Bobby Few (1935-2021)

Bobby Few's piano sounded like the ocean; it sounded like the wind; on the 1979 recording of 'Continental Jazz Express', complete with well-integrated sound effects--whistles, clanks, full steam ahead--it sounded like that most classic of all jazz and blues figurations, the train, Few's thickly chordal, sustain-pedal-borne blurs of sound riding that railroad, under- and over-ground. Few's style was ecstatic, gospel-tinged--a perfect fit on Ayler's last two studio albums (Few had known Ayler since high school), where Few takes the stately church stylings of Cal Cobbs one notch further--and as liable to dreamy or jubilant melody as to the vast waves of sound that filled up the heavenly outer reaches of Frank Wright and Noah Howard's Church Number Nine and Space Dimension. Few was one of the small but robust group of exiles from the free generation who relocated to Paris in the late 1960s, having emerged in the Cleveland-New York energy music axis--Wright, Howard, Muhammad Ali, Sunny Murray, Alan Silva--in all of whose music there existed an equal impulse to create the most 'out', noisy, ecstatic free jazz on earth (Silva's Celestrial Communication Orchestra, with whom Few sometimes played--he's one of the three(!) pianists on the immense Seasons; the various configurations of the Wright-Howard-Silva-Ali nexus) and a fondness for lithe and unusual melody in beautifully apposite arrangement (Murray's Aigu-Grave; Few's numerous records with Steve Lacy--for which, as Lacy put it, he provided "the liquid component in our music"; his later recordings as his leader (Let It Rain can be heard here). Notable too are Few's burningly romantic later collaborations with saxophonists Avram Fefer (Mingus' 'Orange is the Color' here) and Ernest Dawkins, and Sonny Simmons, among others, in which elements of his approach form throughout his career relate more closely to the repertoire and organisation of 'the tradition'. Throughout, Few's was a popular or populist free jazz, marked by the vernacular sounds of blues, gospel, R&B and a joyful tendency to song--like late period Ayler, Wright and Few both recorded as vocalists, the imperfect pitch and wavering cracks of their voices only adding to the music's directness and sincerity.

Stylistically, Few's characteristic figure--a series of descending chords, like someone tumbling down the stairs, at once a signature move and a surprise each time--rendered a sound which was always full of movement--not for nothing does Xavier Prévost name his arpeggios 'torrential'; as one of his track titles has it, Few makes it sound like he's gloriously, exhilaratingly, 'Chasing the Piano'. At the same time, his approach was dominated more by chord than line (and in that sense distinct from the linear adventures of the Bud Powell tradition); you see him deploying both hands for full chordal (or cluster) effect in the photo above. (And the photo in question, taken by Phillipe Gras at the Amougies Festival in 1969, says it all in terms of the energy that drove, informed and was inseparable from that technique.) As an accompanist, Few at once accentuated a harmonic underpinning to even the most 'out' squalls of Frank Wright at full blast and a thick, pedal-reinforced sound that extended into a kind of all-encompassing pan-tonality in which any direction might be taken. It's glorious, and hopeful, and often moving: it's a music of real fervour and hope and bright energy, and this live date by the Center of the World Quartet (Wright, Few, Silva and Ali) exemplifies it as well as anything. Wright's 'Two Birds with One Stone'--a 1978 performance released as a bonus track on the CD re-issue--extends to over twice the length of the version Wright had recorded with George Arvanitas the previous year--here it's at once blissed-out and yearning, the struggle at the heart of happiness, the happiness at the heart of struggle: birds of paradise.

      

