Odd musical instruments being played
Wilbur Sweatman and Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Jazz is pretty much an Equal Opportunity Employer for musical instruments. You’ll find some instruments –saxes, brass, rhythm instruments– played much more regularly in jazz bands and combos but there’s room for even the odd ones out. Yusuf Lateef played oboe and bassoon as well as tenor sax and made them fit into his blessing of post-bop and eastern-tinged music. Eric Dolphy popularized the till then unpopular bass clarinet and Steve Lacy and John Coltrane showed that the soprano sax could be played by someone else than Sidney Bechet, who could play anything. Now everyone plays the soprano, especially tenor players, for whom its fingering jibes with what they do on their main ax. (No new plays it better today than Jane Ira Bloom.)
After a long period of no popularity, suddenly flugelhorns became the horns of the day in the very late fifties, bolstered by Miles’s playing of one on his Gil Evans albums. Other trumpeters took the flugelhorn on as a second horn, or in the case of Art Farmer, his first. The flugelhorn was supposed to be hard to keep in tune while playing, ditto the soprano sax. But no problem today, it seems, so what changed?
Oscar Pettiford and Ron Carter opened up the cello for jazz soloing by reconfiguring the tuning of the strings so they could play it like their main ax, a string bass, but an octave higher. Cellist Abdul Wadad has taken the instrument to wildly experimental reaches, using it sometimes like a rhythm bass and other times playing wild screes of bowed sound.
Guy Klucevsek, “Flying Vegetables of the Apocalypse”
Giani Coscia in duet with Gianluigi Trovesi, Richard Galliano with everybody in town (Paris), and Dino Saluzzi in various ensembles have shown repeatedly that the bandoneon (Saluzzi) and accordion (Coscia and Galliano) are viable solo instruments in jazz ensembles. Maria Schneider, successor to Gil Evans and like her mentor acutely sensitive to tone blends, sometimes incorporates the accordion in her exquisitely crafted big band music and saxophonist Joe Lovano used an accordion on his album Viva Caruso The first time I heard a jazz musician soloing on accordion was West Coaster Pete Jolly playing accordion instead of piano in a quartet on vibes player Terry Gibbs’s Porgy and Bess album, ca. 1960. Guy Klucevsek is pretty the much the benchmark for innovative accordion playing now, having recorded three great albums with Dave Douglas and released several jazz-isa, not all jazz, albums of his own. There toes I have are titled Transylvanian Software (1994) and Free Range Accordion (2000). Klucevsek has a weird sense of humor –wait till you hear his solo take on the theme song from The Blob.
It used to be there were only a handful of jazz violinists, not section players but those who soloed –Joe Venuti (my favorite), Joe South, Stuff Smith– but jazz violinists are legion now, from Leroy Jenkins (alas, deceased) to Billy Bang and Regina Carter and Mark Feldman. (Listen to Feldman with trumpeter Dave Douglas on A Thousand Evenings (2000) and Charms of the Night Sky (1998) –-trumpet, violin, accordion, … beautiful!– or in duet with Karl Berger on Berger’s Conversations).
Quartet Indigo, “The Ladies Blues” (1994)
Then there’s microtone violist Mat Ranieri, who duets with Cecil Taylor on Algonquin (2004), the only violist I can think of in jazz today. Obviously there was a viola player in Maxine Roach’s sadly no longer around Quartet Indigo. (Listen to “The Ladies Blues,” on Quartet Indigo [1991].) And the AACM crew, especially the Art Ensemble of Chicago, do as lot with “little instruments” (whistles, bike horns, things you hit or clang or clink or blow into), and Anthony Braxtonplays almost the entire range of reeds all by himself, from sopranino to bass sax and various clarinets and fifes and pipes. He duets with Roscoe Mitchell on the double album, Nonaah (1976).
Lastly, since hip hop and dee jay music came along, there are scratch artists and electronica playing jazz now, sometimes to great effect, as in the California saxophone quartet ROVA’s Electric Ascension (2008), a dramatic reworking of John Coltrane’s groundbreaking free music classic from of the early sixties. (The original is number two on my list of five Desert Island Jazz Recordings, right after Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven.)
Oops, I almost forgot, there’s Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra, out of San Francisco. On the orchestra’s tribute albums to Ellington (Far East Suite, 2000) and Monk (Monk’s Moods, 2001), traditional Chinese instruments play with more traditional jazz band instruments and even solo.
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But some instruments just don’t make it in jazz. Not at all. And if played anyway in a jazz group, they don’t work or are consistently subpar.
