Fuchsia Swing Song - Sam Rivers

May

13

Fuchsia Swing Song - Sam Rivers

≡ Category: 1960s, Post Bop, Recommended, Reviews |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING

Rating:

In one sense, Fuchsia Swing Song isn’t a whole lot different than many post bop dates from the mid-60s. The structures of the tunes aren’t particularly radical. There’s a swing tune, a blues, one that’s a cycle of 7ths, and so on. The nonpareil rhythm team of Ron Carter on bass and drummer Tony Williams play things pretty straight and up the middle with their characteristic sensitivity and hard driving swing.

One difference comes with pianist Jaki Byard, who brings a shaggy discursive quality to his comping here which is reminiscent of his work with Mingus. Byard is at his most unconventional on the closing tune, Ellipses, where he chops up the time, plays large tone clusters, and deliberately stutters his phrases.

But the main draw here is the leader, Sam Rivers, who weaves in and out of standard post bop and more modernistic devices. Rivers is a restless guy. He’s not the sort to develop a solo over several choruses. He might develop an idea over one chorus and move on, back and forth between post bop and the avant guarde. Rivers explores the whole range of the tenor sax. He’ll honk in the lower range, run a flurry of notes out into the ether, vocalize, whatever he’s feeling at the time.

Really, Fuchsia Swing Song is for people who like 60s post bop but are bored with the Jazz Messengers and have already listened to all of the Miles Davis Quintet’s recordings about 100 times.

If there’s a flaw to Fuchsia Swing Song, it’s that Sam Rivers doesn’t have the maniacal focus of a Herbie Hancock or a Wayne Shorter, at least as an improviser. He’s more mercurial. He has an endless supply of ideas, but any one of them tends not to be that strong, and he certainly isn’t going to build a solo that’s more than a sum of it’s parts.

In other words, don’t expect crystalline works of arts that seem to be sculpted from a single piece of jade. The best approach is to enjoy Fuchsia Swing Song for the fecund and unfettered imagination of it’s leader and the sterling support of it’s rhythm section, and leave it at that.