[Dixielandjazz] Bob Brookmeyer

[Steve barbone]

CAVEAT - Long article, not specifically OKOM.  POSITIVES:   Some OKOM parts,
some interesting history, some interesting musical thoughts from a great
bone player. His 1950's work with Getz and Mulligan is superb. List mate
bone players should find this article interesting.

Choose now to read  or delete.

Cheers,
Steve

Listening With
Bob Brookmeyer: Raging and Composing Against the Jazz Machine

NY TIMES - By BEN RATLIFF - May 12, 2006

TO those listening closely, Bob Brookmeyer has become both the mature
conscience and the hectoring elder of contemporary jazz, making late-period
work that deals with the deeper emotions of living and raging against the
business-as-usual of the jazz world. Yet Mr. Brookmeyer, the 76-year-old
trombonist and composer, has largely absented himself from that world. He
lives in rural Grantham, N.H., with his wife, Jan, composing new works for
his own big band, the New Art Orchestra, based in Germany, and pieces
commissioned for European radio orchestras.

The close listeners might include his students and colleagues in jazz
education, as he has become a kind of guru at the New England Conservatory;
those who knew him from Stan Getz's popular quintet of the 1950's, or as the
formidable intellect of Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band and the Thad
Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra in the early and middle 60's; and the dedicated
bunch who seek out his new work, even though he is seldom invited to perform
it in America. 

The first track on his new album with the New Art Orchestra, "Spirit Music,"
is called "The Door." It begins almost primevally, with a gravitas rarely
encountered in jazz. First there is a single sustained chord played on
synthesizer and piano, for a full minute; then two seesawing chords among
four trombones and five woodwinds, E minor and D minor. After that, the
record keeps opening up different vistas, areas of tightly written,
color-rich arrangements.

Mr. Brookmeyer is the composer and conductor of the music, and only
occasionally allows himself a trombone solo, as on the track "Alone": with
his first notes a dark jollity suddenly enters the picture, a depth of
accumulated life experience. His sound is broad and emotional, roomy enough
for old-fashioned song and tonal abstraction. His music is deep and tense
and stubborn and extremely tender; his talk too, which comes in complete
paragraphs, is full of these tempers.

He does not give up easily, though at various times he has been tempted. In
his 40's, while living in Los Angeles and working in recording studios, he
reached a protracted bottom point with alcoholism and, he says, almost died
from it. Soon after, in his 50's, he nearly quit jazz altogether to become a
classical composer.

Born in Kansas City. Mo., in 1929, Mr. Brookmeyer had a largely unhappy
youth that coincided with the killer years of Kansas City swing, when Count
Basie was the North Star. He first heard Basie at the Tower Theater in 1941,
at a Sunday matinee between showings of western movies, with his father.

"I melted," he said in his low, rumbling voice. "It was the first time I
felt good in my life. I was not a very successful child."

Sitting in his basement studio, overlooking a wooded slope, we first
listened to Basie's "9:20 Special," from 1941, and Mr. Brookmeyer
immediately focused on the structure of the piece, particularly the ensemble
work. "You hear the sax background?" he remarked, under Buck Clayton's
trumpet solo. But when it came to Basie's own contribution, he had too much
to say. We stopped the piece to talk.

"New Orleans was a whole other feel, but Kansas City was concentrating on
the smooth, rhythmic 4/4," he said. "That was everything. There was what you
might call a coolness ‹ that's an awful word ‹ a subtlety, and a strength
that didn't hit you over the head. Long beats on the bass. Drums really
concentrating on cymbals, making a smooth patina."

Basie himself was the key to all this. "He had supernatural powers," Mr.
Brookmeyer said. "He didn't evince a lot of effort. Whereas other people
seemed to take music and pound it into the ground ‹ bounce it off the earth
‹ Basie came from under the crust of the earth and through your feet."

A year after Mr. Brookmeyer's Basie epiphany, Charlie Parker left Kansas
City, about to help invent bebop, and jazz changed. When Mr. Brookmeyer was
working in the city's black clubs, first as a trombonist at 15, then as a
pianist at 17, Parker was making his first significant bebop records in New
York. These were critical for a young musician to absorb. He listened to
them repeatedly at 16 r.p.m., on a Navy-surplus phonograph, transcribing
Parker's lines by ear.

The exercises did him good. "At that stage of the game," he said, "bebop was
such a distant language that what I learned, I owned." But he preferred to
play in swing bands. "They were more fun for me," he explained. "Some of the
beboppers played very well, but they seemed to imitate the worst parts of
progress: heroin, bad attitudes, cliquishness." (He was also viewed as a
square, he suspects, once he started attending the Kansas City Conservatory
of Music.) 

In 1951 he endured six months of Army service in Columbia, S.C., under the
scorn of an officer who looked unkindly on white aesthetes with black
friends. (Trying to defend himself, Mr. Brookmeyer says, he was publicly
dressed down for being prone to "homosexual fits.") He was given an
honorable discharge. Back in Kansas City, he found a job with Tex Beneke's
orchestra, which eventually led him to New York.

