TT 414: Richie Beirach

Coming Together for the great jazz pianist

Richie Beirach has a fundraiser for medical expenses, “who is currently facing overwhelming health and financial problems.”

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In the early 1960’s, there was McCoy Tyner, then there was Herbie Hancock. Hot on their heels by 1967 or so were Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett.

By the early 70’s, people were looking around to see who was next, and many would have voted for Richie Beirach, who was born in 1947 and just beginning to appear on major gigs and records. He had not just the fire and a brilliant piano technique, but also a unique harmonic approach that embraced the modernist ethos of 20th-century composers like Bela Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg.

Tyner, Hancock, Corea, and Jarrett all knew their dissonant composers as well, but they usually only visited that land for novelty effect. Beirach made his home at the modernist encampment, and it made his style fresh and distinctive.

Beirach’s lifelong musical partner is saxophonist David Liebman, and together they explored the post-Coltrane, post-acoustic Miles, and post-Bill Evans continuum with drive and finesse. The 1986 album Quest II on Storyville is one of my favorites from this prodigiously productive collaboration. This was the first time Liebman and Beirach recorded with Ron McClure and Billy Hart, a quartet that would go on to be a working unit for decades.

The album opens with Beirach’s composition “Gargoyles.”

“Gargoyles” starts as a ballad, something like jazz but unusually sophisticated in harmonic construction. A unison angular line for piano and sax fragments into nothingness, then a duo of bass and piano commence free exploration. It’s a rhapsodic fantasy of strangeness — one of Beirach’s best idioms — and concludes with truly virtuosic piano tremolos. The music transforms into backbeat vamp for the burning sax solo; Jabali is large and in charge. While the genres move around there’s no uncomfortable shifting of gears, the track is a unified statement. Peak 1986! The whole album is great.

Another version of “Gargoyles” is on The Duo Live, made in the same era as Quest II, one of the many recordings of Beirach and Liebman together alone onstage. The album was transcribed accurately in full by Bill Dobbins. Issuing the recording with a score was an unprecedented event, and the complex music deserved Dobbins’s careful attention.

Of Beirach’s own albums without Liebman, a good place to start is Elm, the 1979 ECM studio session with George Mraz and Jack DeJohnette. The complex chromatic interplay between the band was cutting edge at the time and still sounds good today. The album is also a showcase for Beirach the composer; the title elegy “Elm” might be as close as this generation of jazzers came to generating an anthem. (The fierce swinger “Pendulum,” heard on both Elm and Quest II, is another Beirach tune that helps define an idiom.)

Elm is a key post-1970 piano trio LP, and it also had far reach with other musicians. Students of Kenny Kirkland really must know this music to grok where Kirkland acquired a couple of harmonic moves…

I wasn’t aware of Rendezvous, an obscure 1981 duo album with Mraz, until recently, when it turned up on YouTube. Piano/bass duo albums tend to be relaxed and unambitious, but this is something else. Beirach supplies six sophisticated tunes and plays deep into the keys, conjuring his own kind of bitter romance. An important record, also for Mraz, who may sound his very best when confronting these kind of Beirach-ian deep waters; the famous bassist even contributes impressive arco melodic work on “Inborn.”

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When I was a teenager, Beirach and other musicians of this generation were style-setting stars, but the jazz life is never easy and nothing is ever guaranteed. I have contributed to the Richie Beirach fundraiser and encourage you to do the same.