Jimmy Garrison

James Emory "Jimmy" Garrison (* 3. March 1934 in Miami , † 7. April 1976 in New York ) was an American jazz - double bass , the "classic" above all as a member of the so-called quartet of saxophonist John Coltrane known has been. Garrison's playing, described by contemporaries as particularly "punchy" and "earthy" , can be heard , for example, on Coltrane's legendary album A Love Supreme , which was recorded on December 9, 1964.

Life

As with many African-American musicians, Jimmy Garrison has some ambiguity about the dates of his early biography. For example, the memorial website designed by his own family states that he was born in 1933, while the usual reference works all name the following year. Philadelphia is also sometimes mentioned as the place of birth , but this is not the case.

What is certain is that Garrison came to Philadelphia at a young age, which in the 1950s had one of the most important creative jazz scenes in the USA. Here he mainly played with well-known greats in the style of the then modern hard bop , such as Benny Golson , Lee Morgan or Curtis Fuller .

With a band of Miles Davis drummer Philly Joe Jones , Garrison came to New York in 1957 or 1958 , where after a while he made a name for himself, especially among the jazz avant-garde. In 1961 John Coltrane hired him as bassist for his newly formed quartet with McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums , known as the "classic" John Coltrane Quartet . In the context of the band, Garrison was perceived by contemporaries as the extroverted, somewhat frivolous part. The singer Terry Callier puts it in an interview as follows:

“He [Coltrane] was kind of isolated from the other musicians in his group too, because… McCoy was very, very young then, Jimmy Garrison was a ladies' man and an extremely extroverted person, and Elvin fought his fight every night various demons - drugs and other things. He was probably only really close to them on stage, where these four individual personalities then became something incredibly big. "

In 1967 Garrison married the San Francisco dancer Roberta Escamilla , who had come to New York to study with Merce Cunningham . Through Roberta, Jimmy Garrison found access to the avant-garde dance scene in Manhattan at the time , with which he remained connected until the end of his life.

Like Tyner and Jones, Garrison found his own style in the course of working with Coltrane; the band found itself in an ongoing creative development process, which led their music further and further away from hard bop in the direction of free jazz . While the pianist and drummer felt overwhelmed by the tireless experimentation of their band leader in the mid-1960s , Garrison was the only musician in the "classical" line-up who remained loyal to Coltrane until his death in 1967.

Due to its enormous stylistic importance for the avant-garde jazz of the 1960s, the Garrison / Jones bass-drum team was often hired by other soloists, above all Sonny Rollins ( East Broadway Rundown , 1966) and Ornette Coleman ( Love Call and New York Is Now , both 1968).

Even after his time with "'Trane" Garrison preferred to move in musical contexts that felt obliged to the ideal of the saxophonist, including bands with Coltrane's widow Alice and again Elvin Jones.

By 1974 the bassist's health began to deteriorate dramatically; the cause, it turned out, was lung cancer. Jimmy Garrison succumbed to his illness on April 7, 1976 at the age of 42. His son Matthew "Matt" Garrison was also known as a bassist (especially as an electric bassist in various fusion and funk bands), while his daughter Joy is active as a jazz singer.

style

General

In a sense, Garrison's style of playing contradicts the development of the double bass in jazz during the 1960s. This was mainly characterized by an enormous expansion of the solo, virtuoso potential of this bulky instrument. New technical developments (steel instead of the previously usual gut strings, pickups and amplifiers ) made it possible to play with less power, more differentiated and more fluidity. This new bass style was exemplarily embodied by the bassists of the Bill Evans trio, especially Scott LaFaro and Eddie Gomez .

In contrast, Garrison saw himself with his "heavy" sound in the traditional role of the accompanying bassist; However, thanks to the special musical construction of the Coltrane Quartet, he gained completely new facets from this role.

Accompaniment style

The bass in the ensemble structure of the Coltrane Quartet

Despite all the joy of experimentation, the Coltrane quartet maintained a finely balanced interplay. Even if the band often uses the traditional structure of a piece as a sequence of improvised solos , the four musicians are already preparing the more open design of musical processes that Joe Zawinul described about a decade later for his band " Weather Report " with the words: " we always solo, we never solo " ( " we solos ever, we never soloing ").

In doing so, the quartet initially - especially in the early phase of its existence - does not do without conventional rhythmic situations. Here Garrison plays in many " straight ahead " swinging numbers a conventional walking bass line in 4/4 time or, in slow ballads from the jazz standard repertoire, the accompanying figures common in this style in half notes.

Generally speaking, one can say that the rhythmic achievements of the Coltrane Quartet are particularly evident in its characteristic treatment of 6/4 time and the development of the so-called rubato ballad.

