Jackie McLean's Cry

Jackie McLean, ‘Hootnan’(Action! Action! Action! a.k.a. Action, rec. 1964)

Towards the end of his solo on ‘Hootnan’, the final track on the album Action! Action! Action!, Jackie McLean unleashes an extreme upper-register cry at the climactic point of an otherwise conventionally swinging phrase. Rhythmically, it fits perfectly; in terms of harmony, it’s a transposition--albeit an extreme one--of the note that he might logically be expected to play next. Yet that sound seems to come out of nowhere, its timbre entirely startling, a miniature explosion that dies down almost as soon as it appears only to to explode once more as McLean unleashes further altissimo notes, each held longer than the last, before winding down the solo into some elegantly curlicuing bop licks that signal in the next soloist, trumpeter Charles Tolliver. No one one breaks a sweat.  Blink and you could miss it; or explain it away as an aberration, an eccentricity, a tic. This was, after all, but one of many such moments in McLean’s solos once he began playing “out”--some variant of this type of cry occurs on virtually every check of Let Freedom Ring, for example (check the acerbic ‘Melody for Melonae’ and the devastating version of Bud Powell’s ‘I’ll Keep Loving You’ for examples). It’s a relatively simple musical manoeuvre--albeit one requiring technical chops. But it’s much harder to place in terms of its ‘meaning’. McLean’s altissimo cry--some writers call it a “squeal”--is not so much the explosion of emotion, not the idea of spontaneous overflow that characterises the idea of the cry or “scream” in the contemporaneous free jazz with which it shared space in New York--Albert Ayler, Frank Wright, Coltrane (Action! Action! Action! was recorded the year before, though not released until two years after, Coltrane’s Ascension). Neither was it the celebratory cry of the barwalking R&B “screamers” and “honkers” from whom the New Black Musicians of the sixties inherited their own cries, the line that links Coltrane to his former employer, Earl Bostic, “up there in orbit”: multiphonics, altissimo tones, turned from musical effects into the basis of a new vocabulary. McLean’s is, rather, an analytical cry, one which seems to offer a vantage point the music from which to observe it, a kind of shattering of a musical fourth wall. The McLean cry radically extends the principal of transposition, of the brief foray into another register, moving so far beyond the conventionally-charted octaves as to seem beyond transposition: a sudden entry from above, an alien sound, hard and metallic and material, bright and implacable, sour and sharp and firm. “Ecstasy”, ex-stasis, means to stand outside oneself, but to stand outside oneself, as McLean does here, need not be ecstatic: looking in on the music while being in it, stepping back while still soloing “out front”, examining the matter at hand from all sides, aslant or straight on. 

In this, McLean’s use of the “cry” has something in common with Sonny Rollins’ use of the altissimo register on another horn--the tenor--during the same period. Rollins uses the technique to perhaps its most startling effect in his superlative duet with Coleman Hawkins on ‘Lover Man’ from Sonny Meets Hawk, recorded shortly after the release of McLean’s Let Freedom Ring, or a few years later, in the eerie conclusion to the title track of East Broadway Run Down. Over a firm rhythmic base, and in tandem with other musicians playing in generally conventional register and key, in Rollin’s hands, this studied, practiced, concentrated, focused sound is too precise to be called ungainly, but could never be called conventionally elegant. It provides punctuation, atmosphere, a sharpening or blurring of edges like a smear in the middle of a precisely delineated painting, or a sharp line in the midst of a field of abstract colour. It clarifies and confuses at the same time. As with McLean, this is not a sound that signifies an excess, an emotional “hotness”, but something else altogether--something intellectual, cerebral, the sound of the working of thought, and that in turn encourages a self-conscious reflection on musical form. 

 

Sonny Rollins/Coleman Hawkins, ‘Lover Man’ (Sonny Meets Hawk, 1963)

Rollins’ legendary sabbatical from the cut-and-thrust business world of the jazz scene, his period of hermetic practice on the Williamsburg Bridge from 1959 to 1961, saw him playing alone, for fifteen to sixteen hours a day, developing his breathing through yoga, working through every possible sound, legitimate or illegitimate, he could wring from the tenor saxophone. In a 2007 interview, he remarked: 

[I’m] interested in the technique of playing in different registers. I’ve spent a long time working on getting a full sound and the proper accuracy on the notes you find above the so-called “normal” range of the instrument. I’ve been experimenting with it, really, since the 1950’s. I’ve got books on such things. What interests me is the accuracy and the security of getting each note right and full every time [...] The whole problem was in getting to feel secure about creating the notes as I wanted; in assimilating them entirely into my “normal” technique. I don’t want to have an artificial division between registers - it should be seamless in my playing. Only then can I incorporate it into my natural improvisational practises. I can do it privately, when I practise, but it is only recently that I’ve felt that I’ve reached the proper level of note production whereby I could play it on stage. I’m building up to it. I may try it soon.

Rollins had, of course, been incorporating such notes in his playing from after his sabbatical--if not before--but his comments suggest an important way in which what he learned in the bridge, while providing the basis for everything he did since, could never be entirely assimilated. The note that is played in private, in practise, but not on stage cannot be given away easily: it is self-possession, the self’s possession, that which might, at times, be given away as sonic gift, air from another planet briefly wafting through. But care must be taken. Recall the ‘Afro-Horn’ of Henry Dumas’ short story ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken?’: an instrument that, in unveiling the “the freedom of freedom”, produces vibrations that cause the hearts of white audience members to give out. “I’m building up to it. I may try it soon.” Another story has Rollins backstage practicing the highest possible of registers, sounds almost too high for the human ear to hear, before going on stage and blowing the lowest possible note. 

What secret is being held here? Rollins’ return from the bridge and to public performance serves as an almost too-perfect allegory of between the public and the private dimensions of jazz: a triumphant public display by which the music is returned to circulation. Yet recall that this return was not only to the atmosphere of nourishing sociality in which the music could be created, but to its exploitation in the environment of uncertain labour conditions, police clampdowns and organised crime which, as Gerald Horne notes in his recent book Jazz and Justice, dogged jazz throughout its history. Rollins had conquered earlier addiction problems in Chicago a few years earlier; McLean likewise suffered from addiction problems early on in his career, an experience he drew on playing one of the junkies in Jack Gelber’s play The Connection (1959-61), and in turn worked in community programmes such as the HAR-YOU initiative in Harlem. As A.B. Spellman notes in his profile of McLean for the classic Four Lives in the Bebop Business, heroin had been flooded into musicians’ communities by the Mafia as bebop was beginning and the young McLean was beginning as a musician. 

I have been told by several men who used heroin during the Forties that, looking back on their own experiences, there was a conscious attempt (most say by the Mafia) to create a market. [...] There was heroin in the jazz set before it was on the street. In [the jazz] set, which Jackie admired so much, heroin was one of the greatest symbols of hipness. It was in this era that the idea of hip developed, and Jackie is one of the last of the original hip musicians. They created a language, a dress, a music, and a high which were closed unto themselves and allowed them to one-up the rest of the world. The bebop era was the first time that the black ego was expressed in America with self-assurance, and heroin, because its effect blocks out all doubt, is a drug that facilitates the self-assurance. There was heroin all around the hip teen-age set that Jackie ran with, and many of the idols whose music, speech, dress, whose every mannerism they were endeavoring to copy, were heroin addicts.

Interviewed for Spellman’s book, McLean suggests that heroin use provided a kind of internalised defense against the backdrop of the broader structural inequalities of which its use was symptom, rather than, as was stereotypically portrayed, cause. “McLean”, writes Spellman, “does not consider having to get his pennies together to meet the connection any more distasteful or self-destructive than choosing to live with dishonest record companies disrespectful nightclub owners, or a disinterested public that guaranteed only long periods of unemployment.” Users were, however, subject to what effectively amounted to a widespread barring of the labour force from its own market, enforced by the State. McLean lost his cabaret card in 1957 and was unable to regularly perform in New York clubs for the next decade. In Spellman’s words, “the law requiring cabaret cards issued by the police department for work in nightclubs selling liquor [wa]s a totally antiquated one which by now applie[d] almost exclusively to jazz musicians in a most discriminatory way”. McLean was instead forced to turn to the recording studio, recording numerous sessions for labels such as Blue Note: studio replacing club as space for experimentation or, more often, simply making ends meet. Ironically enough, it was his turn as a junkie in The Connection that guaranteed him a period of employment, travelling internationally with the play. McLean’s presence, both as a person with addiction issues, and as a performing musician, was acceptable when framed within the lens of a white playwright’s art; unacceptable when he tried to make his way in the regular labour market in which he was forced to frame his own art.

