Outside the Honky Tonk Dream Syndicate, vol. 4
featuring Jimmy Giuffre, Eric Dolphy and Cecil Taylor
After nearly a week’s delay, we’re fucking back. When I first started writing these newsletters I envisioned it as just me giving some quick thoughts on why I like each of the songs I’m playing on any given show, and yet from the get-go I’ve been going way deep into the weeds for no reason other than that in the moment I feel like I have to. As a result, I often feel like these newsletters are always way too long and rambly for their own good. Maybe it’s because I think the music is important and needs to be perfectly represented, so I overthink everything, or maybe I’m just a shit writer. Either way, until someone who reads this tells me to do otherwise, you are all 100% complicit in any poor judgment I demonstrate in writing these. Enjoy!
Steve Lacy - Roswell Rudd Quartet - Bye-Ya
Here’s a great recording from someone who we can all agree is the world’s most famous musician named Steve Lacy. This is a Thelonious Monk tune from the record School Days, one of many Lacy LPs dedicated to Monk’s compositions. I’ve always been curious as to what Monk thought of Lacy’s interpretation of his work, considering Lacy took some decidedly avant-garde turns with his music and Monk always seemed pretty ambivalent to that style of jazz. Either way, just the basic concept of playing Monk’s compositions in a piano-less quartet led by soprano sax and trombone is genius to me. It has a very quirky, oddball sound to it, and the without-a-net feeling gives it a hefty touch of danger.
The quartet is rounded out by two heroes of the avant-garde. Early on in his career, bassist Henry Grimes was a frequent sideman for established players such as Sonny Rollins and Gerry Mulligan, but around the mid-60s he became increasingly associated with the free jazz movement. Grimes played on some of my all time favorite records, including Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor’s legendary Blue Note LPs and Albert Ayler’s Greenwich Village album, and put out one great album as a bandleader on ESP-Disk before completely falling off the face of the earth. Then, a few decades later, after having been presumed dead, a social worker tracked him down and found him without a bass and working a series of odd jobs to support himself - a fate all too familiar to jazz artists who dared to venture into the avant-garde. In the last 20 years of his life Grimes was finally given his due, in large part thanks to the efforts of fellow champions such as William Parker. He performed and taught frequently up until his untimely death from COVID-19 in 2020. The star of this particular track is drummer Denis Charles, a giant of the avant-garde who collaborated with many of the aforementioned players, such as Rollins, Taylor and Cherry. His textural, bottom-heavy style of drumming is the very first thing we hear on this recording, and it single-handedly propels the music forward.
Jimmy Giuffre 3 - The Green Country (New England Mood)
I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that the west coast “cool” jazz scene, often dismissed by certain jazz fans as smooth, watered-down background music jazz, was also a big part of what planted the seeds for the avant-garde movement. The sound associated with Ornette Coleman’s legendary quartet was often referred to as “the New York thing,” but it’s not for nothing that each of those players - Ornette, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins - cut their teeth in Los Angeles before moving out to New York. One of the few established jazz musicians who actually supported Ornette’s quartet and helped them get gigs, as opposed to railing against him as a mentally ill heathen, was Jimmy Giuffre. Giuffre certainly didn’t blow open the doors for avant-garde jazz in the same way Ornette did, but he helped lay the groundwork for that explosion of creativity, and his music is probably the best way to understand the west coast/avant-garde connection.
My introduction to Giuffre was his trio work with Paul Bley on piano and Steve Swallow on bass. This period of his career was explicitly avant-garde, but Giuffre’s music never reached the levels of discordance that Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor reveled in. Even at his most explicitly atonal, much of what made Giuffre’s music so inventive (and, perhaps, so palatable to mainstream jazz audiences in spite of its adventurousness) was the softness of it all, utilizing sparse arrangements and compositions at a time of unmatched virtuosic density. But even prior to this trio, Giuffre was always way out of left field. This track is taken from the LP Trav’lin’ Light, recorded by a trio of Giuffre, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, and jazz guitar legend Jim Hall. Much was made of Ornette Coleman’s lack of piano accompaniment, but this trio didn’t have piano, percussion, or even bass. To the extent that any musician in this trio is playing any traditional role, Brookmeyer’s trombone is providing the bass while Hall’s guitar both functions as the piano accompaniment and at times the percussionist, but I’m not sure there’s much use in looking at the music through this framework. This is music standing at the uncanny corner of jazz, blues, folk and chamber music, pulling beautiful and spontaneously inventive music out of the ether.
