Live at the Village Vanguard - John Coltrane

John Coltrane
Live at the Village Vanguard

There isn't much to dislike about this one. Coltrane on tenor and soprano, Dolphy on bass clarinet, Tyner on piano, Workman on bass, and Jones on drums, playing what was, in 1961, some pretty crazy stuff. I don't know that I will develop this idea at all, but, this is a good example of why fame is important in music, it lets you be extremely progressive - imagine an unknown artist recording this album. No record company is going to touch it, who wants to buy 37+ minutes of shrieking and howling from an unknown? Who will buy it if you Coltrane's name on it? Lots more, some of us in triplicate. Having an established name gives you license to be weird. All of those artists that are "being true to themselves" and whatnot - that is why you are poor, you need to establish some trust and rapport with your audience so that when you want to take them someplace that might be uncomfortably experimental, they will go along.

This is the album that introduced me to the saxophone, Coltrane, and jazz. My Dad had* this on vinyl, original pressing, in stereo. I had inherited my parent's first turntable when in the early 80s, they made the wise choice to switch to a system with an 8-track. (My first album purchase was the score to Star Trek: Wrath of Khan.) Live at the Village Vanguard was there in the hi-fi cabinet stacked uncomfortably between Ray Allen and Johnny Horton. The Streak made me laugh, so did The Battle of New Orleans (love the part about powdering the alligator's ass), but Vanguard fascinated me.

I was young, and everything about this album screamed that it was different and must be dealt with in ways that would expand my musical literacy. It would not let me ignore it. The gatefold cover that was printed on stock that was at least twice as heavy as the other album covers. The track list that only had three tunes, all of other records had at least 7 or 8. The record itself, not a lightweight affair, but impressively substantial, thick, hefty, that black expanse of uninterrupted grooves not anything like others that had many more of the blank grooves between tracks. The thing even smelled different, like the way an old library smelled different from mass market paperbacks at the airport newstand. The record was importantly sophisticated.

Listening to it was just as different. This wasn't a smooth, overproduced recording. The music was raw, with an edge like a rusty, serrated steak knife. This music drew me in, the same way punk and metal would in a very short handful of years, and for the same reasons. The music was rough and loud. It sought to agitate and anger. It wasn't pretty or mellow. This was not the music of Herb Alpert, which was written with the unstated intent that the tinkling of ice in myriad double old fashioneds would serve as an additional percussion track.

You listened to this music. You listened seriously and with conviction. To not listen with conviction gave the music the power to destroy you, to obliterate your musical sanity with ruthlessness that would make Pol Pot seem cuddly and warm. If listening to this album was to kill time, you better just go ahead an listen to the Iglesias or the Alpert, much safer. Dolphy and Coltrane played those instruments exactly the same way that brought one of my parents to my bedroom door, admonishing me to "practice right"; they honked and squealed, they played stuff that I instinctively knew would never show up in my "Level One Alto Saxophone Student: A Method for Individual Instruction".** I wanted the lesson book they learned that stuff from.

Unfortunately, I never found it. That is why today, I am a history teacher. But I did finally realize that you don't learn that kind of playing. In fact, somewhat hypocritically, I would suggest that playing like that is only possible when you have learned so much, and practiced for so many hours, that playing becomes meditation, and gives you the freedom to liberate yourself from the confines of the instrument and the tune and musical theory. You simply play. And what you play is music that grabbed a little kid's ears, confusing the living daylights out of him. That little kid is still confused, but in the most pleasant sort of way.
 

*I say had, because the past tense is correct. I have it now. Hanging on the wall in an LP frame. I don't have a turntable. Neither does he. I stole it from his record collection and it welcomed me as a liberator, happy to be freed from its perverted sandwiching between a Julio Iglesias greatest hits album and The Streak by Ray Stevens. I like to imagine that my father bought this when he was a graduate student in Chicago in the early 1970s. I want to believe that. But submitted as evidence that he might have been given this as a gift are the rest of the records in his collection. Thankfully his tastes have improved. But his Iglesias collection is something he will have to answer for to St. Peter.

