New joy from an old jazz release: Arthur Blythe's "Lennox Avenue Breakdown" (1979

 Lenox Avenue Breakdown -Arthur Blythe (Columbia) 

Arthur Blythe, whose alto saxophone has cut through the New York jazz scene with both clarity and conviction, is a musician of rare vision—someone who, having honed his craft with the likes of Chico Hamilton, now stands among the most compelling forces on his instrument. Where others are content to settle within the boundaries of a single idiom, Blythe gleefully subverts expectations, refusing to be hemmed in by genre. His playing on "Lenox Avenue Breakdown" is eclectic without being diffuse, drawing on hard bop’s muscularity, the searching spirit of the avant-garde, and the agile inventiveness of post-bop—yet always rendered in that unmistakable, burnished tone that is wholly his own.

There’s a robustness and melodic inventiveness to Blythe’s lines that calls to mind the lyricism of Joe Farrell or Phil Woods, but he is equally at home with a technical bravura reminiscent of Sonny Rollins. Blythe reaches for the farthest corners of the instrument: he employs multiphonics and overblowing not as mere embellishments, but as integral tools for coaxing out gritty, timbrally complex sonorities reminiscent of the early experiments of Pharoah Sanders or Gato Barbieri. His phrasing can turn on a dime—from the buoyant, dancing lines of a Charles McPherson to sudden angular leaps and unexpected rhythmic pirouettes. Blythe is no imitator; he is an assembler of influences, forging a style where everything is filtered through his idiosyncratic imagination—a style marked by sharp melodic invention, surprising intervals, and an elastic sense of time.

The ensemble that joins him here is nothing short of remarkable: Jack DeJohnette’s drumming, Cecil McBee’s bass, James "Blood" Ulmer’s taut guitar, and a coterie of equally adventurous colleagues. Together, they construct a rhythmic architecture that is as supple as it is forceful, alternately locking into tight, syncopated grooves and exploding them into polyrhythmic freedom. The rhythm section does not simply accompany; it prods, colors, and challenges—shifting modes, slipping in chromatic asides, building up layers of texture that serve as a launchpad for Blythe’s exploratory journeys.Nowhere is this more apparent than on the title track, which unfolds as a shape-shifting, restlessly evolving soundscape. The pulse mutates, cross-rhythms collide and resolve, and the ensemble’s timbrel palette expands and contracts with painterly precision. Blythe rides above and within this maelstrom—darting with dazzling runs, scaling the saxophone’s upper reaches, and developing motifs with a dramatist’s sense of tension and release. The structure is loose enough to invite collective improvisation, so that every soloist is woven into the conversation, each voice adding to the album’s layered rhythmic and tonal density. "Lenox Avenue Breakdown" is, in the best sense, a jazz record that refuses the comfortable formulas so often mistaken for innovation. It teems with risk, vitality, and raw energy—a bracing affirmation of jazz’s capacity for surprise and renewal. For those who hunger for music that is both grounded in tradition and wild with invention, Blythe’s album is indispensable.

TWO SLAMS AGAINST 1980

 Two hot-take record reviews from the 1980s. I admit that I hadn't listened to either Mahagonny Rush or Gentle Giant in depth , the reason being that at the time I was at the end of my Hendrix worship and given up the quest to find someone who could carry on in the style Jimi invented after his too-early death in 1967. And second, I was never a great fan of progressive rock no matter how superb the musicianship , mostly for reasons that remained the same from Yes to Jethro Tull to Emerson Lake and Palmer to Kansas: solid composition and dazzling arrangements abounded hither and yon for all these bands, but the albums they made were an overcooked meal , a structural mess, a tinker toy cacophony of odd time signatures and gratingly naive and even idiotic lyrics. Some bands get a pass , mainly Zappa, King Crimson and the more proggy aspects of  Return to Forever and Dixie Dregs. But Gentle Giant just pushed me into the ground with their big, grandiose thumb, and despite all one can point as to their superb chops , they were just the thing to dampen a healthy sex drive.

