On the Road - Hong Kong and Japan

I’ve just returned from a tour to the Far East, mostly in Hong Kong and Japan. The band, put together by Pekka Pylkkanen (alto) from Finland, consisted of the Greek pianist George Contrafouris and the Brazilian Drummer Carlos Ezequiel – a truly international band, put together in the way these things often are in jazz these days, through mutual connections. I’d played with George with Dave Liebman and in various trio and quartet settings, I’d played with Carlos in Brazil, and with Carlos and Pekka in Denmark, George had played with Pekka in Finland. So we all knew each other in different ways, though I think I was the only one who knew everybody. We rehearsed by email in advance (as you do these days) and then put the music together in real time when we got there.

What follows is as much a travelogue as a blog, with some thoughts along the way on various subjects that were prompted by our experiences




Hong Kong

And so it begins - Asia. We had a typical Asian experience this morning - i.e. not knowing what's going on. We had a place booked for a rehearsal this morning only for it to be cancelled at the last minute. Efforts to find another place seemed to have borne fruit and so we waited for the confirmation phone call – and waited and waited......... So here we are, still in the hotel lobby three hours after we arranged to meet there to head off to rehearsal. Pekka has fought the good fight, multi-tasking on his iPhone and Macbook, but to no avail. So we’ve decided to give in and go out. You can’t fight the local ways, the best thing you can do is be glad you’re in as interesting a place as Hong Kong and get out and enjoy it – and that’s what we’re going to do............

...............And that’s what we did - took a bus to Kowloon, got lost after staying on the bus too long, walked part of the way back and eventually found the subway. I love figuring out subway systems in different cities in various parts of the world. Once you figure it out it the city just opens up to you and you get a great sense of liberation and independence – the city is your Oyster.

And Oysters seem to be the only type of seafood I haven’t seen in the vast amounts of it here – stalls, shops, restaurants, all selling fish and seafood. And it’s sold dried, fresh, salted, roasted, spiced, steamed........ The number of ways the Chinese do seafood (and many other kinds of food) is always dazzling. Even the vegetable dishes are dazzling. I’m a reluctant vegetarian myself, (as in only if I’ve no choice!), but here the vegetables are cooked so freshly that I didn’t think twice about ordering a vegetable dish for lunch instead of my usual carnivorous spread.

The following morning is the beginning of our first really musical day – a rehearsal followed by a workshop at the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts. The rehearsal took place in an unusual setting – as these these kinds of rehearsals often do once you get off the beaten jazz track – in the nightclub section of a fancy hotel. How Pekka managed to get the use of the place is beyond me, but he did, so here we are amidst the chintzy glitz of a nightclub – all fake gold and sequins and thick carpet – playing contemporary jazz. Or trying to play it – we’re all a little jet lagged and nightclubs by day are always strange places. Stripped of whatever allure they have in the evenings, in broad daylight they reveal all their tackiness and their false promises of glamour. It’s hard to get it going in such a setting, but we work efficiently, have a brief lunch next door, a brief rest back at the hotel and then off to the workshop.

The Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts is a very impressive looking building with state of the art facilities. As far as music goes the two big subjects here are Classical Music and Chinese Music, but an American flautist and saxophonist called Tim Wilson has begun a part time jazz programme for interested students – 2 hours a week, playing standard tunes etc. I have real admiration for people like Tim who work really hard to get something going in a place like Hong Kong, so far removed from the geographical mainstream of jazz activity – Europe and America. Of course Japan, with its long history of jazz support, is pretty close by, but China and Japan do NOT get on, for all kinds of historical and political reasons, so don’t expect Japanese musicians and teachers becoming active in founding a scene in China anytime soon.......

The workshop consists of us playing a few tunes, taking questions and then having the students play while we listen and then make comments. The technical level is quite low, as is their knowledge of the jazz idiom, but they’re really enthusiastic and I must say I get a warmer feeling teaching in a place like this than I often do at some of the high level jazz schools in Europe where the students are sometimes so spoiled you can nearly drown from the combination of their sense of entitlement and their apathy.

What’s interesting musically is that the problems the students have, even at this quite low technical level, are the same problems I see with jazz students everywhere, they’re just a little more extreme. They don’t listen to each other, they play in a very literal way with a high element of role playing – press button A and play this, press button B and play that......... These kids don’t have much vocabulary, but otherwise there are similar issues that one sees in students everywhere. Of course being so far from the jazz mainstream it’s probably also very difficult for them to feel part of something larger – the jazz community and history – but that’s something I often wonder about anyway – how much are young jazz students learning this music as a kind of classical music, and how much are they learning it and seeing themselves as being part of a much larger thing? Questions for another day perhaps........... But first, dinner!



The following day we go to the Hong Kong Institute for Education and do a workshop and performance for the students there. These guys are studying pedagogy, and some have taken jazz studies as part of that. The students are of a higher technical level than in the previous institution, but the same problems are evident. Lack of listening is a big problem – not just to each other, but to the recorded history of the music. Out of 10 guys playing ‘Impressions’ only three had ever listened to the original recording, or heard Coltrane play it! An extreme example perhaps, but again lack of in-depth listening is another current issue among young musicians – the sheer availability of so much stuff does actually impact negatively on their listening habits I believe. They listen to lots of stuff – but often just once, and rarely in-depth. Again, a question for another day......... But the vibe is great, and everyone is so nice and enthusiastic, it made the 2 hours trek out there by subway worthwhile. Dinner in a great Thai Restaurant ends the day very satisfactorily


(Two Students from the Hong Kong Institute for Education try out my bass)

Hong Kong Jazz Festival

Today is the anchor gig of the tour, the Hong Kong Jazz Festival, but before the gig Carlos and I take a trek out to Mong Kok, the electronics Mecca of Kowloon. I want to by a DV Camcorder in order to have a second camera to give a different angle on things when I record music and gigs etc. (In recent years I’ve probably got too into this – spent far too much time on Final Cut Express and not enough on the simple 4 string bass!). We go the Mong Kok Computer Centre – three floors of electronics and a geek’s haven. I eventually settle on a Sanyo hand held device that functions as both a DV camcorder and a digital camera. I save myself an estimated 70 euro on the deal by buying it here, so I’m, pretty happy leaving the store. Out on the street there are even more electronics places – some really huge (see below) - it’s an extraordinary two blocks............



And so to the gig – at the Hong Kong City Hall Theatre – a big 800 seater theatre with very nice acoustics for jazz. Everything is very well organised and the soundcheck runs smoothly and there’s very good equipment and a decent dressing room. Add a free dinner courtesy of the festival to that and you can’t really ask for more. Over dinner we talk to two of the girls running the gig – Carol and Alison and it turns out they’re both piano teachers but also studied other things - business studies of some kind. So the Asian work ethic is very clear from these two young women – you can see why Japan forged ahead in the past, and why China and Korea are galloping up now.

The gig itself is great – the last 2 days of playing/workshops has got our individual and collective chops up and the band really clicks and plays a very high energy set that’s very well received. We’re playing opposite the Rusconi Trio, (whose sound engineer very generously helps us with our soundcheck), whose music is much different to ours, but the audience seems to like both. We have to wait till the end of the concert before we can go back to the hotel since the tradition here is that people get autographs. Since Pekka and Carlos are the only ones who brought CDs George and I let them do the meet and greet while George and I hang out and solve even more of the world’s musical and social problems..........


