TT 524: Al Foster part 4: To Stadium Jazz or Not to Stadium Jazz?

Milestone Jazzstars IN CONCERT with Ron Carter, Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner; Tyner's own record QUARTETS 4X4; Buster Williams SOMETHING MORE; Freddie Hubbard OUTPOST

Part 1 shared what Al Foster told me personally.

Part 2 discusses the Joe Henderson/Al Foster connection.

Part 3 listens to Foster at the Vanguard in 1986 with Tommy Flanagan and Steve Kuhn.

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The 2-LP set Milestone Jazzstars In Concert has been repeatedly referenced in the obits and comments concerning the late great Al Foster.

However, it might be worth mentioning to civilians that musicians generally have a pretty low opinion of this album. I hadn’t listened to it in years. Truthfully it is a bit better than I remembered, but the fact remains that this group did not gel and the music is nowhere near as great as it should be.

The band was given a full court press in the industry, and two secondary sources discuss the project in detail. Doug Clark wrote the Downbeat article in 1978.

Aiden Levy devotes several pages to the Milestone Jazzstars in his biography Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins, where we learn that the 20-city tour was booked by legendary rock n’ roll promoter Bill Graham. It’s all obvious enough. This project was created from the top down: How do we sell a jazz stadium tour like a rock band?

As Milestone A&R man Orrin Keepnews verifies in the DB article, the Milestone Jazzstars were in the lineage of V.S.O.P., Herbie Hancock’s supergroup with Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. In hindsight, V.S.O.P. can also be a mixed bag, but certainly those cats are there to play together, and at least to some extent Hancock was in charge. Since Hancock is a fabulous bandleader, he ensured that these musicians’s god-given chemistry had a proper chance. If you love Freddie Hubbard or Tony Williams, you need the V.S.O.P. records, there is no two ways about that.

In stark contrast, the Milestone Jazzstars did everything they could to not play together. With no single captain able to steer the ship, that was perhaps the easiest way to do it: Over the course of the 2 LPs of the Milestone Jazzstars, only 3 of 8 tunes are quartet! (The rest are solos, duos, and trios.) Unfortunately, that little bit of group repertoire does not play to the musicians strengths. These are four of the master straight-ahead musicians—literally four of the greatest of all time—and instead of doing what they are good at, they try to rock the house with vamps and a backbeat blues. It’s an acoustic fusion concept, as if John Coltrane decided to play over a static backing track.

1978: Strange decisions were being made in every sector of the music. In the first instance, Sonny Rollins appears to be wrestling with Coltrane, and it wasn’t just because he was playing with McCoy Tyner. A jaw-dropping moment is on his “return” Next Album from 1972: the C minor blues “Keep Hold of Yourself” offers a literal take on pentatonic playing a la Coltrane. Rollins also took up soprano sax, another Coltrane speciality, and the smaller horn is featured on “Nubia” from the Milestones Jazzstars set, a garish moment that would be unrecognizable in a blindfold test. Finally, a bootleg offers the Jazzstars playing Coltrane’s signature piece “Impressions,” where Rollins plays literal Coltrane licks all over the tenor. Good grief!

In the arena of hardcore bebop, Sonny Rollins has John Coltrane beat by a country mile! (After Bird, the next guy is Sonny.) There is absolutely no reason for Sonny to try to go after Coltrane at Coltrane’s own game!

Rollins is not the only issue with the Milestone Jazzstars. Ron Carter was at the height of his desire to project the bass as a lead instrument; he was even fronting a band where he played all the melodies on piccolo bass. Carter plays melodies beautifully, but a bass is a bass. It’s really hard to make a stadium concert work with the acoustic bass as a lead instrument. For me, Carter fits better with the collective energy of untrammeled V.S.O.P. than as one of three leaders of Milestone Jazzstars.

Then there is Tyner in his ‘70s maximalist mode, filling in every corner with flurries, cascades, and thick chords. Whatever the tenor or the bass want to do, they have to work around that monolithic piano.

The one person who performs flawlessly is the only one not credited on the cover. Al Foster always sounded good, he hooked it up with taste and style no matter what. His high energy drumming on Milestone Jazzstars is perfect. Probably Foster himself wished they had added “Confirmation” and “If I Were A Bell” to the set list, but that wasn’t the gig. Foster played the gig, just like he always did.

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McCoy Tyner’s Milestone discography from the ‘70s and ‘80s is extensive and exhausting. At certain occasions in this era, Tyner must be the loudest and fastest pianist of all time.

When it works, it is just great. There’s something about the live album Enlightenment that is truly satisfying. The drummer on that record is Alphonse Mouzon, a thought leader of fusion drumming. Many of Tyner’s drummers in that era were in that mold: Louder, faster, harder, more rock ‘n roll.

Sometimes a genuine jazz drummer was present with Tyner in the studio. They make some difference in the music, especially on the swinging tracks, but even these swingers were frequently hemmed in with percussionists and endless vamps.

One of the cleanest, clearest, and best Tyner sessions for Milestone is Quartets 4x4 from 1980. Foster and Cecil McBee join Tyner in the core trio to support and challenge four diverse soloists, John Abercrombie, Arthur Blythe, Freddie Hubbard, and Bobby Hutcherson. Tyner seems genuinely curious to see what these four will bring to the table, and since each only play a couple of tunes, everyone basically gets right to the point (Abercrombie and McCoy take some time to wander about duo a bit). Most of the solos from all hands are notably good; McCoy’s choruses on “It’s You Or No One” (from the side with Blythe) are even worthy of transcription.

