Secrets of Great Communications and Great Combustions: The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble at An die Musik

(This essay appears in the April 2016 edition of the Baltimore Jazz Alliance Newsletter)

“I would rediscover the secrets of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews.”

-- Aimé Césaire, tr. Clayton Eshelman and Annette Smith

Four notes. The concert began in a ritualized fashion, with bandleader Kahil El’Zabar seated centerstage behind a trap kit and coaxing two different tones from the tom toms with a pair of soft headed mallets: bim-bim bom bom. The tones issued forth as breaths and announced that the ceremony could begin. Indeed, the performance by the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble on February 26 at An die Musik in Baltimore was an experience more akin to a ritual or ceremony than it was a typical concert or show. The unlikely trio of drums/percussion, trombone and baritone saxophone played three extended pieces which could be said to correspond to stages of invocation/visitation/deliverance.

The above quote by Martiniquean poet Aimé Césaire from his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land expresses well the different elements of the performance – the audience experienced the soothing of dewdrops and the jarring rumbles of a mighty storm.  Onto El’Zabar’s  understated drum pattern opening the concert came sounds from Craig Harris’ trombone. Only, in keeping with the feeling of invocation, Harris did not play voiced tones, but rather let us hear his breath entering into the instrument and touching off infinite microtones. This gesture caused the audience to listen and to concentrate with the group. Baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett entered in a similarly contemplative and evocative manner and the trio went on to build the piece, using the full range and capacity of their instruments, testing the limits of them using strategically employed extended techniques. This piece evolved into something fast and fluid,  with each of the players listening intently and then building upon the others’ phrases.

With the invocation of the ceremony realized, the trio could now alter its arrangement slightly to proceed with the next act of the ceremony. Bandleader El’Zabar came out from behind the trap kit and picked up a large kalimba which hung on a collar around his neck. He commenced to play a solo on the instrument, vocalizing and adding percussion with a shaker that was wrapped around his ankle. These were violet tinged phrases. Evoking the distant outposts of the journey, Harris even brought forth the call of an elephant out of his trombone. Bluiett masterfully punctuated this scene with low blues lines on the baritone. This was a piece that rose skyward and did, indeed, conjure added presence into the room.

For the final piece, El'Zabar played a rolling beat while sitting atop the cajón and vocalizing deeply and powerfully. The other members of the trio came in and before long were playing the head to “Cherokee” by Ray Noble, the song which Charlie Parker famously transformed into the opening statement of the bebop era. The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble did not play a bebop rendition of the tune. Their version actually harkened back to the Count Basie Orchestra version of the song that predated Parker’s; it was a wide open and scenic take on the piece. Hearing Harris’ trombone harmonize in a joyful way with Bluiett’s baritone offered deliverance, “a drenching by all rains.”

In between pieces, El’Zabar remarked that 2016 marks the 44^th year of the group. He said that upon graduating from college, he told his dad that he wanted to front a trio of percussion with two horns. His father thought the idea was crazy. All these years later the arrangement El’Zabar has been leading continues to prove itself to be the perfect vehicle for engaging music for the purposes of exploration and deep communication.

Dave Douglas and Uri Caine at An die Musik – Present Joys

 This article first appeared in the Baltimore Jazz Alliance Newsletter

It was capacity seating in the listening room with the high-back chairs on Charles Street in Baltimore, but that did not deter the trumpeter, composer, band leader, and record label founder Dave Douglas from squeezing in a couple of extra audience members.  He simply toted from the back of the room a few folding chairs and placed them onstage with him. After all, this was to be a concert of piano and trumpet duets, so there was some extra room up there.  Amused and in good spirits,  Douglas mounted the stage, called up his musical partner, pianist Uri Caine, and recalled for the audience what the late pianist Horace Silver had told him when Douglas worked with the composer early in his career. Horace Silver said that if one wants to be a jazz musician and one wants to hit a homerun, one must be prepared to play the role of: pitcher, batter, outfielder fielding the ball, catcher receiving the throw home, vendor selling popcorn in the stands, and finally the umpire calling the play at the plate.

***

“Chaos was first,

but next appeared broad-bosomed Earth,

sure standing place for all the gods.”

