On Music
GOODMAN, JOHN
ON MUSIC By John Goodman Domesticating Chaos In a live performance Roland Kirk puts on an incredible show. Plugged into various kinds of electronic gadgetry, he drapes himself with cords and...
...at times the seriousness, emotional profundity, and tension of such a display can be physically exhausting to watch...
...They all say, 'Well, I didn't know this kind of thing could happen.' " In the past year...
...The tune itself is played in a happy, uptempo vein...
...Charles Lloyd has received from critics around the world a kind of unanimous panegyric that has virtually never been accorded to a jazz performer...
...The early tendency of jazz to encroach on and "integrate" with classical music seems to be dying out...
...Roland seems to want to master every instrument he can lay his hands on and probe every style and form...
...The madness and brilliance that his group generates in "free" improvisation is not to be believed...
...Maybe he is putting us all on, but there are no mistakes...
...And it is, especially in some of the recordings...
...Ironically, this followed Charles' three-day negotiations with the authorities to be allowed to play...
...Rig means like rigor mortis...
...With Lloyd and Jarrett are Cecil McBee on bass (lately replaced by Ron McClure) and Jack DeJohnette on drums...
...This is how he explains the title of the Rip, Rig and Panic album: "Rip means Rip Van Winkle...
...An irrational wildness lurks in every solo, especially Jarrett's, which can disconcert the listener if he does not know the Parker context or sense the underlying bop song-form and harmonic changes...
...The group's interplay, excitement and range is illustrated in "Autumn Sequence" from Dream Weaver...
...Again, the context or frame is all-important, for it serves to displace our "original" response to the standard: Lloyd's whispy flute and Jarrett's plucked piano strings transform with subtle harmonic echoes and reverberations our stock anticipations and memories of "Autumn Leaves...
...The outstanding success of the Lloyd and Kirk groups in communicating with their audiences I take as a very healthy sign for jazz...
...They're asleep...
...Eric Larrabee produced one of the better essays about Lloyd (Harper's, February 1967) and made two points relevant to my observations on Roland Kirk: First, Lloyd "domesticates" and "makes intelligible" the revolution that began with the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and others...
...Whistles, bells, pops, clicks, microphonic kisses and humming are all part of Kirk's repertoire...
...Still, his technical proficiency and his astonishing power to improvise would be mere show without his exigent need to make music and communicate...
...And by domesticating the chaos we can enjoy it, even laugh at it...
...It's the way people, even musicians, are...
...as well as the customary tenor sax...
...So, while we might quibble about what constitutes a jazz revolution, it is undeniable that Lloyd is deeply influenced by the whole free jazz movement, and he does make much of that movement intelligible...
...It is also, by and large, a sonical-ly nutty, ironically happy world...
...Like Kirk, he in his own way is ambivalent about chaos in music, but in his more ambitious and successful numbers it works very well for him...
...Second...
...And they have gotten it—on their own terms...
...The New York Post reported that the master of ceremonies was unable to quiet the audience and was roundly booed for his attempt...
...Recently, at the Vanguard in New York, he passed out wooden whistle-flutes so the audience could provide a screeching background for "Here Comes the Whistleman...
...He reportedly told them he was being denied his right to play because he was Negro...
...the manzello—a sax-like instrument with one bend and a large bell...
...Lloyd's music reaches the listener through its logic and structure and is thus less immediately frightening...
...For horns he likes to use the stritch—a long, straight ancestor of the alto sax...
...group ever to perform at a Soviet jazz festival, the Lloyd quartet created an eight-minute sensation after its performance on May 14...
...with Ornette you paid your money and took your choice...
...Through the context and his masterful use of jazz cliches, this emerged as one of the funniest jazz satires I, at least, had ever heard...
...The tunes themselves may be Kirk's own compositions, pop or jazz standards, rocks, basic blues, you name it...
...Unlike Kirk's quartet, this one is a rigorously interdependent group which shows its collective personality to advantage on records...
...All of us...
...He has recorded, for instance, a Latin version of the Beatles' tune, "And I Love Her...
...Yet even with his propulsive need to experiment, Roland has no fear whatsoever of using strictly conventional jazz forms when they suit his purpose, typical jazz harmonies and intervals, or cliche runs for highlight or exaggeration...
...Here Charles frames the standard, "Autumn Leaves," with two lovely compositions of his own which give a new kind of wistful nostalgia to the familiar tune...
...Dream Weaver (Atlantic, ATS 1459) and Forest Flower (Atlantic, ATS 1473), display the group that made the sensational appearances, and it seems in every way worthy of the acclaim...