Back to the hotel – tomorrow, Japan!




Tokyo

Tokyo is so huge it took us two hours by train to get from the airport to the city. It’s SO different here from China – I’ve been in Japan before but it’s very interesting to come to Japan from another Asian country rather than from Europe – you get a different perspective. First of all it’s so clean and everything looks so modern and less traditional than in China. And the other thing that hit us the minute we got on the plane was the politeness! Of course I know about Japanese politeness, but when you come from China it’s thrown into even sharper relief. The Hong Kong Chinese (at least to strangers on the street or in shops etc.) are not really polite at all, they’re quite brusque and rude sometimes and never give you the impression they’ve the slightest interest in you. Which is fair enough – it’s their country and they can decide what attitude they want to take to visitors (though I think the waiter who gave me a sort of slap on the arm to remind me to take my bass with me was taking it a BIT far!).Here it’s so different, people are incredibly polite – and friendly! I had at least three exchanges with people by the time we got to the hotel, I don’t think a Chinese person outside of our business dealings, spoke to us even once.

So tonight we went out looking for a restaurant and ran into a girl giving out leaflets about a restaurant on the street – she had very little English, but Pekka has a little Japanese and so we decided to go to that restaurant. When we said we’d go she nearly had hysterics – laughing and doing the Japanese equivalent of ‘OH MY GOD!” - ringing ahead to say she was bringing four foreigners with her. And so we ended up in this tiny traditional restaurant, full of Japanese, and we sat on the floor on Tatamis around a table and had some really great food – sashimi, and Yakitori, rice and various other bits and pieces. There was great hilarity as we tried to figure out from the Japanese menu what to order and the same girl with the leaflets turned out to be the waitress there too – she was a really fun character, up for anything and laughing all the time. Then a man came in who spoke some English, and he helped us with the translation and promptly joined us at the dinner table and had dinner with us and became George’s smoking partner. So it was great fun, and it was very pleasant to be in a real authentic restaurant eating real Japanese food. Everyone in the restaurant waved goodbye to us as we left, and it was a very nice personaiised evening after the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong.


(The band with the two ladies who ran the very nice restaurant on our first night in Tokyo)

The next day we had a gig in the city, in a small venue converted for the evening into a concert space. We got there early, set up, soundchecked and having a few hours to kill we went back to the centre of town, the extraordinary Shinjuku district. Shinjuku epitomises the stereotype about Tokyo – thousands of people, flashing lights, constant movement, noise. It’s almost futuristic around there, ‘like a scene from Blade Runner’ as George described it. I’d imagine you either love it or you hate it – we loved it!

It was a real rush being there, especially being in Shinjuku station which is huge – a million people pass through it every day! - and SO easy to get lost in. Pekka did a very good job in figuring out the lines to take which, when you take a look at the Tokyo subway map (below), you can see is no easy task.



And if you do get lost it’s very hard to get information to help you with because hardly anybody speaks English. In the whole time we were in Tokyo and stopped people to ask for help, and asked them if they spoke English the answer was always no. And these were young people in one of the world’s best educated and richest nations on earth. I’m not saying they SHOULD speak English – we English speakers get away with far too much linguistic colonialism as it is – but there’s no denying that English is the travel and business language of the world, yet in Japan the level of English speaking was lower than almost any country I can remember travelling in. One of the Japanese guys I met, who does speak good English, said it was because the way English was taught - nearly all through written work - was very bad. Anyway, the fact that there's so little English spoken and a lot of the signs are unreadable to a westerner, forces you to really make an effort and to not mind the fact that it's hard to find out what's going on, or where to go, or what stuff is on a menu etc. - sometimes it's fun being lost!

We ended up at Disk Union – a famous Japanese record shop that specialises in jazz and – even more specialised – in jazz on vinyl. George is a collector of vinyl jazz LPs and there was no way he was going to visit Tokyo without visiting Disk Union as well. And it was extraordinary in there – the place was packed with people buying LPs! It reminded me of specialist record shops like Mole Jazz in London (long gone) 20 years ago. Actually it’s amazing how much jazz you hear walking around Tokyo – in shops, restaurants etc. They seem to have a real taste for it, though I notice it tends to be very much focussed around the 50s Hard Bop era. And they’re much more attached to American jazz than they are European (or Japanese for that matter), in fact European jazz musicians rarely play here in comparison to their American counterparts.


(Result! - George with a prized Clare Fischer LP at Disk Union)

George’s LP cravings having been sated for now, we head back to the gig and a play a 90 minute set, which is preceded by an interview with Pekka and George on the subject of ‘what is Finnish Jazz?’ Yutaka, the organiser of the gig, has a passion for Finnish jazz and is selling a bunch of Finnish jazz CDs at the gig. The gig itself is really good – again the band gels very well from the first bar, and it all feels great. Sometimes when you’re on the road and you’re dealing with lots of stuff – hotels, airports, food, money, etc. - you forget that the real reason you are there is to play music. And then if the band is good – which it is on this occasion – you are pleasantly reminded of it once you start playing, as in, “Now I remember - THIS is why we’re here!” After the very well received gig, we head back to Shinjuku and find a restaurant, which is packed with Saturday night diners and which is a bit of a squeeze for four large-ish westerners to get into. But all is achieved with good humour on everyone’s part and the food is delicious.



Then back out into Shinjuku subway station for the train back to the hotel. What was interesting was the fact that at night there are only young people in the subway - all the older people disappear - it was amazing! We were by far the oldest people on the subway that night. And of course everyone was dressed up - or what passes for dressed up among Japanese youth. For the girls it usually means short skirts or shorts, or even more popular, the mini skirt with the knee socks pulled to above the knee. It’s actually a very strange phenomenon in my opinion – this, (as a Japanese friend of mine described it) ‘Lolita Complex’ Almost none of them dress like women - they all dress like girls. There's a kind of childishness about their image - the kind of schoolgirly outfits (and I saw a couple of really weird ones - like Bo-Peep or something!), the Hello Kitty handbags, the miniature pink teddy bears hanging from their mobile phones - that's a little disturbing after a while. And the guys were in all kinds of weird and wonderful haircuts, sunglasses, outlandish clothes etc. It's really unique to walk through Shinjuku station on a Saturday night and see Japanese youth en-masse. An extraordinary sight. Yet, for all this apparent rebellion against the sober dress of the adult Japanese there’s no sense of anarchy about them, nor do you feel any threat, as I would in a Western city late on a Saturday night. They’re very well behaved and they form neat rows, side by side in twos, at the designated areas, to get on the subway trains. I got the feeling that the outfits constituted the beginning and the end of the rebelliousness, and that in other ways they were probably quite comfortably part of mainstream society.

The friendliness of everyone continues to be impressive. The following morning George and I were talking outside the hotel and three ladies came out - very well dressed - and invited us to come and have lunch with them - despite the fact that they had barely any English. But they were SO friendly, trying to find out where were were from (they were baffled by Greece, but were very excited by 'Irelando!') and being giggly and friendly. And in Starbucks in Shinjuku later on a man offered me his seat, said welcome and shook my hand, and then the girls came out from behind the counter and got chairs for all four of us - in a packed Starbucks on a Saturday afternoon! Never saw that anywhere else in the world.......


