We get requests... The Teddy Charles Tentet... encore une fois...

I have mentioned sporadically in this blog my interest in the cultural life of the USA during the late forties/fifties – that much of it still remains buried or critically undervalued as the higher, wilder profile of the Sixties still casts a long shadow. We tend to assume that everything was grey,uniform – because we were told so time and again. While some of this may well be true, there were many stirrings, spring shoots of the later lush crops to come. Especially in jazz... there seems to be an undervaluing or downright ignorance of much of the questing music of the time, as a variety of musicians across the country looked towards expanding and transcending the bebop revolution. One such man was the vibes player and composer/arranger Teddy Charles. I selected a couple of tracks from his historic recording with the Tentet a couple of weeks ago. And have had a request from Mehdi over at Jazz pour tous (which has to be the best blog around for jazz at the moment!) to post the whole album. Usually, due to time considerations, I look to post only two or three mp3's a week at most, but I feel that this album is worthy of larger interest and if Teddy Charles gets some more recognition, so be it...

Charles was one of an interesting and interlocking group of musicians and some time soon I would like to pursue these connections in greater detail. His work runs alongside the launch of the 'Third Stream' and there is definite cross-fertilisation going on but I see it as centred more clearly in the jazz tradition, for all its attempts to expand the interaction between form and improvised content – to go beyond the 32 bar chorus into longer form and using a different harmonic palette while retaining the contemporary perceived virtues of jazz. Look at the names of the composers and arrangers: George Russell, Gil Evans, Jimmy Guiffre, apart from Charles and Mal Waldron, the pianist in this group. One can see immediately where these lines of dispersal will lead... And also note the obscurity that Guiffre and Russell suffered for many years, alongside Charles. He is a neglected genius, creating new timbres and forms while retaining the swing of jazz.

Perhaps the one element that was missing from the experiments of the fifties was getting the rhythms right – maybe it needed Sunny Murray and company to take the conception of jazz drumming to other levels for it to breathe more easily in the utilising of complex harmonic/melodic materials. Sometimes listening to allied experimental music from the fifties, one sees the joins a bit too easily between formal experimentation and a desire to 'swing.' If the latter is ignored, the resultant work can seem a bit arid: allied to it too self-consciously, sometimes it appears as jumping too clumsily between genres, as if the drums, say, are tacked on too ineptly.

But on these Tentet recordings, there is little of this formal unease. Just a marvellous document of a different and neglected time and space in jazz.

Enjoy...

Personnel:
Teddy Charles (vibraphone); Gigi Gryce (alto saxophone); J.R. Monterose (tenor saxophone); George Barrow, Sol Schlinger (baritone saxophone); Peter Urban/Art Farmer (trumpet); Mal Waldron (piano); Jimmy Raney (guitar); Teddy Kotick (bass); Joe Harris (drums).

Download from here:

http://rapidshare.de/files/14541002/teddy_charles.rar.html

(If prompted for a password: freejazz)

For a good overview of Teddy Charles go here...

There is a good hour long radio program devoted to Teddy Charles and the Early Avant Garde here...