Clifford Jordan

Clifford Jordan Beyond Paradiso (NJA 2024)

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Clifford found his Jordanaires in Holland.

Clifford Jordan - Beyond Paradiso

Personnel

Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone), Cees Slinger (piano), Ruud Jacobs (bass), Han Bennink (drums), Steve Boston (percussion); Jacques Schols (bass), Martin van Duynhoven (drums)

Recorded

on September 10, 1969 at VARA studio, Hilversum; on June 3, 1970 at Paradiso, Amsterdam

Released

as NJA 2401 in 2024

Track listing

Vienna
Impressions Of Scandinavia
Doug’s Prelude
Quagadougou
Girl, You’ve Got A Home
I Can’t Get Started
The Girl From Ipanema


Unmistakable tone defines the greats, whether it’s icons like Lester Young or John Coltrane or acquired tastes like Lucky Thompson or Clifford Jordan. You’ll spot Jordan in a cacophony of thousands. Lovely tone. Clear as a blue sky, pure as goat’s milk. His tone is a precious satin cloth that traveled westward through the Silk Road. A touch of the blues. A dog’s wail from the back porch.

Chicago-born. Middle name: Laconia. This is also the title of an exciting Latin-tinged tune from his fourth Blue Note debut album Cliff Craft from 1957. Jordan was a promising, Rollins-inspired tenor saxophonist who found himself a spot in the vanguard of hard bop, recording with Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Horace Silver and Max Roach.

As the years went by, Jordan followed a progressive route, playing with Charles Mingus in the 1960’s alongside Eric Dolphy. He was interested in the movement of black rights and consciousness. Typically, Jordan wanted to take matters in his own hands and produced recordings of favorite artists and himself under the heading of The Dolphy Series. Though his efforts of releasing those tapes by himself stranded, his recordings eventually found a home on the groundbreaking Strata-East label from Stanley Cowell and Charles Tolliver. Jordan’s participation in Strata-East and influence on the avant garde is a feat that is too often neglected.

Glass Bead Games, often cited as a perennial favorite by jazz fans and a major inspiration to following generations of players, was released by Strata-East in 1973. Part of that album represented the start of a stellar quartet that would come to be known as The Magic Triangle: Jordan, Cedar Walton, Sam Jones and Billy Higgins.

A year before, Strata-East released In This World, a set of original tunes by Jordan from 1969, featuring Don Cherry, Kenny Dorham, Julian Priester, Wynton Kelly, Richard Davis and drummers Ed Blackwell, Roy Haynes and Albert Heath.

It is the repertoire of In This World that, among others, is played by Jordan on a top-notch new release by the Dutch Jazz Archive: Beyond Paradiso. Jordan was booked to play in Paradiso, Amsterdam’s hub of the counterculture movement in 1969, but the club was closed for a month due to circumstances and Jordan and his band of Dutch stalwarts – pianist Cees Slinger, bassist Ruud Jacobs and drummer Han Bennink – were transferred to the VARA studio in Hilversum. A year later, Jordan was offered a second chance and played in Paradiso with Slinger, bassist Jacques Schols and drummer Martin van Duynhoven.

The Hilversum date is positively explosive. Jordan presents a ballad, Doug’s Prelude, a hip blues line, Quagadougou, and Vienna and Impressions Of Scandinavia, both enticing modal canvases, open for a lot of suggestions, and everybody rises to the occasion, Slinger in a McCoy/Herbie-inspired role and the tandem of Jacobs/Bennink notably propulsive. At times, Jordan wails like a gladiator to the gods, but, typically, he always remains in balance, flowing with long graceful lines. There never is any strain, a great feat. As liner note writer Tom Beek says – he did a great job by the way – Jordan is quite the king of understatement.

At Paradiso, though the sound, not surprisingly, is a bit dry and muffled, Jordan kept up his charged but balanced playing and, this time, plays the standards I Can’t Get Started, The Girl From Ipanema and Jordan’s Girl, You’ve Got A Home, the latter, which applies to the whole program of Beyond Paradiso, making abundantly clear that the Dutch cats convincingly stood their ground.

In this world, better said, flood, of archival releases, this applies to the Dutch Jazz Archive as well.

Clifford Jordan

Buy Beyond Paradiso at Nederlands Jazz Archief here.

The Vara show is also available on vinyl.

