Lately (11/3/2018)

*I can't stop listening to Peter Brötzmann and Heather Leigh's new Sparrow Nights (out now on the prolific and consistently impressive Austrian label Trost), which I wrote up for Rolling Stone's weekly new-release column (scroll down to near the bottom). So many improv releases are simply recordings of gigs, and those have their place, but as I've written on here before, this music also deserves the proper studio treatment. The Brötzmann/Leigh duo, which I had the pleasure of hearing live in 2017 and which now qualifies as a proper band after several years of consistent performance and live recording, receives that here. I haven't heard, and probably never will hear, every Peter Brötzmann album, but I've heard a whole bunch of them, and for me, this one without question ranks near the top of the pile. Heart-wrenching and achingly desolate music — some kind of spooky ambient blues that sounds like it could go on forever, and maybe has been. It feels like Brötzmann has been waiting decades for a collaborator who could help him zero in on this particular zone of his playing.

Note: for background and context, I highly recommend this 2016 video interview with the duo.

*There is a major new Charles Mingus live box set out. For somewhat obvious reasons (e.g., no jazz artist enjoys Coltrane's level of quasi-religious icon-hood, which only seems to increase with time, a topic explored in depth in Ben Ratliff's masterful Coltrane book), this hasn't been remotely as well-publicized as, say, Coltrane's "Lost Album," but honestly it's probably afforded this listener even greater musical pleasure. My RS review goes into the reasons why.

*Clutch have been one of my favorite bands for going on 25 years. I reviewed their new album a little while back, but I'm glad I was also able to see a show on their current tour, because, as has always been the case, you can never get the full Clutch story from the records. This piece is my heartfelt tribute to a personal fave that I'm happy to say has become a bona fide institution.

Man of (more than) words: Thank you, Nat Hentoff

"'Man of Words' is, I'm told by Booker [Little], dedicated to this writer. Whether the dedication is pejorative or not, the piece may indicate. Actually, it is Booker's description of the writing process. One begins with an appallingly blank sheet of paper and a few ideas. The writer is seldom positive about how the piece will develop, and after rereading what he's already done, he's spurred — sometimes — to go forward. Eventually, a high (or a crisis) point is reached when the writer know he's solved the problem and the piece will work out. The rest is embellishment, resolution or exhortation. Although there has been a considerable amount of fiction writing about music, such as Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, this work to my knowledge is one of the rare examples of a musician describing writers in musical terms. Booker's performance is an impressive display of sustained invention — and sustained clarity of line and feelings." —Nat Hentoff, from the liner notes to Booker Little's Out Front

I'm not a Nat Hentoff expert. Outside of his extensive liner-notes catalog, which any jazz fan knows well, I can't say I'm that familiar with his body of work. But I have to put down a quick note of gratitude for the series of recordings he produced in the early '60s for the Candid label — and more specifically for Out Front, which is simply my favorite jazz album of all time. It's very possible that this masterpiece would not have existed without Hentoff.  Also from the liner notes:

"I had been impressed by Little's playing, first on records and then in a series of night club appearances with Max Roach, because of his strong-lined lyricism and highly individual, thoughtful conception. His originals and arrangements for Roach were also uniquely free of ornamentation and were directly emotional. Finally, I asked Booker to write and organize an album of his own with complete choice of side men. The result is the fullest realization so far on records of Booker's scope as a writer and a player."

And, as Little would die only six months after sessions for this album concluded, at the shockingly young age of 23, Out Front would stand for all time as that fullest realization of what he was capable of. (Booker Little and Friend, a.k.a. Victory and Sorrow, the one post–Out Front studio LP Little made under his own name, is a strong record but not, to my ears, the immortal classic that Out Front is.)


To me, it says a lot that Little would dedicate a piece to Hentoff. Let alone a piece of such profound emotional depth. "Man of Words" is, simply, a complete and utter killer, a dirge-paced shot of pure pathos. (Any experienced writer will know well that feeling of facing, as Hentoff puts it, "an appallingly blank page," and though I can't say that a writer's private anguish is the first thing I think of when I hear the piece, I find it pretty damn fascinating that Little felt so moved as to musically illustrate that sensation!)