By this time Mr. Brookmeyer was playing the valve trombone ‹ a variation on
the instrument's better-known form, with valves instead of a slide. (It has
been his principal instrument ever since; the piano has only returned off
and on.) He worked with Stan Getz, and in 1953 he took the trumpeter Chet
Baker's place in Gerry Mulligan's quietly intricate quartet and sextet for a
few years. 

At the time he basically idolized only tenor saxophonists, not trombonists:
Lester Young, Al Cohn and others. Bill Harris, who played trombone in Woody
Herman's orchestra, was the only exception.

Harris was a brilliant, natural musician, a practical joker and a drunk;
according to legend he once arrived at a hotel before a gig by driving his
car up its steps and into its lobby. Mr. Brookmeyer never got to know him
well, and he says he regrets it.

Mr. Brookmeyer chose a 1952 live version of "Lady Be Good," performed by one
of Harris's small groups, a quintet including Eddie Davis, known as Lockjaw,
on tenor saxophone. Harris's improvisation is extravagantly musical,
bursting with melody ‹ he yanks it out of the instrument ‹ in a tangle of
swing and bebop phrases.

Bill Harris had an overpowering voice on his own, I said. Was he too large a
presence for a big band, too disruptive?

"I wouldn't say disruptive," Mr. Brookmeyer corrected. "He was influential.
His sound was highly emotional. His personality was so strong that he guided
the band a lot. As a trombonist in a big band, you're in the middle of
everything. You learn how things are made. My old joke is that saxophonists
get all the girls, trumpet players make all the money, and trombone players
develop an interior life."

In the 1960's Mr. Brookmeyer began to struggle against the conventions of
jazz, the aspects he has come to call, with derision, "rituals."
Increasingly he turned to composing. "Playing is easy for me," he said.
"It's a nice hobby. I can pretty well turn it on and off. I can't do that
with writing. A blank piece of paper is a great leveler."

What interested him most was overturning the consensual hierarchies in jazz.
His work in the mid-60's for the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band ‹ like his
own "ABC Blues," which used 12-tone sequences over blues changes ‹ was
intellectually challenging. But when he returned to the band as musical
director after a decade in Los Angeles, which ended in two hospital rehabs,
he really started pushing the band to its limits.

He had quit drinking for good and was studying composition with Earle Brown,
the modern classical composer. He became interested in the most aggressive
kinds of modern music ‹"music to make your teeth hurt," as he puts it. And
he set about creating pieces for the fairly mainstream Mel Lewis Jazz
Orchestra (Thad Jones had left by then) in which, as he explained, "solos
became the background to the background."

This was an idea first hatched while he was arranging and composing for
Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band in the early 60's. He wanted to integrate
solos fully with ensemble passages, at times even making them secondary, an
idea dating back to Count Basie, which through his sensibilities would
influence Maria Schneider and Jim McNeely, two current composers for
large-ensemble jazz who owe a great debt to Mr. Brookmeyer.

Back in New York in the early 80's ‹ which was also when he started his
teaching career in earnest ‹ he began to question the entire established
language of jazz performance, but especially solos, which he had come to
regard as "ritual gone mad."

"My first rule became: The first solo only happens when absolutely nothing
else can happen," he explained. "You don't write in a solo until you've
completely exhausted what you have to say. If you give a soloist an open
solo for 30 seconds, he plays like he's coming from the piece that you
wrote. Then he says, 'What the hell was that piece that I was playing from?'
And the next 30 seconds is, 'Oh, I guess I'll play what I learned last
night.' And bang! Minute 2 is whoever he likes, which is probably Coltrane."

One of his heroes at the time was Witold Lutoslawski, the Polish composer.
We listened to Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto, a nearly 25-minute piece
finished in 1970, as performed by Mstislav Rostropovich. It begins with a
series of short D's played by the cello soloist; after some side roads,
confrontations between the cello and the orchestra, the repeated note comes
back.

"Interested?" Mr. Brookmeyer said, grinning. At the beginning of the second
movement, the woodwinds go up and down, in thirds. "It's so lovely, and so
subtle," he said enthusiastically. "It's like a rainbow shooting up. He uses
material that's so beautiful, and makes it happen again, so he raises
expectations."

Mr. Brookmeyer talked about the qualities of music that are important to
him. "How do you begin to speak to the listener?" he began. "The listener
doesn't have to like the process, but he needs to be in the process, to make
the trip with you. 

"In the 80's," he continued, "I began to wonder how long I could extend my
musical thought and still not break the relationship with the listener, not
put the listener to sleep. When I became a teacher, I realized that
everybody writes too short. You've got to finish your thought."

His new large-ensemble pieces can be decently long, but they don't make
anyone's teeth hurt. (He gives Jan, his fourth wife, some of the credit for
cooling him out.) But he still has a problem with solos, even in his own
band, his pride and joy.

"I never think about a soloist when I'm writing a piece," Mr. Brookmeyer
said. "I just think about the piece and say, O.K., maybe it would be a good
place to have a little release." His advice to jazz composers: "Keep your
hand on the soloist, somehow, with long tones, chords, punches. Keep your
hand on him, because he needs it."