But for Rollins, in his time on the bridge after kicking his habit in 1958, and for McLean after he’d kicked the habit in 1964, there was another way, one which took the attitude found in the closed, self-assured ego facilitated in the bebop ear by heroin--Spellman’s “a language, a dress, a music, and a high which were closed unto themselves and allowed them to one-up the rest of the world”--and turned it toward another model of inward strength. The stakes of survival--material, literal, physical, spiritual--all of it--were high. What Sonny Rollins learned on the bridge was not just technique, but a certain privacy, a secrecy, the reliance on inner resources, akin to the register of hermetic knowledge--figured as a kind of combination of street smarts, spiritual discipline, and aesthetic focus--that McLean’s bandmate Grachan Moncur talked about in relation to his own survival during this period, and which he termed “nomadic” and “gnostic”. Such knowledge suggested an alternative to the reliance of the “hip” on the drug high; it might also be known by its more familiar name as the cool, in the politicized way Amiri Baraka talks about that term. “Cool [...] before Lee Konitz and Chet Baker absorbed it” was, for Baraka, a knowing but defiant silence during a time of political reaction, the flipside to the “hot” he and his fellow Newarkers had absorbed from the R&B “screamers”, but a part of the same impulse of rooted defiance. 

And so we might understand the altissimo register that we hear in Rollins as, in part, the sound of that secret knowledge on the bridge: a little sampling of it, not to be used too often, because it can’t be integrated into the public traction of the music--tones that won’t easily, in Rollins’ words, “assimilate [...] into my ‘normal’ technique.” When Rollins plays those notes, the joins show: new layers are created, new levels, ghosts or alien sounds. That’s one side of it, at least. Hearing the Sonny Meets Hawk version of ‘Lover Man’ for the first time, one could parse his playing alongside Coleman Hawkins as disruptive, aiming to shock. But really, it’s about history: Hawkins himself had experimented early on with the altissimo register in pieces like ‘Queer Notions’ or in his famed ‘Body and Soul’ solo--in the process essentially inventing bebop avant la lettre. In taking that technique somewhere else, Rollins was also showing it back to the older musician, returning a gift: here’s what you’ve given me, here’s where I’m taking it. In other words, Rollins’ altissimo is the sound of the social, of connections being passed on, as much as it’s the sound of publicly-displayed secret knowledge. And these are the twinned, doubled, dialectical aspects of the avant-garde of the fifties and sixties: the hot and the cool; the passing on of knowledge, and its transformation into something else that sometimes moves so far beyond its initial source of inspiration as to seem almost unrecognisable to it. 

Steve Lacy, ‘Existence’ (Remains, 1991) 

McLean on alto (his first instrument having been soprano); Rollins on tenor (his first instrument having been alto); a third player to add to the purveyors of analytical cries is soprano player Steve Lacy, who would sometimes rehearse with Rollins on the bridge, and who, thanks to the already-higher range of his instrument, would over time develop an extreme upper range on soprano, staying up there, sometimes at whistle pitch, with resolute, vibrato-less clarity (check the extraordinary opening to the quintet version of his piece ‘Esteem’ from a 1975 Paris live date, or on The Wire from the same year).  Lacy called the extreme upper register “going to the moon”. “When you go to the moon like that, it hurts, and you can’t do it often and it’s got to be controllable”. These questions of assimilation (Rollins) and control (Lacy) are practical ones--questions of technique, of physical capacity, of not damaging lip or teeth or lungs. In a 1961 article that Lacy wrote for Metronome magazine on the potential of his instrument, he observed that “certain portions of the soprano’s range are intrinsically out of tune with the rest of the horn. All instruments have ‘bad’ notes but the soprano has whole segments of such notes.” The solution found in previous decades by Sidney Bechet--the only real precedent for the instrument’s use in jazz--had been to deploy wide vibrato. This approach was not one, however, for Lacy. “If one wants the power of, say, a Bechet without the vibrato”, he noted, “one must humor each note, bending it to the desired pitch. This requires long and assiduous practice with much frustration, or else a high natural sensitivity, coupled with extreme lip flexibility.” The ‘cry’, the extreme high note, is a technical problem, a battle as well as a collaboration with the instrument, a bending of its natural inclinations against itself: something that is artificial, the result of work and practice, far from the myth of spontaneous overflow.

Music is work, insisted musicians, like McLean, like Lacy, like Rollins, for whom too often remuneration was in short supply, who had to work within damaging and degrading labour conditions is work. It is, of course, play too, but play in a serious sense: play as adaptation, improvisational, survival. Recall Thelonious Monk’s piece ‘Work’, recorded on an album with Rollins in 1956, and by Lacy on his own debut album Soprano Sax two years later, a version marked by what reviewer Bob Rusch calls “a controlled tension [...] like everybody’s trying to play, carefully, to a common goal. It’s almost as if someone were present to make sure everybody stayed within obvious perimeters.” Lacy was, it’s true, still at a germinal stage of his playing, undergoing an apprenticeship with Cecil Taylor, who’d first taken him to see Monk, several years before his own six-month stint in Monk’s band. Be that as it may, there’s a quality to both Lacy’s smoother and Monk’s more jagged renderings that suggests something of the title’s doubled sense: laconic, gritted-teeth, a relaxed nervous tension, that which turns work to play, to playing, as serious as your life.

Lacy didn’t know addiction as McLean and Rollins had done, lived in conditions of privation, at one point in New York, sleeping in a tent inside an apartment he couldn’t afford to heat, at another, having decided to depart the States in search of musical opportunity, getting stuck in Argentina in the aftermath of the right-wing coup of 1966, over the next nine months exploring free improvisation and recording the extraordinary The Forest and the Zoo with Enrico Rava, Johnny Dyani, and Louis Moholo-Moholo and discovering what he later called “the hermetic free”. “I made that [record] because I thought the music was too important to lose”, Lacy remarked. “It was what we’d call the ‘hermetic free’. The point of no return. Where the music had the maximum calories in it. There was nothing to say, no words necessary. Just: ‘play’. After that, the music went elsewhere.” In the seventies, Lacy moved away from purely free improvisation, finding the balance of inside and outside, composition and improvisation that would characterise the rest of his mature output: the aim to find a music that, as he said, would “try to get it to the bone”, a principle exemplified by Lacy’s piece of the same name, its one-word title typical of the dry brevity that characterised his aesthetic: “snips”, “stabs”, “the crust”, “the woe”, “the wire”.

Lacy’s playing in such contexts, particularly the solo dates which he made a speciality, would often deploy altissimo as the high point of a working through of scalar figures, a logical and relentless reach up to a point necessitated by its context: an implacable and relentless push, necessitated by the contours of compositional frameworks in which figures would be repeated--sometimes obsessively--put through the permutations of transposition, as if pushing the identity of a musical phrase as far as it could go before it transforms into something else. Take, for instance, the closing portion of the 1991 version of his piece ‘Existence’, a video for which is embedded above: the first movement of his 1970’s solo suite Tao, “composed for six elements of Lao Tzu’s greater principle”. Lacy recorded the piece on  on several occasions: in Tokyo and Como in 1975, released as Solo at Mandara and Axieme on ALM and on Red Records respectively, in Montreal in 1979, released as Hooky by British free improvisation label Emanem, and on the 1991 album Remains, released on Hat ART. The titles to the individual movements--‘Existence’, ‘The Way’, ‘Bone’, ‘Name’, ‘The Breath’, and ‘Life on Its Way’--suggest an approach in which the spiritual is figured through the relentless material, through the negotiations of body and instrument. This is not a music of representation, though Lacy was always drawn to using words, and in time had become perhaps the finest exponent of a particular brand of art song he made his own, but of resolute and relentless presence, an existential music, devoid of sentiment, which left the listener to make up their own conclusions. Around four minutes into ‘Existence’, after a pause of a good few seconds, Lacy begins a figure that progressively cycles higher and higher, traversing the gamut from a throaty low note to a high-wire screech: the cry, taken higher and higher each time before things are taken back down and the piece ends at a point at once definitive and entirely open-ended: a multiphonic, two notes at once, two in one, dialectical clarity and potential. Lacy has already played some upper register notes in the opening section of the piece, running up and down the scale to some high, exposed places, but the high notes towards the end of the piece are something else. Perhaps “cry” is the wrong word, suggesting as it does an involuntary spontaneity or an apostrophic expressivity. These notes mark intensity, but not excitement: a tight, chill grip, a condensation, a focusing of attention, what Lacy in another piece termed “the peak”.

These “peaks” occur at the end of the 1991 recording of ‘Existence’, serving a function akin to that of the musical climax. But, as Lacy’s former student Jorrit Dijkstra reveals in an incisive essay on learning this piece with the saxophonist, they also echo its introduction, “where one ‘warms up the saxophone’ or sets the atmosphere of the tune by slowly exploring the pitches of the first scale, much like the rubato ‘alap’ introduction to an Indian raga.” High notes are often something the saxophonist must build up to--think McLean’s cries towards the end of his solo, moments of focused climax which he followed his former bandleader Art Blakey’s lessons about the art and arc of constructing narrative and drama within a concise, hard-hitting statement, or Rollins’ unearthly altissimo during the final portion of ‘Lover Man’. They can, however, also be a jumping off point, straight from the diving board. Consider here the aforementioned opening of Lacy’s ‘Esteem’, a piece dating from around the same period as ‘Existence’, in which a preludial circling through transposed notes, from high to low, wavers and hovers before settling into a melancholic melody which emerges from it in a kind of exhausted release. That transition is suggested particularly well in the duo version of the piece with Mal Waldron on their album Communiqué, a good twenty years after it was first recorded. Waldron’s sombre fatalism fits the atmosphere of the piece perfectly--an outgrowth of a certain trend in the music of the fifties, that David Rosenthal, in his fine study of hard bop, identifies in particular with his and Jackie McLean’s work: “More astringent, less popular musicians, whose work is starker and more tormented [...] The mood of their work [...] tended to be somber. They favored the minor mode, and their playing possessed a sinister—sometimes tragic—air not unlike the atmosphere of, say, Billie Holiday’s ‘You’re My Thrill’. ” Waldron, another survivor of the heroin years, last accompanist of Holidays last accompanist, who, like Rollins and Lacy, found salvation in exile--this time in Europe, where he was able to clean up and to move his playing into a territory closer to that of free playing--plays as if every note is his last, singular and to itself, yet completely focused as part of a musical chain, a process of scalar rising and falling, the stringing out of seemingly infinite patterns, the building of the biggest structures available from the smallest toolkit possible. Like an experiment with holding your breath as long as you can, Waldron’s and Lacy’s approach alike is a stripping back, a going without, that is at the same time an excess, a constant exceeding, “going to the moon”.

