All Ears

By John DeFore

“Out” Enough For Jazz

Even the most casual jazz fan is likely to know Time Out, the 1959 classic on which the Dave Brubeck Quartet experimented with strange time signatures, producing classic tracks like Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” What fewer people (fairly serious listeners included) know is that Brubeck’s experiment lasted seven years, producing five full albums of material straying from the 4/4 universe – albums with names like Time Further Out and Time in Outer Space. Legacy recently collected the series into For All Time, an elegant box on which every album but the best-known one is augmented with at least one bonus track. It’s an impressive body of work, one on which the players weren’t content with their initial innovation. They don’t simply pick one exotic signature and stick with it; they’ll scatter different ones throughout one tune, and play one in the rhythm section while the soloist works in another time zone altogether.

The other famous group of “out” records, of course, are Eric Dolphy‘s Outward Bound, Out There, and Out to Lunch. The middle child, Out There, is freshly arrived from Fantasy/New Jazz in their latest batch of Super Audio CDs, and is wild enough that those intimidated by the Brubeck set should take a deep breath before listening. It isn’t meter that’s challenging here, but the leader’s stretching of conventional melodic and harmonic sensibilities. On a variety of instruments including the then-quite-rare bass clarinet, he challenged mainstream notions of what is pleasing to the ear. And it’s still challenging today, even with super-enhanced-awesome-special audio: Listen to the eerie, bleak “Eclipse,” where his clarinet grates uneasily against Ron Carter’s bowed cello, to see what I mean. The song is over in under three minutes, but feels so (for lack of a better word) outside the space-time continuum that it draws you back over and over for a closer look.

Fantasy’s other audiophile re-release line, the 20-Bit “K2 Super Coding” series, is currently featuring a musician who never needed to tell anyone how “out there” he was. Thelonious Monk had the honor of recording the first 12-inch LP (the new thing of its day) issued by the famed Riverside label, and the result was Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington, which gave skeptical listeners a new vantage from which to judge Monk’s angular, idiosyncratic style. “Caravan,” for instance, matches Ellington’s sinuous exotica with the pianist’s deceptively haphazard-sounding technique for a result that sounds like both artists and neither at the same time.

There’s a world of difference between the spare, lighthearted version of “Mood Indigo” on that album and the one that begins Legacy’s new edition of Masterpieces by Ellington – which was itself a new adventure in sound, being Duke Ellington‘s first long-player. Freed from the three-minute constraints of a 78 rpm side, Ellington recorded a 15 1/2 minute “concert arrangement” of the tune, with languid horn sections, a filigreed piano solo, and even (halfway through the recording) a singer. The record presented a new side of the legendary jazz man, one unknown to those who had not been able to hear his band live.

Speaking of transformative cover versions, the World Saxophone Quartet is going down a trail blazed by the Kronos Quartet, covering Jimi Hendrix on Experience (Justin Time). Every track here brings a new angle to a Hendrix song – “Hey Joe,” for example, starts off sounding like something out of an updated Porgy and Bess. The group recruits some guests for an epic version of “Little Wing” complete with boisterous drum kit – it’s a nice rendition, even if it doesn’t match the soaring beauty of Gil Evans’ take on the tune.

Lest readers think that All Ears has stopped listening to contemporary original jazz, allow me to point toward Shalagaster (Tzadik), the latest from violinist Jenny Scheinman. A sometime sidewoman to guitar star Bill Frisell, Scheinman shows a lot of versatility as a composer here, wandering from playful tango to new-music-inflected klezmer and moody excursions like “The Lucky Hum.” The pieces are more accessible than much of what is released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, but that probably doesn’t mean you’ll be hearing them on the radio any time soon – unless the recording industry comes up with some earthshattering new technology, like the LP or the Super Bit electro-doodad, that makes commercial radio DJs not care whether female jazz musicians look like Diana Krall. •

By John DeFore