Trio M

Big Picture
Cryptogramophone CG 1434

Big Picture returns Myra Melford to the interlocking trio format with which the diminutive pianist made her reputation in the early 1990s. Except that Trio M is more than the earlier Melford Trio writ large; it’s completed by two other forceful improvisers and composers. Like the pianist, bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson are bandleaders on their own, yet the seven-track CD, which divides the playing and writing chores, irrefutably proves that the sum is greater than its parts.

Dresser, who teaches at UC San Diego, is multi-faceted bassist who at different points on a composition like Wilson’s “Naïve Art” woodenly vibrates a plucked funky blues line in tandem with the drummer’s backbeat crunches with the same assurance he uses to create spiccato squeezes to match Melford’s slurry triple cadences.

Coloring the proceedings with steady bumps and clatter plus unselfconscious rim shots, bell peals and tempo modulation, Wilson is as impressive a percussionist as he is a composer. Antiphonally, the three frequently interlock tones and tempos, as distinctive keyboard vamps, drum bounces or bass strokes often adumbrating connective themes.

Soldering together triple techniques most effectively is the more-than-13½-minute title track. Polytonally modulating from cerebral strummed piano lines to romantic low-frequency runs to near-frenzied cascading overtones with characteristic portamento sluices, Melford’s output is complemented both by Dresser’s squeaky sul ponticello and double stopped shuffle bowing plus Wilson’s rhythmic shifts from irregular ruffs and flams to hammered echoing cymbal resonation.

Highly rated across the board, this is a Big Picture for everyone.

-- Ken Waxman

-- For CODA Issue 336

December 4, 2007

JOHN MCNEIL

East Coast Cool
OmniTone 15211

Dedication with a difference, EAST COAST COOL sets out to recreate the classic sound of baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s influential piano-less quartet without copying its tunes or arrangements.

Unlike the so-called Young Lions, composer/arranger/trumpeter John McNeil, 57, is mature enough to have forged his own identity. That means that the 12 tunes here are treated the way a veteran actor would conceive of a personal interpretation of Hamlet, without resorting to the impersonation of a more established performer.

California-born McNeil, who at one time played in a Mulligan band, has been a New Yorker since the 1970s, and was also a member of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band and pianist Horace Silver’s Quintet. He has also recorded and led his own combos for years. Playing Mulligan to his Chet Baker – though McNeil is a far more accomplished brassman then Baker ever was – is saxophonist Alan Chase, who here sticks to baritone sax. No disgruntled bopper, Chase was a member of drummer Rashied Ali’s, Prima Materia band, has played chamber music and with composer John Zorn, and is also dean of Jazz Studies and Improvisation at Boston’s New England Conservatory.

Playing the Carson Smith and Larry Bunker roles are younger players: bassist John Herbert, who has worked with well-regarded veterans like guitarist John Abercrombie; and drummer Matt Wilson, who is first call for half the bands in New York.

The most noticeable point of demarcation between the Mulligan-Baker combo and the McNeil-Chase one is what the later quartet does with “Bernie’s Tune”, one of the former’s so-called Cool Jazz hits. Taken slightly out of tempo, with McNeil’s tremolo grace notes out front and Chase braying and overblowing, the four are able to suspend time, only retaining the tune’s framework when the trumpeter trades fours with the drummer.

“Bernie’s Tune” is also one of the few non-originals on the CD, with some of the others bordering on atonality, while maintaining a characteristic relaxed lope. McNeil orchestrates “Schoenberg's Piano Concerto” as a swinging West Coast jazz line, complete with shout choruses and Chase rappelling up and down the scale. Equally outside is “Internal Hurdles”, built around double counterpoint from the front line, yet extended enough so that McNeil twitters at the top and Chase’s smooth textures are languid and bottom-scraping.

