Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Jazz for the Neighbors The orchestral sounds are fresh, finely shaded, sensuous, funny, tender—the stuff of fantasy, memory, and prophecy. Easily the most fully...
...For instance, three works by Francis Poulenc: Sonata for Oboe antee it will get sufficient attention and sales to warrant the record company giving Moses a chance to keep the dream unfolding...
...Praise is due Grammavision for giving Bob Moses the time and the support to put all this together...
...Moses is also a drummer and, as such, has worked with a wide range of jazz-rock fusion combos and experimental jazz units...
...I think there are very few people who warrant that kind of space...
...As immediately and lastingly pleasurable as this album is, there's no guarAt twenty-one, Wynton Marsalis has made more of a sudden, resounding impact on the jazz world than any newcomer since "Cannonball" Adderley decades ago...
...It's a chancy undertaking...
...To prepare for his classical debut album—Trumpet Concertos by Haydn, Hummel, and Leopold Mozart, with Raymond Leppard conducting the National Philharmonic (CBS Masterworks 37846)-Marsalis stopped playing jazz for two months to get into the right other groove...
...But unlike Cannonball, this trumpeter from New Orleans is also a classical music virtuoso...
...Though it contains solos, Bob Moses's music has such clear, deep identity because much of it consists of ensemble playing...
...Anyway, this one does exist...
...And there are so many more multicolored, diversely swinging pleasures and sorrows (with the sorrows bearing then-own musical pleasures...
...Easily the most fully realized set of big-band jazz in a long time, When Elephants Dream of Music (Grammavision) immediately establishes its creator, Bob Moses, as a leading jazz composer and one who, as Duke Ellington might have said, is beyond category...
...As he recently told an interviewer from Down Beat: "I'm so tired of playing subdued, non-physical, abstract music for a small audience of elite aficionados who sit there and politely applaud...
...Increasingly, however, Moses has been dreaming of, and planning, his own large, mobile soundscape that would be both personal and universal...
...Grammavision's direct address is 260 West Broadway, New York, NY 10013...
...That's my aesthetic...
...Some say that this astonishing voice is becoming slightly tarnished...
...Philips 6514 176...
...Poulenc's music-poignant, mocking, as entertaining as a carnival but more mysterious in memory—is performed with idiomatic brio by, among others, pianist Gilbert Kalish and oboist Ronald Roseman...
...says Moses...
...very few...
...I think music needs to swing...
...That is, each new listening reveals a turn of phrase or a voicing that has slipped by in the past...
...What bothers me about jazz now," Moses says, "is that it's too casually virtuosic...
...The works of Beethoven, like those of Duke Ellington, are never really heard entirely...
...And then for sheer joy in the act of music, there is Pavarotti/Gala Concert at the Royal Albert Hall (London LDR 70182...
...It is distributed by Polygram...
...If this new album ever gets air play on mainstream radio stations—which is doubtful—a lot of listeners will indeed find nothing abstract about such performances as the strutting "Everybody Knows You When You're Up and In" and the exotic, richly evocative "Lava Flow," which, Moses notes, was "inspired by the magic and power of Hawaii...
...I want to make happy music...
...I don't want not to swing...
...people's music that you can play for your next-door neighbors and they'll love it____My taste isn't much different from that of people in the street...
...Some used to say that about Billie Holliday but they were listening only to the surface...
...As he notes, that makes his work go in a direction opposite to much of the current jazz...
...What's more ambitious than swing...
...So it is with three Beethoven Piano Sonatas—-"Haydn Son-ate," "Fur Therese," "Fantasie"—as newly illuminated by Alfred Brendel, who may well hear more deeply into Beethoven than any other contemporary pianist...
...He also read a biography of Haydn...
...And those listeners who have never heard of Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's true musical son, could still be deeply drawn to the lyrical cry of "Black Orchid," which is dedicated to Strayhorn...
...The Nonesuch label meanwhile continues to bring distinctively flavorful repertory to classical releases...
...Like [Charles] Mingus's music got out at times, but it always swung, which kept it in the realm of the human----I'm a harsh judge of myself, and if thirty seconds of a ten-minute tune don't swing, I can't use it...
...There are too many notes being played...
...Moses's scores do—because his imaginary landscapes are so continually intriguing, with Babar likely to be followed by Miles Davis in dark glasses...
...U and Piano, Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano, Sextet for Wind Quintet and Piano (Nonesuch 79045-1...
...Although his verbal style is cocky, to understate the case, Marsalis takes each musical challenge that he sets himself very seriously...
...In all the myriad events throughout When Elephants Dream of Music—from the protean forms of the ensemble to the searching improvisation of the soloists-there is not a note that does not swing...
...And that's why Moses's music "is mostly ensemble music...
...the string of solos, the endless stretching...
...For all its cunning craft and exuberant skill, the music is so open, so free of pretension, that this orchestra could be set in the middle of a street fair in any neighborhood and gather, like a magnet, most of the revelers, from kids on up...
...Whatever effect all that had, the kid from New Orleans is undeniably authentic in the set, and more than that, is subtly, singingly, flowingly compelling in that European stuff...
...I don't want to depend on the inspiration of the soloists for my music to be great...
...On the other hand, not much written music, in either jazz or classical composing, warrants that kind of space either...
Vol. 47 • September 1983 • No. 9