It needed a pianist with force to play with Wright, regarding whom I often think of the story Murray told Dan Warburton about the time in the studio he cranked up a siren to full volume over the band, leading everyone to drop out except "Frank Wright!"--still playing, reaching beyond. When the Center of the World group arrived in Paris, still in the post-May '68 period, as Few tells it, they ran away from a horde of riot police chasing down students burning cars and into what turned out to be a jazz club that offered them an engagement. While teasing out a metaphorical placement for the band vis-a-vis politics based on this evidence alone would be pushing it, the sounds of both tumult and joy sear through the music. This is not a tumult of torment, though--if late period Ayler in particular can sound ghostly, a precarious and terrible fervour, Wright, Few, et al--partly as a result of personality, partly as a result of the idiomatic vocabulary that courses through Few's playing in particular, from stride to R&B, the blues to free--truly produce a joyful noise. The Center of the World Quartet would play for hours--as Pierre Crépon notes, even a 15-minute excerpt hardly does justice to the emotional and formal momentum of the music, its overarching, spontaneous structures, which thrived above all in the expanded temporal setting and charged atmosphere of live performance--and the other musicians in the group--Silva, Wright and Ali, with Noah Howard often supplanting them--forced a kind of single unit. Few's sound, indeed, is so bound up with the vocalic tenor and saxophone-like vocals of Howard and Wright--the cries of "it is time...for the world...to be at peace" on Church Number Nine, the unison melodies of Uhuru Na Umoja or Space Dimension--the vocal interjections and thunderous crashes that rise and fall, ebb and swell of Last Polka in Nancy?, the righteous group improvisations of Unity--that you can't hear one without conjuring up the other.

Steve Lacy rated Few so highly that, the story goes, having heard Few, Wright and others playing at the Amougies festival, he relocated from Rome to Paris in order to play with them--though he would have to wait ten years before Few would join the band. For Lacy, Few was "the first pianist I heard after Cecil Taylor that had his own thing really well developed". Yet Few was also an ideal accompanist (though the word hardly does justice to what he would accomplish in such contexts)--as he would be on dozens of records for Lacy. Whether operating on the 'inside' or the 'outside' of the tradition--or, as the title to one of his earliest recordings, a sideman date with Booker Ervin, has it, 'The In-Between'--Few was intensively responsive, adaptive--an on-the-spot orchestrator of mood, whether following the general tendency or initiating a new direction, whether in a larger group or by himself. Honed by years as a gigging musician, whether in free or straight-ahead contexts, his adaptive responsive appeared able to withstand any interference, any new information, any challenge: legend has it that his first gig at the Duc du Lombard bar in Paris saw someone throw a bottle of whiskey through the window, to which Few responded with some honky-tonk stylings to accentuate the wild-west atmosphere. He could change direction too: listen to the way he takes these down 6 minutes into this outdoor performance with saxophonist Ernest Dawkins after five minutes of bandstand-lifting energetics that draw appreciative cheers from the audience (here). That magic shift--the after-echoes of the peak almost imperceptibly subsiding down into the trough--is one familiar from any number of improvisational contexts, but nothing Few does every feels old; and, paradoxically--but it's not really a paradox at all--celebrating this singular individual musician involves celebrating his capacity for thinking with others as one, of fitting into the group sound, the sound of collective endeavour and response and responsibility that is one of the supreme virtues of this music.

Beyond any album, any performance that he gave with Wright and Howard, and all the work on the Center of the World label (including the superb More or Less Few)--all completely essential--I'm fond too of rare, late items like this radio date with Arthur Doyle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTuMxewo4M), or Few's work with multi-instrumentalist Zusaan Kali Fasteau (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnZxlpwQAZQ). Pierre Crépon's typically thorough playlist for The Wire has some other highlights (including the aforementioned version of 'Continental Jazz Express', complete with those sound effects.) On Solos Duets, two tracks featuring Few with Alan Silva pose the question and give the answer, as 'Who Got the Keys?', is followed by 'We have found the Keys': the metaphorical (music beyond a single key signature) supplanting the literal (the single point of entry) in good humour and the ecstatic vision of another world within and beyond this--polytonal, polyrhythmic, multi-levelled, spectacular. 

Bobby Few's piano sounds like the ocean.

Space Dimension: A Tribute to Noah Howard

Photo by Juma Sultan

September 3rd 2010 saw the passing of yet another free jazz great: the alto saxophonist Noah Howard. Howard’s music has always been some of the most straightforwardly enjoyable of the ‘New Thing’, and I thought it would be fitting to put together some sort of tribute. The track descriptions below relate to an MP3 playlist I’ve put together: you can download the whole thing via this link.

