On Music

...On Music NAMING IS NOT KNOWING BY JOHN GOODMAN Periodically, everyone gets fed up with categories in music For the past year or so those involved in rock have been struggling, usually in a defensive way, to break free of such labels as "acid rock," "folk rock" and "soul" You hear comments like, "There's no validity in pigeon-holes" or "Names are all bullshit, man '* Consequently, most albums are being produced without liner notes, the music is to speak for itself One inescapable function of language is to name and, therefore, to classify-something long mistrusted by other practitioners of nonverbal arts, too And they have often been right Certainly there is no necessary correspondence between the expressive field an artist stakes out for himself and a critic's deductive idea of how the work fits into a school or category Jazz people, after years of being sorted into piles of dixielanders, hard boppers, etc , have given up on their critics, many of whom have always resisted, m their obsession with structure, the singular kind of synthesis that makes jazz both sophisticated and primitive Because rock is entering upon a new era of sophistication, for better or worse, its musicians are beginning to find themselves bugged with these same critical predispositions The more primitive, popular or stylized a music, the easier it is to categorize and type In the jazz world Vortex Records, among others, is still giving the hype to "soul," a catchall word that is just about meaningless when applied to musical style (its approximate equivalent used to be rhythm-and-blues) Their titles nothwith-standing, Leo Wright's Soul Talk (2011) and Clifford Jordan's Soul Fountain (2010) are well worth hearing The former is a resuscitation of what Joe Goldberg, in his excellent notes, calls "the lounge combo, the saxophone-organ-guitar-drums quartet " Should that description suggest only worn plush seats and old drunks making mawkish requests, Wright's group will offer some surprises The leader plays strong Parker-mspired alto (and flute on one number), the product of a vigorous apprenticeship m Dizzy Gillespie's small band in the early '60s Kenny Burrell, the all-round guitarist, Frankie Dunlop, Thelomous Monk's one-time drummer, and Gloria Coleman, a light and tasteful organist revive a sound that reminds me of the Jay McShann combo I heard in Kansas City some years ago But this group is better While the album is based on the blues, everyone here seems to be a master of many jazz styles The same might be said of the musicians in Soul Fountain, except that the band is bigger and employs more sophisticated jazz and Latin-based rhythms The listener will find, however, that the concept of "soul" is as elusive as ever Ira Gitler's notes tell us that Cliff Jordan, the leader, has become another expatriate m Europe "But before he split across the pond Jordan left us some music on record that reflects some of the feeling in the wave lengths of today's music " That's nice, Ira "feeling in the wave lengths " Gitler goes on to say that soul music is "a blanket descriptive" and "good jazz musicians always have an abundance of soul" There may be some grammatical confusion here Perhaps, to save his soul, Jordan was fleeing the tnte nonsense of jazz writers Anyhow, the disc contains some fine composition and is charged with power throughout, thanks to the rhythmic foundation of organ, Fender bass, congas and bongos, besides conventional drums With the exception of Julian Pnester on trombone, the soloists are first-rate, particularly Jordan on tenor sax, Jimmy Owens on trumpet or flugel-horn, and Frank Owens on organ or piano This is an excellent jazz album, but as to "soul"—well, it is not quite the sound I hear blaring from the record shops on 125th Street Another form of categorization, more blatantly commercial, is the anthology disc It has been common practice in the pop music industry to issue things like The Best of Russ Morgan or Nat King Cole's Big Ones Now the classical composers have been dragged in Columbia has a substantial list of Greatest Hits albums, running from Beethoven through Wagner, all over, people are rushing out to buy Handel's Greatest Hits or Puccini's In jazz, Atlantic has produced something similar in its recent "Jazz Anthology" series, but with taste and selectivity At present, the artists represented are John Coltrane, Eddie Hams, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Ray Charles, Herbie Mann, and Mose Allison The company has done a good job of picking historically and musically significant works from its vaults to represent these musicians, most of whom have been with Atlantic for a number