The Jazz Column

BY MICHAEL ULLMAN

Years ago, the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon spoke to me candidly and unexpectedly about drug use among jazz musicians. He explained to me the strain of performing jazz in the conditions he grew up with. A jazz musician would stand on a makeshift stage in a smoke-filled basement, a few feet above the nearest audience members, who might be—and probably were—talking, chinking glasses and silverware, smoking, and laughing. Behind them, dimly seen, was the rest of the crowd, if there were a crowd, the crisscrossing waiters and waitresses, the bar with a bored bartender ringing the cash register, and the manager whose current job was to answer the phone and yell into the receiver, “Dexter Gordon” and “The next set is at 11.” In the face of all this, a soloist had to focus on everything the rhythm section behind and beside him was doing, and instantaneously and yet coherently invent new melodies over complicated chord changes, sometimes at breakneck speeds. Gordon explained that heroin somehow allowed him to screen out the audience and focus on the music.

We should all know that it takes courage and what used to be called character to play this music, to force oneself to be creative under the most distracting circumstances, to avoid coasting or falling back on clichés, even one’s own clichés, or on crowd-pleasing tricks, a honk, an easy-going riff, or something that worked the night before. Pianist Jaki Byard liked to tell the wonderful story of a concert he played in Europe with Charles Mingus. Byard would interpose some choruses of stride piano in the middle of a bebop solo. It always got the crowd rocking. One night, after a thunderously approving response to one of Byard’s solos, Mingus yelled, “Don’t do that again.” After his initial shock, Byard realized what Mingus meant: “You got such applause tonight that you will be tempted to play the same solo tomorrow. Don’t do it.” At the highest level, the jazz musician is honor bound not to do what has proven successful while at the same time sounding exactly like himself or herself. It’s a daunting task.

Each innovative jazz musician revises, as T. S. Eliot pointed out about poetry, the history of the music that came before him. No wonder the old-timers are not always so welcoming. When the naive young Charlie Parker joined a Kansas City jam session before he was ready, he was driven off the stage. He hadn’t heard, he said later, that there were different keys. So, rather than lock up his saxophone in dismay, he went home and studied every key. When, in 1945, he made his first great bebop records, it was the turn of other musicians to learn—or to shut their ears. Charlie Parker was an obvious virtuoso who showed his reverence for the tradition with his blues playing and with his boundlessly inventive choruses on the chord changes of standards such as I Got Rhythm and Cherokee.

The now 79-year-old Ornette Coleman, whom I recently heard in his September 26th Lincoln Center concert, presented more disturbing problems to the jazz establishment. He grew up in Fort Worth listening to rhythm and blues and the occasional bebop single on a local jukebox. His high-school classmate was the rhythm and blues saxophonist who would become famous as King Curtis, but his inspiration was a local saxophonist named Red Connors. At some point, he began to hear music differently from the blues and bop musicians around him. His tone was more tense, for sure, but the real problems started when he objected to the chorus form. As I have said in these pages, his most distinctive music started with a question: “What would happen if, at the end of a chorus, rather than follow the chord structure, I decided to play on a theme or part of a theme that interested me?” He tried it when playing with a blues band and, it is said, was subjected to the crudest form of music criticism when he was beat up by some audience members and his horn destroyed. He didn’t give up. After a sojourn in New Orleans, where he met Ed Blackwell, soon to be one of his quartet members, he went to Los Angeles, where, among other things, he worked as an elevator operator, and gradually assembled a cadre of musicians interested in what he was doing. One of them was bassist Charlie Haden, who told Valerie Wilmer: “The first time we played at Ornette’s house, the music startled me. I’d never heard anything like it before. . . . I learned more about listening from playing with Ornette than I ever learned in my life from anyone, because to play with him you have to listen completely to everything he plays.” The first time trumpeter Roy Eldridge heard Ornette, to mention a famous example, he couldn’t make any sense of it. He tried him sober and high, and concluded that the man was jiving.