This particular track has such a haunting sense of atmosphere to it that I’m amazed it was recorded in the 50s. It doesn’t really sound like jazz at all, at least not in the traditional sense. More than any other piece of music, it reminds me of late era-Talk Talk (who have been prominently featured in past newsletters). I heard somewhere that Joe Zawinul was inspired by the warm, homely feeling of the Austrian countryside in composing “In A Silent Way,” and Miles Davis’s album of the same name was a very, very important influence on those Talk Talk albums. I hear something similar in “The Green Country,” but the difference is that the comfort is matched by a profound sense of melancholy. It’s the feeling of returning home coupled with the knowledge that whatever warm memories you associate with that place are steadily shrinking in the distance, becoming more and more abstract as life progresses and gets more complicated. Those are feelings I know all too well.
Eric Dolphy - Green Dolphin Street
It’s a struggle to think of things to say about Eric Dolphy that haven’t been said by much more capable writers than myself. Even though I’m a jazz obsessive, and can credit this music with being my introduction to almost everything I listen to today, I’ve always felt pretty out of my depth writing about jazz. Part of it is that I can’t always pick up on the specific details of individual musicianship (i.e. what scales the players are using, what their individual technique is, etc.), and part of it is just a dancing-about-architecture thing. I’m bringing all of this up specifically in relationship to Eric Dolphy because more than any other musician I have trouble thinking of things to say about him other than “holy fucking shit what a genius, this music is amazing.”
One thing I will say about his music is that I feel like there’s a tendency among certain listeners to approach most jazz musicians who aren’t Miles, Coltrane or Mingus as artists who have one album that dwarves everything else. I never want to lecture people for not listening to the right music or whatever, but I don’t understand why Moanin’ is so much more well-known than any other Jazz Messengers album, or Song For My Father towers over every other Horace Silver record, or so on and so forth. Those are great fucking records for sure, but it’s just scratching the surface. Maybe people are just overwhelmed by the sheer volume of jazz records out there, especially from the 50s and 60s, and that intimidates them - I can’t relate, but I guess it makes sense. That being said, Out to Lunch is so much more of a bigger deal to most people than anything else Eric Dolphy made, and that makes no sense to me. That album is an absolute masterpiece, for sure, but Dolphy only released a few albums in his all-too-short lifetime and they were all fucking incredible.
Case in point: Outward Bound, Dolphy’s very first record as a bandleader. I think some people overlook this one because it’s his first and it’s more straight-ahead than the other ones, but I think Dolphy’s genius is fully formed here. I’ve always loved Dolphy’s takes on standards - listen to his versions of “Jitterbug Waltz” and especially his solo rendition of “God Save the Child” and you’ll know what I’m talking about. “On Green Dolphin Street” is one of my personal favorite jazz standards and Dolphy knocks it out of the park, injecting it with a sense of quirkiness and making the song his own. That’s the best thing I think anyone could say about a recording of a jazz standard. I’m pretty sure Dolphy was the first person to play bass clarinet in a jazz context, and if that were all he accomplished he’d still deserve a spot in the hall of fame. It’s one of my favorite instruments, and I don’t think I’d be offending any of my friends who play the instrument when I say that Dolphy’s the best bass clarinetist by far (Bennie Maupin did some incredible things with the instrument as well). It should go without saying but the band here kicks ass too. In particular, Jaki Byard’s simultaneously unconventional and beautifully lyrical piano style makes for perfect accompaniment to Dolphy’s insane soloing. The whole thing has a kind of offbeat swing to it that kind of reminds me of Sun Ra’s early work.
