First is reposting this piece in honor of the great jazz pianist Don Pullen who died 20 years ago today.
Born on Christmas Day, jazz pianist Don Pullen inspired something like faith among those who witnessed his miraculous live performances.
I got initiated back in the 80s when I was getting overpaid dispatching limos for lawyers. After an evening shift, I’d often take a free car to catch a late set at Downtown jazz clubs where I’d sniff the Cointreau and swing alone with masters like Tony Williams, Jackie Maclean, Wayne Shorter, Betty Carter, Benny Carter, Max Roach, Hank Jones, Richard Davis, David Murray, McCoy Tyner. And Don Pullen who broke me out of my solitary lush life. Shaken and stirred, rolling on his rhythms like a jerking boat, I felt at sea. (But not entirely without historical coordinates since I’d been Experienced, Clash-ed and Afro-popped.) As Pullen action-painted what was dancing in his head, he made me want to socialize rather than settle for individuating pleasures provided by his jazz peers – I had to share the shock of this new music. Pullen was the one jazz artist I pressed all my intimates to hear live. I loved getting gone with them as he’d sound out of their world – hammering the keys to their hearts with the backs of his fingers, fists and elbows.
You can catch Pullen in the act of creation on the DVD Mingus at Montreux (1975) which documents a performance by a small group that includes drummer Dannie Richmond and saxophonist George Adams (who went on to make their own band with Pullen and bassist Cameron Brown after Mingus died). When Mingus turns the beat around (after smoking a cigar) in “Sue’s Changes”, Pullen takes the pick-ed up pace as a dare. Acting on his free jazz impulse, he swirls up a whirlwind. The scene/sound of Pullen’s fine heedlessness on the DVD has something in common with another image – “more live-action film than snapshot” – relayed by a jazz fan replaying “what I see when I hear Don Pullen:”
Don is at the piano playing with the repertory band Mingus Dynasty…A few minutes into the piano solo on “Haitian Fight Song,” something amazing happens. Pullen begins throwing down a series of ferocious right-hand clusters — one of his trademarks — when, shockingly, he dislocates a finger. In obvious pain he attempts to shake the throbbing digit back into place, all the while continuing the tonal barrage with his left hand. Without hesitation, Pullen completes his musical statement, then steps off stage to address the injury. This odd choreography comes off so matter of fact-ly, I get the distinct impression he’s done this dance before.1
No doubt. But Pullen had so much time in his hands. Mingus at Montreux shows him treating the Tradition gentle when the band does Mingus’s tribute to Lester Young, “Good-By Pork Pie Hat.” Pullen lights the Montreux night with soft cascades of notes that float out over Lake Geneva before falling down around Mingus’s bass tones – a tour de douceur that hints why Mingus once grabbed a microphone during another supremely tender Pullen piano solo and shouted at some loud college kids in a club: “Shut up out there. This cat’s playin’ his ass off.”
Stanley Crouch understood that back in 1984 when he pointed out:
Pullen is able to get effects that resemble what one would expect of a percussive harp, since he has invented for himself ways of stroking the keyboard for splashes of ideas that nearly fuse the notes together, making his variations into bursts of sound… As you listen to Pullen you become aware of how much he knows about giving each note the color he wants it to have. If he wants a note to ping, it pings; when he wants a floating, song-like quality, the note rises from the string and curves in the air.
Pullen left his fans hanging forever when he died (young) in 1995. His music wasn’t widely known while he was alive so it was gratifying when NYC’s Jazz Gallery honored him in 1999 with an exhibit and solo concert series (“From Gospel to the Globe”) that affirmed Pullen was the piano player of his generation. (The Gallery’s shows seconded Stanley Crouch’s judgment – “Pullen has probably done more than any other musician associated with the so-called avant-garde to make the most adventurous harmonic combinations and flat out blocks of clustered notes…work within the forms of songs.”) I can’t rate Pullen as I’m no jazz expert but for years I’ve felt that I’ve owed him a piece (at least). My impulse to finally pay that debt now has something to do with the recent death of my Dad who was a writer first but always a jazz piano player too. Sharing music gave us something beyond words. Still, I’m not all clear about why his passing has sent me back to Don Pullen. One reason I’m writing this is to find out.