Howard was born in 1943 in New Orleans, and it’s not hard to hear the joyous, declamatory nature of his style as having roots in that city. As a young man, he played in his local church, and with Louis Armstrong; his first instrument was, in fact, the trumpet, and it was not until the 1960s that he switched to alto sax. As with so many other ‘New Jazz’ saxophonists, he moved to New York and came under the influence of John Coltrane, paying tribute to him on his second album as a leader (which had been preceded by a piano-less Quartet date for ESP-Disk). That said, ‘At Judson Hall’, the sophomore album, is quite different from Coltrane’s dense, un-stoppable performances of the time, though both tracks clock in at just under twenty minutes each. The quartet from the first ESP date is expanded to include Dave Burrell’s piano and Catherine Norris’ cello, the addition of another stringed instrument providing greater timbral richness and perhaps mitigating against the dense, high-volume assault of the free jazz ‘blowout.’ Thus, there are moments with a Spanish tinge, as well as a sombre, pensive quality, that actually sound closer to some of the more long-form and abstract explorations of Charles Mingus than to what one might associate with much ‘New Thing’ music of this period. ‘This Place Called Earth’ opens with arco strings (Norris and the great Sirone), Howard sounding a little like John Handy on the latter’s ‘Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival’; after five minutes or so, the rest of the band come in, stating the theme, and there are solos by Colbeck and Dave Burrell. Burell’s lengthy improvisation gradually becomes louder and more intense, pedalled clusters mashing up with flickering cymbals – and Howard (soon followed by Colbeck) takes the opportunity to ride the wave, the horns throwing out chattering, shivering sounds that coalesce and resolve themselves into the returning main theme.

1/ ‘This Place Called Earth’
from ‘At Judson Hall’ (1966)

Probably Howard’s best known work is that undertaken in the late 60s and early 70s on three albums recorded in collaboration with a couple of fiery tenor saxophonists, Frank Wright and Arthur Doyle, whose often abrasive approach was balanced out by Howard’s soaring sweet-and-sour alto. The first of these, ‘The Black Ark’, recently re-issued by Bo’ Weavil, marked Doyle’s recording debut, and he powers his way through these tracks like a force of nature, smearing, shrilling, keening, testifying. As with much free jazz, the actual compositional material (before the solos begin) is accessible and appealing – catchy, melodic, swinging, and gorgeously lyrical. Here’s a (slightly revised) extract from a review of the 2007 re-issue which I wrote for the online magazine ‘eartrip’:

There’s a somewhat cosmopolitan feel to the album: from the Latin/film noir-flavoured ‘Ole Negro’, with Few’s jazzy solo, to the Oriental mood of ‘Mount Fuji’, whose charming melody just about manages to stave off tweeness. In any case the focus is not really on the melody itself- it serves more as a springboard for some righteous blowing and sparkling, ferocious interplay. Also note the way that, as with Coltrane, the melody seems to have become transformed once returned to –struggle and exploration making the starting-point the more precious for having been ‘attained’ the hard way.

On ‘Fuji’, Cross constructs his solo out of yelps and growls, buzzing repeated fingers and tension-building long, held notes. Doyle goes straight for the jugular, like Pharoah Sanders, concentrating on sound and emotion rather than melodic line and careful construction: wailing and screaming, he’s liable to stay in the extreme upper register of his horn for minutes at a time, unleashing barrages of stratospheric trills and supplications. Richard Williams had this to say about Doyle in his 1972 review of the album for Melody Maker, thus: “this man is dangerous – he never plays anything you could recognize, just furious blasts of rage. His solo on “Domiabra” couldn’t be written down, or even sorted out. It sounds more like raw energy than anything I’ve ever heard. He’s nasty, man.” Another review, with reference to that same solo, puts it more dramatically: “he sounds as if he’s trying to blow his whole body through the saxophone.”

Through all of this, the pure, smooth directness of Howard’s alto cuts through like a knife, and it is the moments when all three horns are going for it that are the most compelling on the album. Try resisting the sound of Doyle roaring, Cross blasting, Howard obsessively repeating melodic phrases or playing with yearning, lyrical fervour, undercut by Few’s splashy piano, the insistent bass strum and hum, Ali’s cymbal-work and Juma Sultan’s congas, with the use of a spacey delay sound giving them a Sun-Ra vibe (though it’s easy to lose the detail of their accompaniment in the general exaltation).

It might be helpful to note here that, while the record just drowns in passion, it’s all the more effective for introducing variety in texture and mood, for mixing the bitter with the sweet and the rough with the smooth. As Howard notes in an interview, “if you’ve ever been in a black Baptist gospel church, and the choirs cut loose, you have this incredible harmony, and then you have the soloists, and the soloists go all the way out. And most of the preachers can sing too, and they’ll go all the way out. But always within the context of gospel harmony.” The balance between freedom and restriction, dissonance and harmony, noise and melody, is a difficult one to maintain, but the musicians manage it just about perfectly here.

