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Reviews of two notable “Jazz Detective” albums by Ahmad Jamal and Chet Baker

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ALBUM REVIEWS:

Ahmad Jamal, Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-1964

and Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1965-1966 (Jazz Detective)

and Chet Baker Blue Room (Jazz Detective)

Jazz producer and executive Zev Feldman has long had the nickname of “the jazz detective” for his uncanny skill at finding previously unreleased tapes from the genre’s greats to release as high-profile archival releases. (See related feature article). Now he’s putting that moniker to use for his own label, Jazz Detective, with a distinctive fingerprint logo, along with his typically highest-quality recording and packaging. Plenty of national media, from Variety, The Washington Post, NPR etc., have paid attention.

As a jazz piano aficionado, I’ll testify that the various Bill Evans albums are all treasures, expanding a deep catalog of one of the most beloved and influential modern jazz pianists. But I want to focus on Feldman’s 2022 “Jazz Detective” albums of Ahmad Jamal, a more controversial artist in serious jazz circles. Snobbish naysayers would sniff “cocktail pianist,” as Ahmad Jamal rose to rare jazz popularity with his hit album But Not for Me: Live at the Pershing in 1958. Yes, he’s capable of dazzling ornamentation and glittering fills, but, for the most part, done with stunning grace rather than excess. He’s also a deft and sometimes breathtaking employer of grace notes, of space and silence.

Far more than even that classic album could convey, these two Jazz Detective double-discs prove revelatory. Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-64, and a same-titled one, recorded in 1965-66, provide vast and varied musical protein. Jamal is technically muscular, and expansive, yet exquisite, dynamic and capable of piston-like, two-handed chording, and hard-swinging (eg. “Bogota” and Johnny Hodges’s “Squatty Roo”). Yet he’s always a master of the grace note, poised with a wizardly sense of silence and space, even building drama with it.

You come to understand how Miles Davis learned the art of lyrical-yet-incisive understatement from him: “All my inspiration comes from him,” Miles wrote in his autobiography, an unusual thing for a trumpeter to say about a pianist. You hear, in these four nights recorded over four years, how, riding chops-to-die-for, Jamal expands his sonic, conceptual and harmonic canvas to mural-like dimensions. Jamal’s deep-in-the-night take on “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” becomes a musical joke, as he nurses a Hamlet routine for over 15 stunning minutes, yet you want to shadow his musical genius every step of the way, as it’s filled with dynamic surprises, a la his radical 1965 composition “Extensions.” Has this evergreen ever been played better, ever fresher?

By superb contrast, Anthony Newley’s “Feelin’ Good” plays out in low registers, funky and freewheeling, repeatedly quoting “Workin’ on the Chain Gang,” and the enduring strength of the blues and spirituals. And worry not, there’s a splendid version of his trademark superhit “Poinciana” in the second volume. Suffice to say, this was one of my three choices for historic album of the year in the 2022 Francis Davis jazz poll.

Annotator Eugene Holley Jr. aptly explains the range of classically-trained Jamal’s sources: “a protean and profound pianism that ingeniously melded pianist Art Tatum’s swing-at-the-speed-of-sound and his hometown (Pittsburgh) hero Erroll Garner’s tender and torrid touch, with Franz Liszt’s boundless keyboard technique and the azure French impressionism of Ravel and Debussy.” He has influenced Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Jacky Terrasson and Aaron Diehl (The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s “artistic partner,” who soloed in his orchestral adaptation of Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite May 26-28 with the MSO).

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Also, I’ll note that the new Jazz Detective Chet Baker studio set Blue Room, from Holland in 1979, reminds us vividly of the sublimely cool trumpeter’s personalizing of Miles Davis’s style. 1 Yet no trumpeter had a more buttery-golden horn tone, on the verge of melting, right from the opening Wayne Shorter tune “Beautiful Black Eyes.” Over the years of an extraordinarily tough, heroin-burdened life (he once spent a year and year a half in an Italian jail, as did his newlywed wife), his solos were consistently shapely, lyrical and swinging.

Elsewhere here, Baker again demonstrates how he was as emotionally affecting a jazz singer as we’ve ever had, on songs like “Oh, You Crazy Moon,” “Candy,” and “My Ideal,” by singing almost despite himself. He sounds like a shy introvert vocalizing to a loved one’s photograph. So, while not overtly expressive, his warm vocal tones unfold rounded, often liquidly limpid, and tender, with whimsy, pain and loss, delicately vulnerable. Yet he also scat-sings several choruses of “Candy” and one of “Crazy Moon” superbly.

Blue Room also reveals how underappreciated Phil Markowitz is as a crystalline, hard-swinging, harmonically deep and potent pianist. 2. As a bonus, Baker, in effect, steals something right from under Miles Davis’s embouchure. Miles wrote the superb tune “Nardis” but, mystifying, never recorded it, instead allowing Bill Evans to appropriate it, often as a centerpiece of the great pianist’s repertoire. Ah, but Baker smartly saw the opportunity, so here we finally hear the austere, lonely beauty of “Nardis” as a Miles-esque trumpeter would handle it. However, one also suspects pianist Markowitz, a deeply Evans-influenced player, and a master re-harmonizer, might’ve suggested this tune to Baker.

Blue Room follows a Feldman’s marvelous 2022 Elemental label’s two-album set Chet Baker Trio (with a French pianist and bassist) Live in Paris.

The Jazz Detective catalog and Feldman’s Resonance and Elemental label dates accumulate, both as limited-edition CDs, and historical vinyl packages. These include two 1970s concerts by pianist Bill Evans in Buenos Aires; a long-lost 1972 recording of bassist Charles Mingus at London’s Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club; French radio broadcasts of Baker in 1983-1984; and, the prize package, a five-disc box featuring Parisian concerts from July 1970 by free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler — some of his last recordings before his death the following November.

The Ayler recordings especially underline how Feldman’s pioneering globe-trotting research and development is contributing to expanding jazz history with recordings by artists with strong influence but unjustly low historic profiles, like pianist Walter Bishop Jr. and Shirley Scott, one of the first female jazz organists to ever record. A third album features saxophonist Sonny Stitt, a prolific recording artist in his day who still doesn’t quite get his due.

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1 Actually it’s debatable who influenced whom, Chet Baker or Miles Davis. Miles was still a bebopper, though with modest technical facility, until his transformation into the deft poet of Birth of the Cool, recorded in 1949. But it wasn’t released until 1958. However, Miles did partake in the less-heralded cerebral all-star “cool jazz” album Conception in 1951, with Stan Getz, Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan. When was the real birth of the cool? Baker had been playing a very similar style at least since he began recording as a leader in 1952.

