Dynamic trio plus guests make a thriving quartet
Two recent collaborative albums showcase the finest avant-garde talent of a decade, explains
In both these albums there are two generations converging and creating patterns of music that cross the lives of four astonishing musicians: a septuagenarian avant-garde trio plus the influx of much younger pianists from very different roots.
The veteran Trio 3 have been playing together almost as long as they have been playing.
The reedman Oliver Lake, born in Mariana, Arkansas, in 1942 is a jazz adventurer going back from his early life as a teacher in St Louis and pioneer of the Black Artists' Group.
In 1974 he moved to New York, became a key member of the World Saxophone Quartet, while forming his own bands and making a succession of cutting-edge albums.
Bassist Reggie Workman, born in Philadelphia in 1937, was a fixture in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers during the 1960s, played with John Coltrane on his Live at the Village Vanguard and on Wayne Shorter's album Adam's Apple. He is a teacher in music education at a number of universities and colleges.
Andrew Cyrille is the trio's drummer. A New Yorker born in 1939, he has played his rebellious drums along-side the prophets of the avant-garde, from a long stay with Cecil Taylor to stints with Marion Brown, Bill Bang, Sirone and Peter Brotzman.
On the 2013 album Refraction Breakin' Glass the trio's guest pianist is the Houston-born, in 1975, Jason Moran who came to the fore as keyboard man with Greg Osby before Soundtrack to Human Motion (1998) became the forerunner of a series of powerful Blue Note albums.
Lake's boyhood memories of his mother's restaurant in St Louis combine with his rasping alto, Cyrille's rattling snares and Moran's chiming keys for the title number, before Workman's quasi-subterranean bass leads the way in Cycle III.
In Luther's Lament both Lake and Moran share a duo of united lyricism and Cyrille's AM 2½ shows Lake's notes expressing a rare and beautiful lucidity before Moran's decisive chorus.
The intense four-souled palaver of Summit Conference, with Lake's boiling horns, the cadences of Moran's rocking keys, Cyrille's tumultuous traps and Workman's eternal pulse, all.makes for a master-track.
All Decks has some very swift sequences, with Lake's alto rocking through stars. Listen seizes the listener's attention by Cyrille's brilliant drumwork, inspiring his confreres to leap out into sounds unexpected.
Lake's gargling horn maps out Vamp, turning to a weird, almost adenoidal whistle. Foot Under Foot is Moran's tune, with Workman's dolorous bass undertow compelling all notes downward until the composer takes fire alongside Lake's sprinting storm of sound.
A year later the trio met another pianist, the Native-American born in Rochester, New York, in 1971, Vijay Iyer, whose series of albums with his altoist confere Rudresh Mahanthapa created simultaneously close and faraway new jazz soundscapes.
A key track is Iyer's Suite for Trayvon (and Thousands More), in which four jazz musicians of two generations remember the young people of another, those shot down arbitrarily on their home streets like Trayvon Martin of Miami, Toly Robinson of Madison, Wisconsin, Freddie Gray of Baltimore or Michael Brown of Ferguson Missouri with no form of justice following their deaths.
In what was to become the late Amiri Baraka's last sleeve note, he wrote of this piece with his own eloquence: "It is a moving example of what artists who want their works to spring from the whole of society's life, not just the inside of their heads. So that finally they are emblazoned in all of us."
And as Lane tells the story beside Cyrille's clipping drums, we know again how jazz is such a profound and essentially narrative art form.
The Prowl sounds exactly that, with Lake's guffawing horn watching all sides and Workman's changing bass pulse ricocheting beneath the sonic undergrowth. Iyer's runs of notes are stream-like and the complex patterns that he weaves in Synapse II gyrate powerfully.
Willow Song is more balladic with Iyer's expansive opening and Lake's winnowing chorus, and Lake's Shave has Cyrille and Workman playing in astonishingly differentiated unity.
The finale is A Tribute to Bu, Cyrille's homage to another unique creator of jazz drums, Art Blakey.
There is Africa here, rooting through the skins of Cyrille's American drums and India's echoes resound in Iyer's Keys.
The world and its future is thriving in this quartet's notes.
