TT 351: Podcasts, Posts, and Bebop

Phil Freeman, Paul Bley, Mose Allison, Archie Shepp

It’s good news that the Burning Ambulance podcast is back! I had a great time talking to Phil Freeman about a bunch of topics including my latest release. His cover note is flattering:

Ethan Iverson is also a really interesting American composer. You could be reductive about it and call him a synthesist of old and new pop and jazz styles, but he has a strong and recognizable voice that becomes easy to hear the more of his music you listen to. There are chords and types of melodies that he favors that set him apart from his peers, and he’s got a real attraction to big hooks, which manifested in the Bad Plus’s work in a number of ways and shows up in his solo work too. The Bad Plus developed a reputation for piano trio covers of pop songs that people often seemed to think were ironic, but were in fact performed from a perspective of real love for compositional form. A great tune is a great tune. And it’s worth remembering that they also recorded Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which is an avant-garde landmark but also has some really kick-ass and highly memorable melodies. After all, it was originally written for dancers.

Ethan’s new album, Technically Acceptable, is his second record for Blue Note and he’s doing some things on it that he’s never done before. First of all, he’s playing with two different rhythm sections that are made up of musicians more or less his own age, even younger than himself. Until now, he’s tended to record with older players, legends like Jack DeJohnette, Albert "Tootie" Heath, Billy Hart, Paul Motian, Ron Carter, etc. This is his first time post-Bad Plus making an album entirely with musicians of his own generation. Also, it includes a solo piano sonata – three movements, fifteen minutes, a through composed classical piece that still manages to fit under the umbrella of jazz in a George Gershwin meets Fats Waller kind of way. This album is a real showcase for him as a composer.

I recommend subscribing to Phil Freeman’s Substack, and am looking forward to reading his forthcoming book on Cecil Taylor.

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Also on Substack, Roz Milner is listening to Steve Lacy and Evan Goldfine is surveying J.S. Bach. It seems like Milner and Goldfine are planning to cover a lot of ground when looking at one artist, which is a perfect use of Substack. Another example: Vinnie Sperrazza is considering Max Roach for three posts.

A big welcome to Scott Gray Douglass! His Substack Commonwealth of Jazz is going deep. In the latest entry, Douglass looks at the amazing Undine Smith Moore.

In the more traditional journals:

Ben Ratliff writes about electric Miles Davis for The New York Review of Books. This is a significant piece.

Chris Almeida delves into “The Legend of the Selmer Mark VI” for The New Yorker. A fun article, and also an opening to namecheck one of the most seriously swinging albums of the mid-‘70s. Clifford Jordan’s The Night of the Mark VII (with Cedar Walton, Sam Jones, and Billy Higgins) is a rare jazz record with saxophone gear in the title. Try “Blue Monk” for a peak moment in the discography.

Mia Jackson takes over the Real Estate section at The New York Times for a worthy topic: “For Dizzy Gillespie, Queens Was the Place to Be and to Bop —Rebellious jazz took flight in Harlem at Minton’s Playhouse, but it was nurtured on the tree-lined streets that gave pioneering Black musicians a home.” It is touching to see current photos of Gillespie’s relatives.

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Somewhere in the middle of the above-mentioned podcast with Phil Freeman, I discuss my theory that McCoy Tyner was a significant shift in jazz piano, basically from tonal music grounded in bebop to modal music grounded in scales. Mr. Tyner himself was a bebop master, but some of the Tyner disciples might have a tiny missing puzzle piece skillfully obscured by impressive cascades of pentatonic patterns. Perhaps McCoy Tyner is superficially easier to understand (or cop from) than Bud Powell.

When teaching at NEC yesterday, I brought up two ‘50s jazz piano tracks. Both have solid “straight” bebop piano playing from people who are not associated with the style.

Paul Bley is an avant-gardist, the man who put Ornette Coleman on the piano before playing some of the slowest atonal beauty ever recorded on the 1967 masterpiece Ballads…but listen to him play a brisk “I Want to Be Happy” in 1954!

Mose Allison had a solid somewhat populist career as a soulful singer-pianist, so what the heck is this nifty “Blueberry Hill” from 1957?

I’m not saying these Paul Bley or Mose Allison tracks are up there with Bud Powell, Sonny Clark, Hampton Hawes, or Barry Harris. They aren’t. It was good that Bley and Allison moved on to their more personal languages. Still, they both understood the topic. That’s for certain.

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The SteepleChase Records label run by Nils Winther has done an incredible service documenting jazz cats in casual sessions. It’s an enormous catalog.

Two of the SteepleChase standouts are focused on bebop as seen through an avant prism.

Paul Bley’s BebopBebopBebopBebop from 1989 is one of Bley’s more significant sessions from the era. I always sort of thought this date of bebop-themed repertoire was “better than it should be,” and after I heard the pristine 1954 Bley it all made more sense. Bob Cranshaw and Keith Copeland play “straight” while Bley takes ludicrous chances. The best tracks might be a chaotic solo piano rumble through Dizzy Gillespie’s “Bebop” and a lyrical piano solo on Tadd Dameron’s “Ladybird.”

A related SteepleChase LP is Looking at Bird from 1980, where Archie Shepp and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen play themes associated with Charlie Parker. Not every track is equally masterful, but the opening “Moose the Mooche” is just fabulous. While Shepp is a touchstone for many, somehow I never really get into most of his famous records. However, Shepp plays medium-tempo rhythm changes so good here that it makes me want to reconsider everything else.

Delivering a medium-tempo rhythm changes with style and personality is one of the hardest things to do well.

The first thing Shepp does is quote the original Bird solo a bit, before getting going with honks, smears, and serious harmonic content. NHOP holds it down before taking a fancy solo. I just love it.