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Mike Heffley for Signal to Noise
One night, back in the day, I spied Charlie Parker and Anthony Braxton walking together on the campus of Wesleyan University. It was in September of 1993, about a month before Braxton recorded his CDs of Parker's music. The grassy knolls and alleys between the buildings were more shade than light, and the two conversed intently as they strolled. I eased up on them from behind, to see if I could hear them. They were absorbed in their conference, as was I.
"Mr. Braxton," Bird was saying, "I have heard you described as my torchbearer on our beloved alto saxophone. Such claims have prompted me to investigate your music, and I must say I agree, for more reasons than I expected. That said, I greatly appreciate your solicitation of my input on your planned tribute to me."
I glimpsed his profile in the moonlight. He looked young and hale, pure as a baby grown, and his voice sounded so too. For some odd reason, I could hear Braxton's voice as clearly, but not so his words. I think he said something like, "Sir, the honor of your company is all mine. Your music has been as important to mine as it has to Music in general. Any light you care to shed on our project will be brighter than shining gold to me" — but don't quote me.
"Thank you, my friend," said Bird. "I will admit, I do have an interest in your project. How could I not? It is my chance to pick up where I left off, then go beyond that, with what you do. When you broke your new ground on our horn with For Alto, I would have been about the age you are now, if I hadn't left the planet in 1955, at a mere 35. And if I hadn't left the planet yet at all, I'd still be kicking around doing gigs like you, maybe with you now and then — you, me, and Max Roach, here on the stage at Wesleyan."
"Ah, yes, I think I could persuade the fine music lovers who run this place to give me $500 or so to split between the three of us," Braxton said (I think). Palms were slapped, cackles traded.
Bird continued. "Not only would I like to hear what my middle and old age might have sounded like; I'd like to hear what the world past the 1950s did sound like. I was just starting to get off the ground with those little songbook-based etudes I wrote, and that glib and frantic blowing I did. I can't stand all those copycat players and scholars and journalists and money men who took what I started and froze it up like fresh slaughtered veal for their winter. If I had kept living, I'd have definitely grown my fruits and flowers right out of their hot house garden and into the wide open space, feet firmly planted in midair, exactly as you did..."
At that moment, they rounded the corner of a building. When I turned it myself, seconds later, they were gone.
The next day, browsing through the stacks of Wesleyan's Olin library, I picked up an old bound volume of Down Beat magazines, from 1949. Leafing through, my eyes caught a photo of the young Charlie Parker, circa 1943, blowing a tenor sax in Earl Hines' band. Around it was the text of an interview, about his then-still-controversial new style called bebop. My eyes lit on snatches of it before I read it through:
"Bop is no love child of jazz," says Charlie Parker..."is something entirely separate and apart...The beat in a bop band...has no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug. Jazz has, and that's why bop is more flexible..." He admits the music eventually may be atonal. Parker himself is a devout admirer of Paul Hindemith, the German neo-classicist, and raves about his Kammermusik and Sonata for Viola and Cello...he would like to emulate the precise, complex harmonic structures of Hindemith, but with an emotional coloring and dynamic shading that he feels modern classical lacks...Charlie himself has stayed away from a big band because the proper place for bop, he feels, is a small group. Big bands tend to get overscored, he says, and bop goes out the window...The only possibility for a big band, he feels, is to get really big, practically on a symphonic scale with loads of strings..."This has more chance than the standard jazz instrumentation," he says. "You can pull away some of the harshness with the strings and get a variety of coloration."
Later in the interview, Parker dismissed bop's commercial success as part of that "jazz" world that disdained him, and that he disdained:
"Some guys said, 'Here's bop,'" he explains. "Wham! They said, 'Here's something we can make money on.' Wham! 'Here's a comedian.' Wham! 'Here's a guy who talks funny talk.'" Charlie shakes his head sadly.
Did that stuff ever remind me of Professor Braxton!
A day or so later, after classes in late afternoon, I heard Braxton and most of the American guys on these CDs running through Parker's tune "Hot House" in one of the music department rehearsal rooms. Peeking in through the square glass in the door, I sensed I could probably get away with a little more eavesdropping, so I slipped in. Once in, I could lo-and-behold the Great Man himself, once again, just off to the side of the trio. Listening, then talking whenever his opinion was solicited; mostly just encouraging and affirming what they were doing, which at that point was mostly deciding how to handle and order the tunes. In fact, Bird seemed almost tickled pink, if you can imagine that.
