New York Concerts: The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4

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New York Concerts: The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4
Live album by Jimmy Giuffre

Publication
(s)

2014

admission

1965

Label (s) Elemental Music

Format (s)

2 CD

Genre (s)

jazz

Title (number)

12

running time

1:26:47

occupation

production

Zev Feldman

Location (s)

Columbia University Wollman Auditorium and Judson Hall, New York City

chronology
Emphasis, Stuttgart 1961
(1993) 		New York Concerts: The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4 -

New York Concerts: The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4 is a jazz album by Jimmy Giuffre , recorded in May (quartet) and September (trio) 1965 at Columbia University's Wollman Auditorium and Judson Hall, New York City, respectively June 2014 at Elemental Music.

background

In the 1950s, gained Giuffre as a member of Woody Herman's Herd recognition, especially for his play "Four Brothers", but he really found his voice that he wrote with guitarist in a remarkable trio, Jim Hall and bassist Ralph Pena formed wrote Peter Margasak. The reserved sound ideal of Giuffres brought the music together with cool jazz - “although it was not relaxed and relaxed at the level of improvisation and spontaneous back and forth. At the end of the decade, he pushed the music forward with loose structures and more adventurous improvisation. The commercial failure of Freefall meant that he of [the major label ] Columbia was dropped - he would do as a leader to 1971 no other album - and the trio with Bley and Swallow broke up soon, but Giuffre just retired little back or watered down his ideas, ”which the recordings at hand proved, according to the author. Giuffre remained engaged during "that lost decade" (S. Victor Aaron) and by 1964 he had formed another trio, this time with Barre Phillips on bass and Don Friedman on piano, and that ensemble toured Europe in early 1965. Then, after the tour, he brought in a drummer, Joe Chambers . This is the list that Klabin recorded as the (nineteen-year-old) head of the jazz department of Columbia University radio station in May 1965.

The concerts were both recorded by George Klabin for his radio broadcast; He recorded this group in an empty auditorium with a two-channel tape recorder, a mixer with 4 inputs and microphones for each musician individually, an appearance that should only be played once in his jazz radio program. After the tapes were sent, they disappeared in the archives. However, the trio disc (Disc One) was recorded by Klabin a few months later in a real concert setting during the New York Festival of The Avant Garde . By that time, the Jimmy Giuffre 4 had been reduced to the Jimmy Giuffre 3 again, with Friedman leaving and Richard Davis replacing Barre Phillips on bass. The first disc of the edition contains the music of a trio in which Giuffre played on both the clarinet and the tenor saxophone, as usual. (Giuffre had largely put the saxophone aside in the 1950s, just as he had stopped working with drummers in his own band at the same time.) The set includes a performance of Ornette Coleman's classic "Crossroads," and although Giuffre does not As Ornette sounds, according to Margasak, “this is an instructive decision: Both musicians are pushing for chord change improvisation. Most of the tempos are slow to moderate and the music is characterized by the kind of spaciousness and contemplation that is consistent with the Bley Swallow line-up. ”The second CD features recordings of Giuffres with Joe Chambers, along with bassist Barre Phillips and the Pianist Don Friedman , among the titles played a quartet version of Giuffres “Syncopate”.

New York Concerts was produced by Zev Feldman , who had acquired the rights from Giuffre's widow Juanita and George Klabin.

Track list

Richard Davis, 2010
  • The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4: New York Concerts ”(Elemental 5990425)

Disc 1: Judson Hall, September 3, 1965

  1. Syncopate 7:50
  2. Intro 0:37
  3. Crossroads (Ornette Coleman) 7:47
  4. Drive 11:39
  5. Quadrangle 3:52
  6. Angles 4:32

Disc 2: Wollman Auditorium, May 19, 1965

  1. Syncopate 8:20
  2. Quadrangle 7:06
  3. Three Bars In One 8:50
  4. Cry, Want 9:40
  5. Angles 8:10
  6. Drive 8:06
  • All compositions, unless otherwise stated, are by Jimmy Giuffre.

reception

Peter Margasak said in the Chicago Reader that the chances are slim that "a better historical jazz release will come out" this year than The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4 New York Concerts , "a breathtaking" double CD. The music data "from Giuffre's lost decade, a time when there was almost no documentation of his playing." After the release of the brilliant 1963 album Free Fall (Columbia), one with pianist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow Trio set “that brought the leader's obsession with contrapuntal composition and improvisation to apotheosis. The music was way ahead of its time - drummerless, strict and decidedly abstract - and the years in between have shown how profound Giuffre's ideas were: “His brand of chamber music jazz is preserved in all sorts of contemporary projects, says Margasak. Ken Vandermark even named one of his groups - with the pianist Håvard Wiik and the bassist Ingebrit Håker Flaten - Free Fall ; the clarinetist James Falzone referred to Giuffre's music in his group Klang ; and recently trumpeter Dave Douglas explored these chamber-like sounds in his new Riverside project, the author wrote of Giuffre's influence.