Having some free time before the gig, George, Carlos and I take a walk in the suburbs, and once you get off the main streets you enter a different world – quiet, narrow streets, very little traffic. It all makes for a very pleasant walk after the madness of Shinjuku and we buy some Yakatori chicken that is being grilled freshly on the side of the road, and finish the walk by having a cappucino in a café – everything was very pleasant except the price of the coffee.......... Japan is an EXPENSIVE country! I’d say it’s more expensive than even Switzerland, and that’s saying something. It’s hard to have a meal in a restaurant for less than €30 a head, and that’s just in a regular place – it’s very easy to spend much more than that. In this little café, we had 5 coffees between the three of us, I decided it was my turn to buy the coffees and was somewhat stunned to be handed a bill of €22!


The gig that night is in the ‘Finland Café’, in Shubiya (another incredibly busy area), in a café devoted to all things Finnish. It seems particularly Japanese to do this – this kind of obsessive attention being paid to one thing – though I’m hardly in a position to comment since the whole world is infected with the terrible ‘Irish Pub’ plague. The interior of the café is studded with fake birch trees and books on Finland are strewn around casually (though of course, being in Japan, there’s nothing casual about it at all). It’s a very swish looking place in the basement of an apartment block.



There are no drums in the place, so it’s to be trio, and George, being the trouper that he is, doesn’t balk at the electric keyboard he’s given to play. We play the first set - all standards, which we figure is more apposite for this audience, and which we like to play anyway - and then Yutaka approaches me, looking very embarrassed. It seems there’s been a complaint from a resident about the sound of the bass going up to his/her apartment, and would I mind not playing the second set. He assures me that it’s got nothing to do with my playing! Well, what can you do? So Pekka and George play the 2nd set, with George’s left-hand working overtime...... The audience are great, and interestingly (though it’s tragic that this is something worth mentioning), are mostly women. They pay rapt attention throughout, applaud all solos and insist on an encore at the end. If only all audiences were like this......... Another expensive dinner, an even more expensive taxi ride (having missed the last subway train) and the evening ends.

Kobe

We take the Shinkansen to Kobe – the famous Japanese Bullet Trains. Very comfortable and very fast, we cover the 600+ Km to Kobe in 3 hours. During the journey Carlos and I order a coffee from the girl pushing the coffee trolley through the carriages, and she pours the coffee and then carefully arranges the coffee, sugar, milk and napkin in a very symmetric design on the fold-down table on the couch. Having done that she then pushes her trolley out of the carriage, turns around and bows ceremoniously to the carriage before leaving. Only in Japan would the ordering of a coffee on a train involve such an elaborate display of manners complete with a little ceremony to go with it.



We arrive in Kobe and are picked up at the station by Tako, one of the main guys at the Koyo Conservatory – our hosts during our stay. We go straight from the station to the workshop/performance which will take place in a club called Maiden Voyage. It always feels strange to be in these club situations during daylight – as I mentioned earlier there’s something that doesn’t quite fit about a club shorn of its night-time allure - being exposed like an ageing stage performer who is dragged out into daylight so that their true flaws and imperfections can be seen all the more clearly. But this place is actually quite nice, even during the day and the audience is made up of about 40 Japanese students who are very polite and attentive throughout. We play several tunes first and then open it up to questions.

This workshop (like all the ones we did in Japan) is being translated for us – again the low level of English is pointed up by the necessity of having a translator, something that was never necessary in the Hong Kong workshops that we did. Translated workshops are always difficult since it’s impossible to have any real interaction with the students, the delay of having everything translated kills any spontaneity, and you can only speak in short sentences since the translator has to deal with all the points you’re making, and can’t be expected to remember more than a few sentences at a time. But we do our best (and the translator does a great job), and the students are responsive, if a little shy.



They do get up to play though, and that’s always interesting since you can engage more personally with them having heard them play, rather than just doing a lecture/demonstration kind of thing. Walking cold into a room full of students in a school and figuring out what the best approach for a workshop might be is a very difficult task since you’ve no idea of their experience or concerns or needs. It’s a bit easier in a typical 3rd level US or European jazz school since the curriculum tends to be similar throughout these institutions, but in more far flung places it’s often a bit tricky regarding what level to pitch your teaching to, and what information might be most useful in the short space of time you have. In an instrumental masterclass where you’re dealing with a specific instrument it gets a bit easier, but in these mixed classes it requires a bit of care in order to maximise the impact of whatever information, or help, or even philosophical thoughts you might be be able to give. The students play through Autumn Leaves and this gives us some good talking points and allows us to focus our comments more effectively for the short time we have

The evening ends with a group photo with those who haven’t already left to smoke or go about their business (why do all Japanese kids make the Peace Sign every time a camera is pointed at them!?) then it’s off to the hotel to drop the cases and out for dinner with our hosts Akihito (whom I’ve known for a long time through the IASJ) and Tako.



They take us to a great restaurant and miraculously convert me to Sushi! I’ve never been a fan, (a friend of mine used to say ‘that’s not food, that’s bait!), though I’ve always wished I was, but on this trip the joys of Sushi are fully revealed to me and I’m now a complete convert. But I think for it to work the fish has to be as incredibly fresh, and everything else as well cooked and presented as it was at this restaurant. The food was just amazing, and foodie that I am, I’m delighted to be able to share in a gastronomic miracle that was a closed book to me up to this point.



Back to Tokyo

On any tour there are days that prove trying, and the day after the Kobe workshop/performance proves to be one of those days. Carlos and George have offered to do some extra teaching at Koyo Conservatory before we leave for Tokyo and so we head off there first and, teaching finished, go to the station for the train to Tokyo. There, for reasons too dull too go into, there’s a delay in getting the tickets and we end up missing our train and hanging around for nearly an hour and a half before eventually getting a later train. This delay means we’re behind schedule when we get to to Tokyo, where we have a workshop to do at Tokyo College of Music in the late afternoon. Before doing the workshop we have to check into our hotel in Shinjuku, and Tokyo is so huge that by far the fastest (and cheapest) way to get around, is by subway. Which is fine when you’re travelling with just a shoulder bag or something, but when you’ve got all your luggage and your bass, and you’ve several subway line changes to make on a humid afternoon, the whole thing becomes a bit of an ordeal really. By the time we reach the hotel my shoulders are aching from carrying the gear and manipulating it up and down escalators, across platforms and onto trains. Then it’s into the hotel, drop the stuff and back on the subway for the trip to TCM.

When we arrive at the nearest subway station we’re met by our hosts and then it turns out to be a 15 minute walk to the college and our hosts (both Westerners BTW), are quite happy to walk along beside us for this long trek and it never once occurs to them to offer to help carry the gear – I’ve got my bass, Pekka his alto and backpack, and Carlos his cymbals and they know we’ve had a bit of a trying day, but still they walk along empty-handed, chattering away and never offering to take anything from anyone, and this causes me to add grumpiness to my already tired mood.

So when we arrive at the college (which is an amazing modern building ), late due to all the earlier problems, I’m not really in the mood to do the workshop at all. But once we enter the room the students cheer and applaud and this immediately lifts our mood – how can you resist such enthusiasm? So, on with the show – again we play, and although it’s a cliché, the healing power of music shows itself again in that once we start playing the tired grumpy mood disappears and it’s fun time again! We’ve been playing together for almost two weeks now, the band has really gelled, and we can hit a very high level almost from the first beat. Good humour restored, we answer questions and then have the students play. Again the workshop is translated which slows things down a bit, but these students are really charming and very sweet and enthusiastic and it’s a lot of fun working with them. There are a couple of really talented improvisers among them too – all they need is a bit more experience and access to good information and a wider playing environment.


