Amiri Baraka has been getting in the groove again during the past year, though as he says to those who wonder why he’s “back on the music”, “I never did go nowhere. Somewhere just runned away from the boy…”
That is to say, when JazzTimes fired the Crouch named Stanley, (and if we know, as well, that there is no major publication in the Colonies with a Black writer on what’s called Jazz) then what’s Baron is not Kenny nor Charles but born of a willful chauvinism. (Is that too complicated? I guess so!)
Here are reports on sounds of the cities by Mr. B.
Charles Tolliver Big Band
One thing we can treasure and if we cannot it means the “Yet” of this ain’t borned where we can dig it.
We thought by leaving the house (Newark) at 6 we’d be at the Jazz Standard/East 27th street in plenty of time to see the Tolliver set. But we found we were actually “late”, people were crowded in the place already, so we had to sit in a sideways corner, though close, digging the musicians from the side and rear.
No matter, Jimmy, this is some of the best music we’ve heard in a long minute! Tolliver and I go back to The New Wave In Jazz, an LP I produced as a benefit for The Black Arts Repertory Theater School, which myself and some other self determining minded Black artists opened in Harlem, on W130th St. a month after Malcolm X was murdered.
Tolliver was then a hottening but streaky “Hard Bop/erator” from Brooklyn, one of the knowledgeable graduate students of Professor Blakey’s Funkiversity. Tolliver came through Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, with groups that featured John Hicks, Stanley Cowell. And did a year or so with Gerald Wilson’s California Big Band.
I’d just about forgotten, in the torrent of the Unhip and the submissive that clouds the scene these days at the bottom of the Sisyphus Syndrome where the rock has been rolled so far back down the mountain of human progress it has almost disappeared into the Bushes…that Charles Tolliver and Cowell, in those heavy days (‘71) when the idea of Black Self-Determination was a mass expression founded their own record company, Strata-East!
Part of what was so refreshing this night was that you could hear in the music, the compositions and solos, of this Tolliver led band, the fire of the Blakey/Jazz Messenger CHARGE! type heat, but with an obvious finesse and consummate orchestration of the parts and the smooth yet ever forceful sonic dynamism of the whole. You hear what the leader learned not only from the Blakey hard bop Classicism, but also the orchestral teachings of Wilson, and check it out, what Diz exploded into being with his big bands shot straight out of Gillespie’s marvelously wild yet impeccably well ordered compositions likewise his overall still much undervalued orchestral conceptualization! Usually, Diz the sonic stylist and even his hip comedic antics overshadow the genuine grandeur of John Birks Gillespie, the truly great innovative artist! But none of this is lost on Charles Tolliver, himself one of Diz’ freshest and most skilled progeny in all aspects, compositionally, orchestration, conducting, he even wanna crack some jokes.
After not seeing Tolliver in quite a few years, what we witnessed was a source of deep excitement and gratification. Tolliver stood the music up on tip toe, Dizzy Gillespie Brass-First style, and it was deep down thrilling! Not just the unpreventable nostalgia such magic carries with it, but to hear again such music, such an approach, such charts, such solos, such ideas, played so well, was utterly transforming!
The band, I suspected it, checking the notice, was most likely a squad of skilled veterans, old enough to be funky and conscious, shaped psychologically and socially by “the tradition” to be awesome musical raconteurs of its wonders. And so it was, James Spaulding and Bill Saxton, Tenors; Jimmy Owens, Trumpet; Howard Johnson (the great tuba player) Baritone; Cecil McBee, Bass; Ralph Peterson, Drums just to name some of the biggest names, though believe me, there was some young’ns and some veterans who will come to me who carried much heavy in the set. But just from the names I mentioned, experienced, highly skilled, hope to die funky operatives, who have actually heard the masters of our late Golden Age. The Birds, Dizzys, Dukes, Fats, Tranes, Miles, JJ’s, Carters, Sassys, Billies, Prez’s, who have actually heard the wonderful Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Eckstine big bands, who carry Ellington & Basie in the amulets of their hearts!
So the incredible precision, the unchallengeable swing, Yeh, that, at undecipherable speeds, spraying visions of grand classicism, yet possessing us, themselves and the place, with the newness of the right now.
A wonderful evening, fully Gillespie like, but with its own excellence and excitement. The loud thrashing riffs (Check “Things to Come”, “Emanon”, &c), the sudden lightning of solos or key changes, all calling on whatever was in charge of the joint to challenge the heat of this truth, this beauty (whew!).
