Last week I surveyed 1970s jazz. This week I foolhardily attempt to encapsulate the following quarter century, which I admit deserves more than ten albums to represent it. Once again, chronological order is the rule.
Ulmer rose to fame with Ornette Coleman in the 1970s, followed by a series of critically acclaimed albums as a leader. A strong blues element was always in his style, mixed with quirky phrasing and note choices, a scintillating array of guitar tones, and jagged, unpredictable lines that make his playing simultaneously stand out from yet complement seemingly any style. He also sings, and his mush-mouthed vocals have a certain Hendrix/bluesman charm. Ulmer’s artist breakthrough came on 1980’s epochal Are You Glad to Be in America?, recorded for Rough Trade and fortunately reissued in 1995. It’s a harmolodic bombshell, spraying sonic shrapnel in every direction. Ulmer only sings on two of the ten tracks, focusing instead on giving himself and the horns (David Murray, Oliver Lake, and Olu Dara) fast, intricate heads and plenty of solo space. Part of the album’s sound is defined by the two-drummer team of Ronald Shannon Jackson and Calvin Weston, who generally avoid using their cymbals and concentrate instead on sharp snare accents and rumbling tom-tom patterns that sound like a cross between a marching band and African drumming, with bassist Amin Ali locking into their beats. And throughout, Ulmer’s guitar lines bubble and buzz in barely restrained whiplashes of bent notes and scrabbling strums with the occasional wah-wah-heavy riffing thrown in for good measure.
One of the few great jazz violinists, Bang (born William Walker Vincent) is largely self-taught and immediately identifiable. His love for the style of swing violinist Stuff Smith and Leroy Jenkins’s mentorship combined in Bang to produce a sweet, bluesy, occasionally gritty style which never lacks verve and which he has built up over the years into a superb technique. This 1981 album is an exuberant, swinging quintet session with Charles Tyler (alto and baritone saxes), Michele Rosewoman (piano), Wilbur Morris (bass), and Dennis Charles (drums). Bang plays the material with raw excitement and generous humor, while Tyler and Rosewoman display a gusto perhaps unmatched on their own records. Unlike some of Bang’s albums, which can get looser than more traditional listeners would like, this group is tightly coordinated yet comfortably relaxed—witness the tempo changes on the rollicking title track.
The WSQ, one of the first permanent sax quartets to record regularly without a rhythm section, originated when free-jazz veterans Oliver Lake, Hamiett Bluiett, and Julius Hemphill joined with rising star David Murray for a festival performance in 1976. At first the quartet was primarily a vehicle for free improvisation, but moved towards an integration of improv with compositions and arrangements, and the WSQ’s arrangements often have the spontaneous looseness allied with precision of a small, hot swing band playing head arrangements. The band’s fourth album, from 1982, remains its most appealing and coherent statement, full of Ellingtonian scoring alternated with gutbucket riffing and patches of free improvisation. One of the most exciting tactics is for three of the horns to riff behind a soloist in flight; conversely, sometimes Bluiett nails down the tune with his huge baritone sax sound on a repeating figure while the other three horns improvise intertwining lines above him. At times, individual players are unaccompanied, and the textures are varied even more by Hemphill and Lake playing flutes. This is a kaleidoscopic triumph.
This free-improv super-group brought together four veteran leaders: “skronk” guitarist Sonny Sharrock, who’d played with Miles Davis and Pharoah Sanders; hard-blowing German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann; Bill Laswell, master conceptualist/monster bassist; and technically and imaginatively awesome drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, who’s contributed significantly to records by Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and Cecil Taylor. Reviving the spontaneous spirit of ‘60s free jazz when it was at a low ebb, they eschewed rehearsals but played with a level of intensity rarely matched. But actually, free jazz had rarely been this brutally powerful, though it had often aimed at such in-your-face impact. The Noise of Trouble ranks among the hottest concerts ever recorded. Drawing on two nights in October 1986 (with Japanese saxist Akira Sakata joining throughout and Herbie Hancock contributing effectively on acoustic piano on the final track), it balances the free-for-all improvisation with actual songs and a healthy dose of blues from Sharrock and Jackson.
Randy Weston has been a pioneer in emphasizing the African roots of jazz and the connections between the two styles, something he was doing even before he lived in Africa for six years. In addition, he is a superb Monk-influenced pianist and a distinctive composer whose jazz waltz “Hi-Fly” has become a standard. This bold, questing two-CD set from 1992 explores jazz’s Africanicity, with Weston’s angular piano style set jewel-like amidst Melba Liston’s arrangements for an almost-big band. Guests Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax and gaita (a high-pitched African horn) and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie hint at how expansive the parameters of Weston’s vision are, but everything’s grounded in loping rhythms that swing no matter how far-out the playing gets. It contains a number of classic Weston tunes, from “Blue Moses,” “The Healers,” and “African Cookbook” to “African Village Bedford-Stuyvesant” (heard in two versions), “African Sunrise,” and “A Prayer for Us All”—10 tracks in all, and though there’s a one-CD selection available, the entire original album is a must-own.
