief (much to the cha­grin of crit­ics of that era, if mem­ory serves).

Among the album’s most com­pelling per­for­mances is its take on “Rockin’ in Rhythm,” in which Zaw­inul essen­tially tran­scribes Ellington’s sax voic­ings for tenor sax and synth. The track is brief (three min­utes) and to the point, much in the man­ner of the old 78s. Shorter’s solo with Zawinul’s qua­v­ery, sax-section-like back­ground fig­ures is a work of high art in minia­ture. Equally fine is the group’s cover of Jaco’s “Three Views of a Secret,” a lovely bal­lad that shows us Pas­to­rius was about a lot more than chops. His play­ing here is con­sum­mately lyric and acute.

For much— maybe most—of the album, Jaco’s is the dom­i­nant instru­men­tal voice, not least because he’s heard at vir­tu­ally every moment. His brain-meltingly inven­tive bass lines and Erskine’s and Thomas’s hyper­ki­netic per­cus­sion ani­mate the music, give it an energy and power unknown to all but a very few jazz bands, before or after. Of course, Pas­to­rius’ solos are bril­liant, as well; often­times there’s no telling between his sec­tion work and his solos. His play­ing on the hyper-driven Latin sec­tion of “Port of Entry” is a case in point. Jaco’s solo break, in trio with Thomas and Ersk­ine, is a stun­ning dis­play of vir­tu­os­ity and cre­ativ­ity. Yet it is, if any­thing, exceeded by the bass line he strikes imme­di­ately after — a double-timed blur beneath Zawinul’s keys. It’s not only a work of melodic/textural genius, but also swings as hard as any­thing I’ve ever heard, at as quick a tempo as I’ve ever heard attempted. Ersk­ine and Thomas deserve props, too. Indeed, the rap­port between all of the rhythm play­ers goes a long way in mak­ing this album so wonderful.

Ulti­mately, how­ever — as Thomas implic­itly acknowl­edged in the above quote—Night Pas­sage is Zawinul’s baby. At this point in the band’s life, he was the guid­ing force: the prin­ci­ple com­poser, arranger, and pro­ducer, and, if not the pri­mary soloist, cer­tainly an impro­viser of great dis­tinc­tion. In fact, Zawinul’s halt­ing, dis­con­tin­u­ous style of impro­vi­sa­tion over a con­stantly roil­ing, evolv­ing rhythm sec­tion char­ac­ter­izes his com­po­si­tional style as well, giv­ing voice to the over­all group con­cept. Shorter’s input was crit­i­cal, as was of course Jaco’s and the oth­ers’. When all is said and done, how­ever, Night Pas­sage was Zawinul’s cre­ation. In a life­time of great work, he may not have done any­thing better.

To its credit, Colum­bia stayed with Weather Report until the group dis­banded. I say to its credit; there’s lit­tle doubt the group made the label a con­sid­er­able sum of money over the years, so keep­ing them on-board was hardly an act of char­ity. Yet, by the time they’d recorded their last album, 1986’s This Is This, Colum­bia Jazz was well on its way to becom­ing Marsalis, Inc. Ulmer had been disposed-of years ear­lier. Blythe would be gone soon. Per­haps most telling of all, Miles Davis — the cor­ner­stone of Columbia’s jazz divi­sion for almost two decades — left for Warner Broth­ers that same year.

There would be occa­sional half-hearted efforts to bring back chal­leng­ing music to the label over the years — Jane Ira Bloom and Tim Berne recorded some fine sides in the late ‘80s, and David S. Ware recorded a cou­ple in the ‘90s, but for the most part the label ditched the most cre­ative artists in favor of such straight-ahead revival­ists as Wyn­ton and Bran­ford, Mar­cus Roberts, and a suc­ces­sion of young tradition-worshippers who made an album or two before falling off the map.

The music indus­try as we knew it was des­tined to go into the toi­let the minute some­one fig­ured out a way to rip and com­press CD files. Colum­bia would’ve been hit like every­one else, so you can’t blame its demise totally on its lack of cre­ative foresight.

You can, how­ever, blame the peo­ple in charge for plac­ing a sucker’s bet on jazz’s future being in its past, at a time when record­ing stuff on the cut­ting edge might’ve had a major impact on the sus­tained health of the music. As I see it, they couldn’t have done it for fear of los­ing money, because jazz is and always has been noto­ri­ously cheap to record, espe­cially in com­par­i­son with other kinds of music.

Nah, they must’ve done it for the sim­plest, most All-American of rea­sons: more (as in money) auto­mat­i­cally means bet­ter. That’s the way busi­ness is done in this coun­try. Mak­ing a respectable profit sell­ing qual­ity mer­chan­dise is never enough. Only mon­strous gains and con­stant growth are allowed. That’s fine when you’re try­ing to cor­ner the mar­ket on ketchup, but not so good when you’re charged with the health of America’s One Great Con­tri­bu­tion to World Culture.

Today, Columbia’s back cat­a­log (at least what remains in print) is called Legacy. As for Colum­bia Jazz, Google it and you’ll be led to a page that hasn’t been updated in over a decade, full of dead links to albums by — you guessed it — the Marsalis fam­ily, Roberts, Harry Con­nick, Jr., and Kyle East­wood. Like the music that took it down, Colum­bia Jazz is a vir­tual ghost town, with cyber-tumbleweeds blow­ing down it’s dusty streets. Close your eyes and you can almost see Kyle’s dad, as The Man with No Name, rid­ing his horse out of town, cig­a­rro in cheek, squint­ing his eyes and shak­ing his head in dis­gust at the sense­less destruc­tion wrought by idiots.