I personally have a soft spot for another Howard album, the (still out of print) ‘Space Dimension’, which was cut a year later with a slightly smaller group that featured Frank Wright instead of Doyle, and be-bop drummer Art Taylor pitching right into the free fold to replace Mohamed Ali (on all but one of the tracks). It features some of the same tunes, but takes them even further out, and the contrast between Howard’s smoother, more patient and lyrical approach and Wright’s straight-for-the-gut, throaty passion, is perhaps even more pronounced. The way they build from a simple, catchy groove to massive, noisy free jazz is a shining example of how powerful this stuff can be when done right, and has perhaps never been bettered.

‘Uhuru Na Umoja’, released under Wright’s name, features the same group and a similar set of tunes to that covered on ‘Space Dimension’, though the compositions are re-titled (e.g. ‘Queen Anne’ from ‘The Black Ark’ becomes ‘Aurora Borealis’, ‘Viva Black’ is ‘Ole Negro’). The longest track is just under eight minutes, the shortest just three – quite compressed running time for a free jazz record, but this succinctness doesn’t mean that anything is lost in emotional fervour; the musicians give it their all, and the result is one of the most attractive albums in both the Wright and Howard catalogues.

2/ ‘Mount Fuji’ from ‘The Black Ark’ (1969)
3/ ‘Church Number Nine’ from ‘Space Dimension’ (1970)
4/ ‘Aurora Borealis’ from Frank Wright, ‘Uhuru Na Umoja’ (1970)



Howard’s career trajectory was the usual one for free jazz musicians at the time: early recordings with ESP-Disk, under-appreciation and financial difficulty in America, and a subsequent move to Europe to find greater playing opportunities. His relocation occurred in 1972, when he decided to base himself in Paris. A year earlier, he’d recorded for Dutch radio with Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink, leading lights in the emergent European free jazz/improvisation scene, who’d earlier collaborated with visiting American jazz musician Eric Dolphy. The sextet date, released as ‘Patterns’ on Howard’s own label (and later re-issued on Eremite Records), pairs three Dutchmen (Mengelberg, Bennink, and guitarist Jaap Schoonhoven) with three Americans (Howard, bassist Earl Freeman and conga player Steve Boston) in a free improvisation with a raw, anarchic edge that could be found elsewhere in Howard’s work with Frank Wright and in Mengelberg/Bennink’s Dadaistic improvisations: ululating vocals and African percussion abound. The record cuts in, seemingly mid-way through the improvisation, with a spacey section featuring thick, Sharrockian electric guitar and prominent congas, and it builds from there; a whirlwind of percussion, thunderous grooves, and uneasy romanticism rendered eerie by the studio reverb on Howard’s sax and the unpredictable backing of Mengelberg’s pan-idiomatic, often dissonant piano. There’s some sense that it’s not always an easy fit between the Dutch improvisers, with their desire to play freer and freer, and the groove-focussed Americans – and perhaps it’s that slight mismatch that makes this near-forty-minute session so fascinating. Given the way the piece unfolds, it’s hard to excerpt from it, so I’ve decided not to include the MP3 in this playlist; however, the album (which also includes the collaboration with Chris McGregor included below) should be fairly easily available to buy.