"Hot is this thing called love!" he exclaimed with a chuckle during a pause. "You guys are playing together like Diz and I did, only so much slippy-slidey looser, with such wobblier parameters. It looks like so much fun, over that tight rocking rhythm section. Makes me want to come back to life and loosen up a bit..."
The guys expressed some concern that their Dutch colleagues would meet them for the upcoming concert and studio session without the benefit of the help they were getting from the master. Bird said, "Oh, don't worry about that; Monk and Klook are over there working with them as we speak."
As they proceeded to run down the list — "A Night in Tunisia," "Dewey Square," "Klactoveesedstene," "An Oscar for Treadwell" — my jaw dropped lower, and Bird's smile beamed wider. Things really did seem like an exaggerated version of the 1940s pieces, like Jim Carrey's mask. Paul Smoker seemed to be standing on Dizzy's shoulders when he played those blistering runs, stretched the chromatic palette, floated time away when he wasn't outrunning it ("flight of the bumblebebop!" Bird cried out in delight). Braxton seemed to be doing that on Bird's back too, plus opening up whole new worlds of sound, only implied by Bird's off notes, missed and fluffed notes and pauses, with his bigger and smaller horns, and extended techniques. Bird was obviously gassed by the way Braxton sounded like Lester Young's son Paul Desmond one minute and some growling, yipping cat who thought he was a dog the next.
"You know what kills me" — I swear that's what Bird said — "the most about what you guys are doing is the way you just leave the form of the tune behind altogether when you feel like it, both the changes and the metric structure, then pick it up again, in and out at your whim. It's like what we did when we tore it up, traded fours and stuff, only you take it so much farther out. I don't know why we didn't think of that! I guess I'd have had to keep myself alive and working it all this time to finally get to that. Old lovers have the young stuff in them, but they're loosed from all the anxiety, ambition, heart-attack focus. Chaos and entropy are the vernacular of old lovers, not the dialectic of order and cathartic release. Order is a game and toy of entropy and chaos, mouse to its cat, not its governor by a long shot." I was amazed at Bird's perspicacious loquacity.
After these experiences, several years went by. I never mentioned them to AB, or Joe or Pheeroan. I went on to play and record with all of them, and Paul Smoker too, separately and together, throughout the '90s in New York and elsewhere. This camaraderie got me into the studio sessions in New York and Connecticut when the tapes were ordered and prepared for the CD.
I was just there as a fly on the wall — and so, I noticed, was Bird. This time he was sitting apart from the musicians, next to me; they seemed oblivious to his presence, and he only half aware of mine, enough to position himself so, and glance at me now and then. I noticed with pleasure how they organized the tracks into the two CDs to end them. "Scrapple From the Apple," "Mohawk," Miles Davis's "Sippin' at Bells," and "Koko" were definitely save-the-best-for-last choices, using three particular criteria: this band's penchant for timbral-textural variety and richness, for the organically polytemporal, and for an unusually good chemistry and high vibration in the studio (they're cerebral, intellectual players, with rich inner lives; they had good audience response in CD1, but they don't thrive on that like more extroverted players, even come more alive in the absence of it). Bird's 1949 wish for symphonic expansion on the standard jazz instrumentation almost seemed fulfilled by these four tracks.
****
All right, full disclosure: I'm not sure I wrote the review above. I remember dreaming what it describes, then seeing it all written up on my laptop when I woke. I suppose it must have been me, but if someone has a better explanation, I'm all ears.
On Solo (Milano) 1979, however, the words are no one's but mine. I listened to it while reading the piece above — which, I'm sure, provoked my first observation about it: it is the first of Braxton's solo alto recordings — that ground broken uniquely by him — that presents a mix of his compositions and the American songbook standards foundational to Charlie Parker's oeuvre. Yet another gesture declaring the deep common ground bearing the fruits of both tradition and innovation in Braxton's own body of work.
Like all of the solo alto recordings, this one has the feel of a master artist's sketchbook. As with Van Gogh or Picasso, the more revealed to us through the bigger productions, from duos on up to multiple large ensembles, and from one-line musical to multimedia events, the more the offhand sketches mean and bring to us.