  1. The 1979 Blue Room recordings vividly brought to mind Baker’s live performance in 1981 at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery. At the time, this reporter described him thusly: “Baker’s music glows with a moody romanticism, which takes his trumpeter into a role uncharacteristic of the normally declamatory instrument…But Baker’s playing is more than moody wafting. The intelligence displayed on the venerable “’Round Midnight” was engineered with skill and imagination. Like a ghost slipping through the crack of a door, Baker slid into the familiar shrouded melody, stripped his second chorus to an elegant spareness, then overlaid it with several plush phrases.

“Baker’s singing reveals an even closer view of his personal expression – lyrics of broken love flowing from a tenor feathered with soft gray textures.”

The Milwaukee Journal, Aug. 12, 1981. from the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984 anthology (For those interested in a copy of the anthology at a retail outlet, I’m aware of only of a single copy remaining at Woodland Pattern, in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood).

 

A YouTube recording of “A Tribute to Wayne Shorter” by a Madison jazz sextet brings his often-mysterious music back to life

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Wayne Shorter in the era of his celebrated Blue Note recordings

MADISON JAZZ FESTIVAL 2023, Review VOL. 1

This is for anyone who cares about the passing, in the eternal night, of Wayne Shorter. He was a titanic of modern jazz and jazz-fusion, and of American music in general. As with the famous Titanic, there was a certain fatefulness in him, even though he lived to 89. One of his underappreciated albums was Phantom Navigator, and his wife Ana died in 1986, at age 43, in the crash of TWA Flight 880. And his music often seemed to dwell in mystery, not unlike most of the iceberg submerged and waiting for the “unsinkable” ship liner, now once again in our consciousness, due to intrepid if fatefully foolhardy explorers.

The following video’s value is representing a live tribute by a sextet of musicians who handle an intriguing array of Wayne Shorter repertoire with aplomb and dedication as part of the recent Madison Jazz Festival.

The festival, by the way, has evolved to become, in my book, the best Midwestern jazz festival north of the inherently larger Chicago Jazz Festival. These musicians are from the Madison and Milwaukee region, but perform Shorter’s music in a representative manner, as comparable to most any region in America. The concert was at saxophonist-entrepreneur-educator Hanah Jon Taylor’s music venue Café Coda in Madison, which has been one of the Midwest’s hotbeds of such creative and improvisational music for some years now.

Pianist Dave Stoler (left) and bassist John Christensen from the Shorter tribute band. Tribute band photos courtesy Arts + Lit Lab

The tribute event was organized by the Arts + Literature Lab and it covers a discerning array of Shorter’s remarkable oeuvre. It opens with “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum,” one of the uncannily fetching tunes from his masterpiece album of the 1960s, Speak No Evil.

Wayne Shorter’s 1964 acoustic jazz masterpiece, “Speak No Evil.” Bing images

The title admonishment doesn’t mean that Shorter did not fearlessly peer into the eyes of evil and transmute that into music, among his other uncanny feats. Besides the implicit ominousness of that fable-evoking tune, that shadow-toned album includes the pieces “Dance Cadaverous” and “Witch Hunt,” although one suspects Shorter, a Buddhist fascinated with science fiction, was far more intrigued than put off by the “evil” powers of witches. Tenor saxophonist Pawal Benjamin, employing Shorter’s own horn voice, dug into hearty low notes in a solo both meaty and muscular, though not as oblique as Shorter’s would be. Pianist Dave Stoler came in swinging with some Herbie Hancock-like harmonies. The only drawback here was a rather ragged ensemble reading of the theme.

But that cleaned up in the playing of the ensuing tune, “Lost,” from an underappreciated Blue Note album The Soothsayer. Stoler plays tough here, riding the changes with block chords, really digging into this minor-key mood. As with the first tune, “Lost” has marvelously dense but resounding harmony in the ensemble line, rendering it indelible to memory.

The front line of the Wayne Shorter tribute band included (L-R) trumpeter Russ Johnson, tenor saxophonist Pawal Benjamin, and alto saxophonist Clay Lyons.

The band ensues with their own take on “Nefertiti,” recorded with the Miles Davis Quintet. The original was atypical in that it repeats the sighing, languid theme over and over, with no front-line solos, only drummer Tony Williams sustaining the tune with an explosive solo throughout, so you are constantly listening to his drumming as the theme turns mantra-like. Here the band allowed for a Benjamin tenor solo that slices up the theme nicely while drummer Wayne Saltzman digs into the Williams-esque rock-shuffle feel while striving to approximate the incendiary energy of a drummer who made legend of himself with Miles Davis even in his late teens.

Here Stoler also delivers very Hancock-like block chords and octaves, tart and pungent but still pretty, a fine-honed power.

The ensuing tune, “The Big Push,” also from The Soothsayer, has harmonies I could eat for dinner, as protein-packed as they are, and another oddly engaging melody. About Shorter’s harmonies: Each has a story-telling quality, with a layered ensemble chord a chiaroscuroed image in itself, and the change sequences cast suspense and weird beauty in equal measure.

I’ll touch on the second set somewhat more briefly: a highlight was Shorter’s intense yet atmospheric “Sanctuary,” written for Miles Davis’s slightly satanic yet spiritual album of controversial jazz fusion, Bitches Brew from 1970. It has a loping, free-ish melancholy contour, and here trumpeter Russ Johnson shone — the style is his wheelhouse, unfettered but well-formed improv.

Tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter with trumpeter Miles Davis in the band that produced “Sanctuary,” from the seminal jazz fusion album “Bitches Brew,” which included bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette. Courtesy www.musicajazz.it/festival-e-concerti

The band then shifted back to the Shorter Blue Notes with “El Gaucho,” another deceptively simple theme from the album Adam’s Apple with a characteristically resonating harmonic structure.

The band encores with, for Shorter, comparative ear candy. The rollicking “Yes or No” is among the composer’s most ingratiating and invigorating melodies and saxophonist Benjamin is cooking the hard-bop brew here, which could have been a Jazz Messengers tune, from Shorter’s days as musical director of that band. But the title’s implicit dialectic is key; this is from the album JuJu, by which time Shorter’s was conceptually delving into paradoxical African powers beyond the ordinary.

Such tension-filled qualities permeated the musical particulars of his writing and soloing style and helped to sustain the intrigue of several generations of jazz musicians as represented here.

So, this critical preview is to help document what you hear but, most of all, to encourage you to sit down, buckle up in the safari jeep, and follow this band longer than you might otherwise, on this Shorter sojourn:

(16) Tribute to Wayne Shorter at Cafe CODA – YouTube

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Singer Donna Woodall swings between jazz and pop with aplomb

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All photos courtesy Donna Woodall. 