Clifford Jordan & John Gilmore Blowing In From Chicago (Blue Note 1957)

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Upcoming Chicagoans blend effortlessly with mighty New Yorkers for what has become one of the hard-swinging Blue Note classics.

Clifford Jordan & John Gilmore - Blowing In From Chicago

Personnel

Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone), John Gilmore (tenor saxophone), Horace Silver (piano), Doug Watkins (bass), Art Blakey (drums)

Recorded

on March 3, 1957 at Rudy van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, New Jersey

Released

as BLP 1549 in 1957

Track listing

Side A:
Status Quo
Bo-Till
Blue Lights
Side B:
Billie’s Bounce
Evil Eye
Everywhere


Although the title couldn’t have been more straightforward, I have always felt a sense of mystique regarding Blowing In From Chicago. See them coming, black cowboys on horseback, axe in hand, towering over the potholes of Broadway. Of course, in reality, someone drove Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore through the Lincoln tunnel, via the New Jersey Turnpike to one of the prime places of jazz recording history, Rudy van Gelder’s studio in the house of his parents in Hackensack. Benevolent couple, keen and self-willed optometrist-turned-engineer son, who spent more tape that toilet paper.

Blue Note label boss Alfred Lion had coupled the two Chicagoans with stalwarts Horace Silver, Curly Russell and Art Blakey, reunion group of Jazz Messengers. After all, although not strictly a Messenger, Russell had been bassist on Horace Silver’s Horace Silver Trio in 1953 featuring Blakey and on Art Blakey Quintet’s A Night At Birdland Volume 1-3 in 1954 featuring Horace Silver, among other associations with Silver and Blakey in the bop-to-hard bop-period. Jazz Messengers-founder Horace Silver had struck out on his own in 1956, leaving the baton to booming Blakey.

Happy reunion, success guaranteed. How did Lion come up with the idea of getting Jordan and Gilmore into the recording studio on March 3 in 1957? Likely at the advice of Johnny Griffin. Griffin had recorded his Blue Note debut album Introducing Johnny Griffin in April 1956 and had been high school mates of Jordan and Gilmore at DuSable in Chicago under the tutorage of famed teacher “Captain” Walter Dyett. Blowing was Jordan’s first session for Blue Note. The same year, he reappeared as co-leader (John Jenkins, Clifford Jordan & Bobby Timmons) and leader (Clifford Jordan, Cliff Craft).

Surprise pick John Gilmore is best known for his long association with Sun Ra from 1953-93. The Summit, Mississippi-born Chicagoan predominantly played clarinet in Army bands from 1948-52 and subsequently joined the Earl Hines band on tenor in 1953. One of the figureheads of Sun Ra’s quirky and esoteric big ensemble realm, Gilmore rarely recorded in the small ensemble format.

However, a closer look reveals that Gilmore delivered high-quality, original contributions to small bands, Blowing being the excellent starter. After a long silence, Gilmore added his tenor flavors to Freddie Hubbard’s The Artistry Of Freddie Hubbard (1962), McCoy Tyner’s Today And Tomorrow (1963), Elmo Hope’s Sounds From Ryker’s Island (1963), Paul Bley’s Turning Point (1964), Art Blakey’s ‘S Make It (1965), Andrew Hill’s Andrew (1964) and Compulsion (1966), Pete LaRoca’s Turkish Woman At The Bath (1967) and Dizzy Reece’s From In To Out (1970). His versatility is striking. He’s at home in the post-bop environment but also excellently contributes, clipped phrasing and off-beat developments of motives and all, to avantgarde recordings, notably Hill and Bley. His playing on LaRoca’s Turkish Woman is very powerful and in sync with the drummer’s exotic concept.

No doubt, certainly after all these years where Blue Note has become synonymous with jazz, Blowing is his best-known small band recording. In the liner notes, Joe Segal mentions that both Jordan and Gilmore were influenced by Lester Young, Don Byas, Lucky Thompson, Gene Ammons, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins. On another record, namely Johnny Griffin’s Blowing Session, Leonard Feather simply classifies Jordan and Gilmore as respectively influenced by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. At that phase in his career, Jordan, who would become the revered creator of such original works as Glass Bead Games, surely professed a preference for the Rollins sound and style. But Gilmore and Coltrane? In 1957? Seems unlikely and seems more likely that Gilmore was influenced by the above-mentioned cats that blew in from elsewhere or simply came from Chicago like Gene Ammons.