Phil Schaap once told me that Little learned he had terminal illness between the two sessions that produced Out Front (on March 17 and April 4, respectively, of '61). "Man of Words" was, perhaps unsurprisingly, recorded at the latter of the two. Is that terrifying moment at 3:45, where the band rests and Little fills the resulting abyss with two searing yelps — absolutely one of the handful of most intense musical events I've ever beheld on a record — really an embodiment of what the trumpeter perceived to be the writer's fear and uncertainty? Or is it a cry for help in the face of his own impending mortality? A little of both? Either way, I mean, Jesus... you don't hear that kind of crushingly naked emotion captured on tape that often.

(N.B. Little's own words from Hentoff's liners: "My own feelings about the direction in which jazz should be are that there should be much less stress on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content, on what might be termed humanity in music and the freedom to say all you want." A-fucking-men, sir.)

The rest of the album is, of course, a masterpiece. "Moods in Free Time" is staggering and, in my mind, basically unparalleled as an example of episodic small-group composition and arrangement. Another mega-dirge section in this piece inspiring a volcanic Eric Dolphy eruption, one of his most violent on record. And Roach's monumentally badass drum break leading back into the head. Just a phenomenally assured and personal sound oozing out of every pore of this recording. I thank Hentoff from the bottom of my heart for clearing a path by which this creative act could occur and be documented for all time.

And of course the rest: Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor and Buell Neidlinger's New York City R and B, Jaki Byard's Blues for Smoke, the fascinating Newport Rebels comp. Nat Hentoff was right there in the mix at this crucial jazz moment. I'm not trying to elevate his role above that of the musicians; I'm just saying that his behind-the-scenes role was pivotal. He clearly believed in what was going down in jazz, specifically in the mecca of NYC, at that time, and he wasn't going to let potential masterworks slip through the cracks. (I doubt very much that many others were lining up to arrange carte blanche record dates for, say, Cecil Taylor and Steve Lacy in 19-freakin'-60.)

So, yes, critic, columnist, commentator, "man of words," call Nat Hentoff what you will. But it's clear that he was a guy who made serious real-world moves on behalf of the art that he so dearly loved. And for that, we all owe him big time.

Not sweating it: The George Adams / Don Pullen Quartet

There is a great struggle in jazz, or at least in the discourse surrounding it, between the imperatives of art and entertainment. In learning about bebop, we discover that it represented the point when jazz broke away from its genial "society" function, music for dancing, and became something self-consciously radical, avant-garde. The story goes that hardbop swung jazz as a whole back toward the popular pole and that Ornette, Cecil, Trane and others re-radicalized the music and led the way toward the gritty '60s.

After that comes the largely uncanonized period that I never read much of any value about until the Great '73–'90 Revolution spearheaded by Douglas, Iverson, Smith and others, and chronicled/rubber-stamped by Chinen, which has guided and shaped my jazz listening during the past decade.

We're coming up on 10 years since "'73–'90" really took hold, not to mention 10 years still I started this blog, and I'm still getting my head around this period. What a vast goldmine there still is to hear. (I feel like I could spend a lifetime just studying the Black Saint and Soul Note catalogs, to say nothing of ECM.) I bought a used copy of the George Adams / Don Pullen album Breakthrough the other day for $3 at Black Gold in Carroll Gardens and started mulling that fact all over again.

I've since gone a bit mad for this group, which Steve Smith namechecked in his '73–'90 roundup above. I'd heard bits and pieces and always knew they were there, waiting for me, but never really dove in, until now. I'm not necessarily surprised by what I'm hearing, so much as delighted. This isn't a hard band to get one's head around. Much like the best work by the group's patron saint — Mingus [see note following this post], of course, the former employer of Adams, Pullen and drummer Dannie Richmond, who make up the Adams/Pullen 4tet along with bassist Cameron Brown — the appeal of the music is very much on the surface. Maybe more than any other, this band represents one thing that seemed to happen in jazz in the '70s and '80s, which is that the music's various factions and substyles — as reflected in the whole art v. entertainment discourse cited above — all just seemed to sort of swirl together. In the work of Adams, Pullen, Richmond and Brown, I see a kind of rolling up of the sleeves, a notion that we've got all this music to draw on — not just decades of jazz and blues, but centuries of classical music, which are going to be on the table anytime you've got a pianist as versatile and virtuosic as Don Pullen on the bandstand — and the gig's coming up in a few hours and we'd be fools, and fools with much more time on our hands than we actually have, to sort of chop it up and categorize, classify and segregate it. In other words: let's play.

