Billy Bang: A Tribute to Stuff Smith (Soul Note 121216)

The first album note I ever wrote came about by accident. I worked at Black Saint/Soul Note in the early '90s, when it had a New York office (in the cargo area of JFK Airport, oddly, though since they were importing from Italy, it was somewhat convenient, though certainly my commute was far from convenient). When violinist Billy Bang was scheduled to record an album that Sun Ra would play on, you can be sure I went to the studio.

This turned out to be Sun Ra’s last studio session. It was certainly a pleasure and a privilege to be on the periphery of it, but also somewhat trying. This was after Sonny's stroke, and he was confined to a wheelchair by then, and I'll never forget helping his manager get him out of the cab outside Sear Sound and into the chair while just down the block where a prostitute had been giving a blowjob in clear sight on the sidewalk, a fight broke out between the pimp and the john and they were breaking glass bottles with which to do battle, close enough to us that shards of glass were skittering under the wheelchair. Nor will I forget the totally unrehearsed recording session, with Sun Ra and Bang reconciling differing ideas of how various songs should be structured (as Bang discusses freely above). With Ra's ability to communicate severely impaired post-stroke, the first day proceeded at a crawl, and it was somewhat amazing that it all came together and good music resulted.

Somebody in his camp was scheduled to write these notes, but ended up being too busy dealing with Sonny's health issues (he would die within a year). So, since I was the only Soul Note employee who had attended the session whose native language was English, I got the job. Thanks always to Flavio Bonandrini for taking a chance on me.

In a radio interview back in 1987, Billy Bang was already talking about planning a Stuff Smith project, and if it turned out to be a smaller group than he originally imagined, one statement was still prescient: "It's individual identity that is one of the most important things. When I get this project together I'll be playing the music of Stuff Smith, but when you hear it you'll know it's Billy Bang playing Stuff Smith."

One jazz reference book includes the information that Bang's violin technique had to be corrected because he'd copied Smith's unorthodox way of holding the instrument. Despite this, Bang arrived at his own unique, sweetly acerbic, freely swinging sound. Study with Leroy Jenkins corrected the technical problem, and listening to saxophonists such as Jackie McLean (an obvious tonal influence on Bang) and Ornette Coleman gave Bang a foundation on which to build his own improvisational style. Conscious of what's gone before, he respects it too much to merely imitate it, in the end reflecting the spirit of the original creators. He certainly sees the linear progression. Bang says of Stuff Smith, "He was avant garde too, in his own way.... By the nature of his instrument, basically. People still don't understand the notes of Smith or can catch on to him. He was so far-fetched, so far away from jazz. Not for the main people, not for the people that are inside, but even for people that are in my neighborhood [Bang grew up in The Bronx]. I had never heard of Stuff Smith. It took me a long time. You would hear Papa John Creach before you'd hear of Stuff Smith. You would actually hear Ray Nance before you'd hear Stuff Smith. So he was outside of that medium, somehow."

Smith's career certainly did not follow a mainstream path. Born Hezekiah Leroy Gordon Smith in 1909, he became known in the 1920s but only achieved fame after some 1930s recordings with his Onyx Club Orchestra featuring his comic vocalizing struck the public fancy. This seems to have led to critics not taking him seriously (Louis Jordan suffered much the same fate), and Smith is often left out of jazz reference books. Those that do mention him, however, are properly respectful of his violin skills and even seem aware of how far ahead of his time he was, instrumentally and musically; one book refers to "cross-beat multiplications" as an integral element of his style.

Now having finally recorded his Stuff tribute, which had shown up onstage before being committed to tape, Bang says, "It was a great opportunity for me to get a chance to showcase how I feel and how I can handle a traditional song but still 'a la Bang,' because I hear these same songs played, like `Satin Doll,' by a million different guys, and basically to me they all sound the same: the same clichés or solos, the same licks, the same turnaround. I anticipate what's going to happen and sure enough, it happens. I try to approach it through what I believe and how I interpret it, but still sticking to tradition. The chord changes are the same, bridges, 32 bars, etc., etc. So it's really pulling two different sides, two different angles together, and what really enhances that is being able to do it with Sun Ra."

When it came time to go into the studio, Bang knew who to call in as the perfect foil. He says the presence of Sun Ra functioned "like a physical passing of the baton, and it's like a real physical touch thing--Sun Ra played with Stuff Smith. And I have no connections over there, emotional and musical and all that. And to be playing with a person who played with one of my heros...it's like a real type of a bond. And actually to play one of the same songs that Sun Ra played with him, caught me by surprise, because I didn't know whether we were gonna do that or not. I came back from lunch and saw it on my music stand, 'Deep Purple.'" Ra's collaboration with Smith on that standard can be heard on Evidence Records' CD reissue of Sound Sun Pleasure as a bonus track. Believed to be the earliest recording of Sun Ra yet released, it was probably laid down in 1953 or '54 in Ra's home.