Other pieces such as “Waltz Helios” and “A Time to Go” – described by McNeil as “happy for about four or five bars before you realize that there's someone creeping up your back stairs ready to kill your family” – show off the leader’s command of his horn. Medium tempo and balanced by smooth vibrations from Chase, McNeil’s tart exposition on the later easily distinguishes his style from Baker’s, which was all blankness and prettiness –when he could make it. McNeil on the other hand often balances grace notes and slurs on a knife edge, pulling back in the improvisation before the patterns tumble and shatter. “Waltz Helios” sounds close to the sort of unforced swinger Zoot Sims would play rather than Mulligan, and McNeil’s chromatic patterning is enlivened with a sort of bugling call to colors that Baker would never have imagined.

Confident in his abilities, the brassman feeds a Miles Davis-like muted quote from “Surrey with a Fringe on Top” into his solo on the Mulligan-emulating GAB”. With Wilson reverberating as if he was swatting a set of bongos, McNeil and Chase contrapuntally circle each other like feeding birds, and to the accompaniment of the drummer’s fiery pops, rolls and thumps, knit variations on the theme until its final recap in harmonic unison.

Parenthetically, EAST COAST COOL’s only negative feature is strictly extra musical. Throughout the booklet pictures, McNeil is pictured puffing away on a cigarette like a jazzman of the 1950s. Considering all the jazz musicians and others who have died from tobacco-related diseases in the 50 plus years since jazzers routinely used smoking for added cool credibility, tobacco addiction is one retro style that doesn’t deserve to be revived.

Negate the bad habit; celebrate the music impressively presented on this CD.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Deadline 2. A Time to Go 3.Brother Frank 4. Bernie's Tune 5. Duet #1 6. Delusions 7. Wanwood 8. Internal Hurdles 9. Duet #2 10. Waltz Helios 11. Schoenberg's Piano Concerto 12. GAB

Personnel: John McNeil (trumpet); Allan Chase (baritone saxophone); John Hebert (bass); Matt Wilson (drums and slide whistle)

April 10, 2006

FRANK KIMBROUGH

Lullabluebye
Palmetto Records PM 2100

BEN ALLISON & MEDICINE WHEEL
Buzz
Palmetto Records PM 2101

Affiliated neither with the backwards-gazing Young Lions nor with the try- anything experimenters, New York’s Jazz Composers Collective (JCC) gathers together a rotating cast of musicians and bands to perform and write distinctive contemporary pieces to advance jazz without imitating or rupturing its historic fabric.

Bassist Ben Allison and pianist Frank Kimbrough -- who co-founded the JCC in 1992 and remain two of its composers-in-residence -- refine that concept on these CDs. Problem is, sometimes when you stay in the middle of the road -- even a musical one -- you’re apt to be run over from different directions.

Although more concise, Allison’s disc fares better, with the greater number of colors available with Medicine Wheel, which besides he and the pianist consists of trombonist Clark Gayton, reedists Michael Blake and Ted Nash, plus the refined drumming of Michael Sarin.

Sarin, who has done similar quietly spectacular work for pianist Myra Melford among others, gives some of Allison’s compositions the polyrhythmic oomph they lack. Kimbrough, who takes the piano chair in the JCC’s Herbie Nichols Project, also has a first-rate drummer on board for his trio set. Matt Wilson has backed veterans like bassist Mario Pavone and is certainly proactive on LULLABLUEBYE. There are times, in fact, that it seems like a duo session, with Allison barely present.

This is particularly obvious on “Ode”, Kimbrough’s moderato-paced tribute to pianist Andrew Hill. Accentuating different chordal patterns with his bass drum accents and cymbal resonation, Wilson breaks up the time making the pianist’s playing seem excessively formal.

Percussion inventiveness is on display on John Barry’s “You Only Live Twice” and “Whirl”. The former is an inoffensive, foot-tapping run-through of the James Bond film theme. The later finds Wilson moving from paradiddles and nerve beats to New Thing-style door knocking and rim shots. Coupled with harder tremolos from Kimbrough, it surrounds one of the few extended bass solos on the CD, with Allison ranging his way up to the pegs and down to the bridge. Thematic resolution replicates the beginning with a little more freedom.