"99b" comes from a period in Braxton's output — from the 95 to the 105 series of compositions — that I called his "Golden Peak" in my book on his music. It was then that several different lines of theory and praxis he had been developing over 10+ years of making his own pieces came together in his scored and recorded gestures. Stood alone, this piece is just a little 6-minute excursion triggered by the top two notes of a major triad, sounded like a call and worked up through open repetitions into a monologue marked by shorter-to-longer phrases, pauses, intensities, volumes, mostly within the realm of articulated notes, with a lot of bottoming out, and ending so. Knowing its context in his creative life, its energy and aura is that of, again, a sketch of "A Starry Night," or "La Guernica" set next to the fullblown production the whole world knows and loves or hates.
"Green Dolphin Street," in this context, sounds like the perennial music student's run-through of the American songbook, sung in "jazz" — and also like the American Independent composer claiming such statements as on a continuum with his own original opus.
"77e" is like a sketch done by some French Impressionist grandson of Adolphe Sax who wants to pick the brain of a Japanese traditional artist. Braxton does have some early personal history with both Japanese and Korean music, and this is one of the pieces he made for himself to kick around their way with the pentatonic scale and flexible temperament and timbre, all in his own alto voice. Similarly, "77g" is like that same journeyman artist tackling the lines and colors of his own tradition, souping it up modernistically: the whole-tone (a.k.a. augmented) scale, taken so thoroughly to heart by Ravel and Debussy, as later by Stravinsky and Coltrane to fierier heights, is the matter here at hand. Spelled and respelled by trills, it calls to mind the fierce mysterium sounded by the latter, as also the yodels of ancient cattle herders on horseback. Braxton is the artist who can make such entities out of such basic elements, because an intentional part of his practicing process is to stay with the most irreducible sonic atoms as they bind into molecules, then transcend their chains into what he calls their "identity state," into real music.
Rounding off this triptych is "77d," inspired directly by Braxton's 1971 meeting with Ben Webster, who taught him the "slap-tongue" technique of playing saxophone, explored in this piece. "I remember the first time I heard Charlie Parker's and John Coltrane's music — it was the actual sounds they extracted from their instruments that first caught my attention," he wrote in his Composition Notes about the piece.
Back to the American songbook, with Irving Berlin's ballad "They Say That Falling in Love is Wonderful." You know how certain players' sheer sounds on their horns, aside from the music they make, has a clear emotional affect all its own? Rex Stewart's humor, Miles's sensitivity, Coltrane's reverence, Ornette's childlike joy and sadness both — the songs behind the notes.
Braxton, to my ears, has something I think of as American optimism and adventurous ingenuity as his default sound, and it rings here loud and clear. I've seen it up close and personal — when he plays with the pep band at a football game, or a graduation ceremony, on his Wesleyan campus; or when he leads any of his student ensembles, for that matter — so I've come to pick up on it instantly when I hear things I might have missed it in on first hearing. This is the sound — such as Mr. Berlin and his family of immigrants, so happy to be New Worlders, expressed — that has come to bring meaning and resonance to otherwise possibly too-casual renditions of standards.
Originally published in SIGNAL to NOISE, winter 2005
Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2006 Mike Heffley
CD Reviews
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January 11, 2005 by Nate Dorward for Bagatellen
Braxton's single-composer tribute albums began in the late 1980s with the Monk album for Black Saint and the Marsh/Tristano album for Hat Art. After a few years' gap came this double-album, which remains something of a lightning-rod for discussions of Braxton's abilities as a player of standards. It takes a different tack from most of his other standards projects, which have typically featured relatively conventional rhythm-section accompaniment; instead, he's surrounded here by a crew of sly-devil avant-gardists who aren't shy about messing around with - or just plain messing up - these tunes. Trumpeter Paul Smoker (who used to work with the reclusive bebopper Dodo Marmarosa, by the way) and saxophonist Ari Brown fill out the front line, and there's a jolting-jalopy rhythm section: Misha Mengelberg on piano, Joe Fonda on bass, and Han Bennink (disc one) or Pheeroan AkLaff (disc two) on drums.
The original sessions took place over three days - a Zürich concert and then two days in the studio in Köln. Several tracks were discarded because of recording flaws, which might explain the not-quite-the-whole-story feel to the album: Brown, for instance, is sidelined for long stretches, and AkLaff plays on only four tracks (most of disc two is drummerless). The music on this reissue remains the same as on first release but is given a welcome facelift by Peter Pfister's remastering. The original cover (a close-up of Braxton's pensive head) has unfortunately fallen foul of Hatology's current design programme, which favours drab, unpopulated urban landscapes. Essays by Peter Niklas Wilson and Alex Dutilh have been dropped from the liner notes, but at least Graham Lock's informative interview with Braxton is still included, and this time around the composer credits are actually accurate. Pia Uehlinger's original role as co-producer is, as usual with Hatology reissues, quietly excised from the credits.