Mal Waldron - Space Walk
I’ve actually been meaning to play this track on the show for some time now, but haven’t figured out a way to make it fit. Mal Waldron had as storied a career in jazz as there could be. In his earlier years he was an inescapable presence on Prestige records, playing on several records by Jackie Mclean and pre-Kind of Blue Coltrane. He also played with Eric Dolphy on his masterful Five Spot live albums and was Billie Holiday’s accompanist in the last couple years of her life. Like all too many musicians of the time he struggled with addiction, and he survived an overdose but had to essentially relearn to play piano while recovering. Waldron moved to anEurope to get away from the ugliness of the United States’ racism and its disregard for Jazz as an art form. Over the course of a few years he gradually regained his abilities, but when he reemerged his piano playing had radically changed. Rather than providing the more traditional comping associated with the role of jazz piano, Waldron incorporated more attack and repetition into his playing. The result was a totally singular sound - the closest I could come to describing would be Thelonious Monk if he leaned more into the avant-garde he helped create.
That being said, Waldron’s 1974 record Up Popped the Devil stands out as being particularly idiosyncratic. The title calls to mind Robert Johnson’s last ever single “Preachin’ Blues (Up Jumped the Devil),” but to me, that’s just one piece of the puzzle. Fellow jazz pianist Matthew Shipp wrote a great article for New Music USA outlining what he describes as the “Black Mystery School” of jazz piano. Shipp defined this subgroup of piano players as deeply iconoclastic artists whose approach defies the straight-line narrative of jazz piano as evolving from Art Tatum and eventually landing at jazz as it is taught in an academic context. “Mystery School pianists have developed profound ways of generating sound out of the instrument grounded in a technique they invented and one that cannot be taught in school,” Shipp wrote. “It is a code that somehow gets passed down.” His examples for this style include, amongst others, Thelonious Monk, Andrew Hill, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and, of course, Mal Waldron.
Up Popped the Devil should give listeners a good sense of why Waldron fits into this subgroup. I’ve always thought of Albert Ayler’s music as sounding like wild, ghostly energy being let out of a bag, and Up Popped the Devil has a similar lightning-in-a-bottle feel to it. However, rather than going for the sheer terror Ayler was capable of unleashing with his saxophone, the trio of Waldron, Reggie Workman and Billy Higgins capture something deeply ominous and unsettling. Waldron demonstrates his newfound angular sensibilities on the record, but there’s still flashes of lyricism, and the general feeling is otherworldly in its mysteriousness. On “Space Walk,” the tension is driven by Waldron’s persistent repetition and Workman’s haunting bowed bass, while Higgins holds everything down with textured, sometimes scraping percussion work. Crucially, this track also features Carla Poole on flute, who barely has any other credits and whom I could find no background information about. Her flutework calls to mind gamelan music, and the whole track evokes a ritual trance state unbeholden to the passage of time.
Motoharu Yoshizawa - Fragment 1
Motoharu Yoshizawa is an overlooked upright bassist who nonetheless represents the vanguard of Japanese improvised music. His collaborators include many of the most important figures in that scene, such as Jojo Takayanagi, Kaoru Abe and Toshinori Kondo, as well as fellow travelers such as Steve Lacy, Derek Bailey and Lawrence Butch Morris. Yoshizawa is fairly overlooked by those who aren’t super in-the-know when it comes to improvised music, and his solo work (at least up until the 90s) is fairly underdocumented. As one of the first musicians to record a solo bass record (along with Barre Phillips, another collaborator of his), he’s hugely important, and he helped paved the way for brilliant recordings by artists such as Joëlle Léandre, William Parker, and, more recently, Brandon Lopez.
Inland Fish, the aforementioned solo bass record, is a fascinating one. The album is bookended by two extended pieces that delve into the kind of extended technique studies one would expect from an improvised bass record, and I’d be hard pressed to think of a musician who can harness a wider array of sounds from their bass than Yoshizawa. Sandwiched in between these pieces are two shorter tracks that are more melodic, introspective, and, shockingly, very pretty. “Fragment 1” is interesting because it sounds like two musicians playing at once - I have no idea how Yoshizawa would be able to simultaneously bow and pluck the strings otherwise - but this is a solo live record. Either way, it’s a beautiful piece, one that almost calls to mind Eberhard Weber’s Pendulum, a favorite of mine that’s also solo bass, albeit heavily overdubbed.
