Prodigal Son Returns: Ricky Ford Quartet in Massachusetts

Long-lost Massachusetts native Ricky Ford came back to the Bay State on Friday, February 23 and brought out the largest Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares audience of the season to Hawks & Reed in Greenfield. Over 100 folks filled the 4th floor Perch to hear the great tenor saxophonist lead his Quartet, which included John Kordalewski, piano, Jerome Harris, acoustic bass guitar and Barry Altschul, drums.

The 80-minute concert was filled with robust originals and some very muscular horn playing that brought to mind tenor titans of a bygone era. Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1954, Ford has crafted quite the resume. After studying with Ran Blake, George Russell, Jaki Byard and Joe Maneri at the New England Conservatory, he launched an impressive career that has included recordings and performances with Lionel Hampton, Mercer Ellington, Charles Mingus, Mal Waldron, Abdullah Ibrahim and Yusef Lateef. Besides an impressive catalogue of dates as a leader for Muse and Candid, Ford can be heard to advantage on Ran Blake’s The Short Life of Barbara Monk, Abdullah Ibrahim’s Water From an Ancient Well and Tenors of Yusef Lateef & Ricky Ford, among many others.

Soon after headlining Magic Triangle Series concerts at UMass in 1991 (alongside George Cables and Pete LaRocca) and 1994 (with Danilo Perez, Alan Dawson and a brass section), Ford embarked to Paris, where he has resided since.

As so often happens in the myopic and self-centered U.S. jazz scene, artists who live abroad quickly drop out of sight and mind. So for decades we lost track of Ricky Ford, who was busy teaching at Istanbul Bilgi University, running the Toucy Jazz Festival in Yonne, France, curating a gallery space, painting, gigging, recording and raising a family. For the last couple of years, he has made annual pilgrimages to the States around this time.

Ford has lost none of his drive and fire, tearing through uptempo originals with the swagger of a Johnny Griffin or Paul Gonsalves. His ballad playing also evoked an earlier era when unhurried storytelling and a full, round sound carried the day.

Born in 1943, Barry Altschul is the elder statesman of the band. Like Ford, Altschul lived in Paris for about 10 years, beginning in 1983. Ford has 11 dates as a leader on Joe Fields’ Muse label. Altschul’s first two hugely influential records as a leader, You Can’t Name Your Own Tune (1977) and Another Time/Another Place (1978), were also recorded for Muse. But their paths have only crossed in recent years. Although the Bronx-born drummer is associated with progressive musicians like Paul Bley, Anthony Braxton and George Lewis, Altschul has the whole of jazz history under his fingers. He propelled the band mightily on Friday. During each piece he would swing on one part of his kit before moving the energy to another. Each time he changed focus, our attention would freshen and momentum would build.

Jerome Harris, who spent years playing bass for Sonny Rollins, certainly knows a thing or two about providing momentum and a solid foundation. We heard him accomplishing the same thing in a different context in October, when his atmospheric underpinnings gave body to Mike Baggetta’s Trio. Here in a more traditional setting, Harris got to solo more often, taking full advantage of the space to launch a number of nimble and lyrical statements. Along with Steve Swallow, Jerome Harris is the pre-eminent acoustic bass guitarist in jazz. Valley audiences get one more chance to hear his artistry on March 21st, when he performs with the Marty Ehrlich Quartet at Hampshire College.

Pianist John Kordalewski, a 1976 graduate of Amherst College, leads the Makanda Project, a 13-piece band dedicated to preserving the compositional legacy of Makanda Ken McIntyre. They gave a transcendent Jazz Shares concert in Springfield in 2014. Kordalewski also arranged a fabulous event with South African trumpet great Feya Faku last year at the UMass New Africa House. Kordalewski, who has his doctorate in Education from Harvard, not only arranges concerts, he is a first-rate, self-taught jazz arranger. Kordalewski remarked that the Etsey piano, “didn’t have a sound”. But despite the limitations, he found things to say on the instrument.

The stories flowed before and after the concert. Jazz artists are nothing if not tellers of tales. Saxophonist Charles Davis told Ford about the time Sun Ra was being hassled by police. “This is the worst planet I’ve ever been to,” Ra told the officers. Altschul recounted how much grief Sam Rivers endured in the 1970s for hiring two white guys, Altschul and Dave Holland. And so on.