Haden’s is a nicely balanced statement of what it took to play with Coleman. The saxophonist believes in democracy—he wants people to play themselves—but his band members nonetheless take on themselves the task of listening to him intensely, even as they play in what seems like an even-handed manner: drummer Ed Blackwell plays the most melodic of drums; Charlie Haden plays scales and country-sounding phrases; and Don Cherry plays innocent-sounding phrases on his squeaky pocket trumpet. Their ensembles are ragged; their collective rhythms are sometimes almost singsong. The parts seem independent, but it somehow coheres. Their sound is unlike any other band from the 1950s or beyond. Coleman answered his question by playing a chorus of his often-two-part compositions, and then, without worrying about chord changes or phrase lengths, improvising on whatever melodic fragment caught his ear. The others meanwhile engaged in what was not quite parallel play: a soloist might pick up on a rhythm Blackwell played, or become seemingly entranced by an ascending series of phrases by Haden. The rhythm section might surge forward or recede. Ornette Coleman’s early Atlantic Records had challenging titles: The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century and This Is Our Music . But the titles are endearing: Congeniality, Focus on Sanity, Peace, Humpty Dumpty . Coleman may have dominated the music, but he paid generous tribute to Charlie Haden’s country background, for instance, with his Ramblin’ . (All of these are available on Beauty is a Rare Thing: The Complete Atlantic Recordings , Atlantic R2 71410.) These recordings, sincere though they obviously were, were, like Coleman’s live performances, subjected to a wide variety of responses, not excluding ridicule. Coleman did not play “in tune,” it was said; he countered by saying that there are as many different Cs as there are musical situations. Much later, prompted perhaps by Miles Davis’s fusion bands, Coleman put together a double quartet with electric guitars and bassists. This time it was many of his former fans that were perplexed or offended. He may have won them over—he won me over—with tunes such as the Tex-Mex influenced Latin Genetics ( In All Languages , Dream 008). Always, the soft-spoken, unembittered Coleman persisted. How intimidating can a man be, one wants to ask, who wrote a tune called Friends and Neighbors and invited his friends and neighbors in to sing it for a recording?

Ornette Coleman came to a class at Tufts University, where I teach. On the way to class, I worried about the students’ reaction to this wonderful man. Until recently, students have seemed as shocked by Coleman’s music as were his original audiences. I needn’t have worried. He sat down, looked around the classroom, and told a story, which I shall paraphrase. He said that recently he had gone on a tour to Japan. He was used to being ignored at home, so he was pleasantly surprised to see a welcoming party at the airport. There, a young man approached him and said, “Mr. Coleman, I would like to be your student.” He replied that he did not take students. That night, the young man tried once more outside the concert hall. When the concert was over, he approached Coleman again with his unvarying statement: “Mr. Coleman, I would like to be your student.” Wherever they went, this young man showed up. He even knocked on Coleman’s hotel room door, asking to be his student, only to be told that Coleman didn’t take students. The tour ended, and a few weeks later, Coleman was practicing in his ground level Prince Street apartment when he heard a knock on the door. He opened it to find the Japanese boy standing there. He said, “Mr. Coleman, I would like to be your student.” Coleman said, “Come on in.”

It was a story about persistence, integrity, about wanting something badly enough to put your heart into it, and to take chances. It could have been a metaphor for Coleman’s career. His stories generally are. When later that day I interviewed the saxophonist on the radio, he said, “You know, nobody is out of tune.” I took that in silently, and then he finished his thought: “Everyone is in tune with something.” Later, I drove him to Brandeis, where a student group played some of Coleman’s music. It was awful, and, sitting beside him, I observed the saxophonist twisting his program as if he wanted to strangle it. I asked him if he was okay. He said, “I don’t want them to play my music; I want them to play themselves.” He said something similar to the actual band, and then whispered an instruction to each of them. They started to play again, and suddenly the music was interesting. I asked him what he told them, and he said, “O, I told one to play only jagged phrases, another to play smoothly. And so on.” They were forced to listen to each other in a new way, and in a wide-open context found a way to play.