But I won’t require immediate indulgence on that score. My first Pullen-inspired revelation isn’t all about me and/or my pop.
Surfing the web last summer, I came across a German website devoted to musical file-sharing where I heard a snatch of a 17 minute track titled “Goree” that Pullen composed for Well-Kept Secrets – an album he made in the 70s as co-leader of The Beaver Harris/Don Pullen 360 Experience. Goree is a small island off the coast of Senegal at the westernmost point of Africa that was central to the slave trade for centuries. Hundreds of thousands of slaves (over hundreds of years) suffered through their final days before the Middle Passage in dungeons on the island. I visited it once with my wife and her family. And the sample from Pullen’s “Goree” made me want to hear how he’d handled the weight of the island’s past.
Well-Kept Secrets isn’t an easy record to find. The German webmaster at the file-sharing site didn’t respond to my online enquiries. But a few weeks later I learned longtime jazz journalist Howard Mandel (who wrote liner notes for a number of Pullen’s 90s cds) had a copy of the album and he graciously agreed to let me have a listen to “Goree.” When I knocked on the door of his office in the Village, Mandel seemed ready to get on with his business (though he was polite). He hadn’t heard “Goree” in decades – he vaguely recalled a “blow-out” — but the track turned out to be something more considered. When the awe-full music filled up the space between us, we both faded back in time. I recalled my Senegalese mother-in-law looking at the grandest Baobab tree on Goree with an animist’s eye, wondering what it had witnessed…
Pullen’s composition jumps off with a puzzling jingle jangle meant (I realized when it rang my bell again later in the track) to evoke chimes on slaves’ chains that Goree’s wardens – Portuguese and Dutch and English and French – used to monitor their captives’ movements. Pullen solos into the mix, serenely scaling up and down the keyboard until those hellish bells give his melody snake an ugly twist. That tolling underscores how slaves were regarded as live-stock and “Goree” becomes a sort of horrific pastoral. It plays like an aural equivalent of “The Fall of Icarus” – the Bruegel painting depicting a tingling spring land-and-seascape “concerned with itself” as the mythic figure of Icarus drowns quite unnoticed off in the corner. Though there’s more iron in Pullen’s ironic approach to the nature of indifference because he’s trying to get real about obliviousness on Goree – an actual blood-and-treasure island. Green and hilly like Bruegel’s idealized image of the natural world, it’s a pretty, eerie place dotted with stone steps and ramparts that offer expansive views of the Atlantic and the city of Dakar back on the mainland. A protected, sandy beach with wavelets calls out to small children to come lose themselves by the sea…
The slave-masters found themselves a sweet spot. Though it’s hard to imagine anyone taking the evening breeze or sipping their Claret while around the corner or (in some slave “castles”) under trap doors in dining rooms, starving Africans were locked into cells waiting to be jettisoned through “the Door of No Return.”
When the bells start tolling again after Pullen’s first masterful solo in “Goree”, I thought of Morgan Freeman’s fearful moment in Amistad – Freeman plays a respectable Northern “Negro” – sure of himself and his attainments – who almost loses it when he goes down into the hold of the empty slave ship and bumps into the chains of the departed. Once “Goree’s” chimes of slavery fade, Philly International style horns and a marching beat put me in mind of another pop moment that may well have had resonance for Pullen and his band-mates back in the 70’s. “Goree” seems to offer an avant-garde echo of Gamble & Huff’s “Ship Ahoy”– the audacious side-long “conscious” song about the slave trade those R&B auteurs composed for a hit O-Jays album in 1973. It’s not a stretch to think Pullen (who played organ in R&B combos throughout the 60s) or some other pop-wise head in the 360 band picked up on Gamble & Huff’s liberation orchestrations.
Pullen brings home the message in his own Black Atlantic music by playing with oceanic feeling on top of drums that snap like whips coming down. That sound is muffled though. You have to try to hear it. To get down with it as Amiri Baraka might say, instead of elevating “the intellectual process above emotions.”