So what's this album about? The core problem is that any response to it is going to be seriously overdetermined. There are "free" tracks on here, but many of the tracks are faithful enough to bebop convention that you can't help comparing them to "competent" bebop performances - from which perspective the playing here is often perfectly frightful. But, aha!, there's the readymade argument: of course Braxton isn't interested in producing copybook bebop - he's interrogating the bebop legacy (Dân Warburton even uses the dread word "deconstruct"...). From this perspective Braxton is faithful to the spirit of Charlie Parker, not the dead letter. This is the point at which the Braxtonophile inevitably mentions Wynton Marsalis, and the argument proceeds down a more or less predictable path.
What makes playing wrong sound right? It's eventually up to the listener to make that judgment call. But I get the impression that many Braxton fans are unwilling to acknowledge how much is wrong. Which is just a sign of not paying attention, or not wanting to - because there's a lot wrong on this album by any usual standard. First of all, Braxton loses his place a lot. On "Hot House" he goes astray a mere 7 bars into the tune, fudges the second A section, and the band finally has to drop a bar to sort things out in time for the B section. On "Passport" he forgets where the B section is and adds an extra 16 bars. On "Dewey Square" Braxton returns to the head at the wrong spot, and he and Fonda are forced to fudge the ending. And it's not just Braxton who's messing up, it's the whole band. The heads at the start of pieces are messy, and the restatements at the end are worse: the players rarely manage to scramble back to the head without lots of turned-around beats and extra bars. "Koko," the album's last track, turns into a real melee, unravelling after Misha plunks down the opening chord of the B section (rather than the A section he's supposed to be playing) and the others become increasingly befuddled.
It's not that seasoned mainstream jazz musicians don't make mistakes too - they do, all the time - but that they also have highly developed damage-control skills that permit rapid and sometimes unnoticeable recoveries. Whereas problems here often go unresolved for long stretches: virtually all these tracks feature extended ships-in-the-night passages from the rhythm section. (A particularly awkward passage comes at the end of the live "Klactoveesedstene": Fonda and Bennink lose each other and never do hook up again.) To be sure, a lot of this chaos is deliberately cultivated - Bennink and AkLaff are each in his own way equally unhelpful and Mengelberg is positively treacherous - but this is making a virtue of necessity. This band couldn't play it straight even if they wanted to.
Does any of this matter, except to bookkeepers and the jazz police? In a certain sense it doesn't - Braxton's playing doesn't depend on exact harmonic navigation anyway, so if he misses a few bars, so what. He tends to alternate between two strategies: 1) leisurely which-way-am-I-going slithers up and down the chromatic scale or the home scale of the piece, with a thinned-out, erratic tone; and 2) fast-as-possible scurrying around, his tone now thick and hoarse; every so often he lands on a note with a triumphant cock-crow and proceeds to jiggle it violently back & forth. One never gets the impression of a player at ease with manipulating materials - for instance, the kinds of fluent transposition and variation with which orthodox jazz musicians develop solos. He's on the hunt for happy accidents - which come frequently, but once they're elicited stay stubbornly in place, however excitedly he fusses over them.
What I've said so far concerns his "straight" jazz playing. Listen to his free playing here, on the other hand, and it's contrastingly pithy, elegant - in fact downright exquisite. This delicacy is especially evident in a series of short tracks on disc two, which feature chamberish instrumentation (drummerless trios and quartets), languorous tempos, and the more delicate instruments in Braxton's arsenal: sopranino, flute, contrabass clarinet. (Yes, in his hands the contrabass clarinet is delicate, not a monster - when he pulls it out on "Scrapple from the Apple" and "Sippin' at Bells" it casts a hush over the music.) Braxton's standards albums have often suggested an itch not only to play fast but to speed things up - sometimes ruinously so, such as the reading of "April" once memorably savaged by Lee Konitz in a Wire Invisible Jukebox. But much of the best music here comes when Braxton defamiliarizes bebop by slowing it down, making it more lustrous and more tentative.