Talking about his music, Coleman once said, “The theme you play at the start of a number is the territory, and what comes after, which may have very little to do with it, is the adventure.” The adventure took him recently to the Rose Theater with a quartet that included two bassists, Tony Falanga on acoustic and Al MacDowell on electric, and Ornette’s drummer son, Denardo Coleman. It was—almost—a nostalgic event. Coleman has received his share of honors in recent years: a MacArthur fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize, a festival in his honor in Houston. But he seemed touched by the response of the sold-out Lincoln Center crowd. Almost 80, he sounded gentler certainly than when I first heard him over 40 years ago. Before every tune, he turned to bassist Tony Falanga, who frequently started the music off. Coleman, his tone softened, seemed more willing to fit into this quartet, especially in a room whose acoustics allowed him to hear everything that went on. He played what might sound like Ornette’s greatest hits—it was a shock even to think that he had greatest hits!—including his early blues, Turnaround . Coleman had introduced Turnaround in 1959 on Tomorrow Is the Question (Contemporary). Much more recently, he played it on Sound Grammar (Phrase Text). On the later, 1996 performance, he quotes If I Loved You and an even more unlikely tune, Beautiful Dreamer . He did so again in Lincoln Center. The band, which seemed at times to center on Falanga’s bass, played Coleman’s version of a Bach Prelude (in G) which he had previously recorded on Tone Dialing (Harmomelodic/Verve). It had Falanga bowing the Bach cello piece, at first more or less as written, while Coleman wailed over it. The title Tone Dialing must be one of Coleman’s puns, with the suggestion of tonal freedom and at the same time, a honing in on tonal music. He played the theme from his symphony, Skies of America . Evidently touched by the rapturous response of the audience, and reluctant to abandon the stage, after walking slowly off, he returned to play his now famous keening ballad, Lonely Woman . The crowd sighed and congratulated each other: he might have been Tony Bennett finally giving in and singing I Left My Heart in San Francisco.

In 1965, John Coltrane, for several years the leader of one of the most celebrated quartets in jazz, said, “I feel the need for more time, more rhythm all around me.” He wanted the rhythm to be “multi-directional,” and his drummer, Elvin Jones, for all his four-limbed virtuosity, could only come at Coltrane from one direction. Coltrane reached out to Rashied Ali. Ali, who died at the age of 74 on August 12, was entirely cooperative. He had been angling for the job, however. Ali grew up as Robert Patterson in Philadelphia. His mom sang with Jimmy Lunceford. He studied percussion and worked with local rhythm and blues bands, and then with visiting jazz men. He moved to New York in 1963, and started haunting Coltrane performances. When Elvin Jones wasn’t around, he sat in. (Coltrane always insisted on paying him.) He was learning to play freely, which in his case generally means to play around rhythms, suggest them, without settling into a groove. He played with the astonishingly forthright tenor Albert Ayler—Ayler’s sound is a prolonged wail that seems to drip with emotion. It virtually covers any accompanist; the Ayler drummer must learn to play behind a saxophone that seems to pulse with its own rhythm. Ali also played with Don Cherry and Pharaoh Sanders, with other free drummers such as Sunny Murray. He recorded On This Night (Impulse 97) with Archie Shepp. Meanwhile Coltrane had been observing him. Ali noted that he’d be playing with Ayler and spot Coltrane in the audience. When Coltrane approached him with a job, he rather surprisingly played hard to get; later he accused himself of arrogance. Coltrane already had a great drummer in Elvin Jones. Ali didn’t want to become the second to Jones, nor did Jones welcome him when he did join the band that now also included Pharoah Sanders. Suddenly there was rhythm everywhere. It was difficult for audiences to separate the strands and difficult for the drummers as well. Jones left Coltrane, and pianist McCoy Tyner as well.

In 1965, he made Meditations (Impulse AS9223) with the Coltrane group that still included Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner. The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost from that album begins with the two saxophonists, Coltrane and Sanders, fluttering over a rhythmic background as ceaselessly active and as seemingly impassive as the sea. Coltrane solos, and for once the magisterial figure seems almost lost in the crowd. Perhaps that is part of the point. If so, the effect doesn’t last. Sanders picks up a tambourine, and soon everything seems to swirl about Coltrane’s committed, increasing frenetic, solo. In the next two years, Ali would be Coltrane’s main man, lasting through this period in which Coltrane seemed to have wanted more textures around him, and into the final year when he seemed to be simplifying, as we hear on the almost noble late recording, Expression (Impulse AS 9120). Ali became particularly known for a duet album with John Coltrane: for many it remains the high point of Ali’s career. The session, Interstellar Space (Impulse 34152) was recorded on February 22, 1967. It sounds like a stressful session nonetheless. Ali told All about Jazz : “I didn’t have a clue what was happening. John told me that we were going to be going in to the studio, and I said, ‘Cool.’ And I went in there, and I was setting up, and I didn’t see Jimmy, I didn’t see Alice; I didn’t see nobody else. And I was like, ‘Where’s everybody else?’ and he said, ‘It’s just going to be you and me.’ And I went, ‘Oh!’ So everything was completely spontaneous except for at times I would ask him to give me some kind of clue as to what was happening, you know like, ‘Is this going to be slow like a ballad?’ or, ‘Is this going to be in a certain time like 3/4 or 4/4? Is it going to be fast? Is it going to be slow?’ Because you know, he would just ring the bells, pick up his horn and start playing . . . And you know, I would get in there, and I would play, and he would go, ‘How do you like that?’ and I would say, ‘Well, I wasn’t quite prepared for it.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, you want to do it again?’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, let’s do it again.’” Largely because of Ali’s discomfort, Coltrane allowed himself to play second takes on several tunes. (There are two takes of Jupiter on the compact disc reissue.) Here as on Mars , Coltrane begins by shaking bells and suggesting a rhythm, presumably to pacify his wary percussionist.

