[Dixielandjazz] Challenging the Fetishers

[Stephen G Barbone]

Interesting concept here about how to treat monumental recordings of  
old jazz giants. Forgetting the kind of jazz Ratliff discusses, could  
this be a way to approach the music we call OKOM? Is it OK to bring  
something new to the party?
Just a thought, that perhaps it is OK to challenge and take apart a  
1920s/30s performance and put it into today's context.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone

February 14, 2009 - NY TIMES - by Ben Ratliff

Daring to Take a Chisel to Two Monuments of Jazz


Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” and John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” may be  
the most fetishized jazz records in the last 50 years, and this year  
they both turn exactly 50.

A Jazz at Lincoln Center concert in their honor is almost something to  
dread: not necessarily because the records are technically beyond  
reach, but because such an event can quickly become a knowing lob to  
the fetishizers. Beneath their imposing auras — the cool of “Kind of  
Blue,” the iron discipline of “Giant Steps” — lie all sorts of wily  
suggestions. The albums don’t need respectful glosses, performances  
that harden them into the status of luxury goods; they need  
challenging and taking apart. And Thursday night’s concert at Rose  
Theater, built around the albums (and repeated on Friday), did that  
rather elegantly.

“Giant Steps” came first. It’s a quartet record, but in front of the  
three rhythm-section players — the pianist Mulgrew Miller, the bassist  
Ivan Taylor and the drummer Rodney Green — were arrayed four  
saxophonists. This was already a good sign. In radical rearrangements  
of the pieces, the horns played bits of transcribed, harmonized  
Coltrane improvisations (in “Countdown”); they expanded on ideas that  
were already there. (Three of the saxophonists — Ted Nash, Sherman  
Irby and Walter Blanding Jr. — took up flutes to play the childlike  
melody in the theme of “Syeeda’s Song Flute.”) They improvised  
individually, then became a saxophone choir in a way that had nothing  
to do with Coltrane per se but illuminated certain passages of the  
songs.

And in “Giant Steps” itself, Coltrane’s harmonic — steeplechase —  
étude, the band took special pains to play with expectations,  
flickering between a ballad tempo and the tune’s proper fast pace. But  
all through the set were surprises: solos, duos, four-way collective  
improvising, bass-clarinet interludes. With disparate phrasing and  
tone, the saxophonists varied the moods, and where they actually tried  
to replicate Coltrane’s loud, hard cry, they chose carefully.

That keening almost always came from the fourth saxophonist, George  
Garzone, who could reproduce it without seeming glib, through a real  
understanding of Coltrane’s improvising strategies and his own modest  
gusto. It was good to hear, even better because he offered only a  
taste of it.

“Kind of Blue,” slow and emotional, as miserly with chord changes as  
“Giant Steps” is extravagant with them, remains a great jazz record.  
But it doesn’t belong exclusively to jazz; for instance, it overlaps  
with the interests of Take 6, the six-member pop-gospel a cappella  
group, who sang the album’s five tracks over Mr. Miller and the rhythm  
section. (At several points in the evening, the drummer Jimmy Cobb —  
present in the sessions for both original albums — replaced Mr. Green;  
he played beautifully, jutting out hard bass-drum accents into the  
music.)

It was a great idea, though maybe better in theory. “Kind of Blue” is  
highly improvised and painted with brittle melancholy, and the sweet,  
profoundly organized, not very mysterious group sound of Take 6 didn’t  
do much for it, especially in lengthy individual scatting solos.  
(Also, the tenor Joey Kibble sang his Davis-like improvisations  
through his nose and a lot of digital echo, which crossed beyond  
mellow into nearly unpleasant.)

New ways to think about old music: yes, please, to that. But this  
required different receptors, a whole different switchboard of taste.  
At one point, Take 6 dissipated, and Mulgrew Miller played a piano  
solo on “So What,” with just Mr. Taylor and Jimmy Cobb, setting up a  
series of soft, rich, intense figures and feeding them into the maw of  
the drums. It felt surprisingly relieving: back to jazz as we know it.