Moon Germs - Joe Farrell

Oct

1

Moon Germs - Joe Farrell

≡ Category: 1970s, Avant-Guarde, Essential, Fusion, Jazz Funk, Latin Jazz, Music Reviews, Post Bop |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES ESSENTIAL RECORDING

Rating:

Moon Germs will knock you on your ass.

First of all, Joe Farrell is one of the most underrated reed players out there. He can play anything, from swing to funk to avant guarde to bebop. On soprano sax, he has a bell-like tone, almost free of vibrato. His timbre on flute is like velvet. His note choices reveal an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and impeccable taste.

And look at the band he’s got: Herbie Hancock on electric piano, Stanley Clarke on bass (then at the height of his abilities), and Jack DeJohnette on drums.

Moon Germs (on the CTI label) was cut in one session and all of the tunes have the immediacy of first takes.

The album hits the ground running with Great Gorge, written by Farrell. It starts out with a simple but satisfyingly fat funk riff, which is soon enough interrupted by a series of off kilter melodic statements, performed tutti in odd, widely spaced intervals by the band.

Then the tune takes off into frantic swing based on melodic fragments we just heard. This secton is post bop at it’s most advanced. Everybody knows what the harmonic progressions are, but nobody is playing them. Everybody is playing around them. The same thing goes for the swing time. As the tune progresses, the swing FEEL is maintained, but Hancock, Clarke and DeJohnette frequently stretch, twist and chop up the time.

In his solo, Joe Farrell does everything but make toast with his soprano sax. He plays lots of altered scales, runs pentatonic patterns, and employs wide intervallic shifts. The only thing he doesn’t do is play outside the range of the saxophone. Hancock feeds Farrell ingenious harmonic and rhythmic ideas or responds to Farrell’s. The flow of ideas back and forth is so intense, it’s hard to tell sometimes who is influencing who.

Towards the end of Farrell’s solo, the swing time becomes more amorphous, which is Herbie’s cue to begin his solo. The swing time picks up again, and Herbie mostly utilizes single note lines with chordal stabs almost serving the function of traditional drum accents. When he starts playing in half time and then plays three against four, the rhythm section follows him. It’s a trip.

After the solo, the time dissolves completely for Dejohnnette’s solo. And then we’re back to the funk section we began with to round out the tune. Whew!

The next tune, Moon Germs, is a little more conventional. It’s an innovative 12 bar minor blues, with wide and bizarre intervals wedded to a more typical pentatonic blues melody. As they did with the swing form, the band stretches the blues form until it’s almost abstract. Farrell gives another awesome solo on soprano in the same vein as he did on Great Gorge. Stanley Clarke takes a short bass solo — it’s the epitomy of taste and showcases his gorgeous tone and controlled use of vibrato.

Farrell gives us a break with Chick Corea’s Time’s Lie, a tune with a beautiful melody, which may not explicitly be a bossa nova, but has that feel. But then the tune surprises us by evolving into a samba. Farrell and Hancock take the harmony a little bit outside the harmonic structure of the tune, but mostly respect the outlines of the composition. Finally, we return to the original melody to end the tune. You can safely play this one for your grandma.

Joe Farrell picks up the flute for Stanley Clarke’s composition Bass Folk Song. The structure of the tune is the simplest of the date, shifting between two chords. The melody is diatonic and the rhythms are dance-like. After the melody is stated, the song shifts into a one chord vamp for the solos.

As advanced as the playing is on Moon Germs, it is a very accessible date. Why is that?

Well, one reason is the beauty of the band’s sound. Everybody plays pretty. Stanley Clarke has one of the loveliest acoustic bass sounds in jazz. I personally adore the sound of the electric piano, as long as it’s played by a master like Herbie Hancock, who can imbue it with personality. Joe Farrell, as I’ve already mentioned, chooses not to squeal, honk or otherwise imitate traffic noises, which keeps the difficulty of Moon Germs below nose bleed level. Finally, the engineering by Rudy Van Gelder is incredibly warm, and allows us to appreciate the separate tonal qualities of the instruments while still maintaining a live in the studio feel.

On every possible level, Moon Germs is a success. If you don’t own it, there’s a great big gaping hole in your jazz collection.