**If you are interested in reading something a real writer wrote about this type of music, try "John Coltrane Lives" by Lester Bangs which can be found in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, pages 103-111. I can't find it online, at least not with a cursory search, but it is probably out there somewhere.

Gil Evans - Into the Hot

Gil Evans
Into the Hot

I don't think that I will bother spending much time writing about this album. It is not even a Gil Evans album - as even the most cursory of listens will reveal; Evans was fulfilling a contractual obligation to impulse! with it, and while he apparently was in the same building during its recording, the extent of his contributions was the occasional adjustment to the studio thermostat. This album is mostly interesting as an early example of Cecil Taylor on the piano - and to be quite frank, you need to be a pretty serious Taylor fan to find it interesting.

That this is not a Gil Evans album is moderately frustrating, even if you chose to be incredibly generous and incredibly kind and give him credit as a "producer", this isn't Evans' music. Compared to Out of the Blue, as was clearly intended by its title, Into the Hot has none of the characteristics that define Evans' music of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Enough has already been written about this, what I have to say about this album is in an attempt to judge it based on its merits without getting wrapped up in its rather complex and disappointing history

The point I would make about this album is that it is largely, "Angkor Wat" being the exception, a very early free jazz recording (if you consider Coleman's Something Else the beginning of the movement). Sadly, it does not contribute much to free jazz.

The problem is that the tunes are largely indistinguishable. I still, after listening to this album for the last week, can not tell you with any more confidence than that of a slightly experienced guess, tell you which song is playing. This is largely because of the lack of clear guidance and ownership of the album's putative leader. But the larger issue that is exposed is free jazz musicians' tendency to dismiss the importance of a guiding structure in their compositions and improvisations ad being too constricting to their musical freedom.

(It is a separate post that this idea is crap. The very brilliance of great music of any genre is the ability of the musician/composer to express ideas using the rules of the genre/form being employed. It is easy to be creative while disregarding the rules and then claim that what you have achieved is serious music. Since you have no objective standard of comparison, how can anyone disagree? It is much more impressive to create something new and vibrant within an existing framework. Think of Shakespeare's sonnets. They are some of the world's most impressive poetry, composed in a well-defined form. Now think of the poetry written by every goth teenager who has no idea of the rules of poetry and you will get a sense of what I am talking about. Working within the restrictions of the genre/form is where true brilliance can be demonstrated. Please note that I am not opposed to breaking rules and innovation. I am simply against artistic laziness wherein musicians and artists can claim that rules are holding them back.)

Free jazz is nothing more than taking improvisation to its ultimate extreme where the ideas of the performing musician become dominant and relegate the composer to a minor background role. (Compare this to classical, at the other extreme, where the composer is the ultimate. Consider how the two musics are marketed, jazz is marketed based on who is doing the playing, classical is marketed on the piece being performed. There are exceptions, Itzhak Perlman in classical or a recent recreation of the Kind of Blue album at a jazz club in my hometown.)

My issue is, just as you can not just throw any bum up on the stage with a violin and the sheet music for a Mozart violin concerto and expect an inspired performance, you can't give well-trained musicians the key to the studio and let them randomly fill up tape and expect anything brilliant - you might get it in either of the two scenarios, but you can not expect it. You need a central, guiding force.You need a trained musician. You need a preset piece of music. If you didn't, you could walk into any junior high band hall in the country, record the warm-ups before rehearsal and sell it as free jazz. And that, at its worst, is what free jazz sounds like, random tootings and bangings of prepubescent geeks.

But given a sophisticated leader who understands that music needs structure, even if it is the most minimal structure possible, the result can be sophisticated and sublime. It takes talent to find that little piece of structure, and most musicians lack that talent. Which is why so much free jazz sounds like the aforementioned junior high concert band warming up - there is too much concern with the "free" and not enough of the "jazz", the part that is supposed to provide the structure.

This album's major problem is a lack of that structure, both within the tunes themselves and between the tunes. Like I mentioned above, it all sounds the same, which is the ultimate sign that a free jazz album is a failure. If you can't tell if that is the band warming up or if it is the band performing, there is something wrong. It does not mean you are an unsophisticated listener, it means it is bad music.This album has no intellectually rigorous leader who imposes a central, guiding principle. It fails in providing a basic framework from which the listener can experience the ideas put forth by the musicians. At its most basic then, this album is nothing more than random rehearsals that someone was silly enough to put down on tape.