--  Hesiod’s Theogeny (c. 1000 B.C.E., contemporary of Homer)

Silver’s advice was not just a dose of reality administered to a young jazz musician, his words also touch upon the the essence of the music played that Saturday night in July in Mount Vernon.  The duo played pieces adapted from and inspired by the songbooks of the shape-note singing tradition --  a collection of songs based on a simplified form of musical notation which has its roots in Europe, but which flourished first among the New England colonists and later, in the 19th and 20th centuries, throughout the rural South.  The tradition encompasses songs both religious and secular and is practiced in both African-American and European American communities and in the places where these communities meet.  In their lyrics and in their melodies alternatively stark and bright, the songs etch a portrait of the meeting of the spiritual and the material realms of life.  As is suggested by Horace Silver’s words of counsel to a young trumpeter: to reach great heights, one must work hard on the ground. And as Hesiod’s verse above suggests: it is here on Earth that we encounter spirit. 

Shape-note singing has very different roots from those of the many jazz “standards” -- with their catchy, bittersweet melodies perched over sophisticated chord changes -- that were originally written for Broadway or MGM musicals.  However, Dave Doulas and Uri Caine demonstrated at An die Musik that the shape-note tradition may prove to be a very deep well for jazz musicians to draw from.  The songs in the show typically began with simple, almost march-like piano chord phrases, over which Dave Douglas would play a stately melody from the shape-note tradition. (For those readers unfamiliar with these songs, your closest melodic reference point may be the much more widely known Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” adapted by Aaron Copeland for his score for the ballet Appalachian Spring).  From there, Douglas and Caine employed the jazz aesthetics of improvisation, rhythmic syncopation and harmonic extension to the hymns and laments.

 Uri Caine, a pianist who has released several albums of his fiercely individualistic interpretations of classical composers such as Gustav Mahler and Ricard Wagner  and albums which fuse jazz with drum n’ bass and hip-hop rhythms,  is an excellent choice by Douglas for the shape-note singing concept.  His style can be both precise and free.  His attack on the piano can go from clipped-sounding Glen Gould-style classical rigor to highly percussive blues and boogie woogie.  True to his heritage as a longtime member of the downtown New York jazz scene headed by maverick and genre-hybridizing composers like John Zorn and Marc Ribot,  Caine often played against the melody, deconstructing it and seeming to oppose it --  before returning to a well-defined articulation of it.  The effect was thrilling.

 Dave Douglas has a long history of drawing inspiration from folk music forms.  Notable in his oevure in this respect is the 2000 recording Charms of the Night Sky -- featuring a quartet of trumpet, violin, accordion, and bass -- which explores Eastern European and Jewish folk melodies. More recent is his 2012, Be Still -- featuring his current jazz quintet,  plus the Appalachian vocalist Aofie O’Donovan –-  a recording which contains six American folk hymns that Douglas’ mother requested he play at her funeral in 2011.  His performance at An die Musik made it clear why he is attracted to these old, land-based musical forms.  They come from a time of oral traditions and community singing events. As such, they are imbued with the struggles of everyday people; with their hopes, their longings and their moments of spiritual transcendence.  They serve as an excellent template for Douglas to seek spirit through the plaintive voice of his trumpet.

Baltimore

August, 2014

The Gary Bartz Quartet at An die Musik

This piece first appeared in the Baltimore Jazz Alliance Newsletter.

Midway through an eclectic and exuberant set of music on June 28 at An die Musik in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, Charm City native and jazz luminary Gary Bartz paused to tell a story. “People play this song and sing it with the original lyrics. We’re going to play it and change the lyrics to tell you of some memories.” The quartet began to play the standard “Is That All There Is?” with all of the playfulness, daring and humming chemistry they had displayed in the previous  numbers of the set. Australian native Barney MacCall’s piano traveled seamlessly from bittersweet Elington-inspired melodies to speedy and soaring bop runs. Bassist James King anchored the quartet, articulating solid and expertly chosen three and four note phrases that served as a sort of root system for the group, connecting the drums, saxophone and piano into a living organism. Greg Bandy’s drums propelled the group by manifesting the dictum “less is more.” His distilling of a drum fill to its simplified essence or leaving out of a tom-tom hit where one expected to hear it granted the compositions space, breath and uplift. And finally there was Gary Bartz’s alto saxophone, which,  in keeping with our metaphor, was like the blossoming flowers upon the branches – melodic phrases bursting forth like the congruence of petals that form a flower.