During the 70s, Howard recorded and toured in Europe, often (like Frank Wright) returning to the same themes as anchors for the freer improvisations. He also began to play in a style that was closer to modal jazz than to the ‘New Thing’, as demonstrated on a live 1975 recording of Coltrane’s ‘Olé’. This was also covered by Pharoah Sanders a few years later, and both musicians use the tune’s repetitive chordal structure to build expansive solos, repeating motifs over and over until they seem to crumble under the strain, coalescing into new figures or smooth, held tones and pinched, piercing cries, the drums’ propulsive rhythms constantly threatening to surge and sway over into free playing while always keeping things surging ahead within the framework of the tune. Neither Sanders nor Howard try to emulate the ‘exotic’ quality of Coltrane’s original, which featured Eric Dolphy’s and the wondrous combination of two basses, strumming and bowing to provide a textural element largely lacking from the be-bop of the preceding years. They also focus more on the celebratory, joyous nature of the piece than on the darker, ‘duende’ elements that peaked through in Coltrane’s version; one might also describe the approach as more ‘crowd-pleasing’, though there’s certainly no skimping on length (Howard’s version lasts 12 minutes, Sanders’, 20). It was during this period that some free players began to move back ‘inside’, structuring their playing within more familiar harmonic and rhythmic territory, a kind of middle-ground in which they could meet players associated in most critic’s minds with a slightly more ‘mainstream’ approach – the sort of artists recording for the Strata-East Record label. Whether or not this apparent ‘softening’ of approach gained more than it lost is a matter of debate; personally, I find it a tad predictable, bypassing as it does the transitional, perhaps more episodic and ‘abstract’ approach evinced on the Judson Hall recordings for a more schematic theme-solo-climax-theme layout that, while it does not negate much attractive and inspiring playing, does feel somewhat restrictive. One knows roughly where things are going to go before they happen, in contrast to earlier recordings, where there was a sense of near-chaos, of danger, a sense that the music was being driven by the emotional logic of the moment as much as by pre-determined structural considerations. Nonetheless, if my favourite items from the Howard discography are those from the late 60s and early 70s, particularly the collaborations with Frank Wright, I still find much to enjoy in the later 70s work, and ‘Olé’ in particular is a fine listen.

5/ ‘Olé’
from ‘Live in Europe, Vol.1’ (1975)



1977’s ‘Red Star’ has the bonus of being available (not the case with many of the Howard recordings that still languish out-of-print); it’s a studio date on which he once more collaborates with the great pianist Bobby Few, as well as with legendary be-bop drummer Kenny Clarke. The track I’ve chosen from this album is ‘Creole Girl’, one of Howard’s signature tunes from this period until, it seems, the last few years of his life. A simple boogaloo, it’s treated here in a fairly straightforward manner. Bass and drums are recorded with that slightly artificial splashiness and lack of depth that seemed to characterise some recordings from this decade (perhaps from engineers who weren’t familiar with the importance of the jazz rhythm section as an interacting part of the whole ensemble, rather than simply background noise). But this is actually one of my favourite Howard tracks from the get-go – listen to the way it opens, with a little tinkle down the piano, popping bass establishing the groove before the entry of the horns; listen to the theme, which comes across in this rendering as at once blissfully relaxed and slightly melancholy, stated in velvet unison by Howard’s alto and Richard Williams’ trumpet. Each band member gets a short and sweet solo – all that is, apart from Kenny Clarke, who, of all the players on this date, would actually be the most familiar to your average jazz fan. First up is Bobby Few, who elaborates on the chord changes with jabbing repeated notes and gospelly fervour. Richard Williams’ trumpet is mellow but ecstatic; Howard develops simple melodic ideas with disarming unfussiness and plenty of feeling; Guy Pederson begins with twangy variations on the theme before the tempo slows for him to ruminate at greater length; then the theme comes back in and we’re done. For me, the charm of this piece comes precisely from the fact that it’s quite low-key – neither a super-fast scorcher, nor an all-out emotional free jazz piece. It’s smooth and ‘professional’, but the musicians don’t sound uninterested – rather, they have their say in compressed, sweet statements that stick close to the tune’s harmonic outline without every sounding overly constricted. The eight minutes just fly by.

6/ ‘Creole Girl’
from ‘Red Star’ (1977)



In 1979, Howard connected with the great South African musicians Chris McGregor and Johnny Dyani to record a session originally designed for release by the Mercury Record label. In the event, what they played was judged too politically inflammatory to release, due to McGregor’s interpolation of the ANC Anthem (this before it became trendy for pop musicians to oppose apartheid). The track in question is a kind of free-ranging suite, sometimes centring around melodic figures, elsewhere flowing into sections loosened up by the ecstatic singing of Kali Z Fasteau, and Dyani’s Zulu vocal interjections and incantations. Howard sounds right at home, striking just the right balance between topical, righteous anger (his playing makes much more use of the ‘honks’ and ‘shrieks’ vocabulary than on the previous two tracks) and celebratory melodicism.

