TT 345: Jay Clayton sings Steve Reich and McCoy Tyner

The late singer straddled many worlds

Sorry to hear about the passing of Jay Clayton, an important musician who worked with modernist icons such as John Cage and Muhal Richard Abrams in addition to singing standard jazz repertoire with the likes of Fred Hersch and Stanley Cowell. The bio on Clayton’s website details a fascinating life in music.

Clayton is one of the vocalists on the original 1981 ECM recording of Steve Reich’s Tehillim, a complex work featuring some of the fastest and most difficult odd-meter conceived for a formal score. Reich is indisputably one of the architects of our era, and for my own taste, Tehillim is his masterpiece.

I learned of Tehillim years ago from Jay Clayton’s student Karen Goldfeder. Karen’s substantial tribute to Jay on FB is heartfelt: “I hear her voice as a vein of volcanic rock, liquid and intensely colored, narrow in scope but shooting down below the surface of everything to reach the very core.”

Jay Clayton’s own album Brooklyn 2000 opens with “You Taught My Heart to Sing” by McCoy Tyner and Sammy Cahn. This song is perhaps unique: I can’t think of anything else written in the 1980’s by a jazz master like Tyner also graced with lyrics by an old-school “Great American Songbook” hero like Cahn.

Clayton is accompanied by George Cables, Anthony Cox, and Jerry Granelli.

Perhaps Clayton’s most distinctive work as an improvisor was in an abstract context. The 1988 album No Secrets from Quartett boasts a cast of all-stars (Clayton, Gary Peacock, Julian Priester, Jerry Granelli) and an amusing blurb: “Free jazz in a midlife crisis.”

Clayton’s own composition “Fortune Cookie” is loose and groovy, and towards the end her box of electronic magic tricks supplies an appropriately deranged coda.