John Ore and Andrew Cyrille were hardly afterthoughts in the quartet; both have famously served time playing for strong-minded pianists, Ore with Thelonious Monk and Cyrille with Cecil Taylor. Ore has since played with Ra, too, and Cyrille and Bang have frequently teamed, so this session group had a headstart in cohesion.

Bang himself has played in the Sun Ra Arkestra, if not as soon as he could have. After he finished his tour in Vietnam, Arkestra member Jack Jackson tried to get Bang to join. Having just gotten out of one army, Bang did not immediately jump into another sort of army. Eventually, though, he did join the Arkestra and don the robe and headpiece; he has photos of himself thus attired, playing electric hollow-body violin with the Arkestra in 1981. That experience, although different from playing with Ra in a small group, helped prepare Bang for this session.

"I only played with Sun Ra in a big band. But now I'm faced with Sun Ra at one-on-one, almost. And that did put a lot of weight on me. I always knew how deep Sun Ra is. He comes out of an era I know nothing about, his voicings, everything. He was playing some Scott Joplin, too. So luckily I had been around Sun Ra enough to get enough courage and confidence up to deal with him directly. It was one of the most profound things I had to do musically. It's kind of like being a gunslinger going one-on-one with Ra. He knows what he's doing. I'll give you an example. There's one song called `The Bugle Blues' that has that trumpet intro, but Stuff Smith played it on violin. They used to play that record in Chicago and Detroit to wake people up in the morning on radio stations. Right there [at the end of the intro], for me, was the top of the song. That was the intro, detached from the song. What Sun Ra did was, he definitely counted that introduction, four bars, and when we came in on one, that was the fifth bar. He wasn't going to hear anything else. He had the first solo, so when he hit the top of that bar, which was the fifth bar, then he played up to twelve bars, eight more bars to play, then we're back to the top. So he wanted to go from five to twelve, then from one to twelve. We took a long time, but when we finally figured it out, he was correct. And that's the kind of person he is, that's what he is.

"On some other songs," Bang continues, "I thought he was bringing in the bridge a little too soon in some places. But then I realized later that that's really Sun Ra's style. Because the first time I heard him was this church in Washington, D.C., the first time I really heard Sun Ra play with the time, it was there, but he was kind of in his own time frame. But the thing is, what I had John Ore do was keep counting with us and come right in. So sometimes we came in before he finished his statement, because I wanted to really maintain the structure. Somehow it didn't hurt the structure for him just to be Sun Ra. That's why I had to really utilize confidence and courage, because normally I would allow Sun Ra to finish his statement, and wherever he ended, I would come in, wherever that is. It might not be the first bar at the top, it might be the third bar. But I didn't want to give that much room up, for the sake of the music. So it was kind of push and pull, the whole thing, but it was done in such a mellow way that it was a kind of a non-antagonistic appreciation of that. And it's always been that case for Sun Ra, even when I'm in the band, always. You've got to respect him."

On this recording, Sun Ra showed he had adjusted to playing in the wake of his stroke, deploying Monkish chords and finding complexity in simplicity during his solos. Listen to the first Ra solo of the album, on "Only Time Will Tell." Almost any pianist could play it--but only Ra would think of it. And while comping under Bang, Ra turns the music inside out with his off-kilter rhythms and harmonies. Bang is hardly overshadowed, spinning out inventive yet swinging, structurally sound lines. With Ore's fat bass sound and Cyrille's pointillistic drumming providing a rock-solid but supremely flexible rhythm section, the liberties Ra likes to take are perfectly supported. The one-of-a-kind results speak for themselves.

Gaslini Plays Sun Ra (Soul Note 121490-2)

Sad news from Italy earlier this week: the great Giorgio Gaslini passed away. Here are my booklet notes for one of his albums:

Over the course of his long and fruitful career, Italian pianist/composer Giorgio Gaslini has taken on some daunting musical challenges and emerged with shining success. This is, after all, the man who previously released a solo piano album of Albert Ayler pieces (Ayler's Wings, Soul Note 121270); the man who jazzed up Robert Schumann with trio arrangements (Schumann Reflections, Soul Note 121120). And, although it was less startling, he's the man who recorded an album of solo Thelonious Monk (Gaslini Plays Monk, Soul Note 121020) back in May 1981, while Monk was still alive and such tributes were less common. There's also Gaslini's big band arrangements of Jelly Roll Morton (Jelly's Back in Town, DDQ 128020), not to mention operas based on Othello and the life of Malcolm X. The dapper Italian maestro is, in short, a man of imagination and creativity not only in his own considerable music but also when playing other people's music, even when their strong personalities would overwhelm those of most other musicians.

