The Penguin Jazz Guide 1000 Best Albums

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：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：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：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：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：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：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：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：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：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：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：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：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：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：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.