Cecil Taylor - Trance
It’s pretty insane that this is the first ever appearance Cecil Taylor has made on this show, considering he’s way at the top of the list of musicians I’ll never shut the fuck up about. To me, the ultimate marker of a great artist is that they create their own musical language, that they express themselves and their character in their music to the fullest degree, and that they’re completely uncompromising in their creative expression. I don’t think any musician fulfills those particular qualities more than Cecil. There’s about a million piano players who have emerged since the 60s that have tried to sound like Cecil, but no one actually does. He’s one of those musicians I’d probably listen to even more were it not for the fact that his music makes everything else sound shittier in comparison.
Live at the Cafe Montmarte, also known as Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come, is the first Cecil Taylor recording that fully documents the kind of free jazz cacophony that only he could conjure. I believe Jim O’Rourke once wrote of Derek Bailey (who will be coming up again very shortly) “these ten fingers contain an orchestra,” and I’d say the same about Cecil. That orchestra is on full display on “Trance,” and the shimmering abstraction of Cecil’s tone clusters are something I could get lost in forever. It’s always fascinating to hear other musicians play with him, as I can’t comprehend how anyone can pull it off. Here he’s joined by Sunny Murray, one of the defining 60s free jazz drummers, and it’s a real “unstoppable force meets immovable object” moment; his thunderous drumming on this particular track perfectly augments Cecil’s piano attack. The trio is rounded out by overlooked saxophone colossus Jimmy Lyons, Cecil’s most consistent companion over the course of his storied career. Perhaps Lyons would be more well known were it not for his complete dedication to Cecil’s music - he only has a handful of recordings as a leader and a smaller handful of recordings as a sideman to other musicians. Lyons perfectly understood the continuum between the avant-garde and the true radicalism of Charlie Parker, and he’s a rare saxophonist who advanced Parker’s influence into a new era of music, as opposed to just aping him. In fact, listening to Cecil’s music one can hear plenty of Ellington and Monk amidst the abstraction if they want to, but of course anyone who thinks free jazz is just noise is too ignorant to do so. Anyhow, this record is just one of many Cecil Taylor recordings that’s absolutely essential listening for anyone interested in music.
Paul Bley - Circles
I think of Paul Bley as a central figure in terms of how the avant-garde informed (and was informed by) several different elements of the jazz tradition. The circle of musicians he collaborated with over the course of his nearly six-decade career is all-encompassing. Bley collaborated with Charlie Parker very early on in his career, and his first ever recording was a bebop piano trio featuring Charles Mingus and Art Blakey - no slouch for a Canadian who could barely even drink legally in the states. He was a formative figure in the avant-garde, playing in a quintet with Ornette Coleman that would later become the piano-less quartet that shook the jazz world with their residency at the Five Spot. One of Bley’s most prominent contributions to the avant-garde was as a member of a trio with bassist Steve Swallow and Jimmy Giuffre. While Giuffre’s earlier recordings influenced the avant-garde, his recordings with this trio embodied it, and they include some of the first recordings of compositions by Bley’s onetime partner, the recently departed Carla Bley. In the 60s, the two of them helped create the Jazz Composers Guild - which essentially functioned as a union for avant-garde jazz musicians who were often denied opportunities to perform - alongside Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon and others. In the late 60s, he performed frequently with composer/vocalist Annette Peacock and became one of the first improvisers to utilize synthesizers. Then, in the early 70s, he began working with ECM.
