Thelonious Monk’s blues. Are … not very sad. They’re boppin’ a bit, in fact. When I pulled this record out of the stack, I was searching for quiet, yet reaching jazz piano music, to tell the truth. I wanted a grey chilly thoughtful start to what will be a long, long day full of questions and demands and tasks and such. This is not that album. In fact, I can’t recall this album. It seems so un-Monk, so brassy and loud and externally large, as opposed to the internal, pause-ridden largess that I usually with Monk’s jazz piano.
There are questions here, but not the kind that offer counterbalance to the approaching daily onslaught of tasks and supervisions, and not the kind that help me check off from my list the item indicating that I’m doing the right thing. I think this guy always did the right thing, at least on the keys. Although this album would maybe argue that point, in that it feels so not like this player’s personality.
So I’m disappointed I couldn’t remember that this album is not in fact quiet piano introspection but a full-on horns-and-all band, making the day come on with a one-and-a-two-and-a like the rush of peoples ascending the stairs after trains arrive on both tracks, like the the trucks dangling above us on the overpass, the slam-rhythm on neighbor commuter cars setting off for the expedition at hand: the sounds of going out there, of extrospection. Extra out there, extra open to the dips and flows and peaks of the moment.
I guess that’s what some jazz is, right? Extra. This kind opens with an assault and smooths into a quiet one only two tracks later, arranger and conductor Mr. Oliver Nelson making his presence in the room known at all times via his big, big!, arrangements, horns and horns and horns that leave Benny G. behind by a decade or so, yet still stick together tight enough to pay him his proper dues.
I can list the ways in which I will go outside today, and to this soundtrack I will do it with relish, I will write it pretty and I will keep, keep listing. List the sounds outside like the neighbor kid lists his toys from the backseat of the van, list the tidal back-and-forth swoop of distant vehicles passing, the internalized squeak of the bus stop and the bus wires overhead, list the phone calls I will make soon and the tasks we all will accomplish this day, list the troubles of others and the doubts of yourself, like all the different pangs of guilt I will feel in two minutes when I have to stop working on this to work on other things, list the numbers and numbers of days I have stopped working on this thing in front of me, in order to work.
It’s okay; in the arms of Nelson and Monk it just it what it is. A day. Maybe not the kind you want or expect, but here and present and all accounted for. So whattya gonna do? So, go outside, don’t be too blue, remember the horn section backing you up, and let yourself be.
Octaves are yours: check ‘em off one by one.
[This is not from the album, but is what I was aiming for when I chose Monk today:]
A melody so clean it should have words. We begin with “Oh yeah” yelled in the background, with band at full tilt after a false quiet intro. With you-better-git-it-in-your-soul: sweet togetherness.
The grey sky and the pork pie hat.
I drive home with a new, old hat in the narrow back seat. An inheritance. What must my grandfather have thought of this hat in his couch-wide Cadillac, cruising home from the airport after ordering it from the New york haberdasher on a business trip. Or, more likely, what must he have thought of my grandmother ordering it for him after purchasing herself a designer gown so nineteen-seventies that today it could pass only, maybe, on Halloween. Ordering it as an afterthought, him far away somewhere home-like with one of his girlfriends; she on a trip with her ladies to see the shows on Broadway. Every year passed this way for them. This hat seldom worn.
My mom tells me my grandfather was secretly musical. A trumpet player. Did he ever solo over soul claps and the sound of men talking and hold his own against the silence of rhythm itself?
He gave it up for money. Son of a dustbowl sharecropper makes good, gets sent to med school by the army, is shuffled around like a drum’s undertones until he lands in the fertile conquerable airs of southern California. There, there is a dream that has nothing to do with trumpets or struggle and he snatches it. He doesn’t seem to regret it by the time I come around.
The dream was false. The backbeat scarred with the blood of the underclasses and the deception of the middle ones. It doesn’t exist now, and didn’t even exist when my grandfather and grandmother stood poolside holding cigarettes and cocktails in rich hues of oranges and yellows that embossed the southern sun permanently onto a photograph of them, dusty now in the shadowed den. America was never my white landowning waitress’-ass-pinching grandfather’s either, even if he thought it was. So whose was it?
