Bob Moses: Devotion (Soul Note 121173)

It turned out, somewhat embarrassingly, that five of the tracks on Devotion had been released already on an out-of-print 1980 LP titled Family on the small Sutra Records label. Soul Note learned this when a reviewer pointed it out. Within a few years, expanded use of the internet would make such an error much less likely to occur.

The band here is Moses (drums/percussion), David Liebman (soprano saxophone), Terumasa Hino (cornet, percussion), Steve Kuhn (piano), and Steve Swallow (bass).

Issuing the early work of a jazz musician 17 years after it was recorded carries with it a heavy burden of expectation and responsibility. The musician better be somebody of stature, or his historic document will be dismissed with a simple "so what?" or worse (anybody remember the critical reaction to Harry Connick Jr.'s album of his work as an 11-year-old? Ouch!) And the music better be of more than scholarly interest, or it will speak only to a small coterie. The tapes that Bob Moses's father found in his basement pass both these acid tests easily.

Multi-instrumentalist Bob Moses, born in New York City in 1948, was playing piano, vibes, and drums when he was ten years old and within two years was jamming with Charles Mingus, who was one of his press agent father's clients. He paid his dues as a teenage vibraphonist in the Big Apple's thriving Latin music scene and at the age of 18 formed what many consider the first electric jazz-rock group, Free Spirits (which included Jim Pepper and Larry Coryell). He subsequently played in a wide variety of jazz contexts with David Liebman's Open Sky, various Gary Burton groups, Jack DeJohnette, Pat Metheny, Hal Galper and the Brecker Brothers, and large groups led by Mike Gibbs and George Gruntz, among others. When Gramavision released 1982's When Elephants Dream of Music and 1983's Visit with the Great Spirit, they brought Moses critical acclaim and a broad audience. Yet he has recorded only intermittently since then, partly because he's been expanding his musical palette with trips abroad.

Thus, previously unheard music by Moses is even more welcome for mitigating the paucity of releases. But this album may be a revelation for those who know his music only from the later releases, which tend to be for large ensembles and of polyglot style. To say the quintet documented here is an all-star aggregation is not to engage in hyperbole, but merely to state the obvious. The talents of the players are given much more space than Moses's subsequent large-group works generally afford, and the context is at first glance more traditional, but the search for new sounds and structures found in the later works is already evident here; it's obvious at every turn that this was no jam session, but rather a carefully arranged date.

Thoughout this album, compositions unfold in a highly organic manner, with each section flowing into the next without obvious demarcations. It's as though, having decided that the tonal colors of the instruments and the styles of the players offer contrast enough, Moses wove his music from strands rather than building it from blocks. Jazz references name-check Gil Evans, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and other bandleaders as influences on Moses's arranging, comparisons aiming obviously at Moses's large-group work; this quintet suggests that, structurally and developmentally, the subtle free jazz Jimmy Giuffre conceived in a trio format (to which Swallow was a major contributor) may have pointed towards some of the paths Moses travels down here, though the compositions are more worked out and a harmonic underpinning is almost always in evidence even if not always the governing feature.

"Autumn Liebs" is unsurprisingly a feature for Liebman, who solos first and longest; what is a surprise is that he's on tenor saxophone (as he is throughout the album) rather than on soprano sax. In fact, in the year following this recording he gave up tenor and flute to concentrate on the straight horn. His active (but not cluttered) style on this tune belies the accusation of Coltrane-clone often flung at his tenor work, covering a much broader bop and post-bop range in a thoroughly integrated way. Hino follows with a solo that seems ruminative even during its most expostulative outbursts and high-altitude moments; the longer it goes on, the more fragmentary his lines, lending a questioning quality, until Hino's phrases become so short that when Moses fills in the gaps with accents, it seems as though the two musicians are trading off. Kuhn's high-octane swirls follow in an effective contrast, and when the piece's hesitant theme returns, Kuhn underlines it with gusts and flurries.

"Heaven" is a ballad with an unusual structure: cornet and sax play the theme in unison, then repeat it with the tenor gradually diverging more to echo and comment. When Hino solos, Liebman continues to interject, as though the theme-and-divergence method were being continued, though by the second chorus it's Kuhn rather than Liebman who fills in the gaps. When Kuhn's solo begins, the effect at first is as if Hino has merely paused a bit longer. Kuhn's solo gradually becomes fuller, with his bright right-hand roulades balanced by weighty comping by the left hand, until Hino and Liebman return with the theme over Kuhn's most ornate runs. It is a highly organic arrangement that thoughtfully avoids the predictability and compartmentalization of head-instrument 1 solo-instrument 2 solo-instrument 3 solo-head structures.