Legend has it—a story so straightforwardly American it practically begs for a Norman Rockwell illustration—that a young Frank Marino ( a fine Canadian fretster actually), felled by too much LSD, was given a guitar by benevolent doctors who must have believed in the curative powers of a well-strummed G chord. Miraculously, Marino, who previously had never so much as toyed with a guitar, rose from his psychedelic ashes playing as if the late Jimi Hendrix himself had taken up residence in his fingertips. Interviews abound in which Marino, with all the sincerity of a Method actor, admits to being possessed by Hendrix’s wandering spirit; the prodigy self-anointed, baptized in the holy distortion of the electric guitar. This is the narrative—admittedly charming, undeniably absurd, and, let’s face it, comfort food for fans who relish a good yarn with their riffs. Accept the fable or not; the fact is unavoidable: Marino sounds uncannily like Hendrix, but only if by “sounds like” we mean an enthusiast’s copy—saturated in retro adulation and resistant to the winds of creative change. Rather than pushing the music forward, our protagonist remains firmly anchored in the late 1960s, serving up a stew of rage, reverb, and echo, but somehow missing the subtlety and elegance that occasionally graced Hendrix’s own take on the blues. The problem with Marino and his band, Mahogany Rush, is simple: they can’t, for all their technical fireworks, stitch together a truly memorable song. What we get instead is an endless parade of solos—the musical equivalent of drowning a delicate soufflé in ketchup, offending both taste and decorum. Marino’s technical flair, while impressive, wears thin with repetition; what starts as style soon surrenders to sameness. What’s Next, their latest effort, feels custom-built for the crowd that treats Hendrix like a household god and flinches at the idea that better guitarists might have come along since. One suspects Marino imagines himself as the fretboard’s messiah, the Second Coming of Stratocaster—a fantasy as American as a slice of pie at a state fair.

On to Gentle Giant’s release Civilian, then. There was a time when dabbling with classical motifs in rock identified you as a pop intellectual; Gentle Giant, to their credit, maintained a rare sense of structure and discipline. Now, as trends shift, they appear to be courting mainstream approval, watering down their complexity in a bid for broader appeal. The result is a pale shadow of their earlier work, teetering dangerously close to parody. The compositions tread cautiously within the lines of mediocrity, giving innovation a wide berth. Aside from a few pleasant group interludes, the music plods along, lacking verve. Derek Shulman’s vocals—a plaintive, diluted cry—never soared, and the lyrics, steeped in existential angst, are less soul-searching than mere poetic brooding. Such lines inspire not empathy, but the urge to offer a brisk, corrective nudge—not necessarily below the belt, but somewhere more likely to wake the spirit.

Slow Train Coming

 Slow Train Coming -- Bob Dylan (1979)

Consider Dylan’s born-again phase, and the insistent pulpit pounding of Slow Train Coming—a friend tried to convince me it’s full of conviction and creative worth, but I’m not buying. Dylan’s biblical borrowings aren’t new currency; he’s been strip-mining scripture since day one, patching together Old Testament thunder and parched gospel imagery, whether he’s riding the tide in “When the Ship Comes In” or picking at spiritual scabs in John Wesley Harding. Dylan isn’t just a magpie for sacred texts—he’s the master of turning tired idioms inside out, his voice always straying somewhere between prophetic and profane. At his best, he traffics in existential uncertainty, never content to hand out answers, always inviting you into the labyrinth knowing you’ll never find the center.

Slow Train Coming, though, is a different beast. Masks off. Subtlety gone. Instead, you get blunt-force dogma, Dylan as Sunday school disciplinarian, rallying the troops with “You gotta serve somebody” sermons and threats of damnation for the unconverted. Gone is the sly relativism, replaced by the flat certainty of the freshly saved: you’re either in or you’re out, no questions, no shades of gray. If spiritual crisis was once the engine of his art, now it’s just a flag waved in your face. Sure, maybe faith gave him a ladder out of whatever existential sinkhole he’d fallen into, and I won’t begrudge the man his lifeline. But what’s missing is any trace of introspection—he’s no Eliot or Greene, no Lewis, just a preacher at a tent revival, voice all brimstone, the ambiguity left to rot behind the altar.