Ballads is Bley’s second album on ECM, and it consists entirely of Annette Peacock compositions. I was actually introduced to her music, before I knew much about free jazz, through her album I’m the One. That’s a freaked-out singer/songwriter record filled to the brim with vocal acrobatics and weird, squelchy synths, and it sounds like a bizarre lovechild of Frank Zappa and Betty Davis. Ballads sounds like it comes from a different universe entirely. The compositions take the sense of moody introspection that has long been an aspect of jazz music and injects it with a healthy dose of abstraction, and of course Paul Bley is well-equipped to bring these compositions to life. The record is driven by two lengthy meditations in piano trio improvisation, but right in the middle of the record is a short piano/bass duo piece called “Circles.” The title speaks to the nature of Bley’s music as a whole; open-ended, but always moving forward. The piece is enchantingly mysterious in its melancholy.
Kenny Wheeler, Lee Konitz, Dave Holland & Bill Frisell - Nicolette
Here’s another ECM record, this one by a group of heavy hitters led by one of my all-time favorite trumpet players Kenny Wheeler. Wheeler was born in Toronto but made his name in the untouchable London jazz scene of the 60s, playing on records by Graham Collier, Mike Westbrook and Michael Gibbs. He was also pivotal in the development of free improvisation, playing on a number of essential records by John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Tony Oxley, as well as many of my favorite Anthony Braxton records. However, my introduction to his work was his records as bandleader on ECM.
Wheeler has a number of classic records from ECM’s 70s golden age, but Angel Song, from the late 90s, may be my favorite of them all. I love good percussion, but I also love a good percussion-less jazz group, as I probably established earlier writing about Jimmy Giuffre. Much like those Jimmy Giuffre records, the pieces on this record feel like a tapestry of sorts in which each member is collectively making the music come alive in real time, even though there’s still plenty of soloing. Wheeler and Konitz in particular have incredible interplay, almost calling to mind Konitz’s work with Warne Marsh in the 50s. Dave Holland deploys a lyrical, folk-like approach to his bass playing that calls to mind Charlie Haden. Bill Frisell’s guitar playing is a crucial part of the quartet’s sound, and even though Frisell is well-established both on ECM and within this style of noirish late-night jazz, there’s something slightly offbeat about his playing that, to my ears, gives this record a lot of character. I typically listen to the record all the way through, so it can be difficult to single out any particular track, but as the album opener I think “Nicolette” sets the mood of the record perfectly. Don’t sleep on this one.
Derek Bailey & Tony Coe - Omoidasu
Derek Bailey’s right up there with Cecil Taylor on the list of artists I’ll never shut the fuck up about. Unlike Cecil I actually have played his music on the show before, and I’ve written about him several times, so I don’t have much in the way of additional information to add about the man. What I will say is that, in talking about Derek Bailey, people seem to focus more on his philosophy, his attitude towards improvisation, and the degree to which he shaped what we now know as “free improvisation.” What doesn’t get enough discussion, in my eyes, is his musicianship, because as much as his outlook on performing and improvising is important to me, the crux of what draws me to his music is the music itself. His guitar playing just sounds incredible, and he could play with a wide variety of musicians without ever having to imitate anybody. Beneath all of his cranky views on composition and recordings and anything outside of the purview of live improvisation was a deep and rich understanding of musicmaking, with the act of playing taking on far more importance than any kind of dogmatic theory. Less has been written about multi-reed player Tony Coe, who passed away just a month shy of a year ago. Like many musicians I’ve written about in this newsletter, Coe had a background in the UK Jazz scene, playing with Michael Garrick and the venerable Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band. As is the case with a lot of musicians in that scene, he has some truly random credits to his name; he played saxophone on John Martyn’s Solid Air album and also, apparently, on the Pink Panther theme. And if that wasn’t covering enough ground, he also made an album with Derek Bailey called Time.
I’ve professed my love for the clarinet as an instrument before, so the basic concept of Derek Bailey doing a duo record with a clarinet player already has my approval. It doesn’t hurt that Coe was a phenomenal player. On “Omoidasu,” you can hear elements of Coe’s jazz background in his playing, but at the same time he’s totally on Bailey’s level. Bailey’s playing is as punchy and textural as ever, and Coe responds with a mixture of graceful soloing and piercing tonal explorations. Time isn’t one of Bailey’s most well known albums, but I’d consider it essential listening, both for understanding Bailey’s craft and as a document of Tony Coe, a truly overlooked player, in top form.