Let’s Call This
listening in late 2020
In early June, 1996 I went to the Village Vanguard, to see the Mal Waldron Steve Lacy duo. I was with Roland Dahinden, who was visiting from Switzerland. It was a weeknight, and it was casual at the Vanguard. There was no line to get in, no hassle at the door- a slow night. Waldron and Lacy were laughing as they went onstage, joking to each other, letting their conversation spill over into a long pause before the first song. They reflected the casual, underwhelming feeling in the room in their repartee - they were talking to each other, not the audience. We had the sense that they had seen this moment many times before- slow nights, feeling underappreciated, unvalued, disregarded, probably even on the same Vanguard stage, nights when the Vanguard was a neighborhood bar, not a place where foreign tourists formed the majority, The Village Vanguard. If memory serves, it was a short set, around thirty minutes: ballads, standards, always rubato, everything slow, thin on commitment and wavery in tone. I could tell Roland was disappointed, and so was I.
We were working with Anthony Braxton at the time, in whose world, even if it existed in much the same aesthetic galaxy as the Waldron/Lacy duo, our commitment to exorbitant, effusive, possibly excessive musical plenitude, exemplified by our bandleader, a composer who would write a brand new hundred page long score in a precisely inscribed, but bafflingly vague personal notation system to each gig, then layer it with piles of other older pieces, making ensembles fumble through multidimensional weavings of compositions, improvisations, and strands of soloists and sub-ensembles. Braxton, a generation younger than Waldron and Lacy, showed no signs of slowing down as his career entered a similar phase of playing the role of respected elder. We were judgemental young musicians, and in our own way, siloed in a subset of a subset of the music world, one that scorned what we saw as over-adherence to models from the past - except in irony-tinged senses like that of the Dutch improvisers or the NYC Downtown. Waldron and Lacy’s skeletal standards seemed like lassitude to us.
Even though over time I expanded my aesthetic map to include vast areas of music that I would never have given any time to in the mid-90’s thanks to free and easy access on the internet, I stayed away from Waldron’s work, and though I engaged more with Lacy’s, even working on some of his brilliantly pithy tunes with student ensembles, I never made it a priority. I was aware of Waldron and Lacy’s reputations among my friends and musical colleagues, the extremely high value put on their work by the consensus of whatever “The Jazz World” is (and reflected in their massive discographies), but, perhaps overly influenced by the off night they had at the Vanguard, I never invested the kind of time in their work that I did with Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, or Ornette Coleman, just to name a few composers from their generation still working in the 90’s who I venerated, whose concerts I attended whenever possible, and whose manifold recordings I gathered as much as my ever-thin wallet would allow. Since musical knowledge required actual investment of time and money, it was necessary for there to be blank areas on our musical maps, a situation obviated for the last few generations of young musicians, growing up in a time where musical awareness is as vast and instantaneous as the free-flowing internet can make it. One need only be aware of a certain music, and there it is at the push of a button. One need not even be aware - an individually tailored algorithm can be aware for them. My own algorithm, shaped through its awareness of my interests and those of the people I am connected to, has a role in this story.
In the fall of 2020, the fall of Biden’s election, or rather Trump’s defeat, and its degrading, demoralizing aftermath; the fall of Covid-19’s inevitable second surge, the one sparked by our insistence on going out to motorcycle rallies, gyms and bars, celebrating the so-called “Holidays,” and not wearing masks; the fall of remote school, of binge-watching; the fall of zoom, doomscrolling, sourdough starter and grocery sanitizing, I would end my nights, in much the same meta-location when I spent the rest of my time, in front of a screen, on the internet. My new policy, starting in the fall, was to finish my night’s work - which mostly meant teaching over zoom or mixing recordings by myself and any number of other musicians on my computer - by listening to a single recording from beginning to end, usually something like Taylor, Ra, or Coleman, or related artists like Sam Rivers, Andrew Hill, or Miles Davis, or slightly younger people like Henry Threadgill or the Art Ensemble of Chicago, preferably a vinyl record or cassette, though I would inevitably peruse the internet’s limitless plenty.