After Coltrane’s death, Ali recorded Bout Soul (Blue Note 84282) with Jackie McLean, and a series of recordings, including the powerful Journey in Satchidananda (Impulse 33119) with Alice Coltrane. But he was never offered a contract himself. He did what many musicians did in the early 1970s: he started his own label. Ali first recorded for Survival Records in 1973. To my ears, highlights include the duets with violinist Leroy Jenkins called Swift are the Winds of Life (Survival 112). He began presenting music in his loft, Ali’s Alley , and later started a group, Prima Materia, that made, among other tribute sessions, Peace on Earth (Music of John Coltrane) . One of the saxophonists on that session, Allan Chase, has told me that playing with Rashied Ali has been the highlight of his career. Ali became something of a mentor for the would-be avant-garde. Among other students, he played with the sons of both Coltrane (Ravi) and of Coltrane’s bassist Jimmy Garrison (Matthew). When asked what the avant-garde was, he answered typically: “It’s a very personal kind of a thing; it’s stuff that you can do after you learn how to do everything else. You’ve got to first know where it’s all coming from before you can take something—I always call the avant-garde taking absolutely nothing and turning it into something; in other words, just going for it, just start playing . . . You know, just start! Just do that, and keep turning it over and turning over until it starts making sense.” It has to do with exhausting a piece, with showing all its possibilities. “Just go into a thing until it completely becomes like nothing. Everything just starts working together; that’s when it’s right. You can take any tune and do that. It doesn’t have to be an original tune you write; it can be any tune. If it’s music, you can do that with it; you can get free. I mean being free, still playing But Not for Me , but just open and loose. Just to be able to play uninhibited, just to do whatever you feel like you want to do, and it’s all right in there with what’s happening.” However outside he played, Rashied Ali always wanted to be “right in there with what’s happening.” It was hard for him to miss; he was often the one making it happen.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, people have been saying for 100 years, without anyone (I hope) trying it. Schoenberg said that there were still plenty of pieces to be written in the key of C, and I’ll add there are plenty of good solos to be taken on standard tunes, or on funky or boppish originals. I’ve been listening to two recent recordings by trumpeter Roy Hargrove, the quintet recording Earfood (Groovin’ High B0010997) and the big band album, Emergency (Emarcy B0013289). The quintet session by Hargrove’s working band is tight, of course, beginning with the funky I’m Not So Sure . The big band session fulfills a Hargrove dream: evidently he has wanted for a long time to lead such a band. When I hear people lament the end of the big band concept, I feel like shouting that it isn’t because of the lack of interest among the musicians. People like Joe Henderson waited decades for a chance to record big band music. Who knows what might have happened musically if the resources were available for younger composers like Hargrove to hear their arrangements night after night the way Ellington and Basie and Lunceford did. Emergency is a beautifully recorded album of big band music nonetheless: Hargrove covers My Funny Valentine , taking on, in the process, the recordings by Miles Davis and Chet Baker. He provides a soothing, varied backdrop to mostly young soloists like his regular pianist, Gerald Clayton.