Baraka has visited Goree with his family and his comments on that experience provide deep background for Pullen’s composition:
My son Ras and I went up there in Goree…and when we went to the slave castle and we sat up there in this dungeon with the door closed and everything, tears started coming out of our eyes. The two of us sitting there, father and son, not saying a word, just sitting there crying. Why? I don’t know. It’s just that feeling is too strong, it’s too strong…You just sit there and suddenly, psychologically you begin to feel it on you. It’s something. You don’t want that but you start feeling it. I remember we came out of there crying and when we came out in the open, it was a group of French tourists walking towards us, and Ras says to me, what they want? What do these White people want? That thing grips you. When you come into that, when you actually come close to slavery itself–I don’t mean stories of it, but when you actually get close to it, it will do something to you. No doubt about it. They got a hole in the wall, the door of no return and if you couldn’t make it they would just kick you aside into the ocean. A lot of the people had never seen the ocean, you know, because they were from inland. They had seen lakes. They might jump out there and think they could swim it, might think it was a lake, but that was the Atlantic Ocean and the sharks be circling down in there. Now when you conceive that and conceive that there were people upstairs over the prison, who lived there, who had a little hatch, a trap door in their floor where they could look through there and check on the slaves, you understand what I’m saying? You’ve got to be a cold mamajamma to do that. People down there [makes screaming sounds] screaming and what not, and you can pick up the door, you have your dinner and sh– upstairs and you could pick up the door and look down and see what was happening with that, well, you can’t have no feeling with that. Feeling has to be abolished. That’s why I’m saying they make that separation between the intellectual process and emotion. But I say, if you can’t feel you can’t think. That’s my feeling about that. That’s why we ask philosophers every morning, how you feel?
“Goree’s” protest against Oblivion Wind was one of Don Pullen’s numberless answers to that question. His musical conceptions always embodied felt responses. (Max Gordon, longtime owner of the Village Vanguard, once said of Pullen’s 80’s band – The Don Pullen-George Adams Quartet – “Whatever it is, at least they play with anger. I don’t go to sleep when they’re up there.”) Pianist D.D. Jackson’s recollection of his first encounter with Pullen underscores there was no disassociation of sensibility in the man’s music or mind:
Pullen was conducting a master class where he proceeded to turn the entire audience, many of whom were distinguished jazz teachers and performers as well as students, completely on its head in terms of how they thought about music. Here was somebody who instead of, for example, focusing on which scale sounded good with which chord, and on the right way to approach a voicing, was dealing with “concept” on an almost cosmic level. He talked about the relationship between playing “outside” versus “in”, and how you could combine the two, not just over time during a solo, but often at the same time, between the two hands.
Jackson recalled that master class at a memorable celebration of Pullen’s life that took place at St. Peter’s Church on June 11, 1995. There were performances by dancers (including Garth Fagin’s company), singers like Amina Claudine Myers and Abbey Lincoln (whose “Down Here Below” left us perfectly bereft and dying for more), groups led by horn-men (Howard Johnson and David Murray) and pianists (Geri Allen and John Hicks), Pullen’s own African-Brazilian Connection with D.D. Jackson sitting in on piano. There were also spoken tributes that echoed Jackson’s without being too pious. One of Pullen’s sons explained his pop’s Zennish method of piano instruction, remembering ruefully how Pullen let him play one note in their first lesson. Amiri Baraka, who’d been tight with Pullen ever since their days in the Black Arts Movement of the 60s, delivered a eulogy that reached for inspiration “like the voice of our mother the sky when she is wet and on fire” and left off on a sustained high note of identity politics…
Don was my Brother. He could sing to me like from a very old place and I would feel and hear and understand. And then we would be flying, Black up against the guinea blue. In my memory Don is the future waiting to say hello again. And we know life does not end. Don, if you dig it, is where ever Blue is light, he circles just above our heads, invisible and nuclear, telling quiet stories in the voice of the mother tongue, so we are never alone.
I was listening in the packed Church along with the woman who would later become my wife. We hadn’t been dating long, she’d never seen Don Pullen play, wasn’t familiar with jazz and (as a good Muslim) didn’t exactly share my instinct to drink whatever was flowing from the cup. But she got the groove when the party started with her countrymen Mor Thiam playing djembe and calling down Pullen’s spirit. Thiam – a master drummer who put the Motherland in Pullen’s African-Brazilian Connection band during the 90s – helped my future wife (and me!) by making her feel she might be able to find her own way around my beat. Our shared sense of possibility was amped up further when we watched film that night of Pullen’s ‘94 performance at Montreux with the African-Brazilian Connection. Here again he blessed us through Mor Thiam who sang “Kele Mou Bana” – a Senegalese folk song that my heart knew by heart (and translated for me when she wasn’t singing along) – before Pullen took the tune to heaven. Making my partner fly and see from up there so her homeland became the edge not the End of the Black Atlantic. And even Allah was just another word for everything. (Peace A.B.) By swinging the black music of two worlds into Tomorrow, Pullen and friends proved to my amore you could have your roots and freedom too.