Ware is a tenor saxophonist of power and imagination. Although Ware is identified with free jazz, Sonny Rollins was his mentor, and in his own way Ware draws on the breadth of jazz history. He has a broad, meaty tone in all ranges of his horn, even in the altissimo register. In 1990 he began recording with a quartet including pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist William Parker, and with changes in the drum chair, that has been Ware’s group ever since and has become one of the most cohesive units on the scene (though it was announced this year that it will soon cease performing). This 1992 release is the best of the Quartet albums with Marc Edwards on drums and perhaps Ware’s most accessible disc. It contains two familiar standards, “There Will Never Be Another You” and “Yesterdays,” and the opening track, “Aquarian Sound,” is a modal groover with an easy-to-follow structure. On the stunning title track, Ware’s sustained circular-breathing solo flies with hair-raising intensity above bell-like chords that vividly shows Shipp’s relation to Scriabinesque harmony. This is free jazz, yes, but not in the sense of free improvisation; even at its most “outside” Flight of i shows careful planning, and the quartet’s method of building its music from Ware-penned patterns is at its clearest.
Dixon has long been the supreme groundbreaker of the trumpet avant-garde, conjuring a vast array of nuanced sounds, many never heard before but much-copied since. There are only around 20 items on his discography, including his appearances on other people’s albums, as his main focuses have been the process of creating music (rather than its preservation) and education. Despite the wide span of time between their release dates, Vade Mecum (1994) and Vade Mecum II (1997) were recorded at the same three-day session in August 1993. Dixon’s broad sonic palette has plenty of room around it, which, with the contrasting approaches of bassists William Parker and Barry Guy, plus Tony Oxley’s sensitive splashes of percussion, produces masterpieces of implication and understatement.
Maneri mixes an encyclopedic knowledge of microtonal music (he’s written a respected textbook on the subject) with an acute ear for improvisation, but didn’t have any recordings as a leader released until he was 67, when the English label Leo put out this album in 1995, certainly the most startling debut of the year and perhaps the decade. The music here is as challenging as the most “outside” free jazz but generally subdued, which allows better appreciation of his fine gradations of tone quality. All the compositions are group improvisations except for “Body and Soul,” which is given a deeply felt reading. Bassist John Lockwood and drummer Randy Peterson provide sensitive accompaniment.
Though leukemia tragically ended Chapin’s life when he was only 40 years old, he spent nearly a decade working as a leader and left behind a legacy of many excellent albums and performances and a reputation as a versatile musician’s musician (he played alto, mezzo-soprano, sopranino, and baritone saxophones, saxello, flute, bass flute, and wood flute) who was unfailingly gentlemanly. He moved freely between the dual (and sometimes dueling) New York City factions of the avant-garde downtown scene and the mainstream scene and was respected in both. Though in his trio work he would sometimes play outside time, unlike some avant-gardists he often played metered music even in non-mainstream settings. His natural exuberance made him an expressive showman, yet there was never the slightest sense that he compromised his musicality in any context; he was able to communicate directly and unassumingly in even the most challenging sonic contexts. Chapin’s final album, this trio release, was recorded in 1996 but delayed until he could work on its production during a period of remission from his illness. It came out the same week he died and sounds like a benediction, with a feeling of quiet peace on many tracks. His flute playing is especially striking. The centerpiece of the album, however, is the 11-minute “Night Bird Song,” anchored by Mario Pavone’s vamp-like basslines and which includes a Rahsaanesque section where Chapin plays two saxes in an ecstatic climax.
There are a lot of attempts to “update” jazz that end up merely condescending, cheesy, pandering, or otherwise misguided—or just not jazz. Trumpeter Dave Douglas has never fallen into any of those traps; he’s just naturally forward-looking, and catholic in his musical tastes. He called this 2002 release, which includes electronics in its sound, “my largest ensemble recording to date, but this is truly small ensemble music.” That’s certainly reflected in the creative reflexes of the players involved: Chris Speed (clarinet, tenor sax), Bryan Carrott (vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel), Joshua Roseman (trombone on four tracks), Mark Feldman (violin), Joe Daley (tuba), Drew Gress (bass), Michael Sarin (drums), and Ikue Mori (electronic percussion). The line dividing composed sections and improvisation is sometimes thrillingly hard to define, but this is definitely organized music with strong and memorable themes. The concern for instrumental color that has always been such a focus of Douglas’s style is present more than ever with such a kaleidoscopic range of timbres available to him with this versatile group. Douglas is arguably the most important and innovative jazz artist of this decade.
