Tag: freddiewaits

McCoy Tyner, Expansions

Album of the Week, April 13, 2024

The classic John Coltrane Quartet was no more after December 1965, as first McCoy Tyner then Elvin Jones despaired of being able to follow Trane to the places he was going. Trane died, unexpectedly and awfully, of liver cancer at the age of 40, on July 17, 1967. But Trane’s musical legacy lived on, most notably through those who played with him and the unmistakably audible legacy his works left in theirs. Tyner was one of those, and as we’ll hear over the next few weeks, Trane’s influence ran strong in Tyner’s works for years afterwards.

Following Tyner’s departure from the Quartet, he signed with Blue Note Records and recorded a series of albums that gradually expanded Tyner’s compositional and performing concept beyond the boundaries of the jazz quartet. On Expansions, the fourth in the series (following The Real McCoy, Tender Moments, and Time for Tyner), we get an intriguing mix of modal jazz, the avant-garde, and more traditional sounds, delivered by a septet of players that included Woody Shaw on trumpet, Gary Bartz on alto sax (and wooden flute), Wayne Shorter on tenor sax (and clarinet), Herbie Lewis on bass, Freddie Watts on drums, and Ron Carter, who plays cello here.

Shaw would go on to record on sessions with Joe Zawinul (he actually appears on Zawinul), as well as . Gary Bartz had previously performed with Tyner in Charles Mingus’s workshop and would record with him again before working with Miles Davis in 1970 (resulting in the Live-Evil album) and beginning his own influential band, the NTU Troop. Herbie Lewis recorded with a long list of influential 1960s players including Cannonball Adderley, Stanley Turrentine, Bobby Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Archie Shepp, Harold Land, and others. And Freddie Watts worked with Max Roach, Kenny Barron, Andrew Hill, Joe Zawinul, Freddie Hubbard, and others.

When you hear “Vision,” you could be forgiven for thinking you were hearing a leftover melody from a Coltrane session, at least until the horns enter. Tyner’s harmonic imagination is strongly influenced by Trane’s modal material. But the horns, who play the opening statement of the melody add a new element that’s distinct from the Coltrane style. And Ron Carter’s cello solo, which provides both melody and texture by playing with light pressure on the fingerboard while bowing (sul ponticello), takes the tune even further into unknown reaches. Wayne Shorter, Gary Bartz, and Woody Shaw each take a solo. Shorter’s harmonic imagination is interesting here as he plays unusually aggressively compared to his performances as a group leader. There are touches of some of his playing on Miles Smiles in the speed and bite of his playing. Bartz plays more melodically by contrast, but brings in some distortion in the saxophone. And Shaw goes even further out, playing into the upper reaches and moving well beyond the chords of the tune. The overall tune pushes beyond traditional jazz forms, urged on by Tyner’s percussive playing and Freddie Watts’ drums.

“Song of Happiness” comes from a more meditative center. The opening is played over a static chord with the piano and bass constantly in motion without moving far from the central tonality. A melody starts in the bass and is accompanied by the constantly rolling piano and, ultimately, by wooden flute and clarinet, played by Bartz and Shorter. Finally, the horns come in on a secondary melody and are answered by the bass and piano, tossing the development of the melody back and forth in eight bar patterns. Solos follow from Tyner and Shorter, and the group returns to the flute for the long coda. There’s more than a hint of the East in the arrangement, and it shows how Tyner’s imagination was broadening beyond the minor key workouts of the classic quartet.

“Smitty’s Place,” by contrast, feels almost like an Archie Shepp workout, with a clear melody alternating with free playing from the band. Shorter’s solo here is much closer to his normal playing of the late 1960s, with shadows of his Schizophrenia. The pizzicato cello solo by Carter is one of the farthest-out things on the whole record, and Tyner’s closing solo definitely the funniest.

“Peresina” finds us back in a familiar minor modal groove, led by Tyner’s assertive solo and followed by the melody which is stated in the horns. But at about the two minute mark the tune takes a left turn into something more complex chordally, and suddenly the feel is less percussive, more dancelike. It’s an interesting tune, well played by the band; again, Shorter’s solo stands out for its left turns into unusual tonalities and moments.

Last, “I Thought I’d Let You Know” is the only non-Tyner composition on the album. Written by Cal Massey, who played with Tyner and Jimmy Garrison in Philadelphia in the 1950s, the work opens with a cello feature by Carter before turning to a tender piano solo from Tyner. The two alternate with support from the rhythm section throughout. The overall effect has the serenity of “Song of Happiness” in a more traditional format, as if to say: this, too, remains.