But, though it's tempting to just say that the free tracks are good, the straight tracks chronically awkward, it's impossible to be as clear-cut as that. It would be easy to mount both the case against and the case for this album, yet I'm not sure I want to do either, even though I can't dispose of my irritation with its pervasive sloppiness (not just jam-session sloppiness: it's something more deep-rooted). As I reread the foregoing paragraphs they seem (to my eye anyway) less and less judgmental, more and more just plain description. This is what you get. Do you like it? If you don't shudder from time to time, or shrug in despair, you're either a true believer or just not listening very carefully. If you don't like it at all - well, you probably just don't like Braxton.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2006 Nate Dorward.
CD Reviews
All reviews written by Nate Dorward:
- Anthony Braxton: Charlie Parker Project
- Conference Call: Variations On A Master Plan
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June 16, 2005 by Ty Cumbie for All About Jazz Italia
Bespectacled, tweedy, bristling with intelligence, one could easily mistake him for a professor from some obscure, brainy university (which would be correct), of science or mathematics or philosophy (actually music, though he has an impressive command of those other fields). Anthony Braxton, the musician, is renowned primarily for three traits: fearless experimentation, mountainous technique and a deep devotion to the great work of jazz music's mainline pioneers.
Scandalously underappreciated here, like so many others he has had to find a paying musical audience on other continents. Presumably even in Europe his edgier work, which can be baffling even for the initiate, doesn't draw the big ticket-buying crowds. Here Braxton finds a way to meet the audience halfway, assembling a blue chip band composed largely of the brightest talents from the fringe of jazz and lovingly attacking the music of one of his great heroes, Charlie Parker.
Braxton's canny approach to Parker's music is to stay near the source, seeking novel, smart and entertaining ways to refashion the familiar shapes. On the opening tune, Tadd Dameron's "Hot House" (Braxton wisely doesn't limit himself to tunes written by Parker), the solos come first, the unforgettable melody played one time through only at the very end. Next we hear the first of two renditions of Dizzy Gillespie's overplayed, indelible "Night in Tunisia." After a fairly straight ahead delivery of the iconic theme, the band gradually morphs into abstraction, returning gracefully to earth for the closing refrain. With each tune, Braxton skillfully blends tradition and progress, satisfying the demands of the cognoscenti and pleasing mainstream jazz audiences simultaneously.
Braxton's sidemen here range from the very good to the nearly mythically gifted. Of special note is the presence of one of jazz' last great old masters, pianist Misha Mengelberg, who, as always, exhibits his uncanny, alchemical blend of technique: delicate, forceful, in-the-pocket and out-of-this-world by turns. Mengelberg's erstwhile doppelganger, the nearly peerless, brilliantly boisterous drummer Han Bennink swings ferociously on disc one, a live set. Pheeroan akLaff takes over the drums on disc two and he is powerfully propellent. Ari Brown (tenor/soprano sax), Paul Smoker (trumpet) and Joe Fonda (bass) are all fine, handling the material solidly and holding their own on the solos.
By approaching these tunes more or less head on, Braxton takes more risks even than in his experimental work. On the opening theme of "Dewey Square," he audibly struggles to produce Parker's demanding melodic intervals in brisk tempo, allowing awkward micro-pauses to render jagged what should be a rapid, smooth flow of notes. His solo, however, like most of the solos on both discs, is blistering and liberated. The risk pays off on "Scrapple From the Apple," which Braxton pulls off brilliantly on bass clarinet.
This project could serve as a primer for how to play bebop in the 21st Century - how to play it true and new at once and how good the soloing can and must be.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2006 All About Jazz and Ty Cumbie.
CD Reviews
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Nils Jacobson for All About Jazz
As a visionary with a fiercely independent approach to music-making, Anthony Braxton can be difficult to approach. It's not just that his compositions are annotated using pictures, that his musical world view revolves around a highly developed philosophy of restructural cycles, or that he's gone so far as to compose a work for intergalactic orchestra. You don't really have to travel outside the solar system to grasp what he has to say. But when he touches down inside the sphere of the jazz tradition, he brings just enough familiarity to the situation that a novice listener can pick up the threads that lead off into Braxton's great beyond.
Braxton's 1993 Charlie Parker Project is part of a handful of recordings where the composer and saxophonist has drawn from standards material. Other examples exist on Steeplechase, Magenta, CIMP, Barking Hoop, and most recently Leo, but if you had to pick just one from this category to spin, the Charlie Parker Project would probably be it.