You may notice a certain focus here, a certain centering on an aesthetic core, a subset of Black music more or less associated with jazz, but with a wide swath of interpretations of the idea of freedom, like that of my great mentor Braxton. By late October, my focus narrowed further, zooming in on Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell, whose intertwinings were documented on dozens if not hundreds of recordings, starting with Ornette Coleman in the late 50’s, and extending through the 80’s, from hard bop-tinged records for Blue Note, to expansive Eastward-looking music, in African, European and Asian senses, through the 1970’s, mostly for European or Japanese audiences, all the while maintaining their clear connection to jazz and America in their unique senses of melody, time and sound - even though Cherry, lived what looked like a paradisiacal hippie 1970’s in Sweden.
Unlike Cherry, Waldron and Lacy, Blackwell was never an expatriate. He survived the 80’s, what we tend to think of as a slow time for jazz, by getting a teaching job. I met him a few times in the fall of 1991 at Wesleyan University, where he had been teaching jazz drumming for some time, until he died only a year later. At Wesleyan, he represented a kind of ultra-commitment to Black music’s presence at the center of a music education. This was where I met Braxton too. When I arrived they (and Alvin Lucier) were the star faculty in the Wesleyan music department as far as I was concerned, bringing two distinct but related elite areas of Black music into the lives of liberal arts students (Lucier did something else). Blackwell often played in the practice rooms or in the campus center with other faculty and members of the Connecticut jazz community - which had been thriving in New Haven only ten years earlier, the days when artists like Anthony Davis and Wadada Leo Smith were there. Blackwell taught hundreds of Wesleyan students, very few of whom became professional drummers, but through whom his spirit lives on in America's boardrooms, law firms and government. I never met Don Cherry, but I saw what must have been one of his last gigs with Coleman, in a strange quartet with Charnette Moffett on bass and Coleman’s son Denardo on drums, at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 1993. Cherry wandered off stage when he wasn’t playing, looking lost, maybe under the sway of the heroin addiction that would take his life not long after this.
What I wanted to hear in the fall of 2020 was Blackwell and Cherry together, their dialogue over thirty years in bands like Old and New Dreams, which played Coleman-related repertoire; on Coleman’s own mid-career masterpiece “Science Fiction;” with Cherry’s eastward-looking Nu Band including Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos; and of course their Mu duo, which was the spark for Nathaniel Mackey’s epic poem Mu, which, not coincidentally, I was reading at the time, the fall of 2020. I wanted to hear Black music as a celebration of, or maybe an impetus towards global citizenship, a world music, one might say. Not the tragic marketing term of the 80’s, but a world music that strove to put the entire world’s music on an equal footing, giving equal value to 52nd street, favelas, electronic music laboratories, Japanese temples, and of course the entire African continent. I wanted to hear two people whose aesthetics were so joined that they could bend each others’ wills towards something greater than what they could achieve on their own, a kind of renewal that only happens through the collaboration of true peers, equals in experience and artistry. Through their shared history, they could predict each others moves and celebrate them, or contradict, disrupt and even critique- Blackwell pushing Cherry away from endless one-world feel-good fusion and back towards the kind of sharp-edged mercurial quasi-blues they honed with Coleman, Cherry forcing Blackwell to reach deep into his Afrocentric bag, literally getting him to pull out cowrie shells and bells as well as the endless range of colors Blackwell always got out of the kit - he used a different palette with Cherry. Their dialogue happened in real time, on stages and in recording studios all over the world for over thirty years - the clear dialogue of a true musical union. It will never happen over the glitchy lag of zoom. My world was getting smaller, and what musical activity I could muster was happening on the internet.
