Two sides of a valuable coin: Classicism and innovation in mid-20th Century jazz Pt. 1- Don Byas- A NIGHT IN TUNISIA (Black Lion)

Don Byas is essentially the original expat horn man, and his decision to blow off racist USA in 1946 for the more attractive territory of Europe still affects his standing as one of the major swing to bop blowers. He deserves mention in the same breath as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Ben Webster, forming a holy quartet of forward thinking tenors that helped to subtly modernize jazz in the big-band era while influencing the post-WWII revolution of Parker/Gillespie/Gordon/Navarro/etc in the bargain, but sadly his name persists in being spoken of only in serious jazz terms. Compounding this neglect is the fact that Byas didn’t start recording as a leader until two years before skipping to The Continent, while his post-Euro period slowly became focused more on live performance at the expense of a studio legacy. Some of those club dates were taped, however. Black Lion’s A NIGHT IN TUNISIA was captured at the Montmartre in Copenhagen Denmark early in 1963, and it shows how his playing continued to be spirited and inventive long past any sort of real or imagined shelf life. Byas commanded a lush, insistent, gruff tone that was equally suited for ballads and faster tempos, and this meant he could hold down a long night on the bandstand as the sole horn, playing with advanced, dynamic versatility. “I’ll Remember April” will dispel any doubts over Byas’ lasting prowess on the sax, with its spirited and somewhat agitated soloing proving that his ears had remained open to the sounds of the period. This up-to-date quality is only amplified on a slower number like “Lover Man”, where the raw force of his improvising breathes life into standard material in a manner roughly equivalent to a tack often employed by John Coltrane during the same era, though that’s not to infer any explicitly avant-garde qualities on the playing. On the other hand, while Byas’ sound is straight-ahead, it’s also directly linked to the booming lung-power of Peter Brötzmann, particularly the German free-master’s fairly recent work in small groups, and this connection speaks directly to the elder’s lasting relevance and vitality while providing yet another example of the relationship between tradition and experimentation in jazz history. The seemingly unending avenues and alleyways of that history get sharpened at least a small bit by hearing this sax giant simply pour it on from the bandstand with a crack team of Nordic support: pianist Bent Axen first crossed my consciousness by playing on the Prestige label’s three posthumous volumes of Eric Dolphy’s IN EUROPE, and he really shines here, particularly on “Yesterdays”, his assertive playing essentially anchoring the proceedings while Byas goes on some extended and very choice solo flights. Drummer William Schiopffe might lack the finesse of Max Roach or Kenny Clarke, but this deficiency is easily compensated for with poise, energy and communicative skill, and he excels at faster tempos, throwing off sparks mildly reminiscent of both Elvin Jones and Pete LaRoca. Bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen is the true Euro-veteran in Byas’ band, however. His credits from the ‘60s alone are massive, with two of my favorites from that long list being Roland Kirk’s KIRK IN COPENHAGEN and Dexter Gordon’s ONE FLIGHT UP. He really excelled at the expressive support that so many travelling masters deserved and often didn’t receive, so it’s no wonder the guy’s discography spans into the hundreds. And it was live dates such as this one that helped secure NHØP’s (as he’s often referred) reputation, with a sizeable portion of his recorded work deriving from bandstands and festival stages. There’s a great moment on this disc’s “Lady Bird” where Byas drops out and Axen navigates through a very fine solo with Schiopffe and the bassist swinging into a masterful groove beneath him, and when Byas jumps back in to instigate the tune’s climax there is a palpable sense of everyday, workmanlike brilliance. Just another night/There will be no other nights like this. The song choices here form a fine geography and it’s likely the peaks and valleys of their presentation are a non-tampered with slice of vérité, just one inspired live set from this quartet captured on tape and sent to the pressing plant for immortalization. The disc culminates with a fiery and loose knockabout on Dizzy Gillespie’s titular warhorse, and if you’re a Byas newbie I guess this release is as good a point of entry as any. There are a couple of indispensible collections in the Gitanes/Universal JAZZ IN PARIS series, LAURA and EN CE TEMPS-LÀ, both documenting his early European recordings, and certainly his ‘30s-‘40s stuff is substantially more than necessary; the work with Count Basie’s band (which really put him on the radar, “Harvard Jam Blues” especially), the ’41 jam session MIDNIGHT AT MINTON’S (a key moment in the bop chronology, featuring early work from Monk and Kenny Clark) and the SAVOY JAM PARTY comp in particular (try and find the 2LP original, not the shitty CD reissue that’s seven tracks light and shrinks the liner notes down so small you’ll need a high-powered monocle to read ‘em). What makes A NIGHT IN TUNISIA an acceptable introduction to the man, in addition to the high musical quality described above, lies in how it flouts the oft-heard and truly bogus textbook wisdom that by 1961 pre-bop artists like Byas were, with a few exceptions (Duke and Coleman Hawkins, most notably), past their prime. The booming bigness of NIGHT might temporarily throw a cover of surface datedness over the earlier recordings (nearly all of which were touched by commercial constraints of the period such as song length and sound quality), but the inherent goodness of the older stuff will swipe off that cloak of quaintness tout de suite. Anybody interested in the transition of jazz from lively pop/dance/social music into the vital and interactive modernism of bop and beyond really needs to spend some quality time with Don Byas. He trod over Europe like Gulliver did Lilliput, and the hugeness of his playing still shatters any attempts to place it under glass.