The early 1960s is another matter entirely. Sources like the Coltrane bio Chasin’ The Trane and Coltrane’s interview with Frank Kofsky in 1966 reveal that there has been mutual influence between Gilmore and Coltrane. They met at Monday night sessions at Birdland in 1960, where Gilmore teached Coltrane techniques to reach high notes and Coltrane showed his tenor colleague the ropes of unique harmonies. It is well-known that Coltrane was inspired by Sun Ra. Reportedly, Coltrane had listened extensively to Gilmore, whose playing style on Ra’s records of the late 1950’s directly influenced Coltrane’s new direction of his Chasin’ The Trane recording. It is much harder to pinpoint the influence of Coltrane on Gilmore, which Feather, in his revised 1970’s edition of the famed Encyclopedia of Jazz, reluctantly admits. It’s much more difficult to push the Little Man Influences Little Big Man story down people’s throat than vice versa.

So much for jazz influences and jazz popes, here it is March 3, 1957, stormy weather of swing, a couple of hip tenors aboard the Blakey Boat, captain Art, helmsman Horace and boatswain Curly delivering the goods of a well-documented classic. As producer and writer Michael Cuscuna wrote in the liner notes to Blowing’s 2003 CD reissue, the balance between tunes is perfect, the set being divided between hard swinger (Chicagoan John Neely’s Status Quo) and Latin-tinged tunes (Jordan’s Bo-Till) that are based on familiar changes, contemporary standard and minor-key blues (Gigi Gryce’s Blue Lights and Jordan’s mellow Evil Eye), typically keenly structured Silver original (Everywhere) and major-key bop romp (Charlie Parker’s Billie’s Bounce).

Admirably unperturbed by the gusty winds of Blakey, Jordan and Gilmore acquit themselves very well, Jordan employing a smooth tone and semi-lazy beat, Gilmore working with a harder sound and vertical, dynamic lines. The secret of Blowing’s success, could it be anything else, lies in the presence of Art Blakey. Ever heard a sizzling ride beat as in Status Quo? Ain’t no status quo! Major sea changes in the time frame of merely 5 minutes, incited by furious rolls and tacky rimshots, right on the dot. Blakey’s intro of Billie Bounce, too, is unforgettable and, lest we forget, followed up by sustained, hard groove. It also features a long, fervent solo by Silver.

Made 63 years ago, Blowing In From Chicago remains an unbeatable record, perfect kick start of the day or evening, like a strong and hot cup of Portuguese espresso.

The Cedar Walton Trio featuring Clifford Jordan A Night At Boomers Vol. 1 & 2 (Muse 1973)

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Mainstream jazz at its most fluent, refreshing and adventurous. That is A Night At Boomers Vol. 1 & 2 by The Cedar Walton Trio featuring Clifford Jordan.

The Cedar Walton Trio - A Night At Boomers Vol. 1

The Cedar Walton Trio - A Night At Boomers Vol. 2

Personnel

Cedar Walton (piano), Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone Vol. 1 A1, A3, B1-4; Vol. 2 A2, B1-3), Sam Jones (bass), Louis Hayes (drums)

Recorded

on January 4, 1973 at Boomers, New York City

Released

as Muse 5010/5022 in 1974

Track listing

Volume 1
Side A:
Holy Land
This Guy’s In Love With You
Cheryl
Side B:
The Highest Mountain
Down In Brazil
St. Thomas
Bleecker Street Theme
Volume 2
Side A:
Naima
Stella By Starlight
All The Way
Side B:
I’ll Remember April
Blue Monk
Bleecker Street Theme


Gary Giddins: “Where is jazz going?”
Cedar Walton: “It’ll go wherever we take it. We’re the masters of it. And wherever my colleagues and I feel like going tomorrow.”

The time is January 4, 1973, the place is Boomers in Greenwich Village, NYC, the club that, by all accounts, overflows with knowledgeable jazz fans. The paranoiac and grumpy Republican, Richard Nixon, is in the Oval Office. The burglaries at the headquarters of the Democratic Party take place in May 1972. Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sink their teeth into the case. It’s a pressure cooker. The termination of the Vietnam War is long overdue. The number of casualties has been highest among blacks. The army is still segregated. Blacks here, whites there. And here means low in the hierarchy – straight from the assembly line of the Ford factory to the battlefields. Few if any black men wear stripes and play cards in the mess. It’s still, well, a mess.