As Dijkstra notes, many of the pieces Lacy would perform solo date from the early seventies--that period he identified as the move from the ‘hermetic free’ to what Lacy called the ‘post-free’, that music that cut down to the bone. Lacy comments on the return of elements like the C major scale to his music, the embrace, rather than the abolition, of limits as a paradoxical means toward freedom of a different sort. In the pieces written during this period, can be found a deliberate and definite reliance on patterns and exercises, akin to those found in practice books, a foregrounding of technique, not for its own sake, but as a working-through of process, of the basics of music. Dijkstra comments of Lacy’s composition notebooks, now held by the Library of Congress:

In the first few notebooks we find messy sketches from a very experimental early period (right after he moved from New York to Italy around 1967) where he delved into graphical scores, word combinations, conceptual free improv ideas, anti-Vietnam war protest music, and the first sketches for suites such as the Precipitation Suite and Tao Suite. The pieces in the early ’70s are studies in how one can write music about anything – from the weather to food, materials, animals, expressions, feelings, etc. Cahier n°4 (1973) alone contains “The Wax,” “The Wake,” “The Wage,” “Weal,” “The Wool,” “The Woe,” “The Wow!,” “The Oil,” “Salts,” “Fruits,” “Laps,” “Nags,” “Flaps,” “Ladies,” “Scraps,” “Flops,” “Slabs,” “Worms,” “Lumps,” “Stumps,” “Moms,” “Snorts,” “Slats,” “Stabs,” “Hops,” “Snips,” “Chops,” “Tots,” “Tracks,” and “Revolutionary Suicide.” The vast majority of works from this period are interval patterns grouped into loops, repeated a number of times, followed by a free improvisation. After the mid ’70s his works become mostly texts set to music, and more melodic.

Lacy, as this suggests, would move to art song, to an approach integrating the free forms of the late sixties (the ‘hermetic free’) and early seventies with the exercise-based disciplines of his early seventies pieces (the ‘post-free’)--what he called the ‘poly-free’. But, while one should avoid an over-schematic division of Lacy’s playing into different periods, it’s the moment before that integration that interests me here: that moment of the pare-down, of the scale, the practice book, the composition notebook, of the deliberate establishing of limits. Those looped interval patterns that we hear in ‘Existence’ and ‘Esteem’--loops that push the intervals higher and higher, are the sounds of exercises, of practice: like Rollins on the bridge, the endless work at sound, outside the circulation of music as labour environment, work of a different sort--preparation, practice, a private or even secret readying of “the way”. As his notebooks reveal, Lacy dedicated ‘Existence’ to John Coltrane, dating the piece “Rome 1969”, before revising it in 1975: “Bone”, the piece which gave Lacy’s new ethos its guiding metaphor, was composed in 1970 and dedicated to Lester Young. Lacy explained the dedication to Existence by its resemble to Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’, its scalar working-through at a high tempo--at least in initial versions, and the difficulties this presented for improvisation. Like ‘Giant Steps’, the piece is a rigorously arranged series of harmonic patterns based on large interval leaps. In that sense, it is thoroughly composed, yet, given that these patterns are fundamentally designed as the basis for improvisation, improvisationally demanding: the soloist must both negotiate technically-tricky passages while imparting their solo with the feel of more than a simple exercise. The relative success or failure of the multiple versions of Coltrane’s composition attempted by any number of saxophonists over the years, and the fact that Coltrane himself never played it live following the initial studio recording, suggest some of this difficulty. Teaching ‘Existence’ to Dijkstra, Lacy did not hand over a copy of a score. Instead, he played through eleven different pentatonic scales and recited the words of the relevant poem from the  Tao Te Ching: the musician is intended to memorize and improvise on these scales, while reciting the words to the poem in their head. The pentatonic, a famously pan-global scale that turns up in numerous different musical cultures, is Dijkstra notes, “often considered more fundamental or rootsy than other scales.” But Lacy does not aim for something ‘natural’. Once again, this is work.

The melodies in the Tao suite are composed to the (silent) words of the Tao Te Ching. “While playing the melody,” Dijkstra notes, “one should express the words and sing them in one’s head.” These words and the dedication to Coltrane alike are silent, messages for the player--think, perhaps, of the silent words from Hölderlin inscribed in the score to Luigi Nono’s Fragmente-Stille. They are a private, interior discipline, that interacts with, but does not necessarily translate over to, the social network of playing music to an audience. Dijkstra explains: “Lacy dedicated virtually all of his compositions to a specific artist, musician, writer, scientist, or other high-level practitioner), often a picture of the dedicatee, a date, sometimes a place where it was composed, and specific performance instructions. In many cases, these references connect in a way that makes artistic sense but is hard to describe.” Whether in the tight-knit quintet Lacy had with his wife Irene Aebi, pianist Bobby Few, and fellow saxophonist Steve Potts, bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel, and drummer Oliver Johnson, or in his solo recordings, such dedications were a way to emphasize music’s collective nature, even as it most apparently stripped-down, individual, existential, isolated. “Every piece I write”, Lacy observed, “has a reference to somebody as well as the things which have to do with the person.” Like that of Rollins, this is a music of silence and secrets and of public declaration and declamation at once. And, like that of Rollins, it is a music that, however new, sui generis, or unearthly it may sound, is always rooted in a negotiation with tradition, with history, with predecessors: that which has come before.

In exploring the soprano at a time when the instrument had almost entirely disappeared from the jazz front-line, Lacy remarked, he had drawn on the high notes both of Louis Armstrong and of operatic sopranos: 

Its register is quite vast, as big as for the right hand of the piano. There are a lot of territories to explore: the moon on high, the earth below. The tonality is very feminine—I’ve studied the voices of women singers a lot. Louis Armstrong also played very high, with a lot of excitement, like in the operas of Puccini.

Queer notions: the upper register, the cry or squeal or scream, is that range of the instrument that at once affirms and blurs gendered signifiers--the stereotype of the phallic high trumpet analysed in Krin Gabbard’s ‘Signifyin(g) the Phallus’, on the one hand, the blurring of the operatic high voice, of castrati and opera queens, that Wayne Koestenbaum sketches in The Queen’s Throat, on the other; sound both utterly material and totally unearthly; those two sides that the new jazz of the fifties and the sixties always channelled, often at the same time. This is about work; it’s about play; it’s about survival; it’s about knowledge. Lacy, as Dijkstra notes, returned to music from the Tao suite while dying of cancer in 2004, new arrangements in jagged handwriting. Music, Lacy believed, exists outside the self. “We only follow it to the end of our life: then it goes on without us.” Ex-stasis, continuance, excess. The music, its cry, knows more than it lets on, and more than the person playing and creating it knows.

Lacy; McLean; Rollins. Three musicians, three instruments, three kinds of cry. Listening to these analytical cries, their similarities and differences, moves us beyond the binaries and dichotomies by which jazz and jazz-adjacent musics are still too often understood. Jackie McLean’s cry, like that of Rollins, like that of Lacy, is delight; is disturbance; is analysis; is that which defies analysis. It speaks and it sings. It knows more than we could ever know.

Some Other Stuff: Grachan Moncur, III (1937-2022)

Image above: Grachan Moncur at New York's Vision Festival

Trombonist and composer Grachan Moncur, III, has passed away, the latest loss from the New Thing generation who came of age in the sixties, whose music opens up a world, worlds yet to be attained, makes them open and transparent, brilliant and glittering. Moncur’s work exemplifies the compositional—or, to put it more specifically, the structural: it’s ‘free’, in that it dispenses with, or at least treats as optional the logic of chord changes, but it’s not ‘energy music’; it’s focused on writing, on a composition as an atmosphere to be inhabited, rather than mere structure for blowing, but it’s infinitely more flexible than the stiffness of self-conscious ‘Third Stream’ experiments with the compositional. Brooding and filled with space, constructed on suspended drones or simple vamps, Moncur’s pieces are far from the stereotype of free jazz as energy, ecstasy, and volume. This is a music constructed around space, around absence, in which the careful, and often calculatedly askew placement of notes replaced a logic of momentum and virtuosity of bop, the functional drive of soul jazz, or the decorative restraint of Third Stream and cool jazz. Like the playing of Alan Shorter, of Andrew Hill, or of Mal Waldron—their interrupted vamps and riffs, their calculated mistakes and inscrutable equations—like the spaces between Thelonious Monk’s notes or the dissonant bur of his striking adjacent keys on the piano, Moncur’s music above all contains a core that refuses to reveal itself, an absent centre or central absence, a form of inner or hidden knowledge that initiates an inoculates and protects, that enables survival. Listening to Moncur, the ‘inside-outside’ binary has to be reconfigured: this is music that at one moves ‘out’, in terms of harmonic possibility and liberation from fixed changes—while by no means rejecting them per se—and moves ‘inward’, in the sense of a contemplative inwardness. Moncur, as William Parker would later say, looks for the centre of each note, looks for the silence around it, too: plays only what’s necessary, no filigree, no decoration. Destination...Out! proclaimed the title to a Jackie McLean album for which Moncur’s contributions were pivotal. But outness—McLean’s destination, Sun Ra’s outer space, Dolphy’s Out to Lunch—had its corollary in Moncur’s work in inner space—Inner Cry Blues, as the title to a later album had it. 