Certainly Sun Ra, AKA Le Sony'r Ra, AKA Herman Poole "Sonny" Blount (1914-1993), was one such original, one of the most distinctive, innovative composers and performers in jazz -- a genre overflowing with strong personalities. Gaslini's way with Ra's music is sometimes whimsical, but never capricious; he takes it seriously, yet never sounds academic. The paths of these two musicians from different worlds (the Deep South of the United States, the North of Italy -- or, as Ra would have it, from Saturn and Earth) intersected on the physical plane twice, both festivals when Gaslini's group played the first set and Ra played the second set. The first time was on Gaslini's home turf in 1973 at the very first concert in the history of Umbria Jazz in Perugia; the second time was in 1987 on Ra's old stomping grounds, at the Chicago Jazz Festival.

A stronger link than having met twice is their insistence on making music that, though it comes from strong roots, is allowed to flourish without boundaries, to expand beyond mere genre (like Gaslini, Ra would occasionally translate classical pieces into jazz). One of the most startling expressions of that phenomenon on the present set is the way Gaslini interpolates bits of The Well-Tempered Clavier of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) into each of the tracks. One connection between Bach and Ra could be the importance of counterpoint in their musical conceptions, however differently expressed; another is that both built their art on foundations considered obsolete by the time they found fame. While the streamlined style galant bloomed around him (even his own sons preferred it), Bach continued expanding the learned counterpoint of older generations. Famously, when he played for German organ patriarch Johann Adam Reincken (1643-1722), who had studied with a student of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621), Bach improvised on the same chorale tune as Reincken's famed showpiece, the Fantasia on "An Wasserflüssen Babylon," leading the elder to exclaim, ""I thought this art was dead, but I see that in you it lives!" Sun Ra's Arkestra, though pegged as avant-garde, could and did play note-perfect Fletcher Henderson swing arrangements decades after swing was considered an anachronism. A final link is found in Gaslini's statement, "I found a special similarity between the cosmological conception of Sun Ra and the metaphysical vision of J.S. Bach. It was for me a spontaneous connection." More on that in a moment….

This is just Gaslini's third solo piano album. As he did with Ayler's music, Gaslini made transcriptions from Ra's band recordings (he has not chosen any pieces that  Ra made solo piano recordings of), then arranged them for piano, as he puts it, "preserving the purity of the original themes and seeking to capture the harmonic and polyphonic physiognomy that were so often implicit in the composer’s orchestral versions." Gaslini professes to find "a surprising sort of modern 'classicism'" when Ra's arrangements are thus clarified, a "tendency towards objectivity" that is emphasized even more when set alongside the Bach fragments. On about two-thirds of the tracks, the Bach quotes are easily heard; on the rest, they are harder to catch.

When, as Gaslini says, "the earthly metaphysics of Sun Ra are set beside the serene metaphysics of Bach," it is worth pondering what those metaphysics are. Both composers, whether despite or because of their great rationality, also had a strong strain of mysticism. In Bach, this apparently found some expression in his music through number symbolism; the pioneering research in this aspect of his creativity was done by German scholars Arnold Schering, Martin Jansen, and Friedrich Smend. While interpretation of this symbolism ranges from the innocuous to the extreme, there seems to be some core truth to it. (Ruth Tatlow's article in Oxford Composer Companions: J.S. Bach, edited by Malcolm Boyd, concisely summarizes the methods, provides examples, critiques the results, and delineates the controversies surrounding the use of number symbolism in Bach analysis.) Numbers strongly associated with Christian faith -- 3 for the Trinity, 10 for the Ten Commandments, 12 for the disciples, Psalm numbers, etc. -- mingle with word conversion through use of gematria (application of a number alphabet: A=1, B=2, etc.). Thinking of this as riddles or secret messages embedded in the music misses the larger point; it's a way of making the structure of the music reflect its overt message, making it a holistic reinforcement rather than a hidden meaning. The focus of numerical symbolism research in Bach's music was long on his church works, but more recently, Helga Thoene has posited codes in Bach's solo violin sonatas, not only numerical analysis but also obscured quotations of chorales with strong emotional content; chorale quotations pop up in instrumental contexts in other Bach works as well, including The Well-Tempered Clavier. Ra also referred to earlier religious music in his own works; some of the Arkestra chant-songs can be partially traced back to spirituals.