Though she was born in St. Louis, she’s lived in Milwaukee since 7th grade, so jazz singer Donna Woodall feels deep musical and cultural roots here, considers this home. She grew into a radiant, apple-cheeked purveyor of song who swings like ripe apples on a wind-blown tree. She’s since parachuted far from the tree, a full-fledged artist, perhaps the most active and accomplished female jazz singer working in Milwaukee.

She’ll be honored with a concert at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts on April 21: http://wilson-center.com/calendar/2023/4/21/wisconsin-artists-club-show-series-donna-woodall-group.

“I attribute my specific love of jazz music to my grandfather, who encouraged me to ‘sit and listen’ to swinging divas, and to my mother, Jeanne Woodall, who performed in Milwaukee jazz circles, leaving behind a legacy of song after her passing in 2011,” she explains. Donna diversified her performing skills, studying music, dance, and theater at UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison. Yet, “my mother was my greatest voice teacher — she was a walking encyclopedia of jazz songs and styles.”

Her deepening knowledge, innate musicality and affable personality insinuated her into popular local jazz bands like Eddie Butts, and soon Streetlife, the dynamite jazz-fusion band led by Warren Wiegratz, which played for Milwaukee Bucks crowds for years. So, Woodall can project big, but also charm you with a tender ballad, like “Summertime.” Yet the modal vamp inserted by pianist Theo Merriweather casts a fresh shadow of tension across the languid Gershwin song. This lends strong undercurrents of meaning to a song from a “folk-opera” (Porgy and Bess) about Southern Blacks enduring the early Jim Crow era which, out of context, “Summertime” gauzes over.

Donna Woodall performs recently with keyboardist Theo Merriweather.

A measure of Woodall’s regard among the region’s jazz musicians is that Madison-based Hanah Jon Taylor, arguably the state’s premiere jazz saxophonist, has recently visited Milwaukee twice to perform alongside Woodall, at Caroline’s and St. Kate’s nightclub.

Part of that regard surely has to do with her melted-carmel voice and elastic phrasing, reflecting key influences like Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole and Cassandra Wilson. There’s also Woodall’s expansive repertoire, which includes personalizing atypical-to-jazz pop music songs, including Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing,” The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” (in a jazzy minor-ish key), and even improbably, The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville” — about a romantic relationship in its desperate last hours.

What makes a non-jazz song work for her? “The song should have some connection to my life experiences and great lyrics,” she says. “I was an English teacher for years, so the words and meaning of a song are important!” It should also be pliable enough to “be interpreted numerous ways.” It should also have “universal themes, and a sense of nostalgia to which an audience can relate.”

So, they’re usually songs with a deep history, which all the above do. She’s also had an evocative original song, “Fireworks,” accepted by NPR’s Tiny Desk contest.

For all that, she’s also enabled by a close-knit band which, at the Wilson Center, will include pianist-keyboardist Joe Kral, guitarist Bob Monagle, bassist Ethan Bender (her husband), and drummer Jeno Somali.

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At Woodall’s recent St. Kate hotel nightclub gig, Kral consistently added drive and textural power with a Fender Rhodes keyboard setting, echoing the startling fluency of Herbie Hancock, who made the Fender Rhodes a propulsive and atmospheric alternative to acoustic piano in his Mwandishi and Headhunters funk-fusion bands.

Meanwhile, Taylor again guest-performed with Woodall, deftly blending tenor sax, flute and wind synthesizer, sometimes in the same song. The band geared up a punchy drive to “Route 66,” inspired by Nat King Cole’s version, the singer explained. It proved that Woodall, whom I first encountered performing an enchanting holiday song concert, can kick a little tail when she wants to.

She further deepened her jazz bonafides with a wrenchingly eloquent interpretation of Billie Holiday’s autobiographical “God Bless the Child.” Woodall, who taught middle school English for 30 years, enlightened the crowd by explaining that in her biography Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday said the song inspired by an argument over money between Holiday and her mother when the daughter was a young struggling performer.

Rich relations may give you a crust of bread and such/ you can help yourself, but don’t take too much/ Momma may have, and papa may have/ but God bless the child, God bless the child, whose got his own, whose got his own. 1.

The band dug deep into the song’s tough but tender emotional core. It’s how memories of a hard lifetime get etched in the soul, which bleeds out to anyone who heard Holiday sing it. That evening, we felt Holiday’s blood bleeding from Donna Woodall.

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This article was originally published in shorter form in The Shepherd Express: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/local-music/donna-woodalls-legacy-of-jazz/

1 “God Bless the Child” was written by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939. The song won a Grammy Hall of Fame Award, and was chosen as a “song of the century” by The Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Remembering Wayne Shorter, a jazz traveler as mysterious and beautiful as any in the music’s history

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Wayne Shorter, who turned 80 in 2013, won the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll by a large margin.

Wayne Shorter is gone, finally departed this planet and though, as a Buddhist, his sense of the beyond seemed intellectual, who knows how that translates at this point of metaphysical morphing? As a science fiction buff who increasingly incorporated that far-minded sensibility into his own art, he even co-created a 74-page sci-fi graphic novel for his most ambitious work, the three-album Emanon, an extended concerto grosso of sorts, with his jazz quartet and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. He grew into a larger, more capacious self over his 89 years, as much as any jazz musician. Here’s where he stepped beyond even this open-minded writer to be honest, I’ve never fully taken in all of Emanon, yet.

Though much great music ensued, I’ll concur with the consensus that the Blue Note album Speak No Evil, recorded at age 31, remains his masterpiece, billowing with shades of mystery and humanity, inspected and illuminated with a forensic sensitivity. I mean, “Dance Cadaverous”? The title tune’s swaggering swing conveys both awareness, and characterization, of evil, haunted by its spread-winged whole notes. That album’s exquisite ballad “Infant Eyes” was a favorite of mine to play on piano before becoming manually disabled. Of course, Shorter’s tenor sax rendering is impossibly tender.

“Speak No Evil” album cover courtesy uDiscover

By then, he was commenting as a kind of “cosmic philosopher,” as he did with “Infant Eyes,” written for his daughter Miyako: “I saw all infancy in her eyes, everyone who’s ever been an infant. An infant being a new start. People reminisce about past stuff, let it take over the present, but with every moment, you’re born.” Such insight feels especially apt now, as perhaps he’s being reborn somewhere, as a star child.