Moncur came from the same thriving music scene in Newark, New Jersey, that produced the Shorter brothers, organist Larry Young, trumpeter Woody Shaw. He grew up in a musical family, of Caribbean heritage: his father, Grachan Moncur, II, played bass with swing ensemble The Savoy Sultans at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom; his mother’s best friend was Sarah Vaughan. Low sounds drew his ear: he began on cello, then switched to trombone. He began playing as a teenager, studied at a private musical school, and moved onto Juilliard before having to drop out due to high tuition fees, subsequently touring as Ray Charles’ music director for three years. Energetic hard bop groups were in vogue thanks to Art Blakey: fellow Newarker Wayne Shorter would join Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and push Blakey further out as he took his first steps towards participating in the reinvention of the music. Moving, like Blakey, Larry Young and other fellow Newarkers, to New York, Moncur’s first post-Ray Charles gig saw him part of a Blakey-like sextet, the Jazztet, co-led by Art Farmer and Benny Golson, Moncur contributing compositions including his trademark ‘Sonny’s Back’, a celebration of Sonny Rollins’ return to playing after his infamous retirement. Within the Jazztet, their music a balance between the sound and fury of Blakey and the more measured, distanced sounds of cool jazz, Moncur can be heard finding his voice: the trombone precise and limber, in the manner of J.J. Johnson, but with a pensive openness to it even at higher tempi.

   

The Jazztet had offered efficient, pleasing post-bop—a kind of synthesis of existing trends which offered structure and balance. The real breakthrough, however, came when he joined forces with altoist Jackie McLean with whom he’d played as a teenager sitting in with touring groups in Newark. McLean, of an earlier generation, was coming out of bebop into freer-influenced playing and Moncur was there with him. In 1963, they recorded three albums together: One Step Beyond and Destination...Out appeared under McLean’s name, Evolution under Moncur’s own. To this day there is nothing quite like these albums. As well as its more profitable line in soul jazz and boogaloo stylings, Blue Note Records had become the home for what would be known as ‘free-bop’ or ‘inside-outside’ playing: Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch, Andrew Hill’s Black Fire and Point of Departure, the first records of the teenage Tony Williams, the mid-sixties work of Larry Young. This music took an emotional quality found both in cool jazz and hard bop—the melancholic, even mordant sounds of a McLean or a Mal Waldron, in which melodrama and emotional insularity are each other’s mirror reflections, the astringent manoeuvres of a Sonny Rollins—added the spaciousness of Thelonious Monk, and went somewhere else again. But it wasn’t so much a synthesis of trends as an opened fissure in a world of certainty, genre, categorisation—a world suggested even by the coordinates of names and references I’ve just outlined. It’s a music that lends itself to adjectives: brooding, melancholic, mysterious, even minimalist. Such work didn’t oppose bop, didn’t oppose cool jazz, though it went beyond the limitations into which both sets of stylings had arguably by this period moved; likewise, it supplemented and contrasted the more ecstatic stylings of the post-Ayler continuum as a necessary undercurrent, sidestepping down an alternative path, though deriving from the same source. 

At the turn of the decade, Ornette Coleman had removed the piano, opening up the harmonic possibilities beyond the changes; McLean and Moncur replaced piano with vibraphone, its combination of shimmering sustain and percussive attack, in the hands of Bobby Hutcherson, offering another set of possibilities: a cushioning and probing at once rhythmic as harmonic or melodic, and a timbre at once crisper and more ambiguously floating than that of the piano. One Step Beyond—for which I named a student radio show a decade or so ago—has two compositions apiece by McLean and Moncur. McLean’s ‘Saturday and Sunday’ and ‘Blue Rondo’ suggest one vibe—exploratory, cool, open—Moncur’s ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Ghost Town’ another: the clipped medium temp of ‘Frankenstein’, a kind of swinging march or lope towards the unknown, ‘Ghost Town’ radically slowed, inward, lugubrious, sinister. A simple descending scale, blown in Moncur’s attack-free legato over Hutcherson’s vibratoed vibraphone descends to a bass burr or leaps up an octave in a kind of contained panic. Eddie Khan’s bass carries the rhythmic weight, Tony Williams’ drums are barely there: before the tempo shift for McLean’s oddly jaunty solo, he offers little more than single cymbal strokes, a playing conspicuous by the absences its leaves as the presence it fills. On Destination....Out, recorded at the year’s end, all but one of the tracks—Mclean’s dedication to Kahlil Gibran, ‘Kahlil the Prophet’—are by Moncur: ‘Love and Hate’ opens the album, followed by ‘Esoteric’, and closing off with ‘Riff Raff’, a piece he’d play onstage in the production of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie. ‘Love and Hate’ remains to this listener perhaps the group’s greatest ever recording, a lengthy melody played with exquisite slowness over a simple chordal figure in vibraphone, the spacious setting allowing the contrast in styles between the two horns to reveal itself to the full. Moncur plays the melody first, from the core of its inward focus, before McLean’s alto produces a sour blaze of light: inside-outside, shadow-light, chiaroscuro. ‘Esoteric’ is more self-consciously maze-like, something from The Twilight Zone, ‘Riff Raff’ jaunty, defiant, swinging, its march-style dynamics suggesting the lope of ‘Frankenstein’ or Andrew Hill’s ‘Les Noirs Marchant’. The following year, the piece would make its way to the stage as part of Moncur’s contribution to James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, on which more presently.

   

Evolution was Moncur’s first record under his own name, adding Lee Morgan to the basic quintet format. It’s an album of two halves: misterioso tone pictures, in the first half, a move somewhat closer to post-bop in the second. The opener, ‘Air Raid’ is not exactly programmatic, despite its title: the vibraphone trills with which it opens suggesting a generalized figure of suspension, waiting, pause, over which Moncur blows inscrutable truths in light-dark, dialectical relation to the B-section’s double-time swing. ‘Evolution’—its title suggesting Mingus’ tone poem ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’, on which McLean had participated the previous decade—opens with droning, gently dissonant held notes punctuated by more suppressed martial rolls on the snare; the sound of the three horns getting inside the sound, interrogating what ensemble sounds like. McLean comes in over the top, somewhere between preaching and questioning; by the time Moncur’s solo comes round a few minutes later, it’s unclear if what’s offered is consolation, desolation, or some other affect entirely. The other pole comes on the closing track, the joyously sideways march of ‘Monk in Wonderland’: through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole, bop surrealism as cohesion, moving ahead, together. The feel of Moncur’s music at this time is suggested by the titles to his piece—‘The Intellect’, Gnostic’, ‘Nomadic’, ‘Esoteric’: an intellectual otherness, a pursuit of knowledge by other means, in other directions, Some Other Stuff. This is a music that moves between places without fixed abode, the mind wandering, errant and introspective, moving in to go out. Monk had opened up the spaces in the music with his sparsely placed notes and pungent dissonances; players like Moncur followed further down that route; tempos were often slow, notes placed into the space like stones in a rock garden, in expansively condensed dramas of scale and shade whose contours were, deliberately, closed to the fetishized world of performance and display. This music refused to let out all its secrets; this was the ‘cool’ that had given the name to ‘cool jazz’ but unlike the stereotyped image of tragic glamour associated with the likes of white musicians such as Chet Baker, this was about a kind of strength rather than a performed weakness, a quiet resolve and inward satisfaction; the inwardness, as Moncur suggests in the liner notes to Some Other Stuff, necessary to survive in the city, on the move; but also a space of discovery, of an alternative—perhaps even utopian—to society as it was and is currently constituted. In this time of struggle, musical and political ,people would need all their inner resources as well as their external ones in order to survive. But, despite its introspection, it was also a music about communication. Moncur perhaps worked best with a more exuberant musicians to play off: the telepathic interplay and contrast between Moncur and the sweet-sharp alto of Jackie McLean; or, later, his contrast to Roswell Rudd in Archie Shepp’s band. Moncur’s music of this period was so effective because the musicians he played with were equally interested in opening up the idea of how a jazz group worked, of the lines between ‘frontline’ and ‘rhythm section’, of how you built space, constructed narrative, moved from straight line to ellipsis. 