In relation to the stresses powerful style of play Tyner with its lush Quart stratification - chords and the complex polyrhythms of Jones' drumming Garrison's bass however, often takes a back seat. This is partly an acoustic problem: although the Coltrane Quartet were the loudest modern jazz band of their time, Garrison was very reluctant to use electrical amplification. As a result, his bass can hardly be heard on many recordings in the midst of the dense musical network.

The "drones"

The occupation with ostinato figures has a long tradition in jazz, it begins at the latest with the constantly repeated wind riffs of the swing era in the 1930s. The interest of many bebop musicians, especially Dizzy Gillespie , in Latin American music challenged bassists and drummers in particular to find jazz-appropriate implementations of the typical rhythmic patterns of the Latin styles.

The Coltrane Quartet played a leading role in the further development of modal jazz , as Coltrane's former leader Miles Davis had designed a few years earlier on records such as Kind of Blue . Coltrane's spiritual inclinations had led him to an examination of Indian and Arabic music, where one does not work with changing harmonies , but with extended, static soundscapes. But the traditional jazz bass techniques proved quickly to be insufficient for the implementation of in English drone -called drone Tones, such as those in India by the Tanpura be realized.

The subtle but very effective difference between the approaches can be demonstrated by comparing two typical bass ostinati, which achieve completely different effects in a very similar harmonic situation. The ostinato of Dizzy Gillespie's famous composition A Night in Tunisia from 1945 reads:

In contrast, we hear the accompaniment of Eric Dolphy's arrangement of the English Renaissance song Greensleeves on the Coltrane record Africa / Brass (1961) - the line that was recorded by Reggie Workman on the original takes :

Jimmy Garrison, who joined Coltrane shortly after this recording, quickly developed into a master in the development of such concise rhythmic patterns that clearly define a harmonic field and can be repeated as often as desired (only with minimal variations).

The “meditative” character of his music, which Coltrane is so explicitly striving for, arises from the sharp contrast between Garrison's calm, imperturbable bass lines and the turbulent “mumbo jumbo” ( Geoff Dyer ) of the other voices.

The "discovery" of 6/4 time

The German jazz critic Joachim Ernst Berendt (1922–2000) made the somewhat generalized but essentially correct statement: “Everything that is new in jazz is first of all rhythmically new.” In this sense, it is a little surprising that they are so Coltrane-Band, which is clearly looking for something new, got its signature groove through a compromise with the music business. As Coltrane turned more and more to the avant-garde, he was persuaded to show a certain conciliation towards the audience, at least when choosing his repertoire. In 1961, My Favorite Things was recorded , an extremely popular waltz melody by Richard Rodgers from the musical “ The Sound of Music ”, which in turn was based on the German film “The Trapp Family” from 1956.

Although the interpretation already foreshadows free jazz in many details and the modal technique and the use of the soprano saxophone aroused somewhat strange "oriental" associations for many listeners, Favorite Things was a surprise success for Coltrane. Since he and his musicians did not want to be tied to this one piece, the Coltrane Quartet interpreted increasingly radical new interpretations of songs in 3/4 time over the years (including often very popular pieces such as Chim Chim Cher-ee from Disney -Film Mary Poppins or the aforementioned Greensleeves ).

The use of three-meter meters was the focus of interest for many jazz musicians around 1960. The relationship between 3/4 time and the shuffle rhythm of the older blues was demonstrated by Miles Davis, for example, on the aforementioned Kind of Blue record from 1959 (" All Blues "). With Bill Evans and John Coltrane, two musicians were involved in this recording, who played a key role in the further development of the triple meter in jazz. Evans developed the style of modern jazz waltz with his trios , while Coltrane, inspired by Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, interpreted 3/4 time more and more in the direction of a 6/4 feeling. This corresponded to the ensemble's weakness for polyrhythmic structures influenced by African, Afro-Cuban and Oriental music.

Typical is the version of Inch Worm , a Danny Kaye song composed by Frank Loesser , which the quartet recorded in 1962. Garrison plays the following ostinato:

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The figure can be written down technically completely correctly in 3/4 time, but the repetition of the two-bar phrase creates a 6/4 meter. This is further emphasized by Jones' drumming, and the rhythmic ideas of Tyner and Coltrane imply further complex metric overlays that have nothing to do with the characteristic "swaying" effect of a European 3/4 time.

Rubato ballads

In a jazz piece, the rhythm usually functions on a much more elementary level as a structural element than in classical music in Europe. For this reason, metrically unbound rubato passages were almost exclusively reserved for introductions and closing cadences for decades .

As a result of their collaboration with Duke Ellington (September 1962), the Coltrane Quartet devoted themselves intensively to the development of the rubato ballad type of song . This was mainly a break with the jazz tradition in that ballads were usually designed in a particularly "lush" melodic and harmonic manner. Many of Coltran's rubato ballads, however, are rather compositional fragments, over which the band improvised quite freely.

