Hey, 'Nineteen': Garth W. Caylor's instant classic

There didn't seem to be much risk involved in plunking down $21 for a copy of Nineteen +. A couple weeks back, my friend Stephen Buono tipped me off to this Wire news item concerning a book of interviews with jazz musicians that had recently been self-published by its author, Garth W. Caylor Jr., 50 years after its completion. (Caylor completed the manuscript in ’65 but shelved it after he was unable to find a publisher.) I took one look at the time frame, 1964–65, and the list of artists involved—Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Milford Graves and Steve Lacy are five of the 19 names—and knew that I needed to have this. With those artists on board, Caylor's book had to be at least interesting.

I'm about halfway through Nineteen +, and I'm comfortable labeling it as an essential jazz book. Off the top of my head, my personal short list in that regard would look something like:

Valerie Wilmer
As Serious as Your Life

Ben Ratliff
The Jazz Ear

A.B. Spellman
Four Lives in the Bebop Business

Arthur Taylor
Notes and Tones

Graham Lock
Forces in Motion

Lock's classic Anthony Braxton tome is the odd volume out there, in that it focuses on one artist. The rest of these books are compilations of sorts, where each chapter concerns a different artist or set of artists. Nineteen + is of the latter type. Among those listed above, Caylor's book probably most closely resembles Taylor's classic collection of artist interviews: Unlike with the Ratliff and Spellman books, the chapters here are short (about eight pages on average, and the book itself is small: a paperback just larger than pocket-sized), and unlike with Wilmer's, the author doesn't seem to have much of an agenda in mind. I say "much of" because he does seem to be attempting to get to the bottom of the "inside"/"outside" binary that was a hot-button issue in jazz at the time and which is still a source of occasional debate/commentary; the chapters on Zoot Sims and Al Cohn (they're heard from together here, as they often are on record) and Bill Evans contain some fascinating insights in that regard, e.g., Sims and Cohn's complicated stances on Coltrane (they admire his technique but seem to find his aesthetics abrasive).

Caylor is more or less reporting what he experienced and recorded, aiming not exactly for a portrait of each artist he visits (he interviews the majority—all?—of the musicians in their own respective homes) but for a sketch of their personality and philosophy, aesthetic and otherwise. He uses the Q&A format occasionally and quotes large, sometimes pages-long, blocks of the artists' words verbatim. But these aren't mere transcriptions. Caylor frames the conversations with his own prose, and the effort is beautifully unobtrusive, like an expert lighting job. (In the introduction, Caylor describes how, at the time he was compiling these interviews, he was working as an architect, and the elegant yet unassuming way he structures his chapters seems directly related to that career.) He offers just the right scene-setting details—starting his Jaki Byard profile, for instance, by describing an interaction between the pianist and his young son, or his Steve Swallow chapter thusly:

Steve Swallow lives among tables and chairs of wood, shelves of paperbooks, and shelves of spools of colored yarn above that, all the way to the ceiling because his wife weaves things. They serve coffee with chicory, I think, from cups and saucers of baked earth. There is a bass fiddle, a piano, a loom and some cats in the tall room.

Or even transcribing bits of phone conversations he overhears: serendipitously, Mingus happens to ring Byard during Caylor's interview of the latter, and Miles happens to call up Herbie Hancock while the author is visiting. ("Miles said, 'So you're gonna take what all the musicians say and put it in a book and get all the money for it'—is that right?")

The pieces are far shorter and less commentary-heavy than Calvin Tomkins's wonderful New Yorker artist profiles, but there's a similar kind of sensitive mind at work here. The writing is musical but not gaudy. Caylor also includes complementary quotes from various texts by authors that either come up directly in the conversations or whose work is relevant to the topics discussed in the interviews. Interestingly, he often lets these authors have the final word in a given piece. Art Farmer mentions Ravel, for example, so Caylor closes that chapter with several apropos 1930s quotes from the composer; Caylor and Swallow discuss Zen Buddhism, so the author appends an excerpt from D.T. Suzuki.