7/ ‘Message to South Africa’
from ‘Message to South Africa’ (1979)

During the 80s, Howard turned to funk, though there seems to be no documentation of this period in terms of recordings. I’m also not familiar with his most recent work, often released through his own label, in which he seems to have been experimenting with world music and lounge-jazz fusions, as well as introducing his singing voice. But there’s some fine material among the music that I’ve heard of his from the late 90s and early 2000s, which is, broadly speaking, in the free jazz mould. ‘Live at the Unity Temple’, a 1997 release on Ayler Records, finds him playing once more Bobby Few, covering some of the staple tunes that have travelled with him throughout his career. A measured solo introduction focuses on the repeated main theme of ‘Lovers’, space filled up by Few’s chunky piano, the drums setting up a cracking pace, full of boiling cymbal crashes – the music feels volatile, dramatic, exciting. Over the next ten minutes, this full band rush alternates with bass and drum solos, before Howard introduces the perky theme of ‘Schizophrenic Blues’ which provides, not an anchoring groove, but the spur to more storming, squalling, rousing improvisation, with Howard frequently, obsessively returning to that melodic figure. It’s a suitably joyous way to end this tribute - like the best of Howard’s work, full of impassioned vigour and melodic zest. The man, and his music, will be missed.

8/ ‘Lovers/Schizophrenic Blues’
from ‘Live at Unity Temple’ (1997)

A Tribute to Sirone

News has just emerged that the bassist Sirone (Norris Jones) died in Berlin on Wednesday, at the age of 69. So, another one of the great free jazz musicians has passed away; warning that it's more urgent than ever not to rely on those early pioneers still being around and still keeping their music fresh. With Leroy Jenkins' passing a few years ago, this now means that, of the Revolutionary Ensemble, only one surviving member, Jerome Cooper, remains.

In tribute, I've put together a playlist of some of the Sirone performances in my collection. In some instances, I've excerpted bass solos from longer tracks (often when the bass isn't so well recorded, probably a legacy of the traditional jazz notion that the rhythm section is only a backdrop to the horns); in others, I've kept the whole track, as Sirone's accompaniment plays such an active role in the whole texture.

Sirone appears on albums with (to list just a few) Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Noah Howard, Sonny Sharrock, Clifford Thornton, Dewey Redman, Cecil Taylor, and Dave Burrell, and collaborated with many others throughout his career. Born in Atlanta, he played with John Coltrane in the last year of the saxophonist's life, and became highly in-demand on the emerging 'fire music' scene: one might almost describe him as a free jazz session bassist, though that wouldn't do justice to the quality he brought to each session. Free jazz allowed him much more leverage than traditional routes; he was less an accompanist, a 'rhythm section' player, more an active participant, goading on the saxophones and trumpets and contributing sometimes pithy solo statements of his own. In these, he could be heard to take on something of Charles Mingus' very physical approach to the instrument, whereby the sound of fingers on strings had a real snap to it, the sound of slapped and struck vibrating gut; something, too of Jimmy Garrison's flamenco-flavoured strumming; and he developed, more than either player, a trembling higher register sound which would stand him in good stead for his later collaborations with the violinist Leroy Jenkins. In fact, even at this stage, he was the sort of player who meshed very well in unusual instrumental settings, especially with other stringed instruments to work or contrast with; on Gato Barbieri's 1967 ESP Disk recording, 'In Search of the Mystery', his pizzicato playing forms the turbulent backdrop to the piercing, near-anguished melodies played by Barbieri and cellist Joel Friedman.

1/ La Sorrella (bass solo)
from ‘Why Not’ (Marion Brown, 1966)

2/ Domiabra (bass solo)
from ‘The Black Ark’ (Noah Howard, 1969)

The first track in the playlist is a bass solo from 'La Sorrella', the opener on Marion Brown's 1966 album 'Why Not'. This is the longest solo Sirone is allocated (he solos on most tracks, but only for half a minute or so), and a good example of his interaction with Rashied Ali's drums, and their restless refusal to remain rhythmically stable. Following that, a solo from ‘Domiabra’, the opening piece on the 1969 Noah Howard classic ‘The Black Ark’; after the howling fury of Arthur Doyle, a bass solo might seem like respite, but Sirone’s springy jumps and bends round high and low registers are just as exploratory.

