billyhart – Jarrett House North

Pharoah Sanders, Black Unity

Album of the Week, May 11, 2024

When I was listening to free jazz in college and the years after, I had a fairly narrow conception of Pharoah Sanders’ contribution to the art. On the basis of performances like Meditations and Karma, I assumed that all his work was out there, shamanistic, wild. And while that is indeed a good description of some of his playing, it’s far from the whole story. Some of his performances preceding and following Karma are good jumping off points to make the story delightfully complex, starting with this one, recorded in November 1971.

We’ve seen before how issues of black power and civil rights influenced some of this music, particularly in John Coltrane’s “Alabama” (discussed in the context of Trane’s follow-up album Crescent) and in Archie Shepp’s poem for Malcolm X and elegiac salute to W.E.B. Dubois. Black Unity seems at once to be a nod to the Black Unity and Freedom Party, a Black Power political party in the UK, and a statement of musical purpose that underpins the group improvisation recorded here.

The group is top-notch, with Marvin “Hannibal” Peterson on trumpet, Carlos Garnett on flute and tenor sax, Joe Bonner on piano, Stanley Clarke and Cecil McBee on bass, Norman Connors and Billy Hart on drums, and Lawrence Killian on percussion. Bonner was an underappreciated hard bop pianist from Rocky Mount, North Carolina who had a series of collaborations with Hart and saxophonist Billy Harper in the 1970s as well as solo outings. Garnett played with Freddie Hubbard and with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Stanley Clarke might be the best known name on the album, having come to prominence as a founding member of Chick Corea’s Return to Forever and winning five Grammy awards for his jazz fusion work over the years. And Norman Connors had a varied career, sitting in for Elvin Jones with the John Coltrane Quartet when the group performed at his middle school (!), playing with Sanders, recording as a leader on Cobblestone Records, and switching to R&B in the mid-1970s.

The variety of talent that Sanders’ group brought to the collective improvisation accounts for some of its sheer exuberance. The entire album is one long 37-minute collective exploration of sound, most but not all centered around a deep-grooving three-note theme that emerges within the first minute out of a cluster of sound from the Stanley Clarke, Joe Bonner and the collective percussion section. From the groove, though, emerge other sounds – a sustained wash of what sounds like a hurdy-gurdy, the balafon, and finally a version of the groove theme from the three horns, played in unison. From there the music seems to overflow outward, with all the players going in different directions over the continued groove.

The first moment of “breakage” into free jazz in the collective comes from Sanders, whose horn begins to climb a rocky hill about eight minutes in. “Hannibal” Peterson plays with fierce intensity, alternating between chromatically ascending the scale and then playing an extended improvisation around the supertonic. And Garnett grounds his playing in the original key, bringing it back to the tonic. The horns pause for a second and a relatively brief moment of respite in which the forward pulse of the bass is the main motion gives us the breath we need to flip the record.

Side two opens with a Joe Bonney solo that leans into the upper reaches of the melody. Bonney’s work with other artists ran the gamut from wild to celebratory, but his playing here is solidly in the post-McCoy Tyner world; while a good chunk of his solo firmly subscribes to the Tyner block chords model, there’s also a moment of complete and utter freedom that seems to stop time before he shifts back into a more melodic mode that calls to mind some of Herbie Hancock’s mid-1960s Blue Note output. Sanders follows Bonney, this time on the balafon. The percussive nature of the instrument, which Wikipedia helpfully describes as a “gourd-resonated xylophone”, means that its sound is approximately equal parts tone and wooden thud, and the bassists and percussion step up to support and enhance the sound.

The last part of the work is driven by the basses and percussion. McBee gets a solo that quietly underscores the similarity of the main theme to the “A Love Supreme” theme and time stops for a minute as the two bassists trade ideas against each other. When the beat comes back, emerging from a cloud of clicking percussion, dueling pizzicato, and drone, it’s less frantic, more assured. There’s a higher pitched string instrument in the mix as well, perhaps a harp or koto, that together with the basses transports the entire soundscape for a few minutes to a different world. This entire section is the most eye opening, as the collective groove that has underpinned all the free exploration and melodic expansion seems to stand revealed. If Sanders was making a philosophical—or political—statement on this album, it might be in this revelation of common cause underneath many different expressions of black musical identity In the last three and a half minutes, the rest of the band re-enters to quietly bring the theme back home. When they stop, we hear a crowd burst into applause and calls of “Right on!,” providing the final mind-blowing moment of the album—that it was recorded as a single live performance.