In April 1964, Moncur III took an acting job in the Broadway production of James Baldwin’s provocative and today neglected play Blues for Mister Charlie. The acting gig in the three-hour production meant that he could use the time between his appearances to go backstage and rehearse the pieces he’d written for an upcoming studio session for Blue Note, the results of which would be released the following year as the album Some Other Stuff. Moncur also played an important role in the play, serving as understudy for minor parts, and playing a townsperson who delivered a solo performance on trombone. An interview feature in Down Beat early the following year fills in the details: 

“When I got the call to audition,” he said, “my emotions were mixed—a jazz musician, being confronted with a situation on the Broadway stage. I assumed that I’d have to play something ‘stiff’ for the audition, but to my amazement, they wanted to hear my own music. I played for [director] Burgess Meredith, and he was quite receptive. First I played Frankenstein and laid back a little...He liked it but asked to hear more. When I played Riff Raff, I really opened up, and he was gassed...I had expected a stiff, professional job—nothing more. As it turned out, my judgment couldn’t have been more in error [...] The show really involved me and became my most serious obligation” [...] 

Underlying almost all Moncur’s reflections one notices an almost compulsive need to come to grips with the everyday world. For this the tragic insight of Baldwin's play served as fertile ground. The challenge to create music about a deranged social action became more than a mere mechanical exercise; it had a therapeutic effect. 

“Blues for Mr. Charlie was a demanding job because I was playing alone,” Moncur said. “If I goofed, there was no rhythm section to pick me up. I had to blend with the mood and pitch of the actors—every nuance—every inflection. 

When the theatre was empty, I would go there and practice. I’d try to project my tone to every point in the house—inch by inch. The acoustics were my only support, and I had to know every phase of the reverberation... The mood of the stage was always changing, and if I wasn’t absolutely flexible, the whole performance could be ruined. If you don’t think that’s a responsibility, try it.” 

[‘Flexible Grachan Moncur’, Down Beat, Jan 28, 1965: 15] 

This aloneness suggests something of Moncur’s music: music as reflective supplement to the social action dramatized on the stage in the next-door theatre, honed and sharpened within the sound-proof space of the rehearsal room, constructing spaces for and around itself. The play itself opens with the sound of mourning from the church, Baldwin writing, in his words, to the accompaniment of “my black ancestors, who evolved the sorrow songs, the blues and jazz, and created an entirely new idiom in an overwhelmingly hostile place”. Songs from Moncur’s former employer Ray Charles and Rufus Thomas played from a jukebox, along with Folkways recordings of work songs; Moncur played onstage as a kind of choric figure, his music swelling underneath the memories of the central, martyred Richard, and his love for the music he plays. The music speaks for what cannot be spoken, the trauma of memory and the possibility of future action. Black music here is memory and defiance; communal repository, the “mighty witness” that enabled Baldwin to find a new language befitting he demands of his first play. 

No recordings exist of the 1964 staging, though a playbill notes that he played the pieces ‘Riff Raff’ and the otherwise unrecorded ‘Carissima’. We can, however, hear the record date for which he rehearsed. Though often neglected in comparison to the McLean collaborations, Some Other Stuff may turn out to be Moncur’s greatest work. As Moncur later told Adam Shatz: 

“That whole record was inspired by the hard times I was having in New York. I’d just fallen out with the first young lady I’d met in New York, and I’d moved out of my apartment in the Diplomat Hotel opposite Town Hall, which was the biggest mistake I ever made since I had a room there with a private bath and telephone for only $27 a week [...] I was a nomad after losing my room, and I was a gnostic because I had to survive in the streets by my own wits.’” 

The Down Beat profile commented on Moncur’s combination of “free acoustical structure”, with “specific harmonic design” as “an intimate extension into a new language”, and Some Other Stuff marked another step beyond even the music of the previous year. Blues for Mister Charlie marked a new departure for Baldwin—a turn to the public environment of the stage, influenced by his personal grief and fury at the murders of Medgar Evers and Emmett Till and by changing political currents. So, too, Moncur would soon participate in a wave of New Music that drew on but extended the music of bebop, often in avowed connection to political militancy. As well as that intellectual otherness I’ve named above, the names of Moncur’s pieces—‘Frankenstein’, ‘Riff Raf,’ ‘Space Spy, ‘New Africa’—suggest the confluence of a working-class identity and a conscious ‘weirdness’ or ‘outness’, or sense of dread, that Amiri Baraka noted as a key propensity in be-bop, and that also characterises the work of fellow Newark Alan Shorter, of Sun Ra, Earl Freeman, and many others. The pieces recorded on Some Other Stuff—‘Nomadic’, named for Moncur’s shifting housing situation, and ‘Gnostic’, the secret knowledge required to survive on the street—suggest at once a personal, introspective language and a common, classed experience. The ensemble might seem more conventional than that on the McLean records, with Hutcherson replaced by Herbie Hancock, but the album in fact radically extends their sense of space, in large part due to the astonishing flexibility of Tony Williams—then in his avant-garde phase, thanks to early work in Boston with Sam Rivers—and the openness of Hancock and Wayne Shorter, whose proclivity for free playing has gone too little remarked in surveys of his career. ‘Gnostic’, as Don Heckman’s liners note, “eliminated a pulsating meter”, Moncur’s questioning melodic fragments answered by doomy unison figures with Shorter’s tenor doubled by Hancock’s left hand as his right maintains a constant tolling, in a kind of desolate version of call and response. It’s an astonishing piece: a music that could go anywhere, in which contemplation also means expansion, a world in a grain of sand. ‘Thandiwa’ gestures toward new-found Afrocentricity, taking its name from Bantu language: Moncur’s jaunty, walking-marching pieces are given a sharp, joyful twist, ironized yet at peace. The solos invariably play with that melodic earworm; Shorter’s sharp keens and caresses, Moncur’s melodic musings, Hancock’s swirling triplets and single line, notes opening out like strings of pearls, Cecil McBee elegant and to the point. Opening the second side, ‘The Twins’ plays off a single chord: like Shorter’s later ‘Schizophrenia’, it plays with mirroring, doubleness, dialectic perhaps. Along with ‘Nomadic’—which predates Miles Davis’ ‘Nefertiti’ in serving as a feature for Williams’ drums—the focus here is on rhythm: not the propulsive, Afro-Cuban inflections of a Blakey or a Roach, but a kind of thinned-out, clipped maintenance of a constant tension. Hancock’s chords on ‘The Twins’ suggest the harmonic vocabulary of his own neglected Inventions and Dimensions; McBee, who at periods plays repeated notes in a high register, extends his bass like a high- or a live-wire. Rather than resolution, the point is a constant opening: to inhabit the space of the in-between, up and down, side to side, to sustain a dissonance and see where it goes, remain in the looping ambit of a rhythm; single lines, single notes, a sparse dialogue, an enigmatic conversation of elliptical exchange and give and take. 

 

Moncur was not overtly political as some of his peers, but had at least some involvement in the emergent Black Arts Movement activities of fellow Newarker Amiri Baraka. In March 1965, he led a group at New York’s The Village Gate, as part of a benefit concert for the newly-founded Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S): also on the bill were Sun Ra, Betty Carter, the groups of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and Charles Tolliver. One track per group was included on the original Impulse! Records release entitled The New Wave in Jazz, Moncur’s entitled ‘Blue Free’; a second, much-longer piece, ‘The Intellect’, was first released on the Impulse double LP The New Breed: The Dedication Series Vol. VIII: Cecil Taylor/Charles Tolliver/Grachan Moncur/Archie Shepp (1978). To my knowledge, no other recordings of this group exist: the combined tracks, recorded in impeccable sound, represent almost a lost album. In some ways, we might see it as representing the ultimate stage of the ‘introverted’ tendency in Moncur’s playing represented, say, by the piece ‘Gnostic’ on Some Other Stuff: a hidden knowledge found deep inside the self through a press of isolation and contemplation, a defensive retreat into the self that is also a social affirmation of what it takes to survive in tight spaces and what expansive resources can be found there. Moncur’s music is the still centre of the swirl of sound around it: Ra’s Arkestra, entering its most experimental phase; Coltrane and the New Thing saxophonists; the life-force of Betty Carter’s post-bop vocal extensions. ‘The Intellect’ lasts over twenty minutes, and throughout is extremely slow, grave, engraved: a pause, an interlude, a call to arms, to peace, or to the abyss. With Cecil McBee spending much of the piece ruminative arco lines, Joe Chambers’ drums are often barely there, a perpetual flutter on cymbals with brushes like a kind of tremulous breathing. Bobby Hutcherson’s vibes offer a crisp counter-commentary, acidic and icy or shimmeringly lyrical, lights emerging from the haze; and Moncur solos with a sense of space rarely heard until the “silences big as a table” of the AACM, each note—often the same note repeated—considered from every angle, every possibility, before being sounded out again; like Coltrane’s polyvalent ‘sheets of sound’ but with the additional notes shorn away.The combination of a kind of static or stasis, of inscrutable gloom or wisdom, of brooding introspection—not the romantic openness or blueness of the traditional ballad, but something deeper, darker, existentially freighted and inscrutable, as if conveying or searching for some hidden meaning lost as soon as it’s uttered--as when the audience begin applauding too early, at least a minute before Moncur’s restatement of the main theme takes things out with the beautiful, solemn, terrible pace of a glacier; the soloist playing as if speaking alone, yet always in conversational tandem with the other musicians—it refuses to be anything other than it is. 

