Bop soul to avant garde soul...

My apologies -I've been – as Jane Austen may have said – somewhat indisposed the past few days but now I'll try to get this blog back on track...


In 1960 Johnny Griffin recorded 'The Big Soul Band' album. The track I've selected leads on from the previous posts with its Art Blakey-ish/Hard Bop connection. The Messengers's pianist Bobby Timmons- who plays on a couple of tracks from this session and composed the track 'So Tired' - had written several titles that defined the 'Back to the Roots' movement of the time – and took Blakey's band deep into that re-defining process – 'Moanin', etc. What the critics termed 'Hard Bop' was seen as a reaction to the 'Cool School' with greater emphasis put on the roots of African-American music via the blues and gospel. And earthier timbres... So these musicians knew each other pretty well – the cross-references abound. In fact, Charlie Persip's back-beat that rides through this album is reminiscent of Blakey.
Norman Simmon's arrangements for a ten-piece band frame Johnny Griffin's solo tenor beutifully (and makes them sound like a much bigger ensemble – shades almost of the 'Birth of the Cool' nonet? A bluesier one, of course...). Griffin was reputed to be one of the fastest tenor players extant but here it sounds as if he reigned his usual pyrotechnics back for this project – the unusual understatement working superbly – and emphasizing the ensemble rather than dominating it. 'Wade in the Water' is an old traditional tune given the 'soul-jazz' treatment here – complete with handclaps at the beginning. Some nice rippling triplet fills from Persip – his drums drive this track along mightily against a shouting orchestral backdrop.

What was happening in 1960? Round about the time this albumn was recorded, the big story was the Gary Powers U2 flight scandal. But simmering under was the nascent civil rights movement. The end of the Eisenhower period saw the beginnings of federal government attempts to deal with the running sore of segregation – the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts pointed the way to the more radical legislation – and conflicts – to come. 1960 was an epochal year, literally – the election in the autumn was to bring in Kennedy and his Camelot, one of the deep iconic events of the decade, shiny new Democrats whip on old-school Republican Dick Nixon, Eisenhower's vice-president. Can one read between the lines with regard to this album? Why not have a go... ?
The black militancy that was about to surface and intensify would soon evolve its own vibrant rhetoric of dissent and protest. But in 1960 that was all down the road still...

Yet...

'Soul' music and hard bop can possibly be seen at the end of the fifties and early sixties, from one angle, as the soundtrack and musical response to the rising call for change in the Afro-American community – a celebration and conscious re-emphasizing of the roots of the musics they had pioneered. I see this album as more than just a blowing session, given the careful orchestration and perfect choice of musicians (Clark Terry plays some wonderful solos, for example) and the material itself - as could be gathered from a quick perusal of the titles, gospel music is the inspiration here. The possibility exists that there is a doubled coded militancy going on, embedded in the return to roots because the orginal spirituals possessed their own codes of defiance -
The lyrics to the spiritual are here...
and an interesting analysis of the original and the codes that were inserted into the 'slave songs' pre-Civil War is
here...


Three years later, Griffin left for Europe, following a select coterie of Afro-American musicians who had discovered that there was a fertile audience awaiting and they were treated, in the main, with a respect due to important black artists which did not exist in America to anyway near the same extent. Griffin had other problems as well but he also remarked in later years that another factor in his decision to decamp from New York was the rise of the 'New Thing'- the avant garde. One of the stars of which is now recognised to be Cecil Taylor, whose uncompromising, driving, seemingly densely dissonant music had brought a new, radical flavour to the jazz tradition.

Yet...

Taylor always struggled in New York at that time – the stories are well-known about washing dishing and other menial jobs because, apart from a couple of bohemian coffee houses, the New York jazz world had no time for him, in the main. Maybe Griffin was talking about the contrasted success of Ornette Coleman's arrival in NY, backed up with recommendations from the like of John Lewis, the smooth eminence behind the Modern Jazz Quartet. Whatever struggles Ornette had later, at that moment his star was in the ascendent whereas Taylor had to wait years for his to rise– it gives a sort of euro-link into Taylor's download mp3 on offer here – taken from a live gig in in Copenhagen, where he had similarly decamped a year before Griffin and for many of the same reasons. Hard bop tough tenor and mould-breaking iconoclastic pianist. The real story that pulls them together in exile where they were to continue their, on the surface, disparate takes on jazz – from bebop to hard bop from Griffin and the new thing from Taylor – is, arguably, race. Griffin came from Chicago via the Lionel Hampton group into the Jazz Messengers, Monk's quartet and a fruitful pairing with Eddie Lockjaw Davis, which created some of the most exhilirating wild blowing tenor sax battles to be heard luckily captured on a series of albums. Taylor came from a more middle class background – went to the conservatory to study classical music – and left because he found that his own tradition was ignored or just plain misunderstood. Then found he was dismissed as a musical lunatic, not just by contemporary musicians who couldn't – or wouldn't – hear where his sound world was leading – but by the larger cultural support networks. At that time, Europe offered an imperfect but more welcoming home and greater performance opportunites for black jazz musicians both from the immediate tradition and the the more problematic avant-garde.

The Taylor tune is taken from a live album 'Trance' recorded at the Cafe Montmartre in Copenhagen – where Griffin was to play as well, in his years of exile, and record a live album himself which is damn good –
Sonny Murray was in the process of redefining the jazz rhythmic pulse – his drums are all over the recording, hissing cymbals and rat-tatting snares that sound like a deconstruction of Blakey's bluesmarching rolls at times. Jimmy Lyons still has echoes of Parker in his playing but in a sense that anchors his lines for listeners unused to the complex soundscapes of Taylor. The pianist is everywhere – the terrible piano notwithstanding. Clusters, lightning fast runs, sharply voiced chords – like an awesome river, he runs through this session, chased and underpinned by Murray and prodding and provoking Lyons, who seems almost out of his depth at times yet comes through brilliantly. The rough sound of this session in a sense gives it more validity as a document of how one conception of the directions the new jazz was to travel in. You can literally hear history being made, being worked out on the bandstand of a club with the background buzz of conversation. It is as if Murray and Lyons are examining in real time how to play this music. And not ex nihil with regard to the tradition... The echoes of Parker (and Blakey) mentioned above are complemented by some aspects of Taylor's playing – occasionally he sounds as if he has a Bud Bowell-esque left hand spinning out diving quicksilver runs supported by a left hand that echoes Monk's games with dissonance and his marvellously oblique rhythmic sense:

"The one continual influence on my playing would be Monk... Ellington of course...Bud Powell...
(Quoted from here...)


So the tradition is here and not far from the surface – yet in this recording you can hear it being taken further down the line...

Oddly enough – I've just been listening to the new-found recording of Monk and John Coltrane playing 'Monk's Mood' live at Carnegie Hall – and Monk's piano playing sits not far from what Cecil Taylor is doing here – behind Coltrane he's sending out rippling up and down lines on this mainly out-of-tempo piece and Coltrane is playing back a bit. Synchronicity... it's all there... In some alternate universe, perhaps, one could find a recording of a jam between Griffin and Taylor at the Montmartre blowing bop soul to avant garde soul that would not sound dissimilar...


Johnny Griffin -

Wade in the water - mp3

download - here...

buy here...

Cecil Taylor

Trance - mp3

download - here...

buy - here...