Other albums from his mid-1960s frieze of noirish Blue Note masterworks include Night Dreamer, Juju, Adam’s Apple, The All-Seeing Eye, Schizophrenia, and The Soothsayer, all necessary listening to gain a sense of the compositional and conceptual talent that sculpted an unfolding progressive profile of modern jazz. Though a bit of an outlier among the Blue Notes, Super Nova is memorable for Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Dindi,” sung by Maria Booker who was, at the time, splitting up with her husband Walter Booker, who accompanied her on guitar. She dissolved into tears amid the recording, which was retained, and the interpretation quivers with poignancy. Part of the lyric:

Oh Dindi…
Like the song of the wind in the trees
That’s how my heart is singing Dindi, happy Dindi
When you’re with me
I love you more today
Yes I do, yes I do
I’d let you go away
If you take me with you

It’s hard to encompass Shorter’s career, and recording-wise that may remain for a major retrospective project or two, surely to come. For now, Columbia’s two-album set Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter suffices as an admirable overview of his output, at least to 2004. It complements Michelle Wallace’s same-titled biography, capturing the life of a classification-defying original. And yet his music always had an innate way of redefining lyricism, often contrasting heavy-breathed whole notes with vivid yet eccentric eighth-note phrases. Critic-author Gary Giddins commented on the book, “It makes the case that Wayne Shorter was the representative jazz artist of the past forty-five years, from hard-bop to Miles to fusion to a planet that is too often but inevitably defined as Wayne’s World.”

Album cover to “Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter” courtesy Aika Kawasumi 

It’s difficult to argue too much with that artistic range and authority, even given the eminence of relative contemporaries as Miles Davis, Coltrane, Mingus, Monk and others.

Mainstream acceptance followed at a respectful distance as Shorter eventually won 12 Grammy awards.

Live performance is the essence of jazz, and I was too young to see the Miles Davis Quintet’s boundary-expanding multi-night 1965 stand at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel nightclub, thankfully preserved on record. Here’s where “free-bop” was sparked and nourished. Shorter’s trademark tune “Footprints” (if any single one can encompass him) thrives in live performance beyond intimation on the Davis quintet’s Live at Newport 1955-1975 recording on Columbia. Shorter’s tenor solo slows down the band’s rush and casts odd, glancing shadows across the implied footprints — presence and disappearance — even as it rises to an ominous life-force by the solo’s end.

Shorter found the larger pop-rock-funk audience by slipping into the lurking darkness of Miles’s pioneering electric period, notably on Shorter’s “Sanctuary,” on the genre-shattering album Bitches Brew in 1970. This keyed his transition to join Joe Zawinul and uber-bassist Jaco Pastorius in the original Weather Report, which I did see at the Plugged Nickel. Even live, with Zawinul’s electronics and Shorter’s imaginative reinvention of the soprano sax as a soaring, diving falcon-like creature, the band expanded the sonic parameters of jazz while elevating a standard for jazz-fusion which few bands ever equaled. It ranged from the avant-ish debut album to the cinematic “Mysterious Traveller” to Shorter’s “Palladium” a gleaming, exalted, high-flying celebration, the funk-romp jam “Sweetnighter,” and their cloud-hopping hit “Birdland.”

His soprano work with Weather Report was a harbinger, as he’d go on to advance that difficult-to-play-in-tune instrument as far as anyone has, usually to striking and powerful effect.

Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, the two masterminds and master musicians behind Weather Report, the non-pareil fusion band. courtesy Pinterest

Yet Zawinul was the group’s dominant personality, so inevitably the taciturn, oracular Shorter found his own visionary ways, and soon, with 1974’s Native Dancer, the gloriously gorgeous collaboration with Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento. This redefied the jazz-Brazilian connection — songs like “Ponta de Areia” and “Miracle of the Fishes” (an allusion to Jesus?) are uncannily heaven-on-earth in their lush yet humane expansiveness. Sung in Portuguese, both were written by Nascimento and suggest how, though celebrated justly and foremost as a composer, Shorter understood the value of others’ work, including various classical composers, interpreting over the years Villa-Lobos, Sibelius, Mendelssohn, Leroy Anderson, and others.

Another example that early fed his sense of jazz orchestration was playing on Gil Evans’ “Time of the Barracudas.” This restless piece flowed on the dazzling drumming of Elvin Jones in similar effect, if different style, of how Tony Williams fueled the great ‘60s Davis Quintet, and Jack DeJohnette in the first electric Miles band. Jones had played on most of Shorter’s masterful Blue Notes. Of course, Shorter first made his name in the early ‘60s as the precocious music director of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

Such great drummers informed Shorter’s brilliant rhythmic sense in the uniquely and beautifully elliptical way he thought and played. Another career highlight in another composer’s piece was Steely Dan’s deliciously hip “Aja,” perhaps the jazzy pop-rock group’s career musical peak, and there, atop its crest, unfurled a Shorter tenor solo that breathed and exhaled like a celestial god but with his feet on terra firma. The suite’s co-composer Walter Becker commented, “Wayne was very intent on forging a novel approach to the piece. He was influenced by the contour of sections other than the section that he actually played over,” which was basically a single modal-like chord vamp.

This solo and most all of his career reflect his composerly sense of form, even at fast tempos. His improvisational line is ever-shapely yet unpredictable. On a piece like “In Walked Wayne” with trombonist J.J. Johnson, you get a sense of ever replenishing melody and harmony as unfolding. That sculptor’s sense of shape reveal the depth and seeming boundlessness of his genius.

This album cover conveys some of Wayne Shorter’s oracular quality. Courtesy ebay

He played like a fire dragon on the Footprints Live! version of “Masquelero” with his intrepid late-career quartet, pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and dummer Brian Blade. How many musicians his age would still pushing the boundaries of music, flirting with a black hole and a quasar?

His sense of the beyond had come heart-breakingly face-to-face with tragedy when his wife Ana died in the in the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. He responded by turning to perhaps his closest musical friend, pianist Herbie Hancock. They produced 1+1, the duo album which elicited “Aung San Suu Kyi,” something focused yet transcendent, with a limpid Shorter soprano solo, a shortcut to wonder and possibility.  It was dedicated to and named for the exiled Burmese leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner. “Because we affect lives of those who are here,” Shorter said, “the best way to honor Ana’s life is to become the happiest man alive.” Mercer, writing in the liner notes to the Footprints anthology, comments, “Wayne’s courageous response to his grief was the product and culmination of his Buddhist practice.”

Cover of Shorter’s 3-album with graphic novel set “Emanon.” courtesy WFDD

Of course, later Emanon arose, breaking conceptual ceilings, Wayne Shorter at age 85. Wherever he is now travelling, ageless in mystery and in light, we can only hope to imagine and follow.

