The Penguin Jazz Guide 1000 Best Albums

评语：Bill Dixon says: ‘It might seem there were too many imponderables – the group had never worked together before – and the faint-hearted might have wondered what we might be able to achieve. But things worked out well; in fact they worked out marvellously; all of the players indicated that they wanted to play the music we were confronting that day, which, incidentally, was a beautiful and sunny Italian day totally fit for the recording that we made.’ Dixon not only relied on a European label. He also found European – in this case, British – musicians to be responsive to his music. Inside almost all of Dixon’s small-group recordings there is a dark pressure, like the imprint of a much larger composition that has been denied full expression. That is profoundly evident on Vade Mecum, which begins Dixon’s association with British percussionist Tony Oxley; it later resulted in a pair of Soul Note CDs called Papyrus. It might be argued that both Oxley and compatriot Guy are too ‘strong’ to conform to Dixon’s exceptionally disciplined approach, and there is a hint that this may have resulted in conflict when one finds Oxley’s role dismissed as ‘background’ on the later duo records. The two bassists take very different parts: Parker is sonorous and inward, while Guy flitters rapidly on what may be a chamber bass. ‘Anamorphosis’ on the first record is one of Dixon’s most thoughtful conceptions, and it is clear that the group responded very positively to the forms he proposed. For a time we considered the second volume, recorded at the same session, the stronger of the two – ‘Ebonite’ and ‘Reflections’ are both immensely powerful ideas, anchored in the bass and coloured with Oxley’s unique spectrum of sounds – but really this is just a single superlative record that might easily have been released as a double disc. Too much to absorb in one sitting, perhaps, but richness for the ages in the music.

评语：Saxophonist Tommy Smith says: ‘Garbarek’s sound possesses the call from the wild and the planet’s soundscapes. The sonic experience, whether it’s live or from the studio, is extremely important to Jan. The wonderful trait that he shares with Arild Andersen is the desire for their audiences to hear their live concerts as if they were studio recordings.’ The end of the ’70s established a pattern whereby Garbarek went into the studio at each year’s end to consolidate and capture what had been learned in performance and to send out new feelers for the year ahead. It is what a village bard might have done in winter quarters, spin tales about the year past and boast about what would come when the sun returned, and the folkloric strain became more evident as Garbarek’s music moved in the direction of improvisational folk music. Star in 1991 was widely hailed as the saxophonist’s return to straighter jazz playing, but it was a curiously woolly album – the contributions of Miroslav Vitous and Peter Erskine notwithstanding – that never quite delivered on its promise, and it was Twelve Moons that restored something of the atmospheric beauty and deep pulse of Dis. Appropriately, it was Garbarek who was chosen to front ECM’s 500th release. It finds him at an interesting point of development, still exploring folklore but again espousing a jazz-orientated programme. There’s an emphasis on soprano saxophone, perhaps to blend better with the voices, but even here the tone is stronger and heavier than of yore. Katché is essentially a rock drummer, with a crude but immensely vibrant delivery. One thinks occasionally of Ginger Baker, but among previous associates he is closer to Edward Vesala than to Jon Christensen. This time around, in addition to Sami joiks, Garbarek includes an arrangement of national composer Edvard Grieg’s gentle ‘Arietta’, and a new version of the late Jim Pepper’s ‘Witchi-Tai-To’.

评语：Ernie Watts says: ‘This was the first session I played on a brand-new saxophone, my Julius Keilwerth SX 90R, which I got just two weeks before – and have now used continuously for 16 years. So I had to get to know my saxophone at the same time I was making the recording, which made it even more of an adventure.’ Ernie Watts describes himself as an analog man in a digital world; he even used that designation for a recent album. One might add that he is something of an invisible man as far as the recording world is concerned. Few of his records have stuck in catalogue, despite their obvious merits, and apart from his membership of Charlie Haden’s Quartet West and a few other high-profile situations, he remains largely unknown to a wider jazz public or else dismissed as a world music and fusion dabbler. His chief influence is Coltrane, but the Coltrane of the earlier, sheets-of-sound period. Watts is essentially a romantic player, but he’s far from undaring and the failure of his work to remain in catalogue is more a reflection of its uncategorizability than of its quality, which is consistently high. In 1991, he recorded Afoxé – say it ‘aff-oshay’ – a set of tautly dancing world grooves that would have intrigued Miles Davis had he lived to hear it. Reaching Up, from two years later, is more obviously a jazz record, and a pretty headlong one, too. If Watts was trying out a new saxophone, he wasn’t breaking it in gently. The solos are driving and intense. Some profess to hear a resemblance to Michael Brecker, and there is a brittle edge here and there that points in that direction, but it’s unmistakably Watts in his own voice. Jack DeJohnette, who had contributed drums and keyboard kalimba to Afoxé, provides the fuel, but credit also goes to that underrated composer and bassist Charles Fambrough, who brings ‘The High Road’, ‘Sweet Lucy’ and a good deal of invention and class to the set. Sandoval is featured on just two cuts, which is just about right; any more and he might have overheated things. Miller’s comping is exact but attractively loose. Watts includes a Coltrane tune (‘Mr Syms’) and a standard (‘I Hear A Rhapsody’), but his own material dominates, particularly the concluding pair of ‘Angel’s Flight’ and ‘Sweet Rhapsody’. Some might find the multi-noted approach a little excessive, but there’s structural iron in every solo.

