Jazz
Sometimes Pharoah Sanders came back and played like a primordial saxophone deity, cutting into the rhythm section like an act of penetration.
Longtime GBH host Eric Jackson passed away earlier this morning.
To hear free music so beautifully contained and expressed in such inventive forms isn’t unheard of (Henry Threadgill? Vijay Iyer? Wadada Leo Smith?). But bassist Michael Formanek has his own way.
If you don’t know those 1969 originals, get them and listen to them. And if you know the recordings well, listen to them again. No matter how familiar this 50-year-old music is to you, you’ll be struck by its timelessness.
The shadow of Weather Report looms over this groove session of consonant harmonies, the only documentation of a short-lived band that should have had the chance to burn more brightly.
The sound of both musicians is indelible: trumpeter Enrico Rava is warm and rounded; pianist Fred Hersch, often icy, is fetching and detailed.
The saxophonist has the slithery facility of a bebopper, but I also hear something of the forthright stance of Coltrane in his playing, despite the rhythmic complexity of his writing — and his distinctively varied use of his Puerto Rican background.
To my ears, these beautifully recorded improvisations — with their unique sequences of tones and subtle interactions — are never less than intriguing.
Guitarist Eddie Condon quotes a mobster on jazz: “…it’s got guts and it don’t make you slobber.”
To some degree, everything fit under the resilient umbrella that the late George Wein raised at the edge of Newport Harbor.
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