(Photo of  Zaw­inul by Bob Travis, photo of Weather Report cour­tesy of Dino Ferrari)

In talk­ing about how, when, and where jazz lost its way (and I use the term “jazz” as a catchall to describe  the genre’s eco­nomic main­stream, as rep­re­sented by it’s few most lav­ishly rec­om­pensed fig­ures and a rick­ety indus­try – now seem­ingly on its last legs – con­structed around them), I should be care­ful not to con­demn any par­tic­u­lar style or genre. As I was reminded today in an e-mail exchange with Smalls Records’ Luke Kaven, in the end it’s not  what you say, or even how you say it, but the human­ity you express, your essen­tial con­nec­tion to every­thing else.

The great­est art expresses that uni­ver­sal affin­ity. As it relates to music, it’s some­thing inde­pen­dent of style or idiom. A Dix­ieland player can express it as well as a bebop or Free player; a sec­ond vio­lin­ist in an orches­tra might express it bet­ter than a soloist play­ing a concerto.

Lis­ten to Sid­ney Bechet on “Sum­mer­time” and Albert Ayler on “Ghosts” and tell me they’re not com­mu­ni­cat­ing the same ele­men­tal emo­tions, the same vision of uni­ver­sal­ity. Like any two great poets sep­a­rated by time and cul­ture, they use dif­fer­ent means to get their points across, but their mes­sage tran­scends par­tic­u­lars of lan­guage, touch­ing on the infi­nite mys­tery of exis­tence, some­thing that even the great­est intel­lect can­not hope to unravel.

As Luke pointed out in so many words, poetry begins where style ends. It’s still pos­si­ble in the 21^st cen­tury for a bebop or Dix­ieland or Swing player to speak with that sense of all-embracing absoluteness.

So when I come down on jazz — or an indi­vid­ual jazz musi­cian — for being out of step, I shouldn’t con­fuse the prac­ti­cal with the inef­fa­ble. Jazz lost its way in the early ‘80s, but not only because a few pow­er­ful guys decided to push bebop to the fore. Just as cru­cial is that they favored sur­face over depth. It’s true that, in favor­ing an older style, they made it less likely that the music would find a young audi­ence. That’s an issue of prac­ti­cal­ity that’s impacted the growth … excuse me, the shrink­ing of the jazz audience.

More impor­tant, how­ever, is that instead of pro­mot­ing great artists — and in the ‘70s and ‘80s there were plenty, play­ing bebop and free and fusion and every com­bi­na­tion thereof — they pro­moted skilled copy­cats. Rather than find the gen­uine arti­cle, they beat the bushes for young, pho­to­genic arche­types that had the exter­nals down, but lacked wis­dom and under­stand­ing. In short, they hired impres­sion­ists, not poets. In the years since, they’ve per­pet­u­ated and com­pounded that orig­i­nal mis­take, and the music has suf­fered for it.

So under­stand that when I talk trash about “rebop­pers,” it’s the impres­sion­ists I’m rag­ging on, not the men and women who’ve lived the life, absorbed the lessons, and spo­ken so elo­quently in an idiom that is, for them, the lan­guage of the eternal.

About a mil­lion years ago, I remem­ber read­ing a Blind­fold Test in which a cocky young punk sax­o­phone player told the inter­viewer to stop play­ing a record of Eric Dol­phy, because Eric Dol­phy — accord­ing to this cocky and seri­ously mis­taken young punk — played the same lick over and over and over, and this cocky young punk thought that was horseshit.

Well, it’s a mil­lion years later. The cocky young punk is middle-aged, but he’s not done know­ing it all. Only now instead of diss­ing a giant of jazz whose jock­strap he can­not but hope to sniff, he’s pass­ing judg­ment on the sar­to­r­ial choices of his fel­low jazz musi­cians.

To that cocky, once-young-and-now-middle-aged punk I say: you play awright, about like I’d expect a guy who wor­ries as much about his “vines” as you do. But if I want advice on how to dress on stage, I’ll ask you, ‘k? How ’bout instead of enforc­ing a dress code, you try inject­ing some human­ity into that ice-cold com­put­er­ized shit you been play­ing for way too long?

And by the way, Char­lie Parker dressed like hell, but his music was heavenly.

(In case there’s any doubt, the name of the cat we’re talkin’ about rhymes with “Cosby.” )

Man, I been waitin’ to get that off my chest for about a mil­lion years.

Back ‘n I ‘uz just knee-high to a pis­sant, my li’l ol’ gram­maw back in Okla­homa used to say to me when she ‘uz in the barn­yard chop­pin’ the heads off’n them dang ol’ chick­ens’, my gram­maw, she’d say, “Chris, dan­gnab­bit, it ain’t enough to be agin’ ever’-dang-thang in this world! Ya gotta be fer sumthin’, too!”

Ok, I’m lying. My grand­mother didn’t chop the heads off chick­ens. Not in my pres­ence, any­way. As far as I know, she pur­chased them at a gro­cery store, fully beheaded and pre-plucked.

And she wasn’t some guff-talkin’ hill­billy. She was actu­ally quite artic­u­late. Did I also men­tion that she didn’t smoke a corn­cob pipe, nor did she drink moon­shine from a jug labeled “XXX?” No? Well, she didn’t.