评语：Keith Nichols says: ‘We took great pains to match the sound of the original instruments. Trombonist René Hagmann managed to find a pre-war instrument – the same model Jimmy Harrison played in 1927. The pieces were taken from 1924–31, ranging from the Louis Armstrong period to early swing. Playing and arranging styles in hot dance music evolved out of all recognition during that time, demanding great versatility from the musicians on this CD. It was an education for us all and we’re very proud of it.’ Nichols is a British specialist in American repertory: ragtime, hot dance music, New York jazz of the ’20s, Blake, Morton, Berlin, whatever. He has a versatile background in acting and entertaining, but is primarily a practising scholar of ragtime and early jazz repertory. His piano-playing and Hoagy Carmichael-like singing are less important than the mastery of old form that he successfully displays on his records. Henderson Stomp is surely his finest hour to this point and one of the most convincing pieces of authentic-performance jazz ever set down. Stomp Off producer Bob Erdos has always been keen on authenticity, with the accent on lesser-known pieces. Transcriptions were done by Nichols, Claus Jacobi and Bent Persson. Twenty-two of Fletcher Henderson’s most effective pieces – from several hands, though many of Don Redman’s somewhat familiar charts are bypassed in favour of other arrangements – are re-created by a picked team of some of the most talented repertory players and revivalists in Europe: the brass team alone is gold-plated, with the amazingly versatile Persson and Barker set alongside the brilliant Hagmann. The reed section seems totally schooled in the appropriate section sound of the period – Guy Barker sits almost unnoticed in the section, but is just as good as Marsalis, or Payton, at this kind of thing – and each of the tunes emerges with the kind of rocking swing that is properly flavoursome of the era. With such a strong team of soloists, the various breaks and carefully fashioned improvisations have the nous needed to transcend any scripted mustiness.

评语：Glenn Spearman said (1992): ‘I got saddled with the reputation of being this crazy/John Coltrane/screamer/out-there type and that never left me. I don’t think it’s done any real harm, but it maybe didn’t do that much good either.’ Spearman’s death from liver cancer left a sense of things undone and of a major talent not yet properly recognized. His blues-soaked sound bears comparison with anyone from Illinois Jacquet to Archie Shepp. He’d got involved in creative music-making in Oakland in the ’60s, but was a relative latecomer to recording. Spearman was over 40 before he made Utterance for Cadence, so not surprisingly he already sounded settled into a strong and individual voice. He started out as a Coltrane-influenced screamer but quickly recognized that a more thoughtful delivery might well bear dividends. Spearman made a couple of fascinating records for Black Saint in the early ’90s with a group that included ROVA’s Larry Ochs, percussionist William Winant and others on that Californian free scene. Dedicated to Ornette Coleman (and to the structured freedom on Ornette’s Free Jazz), Mystery Project consists of a large three-part suite, in which the direction of the music is dictated not so much by notated passages as by the distribution of the personnel. As in ROVA man Larry Ochs’s ‘Double Image’, the basic group is a palette from which various colours and shadings can be drawn. Spearman’s personal colour-code would seem to be black and red. He’s a fierce player, overblowing in the upper register and virtually incapable of anything less than full throttle. He never sacrifices subtlety to power, though. This is intelligent music that never palls or sounds dated. The follow-up record has the same line-up and makes similarly effective use of doubled instruments. It’s a long – 75-minute – suite with an intermission built in, not because an LP version required a break, but because the music is so unremittingly present that one couldn’t absorb any more without some surcease. Spearman’s time in Europe opened up many interesting compositional ideas to him, but these performances are squarely in the tradition of the ’60s avant-garde, and their strength comes from Spearman’s profound conviction that the ideas adumbrated at that time are far from exhausted but still constitute a lingua franca for improvisation. The ‘in-take’ and ‘out-take’ of ‘Axe, Beautiful Acts’ exude a fierce poetry that is worthy of Cecil Taylor.

评语：Reggie Workman said (1995): ‘I spent a lot of time supporting other artists in their projects, and I realized that it wouldn’t be easy to jump back in and assert myself with my concept, which might not be something the industry wanted at that time. But I know that those who have followed my evolution will understand.’ As befits his name, Workman has clocked up a formidable number of credits: with Coltrane (Olé, the 1961 European tour, the Africa/Brass sessions) and with Wayne Shorter, Mal Waldron, Art Blakey, Archie Shepp and David Murray. It has often been asked what might have happened had he remained with Coltrane, but it’s academic: impending personal loss and other responsibilities meant he had to move on and it seems both patronizing and potentially hurtful to dwell on it as if his life stalled at that point. He played R&B as a teenager, then worked in New York hard-bop groups in the ’60s before moving towards the freer styles of Coltrane and Archie Shepp. Far from being a closeted avant-gardist, Workman is a communicator and a selfless teacher. But he is also a forceful composer and leader who has moved on to explore areas of musical freedom influenced by African idioms and frequently resembling the trance music of the griots. There are Latin tinges, too, in the music, African-Cuban rather than ersatz south-of-the-border stuff. It energizes Summit Conference and the equally superb Cerebral Caverns, which followed from a similar high-octane group. It’s a wish-list line-up. Rivers and Priester are in boilingly good form; akLaff keeps the pace up. Hill isn’t a delicate player and it worried us at first that he didn’t seem to be coming through the mix, but he’s there, under it all. The bulk of the session is uptempo, often in subtly fractured metres that still get their information across straightforwardly. The Sonelius Smith tune ‘Conversation’ shows how much Workman stays close to his roots, but there’s still room for a heart-on-sleeve ballad, Rivers’s ‘Solace’, introduced by trombone, piano and sax before the composer goes up a gear and delivers his most magisterial solo for years. Priester’s ‘Breath’ is pitched in a distant, sharp-ridden key, and the set closes with Rivers on flute, duetting with Hill on the pianist’s ‘Gone’. Workman is self-effacing on his own date, but he marshals the energy and one is always conscious of him at the centre of the music. On another day, we might pick Cerebral Caverns ahead of this one, if only for Geri Allen’s unpredictable presence, but …

