Happy 75th Birthday to Ran Blake
Ran Blake is not exactly famous, but jazz piano aficionados know he’s one of the greats. He was born April 20, 1935 in Springfield, MA; in celebration of his 75th birthday, I’ve here adapted and updated my Blake entry in MusicHound Jazz: The Essential Album Guide.
There’s an obvious and freely acknowledged debt to Thelonious Monk in Blake’s pianism, but nobody else has ever taken Monk’s ideas and distilled out of them such an equally personal and inimitable style. Blake can have the lightest touch one moment, then switch into a highly rhythmic, stride-influenced groove the next. There are plenty of pianists with better technique, but few who can make such strong statements in a solo context. In a way this is because, despite all his remarkable harmonies and his elusively dreamlike musical logic, his biggest influence after Monk is singers, especially the Pentecostal black gospel singing which made a vivid early impression on him while he was growing up. So no matter how far-out his playing gets, it retains an inherent soulfulness that always communicates. And since his technique focuses on timbre and his rhythm is so personal, he works most often, and best, in solo or duo formats.
The first jazz major at Bard College, he also studied summers at the innovative Lenox School of Jazz, founded by John Lewis (of the Modern Jazz Quartet) and Gunther Schuller. Blake also studied privately with Lewis, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Mal Waldron, and to a degree with Monk. Schuller got Blake his long-time teaching position at the New England Conservatory of Music, and Schuller and Blake are both associated with so-called Third Stream Music, a term coined to describe the flowing together of streams from classical and jazz musics. Blake played a major role in broadening the boundaries of Third Stream by adding pop and ethnic musics to the mix.
Here are my ten favorite Blake albums in chronological order. A lot of them are out of print, but thanks to amazon.com, gemm.com, and discogs.com, that’s not the impediment it might have been a decade ago.
The Newest Sound Around (RCA, 1962)
All his collaborations with singer Jeanne Lee are wonderful, with his style perfectly matched to her darkly ruminative approach to song interpretation, though one can’t help but wonder how the listeners of 1962 reacted to his deconstructive accompaniments. This was his debut, and hers as well; for their more mature interactions, search especially for You Stepped Out of a Cloud (Owl, 1989).
The Blue Potato and Other Outrages (Milestone, 1969)
Despite its importance, this solo album has never been on CD. Musically the most important development here is his incorporation of Greek music, not only Manos Hadjidakis’s “Never on Sunday” but also Mikis Theodorakis’s “Vradiazi.” But what is most remarked on is that this is the political Blake. Even standards are used to comment on events of the day: “Chicago” refers to the violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention, “Never on Sunday” reflects Greece’s 1967 coup, “All or Nothing at All” and “Stars Fell on Alabama” obliquely refer to America’s racial divide. Blake also covers Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus” and Max Roach’s “Garvey’s Ghost,” both politically intended from the beginning, and Blake’s originals mince no words either.
Breakthru (Improvising Artists, Inc., 1976)
Another uncompromising album of stark insistence and repeated dissonances, recorded for the label run by fellow pianist Paul Bley. “You Stepped Out of a Dream” takes the title literally; the melody is proclaimed boldly, contrasted with quiet Impressionist harmonies delivered gauzily via intricate pedaling. Among the little surprises that always dot a Blake album are a few nods to bebop, a style seemingly antithetical to his ethos. He may have been 40, but his playing still had a youthful brashness, its avant-garde gestures keeping it far from cocktail-lounge territory.
The Realization of a Dream (Owl, 1978)
Another solo masterpiece. The best of Blake’s albums on the French Owl label makes most explicit the importance of the dream state in his music’s structural and textural conception.
Suffield Gothic (Soul Note, 1984)
This is a look back at his early life in Suffield, Connecticut and Blake’s tribute to the music he absorbed in black churches (though there’s also a surprising version of “Stars and Stripes Forever”). Though that quality of soul may not be what listeners first associate with Blake’s chiarascuro piano style, here those gospel (and blues) roots well up from deep within him, without partaking of any obvious cliches. Saxophonist Houston Person, of course, has soul to burn, and on the three tracks on which they collaborate here, their styles meet midway; on Person’s solo number, Blake’s “Vanguard,” he moves deeper into the composer’s highly personal sound world.
The Short Life of Barbara Monk (Soul Note, 1986)
Blake rarely works in the common quartet setting, so this darkly beautiful tribute to Thelonious Monk’s daughter is a valuable document, not only for format reasons but because Blake surprises (shocks might even be the word) with two considerably stripped-down covers of Stan Kenton Band material. Saxophonist Ricky Ford pensively probes the pieces’ tender spots, and Blake is his usual cinematic self.
Epistrophy (Soul Note, 1992)
Unmarked Van (A Tribute to Sarah Vaughan) (Soul Note, 1997)
On this mostly solo album, Blake’s experience of Sarah Vaughan is so imbued with his personal reactions to her music that he is paying tribute not to her singing style, not to her era, but to her emotional presentation and the effect it has on him as a listener. The songs themselves are often utterly transformed in a hallucinatory manner: “Old Devil Moon” has never sounded more truly devilish than it does here, with tightly voiced dissonances contrasted with throbbing bass. The four quite different versions of “Tenderly” are particularly astonishing in their imagination and fluidity, and “Whatever Lola Wants” has never been more questioning. Blake mixes in a few originals that are even more elusive yet indescribably apt.
That Certain Feeling (hat Art, 1991)
Blake’s George Gershwin tribute includes Steve Lacy (soprano saxophone) and Ricky Ford (tenor saxophone). “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “The Man I Love,” “Oh Where’s My Bess,” “I Got Rhythm,” and other favorites are re-examined, with surprising facets revealed as always in Blake’s deeply reinterpretive art.
All That Is Tied (Tompkins Square, 2006)
The lion in winter. On his 35th album, recorded when he was 70, he looks back over his career and, for a change, focuses on his own compositions (with the exception of the title track), which for listeners familiar with his long career gives this disc a uniquely retrospective angle. His delight in unusual twists has not mellowed much with age, and there’s more originality on this one disc than most pianists manage over entire discographies.