Their evidence, though, was inadmissible in the court of (self-proclaimed) Hanging Judge, Stanley Crouch, who wasn’t trying to hear what might extend him beyond his anti-Afrocentric comfort zone. Crouch was a no-show at St. Peter’s Church that night and he never rolled with Pullen’s spin on World-Jazz. I shouldn’t have been surprised but Crouch brought me up short one time when I brought up Pullen’s African-Brazilian Connection – “You like that Afro crap?” He must have avoided the Connection’s live shows because that band could turn anyone around.
As I found out the last time they played an extended gig at a club in New York City. I went to hear Pullen’s group with a very particular woman who was preparing to ex me out. She didn’t believe in going to the West Village on the weekend. Especially not to hang in a tourist trap with no dance floor. Her idea of a good time dated her but it was still undeniable: a night of disco at the Garage and then on to the beach for a morning dip. Yet I didn’t pick up when she called to cancel. I thought Pullen’s tidal waves of sound might flow her away. The morning after he took us keyboarding, she used the L word for the first (and as it turned out) only time. She Dear John-ed me a week or two after Pullen fast-forwarded her. Thanks to him, though, I got all she had to give (and more).
All’s fair because Pullen once made me give away more than I intended in front of another girlfriend (who stuck with me a lot longer). That happened when he played the Vanguard with the band led by David Murray that made Shakil’s Warrior (1992). On that album and in the club, Pullen played organ, returning to the instrument that was his bread and butter in the 60s when he couldn’t find steady work as a piano player. Along with Murray, he reconceived the kind of roots music he’d played in R&B organ trios. His blues seemed born again. Un-phased by the organ’s limitations, he took on the instrument’s technical challenge with nervy trills and soulful silences. In command of the moment, alive to the other musicians on the stage, he played like Magic – a “point guard of the new” to lift Baraka’s phrase. (On piano Pullen was more like Jordan at his peak.) The Vanguard audience set out to clap Pullen and the Warriors back on the bandstand after the last set. While we were urging them to return (for the only encore I’ve ever seen at that club), I realized my girlfriend was staring at me. Then I heard myself. I was wailing “I NEED it!” over and over. Which sounded strange, of course, but my girl was looking at me funny because she’d heard something like those needful cries before. Back in the dawn of our relationship, all I wanted was her sharp, baby-soft curves. I didn’t like condoms so when my time was coming I’d slide on her thigh or breast-bone. Or rub him right on her sweetback. And when I’d finally spray, we’d hear a lion groan in relief (and frustration). Though I wasn’t pouring it all out, I didn’t mind because I dug the sound of my nature rising.
What’s this jizz have to do with Pullen’s jazz? “Don loved love”, as per Baraka: “he wanted, like all of us human beings to be love, to make everything love…to make everybody whisper and scream and embrace themselves.” If you doubt that, try “Andre’s Ups and Downs,” where Pullen referenced his son’s romantic life and where his repeated transitions from regular technique to swirls seem inspired by a serial monogamist’s leaps into the plenitude of love. Or jump to the Bo Diddely riff in “Big Alice” on Don Pullen/George Adams Quartet Live at the Village Vanguard Vol. II. Pullen and drummer Dannie Richmond rode that beast with (three into) two backs for about twenty minutes the first time I ever heard him. (What can two people do in twenty minutes? – Darling, you’re gonna need my help – You can’t make love all by yourself!) That’s when I started wanting to share a Saturday Night in Pullen’s Cosmos with somebody pretty or willing.
