Every Great Song Ever

everygreatsongever:

Donald Byrd: I’ve Longed And Searched For My Mother (I’m Tryin’ To Get Home, 1964)

For an album called I’m Tryin’ To Get Home, Donald Byrd’s tenth LP as a bandleader is for the most part remarkably celebratory. Like its predecessor, A New Perspective, it combines threads of cool jazz and gospel to create a seamless and singular sound. A few years later, Quincy Jones took this same kind of sound, dragged it further out of church and shot it into orbit on his great Walking In Space LP, but here it still has a strongly organic feel.

In the middle of all this joyous, wordless singing and upbeat jamming, though, is this song, “I’ve Longed And Searched For My Mother,” which is… I don’t know what you’d call it. A cosmic funeral march, perhaps. It twists the ebullience of the rest of the LP inside out, and for all its very intentional drama, it’s really a devastating piece of music.

Byrd takes the sound he’d developed and pulls it apart, strand by strand, isolating one female voice and setting her away from the background singers. The others may be there, cooing at the fringes, but she is alone. He has the saxes playing at the very bottom of their range, where the tone is naturally rougher and less even, and he keeps his own trumpet muted at the outset, calling out from the distance. When he finally takes a solo, he doesn’t sing out—he sings inward. His trumpet sounds exhausted but determined.

It’s a modern tone poem. It doesn’t tell a story with a concrete beginning, middle and end, but it does nevertheless tell a complete story, taking you on a journey of ache.

Albums like this make me wonder why I don’t hear more about Byrd as a bandleader. He’s widely respected as a trumpeter, but the LPs he made under his own name aren’t usually considered must-hear entries in the jazz canon unless you’re already in deep. I suspect some hardcore jazz heads never forgave him for the records he made in the 70s with the Blackbyrds, a fusion group he assembled from among his best students as he was teaching music at the university level. It’s also awfully hard to make a dent in jazz’s front line when it’s populated by guys like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Bill Evans and Dizzy Gillespie.

Regardless, the guy was a fantastic leader with lots of great, creative ideas, and exploring his catalog reveals some amazing stuff, from his hard bop days in the 50s all the way through the Blackbyrds. His roughest fusion record, 1971’s Ethiopian Knights, is a favorite of mine.

I’ve loved this song for years, but there’s a reason I chose to write about it today.

Byrd was born Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II in 1932. He grew up in Detroit, was a music major at Wayne State University, and went on to a brilliant and prolific career leading his own bands and playing with Coltrane, Art Blakey, Lionel Hampton (while he was still in high school!), Herbie Hancock, Paul Chambers, Horace Silver, Red Garland, Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins and others. He was one of the last people to play with Eric Dolphy before the woodwind player’s untimely death from insulin shock.

And he taught his craft generously, to students at Oberlin, Rutgers, Howard and half a dozen other schools. He’s still going today at 77, living in New Jersey.

And as for me, I just moved to the Detroit area so my wife could teach at Wayne State. And there is something about this piece of music that matches the journey of Byrd’s home city over the last five decades. Detroit’s population peaked in 1950. Things were already changing by the time Byrd recorded this fourteen years later—the ‘67 riots weren’t the beginning of the end like we’re often told. They were a step along the way.

And of course, you’ve seen the photos of abandoned homes and factories, and the vacant lots, and you’ve heard about the white flight and the hollowing of the city’s core. But I’ve been around this place a little now, and I can tell you it’s not all bad. The suburbs and the city still have their backs turned to each other, and there’s a lot to be done, but the thought of doing it makes Detroit an uncommonly exciting place to be these days.

And that’s the bit I left out of my description of the song above—the edge of hope. It has the ring of a long, exhausting journey that hasn’t reached its destination yet. You don’t know where else it will take you, but the future just might carry you home. And that’s something to look forward to.

Donald Byrd passed away last week, and I’ve been wanting to do a proper remembrance post. Re-sharing this will have to do for the moment.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet: “The Golden Horn” (Jazz Impressions of Eurasia, 1958)

Yesterday, we lost Dave Brubeck, a day shy of his 92nd birthday. Pitchfork’s obituary headline today refers to him as a “jazz titan,” which is perfectly apt. The man’s influence was huge, and he made a few of my very favorite albums with his excellent quartet from the late 50s into the early 60s.

The thing that triggered that run of greatness was a world tour organized by the State Department in 1958. The classic quintet lineup of Brubeck on piano, Paul Desmond on sax, Eugene Wright on bass and Joe Morello on drums was cemented on this tour, and the music they heard as they traversed Asia and Europe deeply affected the band’s music.

Brubeck and Desmond began to build their compositions in a wide variety of unusual time signatures, and they expanded their harmonic concepts, already indebted to modernism and neo-classical music, to reference the music of other parts of the world.