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Is this the best? Marcin Wasilewski’s cutting-edge piano trio forges ahead

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Marcin Wasilewski Trio - En attendant - Amazon.com Music

This magnificent piano trio graced the Polish Center of Wisconsin in November 2008, an event etched in my memory as the last concert I attended with my parents, before they died. “That was the best live jazz I’ve heard in years,” said my father, a lifelong jazz buff. For good reason, as the trio, with intact personnel for 26 years, demonstrates on En attendant. My father’s favorable impression also spoke to the threesome’s range of appeal.

They are a cutting-edge piano trio, as demonstrated by “In Motion,” a three-part piece scattered across the album. It seems largely free-improvised, while demonstrating organic cohesion – the effect of close and responsive listening to each other. Throughout the album, Wasilewski displays an exquisite pianistic touch at all dynamic levels, even amid awkwardly fingered chromatic chords. His harmonic and rhythmic sense suggest respectively, Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett influences.

MARCIN WASILEWSKI TRIO

Pianist Marcin Wasilewski. marcinwasilewski

Album spices include two surprising “covers”: Bach’s 25th “Goldberg” Variation unfurls with Evans-like grace and chording. On The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” they almost reinvent the song’s serpentine harmonic progression while maintaining that familiar form like jugglers with so many balls in the air, buoyed with an overtly swinging groove. The closing “Glimmer of Hope” radiates lyricism both asymmetric and gratifying.

With the demise in Keith Jarrett’s health and of his long-time Standards Trio, (and the recent death of Chick Corea) these might be big players in the the debate over what is best piano trio in in jazz today, along with Brad Mehldau’s and Vijay Iyer’s. Is it possible that a Polish trio can seize the mantle as the best living jazz group in their format? As this stage in cultural history with the broad dissemination of jazz across the globe, why not? Though created by African-Americans, it’s been an international language for decades now.

Like Mehldau and The Bad Plus, Wasilewski’s trio knows the value of adding a token pop piece or two yet knows what to do with them without losing their integrity as a jazz band. Previously they’ve recoded Ennio Morricone’s title soundtrack song to the film, Cinema Paradisio, “Message in a Bottle” by Sting, and “Actual Proof,” Herbie Hancock’s fusion crossover tune from the Headhunters band. (Hancock infrequently works in a trio format, so he’s probably beyond this discussion.)

Among mainstream, straight-ahead pianists, I’d have to also consider Kenny Barron, who frequently has worked in trios, especially in club dates.

Marcin Wasilewski and Slawomir Kurkiewicz (both born in 1975) have been playing in trio with Michal Miskiewicz (born 1977) since 1993. The group quickly became an important force on the Polish jazz scene, both in its own right and as three quarters of trumpeter Tomasz Stanko’s band.

It was with Stanko that they first came to ECM appearing on the acclaimed albums Soul of Things (recorded 2001), followed by Suspended Night (2003), and Lontano (2005). Stanko, who was also a mentor for the trio, enthused, “In the entire history of Polish jazz, we’ve never had a band like this one. I’m surprised by these musicians every day. They just keep getting better and better.”

In recent years they’ve also recorded with American sax greats Joe Lovano and Charles Lloyd.

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This review was first publish in slightly shorter form by The Shepherd Express, https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/en-attendant-ecm-by-marcin-wasilewski-trio/

 

The jazz black-rock trio Harriet Tubman gives a gift of, and for, its namesake

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CD cover courtesy sunnysiderecords.com

Harriet Tubman Araminta (Sunnyside)

Guitarist Brandon Ross leads his jazz/black-rock trio Harriett Tubman with stylistic bravura and unabashed love of vivid distortion, evoking what Sonny Sharrock might be doing if still alive, but with a more poetic control of sonics.

Ross hasn’t recorded much as a leader but he’s shown great versatility in cutting-edge jazz. I heard him live and on recording accompanying Cassandra Wilson, so he has both the nuance to support and enhance a daring and soulful vocalist. He’s also a singer, though not on this recording. As a rhythm section, Ross, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and Drummer JT Lewis have collaborated with artists as diverse as Living Colour, Lou Reed, Herbie Hancock, Henry Threadgill, Sting, Arrested Development, Archie Shepp, David Murray and Me’Shell N’degeocello.

So, on this album Ross’s guitar howls at the moon with beautiful abandon. Yet “Nina Simone” paints a songful and pain-felt portrait of the black singer-songwriter who invoked social justice with unmatched power and poignance. It recalls Miles Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly,” for Duke Ellington. Guest trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith lacerates and burnishes his notes magnificently here, bleeding in the glistening sunlight of truth. Drummer J.T. Lewis punches and slashes like a black man who defiantly matters. Throughout, Smith unfurls deep textures, sustaining eternally spatial and grand pronouncements. 1

It closes gratifyingly with the almost submerged-sounding blues reverie, “Sweet Araminta,” tenderly referencing abolitionist Harriet Tubman’s birth name, without trivializing the grit and gravitas of her achievement.

Harriet Tubman photosstategov.com

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  1. And Wadada Leo Smith, of course, is among the pre-eminent, most original and  conceptually ambitious brass players in jazz, in music, period. In fact, he’s sort of a jazz version of filmmaker Ken Burns, but in an abstract but wonderfully painterly way, playing that brings to mind both action painter like Jackson  Pollock. But you can also sense abstract color field painters, both big-gesture painters like Robert Motherwell and even sublime Zen meditators, like Mark Rothko.  Smith’s epic four-record set Ten Freedom Summers from 2012, musically re-imagined the black American history and the Civil Rights movement, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Chicago native has done similar multi-disc takes on The Great Lakes, which evokes and reconsiders those mighty bodies of water that have defined so much of life from the East to the Midwest, since the days of the great pioneers. He’s now based in the New York area, but being from Chicago he understands The Great Lakes. And this year came Smith’s magisterial and mysteriously beautiful double-disc project called America’s National Parks. a comparable musical paean to those great irreplaceable natural resources.

This review was originally published in shorter form in The Shepherd Express

Christmas postscript: The star over Bethlehem burned brilliantly within this piano trio

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Pianist Rick Germanson and bassist Peter Dominguez perform Dec. 23rd at the The Jazz Estate in Milwaukee (Photos taken by Kevin Lynch, unless otherwise indicated, in a low light without flash.) 

T’wasn’t the night before Christmas, but all through the club all the creatures were swinging, even the mouse. Actually it was two nights before the magical, mystical night in a Bethlehem manger.

The band did play one seasonal song, Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song” — as if they’d just dreamed it up in a sugarplum fever. Yet pianist Rick Germanson so deftly veiled it in fresh voicings that it spurred a debate between me and my girlfriend on the song title (I won).

“Merry Christmas, everyone,” the pianist said at the song’s end.