I find it extraordinary that there is no undergraduate degree that can be taken in jazz alone in Japan. When you see the history of engagement with the music here, and the popularity of it, it’s amazing that there’s no way of studying full time to degree level through the state institutions. But from talking to teachers here who are trying to change things it seems the Japanese education system is very rigid and the same structural problems that prevent effective English language teaching, also stymie any attempt to bring jazz into mainstream music education here. The Koyo Conservatory has a 2-Year full time programme, but it’s a private school and as far as I know it can’t offer an undergraduate degree at the end of the course.

As always, the evening ends with food. This time the some of the students and one of the teachers comes with us and it’s a fine way to end the tour, chatting with these very nice people and eating, again, GREAT food that arrives one dish after another in that very nice communal eating style found in Asia. George gives one of the piano players an impromptu lesson in upper structure chord voicings while I expound the joys of the Ligeti Études to another group of pianists and Carlos and I explain the geographical position, and relative difference in size and population between Ireland (4.2 million people) and Brazil (200 million). The students talk about their lives and studies and the whole evening is a great way to end the working part of the tour – we have a day off the next day before heading home.



Which Carlos and I decide to spend in Akihabara, the famed electronics district of Tokyo. It’s a noisy crowded area, full of electronics shops blaring out music and sound effects from computer games, and Anime films and all kids of other things. I remark to Carlos that this area is definitely many people’s idea of hell – noise, commercialism, crowds – but it’s also fascinating, at least for a couple of hours. The sheer energy of the place is extraordinary and it’s a real luxury to have a couple of hours to wander around and observe the scene. Again this strange Lolita complex is in evidence as the area has girls of about 17 years old on every street corner, dressed in kind of French Maid outfits handing out leaflets for various shops. The whole thing is kind of weird – there would be outrage in the West if teenagers were asked to parade around in outfits like that for the purposes of selling electronics, but here, in modern industrialised Japan, it doesn’t seem to provoke even a raised eyebrow among the passers-by.........



I end up not buying anything – the prices are dearer than Hong Kong and nothing really catches my eye. In the evening Carlos, George and I meet up for a last meal and on impulse go to an Indian restaurant (Indian food is a passion of mine), where the food is very good and the portions more in keeping with the needs of someone of George’s size. George has been enjoying the Japanese food but has felt that the meals often feel more like a snack to him than a proper meal. We finish up having a coffee in Starbucks – not a chain I like particularly, but I have been missing the after dinner coffee while in Japan – they haven’t really embraced coffee culture and, uncultured addict that I am, I’ve been feeling that the one thing these great Japanese meals need to make them even greater is an espresso at the end.

So that was that – the next day we all undertook the long trip home, (Carlos’ journey was 44 hours via South Africa......) and brought to an end a really great trip involving music, crowds, culture shock, traffic, teachers, students, subways, soundchecks, festivals, sushi, sashimi, stir fry, yakitori, neon signs, unreadable signs, noise, politeness, impoliteness, efficiency, inefficiency, planes, trains, automobiles..................

After 2 weeks of man-made wonder, on the way home my plane flies over Siberia on a perfect day for viewing the beauty and wonder of nature...........

Bill Evans - A Forgotten Man?

Bill Evans a forgotten man? Seems like an absurd thought – but with the arrival of the 30th anniversary of Evans’ death on September 15th, I definitely got the feeling that his one-time huge profile as one of the most influential, important, and admired, pianists in jazz had taken a serious tumble. Yes there were jazz blogs which mentioned him and marked the anniversary, but they were in general blogs that have a stylistic leaning towards the music of the 50s and earlier, rather than blogs that deal with contemporary jazz and its doings. It was a combination of reading these blogs, noting the absence of mentions of Evans in others, and watching some Youtube clips of Evans that gave me this feeling that as far as the contemporary jazz world is concerned his star has fallen considerably in recent years.

But a forgotten man? This post is more me thinking aloud rather than me coming to any definite conclusion.

There was a time when Evans was ubiquitous, where he was mentioned in any serious discussion of jazz piano, when everyone could list their favourite Evans albums (which in those days were NOT just ‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ and the trio recordings with LaFaro and Motian). And of course up to 1980 he was touring and recording, so I knew many people, even in Ireland, who had seen him play. I just missed that particular boat myself, he died just as I started to get around, get out of Dublin and go to NY and London to see international artists who, at that time, never appeared in Ireland. So at that time his reputation and influence were enormous – it was very much accepted as a sine qua non that he would be always mentioned in the pantheon of jazz piano Gods alongside such deities as Art Tatum, Bud Powell etc.

But now? I don’t think that if you asked contemporary pianists about Evans that they would downplay his importance in the jazz piano lineage, but you rarely hear them volunteer Evans when asked about their influences. Of course as time passes all young musicians listen to different stuff than their elders did, and that’s how it should be. But it’s not uncommon to hear contemporary pianists cite Monk, and Bud Powell, (both of whom would have been mentioned in the same breath as Evans in the roll call of great pianists by an earlier generation), as influences. And it’s not uncommon to hear people such as Andrew Hill, or even Herbie Nichols and Jaki Byard being mentioned as being important figures for several well known contemporary pianists. But it’s been a long time since I heard a young cutting edge pianist make any reference to Bill Evans. Even Mehldau got quite miffed about his trio constantly being compared to Evans’ in the early days (rightly so – it was just lazy journalism to conflate the two bands) and went out of his way to deny the influence.


Shortly after Evans died a tribute recording was released which featured many great pianists then active on the jazz scene – some older, some younger, some not so well known, some legendary. The line-up included Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, Teddy Wilson, George Shearing, John Lewis, Dave Mckenna, Denny Zeitlin, Jimmy Rowles, Richie Beirach, JoAnne Brackeen and Andy LaVerne. Quite an impressive tally of great pianists, and all lining up to praise Evans and play pieces by him or associated with him. I wonder if you did the same thing today – i.e put together an ‘Evans recording’ featuring the current crop of well known contemporary American pianists – Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, Ethan Iverson, Craig Taborn etc. - what the result would be? I think the musical results could be intriguing, but I wonder how many pianists, (outside of pianists who deliberately position themselves within earlier styles of playing), would have any interest in recording Evans material these days? In these days where the music of others is deconstructed or ‘re-imagined’ or whatever the current phrase might be, by young musicians, how in sympathy would they feel in working with pieces like ‘Turn Out the Stars’ or ‘Very Early’? That harmonic world of constantly moving chords seems very far away from a lot of current pianistic concerns. Not that I’m bemoaning that – it’s just an observation.

An aside – for me the greatest Evans ‘tribute’ album was made by Paul Motian with Frisell and Lovano and Marc Johnson without a piano in sight. Frisell is just scary on this recording, the way he can distil the harmonic complexity of Evans music into a two-note guitar chord is an object lesson in accompaniment and ingenuity. John McLaughlin also made an often very beautiful Evans recording using five guitars!