            Gary Bartz sang “Is That All There Is,” his voice possessing the weathered presence that one would expect to hear in a 73-year-old musician who has played with Charles Mingus and Miles Davis. As the chorus approached, the music reduced and the bandleader told the story of his earliest memory.  He was two years old and playing in the living room of his family’s house in Baltimore, as his great-grandmother stood in the kitchen cooking a pot of beans. “I heard her fall down and saw her laying on the floor of the kitchen. My parents returned home and asked me where great-grandma was. I said that she was in the kitchen, sleeping. My parents entered the kitchen and saw her. And I said (and here Bartz began to sing and the music returned full on), ‘Is that all there is?’ “

It is odd that this story of viewing death for the first time served as the preamble to the chorus refrain, “Is That All There Is?” Death is so immense and incomprehensible to the small child that the response, “Is that all there is?” seems weirdly apt. And this - the union of seemingly incompatible parts - gets to the essence of great jazz, like that performed by the Gary Bartz Quartet in the high ceilinged room with the tall, arched windows that warm Saturday night in Baltimore in late June.

Chicago reed player Douglas Ewart has stated of jazz, “This is music of collective thought.” Throughout the evening, we heard this collective thought in full force. Several of the night’s pieces came from Gary Bartz’s most recent release, “Coltrane Rules - Tao of a Music Warrior.” These pieces (some of which are Coltrane compositions) feature the spiritual seeking characterized by a stark saxophone ascending in dizzying spirals over the moving ship formed by the piano, bass and drums – a form forged by the John Coltrane Quartet and carried on since by many disciples. It was within this structure that we heard the simultaneous and collective improvisation alluded to above. While the bass maintained a blues-based ostinato and peppered variations upon it, the piano endlessly unspooled chord voicings – tinged now with the Impressionist colors of Debussy, now with the sly impasto of Fats Waller. Bandy’s drumming, meanwhile, was in constant conversation with these moving parts: a cymbal splash to acknowledge a piano accent, a quick snare roll as a tip of the hat to a saxophone flourish.

Gary Bartz - looking stately in a gunmetal blue suit with a light green shirt, his curly gray locks combed straight back and cascading onto his shoulders – led the band on alto sax, soprano sax or vocals and mesmerized the audience. Writing of the late Chicago tenorman Fred Anderson, the poet Sterling Plumpp has said, “He believes art is the process of knowing one’s axe (instrument), as exemplified by one’s ability to invent a personal language that articulates its infinite layers of prophecy.” This, exactly, has been the pursuit of Gary Bartz for more than 60 years. A “personal language (articulating) infinite layers of prophecy” describes precisely what the enthralled audience heard that night at An die Musik. In his liner notes to Coltrane Rules, Gary Bartz defines himself as a warrior involved in a lifelong struggle to bring people healing through music. At the show, Gary Bartz healed and provoked with the power of his tone imbued with many decades of artistic and spiritual seeking, dating all the way back to his earliest memory involving his great-grandmother in the kitchen in Baltimore.

  Baltimore, Maryland. June, 2014

Mary Halvorson Solo Guitar at Otto Bar – Baltimore

This is the guitar as it is rightly played. I speak not of the genre of music presented – which is a neuron-firing blend of jazz, free jazz, noise and punk aesthetics in the service of European folk melodies, among other things. I speak, rather, of the attack of Mary Halvorson on the guitar. The instrument appears as something she uses to express her feelings and ideas and stories; but the large and heavy hollow body guitar, made of polished wood and metal and electronics, also influences, in return, all she has to say. We hear in real time the mysterious interface between an artist and her tools. The instrument is influencing Halverson's expression of the song as much as Halvorson is influencing its articulation on the guitar – and these two processes occur simultaneously. We hear song that is the fruit of at least three converging forces: the melody of the original composition, Halvorson's understanding of that melody and, finally, its articulation via the big six-stringed and resonating instrument. Spirit in matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXvs5_rLU9g

Tatsu Aoki's Miyumi Project at MCA Jazz on the Veranda

Tatsu Aoki’s Miyumi Project
MCA Veranda
Tuesday, June 14, 2011

A vastidão (ah vahs-tchee-DOWN): Somehow the Portuguese word (with its wide-open syllables and three-beat length) that expresses the concept of vastness resonates more directly with the spirit of the most recent concert at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Tuesday on the Veranda series than the clipped-sounding English word. A vastidão, the expanse of the sextet: two tenor saxophones, one baritone sax, upright bass, taiko drums, three-congas percussion. A vastidão, the 360 degree view from the veranda seats: the sextet, the 2/3 height mark of full, green trees, and the honeycomb windows and decks of lakefront apartments to the North; a manicured green lawn lined with enormous white stone flower pots, the blur of Lake Shore Drive, then the pure blue lake and the shimmering horizon to the East; the speckled grey minimalist walls of the museum to the West; and stone steps cascading down toward Chicago Avenue behind, to the East.

