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(From Down Beat Vol. 35, No. 12, 1968 - p 28-29) - US FOUR MODERNISTS Archie Shepp
IN EUROPE—Delmark DS 9409: Cisum; Crepuscule With Nellie; O.C.; When Will the Blues Leave; The Funeral; Mik.
Personnel: Don Cherry, cornet; John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Shepp, tenor saxophone; Don Moore, bass; J. C. Moses, drums. Rating: * * * ½ Pharoah Sanders
TAUHID—Impulse A-9138: Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt; Japan; Aum; Venus; Capricorn Rising.
Personnel: Sanders, tenor saxophone, flute, piccolo; Dave Burrell, piano; Warren (Sonny) Sharrock, guitar; Henry Grimes, bass; Roger Blank, drums; Nat Bettis, percussion. Rating: * * * * Cecil Taylor
CONQUISTADOR!—Blue Note BST 84260: Conquistador; With (Exit).
Personnel: Bill Dixon, trumpet; Jimmy Lyons, alto saxophone; Taylor, piano; Henry Grimes, Alan Silva, basses; Andrew Cyrille, drums. Rating: * * * * * Albert Ayler
LOVE CRY—Impulse A-9165: Love Cry; Ghosts; Omega; Dancing Flowers; Bells; Love Flower; Zion Hill; Universal Indians.
Personnel: Donald Ay1er, trumpet; Albert Ayler tenor saxophonc; Call Cobbs, harpsichord; Alan Silva, bass; Milford Graves, drums. Rating: * * * * ½ A lot of people, for a lot of reasons, have nothing good if anything at all to say about the latter-day saints of jazz. At bottom, I believe, most of this criticism and apathy stems from selfish prejudices and fears. From time to time, every art form has faced—and gone past—the objections to its abstract manifestations. Not so jazz.
Over half a century ago, the New York Armory Show broke a path for everything up to and including the absurdities of pop art’s worst protagonists. Kerouac, e.e. cummings and Jean Genet no longer cause traumas, either from the standpoint of style or content. Giacometti, David Smith, and those cats with the neon lights have all been survived. Ionesco, Brecht, and Le . . . yes, even LeRoi Jones have been digested without adding to the number of inmates at Charenton. But when it comes to that “way out music. . . .”
If Andy Warhol has a Dunn&Bradstreet rating, Joseph Jarman should have a listing in Fortune. In this age of superjets, Lamborghinis, and Remington 30-06s; in this era of peace parades and poor marches; in this time of assassination politics and police versus students and napalm versus epidermis, Pennies From Heaven, even taken up-tempo, just doesn’t seem to speak to the moment. Rather, that moment is more faithfully reflected in the febrile community of sounds inadequately lumped together under the heading of avant garde.
No one can say but the artists themselves that their performances are the conscious expressions of these contemporary elements of our existence. But the screams, the bent, twisted, broken, cut and shot tones that leak and explode from their instruments are full of imagery from somewhere, and it’s not merely the hip thing to do to hear them—there is value and reward in listening to these players, just as there was in listening to King Oliver.
Shepp’s album, recorded in Denmark in 1963, is characterized by a blowing approach which seems, in retrospect, almost a conscious rebellion against the bebop influence. The front line remarks, knitted together by a straight-ahead rhythm unit, were somewhat influenced by the Ornette Coleman efforts which preceded this work by several years. Furious phrasing, loosely based on the heads, followed by abrupt stops; hiply out-of-joint bop lines done in haphazard unison, were all in the Coleman genre. But Shepp, Tchicai, Cherry, et al., were the original New York Contemporary Five, and, as such, influenced not only subsequent NYC5s but a legion of instrumentalists from then till tomorrow.
The trumpeter’s piece, Cisum, is an apt launching pad for his high-flying solo here. Tchicai, likewise, grinds exceedingly fine. Moses and Moore pace the group in a correctly unmerciful manner for the more than 11 minutes the track runs. Shepp returns, tit for tat, what the rhythm lays on.
The inclusion of Roswell Rudd’s verbatim scoring of Monk’s Crepuscule was no doubt due to Shepp’s well-founded awareness of and respect for his heritage.
The rambling O.C. theme is quickly followed by solo Shepp, who sets a standard for eventful monologue.
When Will, by Ornette, finds Cherry right at home—except that his phrasing is much tighter and more confident today than it was five years ago. Tchicai, with good delayed-beat comments, a la Ornette, was competent; was one of the only players doing it then; but he too has come a mile or two since. Shepp, with snatches of I Remember You, etc., leads the horns into a melange of group improvisation to emerge alone.
Shepp’s Funeral, dolorous, full of fine abstract sound elements, is graphic in its portrayal of pain, and fits its later purpose: acknowledgment of one of U.S. racism’s many victims, Medger Evers.
Tchicai’s Mik follows the 12-bar structure in common meter. The composer’s solo is relaxed; Cherry’s is original and Shepp’s is unique.
Sadly, this album was recorded so long ago that much of it is no longer as interestingly spontaneous as it once was.