James Brown is now singing that crack is ruining the hood. The seeds of gangsta rap are sown. White rock is fed to the general public, the corporate smile grows broader and broader by the minute. In jazz, fusion is the big thing, Miles Davis and Weather Report the big names. Living jazz giants are doing fine: Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz. Dave Brubeck is a star. In general, straight-ahead jazz is having a hard time. Regardless of the passionate promotional and educational efforts of Cannonball Adderley, John Lewis, critics, and the occasional write-up in Time Magazine, Average Joe has by and large been (kept?) ignorant of jazz, the beautiful musical art form that, though not exclusively of black origin, can’t be separated from the tormented past and lively culture of the black race and would have been void without it. Amidst the general turmoil, a group of outstanding innovators and stylists, either in the USA or as expatriates in jazz-minded Europe, keep the flame of classic jazz burning: Kenny Clarke, Dexter Gordon, Clark Terry, Gerry Mulligan, Johnny Griffin, Zoot Sims, Art Pepper, Benny Bailey, Phil Woods, Slide Hampton, Jim Hall, Joe Pass, Art Farmer.

And pianists like Tommy Flanagan, Ray Bryant, Kenny Barron. Cedar Walton. Walton, born in Dallas, Texas, was supposed to play on his friend John Coltrane’s landmark album Giant Steps. But while he was out of town, Tommy Flanagan got the call. Walton came into prominence as the pianist of Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers. A gifted writer, Walton penned future standards as Mosaic, Ugetsu, Bolivia, Mode For Joe and Holy Land. Now it’s 1973. Walton, already a very accomplished player in the 60s, matured into a commanding maestro – it has slowly but surely dawned on me that the work of the Flanagans, Bryants, Barrons and Waltons gained considerable depth in the second phase of their careers. Much to our delight.

Crew of Boomers: Walton, craftsman with amazing skills, skills subservient to flexible, rich lines, unceasing drive and phrases crusted with the grit of the honky-tonk floor. Bassist Sam Jones and drummer Louis Hayes. Extraordinary rhythm engine since The Cannonball Adderley Quintet. Hayes the former drummer of Horace Silver’s group, who elevated ‘small ensemble’ hard bop drumming to its ultimate level. Tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, who matured from Rollins-styled player to volatile Mingus associate and individual personality that delivered the remarkable Glass Bead Games eight months after the Boomers gig.

Glass Bead Games – extension of John Coltrane’s music – tapped into mankind’s subconscious longing for beauty and unity. It’s uniquely organic. A Night At Boomers, regardless of progressive tinges, is more concerned with redefining mainstream jazz. It does, however, possess a wholesome vibe, perhaps because everybody felt it, musicians and audience alike. If this was an exemplary performance of the Cedar Walton Trio featuring Clifford Jordan, and there is not much room for doubt, I envy those who were able to experience it night after night. The Baby Boomers comprised a lucky crowd.

Boomers bristles with invigorating interpretations of standards, All The Way, Down In Brazil and Charlie Parker’s Cheryl among them. Stella By Starlight and I’ll Remember April are souped-up Kreidlers suddenly taking swift turns like the slickest of Kawasakis. The first four minutes of April are reserved for Sam Jones’s meaty and lyrical bass story, the second part for Clifford Jordan’s fiery tenor playing. Clifford Jordan’s balanced but potent blues playing is the topping of Thelonious Monk’s Blue Monk’s leisurely pace. The archetypical juxtaposition of the Carribean rhythm and uptempo 4/4 sections of Sonny Rollins’s St. Thomas are handled just that extra specially, the Latin part boisterous, the 4/4 part lightning fast and crisp as crackers on Sunday morning. Walton reacts accordingly, switching smoothly from percussive variations to a quicksilver update of Bud Powell.

A joy. The best, however, is yet to come. At least, the tracks that I usually have been immediately drawn to are Holy Land, The Highest Mountain, This Guy’s In Love With You and Naima. The composition of Holy Land is a stroke of genius. The simple and lovely melody – you can hear a child humming it in the playground – is introduced and ended by Walton’s glamorous Bach-like outlay of the chords, which flows smoothly in and out of the tune’s mid-tempo bounce. Whatever the holy land means from Walton’s perspective – Israel for the chosen ones that fled from Egypt, the promised land of Dr. Martin Luther King – Walton obviously had good hopes of discovering it one day.