In fact, my grand­mother was a respected pil­lar of her com­mu­nity, the elected city clerk of a small rural Okla­homa town. And she never uttered the afore­men­tioned apho­rism, not that I can remem­ber, any­way. Although I’m sure she would have, had she thought of it.

But that doesn’t mean that what she didn’t say, but prob­a­bly would’ve said, isn’t … 100% true … uh, wait .…

Never mind my grand­mother. Let’s try this:

It ain’t enough to root against the Yan­kees; you gotta find another team to root for, know what I mean, Vern?

In that Ernest spirit, let me say: I’ve come today not to bury Colum­bia jazz for the cat­a­stroph­i­cally wrong turns it took begin­ning around 1982, but to praise it for the great music it recorded before it went all old-timey on our asses.  In par­tic­u­lar, I’m look­ing back at some of the notable Colum­bia jazz releases from the late 1970s and early 1980s — albums that we’ve been told fore­shad­owed the immi­nent death of jazz, but which in real­ity con­tain some truly extra­or­di­nary music.

Part One con­sid­ered sax­o­phon­ist Arthur Blythe’s 1980 release, Illu­sions. Today’s sub­ject is Free Lanc­ing from ’81, the first Colum­bia release by Blythe’s gui­tarist on Illu­sions, James Blood Ulmer.

Ulmer’s trio with bassist Amin Ali and drum­mer G. Calvin Weston (like Ulmer, a fully-accredited Ornette-ian) serves as Free Lanc­ing’s cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem. A sec­ond gui­tar and female back­ground singers are added on three tracks, and an all-star horn sec­tion – David Mur­ray on tenor sax, Oliver Lake on alto sax, and Olu Dara on trum­pet (or so it says on the cover; more likely, Dara played cornet) – on three more. In the end, how­ever, the core trio ani­mates the music.

Tak­ing the least first and get­ting it outta the way: It would be almost too easy to dis­miss the vocal cuts, yet by lis­ten­ing past the cheesy, ‘70s-vintage back­ground vocals, I hear that Ulmer is a more than decent blues/soul singer. That said, the tunes are noth­ing spe­cial, and while Ulmer, Weston, and Ali – with sec­ond gui­tarist Ron­nie Dray­ton – crank out plenty of juice, I find myself smil­ing dis­tract­edly while look­ing  at my watch, wait­ing for a return to the  pri­mal scream-inciting instru­men­tals (and to be hon­est, it’s not so easy to shut-out those cheesy back­ground vocals).

The other guests bring more to the table. You’d expect their solos to be scorch­ing, but Dara, Lake, and Mur­ray also make for a sur­pris­ingly tight and tor­rid horn sec­tion. From the quasi-reggae of “High Time” to the Brecker-Brothers-on-crack hyper funk of “Hijack” and the orches­trated har­molod­ics of “Rush Hour,” the horns tear through Ulmer’s knotty charts with guts and gall and exhil­a­rat­ing pre­ci­sion. Their solos indeed burn, though they’re a bit on the short side. Of course, this was the olden days. Vinyl LPs allowed lim­ited room to stretch. (If only they’d left off one of those vocal tracks, and let David Mur­ray blow another minute or two on “Rush Hour.”  Oh, well.)

Good as the horn cuts are, the trio tracks are the meat of the album, if for no other rea­son than they pro­vide the opti­mum show­case for Ulmer’s cor­ro­sively bril­liant free jazz gui­tar. There had never been a gui­tarist like Ulmer, and there hasn’t been one since. He com­bines the best of Chicago-style blues gui­tar with coun­try blues, funk, bebop, and free impro­vi­sa­tion, in a style that’s as dis­tinc­tive and elec­tri­fy­ing as any in jazz.

The tunes range from the riff­ing to the tor­tu­ous, and while they’re def­i­nitely funky, it’s not George Clinton-style funk, but some­thing even dirt­ier and more ele­men­tal. Weston drums in an almost African style, heavy on the toms, often with a rolling triplet feel dom­i­nant. Ali’s slap­ping and pop­ping bass avoids most of the technique’s clichés; he’s sur­pris­ingly melodic, and strongly rhyth­mic. The pair engages Ulmer on every level, more-often-than-not to spec­tac­u­lar effect.

The tight­est grooves and the exact­ing up-tempo, start-and-stop heads (like the final tune, “Happy Time”) are plenty thrilling. Even more mind-blowing are the looser, more uncon­strained jams, as on the title track, where the impro­vis­ing gets most rau­cous and Ulmer’s gui­tar gives off the most heat. The track’s cre­ative tumult, cre­ated spon­ta­neously and guided with a min­i­mum of indi­vid­ual ego, is an exam­ple of every­thing that’s great about impro­vised music.

Of course, there’s not a sin­gle canned lick on the entire album – no trib­utes to any­one dead, no quotes from “Potato Head Blues,” noth­ing like that.  So it obvi­ously can’t be jazz, nor would any­body buy it. At least, that’s what the geniuses at Colum­bia soon divined. After a cou­ple more albums, they showed Mr. Ulmer the door, leav­ing this as a reminder of how hip a jazz label it once was.

Next: Night Pas­sage, by Weather Report.

(Photo of James Blood Ulmer by Chris­t­ian Sahm)

A week later, my agita from hav­ing belat­edly watched that final hare­brained episode of the Burn­salis docu-crappery (or should that be crap-umentary?) has sub­sided. It occurs to me that I might now engage in a more pleas­ant act of retrospection.