 

“These musicians change what is given and hopefully understood. What the normal feeling of adventure is [...] show you the music is changing before yr very ears,” wrote Amiri Baraka in the liner notes. Steve Young, music co-ordinator at BARTS, was more dramatic. For Young, the music conjured up: 

“the lands of Dada-Surreal a la Harlem, South Philly and dark Georgia nights after sundown, night-time Mau Mau attacks, shadowy figures out of flying saucers and music of the spheres [...] This music, even though it speaks of horrible and frightening things, speaks at the same time so perfectly about the heart and to the heart. This music, at the same time it contains pain and anger and hope, contains a vision of a better world yet beyond the present and is some of the most beautiful ever to come out of men’s soul or out of that form of expression called Jazz.” 

Following the Village Gate Benefit, Baraka remembered Moncur as one of the musicians, alongside Coltrane, Ayler, Ra, and McLean, who participated in the outdoor music programme the Black  Arts Repertory Theatre/School ran in Harlem that summer, in which the musicians would “play in playgrounds, housing projects, parks, vacant lots, along with four other trucks we sent out Summer of 65, carrying Poetry, Drama, Graphic Arts, Dance into the Harlem Community”. Moncur himself was not politically outspoken, but his next major collaborator was amongst the most politically outspoken of all the New Thing musicians: Archie Shepp. From around 1966 onwards, Moncur formed Archie Shepp’s phenomenal two-trombone band alongside Roswell Rudd: Rudd extroverted, satirical, Moncur a brooding heart at the centre of the storm. The albums from this period, with studio ensembles of various sizes, are unparalleled—Mama Too Tight, The Way Ahead—but it’s the live album from a European tour with a disgruntled Miles Davis, later released as One for the Trane: Life [sic] at The Donauschingen Music Festival where the music really takes off. (Radio broadcast recordings also exist of a gig in Rotterdam the same month, October, 1967, and a December gig in France, released as Freedom on a 1991 bootleg). While Shepp’s early work with Bill Dixon and the New York Contemporary Five emphasized sparse, Ornette Coleman-style heads and improvisations, exacerbated by the absence of chordal instrument, and his work with Bobby Hutcherson on New Thing at Newport and On This Night imparted a kind of sardonic cool to his flurries, his new music, likely under the influence of Roswell Rudd, now turned towards timbres more reminiscent of pre-swing jazz than of bop. The band’s key feature was its unusual two-trombone timbre—Rudd’s raucous upper-register blares contrasting with Moncur’s propensity for dark-toned, melancholic and menacing shades—and for its suite-like form, as Sousa marches, blues and standards emerged and disappeared from extended improvisations in long pieces that flowed without a break. Shepp later recalled the kinds of reception the band encountered. 

"We performed [...] one time in Paris at a big hall called the Salle Pleyel, where we followed Miles Davis. Now, Miles had gotten a standing ovation. This was in 1967, [soon] before the student rebellion in Paris. And so we came on, and we were shocking to look at: Roswell was wearing a baseball cap; I was wearing a dashiki. And there was this explosion of sound, cacophonous, and we only played one song, one long piece for about an hour and a half. [...] 

When we finished, contrary to Miles, there was an outcry of boos – oh, it was terrible. But up in the balcony — where all the young people were seated, in the cheap seats — everyone was cheering. So there was a standoff for about ten minutes between the boos and the cheers. And finally I was asked to do an encore; it was amazing. And the following year they had that student rebellion, so I guess it was an indication of things to come." 

Moncur in rehearsal with Archie Shepp, 1966. Photograph by Guy Kopelowicz.

In the summer of 1969, Moncur accompanied Shepp to the more conducive environment of the Pan African Festival in Algiers. Anticipating the trip, Moncur had written a piece entitled ‘New Africa’, which Shepp had recorded for an expanded group that February. Though the recordings would not be issued for another five years—eventually appearing on the unjustly-neglected Kwanza—they’re among Shepp’s finest, Moncur’s enormous spaces turned to the expanded future so many saw unfolding on the African continent, calling across to those other cities of Algiers from the inner cry of New York’s inner city with clarion certainty and turbulent purpose. In Algiers, Moncur played with Touareg musicians, on the streets and on a boxing ring converted into a stage: though he can often barely be heard on the lo-fi recordings of Live at the PanAfrican Festival, the experience was crucial to all involved. Interviewed by Algerian newspaper El Moudjahid, Shepp affirms jazz as a weapon in the popular struggle. For Moncur, though, music is just music. “Music and politics are two very different things. Music is spiritual, politics is, if you like, material. There may be some rapport between them, but they are two distinct things”. (My translation) Afrocentricity and a wide-open experimentation both the atmosphere of Algiers and of post-May ’68 Paris nonetheless suffuses the recordings the members of Shepp’s group would make for BYG Records on departing Algiers. Recording everyone and everything, while hardly paying anyone, the BYG sessions are an invaluable document, despite the business practices of the label’s owners. Moncur appears amidst the dense ensemble textures of Alan Silva’s Luna Surface and Dave Burrell’s Echo, two of the loudest free jazz recordings ever made; by contrast, his featured role on Burrell’s La Vie de Boheme, an instrumental adaptation of Puccini’s opera, sees his trombone replaces operatic voices with a kind of measured, mournful cool, and contains perhaps the sweetest playing of his career. 

 

 The two albums recorded under his own name are fresh takes on the introspective spaces from earlier in the decade. For the first of the sessions, Moncur’s New Africa, three members of the Algiers quintet—Moncur, Silva and Burrell—are joined by Andrew Cyrille and Roscoe Mitchell, with Shepp appearing on the final track. The pieces tend to operate on vamps, repeating figures, slowly pulsing ostinatos, over which Moncur teases out and develop simple, leisurely melodies, their cast suggesting something of the various ‘folk’ musics he might have heard in Paris or Algiers. His second BYG album, Aco Dei De Madrugada (One Morning I Waked Up Very Early), would indeed, feature Brazilian singer/pianist Fernando Martins and drummer Nelson Serra De Castro, the record divided between Moncur originals and arrangements of Brazilian traditional songs. Mitchell, meanwhile, functions in a kind of update of the Jackie McLean role: his alto thinner and, if anything, even more sour than that of McLean, his playing relatively restrained compared to the stream of notes he would unleash with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, he offers tonal contrast to Moncur, the lyricism of his playing delivered with a timbral sharpness that gives it a piquant clarity. The title track, here recast as a suite, again bursts with the sense of possibility, of wide-open space; hard, concise and lapidary, ‘Space Spy’, by contrast, conveys an impression of relentlessness, seriousness, a brooding and oppressive atmosphere in which repetition is the spur of tension and uncertainty rather than familiarity and comfort, as Burrell stabs out a two-note motif, like rumbling morse code, while Moncur explores gnomic, fragmentary dissonances. ‘Exploration’, as its title implies, is the ‘freest’ track on the record; another menacing low-end melody gives way to a period of collective soloing that finds Moncur and Mitchell initially, elusively, suggesting clock-tower chimes. The horns and Burrell then proceed to riff off each other, picking up, varying, developing and discarding each others’ melodic figures in a sometimes sprightly, sometimes deliberately lugubrious fashion. Another unison melody opens ‘When’, this time more simple, song-like and hopeful, the sort of material that could easily be turned into a collective chant. The temperature boils up when Shepp joins on tenor: the extension of pauses to create tension and uncertainty; the sudden re-entrances in a blurring, blarting blast; the use of particular forms of tonguing, slurring, notes trailing away after that initial fortissimo impact; the combination of languor and passion, romanticism and fury, sometimes within the same phrase; the timbral reminiscences of Ben Webster or Jonny Hodges tied to the multiphonic innovations of John Gilmore and John Coltrane, sliding between smoothness and acidic sharpness. Moncur follows, blowing some delicious, voice-like high notes that seem to pre-echo Mitchell’s bleats, trills, and smooth melodicism, and Shepp ends the piece with fluttering harmonics that seem to momentarily transform his tenor into a flute. 

 

As well as playing in Shepp’s live group, around this time, Moncur and Burrell joined with drummer Beaver Harris and saxophonist Roland Alexander to form a group entitled the 360 Degree Music Experience. Though they wouldn’t record for several more years, footage of an early live appearance with poet-vocalist Bazzi Bartholomew Grey has recently surfaced online the humour in Moncur’s music illustrated by his exchanging duck calls with Grey on ‘Blues for Donald Duck’. Here was the ‘inside-outside’ sound of the time: repetitive vamps, extended solos, a steadiness and optimism more extroverted than the earlier, ‘gnostic’ recordings.