Maybe these guys. In play. In the twist of “Pork Pie Hat,” which is that the song is a steady low flow tricking you into thinking it’s easygoing, the calm swoop of horns over Mingus’ lead edge, the downtempo pause in what is otherwise a fairly bop lineup of songs. It’s not. It’s never easy.
Better, then, to not be false, to stick with a trio, slam sounds out of metal objects, catch on the wind the next through-line and see if you can just, maybe, for a few bars, win it over to be your at last.
This is the moment you wonder if what you picked was right, because you thought the whole album was like this famous song but the whole album is really fast, sort of upbeat, swinging as they say, and is that the right pensive tone for a grey beginning of yet another day doing what you have to do? Is that the right way to remember the histories of us, to sit wrapped in blankets sewn by other mothers and beneath your naked head slowly fizzle your way back into daily awakening?
It’s all the same underneath: these low-picked raindrops of bass, the glue, the accelerator and the decline of everything we see on the surface.
First track, it’s like I’ve gotten new speakers: there are notes here that I’ve never heard before. What I mean by that can be one of two things: “I never noticed that musical part even upon my many repeated listenings,” or “I have actually never in my life heard this note before. It’s new.” Oftentimes with jazz, it’s both (or it feels like both). But that new note is on every Coltrane track, right? I mean, every time you hear a Coltrane album you remember there’s some other notes in between, and right up next to, the famous ones you remember—and those extras are the unseen something that’s holding this brick together.
This record is placed for me in many words people use to describe certain records: classic, timeless, seminal, a meeting of two greats, blah blahblah. What that means for me is, every time I put this album on it launches me into my own private cinematic listening soundtrack. A Sentimental Mood indeed. The combo, the bass solo, augh! It’s almost too slick.
This album should really be called “Duke Ellington & John Coltrane & Elvin Jones & Aaron Bell & Jimmy Garrison & Sam Woodyard,” but, you know… that wouldn’t fit on the little round label they put in the middle of the vinyl. Also would probably not go well with Impulse’s famously modern graphic design. But seriously, with jazz records, the band is often so, so good (and also often equally famous as the leader) that I wish jazz bands had names like rock bands. I know why they don’t. But I wish they did.
They bop around with a steadiness under the current. Slide over and upon my day, make it iconic just to be here and just to be standing. Notes that are new and old and in between, guys that are groups and stand alone, jazz in a Tuesday morning, got lots to do soon, let’s just slow it down for a second and be kind of way.
Not a lot to say on this one. It’s one of the best ones. Whispering through the new notes, the old hands, the avant and the back and whatever other front you want this music to represent. It’s comfortable here, on the edge.
I have a head cold today. Listening to music when you have a cold can be a bit odd—you feel fuzzy, and that fuzziness affects your body’s sonic chambers so acutely it’s hard to really enter the sound of an album. Everything seems so far away.
Perhaps that’s a good place to be, far away, when I approach writing about jazz for the first time in my life. How do you write about jazz? I don’t know much about the theory of music or the finessed points of horns or solos or structure, so how to approach a musical form that is different from the one with which I most identify, which is the blues (i.e., rock)?
How do I write about anything? First, listen. So. How do I listen to jazz?
Same way as anything else. I hear notes, melodies, parts, overlapping. I space out with solos and get swept up in syncopation. If I was still in my early twenties, I’d probably smoke a joint first. I used to do this after work with my friend Matt. One hot Portland summer we both often drew the morning shift at the record store, 8am to 4pm, and he’d give me a ride home in his mini van. We’d stop at his place, get baked, and lie on the floor of his small, cool, ground-level apartment, practically lying inside the open closet, and he’d play jazz records and we’d … listen.
Eric Dolphy came to prominence in the “avant garde” jazz scene of the 60s. He was from the West Coast and he played, mostly, alto saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute. He played with a ton of amazing artists, including John Coltrane during his “Live at the Village Vanguard” shows. People thought they were crazy, harsh, un-musical.
Outward Bound was released by Prestige in 1960 (my copy of it is a fascimile reissue made by Fantasy Records in 1982, or “Original Jazz Classics”). It was Dolphy’s first record as a “band leader.” (I know this means he wrote the songs, but I always feel a bit frustrated by jazz’s insistence to name bands after the “leader” when jazz is to me so clearly an across-the-board collaboration.) Playing with him were Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Jackie Byard on piano, George Tucker playing bass, and Roy Haynes on the drums.
Outward Bound gets swingy a lot – Dolphy was definitely coming from an influence of big band musicians as well as be-bop, and this is one of his less “weird” albums. It was recorded at a historical moment, when jazz was veering toward the experimental and people like Ornette Coleman, who’d been pushing in that direction for years now, were starting to be recognized as the pioneers they were . Dolphy was indeed “outward bound,” but he wasn’t yet all the way out there. (I do have more of his later albums, so we’ll talk more about them later.)
This record is hailed on the cover as “the new direction of jazz” and I suppose it was. It sounds not that “far out” to me, although historically I know it was. Side 2 does get a little trippier – Dolphy plays flute, and it feels psychedelic here, or at least leaning that way. This is what listening gets me: I don’t know about the loops and whistles and what they’re called here, but I can hear this man breathing. I can hear Eric Dolphy take actual, individual breaths between phrases. It’s live. It’s in my ear. It’s next to me right now, it’s in here. But looking outward.
Dolphy’s alto sax is easy. It loops and sways above the combo, turned up loud in the mix, and from time to time to piano rises up to dance with it –these are parts I like best. And when the drummer kicks his heels and picks it up (like the beginning of track# 3, “Les”) we have the band in full form, all at the top of their game and dancing together and against and through one another.
When Matt, who’s a musician, and I listened in his apartment on those hot, quiet Portland summer afternoons, we talked about the music. Sure, there was a certain amount of stoney, “Dude, that is sweeeet!” moments, and a certain amount of silent, private, feeling-the-music moments, but we’d also point out different parts and rises and falls in the composition and draw comparisons between artists and instruments. We’d talk, and we’d lie back, and sometimes I would close my eyes and just be there— bending and falling with the flute here, the insane trumpet there, tripping out to the brilliant drum or the sick piano parts or all of it, everywhere.
I learned a lot that summer. Mostly I was honing what I already knew instinctively how to do—learning and reinforcing how to listen to something, even if I didn’t understand its structure in a profound of quantifiable way. How to single out different instruments in the mix and follow them until you jump off onto another line and follow that.
This is how I listen to jazz.
Let’s listen to “Les,” the third track on the first side. It gets a bit more crazy than the previous two tracks, leaning more directly “out”—by which I mean toward melodies and lines that are just enough “off’ the regular listener’s path of norm that they wake you up, question you, and then lie you back down to hear what they have to say.
On “Les,” Haynes kicks it in with the drums and we’re off. We encounter a smooth sax line and Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet bopping along right next to each other. Then things diverge. Soon, after another Dolphy solo, we hear a trumpet whose quality sounds like almost an echo, thin and rough at the same time. It’s as though Hubbard is being piped in from…where? Where is that, way out in the back there? Before I can figure it out, Byard steps back up. Piano. Things always get quiet around the piano, everyone backing off to let the granddaddy of all instruments remind us where we come from. Then the horns are back, and this time it’s Dolphy who sounds out-there. Like he’s playing from down the hall or something. You can hear the spatial dynamics of four physical people, playing together in a physical space. Haynes drumming it up back there the whole time. A few more rounds of people taking turns, the tight line between competition and collaboration holding together the combo as they blaze further into the song.
I feel fuzzy. This band is blowing out the speakers of something. Maybe it’s my head.
To close the song and the first half of the album, a bizarre solo battles ensue, with Dolphy and Hubbard both loud and upfront. Soon, a mix of everyone at once: this is jazz. The effect of the final spiral of sound is similar to that of walking into a large train station—say it’s Grand Central—when in it’s empty, and in the very next moment the steel cavern of the building filling with people. You’re standing on the balcony with your eyes closed, hearing and feeling the swell of the rush hour crowd, the masses navigating their messy improvised choreography without accident, the sound that bounces in the space between their heads and the rafters above you. You hear the metal structure of trumpet rafters directly underneath a saxophone roof, reinforcing one another in the middle of the sky. Below: whirlpools of hi hat, oceans of black keys. The “new direction” is everywhere.
