SFJazz Collective, Vol. 2 - SFJazz Collective

Jan

27

SFJazz Collective, Vol. 2 - SFJazz Collective

≡ Category: 2000s, Avant-Guarde, Free Jazz, Hard Bop, Post Bop, Recommended, Reviews |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

JAZZBO NOTES RECOMMENDED RECORDING

Rating:

In jazz festivals these days, programmers always face a quandary. Young musicians naturally want to showcase new music, but audiences respond to familiarity, in the form of standards. The SFJazz Collective has come up with an ingenious solution to this dilemma. During their first year, they focused on the works of Ornette Coleman, including compositions that represented different stages of Ornette’s development as a composer. For the present recording, SFJazz Collective, Vol. 2 (on the Nonesuch label), the SFJazz Collective chose to honor John Coltrane in a similar manner.

One of the most important members of the collective is Gil Goldstein, who doesn’t play on the CD, but nonetheless contributed the arrangements of the Coltrane standards and consulted on the arrangements for the originals written by members of the collective. It’s especially noteworthy how he has written for a potentially unwieldy octet with grace and style, making full use of the range of colors available, but showing rare wisdom about when to have certain members lay out at strategic times. He doesn’t overwrite.

Goldstein’s version of Coltrane’s Moments Notice doesn’t deviate that much from the original, but gilds the arrangement with some non-functional parallel harmonies just to give the tune a little edge. It’s startling to think that Moments Notice, which was so cutting edge in 1958, sounds so mainstream today. Nicholas Payton has the first solo on trumpet, and he swings his ass off on the difficult changes, and is quite melodic in the bargain. Isaac Smith on trombone doesn’t swing quite as hard on his solo, but displays a keen intelligence in his note choices.

Coltrane’s Naima has been played so many times that it’s hard to imagine that anyone could find something new to say with it, but Gil Goldstein manages quite well. He has Matt Penman outline the changes on bass with wide dancing intervals, while the horn section of Payton, Smith, Joshua Redman (on tenor) and Miguel Zenón (on alto) provide color with open voicings. The melody is carried by Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone, which gives the track an odd delicacy. Hutcherson evokes some performances of Naima by Coltrane’s old bandmember McCoy Tyner in his shimmering solo on vibraphone, but he’s his own man.

It’s difficult for me to fully assess the success of Gil Goldstein’s arrangement of Africa, from the Africa Brass Sessions, because I haven’t heard Coltrane’s version (oh, the shame!), so I’ll just go with my impressions. Goldstein starts the arrangement with some African-sounding percussion and vibe melodies that are written to imitate a kalimba. Bobby Hutcherson solos over a rubato rumbling from drummer Eric Harland. Nicholas Payton and Isaac Smith briefly duel in a free jazz exchange before Joshua Redman enters with Coltrane’s melody. Behind him, Eric Harland reminds me a bit of Elvin Jones in the loping rhythm, the way he plays pulse instead of time. For that matter, Renee Rosnes does a pretty decent McCoy Tyner, laying down dense clusters on the piano, though she can’t hope to approach Tyner’s power. Joshua Redman does the master proud with a knotty solo based on pentatonic permutations. Here and there, Gil Goldstein allows the horn section of Payton, Smith and Zenón to comment on the proceedings, breaking up the arrangement nicely. After Redman’s solo, the arrangement trails off into the rubato Africanisms of the opening, the perfect setting for a tasty free-form drum solo from Eric Harland. The entire band reprises the theme and then pianist Renee Rosnes and Bobby Hutcherson twine in and around each other, eventually trailing off into silence. Nice track.

The final Coltrane track is from his mature period, when his music was entering a heavily spiritual phase. Goldstein’s arrangement of Crescent starts out being relatively faithful to the original in concept. Essentially, all Goldstein does is provide some color shading from the horns and moved the melody around from horn to horn. But for the first solo, instead of having the band play pulse ala Elvin Jones, Nicholas Payton plays over standard swing time. It’s a different way of hearing the composition and, in a funny way, calls attention to how innovative it was for Coltrane’s band to play pulse instead of swing. Midway through Payton’s solo, Goldstein orchestrates Coltrane’s melody and uses it as a harmonic background.

You might notice that the SF Jazz Collective doesn’t even touch Coltrane’s late period, and there’s a good reason for that. The jazz world still hasn’t come to terms with it. The rest of Coltrane’s legacy has been mainstreamed, but the innovations of his late work have barely been touched. The only musician I know of that’s even taken a crack at it is Dave Liebman, who had a great deal of success covering Love (from Coltrane’s problematic Meditations release) on Homage To John Coltrane.

Anyway, that leaves the originals.

At first glance, Nicholas Payton’s Scrambled Eggs seems to be an odd choice for inclusion in a program built around the music of John Coltrane. Scrambled Eggs has a halting structure that steadily builds in density and speed, like a falling row of dominos. Come to think of it, Scrambled Eggs has a little in common with the Coltrane of Son Ship, which featured compositions that consisted of little more that short phrases linked together. As the composition proceeds, the complexity compounds, as different horns play different configurations of the key intervals seemingly at cross purposes. Renee Rosnes has the solo spot here on piano, and she keeps the spirit of the composition with short phrases which steadily compound until a climax, and which point the process starts all over again.

Half Full, written by Joshua Redmond, is a little easier to follow. It has some of the pedal points and modal structure that we associate with mid-period Coltrane. During a rubato passage, perhaps Redmond’s tendency to pass the melody along to different horns at regular intervals is a bit reductive, but that’s okay. Later in the composition, the chord structures and rhythmic attack are similar to those used by McCoy Tyner in his Milestone period, or even more by Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau in the recent Metheny/Mehldau. It’s pretty neat, really, that Redmond has written a composition demonstrating all those linkages. It’s amounts to a mini jazz history lesson. Renee Rosnes’ piano solo owes less to Tyner, let alone Mehldau. She’s really doing her own thing, though you can hear traces of Herbie Hancock in her lines. Never mind — her melodic lines and comping bristle with intelligence.

You may have noticed that I’ve written at length about many of the tunes on SFJazz Collective, Vol. 2. The reason for that is so that you understand that a whole lot of thought has gone into this music, and it encompasses many different many different styles and stages in the development of jazz. There’s a lot to digest here.

With the possible exception of arranger Gil Goldstein, none of the musicians on this date absolutely blows me away, but every last one of them is a competent instrumentalist, they all swing, and the solos are consistently thoughtful. There’s a lot going on in the non-Coltrane compositions, too. Everybody involved in the SFJazz Collective stepped up to the challenge of a project based around the music of John Coltrane. This is high quality jazz, folks.

Best of all, even though the ideas in the music are frequently quite complex, the musicians have taken a hint from Coltrane himself and made these ideas as accessible as possible. That makes SFJazz Collective, Vol. 2 rewarding to listen to on a number of levels, from casual listening while doing the housework all the way down to transcription and analysis.

Addendum: I wrote the review you just read after listening to SFJazz Collective, Vol. 2 only once. After listening to it many times since, I’ve noticed that the solos don’t hold up very well to repeated listens, with the exception of those of Bobby Hutcherson. In a way, that’s kind of to be expected as he has about 30 more years of experience than anyone else in the group. The other thing that I noticed is that drummer Eric Harland tends to lack subtlety. He bashes away a whole lot. Sometimes he reminds me a bit of James Taylor’s longtime drummer, Russ Kunkel, and I’m only half kidding. Nonetheless, I still stand by my original rating.