Things pick up a bit with “Kid Stuff” and “Ben’s Tune”. “Stuff” finds Wilson’s tick-tocking cymbal raps, rebounds and ratamacues accompanying a bit of Baroque-like invention on Kimbrough’s part, albeit a section with pitchsliding and pointillism. Here though, the repeated note clusters bring early Chick Corea to mind. The other tune is unfussy, unfocussed and unpretentious and sounds like fun to play. It features arpeggio rolls and metronomic time keeping from the pianist, with light voicing that sometimes makes it seem that he’s about to launch into “Ferry Cross The Mersey”. Despite its title as well, Allison’s solo is unspectacularly low-key.

The bassman is more assertive on his own CD, but at least that doesn’t translate into a string of bass solos. Instead he integrates within the more aggressive sounds of the horns and drummer Sarin.

You can see the freedom he gains when you compare tuns such as “R&B Fantasy” and “Green Al”. The first isn’t related to the common definition of R&B, ending up as more like a classically styled fantasia with contrapuntal parts for nearly everyone. Sarin’s press rolls and brush-driven cymbal pressure holds the beat, that’s prevented from becoming too overpowering by modulated, moderated and meshed saxophone and piano lines. Improvising like a more modern, lilting Stan Getz, Blake, on tenor, puts not a note out of place until the very end when he introduces some mannerly squeals and flutter tonguing. Kimbrough comps politely behind him until the other horns enter and take out the piece, with the pianist reprising the rondo-like beginning.

Perhaps the title of “Green Al” is supposed to in a backwards way suggest the Memphis-based gospel-soul singer of the same name in reverse, and it certainly has a slinky, bass-driven call-and-response beat. Sarin on hand-beaten snares and with cymbals scratches would never be confused with the MGs’ Al Jackson, however. And while Blake brings some impressive double tonguing and slurred upper partials to his funk-tinged tenor solo, the unsweaty way he approaches it distinguish him from the Memphis horns.

Sarin’s skills are again showcased on the nearly eight-minute title tune. Manipulating his percussion set so at various times it appears as if he’s playing djembe hand drums, congas and unattached cymbals, he meets slide pecks from Gayton and stratospheric runs from Nash on tenor. Far more than on his own CD, Kimbrough asserts himself, creating high frequency boogie licks as well as squeezing a handful of keys into a tremolo countermelody. By the end, the horn fills have turned to a constant vamp.

After Sarin, it’s Blake who emerges as the most consistent soloist, with a tone that ranges from wide and fruity to delineated and free. His Asiatic and Latinesque “Mauritania” provides a showcase from Nash’s crisp flute tones and growling plunger work from Gayton.

Everyone’s playing appears to need firming up however on “Erato”, a transcription of a 1960s’ tune by pianist Hill, who was also celebrated with “Ode” on Kimbrough’s CD. Here the floating romantic line becomes too smooth under the double counterpoint of Nash’s breathy tenor and a stolid bass line. The placid piano chords don’t help either.

Both Allison and Kimbrough, plus their JCC associates, are well on their way to establish unique identities. But on the evidence of these CDs, tougher-minded improvising and arrangements must be added to more advanced compositional and conceptional facilities for this to occur.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listings: Lullabluebye: 1. Lullabluebye 2. Centering 3. Kid Stuff 4. Ode 5. Whirl 6. Ghost Dance 7. You Only Live Twice 8. FuBu 9. Ben’s Tune 10. Eventualities

Personnel: Lullabluebye: Frank Kimbrough (piano); Ben Allison (bass); Matt Wilson (drums)

Track Listing: Buzz: 1. Respiration 2. Buzz 3. Green Al 4. Mauritania 5. Erato 6. R&B Fantasy 7. Across The Universe

Personnel: Buzz: Clark Gayton (trombone and bass trombone); Michael Blake (soprano and tenor saxophones); Ted Nash (flute and tenor saxophone); Frank Kimbrough (piano, prepared piano, Wurlitzer piano); Ben Allison (bass); Michael Sarin (drums)

October 11, 2004

FRED HESS QUARTET

The Long And Short Of It
Tapestry 76006-2

Celebrants and first call adherents of Colorado’s nascent jazz scene, erstwhile collaborators tenor saxophonist Fed Hess and trumpeter Ron Miles hadn’t played together for half a decade before this understated session.