But no-one was having me so I began with family – my little sis and older brother (and my sister-and-brother-in-law) were high on Pullen right away. My brother ended up bringing us all closer to our culture-hero when it turned out he was working with Pullen’s son Andre in the 125th St. Post Office. One time Pullen sat down at our table after a set (avoiding a fan eager to discourse on his “intervallic concept”) and we happily exchanged family anecdotes. That night was a trip for us because Pullen had just come flying home from Rio and Dakar in his first NYC performance with his African-Brazilian Connection. But the evening was daunting as well because Pullen appeared to have lost a lot of weight and we worried he might be sick. I don’t know if he’d already been diagnosed with cancer at that point, but his End must have seemed close like that during his final years. Especially since two of his closest musician-friends – George Adams and Dannie Richmond – died way before their time.
Pullen’s composition “George We Hardly Knew Ye” was dedicated to Adams and his second pass at that melody during the 94 Montreux show (preserved on Live Again) is for the Ages. In an effort to ease the pain of those who were missing “G. and Dannie,” Pullen quoted these lines, which he’d read at their St. Peter’s Memorial Services, in the notes to his cd Ode to Life:
Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. Whatever we were to each other, we still are. Call me by my old familiar name. Speak to me in the same easy way you always have. Laugh as we always laughed together…Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it always was. There is absolute unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of your mind because I’m out of your sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval. Somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well. Nothing is past. Nothing has been lost. One brief Moment, and all will be as it was before – Only better. Infinitely better. We will be one, together forever.
I’ve found a little consolation in these lines since my dad’s death. But the nothing-but-blue-sky attitude bothered me too. Something shattering was obviously missing so I googled Pullen’s quotation. It comes from a 19th Century sermon titled “The King of Terrors” written by an Anglican Churchman named Henry Holland who wasn’t a beamish type. (Struck by the fact the “streets of London reek with human misery”, he became a sort of liberation theologian who trashed Social Darwinism without denying evolution or the historical Jesus.) The point of his sermon was to help his hearers confront what surfaces at the moment of death – “so ruthless, so blundering – this death we must die. It is the cruel ambush into which we are snared. It is the pit of destruction. It wrecks, it defeats, it shatters. Can any end be more untoward, more irrational than this?” But, as we’ve seen, he also invoked an innerness that even “death cannot destroy.”
Pullen’s performances in the 90s often suggested he understood such double-truths inside-Out. Infused with faith of “black and going on” folks, his music was marked by a deep sense of continuity, yet his playing took on a new ferocity and pity. In a late live version of a song titled “Silence = Death”, which he played one night at a free show in Lincoln Center’s bandshell, sorrowful single notes gave away to the back of his hand and what sounded like a touch of madness. But as he swung back and forth between grief and going off, his balancing act seemed to signify sweet, bitter reason. In this version of “Silence = Death” (which took off from the one on a 1990 solo album where he tried to shame the sky with thunder-block chords), anger became an energy, a measure of love and sanity in an Age of AIDS.
Thousands of listeners were caught up in Pullen’s flows that night at the bandshell. I was by myself but I didn’t feel alone as the college kid next to me marveled at Pullen’s technique and two elderly race men on the other side of the aisle danced in their seats, reveling in the reality their people – under the radar-screen and beneath the underdog – had produced another indisputable champ. Pullen swirled their world even though his performance was relatively restrained. He was intent (I think) on not upstaging Ahmad Jamal who followed him on the program. (Pullen played solo, Jamal had a trio.) Before his last number Pullen spoke with feeling about Jamal’s influence on him. On my way out of the bandshell, I ran into a jazz critic who knows much more than I do about the Tradition and who scoffed at the notion that Ahmad Jamal might have a problem following Don Pullen. But I couldn’t help noticing that he, like me, was stepping off half-way through the elder pianist’s set.
My pop once had trouble getting through one of Pullen’s sets. Back in the 80s, I pushed him one time to pass up Ellis Larkin’s regular uptown gig at the Café Carlyle and check my man at the Vanguard. (C’mon pop, since you’re down when Larkin takes “I Got Rhythm” slooooow, you’ll get lifted when Pullen finds a perfect beat at warp speed.) But I shouldn’t have pressed. My pop enjoyed Beatles’ tunes and “Lady Jane”; he loved “I Never Loved a Man” and (Percy Sledge’s) “My Adorable One”; he wrote appreciatively of Springsteen and Elvis and Marley. But he played jazz. It was his music – the soundtrack for his own singularity. He once said that no aesthetic experience in his lifetime beat hearing Jelly Roll Morton’s “Win’ing Boy.” The art in Pullen’s swirling, on the other hand, was beyond his reach. My pop wasn’t a moldy fig but he never needed to go past Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington.