3/ Communications Network Part 1
from ‘Communications Network’ (Clifford Thornton, 1972)

Clifford Thornton, a trumpeter and trombonist (as well as cornet and electric piano player on this date) recorded some fine albums in the early 70s, probably the best known of which is the ambitious large-ensemble suite ‘The Gardens of Harlem’, recorded with the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. For the first two tracks of ‘Communications Network’, Thornton features an unusual small group which, given the presence of Sirone and Jerome Cooper, is pretty much The Revolutionary Ensemble, with L. Shankar (of Shakti) replacing Leroy Jenkins on violin. This group has a very different sound, though; Shankar’s ecstatic raga lines over Thornton’s electric piano create a fusion feel which sits oddly – but very nicely – with Sirone and Cooper’s free jazz rhythms. Thornton’s cornet playing (he’s presumably overdubbing the electric piano) is declamatory and dark-toned, and, even if he and Shankar are very much the lead voices (bass and drums are way down in the mix, often obscured by the electric piano), it’s an interesting context in which to hear Sirone.

4/ Spring of Two Blue-Js Part 2 (excerpt)
from ‘Spring of Two Blue-Js’ (Cecil Taylor Unit, 1973)

Perhaps the greatest challenge for a jazz bass player is the immense stamina required: whereas a saxophonist can take a breather after blowing hard, bassists will most often play for the entire duration of a piece. Call this problem exacerbated in the music of Cecil Taylor, his pieces stretching to lengths that surpassed even those of John Coltrane, and whose fundamental characteristic was what Ekkehard Jost termed ‘energy’ (as opposed to ‘swing’), though of course Taylor has a lyrical streak which has grown more pronounced in recent years (sounding almost Debussyian at times). Robert Levin recounts one occasion where Taylor’s ‘Unit’ was playing in a jazz club; towards the end of the piece, his bassist at the time, Buell Neidlinger, had become so exhausted that he stopped playing, propped up by his instrument, his eyes closed as if, for all the world, the music had drained so much energy out of him that he had simply expired on the spot. If anything, Taylor’s music had grown even lengthier and more energetic by the time Sirone joined his Unit. An extreme example of this is the triple-LP (now double-CD) ‘One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye’, and to get a real sense of Sirone’s contribution to the music, one would probably have to listen to the whole thing – the cumulative intensity and accumulation of detail into a kind of trance-like block of sound is something that has to be experienced in the listening, rather than the describing – to be experienced as something total, complete. So I’ve chosen a short excerpt from the second piece on ‘Spring of Two Blue-Js’ (1973), an album recorded live at Town Hall in New York (at a concert dedicated to Ben Webster). We’ll hear the tail-end of the energy rush ridden and spurred on by saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, followed by Sirone’s solo, and a brief interaction with Taylor on piano ending the piece.

5/ Seeds and Deeds
6/ Meditation Submission Purification
7/ Joie de Vivre
8/ Qow
from ‘Coincide’ (Dewey Redman 1974)

Next, four complete pieces from Dewey Redman's 'Coincide' (1974), one of my favourite Redman recordings. Sirone and drummer Eddie Moore appear on all tracks (apart from 'Phadan-Sers', a Redman zither solo), and the other players are violinst Leroy Jenkins and trumpeter Ted Daniel. 'Seeds and Deeds' opens the album with some 'hard-driving jazz' (to borrow the title of the John Coltrane/Cecil Taylor collaboration), Redman and Daniels blasting away, Sirone and Moore skittering all over the place to create an exceptionally jittery, energetic feel. By contrast, 'Meditation Submission Purification' has its tone set by the otherworldy sounds of Redman's zither, Sirone's arco harmonics, and Eddie Moore's 'bowed and struck idiophone'. The arco playing of Jenkins and Sirone was one of the finest things about the Revolutionary Ensemble, opening up textures and sonorities which had previously been thought of as the province of 'classical' music (and still are, to some extent, despite the work of John Edwards, Barry Guy et al), and, with the zither coalescing into hanging clouds of sound rather than taking a lead role, Sirone's playing is perhaps the most dominant voice here. It's an entrancing piece with a very special atmosphere. 'Joie de Vivre' shows yet another side to Sirone's work: after the free jazz of 'Seeds and Deeds' and the 'extended techniques' textural work of 'Mediation...', he proves that he can play very fine pizzicato straight jazz ballad bass on 'Joie de Vivre'. It's the same trio as on 'Mediation...' (Redman, Sirone, and Moore) but with a very different use of space: whereas on the previous track the effect was of time standing stil, here it just moves very slowly, in graceful and unhurried comfort. All three musicians sound supremely relaxed. Beginning with an equally relaxed sound, but at a faster tempo (a brisk, happy walk, rather than a slow stroll), ‘Qow,’ the longest of my four selections from this album, opens with Redman playing off Sirone’s catchy repeated riff before his rough-edged smears move things further ‘out’, Sirone switching to fast walking bass and then taking a popping, bubbling solo.

