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Show RIPPINGTONS featuring R U S S FREEMAN K I L A I J A H 0 Oil PASSPORT JAZZ RECORDS. COMPACT DISCS. A Passport Label. Distributed by JEM Records, Inc., South Plainfield, NJ 07080. WE'VE MOVED FRflNK'S DRUM SHOP New Location 222 S. JEFFERSON CHICAGO, IL 60606 1-312-606-0707 record reviews S01/27T-1341 a static plucking/strumming guitar passage, alto tones become a mournful melody with long arches of sobbing tones; a sort of Johnny Hodges revised by Albert Ayler. Presently Braxton is in the midst of a most creative period, which includes a major work, Composition 113 (Sound Aspects 003). All of his recent recordings are ipso facto important. By now, the two English artists, Bailey and Parker, seem to have been accepted by American audiences for the valuable innovators they are. So these additions to the relatively few of their recordings available on this side of the Atlantic are definitely welcome. And listeners new to the music of these two are urged to seek their earlier Incus solo albums in particular for examples of Parker and Bailey at their most rewarding. -John litweiler PAUL ELLINGSON PAUL ELLINGSON SOLO JAZZ PIANO VOLUME ONE-Ivy Jazz IJI-E1-2: Universal Flux; Go Down Moses; Little Laura; Night 'In Tunisia; Continumorphic; Pete Kelly's Blues; The Purples; Without A Song; Coal Train; So Long Monk; Key Largo; The Spacial Model; Pow Wow; Sets Of Three; Re:Person I Knew; Extreme Nonfunction;The Lord 's Prayer; Artistry In Rhythm; America The Beautiful; Deep Space; I Loves You Porgy ; Kurt Sandholtz; Infinite Variety. ¦ Personnel; Ellingson, piano. • • • It's been 29 years since George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept Of Tonal Organization was published; perhaps the time is ripe for a new theorist to sweep the cobwebs from our conceptual outlook, to force us to re-evaluate and reorganize our musical materials, to approach jazz composition and improvisation from a new, liberating vantage point. And, at its best, Paul Ellingson's theory is liberating. In the long, detailed, provocative album jacket essay which houses this two-record release he, at times, is indeed eloquent. Ellingson writes: "Jazz is nonresolving, infinitely varied, random, suspended, free yet disciplined, an infinite series of unique vertical combinations. Jazz needs literature on the imaginative possibilities of graded polytonality. Any chord can be followed by any chord and any note can be played against any chord as long as there is ah imaginative balance between consonance and dissonance." This, I think, is theorist Ellingson at his strongest. At his weakest, he is merely polemical, espousing an absolute faith in making a naive distinction between European music and American music (at times he sounds ringingly Emersonian) all the while maintaining the clear-cut separateness of vertical (i.e. American) and horizontal (i.e. European) organizational systems. It's the mark of the polemicist that he sees things in abstract categories of absolute rather than gradiations of grey, in ebbs and fluxes, in contractions and expansions. However time will assess Ellingson's contributions, the proof of which this theoretical pudding is in the hearing. A piece like Universal Flux highlights his strengths. Ellingson favors rhapsodic, arhythmic music musings. (Ellingson's theory inexplicably overlooks jazz's African tradition.) Chords-and this is the center of Ellingson's posture-are treated as isolated events, shorn of their contextual meaning. The key center doesn't meander, it's simply never clearly articulated, or at best is equivocal. It takes, I suspect, a player with a stronger melodic sense than Ellingson to bring off music like this. Other pieces, like Little Laura are simplistic, like an exercise, as though the player were asking us to genuflect in front of Mother Goose. Ellingson is on stronger ground when he approaches standards like Without A Song and / Loves You Porgy, for vehicles like these have built in melodic strengths lacking in his own compositions. George Russell showed us how to play through changes. Ellingson's theory, for all its flaws, may just revitalize our interest in playing on top of them, or-better yet-force us to reevaluate the very way in which we think about improvisation. -jon balkras MARKHELIAS THE CURRENT SET-Enja 5041: The Current Set; No Passport; Rebound; Greetings FromL.C; Nuclear One; Eupsis. Personnel: Helias, bass; Tim Berne, alto saxophone; Robin Eubanks, trombone; Greg Osby, soprano saxophone (cuts 1, 5, 6); Victor Lewis, drums; Herb Robertson, trumpet, cornet, flugel-horn; Nana Vasconce/os, percussion, voice (4). • •¦ * • . . . ¦ ' DAVE HOLLAND QUINTET THE RAZOR'S EDGE-ECM 1353: Brother 7V; Vedana; The Razor's Edge; Blues For C.M-i Vortex; 5 Four Six; Wights Waits For Weights; FigitTime. 38 DOWN BEAT MAY 1988 |