Perhaps he also longed to reach The Highest Mountain, an equally beautiful, modal-tinged composition. He’s assisted on his travels by Clifford Jordan (Led by Joshua, the tribes of Israel crossed the river Jordan…), who tells one of his all-time great stories. Jordan gives pleasures in measured doses. His tone doesn’t push you against the wall, it’s relatively thin, light as a day in early Spring. His phrasing is agile like the movements of the antelope and his smooth but forceful message is interspersed with sudden, emotionally charged grunts and growls. One hears him searching, investigating, wondering, smiling, pondering and, finally, finding something he deems worthy for a new search. A great artist.

Cedar Walton reaches new levels of trio playing. There’s an endless stream of long lines and ideas during This Guy’s In Love With You, which is started in a funky vein, developed into a crisp groove. Walton is exuberant and his superlative skills are balanced by commanding blues figures. John Coltrane’s Naima never fails to touch my heart, Walton’s voicing and lines a rare, heartbreaking thing of beauty. I have to go with Gary Giddins, who says in the liner notes that Walton is ‘meshing softness with command. It has the cumulative effect of a rose unfolding its pedals.’

This group with near-telepathic synergy effortlessly moulds contemporary jazz to its feelings and highly developed aesthetic.

Charles Mingus Right Now: Live At The Jazz Workshop (Fantasy 1964)

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As the reflection of a typically volatile live performance of Charles Mingus, Right Now: Live At The Jazz Work Shop is indispensable.

Charles Mingus - Right Now

Personnel

Charles Mingus (bass), Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone), John Handy (alto saxophone A1), Jane Getz (piano), Danny Richmond (drums)

Recorded

on June 2 & 3, 1964 at The Jazz Workshop, San Francisco

Released

as Fantasy LP 6017

Track listing

Side A:
New Fables
Side B:
Meditation (For A Pair Of Wire Cutters)


By 1964, bassist and composer Charles Mingus had been in the business for two decades, contributing to the bebop revolution and recording landmark albums that stretched the boundaries of mainstream jazz, such as Pithecanthropus Erectus, Mingus Ah Um and Black Saint And The Sinner Lady. In the summer of that year, the beguiling line-up of Mingus’ latest group including reed wizard Eric Dolphy had partly disbanded. Pianist Jaki Byard’s last appearance with Mingus had been in April. Trumpeter Johnny Coles fell ill and Dolphy stayed behind in Berlin after their European tour. (where Dolphy died from a diabetes attack on June 28, three weeks after Mingus recorded Right Now) Of that group, tenorist Clifford Jordan remained alongside the longtime Mingus sidekick on the drums, Danny Richmond. Right Now doesn’t give the impression that Mingus temporarily lacked inspiration because of Dolphy’s and Byard’s absence. On the contrary.

New Fables is a reworking of Fables Of Faubles, Mingus’ famous biting protest tune directed against the segregationist governer of Arkansas, Orval E. Faubus. Mingus continued playing the other composition of the album, Meditation On Integration, from the ‘Dolphy’-era, giddily retitled as Meditation (For A Pair Of Wire Cutters). Both tunes cross the 23 minutes line, but keep interesting to the last note. It’s a revealing experience to hear Mingus direct the flow of the music in New Fables through his driving, immaculate bass playing, shifting tempo’s like a madman and pushing the group to segue into and out of themes, wild shuffles, a cappella horn parts and slow blues parts. Tenorist Clifford Jordan is inspired to go well beyond his game and John Handy, who had a history in Mingus groups, puts in a hard-driving mix of bop and blues. Mingus also stokes up the fire with his archetypical, hoarse exhortations that sound like crosses between the fire and brimstone of the altar and the hog call.

An equally rousing personality as Mingus, drummer Danny Richmond is integral to the group’s spontaneous combustion. He blends proficiency with intuition and has the guts to veer off track, the road always lead home. Take into account that home, in this case, isn’t your everyday, suburban household. Mingus and Richmond have always been on the same page and their shared energy level on Right Now is absolutely crazy! The way they steer their way through Meditation’s first five minutes from the percussive opening driven by Mingus bowed bass, via a barnstorming swing section to a lovely, warm ballad bit, is breathtaking.