Brubeck’s open-armed embrace of music that challenged his existing notions and constant desire to push the boundaries of his own music are two of the things that most endear me to him. He was among the first jazz musicians whose music I warmed to, in part because the transition from progressive rock to his odd time signatures and complex harmonic ideas was a fairly smooth one. My love of Brubeck’s music helped kick down the door to a broader love of jazz. I owe him for that.

The run of albums that sprang from Brubeck and his band’s overseas awakening is among my favorite bodies of work by anyone: Jazz Impressions of Eurasia, Time Out, Time Further Out, Countdown—Time in Outer Space, Time Changes, Jazz Impressions of Japan, and Time In are all wonderful records. His piano style on these records is distinctive and spry, and his penchant for patterns dovetails with his rhythmic experimentation to lend the music exquisite math.

Brubeck impressed me as a person, too. He was embarrassed when TIME put him on the cover in 1954, because he thought it should have been Duke Ellington instead (he understood racial politics humbly enough to recognize, even at the time, the likely reasons TIME had favored him for the cover). He managed a feat rare for jazz musicians when he landed “Take Five” (a Paul Desmond composition) in the Top 40, and his music’s accessibility made him enduringly popular, but I’ve read interviews with the guy from near the end of his life, and it didn’t seem to go to his head. He was still kind of taking it all in, in the way he did.

I know who I’ll be listening to all day.

Freddie Hubbard & İlhan Mimaroğlu: “Monodrama” (Sing Me a Song of Songmy, 1971)

İlhan Mimaroğlu is not a widely known name in electronic music and modern composition, but he was a musician of singular vision who managed to carve out a distinctive niche for himself. Born in Istanbul, he was the son of architect Mimar Kemaleddin Bey, the architect that helped define the building style of the early Turkish republic in the immediate post-Ottoman years. 

Mimaroğlu left Turkey in his twenties to study music in New York and became part of the early wave of composers to experiment openly with tape manipulation, working with Edgard Varèse and studying under Vladimir Ussachevsky. Recordings of his work are available, often on CDs where one of his pieces is compiled with work by other composers, and tracing his career reveals quickly how interested he was in making politically tinged statements with his work.

His greatest statement may have been Sing Me a Song of Songmy, the powerful anti-war document he made with the late jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard in 1971. Mimaroğlu was the composer and producer on the project (he produced a fair number of jazz dates, actually, including a couple of Charles Mingus LPs), and was responsible for all the synthesizer and tape manipulations. It’s an incredibly forward thinking album, and I struggle to think of another jazz album from its era that sounds like it. 

“Monodrama” is the moment of contemplative calm at the center of the album, which otherwise reflects the fury and sorrow inspired by the Vietnam War. If you like this, I encourage you to seek out the whole album (it’s available on CD paired with Hubbard’s Echoes album), and also to explore some of his longer electronic works, such as 1974’s To Kill a Sunrise, or 1975’s Tract: An Agitprop Composition for Electromagnetic Tape.  

Mimaroğlu passed away on Tuesday. He was 86.

Rachel’s: “Water From The Same Source” (Systems/Layers, 2003)

Today, I bought Cheez Whiz for my cat. As much as I never imagined I would do such a thing ten years ago when we adopted him, I can’t say I was surprised to find myself doing it. My dealings with animals, the ones I’ve adopted and the ones I’ve looked after at rescues and shelters, have led me to do plenty of things I never would have predicted for myself.

I never had pets growing up. It wasn’t until I was 23 and married that cats ever entered my life in any meaningful way, when my wife’s childhood cat, Abby, came to live with us, and we brought Jazz, the cat I bought the Cheez Whiz for, into the family a month or so later.

Abby lived 18 years. She was a brown tabby and embodied a lot of the things that people talk about when they talk about cats generally. She was aloof and could be surly, didn’t like to be picked up or bossed around, slept a lot… She picked favorite people, and for some reason I was one of them.

At the end of her life, Abby’s kidneys started to go bad on her, and I found myself in the guest bathroom, giving her subcutaneous fluid treatments. I gave her shots. I tried to get her to eat. On one of the worst days of my life, Labor Day, 2008, we rushed her to an emergency vet when she grew weak and disoriented, and we ended her life as painlessly as possible as her organs began to shut down.

Now Jazz is 16. He’s been getting by with one functioning kidney for two and a half years. He was 20 pounds when we brought him home, and now he’s eight and a half. We keep a veritable buffet of cat foods around, and he goes from one to the next, getting tired of each one quickly. I’ve been giving him pills for years to manage his blood pressure and settle his stomach (his newest pill, a sort of turbo booster for his colon, had to be specially made at a compounding pharmacy because no one manufactures it anymore), and I’ve experienced something I think a lot of parents experience at some point or another. He’s started to resent me.

There is always necessarily a gap between your knowledge and abilities and the knowledge and abilities of those in your care. Without the gap, they wouldn’t need your care. I know Jazz needs these pills to manage his health, but he doesn’t know that. He just knows that I’m shoving something down his throat that tastes bad. And sometimes when I come near him, he flicks his tongue like he’s nauseous, which is what he also does when anticipating his pills. He’s started to associate me with his pills, which hurts, because I know I’m giving him medicine to help him, and he’ll never understand that.

But I do it, and I make sure my wife doesn’t have to because I want him to have one person around the house he doesn’t associate with medication. Lately, his health has declined badly, and we’re in that awful zone pet owners inevitably inhabit where we begin to question how far and how hard we should push these creatures in our care, animals that have trusted us to do what’s best for them, even if they haven’t always understood why we do it. Jazz is the sweetest cat. He never bites or scratches. He loves belly rubs and laps, and in spite of everything, food, but I see his spirits waning and I feel terrible and a little helpless.

That’s what the Cheez Whiz is for. The plan is to coat all of his pills with it, to give him a good flavor for the brief trial he has to endure every day, to hide the bitter edge of benazapril and famotidine. I hope it works.

If it doesn’t, we’ll plug along as we have, doing our best, and at some point, we will have to weigh his quality of life and make the hard decisions. But not yet. He still has enough happiness in his life that I think the pills and vet visits are worth it. And a little resentment is a price I’m willing to pay for that.

The Bill Evans Trio: “When I Fall In Love” (Portrait In Jazz, 1959)

As the year ran out and I lost control of my personal time, three deaths occurred that I wanted to take time to mark, and now that 2011 is almost in the bag, I figured I’d give up on my scattershot attempt to catalog or make sense of the year and get down to the business of honoring three people I wanted to honor earlier.

The first is Paul Motian, who died on November 22nd, was one of the great jazz drummers. He led his own groups and played with a huge who’s who of other great musicians (for one odd example, he was in Arlo Guthrie’s band at Woodstock), and he was one of a handful of drummers who helped break the instrument free from just keeping time.

My favorite recordings of Motian’s—and this is not really all that unique—are the ones that brought him to prominence, with the Bill Evans Trio. He, Evans, and bassist Scott LaFaro (who died far too young in 1961) had the kind of simpatico you only hear a few times in a lifetime. They played together as one mind, and Motian, well, he painted with the drums, his playing as dappled and impressionistic as anything by Sisley, Morisot or Degas.

This year has drained the words right out of me—I don’t have much more to say about it than that. Paul Motian lived 80 years, and he gave us this before he turned 30, and if he’d never done another thing, it would have been generous enough.

Rudresh Mahanthappa: “Parakram #2” (Samdhi, 2011)

Back in the 1950s, Lennie Tristano made a few records where he overdubbed himself playing multiple piano parts. One of the best-known is “Descent Into The Maelstrom,” which also attempts to merge atonality with jazz but mostly just lives up to its title. This was groundbreaking work in some ways—it’s routine now, but overdubbing was a young recording technique back then.

A lot of Tristano’s colleagues in the jazz world, and a fair number of critics, thought it was more outrageous than progressive, though. This was, after all, music rooted in people playing together in the moment, responding to each other. This approach was alien. Tristano, I think, was one of the first jazz bandleaders to approach making a studio recording as a fundamentally different kind of project than playing a gig.

How times have changed. If there was any doubt about whether jazz could have a different kind of life in the studio, Miles Davis and Teo Macero erased it with Bitches Brew in 1970. But even there, it was edited live-in-studio performances. I think that no matter where jazz goes stylistically (and there no longer is any central style in jazz—it’s like rock in that way), that real-time collision of ideas will still be central to it.

Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Samdhi is full of real-time interaction—he leads a quintet with himself on alto sax, David Gilmore on electric guitar, Rich Brown on electric bass, Damion Reid on drums and Anantha Krishnan on mridangam and kanjira (Indian percussion instruments). But here, Mahanthappa also credits himself with “laptop,” and he manipulates some of the performances to twist them into something different. Sometimes it’s subtle, like when he places two of himself in the climax of “Ahhh.”

“Parakram #2” is the most extreme example, and that’s what I’m featuring here, even though it’s not the album’s best track. The manipulation is easiest to hear on this song because it takes over completely halfway through. It’s jazz-as-soundscape, and it’s bold and a little bit thrilling, intellectually if not viscerally.

Mahanthappa and his label, Act, snuck this out in the fourth quarter, and I wish they’d either released it sooner or waited until 2012, because I feel like it got lost in the annual year-end melee, and it’s really a very accomplished album. Mahanthappa doesn’t ever seem content unless he’s dismantling his approach to composing, playing and recording and building it back up (his brilliant albums Kinsmen and Apti attest to that), and this record finds him doing that in a very straightforward way.