The Adams / Pullen band was not sweating it, and by "it," I mean the idea of what jazz is for. This music bellows, yawps, if you want to get Whitman-y, which I think is appropriate given this band's lusty abandon, their mix of fun and thrust and potency and vitality. What jazz is for is for playing. You get up there and you dig in and you make something happen, and all the ideas and currents just sort of course through you.

Simply put, you should set aside an hour and watch the whole video above, a complete set by this band at a Cologne club in 1986. The opening blues is just pure sweaty pleasure — I love Adams's presence on the mic — but check out what happens from about 20:00 on. Richmond sits down for a smoke, and it's Don Pullen Master Class time. He has a lot of places he wants to take the music, but he's careful to leave a breadcrumb trail, a way in for the attentive listener. The music sparkles and swoops, quiets, swells, reaches some kind of ecstatic avant-barroom frenzy around 24:00, scribbling, flurrying. Out come the sides of the hands, the elbows. Richmond wades fearlessly into the shark-infested waters around 26:30, and in one of those moves that seems straight out of the Mingus playbook — when you bring the rhythm section back in after a break and just start burning/churning — he, Brown and Pullen effortlessly shepherd the music into ass-kicking uptempo bop territory. Adams digging in, throwing a "Rhythm-a-Ning" quote and then blasting off into an indescribably nasty and glorious duo with Richmond. Jazz rarely sounds rawer or better to me than during this kind of stripped-down sax/drums episode, perfected of course by Trane and Elvin, and Adams and Richmond put their own stamp on it here. Adams is a fountain of Monk quotes, throwing out "Round Midnight," "Well You Needn't" and others, while maintaining a molten post-Coltrane flow.

This is what I mean about the abolishment of "school" or faction or sub-movement. You marinate in the music your entire life — think about Don Pullen doing this with Milford Graves in '66 and this (on organ) with Charles Williams five years later — and by the time you've paid your dues and you're in the mature phase of your career, as Adams, Pullen, Richmond and — to a lesser extent at this stage — Brown obviously had and were, you're just strapping on the horn, or sitting down at the drums or piano and just sort of letting it rip. It's the perfect marriage of abandon and authority, and that's what I hear in Pullen/Adams/Brown/Richmond. It's a concept that again flows straight out of Mingus, a man whose bigger-than-big tent encompassed jazz, American music — music, period — from its earthiest to its most ethereal. (See also: the Total Piano school exemplified by obvious Pullen forebear Jaki Byard; Roland Kirk's irreverent, soul-drenched avant-gardism.) It must be stated that the Adams/Pullen 4tet also had no qualms about laying claim to a more-tepid but undeniably enjoyable aesthetic middle ground, often complete with after-work-margaritas-appropriate flute, such as that which shows up here around the 2:00 mark.

Back to the concert above, around 44:00, where Dannie Richmond is laying down this fiercely funky Bo Diddley gone bebop gone breakbeat groove. (A stock word such as "infectious" seems almost profane in reference to such a display — the plain fact is that you cannot sit still when Dannie Richmond is playing drums.) At this particular moment, it's party time in the Pullen/Adams universe. A time for revelry, a time for exuberance, a time for butt-kicking, a time for precision. A time, again, for the decimation of category. The buffet is open and it's all-you-can-eat and Fine Dining and Down Home are equally represented. It is the mid-'80s, but, say, the '40s and the '60s, when aesthetic battles were being fought in the shadow of racial and cultural ones, are far from forgotten. In fact they're the immediate context for much of what's happening here, the source of the vocabulary that courses, unfiltered, out of the instruments. In other words, the struggle that was so apparent in the Coltrane Years now looks, and sometimes sounds, deceptively similar to "mere" entertainment, literal bar-band music, but spend any amount of time with the Adams/Pullen 4tet and you feel a deep pride, a cocky defiance, a profound purpose radiating from the group. We're still in As Serious as Your Life territory.