评语：Barry Guys says: ‘The score, one large-format sheet, is graphic in nature and is designed to take into account the mixed abilities of this co-operative ensemble. Various “modules” of musical material hover over a dark void which can be brought into play via flash cards. This void is graphically indicative of the fragility of co-operative groups where the passing of time may implode or explode the artistic intentions of its members.’ Guy is relatively unusual in the field of improvised music in having kept up a parallel career in composition and in performance of the baroque. What impact this has on his improvisations is a matter for discussion, but one senses the presence of other musical influences, as a kind of ‘back story’. Guy has been at the hub of British free music and organized improvisation since the end of the ’60s, when he was a member of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Iskra 1903 and Amalgam, who along with AMM staked out British free music’s field of enquiry. He is also the founder and motive force of the London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra, whose long history provides a barometric reading of current musical philosophies. In addition, Guy has performed in trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lytton. Apart from some of the LJCO works, Guy’s large-scale compositions and improvisation structures are still not as widely regarded as, say, Braxton’s, which is surprising and somewhat unjust. Few figures in the field so confidently blend intellectual sophistication with the flexibility one associates with improvising ensembles. Study – Witch Gong Game II/10 was commissioned by the New Orchestral Workshop in Vancouver and is performed by that group here. It is an important work, inspired by the Scottish painter and saxophonist Alan Davie’s series of paintings of the same name and it has continued to be part of Guy’s working repertoire. The Canadian group take to the discipline vigorously, but one senses that discipline is the operative word and that Guy controls the procedures quite strictly. That shouldn’t imply a work of conservatory dryness, for Study – Witch Gong Game II/10 has a dark and scarifying cast, a musical Walpurgisnacht that makes for very unsettling, but also very satisfactory, listening. The other piece on the record, ‘Study’, is a briefer, drone-based work that uses minimal material to push the ensemble steadily towards a breakout point for improvisation. Its lighter presence complements the main recording’s uncanny sound-world rather well.

评语：Harold Danko says: ‘Staying in Italy with my friends Enzo and Claudio Verdelli, right before coming to Denmark for the recording, I was slightly overwhelmed by the prospect of making a permanent pianistic document of the great music of John Coltrane. Turning from practice, I scanned one of the only English books in the house, dealing with the Japanese tea ceremony. (I drink coffee, particularly in Italy, so this was nicely off-topic.) I found one of those wonderful words for which there is no English counterpart: wabi, which translates roughly as “appreciation of the imperfections in art over time”. Pragmatist rather than philosopher I immediately sought to apply this to my situation, and it came in very handy. During playbacks, instead of being overly critical I simply acknowledged the many instances of future wabi I may have created.’ Steeplechase producer Nils Winther has an instinct for piano-players and gives Danko, who’s not a showy or histrionic player but someone who shapes his music with warmth and intelligence, a nicely expansive sound that helps it all communicate. Where Tommy Flanagan treated a similar date as an occasion for richly abstract meditations on Coltrane material, Danko approaches it both more modestly and more radically. He tackles no fewer than 14 Coltrane compositions, ranging from ‘After The Rain’, ‘Lonnie’s Lament’ and a brilliantly re-conceived ‘Syeeda’s Song Flute’ to less obvious material like ‘Dahomey Dance’, ‘Mr Day’ and ‘Straight Street’. What is remarkable is that Danko makes these tunes sound both naturally pianistic and utterly his own. To be sure, he doesn’t take on anything from Interstellar Space and treats each theme in an essentially song-like way, but that isn’t to suggest that this is Coltrane-lite. Even his reading of ‘After The Rain’, which has become something of a piano cliché, with all those tumbling chords and lavish voicings, has solid structural muscle. Though clearly intended as a homage, there is no obstacle to wholesale reinvention, and Danko recasts ‘Mr Sims’ and ‘Wise One’ with a free hand. Danko’s a modest fellow, but among contemporary piano-players he is one of the wise ones, a musical thinker who’s worth the outlay of time whatever the context, but never more revealing than when he plays solo.

评语：Steve Lacy said: ‘When I was a young man, I guess I used to haunt Monk. I’d go along to a club and stand right next to the piano. He’d ignore me for the longest time and then at the end look up and say in a tired voice: “Oh, it’s you again, Steven.” ’ Emanem curator Martin Davidson’s point that the daring Lacy showed in his very first solo saxophone performances in the early ’70s was rarely seen again is well taken, but also somewhat misleading. In 1994, Lacy turned 60. At least some of the fire and Eugene Gant hunger for musical experience was stilled. In the early ’90s, he had seemed content to be part of a band, to showcase his own compositions and arguably to take fewer improvisational chances than in the past. But having spent a good deal of time over the previous few years working with the group and with larger-scale arrangements, Lacy showed every sign of wanting to return to unaccompanied performance. The gesture in itself suggests that his appetite for raw self-exposure hadn’t gone, though of course there are also strong economic reasons for unaccompanied touring. This recording was made during an improvisation festival in Stockholm. It is pretty much exactly as described, five tunes by the master and five originals, including the familiar ‘The Crust’ and ‘Deadline’, both of them well-established Lacy repertory tunes. His approach to both ‘Pannonica’ and ‘Evidence’ is notable for subtle shifts in the geometry of the tune, changing internal relationships without changing the components, rather like one of those relativity diagrams in which time-space is presumed to be gridded on a sheet of rubber which can then be stretched and folded but not cut or torn. The fabric of Monk’s composition remains intact, but dramatically changed.