If it’s difficult to sustain a career as a jazzman, for decades it seemed that it was virtually deadly to try to be a bluesman or woman. Pinetop Smith was gunned down in a bar, and Blind Lemon Jefferson froze outside one. Little Walter died of wounds sustained in a fight; Robert Johnson was poisoned by an angry husband (or jilted woman). Tommy Johnson lost his mind over drink; Bessie Smith was killed in a car accident on a backwoods road on the way to one more gig. A half dozen major bluesmen spent significant portions of their lives in Southern prisons with innocent-sounding names like Sugar Land and Parchman Farm. The famous harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson was killed in a June 1948 mugging while walking home from a gig at Chicago’s Plantation House. He was 34. He was 23 when he made his first hit, Good Morning, Little School Girl . He wasn’t the first prominent harmonica player in the blues, nor even the most virtuosic. Sonny Terry, who had accompanied Blind Boy Fuller before he paired up with guitarist Brownie McGhee, probably takes precedence. But Terry always sounded country, though delightfully so; he played versions of fox chases and whooping train imitations. In his early career, Terry was as likely to shadow the vocal by doubling the sung line. Sonny Boy Williamson adapted his simple instrument to an urban style. He used the instrument as a second voice, introducing Good Morning, Little School Girl with what sounds like an overblown harmonica. He recorded a lot in his decade in the public eye. Several years ago JSP Records brought out a five-disc set, The Original Sonny Boy Williamson, Volume One (JSP7797), charging little more than what a single disc might go for. That collection starts with Good Morning , and includes his Whiskey Headed Blues . It includes performances such as Big Joe Williams’s famous Baby Please Don’t Go , which he would reprise again and again, often with Sonny Boy behind him. Whiskey was his nemesis, and Williamson became increasingly unreliable in his work, but most of the new collection, The Original Sonny Boy Williamson: The Later Years (JSP77101), is equally worth having. Sonny Boy was famous in those days, from 1939–47, and, as Sunnyland Slim testifies in the notes, he could make $20 a night a parties. Union scale was $8.50, so the harmonica man, who seemed to be bringing the instrument towards rhythm and blues in his last years, and who would have been a star in the upcoming electrified Chicago blues style, seemed content with what he was doing and getting. The records, including Hoodoo, Hoodoo , remain. By the end he was playing with a small jump band, so we get to hear such fine bluesmen as Eddie Boyd ( Five Long Years ) and we get to imagine what Sonny Boy would have been like in the electric blues era.

The man who led that movement, and surely one of the finest of all blues singers, was born McKinley Morganfield and called Muddy Waters. Waters was born in Mississippi outside of Clarksdale, and worked on a plantation until he was discovered by blues collector Alan Lomax. A crucial thing happened. He listened to the test pressings Lomax made and decided he sounded as good as many on the records he had heard. He went north to Chicago, where eventually he found work and put together a small band that featured the harmonica player, Little Walter. Undaunted by the noise of Chicago bars, he electrified his instrument and started to play an up-tempo form of Delta blues that people would dance and shout to. Willie Dixon, an A&R man for Chess Records and a blues composer and bass player, called what Muddy Waters had “pep.” It was a new kind of blues, and Dixon saw to it that Waters was recorded by the new labels started by the Chess brothers. Interestingly, those fellows weren’t so interested in the band Waters was leading. They wanted an older sound. It was only after a few successful recordings that he was allowed to show off the complete new style. (This was one of the rare occasions when the producers wanted a less commercial sound.) With boasting, macho songs like Hoochie Coochie Man , Waters took off. The earliest Muddy Waters, including the field recordings, but also including the earlier Chess records, have been collected as Muddy Waters: King of Chicago Blues (ProperBox 102). A better anthology for the Chess recordings is Muddy Waters: The Anthology 1947–72 (Chess). Many of us listeners came to Muddy Waters after his 1963 Newport appearance, which became a hit LP . Waters was in a stunningly good mood there. Now that performance, which has always been available on LP , is part of a DVD called Classic Concerts . Get it if you like blues at all. Waters, usually a dignified and restrained figure, dances his way through a joyous performance. At one point, he grabs one of his sideman and cuts a rug. He’s ripping throughout. It’s worth seeing just for the now-classic performance of Got My Mojo Working . In recent weeks, a new Waters concert disc has become available. Muddy Waters Live in Fillmore Auditorium (Chess) is what they are calling an authorized bootleg. It has an extended version of She Moves Me with an icy, high-pitched guitar solo by the man himself.