No Western chauvinists, they made the CD more than a reunion by recruiting two Easterners for the rhythm section. Even so, while the music becomes more assured as the nine tunes play out over its 57 plus minutes, the end product is a bit too laid back to make it into the first ranks.

As leader, Hess, who teaches at Metropolitan Sates College of Denver, as does Miles, must accept the brickbats as well as the bouquets. He writes attractive compositions -- all here are his -- but a combination of missing flintiness in the front line and the tendency towards round robin soloing robs the music of the vigor a more committed reading would give it.

For example, pieces like “Happened Yesterday” and “MLE” possess the geniality and lack the depth exceptional music making demands. On the former and elsewhere, Hess, who has played with artists as diverse as bassist Ray Brown and drummer Ginger Baker doesn’t seem to break a sweat when spinning out his Stan Getzian line. Additionally, Miles, best known for a stint with guitarist Bill Frissell, may double tongue and run chromatically up the scale, but the effect is more like 1970s Freddie Hubbard than anything outside. Before the horns meld together for a delicate exit, bassist Ken Filiano has confined himself to a walking bass line and drummer Matt Wilson to a rhythmic straight line.

MLE, which too ends in sweet horn harmony, finds the drummer, whose employers have ranged from saxophonist Dewey Redman to the Herbie Nichols Project limited to brushes, while Filiano, whose longest time association as been with West Coast multi-reedist Vinny Golia, again working in a straight line. At least in the penultimate bars as the horn lines dance around one another, Miles double times and Hess produces unexpected, irregular vibrations and body tube honks.

Although it too at first appears to be another soundalike cool-bop exercise, “The Last Trance” is one tune that shows what could have been accomplished with a tougher leader. Working from a well modulated spiccato bass figure that leads into higher pitched grace notes from the trumpeter, the rambling tune soon meets cymbal splashes and tom tom rattles from the drummer. After Miles slurs out elongated buzzes from his valves, Hess reprises the theme smoothing it out with growling explorations and whistling honks that owe as much to John Coltrane as Getz.

Even more memorable is the slow moving and almost atonal “The Clef’s Go To The Big City”, with its smeared reed sax arpeggio and polyphonic trumpet tones. Filiano lets out a long tone as if it was on the end of a deep sea fishing pole and Wilson bangs away happily. The bassman then drags his bow over all four strings as Miles contributes irregular ejaculations and inner bell noises. Hess builds up a single note solo and, after Wilson hits march tempo, the piece fades out in a welter of brass grace notes and comedic voices.

With Filiano’s contributions sometimes undermixed, even on some of his own features, this quartet session isn’t as outstanding as the saxman’s quartet disc from 2002 that also featured the bassist was.

The long and the short view of this CD is that committed Hess -- and Miles -- fans may be more impressed by this meeting between East and West. Others will know that Hess especially, is capable of much more and await that outing.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Norman Says 2. Skippin’ In 3. Happened Yesterday 4. MLE 5. The Clef’s Go To The Big City 6. From Bottom To Top 7. The Long And Short Of It 8. Gear Tips 9. The Last Trance

Personnel: Ron Miles (trumpet); Fred Hess (tenor saxophone); Ken Filiano (bass); Matt Wilson (drums)

May 10, 2004

MATT WILSON

Humidity
Palmetto PM-2089

After a while, it’s embarrassing to keep repeating it, but Matt Wilson has emerged as one of the most accomplished -- if not the most accomplished -- inside/outside drummer of the 21st century.

Wilson, whose inside credentials include membership in mainstream pianist Bill Mays’ trio, and whose outside work includes being a part of the experimental Jazz Composers’ Collective, demonstrates once again on his own discs that he can switch effortlessly from the cerebral to the demonstrative. HUMIDITY provides 12 sizzling examples of this.