These men banded together at a time when all jazz could be vernacular music, especially in Europe, where musicians from Sidney Bechet to Ben Webster to Albert Ayler to the Art Ensemble of Chicago had received such a warm and loving welcome, when — at least in the best of scenarios, such as the Pullen/Adams band, a working group that led a long and fruitful collective life — aesthetic debate took a backseat to "Let's just play." This is jazz that needs no translation, jazz not in a fallow, wayward period, but, maybe, jazz at a summit, jazz with nothing to lose, jazz which not even the most faction-conscious listener could argue with — jazz at its actual free-est (not bounded even by "free jazz") and most voracious.

I could imagine Ray Charles sitting in with this band, or Cecil Taylor, or Sonny Rollins, or David S. Ware, or Jason Moran, or Pat Metheny, or Ornette, or Charlie Haden, or B.B. King, or Dr. John. It's the whole thing on one plate, and no one's sweating it. What they're sweating is the spirit and the feeling and the communication and the fun and the severity and the madness and inspiration of the moment. (Just like Mingus taught them.)

It feels quintessential somehow: not the "best" that jazz ever got, because what does that even mean, but, just maybe, the broadest and most bighearted.

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Note: It occurs to me that the Adams/Pullen band was to Mingus what Old and New Dreams was to Ornette, a sort of self-governed franchise operation (different in mission, I sense, from an explicit tribute band like Mingus Dynasty, though I'm not familiar with that catalog) in the absence of the figurehead, which in some cases seemed, almost, to achieve a liberation and depth unavailable to the bands in which those figureheads themselves featured, perhaps at the very slight expense of focus and piquant eccentricity.

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*Here's a big playlist I made of all the Adams/Pullen I could find on Spotify, including the fascinating duo album Melodic Excursions. This makes for a hell of a shuffle. As far as the individual albums, I'd love to hear people's favorites, but Life Line really grabbed me on a first listen, in addition to Breakthrough, which was reissued here. Incidentally, Ehsan Khoshbakht has some sharp thoughts on the video above here.

*A Dannie Richmond video interview, which predates this group, but nevertheless seems relevant and extremely valuable.

*If anyone has a firm handle on the Don Pullen solo discography, as well as other collective efforts like Warriors, I am, again, all ears. I only know bits and pieces.

*Same goes for George Adams. I'm fascinated by Phalanx, with the incredible lineup of James Blood Ulmer, Sirone and Rashied Ali, but I'm just starting to explore in earnest. This band seems to marry Adams's post-Mingus aesthetic to Blood's post-Ornette one.

*I'm just starting to get a firm handle on the mid-'70s Mingus period that directly birthed the Adams/Pullen band. This is an extraordinary bootleg, in which both Adams and Pullen are both fully on board and very much off the leash.

*Great Don Pullen interviews, from '76 and '80, respectively. Note complex feelings toward Cecil Taylor: admiration tinged with resentment at the comparisons constantly made between them. '76: "We appreciate each other, we dig each other as people." Then, in '80, re: CT's infamous concert w/ Mary Lou Williams: "I am furious that he climbed on the stage, in one of the grandest music-halls in America, with this great lady, this great lady of jazz, aged sixty-eight, in order to reduce her to nothing."

There's also this, from '80: "If I played popular music at this time, it was because I needed to survive." I do hear, as I've indicated above, if not a "poppy" aspect to the Adams/Pullen 4tet, at the very least a populist or vernacular one, which I feel accounts for so much of the fruitful creative tension the band had to offer. Apparently, though, DP drew a sharp distinction between these currents, at least when it came to his overall career arc.

I claim no authority on this matter, but watch Don Pullen groove at the keys around 2:15 here and tell me he wasn't an artist deeply invested in the idea of music that could both enlighten and entertain.