TT 517: Roll Call

Recent losses: Andy Bey, Bunky Green, Roy Ayers, Alexander Goehr, Sofia Gubaidulina, James Foley, George Wendt, Joe Don Baker, Ken Bruen

Andy Bey. One of the best nights I ever had at the Jazz Standard was watching Bey’s trio with Joe Martin and Victor Lewis. Bey was a tremendous singer, of course, but he was also an exceptionally idiosyncratic pianist, far closer to Paul Bley or Andrew Hill than any number of fellow pianist/singers. (Fred Hersch joked to me that Bey the pianist “specialized in avoid tones.”) At the club that night, the voice was velvet, the piano was reaching, and the trio was swinging.

Billy Hart told me about a wonderful duo of Bey with Geri Allen on Billy Strayhorn’s “Pretty Girl.”

Bunky Green. The influential alto saxist lives on in the abstract intervallic phrasing of Greg Osby and, especially, Steve Coleman. Green’s albums include Places We’ve Never Been, which documents Randy Brecker, Albert Dailey, Eddie Gomez and Freddie Waits in fine 1976 form, while Another Place from 2004 offers a rare chance to hear Jason Moran and Nasheet Waits together on a standards date (Lonnie Plaxico completes the band).

The opening chorus of “It Could Happen to You” is loose and exploratory, and as the momentum builds, Green soars higher and higher. Taken together, these two albums are good place to examine father and son Freddie Waits and Nasheet Waits alone and in juxtaposition.

Roy Ayers. Ayers made a popular and commercial impact with his groovy and soulful vibraphone, and eventually would command name recognition in the world of hip-hop. For the jazz heads, Virgo Vibes from 1967 is intriguing listen. The first band (recorded in New York) is Charles Tolliver, Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock, Reggie Workman, and Bruno Carr, the second (recorded in LA) is Tolliver, Harold Land, Jack Wilson, Buster Williams and Donald Bailey. While the music has undeniable merit on its own, the tracks also fill out the larger picture of the marvelous creativity of the era. (It also fills out something about variable production values: The piano on both coasts is noticeably out-of-tune.) In terms of Ayers himself, the slow blues solo on the title tune is magnificent. (Land is great here as well.)

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Alexander Goehr. The noted British composer passed away late last year at 92. A piano piece he wrote for Peter Serkin, In Real Time, is one of my favorite things. Just a miracle. Like Elliott Carter, Goehr seemed to have a fairly accessible “late style.” In Real Time is definitely tonal, but the composer undoes conventional rules of tension and release. At some point I’d like to learn much more of Goehr.

Sofia Gubaidulina. The Russian composer was beloved and received many honors in her lifetime. She was somewhat in the lineage of Shostakovich and Schnittke: all three pulverized tonality from the outside, all exhibited grim Russian desolation and wit, and all were intrigued with updating the baroque: Shostakovich wrote fugues, Schnittke wrote concerto grossi, and the first Gubaidulina piece to travel to the west was Offertorium, based on Bach’s The Musical Offering.

Offertorium was championed by someone who would prove to be an important collaborator, the great Gidon Kremer. In The Lyre of Orpheus, composed in 2006 when Gubaidulina was 74, a string orchestra and a battery of percussion surround Kremer’s violin. It’s a rocky landscape, but the narrative thread is clear, eventually building to a devastating climax before drifting off into dust.

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James Foley. I rank At Close Range (1986) with Sean Penn and Christopher Walken as one of the great films. Apparently Sean Penn was hot, the studio thought they had the next James Dean on their hands, so they let the untested Foley do whatever he wanted. The film was not a box-office success, so that was basically that. Foley directed a few other notable pictures, including Glengarry Glen Ross, but nothing else is like At Close Range.

George Wendt. I had never seen an episode of Cheers until the socials were full of tributes to Norm. Sarah had liked the show when it was originally broadcast, so two nights ago we watched “Endless Slumper” from season one. It was good!

Joe Don Baker. I recently posted about Edge of Darkness, one of my favorite things ever. “To his credit, Baker doesn’t ever really seem like he’s acting. He simply embodies the genial big-boned Southern tough guy, immensely likable or terrifying.”

Ken Bruen. The White Trilogy hit me like a ton of bricks, and I included it on my big list of 20th-century crime fiction. “The 87th Precinct gone Irish insane.”

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Bonus track: When she was younger, Sofia Gubaidulina explored polystylism in the manner of Alfred Schnittke. While Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1 includes many quotations including modern jazz, Gubaidulina’s Revue Music for Symphony Orchestra and Jazz Band (the link calls it Concerto for Two Orchestras) seems to be a direct tribute to Lalo Shifrin’s score to Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, with funk rhythm section and wordless vocal. (I really like this—it makes me scream with laughter— in a way I don’t really like Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1. I adore Schnittke, but my favorite pieces are from after he got that epic Symphony out of his system.)