Sanders would explore the axis between group improvisation, deep melodies, and ecstatic free jazz throughout the rest of his career. You can find more examples of any of the sides of his work throughout his discography; for more like Karma, check out “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah” on his Jewels of Thought. By the mid-1970s he was playing more melodically (as you can hear in this great 1975 live set from Transversales Disques), and it’s that Pharoah that appears in his last recording, the 2021 Floating Points collaboration Promises. But regardless of whether he was playing fierce and free or achingly sweetly, the common core of all the work is searching (and finding) transcendence, putting him firmly in line with the work of his mentor Coltrane. We’ll get one last check-in with another Trane associate next week as we see how McCoy Tyner continued to evolve following his departure from Blue Note.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Pharoah Sanders, Karma

Album of the Week, April 20, 2024

Pharoah Sanders continued to work with John Coltrane following his appearance on the Seattle club performance that became A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle. The first released fruit of their collaboration was Ascension, then Meditations, Om, Kulu Se Mama, Expression and a host of live recordings. While working with Coltrane, though, he started his series of recordings for Impulse Records, beginning with the November 15, 1966 session that produced Tauhid. What followed, though, was nothing short of a hit, an almost album length performance that cemented the advances of A Love Supreme, adding additional types of percussion and making the vocals a feature, and essentially codifying the “spiritual jazz” genre.

It’s not clear that Sanders knew this was going to be the outcome when he entered the RCA Studio with Bob Thiele in New York on Valentine’s Day, 1969 to record the first session, “The Creator Has a Master Plan.” What is clear is that he had something in mind much broader than a traditional jazz quartet album. The players included Trane’s onetime bassist Reggie Workman, alongside second bassist Richard Davis; James Spaulding (previously heard on The All Seeing Eye and Schizophrenia) on flute; Julius Watkins, who had previously recorded with Trane on Africa/Brass, on French horn; the great Lonnie Liston Smith on piano; Billy Hart on drums; Nathaniel Bettis on percussion; and Leon Thomas on percussion and vocals. A second session five days later yielded the second track, “Colors,” and featured the same players minus Davis, Spaulding, Hart and Bettis, and adding Freddie Waits on drums.

Leon Thomas was a big part of the distinctiveness of the new sound. He had sung in more traditional ensembles in the early 1960s but was drafted in the early 1960s. When he returned from the service in the late 1960s, substantially weirder, he began working with Sanders on this record. His contributions included writing the poems for both tracks, singing them, adding miscellaneous percussion, and especially employing a distinctive yodel. The yodel had roots in ritual practice and in African Pygmy music; you can hear examples of the latter in the field recordings of Colin Turnbull.

“The Creator Has a Master Plan,” recorded during that first Valentine’s Day session, takes up the entirety of Side One plus half of Side Two. There have been only a few records I’ve reviewed where I feel you get a better sense of the composition by listening to the CD version, and this is one. Sanders’ vision ranges for more than 30 minutes across the two sides and signals its intent from the opening notes of the saxophone, which quote some of the progressions that Coltrane used in A Love Supreme. In this case, though, they’re played over a host of percussion, flute, and piano chords, and the modal darkness quickly gives way to a more hopeful chord as Spaulding’s flute twirls overhead.

The ensemble pauses, then the bass picks up the main theme. Again seemingly inspired by A Love Supreme, the theme is an eight-note pattern formed by two closely related motifs that stretch out over an octave before resolving back to the tonic (V-I-V-IX, V-I-V-VIII). The bass theme is accompanied by tuned percussion and by Lonnie Liston Smith strumming the strings of his piano like a harp. Spaulding picks up the theme in the flute, and Sanders finally enters, first playing pedal notes on the supertonic and tonic and then freely improvising in a major key over the open tuning of the theme. His tone is mostly ballad-smooth, but there’s a little brimstone around the edges. Smith’s piano primarily sticks to reinforcing the core chords, and Watkins’ French horn primarily provides supporting color. This beginning section of the work—call it Prologue and Part 1—proceeds for almost seven minutes and 30 seconds before Leon Thomas enters.

