On Music
GOODMAN, JOHN F.
ON MUSIC By John F. Goodman The Hat Trick Iused to have a collection of funny hats, and that may be one reason why I like John Handy. Or, to paraphrase Mel Brooks, you like the hat, you buy the...
...How better to proclaim and dramatize this than by smiling enigmatically and wearing an astrakhan...
...Handy has come a long way from his days with Charlie Mingus, although even then he had some fine moments, as in Wonderland (United Artists, UAJS 15005...
...Recently at the Village Vanguard in New York, Handy's sextet—his new group—appeared back to back with the Bill Evans trio...
...If Only We Knew" uses this affective pattern in the minor mode as well as complex variants of it in seven movements...
...they depend on a tightly controlled emotional progression to render their form...
...If Only We Knew," perhaps his best piece, appeared on his first record, John Handy, Recorded Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival (Columbia, CS 9262), and lasted over 26 minutes...
...Everyone praised his lyricism in those days...
...When playing he is intense and almost cunning...
...Handy himself is a magnificent musician and projects a full and open tone...
...This general criticism is by way of compliment to Handy, who seems always to bring to his longer pieces a fine sense of the formal limitations of both the music and the situation...
...If this happens, the first thing to go will be the hats...
...Handy seems to thrive in these conditions, but he made a revealing remark on the jacket of The Second John Handy Album (Columbia, CS 9367...
...While dry wit, understatement and irony have always been important emotional forces in the jazz rhetoric, Handy is working to create a considerably broader and deeper emotional base in his music...
...The version I heard at the Vanguard, with a more intimate audience, took up about 45 minutes and was just as gripping...
...Evans performed first, wearing a dark blue business suit and French cuffs, seeming wholly absorbed in his music as he typically bent over the keyboard to produce the impeccable pianism that is his trademark...
...I am told that Handy's hard-core fans in San Francisco, his home, are by and large the experimental-rock and Indian raga fans, and this is not surprising...
...Handy came on sporting a turtle-neck T-shirt and fez, and a quiet smile...
...He said, "We played the tunes shorter and better in the recording studio...
...These longer works are only vaguely structured as a "tune" or as a series of chord progressions...
...now his playing has more substance as well...
...The insistent rhythmic figures and their variations in "If Only We Knew" and "Theme X" (on the second album) seem terribly important to project this kind of music...
...Or, to paraphrase Mel Brooks, you like the hat, you buy the face...
...This facetious contrast in styles worked to the benefit of both groups, and the management should be congratulated...
...On records the situation has not been much better, though the good old "blowing session" seems less popular and more controlled...
...In manner he is a subtler version of Glenn Gould...
...Given this kind of varied material, the group performs it in a remarkably wide range of individual and ensemble textures...
...You almost find yourself following a neatly plotted "story," expanded to the status of a form from the response pattern of arousal, expectation, suspension (frustration and deviation), and resolution...
...His weakness could be a tendency to run away from jazz idiom for the sake of an emotional content, as John Coltrane seemed to do in the past...
...This is a clear contrast, perhaps a response, to his long and beautiful unaccompanied solo near the beginning...
...Musically more or less abstract, they are dramatically concrete and exoteric...
...Dancy Dancy" is a fast samba with a catchy melody that gets the whole band romping...
...The solos throughout are long yet, as I have said, they possess an emotional form, or psycho-logic, which makes them work...
...his range is astonishingly varied and complex, and the music, for jazz, is therefore highly experimental...
...In some cases jazzmen have almost wilfully alienated their nightclub public with this windy self-indulgence...
...Since he can depend on and exploit a visual as well as an aural drama with a live audience, Handy may extend his longer numbers somewhat, according to his assessment of the audience, and without any apparent strain...
...There is no bleating...
...The quintet consists of Handy's alto sax, White's violin, Jerry Hahn on amplified guitar, Don Thompson on bass, and Terry Clarke on drums...
...An amplified cello, played by Calo Scott, was added in New York...
...There are four of these on the second album, and they range from "Dance for Carlo B"—light and graceful yet, as Handy notes, full of tension— to "Blues for a Highstrung Guitar," a country blues with rock and jazz overtones and some stirring violin work by Mike White...
...He gave the impression of being alternately absorbed and detached...
...Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk went through hat phases, but Monk, for instance, settled down to probe a fairly limited emotional range where he felt at home...
...cheme #1" on the second album is not nearly so successful to my ear, but Handy says this is the direction in which he wants to go...
...For many, however, the chance to stretch out and expand their musical conceptions is a temptation not to be denied...
...I do not think the different timings just "happen" in Handy's band, as they do in most jazz bands...
...These be-haviorial styles, whether conscious or not on the part of the performers, are clearly theatrical: Surely none of these details are lost on a jazz audience, since they provide obvious clues for the understanding of the music...
...There occurs a finely developed "peripety" in the sixth when Handy re-enters to solo over the guitar, bass, and drums which have built the tension to a near-climax...
...He has mastered all the sax gimmicks, such as flutter-tonguing and dirty tone, but these never get out of hand...
...The band found the long sets in a club exhausting, and we infer that the presence of a live audience may compel performers to approach their music with a very different and less happy attitude...
...If the formal limits of the tune should snap under the strain, well, the audience has booze to allay its boredom and disgust...
...His music uses elements of both these styles, which are themselves excellent vehicles for the kind of theatricality and emotional drama that Handy is bringing to jazz...
...Other musicians have expressed similar feelings...
...when "laying out" for the others he will relax and listen or whisper something to his cellist, Calo Scott...
...To put it differently, jazz musicians in a club know that they have to contend with an audience whether they like it or not...
...Largely an arhyth-mic and atonal piece, "Scheme #1" seems to lose contact with jazz idiom on the one hand and emotional-dramatic patterns on the other...
...Handy's strength lies in the skill and taste with which he can dramatize emotion in a given piece, using rather basic jazz conventions...
...Handy's headgear, I imagine, is a part of his intense yet understated theatricality, a quality which all the best jazz musicians have and which must communicate itself to some extent in their music...
...Most jazz fans will find the shorter pieces more traditional and perhaps more exciting...
...The ensemble sound is never clogged or contrived: The light timbres seem to float the sound rather than fling it at you, and they are appropriate for the lyric, yet gutsy attack that the band prefers...
...Incidentally, drummer Terry Clarke supports the whole band in these excursions with astonishing technique and control...
...Handy shows no signs yet of settling down at all...
Vol. 50 • March 1967 • No. 6