But these three men were home for the holidays. And by that time, in the second set, they’d delivered arms full of gifts, like three wise men from the Orient, casting riches upon our little jazz scene — compared to New York, as humble as the hay-strewn Bethlehem manger.

Sure enough they were all coming far from The East. New York, that is – not “the Orient” (which still exists only as a dated cultural construct).

All the rest of it was quite serious music-making, or I should say serious fun, because it mainly grew out of the loamy soil of hard-bop, which takes the most salient and vibrant aspects of bebop and he gives them a palpably funky and bluesy boost.

Or to mix a merry metaphor, it tasted like eggnog spiked liberally with something that never made Milwaukee famous – modern jazz, on December 23rd at the newly renovated and reopened Jazz Estate on Milwaukee’s East side.

The New York-based Rick Germanson Trio, all Milwaukee-area natives, made their hometown proud, and even gave this veteran jazz observer jolts of surprise, delight and, at times, mystification, as in: How the hell does he do that?

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Rick Germanson takes a solo.

I figured that Germanson and his mates would be pretty damn good. But this was nearly off the jazz charts that none of these guys needed. In fact, the pianist, whom I observed closely with a virtual keyboard-side seat, repeatedly played extremely complicated and dynamic passages with intense concentration. Yet his eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the keyboard. That “look-ma-no-look!” effect just hints at the man’s mastery.

“In New York, Rick’s nickname is ‘Brick,'” said his bassist Peter Dominguez after the gig, flexing his right arm into a curl for emphasis, “because he’s so strong! And he takes no prisoners. Either you’re ready for him, or not.”
Consider that New York is, by far, the toughest and most competitive jazz scene in the world, and you begin to sense the mark with Germanson is making far beyond old Brewtown.

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On his Jazz Estate gig, Milwaukee native Rick Germanson displayed the musical determination to succeed as a jazz artist, which has earned him the nickname “The Brick” in New York, where he now lives. Photo by Ann K. Peterson.

Yet, he still seems under the national radar, despite his New York bona fides, including extended stints with guitarist Pat Martino and the Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band featuring Louis Hayes, and work with The Elvin Jones Jazz Machine, Mingus Dynasty, Tom Harrell, Jeremy Pelt, Brian Lynch among others, and co-leading his last recording with trumpeter Eddie Henderson.

Germanson was nowhere to be found in the latest Down Beat International Critics Poll, which I have contributed to in the past. After listening to his too-few recordings as a leader and on this stunning night, I would place him in the top 10 pianists, perhaps even number seven, right behind Brad Mehldau. And noting the unsurprising poll-winner Kenny Barron, it struck me why Germanson’s dark-horse presence is so well-earned. His overall style compares with Barron’s. Perhaps the elder pianist possesses unsurpassed elegance, offhanded ease and range of repertoire. But Germanson, at 44, is right in his prime, and can do most anything Barron can do, it seems.

(Full disclosure: about 17 years ago, Germanson played solo piano at my second wedding’s reception in Madison. But it was an accident of circumstance, as my chosen pianist, Dave Stoler, needed a last-minute substitute. I had little chance to really hear Germanson play that busy day.)

Some close-listening critics might argue that his influences remain a bit too evident. They’re detectable but also myriad. Just sitting through a few tunes, I scribbled down the relevant names: Ahmad Jamal, Cedar Walton, Ramsey Lewis, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Bobby Timmons, Hank Jones, McCoy Tyner. But Germanson tosses off these aspects with such alacrity that they ultimately feel integrated into an astonishingly wide mainstream jazz piano vocabulary. Call the dialect “post-hard-bop Germanson.”
There was Evans’ pensive ballad “Very Early,” with his sinuously-kneaded chord changes, and then Bobby Timmons’ groove-twitching “Jive Samba,” a tune Germanson surely played countless times with the Adderley Legacy Band.

Then yet another stylistic shift to the modern Coltrane-esque modalism of Cedar Walton’s “Holy Land,” wherein he carries you to the Promised Land with powerful gusts of crystalline sand and whirling wind. You can imagine how brilliantly he embraced the McCoy Tyner-esque stylistic power strokes Elvin  Jones was accustomed to in his rhythmic cauldrons.

Yet, at times, I wish he’d be a bit more harmonically daring and bullish, dash one flat or second interval hard across the grain, like Monk might. But Rick’s fully sophisticated in the post-bop tradition, so that caveat only seemed like a late-set afterthought. In re-voicing familiar tunes like “Autumn in New York” or “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” he lulls you with a theme-in-the-breeze, like a siren on the shore, rather than simply stating it. That way, he pulls you into his orbit and, with his encyclopedic stylistic resources, you feel set for a long stay.

The strategic success, at least of this live set, took off from a hard-bop pad. So the band often plays like a canny, old-time carnival clown – plenty of deep pockets full of surprises and loads of nimble wit to spur bobbing heads and chuckles of amazed delight. And in a place as intimate as The Jazz Estate, virtually the whole audience palpably feels it all down to their tapping toes. And if there’s a mouse or two lurking (unlikely), they’re surely hipsters, too. 1

At the heart of any great straight-ahead jazz style, as with Germanson, is the creative space facilitated by continual dynamic accents and deep-in-the-groove currents. Here too, he shines, his playing bejeweled with tough rhythmic finger drumming, incredibly tight sustained octave  tremolos,  or cross-punching tiger-paw attacks, or long, crackling-swift arpeggios.

And yet Germanson seems to know when to pull his own reins in and not seem like a show horse. He often offers such a gambit as a discrete jewel setting, with crisp entrances and segues. He almost floats against a pulsing flow of bassist Peter Dominguez and drummer Pete Zimmer. These two possess the power, precision and elasticity of a great neo-bop rhythm section, such as the 1980s Heath Brothers Band with its bounding harmonies and hop-skip-skittering rhythms. (continue reading below)

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Bassist Peter Dominguez (above) and drummer Pete Zimmer playing with Rick Germanson at the Jazz Estate.

The second set helped affirm the pianist-composer’s evolving originality, as in “Rick’s Blues,” in which to Dominguez displayed his arco chops on a solo with fine, deeply resonating legato and highly evocative effect. This reveals his study with the great Madison bassist Richard Davis, one of the supreme masters of jazz bass bowing. (Germanson and Dominguez also display superb simpatico, taste and imagination on the Dominguez album How About This, a trio recording with former Herbie Hancock drummer Billy Hart.)