Let’s be clear: Dylan burned bright in the ’60s, then spent the following years outrunning the shadow of his own genius, sometimes with pyrotechnic self-destruction (see: Self Portrait). Slow Train Coming feels less like a second coming and more like a warning flare. If you spend all your insight on one revelation, what do you have left for the long road ahead? Dylan’s latest incarnation is the saddest of all: a legend gutted by the weight of his own myth, now stuffed full of the easy certainties of the converted. In the end, it’s a cautionary tale for anyone tempted by answers that come too easily—listen closely, even if the tune’s gone flat.

 

 Ju Ju -- Wayne Shorter (Blue Note)

Wayne Shorter -- tenor sax / McCoy Tyner -- piano / Reggie Workman -- bass / Elvin Jones -- drums

A 1964 session, sweetness and light meet fire and deep-seated anxiety in seeming alternating breaths. Shorter is thoughtful, probing the moods of his ingeniously laid-out material with finesse that hints at 

more expressionistic playing to come--his tone always struck me as inner-directed--while the band delivers everything their names promise. Elvin Jones continues to convince that he is the greatest drummer in jazz history.

Sorcerer --Miles Davis (Sony)

Sorcerer, the 1967 album from Miles Davis, has been in my CD player the last couple of days and, to pun badly, I've been more than a little entranced by how amazingly well these improvisers, all of whom are distinct and potentially dominating in ensemble efforts, work so cohesively as a group. There’s a perfect kind of modal combustion here, with Miles Davis contrasting his spare and fairly angular sense of improvisation with the formidable resourcefulness of this album's principal  ensemble, Wayne Shorter (saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (double bass) and Tony Williams (drums). The music is a unusual  combination of  the unforced and the aggressive, resisting the temptation to either go slack in their pace or stray toward the harsh vicissitudes of anguished, strident experimentation,  a pulsing course of off-accented rhythms, musical swaths of varying tones and colors, and ingenious interlacing between primary soloist Davis, Shorter and Hancock. Ensemble exploration at its peak, it seems, as the three of them actively listen to and anticipate each other's ideas during the respective solo spots. This is what the great Davis groups did, find unexamined nuance and moods in the musical tones.  Davis and Shorter in particular offer up a few exquisite moments of dialogue as they answer, query, interrogate and respond to musical propositions put forth by the other. As great as the previous occupant in the saxophone chair had been, the redoubtable and effusively  brilliant John Coltrane, Shorter was a better fit for Davis' ideas for the ensemble at the time,  1967, when this disc was recorded His solos are less galvanic than Coltrane's were, more composed, filled with lithe and delicate phrases , wonderfully respondant to the rhythms and pulse Williams and Carter provided and the full range of ideas underscores and textures the sound with.Davis is at his best, lyrical, on the edge of atonal, bracing when needed, the tone of his notes isolated and longing.

A Tribute to Miles Davis--  Wayne Shorter (saxophones) Wallace Roney (trumpet), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums).

You need to bear in mind that this isn't a dusty museum exhibition where the music of the late trumpeter and bandleader is dutifully eviscerated and mounted on a pedestal. Quite the opposite, as Davis alum Hancock, Shorter, Carter and Williams, along with firebrand trumpeter Wallace Roney perform a number of familiar tunes with vigor and intensity. Mere reverence is replaced with passion and a willingness to stir things up. Roney, in particular, is a wonder and an inspired choice to fill the trumpet position; he has a hard-core virtuosity that rivals Freddie Hubbard, and yet retains a sublimely modulated, vibrato-less tone, clean and pristine. His register-jumping flurries on the live version of "So What" or the delicately etched readings are remarkable examples of pace and phrasing. For an instrument known for its uniformly declarative, sound, with the notes, as executed by the most superlative of players, sounding sharp, full, hard bits of color sculpting whole structures of sound from the metaphorical block of granite. Roney, though, had something else, the rarest of thing in jazz trumpet, the ability to make his extemporaneous statements fluid, one note flowing out of the one before it and into the one that follows in a deceptively easy legato that made you think of the accelerated fluidity of saxophonist John Coltrane. Roney, I'd wager , is the obverse of Hubbard; in my life I've witnessed the glory of two of the most compelling jazz trumpet players, one the skyrocketing lyricist, Hubbard, for whom precision and speed were in the mastery of musical ideas that sped by in breath taking forays, and the other and no lesser , Roney, whose virtuosity was in the service of seemingly unlimited ideas of restatement, reconfiguration, and reimagining of a composer's written score. 