评语：Peter Kowald said (1991): ‘I don’t play jazz and I don’t play any instrument other than the bass, which was intended for European art music and then found itself playing different things, in New Orleans and Chicago and anywhere one floated up. I take sounds from all over, and I pause with respect in front of them, but I only pause: I don’t hesitate to take from any music I hear, and use it.’ One of the most individual of the European free players, Kowald is more often advanced as an influence on other players than for his own work. The catalogue is thin enough, but what is available is of consistently excellent quality, concentrated and intense, with an independence of spirit audible in the voice which recalls Pettiford and Mingus. In the late ’80s, Kowald curated and participated in an epic sequence of improvising duos with European, American and Japanese players that opened up fresh contacts and associations in free music. It may seem difficult, if not impossibly perverse, to justify our selecting a record of solo contrabass improvisations. We are unrepentant. This is music of the very highest order, technically adroit, emotionally and intellectually concentrated, and beautifully recorded. Only Derek Bailey and Evan Parker have shown themselves capable of sustained solo performance at this level; what distinguishes Kowald is the light, dry humour he brings to these pieces, philosophical quiddities that seem perfectly content not to be answered. Without other instruments in attendance, Kowald goes for a stronger and more than usually resonant attack which mitigates a slightly dry sound. A record to savour and ponder; a record to return to, as often as time allows.

评语：Evan Parker says: ‘It came in the period after I had left Incus and before psi was up and running, so I was reliant on other independents to record. Leo Feigin called and said: “But Evan, it muuuust be recorded. Leave it to me.” He used all his old BBC connections to make sure it was done well. He got two good sets. Those two trios are still working, and people are still buying the CD. It was a great night.’ ‘The echoing border zones …’ Robert Graves’s poetry seems the ideal source for titles for these performances, which again combine Parker’s gritty involvement in ideas and history, though this time the history is his own. The two trios represented his most important long-term associations. Despite the essential Englishness of much of his aesthetic (not the Englishness of the pastoralists or the Georgians, but of those who built an empire on empiricism and craft), Parker has always gravitated to the European scene. As he describes in an unwontedly personal liner-note, bassist Peter Kowald, promoter and label boss Jost Gebers and pianist Alex von Schlippenbach were largely responsible for widening his musical horizons, in terms of playing partnerships. The Schlippenbach trio with Lovens is the perfect counterbalance to the more familiarly documented work with Guy and Lytton. This is probably the only small group with two separate entries in this editon of the Guide: see under Schlippenbach (p. 401). The textures are more open and more concerned with radical harmonics. Lovens and Lytton are occasionally confused – verbally – even by people who know the scene well. They couldn’t be mixed up even on the briefest hearing. Lovens is immensely detailed, a microsurgeon of the pulse, while Lytton tends to favour broader and more extended areas of sound, opening and unfolding like an anatomist. The long opening piece with Schlippenbach, ‘Hero Of Nine Fingers’, is supremely well argued, with Parker and the pianist trading ideas at a dazzling pace. This isn’t energy playing, but it generates its own energies moment to moment. The only quibble is that disc one is just 45 minutes in length (and disc two a mere 40); but that does not alter the sheer brilliance of conception and execution. The remaining pieces with Guy and Lytton seem particularly focused on this celebratory occasion. Rising 50 himself, Guy has regularly rethought his musical parameters, and one can almost hear him refining his language as he plays. Lytton is flawless on the long ‘In Exultation’, though he’s the one musician on the set who probably isn’t well served by the sound. The occasion, recorded in Dingwalls Club in north London, was very special. These documents are no less so. It would be hard to imagine music less ephemeral.

评语：Claudio Roditi said (1999): ‘My mother’s sister married an American man and it was spending a holiday with them in Bahia that opened up jazz to me. My uncle was interested and he told me about Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Miles, modern things. There was a great Frank Rosolino album, too, with Sam Noto on trumpet on the Stan Kenton Presents series.’ An eclectic musician who never sounds like he’s butterflying from one style to the next, Roditi came up from Rio to study at Berklee and then settled in New York, though these days he turns up almost anywhere, doing a mix of things from Latin to relatively orthodox hard bop. Roditi doing a tribute to Lee Morgan sounds like a recipe for overcooking it. Yet Free Wheelin’ comes close to being exactly the classic album the trumpeter might have in him. This is the best band he’s had in the studio: Boiarsky is a heavyweight, and the rhythm section, especially the inimitable Williams, are right there with the horns. But it’s Roditi’s concentration of his own powers that impresses here. Without trading in any of his fire, he keeps all his solos tight and impeccable, which makes flare-ups like those on ‘Trapped’ and ‘The Joker’ all the more exciting. ‘The Sidewinder’ follows the original arrangement – in his notes Roditi confesses that he couldn’t see any point in messing around with the original charts – and still sounds entirely different from Morgan’s original. Nine of the ten tunes are from Morgan’s own pen, but the new twist on ‘A Night In Tunisia’ – with trumpet overdubs and a two-soprano section – is a startling departure. Brignola guests on three and is a welcome visitor.