The uptempo "Radio" has the merest excuse of a theme, its main characteristic being its asymmetrical phrase lengths and seemingly abrupt conclusion. In fact, it's a perfectly typical 32-bar length, but the ever-shifting phrase lengths with their unexpected pauses and extensions will throw listeners off-balance even on repeated hearings. Rising out of the absence of theme, Swallow steps to the fore for the first time, and then Hino plays his most fiery runs yet. The solos are not long, and after a typically bravura Kuhn excursion, Liebman charges in to top him. Throughout, Moses swings hard and fast, and after Hino spices the end of Liebman's solo, the theme gets played twice in a more assertive and less disconcerting fashion.

The oddly titled "Snake and Pygmy Pie" lays out a modal groove mostly carried by Swallow's ostinato pattern, with a sinister cornet/tenor melody full of pregnant pauses twining through Kuhn's spare Orientalisms while Moses plays a very free pulse. The textures are pared down even further when Swallow and Kuhn drop out, with Liebman and Hino trading figures which are more gestures than phrases, often overlapping, while Moses shifts the rhythm constantly. When the horns drop out, Kuhn and Swallow re-enter, both playing the ostinato figure, while Moses solos (a welcome change from the usual unaccompanied nature of drum solos). A lengthier and more elaborate variation on the style of the beginning turns into a coda that conjures the icy elegance of some of the quieter moments of electric-period Miles (a former employer of Liebman and an obvious influence on Hino, who on open cornet often manages to evoke a Harmon mute sound) with utterly different materials and procedures.

On "St. Elmo" (a reference to underappreciated bebop pianist/composer Elmo Hope, perhaps?), Hino finally does use a mute, recalling Miles's Prestige years. The piece seems continually to come to a close even in its earliest segments, yet keeps starting up again. The gorgeous ballad features Hino for quite a while until Kuhn takes over briefly with a strangely swirling line in which every accent is placed with lapidary precision, like Monk playing a Bill Evans tune. The oddly coda-like character of the entire piece, with Liebman entering late and Hino's fragile tone so predominant, leaves an elegaic impression at the same time it continually unsettles expectations; when it finally does cease to start up again, the effect is breathtaking.

The speedy "Portsmouth Figuration" has another odd, and quite short, head, with a few note-filled snippets of varying lengths alternating with brief, frenetic solos, with Swallow's trotting (this is too fast for walking) and Moses's headlong rush of a cymbal beat holding it together. Hino again plays fragmentary lines during most of his short solo, contrasting strongly with the robust, perpetual-motion lines Liebman spins out next. Moses then takes an unaccompanied solo of JATP-like proportions, shifting kaleidoscopically through a variety of patterns spiced up with some percussion sounds definitely not found in a standard drum kit. Through all the pauses and twists, his momentum never flags until he fades out before the oh-so-brief reappearance of the instruments.

The melody of "Christmas '78" is awfully nostalgic, in a fairly melancholic if hardly depressed tone, for a holiday a mere eight months past at the time of recording. Though Kuhn's comping under Hino's solo, along with Swallow's rhythm, is sometimes quite jaunty, it alternates with a foreboding modal pattern utterly lacking in cheer. Hino's improvisations here are much more of a piece than elsewhere on the album, and within a relatively narrow range. Similarly, Kuhn's solo is at first more restrained and less overtly virtuosic than his established norm on the other tracks. He takes us through a series of juxtaposed moods ranging from chirpy to ironic, all seemingly with quotes around them. Liebman's pensive, Shorteresque solo has an elliptical quality that leads into a unison restatement with Hino of the regret-laden theme.

Hino opens "Devotion" by himself in his most heart-wrenching tone, developing the nagging motif with some mildly avant timbres before returning to his plushly mellow tone. Swallow takes over with a minimal, broadly paced ostinato just barely accompanied by Moses, leading finally to the theme. A regal melody laid out in long notes, it has a flavor of archaic majesty to it that all the players emphasize as they simultaneously embroider it, slowly crescendoing in volume and intensity. The title helps suggest a sort of ritualistic worshipfulness, and the ever-increasing fervor of the players suggests this devotion brings with it an ecstasy surpassing verbal expression. Kuhn in particular utterly submerges his florid tendencies in a chiming procession of block chords. The bends and tonal inflections of Hino and the plangent, mournful sound Liebman draws from his horn, which eventually is stripped down to a long held tone, give way to Swallow's final statement of the ostinato and then to silence. It is the most organic and elliptical of all Moses's arrangements on this masterful session, and its hushed rather than bravura ending, like all of them, heeds conventional ideas only to quietly subvert them. Here's hoping Richard Moses finds some more tapes in his basement.

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.