Just before the set, as musicians came trooping over to our table, a couple in front said, “Whooh, you’re too popular” and moved so they would not have to be stepped over.
It was a re-unioning of sorts, the musicians to some acolytes, us both and all to the grand beboppers of our finest sessions. So dig, next time you see Charles Tolliver Big Band some where (he’s got a refinery, I’m told, at The New School) don’t blow, pick up and go! You’ll love me for telling you.
The Heath Brothers
Recently my wife, Amina and I have started to come out for The Music, with encouraging though, of course, mixed returns. One night, we journeyed up to just below the golden trestle that connects upper and lower Park Ave to The Kitano (a new very polished joint) trying to dig John Hicks. But the man in the lobby sd, in impeccable whatever it was, “No Jazz tonight.”
So we went back downtown to more familiar turf and lo and behold The Heath Brothers were at the Village Vanguard. Only Percy, hospitalized after an operation, was missing. Jimmy with his paradigmatic tenor and Tootie of the energizing smile and energetic tubs held the fort in what must be one of the smoothest bands extant.
What it is, Jimmy’s approach seems still to pay tribute to the President of the Tenor, easy, flawless, sensuous, but swinging relentlessly. Tootie, like they say, always tasty, a little salty, down with the commas, apostrophes, exclamation points that make the “straight ahead” the constantly sought after refreshment in the midst of whatever the “Dangs” is pushing in the contemporary mix of commerce uber feeling.
Plus, the band’s got a new “wunderkind” on the piano, a student of Jimmy’s & Sir Roland Hanna’s, a young (white) pianist, Jeb Patton, who can play, even though one day he will make a squillion dollars. Add bassist, Paul West, who has cruised through Dinah Washington, Carmen McRae, Dizzy Gillespie, which layers a bunch of priceless experience, and you have the content and contour of a very easy to dig contemporary package, combining much history, virtuosity and musical hip.
Plus Jimmy Heath, as always, the fastidious funkmeister, subtly shaping the whole ensemble, breezing through the most familiar charts, Monk, Trane, Miles, &c reminding us why these are some of our favorites, and why and how the Heath Brothers have pleased the real Diggers for so long.
Spirit of Life Ensemble
One night we went to Newark’s Priory, which is, like the big dude sd, “a chancy job”, us taking a chance that as the flyer said, they wd feature Joe Lee Wilson, whose been living “unexiled” says he, in England, near The White Cliffs.
Unfortunately, this night was not much Joe Lee, though the group who was, in truth, given the most ink, Spirit of Life Ensemble, Daoud Williams’ Jersey City shaped confection did hold forth with enviable energy. The group changes personnel so much though it’s hard to get a fix on where they’re coming from musically.
This night they were into a big Latino sound, which at times was on it but sometimes rather confusing. Like when the trombone player who seemed to be the leader gave us a lengthy example of arch trombonery sonics and then had one of his little girl studentin duet on one of the tinkle tinkles. We was not impressed and were so distressed we made loud unsophisticated noises as to how we had come to hear Joe Lee Wilson. And I herewith apologize for the raucousness of my conduct but not the spirit.
But that is one problem generally with the Priory, that too many of their acts ain’t acting all that tough, especially those from out of the boondockery of church properties now given to neatly reemerging as polite “funk” joints. Though, SOL, has been on the scene for a couple decades, for which they should be celebrated, too many of P’s offerings are unengaging mysteries. Especially when there are so many great musicians out here not working regular, you know?
Joe Lee Wilson
The next night we went over to Bro Wm’s lair in Jersey City, specifically The Miller Branch of the Jersey City Public Library where he has held forth for many moons. Sure enough, though our late sallying forth from Newark brought us into the second set. But here, Joe Lee could get heavy with his marvelous style and voice.
What I dig about Joe Lee Wilson is that he is able to take the vocal pyrotechnics of the hippest jazz singing and root it so deep in the blues that it all rings like an epoch. I mean like history being explained in a song phrase.
We missed the great “Where or When” which he uses, he told me as I pouted, as his opener. A wild arrangement Joe Lee hinges on a kind of native American like rhythmic emphasis, zooming the old words high up and smoking across their bow! But what about “Pink Champagne” which brought back The Terrace Ballroom in Newark in the 50’s, or “The Blues Ain’t Nuthn’” one of Joe Lee’s signature pieces.