In Europe there is a stream of contemporary pianism that is more clearly linked, in evolutionary terms, to Evans – for example the Scandinavian tradition espoused by the descendants of Bobo Stenson, Lars Jansson etc. and the Italian piano tradition of such great players as Enrico Pieranunzi and Stefano Bollani. But the European pianists who are influenced by Evans seem to favour the more ‘classical’ elements in his playing – the rich voicings, the impressionistic melodicism – and ignore the hard-swinging Evans. While the American pianists who these days do speak about Evans tend to focus on the swinging aspects of his playing and not be too interested in the pianistic impressionism. Of course these are generalisations, but I do detect a trend in the contemporary response on both sides of the Atlantic to Evans’ legacy.

As for me, I kind of go in and out of an Evans thing. I have a huge collection of his recordings – most on LP – and mostly collected in the early 80s when it was a given around these parts that Evans was a God and that it behoved any serious student of the music to have everything he recorded. And in collecting all these recordings I got to hear much great music that I think a lot of present-day musicians maybe don’t know since, these days, there seems to be a lot of focus on the earlier part of Evans career, and the later trios (post LaFaro/Motian, pre Johnson/Labarbera) seem to be unfashionable now.

But actually I particularly like the trio that was together the longest – the one with Eddie Gomez and Marty Morell. This trio is often accused of going through the motions, and much comment is made on their proclivity to rush. But I really like this band – I think the very underrated Morell really brought a kind of muscularity to the trio that was missing in some of the earlier versions. And yes they do rush, but it can be very exciting, and besides, other famous groups rushed – Tony and Ron with Miles for example – and never got the same opprobrium heaped on them for doing so. And Gomez, particularly in the earlier recordings by this trio, was just savage! Check out his solo on this version of ‘Emily’ - his motivic development stuff is amazing - and also check out how hard swinging this trio could be, even on a ‘sensitive’ jazz waltz like this one. (I love the setting for this clip, and the others in the series – a house in Helsinki, with the stark Scandinavian landscape outside and the clean lines of the house furnishings creating a contrasting backdrop to the rather florid music)



When I hear something like this I can easily get back into an Evans kick, because these days I can also easily go for long periods without listening to him, and sometimes I wonder how the slightly ‘rootie-tootie’ swing 8th notes of the later Evans still manages to swing, because it shouldn’t! And the over-amplified bass of the later trios bothers me, and how many times can you hear the same arrangement of ‘Autumn Leaves’ anyway?


But then something will spark me to listen again to Evans and it becomes evident again what an incredible amount of great music he was responsible for both under his own name and as a sideman – George Russell’s ‘Jazz Workshop’, ‘Blues and the Abstract Truth’, ‘Kind of Blue’, ‘Montreux’ with Gomez and Jack DeJohnette’, the first great trio with LaFaro and Motian, the intros to Nardis on the last trio’s live recordings, the poignancy of ‘We Will Meet Again’, etc. etc. He really was one of the greatest jazz musicians of his era, a huge influence on pianists whether directly or through pianists such as Herbie Hancock (the only major post-Evans pianist to openly acknowledge the influence) or Jarrett, and a true giant of the music. I think it’s a shame the 30th anniversary of his death wasn’t highlighted in a way a bit more in keeping with Evans’ stature, but I also think it’s interesting that it wasn’t – it says something about how Evans is now viewed in contemporary jazz – I’m just not sure what that something is! If there are any working jazz pianists under the age of 40 reading this I’d be interested to hear what your take on Evans is, and whether he had any influence on you as a pianist and/or improviser.

And to finish this rather rambling post – here’s the Evans/Gomez/Morell trio again burning their way through ‘Gloria’s Step’ from 1971. God bless Youtube.................

Every (Jazz) Man Has His Price

Why do many truly great jazz musicians, musicians who over many years have played some of the greatest music in the idiom and forged reputations as being among the finest in the world, agree to make recordings with people who, in jazz terms at least, simply can’t play?

Why do many truly great classical musicians, have such a lack of respect for jazz that they feel they can hire some of the greatest players in the music to accompany them while they butcher the idiom?

These questions were prompted by listening to an absolutely dire recording by the classical violinist Nigel Kennedy called ‘Blue Note Sessions’ in which Kennedy is joined by some of the greatest jazz musicians active today, who seem quite happy to play with someone who, to descend into Irish argot for a moment, doesn’t come within an ass’s roar of the kind of level of improvisational ability, or vocabulary, that should be required for anyone hoping to come within the aforesaid braying distance of any recording studio containing the likes of Jack DeJohnette, Ron Carter, Joe Lovano and Kenny Werner. And listening to Kennedy’s playing here, he’s so far below the level of the other players – stilted phrasing, clichéd, unimaginative, throwing notes at improvisational problems – it seems extraordinary, at least on the surface, that he could make an album like this with players of this calibre. Yet not only can he be on this album, he is actually the leader on it.

I find these kids of classical ‘crossover’ recordings very both infuriating and depressing.

Infuriating because of the arrogance of the classical musicians who on the one hand claim to love jazz (or Brazilian music, or Indian music or whatever genre they or their record company feel is worthy of exploitation), yet never stop to ask the question whether, if they really respect and love the music as they claim to, they should REALLY be playing with true masters of the idiom, recording it, and putting it out under their own name? Have they no shame? Are they so immured in their own sense of self-worth that they believe themselves to be capable of playing pretty much anything at the highest level? Is it a case of ‘listen, I can play Beethoven’s violin concerto at the greatest concert halls in the world, how could I NOT be able to play a blues with jazz guys!? I’ve been touring the planet and been playing great music with the world’s greatest orchestras for over 25 years, and I’m a household name – of course I can improvise over a simple tune like Autumn Leaves!’ Do they never listen back to the recordings they make with great jazz musicians and writhe with shame at the vapid clichés, stilted phrasing, crocodile tears attempts at blues phrasing, and general corniness of what they play in these projects?

Maybe they do, maybe they’re just pressurised so much by the record company, who feel this will help broaden their appeal, that they’ve no choice but to do it. Mind you, in the EPK video for his Blue Note album Kennedy states that one of the things that persuaded him to do the album was the fact that people like DeJohnette and Carter would be on it – so, no fear of HIM feeling like he’s not worthy to play with jazz people of that calibre. He obviously sees it as a meeting of equals. Nigel Kennedy is a great classical violinist, but is, at best, a hack as a jazz musician (others can comment on the success or otherwise of his ‘Hendrix’ project), so the idea that in this milieu he has the artistic right to record with these musicians is in my opinion laughable. Just because you have the money and the opportunity, should you still do it? Not if you’ve even a shred of respect for the music or musicians involved. But I’m convinced that despite all the profession of love for jazz and respect for the tradition these players pay lip service to, underneath it all they don’t really believe this to be a serious genre – or at least as serious as theirs. Otherwise they wouldn’t record and release these awful discs.



And I find these recordings depressing because of the jazz musicians’ compliance with this disrespecting of the music to which they’ve devoted their lives, to which they’ve contributed immensely, and by which they have inspired thousands of musicians all over the world. Now of course there’s money involved here, and I’m not condemning anyone for having a big pay day. But I think that surely there must be a cut-off point – a point decided upon by a combination of the stature of the jazz musician involved and how much or how little they need the money. I can’t believe at this point in their careers that either Ron Carter or Jack DeJohnette – two musicians who command big fees all over the world – really needed the money Kennedy gave them for their involvement in this mediocre (to put it generously) project.

