Viable Traditions: Roots Revisioned

By Stuart Broomer

“Is this the greatest photo in jazz history?” asked the New York Times on March 8, 2019, the image, one captured by Bob Parent at New York’s Open Door in 1953, of a standard jazz quartet of the time, idealized and memorialized for the band’s constituents: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Roy Haynes, playing – emblematically and respectively -- alto saxophone, piano, bass and drums.

We’re now separated from that band by just about double the years that separate it from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Tiger Rag” and “Livery Stable Blues”, yet little from 1917 (or far more authentic music waiting to be recorded) persisted in the music of Parker, Monk, et al. One is nascent art or novelty, the other high art, specifically evolved. Turning to the subjects in hand, Wood Blues by أحمد [Ahmed], the quartet of saxophonist Seymour Wright, pianist Pat Thomas, bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal, and Truss by saxophonist Dave Rempis, pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, bassist Jakob Heinemann and drummer Bill Harris, we encounter music that is at once at certain cutting edges and at the same time deeply traditioned in both bop and blues. Both bands are in it for the long haul and I don’t just mean their commitment: Wood Blues is a single track running close to an hour, Truss has a 43-minute “Stone Fruit” and a 10-minute “Burning Bush” a brief envoi. Each has nearly identical instrumentation to that estimable photograph. أحمد [Ahmed]’s Seymour Wright plays alto saxophone, as did Parker; Rempis switches it up between saxophones, but that’s the sole difference on that front. Both are “free” bands, in a sense, but each also acknowledges certain degrees of harmonic agreement and strong suggestions of cadence, أحمد [Ahmed] is literally referencing a previous composition, Karayorgis’ approach acknowledges Monk and a broad tradition, as does Pat Thomas.

Everyone is anchored deep in the blues, as transfigured in bop and hard bop. This is, in a sense, the ethos of “free jazz”, a distinction to be made between that term and an umbrella notion of “improvised music”. Each has a rhythm section that functions to a degree as architecture, though that of Truss isn’t strict, rather a continuous sonic dialogue among partners. One of Pandelis Karayorgis’ recent recordings was The Hasaan, Hope & Monk Project , an homage to that special stream of modern jazz piano, while Pat Thomas has recorded masterful tributes to Duke Ellington and Paul Bley. Monk compositions have recently appeared in أحمد [Ahmed] performances.

أحمد [Ahmed] - Wood Blues (Astral Spirits, 2024) 

"Wood Blues” has its roots in “Oud Blues”, a track from the Prestige LP The Music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, recorded in 1961. The original is a trio piece, a light and infectious blues. Abdul-Malik plays the melody on oud, a fretless Middle Eastern lute; Calo Scott plays a walking bass line on cello; Andrew Cyrille drums, yes, but with brushes, a key device in the arsenal of his great teacher, Philly Joe Jones. In some ways, أحمد [Ahmed]’s version is a radical extension of the original, but that’s also the most authentic form of homage, taking time to give new life to the past. Part of the evolution includes stretching the original from four minutes to almost an hour. It also grows in volume, intensity and sheer noise, with Thomas’s forcefully insistent chording rooted in the blues, Ellington (“Duke’s Place”, perhaps) and Monk, while Seymour Wright’s alto is often devoted to a honking rhythmic monotone. They can lock onto time in an uncanny way: there are passages in which molecular events are repeated so closely that only the audience’s shouts can distinguish the live recording from a loop.

If “Wood Blues” has its roots in the gentlest of originals, It soon exceeds Julius Hemphill’s “Hard Blues” for sheer territorial marking. Thomas’s piano is insistent, a joyous hammering of alternating dissonant and consonant chords that stretches toward the maniacal edge of bliss, while Wright develops a kind of vivid honking that’s initially monosyllabic but which soon becomes a strange combinatory honk, the sound switching in mid-honk to a sudden and brief upward slur, a neat trick that is, as well, repeated ad ecstasim, where all of this is headed.