“Daytona” took a muscular McCoy Tyner approach and gives it a Latin twist. Even more distinctive was Germanson’s “Theme for Elliott,” written for his son, which “kind of captures his vibe,” he offered. A deceptively simple one-handed melody, like a boy might pick out on a keyboard, develops into a thoughtful but slightly impetuous exposition, tempered by recesses of shyness, a lyrical but probing creation.
Another personal gesture arose in “Susan’s Waltz,” written for his wife, who stood approvingly a few feet away from the keyboard. It seems almost a gently-traced character sketch, folded between deft chords. Here bassist Dominguez remade the melody like a grizzly bear capturing a butterfly in his paw, and slowly and tenderly letting it fly away.

The trio upped the power quotient in the Tyner mode on Germanson’s “Interloper,” conveying an apt sense of intrigue and drama. The three men from the East absolutely burned through this, with the sort of spiritual power akin to Tyner in his prime. Drummer Zimmer bristled with a swift-yet-sharp tempo and bassist Dominguez unleashed a panther-swift fast-walking pulse. Germanson’s solo set off fireworks, riding a powerful left-hand thunder of chords. And yet his ruthlessly rapid right hand didn’t really mimic Tyner, nobody quite can. Plus, his solo delved into complex harmonic underpinnings reminiscent of Herbie Hancock’s impressionistic sorties.

It all ended with a brief encore rendering of Miles Davis’s set-closing standard, “The Theme,” which I hardly recognized with the re-harmonizing that Germanson says he drew from the late Cedar Walton’s approach to it.

Yes, Walton is one of this pianist’s touchstone fathers. But Rick “The Brick” has found himself, proving an old adage, that finally the child is the father to the man, his own man.

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1. A few more words about the new-and-improved Jazz Estate. It was a great listening space to begin with, but an excellent move was to re-configure the small back room. Instead of a cluster of tiny tables and chairs, the new owner built connected booth seating along the two walls leading to the back exit. This allows for at least several extra seats, and more lounging comfort through the last set. And the restrooms, previously merely functional, like many jazz clubs, now have “expanded fixtures” and very classy furnishings.

 

Bobby Hutcherson brought spiritual questing and down-home allure to the vibes

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The late vibes and marimba player Bobby Hutcherson. Courtesy www.nga.ch

On another sultry but beautiful day yesterday, I had to get away from the computer and outside in the afternoon. So I went out to nearby Kern Park and shot some baskets and, because I was the only one with a ball, I attracted a few other guys and we ended up getting into a game of hustle that included one 6 foot 2 dude who could dunk the ball, another built like a linebacker, and an 11-year-old who consistently sunk high school three-pointers from beyond the top of the key! It was great fun and then I did some grocery shopping in my sweaty shirt, and when I came home I did not want to go back to the computer or Facebook.

So I didn’t learn about vibes and marimba player Bobby Hutcherson’s death until I peeked at Facebook at about 10 PM and noticed Howard Mandel’s recommendations for listening to Hutcherson albums. My heart sank because I figured he’d been prompted by Hutcherson dying. I scroll down and found a few more posted tributes and then Nate Chinen’s New York Times obit. The great musician had died Monday at age 75, at his home in California, after years of struggling with emphysema.

Although I studied piano, Hutcherson was the guy who, more than anyone, had me fantasizing about playing the vibes, from time to time.

Last night I immediately thought back to one of the very first phone interviews I ever did when I began covering jazz for The Milwaukee Journal in the fall of 1979. It was with Bobby Hutcherson, who was to be performing at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, and I still have the cassette recording of the interview because he so impressed me when a hung up the phone. I thought to myself, this was one of the most musically dedicated and spiritual persons I have ever spoken to.

Part of that openness to the spiritual or psychic or the subconscious arose in an anecdote he related to me about the great wind multi-instrumentalist, Eric Dolphy, with whom he had spent time playing and recording with in the 1960s for Dolphy’s premature death.

Hutcherson recalled: “Eric used to call me up, maybe 4 o’clock in the morning, tell me his dreams. He’d say,’ Bobby, write this down.’ Things like, ‘one, six, eight, 17.’ You know, numbers and letters. He dreamt these things as if they might mean something, like intervals or scales or chords.

“The next morning he met me at my house and we would try to figure out what it meant, and try to play something from that dream.”

Earlier in the interview, Hutcherson also said: “I want to play some tunes that people can hum, you know, just as long as I can still make a living being true to myself and giving something to people. They can respect you for digging into the music. Like there’s still some hope in this or it lasts, because it’s for real. It helps to destroy some of the plasticity of this world.”

You sensed in the man and his playing the desire to create beauty but also to press ahead with an insistent sense of what was musically possible and that might change things for the better, at least a bit.

I was also fortunate to have just heard, in person at the Jazz Gallery, Hutcherson’s greatest inspiration vibist Milt Jackson, a few weeks before I interviewed Hutcherson. And there was no doubt that the great Jackson showed that he was the master of both the blues as expressed in through this ostensibly non-blues-friendly instrument, and the king of vibes swinging, against and around the rhythm.

Then Hutcherson played Milwaukee in late October, 1979, and looking back at my review (in the anthology of Milwaukee Jazz Gallery press coverage published by the Riverwest Artists Association) I noted an affinity with another great jazz musician that he would collaborate with quite often, pianist McCoy Tyner. The review headline is “Jazz Storm has Serene Center.” I wrote: “The effect is precisely that rare sense of drama that can be found these days in the group of McCoy Tyner, but with no saxophone for easy ascent. Hutcherson struggles and thrashes, reaching, reaching. But he never quite gets to the note, even if you heard it.” That was the sense of purpose and ever-driving momentum and ultimately questing that gave a backbone to Bobby Hutcherson’s stylistic beauty and spiritual balance.

Just a few days before his death, I had been thinking about Hutcherson and had pulled out a few of his CDs to listen to, including one of his later and lesser-known Blue Note albums called Patterns (1968), which is marvelous and a bit challenging with James Spaulding’s bracing alto. But there’s also plenty of color, texture and pattern with Spaulding’s flute and, of course, Hutcherson’s vibes and Joe Chambers’s artful percussion play.

Here is Hutcherson’s stately but swinging title tune Patterns.

There are a number of other excellent Hutcherson albums including his heady Blue Note debut Dialogue with pianist Andrew Hill and the great Madison, Wisconsin bassist Richard Davis, recorded shortly after Hutcherson and Davis had collaborated with Eric Dolphy on his masterwork album Out to Lunch. There is also the meaty Stick Up! with Tyner and saxophonist Joe Henderson, and the ambitious nine-musician album Spiral.

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Hutcherson’s ambitious debut on Blue Note, “Dialogue.” diskunion.net

By contrast, also recall Hutcherson playing on guitarist Grant Green’s languid soul-jazz classic Idle Moments.

Then there are two albums that feature Hutcherson’s warmly alluring marimba as well: Components from 1965 with “Little B’s Poem” — “the lilting modern waltz written for his son Barry,” as Chinen notes, and Hutcherson’s best-known tune.