And who could blame him? Still we did get into it once when a particularly dissonant Pullen track got into the mix during a family occasion. My pop dissed it quick, quoting a Philip Larkin line about avant-garde jazzmen “improvising on fuck-all.” Which pissed me off because I knew my pop recognized the limits of Larkin’s proudly provincial approach to jazz. (Forget Pullen, no Monk need apply.) The emotion generated by our little blow-up lingered since we avoided arguments during my pop’s last decade – there wasn’t time enough to enjoy the frisson of contention.
But I took a little risk when I was visiting my parents during my pop’s final year. One soft evening I put on Pullen’s “Variations on Ode to Life” (the final track on Ode to Life).
Pullen knew he had cancer then and this “Life” feels like a summation as well as a provocation. You’re sure he’s going to leap from single notes to swirls during his first solo. His trills have you treble-ing on the edge of his keyboard. But he never turns his hands up to throw all the way down; he stays inside the Tradition. (Pullen allowed longtime listeners might find his playing “subdued” in the cd’s notes.) Yet his “variation” on “Life” isn’t about giving in. Pullen aims to sustain; he’s carrying on and closing in (not cooling out). No longer naturally forcing the tempo, he faces the music of his mortality. His final solo takes it shimmery and slow – the pulse of his piano flickers for breath-catching moments. But his blue Clair de Lune shines on. Until his final bass chord kills the light.
My pop and I sat outside listening in the dark. We didn’t speak much after Pullen finished his moonlit version of “Life” but our common sense told us the soul of the man will never die. My pop not only shared my taste, he appreciated Pullen’s more than I ever could – wondering at how his fellow piano player had colored it all in with “one blue note.”
That note reminds me of some blue ones my pop played when he was trying desperately to recover from the second of what became a series of heart operations. He wasn’t allowed to eat or talk (or sing) and was barely able to walk on his own when he sat down at the piano for the first time in weeks to play Duke Ellington’s “Lucky So and So”. He’d fallen in love with that blues when he heard Ella Fitzgerald sing it, accompanied by Ellis Larkin on their (no strings!) collaboration, Ella Sings Gershwin. (It’s the only non-Gershwin track.) My pop plays and sings his own “Lucky So and So” on a homemade CD that my brother-in-law helped him make. But he went deeper into the song when he was laid down low. He couldn’t sing the springy lyrics – “the birds in every tree/all sing so merrily/they sing wherever I go/I’m guess I’m just a lucky so and so” (and not just because his throat wouldn’t let him). Without a voice, with the bad luck, he made his piano testify for a human right to good times. He swung the song’s open-hearted melody with infinite care, slowing the song’s mellow roll – “as I walk down the street/seems like everyone I meet/says a friendly hello” – until its final promise of happiness – “when the day is through/each night I hurry to/a love that’s faithful I know/I guess I’m just a lucky so and so” – seemed so far gone. Looking back now, I guess it was his “Ode to Life.”
That’s a pretty thought (and the need to have it probably impelled me to write this piece). But my pop wouldn’t have let me leave off there. He was wary about promoting comforting ebony-and-ivory visions of commonality. He realized (see The Trouble With Friendship: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Race) the mystique of one-on-one interracial intimacy in our culture obscures a debt that must be paid even if it can’t be made good. He understood, as long as obligations conferred by history (by Goree!) remain unmet, life in America won’t stop breaking down to black and white.
And color lines aren’t all that separate my pop’s un-“Lucky So and So” from Don Pullen’s graceful “Ode to Life.” My pop lacked faith. Pullen played like there was something up above his head. The apple don’t fall far from the tree. Yet Pullen’s example might be leading me back to the future here. I’m intrigued by that Victorian theologian Pullen directed me to. In a famous long ago book Lux Mundi, Henry Holland argued Christianity was to be experienced, not contemplated (though faith for him wasn’t blind but a matter of reason). Maybe I’ll search for his Lux. Tis the season after all. And I’m (almost) a Christmas baby like Don Pullen.
Notes
1 Doug Schulkind’s Sound Mind – www.wfmu.org