The sin­gle pos­i­tive that came from hav­ing watched Ken Burns’ Jazz, “Episode 10: A Mastodon by Mid­night” was being reminded of all the great, inno­v­a­tive music the film ignored: the music of my young adult­hood, the stuff that got me excited about jazz in the first place. Incu­ri­ous jazz beauxs who came of age in the ‘90s and later might find this hard to believe, but in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, major labels doc­u­mented a fairly large amount of leftward-leaning music (good for me, since in those days, indie releases sel­dom made it as far as Okla­homa).  Among them, Colum­bia might have been the most intrepid.

On the jazz side, Colum­bia in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was a far cry from the sim­per­ing, nostalgia-peddling behe­moth it would become. Long before it col­lapsed under the weight of its com­mit­ment to mori­bund pre-1960s jazz styles, Colum­bia jazz was aggres­sive in sign­ing experimentally-inclined artists like Arthur Blythe, Weather Report, James Blood Ulmer, and Ornette Cole­man, among oth­ers (not to men­tion Miles Davis, a Colum­bia artist dat­ing from the ‘50s). As recently as the late ‘80s, third-generation out­cats Tim Berne and Jane Ira Bloom actu­ally landed multi-record deals with Colum­bia, even after it had pigged out on  reboppers.

For a long time Colum­bia served the mod­ern jazz audi­ence very well. Had they kept it up, instead of tak­ing the path of least resis­tance (and short-term pay­offs), Colum­bia might have attracted some of those music-hungry young lis­ten­ers who later dis­dained jazz in favor of other more con­tem­po­rary and, from a young person’s per­spec­tive, more rel­e­vant musics. But they didn’t, and now Columbia’s jazz com­po­nent is all but non-existent.

In the inter­est of debunk­ing the idea that jazz was dead or dying before the latter-day New Orleans cav­alry [Appear­ing Cour­tesy of Colum­bia Records] rode in to res­ur­rect or save it (a myth that orig­i­nated with Stan­ley Crouch’s fawn­ing liner notes to Wyn­ton M.‘s epony­mously titled first album), I’m gonna spend some time dig­ging through my stacks of old vinyl in the com­ing days, min­ing some of that late-‘70s/early-‘80s CBS gold.

Today’s entry: Arthur Blythe’s Illu­sions, from 1980.

I first heard Arthur Blythe play on Jack DeJohnette’s 1979 ECM release, Spe­cial Edi­tion. ’79 was the year I grad­u­ated from high school. It was also the year I grad­u­ated from lis­ten­ing to big bands (May­nard Fer­gu­son, Buddy Rich, Woody Her­man) and fusion (Her­bie Han­cock, Grover Wash­ing­ton, Jr., early-late Miles) to dig­ging free jazz.

Spe­cial Edi­tion was my diploma. It got rave reviews in Down Beat and Musi­cian, and it was an ECM release, so it was avail­able in the boon­docks, where I was so incon­ve­niently located. I bought the sin­gle copy allot­ted my local chain record store the sec­ond it hit the rack.

I was a con­vert before the first track (DeJohnette’s “One For Eric”–Eric as in Dol­phy, whose music I would also soon inves­ti­gate) ended. Blythe and David Mur­ray, the group’s psychotically-intense two-sax front line, pinned me to the floor, put their boots on my throat and promised to leave them there unless or until I renounced May­nard Fer­gu­son and pledged eter­nal devo­tion to all things free. I was only too happy to oblige.

My middle-age-befogged mem­ory can’t be sure all these years later, but I think I bought Illu­sions within a cou­ple of weeks of buy­ing Spe­cial Edi­tion. The fact that my vinyl copies of both are about equally beaten-up sup­ports that the­sis. Illu­sions was the third of Blythe’s Colum­bia albums. It fea­tured both of his work­ing groups of the time: a free-funk lineup fea­tur­ing gui­tarist James Blood Ulmer, cel­list Abdul Wadud, tubaist Bob Stew­art, and drum­mer Bobby Bat­tle; and the ensem­ble that became known as his “In the Tra­di­tion” band (after Blythe’s sec­ond Colum­bia release), fea­tur­ing pianist John Hicks, bassist Fred Hop­kins, and drum­mer Steve McCall.

[A dis­claimer: Had I heard Blythe’s first Colum­bia effort, Lenox Avenue Break­down, before Illu­sions, I sus­pect that it would be the sub­ject of this dis­qui­si­tion, for it’s prob­a­bly an even bet­ter album. I missed my chance to hear Lenox when it first came out. An older jazz musi­cian friend loaned me a copy before I’d even heard of Blythe, but the plat­ter dropped from its sleeve as I was get­ting out of my car and broke into pieces before I had a chance to lis­ten to it. Had that not hap­pened, Lenox might have seared itself into my con­scious­ness before Illu­sions got the chance. Such is life.]

The com­bin­ing of funk and free jazz was a fairly new phe­nom­e­non in 1980. Ornette Cole­man had pio­neered the con­cept (sur­prise!) with his Danc­ing In Your Head and Body Meta albums, recorded in 1976, and Tales of Cap­tain Black, recorded in 1978 and issued under Ulmer’s name (one of Ornette’s rare side­man gigs).