And, square as it may sound, it's always great to have Hancock et al return from their wanderings in the fusion wilderness and apply their singular skills on material that requires the best of their improvisational genius. Shorter, for my money, remains the best saxophonist of the post-Coltrane generation, assembling his solos in abstracted sections and deliciously snaky tangents. Williams is, to say nothing else, an astonishing drummer, a continuous rumble of polyrhythms, rising and falling with the many sly turns of this music. Bop, ballads and casually asserted samba rhythms are highlighted with William's strong, graceful stick work.

Both Directions at Once----John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter

Incredibly, what comes to be full-length album of mostly new, previously unheard material from John Coltrane has emerged lo these many years since the man's passing, and it is masterful. What's mind-boggling is that after decades of posthumous Coltrane releases that were previously unheard versions of familiar material --I haven't done a precise count, but it occurs to me that there are enough live versions of Coltrane's disassembly and reconstruction of the  Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune "My Favorite Things" to warrant a series critical comparison in how the saxophonist and his collaborators adjusted their improvisations gig to gig--  but rather something wholly fresh, new, with new compositions and ideas, recorded when this ensemble was at their peak.  The story told as to why this album has surfaced on now comes from Wikipedia, which asserts that the band --Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones-- entered Impulse Records studio in 1963 to lay down the master tape of an album of new material for eventual release. Somewhere in the lapse between that recording and its 2018 release, the original tape was destroyed when the label decided to cut down on expenses regarding storage; what we have here is from a copy of the tape Coltrane had given to his wife. It's not useful to dwell on the reasons for the delay and best, I think, to appreciate how profound this gift of music happens to be.Both Directions at Once, the title, comes from a discussion Coltrane once had with Wayne Shorter at some point, in which had come up the idea of starting their solos in the middle and working their ideas backwards, toward a calmer section that would have been the casual, tentative build up, and then the other way, toward greater fluency, acceleration, intensity from the tenor saxophone's horn, going "both directions at once." You get what they were talking about in mere minutes; Coltrane's playing is serpentine and advances effortlessly through the registers with rail-splitting chromaticism. He darts, dodges, telegraphs and races along melodic lines he creates on initial choruses and subsequently rethinks and rewrites with each return to the song's head; ideas brawl, embrace and interweave in swift, howling glory. The improvisations are as fine, searching and soulful as anything he released in his lifetime. On hand were the members of his Great Quartet, Elvin Jones on drums, McCoy Tyner on piano and Jimmy Garrison on bass. This is a quartet that has weathered time, circumstance and hundreds of hours playing together, with the sinewy yet agile polyrhythms of the ever-brilliant Jones and the no less masterful Garrison buoying and propelling Tyner's color-rich harmonies and Coltrane's thick, sonic weaves. There is nothing tentative about his disc. It's quite a bit of music from this epoch-defining unit, and there is, of course, nothing better than coming across Coltrane you've haven't bared witness to yet.

Alegria—Wayne Shorter

Fronting a superb brass and woodwind ensemble, saxophonist Wayne Shorter goes to expand his considerable palette with this 2003 set of compositions intended, I suppose, to highlight his talent as a master of texture, tone color and someone who can lead a large ensemble through theme and variation. This is not Ellington, this is not Julius Hemphill, this is not even Gunther Schuller. What is, though, is monotony on a virtuoso level. Technically there is much to admire, but there is little to enjoy since the project is obsessed with making Alegria match other large-group efforts at the sacrifice of the punch and flurry a richly showcased set of improvisations would provide. Oh, if they had reached a little less and jammed a little more. Davis didn't forget to swing amid the expanded contexts of Kind of Blue, and neither Mingus nor Monk forgot the blues wail or the gospel shout in the textures and subtler angles of their respective concert works. There are moments here, of course where Shorter's tenor and soprano saxophone sorties emerge from the arty murk and redundant changes of the ensemble to lighten up the proceedings, but even here it feels rootless, divorced from the melodies they should be making statements upon; one senses Shorter trying to make something happen. Nothing does as