评语：Publisher of The Wire, Tony Herrington, says: ‘The man is quite remarkable. He is up at 5 a.m. and he spends half the day on the phone to this huge constituency of people who know him as musical collaborator, teacher and guru, label boss, producer, landlord and friend. He has a whole culture shaped around him.’ A good deal of Zorn’s music falls outside the remit of this book, and this book is too small to deal adequately with the range of Zorn’s music, which has covered free improvisation governed by game theory, quasi-bop projects, interpretations of Jewish traditional music, large-ensemble scores for movies and pretty much everything else in between. A single sample does no justice to the man or his work, but we console ourselves with the thought that this applies to pretty much everyone else in the book and that choosing 50 Zorn projects wouldn’t get much closer to exhausting his diversity. A lifelong New Yorker, Zorn studied briefly in St Louis but made his mark with the circle of improvisers based in New York in the mid-’70s. He steadily came to wider attention through relentless work, composing, performing and eventually gaining major-label recognition, though this was soon sidelined in favour of his own label, Tzadik, which releases most of his work. Groups down the years include Naked City, Painkiller and Masada. Outspoken, furiously prolific but ruthless about quality control, Zorn has fashioned his own multiple-idiom music, of which jazz remains a buried but tangible part. Zorn’s major creative enterprise of the last 15 years has been a steady and passionate (re-)discovery of his own Jewish musical heritage. On Tzadik he has curated a sequence of records called ‘Radical Jewish culture’, but his own most direct input has been the improvising quartet he calls Masada, which has produced a very substantial body of work based on small, folkish-sounding themes that stand in the same relation to Zorn’s work as Anthony Braxton’s ‘Ghost Trance’ and ‘language music’ compositions do to his, with all the obvious differences accounted for. Masada has also incorporated other instrumental elements over time and Bar Kokhba is a fine example of how confidently Zorn expands the concept. These are exquisitely voiced folkloric essays, executed without strain. Zorn’s own part in these ensembles is more distant than in the quartet, where he is inevitably the lead voice. The quartet is also more obviously a ‘jazz’ ensemble, where here the music sounds as if it arises out of the culture intact and without mediation, which is considerable testimony to his powers of synthesis and persuasion. It is exquisitely beautiful and often very moving. Douglas and Speed are the most effective solo performers, though Dresser’s rich bass-playing is a huge asset. And yet, it is Zorn, as always, who dominates as composer/historian if not this time as instrumentalist. That, though, is worth a footnote, for it is often forgotten just how fine an alto saxophonist Zorn is, fleet and boppish and with an unmistakable tonality that predates his active interest in Jewish musical culture; even then, its ‘blue notes’ always seemed to come from another place.

评语：Rich Perry says: ‘I listened to it yesterday, and as I thought, I’ve improved so much since that recording. I should record those tunes again; maybe I will because I’ve no other ideas at the moment! I must say I liked “But Not For Me” best. I remember Nils Winther also recorded me with Paul Bley that same week with Jay and Victor, kind of a package deal. Wish I could do that one over again, too! I came late to small-group recording, but the experience I got on those early Steeplechases really paid off down the road.’ Previously hidden in big-band sections and sideman roles for some 20 years, the tenorman’s absolute command goes with a soft-edged tone and an undemonstrative delivery that creates a paradox at the centre of his style. Other commentators have cited Getz, Marsh and Rollins among his models, yet Perry doesn’t sound much like anyone else and his individuality takes some time to tease out; once it’s evident, though, he suddenly becomes quite distinctive, even when he pops up on someone else’s date. Perry manages to be consistent without being boring and there’s little to choose between the early dates for Steeplechase. Instead, more depends on the context. Beautiful Love is the pick of the three, since without a piano the skill and judicious intensity of the sax-playing come through more clearly. There are truly marvellous improvisations on ‘Prisoner Of Love’, ‘All The Things You Are’ and ‘I Fall In Love Too Easily’ at the heart of the record, and for once eight quite lengthy tracks don’t seem a moment too long. ‘But Not For Me’ has an almost philosophical calm at the heart, and at a stroke raises Perry to the first rank of young contemporaries. Anderson and the superb Lewis are also in good order.

评语：John Surman says: ‘It was inspired by my great-great-grandfather, who lived in Portesham, Dorset. I never met him, but I heard many, many stories as a youngster. How many were true I’ll never know – but I found inspiration in the legend at any rate.’ As long ago as 1972, the year after Tales Of The Algonquin, Surman had been experimenting with solo performance and with the possibilities of overdubbing. Westering Home is a spare, sometimes raw but very intense record. To some degree this was a necessary fix for a musician whose label contact had been severed, but it was also an aspect of music-making that fascinated him, particularly now that The Trio, his main improvising small group, was no more. New groups followed, including the all-saxophone trio SOS, but with the recording in 1975 of Morning Glory, and contact with the eponymous group’s Scandinavian member, Terje Rypdal, Surman was in every way embarked on a course that would lead him to ECM. He first recorded for Manfred Eicher in 1979. Upon Reflection was the first in a series of multi-tracked solo projects on which he improvised horn-lines over his own synthesizer tracks. It was similar to what he had been doing with SOS, but it also saw a strong return for his baritone-playing, which had been somewhat set aside in favour of the soprano. Now, Surman was required to play right through the ‘section’. As Surman’s facility with this kind of project grew, he placed steadily less emphasis on synthesized ostinati and more on the detailed interplay of horn-lines. Adding alto clarinet to his armoury delivered an important new timbre and tonality, and many of these pieces seem to be lighter and more plain-spoken than the earlier ECMs. It is the same mix of jazz, folk and church themes, however, the only difference lying in the more relaxed, less stressed opposition of tension and release, and in the significance accorded to individual lead-lines. Right at the heart of the album, ‘’Twas But Piety’ marks almost a summing up of Surman’s musical explorations up to that point, an impassioned saxophone piece, but with ‘organ’ accompaniment at beginning and end and with a loose and limber approach to counterpoint. We are admirers of all Surman’s solo ventures, but this one has a special quality that sets it apart.