Blythe’s Bush Baby, recorded in 1977 for the Adel­phi label, fea­tured the alto sax­o­phon­ist in a sort of  pri­mor­dial funk trio with tubaist Stew­art and conga player Ahkmed Abdul­lah. The con­cep­tion vaguely resem­bled Coleman’s, only greatly pared down.  By the time Blythe made Illu­sions, he’d hired Ulmer, replaced Abdul­lah the hand drum­mer with Bat­tle the trap set player, and added cel­list Wadud to the mix. The result was a fuller, raunchier, more ener­getic ver­sion of the Bush Baby group. Battle’s drum grooves were  more con­ven­tional than Ronald Shan­non Jackson’s and Denardo Coleman’s with Ornette, but the Blythe group’s melodies, har­monies, and tex­tures were just as out.

The “In the Tra­di­tion” group was more, well … tra­di­tional, although they were every bit as capa­ble of tak­ing things into the stratos­phere. The next time some­one tells you free jazz doesn’t swing, point them in this band’s direc­tion, or toward Henry Threadgill’s band, Air; both were pow­ered by bassist Fred Hop­kins and drum­mer Steve McCall, a pair of AACM mem­bers who could play any­thing and every­thing, from rag­time to free-time, and play it as cre­atively and with as much white-hot inten­sity as any­one. Add John Hicks, who played in every bag bril­liantly and with absolute dis­tinc­tion, and you have a rhythm sec­tion that makes the young book-learned rebop­pers of today seem glib and callow.

The album com­prises six Blythe com­po­si­tions: three by each group and three per album side. The three “In the Tra­di­tion” tracks exem­plify a type of swing­ing acoustic jazz you hear all too sel­dom these days, when the bar­ri­ers sep­a­rat­ing “inside” and “out­side” seem huge and impen­e­tra­ble. Not so here. Jazz is a seam­less con­tin­uum to these guys. The duo of Steve McCall and Fred Hop­kins was a two-headed mon­ster, as sim­patico as any bass/drums team in jazz his­tory. They think, breathe, and swing as one. Often they’re vir­tual appendages of one another – McCall’s ride cym­bal fit­ting inside Hop­kins’ lux­u­ri­ant sound hand-in-fur-lined-glove, Hop­kins’ thwomp­ing four-on-the-floor serv­ing as an exten­sion of McCall’s kit.

Pianist John Hicks eas­ily molds him­self to his sur­round­ings. He has the same rest­less per­son­al­ity as McCall and Hop­kins. He obvi­ously has no com­punc­tion about fol­low­ing wher­ever the music leads … and under Blythe’s dynamic lead­er­ship, the music goes to some amaz­ing places. Time and again they lay down swing­ing, tonal or modal grooves that in the course of the per­for­mance are twisted and mauled and turned into some­thing so dif­fer­ent as to be nearly beyond recog­ni­tion – some­times dis­so­nant, some­times impos­si­bly intri­cate, often bor­der­ing on total free­dom but never los­ing the cen­ter. Their wild-and-wooly adven­tur­ism is a snap­shot of state-of-the-art, straight-ahead acoustic jazz in the final his­tor­i­cal moments before it took a sharp right turn to Squaresville.

Whereas the  “In the Tra­di­tion” expounds upon a tried and true for­mat, Blythe’s tuba-guitar band cre­ates one anew. The free jazz/funk hybrid is a rel­a­tively new­fan­gled gizmo, and the pres­ence of a tuba is down­right rev­o­lu­tion­ary. Few if any jazz bands of the era (out­side of New Orleans brass bands and Dix­ieland revival­ists) used a tuba to hold down the bass line. Of course, few bands had access to a tubaist as accom­plished as Bob Stew­art, a tremen­dously fleet and inven­tive melodist gifted with the ear of a top-notch jazz bassist.

On the album’s open­ing track, a rework­ing of “Bush Baby,” Stew­art lays down a funky bass line wor­thy of Bootsy Collins, while else­where, he plays fast, walk­ing lines that could as well have sprung from the mind of Scott LaFaro. When it’s called for, he and Bat­tle groove in lock­step, though there are mul­ti­ple times when the pocket splin­ters and they move in syn­er­getic opposition.

Ulmer’s skit­ter­ing, high-strung gui­tar blends coun­try blues with a melod­i­cally and rhyth­mi­cally sophis­ti­cated free jazz con­cep­tion. Unless my mem­ory is fail­ing and I’m for­get­ting a con­nect­ing link, I’d ven­ture that he was the next, most influ­en­tial step in the evo­lu­tion of jazz gui­tar after Sonny Shar­rock. Cel­list Wadud adds a queru­lous voice: a fid­gety, agile pres­ence whose energy aug­ments Ulmer’s jit­tery intensity.

Blythe Big-Bad-Wolfs-it in both ensem­bles – huff­ing and puff­ing and blow­ing the house in (and out, and upside down). Blythe is like some not-officially-sanctioned-by-a-higher-power combo of Maceo Parker and Eric Dol­phy. He plays fan­ci­ful, Dolphy-esque ideas with the hard-bitten, funky enun­ci­a­tion of James Brown’s favorite alto sax­o­phon­ist. His huge, vibrato-laden sound can cut through a ten-f00t-thick slab of gran­ite at 2O paces.

Blythe’s style works well with both bands. Yet as much as I dig the “In the Tra­di­tion” band – which did the tra­di­tion jus­tice not by mim­ic­k­ing it, but rather expand­ing upon it – I think his rhyth­mic solid­ity and vibrant tone are par­tic­u­larly well-suited to the tuba-guitar band’s free-form jazz funk. The intel­lec­tual and phys­i­cal aggres­sion inher­ent in his style fans the flames beneath the already cook­ing Ulmer/Wadud/Stewart/Battle ensem­ble. All these years later, the band’s effect is some­thing like hav­ing a 16 oz. can of Red Bull injected into your veins.

Blythe’s rela­tion­ship with Colum­bia lasted sev­eral more albums after Illu­sions, but in the end the label dropped him, as they dropped all their most adven­tur­ous jazz artists. Hence­forth Colum­bia increas­ingly went with young, pho­to­genic young rebop­pers, to the gen­eral detri­ment of the art form. How things would’ve shaken out in the long run had Colum­bia taken the road less-traveled is impos­si­ble to say, but I can’t help but think the label would’ve done as well finan­cially – and much bet­ter, artis­ti­cally – with fewer backward-looking Wyn­ton Marsalis records, and more outward-bound stuff by cats like Blythe.

Next: James Blood Ulmer’s Free Lanc­ing.

(Pho­tos: John Hicks by Daniel Shen, Abdul Wadud by Tom Mar­cello)

I real­ize that most peo­ple inclined to give a damn saw Ken Burns’ Jazz in its entirety long ago … and that surely includes most liv­ing jazz fans, since the music seems to be grow­ing new lis­ten­ers with all the light­ning speed of those sta­lac­tites I’m con­vinced are form­ing on the inside of Stan­ley Crouch’s cra­nium. As for me, I watched a cou­ple of install­ments when it was first broad­cast in 2001, before quit­ting in disgust. 

Since then, I’ve seen bits and pieces of most of the episodes, yet I never allowed myself to see the final, infa­mous “Episode 10: A Mas­ter­piece by Mid­night” until this past week­end. Those of you to whom the phrase “tired of fight­ing the jazz wars” applies, I urge you to put on your copy of From The Plan­ta­tion to the Pen­i­ten­tiary and bliss out. As for the rest, per­haps you can commiserate. 

I wrote most of this yes­ter­day, in a state of drool­ing apoplexy.

---

I finally did it.

Eight years or how­ever long its been since that mutha uckin’ abom­i­na­tion known as Ken Burns’ Jazz first hit the air­waves, I finally watched the noto­ri­ous “Episode 10: A Mas­tur­ba­tion … I mean, A Mas­ter­piece by Mid­night,” wherein Burns and his jolly crew of self-serving revi­sion­ist idiots Bran­ford, Crouch and Cus­cuna, et al tell the bogus tale of how jazz was mur­dered in the ‘60s and ‘70s by craven fusioneers and face-painted avant-gardists, and how it was res­ur­rected by … well, by impli­ca­tion, the self-serving revi­sion­ist idiots them­selves, and by direct attri­bu­tion, their faux folksy fab­u­list trumpet-playing sock pup­pet, Wyn­ton Lear­son Marsalis.

For years, I put off watch­ing this thing the way a Jew­ish film critic might put off see­ing Tri­umph of the Will, know­ing that I’d even­tu­ally have to hold my breath and watch it, if for no other rea­son than to ful­fill the oblig­a­tions of my profession.

The time finally came Sun­day. The Mets’ sea­son had ended, the Yan­kees (to my deep­est cha­grin) had kicked the crap outta the Twins in the first round of the play­offs, and the only thing on TV was foot­ball for as far as the eye could see. The voice in my head that’s always scream­ing out ran­dom lot­tery num­bers yelled, “HEY, DIPSHIT, NOW’S A GOOD TIME TO WATCH CHAPTER 10 OF THAT BURNS THING. SEE YOU IN HELL! HA HA HA HA HA!”

Has the voice ever been wrong?.

So I fired-up the Net­flix and started watch­ing. I took in as much as I could in one sit­ting, turned it off, kicked my dog, yelled at the kids, went to bed, got up and watched the rest this morn­ing. God help me, it’s gonna take me weeks to get over this.

So much rage, so lit­tle time, so I’ll just touch on a cou­ple of par­tic­u­larly appalling elements.

Burns’ puppydog-like eager­ness to anoint Wyn­ton the suc­ces­sor to Arm­strong as “The King of Jazz” would be be com­i­cal if it weren’t so insult­ing to the many great musi­cians who are either ignored or – in at least one egre­gious case – explic­itly dis­par­aged. The film­maker spends a lot of time fol­low­ing Arm­strong and Elling­ton around dur­ing their last years (because, after all, who else was mak­ing impor­tant music in the early ‘70s? Accord­ing to Bran­ford Marsalis, nobody except a few of his bop-playing men­tors). At a cer­tain point, a bored Burns marks time, evi­dently anx­ious for Pops and Duke to die in ’71 and ’74 so he can skip ahead (past the likes of Bill Evans, George Rus­sell, Weather Report, Sam Rivers, Jack DeJohnette, Arthur Blythe, Keith Jar­rett, and any­one Euro­pean) to the night Art Blakey hired the teen-aged Wyn­ton, an event Burns treats like the com­bined birth and res­ur­rec­tion of Christ.

Equally barf-inducing is Burns’ search for clues as to why jazz ceased being pop­u­lar in the ‘60s and ‘70s (actu­ally, it hadn’t been pop­u­lar since the ‘40s, but that incon­ve­nient truth runs counter to the Burn­salis agenda), a process that engages him for much of the first three-quarters of this one-hour-fifty-minute cir­cle jerk. Guess who’s at fault? If you said the Bea­t­les and/or “The Man,” you get par­tial credit. How­ever, if you said The Art Ensem­ble of Chicago, Cecil Tay­lor, and their avant-hooligan friends, you can go to the mutha uckin’ head of the class and let Pro­fes­sor Short­hair Marsalis lay some o’ that tasty gumbo on y’all … ‘cuz ya’ll know that Prof likes his gumbo! Mmm-mmm-mmm!

