Free Fall (Jimmy Giuffre album)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Free Fall
Studio album by Jimmy Giuffre

Publication
(s)

1963

Label (s) Columbia Records

Format (s)

LP / CD

Genre (s)

jazz

running time

34:40 (LP), 56:57 (CD)

occupation

production

Teo Macero , Michael Cuscuna (reissue)

Studio (s)

New York City

Free Fall is a jazz album by the Jimmy Giuffre Trio, starring Paul Bley and Steve Swallow , recorded on July 9, October 10 and November 1, 1962 in New York City. The album produced by Teo Macero was released in 1963 on Columbia Records . It was re-released in expanded form on CD in 1998.

prehistory

Giuffre first heard Ornette Coleman at the Lenox School of Jazz , where he taught in the late 1950s , who attended their summer school in 1959. Giuffre was very impressed by Coleman's playing, switched from the baritone saxophone to the clarinet in 1960 and changed his music in the next few years; the result were atmospheric, overlapping improvisations without a fixed key or tempi that characterized his playing from then on.

In 1961 the clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre founded a trio with the pianist Paul Bley and the bassist Steve Swallow, with which he recorded the two Verve albums Fusion (March 1961) and Thesis (August 1961) (re-released under the title 1961 by ECM), and went on a four-week European tour in October / November 1961, documented on albums such as Emphasis, Stuttgart 1961 and Flight, Bremen 1961 (released on HatHut Records ). Between the two Verve albums, Giuffres music had evolved away from the pastoral plaintive sound of "The Train and the River", which after the memories of Steve Swallow in Verve management was not enthusiastic; an attempt was made to convince Giuffre to "tone down his attack on the purchasing power of jazz" and commissioned Creed Taylor to oversee the sessions, which were quickly settled.

The album

The Columbia session a year later "took place in a more pleasant atmosphere," recalled Swallow in 1998; "Teo Macero was more tolerant of our music than Creed Taylor was, and had a lot more sympathy for it." The recordings - with a sound engineer familiar with classical music - took place in a studio-converted church on 30th Street, which has a suitable acoustics.

After the first recordings of unaccompanied solos in July 1962, Giuffre went to the recording studio with Bley and Swallow on October 10; during the session (in addition to the solo number Man Alone ) the titles Spasmodic, The Five Ways and Threewe were created . At the last recording session on November 1st, the trio titles Dichotomy, Divided Man and Motion Suspended as well as the solo titles Onothoids, Yggdrasill and Primordial Call were recorded.

The original album contained five clarinet solos, two duets for clarinet and bass, and three trio titles. When it was re-released as a compact disc, five more clarinet solos were added. Giuffre later judged the music on the album:

“ There's no time, no key, no meter. "

List of titles

LP edition 1963

  • Jimmy Giuffre: Free Fall (Columbia 1963 - CL 1964 / CS 8764)

A1 propulsion -1: 43

A2 Threewe -4:10

A3 Ornothoids -2: 11

A4 Dichotomy -3: 56

A5 Man Alone -2: 16

A6 Spasmodic -3:24

B1 Yggdrasill -2:32

B2 Divided Man -1: 52

B3 Primordial Call -2: 16

B4 The Five Ways -10: 20

  • All titles are by Jimmy Giuffre.

CD edition 1998

  • Jimmy Giuffre: Free Fall (Columbia 1998 - CK 65446, Legacy - 01-065446-10)
  1. Propulsion 3:07
  2. Threewe 4:11
  3. Ornothoids 2:43
  4. Dichotomy 3:57
  5. Man Alone 2:18
  6. Spasmodic 3:27
  7. Yggdrasill 2:32
  8. Divided Man 1:53
  9. Primordial Call 2:17
  10. The Five Ways 10:19
  11. Present Notion 3:41
  12. Motion Suspended 3:16
  13. Future Plans 3:56
  14. Past Mistakes 2:05
  15. Time Will Tell 3:49
  16. Let's See 3:26

Effect of the album

This trio existed for less than two years; Steve Swallow later wrote that the group last played in a coffee house on Bleecker Street in New York, where the fee for each musician would have been 35 cents. Despite positive reviews - according to Jazz magazine (1964), " Free Fall contained some of the most unique group improvisations ever recorded" - Free Fall remained a commercial failure when it came out in 1963. After the Columbia album, Giuffre did not release any new recordings for ten years. Instead, he taught at the New School and New York University in New York City. It was not until 1989 and 1992 that Giuffre, Bley and Swallow met again for tours and recordings; this resulted in the albums The Life of a Trio: Saturday and Sunday and Fly Away, Little Bird (Owl).