9/ Manhattan Cycles, Side A
from ‘Manhattan Cycles’ (The Revolutionary Ensemble, 1972)

10/ Ponderous Planets
from ‘The People’s Republic’ (The Revolutionary Ensemble, 1975)

Sirone’s probably best-known for his work with violinist Leroy Jenkins and drummer Jerome Cooper in The Revolutionary Ensemble, which formed in the early 1970s. Jenkins had moved to New York from Chicago, where he had been an important member of the AACM. Given the realities of being a jobbing musicians in the Big Apple, the Ensemble was formed partly to fulfill the need for a regular group which could explore some of the subtleties that had characterized the AACM – the so-called ‘chamber jazz’ carried over from the Creative Construction Company, in which Jenkins had played with Anthony Braxton. A long period of practice prefaced the Ensemble’s official emergence. as testified by the flowing interaction of the music – in some ways a contrast to the ‘blow as loud and hard as you can’ school of free jazz. Cooper’s drumming never asserted itself so much as rolled into being, repeating in slowly developing waves, or cells of sound, and Sirone meshed with Jenkins’ melodically assertive violin, rather than trying to sound out as a lead voice. It was this quality in particular that made the Ensemble such a special group – for though, as we’ve heard, Sirone could be an assertive player, he was perhaps at his best when creating a textural thread that altered the whole sound of a group without one quite realizing that, or how, it had been. The Ensemble’s first album came out on ESP-Disk (it’s just been re-issued under the title ‘Vietnam’) and has been criticized for the sound quality, which failed to capture the subtlety of the groups’ quieter, spacier moments. In fact, though, the tape hiss and drone comes to seem almost a part of the music at these times, something entirely appropriate as the ensemble would make use of tape recordings and other non-standard sounds to supplement the basic violin, bass, drums line-up. Thus, on ‘Manhattan Cycles’ (the entire first side of which I’ve included in the playlist), Billie Holiday’s voice floats out, muted, Jenkins picking up on the ghost memory and turning it into living, flowing improvisational lyricism. ‘The People’s Republic’ (apocryphally supposed to have invoked the ire of Quincy Jones over dinner with Herb Alpert, and the subsequent cancellation of A&M Records’ jazz sub-label Horizon) is one of my favourite of the Ensemble’s recordings; the tracks are shorter than on the long-form ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Manhattan Cycles’, with some particularly gorgeous melodies (such as the beginning of ‘New York’) , a spacey, African-flavoured piece for vocals and percussion (the title track), and much atmospheric use of gongs, cymbals, musical saws, and the combined arco playing of Jenkins/Sirone (‘Ponderous Planets’).

11/ Berlin Erfrahung
from ‘And Now’ (The Revolutionary Ensemble, 2004)

During this time, Sirone made a few recordings under his name (it would be more than 20 years before he did so again). The Revolutionary Ensemble split in 1977, and, like many American avant-jazz musicians, he settled in Europe, finding the climate there much more receptive than in his home country. Based in Berlin, he nevertheless to maintain a presence in America as well, going on to work with Charles Gayle, Billy Bang, Cecil Taylor, and the George Adams/James Blood Ulmer group Phalanx. In 2004, the Revolutionary Ensemble, which had been dormant since the late 70s, unexpectedly reunited, releasing an acclaimed album on pi records which demonstrated the same virtues as their 70s work, as fresh as ever. Each member of the group contributed two compositions: Sirone’s ‘Berlin Erfrahung’ offers a strongly melodic approach to composition.

Sirone was still working in the years leading up to his death, recording a couple of albums under his own name with European musicians as well as with the violinist Billy Bang. Needless to say, his music lives on.

Download link for Sirone Tribute Playlist: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?1o1mozmvn0n