And then there’s Jane Getz. No relation to Stan. Not a household name, but a female jazz personality with a peculiar and outstanding career. A child prodigy on piano who’d spent her childhood in Los Angeles, Getz moved to New York when she was 15 and quickly acquainted herself with contemporary leading figures, playing with Pony Pointdexter, Pharoah Sanders, Charles Lloyd, Roland Kirk, Elvin Jones, Stan, yes, Getz, and, eventually, performing with Mingus. Dropping out of the jazz scene when she secured a RCA deal as a session musician and producer in L.A., the seventies and eighties found her working on albums by the likes of John Lennon, Harry Nilsson and The Bee Gees, as well as recording country music as Mother Hen. It was only in the early nineties that she returned to jazz. Getz struck up a fruitful association with saxophonist Dale Fielder (who chronicles the life and career of Getz on his blog here) in 1995, which remains to this day.

Thrown into the barnstorm of a Mingus session at the last minute, with a couple of complex charts in front of her ten fingers and eighty-eight keys, Getz fazes the controlled chaos of Mingus couragiously. Her accompaniment is robust and edgy, she puts in some interesting thematic variations behind the soloists. Her transparant, long lines in Meditation bring to mind the modal moods of mid-sixties McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock. I’m a sucker for the disturbing ‘banging’ sound of piano, bass and drums that signal new sections in New Fables around the third minute that alludes to modern classical composers such as Edgar Varese. Or maybe they were just trying to blow off the Jazz Workshop’s rooftop. At any rate, although I know I have it coming, it keeps shaking my nervous system time and again in a rather mysterious, euphoric manner. Being hurled into the shredder by The Baron. A recognizable feeling for many jazz fans, I’m sure.

Clifford Jordan These Are My Roots: Clifford Jordan Plays Leadbelly (Atlantic 1965)

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The Mosaic label, whose policy of re-issueing and uncovering vaults has been so essential in keeping the flame of classic jazz burning, shed a welcome light last year on tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan, releasing a box set of six adventurous albums Jordan produced and recorded in the late sixties and early seventies on Strata-East, among them Jordan’s career-defining 1973 album Glass Bead Games. Jordan’s career included other rewarding efforts, like These Are My Roots: Clifford Jordan Plays Leadbelly, Jordan’s sole album on Atlantic. It’s a surprise act, a wicked dedication to the roots of black musical culture.

Clifford Jordan - Leadbelly

Personnel

Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone), Roy Burrowes (trumpet), Julian Priester (trombone), Cedar Walton (piano), Chuck Wayne (banjo), Richard Davis (bass), Albert Heath (drums), Sandra Douglas (vocals A3, B3)

Recorded

on February 1 & 17, 1965 in NYC

Released

as SD 1444 in 1965

Track listing

Side A
Dick’s Holler
Silver City Bound
Take This Hammer
Black Betty
The Highest Mountain
Side B
Good Night Irene
De Gray Goose
Jolly ‘O The Ransom
Yellow Gal


Jordan hailed from Chicago, hometown of hard-driving, so-called ‘tough tenorists’ like Gene Ammons and Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis. While Jordan shared their unnerving bravado, his tone is different, an alluring tone, simultaneously rough around the edges and ephemeral. A sought-after sideman, Jordan recorded with stalwarts as Lee Morgan and Max Roach in the late fifties and early sixties, as well as a series of high standard solo albums. Much acclaimed hard bop favorites are Blowing In From Chicago (Blue Note, 1957, with John Gilmore) and Cliff Craft (Blue Note, 1957) Like age matures wine, Jordan’s style ripened in the early seventies, his lines becoming fluent like ripples of lake water. Jordan kept recording and performing steadily until his death in 1993.

Maybe this album, filled with interpretations of such classic tunes as Take This Hammer and Goodnight Irene, is not such a surprise act after all. The preceding year, Jordan had been part of Charles Mingus’ outfit (appearing on the hi-voltage live album Right Now: Live At The Jazz Workshop) Musical gobbler Mingus’ unfazed search for new vistas while retaining an all-embracing sense of the past’s relevance and blend of harmonic finesse with unbridled juke joint tumult surely rubbed off on Jordan.