I shouldn’t complain about the internet though, because after a few weeks with Cherry, the algorithm did its job and served me up a video of Blackwell playing with a quintet led by Mal Waldron at the Village Vanguard in 1986, along with bassist Reggie Workman, one of Blackwell’s regular collaborators, who also worked with a who’s who of jazz greats including John Coltrane, Art Blakey, and Wayne Shorter; tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, best known for his lengthy stint in the Thelonious Monk Quartet that recorded so many classics for Columbia; and Woody Shaw, a younger player, one of the most respected trumpeters of his generation, someone who many thought should have achieved much greater prominence among the listening public, and who died after a tragic series of events involving heroin addiction and a subway accident only a few years later at the age of 44. I was especially interested to hear Blackwell with Shaw, as a counterexample to his work with Cherry, and in what I thought would be an example of Blackwell’s work in a more straight-ahead band, proof of my theory that Blackwell was one of the few musicians who played exactly the same in free improvisations or extended modal pieces as he did on tunes with chord changes, but in truth this was a more or less arbitrary click, the kind of low-stakes listening that following a YouTube rabbit hole makes possible.
The piece, a Waldron composition called “The Git Go,” gets its perfunctory melody out of the way quickly and becomes a series of extended solos over a medium tempo vamp - not solos in the stereotypical sense of an improvisor seizing the spotlight, the soloist/accompanist dynamic that we’ve internalized as the norm in post-War jazz, even in much of the so-called avant-garde. Rouse, nominally the first soloist, played the least of anyone. The members of the rhythm section filled much more space than he did - maintaining a constantly shifting version of the vamp, stretching it, commenting on it, revealing new ramifications of it. Blackwell, much as he did with Cherry, carried on a quasi-melodic role on his tom toms and snare, while Workman added his own layer of constantly changing counterpoint on the bass. Waldron continued playing a similar rhythmic pattern from the written part of the tune, the head, but over the course of the eight minute long solo - the first of three sections that long - he shaded each chordal hit with new harmonic colors, and placed them in a shifting, almost unstable relationship to Workman and Blackwell’s groove. There was no dichotomy of soloist/accompanist - the four musicians were painting a picture with a foreground and a background, a dynamically changing mesh where all four were equal participants, charged with invention at all times. As Shaw stepped into the center, playing longer lines with more tangential relationship to the vamp’s harmony and necessitating some adjustment, Waldron pulled his harmonies further from their original positions, though mostly maintaining their rhythmic shape, and Blackwell reduced his activity on the snare. Workman took on more of the commenting role, eventually blurring the distinction between foreground and background to the point that he seemed to throw Shaw off, making him end the solo in an almost anticlimactic drift - as if to question the idea that a solo should have a dramatic arc at all. Waldron’s activity increased, along with hi-hat commentary by Blackwell, as he began his time in the spotlight, but without changing much from his time in the purported background. Waldron continued to articulate the vamp’s inexorable rhythm, but colored each chord differently, reaching into higher registers, creating an illusory stasis. Each moment was unique, in league with similar constant variation by Workman and Blackwell. Eventually Workman and Blackwell each got their time in the foreground too, with Blackwell taking a particularly colorful unaccompanied solo, breaking the vamp’s dominance with cowbell then a clangorous, dessert plate-sized gong placed flat on the top head of his snare, the dynamic high point of the whole almost thirty minute long piece, and a prime example of Blackwell’s exuberant percussive melodicism and his unique New Orleans to West Africa modernism, then he brought the groove back, and they ended the tune. It was another casual night at the Vanguard, another night in the constant thread of gigs and recording sessions that stretched back to the 1950’s for these musicians, an era of music that has been ending for a long time, with the pandemic-forced shutdown its possible ignominious unmarked grave.
After clicking on a few more casually brilliant Waldron/Workman/Blackwell recordings, I turned to Facebook to express the joy of starting to fill in the Waldron zone on my musical map by sharing a link to a 1983 trio session from Tokyo, one of several cities around the world where Waldron had deep connections. I asked for more Waldron recommendations, and there were several for his records with Steve Lacy. I got in a brief conversation about my experience at the Vanguard with saxophonist Sam Weinberg, who entertained my retrospective snark, but expressed very clearly that I had made a mistake. I was sure he was right.