By the 12-minute mark the taut tension curve finds its initial release in the audience, several members of which are sometimes chanting rhythmically, embracing the obsessive. There’s something about this as a reinvention of much that is essential in jazz, an opening of the field in which Ellington and Sun Ra’s common ground appears, represented by the 1956 Newport Jazz festival performance of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (It’s not actually “legendary”: you can find it anywhere, most conveniently on Youtube). At one later point, Wright touches on the elemental riff of Mingus’s “Boogie Stop Shuffle”.

A few minutes on, Thomas has reduced his role to repeating a single dissonant cluster, while Wright soon modulates to a strange, sustained, slightly hollow honk. Then it breaks and this commentator stops watching the timer as the piece stretches toward an infinity of blues. Wright briefly lays out and Thomas assumes a new tack, initially sort of tuneful, but soon reduced to a two-chord rhythmic figure, then with fresh bleating from Wright, all in lockstep with the Joel Grip’s bass, while Antonin Gerbal offers another pattern. It is, like many of أحمد [Ahmed]’s performances, ceremony and miracle of advanced insistence, an insistence that makes the music [Ahmed}’s alone with all of its in-your-face subtlety and its functional shifts among instruments. the bass a submerged melodic lead, the saxophone as rhythmic a monotone as hi-hat or ride cymbal now placed as a central event, its range of honks sometimes suggesting a large kazoo (reminiscent of the Mound City Blue Blowers, circa 1924, this suggests really deep roots). Piano and drum kit sometimes battle for polyrhythmic pre-eminence. It may be, like much great jazz, another continent, which also includes a playful, exuberant wildness. The longer the piece is sustained, the more intense the insistence, the more astonishing the performance

Rempis/ Karayorgis/ Heinemann/ Harris – Truss (Aerophonic/ Driff 2024)

This Chicago studio recording is a spontaneous collaboration with Boston-based pianist Pandelis Karayorgis joining three Chicagoans, saxophonist Dave Rempis and the emerging team of bassist Jakob Heinemann and drummer Bill Harris. There’s significant musical history between Rempis and Karayorgis: the pianist led a Chicago quintet on two CDs about a decade ago that included Rempis and they share Boston origins. More significantly, they’re two of America’s most deeply rooted free improvisers, consistently making music that’s thoughtful and spontaneous, passionate and organized.

The CD consists of two group improvisations, each in constant motion. “Stone Fruit” is a sequence of episodes, each evolving from the preceding, the dialogue shifting constantly. It begins, remarkably, in a miasma of voices that are both perfectly ambient and almost perfectly unidentifiable – bowed bass, saxophones, percussion – until Karayorgis’s piano rises quietly, slowly out of the compound drone. It is the immediate sense that the music is unhurried that initially defines it. Rempis’s baritone is conjoined to Heinemann’s light pizzicato flurries and Harris’s welling percussion, but the music’s miracle is hard to describe, the way in which the light and tentative can suddenly grow, somehow organically, into compound squall, swirling lower register saxophone with meaningful bleats, rapidly expanding percussive flurries … then sudden unaccompanied Bartok-dense unaccompanied piano, soon joined by storms of arco bass and metallic percussion knitwork.

It’s always free jazz, but it removes any sense that the form might carry any limitations. Around the fifteen-minute mark, Rempis launches an alto performance that might epitomize free jazz, constructed on the liberated expansions of Charlie Parker initially practiced by Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Lyons and Marshall Allen. An extended passage by the younger “rhythm section” has Heinemann suggesting the radical and fleet abstraction of Scott La Faro’s appearances with Ornette Coleman, while Harris constructs fascinating patterns with resonant clicks. In an extended foray on baritone, Rempis further demonstrates a poetic gift for complexities of mood, intent and control, including the strange combination of hard-edged, even harsh timbres with phrases that communicate great complexity, including warmth and delicacy

Just ten-minutes long, “Burning Bush” begins with Rempis’s foregrounded tenor initially accompanied by Heinemann alone. It’s almost a cadenza in free time, from blasts and blues reverie to an occasional run, a series of suggestions of the tough tenor tradition, with perhaps an emphasis on Sonny Rollins; eventually Harris joins in, Karayorgis arriving shortly thereafter. The music never settles into a strong form, but is rather a dialogue of moving parts, Rempis and Karayorgis moving through a series of individual viewpoints, sometimes holding for only a couple of seconds, covering a tremendous amount of territory in relatively little time.