Da Gray Goose is one of the cases in point. Tasteful harmony over the stop-time theme kicks it into action, strongly plucked bass and fiery drums inspire the soloists, creating an atmosphere of abandon. Lusty shout choruses stoke up the fire as the tune progresses. There are also some, yes, virtuoso banjo parts.

The gloomy folk blues music of Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter, whose life story reads like a combined effort of Shakespeare and James Baldwin, including oppression, hardship, addiction, treachery, murder and prison life, is excellently cast in a jazz frame. But not too jazzy, often the sound of Jordan’s top-notch group is as tough-as-nails as the sound of any one group that enlivened the back alley bars way back when. Jordan’s unpredictable phrasing overcomes the restrictions of the rigid folk blues form.

Craftily uncrafted, These Are My Roots is a spirited album of earnest, raw and ebullient swing.

Horace Silver Further Explorations (Blue Note 1958)

- Francois 1 Comment

Further Explorations, pianist Horace Silver’s sixth release on Blue Note, is a revealing album in his catalogue. Silver branches out beyond his idiom, further developing tunes with Latin rhythm, the minor key and unusual bar lenghts. Carefully crafted but uncluttered, the album doesn’t stress the down-home feeling Horace Silver incorporated into modern jazz. But Silver’s innovative writing and supreme piano concept make it an extremely rewarding listening experience.

911iAJn4x6L._SL1500_

Personnel

Horace Silver (piano), Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone), Art Farmer (trumpet), Teddy Kotick (bass), Louis Hayes (drums)

Recorded

on January 13 at Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, New Jersey

Released

as BLP 1589 in 1958

Track listing

Side A:
The Outlaw
Melancholy Mood
Pyramid
Side B:
Moon Rays
Safari
Ill Wind


The album sits between Stylings Of Silver, which had the same line-up except Hank Mobley instead of Clifford Jordan, and the albums Silver made with his longstanding group from 1959 to 1964, consisting of Blue Mitchell, Junior Cook, Gene Taylor and Roy Brooks. The ensemble playing of the group on Further Explorations is outstanding. Art Farmer contributes elegant solos and his sound is crystalline. Clifford Jordan’s playing, albeit a bit guarded at times, is excellent.

The first two cuts make it clear that although Further Explorations is an appropriate title, More Stylings Of Silver would be on the money as well. The Outlaw has unusual bar lenghts, a Latin beat alternating with 4/4 time and labyrinthine stop-time sections, yet moves along swiftly in the manner of early Silver gems such as Room 608. (from Horace Silver And The Jazz Messengers) It’s intricate, but at the same time would still be a credible juke box tune.

The second composition, the ballad Melancholy Mood, is a change of mood indeed. It’s a ballad that starts as a warm-hearted duet between Silver and Teddy Kotick, (one of Charlie Parker’s favorite bass players) who plays bowed bass on the Thelonious Monkish-theme. Louis Hayes chimes in with smooth, elevating brushwork. Silver’s solo is a gem, mixing long stretches of brooding minor chords and notes with sensuous phrases and repeated funky licks.

Both Pyramid and Moon Rays have perplexing, yet swinging themes. Pyramid is a mix of a catchy melody, Latin tinges and stop-time choruses, wherein Art Farmer finds his way with lyrical, long flowing lines. Moon Rays is the eleven-minute long centre-piece of the album. As counts for all tunes, the melody, again partly Latin, is exasperatingly beautiful. The manner in which Silver’s occasional old-timey lines travel in twisted ways again proofs the influence of Thelonious Monk. The parts of Clifford Jordan and Art Farmer are proficient, but somehow fail to get on the magic bus of Silver’s inventive tune.

Jordan and Farmer are much better on Safari, a re-visit of the trio take Silver did with Art Blakey and Gene Ramey on his Blue Note debut Introducing The Horace Silver Trio in 1952. At breakneck speed, Clifford Jordan finally has gotten the real hot blues. Arlen and Koehler’s Ill Wind, the only non-Silver composition on the album, refers to Things Ain’t What They Used To Be with a couple of notes that Silver also uses in his interesting solo. Ill Wind is not the distinctive melody you’d dream up as an ending to the carefully prepared, wonderful set of Silver inventions that comprise Further Explorations.