After gigs at the Side Door Café in Old Lyme, Connecticut, Mark Morganelli’s Jazz Forum in Tarrytown, New York and some others, Ford is back to his life on the Continent. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 25 years to see him again.

All Together Now: BassDrumBone at UMass

The average length of a marriage in the United States is just over eight years. Mark Helias, Gerry Hemingway and Ray Anderson have been together as a band for 41 years. You can imagine the familiarity, the shorthand, the sense of trust developed over that span of time. Being in a working band is a kind of marriage. The trio has travelled hundreds of thousands of miles together to countless performances, multiple recording sessions, and social gatherings. There have even been a few name changes over the years (the trio began their career as Oashpe).

Fresh off performances at Cornelia St. Café in New York, Dartmouth College (hosted by band director Taylor Ho Bynum) and a cool space in the very small town of Honesdale, PA, BassDrumBone gave a masterful and highly nuanced concert for 90 attentive listeners at the new Old Chapel at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on Sunday, February 11, 2018. The concert was part of the Fine Arts Center’s Magic Triangle Jazz Series.

As was clear during the pre-concert dinner, and equally apparent from the bandstand, bassist Helias, drummer Hemingway and trombonist Anderson have a ton of shared experience, musical and otherwise. They spent the 75-minute performance in a constant state of becoming, confidently marching to an uncertain future. They hovered between grooves and frequently shifted meter. They locked in for stretches, referencing funk, swing and bop, only to dissolve into a delicate openness that privileged sound. Because we were in the presence of highly trained musicians, we could relax into whatever pose they proposed. The compositions, all originals by the band members, had character, personality, a point of view, an architecture we could relate to.

Each musician had been to the Magic Triangle Series many times over the years as both leader and sideman. It was a dream come true to finally present them in their most illustrious and longstanding ensemble.

It was a big treat to hear Hemingway, who for the past nine years has lived in Switzerland, where he is a professor at the Hochshule Luzern. His last appearance in the area was a 2002 concert with Miya Masaoka (koto) and Reggie Workman (bass), which highlighted his delicate, textural skills. Those were well displayed on Sunday. At one point, he used a metal cup on his floor tom to produce bent notes of other-worldly proportions, and he used multiple brushes, mallets, sticks and hands to color the proceedings. But on his Don Cherry tribute, Cherry Pickin, and elsewhere, he bashed and wailed, providing energy and drive, sub-dividing beats, teetering between feels.

Helias was last here in April, 2016, at a Magic Triangle concert featuring Jane Ira Bloom, who premiered Wild Lines, her beautiful evocation of Emily Dickinson. He has appeared four times previous: an Ed Blackwell tribute, with Joe Lovano and Tom Gianpietro (2014), the Michael Gregory Trio (2007), as half of the Marks Brothers, with bassist Mark Dresser (2002) and his own Quartet (1997). From my perspective, it’s hard to name a more consistently engaging bass player in jazz over the past 40 years. He is the anchor in BassDrumBone, or perhaps it’s more accurate to call him the rudder, charting the band’s direction, steering the ship. The superior acoustics in the room allowed Helias to say a lot at low volume.

Last summer, up and comer Joe Fieldler told me about his “turning point moment” as a budding musician. While listening to the radio, he remained in his car after reaching his destination to hear the name of the fellow trombonist blowing his mind. It was Ray Anderson. With Roswell Rudd’s recent passing, the mantle falls to Anderson, whose impish spirit and loquacious sound, are essential in advancing the trombone language. Besides an impressive circular breathed, unaccompanied solo statement to begin one piece, Anderson played the horn without multi-phonics or other extended techniques. Just pure vocalized expression through nine feet of coiled metal.

During a gorgeous interlude towards the end of the evening, we heard bird sounds. Where were they coming from? Just as we were settling on Anderson as the source, a bird appeared, making large arcs through the Chapel’s rafters. Just birds being birds, we thought. Except it was a bat, silent, perhaps roused by Anderson’s aviated offering.