Nor can I believe that they did this for any other reason than the money – if they really believed Kennedy was any good as a jazz musician they’d be including him in some of their own projects – right? Has any jazz musician of any stature, anywhere, ever included Kennedy (or any other classical high-flyer for that matter) in their own creative projects? I don’t think so. The whole history of this genre is one of the classical musicians waving a wad of money at the jazz guys and the jazz guys scampering over, only too happy to lend their names and prestige to any lame ‘jazz’ project as long as the price is right. Maybe it’s a hangover from the days when you did whatever you could to get by, a gig’s a gig etc. etc. But surely there must come a point where you reach a level of financial security when you really don’t need to place your talent and achievement at the service of anyone who has the price to hire you, regardless of their ability?

Because what I find doubly depressing about this is that I don’t believe the reverse to be true. That is, in the classical world, that the true heavyweights – the Evgeny Kissins, Arturo Benedettis, Anne-Sophie Mutters etc. - , no matter HOW much money was involved, would countenance a jazz guy hiring them to play on a classical recording that he (or she) was making, listen to him butchering Brahms or Shostakovitch or whatever, and agree to have their names lent to the project in order to allow it to gain credibility, and to allow the jazz guys to pretend to their own jazz public that really could play classical music at the highest level. I just don’t believe it would happen. These people have too much regard for their own genre, their own art, their own tradition to traduce it like that in public for folding money. Why can’t the jazz equivalents of these great musicians have the same self-respect and the same respect for their own tradition?

If the greatest players in the jazz world can’t respect the music they’ve helped to shape enough to refuse to publicly appear and record with players who can’t play – no matter how well they may be known in other fields – then what hope have the rest of us got in convincing the world that what we do is serious and worthy of equal consideration with any music?

The String Problem

I’ve just been listening to Alan Ferber’s new recording ’Chamber Songs’, which features his nonet with the addition of a string group. I always keep an eye out for new jazz recordings that feature strings, because I have a particular interest in string writing, and am very curious as to how strings can be better integrated into a jazz context. I enjoyed Ferber’s recording, it has some very nice writing and playing on it and it’s really well recorded. He definitely knows what he’s doing, particularly with the nonet. Some of the writing had a tone poem quality to it that is quite attractively elegaic. But, for my own taste, I could have used a bit more counterpoint and polyphony from the strings and in the string writing in general.

This tends to be quite a bugbear for me – I love writing for strings and have done a lot of it both in my capacity as a jazz composer and also while writing for classical musicians. So far I’ve written two violin and piano sonatas, a violin concerto, a string quartet, a sonata for solo violin, a sonata for solo viola, a sonata for viola and piano, (for Tanya Kalmanovitch), a piece for string orchestra, music for string trio and clarinet, music for jazz guitar trio and string quartet (for John Abercrombie), and music for soprano saxophone and string quartet (for Dave Liebman) , as well as using strings in various orchestral pieces. As a bassist I am of course a string player myself, so I’m perhaps biased towards them and therefore fussier than the normal jazz musician when it comes to writing for strings..

Strings have proven to be problematic in jazz, in the sense that even in the 21st century a violin soloist, (or even rarer, a cello soloist, or viola soloist) in a jazz group is the exception rather than the rule. However in this post, I’m interested in discussing the integration of a string group as part of a composed piece, rather than discussing the paucity of string soloists in jazz, (perhaps that’s for another time).

String writing in jazz tends to be rather hit and miss – and perhaps more miss than hit. In general jazz writers tend to go for one of two options when writing for strings–they either use the strings as surrogate horns, or go for the dreaded “string pad” effect. “String Pad” is the term I’ve heard string players use to describe, in a less than complimentary way, the type of writing they often encounter from composers outside the classical world when dealing with strings. In this String Pad genre the composer goes for slow-moving chordal, lush backgrounds over which the jazz soloist does his or her thing. You can hear a lot of this string pad affect on “Bird With Strings”, where the lush backgrounds support Parker’s fantastic soloing. In this kind of writing the composer uses a string ensemble as a kind of block effect - slow moving chords that display the richness of the string sound. I can understand the temptation to use this kind of effect – after all the natural sound of a string group playing a chord is one of the richest sounds you can ever experience in music. And since we don’t normally deal with strings in jazz, when we get the opportunity to do so it’s very hard to resist the novelty of having this rich sound at your disposal. But it really is a kind of one-size-fits-all unimaginative way to use strings, and whenever I hear that kind of sound I always think to myself that the writer is being, at the very least, a bit lazy.

in reality string ensemble writing is all about counterpoint. From the baroque period onwards, (and even before this), counterpoint is the major feature of all string writing. They lend themselves so well to polyphony, and of course extend across the full range from deepest bass to highest treble. And strings not only cover the full range of the human voice, they also are able use as many expressive devices as the human voice. So with their ability to cover a very wide pitch range, and the huge range of techniques and devices that are available when writing for strings, it really is a cop-out to mainly use the strings as a kind of harmonic blotting paper filling up all the available space with their woody richness.



As I said, in string writing counterpoint is, to use the technical term, the shit. But in jazz we don’t tend to use counterpoint a whole lot – at least not in mainstream jazz writing. Have a listen to any post-bop recordings, then try and identify any use of counterpoint in the tunes. There’s usually not a lot there - any small bits of counterpoint tend to be used as small fillers to the main melody rather than any truly independent line. Like anything of course, there are exceptions to this – Mulligan’s piano-less quartet being a famous example, then George Russell’s masterpiece ’Jazz Workshop’ is another. But these are exceptions, counterpoint is rare in post-bop mainstream jazz.

And when we do use counterpoint, we tend to use a very “top–down” kind of writing, where the melody is played mostly in the higher pitched instruments and any counterpoint that’s going on is really just engaged with filling out the chords of the harmony underneath the melody - they’re often really just glorified guide-tone melodies. When I hear this kind of thing, I always get a sense that the composer conceived the music at the piano – you get that sense of the melody being played in the right hand while being supported by left hand chordal action. But examining compositions for string quartet by great composers reveals a whole other world of counterpoint. In this genre all four instruments are equal - the violins, the viola, or the cello can have the lead at any time, and themes, sub-themes, melody, and accompaniment are constantly flipped around through the ensemble. Rather than have the violin play the melody all the time supported by the lower instruments as in so much jazz string writing, in this world all the instruments are equal and are fully engaged in the cut and thrust of the musical dialogue.

There’s probably a reason why we jazz composers tend not to do this when writing for strings – this shit is hard! Counterpoint is hard. When you have four voices moving independently, their horizontal forward motion creates a vertical harmony. The writer needs to be aware at all times of the function of every note in all four instruments, how they relate to each other, and how they relate to the underlying harmony of the piece. Classical composers train for years to be able to do this, we get little or no instruction in this area–naturally enough, since we have other fish to fry, fish that take years in themselves to fry properly. But that’s no reason to succumb to the lazy string pad syndrome. I think if you have the luxury of working with a good string group you should try and write something worthy of the possibilities that this kind of ensemble can bring to your music.