Appropriately enough, he begins this CD with a salute to the late Billy Higgins, another jazzman whose versatility allowed him to play on alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s first earth-shattering LPs, then turn around and record the funkiest Blue Note sessions. Informed by Coleman’s unique sense of rhythm, “Thank You Billy Higgins”, written by Wilson like all others but three here, suggests a pastiche of Ornette’s early compositions. On it Wilson emulates the foot-tapping, shuffle rhythm of Higgins, a drummer whose playing he said he experienced as a “life changing experience”.

Another track that will soothe the traditionalists, is the band’s more than 6½-minute version of Tadd Dameron’s bop classic, “Our Delight”. Given an amiable, ambling beat from Wilson’s cymbals and door-knocking rim shots, at times you’d swear the drum work comes from Ur-bopper Roy Haynes. Although the horns play off one another’s lines, alto man Andrew D’Angelo and tenor saxist Jeff Lederer aren’t afraid to add some non-boppish slurs and altered notes to the tune.

The composition follows another exercise in modern traditionalism, Lederer’s arrangement of McHugh-Fields’ “Don’t Blame Me”. On top of conventional plucked bass and restrained drumbeats, the head is advanced with screechy alto split tones that meet shakes and flutter tonguing from the deeper tenor saxophone.

“Free Willy” is a pulsating freeboppish D’Angelo line that sounds like would have happened if some New Thingers had infiltrated the 1960s Jazz Messengers. Performed staccatissimo, it has the horn men howling at the skies before, as per the tradition, trading fours. Yosuke Inoue’s walking bass and Wilson’s rolling rhythms keep things on an even keel.

Although there are as many allusions here to standards and Ellingtonian color as out-of-the-ordinary rhythms and World sounds, the Wilson coterie shouldn’t be mistaken for one of those retreading neo-con combos, however. One of the drummer’s tunes for instance, is inspired by the poetry of Carl Sandburg; a couple of others wouldn’t exist, except for the extended playing techniques and compositional emancipation brought to the music by Free Jazz.

Several compositions, especially those that add trumpeter John Carlson, trombonist Curtis Hasselbring and violinist Felicia Wilson to the basic quartet, are even artier. The title tune, for instance, manages to combine a finger-snapping beat with an overall theme that swirls about just this side of cacophony. Finally it’s brought to fruition with ringing chimes, plunger trombone lines, a single-lined contralto clarinet part, legit violin tones and triple time drumming.

“Raga”, despite its title, combines intimations of Peking opera, a Brazilian beat and a short South Asian measure. Beginning with clanking gongs, the theme advances with a sour sounding alto tone and single, powerful cymbal crack. Although every quartet members may be shaking hand bells, this is yet another foot tapper, with the theme wiggling from Far Eastern to Klezmer territory first from the massed horns, then from Wilson’s kit. Setting up some jazzy, raga-like bounces, Wilson also gives Inoue scope for some sawing and sliding arco work.

HUMIDITY is another hot platter from Wilson & Co. that should please jazzbos of every school. Right now, with all his pliability and talent, though, it seems that the only challenge left for the drummer is to make a CD of completely free music.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Thank You Billy Higgins 2. Swimming in the Trees*@% 3. Cooperation 4. Free Willy 5. Wall Shadows 6. Raga 7. Code Yellow 8. Humidity+@% 9. Don’t Blame Me 10. Our Delight 11. All My Children 12. Beginning Of A Memory%

Personnel: John Carlson (trumpet*, pocket trumpet+); Curtis Hasselbring (trombone@); Andrew D’Angelo (alto saxophone, bass clarinet, handbells); Jeff Lederer (tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinet and handbells); Felicia Wilson (violin%); Yosuke Inoue (bass and electric bass, handbells); Matt Wilson (drums, percussion, chimes, Univox, handbells)

May 26, 2003

MARIO PAVONE

Mythos
Playscape PSR#J111401

Veteran bassist Mario Pavone better watch out. His writing and playing could breathe new life to the standard jazz piano trio format, which in other hands is mired in predictability. Of course, as this eye-opening CD, split between trio and quintet tracks shows, he may also be able to do the same for the traditional two-horns-and-rhythm jazz quintet.