This sort of stuff reminds of Jackson Pollock, who I do not like. I hate looking at a Pollock:

I get that lots of people see great art in that kind of stuff. I do not. I do not see any structure their, either philosophical, or artistic, or technical. It is paint splatters. I finally realized that I can't consider this to be art because I can not find any guiding central principle to its creation. This does not mean I dislike all abstract art. Far from it. I just demand that it have structure, even if that structure is so minimal as to be transparent, if it is there it will exert its influence.

Max Roach - Percussion Bitter Sweet

Max Roach
Percussion Bitter Sweet
1961

The music: This is an ok album. The music is interesting, not brilliant, but still engaging. Eric Dolphy is less vibrant than usual, but is still worth it. Max Roach understands percussion but plays with a very unpleasant arrogance. Abby Lincoln only shows up twice - once ("Garvey's Ghost") she is brilliant, the other ("Mendacity") she is trite and remarkably unsophisticated.

The other: Since this album was recorded as a political statement, the fair thing to do is consider it as a political statement. In almost every way, Percussion Bitter Suite gets so caught up trying to be political that the music suffers.

The lyrics to "Mendacity" are ridiculous. The way Lincoln enunciates on this piece is enough to drive me insane. Is she trying to give an elocution lesson? The words themselves are better suited to an expository composition piece in your first year of college. Using "mendacity" in a piece of music that is trying to make a serious statement about the state of the world is a great example of immature pretentiousness. The music itself is great, but those vocals/lyrics are so stupid, they cancel each other out.

What irritates me the most, is this is a jazz album trying to make a political statement - one of the strengths of the art form (jazz) is its subtlety, and those lyrics are not subtle. They rest of the album is subtle, and those lyrics stick out - Max Roach took the trouble to compose an album that expressed some of the emotions of the civil rights movement using instrumental music and then he goes and includes those lyrics? Why?

What's frustrating about that is "Garvey's Ghost" gives Lincoln a chance to record using scat that does a more satisfying job of fitting in with the overall idea of the album.

The simple truth is that compared to "Freedom Now", "Percussion Bitter Sweet" is a failure. It does not generate that anger, fear and violence that "Freedom Now" does. "Percussion Bitter Sweet" in simple musical terms is not going to be able to do that, at least not with the Afro-Cuban flavor that Roach gives it.

My impression is that Roach felt compelled to record a follow up to "Freedom Now", didn't really have the right kind of ideas, so he recorded the ideas he had, and gave them titles that suggested a civil rights millieu.

Of course, I have a philosophical aversion to abstract forms of art trying to deal with concrete issues. Jazz is one of the most abstract art forms in this consideration. The better the musician is, the more capable that person will be in evoking a specific emotional response. But I do not believe that it is possible to write instrumental, improvised music that addresses such a specific issue. To do so imparts powers to jazz that it does not have. Which, on a tangent, is why I often feel those musicians who think they are the most advanced musically fail those miserably - they do not understand the limitations of the musical form they work in.

That is what I take away from this album, and why I ultimately don't find it all that satisfying outside of a few individual performances. It is important that jazz's limits be understood. As admirable as it is to try new things, there is stuff that jazz is incapable of doing. Jazz of the type that Roach has recorded here can't do what he wants it to do.

For your consideration: The best example of politically-engaged jazz is "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holliday. It isn't trite, it is subtle, and it is musically engaging and satisfying.

Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers - art blakey!!!!!! jazz messengers!!!!!

Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers
Art Blakey!!!!! Jazz Messengers!!!!!
Art Blakey - drums
Freddie Hubbard - trumpet
Wayne Shorter - tenor sax
Curtis Fuller - trombone
Cedar Walton - piano
Jymie Merritt - bass

This album is quite good. The musicians are exceptional (as should be expected, Art Blakey's standards are quite rigorous, you can safely purchase almost any of his albums sound unheard without having to worry about being dissappointed.) and the tunes nicely balanced.