My most recent piece that involved a string group is a recording that will be coming out in the not too distant future of a piece that I composed called “Renaissance Man”. This is a a large-scale piece for a jazz guitar trio and string quartet, with John Abercrombie as the guitar soloist. In this six movement work, I tried at all times to use the strings in the way that I believe they should be used, as contrapuntal protagonists in the musical dialogue, as well as occasionally using them for their beautiful colouristic tendencies. Here’s a sneak preview of one of the movements – the only one that is completely written, and features the string quartet alone - its called “And This Was Odd Because”, and features the group in very rhythmic groove oriented playing, as well as the aforementioned counterpoint.



If one has ever attempted to write string music, the best advice I can possibly give to anyone who wants to write for strings, but maybe hasn’t had much training in the genre, is to check out Bela Bartok’s six string quartets. Everything you need to know about string writing is contained somewhere in these quartets. The whole history of string writing to that point, is contained here - Everything you need is here with the possible exception of extended techniques, but really if you’re not an experienced string writer you is shouldn’t be worrying too much about extended techniques anyway. And Bartok puts plenty of different techniques into the string writing anyway – more than enough for all but the most experienced of string writers. Check out the amazing movement no. 2 from Quartet No. 4, where he uses the mutes to create a creepy rustling effect as the music hurtles around the four instruments.



Now THAT’S string writing! And of course great music. I still keep my ears and eyes open for great jazz string writing, but I’ve not had a huge amount of luck so far. Any suggestions as to good stuff to check out will be gratefully accepted and acted upon.

In the meantime here’s a little video clip from the making of the aforementioned ‘Renaissance Man’ recording – the CD should be out in early 2011.

Blog to Blog

I just saw where Ethan Iverson - without doubt the most respected jazz blogger around (at least as far as writing about the actual music is concerned), mentioned this blog in a round-up in his always fascinating 'Do The Math' blog. Which is nice since it was reading Ethan's blog that originally inspired me to start writing myself. As I mentioned in a post called 'Musicians on Music' I felt that far too much of the jazz writing online was being done by non-musicians - or maybe it would be fairer to say that far too little was being written by the guys in the trenches, and too little of the musicians' own voices was being heard. A combination of this belief and seeing, via in particular a blog by Ethan on Lennie Tristano, (which was on the old DTM site and will be over on the new one soon apparently), how good it could be when musicians write in depth about what they really know, that inspired me to start writing.

Interestingly - to me anyway! - Ethan, in speaking about the blog says the following:

Actually, I’m pretty sure Ronan and I disagree about nearly everything in jazz from A to Z, and look forward to looking him up in Dublin sometime and arguing all night long over some Jameson.

Actually I'm not so sure we would disagree quite as much as Ethan thinks we would - or at least I can say that I rarely read his writing about the music and violently disagree with what he says. For example I really enjoyed his recent post on the 'Great Jazz Trio' recordings with Hank Jones, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, since these are recordings I know really well and bought on LP back in the 80s when they were originally released and have lived with for a long time. He wrote very well about them and what he said pretty much jibed with my own opinion on those recordings.

But obviously, if I agree with much of what he writes, the same can't be said for his view of the opinions I express in my blog! Since he doesn't write comments on other people's blogs (as far as I know, and it's a stance I can completely understand. It's so easy to get sucked into stuff and suddenly, BAM! - the whole night's gone........) I'm not sure which part(s) of my A-Z of jazz he disagrees with, but I look forward to the all-nighter the next time he's in Dublin, (probably minus the Jameson though - for me anyway..........).

Don't Give Up the Day Job!

In the previous post on Denny Zeitlin, I questioned whether anyone apart from Denny had ever really scaled the jazz heights as a player despite not pursuing the music full time. I've just remembered another exceptional part-time player - Franco Ambrosetti. The Swiss Flugelhorn player, (whose family business has made him very rich and for whom he still works), may not be in the same compositional/conceptual league as Zeitlin, but as a player he's truly world class. Here he is burning out on 'Sidewinder' from 2001, and in some very heavy company too...................

Overlooked Masterpieces 1 - Denny Zeitlin

(Since I wrote this post I receieved some factual corrections, observations and clarifications from Denny - I've added these in an addendum to the blog - please make sure to read this at the end of the post)

Denny Zeitlin is the exception that proves the rule - the rule in this case being that contemporary jazz is such a complex and demanding art form that to be a true master of it demands that one devotes one's entire attention to it, and spends one's whole life in its singular pursuit. This ‘rule’ is something that I actually believe to be true – while there have been many fine part-time jazz musicians, there’s never really been many (if any?) who only devoted some of their time to it yet played it at truly the very highest level. In fact I would go as far as to say that it’s not possible to really play it at the very highest level while devoting half of your time to doing something completely different.

Or perhaps it's more accurate to state that I would say that if I didn’t know about Denny Zeitlin...........

Zeitlin is, and has been for over 40 years, a full time psychiatrist and a part-time jazz musician – or at least part-time in that he has always fulfilled a fulltime role as a medical man while presumably (though I don’t know this for sure), playing jazz only when he has time away from his medical practice. And what is extraordinary about him is not that you could say he’s an amazing jazz pianist considering he doesn’t devote himself full time to it – what’s extraordinary is that he is a truly great jazz pianist by any standard. He is truly world class, and always has been ever since the time he came to New York as a medical student in the early 1960s, playing gigs and making recordings while studying medicine .

His brilliance and originality is immediately evident on the first recordings he appeared on, and no less than Bill Evans recorded his beautiful composition ‘Quiet Now’ which became a staple of Evans’ repertoire at that time. He released several albums during the 60s and then seemed to disappear from performance, emerging again in the early 80s with a beautiful duo recording for ECM with Charlie Haden ('Time Remembers One Time Once'), and even locking horns with Herbie Hancock on Straight No Chaser from a live recording, ('Jazz at the Opera House'), that I don’t think has ever been released on CD, but is one on which Zeitlin demonstrates again his right to be considered as one of the truly great jazz pianists.

Yet he remains under-appreciated and under-recognised, despite the fact that he remains active as a pianist and is playing as well as ever both solo, and in his trio with Buster Williams and Matt Wilson. I was recently talking to some musician friends of mine, and I brought Zeitlin’s name up, and while some of them had heard his name, few were aware of his work, and none were aware of the great trio recordings he made in the early 60s. I think it’s a travesty that these recordings are not better known – hence this blog post.

In 1964, while only 25 years old, he made what is for me an incredibly forward looking and prophetic piano trio album – Cathexis – with Cecil McBee and Freddie Waits. This recording is full of compositional, pianistic and ensemble concepts that were very uncommon at the time, but that later went on to become part and parcel of the contemporary jazz pianist's (and musician’s) vocabulary. It was very far ahead of its time in so many ways.



At a festival we were both playing at in Belgium last year I had the good fortune to have a conversation with Cecil McBee, the bassist on Cathexis, during which I brought up this recording (Cathexis) and asked Cecil about it. He said a very interesting thing – he told me that it was the first recording he (and Freddie Waits), made in New York when he arrived there, but that in hindsight he felt that he wasn’t really ready to make that recording. When I asked him what he meant by that, he said that though his reading skills and technique were in good condition due to his just having left music college, and he was able to negotiate the many technical difficulties of the music, at the same time he said that the conceptual material was so varied and demanding, he felt that he didn’t have the experience at that time to deal with the music in the way he now wished he could have.