The group arrived ready to meet the June breeze with the force of brass floating serpentine over four-note bass ostinatos. Taking a cue from the modal jazz pioneered by Miles Davis on his masterwork Kind of Blue, the Miyumi Project privileges melody and the hypnotic rhythmic phrase over the rapidly moving chord changes of be-bop. However, there the comparisons end. The two tenors and one baritone sax do not play medieval church modal scales as do the horns on the Miles’ work, but rather blossom their inventions within the traditional Western 8-note scale – with polytonal embellishments and extended techniques, to be sure – and with much reference to the pentatonic “blues” scale. Additionally, Aoki’s ensemble features a conga player and a percussionist on the martial Japanese taoki drums, a touch not found among the modal jazz groups.

The musicians played two sets of several pieces each and the musical/emotional range that was covered covered, also: a vastidão. Tatsu Aoki’s Miyumi Project, may hearken to modal jazz in its emphasis on melody and repeating bass lines, but its direct spiritual and aesthetic forbear is certainly the 1960’s work of Yusef Lateef. Lateef is the first jazz composer and arranger to blend Eastern music and instruments with a blues/jazz aesthetic. The opening track, “The Plum Blossom,” to his seminal work, Eastern Sounds (1961), sets the radical and hypnotic tone for the record, as the Afghani stringed rubab plays a steady pulse twang and Lateef states the melody and improvises on the Chinese clay xun pipe. Since Lateef, the East and West have continued to form sometimes intriguing and sometimes dubious hybrids in jazz (John Zorn’s Masada and Don Cherry’s work in the 1970’s are standouts in the realm) and Aoki’s Miyumi project clearly falls into the “intriguing” category, to which I would also add the describers bold, mesmerizing and joyful.

The ensemble’s front line of horns, Edward Wilkerson and Jeffrey Chan on tenor and Mwata Bowden on baritone sax, clarinet and diggery-doo -- constitutes a type of Chicago Brass Dream Team. Bowden, the elder statesman of the group, gaunt in a white tunic, stood in between the two younger players and anchored the trio with forceful and passionate blues-based lines that expanded into sky-climbing poetics before finally returning to the tonic note like a hawk soaring back down to its nest. Bowden’s vocabulary is ever-expanding and it was striking to hear his flexible New Orleans march-tinged lines syncopate with the often strict, Japanese martial rhythms pounded on the taoki drums by Amy Homma: a new pleasure for the ear.

Wilkerson played impressionistically. His tenor phrases often sounded as questions, which were then repeated, interrogated, investigated, and placed again into sonic space to see what further questions they may provoke. His lines veered from jagged to round, as abstraction and speed braked into cooler melodic statements. He came meditatively upon long individual notes which he let the audience savor as they peaked and decayed. He blew what my scribbled notes call “phosphorescent meltdown” and at times, when his melodic lines ascended and descended as a trick waterfall which falls, hits the sandy bottom, and suddenly bounds back upwards, Wilkerson even recalled the rapid-fire minimalist lines of composer Phillip Glass.

The youngest of the front line horn players, Jeffrey Chan, evoked the sweet and the melancholy in his playing and in this sense echoed Duke Ellington’s poetic sense. The breathiness and slowdown which emerged towards the end of some of Chan’s expertly chosen note-paths brought out Tuvan-like overtones compelling to the ear. When Bowden played, Chan often teamed up with fellow tenor Wilkerson to blow quick five-note statements in unison that recalled the punch-punch lines of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat ensembles. The Brass Dream Team listened so well to each other that such call-and-response dialogue elevated the pieces into unexpected realms of intensity.

