COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Reissues renew jazz adventures
Please don’t get me wrong. Superb new jazz discs still come out all the time. Anyone claiming to you that recorded jazz is dead — or merely has a wicked case of the sniffles — is grinding an ax. You might want to step far back for the moment they decide to wield it.
What IS true is that truly electrifying jazz records are few and very far between. Years go by now without hearing them. A jazz disc that combines truly extraordinary playing, conceptual audacity and a unique personality in a jaw-dropping way is almost a phantom in the 2000s.
It wasn’t always thus. And that brings up one of the most exciting series of jazz reissues to come out all year — particularly exciting just a few days before Black Friday (the biggest shopping day of the year) in a year of widespread economic travail, when holiday giving has to be rethought entirely.
The series is called “Touchstones” — a series of genuinely classic jazz recordings from Manfred Eicher’s great ECM label, many of which blew me away (in street parlance) when I reviewed them the first time around and still rock me pretty soundly now. They’re from an era which hadn’t yet infected jazz with singers around every corner. They’re packaged in cardboard, not CD “jewel cases,” which means they can be sold for $11 or less. Search online a little, and you’ll find prices you won’t believe for music this good (though it goes without saying that the $11 record store price means you don’t have to wait for delivery).
What, for instance? Try these, for jazz ears hungering for adventure:
Keith Jarrett, “Facing You”: His very first solo piano record from 1972, long before the hugely popular records of concerts in Koln, Bremen and Lausanne (not to mention the 10-record set from Japan) that completely redefined expectations of what jazz pianists did in solo concert. It’s a little-known fact now that Jarrett wasn’t the first great young jazz pianist to record solo for ECM, Chick Corea was. It’s just that this disc completely reconfigured solo jazz piano performance. It is still different in kind from other great solo Jarrett performances. It seems charged from beginning to end by an amazing musician who is in the act of discovering something utterly new in jazz.
Jack DeJohnette, “Special Edition”: A pianoless quartet to die for from March 1979 — tenor saxophonist David Murray, alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, Peter Warren on bass and DeJohnette (my nomination for the greatest virtuoso on any instrument in his time) on drums. I hadn’t heard this in almost 30 years. The minute I did, I sat ramrod straight and wished that this particular quartet had recorded more (sadly, they didn’t).
Lester Bowie’s “The Great Pretender” and TheArt Ensemble of Chicago’s “Full Force”: The great Chicago avant-garde trumpet player Lester Bowie helped the collective Art Ensemble of Chicago make total sense when they moved their sonic rituals to ECM. When, on Bowie’s “The Great Pretender,” his group covers the Platters first and then “It’s Howdy Doody Time,” you knew there was a reason he performed wearing a white lab coat. Humor was crucial to Dr. Bowie’s RX (in the laboratory of sound, nothing is more crucial). “Full Force” is not for timid souls, nor is it self-indulgence either. Parts are quite wonderful.
Pat Metheny, “New Chautauqua”: Metheny’s immense popularity and Missouri populism could have constricted him fatally and turned him into some sort of godawful Kenny G of the guitar, but it never did. This 1978 disc is Metheny’s first overdub fantasia, an all-Metheny “Country Poem” that, in comparison to today’s smash hit Metheny, sounds almost heart-breakingly modest and lyrical, as if popularity were the furthest thing from his mind.