Thomas’s vocal and percussive part, like Trane’s chant on “A Love Supreme: Acknowledgement,” serves to kick the whole performance into a higher plane. He both provides the explicit message of the song and adds vocal color from multiple religious vocal traditions, including the aforementioned Zaire Pygmy people, gospel, and traditions even further afield. Thomas also plays hand percussion, further adding to the ceremonial overtones. This first section comes to an end with a restatement of the opening theme, now with greater passion and energy, as though the band was preparing to wrap up the performance.

But that doesn’t happen; instead, at 13 minutes, the bass theme and opening recapitulates as though beginning the work again. But this time, after about two and a half minutes of Sanders’ soloing, the tempo accelerates to double speed and the real Pentecostal hollering begins, starting with Sanders and spreading to Watkins, the basses, and finally Thomas, who takes a wordless solo that first emphasizes the melody and then moves beyond it, employing multi-octave effects, falsetto, and more. (There are stretches that echo some of the Moroccan and Egyptian street performances that Peter Gabriel sampled in his Passion soundtrack, for instance the vocal color that underpins from 0:05 – 0:23 of “It Is Accomplished.”) It’s so intense that the solo actually seems to be overdubbed in a few parts. It’s in this section, by the way, that the LP version inserts a side break, returning on side 2 to absolute chaos with every player blowing or striking their instrument at maximum volume, saturating the entire sound field and providing something akin to a vision of a multi-eyed, multi-faced, multi-winged fleet of seraphim. It’s not for the faint of heart or sensitive of hearing.

At the end of this section, Sanders reintroduces the faster theme and signals a return to tonality, but not to the more subdued meditation of the beginning. We are still transcendent beings by this point, a point he quickly reintroduces by overblowing to produce additional harmonics. Thomas’ solo returns to a more melodic yodel, this time accompanied by a sustained pedal note in the bass and French horn. Finally, 28+ minutes in, Sanders returns to the original theme and tempo and provides a final recapitulation of the opening theme along with the final statement of the poem by Thomas, going into a fadeout. A fadeout! After more than 32 minutes of straight performance! This band was going to keep playing all day.

After the onslaught of “Creator,” “Colors” comes as a meditative, though not exactly peaceful, coda. The opening statement from Sanders could almost have come from the opening theme of “Creator,” but instead of the insistent bass groove we get a field of bells, arco bass, flute and piano chords that provides a meditative bed for Thomas’ sung poem. Here he dispenses with the vocal pyrotechnics, providing a straight reading of the Creator as the source of the “rainbow of love.” Sanders blows one last run of the theme from the prelude of “Creator” under the final statements of the colors, then lets Spaulding have a final crack at the gentle melody before finishing with a last two note statement of the octave.

There is no such thing as a jaundiced listen to this music; it remains mind-blowing and repays close, repeated listening. Bob Thiele knew he had something big on his hands with this session, but had to convince the brass at ABC. He’s quoted as saying, “Until the record came out, it was the same tired tune: ‘What kind of crap is this? This isn’t going to sell; it doesn’t mean anything; it’s a lot of junk; you can’t dance to it; you can’t listen to it;’ ad infinitum.” But sell it did, and topped the Billboard Jazz chart for 12 straight weeks.

Like all good gospels, Karma recapitulated and honored what had come before while simultaneously marking the birth of something new. We’ll hear some of what followed in its wake next week.

You can listen to the album here:

PS: Another really good review of Karma by Josh Mound can be found on “The Best Version of…” in Audiophile Style.

Joe Zawinul, Zawinul

Album of the Week, September 17, 2022.

We last met Austrian keyboard player and composer Joe Zawinul when he arrived, seemingly from nowhere, to explore the unknown realms of in a Silent Way. On this appropriately self-titled album, Zawinul continues the journey, this time as leader and not merely as mystic guide. The album is a journey into outer space; it is also an instructive guide in the different ways to create jazz music.

