Bassist Eric Revis‘s second album for the Portuguese Clean Feed label, City of Asylum, was recently released. It’s a follow-up of sorts to Parallax, an album featuring saxophonist Ken Vandermark, pianist Jason Moran, and drummer Nasheet Waits. That was an interesting collision, given that Moran, Revis and Waits are all black and all East Coast post-bop masters who’ve worked with Branford Marsalis, Andrew Hill and many, many others (Waits is also the drummer in Moran’s Bandwagon trio); Vandermark, by contrast, is a white, Chicago-based free jazz blower who divides his time between the US and Europe, where he allies himself primarily with players like Peter Brötzmann (with whom Revis has also played), Mats Gustafsson, and Paal Nilssen-Love, among others. It didn’t work all the time, but Parallax had its moments, for sure.
City of Asylum shares neither personnel nor thematic commonalities with Parallax. It’s a piano trio date, featuring the bassist, Kris Davis on piano, and Andrew Cyrille on drums. Seven of its 10 tracks are improvisations—the other three are a version of Thelonious Monk‘s “Gallop’s Gallop,” a take on Keith Jarrett‘s “Prayer,” and “Question,” written by Revis.
The album’s first two pieces, “Vadim” and “Egon,” demonstrate both the potency of this trio and the risks of unmediated interaction. There’s a lot of potential here—Revis and Cyrille almost establish a groove, Davis almost creates a melody the listener can hang onto—and a tremendous amount of eruptive creativity: stabs and flurries from the keyboard, a thick and driving bass throb, delicately dancing cymbals and evocative taps on the toms. But “Vadim” ends without having gone anywhere, or taken the listener on a journey; it’s just distraction. And “Egon,” pointillist and frenzied, with Revis bowing the bass madly, is even more abstract and less welcoming, and has nothing to do with what’s come before—the group has started all over again, from nothing, and the listener must effectively do the same. When the classically Monkian melody of “Gallop’s Gallop” is the next thing heard, it’s hard to not feel relief wash over you. Even so, Davis strives mightily to dissect and scatter the piece, reducing it to its component notes as Revis and Cyrille pulsate and rattle, avoiding the churning, broken-beat swing that was so essential to Monk’s music.
The album continues to vacillate between freely improvised pieces which offer moments of great beauty, but little lasting impact, and composed pieces which do much more. “Sot Avast” has a churning, almost marching rhythm reminiscent of Julius Hemphill‘s “Dogon A.D.,” especially when Revis returns to bowing the bass, creating thick, skull-filling drones. The group’s version of Keith Jarrett‘s “Prayer” is a slowly unfurling flower, easily the disc’s most emotionally resonant moment, while Revis’s composition “Question” has a Monkish feel all its own, and the band swings through it in an abstracted but forceful manner, Davis offering shimmering ripples and hypnotic, repeated phrases from the piano. The title track, which closes the disc, might be the most surprising piece here; Revis plucks some of the highest notes the bass can offer, sounding almost like a violin at times, while Davis darts about the keyboard, notes falling like raindrops on a pond, and Cyrille barely brushes the toms, rumbling like far-off elephants. It’s more like chamber jazz than anything that’s come before, and it demonstrates the possibilities of improvisation, when the players are 100 percent in mental and emotional sync, better than anything else on City of Asylum. This is an album with peaks and valleys, but it’s definitely one of the most interesting piano trio releases of 2013.
This trio will be performing at the Vision Festival on Saturday, June 15 at Roulette (509 Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn). Full Vision Festival schedule here.
Tim Warfield is a tenor saxophonist who first emerged into the public eye in the early 1990s, as one of the featured players—along with Walter Blanding, James Carter, Herbert Harris and Todd Williams—on the Tough Young Tenors album Alone Together. As you’ll read below, that album turned out to be something of a novelty, and not the career-kickstarter the participants likely hoped.
Warfield ultimately made his debut as a leader in 1995, with the album A Cool Blue, on the Dutch label Criss Cross Jazz. He’s since made six more albums for Criss Cross, most recently this year’s Eye of the Beholder, and self-released Tim Warfield’s Jazzy Christmas this past winter. All of his records are firmly in the hard bop tradition, with the exception of 2008′s One for Shirley and 2010′s A Sentimental Journey, which were organ-driven albums that explored groove and balladry in equal measure. Warfield tends to work with a few musicians with whom he’s friendly and compatible; these include trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Terell Stafford, pianists Cyrus Chestnut and Orrin Evans (on whose Justin Time and Captain Black he appears), bassists Tarus Mateen and Rodney Whitaker, and drummer Clarence Penn.