Listening to Cathexis even now, there are so many challenges for the rhythm section, and so many varieties of feel and approach demanded of them. Waits and McBee do a fantastic job on the music, especially given the difficulties involved - I wonder if they did any gigs in preparation for the recording...... Even today this music would be challenging, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be faced with those pieces at that time – it remains incredible to me that this recording was conceived and recorded in early 1964, and by someone who wasn't devoting all of his time to music!

For example – here are a few audio clips which give an idea of the sheer breadth of conception and ease of execution of this music and this CD (Thanks to Mr. Zeitlin for permission to use these clips - depending on your internet connection some clips may load slowly, if so, please be patient)

‘I-Thou’ is an exquisite melody, which has a wonderful circular feel with a deceptively tricky form – melody is one of Zeitlin’s great gifts




'Stonehenge' on the other hand, is a fast modal piece that has a hair-raising (for the rhythm section) rhythmic and densely chorded section that's used to launch the solos. Even in today's jazz world, where we're used to rhythmically difficult passages in the music, this would be considered challenging.




The use of 20th century harmony (as in the chromatic harmony of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, featuring stacked triads etc.) to re-harmonise standards became very popular in jazz the mid-to late 70s, particularly through the work of Richie Beirach and Dave Liebman. But Zeitlin was doing this many years before, such as in this take on Gershwin's classic 'Soon'





Or how about this chromatic take on the even more classic 'Round Midnight............





'Nica's Tempo' on the other hand features many tempo changes - a very unusual thing in a piano trio recording in 1964, though Mingus had been using it as a compositional device for a while





'Little Children, Don't Go Near That House' (the title is worth the price of admission alone!) is a very unusual melody showing a real original mind at work - the harmony is dense, the melody is lyrical and a little poignant, yet stylistically unclassifiable.........



'Cathexis' itself is a burn-out, with lots of chords including the fast moving Trane type progression heard here that shows that Zeitlin, along with pretty much everyone else at that time, was affected by Coltrane's contemporary harmonic explorations




And finally - an extended form composition - in this case an exploration of the minor blues. 'Blue Phoenix' works its way through three different sections, starting off very slowly with solo piano before getting into an extraordinary evocation of a walking bass line with the left hand of the piano. Zeitlin has always been brilliant at this (check out his 'Billie's Bounce' from 'Time Remembers One Time Once' on ECM for another amazing example). As a bassist I've rarely heard pianists successfully imitate the feel of a walking bass line - it's usually too angular and percussive. But Zeitlin seems to have figured out how to get that legato driving thing that bassists often do - as in this example:




He finishes 'Blue Phoenix' as a fast burning minor blues, utilising the following accelerando (another rare thing in jazz) to get to the desired tempo









He moved to the West Coast in the mid-60's and in between his medical work put together a new trio with Jerry Granelli and Charlie Haden which made several recordings - 'Carnival', 'Live at the Trident' and (with Joe Halpin on bass and Oliver Johnson on drums on half of it) 'Zeitgeist'. Carnival and Zeitgeist were recently released on a Mosaic box set that also includes 'Cathexis', though the Trident recording wasn't included in this collection for some reason.

While Haden and Granelli recorded more extensively with Zeitlin and form an obvious trio rapport with him, I've always been very fond of the pieces on Zeitgeist that have the Joe Halpin/Oliver Johnson bass and drum team. They have a muscularity of approach that really fires the music and puts it into other areas. This is particularly true on 'Dormammu' where Zeitlin shows the breadth of his creative abilities yet again. Here he ventures into some ferocious open improvisation with Halpin and Johnson that shows he was au fait with the 60s free scene






I also really like Johnson's time feel too - he has a wonderfully springy cymbal feel with an edge to it - slightly pushy but not rushing, reminiscent of Jack DeJohnette's time feel. 'Night and Day' is a good example







And finally, have a listen to the playfulness of the way they play the hoary old classic 'I Got Rhythm' - dense voicings yet underpinned with real swing






These albums contain an extraordinary amount of improvisational and compositional approaches - extended form, lyrical ballads, complex rhythms, sophisticated chromatic reharmonization of standards, free playing, fantastic swing. They are major statements in the art of the possible for piano trio, and given the time they were made, were very prophetic. The dominant piano trio influence in mainstream jazz in the 60s was Bill Evans, yet to my mind, these trio recordings show a greater variety of approach within what is largely a conventional jazz context, than does the various Evans trios. This is not to denigrate the Evans trios, but rather is meant to point up the extraordinary achievements of the Zeitlin trios.

Achievements that have not been given their due recognition. Which brings us back to the opening point - can you really reach the highest level you can reach if you don't devote yourself full time to the music? I think its clear that Zeitlin has reached and surpassed the level that most full time pianists can reach. But could the achievements have been even greater had he devoted himself fulltime to music? He certainly would have been given greater recognition - as Monk famously said, even if you don't have a gig you should always be on the scene. Out of sight, out of mind is a truism - there's no doubt that Zeitlin's absence from the scene - especially in NY - has contributed to the lack of awareness of his work, especially today.

However he has an interesting take on all of this, in which he posits the idea that his medical and musical work feed off each other. So - do check out these great trio albums, check out what he's doing currently, and let's leave the last words to him





Addendum


After I wrote this blog I received a message from Denny pointing out a couple of factual errors and giving some insight into some of the points I raised.

With regard to the errors - ‘Billie’s Bounce’ was actually recorded on a Palo Alto recording called Tidal Wave. And the audio clip version of ‘I Got Rhythm’ that I posted featured the bass and drum team of Charlie Haden and Jerry Granelli – there’s a different version featuring Joe Halpin and Oliver Johnson on the bonus tracks of the Mosaic Box Set I mentioned in the post.


Here are Denny’s observations and clarifications:

It is accurate that over the years I have maintained a primary responsibility to patient care and psychiatric education, and have woven music into this fabric as best as I have been able.



Re my "disappearance" : After the Columbia series of 5 LPs in the sixties, I became very interested in the integration of acoustic and electronic instruments, jazz, classical, rock, funk, and free music. I withdrew from public performance for several years while I got the instrumentation, technology, and group together, and then performed this music through the seventies. This journey was recorded on the small independent label, 1750 Arch, and culminated in my acoustic-symphonic-electronic score for the remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." That score was recently released on CD. I then returned to a focus on acoustic music, and the duet album for ECM with Charlie soon followed, reaching a larger audience.



Re Cathexis: I had one night of rehearsal with Cecil before our first recording session, and met Freddie for the first time in the studio. We never gigged as a trio. I agree that they did an absolutely superb job on the date. It was very interesting to learn of Cecil's conversation with you.



RE Blue Phoenix: You might want to mention also that my new solo CD, "Precipice," has several examples of walking bass lines at different tempos.



RE the Mosaic Box Set: The reason Live At The Trident was not included in this set is that the set focuses exclusively on the studio dates. Mosaic plans to release LATT on CD, probably within the next 12 months.



(Your description of the Johnson/Halpin team and Oliver's contribution is right on, and tallies with my experience of them.)



RE: I Got Rhythm: The version you audio-clipped and described is actually one of the Haden/Granelli

Bonus tracks. The version with Johnson/Halpin is the very brief, more avant-garde reconstructed/deconstructed track 6 of Disc #3.



Many, many thanks for your support of my music, Ronan, and I hope our paths will cross in person before too long.



All best,



Denny