What does Pavone have that others lack? Well, for a start, it’s experience. At 62, he’s been involved in modern genres that encompassed screaming energy music, calm modern composition and creative freebop, finally settling on his mixture of sound and silence. Influenced by the approach of intellectual playing partners like multi-reedist Anthony Braxton and pianist Paul Bley, Pavone was heavily involved in the group sound created in the 1970s and 1980s by his contemporaries such as drummer Gerry Hemingway, brassman Wadada Leo Smith and multi-woodwind player Thomas Chapin.

Heading his own bands of various sizes during the last decade, he’s mentored younger players such as pianist Peter Madsen and drummer Michael Sarin, who appear on this disc. Both, along with the other sidepeople -- trumpeter Steven Bernstein, tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby and Matt Wilson, who splits drum duties with Sarin -- are inside/outside musicians as comfortable in a regular jazz settings as experimental improv situations.

Bernstein, who also leads his own Sex Mob, arranged the quintet numbers, and brings his peculiar PoMo insouciance to them. The title track, for instance, written like all other tunes except for two, by Pavone, is constructed as three duos. First up is the trumpeter’s plunger mute wiggles mated to the bassist’s solid tones; then Malaby extracts hairy-chested basso tones from the bottom of his horn as Sarin pumps out bass rolls; finally the pianist’s right hand skittering tickles and sliding runs come to the fore, as Pavone’s plucks are as unvarying as if he used an electric bass, and which serve to reintroduce the theme voiced by unison horns.

Malaby and Sarin can handle quirky bass-led tunes like this one and “Diode” with ease, having functioned as the other parts of bassist Mark Helias’s trio. For seven years, Sarin and Pavone were also the rhythm section of Chapin’s band. Still, the late reedman’s “Sky Piece” seems straighter in conception that one remembers from his playing, with its tension and release vamps spelled by a top-string pizzicato solo from Pavone and feathery impressionistic chords from Madsen. Firmly anchored to Bill Evans, and the beauty expressed by his former boss Stan Getz, it’s hard to reconcile that with the reality that the keyboardist’s sidemen duties often take him out with Fred Wesley and the JB Horns.

As if to compensate, his negotiation of the irregular -- let’s say it -- crab-like, angular turnarounds that make up Richard Twardzik’s “Crutch for the Crab” practically turn that trio outing into a mini piano concerto. An advanced thinker in the Herbie Nichols-Lennie Tristano mode, Twardzik wrote this unique line in 1954, a year before he ODed while on a European tour with Chet Baker. With Wilson and Pavone strongly seconding him, Madsen explores every diamond-like facet of the composition, easily tying sub themes together. Later on “Isobars”, with its pumping Latinesque beat, the pianist even comes across with a weird amalgam of Bill Evan’s delicacy and Ramsey Lewis’s steam roller swing.

Elsewhere, Wilson, a regular associate of tenor man Dewey Redman, can be as unrelenting in his kit exploration as the Energizer Bunny -- and still find time for a rim shots solo. Meanwhile Sarin, who put in time with pianist Myra Melford’s quintet, can allow Pavone to indulge his nunanced ballad playing in the highest registers on the short “Fablet”, by gently providing nothing heavier than percussive coloring to the mix.

If fault must be found with any part of the CD, it’s that a few too many of the tracks end with a fade, rather than letting the tunes finish logically and satisfactorily. Other than that, it would be hard for anyone to find a better example of unclichéd modern jazz, directed by a old hand and featuring young musicians who really know their stuff.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Diode^# 2. Dialect* 3. Odeon* 4. Sky Piece# 5. Mythos^ #6. Crutch for the Crab* 7. Dancers Tales* 8. Interlude^# 9. Isobars* 10. Fablet# 11. And Then We Wrote*

Personnel: Steven Bernstein (trumpet)^; Tony Malaby (tenor saxophone)^; Peter Madsen (piano); Mario Pavone (bass); Matt Wilson* or Michael Sarin# (drums)

July 13, 2002

MARIO PAVONE OCTET

Totem Blues
Knitting Factory Works KFW 292

Maybe there's hope for some of the Young Lions after all.