In addition to recording and performing regularly, Warfield is an artist in residence at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, and an adjunct faculty member at Temple University. After the jump, an interview.
Many jazz albums are just collections of tunes, and that’s fine. But others are more conceptually unified than that—they may represent the exploration of a musician’s compositional theories, attempts to fuse music from diverse cultures, or something more. In our new feature, What’s the Big Idea?, we’ll periodically ask a musician to provide some background or context for an album we think needs it.
In this installment, we talk to guitarist Rez Abbasi, whose new album Continuous Beat is not only his first trio record, but is different from his previous releases in many other ways as well. It’s out today from Enja. We sent Rez seven questions about his album and his music, which he was kind enough to answer.
Your sound is very different on this record – what did you do differently, and why?
This is my first trio recording and I realized before doing it, why I never did one prior. The reason is because my ears get a little jaded with hearing the same texture throughout an album. I like more textural surprise and that’s one of the reasons I often use a fourth or fifth person in my groups…That way it gives me more colors to shape the music with. So when I was conceptualizing this trio, the idea came up of using some effects and live electronic manipulation in order to give the listener a wider listening experience. Furthermore, I only use the manipulation on the written melodies in order to give the solos a contrast and clarity with the various raw guitar sounds. So it is a trio but occasionally gives an illusion of being a larger group, or at least a quartet.
There are three non-originals (not including “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which we’ll talk about in question 3) on this record—one by Keith Jarrett, one by Gary Peacock, and one by Thelonious Monk. Why did you choose those three pieces, what did you do to make them your own, and how do they fit into the album’s overall concept?
Well firstly, these are some of my favorite musicians of all time. Secondly, I felt these pieces would be great in guitar trio especially because they were composed and played on piano. Thirdly, I had scheduled to play a concert with Paul Motian which was cancelled due to his health. Besides writing a few new tunes for this date, I wanted to do some tunes that were modern standards that I felt he would relate to. Monk, Jarrett and Peacock happened to be deeply affiliated with Mr. Motian.
As far as making them my own, I think by now, if I relate to any music that’s not composed by myself, it’s going to come across as my own merely through my playing and interpretation. More specifically, for this album, some of the effects I mentioned served to open up the tunes in even a more personal way. I actually created the electronic manipulations based on each arrangement of a tune, not as an after thought. So for instance, Jarrett’s “The Cure” would not have been chosen if it weren’t processed hand and hand with creating the effected sound and arrangement. It kind of all happened together.
Why close this album with “The Star-Spangled Banner”? And as before, what did you do to make it your own, and how does it fit into the album’s overall concept?
The album opens with an improvised piece based on an Indian Raga that I’ve had the opportunity to explore in my wife, Kiran Ahluwalia‘s group—she’s a professional Indian vocalist. This intro is bookended with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Both reflect my multicultural background as I’m an Indian/Pakistani-American. I was born in Pakistan and we moved to the states when I was four. My father was born in India but after partition moved to Pakistan. So it becomes this all-encompassing approach, an improvised piece based on Indian classical music and an arranged Western piece based on Western classical and jazz music. In between, there are hints of most everything else, which to me is modern music.
What specific challenges are involved in transposing a piece written on piano (e.g. the Jarrett or Monk compositions) to guitar?
I let the music dictate that and try not to think of the limitations of the guitar versus the piano. As mentioned before, the electric guitar offers the opportunity to electronically enhance the signal, and that’s what I took advantage of. Most compositions in modern history were written on the piano so it’s kind of a normal process to transfer things to other instruments.
How did you choose the backing musicians for this record, and why have you chosen to feature different personnel on each of your albums?
Each group is different because I write a variety of music. The trio couldn’t do the music I wrote for my previous album and vice versa. That’s not to say all the musicians couldn’t all play in either group, they could, it just means I hear a certain character and personality on some music and a different character on other music. Everyone I play with is an amazing musician, this is why I live in New York.
With this trio of bassist, John Hébert and drummer, Satoshi Takeishi, although we’ve played in various groups for over 15 years, we’ve never played as a trio, which is why it’s kind of special. With any group, it’s important to get members that correlate with your own vision, but it’s even more important in a trio. In a trio, the participants are always interacting so in order to get to the magic, everyone really needs to be on the same page.
This is your first album on Enja, after two albums on Sunnyside in 2010, and you’ve hopped from label to label frequently in the past—is that your decision, or the labels’? Discuss this to whatever degree of detail you’re comfortable with.