Ten From the '90s Part Four (1993 [sort of]): KMD- BLACK BASTARDS CD (Sub Verse)

Lots of folks like to fetishize the ‘80s as the classic locus of hip-hop grandiosity, “old school” authenticity and all that, and I’ll certainly agree that there was a surplus of major creativity and rapid fire evolution in hip-hop during that era, but I tend to think of the ‘90s as an epoch of constant rap innovation, the decade where it no longer had to answer questions of musical validity and also produced records at a high frequency that could stand toe to toe qualitatively with the best from any contemporaneous genre. It was also the period where underground hip-hop really began to exert itself as a deep, sustained counterpoint to the more commercial manifestations of its form. In 1993, this writer was neck deep in the assorted permutations of the indie-rock scene, and when I wanted a momentary respite from that environment, I almost always turned to two things: jazz and rap. Gang Starr, Souls Of Mischief, Beatnuts, Del the Funky Homosapien and numerous others formed a powerful, diverse, and still relevant sonic labyrinth that is/was secure from ever running dry. Much of this movement was in fact many different smaller and often geographical scenes, with quite a few reacting to and extending the funky intellectualism of the A Tribe Called Quest/De La Soul/Jungle Brothers/3rd Bass axis, so in turn it was indirectly related to earlier heavies from the ‘80s like Boogie Down Productions and the Ultramagnetic MCs and the Def Jam scientists. It was an extremely fertile stream of sound, a landscape that eventually sent both Outkast and Nas into the larger public consciousness. So, am I going to enthuse on any of the abovementioned names that happened to release a record in 1993? Nah, how ‘bout we talk about BLACK BASTARDS by KMD, a record slated for public consumption in that year only to hit a stumbling block (brick wall, more like it), not becoming legitimately available until 2001, and if you drink in the cover above, I’ll doubt you’ll have any difficulty gleaning why. KMD’s first record, MR. HOOD from ’91, is an outstanding mixture of De La Soul’s deceptive surface lightness and a deeper, well pronounced black consciousness that was just beginning to really articulate itself, largely due to Public Enemy’s righteous clamor. Many people today recognize the name KMD, if at all, as the place from whence came MF Doom, but back in the day (as they say) MF Doom was known as Zev Love X, and KMD were just one group amongst many populating a culture that was dedicated to promoting hip-hop as something other than a string of one-hit wonders and flashes in the pan. If BLACK BASTARDS had actually seen release at the time of its completion (which means that Elektra would’ve momentarily had to act as something other than an ass-sucking corporation), I have no doubt it would now be recognized as the equal of any rap disc released in the first half of the ‘90s. But reality stinks in this case (Elektra unable to be anything but what it was), so this amazing record now needs as much posthumous advocacy as it can get. Where MR. HOOD was the kind of fun-flowing jam, full of good humor and Sesame St. samples, that you could play while yr Mom grilled shish kabobs and you played chess with yr Uncle, this follow up was a noticeably darker affair, at times bordering on angry, though it is always coherent and in firm command of its intentions. In some ways this progression is comparable to the big jump Public Enemy made from YO! BUM RUSH THE SHOW to the gargantuan follow up IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS (I’m sure you know the rest), but KMD weren’t militant in delivery (while being tight with Brand Nubian). Instead, on their second record, KMD were concocting an extremely varied sound. Some of it sounds like a pissed off Tribe (and can you ever recall Q-Tip sounding pissed off?), other parts examine cyclical loops of acoustic bass that boom large without any self-congratulatory back-patting, and there are additional passages that present a sustained dexterous elasticity full of ragged intensity that sits in contrast to the deliriously smooth sonic flow promoted by DJ Premier on records by Gang Starr, Jeru the Damaja etc. I’m notoriously a guy far more concerned with the creativity of DJ’s and producers in the hip-hop scheme of things, quite often caring less about the constant stream of verbiage that spouts from the mouth of an MC, indeed not connecting so much with what the words are saying (the content), instead absorbing the sound and unbroken extendedness of the vocalization (the form). All that explained, both Zev Love X and Rodan excel at being fully formed rappers; I’m quite confident they’d sound fantastic if I didn’t understand a word of English, though their command of the language is admirable. And the late DJ Subroc (Zev Love/Doom’s younger bro, felled by a reckless New York motorist) integrated a raw, sample heavy density that never once feels like it’s recycling itself. His astute ability at weaving a funky progression of cleanly picked guitar samples is the sort of thing that’s been almost entirely left behind in hip-hop’s current more technocratic state. BLACK BASTARDS might have been temporarily sidelined by the bottom-line assholes at Elektra, but its subsequent release establishes a deep corrective to that bad major-label mojo, so do please search it out if it sounds like yr sort of rafter shaking ruckus. It’ll blast grand between STEP INTO THE ARENA and I WISH MY BROTHER GEORGE WAS HERE. It also sounds sweet three times in succession, and that’s a sure sign of a truly great record.