Zawinul’s approach to this album was less group improvisation and more Gil Evans. The group features both Miroslav Vitouš and Walter Booker on bass, multiple drummers and percussionists (on different tracks, Billy Hart, Joe Chambers, Jack Dejohnette, and David Lee can be heard, usually in combinations of two or three), and a front line including Woody Shaw on trumpet (with Jimmy Owens on one track), George Davis on flute, Earl Turbindon on soprano sax, and Herbie Hancock on the mighty Fender Rhodes, alongside Zawinul on acoustic and electric pianos. One track features Wayne Shorter, Hubert Laws, and Dejohnette in lieu of Turbindon, Davis, and the other drummers. And the whole group performs in through composed suites that are strongly reminiscent of Gil Evans’ style, though still keeping room for solos.

“Doctor Honoris Causa” opens the album in a demonstration of this approach. The melody, written in honor of Herbie Hancock’s honorary doctorate from Grinnell University, is cut from the same cloth as “In a Silent Way,” with a slow chromatic drift of chords from the keyboards and the horns yielding to an insistent bass line supported by a steady backbeat. The front line then enters, with Turbindon, Shaw, and Davis playing the melody line with one voice as it circles the tonic before climbing up to a diminished sixth. There is a short break of around four measures before the second part of the melody returns, again in unison. Following the same arrangement pattern as some of Miles’ work on Nefertiti, the melody returns over and over again, with longer solos between. Shaw takes the first extended solo, his trumpet climbing over strong support from the Fender and Zawinul’s organ. Turbindon takes the next one, with his soprano sax exploring minor modes around the tonic and drifting away, with the Echoplexed Fender Rhodes of Herbie Hancock taking the next solo, reverberating through the cosmos. Zawinul takes the final solo, steering the group’s improvisations through turbulent air before gently bringing them to a landing. The work may celebrate Hancock’s accomplishments in title, but in execution it’s an evocation of flight.

“In a Silent Way” returns to Zawinul’s iconic composition that lent its title to Miles’ pioneering fusion album. Here we hear the work in its full extended form. In doing so, he gives us an insight into Miles’ compositional methods. The original arrangement heard here takes us through an extended introduction in multiple modal chord changes before bringing us to the famous melody. In doing so, the work takes on a very different character from Miles’ wide-eyed, searching rendition. At the last Tanglewood weekend of this summer, I heard WCRB commentator Bryan McCreath point out that much of the power of the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony comes from the open fourths and fifths that constitute the opening theme, because of their harmonic ambiguity. Minus a third in the progression, they could either fall to a major or minor key. The same is true of the Miles version of “In a Silent Way,” which keeps its progressions open for as long as possible before finally revealing its mode. Zawinul’s original extended introduction, which pivots from major to minor with richer harmonies throughout, is more fully voiced, but the ambiguity is lost. It’s still a stunning performance, evoking the Swiss Alps of Zawinul’s youth, albeit with less mystery and more sentimentality.

“His Last Journey” is a different animal altogether, a tone poem for bass, piano, chimes, and trumpet. The melody is played in the uppermost ranges of the arco bass over the second bass and a descending piano line, with the trumpet sketching an alternate melody around the edges. It’s a brief dream of a composition that is over all too soon.

“Double Image” is the outlier here. Recorded in a different session in late August 1970 with Shorter and Laws, the work is more of a group improvisation than anything else on the record, with the two keyboardists and two bassists alternately working together and improvising separately, with the extended bass arco solo at the beginning exploring the outer reaches. (I’ve gotten pretty good at telling the players apart on these albums, but am not sure whether we’re hearing Vitouš or Booker there.) Zawinul takes the other solo on the track, with the horns and flute providing the echo of the melody in between. The energy level and level of abstraction comes closer here to the more frenetic tunes on Super Nova and Bitches Brew than anything else on the record; unsurprisingly, this is the one composition from this period that would later be recorded by Miles’ electric group on Live-Evil.

“Arrival in New York” closes the album with something else again: a sound collage, with taped segments of bowed bass, organ, and percussion manipulated to evoke the cacophony of the New York streets, subways, and harbor as Zawinul remembered them from his arrival in the United States in 1959. As a composition it’s an island unto itself, but it would not be the last time Zawinul would embrace different studio techniques to discover new soundscapes.

So Zawinul points toward a different way to embody Miles’ searching while taking some of the great trumpeter’s collaborators in a different direction. He would continue working with Shorter and Vitouš; we will hear that collaboration next week.

You can hear the album here: