Herbie Nichols: Shuffle Montgomery (1955)
In 1977, I finished my dissertation. It had only taken me ten years from the time I started at Yale.
In 1978, I abandoned the idea of teaching full time –I would still teach part time until 2002– in favor of working as an administrator, a profession for which I turned out to have aptitude but for which I had never prepared.
In the space between the one year and the next, I had time on my hands for the first time in years. One of the things I did with it was listen to new music. Jazz mostly. And closely.
Not all of the music I listened to was strictly new. Herbie Nichols, for instance, had died almost a decade and a half before, in 1963, of leukemia, aged 44. In his lifetime, he’d only recorded four albums: three for Blue Note in 1955-56 (The Prophetic HN, vols. 1 and 2, Al McKibbon, bass, and Art Blakey, drums; The HN Trio, McKibbon or Teddy Kotick, bass, and Max Roach drums) and one for Bethlehem in 1957 (Love, Gloom, Cash, Love, George Duvivier bass, and Dannie Richmond, drums). They weren’t all released at the time and none sold well. Nichols ended his days playing backup in Dixieland bands, disappointed that his talents as composer and piano player were little acknowledged.
The Blue Note albums had just been reissued as a double-LP album and the Bethlehem as a single LP in 1978. I snapped them all up. Nichols was interesting to listen to, both as a player and a composer. He had a hard time in the early days of bop at Minton’s. He wasn’t a hard guy and the macho types gobbled him up or just ignored him.
Monk was one of the few cats who befriended him then. It’s easy to see why. Music wise, Monk and Nichols had a lot more in common than in difference. Both constructed songs in interesting and unorthodox ways. Both played games with rhythm. Both used the most elemental parts to build complex and sophisticated musical structures. There they separated. Monk’s roots were in stride and blues –James P. Johnson made modern. Nichols’s influences were classical as much as jazz, Eric Satie and Bela Bartok. He also mentioned Shostakovich and he said he’d like to be the new Prokofieff. You can hear Satie in his music too –more obviously than Bartok but Bartok’s harmonies lurk hidden there.
Move on several decades and Nichols is finally in favor At least two Herbie Nichols tribute bands were playing and his tunes –“Blue Chopsticks,” “Cro-Magnon Nights,” “Lady Sings the Blues,” especially “Shuffle Montgomery” –were being played by musicians who were most of them too young ever to have heard him play live.
[Simon Nabatov? Who’s Simon Nabatov?] [It turns out he’s a 59-year-old jazz pianist from Russia who’s played with good people. I ordered his Herbie Nichols album and loved it.]
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I discovered Chicago that year too. I’d been living in up state New York, short on money and preoccupied with parenting, husbanding and doing research and teaching. and in the process, I’d missed out on a lot of new music coming out of Chicago.
- In 1965, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM, pianist composer Muhal Richard Abrams in the forefront) was founded, the driving group in the new black music.
- In 1966, multi-reedist Roscoe Mitchell recorded Sound and Old/Quartet, with most of the group that became the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the great groups in post-bop jazz. It was eventually composed of Mitchell and Joseph Jarman on reeds, Lester Bowie on trumpet, Malachi Favors on bass, and Famoudu Don Moye on drums. Everyone in the AEC played “little instruments” as well –percussion, horns, woodwinds. From the start, the AEC excelled in combining cerebral, experimental sounds and structures with hard driving, even funky, straight ahead jazz.
- In 1970, multi-reedist Anthony Braxton, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, violinist Leroy Jenkins, pianist Abrams, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Steve McCall recorded two albums as the Creative Construction Company.
- In 1971, Jenkins joined bassist Sirone (who had the deepest, most resonant bass sound ever) and multi-percussionist Jerome Cooper (he played musical saw on one piece) to form the Revolutionary Ensemble (1971–77).
- In 1977, two supergroups formed: Air (Henry Threadgill on reeds and hubkaphone, Fred Hopkins bass, and Steve McCall drums); and the World Saxophone Quartet (original members: Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Hamiett Bluiett, and David Murray).
I missed out on all of it.
(I also missed out on Sun Ra’s Arquestra and Horace Tapscott’s west coast band and San Francisco’s ROVA saxophone quartet, but that’s another story.)
Art Ensemble of Chicago: “Nonaah,” from Fanfare for the Warriors
Anthony Braxton: “22-M (Opus 58),” from Creative Orchestra Music 1976
I may have started catching up late but by the spring of 1978, I’d listened to and bought recordings by the Art Ensemble (Fanfare for the Warriors, 1973, with Abrams on piano and the first version I heard of Mitchell’s classic piece, “Nonaah”), Braxton’s 1968 Three Compositions and his masterpiece, Creative Orchestra Music 1976, two Hamiett Bluiett albums (one solo bari sax, the other a quartet with Olu Dara on cornet), a duet album of German pianist-vibist Karl Berger with bassist Dave Holland, the first Creative Construction album, two albums by avant garde violinist Leroy Jenkins (one solo, the other a duet with drummer Rashied Ali, modeled along the lines of Rashied’s famous duet album with John Coltrane, Interstellar Space), and three albums by the tenor player who soon became my favorite soloist of them all, one of the most versatile players the tenor sax has known, David Murray.
Eberhard Weber: “Sand Glass,” from Yellow Fields
As if that weren’t enough, I dug deeper into Keith Jarrett’s Stateside quartet (Dewey Redman, tenor; Charlie Haden, bass; Paul Motion, drums) and discovered his European quartet (Jan Garbarek, tenor; Palle Danielson, bass; Jon Christensen, drums).
I picked up my first albums by the exotic German bassist Eberhard Weber, who didn’t so much solo as create sound pallets for the other horns to lie upon. Yellow Fields! What an album that was! Charlie Mariano on reeds; Rainer Bruninghausen, keyboards; Weber, electric bass and cello; Jon Christensen on drums. I own my third copy of that now.
I finally processed in my head Miles Davis’s turna-round album, Bitches Brew, and I bought the best of Davis’s funk-jazz mixes, Tribute to Jack Johnson.
I took time to get down on what Ornette was doing and suddenly I not only dug it, it felt familiar.
I made a serious stab at understanding Cecil Taylor but listen to Unit Structures as much as I could, I still didn’t dig it. (That would take ten more years and much more listenings. For me, the transition to understanding Cecil was his octet piece, “Bulbs,” on the Gil Evans produced album, Into the Hot. Then around 2000, I listened to him in duet with four different drummers –albums from the late 80s- and in duet with the micro-toned violinist Mat Manieri. Ever since, I’ve understood what I’m hearing with him. It’s still work to listen to him but now I dig him. In the ’70s, I still didn’t.)
Sometime around 1973-74,, our good friend Annie Dailey gave me a cop[y of Trane’s Ascension album. Her brother had given it to her for birthday and she couldn’t stand it. I listened at the time but not really listened: I put it aside as an experiment along the lines of Ornette Coleman’s double quartet album, Free Jazz, only with more screaming on it. Now, at the end of the ’70s, I took the time to listen to it carefully, reportedly, and it blew me away. How good it was, how well ordered beneath the apparent surface of chaos.
I spent serious time listening to Coltrane’s ’60s albums that year.
John Coltrane: “Ascension” (2d part)
Rova Saxophone Quartet: Electric Ascension (sample)
I also listened to Circle’s Paris Concert, 1971 (Chick Corea, piano; Anthony Braxton, reeds; David Holland, bass; Barry Altschul, drums) and healthy chunks of music by Elvin Jones (drums), Dexter Gordon (tenor sax), Sonny Simmons (alto sax) and Prince Lasha (flute). Lasha’s and Simmons’s The Cry! was a sign that Ornette Coleman’s innovations had taken hold beyond the bounds of his own group. They were no longer a personal idiosyncrasy. They were part of the family of jazz.
Prince Lasha and Sonny Simmons: “The Cry” (1962)
MUSIC & ME 