Advocate - Jim Beard | Jazzbo Notes

May

24

Advocate - Jim Beard

≡ Category: 2000s, Fusion, Music Reviews, Post Bop |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING

Rating:

Okay, it’s not an unqualified success like Beard’s previous albums, Song of the Sun, Lost at the Carnival, and Truly, but Advocate is still better than 95% of the new jazz I come across.

This time out, Jim Beard seems to be less intent on providing a meticulously thought out soundscape for occasional improvisations, but rather chooses a looser arrangement style to allow for more free playing from the members of his band.

That’s fine, but frankly, his band members, while good players, aren’t on the level of say, Miles Davis’ 2nd great quintet, so overall, Advocate can seem difuse and undirected at times, especially on more improvisationally oriented tunes like the opener, Fever.

That’s not to say that Advocate is any less adventurous than Beard’s other recordings.

For example, on Jazz (a title seemingly designed to infuriate those who take a narrow view of the music), Beard sets up a repetitive bass pattern on the A section of the tune, which is ambiguous enough that it can be harmonized any number of ways, and then directs Jon Herrington (guitar) to improvise distorted riffs derived from heavy metal, but not necessarily adhering to pentatonic scales. The point Beard is making is that jazz is improvisational music, but that we shouldn’t limit the stylistic choices of the soloists, or instrumental choices, or even compositional or arranging styles.

Beard also goes even farther out on a limb on an explicitly comic piece, the slapstick Glee Club. The main rhythmic thrust of the piece is hiphop, except the rapper comes off like a deranged rotarian. Sample lyrics: “Sometimes I like to beat myself with a fish, kiss my Auntie Trish, and smash my rear end with a dish.” Beard punctuates the doggerel by occasionally dropping out the hiphop rhythms and inserting an instrumental break. The first time I heard it, I was rather shocked. It’s definitely a provocation to put something that blatantly silly on a presumably serious jazz record. It’s like Beard is daring the Ken Burn culture police to come after him. But why shouldn’t jazz have a sense of humor?

Sometimes this humor can get Beard into trouble. For example, on the tune Hope, he has Arto Tuncboyaciyan sing a rhythmic pedal tone a fifth above the tonic in the falsetto range, around which Beard revolves the harmony. Usually pedal tones are played by an instrument with a thick timbre in the bass clef. Does it work? Yes and no. In a purely musical sense, it’s effective and original. But the tone of the singer is whiny and satirical, like he’s putting us on, which is surely deliberate. Beard wants to have it both ways, to be humorous and be musically effective, but in this case, the joke pulls us out of the tune.

Fortunately, Beard not only dabbles in humor, but continues to be interested in incorporating instruments, sounds and styles which are not necessarily associated with jazz into the music. On Relief, for example, Arto Tuncboyaciyan play a haunting solo on the duduk. What’s a duduk? As it turns out, it’s a Bulgarian flute. Somehow, Beard manages to arrange the piece so that the sound of the duduk fits. Elsewhere, Beard uses bassett horn and banjo, but never obtrusively.

For the first time on his own records, most obviously on Trip, Beard incorporates noise as percussion into the music. By this I mean that the ear doesn’t necessarily identify the sounds that Beard chooses in his drum programming as inherently musical. This isn’t really surprising, as it seems as if Jim Beard is constantly evaluating the world in terms of music and nothing escapes him. Not geese honking in the park, not music in an elevator or department store, not the musical qualities in the speech of a preacher, not the cheesiest novelty hit, nothing.

Jim Beard lives to confound expectations, to include elements in his music that seemingly don’t belong. The irony is, as radical as his approach to music is, the end result is often disarmingly pretty, leading to the charge from critics that his music isn’t sufficiently rigorous. Nothing could be further from the truth.