The staff was in a tizzy, not reassured by Helias’ comment that his barn is full of them. But the animal’s swoops and whooshes made manifest the dramatic and unexpected nature of this music.

Jazz Shares Hosts the Jaimie Branch Quartet

Above Giovanni Russonello’s December 1 New York Times article about the added burden of being female in the marginalized and male-dominated world of jazz, was a large photo of the trumpeter Jaimie Branch. The newspaper piece makes the point that although gender discrimination is alive and well in jazz, the ship is starting to right. Over 100 of us got to see Jaimie Branch in the flesh on Saturday, January 20, as Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares presented her Quartet at the 121 Club in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

The subject of gender never came up during Branch’s visit, but the burden of being a creative artist in the time of Trump did. On the first anniversary of the would-be dictator’s ascent to power, Branch and her ensemble, Lester St. Louis, cello, Jason Ajemian, bass and Mike Pride, drums, gave a spirited concert of wall-crumbling proportions.

Coinciding with women-led resistance demonstrations held throughout the country, the concert reinforced the notion that we will no longer conform to norms that do not serve human needs. The band blasted through melodies found on Branch’s heavily lauded debut recording, Fly or Die (2017, International Anthem), infusing them with the same force that brought down the stone perimeter of Jericho.

The themes from the 35-minute recording were stretched and expanded over the course of the 80-minute concert, resulting in a suite-like journey through a range of moods. Although there were sections of intense swing, molasses paced walks and searing beauty, much of the evening was spent in an abstract, fever dream from which we were reluctant to wake.

I kept thinking of the Pauline Oliveros concept of Deep Listening as I watched Branch’s closed eyed expression while the other musicians played. “Hear with your ears, listen with your heart,” was Oliveros’ guiding principle. On a promotional video for Fly or Die, Branch says, “I like to listen to the first five seconds of whatever happens, like really pay attention, to just turn on your ears right away and then ‘whoosh,’ like scattering that to a million different pieces. You can get into this zone, you’re almost looking at everything from above, you’re able to hear everything, you’re able to play what you want effortlessly, it’s like a teleportation space.”

Branch’s star is certainly rising. The record (released on both CD and LP) is on its fourth pressing (“It’s about to break even,” she laughed.) It seemed to show up on everyone’s Top 10 list of 2017. She will be a featured soloist in an upcoming performance of Julius Eastman’s “Trumpet,” part of an important three-week retrospective of the late composer’s work at The Kitchen. The gigs are starting to materialize.

These shows in New York, Easthampton and Philadelphia were the young cellist Lester St. Louis’ first opportunity to be on stage with Branch. (Tomeka Reid usually has the cello chair.) He acquitted himself superbly. Chad Taylor, the drummer on Fly or Die told Branch, “Just that name, it sounds like he can play.” Yes, he can. St. Louis will also take part in the Julius Eastman retrospective. It turns out Priscilla Page and I saw him play cello as part of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ celebrated New York production of “An Octoroon” in 2015.

Chad Taylor had a gig with David Murray on Saturday, so we got to hear Mike Pride, a forward-thinking young veteran with an already impressive discography and a plan for the future. A mellowing wild man, he nevertheless played possessed, unbridled. He augmented our 4-piece, Gretsch Catalina Club kit, with extra drums, cymbals and little percussion to produce waves of rhythm, always in concert with what was going on around him. For the last two years he has put real bread on his table playing large American venues opening for Amy Schumer, with Jason Roebke and Schumer’s brother, Jason Stein.

Jason Ajemian is featured on Fly or Die, and is integral to the success of the project. His history with Branch goes back to their time together in Chicago. The bassist now lives much of the year in Talkeetna, Alaska, (population 900), where he is a pilot and airplane mechanic. Like the rest of the band, he is a committed non-conformist, although on Saturday his role and his sound production largely followed jazz convention. For a unique listening experience, check out his 2014 Delmark release, Folklords.

One thing’s for sure: the shape of jazz to come will look and sound different than what came before. Given our current political situation (and the lack of collective imagination that has led us to where we are) we certainly need something new and different. As always, artists will lead the way. Jaimie Branch is one of them.