评语：Richard Galliano said (1999): ‘The accordion is a travelling instrument. It’s not like a piano or an organ. You have it here, strapped to your front, on the train or in the street. That is why it is everywhere in world music.’ Ubiquitous the accordion may be, but it has surprisingly little presence in jazz, and at present Galliano is its most distinguished practitioner. His background is that of French musette, which he has carried forward and modernized somewhat in the way his great mentor Astor Piazzolla modernized Argentinian tango. Piazzolla is the presiding genius of modern accordion. Galliano is by no means in thrall to him, but like any accordion-player he draws heavily on Piazzolla themes, notably ‘Libertango’ and ‘Milonga del Angel’ on the wonderful Laurita. The core trio has a close understanding. Baron, that most musical of drummers, plays with real grace and delicacy and Danielsson is always lyrical. The guest players deliver exactly what you would expect of them, and no more. Their presence is welcome, but not necessary. Delightfully, this isn’t just a record of swooning romanticism. A tribute to zydeco king Clifton Chenier is the penultimate track, giving the tail of the set a vibrant, upbeat, dancing quality that transforms its occasional Debussy-meets-Bill-Evans airs into something more robust and earthy. It’s an almost perfectly balanced record.

评语：Stomp Off boss Bob Erdos said (1998): ‘The label had a hand in putting this band together and what it gives you is a flavour of how Dixieland jazz might have sounded with modern audio fidelity.’ Part of the Californian revival, Gill has multi-threaded credentials in a series of groups, including the alarmingly named Novelty Orchestra Of New Orleans, but driven by a sincere passion for New Orleans music. Shading between revivalism and a straight and strict re-creation of hot dance, Gill’s outfit sometimes errs on the side of the latter, which will tend to switch off all but the more dedicated archivists. Gill plays trombone rather than banjo on the later sets, calls the group – which achieved considerable festival success in the later ’90s – The Dixieland Serenaders, and has them play the stuffing out of a repertoire brimful of Oliver, Morton, Dodds – and Lu Watters–Turk Murphy revivalism. Except that this group actually sounds better than the oldtimers of San Franciscan jazz usually did. The two-trumpet front line blows over the rest of the band like a particularly cussed zephyr, and Giordano and Smith give the group a terrific lift even when they’re playing a simple two-beat. The result is a shakedown of a lot of mothballed tunes that puts a new lease on almost all of them. We like Looking For A Little Bluebird for its maniacal ‘Alligator Hop’ and the beautiful extended treatment of ‘Farewell To Storyville’, and for Richard Bird’s sound, which shoves the band right in your face while still giving them a full and clear balance. The sequel, Take Me To the Midnight Cakewalk Ball, is almost as good.

评语：Abdullah Ibrahim said (1993): ‘We were in Seattle when [Nelson Mandela] was set free. We knew from ANC that something was going on, that something large was going to be resolved, and by peaceful means. We watched all night on television, a very emotional time.’ Ibrahim’s career has obviously reflected to a large degree the situation in his native South Africa, which changed on 11 February 1990 when ‘Madiba’ (Nelson Mandela) was freed from jail. One does not hear an immediate loosening in Ibrahim’s music, but certain buried currents do begin to rise to the surface. He had for so long sublimated his anger into expression that there was no question of that energy abating. Yarona is a truly magisterial performance by the 60-year-old, bringing the house down at Sweet Basil in New York City. He still hits the piano very hard, using the bass almost as a drone, alternating narrow intervals and often allowing the drummer considerable licence to range outside the metre. The left hand is relentless and, in the other sense, timeless, the melody-lines stripped down and ritualized. ‘Duke 88’ once again acknowledges a personal debt. ‘Nisa’ is an exclamatory hymn to another, the womenfolk of South Africa. There is a reworking of ‘African Marketplace’ and a concert outing for ‘Stardance’, one of the lovelier themes from the Chocolat soundtrack. The love song ‘Cherry’ (not, as one critic assumed, a tribute to the trumpeter) shows his more lyrical side.