   

Moncur’s playing still had that burnished tone, that sense of space, but to different means. The results can be heard to the full in what was perhaps the summit of his achievement, the album Echoes of a Prayer, one of a series made by the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra and released on the JCO label in 1975. Opening with a trombone prelude, Moncur’s album-length suite is organised on that repeat: ‘Reverend King’s Wings’, ‘Medgar’s Menace’, ‘Garvey’s Ghost [Space Station]’, ‘Angela’s Angel’, and ‘Right On’, separated by a drum transitions, featuring Congolese drummer Titos Sompa alongside Harris. The cycle plays twice, ending with an ‘Amen Cadence’ and a bitter coda, featuring Bley on piano, pointedly entitled ‘Excuse Me, Mr Justice’. The circling structure offers an analogy both for the lack of progress made—the deaths of martyrs—King, Medgar Evers—the attempted silencing of figures of resistance—Garvey and Angela Davis—and for the recurrence of collective resolve—‘Right On’, while also suggesting a rejuvenative notion of the cyclical, the figure of ‘sankofa’, of ancestral return and inspiration as a means of moving forward. The operative mood of much of Moncur’s earlier music was brooding, minimalist, melancholic: but what stands out above all is the joy of the music, as often wide-open and celebratory as ominous and questing, with storm-clouds averted for a blazing sun. This is often connected to the consciously diasporic heritage of the music and to the insistence on a group sound, with soloists embodying certain aspects or moods within an overall texture: much of it is riff driven, and the drums that boil up in the transitions are a central part of the music. The album packs a wider variety of moods, textures, feelings into its running time than some manage in an entire career. Moncur’s solo over rising, choraled brass chords and fluttering cymbals on ‘Garvey’s Ghost’ is like the sun rising: checking the time, it’s hard to believe that only eight minutes have passed. The up-tempo drive of ‘Angela’s Angel’ is another highlights: in the first version, Moncur follows Pat Patrick’s flute with serene confidence, in the second, Hannibal Marvin Peterson blows to the heavens. The album has never been reissued and remains almost never discussed. One day someone will analyse together the JCOA recordings made in the 70s—Bley’s Escalator Over the Hill, Don Cherry’s Relativity Suite, Roswell Rudd’s Numatik Swing Band, Leroy Jenkins’ For Players Only—as a necessary chapter in the history of jazz, ‘free’ or otherwise. For now, seek out the music while you can.

   

Through the seventies, Moncur continued to work with the 360 Degree Music experience, to work with Shepp on live tours, and to participate in New York’s Loft Scene, where Dave Burrell recalls him bringing the likes of vocalist Eddie Jefferson over from Newark. In general, though, he recorded far less. His obscurity was in part to do with health issues, included dentistry, as well as artistic control of the music. As his widow, Tracy, remarked to WBGO:

“After he made the albums for Blue Note, he wanted to own his own music. He wanted to not only get royalties as a performer but also as a composer. He was told that he was never going to work again. Basically, he still worked, but he was one of the first to get out there and actively try to own — and did end up owning — his own music.”

Shadows, released under Moncur’s name in 1977, features strong performance from vocalist Andy Bey on a set of standards and ballads, and is not what one might expect given Moncur’s previous work. The determined strangeness of the album lies, not, as on Evolution or Some Other Stuff, in the spacious inscrutability of playing or compositions, in its balance of the straightahead—swing, chord changes, ballads—with the textural oddness of Bey’s vocals, treated at times as a kind of instrumental third horn alongside Moncur’s trombone and Marion Brown’s alto. Dave Burrell’s typically expert composition ‘Teardrops for Jimmy’ is meltingly traditionally, beautiful, Bey entering half way through and channelling a higher-pitched, more emotionally extroverted, Johnny Hartmann, Moncur offering sweeping, lilting cadences in glorious tandem. 

I’m less familiar with the later work than the earlier, though there are fine turns on albums like Butch Morris’ debut, In Touch...But Out of Reach, from 1978, merging with Morris’ dark-toned cornet on lengthy explorations, and, in particular, on Frank Lowe’s Decision in Paradise (1983), its crisp bop edge contrasting Moncur’s burnished tone with Don Cherry’s bright trumpet and Lowe’s rough-edged tenor—the tone and placement of notes within a ‘freebop’ context suggesting an airier version of the work to come of the David S. Ware quartet—and with an early feature for the late Geri Allen. On the heads, alternately jaunty, sardonic, lushly intellectual, long phrases spool out with a post Ornette-Coleman feel; Allen offers smoothness, doubling, a variety of voicings; Lowe breaks things up in truncated riffs and melodic fragments; Cherry pitches and sails; Moncur discloses his hidden knowledge with inspiring steadiness. He knows! Throughout his late recordings, Moncur’s playing maintained its qualities, adding layers of emotional expansiveness that brought it closer in line with ‘inside’ playing: up-tempo joy, balladic serenity. More important than technical terms is the feeling or quality of the tone: it’s there, you know it. In 1995, Moncur’s trombone graced William Parker’s In Order to Survive. My favourite cut is the ballad, ‘Anast In Crisis Mouth Full Of Fresh Cut Flowers’, in Parker’s words, “written about a poet named Anast whose words cannot get out to the world, so the words turn to flowers. Anast cries out but no one hears her because her words are now flowers”. This paradox of communication and non-communication, the offerings the musicians make. “From the infinite number of sounds available”, writes Parker, “[Moncur] chooses the right notes, and places each note in the middle of its tone centre. His sound is full of hope and is laced in the tradition of change.” 'Laced' is a lovely metaphor: flowers, lace, delicacy, the blooming richness of his sound in tandem with the other horns, Lewis Barnes’ trumpet and Rob Browne’s alto, words that become flowers, in and beyond crisis, resplendent.

  

In his final years, Moncur recorded a couple more albums as a leader, returning to his classic earlier compositions in new arrangements with Mark Masters on Exploration (2004) and on Inner Cry Blues (2007). Sporadic as they were, his relatively few appearances were always welcomed; his sound now opened up to a more straightforwardly swinging joyousness that leavened the intensity of his early work, within a relaxed, post-bop idiom. His real legacy, though, remains that work of the sixties and seventies, a time when anything was possible: the inner explorations of Some Other Stuff, of Evolution and Destination...Out, the wide-open spaces of New Africa and, above all, the cleansing collective propulsion and catharsis of Echoes of a Prayer. Moncur’s music emerged at a time whose implications are still little understood. His work and life open up a gnostic possibility, dismantling illusion, going the way of the hidden, pursuing knowledge by other means, opening onto new vistas, “a vision of a better world yet beyond the present”.

Vibes & Time: The Elasticity of Bobby Hutcherson, &c.

Above: Walt Dickerson erasing the drivenness of be-bop, its relentless forward momentum, slowing things down to a floating meditation in which it can seem that every note is surrounded by a wavering, blurred, vibrato’d halo, haze round streetlamp, fogg’d, exquisitely taking its time & erasing time as it goes, so that, rather than remaining within the compact confines of a tune, with its set order & order within the overall set of album or gig, the playing hangs loose, occasionally bursting into plosive, explosive runs, but more often than not just hanging there, tracing the permutations of a simple phrase, as if whispering it diminuendo to oneself alone, sometimes barely audible over the whispered, tremulous harmonics of Richard Davis’ absolutely exquisite arco bass playing. The result is far from merely ambient wash – rhythmic pull & release, ebb & flow is always in evidence; this is serious & inventive playing indeed, but is not jazz in the speed-freak boppery sense. That’s not to say that Dickerson can’t fly up & down those mallets with the best of them, that he can, in the words of John Fordham, “improvise such fast melodies that his mallets seem barely to be making contact” – indeed, there are some scintillatingly fast runs on this very track – but the overall impression is nonetheless far from omni-directional drive, is something far more considered, spacious, even at higher tempi.

This results in part from Dickerson’s own judicious use of vibrato – taking us somewhere close to the “soft-lights glow” that Fordham sees him as rejecting (tho’ Clifford Allen’s paradoxical descriptor “warm-ice sheen” is perhaps more apt) – but also to the accompaniment of such superbly subtle drummers as Andrew Cyrille, who, on a recording like ‘Tell us Only the Beautiful Things', the logical extension to Dickerson’s earlier ‘To My Queen’, sometimes sounds as if he’s barely even there, or else in another room, the swish of his brushes or the tap of stick on stick merging with the hiss of room tone as a kind of gently rhythmic white noise over which Dickerson can stop-start rhapsodize in tandem with bassist Wilbur Ware, here melodic equal rather than mere sideman. Dickerson’s preferred contexts would seem to be in small groups, with players who are more interested in the changes in texture and temporal flow necessitated by improvisational contingency than in maintaining a constant bed to anchor solo playing: Bill Evans taken further out – much further out! – let’s say. Thus, rather than establishing clear sections for particular players to do their thang, there might be sections in which only Dickerson and Cyrille, or only Ware and Cyrille, or only Dickerson and Ware, or only Dickerson, are playing, yet the transitions are so subtle that they don’t really feel like transitions at all. Further, Dickerson has a trait of returning every so often to the initial theme, caught in the same stream as the improvisation; not in the way that Monk would improvise close to the melody over changes, nor as ensemble refreshment between individual solos, but as part of improvisatory thinking and overall mood. Faster passages might stop and return to rumination; or a sustained vibraphone swell might be followed by a breathless run of fast-struck notes; but again, these are not so much sharp contrasts, gestural or timbral blocks in the Albert Ayler manner, as extensions of and in time that evince a beautifully intuitive sense of form’s unfolding as the unforeseen.