This is my second album for Enja. The first came out last year—Suno Suno, with my quintet with Rudresh Mahanthappa, Vijay Iyer, Johaness Weidenmueller and Dan Weiss. I feel like I’ve found a home with Enja. It takes time to build up to a label like Enja. The founder, Matthias Winckelmann, has become more selective with his output and he also doesn’t pigeon-hole himself in a style of jazz like so many other labels. We are planning on another release in 2013 for Invocation. The music is being prepared now.
Does this album represent a potential future path, or is it a one-off, the documentation of an experiment?
I have three groups that I lead so I would like to keep them as active as possible, although that’s not easy since the industry is usually interested in the group with the new album. None of the groups are one-offs but it does take time and patience to write inspired music for each and release new albums. If I could put out two albums a year, I would!
We’re heading into the home stretch with our countdown of the 50 Greatest Saxophonists…EVER!!! Here are #s 20-11, followed by a bonus list: Rudresh Mahanthappa picks his 5 favorite saxophonists!
20. PHAROAH SANDERS. Pharoah Sanders went from being one of the screamingest of the 1960s screamers (particularly when he was a member of John Coltrane’s final band in 1966 and 1967) to a more subtle, but still forceful, player in the early 1970s, as his large bands began to blend open-ended modal vamping with pan-African percussion and Indian drones, creating a globe-spanning spiritual clatter and roar that’s still some of the most unique and hypnotically fascinating “jazz” ever made. He got a little lost in the latter half of the decade, but never truly lost the fire, and when put into an interesting context, like his mid ’90s Bill Laswell-produced collaboration with North African Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania, The Trance of Seven Colors, can still blow the walls down. ESSENTIAL LISTENING: Live at the East and Village of the Pharaohs, neither among his best-known Impulse! records, but each containing some of his most emotionally potent playing.
19. JOHN ZORN. Instantly recognizable, John Zorn is not only a fiercely talented alto saxophonist capable of making the horn produce just about any sound he likes, at any tempo of his choosing; he’s also a skilled composer who can pastiche and collage his way from conceptual japery to genuine beauty. Marrying Ornette Coleman to hardcore punk (and not just on the album where he did exactly that, 1988′s Spy Vs. Spy), his language of squawks, screams and ultra-fleet bebop phrases is entirely his own, unmistakable and unforgettable. ESSENTIAL LISTENING: The Zorn discography is vast and sprawling, but he’s best heard in the context of some of his long-running bands, so: Naked City’s Complete Studio Recordings; Pain Killer’s Collected Works; Masada’s Vol. 1.
18. CHARLIE ROUSE. Best known for his decade-plus partnership with Thelonious Monk, particularly during the pianist’s 1960s tenure on Columbia Records, Rouse also worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine and Duke Ellington, but he made a few albums of his own as well. His big tone and fluid yet forceful lines made his playing instantly recognizable, and an ideal foil for Monk’s jagged and thumping approach to melody and rhythm; he slips phrases around the corners, ducking in and out of the band as it lurches forward, like a child running through a parade. At the same time, his voice on the horn is never tentative, and always strong, without ever tipping over into bar-walking bluster. ESSENTIAL LISTENING: Takin’ Care of Business, his debut under his own name, released on Jazzland in 1960 and pairing him with trumpeter Blue Mitchell and a rhythm section of pianist Walter Bishop, bassist Earl May and drummer Art Taylor.
17. ERIC DOLPHY. One of the very first jazzmen to veer sharply away from standard forms and into the uncharted territory of free play, Dolphy may have one of the most distinctive sounds of any avant-garde sax man, and was a divisive figure almost immediately. Before a far too early death overseas, Dolphy left behind a handful of fascinating recordings under his own name and multiple brilliant collaborations with John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, using his instrument to redefine space and time in a musical sense, inject atonal and modal developments in concert music into a jazz framework, and make the saxophone into an entire army of sounds and not just a single rank-and-file soldier. ESSENTIAL LISTENING: Out to Lunch is Dolphy’s finest recording, and unfortunately, his last. Its alarming leaps, squawks, dances and flows give an indication of just how amazing his music might have become had he continued in that direction.