What strikes me is how freely Caylor gets these musicians to speak. The insights pour out. After reading each piece, I really do feel like I've spent an hour in the company of the artist in question. I've already dog-eared this book to death. A few excerpts:

[Playing with Paul Bley] was an overwhelming experience—I got physically sick afterwards—I stayed in bed for three or four days and thought and thought… Playing with Paul Bley was the first wholly musical experience I'd had—it wasn't recreational and it wasn't social. It had an awesome effect on me.
—Steve Swallow

So really Charles Mingus's band is about the only group I can think of that I could play for and be able to play every thing I know on piano.
—Jaki Byard

The kind of group I want is say a quintet where each piece is a composition by all five players. I want to get an interaction of sound caused by an interaction of minds. I want everybody to be playing together, not necessarily all the time, but maybe so. Maybe two guys will solo at once. Maybe more.
—Herbie Hancock

…[Going] to a museum clears my head—I get a lot of inspiration looking at pictures, and I don't make literal associations. I don't compare it to what I'm doing—it makes me feel much "braver" about my own playing and writing.
—Jim Hall

So you see what I mean. Caylor gets these artists talking about what matters, which is the music. If you, like me, have an endless thirst for this kind of primary-source interview material (the phrase "Musicians on music," which John Zorn employs in the subtitle of his Arcana volumes, seems apropos, although in Caylor's book, the musicians are just as often talking about literature or visual art), you're going to gulp this concise book down.

I should point out that the Milford Graves conversation is especially valuable. We're lucky to have a thorough documentation of Graves's current viewpoint, but I don't think I've ever read an interview with him from the mid-’60s, when he was making so many indelible contributions to jazz, drumming and music in general. The Graves interview is a torrent of ideas, free-flowing but absolutely coherent. Caylor sees a handwoven basket (presumably Native American, since he includes a picture of a Washoe basket in the text, one of many tastefully incorporated visual aids in Nineteen +) on the floor in Graves's home and asks about it. Graves replies:

It's sort of an environmental thing for me, first of all it makes me think of a snake, you know; it keeps my coordination together when I think about it. An object that I can look at for a while sort of helps me inside, edifies me, builds my mind and makes me comfortable.

Funny, because Graves drumming does all those things for me. At another point, Graves provides an eerily apt description of his musical asethetic:

…[My] thing is not to capture sound, you know. My feeling is just to move along with it, just to get into the sound, to make myself a part of it and just move along without making any stops.

I'm reading this book and I'm underlining incessantly—consuming these marvelous first-person insights in a state of joyous disbelief. For jazz people, the publication of Nineteen + is a major event. I'm confident that if it had come out 50 years ago, it would be held up as an all-time classic in the field. As far as I'm concerned, the book attains that status instantly. It's an invaluable work of artists-on-art scholarship—as WKCR taught me, the hierarchy goes 1) the music itself, 2) the words of the people who made it (i.e., the majority of Nineteen +) and 3) everything else—and my only wish is that there were several more volumes of Caylor's conversations to follow. Purchase immediately.

P.S. In terms of musicians-on-music, I've also become an avid fan of Joe Wong's drumcentric podcast, The Trap Set. Try the Drumbo, Dale Crover, Ndugu Chancler interviews.

Basra lives: RIP Pete La Roca

I'm not an authority on the work of drummer Pete La Roca (born Peter Sims), who, as Ethan Iverson, A Blog Supreme and Sonny Rollins have reported, passed away this past Monday. But I am a fan of his work. I remember some friends turning me on to Basra—La Roca's 1965 debut as a leader, and the only session he led for Blue Note during that period—in college, and it grabbed me hard. I've returned to the record periodically, and it's had the same effect every time. I spun it yesterday when I heard the news, and it seemed stronger than ever—dark, swirling, heady, raw but incredibly tender. The tones of the instruments are so present and unadorned; you feel like you're right there within the mix.

It's because of this kind of record that I get queasy when I see all-time "Best Jazz Albums" lists that stick to the same old narrow canon. Kind of Blue is a great album; I like A Love Supreme very much. But not only are there tons of respective Miles and Coltrane records that I love more, there are so many classics that you'd just never see on a list like this, records that might hit neophytes harder that the so-called staples. Basra is one of these records.



