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January 2009 Cover

Benny Golson
Fortunate Whispers
By John McDonough

If you make it to 80 and are still at the top of your game, you’re one lucky guy. All you have to do is look around and think about all the guys who didn’t make it. In the end, you begin to wonder whether maybe the biggest score of all in life is to be the last man standing. It may be lonely, but you have the satisfaction of looking back across the times of your generation with the certain knowledge of how everything turned out.

Tenor saxophonist Benny Golson has been thinking thoughts like these lately as he arrives at his 80th birthday on Jan. 25 (to be followed by his 50th wedding anniversary in March). He will celebrate his birthday with a CD by the New Jazztet (with Eddie Henderson in for Art Farmer), New Time, New ’Tet, out this month on Concord; and a concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 24 featuring Ron Carter, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Al Jarreau, the Clayton–Hamilton Jazz Orchestra and others. He’ll also think about the colleagues who are not there: Farmer, Clifford Brown, John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers—the ones who didn’t make it.

Golson continues to play concerts and clubs. Last September he came to Chicago for a short week at Joe Segal’s new Jazz Showcase in the South Loop. Opening night was slow, but Golson was competing with a persistent drizzle and John McCain’s Republican presidential nomination acceptance speech. By the weekend the rain and the oratory has passed, and the fans came out to enjoy one of the great survivors of an increasingly fabled era of jazz innovation.

Among many things, Golson will be remembered for his appearances in two pictures. First, as the McGuffin in Steven Spielberg’s 2004 The Terminal A few days after Golson’s Chicago opening, we sat down for lunch in his hotel. Golson exudes a friendly but distinguished air. He speaks softly and uses language with careful precision. Words appear in his e-mails that can send even the most literate reader to a dictionary.

I opened a large brown envelope. Inside was the original January 1959 Esquire.

“Oh my goodness,” Golson said with some surprise in his eyes. “I lost mine.”

He took the magazine and turned the pages cautiously, as if handling some fragile historic artifact. And there it was on pages 98 and 99. He reflected in a way that comes naturally to a man looking at a 50-year-old photo of himself standing as a young man among a community of his peers and heroes. “None of us had any idea what would happen with that shot,” he said. “There are only six of us left. I’m at the top right here.”


Features

Ron Carter
Beyond The Abstract
By Dan Ouellette

Yhe most unlikely recording experience of Ron Carter’s exhaustive session work came in 1991 when the pioneering rap group A Tribe Called Quest rang him up. The request? To deliver bass lines on the track “Verses From The Abstract” for its sophomore CD, The Low End Theory, the follow-up to its triumphant debut, People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm, issued in 1989 on Jive Records.

As it turned out, Carter not only helped to make The Low End Theory one of the best hip-hop—and pop—albums of all time, but also contributed to the ushering in of an era in the early to mid-’90s where jazz and hip-hop, both rooted in African-American music traditions, commingled in an intriguing and, at times, compelling fusion of rap and swing. A natural teacher in the classroom and on the bandstand, Carter also served to further school Q-Tip—Tribe’s co-founder and MC, born Jonathan Davis, whose legal name now is Kamaal Fareed—in the rudimentaries of making music that expanded beyond beat basics into rhythmic sophistication.

As for Carter’s willingness to appear on a hip-hop record at a time when the rap-infused music was entering its second decade of impact (and often controversy) as a pop genre, his son Ron Carter Jr. is not at all surprised. “It’s one of the biggest misconceptions about my father that he didn’t know anything about hip-hop culture and music,” Carter Jr. said. “How could he not? He had two teenage sons who wanted to be DJs and were hanging out in Harlem in the ’70s. He bought my brother Myles and me mixers so we could learn.”

Carter Jr. recalled four essential records that “every wannabe DJ” learned to mix on: “Dance To The Drummer’s Beat,” “Apache,” “Scratchin’” and “Take Me To The Mardi Gras.” The two Carter sons played those tunes over and over, so much so that Carter banned them from being spun in the home. “My dad told us to find some new records,” Carter Jr. said. “He got tired of listening to those other ones. But he looked on hip-hop as an art form that was getting young kids into music.”


The Art of the Solo
By Bob Davis

On the bandstand in 1942, James Moody began jamming on “I’m In The Mood For Love.” He improvised a solo so singable that it inspired Eddie Jefferson’s immortal marriage of lick and lyric, “Moody’s Mood”: “Pretty baby you are the soul who snaps my control.”

What was Moody thinking? In the middle of a tune or jam, when the improv torch was passed to him, how did he make his solo sing? “I was playing alto and I was really a tenor player,” he said. “I was trying to think of where my fingers should go on the alto, to play the song.”

It’s a strange and tricky task to stand up in front of a crowd and make up something interesting, compelling, connecting, moving and musical. Unlike editable art—a piece of writing, for instance, that can be contemplated and corrected—a jazz solo issues forth in real time. The notes can’t be taken back, reconsidered or rewritten. All the woodshedding ultimately comes down to that live, public moment of truth.

The answer to the question “How do you build a solo?” differs from musician to musician. Kenny Barron instructs his students to be as lyrical as possible. “In one lesson I may tell them, ‘We’re going to take a solo. But I don’t want you to double up at all. Try and leave space. Consider the fact that silence is a part of music, too,’” the pianist said. “I try to get them to understand that you have to leave space sometimes. Because when you’re young you want to play everything you know at every moment. Be lyrical, and use space.”

Oliver Jones also emphasizes respect for the original song. “Someone from my era who’s been playing since the early ’40s, we had a little bit more respect for melody,” the pianist said. “I always like to state the melody first, and respect the composer’s original thought. Somewhere within my tunes you’ll always hear the melody, even if I’m playing it in the left hand. Whether harmonically or finding different ways to build my solos, I make sure that I’m not that far from the melody, but I want the things to sound exciting and fresh every time.”

Something new coming up every time is vital for Herbie Hancock, for whom even stating the melody and sticking to the song are less important. He doesn’t like to present what people expect. “I set about trying to design the presentation so that it’s more of an experience for the audience,” he said. “As far as the shape of the music is concerned, many pieces I reharmonize, or at least reshape the arrangement, so that it’s not always just a melody and then there’s improvisation, then the melody and then it’s out. “Wayne Shorter’s group is interesting because they don’t take that approach at all,” Hancock continued. “Wayne plays a few phrases, and next you’ll hear Danilo Pérez playing. He’ll go off on something, complete some idea, but it’s not like a whole long solo. It’s an idea that can be picked up by the bass or drums. Sometimes they all play together.”

That atypical structure—an animated toss-and-catch dialogue instead of serial soliloquies—is a freer form of group improvisation, a musical conversation in which players don’t merely support but actually build upon each other’s ideas. Ahmad Jamal has another approach—the entire ensemble is his instrument and the entire song is a solo. “There’s the role of the architect,” Jamal said. “Building blocks. You have to build if you’re a musician. You have to be a musical architect, if you have the players who can do that. I like the idea of building and ending when it’s complete—not before it’s complete. I like to build as perfect a structure musically as I can.”

Players
Gerald Cleaver
Mary Halvorson
Getetchew Mekurya
Michael Bates

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