My modus operandi for the first month and a half of this project has been to pick apart the music, either song-by-song or musician-by-musician. I don't see too much that would be interesting following that pattern for this album, it doesn't have those surprises, good or bad, of the other recordings I have reviewed so far. The question that occurs to me to ask is: What makes this a really good hard bop record?

Because of energy. The one thing that defines hard bop at its simplest level is an intense energy that is conveyed through all parts of the music: tempo, tone, chording, bass lines, the list goes on and on.(As an aside, tempo is the least important of these things. Listen to "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You" from this record. It is played at a relatively slow tempo, but it still bristles - Wayne Shorter's tone and phrasing on that tune can only be described as energetic.)

Another way to put it might be to say that the music never relaxes. Listen to something like "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck, a tune from the cool jazz catalogue - it has a lot of things that might create tension and therefore energy (uptempo, active rhythm section, odd time signature) but the way Brubeck and Paul Desmond and the rest of the quartet play that song makes it practically a lullaby - it is boring, but in the best possible way.

It is close to midnight as I write this, I have been up since about 6:00 a.m., I have taken a couple of allergy pills that normally put me to sleep like a baby in a car seat, and I am wide awake. Because I'm not listening to Brubeck, I have art blakey!!!!! jazz messengers!!!!! playing. Right now "Invitation" is playing, not a tune that can be called uptempo. Freddie Hubbard's tone on the solo he just played was piercing, and Wayne Shorter just started on a short couple of bars and is going to turn it over to Curtis Fuller on trombone.

And here is where my point is proven. Curtis Fuller. On trombone. On a slower tune. And the energy is still there. And here is the beautiful part - you get that energy without the caffeine-induced edginess of some of that frenetic, Charlie Parker-inspired bebop that can sometimes feel like a crack addict that sprinkles crystal meth on your cornflakes. Alright, I exaggerate, but, you get my point.

So the real question is, where does that energy come from? There are several ways I think they do it, without resorting to cheap musical tricks that would only serve to cheapen the hard bop art form.

Art Blakey can simply play the drums. For example, when Shorter begins his solo in the third minute of "You Don't Know What Love Is", Blakey knows that Shorter's sax is going to provide a jolt of electricity - so he adjusts his playing - he uses less, most notably less of the ride cymbal. Then, Curtis Fuller takes over with a trombone solo. Trombones might need a bit more help in the energy department, so, after a small bridge section with Hubbard on trumpet, Blakey picks up the lost energy with more ride cymbal. Simple, yes, but that little thing helps maintain the consistency of the song without relying on Buddy Rich-style pryotechnics.

Also on "You Don't Know What Love Is" you can hear how Blakey manipulates tempo to create tension, and therefore energy. This is a mainly a slow tune (100 bpm? I am not good at estimating that kind of stuff) but every once in a while, they jump it up to time and a half (? again, not good at estimating that stuff). That expectation is always there, leaving the listener with anticipation, that anticipation is tension, and that creates energy. 

That energy also comes from the tones that the musicians pull from their instruments. Shorter on "Alamode" might be the best example. The sound he gets out of the sax is focused, efficient, clean; it isn't loose, or curved. The sound is sharp without being out of tune. It grabs attention, conveying a sense of energy through tone.

I keep using the word energy, and I feel that I am getting a bit cliched. I think it is important to explain what I mean. From my standpoint, as a listener (and I do know both sides of the musical transaction having ever so briefly been in the minor leagues, to use a sports metaphor) energy in a piece of music commands my attention. It sharpens my focus on listening. When I have been listening to the albums for this blog, I typically listen to it five or six times just listening to the music, the individual musicians, the solos, et cetera. All of my other listening to the album is done while I putter around the kitchen or do laundry or read. I have not gotten a lot of that done this week, especially reading because this album dictates my attention. (I have only managed a paltry 100 pages in a lengthy history of the Korean War.) So I suppose that is what I mean when I say energy - there is something about the music that forces me to pay attention to it, it simply will not be ignored, it will not be relegated to background music.

That, I think, is what makes this an excellent hard bop album.