Just as long as they're placed in the context where their chops and ideas are utilized as part of a larger concept, then they perform admirably. This octet CD with band split down the middle -- half-callow musicians and half veterans -- proves the point. Of course, it also helps to have a visionary leader and composer at the helm. Which is where bassist Mario Pavone comes into the picture

Best known for his collaborations with exploratory reedists Thomas Chapin and Anthony Braxton he has record several well-received CDs with largish group like this one, a few including some of the same players featured here.

Perhaps the bassist knows how to get the best out of these young musicians because Pavone, who is now a grandfather, was a 1960s/1970s Young Lion himself. After early experience with the likes of trumpeter Bill Dixon and pianist Paul Bley, he helped found the Creative Musicians' Improviser's Forum. It was a sort of Connecticut version of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which included percussionist Pheeroan akLaff, drummer Gerry Hemingway and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith among others.

Two of the Young Lions, pianist Peter Madsen and drummer Matt Wilson worked with Pavone on REMEMBERING THOMAS his tribute to Chapin. Moreover, Wilson has already proven himself one of the most versatile of younger percussionists, putting in time with everyone from saxist Dewey Redman to the Jazz Composers Collective. Madsen also has a list of credits as long as a Bosendorfer keyboard ranging, from the expected -- the Mingus Big Band and Marty Ehrlich a -- to the unusual -- Maceo Parker, Stan Getz and Don Cherry. If his work with any of them was as exemplary as it is here, he's obviously headed for a long, versatile career.

Saxophonists Mike Dirubbo, who also specializes in Latin music and teaches professionally, and Jimmy Greene both studied with Jackie McLean. The later also worked in a reconstructed Horace Silver group and was a runner-up in a Thelonious Monk Institute competition, which has the same resonance in a neo-con's career as a studio mailroom job does for a wannabe Hollywood producer. Still, on tunes like "Not Five Kimono" and "Poet O Central Part" his exploratory tenor tone proves that his influences are wider than most.

As for the veterans, reedman George Sovak worked with ill-fated Chapin in the 1980s, while trombonist Peter McEachern's employers range from minimalist composer LaMonte Young to blues legend, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, as well as Chapin and Pavone. Meanwhile trombonist Art Baron played in Duke Ellington's band the last year Ellington himself led it, and has experience that encompasses Broadway pit bands, the Olympia Brass Band, sessions with Stevie Wonder and, surprisingly, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

Baron's Ellington roots come most clearly to the fore on the title track, where he and McEachern recall the plunger mute heyday of "Tricky Sam" Nanton in Duke's Jungle Band. However the tune itself, with its Native Indian motif is more closely allied to J.J. Johnson's "Mohawk" than anything in the Ducal canon. Interestingly enough, here and on the speedy "New Socks", it's McEachern's muted, but limber neo-bop lines that sound more obviously Ellingtonian than what Baron produces.

Charles Mingus, Pavone's other main influence, gets his due in "Not Five Kimono" with its gospelish mixture of bones and saxes. Greene comes across as a more discordant sounding Booker Ervin and Madsen references Horace Parlan. Incidentally he suggests a double-timing soul-funkster on "Otic" as well.

The rest of the tunes, all written by the bassist, except for Chapin's "Poet O Central Park" are more fine examples of evolving contemporary freebop, foottappers with brains. Pavone takes solos on most of the tunes, but considering the advances in bass playing that have been made since he was a Young Lion, his work can be heard as yeoman-like and able to get the job done, but not spectacular.

There's a positive feature in this as well. For obviously the bassist didn't see his role here as star soloist with massed supplicants framing his genius. Instead he comes across like a wily bandleader of old, directing his Young Lions and youthful veterans towards the promised land of good jazz.