...But when things are working well for him, in live appearances and in two or three fine albums, Roland produces some of our most forceful and exhilarating contemporary music...
...as Lloyd does here...
...The result, strangely enough, is wholly musical...
...The variety of instruments and special effects is the whole raison d'etre for Kirk's musical world, a world which seems to me as inclusive as any ever conceived by a jazz performer...
...even the lohn Lewis fans (bless them), should be thankful for this...
...and he entitled a composition of his own "From Bechet, Byas, and Fats...
...To accuse him of exploiting gimmicks, as some have done, is like taking him to task for being blind...
...In the quartet format, which he seems to prefer, he still remains a one-man show: The band works with him, and they support his effects...
...They are like kids or lunatics raising total hell with their instruments...
...Lloyd's enormous variety of style, mood, tone color and material begins to be evident here...
...Roland is clearly an experimentalist in his desire to find in jazz a new kind of instrumental freedom, a new stock of tonal effects, tensions and juxtapositions...
...Bird Flight," from the same album, is a bow to Charlie Parker, who loved to improvise on the chord pattern of "What Is This Thing Called Love...
...At his Town Hall concert on May 4, Charles broke up the audience with a 10-minute solo composed entirely of "bad" notes and generally foul sounds...
...Soon we cannot fail to respond, though, and Kirk controls our responses by brilliantly manipulating musical conventions which any jazz fan would understand and by projecting a deep emotional power into everything he plays...
...With such a wild blend of the avant-garde and the traditional, one might expect Kirk's music to be frequently tasteless and uneven in quality...
...Certainly a man who plays the nose flute can't be all bad...
...Rather than frightening off the audience, the quartet is winning people over by the thousands, even in Russia...
...The reason is, simply, his personality...
...Beyond this, his audiences sense his desire to reach them from a world probably more chaotic but paradoxically more ordered and beautiful than theirs...
...As the first U.S...
...His stylistic province comprises nearly every jazz idiom and genre from blues shouting to free forms, though his roots seem strongest in the swing era...
...Between tunes he offers wry comments on subjects like audiences and musicians, making love, lsd...
...A flute, sometimes electrified, gives him another rich tonal spectrum...
...He does more than reach out to the listener...
...When they hear me doing things they didn't think I could do, they panic in their minds...
...Both of his later records...
...They don't want to integrate musically, but they do want acceptance...
...Of Course, Of Course (Columbia, CS 9212) is a good set with an impressive improvised duet between Charles and Gabor Szabo on guitar ("The Things We Did Last Summer"), an ethereal ballad ("Voice in the Night") and a modernized down-home blues ("Goin' to Memphis...
...Pianist Keith Jarrett, bouncing up and down on his bench, will move from a harmonic mode into a crazy, nonsense series of fast runs and arpeggios: or he may jump up and pluck the strings while striking the keys, adding a new dimension to the Cecil Taylor procedure...
...Various taped sounds are electronically altered and used in two pieces from his best album, Rip, Rig and Panic (Limelight, LS 86027), with Jaki Byard playing piano, Elvin Jones drums, and Richard David bass...
...Roland's instrumental dexterity produces such an astonishing array of sounds and suggestions that at first we may feel aurally overwhelmed...
...That's where a lot of people's minds are...
...Men like Kirk and Lloyd take their roots seriously...
...Roland is blind but moves easily if not gracefully around the platform, blowing sometimes three instruments at once, stomping, clapping, hollering, or reaching into the piano to turn up the reverberator for his electric flute...
...No matter what the group's emotional purpose at a given time, the , listener feels it is always in control of its effects because Lloyd provides a relatively tight musical context in which to judge the relevance of his free forms...
...A similar version is on the record of the same title (Atlantic, ATS 3007...
...Roland also knows that he runs the risk of frightening them off by assaulting their conventional musical sensibilities...
...Charles is not putting us on or "making mistakes...
...Plugged into various kinds of electronic gadgetry, he drapes himself with cords and instruments which, in the course of a number, become uncanny sensory projections of himself...
...he collars him...
...Lloyd, hair flying, will bob and weave about the stage evoking every kind of appropriate bleat, honk, nonsense run or whatever from his tenor sax (or flute...
...Charles' earlier groups were more conventional but nonetheless interesting...
...The result of all this is a kind of glorious chaos (a word Roland enjoys using), but hardly the chaos of life and the streets...
...Every tune is a new set of possibilities in sound...
...As the man himself says, we bring it indoors...
Vol. 50 • June 1967 • No. 12