Tatsu Aoki is the ensemble leader, not only as he is responsible for the compositions, but also because it is the three, four or five note repeating figures that he plays which form the backbone of the group’s explorations. Elegant in a black cape draped over black pants and shirt, Aoki adroitly stated the bluesy bass lines and two-stepped lightly on his feet around his instrument. With Aoki’s architecture sketched, the ancient taiko drum patterns played by Amy Homma could enter the picture. As mesmerizing as the strict martial figures Homma played, were her movements: she would form an inclined T with her torso and arms and then revolve the sticks into the drums with dramatic stretches and swings. The ways in which Homma’s strict-time, non-syncopated percussion crosshatched with the African-based syncopations of Coco Elysses’ congas formed a sonic knot for the listener to try to undo as the night progressed. This, in fact, is the great ambitious gesture of the Miyumi Project: the attempt to mesh the upright, martial beats of the aoki percussion with the jazz musicians’ swing. It worked in a way that maintained a delicious tension throughout the evening.

The pieces sound as the architecture-inspired paintings of Roberto Matta appear. Visible are the lines of the dwelling, in the form of Aoki’s bass parts, while the instrumentation of the rest of the group drapes and swirls around as splashed light greens and bright whites -- in a way that is both free and yet totally cohesive. To sit in the echo of such living and pulsing structures is to feel as if one has entered a work by Matta – some dream.

Beau Barry at Cafe Ballou

Beau Barry
Café Ballou
Sunday, June 12, 2011

A rail-thin man wearing wire rim glasses and with a mop of grey hair enters the café. “Are you one of the jazz guys?” the barista. “Yeah,” the musician, with a slight smile. He extracts a shiny blonde wood Epiphone hollow body from its case. He places a large take-out coffee cup on the floor in front of him, the letters TIPS spelled out in black marker across it. And then the guitarist waits.

Minutes later, a large and jovial man carrying a saxophone case enters through the sunny doorway. His eyes are wide and expressive and he smiles a broad gap-toothed grin. The tenor saxophone he takes out from the case has the hushed, romantic hue of brass unpolished. The duo opens with “April in Paris” and the tenor’s statement of the melody is full and breathy and with enough idiosyncrasy in the phrasing to cause the café patrons to pause at their laptops. The guitar accompaniment is rudimentary; it runs the chart workman-like, but keeps good time: a metronome of harmonic structures upon which the tenor can navigate.

Beau Barry, the tenorman, states each standard’s theme with intriguing lacunae and phrases run-past-the-measure-bars. His improvisations over the hollow body’s harmonics are by turns whispery, introspective and intimate or big and blustery. They seem a wonderful expression of the spectrum of the big man’s spirit. Regardless of where upon the arc the improvisation falls, the song’s story remains always present – stated though it may be within perilous, rapid ascents of notes or sweeping runs downward to the lower register.

And so it goes at Café Ballou on Western Avenue on a Sunday afternoon in the city the mystery writer Harry Keeler called “the London of the U.S.” A few dollars will find their way into the tip cup and Fats Waller’s racing and shimmering “Jitterbug Waltz,” from 1942, will have leapt once again to life – perhaps never played so well before.

Mike Reed's People, Places and Things/Green Mill/June 11, 2011

Mike Reed’s People, Places and Things
Green Mill, Chicago
Saturday, June 11, 2011

Last night's show at the Green Mill with Mike Reed's People, Places and Things -- a group dedicated to interpreting hard bop compositions by Chicagoans active in the late 50s and early 60s -- went places seldom heard. The saxophone symbiosis between Tim Haldeman's tenor and Greg Ward's alto was a dialogue of declaration, listening, comment, and embellishment. What's the Laurie Anderson line? "Excellent birds" -- an apt description of the conversation between the two saxophonists. That revisiting the Chicago hard bop compositions of the late 1950's could result in such bold blossoming in 2011 reminds us of how much is to be gained be relooking at the past.

Reed's delving into this 1954-1960 Hyde Park songbook reminds one the gestures of the characters in the fiction of Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño. In his story "Last Evenings on Earth," a boy accompanies his father on a supposed bonding trip to Acapulco, but only finds refuge amidst their strange tourist meanderings in a book he carries which describes the lives of little known French Surrealist poets of the World War II era. In the novel The Savage Detectives, a pair of poets in the 1980s travels the labyrinth that is the Northern Mexico desert to find the elusive poet Cesárea Tinajero who was active in the 1920s Mexican avant-garde. For the characters of Bolaño, dialogue between artists across the decades lends sustenance to life. And what transpired at the Green Mill with Mike Reed's People Places and Things was a dialog between the Chicago of today and the Chicago of the late 1950s -- both eras hovering, vibrating within the city's unending grid of tracks and streets. Both eras speaking across time to each other.

Dan Hanrahan