of years But since jazzmen commonly change their recording affiliation, the selection on several of these discs is limited and partial The Best of John Coltrane (sd-1541), for instance, contains only his 1959-60 recordings, and will thus be an incredible misnomer for some Still, if you are a Coltrane fancier you must have such pieces as "Giant Steps," "Equinox," and the first recorded version of "My Favorite Things " By the way, it is intriguing to compare the latter, not with the distended 1966 performance (on Impulse as-9124), but with a recently released 1963 version on Selflessness (Impulse as-9161) featuring McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Roy Haynes on drums The Best of Ray Charles (sd-1543), like the Coltrane, is interesting because it is early, it presents Ray as strictly a jazz pianist, rather than the Entertainer he is today During a classic rendering of "How Long Blues," at one point Ray unexpectedly switches to alto sax while Milt Jackson, the vibraharp-ist, doubles on piano This, as they say, is worth the price of admission Mose Allison's Best (sd-1542) represents the full spectrum of his talents Some people m jazz have put Mose down as the white man from Mississippi who "disinfected" the blues, but a genuine blues man he is, even if the term hardly conveys the sense of his easy, homespun modernism Through the insinuating, nasal voice and the deft modern-jazz piano style come occasional untoward suggestions of tough, black, urban blues singers like Sonny Boy Williamson (in "Your Mind Is on Vacation") and Muddy Waters ("Rolhn' Stone") The blues is one category that can hardly be delimited much less defined It is equally difficult to label the music played by The Fourth Way, a quartet of sometime jazz musicians who, a bit pompously, proclaim their credentials and former group associations on album liners and publicity releases (Violinist Michael White was the star of John Handy's quintet a few years ago, in which pianist Mike Nock also played ) Their music, as far as I would care to define it, is usually jazz-based modal improvisation Although Ron McClure's amplified bass and Eddie Marshall's tasteful drumming frequently lay down rock rhythms, the group's only use of rock textures comes in occasional excursions by Nock's Fender piano Their first recording for Capitol, The Fourth Way (st-317), surpassed the second in variety with its elements of country music ("Bucklehuggin"), relatively free improvisation ("Dance of the Mechanical Men"), and interesting harmonic inversions (from "Everyman's Your Brother" to "Clouds") The second album, The Sun and Moon Have Come Together (Harvest skao-423), a live concert, employs two short, pleasant Afro and skiffle figures developed as fills between the longer modal pieces Yet only in "Strange Love" does the band get into the kind of rhythmic variation it is really capable of These gentlemen are extremely competent, and their music reflects a search through jazz for a new synthesis using the modal approach It is not the typical jazz-rock fusion at all Describing his search for a personal artistic synthesis, pianist Bill Evans makes some curious and revealing comments on the liner of his fine solo album, Bill Evans Alone (Verve V6-8792) They are worth quoting to show how a brilliant jazz musician reacts to being unfairly typed as a glorified cocktail pianist Evans talks fondly of the hours he has spent alone with the piano, how they have "unified the directive energy" of his life "At those times when I have achieved this sense of oneness while playing alone, the many technical or analytic aspects of the music happened of themselves with a positive Tightness which always served to remind me that to understand music most profoundly one only has to be listening well " [Italics mine J G 1 That Evans has always preferred to play without an audience has been "a problem of personal self-consciousness which had to be conquered As a performer, his "solo piano professional experience has been negligible, and it is sad that this great tradition m jazz is in danger of extinction because of the prevalent public attitude relegating a single pianist to background for conversation or dinner " The "cocktail pianist" attitude may well be responsible not only for Evans' avoiding solo work m clubs, but for his competition with the cocktails in the form of a trio Like many musicians, he would shed his audiences if he could, yet still have them "listen well" His view of most listeners' critical predispositions makes the recording studio, with its solitude, his lone means of communicating with the public without forsaking that unity of expression he so desires...