Party atmosphere

 

Eight (+3) Tristano Compositions 1989 For Warne Marsh

A few more observations, then, on this very enjoyable (and, for B., rather personal) tribute album... at some point in the dim-and-distant I must have heard this album before, and I did already have a rip of it from the (cough) heyday of the blogosphere. But I really didn't remember anything much about it, so to all intents and purposes I might as well have been listening to it for the first time recently... when my CD copy arrived, I was not immediately in any position to listen to it at all, lacking anything on which to play it at the time. Even when the box containing my CD player turned up after the move, I couldn't do anything about it straight away. What with one thing and another, it took me until last Saturday night to get round to playing it. That, then, pretty much definitely was the first time I had heard the original, twelve-track, 75-minute 1990 release. It's rather better known now in its remastered and retitled version, clipped down to ten tracks. 

As usual at the moment, I shan't be cutting too deeply with this post. It would in any case be pretty pointless to try, since I have almost no familiarity with the original material: I don't know a huge amount about Tristano or his work, or his school; and if anything I know even less about Marsh, who (if I'm totally honest)

really only shows up on my radar at all by virtue of his status as one of B's touchstones. I have heard some of his recordings, but he's not a player who has ever particularly spoken to me*. 

So let's see what's left... well, first of all, let's just sort out this trivial matter of the album's title, which is surprisingly difficult to render in standard monochrome type (hence what I have done above). Most discographies (etc) insert a hyphen before the dedication For Warne Marsh; but you won't find a hyphen on the album cover, whichever version you get hold of... instead the title is split over two or more lines (depending on whether you're considering the original release or the remaster). On the original CD, the main title appears in red lettering, and the dedication is on the line below, in black. This I have tried to reproduce, in part, at the head of this post; without the use of colour there is not really any way to get it down without "cheating", inserting a punctuation mark which (strictly speaking) has no business being there.

The other thing to say about the title(s) is to do with the two different versions of the album. I already figured out last time that the whole "+1 / +3" thing concerns the number of inclusions which were not penned by Tristano; originally there were three of these, one ("Sax of a Kind") by Marsh himself, and two complete outliers, "songbook" standards whose connection to the other material is entirely beyond me, but which in any event were not written by Tristano nor by any of his students ("How Deep is the Ocean" is by Irving Berlin; "Time on my Hands" is credited on my CD - and elsewhere, including Discogs - to Vincent Youmans, although other sources co-credit two other writers... possibly these were lyricists?). The inclusion of these latter two numbers is not explained in the liner notes, but in any case, when the time came to reissue the album, Hat just excised them completely and hence discreetly adjusted the album's title. It does sort of make sense: besides their provenance, these two standards are played by a quartet with B. on flute; this does make for a bit of a "collector's curiosity" (I am not aware of B. regularly showcasing his fluttery flute-playing on standards; it's absolutely not his main axe, and in recent years he seems to have abandoned it altogether**), but it does also come across as a pretty strange choice for this project. Did Marsh ever play flute at all? Did any of Tristano's stable..?

- 'cos the instrumentation for the date is somewhat jarring anyway, although that ultimately just comes across as yet another example of B's charming eccentricity. As I mentioned before, heading up this project with alto & baritone sax is, on the face of it, bizarrely inappropriate. What would be interesting to know is: which came first? Did B. conceive the project with these eventual voicings already present, in his ears? (- in which case Raskin - with whom B. had worked the previous year - would have been an obvious choice) ... or had he perhaps bonded with the baritonist at the time of that earlier date, over a shared interest in Marsh's music, giving rise to musings which finally resulted in this recording? Again, this is not touched on in the liners (which are nevertheless pretty good, by the way, half by B. himself and half by Hat's go-to critic Art Lange). Either way, though, what may seem on paper - and initially to the ear - a very peculiar instrumentation turns out to be rather inspired. The music fizzes with excitement from the word go.

Several of the numbers are either brisk or flat-out fast, and of course I don't know what sort of tempo they had originally - although I do know that B. has always delighted in showing off his own (and his collaborators') virtuosity by hammering out difficult tunes at insane speeds (think of the pace at which he takes "Skippy" on the Monk covers album, another project from this same period***), so I would guess that "April" and "Victory Ball" in particular were not originally written to be played that fast. But even the less frantic pieces are imbued with a palpable, infectious sense of enjoyment. It's more or less impossible to listen to this recording without smiling. McBee and Cyrille - whose musical association is certainly not limited to this session, though I don't know to what extent it preceded it - are never remotely troubled even at the fastest tempos; pianist Dred Scott positively revels in them. That, by the way, is one question which is answered by the liner notes: this was Scott's first recording date, apparently, and according to Lange, he was a "25-year-old discovery of Braxton's"#. The listener would have no way of knowing that the pianist had never recorded before: his confidence and authority - no doubt bolstered by the unswerving faith and support of the leader - is remarkable throughout; and it's scarcely possible to miss it, since his presence becomes ever more noticeable as the programme progresses. "Baby", the penultimate selection, is played as a duet by B. and Scott, its very tricky melody line negotiated with faultless nonchalance by both men; on the craziest number of all, the album-closer "April", taken at ludicrous speed, Scott plays a marvellous extended solo which just seems to get more and more inspired, new ideas tumbling out of his fingers one after another in an exhilarating rush. (When he finally finishes his solo, Raskin picks up from him with a raucous series of explosive snorts and squeals which encapsulate the sheer energy of this performance.)

The maestro, naturally, plays an absolute blinder and must surely have enjoyed himself enormously. This two-day session pretty much provided the culmination of what was something of an odd period for B., who really didn't have a proper working band at the time, but who made up for it by embarking on the most extraordinary series of ad-hoc projects and collaborations, starting some time in 1986 and continuing right up to this very recording in December 1989. (To list them all here would be quite demanding; there is still a way to see what I'm talking about ##.) During this period, he got the chance to play his own music with unusual one-off groups, and he played other music(s) with new collaborators. Here, he got to pay tribute to one of his personal heroes, in a very specifically Braxtonesque fashion; we can only imagine what Marsh himself would have made of it - never mind Tristano, famously very hard to please - and it's quite possible that B. only really felt "safe" to unleash such a project once neither man was alive to hear (and judge) the results. Tristano had already been dead for over a decade, Marsh for a couple of years. How true this last supposition is or isn't, only B. could tell us; but however it came about and however long its gestation, the project's final flowering remains fresh and vital and hugely enjoyable.

* B. would probably say I just haven't listened properly. In the liner notes, he recounts an experience of his own, listening to a new Marsh album which initially did nothing for him: "... but with Warne... well, you had to come to it 'somewhat differently'... It was my listening that had been off."

** It's entirely possible that this just isn't true, and that I'm either misremembering it or simply haven't heard recent recordings where B. does play the flute. I do know that he has always been quite self-deprecating about his flute playing.

*** As it happens, this was the very first Braxton album I bought, quite some time before I took a special interest in him - though I was already aware of him as a significant name for me: that is, I reckoned almost at first encounter that this was someone I needed to explore later, but was not in any position to engage with just yet. I was, however, already collecting Monk covers as I came across them.

# - so presumably Scott was a student at Mills (?). [I did look him up; he went on to have a most singular career, much of it not really in jazz at all, and recently published an autobiography with the outrageous title Fifty Thousand Bong Hits.]

## Whisper it quietly, but (a version of) the Restructures discography is still available online. I mean it: don't go telling too many people about this in case Jason finds out and gets them to take it down. It's not the final version - there's plenty of late releases missing from it. But to say it's better than nothing is a serious understatement.