Like many Milestone releases, the claustrophobic engineering leaves something to be desired, even though all four sessions were done at Rudy Van Gelder’s in New Jersey. Cecil McBee might be too hot in the mix, another commonplace problem of the era.

Quartets 4x4 is not perfect, but it stands tall among its immediate competition, and Al Foster is just killing it throughout.

I am not exactly sure why Quartets 4x4 is so much better than Milestone Jazzstars. But part of it must simply be that the Milestone Jazzstars are trying to light it up for a stadium, while the bands on Quartets know they are humbly playing great jazz for a small but sincere audience.

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After V.S.O.P, Herbie dialed it back a bit for working unit with Buster Williams and Al Foster. This great trio was at the top of their game, but they existed only for a few years in the late ‘80s and made no official studio record. The name “Al Foster” does not appear in Hancock autobiography Possibilities.

At some point I should write up the concert footage, which includes appearances at Montreux in 1987 and Newport in 1988. The repertoire was arguably fresher than the V.S.O.P. book, featuring standards that Hancock had not previously been associated with such as “Limehouse Blues” and “Just One of Those Things.” Some of the videos also feature guests like Bobby McFerrin, Michael Brecker, and Greg Osby.

Buster Williams told me last week that he put the album Something More (1989) together specifically to document the way the trio with Herbie and Al was sounding. It was recorded out at Rudy’s with Wayne Shorter and trumpeter Shunzo Ohno, and it sounds much better than the McCoy Tyner session Quartets 4x4 discussed just above. Rudy must have decided to go retro for the return of Herbie Hancock, for this piano sound is identical to the classic Blue Note sound circa 1964, the era when Hancock was out at Van Gelder’s every other week.

The highlight is “Deception,” which is a straight up swinger with creative harmony, just like the old days. A fantastic track, fantastic magic carper from Buster and Al together, great solos from everyone. Surely this is one the best moments of Wayne Shorter tenor after 1969.

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Just one more favorite Al Foster performance from this era:

Freddie Hubbard’s Outpost on Enja was a modest affair with Kenny Barron, Buster, and Al. The way it should be done. In fact, I think this might be the definitive ballad performance of “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” It might not seem like Foster is doing all that much, but that whispering brush work and the shaping of the whole track is absolutely at the highest level of drum performance.

Outpost is from 1981, a particularly busy year for Hubbard. There were no less than three full all-the-bells-and-whistles fusion records produced around the same time: Mistral for Eastworld/Liberty, Splash for Fantasy, and Ride Like the Wind for Elektra/Musician. A lot of effort was expended on three albums that mostly have retro camp value today. “Hey, let’s disco like it is 1980!”

The inexpensively made and casually produced Outpost has the correct musicians in the correct setting playing the correct sounds. Outpost is therefore proving to be timeless.

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Footnotes:

1. I saw Sonny Rollins live twice, and one of the gigs the drummer was Al Foster, and he made a difference. Foster told me he was proud of the time he played for Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, and Stan Getz—all within the same week.

2. Sonny Rollins sounds more like Coltrane in 1972 on “Keep Hold of Yourself” than he does with Coltrane’s rhythm section of Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones on East Broadway Run Down from 1966. Oddly, Rollins brings in the out head of “Keep Hold of Yourself” incorrectly. Between the explicit Coltrane references and this big structural error, it’s a bit surprising this track was released. Various skilled listeners have asserted that the best post-1972 Sonny Rollins exists in tapes from live concerts and might someday see the light of day.

3. The DownBeat with the Milestone Jazzstars article leads off the record review section with the latest Milestone albums from the headliners: McCoy Tyner The Greeting (awarded four stars), Ron Carter Song for You (four stars), Sonny Rollins Don’t Stop the Carnival (three and a half stars). All three LPs are fairly grandiose and exhibit somewhat dated 1978 production values. It is interesting to think about the same trio convening ten years earlier or ten years later. Obviously, ten years earlier would have been before amplification, but ten years later it might have been more acoustic as well. For JazzTimes I wrote a piece called, “Ron Carter Leaves Stadium Jazz Behind,” detailing three small-scale Carter masterpieces from the ‘80s. After his time with horns, percussion, and Orrin Keepnews, McCoy Tyner started up a comparatively relaxed trio with true swinger Louis Hayes; the first album in 1985 was called Just Feelin’. One of the better Rollins later records, Falling in Love with Jazz from 1989, features bebop poet Tommy Flanagan in a relatively intimate situation. However, a bootleg of Sonny and McCoy together at the Half Note from 1966 is a very odd document indeed—there are hardly any piano solos, for starters—suggesting that the two were never truly appropriate for each other.

4. It may appear that I think jazz musicians shouldn’t use pop music as a resource. That’s not true, but a lot of 70’s fusion sounds pretty dated, either because the songwriting isn’t strong enough or the rhythm section parts are not sorted correctly. A positive counter-example: I just learned of a Buster Williams piece, “The Hump,” from Buster’s own 1975 album Pinnacle. Buster is on electric bass and Billy Hart is playing an odd-meter funk groove, coming out of what they did together in Mwandishi with Herbie Hancock. When listening to “The Hump,” the word “fusion” didn’t occur to me, and neither did the word “dated.” It is just the correct stuff. Buster told me that this track was eventually sampled by the Fugees, A Tribe Called Quest, Showbiz & A.G., Jurassic 5, and All Saints.