A characteristic example of Jimmy Garrison's handling of this new type of song is Alabama (1963). In the rubato passages of this piece (intended as a political statement), the bassist completely separates himself from his accompanying function in order to develop an extended contrapuntal duet with the tenor saxophone .

Solo performance

Garrison largely eluded the pronounced trend of the 1960s towards virtuoso, solo bass playing. Double bass solos had a clear dramaturgical function in the ensemble concept of the Coltrane Quartet: They served to mark a moment of meditative calm in the otherwise extraordinarily dynamic music. As a rule, Garrison's solos remained solos in the exact sense of the word, piano and drums also usually skipped in these passages.

Garrison made intensive use of the opportunities that this freedom offered him, as can be clearly seen from the solo on Prayer and Meditation from the album Transition (1965). His style can best be described as a further development of Charles Mingus' solo performance . Like him, he draws on a multitude of playing techniques: an episode bowed out with a bow in which Garrison also uses the relatively modern col legno technique, the double stops and arpeggios (for which the somewhat unfortunate term " flamenco grip" is in circulation is) are also characteristics of the Mingus style in only slightly different form .

Musical effect

Meaning for rock and soul

The emerging rock was rather skeptical of modern jazz; Chuck Berry had already formulated this in his song Rock and Roll music in 1957 : I got no kicks against modern jazz / Unless they try and play it too darn fast./ They change the beauty of the melody / Until they sound just like a symphony.

The music of the Coltrane Quartet, by which many players and listeners of the younger popular music felt extremely inspired, was excluded from this negative evaluation. For many contemporaries, the band represented the attitude towards life of the "Sixties" with their spirit of optimism, their rebellious and spiritually searching attitude at the same time.

A take in the film Almost Famous (2000), which is set in the rock scene of the early 1970s, testifies to the widespread acceptance of Coltran's variety of modern jazz in rock . Here you can see a wall decorated with LP sleeves, where Coltrane's records hang naturally next to those by Cream and Grateful Dead .

In addition to the sheer intensity of the quartet with its almost rock-like volume, it was above all Garrison's stable, fundamental bass work that made Coltrane's highly abstract music accessible and attractive to the young audience. Even then, the album A Love Supreme enjoyed pronounced cult status , the first part of which (" Acknowledgment ") is almost exclusively constructed around Garrison's bass line, which is constantly repeated for minutes:

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Patterns such as this, characterized by an intelligent simplicity, inspired the rock and soul electric bassists of the era to develop a new style that still hints at influences from the older blues , but is already committed to a new sound quality, for example by creating a completely new one Makes use of the pentatonic scale. In this respect, jazz, rock and soul still work with very similar musical elements in the 1960s.

Selected discography

Pre-Coltrane

• 1957 - Kenny Dorham Jazz Contrasts
• 1958 - Philly Joe Jones Blues For Dracula
• 1959 - Jackie McLean Swing, Swang, Swinging
• 1959 - Lee Konitz Live at the Half Note
• 1961 - Benny Carter Further Definitions

With Coltrane

• 1961 - My Favorite Things ( exact session dates are controversial, various discographies name Reggie Workman as bassist )
• 1961 - Africa / Brass Sessions Vol. 2
• 1961 - The Other Village Vanguard Tapes
• 1961 - Impressions
• 1961 - Ballads
• 1962 - Duke Ellington and John Coltrane
• 1962 - Coltrane
• 1963 - John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman
• 1964 - Crescent
• 1964 - A Love Supreme
• 1965 - Ascension
• 1965 - Om
• 1965 - Kulu Se Mama
• 1965 - Sun Ship
• 1966 - Live at the Village Vanguard Again
• 1967 - Expressions
• 1967 - Stellar Regions

With other musicians of the New York avant-garde

• 1959 - Ornette Coleman Art of the Improvisors
• 1961 - Ornette Coleman Ornette on tenor
• 1963 - Elvin Jones Illumination
• 1966 - Bill Dixon Jazz Artistry of Bill Dixon
• 1966 - Sonny Rollins East Broadway Rundown
• 1966 - Robert F. Pozar , Good Golly Miss Nancy
• 1967 - Archie Shepp Live at the Donaueschingen Music Festival
• 1968 - Ornette Coleman Love Call
• 1968 - Ornette Coleman New York Is Now
• 1972 - Archie Shepp Attica Blues
• 1974 - Beaver Harris From Ragtime To No Time

After Coltrane's death

• 1968 - Elvin Jones Puttin 'It Together
• 1968 - Alice Coltrane Monastic Trio