Looking yet again at
Woodstock for its 50th anniversary, I was struck by the
full lineup of musicians who played – those who missed the cut for
the movie have assumed a sort of ghost form in the public memory.
What jumped out at me was that you could have formed a nice ECM-style
trio there.
Tim Hardin lived in
Woodstock, and because he was there the organisers apparently wanted
him to open when scheduling acts were showing up late because of the
traffic jams. But Hardin had two longer journeys to make that day:
first he was a junkie and second he suffered from stage fright. It is
not inconceivable those two conditions were related.
He played with a
band the first day that included Ralph Towner on guitar and piano and
Glen Moore on bass. A year later, those two would found Oregon, which
preceded the jazz-rock fusion with a kind of acoustic,
eastern-influenced jazz that prefigured both ECM and, at the other
end of a similar spectrum, the new age mood music of George Winston.
Towner’s Solstice band included Eberhard Weber and Jan Garbarek and
was a regular on my turntable as I wrote the poems of my master’s
thesis.
Hardin’s use of
jazz musicians wasn’t unusual. His album Tim Hardin 3, the year
before, had included Mike Manieri on vibes, Warren Bernhardt on piano
and Eddie Gomez on bass (as well as warning, in the liner notes,
about the bells drummer Donald McDonald was wearing being audible!
But I remember Bernhardt explaining once that because of nerves and
being strung out, Hardin would rarely play as rehearsed, missing
beats, adding things, and there was often as sense of their being out
of time with him. This is also how his set at Woodstock was
described, and it’s a shame, because the band also included Richard Bock on cello: Hardin was way ahead of his time in bring a wider palette of sounds to what had been 'folk' music: another junkie Tim, Tim Buckley, was doing something similar too.
Arlo Guthrie played
the next day and his drummer was the late Paul Motian, another of the
mainstays of ECM but someone who had already played with Bill Evans,
Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett before a brief stint with Arlo that
included the festival. Interestingly, he would go on to play mainly
with guitarists in small group situations, including an amazing trio
with Bill Frisell and saxophonist Joe Lovano, and wonderful stuff
with bassist Charlie Haden.
Towner, Moore and
Motian would have been a fantastic trio. I’m not sure if there
would have been a smooth way to fit David Sanborn into that group,
but of course he would go on to a huge career in jazz fusion. At
Woodstock he was still playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s
horn section, with Gene Dinwiddie and drummer Philip Wilson. I’d
maybe float them bassist Jim Fielder, one of the overlooked great
rock bassists, and trumpeter Lew Soloff from Blood Sweat and Tears
and make them some sort of fusion group.
It's not surprising that google reveals little in the way of pictures of back-up bands from Woodstock. It would have been nice to illustrate this exercise in building fantasy band lineups from 50 years ago...
2 comments :
E M Forster, not Maugham.
Oops, that should have been a comment on "The Silent War" post.
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