16. MARION BROWN. This Georgia-born alto saxophonist made his recorded debut on John Coltrane’s Ascension, and worked with many other key figures of the ’60s avant-garde, including Bill Dixon and Anthony Braxton. His music delved deep into the roots of jazz and precursor forms, from blues to the rawest sort of back-country folk as well as African and Caribbean rhythms, and he could veer wildly from far-out blowing to tender ballad murmurs. ESSENTIAL LISTENING: Geechee Recollections and Sweet Earth Flying, recently reissued as a single disc. Folk meets poetry meets free jazz in a pastoral dream world.
15. JOSEPH JARMAN/ROSCOE MITCHELL. While each of these two men has recorded impressively and at length as a leader, they’re best heard as part of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the collective that bridged gaps between all eras of jazz, from New Orleans polyphony to free skronk, and funk, soul, pure unfettered improvisation and pretty much anything and everything else you could ever file under “black music.” Mitchell’s dry, intellectual rigor (occasionally leavened with a weird, almost alien sense of humor) was perfectly paired with Jarman’s Buddhist openness to any sound. ESSENTIAL LISTENING: Les Stances A Sophie, a movie soundtrack that’s one of the Art Ensemble’s funkiest, rockingest, and most experimental albums, all at once.
14. COLEMAN HAWKINS. What Louis Armstrong did for the trumpet, Coleman Hawkins did for the tenor saxophone. He was there at the beginning (1924-25), setting the rules and cutting records that would influence generations after him. His harmonically complex, hard sound was basically the sound of the swing era, and even when bop took over, he became an important bandleader, hiring young players like Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Max Roach as sidemen in the 1940s. He’s also credited with the first unaccompanied sax solo, on “Picasso,” from 1948. ESSENTIAL LISTENING: The Essential Sides 1929-1939, a four-CD box including over 100 tracks; despite the earliness of these recordings, Hawkins’ style was already quite fully formed.
13. FRED ANDERSON. A testimony to the power of localism and perseverance, Anderson’s instantly recognizable tenor style wasn’t his sole contribution to jazz; from the 1970s to the 2000s, he ran the Velvet Lounge, a club in his native Chicago that hosted and husbanded the city’s avant-garde scene. His decades-long relationship with drummer Hamid Drake birthed some of the most swinging, bluesy free jazz albums in American history. ESSENTIAL LISTENING: 2 Days in April, a double-disc set documenting the first gigs by a group featuring Anderson, fellow saxophonist Kidd Jordan, bassist William Parker, and Drake.
12. WAYNE SHORTER. Shorter’s career, spanning seven decades, may be the most diverse in jazz outside of his former boss Miles Davis, bridging hard and post-bop into modal, progressive, pop and fusion, and he left a mark in every style. Primarily known today as a skillful and thoughtful composer, he’s also an excellent player, with sneaky, insinuating runs that keep his songs moving. The mere fact that he’s so adept at translating his own material to performance is a testament to his ability—nobody plays Wayne Shorter like Wayne Shorter. ESSENTIAL LISTENING: Speak No Evil, a 1965 release on Blue Note with a devilishly good band, is a great place to see Shorter’s transition from bop to avant-garde take shape.
11. DAVID S. WARE. It could be said that David S. Ware was the tenor saxophonist of the 1990s. Though he got his start back in the loft jazz scene with the trio Apogee and a mid ’70s stint with Cecil Taylor, he didn’t truly hit his stride until forming his own quartet. His massive, leonine tone and utterly disciplined mastery of phrasing and harmonics, which arose out of the language of Sonny Rollins but journeyed far out into realms of post-Ayler, post-Sanders cosmic exploration, made him an awe-inspiring live act. His studio albums, though often extraordinarily powerful, rarely captured his full majesty. In the wake of recent health problems, he’s become a more introspective, spiritually questing improviser, though he can still blow the walls down when he feels like it. ESSENTIAL LISTENING: Live in the World, a three-CD set documenting three mid-2000s concerts with three different drummers; Live in Vilnius, a double LP capturing the quartet in full flight on its final European tour.
RUDRESH MAHANTHAPPA’S 5 FAVORITE SAXOPHONISTS
CHARLIE PARKER. The Savoy Recordings changed my life. On a bad day, Bird sounded better
than most folks do on their best days.
JOHN COLTRANE. The original Impressions album is a beautiful study in modern approaches to
improvisation. I always go back to Trane for inspiration.
BUNKY GREEN. An underground hero of the alto saxophone who conscientiously developed a new vocabulary and a new voice worthy of study by generations to come.
GARY BARTZ. Gary sings the truth every time the horn touches his lips.
STEVE COLEMAN. Quite possibly the most important alto saxophone player of the last 20+ years.