Don Friedman (2009)

S. Victor Aaron wrote in Something Else !: “While Giuffre never deviated from his concept, the [personnel] changes had a significant impact on the music. Starting again with 'Syncopate', [Richard] Davis fills the void left by a missing piano. His sliding notes set him apart from Phillips and Giuffre, who mixes abstract noises and croaking with swing suspicions on the tenor saxophone. ”With“ Crossroads ”it is revealing, like a great champion of“ The New Thing in Jazz ”, Ornette Coleman, interpret. “Giuffre conjures up Coleman in the introductory Head and then makes his composition his own. Atonal and microtonal are the sounds he emits from his clarinet that the instrument does not trust. ”“ Drive ”is an atonal blues that is quickly deconstructed. Davis followed a path shaped by Giuffre's saxophone and Swing broke out of Chambers' drum kit, but the other two mostly played free. The song breaks up again into "some strange sounds" when Davis makes sawing sounds with his bow and Giuffre can imitate these sounds with his saxophone, "which creates this really eerie richness of sound." New York Concerts , according to Aaron's summary, is one of them most exciting finds of lost jazz recordings of the last few years together with Wes Montgomery's Echoes of Indiana Avenue , she “confirms Giuffre's foresight and understanding in the field of free jazz , just as the music began to push out of the fringes and express what was possible. Jimmy Giuffre was there the whole time, but only a few knew that. "

In his reviews of the album in The New York Times, Nate Chinen discussed Giuffre's position in the free jazz / New Thing movement; “Giuffre licked his wounds” after the debacle with the Free Fall album, “but continued his concept as the avant-garde energies of jazz around Mr. Coleman and the rapid fervor of John Coltrane began to take hold . Giuffre appeared on "The October Revolution in Jazz," a groundbreaking free jazz festival hosted in 1964 by trumpeter Bill Dixon . But revolution as a cultural and rhetorical strategy was not the focus of his company. The compositions he played in 1965 have titles related to either geometry ('Angles', 'Quadrangle') or movement ('Syncopate', 'Drive'). As a white musician who had conscientiously withdrawn from the jazz mainstream - and by all accounts a serious, gentle introversion - he was absolutely not up to the black nationalistic zeitgeist. "

Giuffre's drummer Joe Chambers, who recorded with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and pianist Andrew Hill , was closely associated with the Afro-American jazz pulse and his work on The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4: New York Concerts was good and refreshing, Chinen said . The addition of Chambers to Giuffre's band, which otherwise included pianist Don Friedman and bassist Barre Phillips, could have been intended as a corrective. In any case, the quartet benefits enormously from the presence of drums. Chambers, according to the author, brought in a sense of intelligent grip and an implicit connection to the evolving post-bop tradition.

Regarding the trio recordings in September 1965, Chinen notes that the music with bassist Richard Davis does not feel completely at ease; Davis' game has an essential gravity. When working with bass and drums, Giuffre prefers the tenor, although he occasionally shows signs of his admiration for Sonny Rollins . "I think what Jimmy wanted to achieve was a special state of heightened vigilance on the music desk," quotes Giuffres bassist Steve Swallow, "with a feeling for the individual parts and their relationship to the whole." Nate Chinen said in his summary, that "there is a possibility that the timing this time, at least in this sense, could be favorable for Giuffre."

Mike Shanley wrote in JazzTimes : "New York Concerts proceeds in reverse chronology, which makes sense musically, since the later trio recording would sound naked like the quartet." You play loosely, but with focus; there are wide open spaces in the music, car horn growling from Giuffre and an extension of the chamber music aesthetic of his previous albums. Ornette Coleman's “Crossroads” shows that Giuffre, with the middle trills and high notes of the clarinet, is able to deal with the freedom that comes with music. Richard Davis occasionally moves in parallel with his bandmates, but uses the experience of Out to Lunch! Session to keep things together. Chambers, who studied atonal music at American University , brought this knowledge with him in pieces that "use him as part of the composition rather than as a simple timekeeper."

Regarding Giuffres' previous session with Chambers, Barre Phillips and pianist Don Friedman, Shanley elaborates on the latter: “The piano adds a sense of harmony to the four melodies that overlap from the festival set, but things still feel blunt. Indeed, there are moments when things wander. ”On the plus side, according to the author, the quick interactions across the group are in 'Three Bars in One'; they evoked memories of Cecil Taylor's Cell Walk for Celeste. 'Cry, Want' also shows that the composer had not completely given up the blues in his composition. Both sets offer lost treasure and "a new appreciation for an adventurous spirit," Shanley sums up.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Peter Margasak: Uncovering reedist Jimmy Giuffre's lost decade. Chicago Reader, June 27, 2014, accessed April 28, 2019 .
  2. ^ A b S. Victor Aaron: The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4: New York Concerts. Something Else !, June 7, 2014, accessed April 27, 2019 .
  3. ↑ a b Nate Chinen: Booed in the '60s, but Time Will Tell - The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4: New York Concerts. The New York Times, June 1, 2014, accessed April 28, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Discographic information at Discogs
  5. ↑ a b Mike Shanley: The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4: New York Concerts. JazzTimes, June 2, 2014, accessed April 28, 2019 .