The importance of the album was only fully realized in later years; According to the British magazine Gramophone , the Jimmy Giuffre 3 with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow "in retrospect" was one of the most ambitious groups of the era. According to Tracie Ratiner, however, the appearance of Giuffre's trio free jazz was overshadowed by Ornette Coleman's fundamental album The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and other releases of this phase. Steve Voce described it in his Giuffre obituary in the Independent 2008 as a classic album of the free jazz genre; Josef Woodard described it in JazzTimes as an "early and important rumble of the coming revolution in improvisation".

According to the British music critic Wilfrid Mellers, Giuffre is taking "the ultimate level and is completely detached from the beat ". According to Piero Scaruffi , Giuffre explores soundscapes on the border between free jazz and classical music.

Thom Jurek rated the album in Allmusic with 4½ stars and describes it as one of the most revolutionary recordings to come out of the 1960s. While John Coltrane , Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor “wanted to tear the music down from within,” Giuffre calmly developed his own microtonal revolution that was overlooked by the other avant-gardists in jazz. In Free Fall , Giuffre embarks on a journey that goes much further with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow than on the two previous Verve albums Fusion and Thesis (1961) “in his search for pointillist harmony, open-tonal play and the power of one nuanced phrasing to create new perspectives on solo and group improvisation. ”The album gives a great look at Giuffre as a master not only of free improvisation but also as an excellent interpreter of a musical language used by composers such as Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky , Olivier Messiaen and also Morton Feldman and Earle Brown .

Giuffres clarinet studies like Man Alone, Yggdrasill and Present Motion are studies in tonal coloring; the group interactions Threewe and Spasmodic offer a glimpse of interlocking chromatic pointillism. But Free Fall was such radical music at the time that nobody was ready for it. Free Fall is a forerunner of European microtonal studies and an inspiration to all who embrace it.

Richard Cook and Brian Morton award the album in The Penguin Guide to Jazz with the highest grade of four stars and the additional crown (a special token of merit) . Compared to the two previous albums Fusion and Thesis , Free Fall has a “more complicated and insidious sound”. It catches the group just before the end of its existence. It is remarkable that Columbia had the courage to realize this project. “What you hear is something that has stabilized in practice, but has by no means lost its creativity. Swallow's fiery rummaging around and pointed single-note playing gives the music a new impulse, the kind of energy “that you find in free jazz . In addition to the previous albums, Free Fall is an "essential document of a broader jazz idiom that refused to see Bop as the sole claim."

Jimmy Giuffres trio recordings with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow were the inspiration for Ken Vandermark's recordings with Havard Wiik and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten ( Free Fall: Gray Scale 2010). The trio of Lotte Anker , Rodrigo Pinheiro and Hernâni Faustino also referred to Free Fall on their album Still (Creative Sources, 2007) .

Free Fall was recorded as # 112 on The Wire's “100 Records That Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening)” .

Rolling Stone magazine voted the album at number 93 in its 2013 list of The 100 Best Jazz Albums .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Ben Ratliff : Obituary (2008) for Jimmy Giuffre in The New York Times
  2. ↑ a b Steve Swallow, Liner Notes from the album (1998)
  3. ↑ Tom Lord : The Jazz Discography (online, August 31, 2013)
  4. ↑ Quoted from: Max Harrison , Charles Fox, Eric Thacker, Stuart Nicholson (eds.): The Essential Jazz Records: Modernism to Postmodernism , London, Mansell, 1984, Continuum 2000, ISBN 0720117089 , p. 371
  5. ↑ Jazz 1964 - Volumes 3–4 - page 65
  6. ↑ Gramophone - Volume 70, Issues 836-841 - page 80
  7. ↑ See Tracie Ratiner: Contemporary Musicians: Profiles of the People in Music, Volume 64 2008, p. 92
  8. ↑ < Obituary in The Independent
  9. ^ Paul Bley remembers Jimmy Giuffre (2009) in JazzTimes
  10. ↑ Handbook of Texas Music, edited by Laurie E. Jasinski
  11. ↑ http://www.scaruffi.com/jazz/giuffre.html
  12. ↑ Review of Thom Jurek's album Free Fall at Allmusic (English). Retrieved August 23, 2013.
  13. ^ Richard Cook, Brian Morton: The Penguin Guide to Jazz. 6th edition. London 2003, p. 578 f.
  14. ↑ Review of the album Free Fall: Gray Scale by John Fordham (2010) in The Guardian
  15. ↑ http://www.hernanifaustino.com/discography/reviews-birthmark/
  16. ↑ Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Jazz Albums . Retrieved November 16, 2016.