The clip at the start of the post is one of a number of exquisite duets that Dickerson recorded with Richard Davis, something of a master of the form (recall the extended treatments of e.g. 'Come Sunday' with Eric Dolphy); & indeed, it's through both Davis & Dolphy that I want to make a connection, or, more accurately, comparison, to another vibes player, Bobby Hutcherson, who, with Davis & Tony Williams, formed one of the great rhythmic set-ups on Dolphy's 'Out to Lunch', ten or so years earlier. Perhaps it's an indication of changing sensibility that these collaborations are so different - certainly, the absence of a drummer affects things, the intimacy of the duo format versus the asymmetrical push of Dolphy's full-group compositions. But it's nonetheless instructive to compare Dickerson's free-float with Hutcherson's much more overtly percussive style.

For Hutcherson, the vibes are jagged edge, each note struck pinging out, the vibraphone's resonant afterglow only serving to round out the sharp attack of that sound still further: listen to the extended section towards the end of his solo on Jackie McLean’s ‘Action’, in which his temporal extensions and tightenings of one phrase move like a stretched and then relaxed elastic band over the steadier, tho' always driving & toe-jiggling momentum of Cecil McBee & Billy Higgins' bass-drum team. Charles Tolliver does something similar in his trumpet solo on the same tune, something about the pauses which might for a moment make you think he's lost his way, phrase out-blown but the smoother repetition which could naturally follow & draw applause in its smooth generation of 'excitement' as be-bop fluency mixed gutbucket edge REFUSED! instead for a repetition that sounds as if it's missed its cue and has to cram the phrase into the remaining time allocated by the changes played underneath with sudden burst of breath, askew & gasping burr. I guess Monk would be the temporal & off-centre phraseological model – tho' Monk's status as piano player often gave the impression that his solos consisted of the spare material that would usually make up another piano player's comping beneath a horn player's solo (while, conversely, his comping, with its clanging lower-register thump & thud, sometimes serves to distract attention from the soloist if they or you aren't careful). Certainly, Tolliver & Hutcherson would desire to fill up the total space more so (plus the tempo itself licks out at a generally higher rate than Monk himself had settled into by this point, with the Charlie Rouse group of his, anyhow).

Hutcherson's own comping, meanwhile, as perfected on Eric Dolphy’s ‘Out to Lunch’, has a kind of floating quality to it that piano players are less able to sustain, by virtue of their instrument's capacities – by this, I don't mean to contradict my earlier comments on his isolation of single notes, but rather to suggest that this kind of ‘floating’ or ‘hanging’ quality is like the suspension of a phrase that is suppressed or skipped, so that the sequence is always implied but never totally filled out: the interval between one phrase and another, either sustained by a silence or a reverberating after-glow of struck notes, is felt as tension, delay, break, rupture, a rupture that can't be entirely filled by bass & drums' maintenance of tempo throughout. (Here one might recall A.B. Spellman’s comments in the ‘Out to Lunch’ liner notes: “For one thing, [Hutcherson] avoids the tight pedalled, piano-like effect of long and lucid arpeggios that most vibists try for. His is a more ringing, chime sound. His chords, once struck, hang in the air.”)



That said, Tony Williams and Richard Davis, on ‘Out to Lunch’, are just as much about breaking things up in this way as is Hutcherson: Davis, insisting on muscling his way into the front row with odd harmonic extensions of the walking bass line, Williams, with his splash-crash-suspend attack, working on similar principles to Hutcherson. (This is also the case, for Williams, in his work with the Miles Davis quintet at this same mid-60s period, where, for example, the usual roles by which horns can break up & vary the temporal & harmonic line over a steady rhythm section backdrop are reversed, so that it is Williams who solos with rhythmic freedom over the steady, obsessive-repeated melodic iterations of Davis and Wayne Shorter – on ‘Black Comedy’ and ‘Nefertiti’ most notably. It's worth noting here that this was a period when Coltrane, tho' buoyed along by the much more steady, on-the beat clang of McCoy Tyner’s left-hand, was starting to blur the edges with the addition of extra percussionists, bassists, horns – even if, ultimately, the direction into which Coltrane would move, in the last phase of his career (the Sanders / Alice Coltrane / Garrison / Ali group) was much more an ecstatic continual thicket of texture, high-energy plateau rather than constantly broken-up, jagged momentum. Albert Ayler’s work proves a further contrast, in which the jagged nature of the music occurs not so much in the collective improvisations – which are experienced, again, as ecstatic thickets (Ayler’s own term) or blocks – but in the compositional or organisational contrast between the simple marching themes & the passages of wild & free atonality).

Returning to the trio of Hutcherson, Davis and Williams: their extension of be-bop's sharpness, its swift & exciting laying down of contour at a speed almost too fast to follow, is primarily a rhythmic extension, in which time itself becomes more elastic, but in which the play between that elasticity & the maintenance of generally consistent and swinging beat creates a constant frisson – the same too, true of the harmonic & timbral permutations of McLean's higher-register work (first deployed as far back as some of his late ’50s-work with Charles Mingus: check ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’). And of course this is not an attack on two fronts, separated into two categories marked 'temporal-rhythmic' & 'harmonic-timbral', because it is the combination of these two elements which gives this music its tense & tensile drive: check also the work of Sonny Rollins from, say, '63-'66, 'Sonny Meets Hawk' & 'East Broadway Rundown', as voice in broken monologue, as an actor forgetting lines, stumbling & stammering thru hesitancies, blank spaces - or, rather, as something much more calculatedly off-centre, the development of a melodic fragment or askew interpretation of a scale that runs deliberately counter to the changes being laid out competently underneath as the horn pursues a different path at a different pace.

{{Another horn to consider, by way of contrast: Archie Shepp, whose work at this point, most notably on ‘New Thing at Newport’, where his group consists of Hutcherson, Barre Phillips & Joe Chambers, provides a fairly steady, ominous set of atmospheres over which Shepp's tenor dives in & out, slurring & blaring with sudden, almost vulgar emphasis or soft-breathed amour straight outta Ben Webster & Coleman Hawkins: exemplified for me, at least, on 'Rufus'. The tone would remain, but the temporal attack would become much more regularized, once Shepp became, to all intents and purposes, a straightforward be-bop/blues heritage player at some point in the mid-to-late-’70s. The repeated & relentless ostinati of Grachan Moncur tunes on which Shepp often draws at this time do share territory with Moncur’s frequent collaborator McLean (or with, say, McLean's version of Tolliver’s ‘On the Nile’, which, on the Tolliver big band recordings (see below), is fast & punchy in a fairly straightforward manner, but on Mclean's sludges out (at least in the opening melodic exposition) at grinding clip-clop pace, drags you into its orbit as dark-toned procession, paradoxically that much more urgent for the slower tempo). Yet this happens several years after the fact, as it were (and several years, indeed, after Moncur himself had been a part of Shepp’s group), so that these tunes are now vehicles for 20 or 30 minute saxophone solos in which seemingly endless exposition of particular scalar patterns or licks replaces packed-in tension & uncertainty with declamatory pontification. (That’s not to say that said pontification doesn’t possess a certain sense of granite purposiveness which can, if you're in the right mood, act as a slow-burning kind of exhilaration. This is the 'hip' in 'Hipnosis', perhaps - i.e. check the 25-minute-plus version of McLean’s tune of that name on ‘A Sea of Faces’, in which that aforementioned relentlessness of repetition becomes both literal hypnosis, a kind of trance state of the sort Shepp explored thru the quasi-african drumming on 'The Magic of Juju' (tho' without the harmonic freedom provided by the keyboard-less, percussion-heavy set-up of that piece). & check also the mega-version of ‘New Africa’ on a 1977 bootleg recording from Alassio, Italy.)}}



Yet all this nonetheless has little of the jiggly nerve-fry that makes you feel really so urgently alive in the McLean-Hutcherson-Williams nexus of the woods. Wrapping these rather rambling notes up, one final comparison might be between the McLean band's take on a number of Tolliver's tunes - 'Right Now!', ‘On the Nile,’ ‘Jacknife’ – to Tolliver's own 1970s takes on them with his band Music Inc., where they're much more straightforward blowing vehicles, the compositional material (these are good, memorable tunes) actually overshadowing the sometimes rather by-rote soloing: well, e.g. on ‘Music Inc. & Big Band’, an album I love, the big-band riffs & so on that come in under the solo rather distract attention from whatever the front-line instrument (normally Tolliver's trumpet or Stanley Cowell's piano) is playing, the soloist sometimes seeming to fill a particular time & space that has been allotted within the format of the tune without that particular urgency or tension or sense of playing with he form that you get in the McLean records. This is not to say that Tolliver’s big band music is not intensely joyous & colourful & punchy, tho' its tone colours are a lot less adventurous than say, those of Gil Evans, or, indeed, the subtle & complex work of the great jazz composer-arrangers of the big band heyday (the effect, by contrast, is something like McCoy Tyner’s piano style translated in stark & unfussy fashion to a bevy of brass instruments, with occasional flutes for the rather rarer delicate moments; indeed, Tyner's own big-band record ‘Fly with the Wind’ is somewhat similar in effect). Certainly, tho’, in terms of form, it's much easier to coast along to in one's listening than McLean and Hutcherson’s constant engagement – or, for that matter, Dickerson’s more meandering elasticity, form as rumination and reverie as against form as inexorable repetition (Shepp) or form as something from which one departs and to which one returns in swift break-outs (McLean, Hutcherson et al)).