Bob Seger's SEVEN album, from 1974

 SEVEN -Bob Seger (Reprise)

Bob Seger's SEVEN album is an uncommonly mature rock and roll statement in a scene where the rule of thumb dictates that rockers must be public idiots for audience consumption. Seger doesn't wear funny hats, tight pants showing the width of his rig, or bandy about the stage gasping and wheezing, acting like the power of the music has possessed his soul. No, Seger is content to sing his hard rock straight forward, letting the rough-edged intensity of the music supply its own excitement. And Seger is a singer of such manic power as to lay to rest forever all the inept rabble-rousing Slade, Foghat and Humble Pie indulge in. Seger has his finger on the rock and roll pulse—beat. "Get Out of Denver “opens the album, a Chuck Berry chop done the way Berry meant it—fast, intense and over with, quick. The truck driver as dope smuggler theme makes a believable image of a Semi hauling ass down a Midwest highway from a slew of county sheriff’s cars. "Need Ya" is a great lift from the Faces' "It's All Over Now." Seger's voice is breathless and hoarse, laden with an obvious base desire while some slippery slide guitar from Jim McCarty riffs under it. "School Teacher" is the weak link in the album's progression. Neither the rapid redundancy nor Seger's all stops pulled grate manage to salvage this nothing exercise.

Fortunately, this fluke is one of a kind, and everything that follows is an ecstatic upward climb. "UMC (Upper Middle Class)" smacks of brilliance. Brandishing a mocking Mel Torme blues scamper while fine-tuning a witty, Mose Allison outlay of mid-century irony, Seger sings a song about wanting to be rich. Why not? One can sing the blues convincingly if one's led a wretched life to back up bragging about hard times. But who sings about wanting to be poor? Seger at once lampoons his white culture and expresses a universal aspiration anyone with an eye for better things can identify with. "Seen A Lot Floors" is a great rock and roll touring song, a terse blues grunt whose matter of fact lyrical sparseness amplifies its meaning. "Seen a lot of flooooors....Seen a lot of dooooors " shouts Seger, letting the words drop into an abyss of ennui and low level dread, tangibly described.

The details of toad life—the motels, the groupies, the larger than humanly tolerable concert halls— all become an amorphous drug drenched blur. A Jim McCarty solo starting with a ruthlessly stretched harmonic enters, followed by a lazily drawled sax solo, returning bluntly to Seger's bone-tired voice. Indicative maybe that after a while even the music ceases to have meaning, that it becomes part of the systemized routine that earns the artist a living. "Floors" is great. "20 Years from Now" is the only let up in the brisk pacing of SEVEN; it's a mawkish love song crammed to the gills with Van Morrison phrasing. But the song is worth the listening effort, if only to hear Seger squeeze his words in an effective emulation of Otis Redding.

The last song, "All Your Love," again cops from the Faces. The guitar chords are chunky, metallic without approaching heavy metal, and Seger's phrasing cleanly takes from Rod Stewart without once suggesting imitation. Bob Seger is his own man, able to take from any number of mainstream rock sources and use them to his own best advantage SEVEN fires no innovating trails in the history of rock and roll, but at least it's honest, which is more than you have a right to expect from a scene dominated with disposable personas.

The Byrds, "Younger than Yesterday"

 

Released in 1967, the Byrds' fourth album YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY saw the band saw the band having to commit itself to releasing a record after the recent loss of their principle and prolific songwriter and lead singer Gene Clark. To be sure , Clark's departure is said to have been caused by a money dispute ; he received more royalties than other band members because of his songwriting contributions.

Admirably, Roger (née Jim) McGuinn. Chris Hillman and David Crosby took up the loss and contributed high caliber material to fill in the void left by Clark, the result being YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY, which I would argue is their best and most important record and certainly, one of the best and most important studio albums by an American rock band in the Sixties. Clark's absence force the other members to draw on their own musical passions and, taking their cue boldly from what the Beatles were doing with their experiments, handily expanded their sound far beyond the jangling-folk rock that initially launched them . The harmonies remain without peer, and we saw the very early integration of jazz, Indian raga, country and western , psychedelia and electronics into their musical weave.