The two discs that comprise this just-reissued recording date from 1993 performances in Zurich and Cologne with saxophonist Ari Brown, trumpeter Paul Smoker, pianist Misha Mengelberg, bassist Joe Fonda, and drummers Han Bennink or Pheeroan AkLaff. Most of the compositions come from the pen of Parker. In Graham Lock's liner note interview, the leader homes in on the blues as a central feature which must be properly incorporated in order to enter Parker's music, but there's obviously a whole lot more to getting it right.
"Yardbird Suite" gets started as a loosely melancholic affair, horns circling overhead while Mengelberg punctuates the canvas with tight chords, then segues seamlessly into the main theme, delivered authentically with just enough understated swing to bring back nostalgia. After a sweet saxophone solo, the pianist returns in full-on Monk mode, peppering his melodies with brief stabs and thrusts, eventually yielding to a higher-density statement by Smoker.
Other pieces are taken to much greater degrees of intensity, abstraction, and invention. Overblown cries, vocalized outbursts, and collective improvisation pop up all over the place. The twelve-minute "Dewey Square" finds Braxton focused on chromaticism as a means to work through the changes, reminiscent of the speedy, twisting navigation that Parker used back in the day. Han Bennink makes a fine choice for this effort because he straddles the ground between propulsive swing (whether direct or implied) and colorful accent drumming.
It's worth pausing to remember the mantra of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, with which Braxton shares roots: "Great black music: ancient to the future." Charlie Parker may not yet be antique, but it's no easy matter to connect his music with the drive, intensity, and collective freedom that came of age in the '60s and has been honed to a fine edge ever since.
The sheer magnitude of this recording does not in any way compromise its free spirit. The Charlie Parker Project makes all sorts of unexpected connections in a spontaneous, forward-looking way.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2006 All About Jazz and Nils Jacobson.
CD Reviews
All reviews written by Nils Jacobson:
- Joe Fonda: When It's Time
- Anthony Braxton: Charlie Parker Project
- FAB: Transforming The Space
- Joe Fonda & Xu Fengxia: Distance
- The Nu Band: Live at the Bop Shop, Rochester, NY
- Michael Musillami Trio: Beijing
- Morena-Fonda-Hirshfield: What We're Hearing
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José Francisco Tapiz for Tomajazz
Anthony Braxton es uno de los músicos aparentemente (sólo aparentemente) más extraños que pueblan el universo Jazz para una gran parte de aficionados. Por un lado aparece como figura indiscutible en el desarrollo del Jazz durante las últimas cuatro décadas en cualquier historia seria sobre el género. Pero por otra parte está ese su lenguaje propio, que ha desarrollado y cultivado a lo largo de los años, "gracias" al que muchos aficionados lo ven como un personaje extraño, críptico y misterioso escudado en esos títulos tan matemáticos y enigmáticos que recorren el alfabeto y los números (y que no tienen otra función de servir como nomemclátor para las distintas series de composiciones). Asociado cada uno de sus título con unas curiosas representaciones gráficas, todo ello no sirven sino para adjudicarle una fama de músico frio y matemático. No estando en absoluto de acuerdo con esta afirmación (no hay más que escucharlo interpretando su composición 40B para darse cuenta que como toda verdad absoluta como esta es una afirmación gratuíta), cabría indicar que sólo es un aspecto de un MÚSICO poliédrico: además de sus proyectos relacionados con la investigación y su relación con la educación, a lo largo de su carrera (no hay más que echar una ojeada al recientemente editado "Donna Lee" en Free America del año 1972) se ha dedicado a homenajear a diferentes compositores y composiciones con peso propio en la historia del Jazz. Sin ir demasiado lejos en el tiempo, en el pasado 2004 Leo Records ponía en circulación un cuádruple compacto en edición limitada que recogía su forma de acercarse a los clásicos del jazz (con composiciones de músicos de la talla de Monk, Shorter o Brubeck) con su Standards Quartet. A este proyecto genérico en cuanto a la recuperación y reinterpretación de la tradición del Jazz se unen a lo largo de su carrera diversos proyectos con los que se ha acercado al legado de algunas figuras en particular. Thelonious Monk, Lennie Tristano, Andrew Hill o Charlie Parker (en la grabación aquí comentada) son algunos de los maestros que han sido homenajeados por el multiinstrumentista (además de saxofonista y clarinetista es pianista) de Chicago.
