Hearing Jazz

THE JAZZ EAR: CONVERSATIONS OVER MUSIC
By Ben Ratliff New York, Times Books: 2008 781.6509 RAT

If you think musicians are taciturn or inarticulate, this small book will make you think again. As a jazz critic for the New York Times for the past dozen years, Ben Ratliff’s interviews with a variety of jazz musicians, including Pulitzer Prize winner Ornette Coleman, have afforded him - and his readers - privileged access to their thoughts about music. Ratliff’s idea to structure his interviews around listening to and talking about music that interests the musicians has produced some surprising results.
I read the introduction; you are free to skip it and I suggest that you do. Ratliff’s explanation of his method and his reasons for choosing it are redundant, smack of dime store psychology, and over all hovers a whiff of self- congratulation that adds nothing to the reader’s experience.
Saxophonist Wayne Shorter leads the interview away from his well-known interest in film scores to the rhapsodic orchestral work, The Lark Ascending, by English symphonist , Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Guitarist Pat Metheny’s improvisational acumen has been obscured for many listeners by his facility at creating melody and exploiting the sound effects made possible by recording technology, and all this on an instrument that some jazz musicians regard as a secondaryplayer in the evolution of jazz. It is not unusual for a practicing musician’s tastes to be more eclectic than those of his audience. Metheny’s fondness for country music comes from his Missouri childhood, but it was a live recording of Miles Davis playing Seven Steps to Heaven that convinced the eleven year Metheny that he wanted to play jazz. After a large commercial success with American Garage in 1979, Metheny spent time with the Brazilian composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim. A hero to academic jazz students everywhere, Metheny remains unimpressed by the results of jazz education. Jazz, for him, is “this completely invented language that happens to line up perfectly”, hence his enthusiasm for a saxophone thrown-down between a young Sonny Rollins and the master, Coleman Hawkins, in 1962.
Rollins, one of the greatest living improvisers in jazz, is reputed to be erratic and moody and is known to have wrestled with a drug problem early in his caree. Here we find him to be a focused musical thinker and genuinely modest about his musicianship. “I look at all that from the inside, so you’d probably have to ask someone else about that” is his response to a question about a recent performance. In his remarks on recordings by Fats Waller, Lester Young, and especially Billie Holiday, the warmth of his appreciation shines through. About Holiday's last recording, Lady in Satin (1958), which shows her voice in diminished force, Rollins emphasizes, "I was right there with her until the last note!"
Ornette Coleman remains inscrutable even as he touches on Jewish rabbinical singing, Charlie Parker’s compositions, and folk music from Central Asia – Kyrgystan – to be exact. Generous but pessimistic is about as close at Ratliff gets to this master.
Maria Schneider has managed the difficult feat of keeping a large jazz orchestra together and gainfully employed for more than a decade, yet her beautifully crafted compositions seem to be pulled farther and farther from what a large audience would understand as jazz. Her admiration for Miles Davis’s collaboration with arranger Gil Evans is well known, her love for the music of Frenchman Maurice Ravel is something she shares in common with many jazz musicians, including Branford Marsalis (also interviewed by Ratliff), but her enthusiastic explication of the wonderfulness of the Fifth Dimensions’ recording of Up, Up, And Away is her favorite metaphor for flying, a notion that is a recurring theme in her music.
Exiled Cuban pianist Bebo Valdes is a man whose life has had to accommodate the upheavals of 20th century history, yet has made a productive career wherever he went. Born in 1918, only thirty years after slavery was abolished in Cuba, Valdes attended Havana’s Conservatorio Municipale, established for talented but impoverished students and graduated in 1943. He became the house pianist at the Hotel Tropicana in Havana, frequented by the wealthy and by foreign tourists. Here Valdes learned to incorporate the bata, a drum used in sacred music of the west African Yoruba into dance music, a move that was controversial at the time, but is now the rhythmic backbone of Afro-Cuban jazz. Here Valdes also played on Nat King Cole’s Cuban sessions. Valdes, along with the eminent bass player Israel “Cachao” Lopez and Orestes Lopez, invented the mambo in the 1950s. Valdes married and had five children, including pianist Chucho Valdes. After the Revolution of 1960, Valdes fled to Mexico, then Spain, and ultimately landed in Stockholm, Sweden, where he has lived since 1963. Liker many Cubans, he had expected the turmoil to last only a few years, but found himself unable to return home.
Valdes’ life on this side of the caesura has grown to include a new family, decades spent playing in hotel lounges and an easy comfort with versatility. Another Cuban exile from a younger generation, saxophonist Paquito d’Rivera, drew Valdes back to the recording studio in 1994 and in 2000, Valdes was one the stars of Francesco Trueba’s acclaimed documentary about Latin Jazz, Calle 54. A generous musical taste encompasses Jerome Kern, Art Tatum, Frank Sinatra, and the piano concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Image: Stompin' At the Savoy by Romaire Bearden (1974) at Christie's New York.