Smart, disciplined production by Gary Usher keeps this record form becoming a swamp of overcooked pretensions--he was the man who had the job to say "that's enough". SO YOU WANNA BE A ROCK AND ROLL STAR, EVERYBODY'S BEEN BURNED, WHY, RENAISSANCE FAIR, TIME BETWEEN-- the songs are first rate and the confidence these fellows confront all the alien influence and make part of their sound and legacy is remarkable. It sounds fresh, alive, 53 years after its release. The only down side on this disc is the last track on the last side (from the original release) , Mind Garden", an unnavigable mind-blown miasma from David Crosby .

It was the day, I suppose, when drugs were exciting, most of us working day jobs after school to have cash to buy records from major corporations believed a Revolution was pending, waiting in the winds , and that many musicians and producers, always marketers, thought they needed a song about altered consciousness to appeal to the gullible teen and the witless rock critic. I assume Crosby was sincere in his attempt to get the experience of having a blown mind in song form, but its a mess. I even thought that in 1967, when I was still in junior high. But beleiver, Younger than Yesterday is a great record.

Sublime Joe Henderson Tribute from the Lori Bell Quartet

 Recorda Me: Remembering Joe Henderson -- Lori Bell Quartet

It’s more a case of slipping into a comfy, loose-fitting garment than it is studying Lori Bell’s latest release, Recorda Me: Rememb ering Joe Henderson. Kicking off with the late jazz saxophone great’s composition ‘Isotope,’” Bell nimbly states the spry signature theme, and one finds oneself unexpectedly wholly immersed in a delightful exchange between the flutist and pianist Josh Nelson. She and the keyboardist weave a delicate and swinging set of variations on it. Nelson’s touch on the keys is light, deft, and swinging, surely over the subdued but percolating tempo provided by bassist David Robaire and drummer Dan Schnelle. Bell is, as she has always been in her distinguished effort, a flutist with unlimited resources who brings her nuanced lines to the fabric that the others have created for her on the opening track. Her playing soars, bringing a different assortment of tonal color to her speedy bop-informed lines and the lyrical blues coloration she often provides in her slower passages.

The album continues in this pleasurable vein, a sagacious offering of deceptively easy grooves and meters. The Lori Bell Quartet has an odd combination in that the allure in this album’s worth of interpretation of Joe Henderson’s compositions lies in the kind of classical precision, yet full of the intricate twists and shifting chord voices that elevate the improvisational acumen of all the players. It’s apparent halfway through the disc that this does not come across as a routine “tribute” to a departed jazz giant as well as projects that—in spite of good intentions—too often seem lifeless or at least absent the grace and luxuriant finesse of whomever the tribute is geared toward.

Bell avoids stifling perfectionism that mars such efforts and lets Joe Henderson’s compositions breathe in a way; the ensemble allows itself to be playful with the music in front of them, undulating with a steady yet continually evolving succession of rhythmic invention. Henderson’s saxophone playing was rich and expressive, versatile and harmonically complex. He had at his disposal an armada of voices that would be brackish and groove, smooth and lyrical, excitingly precise as his compositions required. Deeply rooted in the blues, Henderson’s songwriting used Latin and Afro references, elements creating an insistent and flexible rhythmic basis that made his inventive use of unexpected chord progressions more provocative. His music was one of dynamic but unassuming brilliance.

Recorda Me: Remembering Joe Henderson is stellar work, with the collective readings of Henderson’s “Inner Urge,” “A Shade of Jade,” and the tour de force workout on the title track, with its ascending and descending themes and shifting melody contrasts. It is a wondrous effort toward a breathtaking whole: Bell negotiates Henderson’s galloping changes with quicksilver improvisations over Nelson’s sympathetic chordings and counter melodies. His solo outing here in turn is a keen master class in uncluttered elegance. A shout out as well for the very fine work by drummer Schnelle and bassist Robaire, a rhythm section pursuing a dialogue of their own as meters swerve and sway and swing. Recorda Me does exactly what Bell and her superlative quartet intended, reintroducing listeners to a resourceful and exciting musician and composer. This music moves fast on the uptake, is light on its feet, and is memorable and compelling, rendered with a fervent wholeheartedness by a superlative ensemble.    

(originally prublished in the San Diego Troubadour).