What remains a large drag is why a singer of Joe Lee Wilson unique innovative quality can only be seen in the marginalia of New Jersey while commercial still lifes masquerading as singers, crowd into the big well advertised venues. But the arts reflect the social and political life of a society. So that when there is a political upsurge, you can be sure the most sensitive artists will reflect it. So that if we can understand that we are in the downward roll of the huge boulder of struggle for equality and self-determination, Sisyphus style, then the answer to that last question should be plain as Kenny G.
David Murray and Gwo-Ka Drum Masters
We went to see David Murray during the so called JVC Jazz Festival, the commercial George Wienie roast, characterized by a few hits and a buncha misses. At the same time, the JVC operation puffs itself up by tagging whatever clubs have something (anything) theoretically going as part of the Festival. As far as I know the sole connection is a little white JVC flag strung up somewhere on the premises.
Happily one of those expansion venues, The Jazz Standard, had really exciting music in the latest reappearance in the US of saxophone innovator David Murray. This time with his Gwo-Ka Drum Masters group.
My wife Amina and I came early this time. Since the last time we showed up On Time to see Charles Tolliver’s wonderful big band, the joint was already packed. But this time, our reward for coming early is that we met David coming out of the club, just as we were about to enter.
This was serendipity, because David and I go back over twenty years, when he, Steve McCall & I worked together for several years as a poetry jazz trio (See New Music-New Poetry, India Navigation)
But the music David brought back this time was of a high order, what you’d call International Funk. The Gwo-Ka drummers are part of a socio-cultural and partially religious drumming organization that features the most ancient musical traditions of Guadalupe. Murray has spent a lot of time in Guadeloupe and a lot of other places since booking out of the states a few years ago to live in Paris. And although he is heavy in European gigs, he has been a world traveler on the real side for the past decade. Though, fortunately for the US faithful, he comes back home regularly, NYC and the coast definitely.
David Murray has also been doing a great deal of earnest work broadening his musical palette. A big band gig in Cuba, the cd Creole also utilized musicians from Guadeloupe. The marvelous cd Fo Deuk combined the great Senegalese sabar drummer, Doo Doo N’Diaye Rose and a phalanx of Senegalese drummers and Wolof speaking rappers, plus a high powered funk component including drummer JT Lewis, Electric Miles’ keyboardist, Robert Irving and the incomparable electric bassist, Jamaladeen Tacuma. (Am I saying all this because I was on that album as well? Dig that!)
The latest carnation of Murray’s PanAfrofunkistry, carries another part of that international presence, the likewise African derived Black culture of Guadalupe. So that the Black North American & the Black South American embrace as a hemispheric reinvention of the Ancient Mother Tongue. From the mix at the bottom, the southerners still funky with the hand drum, and the northerners with their eloquent “boom a loom” machine derived from the post U.S. slavery one man bands.
What David Murray has envisioned, just as he showed on Fo Deuk, was that the combining of the old and new vonze, would be as he projected it earlier as an Interboogieology. What I conceived a few years before in an essay called “The Changing Same” (Black Music): “Let the new people take care of some practical bi-ness and the R&B take care of some new bi-ness and the unity musick, the people-leap, can begin in earnest.”
So that is my take on Gwo-Ka, as in Creole and Fo Deuk, Murray is in deep construction of such a Unity Music. Here with recent Guadeloupe constants Klod Kiave, ka drums and vocal, Francois Ladrezeau, boula drum, lead vocal, plus the veteran new music bassist, Jaribu Shahid, a young omni-musical guitarist, Herve Sambe, from Senegal. Omni, because he can deal with “the one” as well as the more complex next, i.e., the funk and the new.
Pieces like “Gwotet”, “Ouagadougou”, “Ovwd”, have the percussive passion of the ancient, motorized with the north slick industrial rumble, which cushions, projects, provides the blast-off for Murray’s still incredible saxophone pyrotechnics, or the subtly rapaphonic toning of his bass clarinet. The young guitarist was a perfect textural foil whether in screaming contrast, or echoing melodically. That is the feeling, the African, the Caribbean, the Afro American neoning north, “The Black Music which is jazz and blues, religious and secular. Which is New Thing and Rhythm and Blues” (op cit, “The Changing Same”) i.e., the Unity Music.
The Standard appearance coincides with an album with the Gwo-tet, on Justin Time in association with Murray’s own 3-D Family, called David Murray & the Gwo-Ka Masters, which also includes another master, Pharoah Sanders, taking the Gwo-tet even further up up and away.