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The ECM Old Masters Series

Manfred Eicher’s ECM label, still celebrating the 40th anniversary it observed late last year, has reissued some of its landmark recordings. Many of them are on CD for the first time. Over the decades, ECM has achieved nearly infallible sound reproduction of a broad and eclectic range of musicians including such disparate label mates as Arvo PÃ¤rt, Andres Schiff, Keith Jarrett, John Cage, Kim Kashkashian, Iva BittovÃ¡, Johann Sebastian Bach and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

The label evolved with attention to core jazz and classical values side by side with a sonic expansiveness that led to an identifiable Northern European aspect of what was to become known as world music. Four of ECM’s reissue sets are by artists who personified changes that moved through jazz in the 1970s. All of the musicians but one remain active, and all have built on the stylistic and popular success they developed with ECM.

Steve Kuhn, Life’s Backward Glances (ECM). In his mid-thirties when Eicher persuaded him in 1974 to record the solo album Ecstasy, Kuhn had played piano for John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Art Farmer and Kenny Dorham. Eight years earlier, when he was the featured soloist in Gary McFarland’s October Suite, he demonstrated that he thought beyond bop harmonies, with romantic expansiveness. Kuhn employed his massive technique to achieve the tenderness epitomized by “Silver” in the Ecstacy album. He was just as convincing with his power and controlled wildness, as in “Oceans in the Sky” from the quartet album Motility (1977), which features the atmospherics of Steve Slagle’s soprano saxophone. Joining Ecstasy and Motility in the box is Playground (1979), the first recorded instance of Kuhn’s celebrated partnership with Sheila Jordan. Unexpected from ECM, the audio mix occasionally all but obscures the intelligibility, but not the passion, of Jordan’s singing in this collection of Kuhn’s songs. Ironically, her voice has the greatest clarity in the wordless vocalizing on “Deep Tango.”

Kuhn’s soloing and his interaction with bassist Harvie Swartz and drummer Bob Moses are exquisite in Playground. Kuhn has frequently recorded “Life’s Backward Glance,” which inspired the title of the box set. In Ecstasy, he introduces the song as a solo piano piece. In the quartet version with Jordan five years later, he gives it a lyric, and a home-key change. Kuhn’s originality as a composer is evident in that piece, “Tomorrow’s Thoughts,” “The Rain Forest,” “The Saga of Harrison Crabfeathers;” indeed, throughout all three CDs.

Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, Setting Standards (ECM).
Twenty-seven years ago, jazz was reaching, even flailing, in all directions. Despite a retro movement headed by Wynton Marsalis, many jazz musicians were determined to detach from a past represented by the songs of their parents and grandparents. Freedom from formal restrictions and concentration on original composition brought a deluge of individual material. It also brought stultifying boredom created by album after album of tunes by youngsters inspired by the inventiveness of the Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Tom Harrell generation but who were composers only in the sense that they were putting notes on paper. It is unlikely that pianist Jarrett, bassist Peacock and drummer DeJohnette set out in 1983 to preserve anything other than their own sense of stability in a shifting jazz scene. Still, their first albums of standards and the flow of the trio’s concerts and CDs that followed emphasized what gifted players can do with the rich cache of great songs at the core of popular music.
Their success has encouraged jazz musicians everywhere to make the Great American song book a living part of their repertoires. That’s a public service. The Jarrett trio’s recordings are a legacy of passionate, involved andâ€”dare I use the word?â€”entertaining music. I haven’t had a better time in weeks than listening again to the extended down-home romp the three develop in “God Bless the Child.” Their interdependence, interaction and individuality seems to have formed spontanteously in these initial sessions in January of 1983. It has flourished ever since. After their interpretations of “Moon and Sand,” “All the Things You Are,” “If I Should Lose You” and eight other superior songs in Standards Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, the Changes album of original compositions follows logically in the same spirit. “Flying” and “Prism” remind us what a gifted composer Jarrett was. We may presume, if he decides to write again, that he still is.

Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Crystal Silence (ECM). The original 1972 LP Crystal Silence became a model and inspiration for duo performances in modern jazz. The album melding Burton’s vibraphone and Corea’s piano followed a spontaneous concert performance by the two. It may have been inspired in part by pianist Bill Evans and guitarist Jim Hall in their albums Undercurrent (1962) and Intermodulation (1966). Burton and Corea were extravagant admirers of Evans and Hall. In any case, the pairing was so successful, it established a partnership that has thrived for nearly four decades and produced a body of chamber music that is among the most rewarding andâ€”because of the virtuosity and ingenuity of the playersâ€”complex contemporary chamber music on record in any genre.
This box of four CDs brings Crystal Silence together with 1978’s Duet and two discs of In Concert, recorded in Zurich the following year but never released complete until now. Many of the pieces included here have become jazz standards, among them “Falling Grace,” “Arise, Her Eyes” and “I’m Your Pal,” all by Steve Swallow; Burton’s “SeÃ±or Mouse;” and “La Fiesta,” “Bud Powell” and several “Children’s Songs” by Corea. During the late 1960s and the ’70s both Corea and Burton led or were involved in bands fusing jazz with other styles. Most of those projects, however successful musically, tend to sound dated because of the electronic keyboards and stringed instruments they used. Granted, Burton’s vibes are electrified, but by the seventies their sound was an established element of the jazz landscape. Nearly forty years later, swirling, darting and jousting with Corea’s piano, their freshness is undiminished. The restored concert material allows us to hear for the first time on record stunning solo performances by both musicians, Corea on “Love Castle,” Burton in a medley of “I’m Your Pal’ and “Hullo Bolinas.”

Eberhard Weber, Colours (ECM). Perhaps more than any other ECM artist, the German bassist Weber set what in many minds came to be the label’s signature sound. The foundation was in the passionate and virtuosic way he played his electrified standup bass modified with an extra string, and in the sheer size of its amplified sound. In a way that created a sense of capaciousness, Eicher and his engineers mixed Weber’s bass and Rainer BrÃ¼ninghaus’s synthesized keyboards with John Marshall’s or John Christensen’s drums and Charlie Mariano’s soprano sax and assortment of flutes and exotic winds. At the same time, the recording technique etched the sound of each instrument to achieve crystalline definition. The music had intimacy but seemed to float in space. Weber’s hypnotic compositional style had much in common with minimalists like Steve Reich and Terry Riley. His music could be soporific, but at its frequent best, as in this set, it was compelling.

Weber’s breakthrough album, The Colours of ChloÃ«, is not included in this box, but it led him to form a working group and ultimately name his band Colours. The three albums in the set, Yellow Fields, Silent Feet and Little Movements, cover 1975 through 1980 and represent the ethos that intrigued such fellow musicians as Burton, Jaco Pastorius and John McLaughlin and endeared Weber to legions of listeners who might otherwise never have come near jazz. For dedicated jazz people, Mariano’s fiery soprano sax work on pieces like “Left Lane” and “Seriously Deep,” and the cymbal-splashed drumming of Marshall and Christensen, are likely to hold the most interest, but there is no denying the forceful pull of Weber’s music. In a solo like that on “The Last Stages of a Long Journey,” he makes clear that he was a formidable improviser. His 1980 “Little Movements” remains one of the most startling examples on record of humor wrapped into a serious piece of music. Weber is recovering from a 2008 stroke.

…The Sincerest Form

Bill Mays, on tour in Japan, sent a link to a Japanese web log called…
Rifftide:å¾Œè—¤ èª ã®JAZZ and other matters..
What a surprise. The blog seems to be operated by someone identified as Makotogotoh. If you go there—and if you know Japanese—you can read a review of a Mays performance with the guitarist Yoshiaki Masuo.
The more blogs the merrier, I guess; and good names are so hard to come by.

Kellaway In Boston And L.A.