Happily, Delmark’s Bob Koester saw fit to purchase it from its European owners and give it to us even at this date. It provides us with further history of the middle of the past decade’s significant jazz activity. As such, it is valuable source material, as well as good music.
Thanks to the insight (foresight?) of John Coltrane, another first-rank tenor is on the scene. Pharoah Sanders would undoubtedly have been overlooked for many years (if not entirely) as just another integer in the crowd, had Trane not included him in his last recordings. (That’s no putdown of Sanders’ abilities, just recognition of the mundane fact that it’s not what you know, but who you blow with that counts.)
When exposed to him, many listeners found that Sanders did have more of a musical axe to grind than the average “promising player”, as well as a uniquely forceful way of honing it. In fact, some of the jazz wags were saying—just before Trane’s departure—that “Pharoah is saying it all, man; dig Meditations.” (The criterion, hardly justified, was Sanders’ stringency and stridency, comparatively more forceful than Coltrane’s neo-lyricism at that point.)
But Sanders is here—with his music. His compositions, even the heads—uncopable, in the latter-day manner that many onlookers, critics and plagiarizing musicians find so annoying (they say “so jive”)—are pillars of abstract continuity. They almost have to be played only by their composer because, as with so much of the best of the modern idiom, composition and exposition are inextricable; who else can sing Strange Fruit?
Lower Egypt is a rising bulge of sound—full of swirling piano, long reed swells, rattling temple blocks and bells—heaving with the powerful suggestion of birth, cresting subtly, then diminishing to a Grimes bowed passage. Sanders on piccolo is indebted to Sanders on tenor.
A rhythmic pattern, a montuna, emerges at a swift tempo to herald Upper Egypt. Against the regularity, Bettis places tricky percussion effects with, I believe, temple blocks or maybe boo-bams. A soaring Sanders enters on tenor. He builds away from the original line until, in less than a chorus, he finds ferocity. When the intensity subsides, he vocalizes with the rhythm.
Japan begins as gently impressionistic as a view of a Tokyo tea garden: little bells jangle against Sharrock’s guitar, strummed like a Koto, and Grimes’ soft harmony. There is a brief interlude of chanting by Sanders, more an impression than an imitation of the Japanese idiom.
Blank sets the tone for Aum (Om), also the title of the last Coltrane album, and it is frenetic. Sanders, on alto, collides with Sharrock in a pitched battle, pushing all the silent places out of existence.
The leader takes to his tenor again on Venus. Initially, he carves a sylph-like melody with that painfully beautiful tone of his. Then he begins to twist the line, fracture it, carve it up until it screams in torture. Burrell’s tumbling chords and the rumbling bass and percussion behind him add to the dynamics and gravity of this segment. Grimes and Sanders interlace like shoestrings to climax Capricorn, and one is again reminded of the poetry in Sanders’ tenor: the continuation of a song from joy through pain to peace.
A pianistic field holler begins Conquistador, the first of the Taylor album’s two sidelong tracks, both the leader’s compositions. The call is answered with a rush of horns and rhythm. Lyons’ line, beginning on a level of intensity several notches below that of the violent ground-swell supporting it, is somewhat buried within the buttressing folds of agitation. Ultimately, however, like a mountaineer, Lyons matches the summits of exertion around him.
When Dixon enters, the energy diminishes and his long, held tones are intermittently slashed by Taylor’s razor-edged chords. The tandem bass work is a dichotomy in arco and pizzicato.
Taylor’s solo is a masterful montage of rhythmically dominated fragments, laced together with myriads of 100-watt arpeggios—little Miro figures swimming brightly.
The flip side, With (Exit), opens with plastic skeins of music unwinding, unraveling to the puckering bow and exploding digits of Grimes and Silva. Again Dixon, with that haunted tone, slides whole notes across the air as if he were buffing antiques with a velvet rag.
Taylor’s tumbling, whirling, strobe-light pianistics are again a Herculean display of dynamic and textural virtuosity. Like John Henry, he never lets up; his music, the driven steel of inspiration, turns white hot before it’s over. His conception, admirably interpreted by the group gathered here, is thorny in perceptibility for some, since it has no fat couches on which the listener can lie and be entertained.
Intentionally or not, Albert Ayler ranks with the most sophisticated and satirical musicians of the decade, if one measures him by the “brevity is the soul of wit” equation. His best efforts, to this reviewer, are those of a genius because, in their simplicity, they tell the greatest of stories with a modicum of trivia attached.
Brother Donald has greatly improved over the last couple of years; either that, or his taste in recording companies has. The brothers’ musical interactivity suggests images in a house of mirrors, magnified and multiplied in a kind of cubistic situation wherein all sides of the phrase at any given moment are played as near simultaneously as possible. The cumulative effect is one of continuous revelry.
All the pieces on this disc are the leader’s. He apparently gave consideration to the possibility of airplay—if there are any imaginative and/or unrestricted deejays left in radioland. Each of the tracks on the first side is under four minutes long—some way under. Abbreviated versions of Ghosts and Bells, formerly waxed at epic length, strengthen this notion.