评语：Jim Hall said (1992): ‘When I was a young teenager, about 13 years old, I heard a Charlie Christian record: “Grand Slam”. That was it. That was my life’s calling, right there.’ Hall’s smooth, gentlemanly approach got seriously interesting only once he had passed his 60th birthday and started to work with larger groups. Totally professional, Hall delivers reliably every time, with no apparent difference in approach between live and studio sessions. The former don’t lack for polish but nor do they ramble on any longer than they need to. Hall can never be accused of redundancy, for his solos are always unimpeachably controlled. Nor can he be described without qualification as a mainstream swinger, for he has impeccable credentials with some of the key modernists, appearing on records with Jimmy Giuffre, Sonny Rollins, Art Farmer, even with John Lewis, Gunther Schuller and Ornette Coleman in a Third Stream context, and in more recent times with fellow guitarists Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell as well. He studied classical music and later took an interest in Argentinian music too, and both of those surface – often subliminally – in his mature work. We wouldn’t suggest that Hall isn’t worth listening to before 1990, but there is a curious shortfall in the surviving discography that might suggest such a thing. Concord, Musicmasters and Creed Taylor’s CTI all recorded him, but not much survives from that time, and it wasn’t until the (almost) solo Dedications & Inspirations, made for Telarc in 1993 with an experimental new playback system which allowed him to duet with himself, that Hall started to sound like a major recording artist. The solo concept was to take a step further on Dialogues, though there are only two duet tracks, both with Goldstein on his regular and bass accordion. The rest are small-group performances designed to highlight horns and guitar, and with Colley and Watson taking pretty much a back seat. With the exception of the closing ‘Skylark’, which features Harrell in exquisite form, all the tunes are Hall originals, written with a playing partner in mind – ‘Frisell Frazzle’, ‘Calypso Joe’, and ‘Stern Stuff’ – and it is Mike Stern who delivers the surprise of the session with an offbeat blues sound on ‘Uncle Ed’. Frisell is in typically playful form on the opening dedication, reappearing on ‘Simple Things’, which has more of a country feel. The saxophonist has had more convincing days, but he manages to give his two appearances a reasonably personal slant. Telarc recordings are famously good, but on this occasion John Snyder and Jane Hall have outdone themselves. Holding back a notch on the rhythm section was a risky stratagem, but what they have produced has near-perfect balance and no loss of definition.

评语：Bassist Dave Green said (1996): ‘He’s solid, he’s forgotten more songs than most piano-players will ever learn, but, above all, he’s never boring.’ ‘Is that a nickname?’ an American fan asked on being told who the piano-player was. ‘If so, it’s not just cruel, it’s irrelevant. He’s terrific.’ He is, indeed, and has been for five decades, though it was John Bune’s lemon-liveried Zephyr imprint that put the pianist on the recording map. The label debut throws up three bars from the first. It’s a quality record. The title-track is a model of its kind, and the medley of ‘Exactly Like You’ and ‘I Thought About You’ works at all sorts of levels. A version of Sonny Rollins’s ‘St Thomas’ doesn’t sit quite as obviously for Lemon’s technique but, following as it does the one original, ‘Blues For Suzanna’, it underlines his other gift, the pacing and direction of a set. The most common criticism of the records that followed is that they tend to be polite, perhaps a little chummy, but jazz isn’t all sparring and intrigue. Sometimes it’s possible to let the songs speak for themselves, and Lemon does this with sure-footed intuition.

评语：Label boss Werner Uehlinger reports Dave Douglas’s reaction to the record: ‘Yes, that was a good day!’ Fifteen years ago, the authors of the Guide were calling – together and severally – for a moratorium on the cult of Miles Davis and due attention to a rising generation of trumpet masters, and most particularly Dave Douglas. He wasn’t the least obvious horse to back, a player of staggering technique and laconic but capacious musical vision, who seemed effortlessly to take in early jazz, the avant-vernacular of Lester Bowie, Balkan music and much else in between. He began improvising while an exchange student in Spain and had an extended musical education; not just the requisite Berklee sojourn, but the New England Conservatory and New York University as well. The alumnus is an individualist whose grasp of history is apparent mainly in elision and omission rather than homage. Here was a contemporary jazz artist confident enough to include Webern in one early set-list and with a purview that went beyond music to world affairs: no closeted aesthete or style-policeman. Douglas has led a number of different groups, more recently Charms Of The Night Sky, which is named after a fine Winter & Winter record. The Tiny Bell Trio with Brad Schoeppach (now Shepik) and Jim Black was perhaps his first important ensemble, a lean, flexible group with an intriguing Balkan-improv remit. The best of the Tiny Bell records, Constellations was recorded off-road but mid-tour. One hears immediately that this is a working unit. Douglas’s Balkan interests – both musical and political – come through strongly. ‘Taking Sides’ is inspired by the brutal civil war in the former Yugoslavia, a raw, powerful expression of anger and mourning. In an entirely different vein, ‘Maquiladoras’ takes up cudgels for low-paid migrant workers. ‘Scriabin’ is a thoughtful essay in extreme chromaticism, almost serial in quality, and ‘Hope Ring True’ sounds like ’60s agit-prop jazz. To underline his eclecticism and sense of history, Douglas hands the pianoless group a forgotten Herbie Nichols theme, ‘The Gig’, and makes it sound utterly contemporary as well. Douglas seems confident in his partners, allowing Black in particular to stretch out and express himself. Schoeppach throws deliciously complex harmonic shapes, a crushed-velvet foil to the trumpeter’s bright lines.

评语：Saxophonist John Dankworth said (1998): ‘French players and fans ask you about Tonee Coe, the Danes have given him this big jazz prize, an American lady asked me if I knew Tony Co-ay … the only place he doesn’t seem to be appreciated is England.’ Possessed of a glorious clarinet sound and an approach on tenor saxophone that often resembles Paul Gonsalves (who spent his last period in the UK, so there may be a connection), Coe is at home in almost any style from Dixieland to free, and has even – like his mentor, Alan Hacker – experimented in more formal settings. He took over the Plas Johnson saxophone role in later Pink Panther films and it is rumoured he played on a Beatles recording, though Coe himself has forgotten the occasion. His albums are dotted about all over the place, on labels as improbably matched as Nato, hat ART, Storyville, between the line, Hep and Zephyr, and despite the warm admiration of fans he has always seemed to work just under the radar. Fortunately, there are exceptions. In 1995, Coe was deservedly awarded the Jazzpar Prize, which brings a big-band performance as part of the award. The title-piece makes a strong and lyrical climax to an album that combines large-scale charts with a small combo that included Bob Brookmeyer, David Hazeltine, Henrik Bolberg Pedersen, Thomas Ovesen and Steve Argüelles. In addition to Coe, there are compositions by Brookmeyer, Argüelles and Maria Schneider. Unusual for a Jazzpar winner to be so retiring about his own work, but Coe won his award primarily as a player, one suspects, and so ‘Fools Rush In’ and ‘How Long Has This Been Going On?’ (the latter for full orchestra) are both superb. Coe’s tone is as pure as spring water, with none of the quavering ‘oboe’ sound he so much dislikes in the post-Coltrane players.