Bach's otherworldly outlook came directly from his strong Lutheran beliefs, at least partially touched by the Pietist movement and its incorporation of the strains of mysticism  found in much earlier writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas à Kempis, influences on Luther himself. (However, Bach was definitely not sympathetic to the Pietist opposition to concerted music in church services!) Sun Ra's mysticism -- perhaps better characterized as his highly personalized way of reinterpreting the world -- came from a wider variety of sources. A telling glimpse comes from the Spring of 1971, when he taught an Afro-American Studies course at Berkeley (as pithily described by John F. Szwed in his invaluable Ra biography, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra). The course was called The Black Man in the Cosmos; the reading list included The Egyptian Book of the Dead; David Livingston's Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; the King James Bible (which on the syllabus Ra called "The Source Book of Man's Life and Death"); P.D. Ouspensky's A New Model of the Universe; Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan's Black Man of the Nile and His Family; Frederick Bodmer's The Loom of Language; and a host of others, many even more esoteric. For the students to track down much of the list was a nightmare.

The Bible was a constant reference for Ra throughout his life, but his attitude towards it shifted to a belief that it required radical reinterpretation through permutation of passages into new meanings, sometimes the opposite meanings from what were ordinarily imputed to them. In effect, Ra was a modern-day Gnostic preaching that the world we live in is a world of illusion; he was fond of saying things such as, "I'm talking about space; I'm talking about not being part of this planet, because it's not proper," and, "This world is not my home. My home is out there." Compare this to the Lutheran sentiments in so many Bach cantatas: sin corrupts this world, and death is a passage into new and better life. Of course, to try to force too great a correspondence between Bach and Ra is unproductive, but the parallels are definitely there. Ultimately, there's no reason to try to prove a connection that's not a matter of fact, but rather intuitive and metaphorically enriching. Similarly, one need not be fluent in gematria to enjoy the contours of Bach's music.

Nor, for that matter, would a listener have to know any of the above to enjoy this album. Maestro Gaslini has constructed a varied program of Ra rarities and familiar items. "Out in Space" and "A Quiet Place in the Universe" exist, as far as is known at this time (certainly plenty of concert tapes continue to pop up) in only one version each, both recorded "live." Then there are pieces that perhaps existed only in the studio. "The Perfect Man" is an exceptional case, originally released only on a single. It's seemingly an unlikely candidate for this sort of tribute, an oddball attempt at pop that's peripheral to Sun Ra's jazz legacy aside from its use of synthesizer, on which Ra was a jazz pioneer. Gaslini can't duplicate the textures on a piano, but he largely keeps to the use of more vernacular style, especially boogie-woogie, with another Bach interpolation (with similar motion and rhythm, however) and an eruption of free playing just before the end. "When Angels Speak of Love" (Gaslini wonderfully captures its quirky, off-kilter lope), "Kingdom of Not," and "Lanquidity" are the other unique items chosen for this album.

"Yucatan" was released on only one album, Atlantis, but exists in two versions because when the album, first on Ra's own label, Saturn, was issued on the Impulse! label, a different tape was substituted. Gaslini ends his arrangement with a brief Bach quote that rhythmically matches the drums at the beginning of Sun Ra's versions, most closely the Saturn. "Satellites are Scanning" is the same piece as "The Satellites are Spinning," merely mistitled on the Enja album Destination Unknown that documents a March 1992 concert. But, of course, that's not to say that "Satellites are Scanning" sounds the same as "The Satellites are Spinning." The arrangements are really quite different, partly because the recording of "Scanning" dates from Ra's post-stroke period, when his left hand was greatly weakened. Gaslini's arrangements are also considerably different from each other. "Spinning" is noteworthy for several Bach insertions that move in and out in the tightest Bach/Ra integration of the album; they're themes that inherently suggest spinning. The first is soon dovetailed with Sun Ra's theme in a sensually and intellectually pleasing counterpoint that banishes sorrow just as June Tyson sings in the famous version from the soundtrack to Space Is the Place.

There is only one released studio recording of "Fate in a Pleasant Mood," but Ra revived it several decades later as a concert staple. "Images," "Medicine for a Nightmare," "Saturn," "Tapestry from an Asteroid," "Discipline 27," and "Interstellar Low Ways" were all revisited multiple times. The Bach in the middle of "Discipline 27" offers one of the starkest contrasts in this program as the spare first four measures of the Fugue in C minor from WTC II enter shortly after hectic, extreme dissonance; it proves to be a bridge to a pretty little vamp. "Interstellar Low Ways," closing the album, finds Gaslini, through the use of overdubs, also playing inside the piano, brushing and plucking the strings to add special colors to the stately presentation of this wistful number. As the tune gently dissolves into swirling, tinkling dissonance and then silence, we seem to have drifted into the quiet weightlessness of space, an apt place to conclude this interstellar journey.