When Roger Kellaway isn’t performing in a club or concert, or practicing and composing at home, chances are he’s out collecting honors. Recently, he picked up two in the city where he grew up, Boston. For one event, he and his friend Quincy Jones dressed in black gowns and medieval hats to receive honorary doctorates from Kellaway’s alma mater, the New England Conservatory of Music. For another, he heard his music played by the Boston Pops. The news may have been in all of the Boston papers, but we heard it by way of the semi-weekly newspaper in Ojai, Kellaway’s longtime mountain valley home in Southern California. To read the story, go here.
For a Rifftides review of a recent Kellaway album, see this Doug’s Pick.
And from out of Kellaway’s past, here he is accompanying Zoot Sims and soloing at the belated Donte’s club in Los Angeles in 1970. Chuck Berghofer is the bassist, Larry Bunker the drummer. The tune is Ferde Grofe’s “On The Trail.”

A Desmond Followup

For those still thinking about Paul Desmond, Iola Brubeck sent a lovely comment with a poem. To read it, click here.

Other Places: The Poetry Of Jazz

Devotees of jazz and poetry or of poetry about jazz will want to read Ed Leimbacher’s new entry on his I Witness blog. He wraps together several samples and a review of a poetry collection, and offers this:

Like any other art at its best, certain pieces about Jazz can make you “stop breathing” for a moment, reflecting emotion… thought… admiration… wonder.

To read the whole thing, see Jazzed, Everyone of Us. For a Rifftides archive post that touches on the topic, go here.

Rifftides Revisited: Jessica Williams

Occasionally, the Rifftides staff trolls the archives with an eye for older posts that hold up. Here is one from three years ago this Memorial Day weekend.

Time out of the writing crunch to hear successive Jessica Williams concerts was time well spent. Williams has taken a liking to The Seasons and returned there with her new trio for two evenings. On Saturday,Williams, bassist Doug Miller and drummer John Bishop played a Duke Ellington program. The repertoire, except for the infrequently heard calypso “Angelique,” was made up of sixteen of Ellington’s most familiar pieces. She opened with “C-Jam Blues,” closed with “Take the ‘A’ Train” and included “I Got it Bad,” “Do Nothing ‘Til You Hear From Me,” “Satin Doll” and…well, you get the idea. A routine Ellington lineup, perhaps, but Williams’ piano playing and her interaction with Miller and Bishop were far from routine.
Williams employed all of her virtuosity; the improbably long fingers executing piston keystrokes, the extended crossed hands passages, the stride left hand, the tremolos, the polytonality. Still, what captured the crowd was the swing, warmth and humanity of the music. Following a distracted start on “Prelude to a Kiss,” Williams called a halt and got sympathetic chuckles from the audience when she said, “If you can forgive others, you can forgive yourself.” She started the song again, soloed with passion and comped like a guiding angel behind a Miller bass solo that was a highlight of the concert. Williams’ concept for the evening was to program it as if the trio were playing for a dance. Indeed, she encouraged people to dance in the area between the front row of seats and the stage. Three couples did, rather tentatively, during “Mood Indigo,” but one of them told me later that the listening was so good, dancing was a distraction. That’s an interesting switch on the old complaint “Why don’t you play something we can dance to?”
Sunday, Memorial Day eve, Williams premiered a new composition, “Freedom Suite,” not related to the 1958 Sonny Rollins piece with the same name. She dedicated the six-movement work to veterans who died in all US wars from the American Revolution to Iraq and Afghanistan. Prefaced with a flag ceremony by women volunteers from a Veterans of Foreign Wars unit, the suite began with an other-worldly piano introduction to Miller’s bowing of “Taps,” its resonance supported by Williams’ impressionistic chords and the shimmering swell of Bishop’s cymbals. The movement called “Night Patrol” surged with modal intensity through piano and bass solos into a Bishop drum solo over an insistent pedal point.
Introducing the “Final Wish” section, Williams said, “I finished writing this one at 3:30 or 4:00 o’clock this morning. I wanted it to be perfect–and so far, it is.” She showed Bishop the bass part she had written for Miller, explaining the varied rhythms she wanted through a series of eight-bar sections. Bishop nodded and smiled, and with only that discussion for a rehearsal, the trio played the piece for the first time. It remained perfect.
Leaning into the piano, Williams stroked the strings like a harpist, setting up insistent three-four time that supported the dirge of the final movement, “Lament.” By way of her virtuosity through an unaccompanied solo that at times suggested an affinity for early McCoy Tyner, she managed to express optimism as well as sadness before Miller and Bishop rejoined her for a final statement of the theme.
This is an initial impression of a work I want to absorb further. We may all have that opportunity. The concert was recorded and could appear on a CD. If that happens, I’ll let you know.

So far, it hasn’t happened. Stay tuned.

Recent Listening: Jarrett And Haden

Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden, Jasmine (ECM). Keith Jarrett has had partnerships with powerful and distinctively different bassists; Gary Peacock since 1983 in the pianist’s Standards Trio; Palle Danielsson in the late 1970s in Jarrett’s European Quartet; Charlie Haden in his mid-70s quartet. For all of Peacock’s dazzling virtuosity and Danielsson’s rock-solid strength, Haden brought to Jarrett’s music something unique—deceptive simplicity rooted in his beginnings as a folk musician. Rather than the parsing of chords that dominates much of modern jazz bass playing, Haden’s lines relate directly to melodies. Often, his bass lines are less accompaniments or harmonic guides than melodies or melodic variations offered as commentaries. That might drive some pianists to distraction, but not Alan Broadbent of Haden’s Quartet West, and not Jarrett.
Thirty-three years after they last recorded together, the empathy between Jarrett and Haden retains its seductive strength in this collection of ballads. Haden’s deliberative playing underscores the beauty of “For All We Know,” “Goodbye,” “Where Would I Go Without You?” and other slow pieces. When the tempo increases slightly on “Body and Soul” and prominently on “No Moon At All,” he generates amiable forward motion, a runner on a relaxed jog finding the perfect slot . A pleasing aspect of Haden’s work has long been his ability to solo by creating melodies that approximate story-telling speech. There are instances of that on nearly every track here, notably in “Body and Soul.”
Jarrett’s lyricism seems stirred by Haden’s careful listening and note choices. He creates memorable solos throughout. There is fugue-like independence of left- and right-hand lines in his stimulating work in “No Moon At All.” He caresses the melody of Victor Young’s “Where Would I Go Without You,” then in his solo finds the blues implications in the tune’s harmonies. Following an unaccompanied introduction to “I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life,” he manages to be languorous and urgent at the same time. In the bridge of the second chorus of his solo on “Body and Soul,” he achieves a floating state approaching weightlessness. Jasmine is a satisfying addition to Jarrett’s discography.
Coming soon on Rifftides, a review of ECM’s retrospective release of early recordings by Jarrett’s Standards Trio, Steve Kuhn, Gary Burton with Chick Corea, and Eberhard Weber.

Scott Robinson

On a collection of horns that amounts to an instrument museum, Scott Robinson plays every style of jazz from traditional to free. One night he might be with the cornetist Jon-Erik Kelso playing music inspired by Bix Beiderbecke, the next anchoring the floating impressionism of Maria Schneider’s orchestra. His arsenal, dozens of instruments, ranges from the slide soprano sax to the contrabass saxophone. It includes the theremin, the normaphone and the bass marimba. He plays all of those and more, and plays them well. In a video attached to the online version of Will Friedwald’s portrait of Robinson in the Wall Street Journal, he demonstrates a few of his prized possessions. To read the article and see the clip, go here.
In Friedwald’s piece, Robinson mentions his love of the tenor saxophone, which he considers his main horn. Here he is, playing tenor last year with the amazing 87-year-old Frank Wess on the Gene Ammons-Sonny Stitt specialty “Blues Up And Down.” The rhythm section is Ilya Lushtak, guitar; Tal Ronen, bass; and Quincy Davis, drums. Robinson is the one on the right, in the conservative jacket.