评语：Joe Morris says: ‘This is the manifestation of 20 years of figuring out that my interest in music was going to present itself in more than one approach. One producer I knew found fault with my plan to separate the different tracks by instrument. He thought I should mix up the sequence. But it really has to be the way it is because they are all so different.’ The Boston-based guitarist has a highly distinctive playing style, almost always in fast, single-note lines, with distinctive mid-phrase trills and a notable use of space. A charter member of the Boston Improvisers Group, Morris was an actively eclectic sideman and local star before he made it big as a recording artist. He has a facility for straight blues and fusion playing, but works in a pumped-up free style that works in quite stark, abstract ways. His self-determination extended to putting out records on his own Riti label, which has undergone a renaissance. It may seem excessive to include two Morris records from within essentially the same time period, but it is our conviction that the guitarist – who also plays double bass when occasion demands – is one of the most important musicians of recent times and it is testimony to his prodigal talent that no artist in this book provoked more changes of mind as to which records to highlight. If there were a new edition tomorrow, there might be two different choices. No Vertigo is a solo tour de force. Morris has obviously been influenced by British improviser Derek Bailey. His acoustic work is very reminiscent of Bailey’s ’70s work but with a hint of a jazz groove always hovering in the background, which Bailey seldom permits. He also includes tracks on an electric instrument (the long, very detailed ‘For Adolphus Mica’), banjouke (‘Long Carry’) and even mandolin (a sequence called ‘The Edges’). There is nothing slipshod about this music and neither do the individual instruments fall back into stereotypical ‘voices’ – ‘banjo means folk, electric means rock’ – something that even Bill Frisell has been guilty of. Even without playing partners Morris is a stern disciplinarian and the defining characteristic of all his music is a kind of responsiveness to context and a willingness to let the music exist spatially, as an object of attention, rather than as simply a passing phenomenon, each moment eaten up by the one that follows.

评语：Roy Hargrove said (1996): ‘Bop, rap: it doesn’t seem to me so far apart. Parker’s tunes were like parts of solos, with everything going round to the beginning again. You listen to that and you listen to … LL Cool J or KRS-One, and it’s not so very different.’ Spotted by Wynton Marsalis – who probably doesn’t share his insistence on the continuity of black vernacular music from hot jazz to rap – Hargrove was one of the first post-Miles trumpeters to show an equal facility in post-bop and other forms. He went on to record eclectically, but with jazz always in the foreground. Interestingly, Hargrove only spent a year at Berklee. He’s a raw, self-determined talent, who doesn’t appreciate academic solutions. Recorded in Parker’s 75th anniversary year, Parker’s Mood is a delightful meeting of three young masters, improvising on 16 themes from Bird’s repertoire. Hargrove’s luminous treatment of ‘Laura’ again suggests he may be turning into one of the music’s pre-eminent ballad players, but it’s the inventive interplay between the three men that takes the session to its high level. One clever aspect of the record is that it isn’t always three guys. ‘Chasin’ the Bird’ is done as a trumpet/bass duet and other tracks are taken as solos. Scott, sometimes burdened on his own records, plays as freely as he ever has, and McBride is simply terrific. No musician of his time provokes more curiosity in us, even if at times the signs of greatness refuse to break through.

评语：Django Bates said (2003): ‘I’m not really interested in jamming, that side of jazz. I need every piece to have its own character and shape and that comes from knowing the musicians you work with and writing things that you know they can play – not just in terms of technique but that they might do something interesting with.’ After stints with London bands Borderline and Zila, Bates worked with his own small group Human Chain and was a central player in the big band Loose Tubes, whose sophomoric humour sometimes camouflaged Bates’s brilliance as a composer. He remains committed to a view of jazz that allows play and playfulness full rein, but inevitably Britain took revenge on his creativity by starving him of commissions. Bates wisely decamped to Denmark and his occasional home visits are paid for in kroner. Summer Fruits is the first part of a loose, seasonal cycle of records that also includes Winters Fires (And Homes Ablaze), the solo piano album Autumn Fire (And Green Shoots) and, belatedly, Spring is Here (Shall We Dance?). The first record, originally on JMT, where everything was subject to a cold seasonal wind, alternates big-band arrangements with tracks from Bates’s Human Chain. It’s not an entirely happy combination and, for once, one feels a need for two discs to reflect what sound like rather different aspects of his musical personality. The vices of Loose Tubes are still in evidence: over-writing, a blokey exuberance and a callow suspicion of straightforward expression. Bates’s dense scores and the pieces for Delightful Precipice (the big band) are thickly notated. They’re undeniably lively, but the circus pieces, inspired by an earlier collaboration, are glibly ironic, and some of the most virtuosic scoring is lost in ‘off-the-cuff’ gestures. The Human Chain tracks, notably ‘Food For Plankton (In Detail)’ and ‘Little Petherick’ (which provides the best Bates solo of the disc) are much more coherent.