Le Spectacle, Tim Berne and the Saxophone

Today I saw a concert featured in the L'OFF Festival de Jazz de Montreal. This city has two very fine jazz festivals that run basically back to back, the next being the International Montreal Jazz Festival, where I will be seeing Wayne Shorter's Quartet at what I'm told is a nice, intimate, good-sounding theatre.

The concert I saw tonight was a quartet of four famous Quebecois jazz musicians. They were:

Michel Cote - Tenor Saxophone
Alexandre Grogg - Piano
Pierre Cote - Bass
Pierre Tanguay - Drums

I had heard all kinds of things about Pierre Tanguay before coming here, and I'm not too sure why I hadn't seen him play until tonight. I could tell by the way the musicians walked onstage that it was going to be a great concert. There is a certain kind of authority and "This is going to music" type attitude that really comes across (at least to me).

The music consisted of simple but memorable compositions strung together with various levels of free playing. There was atleast a vague resemblance of Keith Jarrett's American Quartet (especially in the styles of Alexandre and Pierre Cote) but the music was clearly their own. One of the striking things about the band was how content Michel Cote seemed to be to play his own melodies, blow a little bit and step back and see what would happen. His sound was beautifully personal and reminded me of Charlie Rouse at times (it took a while to figure this out). The other interesting thing was the use of recordings of French people speaking, often several overlaid on top of each other, which Michel initiated as interludes, several times during Pierre Tanguay's drum solos and once over a piano drone created by striking mallets against the strings on the inside of the piano. This effect could've been tiresome but instead felt perfectly authentic and uncontrived.

All in all I was very inspired by this concert and must make an effort to see more jazz on this level in Montreal (it's clearly out there).

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I check Ethan Iverson's blog a little more than I'd like to admit (probably every day). Often I feel like quite a nerd for doing this, but not today when he posted a gigantic interview with Tim Berne, one of my favourite saxophonists ever.

I've already read this interview twice and it is incredibly illuminating. Highlights for me include knowing that Julius Hemphill used Sigurd Rascher's book Top Tones for the Saxophone.

In Vancouver I took not many more than a few lessons with a great baritone saxophonist Chad Makela. Chad definately believes in playing the saxophone in a very specific way that is definately "the real deal", for lack of a better way to describe it. This comes from his teacher Stan Karp, who studied with Buddy Collete and Joe Henderson among others. Many saxophonists from Vancouver have studied with Stan and everyone I've talked to has praised his methodical teaching methods (I also studied with Stan for about a year).

I remember telling Chad after seeing Bloodcount at the last Vancouver Jazz Festival that I saw Tim Berne playing with some kind of mouth guard in his mouth (This is true. I'd be curious to know if it's a regular or one-time thing. It isn't mentioned in the interview). Chad immediately replied: "Oh really? Suddenly I'm anti-Tim Berne. You can't play the saxophone with that shit in your mouth." I pushed the topic a bit further by saying that surely since studied with Julius Hemphill he must be legit. Chad replied by saying he had never heard Julius Hemphill play a straight long tone in his life and made some disparaging remark about the World Saxophone Quartet.

Now I respect Chad's position. Anyone who has heard him play the bari will attest that he knows what he is talking about. He also knows these Tim Berne records (though I doubt he has listened to much of Julius Hemphill or the World Saxophone Quartet.) Even though I will always aspire to play the saxophone as legitimately and with as much dedication as him, I can't deny the authenticity of Tim Berne and the pure bravado it takes to go your own way at any expense. I also believe that Chad too would acknowledge this on some level.

But the fact that Julius Hemphill was fully aware of and taught out of the Top Tones book (the same book Stan and Chad swear by; I also practice out of this book everyday) seems to refute the assertion that Julius Hemphill never played a "straight long tone" in his life (Tim Berne also admits to practicing long tones for 45 minutes every day religiously.)

As much as Stan and Chad value a strong tone (and they do), Stan once told me that as much as he is a stickler about sound, he is an even bigger stickler for time. (I never studied with him long enough to get as much time information from him, though the sound information was invaluable.)

Though I can assert that Tim and Julius practiced long tones, it is harder for me to assert that they would've practiced playing with the metronome in any serious way. (There is no mention of the metronome in the interview). Indeed, it seems that both Julius and Tim's sense of groove, which Tim admits to having a huge thing for, comes through osmosis from listening to soul and R and B music, music that has very little to do with jazz. It seems like this lack of a serious jazz beat is what would make Chad skeptical of Tim Berne and Julius Hemphill more than anything.

One of the records I bought when I was in Vancouver last month was Branford Marsalis' Contemporary Jazz, which features Tain Watts on drums. It's a good record; i hope to study it in greater depth at some point. One of the highlight tracks is the third, Elysium. It begins with 15 seconds of the most "out" Branford I would guess you would ever hear, complete with overblown multiphonics. After those fifteen seconds though, this idea is abandonned for straight ahead lines in a rubato Coltrane quartet setting, before moving towards a more complicated compositional structure in time. The free playing does return several times, admittedly, but never as blatantly as in those first fifteen seconds.

The track is fifteen minutes long and I'm not sure I understand what's really going on structurally, but I don't doubt that that (and Tain and Branford playing some fierce up-tempo swing) is what is important about this track. The free, or outside playing, just sounds tame to my ears, in a way that I know it wouldn't if Julius Hemphill were playing. I will probably always love this track though because to me it declares that this type of (free) music is going on 50 years old and even the so-called conservative axis of the music accepts it.

Related to this point is the part of the Tim Berne interview where they are discussing Julius Hemphill's famous Dogon AD record (which I have only this past year begun to study thanks to the McGill Library's vinyl collection complete with many Arista Freedom records) and Tim Berne states that it "probably wouldn't be as interesting with someone who plays the shit out of 11." There is some tribal element to that record where even though I feel that Julius and Baikida never really outline the 11 at all (Chad Makela might go as far as to say they aren't hearing it), their playing is still strongly authentic. I certainly wouldn't want to trade out Hemphill for Chad Makela (who CAN play the shit out of 11) on Dogon AD.

Interestingly, Chad Makela plays a Tim Berne-like role in bassist Tommy Babbin's band, Benzene. He definately sounds good, no question. Check out your body is your prison on his myspace.

There's definately more I could say about this but honestly I wasn't expecting to even write this much. There is plently more juicy material in that interview though, including Tim Berne's account of Dewey Redman and his thoughts about lifting solos and consciously trying to copy someone else.

Over the past few months I have been trying to explore Tim Berne's earlier music and his collaborations with Herb Robertson and Hank Roberts more since I was introduced to his music through Bloodcount. It's taking a big of adjustment but recently his stellar tribute to Julius Hemphill, Diminuitive Mysteries, has really clicked, but there is still lots more to investigate.

Books:

Stanley Crouch - The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity
Kyle Gann - American Music in the 20th Century
Richard Brody - Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
James Joyce - Ulysses (in small chunks)
Homer - The Odyssey (prose translation by W. H. D. Rouse)

Movies:

Hiroshima Mon Amour
Vivre Sa Vie
The 400 Blows
Jules and Jim
Down by Law
The Seventh Seal
Wild Strawberries
True Romance

Music:

Muhal Richard Abrams - Mama and Daddy
Leroy Jenkins - Space Minds New Worlds Survival America
Yusef Lateef - Into Something
Keith Jarrett - Surviver Suite
Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder
Joni Mitchell - Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
Warne Marsh - Warne Marsh
Dave Holland - Seeds of Time