The hammered dulcimer is the perfect example. It’s okay for New Age music –Enya, that kind of pap– and is used to substantial effect in certain kinds of folkish music –Appalachian, Nordic, eastern European gypsy music. On If Grief Could Wait (2011), a great album, soprano Sussana Wallumrod is backed by an ensemble composed of harp, viola da gamba and a fourteenth-century Scandinavian instrument called a nyckelharpa that’s a cross between dulcimer and fiddle: it’s played slung around the neck, bowed or plucked as the occasion requires. It’s a great album: where else can you hear compositions by Purcell and other early modern pieces mixed in with songs by Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen?
The gypsy band, Taraf de Haidouks, uses a cimbalom, which is an out-sized dulcimer with a big sound. It’s riotous, infectious music. But I don’t predict a future for dulcimers. They’re too folky, and the sound is too tiny (except for the cimbalom).
The same is true for lute and theorbo. They’re both lutes, but the theorbo is longer necked and accordingly lower in tone.
The lute is employed a lot in early modern music: used in solo, accompanying singers, etc. It was probably economics as much as sound: it cost less to employ one good lutenist than a whole string ensemble and I suspect the logistics of rehearsing become easier also. If you want to hear how effective the lute can be, you can do worse than listen to the counter-tenor Iestyn Davies dueting with lutenist Thomas Dunford on The Art of Melancholy (2006), an album of ballads by the sixteenth-century English composer John Dowland. Or listen to any of several albums by lutenist-guitarist Paul O’Dette, who pretty much has a lock on this period. 
I only know one theorbo player of note, Christianne Pluhar, and she doesn’t solo, she just plays in ensemble –her own ensemble, l’Arpeggiata, which is a terribly cool Renaissance/folk music ensemble that sometimes includes jazz clarinetist Gianluigi Trovesi. Lots of good music there!
The oud is a lute too, but a big fat one with a much lower and less distinct tone. There is one major jazz oud player today, Anouar Brahem. He records (prolifically) for ECM Records but his music doesn’t do anything for me. It’s like a dog walking on hind legs: you applaud the dog for doing it but you’re not deceived that it’s really like walking. The dog just doesn’t have the instrument to walk smoothly. Brahem’s talented. His problem is his horn. The oud plays thudly (indistinct and almost muffled) and slow, and jazz is sharp and fast –or at least it has to be sometimes.
Oscar Pettiford Orch w/ Betty Glamann, “Laura”
The harp doesn’t fare much better in jazz. There were two jazz harpists of note in the fifties — Dorothy Ashby and Betty Glamann. Now there’s a third, the Swede Gunhild Carling, who plays –dig this –trumpet (sometimes three at once), trombone, recorder (another jazz non-starter), bagpipe and harp, often in the same song, and will occasionally in the same song break into a tap dance or singing. Oscar Pettiford, who was not only a major talent on bass and cello but a savvy, forward looking combo and band leader, loved Glamann’s harp: he felt it added class to his ensembles. But other than the occasional patch of color, Glamann’s harp didn’t add a thing, and her solo work (for instance on “Laura”) was pedestrian.
I’ve commented on bagpipes in another blog. I don’t care if Rufus Harley played with John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. I don’t like his playing. The instrument is too hard got control. There’s no finesse to it and blending sounds with bagpipes can be a real problem. The same applies to the uilleian pipes, a small underarm bagpipe employed in the Celtic group, Lunasa.
theremin solo on “Over the Rainbow” –fun to watch
The theremin, god no! I shouldn’t even have to bring it up! Limited maneuverability and horrendous blend problems.
The same applies to tuned water glasses. Benjamin Franklin may have been enamored of them and Mozart may have composed a piece of music for them, but again, they’re hard to move around on and the sound they produce doesn’t blend well with the other instruments you find in jazz. Not at all!
There didn’t use to be sitar players or tabla players in jazz but now there are, though not many. It started with Colin Walcott in the group Oregon and with the three-time recording trio, CODONA (COlin Walcott on sitar, tabla and snare and cymbals; DOn Cherry on pocket trumpet and wood flutes; NAna Vasconcelos on miscellaneous Brazilian rhythm instruments, including the berimbau). After Walcott’s death, Trilok Guru played with Oregon for a while and among the many drums he played were tabla..Guitarist John McLaughlin, of Miles Davis and Mahavishnu fame, has twice formed groups around Indian instruments, Shakti and Remember Shakti. In neither group did he include sitar –rather, Indian violin in the one, and Indian mandolin in the second– but the presence of Zakir Hussein, possibly the best tabla player alive today, kept the group’s pulse authentic.
In short, there aren’t any sitar players of note in jazz today that I know of but there are a tabla players. Both instruments work well in jazz, but of a particular flavor and mood.
Elvis Costello, “Weird Nightmare,” from Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus” (1992)
Harry Partch’s home made instruments, especially his cloud chambers, feature on one jazz album, Hal Willner’s homage to the music of Charles Mingus, Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus (1992), but don’t expect to see them played on a jazz album again.
MUSIC & ME 