With so many CDs and bands appearing which highlight the neo-con equivalent of the blind leading the blind -- the inexperienced leading the inexperienced -- TOTEM BLUES is doubly impressive. By giving his sidemen guidance and a proper climate in which to blow, Pavone has come up with a noteworthy octet that produces an impeccable setting for his compositions.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Not Five Kimono 2. Sequence 3. Totem 4. Poet O Central Park 5. Bass Song 6. Bella Avo Fero 7. Otic 8. New Socks 9. Odette 10. Cherry Bars

Personnel: Art Baron, Peter McEachern (trombones); Jimmy Greene (tenor saxophone); George Sovak (tenor saxophone, clarinet); Mike Dirubbo (alto and soprano saxophone, clarinet); Peter Madsen (piano); Mario Pavone (bass); Matt Wilson (drums)

November 5, 2001

MATT WILSON

Arts and Crafts
Palmetto records PM 2069

Neo cons may pontificate as much as they want about their narrow definition of "true jazz", but an unabashed mainstream session like this one easily shows that so-called avant garde sounds long ago became part of the common vocabulary of most improvised musicians.

Among the tunes you'll find nestled on this session among ones by George Gershwin and Bud Powell, and including a bossa nova and a Welsh folk song, is a Rahsaan Roland Kirk swinger, an Ornette Coleman gospel-blues rocker, and the leader's disconsolate tribute to the late Art Ensemble of Chicago trumpeter Lester Bowie.

True, if drummer-leader Matt Wilson was called up before a McCarthyite-style House UnJazz Activities Committee, he'd probably be forced to admit that he played in the bands of saxophonist Dewey Redman and bassist Cecil McBee -- no favorites of the Jazz Orthodoxy. But what about his fellow travelers? Pianist Larry Goldings has worked with guitarists John Scofield and Jim Hall and trumpeter Terell Stafford was in the neo-bop combo Horizon for a few years. Even general utility man, bassist Dennis Irwin, besides work in the bands of the likes of tenorist Joe Lovano, Scofield and Mel Lewis, even put in time with the Jazz Messengers, the neo cons holy grail of modern music.

Maybe the band members -- undeniably tainted with freedom -- will all be hustled off to the jazz reeducation camps being built around Lincoln Center. Or perhaps some of the neo cons -- those who aren't already drifting off into the lucrative fields of hip hop fusion by now -- will realize that the only way for orthodox jazz to evolve is to mix in ideas from other sources -- even the dreaded avant garde.

Wilson's group proves that in spades. Stafford's plunger work is sufficiently raunchy and dirty on the "Lester", for instance, even if Wilson operates more as a colorist than a timekeeper. Midway between doo-wop and the blues, the song also boasts some deep-dish pianisms from Goldings. And, come to think of it, why shouldn't there be a few standard tunes honoring ring mainman, Mr. B., compared to the hundreds turned out for Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown and the (pre-1970) Miles Davis?

"Old Gospel," which Coleman recorded on trumpet with altoist Jackie McLean, shouldn't send anyone scurrying for the concert halls either. A straightforward swinger, juiced by Stafford's open horn and some off centre gospel chords from the pianist, it's about as subversive as when the Dixie Hummingbirds recorded with Paul Simon.

Elsewhere, as on "Love Walked In", the trumpeter is as melodic as any of the highly-praised little Wyntons, the pianist comps like a neo-Red Garland, while Irwin and Wilson fuse together like any 1950s Prestige Records rhythm team.

If there's any criticism that could be directed towards this session it's that Wilson doesn't step forward often enough as a percussionist. But since he obviously doesn't see a solo disc as an empty percussion display and ARTS & CRAFTS is designed to be a compositional, rather than a performance, showcase, that can overlooked.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. Stompin' Ground 2. Lester 3. Webb City 4. Beija Flor 5. Final Answer 6. There's No You 7. Arts & Crafts 8. Old Gospel 9. Love Walked In 10. All Through The Night

June 1, 2001