Soon enough, I was listening to Live at Dreher Paris 1981, a four disc set issued several times over the years by the Swiss label Hat Hut, now residing in the ethically dubious but seductively plentiful realm of Spotify. This would have been a hometown gig for Lacy, who had been living in Paris since 1970, and practically one for Waldron, who was a frequent visitor to Paris and who I believe was living in Munich in 1981. Le Dreher was a small brasserie at 1 Rue St. Denis that hosted jazz gigs for a few years in the 80’s in its basement (it appears to be a baby clothes store now). On this recording, it sounds like the kind of room Waldron and Lacy would have known well - just big enough for a crowd of serious listeners, slightly wonky piano, clear sound without microphones - the kind of jazzkeller found in most European cities since at least the 1950’s, if not much earlier in some cases, and quite similar to the Vanguard.
It was obvious from the opening bars of “Let’s Call This,” the first of four Monk compositions in the set, most of which are played more than once, that the energy level in 1981 was very different from what I heard fifteen years later at the Vanguard. Critics often use the word “minimalist” in talking about Waldron and Lacy, but this “Let’s Call This'' is anything but sparse. Waldron barely rests, keeping up a steady but constantly changing rhythmic churn much as he did during “The Git Go.” When Lacy drops out, he continues, but adds higher registers and denser right hand chord voices. Again, the line between soloist and accompanist is blurry. Lacy’s solos are similarly dense and detailed. He too shades each note with unique inflections of tone and tuning. His sound (captured in exquisite precision by recording engineer and electronic composer Jean-Marc Foussat), though constantly varying, is always huge, dominating the soundscape. Lacy is in a mode of constant linear and motivic invention- playing long lines and generally avoiding the types of repeating phrases that Waldron prefers- while throwing in a panoply of references to standards and other pieces by Monk. Lacy usually isn’t compared to fellow soprano saxophonists like John Coltrane and Evan Parker who used its bright, somewhat goose-like tone to saturate aural space, but that’s what he does here, even using a Parker-like cross-registral arpeggio for a brief moment in his piece “Blinks” on disc 3. Though he doesn’t use circular breathing the way Parker does, his rests to breathe are brief, except when giving Waldron solo space. Live at Dreher is four hours and twenty one minutes long, and the discourse between these two master musicians never lets up. They had a lot to say to each other.
Much of that discourse has to do with Thelonious Monk, who is so present on this recording that he is practically an invisible band member. Almost 40% of the music in this set was composed by him, and both Waldron and Lacy are frequently associated with his music, Lacy as one of the earliest, most committed interpreters of Monk’s compositions, Waldron as a fellow idiosyncratic New York pianist/composer. Though one would never mistake Waldron’s playing or writing for Monk’s, it’s easy to see why their personal versions of virtuosity are lumped together by critics. Like Monk, Waldron’s playing is unmistakable for anyone else’s, not just his stylistic and strategic choices but his rhythmic feel, his harmonic sense, and especially his touch. That uniqueness could be mistaken for a lack of technique if your standards are pegged to players like Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Keith Jarrett or even Cecil Taylor, pianists whose limitless chops expanded the concept of what could be done with the piano. You don’t learn about what the piano can do from Waldron’s playing, you learn about Waldron’s poetic vision of the world.
Like Cherry and Blackwell, through jazz, Waldron and Lacy achieved a kind of world citizenship, able to connect with audiences anywhere around the globe not by making their music conform to some kind of banal popular model, but through their individuality. At a time when audiences still remembered the revolutions of the early 1960’s, Waldron and Lacy represented both the core of a modernist jazz aesthetic which they helped shape, and a freedom to drift away from America and embrace ways of life and music that were very different from the New York that shaped them. Though jazz’s popularity was fading In 1981, these were still artists in their prime. It was only twenty years since the Coleman Quartet arrived in New York from California and ignited a new era of creative music. This would have been fairly fresh in the memory of the shrinking, but still robust world of jazz lovers. In the 80’s, jazz was central enough to French, if not European culture in general, that a brasserie a leisurely 10 minute walk down the Seine from the Louvre could host jazz of the most uncompromising character. As 2020 ends, listening to recordings from that brasserie, hearing the audience cough and chatter behind Waldron’s ballad “The Seagulls of Kristiansund,” it’s hard to imagine a time and a place like that, the musical unions that extended over decades of sets, sessions, dinners, drinks after the gig, and early mornings in hotel lobbies, waiting for the taxi to the train station. It’s hard not to feel that almost twenty five years ago, I was taking something for granted.