Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
NDIGENOUS MUSIC Nat Hentoff Spanning the Generations James Newton's The African Flower smashes a number of stereotypes all at once. First, there's the notion that the flute is not a jazz...
...The African Flower is a most singular achievement by all involved, including producer Mike Berniker and Bruce Lund-vall, the head of the resurgent Blue Note Records, who put up the bread to make it all cook...
...Or make you feel the beat all the way to your toes...
...As for the inability of anybody but Ellington and his men to play these works, Newton begins by not imitating the past...
...The other musicians, each a considerable figure in contemporary jazz, have zestfully and lovingly engaged in an act of collective expression, subsuming just enough of themselves to the needs of the enterprise as a whole...
...I expect Ellington would be intrigued with what has been done here, and having listened all the way through, would have kissed Newton on both cheeks, as was his custom when pleased...
...In the rhythm section are such limber, resourceful luminaries as vibist Jay Hog-gard, drummer Pheeroan Aklaff, and the marvelously subtle and supple drummer Billy Hart...
...Newton's sidemen are distinctively themselves...
...And Newton's scores combine strongly knowledgeable affection for Ellington with Newton's own way of hearing and shaping these dimensions of the Ellington heritage...
...They try for the feeling of the Ellington pieces and his overall spirit instead of reaching for shadows...
...First, there's the notion that the flute is not a jazz instrument, can't speak strongly enough, and is, after all—and this part is communicated only in hushed tones these days—really a woman's instrument...
...Cornetist Olu Dara, originally from Mississippi, is in my view the most ar-restingly personal and blues-graceful brass player among jazz musicians of recent renown...
...He has organically fused the past and the present so that Ellington's originals, their essential integrity intact, are heard through a contemporary sensibility that neither genuflects sycophantically to them nor plunders them, leaving only shards behind...
...A good many current jazz musicians, for instance, have rather extensive training in European music, so how can they really get into the deep blues and gutbucket abandon of the players of the 1920s and 1930s...
...The leader, James Newton, is a flute player and composer who has studied a wide range of musical forms and inner directions...
...A number of Ellington's sidemen benefited similarly from Duke's scores, sounding somewhat adrift when they went off on their own record dates...
...The second stereotype acknowledges Duke Ellington's original body of jazz compositions as the largest and most ceaselessly original in the music's history but holds that the full and deep flavor of those pieces can only be heard on Ellington recordings...
...It is an index of the state of American jazz recording that Dara is seldom heard on records these years...
...So how can they glide gracefully inside a lyrical ballad as the classical jazzmen did...
...Others came along of a more lyrical bent, but not until John Blake on this album have I heard a violinist of Stuff Smith's force who is also a romanticist with a rhapsodic voice that can whisper intimately...
...The African Flower (Blue Note BT 85109) blows all this disinformation away, just as I.F...
...Decades ago, Stuff Smith was the hottest and roughest of jazz violinists...
...In sum, Newton has the rather rare capacity of paying tribute to an original force by adding his own originality to the scores in a way that complements the source by bringing it, with full honors, into the present...
...Arthur Blythe, a much-lauded alto saxophonist on the new jazz frontier, sounds much more compelling in these scores than on his own recordings, probably because he needs the editing that Newton's discipline provides...
...The third stereotype, a corollary of the second, is that younger jazz players cannot convincingly play the works of their elders because the generations have become so different in background and intentions...
...Similarly, most of the young take naturally to avant-garde jazz where the beat is not explicit, the melodies vanish in midair, and instruments are sometimes made to sound as if possessed by extremely distraught dybbuks...
...Newton plays the flute with such power, so deep and wide a range of textures, that its legitimacy as a jazz instrument is established unquestionably...
...On one track, Milt Grayson sings Duke Ellington's "Strange Feeling" in a convincing impersonation of a man at the edge of the twilight zone...
...Stone used to disintegrate government press releases in his weekly newsletter...
...For this set, the most impressive he has ever made and one that will last a long time, Newton decided to pay tribute to Duke Ellington by scoring compositions of his from the 1920s to the 1960s...
...Newton, by the way, sings through his instrument as he plays—over a four-octave range...
...Subsequent interpretations of the works by others, although often pleasant enough, are just pale versions of the real thing...
...He is also, at times, a participant in experimental jazz adventures...
...He does not ask his players to sound like such nonpareil Ellington sidemen as Johnny Hodges, Tricky Sam Nanton, Ben Webster, and Cootie Williams...
...As Stanley Crouch says in the notes, "Since the essence of one aspect of jazz technique is transferring the African approach to the 'talking drum' to Western instruments, it is interesting to hear the Negro inflection as distinctly on the flute as on the cornet or the violin or the alto saxophone...
Vol. 50 • June 1986 • No. 6