Entrando en la grabación objeto del presente comentario, indicar que los dos compactos que conforman este proyecto presentan dos aproximaciones diferentes y complementarias a un repertorio común. En formación de septeto ambos, el primero de ellos está grabado en directo en Zürich e incluye además de al propio Braxton al sopranino, saxo alto y clarinete contrabajo, a Ari Brown en saxos soprano y tenor, a Paul Smoker en trompeta y fliscornio, a Joe Fonda al contrabajo y a los holandeses Misha Mengelberg y Han Bennink en piano y batería respectivamente. El repertorio comienza con la interpretación de Hot House de Tadd Dameron y continúa con A Night In Tunisia de Dizzy Gillespie, que junto al original de Parker Klactoveesedstene son las dos únicas de las trece composiciones que conformando el repertorio global se repiten en ambos compactos. Completan el repertorio Dewey Square y un largo An Oscar For Treadwell de casi 20 minutos. Si hay todavía quien tenga dudas sobre si unos músicos asociados a la vanguardia (como es el caso, aunque quizás convendría preguntarse qué es lo que se considera y se debiera considerar como tal) son capaces de interpretar una música con un swing infeccioso y directo (¡sí, SWING!), se le aconseja encarecidamente que escuche este primer compacto. Allí todos los músicos están en plena forma y en un particular estado de gracia. Tanto Braxton — especialmente — como Brown están tremendos a los saxos. Misha Mengelberg aparece más Monkiano que nunca con el uso de sus silencios. El caso de Paul Smoker resulta curioso: en el tema que abre el disco y tras un tremendo solo de saxo, aparece un tanto tímido para ir tomando poco a poco impulso y confianza y acabar sumamente expresivo y brillante. Han Bennink también está perfecto apoyando magnífico a sus compañeros. Termino con el contrabajista Joe Fonda, quien merece ser señalado aparte debido al gran trabajo que allí realiza.
En cuanto al segundo de los compactos, grabado en dos sesiones en Alemania en los días siguientes a la grabación del compacto en directo y con el único cambio en la formación del batería Han Bennink por Pheeroan AkLaff, este presenta en general un carácter más abstracto y contenido. No es quizás una casualidad que el tema más extenso en estudio (A Night In Tunisia) dure menos que el más corto de los grabados en directo (Klactoveesedstene).
En cuanto al repertorio y salvo los dos temas comunes en ambos discos, aquí se incluye de nuevo una colección de clásicos y temas no muy conocidos de la herencia del be-bop. Del repertorio de Bird están piezas tan famosas como son Yardbird Suite, Scrapple From The Apple o Koko y también Bongo Bop, Passport y Mohawk. Este se completa con Sippin' At Bells de Miles Davis y el archiconocido Bebop de Dizzy Gillespie.
Esta versión es precisamente la que abre el compacto. De nuevo nos encontramos con un Joe Fonda magnífico, que tras la exposición del tema lleva ¡y de qué manera! el peso del breve primer solo directo y pleno de swing, que enciende la mecha que da paso a unos magníficos solos por parte de Ari Brown, Misha Mengelberbg, Paul Smoker y Braxton, quienes evolucionan mientras AkLaff y Fonda juegan por debajo del trabajo de sus compañeros y Mengelberg aporta a partes iguales notas y silencios aquí y allá. El tema termina redondo en un aparente final que es retomado a modo de coda para terminar tras la reexposición de nuevo del tema en un (sólo) aparente caos: una joya. Tras este inicio, siguen los temas citados, como se ha comentado anteriormente, con una duración más breve y un carácter más abstracto, pero no inaccesibles.
Tras la escucha de la reedición por parte del magnífico sello suizo hatOLOGY - HatArt del proyecto-homenaje a Charlie Parker, dos ideas quedan por encima de todo lo demás que se pueda añadir. La primera es que este puede ser un magnífico primer paso para quien quiera aproximarse a la figura de Anthony Braxton por contener en su repertorio piezas lo suficientemente conocidas. La segunda es estar ante una de las reediciones del año 2005. Por supuesto y finalizando, está la grandeza de unos músicos que saben utilizar el legado de los clásicos no para imitar sino para crear una nueva obra.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2006 Tomajazz and José Francisco Tapiz.
CD Reviews
All reviews written by José Francisco Tapiz:
- Anthony Braxton: Charlie Parker Project
- Nu Band: Live at the Bop Shop, Rochester, NY
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