On Expansions, McCoy Tyner’s compositional skills and range are on full display. While still touched by the shadow of Trane’s influence, tracks like “Song of Happiness” and “Smitty’s Place” show that Tyner could stretch convincingly into his own definition of the avant-garde and could command a substantially broader tonal palette. We’ll hear more of that in coming recordings from him; next week, though, we’ll check out another post-Trane recording from one of his later collaborators.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Hubert Laws, Afro-Classic

Album of the Week, April 29, 2023

It’s hard to believe, but the four albums we’ve covered so far since the founding of Creed Taylor’s CTI label—Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay, the Joe Farrell Quartet, and Stanley Turrentine’s Sugar, plus the earlier reviewed Bill Evans Montreux II— were all recorded in 1970. Taylor kept an incredibly busy recording and release schedule with engineer Rudy Van Gelder in the latter’s studies in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and the label’s recordings in the first year were something of a who’s who of the early label. The last recording made in 1970 at Englewood Cliffs introduces another important artist on the CTI roster to this column, though it was actually his second recording for the label, as well as introducing another musical genre to the new label’s tapestry.

Flautist Hubert Laws was, by 1970, one of the most significant proponents of the jazz flute, having appeared on sessions with James Moody, Mongo Santamaria, Kai Winding, Bobby Timmons, Ron Carter, Chick Corea, Paul Desmond, Milt Jackson, and Quincy Jones, as well as on Joe Zawinul’s self-titled masterpiece and Herbie Hancock’s Fat Albert Rotunda. He had recorded his debut as leader, The Laws of Jazz, in 1964 (which we’ll review another time), and his recording Crying Song was the first official release on the CTI label. But his approach to the instrument was still evolving, and Afro-Classic revealed a new facet of Laws’ work, with the introduction of classical music to the recording.

The combination of jazz and classical was not new; Gunther Schuller had introduced the concept in a 1957 lecture that named the combination third stream. True to the concept, Afro-Classic includes pop music treated like classical and jazz, and classical treated like jazz and blues, all wrapped in the now-trademark CTI gatefold cover with a brilliant Pete Turner photo.

The opening track, a cover of James Taylor’s then four-month-old “Fire and Rain,” presents the tune almost as a rondo, with an opening statement that in retrospect anticipates the synth-flute in Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and echoes spiritual jazz practice, before Bob James’ electric piano presents the opening verse as a sonata. Ron Carter’s bass and Fred Waits’ drums (with an assist from Airto on percussion) then alter the template again, with a second statement of the melody as a blues groove. It all swirls together into a greasy, funky reverie, before returning to the more sonata-like form of the beginning and fading out on a revisitation of the groove. Don Sebesky is credited with arrangements on the album, but he keeps a light touch throughout.

From this opening, Laws pivots into a more pure classical approach with an arrangement of the Allegro from Bach’s Concerto No. 3 in D (BWV 1054). Except for the use of electric piano, and the addition of Gene Bertoncini’s acoustic guitar, the arrangement is taken straight, with a bassoon added to fill out the arrangement with some of the woodwind parts. The recording would not have been out of place on my childhood classical radio station—or as incidental music for one of the later Charlie Brown TV specials. In fact, I kept thinking about the score to “It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown,” which supplemented Vince Guaraldi’s iconic compositions with a Bach sonata for the characters in the department store scene.

The “Theme from Love Story” is likewise played “straight” for its opening, the theme—familiar to those who suffered through hours of easy-listening orchestral arrangements in the late 1970s—stated by Laws on the baritone flute. Sebesky’s arrangement is mercifully understated, allowing Laws’ gentle jazz inflections on the chorus to play out in counterpoint with the bassoon and acoustic guitar, before the entrance of Ron Carter’s bass pedal point signals a variation with a gentle Latin groove. The next verse digs deeper into this concept, with Laws and the percussionists creating a swirling minor-key soundscape over the grounding of Ron Carter’s bass and Bob James’ piano, before returning to a recapitulation of the melody. It’s a great example of Laws’ talent for beginning with familiar, unprepossessing melodies and taking them into highly interesting places.

Returning to Bach with “Passacaglia in C Minor” (BWV 582), the opening statement is sketched by Carter’s bass line, then elaborated by James with light accompaniment from the percussion. Laws and James trade the theme back and forth, effectively serving as the right and left hand of the keyboard part, before the ensemble chases the tune down to the tonic. Subsequent verses explore jazz improvisations on the theme, with increasingly strong jazz inflections, before a reverb-heavy flute solo and a grooved-out statement by James—in 6/8 time—take us over the edge into a modal workout. As the piece passes the ten-minute mark, Van Gelder and the musicians find some remarkable new tones, with arco cello, treated electric piano, and reverb-heavy flute noise swirling the melody into something like an exploration of inner space. The recapitulation of the theme is once more taken straight, re-grounding the work in the original composition. It’s a masterful unification of the differing approaches to music on the album into a single artistic statement.

The album concludes with Mozart’s “Flute Sonata in F” (K.13), which—like the Bach Allegro—could be mistaken for a classical recital but for the prominent bass and James’ electric piano. Coming after the phantasmagoria of “Passacaglia,” it’s a cheeky punctuation point on an album that quietly upsets any pre-conceived notions the listener might have regarding the lines of separation between jazz and classical music.

Laws brought a significant new stream of influence to CTI with this record, one that he and other performers on the label would revisit throughout the rest of its run. We’ll hear from Laws, and classical influences again. In the meantime, if you are intrigued by his approach to jazz flute, you might want to check out my Exfiltration Radio show “Flute’n the Blues.”

You can listen to the album here: