LAST STAGE OF A LONG JOURNEY: A Poem After Eberhard Weber

The Last Stage Of A Long Journey is a song by Eberhard Weber which first appeared on his 1980 ECM album Little Movements. You can listen to that version here. It's a slow builder, but I especially like Charlie Mariano's moves from harshness to sweetness, and Rainier Bruninghaus' piano, and the way it seems to swirl around with Weber's bass. The song also appears, and lends the title to, Stages Of A Long Journey, another ECM disc recorded in 2005, for Weber's 65th birthday. This version features Jan Garbarek on sax, Gary Burton on vibes adding extra texture to Bruninghaus' piano, and a full orchestra in the background.
I was listening to that version a couple of years ago, and thinking about the stroke in 2007 which left Weber unable to use one hand, and thus play the bass, when the poem below appeared to me. I haven't made many changes in those two years, and I feel like the texture is somewhere between Weber's song and the rhythms of Woodmont beach, where I grew up.

Weber's since released two albums of bass solos he recorded in live performance over the years with the Garbarek group, with edits and improvisations, including his own one-handed keyboard playing; there has also been another tribute concert in Stuttgart, this one for his 75th birthday, where Garbarek and Burton returned, along with Pat Metheny, Paul McCandless, Danny Gottlieb, and composer/arranger Mike Gibbs. This time he plays one mallet with Burton on the vibes, worth a close listen if you can hear it. I've told the story elsewhere of my one meeting with Weber, he remains an inspiration to me. Here is part of my appreciation.


THE LAST STAGE OF A LONG JOURNEY

(after Eberhard Weber)

Snow falling on the Sound, wind scrapes like a dinghy on shore,

Off the jetties blowing sand across the beach into my face &

Forcing my eyes shut. It's winter

Where I grew up,

Winter in the place I would remember forever

If I could.

                    I turn

My back to the wind & without needing

To open my eyes I walk home, up & down the Central Avenue hill.

The back door is open; my mother & father never

Leave it locked. I float through the kitchen &

Just to the right of the hall is their desk. I open it, take

Some pictures from the middle drawer, to show my son

So he will remember the grandparents he never met

Then

My eyes open & I cannot remember

Who or what or where or when anything was

Or is. I show him the pictures; ask him to try

To remember for me. He is not there. The desperation

In my voice calling for him echoes down that narrow hallway

Full of far-off music I move through
Searching for him.

DAVID BOWIE: CELEBRATING THE DISPLACED SELF

The outpouring of reaction to David Bowie's death surprised me, though it probably should not have. The papers gave it somewhat less space than George Harrison received (front page stories, full page obits), but if anything far more columnists and feature writers tripped over each other to give their own versions of his universal importance to them. I discussed this briefly on the Americarnage podcast (show 203 at americarnage.co.uk) but it's worth a deeper examination.

It's in the adolescent/teen years that music has its deepest hold on most people, and that music stays with them all their lives. The columnists and other opinion makers now are of a generation that grew up with Bowie, in the Seventies, rather than the Fifties and Sixties music I reference so often, which was the music of the columnists and editors when Harrison died.

But that didn't explain the emotional impact, beyond the media. One friend of mine, who hit her teens in the early seventies, told me yesterday she burst into tears when she heard the news and was crying all through the day-- and this chimed with the response that inspired my first reaction, as I said on Americarnage, which was to consider what made Bowie so meaningful to them, while it was nothing of import to me.

The music I grew up with was directed outward. It was aimed at trying to navigate and solve and fight through the problems kids encountered growing up. Originally much of it was being written by adults aimed at kids. But even as the younger generation took over the production, even at its rebellious peak, it was music aimed at coping with the world outside, and maybe changing it, of coping with the ways it would come down on you.

David Bowie's music was doing something different: it was dealing with equipping the vulnerable self to cope with the vicissitudes of that world by escaping it. Bowie's music encompassed the showmanship of adopting new identities, many of them extra-terrestrial, showing there were ways of creating a new you with whom you might feel more comfortable regardless of what was going on outside your room. It was a way of protecting yourself against the ways the world came down on you. It also suggested freedoms to be different from the world well beyond those of the generation before.

It wasn't the music per se. Many commentators wanted to cast Bowie as a revolutionary or innovator musically, but he really wasn't, and that wasn't where his influence lay. My friend Cynthia Rose, for whom I wrote at City Limits some 30 years ago, dug up an interview with Bowie she did in 1983, and she said in its introduction that 'when he achieved profundity it almost always occurred by accident or as a result of his long, usually misunderstood, relationships with three major sources: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Robert Fripp.' This is not to minimise his talent (though I'd add Brian Eno to that list of his influences); he made pop songs with catchy hooks and often fantastical themes; as an example of that, he gave Mott the Hoople their best song (the only one I ever paid any attention to); and he had a distinct flair for the dramatic tied to a moment in time. Even his final, darkest record was timed to his own passing. When he did the words for Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays's 'This Is Not America', a song I listen to often, given that I live in Britain, he sung them with his voice that was actually most effective in the lower registers, and gave the song an uncertainty and depth that the lyrics don't immediately suggest, and which Pat Metheny Group's own versions, while often more attractive instrumentally, often lack.

I said on Americarnage that Bowie's influence lay in the adoption of identities, and Cynthia made an interesting point, comparing him to dandies and pointing out how the original dandies, who confronted society, mutated into the Noel Coward or Cole Porter versions, 'men who sought to sell the world placebos for its deepest needs...demonstrating that the displaced self could celebrate, rather than solve, its losses.' She pointed out how he was 'merchandising other people's 'explorations of the isolated heart and mind', offering 'conceits of style' because he was, at heart, 'conventional'. And remember, Cynthia wrote that more than 30 years ago.

It chimes with what I said on Americarnage, and the range of Bowie's work, particularly outside the music world, reinforces that. He did telling, though not transcendent, work outside music, in a way moving with the times but also moving on from image-oriented music into fields where he could play with that image and often work against it.

Where Bowie's influence might well have been greatest is in the people who followed and borrowed from him. What is Madonna, after all, if not a David Bowie for the next generation, and there is a major essay to be written on the way she provided girls with a female equivalent of the androgynous male with whom they could identify their angst.  I think of George Clinton, Parliament and Funkadelic, as a sort of ironic parody of this, all Mothership and Garry Shider in diapers, with more than a hint of suggestion to the audience to question the placebo they're being handed. Maybe they were the way my generation could interpret Bowie.

Perhaps it's all just generation gapping in the end, perhaps it's just my being a curmudgeon not getting what the next generation gets instinctively. It's an almost inevitable progression, though, from the adoption of a new form of music to the adoption of new identities on stage, to the acting out of science fiction and the emperor's new clothes on stage. But that's not what he was being mourned for. Maybe combining Iggy Pop and Robert Heinlein was an innovation, but it was his understanding of alienation that lay behind what was covered up by the glitter; that was Bowie's real achievement, and what brought so many people to honest tears when he died.

CHARLIE HADEN: AN APPRECIATION AT BOTTOM

Appropriately enough, Charlie Haden was born in Shenandoah. This was in Iowa; the name is the same as one of the greatest traditional American songs. He began singing professionally when he was two, country music, on the radio with the Haden Family Band. Polio turned him into a bass player, when it damaged his vocal chords. He followed his older brother on the upright bass, but he was more taken with classical music, especially Bach, and with jazz. When he was 20 he headed out to Los Angeles to study and to seek out Hampton Hawes. He played with Hawes, and Paul Bley, and Art Pepper, before he wound up in his first great band, the Ornette Coleman quartet, with Don Cherry and Billy Higgins, who were busy inventing 'free jazz'

It makes sense, because Coleman was from Texas, with a heavy blues influence, and he could hear the country roots in Haden's bass. There's a lot of modern jazz, particularly involving Bill Frisell, that sounds like what jazz would be had it come out of country rather than the blues, and there's a lot of that underlying Coleman's relentless improvisations. With Coleman, Haden pushed the bass out front.

He left Coleman to enter Synanon, which if you're not of a certain age won't mean anything to you, to kick his drug habit. When he came out he got busy as a sideman for everyone from John Handy to Bobby Timmons, Pee Wee Russell to Red Allen. Then he joined Keith Jarrett's 'American Quartet', Jarrett fresh from Charles Lloyd, along with Dewey Redman and Paul Motian. There's a lot of Coleman and Coltrane there, as there was when he began recording with Old And New Dreams: Cherry, Redman, and drummer Ed Blackwell.

That's probably where I came in, working my way back to Ornette. I was gone from Montreal by the time of the Liberation Music Orchestra, Haden and Carla Bley's always evolving big band—Montreal always seemed to have a special place for him. The 'Liberation' part wasn't taken lightly; Haden had been detained in Portugal when he performed his 'Song For Che' there, and he was quizzed by the FBI after he returned stateside. By the time I left Montreal for London I was firmly embedded in the ECM jazz world—Jarrett's European Quartet and Gary Burton led me to Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber as well as Old And New Dreams. But it wasn't until the mid-80s, when I was again living on my own, that Charlie Haden really made an impact on me.

I caught up with his albums with Garbarek and Egberto Gismondi. I was immensely taken by Quartet West; with the great and versatile sax man Ernie Watts, alongside Alan Broadbent and Larance Marable; by then I was also immersed in film noir and Haunted Heart, their first album, touched a nerve. It's an amazing record, not just for its original compositions, but for the songs sung by Jo Stafford, Jeri Southern, and Billie Holliday. Stafford's 'Haunted Heart' is so, well, haunted, that I ran out and got one of her collections, only to discover it was the arrangement and the quartet that set her voice free; it's its time it was buried under a lava flow of sickly sweet charts, apparently by her husband.

Haden had a wonderful partnership with Pat Metheny, which began with 80/81, with Michael Brecker and Jack DeJohnette alongside Dewey Redman, and the 1986 record Song X, a re-working of and homage to Ornette Coleman which confounded those who found Metheny too glib. They culminated in the 1996 classic Beyond The Missouri Sky; two Midwestern boys playing the most lovely duets imaginable. Go back to 'Shenandoah', whose subtitle is 'Across The Wide Missouri'. I've played the disc almost to death; it played a huge part in winning my second ex, and it played an even bigger part in helping me through the pain of the breakup a decade later.

What's amazing in the two decades from the early 90s is the range of music Haden was playing. Folk songs and spirituals with Hank Jones; Latin music with Gonzago Rubalcaba; with pianists John Taylor and Kenny Barron; with Ginger Baker (a great trio with Bill Frisell); with the Italian guitarist Antonio Forcioni, a disc which my late father-in-law gave me, and which I treasure. In 2008 he made another country record with a new version of the Haden family; his wife Ruth Cameron (listen to the lovely 'Waltz For Ruth' on Missouri Sky, or live in 2009 here) including his son-in-law Jack Black.

I've been listening to a lot of Haden lately. Not the daytime Haden, the trios with Gery Allen and Paul Motian, or Joe Henderson and Al Foster. But the nighttime Haden. There's a 2012 two-disc set called Magico: Carta de Amor; a live recording of that band with Garbarek and Gismonti. There's Live At Birdland (2011) with Lee Konitz, Motian, and pianist Brad Mehldau. Most of all there's Jasmine (2010), duets with Keith Jarrett. By this time Haden was suffering from post-polio syndrome; Jarrett of course had suffered Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and come back a somewhat gentler player. Haden also suffered from tinnitus; he attributed it to the loudness of those early groups, and I've no doubt the polio left his ears more vulnerable; the quiet of his late work seems a just response to that. It suited the two of them, and their versions of standards resonate. They made a sequel, called Last Dance, which came out this year and topped Billboard's 'traditional' jazz chart.

I look back on what I've just written and it seems like a list—and a fairly incomplete list at that. I thought to myself, that doesn't do Charlie Haden justice, and then I realised that yes, it did. Because in a sense, I grew up in jazz with Charlie Haden. Everything from the freest of free modern jazz to the softest of ballads, as if to belie the jokes we used to make about ECM standing for European Chamber Music, or Exceedingly Caucasian Music, as much to belie the blackness of the post-bop era. I started flipping through my discs, and finding Haden on some where I'd forgotten he played. I wished I had the vinyl, those records that played on the turntable that sat on top of one speaker on the floor of the one closet in my tiny Montreal flat. I know tonight I will play a Charlie Haden disc as I lie in bed and wait for my mind to find its space in the night, and the melody of his bass will show my pulse the way to go.

GARY BURTON AND AL KOOPER: Irresistible Targets June Playlist

There has been a nostalgic theme to Irresistible Targets lately, and when, inspired by John Harvey to think about my 'playlist' for the month of June, I realised that the two new discs which have been spending all the time in the scanner are both by musicians I've been listening to for at least forty years, I thought it worth indulging tha nostalgia just a little bit more. I realised too that, in the wake of the Michael Jackson death-circus, they both took me back to a time when I really got caught up in music for its own sake, rather than caught up in the multi-media cult of the artist, even though the cults in those days were nothing like the marketed hype of today. And both of these discs play consciously with their roots in that time, though in different ways. And it was only while thinking about these two discs that I realised there was a direct, if tenuous, link between Gary Burton and Al Kooper, a link constructed by the way in which I pursued associations in the music I loved.

Gary Burton's Quartet Live sends you right back to the Sixties because it's packaged in a cover by none other than Peter Max. Of course, as it's a CD and as I've been wearing glasses for the past few years, it doesn't have quite the impact it would have had as a LP jacket, but my generation has learned to live with that. It always amazes me, in the world of digital downloads and Ipods, how much impact LP covers had on their audience; I can think of dozens of records whose covers caught my attention before some information on the sleeve caused me to give the record a try or discard it.

It's a summertime record, and it's been playing through the current British 'heat wave', the kind of music that accompanies sitting at the desk with sunshine and breeze blowing through the window, and I've been feeling that way about Gary Burton's music ever since I was in college. I don't remember whether I was drawn to Burton by Larry Coryell, the guitarist in his original, 1968, quartet; I remember I used to play Coryell's Lady Coryell incessantly, despite my roomates' complaints about the awful vocals, and nowadays people look at that as one of the first 'jazz-rock' albums (I'll be writing more about this when I cover the David Sanborn concert I saw the other night). But since I think my first Burton album was 1969's Throb it's more likely I was drawn to it by the presence of fiddler Richard Greene, from the last incarnation of Kooper's Blues Project (and there's the link) which became Sea Train. He'd played with Bill Monroe and also played bluegrass with the Blue Velvet Band, and the idea of his joining a vibraphone-led jazz band must've seemed strange. But this was the time of Herbie Mann's Memphis Underground, when Kooper was producing records by the Don Ellis Orchestra, and of course the Electric Flag and Kooper's own Blood Sweat & Tears issued their first records, which are still two of my favourites. Throb's title track is a haunting piece composed by Mike Gibbs, who contributed three other tunes. The only member of the original quartet still around is bassist Steve Swallow, drummer Bill Goodwin replaced Roy Haynes and Coryell gave way to Jerry Hahn, from the rock band The Serfs, who also produced the great keyboardist/singer Mike Finnigan.

Although Quartet Live has the feel of an anniversary album, it's not. Guitarist Pat Metheny Metheny first joined Burton in a two-guitar quintet (along with Mike Goodrick) for Ring (1974) which also played Eberhard Weber's bass off against Swallows. Metheny played on two more records, Dreams So Real and the classic Passengers, again with Weber, before going on to the huge stardom he now enjoys. But he's already done two 'reunion' albums with Burton; Reunion (1990) and Like Minds (1998, with Haynes, Chick Corea and Dave Holland). In fact, Quartet Live opens with 'Sea Change', a Corea composition Burton's done with the pianist many times. There are afew other familiar tunes revisited, most notably Metheny's lovely 'B&G(Midwestern Night's Dream)' but the range of writers includes Swallow, Burton (never a prolific composer), Keith Jarrett, Carla Bley, and Duke Ellington's 'Fleurette Africaine'. What Burton, with his four-mallet playing, and Metheny, with his speed, have in common is a sense of weaving the many notes they play; never displaying virtuousity for its own sake (well, OK Metheny, on his own work, sometimes does). Swallow fits this layered approach perfectly, and the addition of Metheny's current drummer, Antonio Sanchez, is perfect because he provides a rhythmic drive, in fact, reminds me much more of the muscular Haynes than of other more gentle Metheny drummers like Bob Moses. It's a record that's more fun than its cover.

Al Kooper's White Chocolate is a sequel of sorts to Black Coffee, but appears to have been released only by Sony Japan (and through Kooper's own website), in 2008. It was the disc that was getting the most playtime in my office during those wretched rainy weeks of June, when you ask yourself why you're living in Britain and you listen to music that makes you think of home. I go back with Kooper all the way to the Blues Project, 1966 or so, and this record has some of the eclecticism that made the Project so good when they were good. In fact, it's very much a valedictory work, with a lot of familiar (by other people) material. The piece that will get the most attention is probably a slowed down version of It Takes A Lot To Laugh (It Takes A Train To Cry), the Dylan song Al did with Steve Stills on Super Session. Of course Al is today remembered primarily as the guy who slipped into the organ chair and added the riff on Dylan's 'Like A Rollin Stone'. As he said in a piece about White Choc written by Mark Gould, 'Ahhhh, it's just great to be remembered for something other than bombing the World Trade Center or shooting Jack Ruby.' Yes, I know, nobody shot Ruby, but you get the point!

But there are also covers of the classic 'I Who Have Nothing,' Fred Neil's 'Candy Man' (a huge hit for Roy Orbison), Otis Redding's 'I Love You More Than Words Can Say' (written by Eddie Floyd and Booker T Jones), and two Kooper kollaborations with Gerry Goffin, apparently done by email. There is also a eulogy to Stax, one of the kind of songs Stax themselves used to do so well, which features Booker and Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper and allows Al the chance to yell 'play it Steve' just like Sam Moore did on Soul Man (by the way, when I do write that Sanborn piece I will be mentioning Sam's singing with him). Al's voice is weaker than it was (he's 65, and has suffered a number of serious illnesses, including a brain tumour and a near-loss of eyesight) but since at his peak he was once described as sounding like a soulful asthmatic, it may not have quite the pop the song demands, but it is great fun and sounds great behind him, and since Stax was always the inspiration behind his horn charts, it makes sense.

The record features vocals by the exquisite Catharine Russell and Sherryl Marshall, who go all the way back with Al to Child Is Father To The Man that first BS&T album, which may still be my favourite rock record of all-time. Russell, a true soul diva, even gets to sing lead on Hold On. Like almost all Al's albums, it's uneven; he's too indulgent of his own cleverness to simply pay to formula, and some of his favorite quirks don't always hit the right note, but there are far more hits than misses. And yes, one of the songs sounds an awful lot like on of the ones of Black Coffee, but I won't say which. But there are also a couple of touching takes on growing old, Al originals, 'You Never Know Til You Get There' and '(I Don't Know When But) I Know That I'll Be There Soon', both featuring Al Gorgoni on acoustic guitar, another of those session guys who popped up on Al's album credits and very few others. It may sound like I'm off on a nostalgia trip, but I played and replayed this record with immense satisfaction, and you tell me how many records you can say that about today?

Irresistible Turntables: The June Playlist:
Gary Burton 'Quartet Live' (Concord 2009)
Al Kooper 'White Chocolate' (Sony Japan 2008)
Jack DeJohnette's Parallel Realties 'Live' two-discs from Philadelphia, 1990, on the semi-bootleg German Jazz Door label, with Metheny, Herbie Hancock, and Dave Holland. Harder driving than the studio albums, this one really moves.
for the Summer Soulstice, June 21st:
Taj Mahal The Real Thing, the phenomenal 1971 Columbia live album with a four-tuba horn section. Key track: 'Ain't Gwine Whistle Dixie (Any Mo')' for its solos by three guys less celebrated than they should be: Howard Johnson (sax), John Hall (guitar) and John Simon (piano—producer of that first BS&T album, as well as the Band's first two).
Stax Soul Power (Mojo 2/07) on 21/6, especially William Bell's 'I Forgot To Be Your Lover'
Baby Washington (pictured right) I've Got A Feeling (Stateside 2005) a great best-of compilation which includes the best cover of I'm On The Outside (Looking In)

Isle Of Wight/Glastonbury /Hyde Park displacement therapy:
Neil Young (Reprise 1968), that first solo album, of which I've still got the rare, title-less LP cover, isn't really solo since its mostly-unbilled players include Poco's George Grantham, Ry Cooder, Jack Nitzsche, and Jim Messina, along with the wonderful Brenda Holloway leading a great chorus. To stay in that 40-year old groove, Sugar Mountain (Reprise 2008), is the 1968 live Canterbury House solo concert, which is Neil at his most vulnerable, and sounding very much in, and of, that time.