Echo
Nate Chinen's NY Times obit and further links.
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Jazz history would be written a bit differently if Sam Rivers hadn’t taken the young teenager Tony Williams in hand and began playing him records of European modernism. (To the end of his life, Rivers could do a credible imitation of the Second Viennese School at the piano, which he would perversely contextualize with some Randy Weston-ish vamps.)
Like any natural avant-gardist, Williams ran with that intellectual information. The innovations of Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell with Ornette Coleman were less European-based, so for a few years Williams was just about the only drummer playing swinging time without a form while surrounded by complex harmony.
Williams honored his teacher by recommending him to Miles Davis. The Japan gigs are interesting to listen to, but the place to hear the Rivers-Williams hook-up is not with Miles. A collection of meta hard-bop, Fuchsia Swing Song, has more of the real vibe, although according to Rivers himself those were older tunes.
Bill Frisell remembers:
When I was in high school (late 60s) I started trying to figure out was "jazz" was. Back then, in Denver, at Woolworth's and Wallgreen's you could get Riverside and Blue Note albums ("cut outs") for 79 cents. The first one I ever got was Wes Montgomery's first trio record. I think one of the next records I bought was Sam Rivers Fuchsia Swing Song. I had no idea who he was at the time. The cover looked cool and I think by then I may have heard of Ron Carter and Tony Williams. Jaki Byard. What a band. All those amazing tunes. A few years ago you couldn't even get this album on CD in the US. I had to get it in Japan. I love this album. I was just listening to it minutes before I received your message. Extraordinary music. Soon after I got this one I went out and got A New Conception where he plays all standards. "I'll Never Smile Again"...there's that moment where the form get's suspended and he switches from tenor to soprano and then they all come back in. Man alive. I listened to these 2 albums a LOT! And then on to the stuff with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul. Oh man. I don't know what to say. We are so lucky he was here.
I had a similar profound experience with Tony Williams’s Spring, which along with the predecessor Life Time documents the most avant-garde Rivers-Williams collaboration. Full credit to fiery virtuoso Gary Peacock as well. Everyone thinks like they can play like this today, but honestly the originators, Rivers-Peacock-Williams, still set the bar. It’s deeply swinging -- not just a learned swing, but a folkloric swing -- but can unselfconsciously go in any direction with an unplanned atonal map.
Spring was superbly recorded by Rudy Van Gelder on August 12, 1965. I had it very young, on vinyl, but hadn’t listened to my CD copy in years. Hearing it again now reminds me of why I play jazz in the first place. It’s perfect music.
On “Extras,” Wayne Shorter and Sam Rivers improvise a bit of counterpoint before Shorter burns through a motivic swinging eighth-note abstraction. After Peacock’s intelligent solo, Rivers enters with a sing-song cry and the music quickly moves through a few different feels. These unplanned and intuitive moves are totally natural. The two tenor “solos” (they are actually two different trios) are very different but equally successful.
“Love Song” is the only tune the album with a chordal structure for improvising, where Rivers, Peacock, Williams and Herbie Hancock try their hand at some 5/4. I believe this is the first jazz five that doesn’t obviously state the meter in every bar like "Take Five.” Incredibly, they aren’t worried about getting lost, but just somehow wander comfortably through the five and a few bars of three. The form isn’t always correct, and therein lies the magic of all this era’s music with Williams and Hancock: they just don’t care if they get lost for a minute. It’s a way of playing that happened for a few years in the sixties before being banished from the straight-ahead vernacular. It’s too bad it’s gone, but I doubt we would have had it at all without Sam Rivers showing Tony Williams a thing or two.
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I’ve also re-listened carefully to the two later Rivers-led albums I loved in high school: The Quest, a rawly-recorded, totally free date with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul; and Contrasts, a high-end Manfred Eicher production with a few forms featuring George Lewis, Holland, and Thurman Barker.
The first comment is: Holland and Rivers is a classic combination. The bassist really needs a wild-card saxophonist like Braxton, Rivers, or Steve Coleman to bring out what I really love in his playing. Next: I want to hear gigs in 2012 with Altschul, Barker, and Lewis --- the last where he just plays great trombone, not enmeshed in electronics or large-scale scores. For that matter, I'm ready to hear Holland on a free-form hit again, he hasn't done enough of them lately. Finally: For me, these records take off when Rivers plays tenor saxophone, not soprano, flute, or piano.
Live, I’m sure all the instrument-switching was fun, but to make truly excellent records, Rivers needed to play the big horn, of which he will always be in the canon as one of the greats. On a bootleg from 2000, his last working trio with Doug Matthews and Anthony Cole performs his most familiar work, “Beatrice.” Rivers shows that he still play changes like a demented angel. Aw, man! Couldn’t you have made one recent record of tenor trio playing obvious tunes? It would have been instantly immortal.
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I don’t know the rest of Rivers’s extensive output all that well. In particular, I haven’t explored his big band writing enough. Like some AACM music, it seems very “process” oriented rather than committed to delivering a finished “product.” That’s a mode of behavior I have yet to really understand when more than four people are onstage, but then again I’ve never had the privilege of being involved in any of those scenes as a participant. I certainly leave room for Rivers’s large ensemble music suddenly ringing all my bells someday.
I expect a DTM guest post on Rivers to land in the future but wanted to throw up something quick this week. For now, I’m really enjoying re-listening to the above records along with Black Stars, which has one of the great recent tenor solos on the first track, “Foot Under Foot.” I’m so glad that Jason Moran, Tarus Mateen and Nasheet Waits got Rivers for this significant disc. Jason and Nasheet keep having the right idea: alongside Lonnie Plaxico they worked with Bunky Green for the stunning Another Place and now Tarbaby has Nasheet with Oliver Lake (and Orrin Evans and Eric Revis). Losing Sam Rivers is yet another wake up call to pay attention to who we have left.
12/29/2011
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