Another notable marimba-colored album is Blue Note’s 1966 Happenings, a quartet date with Herbie Hancock that includes Hutcherson’s gorgeous meditation “Bouquet” and a superb reading of Hancock’s modern standard “Maiden Voyage” and the weirdly witty free-jazz piece “The Omen.”

Also consider the album Oblique, another quartet with Hancock, which includes the pianist’s theme from the classic French new wave film Blow Up. The theme’s intoxicatingly catchy chordal vamp can get you dancing but also carry you someplace.

My most specific appreciation, however, will be reconsidering one of Hutcherson’s most personal recordings (on Contemporary/OJC) which I just listened to again. It’s called Solo/Quartet recorded in 1982 with McCoy Tyner, Herbie Lewis and Billy Higgins.

Solo/Quartet

“Solo/Quartet” is one of Hutcherson’s most personal projects. allmusic.com

It opens with three pieces that Hutcherson recorded solo, with multi-track overlays. The first is “Gotcha,” wherein the marimba takes the improvised solo, conveying the intense repetitive patterns of Hutcherson’s kind of the blues feel, but also a sense of spiritual wonder. He’s “gotcha” — caught you in the resounding percussive melodic web layered here by multi-tracking. It’s simple but complex in its charms.

Then comes “For You, Mom and Dad,” a humble but radiant lyrical theme with the sort of resonating and questing peak notes that were part of Hutcherson’s characteristic open-mindedness, his sense of possibility. Again his marimba takes the improv lead and its warm, woody wit is elevated into stunning arpeggios circling to a climactic high note, and then he sustains intensity while revisiting the theme with tubular bells backing it. Hutcherson had managed with nothing but the striking of metal and wood instruments to create a spiritual vibe that is nevertheless, down-to-earth enough to be understood as a song tribute to his parents. As if to say, look, mom and dad. This is what I’ve been able to create partly because you were there, and supported me all the way. Even though his dad wanted him to be a bricklayer.

I love Chinen’s story about Hutcherson driving a cab during hard times in New York with his vibraphone in the taxi trunk.

What the wouldn’t-be bricklayer built was a new way for the vibraphone, in a mode different from what his great contemporary Gary Burton did with his four-hammer virtuosity.

The following solo tune on Solo/Quartet “The Ice Cream Man,” is another example of this musician’s balance between playful earthiness and psychic wonder. He’s clearly mimicking some of the sounds recalled from the bell-ringing, neighborhood-trolling ice cream trucks of his youth, but the sound of the note decay of the vibraphone is perhaps the key to the piece. This sostenuto effect opens the mind up, even as the melodic and rhythmic patterns beneath it engage you. The repeated playing of the theme is not tiresome; rather something you tend to savor, like every lick of an ice cream bar on a hot summer day. It keeps you rolling with the truck’s chiming melody, and in Hutcherson’s aura. The total effect is enchanting and transporting and yet he’s taking us back to familiar experience, like the best memoirists.

Hutcherson does this all by himself because his own personal life and experience is being relived and transmuted into a vivid almost cinematic environment. I know of no vibist who has accomplished so much all by himself on a recording.

The album’s last three tunes re-unite the Stick-Up! rhythm section, the great McCoy Tyner on piano, Hutcherson’s long-time friend, bassist Herbie Lewis, and the wondrously dancing drummer Billy Higgins.

“La Alhambra” is a Hutcherson piece of brief ascending and descending rhythmic phrases with very shapely chord changes implying a classic Latin rhythm, with bass and drums percolating beneath. Tyner’s astonishing, muscular, supercharged energy comes cascading out of the chute, but he fully honors spirit of his friend’s composition with its Latin rhythmic allusions.

Solo/Quartet is also remarkable because, as producer John Koenig explains in his liner notes, “during the album’s planning stages Bobby had an almost tragic mishap with a power lawn mower in which he sustained an injury to the index finger of his right hand which nearly ended his career.”

During this convalescence, Hutcherson had time to reflect on what he really wanted to say in such a personal project, and thus the true quality and depth of Solo/Quartet was born.

The next two tunes are two of the finest old standards in the repertoire book, both soulful vehicles that singers usually make the best of. But Hutcherson feels rightly that his vibes can do songful justice to both “Old Devil Moon” and “My Foolish Heart.” And he’s absolutely right.

Again, it is his combination of swirling pattern-making and eloquent melodic phrasing that lifts the songs as high as an old devil moon and as deep as a heart, foolish though it may be.

The album closes with Hutcherson’s “Messina,” a characteristic melding of subtlety and whirling, surfing rhythmic momentum, the sort of tune he might’ve dreamed up watching the powerful ebb and flow of the Pacific Ocean near the home he built in the coastal town of Montara, California, which is his native state.

Solo/Quartet is such a marvelous record also because Tyner is a very kindred musician and this quartet swings deeply in a very modern ways, shifting and sifting through phrasing implied by the melodic changes. Clearly Hutcherson learned a lot from Milt Jackson about swinging, then found his own way to do it.

In 1986, Hutcherson also has an interesting brief apprearance in a wonderful feature film Round Midnight by Bertrand Tavernier which stars saxophonist Dexter Gordon as a dying jazz great in Paris. Hutcherson plays a sort of expatriate but down-home cooking connoisseur in an amusing role. Yet it fits in with the man’s aesthetic for finding the good, beautiful and soulful — even in the most unlikely or displaced of places.

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Bobby Hutcherson. Courtesy media.npr.org

Now, since the passing of other great California modern jazz giants like saxophonists Art Pepper and Joe Henderson, big-band leader and composer Gerald Wilson, and now Hutcherson, the historic role of the West Coast, in post-bop and modern jazz is beginning to become clearer, set against the somewhat East Coast-centric focus of modern jazz. West Coast cool jazz was a contrast to East Coast energy, but as a summation of the region the label always fell short. All these deceased musicians, and others like Horace Tapscott, Arthur Blythe, and The Bobby Bradford-John Carter Quartet embodied West Coast creative fire, as finely calibrated as theirs could be.

The brilliant SFJAZZ Collective, with Hutcherson-influenced vibist Warren Wolf, exemplifies that West Coast modernism today, as both a repertory band and a vehicle for its members’ original compositions. Hutcherson co-founded the collective. Don’t be surprised if they honor him with a recording of his compositions.

Let us always think in such larger terms when we consider the qualities of such a wide and deep art form as jazz, and the great musicians who brought contrasting and complementary sensibilities to advancing it.

Hutcherson’s long, gleaming vibes tones will always radiate, like a Pacific lighthouse beacon in the darkness, through the music’s history.