Re-listening yesterday, what struck me about Basra was its droney expanse, the patient way it constructs a mood and just lets it ride. Iverson used the word "folkloric" to describe La Roca's left hand, but I'd apply that term to the entire feel of this album. Listen to the title track, how it sprawls out, like an improvisatory incantation. The rhythm section brings out some of the freest, most speaking-in-tongues playing of Joe Henderson's career, not via commonplace fire (I think here of La Roca's astute critique of free jazz in the interview Iverson links to, e.g., "Free music is in a constant state of surprise and, consequently, presents no surprise at all.") but via hypnotic drift, an authoritative yet almost ghostly pulse, like a James Brown groove slowed way down so that the funk becomes merely implicit. The Henderson figure that starts at 4:43, this overblown, Spanish-sounding thing, just slays me; and then listen how he trails off into this writhing tail of a phrase. What I feel when I hear this saxophone solo is that it is a sort of conjuring on the part of the rhythm section, i.e., that these strange sounds are being drawn out of him by Sims, pianist Steve Kuhn and bassist Steve Swallow. Not to take any credit away from Henderson—just to say that this is a band discovering sound together in real time.

Listen around 5:37 as Sims begins to imply a backbeat feel, faint yet stealthily funky. Then into a kind of bass-drums joint solo, with La Roca limiting himself to hand work: snare rolls that remind me of Tony Williams and the occasional thunderous, Elvin-style tom thwack. But the dynamics and the groove are all his own; he's soloing, yes, but also protecting the pocket, riding the drone. When Henderson reenters at 8:55, the entire band sounds like it's in a stupor, hypnotized by La Roca's faint, earthy churn and Kuhn's eerie high-end textures. I really can't think of any other jazz like this, so engaged with the drone and the sprawl, the way-sublimated funk. And this vibe is no accident, heard on this track alone; it pervades the entire album. La Roca was in search of a mood here, and he nailed it. Blue Note albums, as wondrous as they tend to be, don't often feel fully coherent, holistic in this way, which is why a deliberate concept album like Wayne Shorter's The All-Seeing Eye (recorded just five months after Basra) seems like such an anomaly among the BN discography of that period. I think Basra deserves to be called a concept album as well; its concept is its sustained mood, the one that propels Henderson to an ecstatic trance state, sounding, to me, more unfettered and in-the-moment than on any other of his countless sessions.

La Roca does provide some clues to Basra's otherworldly mood in the aforementioned interview, citing how his two early records as a leader—the other is Turkish Women at the Bath, an interesting LP but not the intoxicating powerhouse that Basra is—were built around "ethnic themes." He cites "Basra" in particular as a Middle Eastern melody (the title comes from a city in Iraq), though it seems to be credited to La Roca himself in the various discographies. Does anyone know if this is a traditional tune of some sort?

The opening track on Basra, "Malagueña" (by Cuban pianist-composer Ernesto Lecuona) uses a very different rhythm than the title track—a classic, Elvin-y 6/8 swing feel—but the vibes of the two pieces are similar, and Henderson reaches that same place of ecstatic incantation. I love "Malagueña," dearly, but during my pass through Basra yesterday, the other track that stood out most prominently was "Lazy Afternoon." I'm not sure that it's possible for a ballad performance to conjure more mystery or more grace than this one does. It feels to me as though the entire quartet is dreaming the same dream, drifting along on the same cloud. Pieces like this, where you stop feeling the genre, the style and start feeling total mood immersion, are the ones that really sold me on jazz in the first place (Andrew Hill's "Black Monday" is another one that hits me this way) and the ones that still fuel my devotion. Listen to how La Roca's brushwork starts pushing ever so slightly harder at about 4:10, like a whisper growing more passionate without getting very much louder. And then by 4:50, back down to that hushed dream state, which sounds like it could last forever. That's how I think of Basra as a whole, as a reverie with no defined beginning or end. It's a sensation you step into, along with the players: a group trance, a collective prayer.

When I hear the record now, in light of the sad news, I imagine it as an ongoing present, where Kuhn and Swallow—both still with us—continue to coexist with the late masters Henderson and La Roca, tapping into that otherworldly flow. La Roca is gone, but Basra lives.

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*I recommend this brief take on Basra, from last August, by the outstanding metal drummer Aesop Dekker (Agalloch, ex-Liturgy), via his fine Cosmic Hearse blog. Dekker cites the "exotic, yet grave" feel of "Malagueña" and has this to say of "Basra": "The title track is an absolutely gorgeous landscape of sound, sultry, sexy, and altogether mysterious."

*Anyone heard this 1997 La Roca/Sims session, SwingTime? The samples sound really nice.