The film’s none-too-subtle bash­ing of avant-garde and fusion musi­cians has the remark­able qual­ity of mak­ing me want to gouge out my own eyes with one of those pointy spoons you use to eat grape­fruit. Tar­geted for super­fi­cially respect­ful yet ulti­mately shabby treat­ment are the afore­men­tioned Art Ensem­ble of Chicago and Cecil Taylor.

Both get hit for exces­sive arti­ness. Burns’ solemn nar­ra­tor tells us that, appar­ently despite the fact that they’d taken to wear­ing African-inspired garb on stage, “… noth­ing the Art Ensem­ble of Chicago, or any other avant-garde black coop­er­a­tive did, seemed able to win back the black audi­ence .” Worse, the group “attracted its largest fol­low­ing among white col­lege stu­dents … in France,” the final word spo­ken with just the proper hint of incred­u­lous, Franco-phobic dis­gust. Ah, well played, Mr. Boo-urns!

As for Tay­lor, he comes in for the harsh­est words of any musi­cian in the entire series, cour­tesy of the gad­fly punk Bran­ford Marsalis. (Some­one please tell me: just how in hell did Bran­ford ever get the rep­u­ta­tion he enjoys as the “open-minded” Marsalis? Because he played with Sting 25 years ago? Puh-leeze. The guy’s always been will­ing to cash a pay­check. He’s every bit as arro­gant and artis­ti­cally big­oted as his next-youngest brother.) Bran­ford is asked about a state­ment Cecil once made to the effect that he (Cecil) pre­pares for his con­certs, so the audi­ence should pre­pare, as well. Appar­ently it did not occur to Bran­ford Marsalis-Super Genius that Tay­lor might have sim­ply been sug­gest­ing that lis­ten­ers open their minds and dis­card pre­con­cep­tions as a way of engag­ing his – or any other inno­v­a­tive artist’s – work. No. The All-Knowing-and-Judging “open-minded” Marsalis has a dif­fer­ent interpretation:

“That’s total self-indulgent bull­shit as far as I’m con­cerned. I mean, you know, I love base­ball. I mean, I’m not going to go and catch a hun­dred grounders before I go to a game. I mean, that’s what … we pay to see them do what they do and to appre­ci­ate them. I mean, why would the audi­ence sit around and prac­tice and pre­pare? I mean, they pay their money to hear what it is that we do and to appre­ci­ate what it is that we do.”

So Branny-cakes, you actu­ally believe that Cecil was ask­ing his audi­ence to prac­tice piano before lis­ten­ing to his music? Really? Or maybe brush-up on some quan­tum physics? Are you a moron? C’mon, you can tell me. I won’t breathe a word to any­one, I promise.

Someone’s full o’ shit here, and it ain’t Cecil Tay­lor. I’m bet­ting it’s not the stu­dents who Bran­ford so recently and famously derided, either.

Oth­ers played roles in bring­ing this turgid waste of cel­lu­loid to com­ple­tion. Stan­ley Crouch blovi­ates, as he’s wont to do. Michael Cus­cuna comes off as espe­cially ridicu­lous. His con­tri­bu­tion to Burns’ Wyn­ton hagiog­ra­phy at film’s end – “Wyn­ton was the, the first new acoustic jazz player with some­thing to say,” as if such slightly older and self-evidently superb straight-ahead jazz musi­cians as Bobby Wat­son, Ricky Ford, Tom Har­rell, and so on were noth­ing but place-holding hacks wait­ing for the emer­gence of The Cho­sen One – is one of the most absurd lines in a film that’s pos­i­tively stuffed to the gills with ‘em. One hopes Cus­cuna regrets the utterance.

To give credit where it’s due, Gary Gid­dins takes up the cause of the out­cats with some suc­cess, although his repeated asser­tion that one has to “work” to get much of that music is mis­guided, IMO (bet­ter to view it as a sus­pend­ing of expec­ta­tion, which is an act of lib­er­a­tion, not man­ual labor). Joshua Red­man also implies a predilec­tion for open­ness. For the most part, how­ever, “A Mas­ter­piece by Mid­night” is a small-minded attack on any­one to the musi­cal left of the Marsalis broth­ers, as well as a coro­na­tion of Ellis’ sec­ond heir as Mas­ter of the Realm.

But it’s over, and those who think the Marsalis take is fine and dandy will have their way. What’s done is done, and the Burns film stands – tee­ter­ing on a decay­ing foun­da­tion of self-congratulation and mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion – as the defin­i­tive film his­tory on the subject.

One thing I know, how­ever. Hard core jazz folk are too smart and too pas­sion­ate to let this dreck gunk-up the joint for­ever. Some­day a gifted, jazz-loving direc­tor will make a qual­ity filmed his­tory of jazz (espe­cially post-1950s jazz) – someone who, unlike Burns, actu­ally knows some­thing about the music and there­fore won’t have to rely on a gath­er­ing of self-promoting oppor­tunists to tell the story for him or her. The music deserves that much.