The title wedge, pure jubilation, is a call by the leader, echoed a second later by the trumpeter, in successive layers of ecstacy. Albert abandons his axe to chant the theme, as did Pharoah on Japan.
Dancing Flowers, featuring Albert alone in front, begins with a parody of Wayne King’s alto sound, tripping through the ricocheting vibrations of Cobbs’ harpsichord and the pulsating rhythm unit. Bells retains its happy, ringing instrumental chant. The theme figure races up and down, working its way out of a maze.
Love Flower is a plaintive tapestry decorated with filigree of harpsichord and percussion. Zion Hill is characterized by little circular movements and angular trips within the forward motion of the piece as a whole. It is similar to but less volatile than Cecil Taylor’s laminations.
Universal is a prolonged assault on apathy. Albert, proving kinship with Pharoah’s approach, furiously overblows at the top of the horn. He seems to want another register at the upper end and, finding none, forces the top one to extend itself to those heights anyway. A bugling Donald brackets Graves’ calibrated efforts and Silva’s bow-swoops, and dives to the returning onslaught of the front line.
These recordings are by four of the greatest and most diversified of the modernists. They are exemplary of the near past (Shepp), the present, and the future. Especially the future, because, though vilified by many “derriere-guardists”, they provide the grapes from which much of the watered-down wine of popular American music is made. The sad fact is that white all these men have a somewhat greater following in Europe, in a number of cases, the U.S. Bureau of Artistic Acceptance still pays its hacks to copy the work of its artists and present it in spayed versions. —Quinn
(Bill Quinn) *** (From Jazz Magazine No. 157 - July/August 1968, p.60) - France albert ayler Love cry : Love cry / Ghosts / Omega / Dancing flowers / Bells / Love flower / Zion hill / Universal indians.
Albert Ayler (ts), Donald Ayler (tp), Call Cobbs (clavecin), Alan Silva (b), Milford Graves (dm). New York, 1967.
Impulse A - 9165 / 33 t / 30 cm 1(0)/10 Il faut aller plus loin que 1’humeur. Ces dernières années, le jazz, comme nombre d’éléments jusque-là tenus à l’écart et insuffisamment préparés, sera devenu un instrument de combat. (Jadis déjà, sur le mode de la confiance et de la bonhomie, les tournées du Département d’Etat.) Le jazz n’est plus un meuble de loisirs. Albert Ayler nous a dynamité tout ça, notre confort et nos illusions, avec un grand rire. Et tout un peuple d’incubes et de succubes, de démons et d’esprits, enfermés tenus en laisse dans les profondeurs inexplorées ou inexploitées des consciences, tout un peuple s’est levé, rugissant, brandissant 1’étendard d’un monde parallèle. Ornette Coleman, ce prophète, avait esquissé un léger pas de danse, un pas de nymphe au pied mutin. Il n’était jamais allé aussi loin dans la mesure. Ayler, lui, a fait sonner la charge et, loin de la démesure, tente d’instaurer un ordre nouveau, quelque chose, une œuvre brouillonne, naïve et rouée, qui n’est pas seulement une contestation mais la négation d’un monde qui ne survit que par nos habitudes. Le jazz, voilà, s’est longtemps complu dans des ajouts à une matière minée, creusée de tant de galeries et de dédales souterrains qu’il a suffi d’un homme, armé de son saxophone et de sa bonne volonté, pour le foudroyer. Le bateau va couler, le bateau coule. Premier rat à 1’abandonner, rat moins raté que les autres, Albert Ayler mêle en un sursaut originel, «préhistorique», les chants des Indiens Zuni aux sonneries altières du Débuché de Paris en passant par la Lorraine et Sambre-et-Meuse. Il brasse, pétrit, fonde ces éléments, cette mosaïque, en un magma tentaculaire, malmené à jet continu, traversé de part en part de grandes explosions de cris et de sons. Le bateau coule et les rats s’attardent. Ils ne musardent pas, ils raccommodent, tentent de colmater les brèches, chassant cette idée fixe et dévastatrice que tout est foutu. Ayler en a marre du passé du jazz. Il sait, lui aussi, reproduire de belles mélodies. Il 1’a prouvé (My name is Albert Ayler).
L’air se raréfie. Il faut gagner les hauteurs. Là, bien campé, Ayler nous pète au nez. Et cette exhalaison immonde devient un souffle d’air frais.
Love cry, volet supplémentaire consacré aux thèmes répertoriés par Carles et Comolli, Ghosts, Bells repris, remaniés, réexplorés en de brèves volutes, en de brutaux encorbellements, épaulés par Omega, Dancing flowers, Love flowers, Zion hill, Universal Indians. Mais voilà. «UIysse»est une œuvre importante, Bells est une œuvre importante, mais nous ne pouvons pas en faire notre ordinaire. C’est pourquoi nous relisons «Le Rouge et le Noir» ou réécoutons Al Sears dans «Beautiful Indians».
— J.-P. B. Back to: Record Reviews Discography: Love Cry |
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