Maybe by that time, “A Mas­ter­piece by Mid­night” will be Jaz­zs­peak for “crazy old lady in the cor­ner talk­ing to her cat in esperanto.”

(Photo of Bran­ford Marsalis by Tom Beetz)

Lotsa pay­ing work on my plate, so expect the flow of info to slow a tiny bit. Next up is my review – 9 years late – of the final episode of Monty Burns’ Jass. I know: old news, “re-fighting the jazz wars,” blah, blah, blah. Fact is, I never saw it until now, and since the two hours I spent watch­ing it were among the most excru­ci­at­ing of my life, the least I should be allowed is to vent on my own blog. More later …

Appar­ently, min­i­mal­ism ain’t just an area of clas­si­cal music pio­neered by La Monte Young. It’s also a recent trend in CD pack­ag­ing, exem­pli­fied for our present pur­poses by the Engine label, a new imprint that’s joined forces with the  reju­ve­nated ESP-Disk, which I wrote about here.

Tenor sax­o­phon­ist Fred Anderson’s Stay­ing in the Game comes encased in what’s lit­tle more than a slab of brown card­board, folded a cou­ple of times to form a spine and a front and back cover. Between the folds is a small rub­ber appur­te­nance that fits through the hole in the CD and holds the disc in place. The out­side cover sports a sim­ple design in white ink with text that looks as if it were applied with a rub­ber stamp. Glued to the left inside cover is a strip of paper on which is printed album cred­its. There’s also the nota­tion, “letter-pressed on 100% recy­cled chip­board in brook­lyn new york.”

It’s an inten­tion­ally rus­tic pack­age that’s as attrac­tive in its rough-hewn way as it is environmentally-correct. Of course, the disc itself is pre­sum­ably made of the same petroleum-based sub­stances that are tak­ing the planet to hell in a sur­plus Tower Records shopping-basket, but what the hell, ya gotta start somewhere.

As for the point of the whole thing – the music dig­i­tally encoded on the afore­men­tioned damnable plas­tic plat­ter – it’s extra­or­di­nar­ily good.

I wrote yes­ter­day about gui­tarists Dom Minasi and Duck Baker, two vet­eran gui­tarists who’ve taken an exper­i­men­tal path dur­ing the last decades when hordes of younger play­ers chose the road more trav­eled. Ander­son is another elder states­man (much elder – at 79, he’s a full gen­er­a­tion or two older than Minasi and Baker) who’s kept the free jazz faith dur­ing the Marsalis Years. Even though his man­ner of pre­sen­ta­tion runs to rather con­ven­tional con­texts – boil­er­plate horn-with-rhythm, mainly – his voice is so utterly dis­tinc­tive as to put many a book-learned young con­ser­v­a­tive to shame.

Ander­son is joined on Stay­ing in the Game by the superb bassist Har­ri­son Bankhead and the fine young drum­mer Tim Daisy. Chicagoans all, the band demon­strates the hard-minded, uncom­pro­mis­ing ide­al­ism typ­i­cal of the city’s finest.  Con­sist­ing of six spon­ta­neously con­ceived tracks vary­ing in length from six to over twenty-four min­utes, the album embraces the virtues of jazz-based free impro­vi­sa­tion in its most mus­cu­lar and ener­getic form.

Har­ri­son Bankhead is too often over­looked in dis­cus­sions of great con­tem­po­rary bass play­ers. Per­haps if he led more dates, he’d be be more talked-about. As it is, I pre­fer the kind of fleet, inven­tive, and impas­sioned side­man work he con­tributes here to the play­ing of many another band-leading bassist.

I know Tim Daisy mainly from his work with sax­o­phon­ist Ken Van­der­mark. As much as I enjoy his play­ing with The Van­der­mark 5,  his work here is even bet­ter, IMO – prob­a­bly thanks to the alto­gether more organic approach taken by this band. When left to his own struc­tural devices, Daisy’s play­ing has a remark­able flow. The off-kilter, free-time grooves he sets under­neath Ander­son have me uncon­sciously reach­ing for my own horn.

If I were to grab a horn and play with these cats, I’d best stick to soprano or alto, for it would take cantaloupe-sized cojones to pick up a tenor in the pres­ence of the great and pow­er­ful Fred. A direct con­tem­po­rary of John Coltrane and an early mem­ber of the AACM, Ander­son plays with the unal­loyed pas­sion of the for­mer, and the for­mal acu­men of  musi­cians asso­ci­ated with the lat­ter. As on the best of Anderson’s recorded work (a cat­e­gory that includes pretty much every one of his albums I’ve heard), his play­ing here is pow­er­ful, gritty, and moving.

It is per­haps a cliche to point out that Ander­son was 79 when he recorded this yet dis­plays the cre­ative inquis­i­tive­ness of an artist one-third his age … but just ‘cuz it’s a cliche doesn’t mean it’s not true. Why his curios­ity is so much greater than the typ­i­cal student’s can partly be attrib­uted to a genre-wide psy­chosis that’s afflicted large num­bers of young jazz musi­cians over the past quar­ter century.

Ulti­mately, how­ever, I has­ten to  give Ander­son his due. Liv­ing on the cre­ative edge for as long as he has is not some­thing many have been able to do. That he’s man­aged to keep it together so suc­cess­fully for so long is amazing.

That he’ll be doing it long after the com­pact disc – no mat­ter how inge­niously pack­aged – is a his­tor­i­cal relic, I have lit­tle doubt.

(Photo of Fred Ander­son by Fordmadoxfraud.)