Sclavis’s Odyssey

Lost on the Way
By Louis Sclavis
ECM Records 2098

The epic poetry of Homer and modern improvised music might seem worlds apart, but there have been at least two jazz-oriented albums inspired by The Odyssey. Bob Freedman’s obscure Journeys of Odysseus featured some appealing Third Stream compositions and several talented soloists, but is somewhat marred the gimmicky excesses added by the producer. Louis Sclavis need not worry about such treatment working with producer Manfred Eicher, whose ECM Records enjoys a peerless reputation among artists and audiophiles. Lost on the Way, the latest fruit of Sclavis’s productive ECM tenure also features familiar Homeric references, as well as the French clarinetist’s restless musical spirit.

While far less electronic than his previous release, L’Imparfait des Langues, Sclavis retains the services of electric guitarist Maxime Delpierre and longtime drummer François Merville, both of whom definitely add a pronounced jazz-rock flavor to the proceedings. Yet Lost feels more intimate and conceptually unified than most rock-influenced improvised music.

The spritely “De Charybde en Scylla” opens the journey with the leader’s bass clarinet and Matthieu Metzger’s soprano saxophone somewhat evoking the spirit of the old world, but counterbalanced by Merville’s funky backbeat. After the brief interlude, “La Première île,” Sclavis darkens the mood on the tempestuous title track, taking a searching solo that quivers and quavers with power.

“Bain D’or” also has an exotic pastoral vibe, fitting to Odysseus’s Mediterranean journey, further distinguished by a striking solo from bassist Olivier Lété, layered over Delpierre’s spare comping and Merville’s hypnotic rhythm. Likewise, Merville’s insistent drumming has a trance-inducing effect on the snaky, distorted “Aboard Ulysses's Boat.” However, his funkiest moments might be represented by his cymbal work on “Des Bruits à Tisser,” which also offers Delpierre the opportunity for a nice power-fusion solo. Sclavis again shifts gears from the preceding ultra-modern sounds, with the brief “L’Absence,” a fittingly elegiac coda to the ancient journey.

Though it has its contemplative moments, Lost is an intense, darkly hued musical statement from Sclavis. Yet despite his experimental impulses, it is melodically accessible, performed with vigor and crispness. Sclavis has long been a musician who can radical alter the way listeners think of the clarinet. Now he also offers a distinctively fresh musical perspective on Homer’s epic with the compelling Lost.

Poetic Cyminology

As Ney
By Cyminology
ECM Records 2084

Cymin Samawatie, born and raised in Germany, would not be allowed to front her genre-defying group Cyminology in her family’s native Iran. That is Iran’s loss. Blending jazz influences, modernist chamber music, and Persian poetry, Cyminology has a richly distinctive sound, which is dramatically captured on their first ECM release, As Ney.

As still one of the world’s most widely read poets, the thirteenth century Rumi’s Persian verse proves a fitting starting point for Cyminology’s dialogue between the ancient and contemporary with the title track “As Ney (Song of the Reed-Flute).” Adapted as a gorgeous song of longing by Samawatie, it is an excellent example of the mystical mood they create through her otherworldly vocals and the group’s evocative use of space. Samawatie also covers the fourteenth century Iranian poet Hafiz, giving “Por sa ssedaa (Resonating)” a distinctly modern sound, thanks to Ralf Schwarz’s prominent bass lines and Benedikt Jahnel’s pulsating piano vamps.

Cyminology then looks to the mid twentieth century with Jahnel’s setting of “Naagofte (Untold)” by the Iranian modernist feminist poet Forough Farrokhzaad. A trailblazing filmmaker as well as poet, Forough’s life was tragically cut short by an auto accident. Her words, which translate as: “Hang no lock of silence on these lips/For I must share my secret/And reach the ears of the world,” take on a multiplicity of meanings in Samawatie’s sensitive rendition. In an arresting arrangement, Samawatie’s wordless vocals blend seamlessly with composer Jahnel’s cascading piano, before finally concluding with Forough’s brief poem.

Samawatie’s own lyrics are decidedly spiritual in content, like the haunting “Niyaayash (Prayer),” which is strikingly shaped by Jahnel’s delicate piano figures and Ketan Bhatti’s shimmering percussive accents. While Cyminology employs the standard jazz instrumentation of a vocalist supported by a trio of piano, drums, and bass, definitively classifying their music is a tricky proposition. Perhaps the most explicitly jazz-oriented moments can be heard from Jahnel on the three-part “Kalaam/Dassthaa/Delbasstegi (Words/Hands/Closeness),” but their musicianship is consistently impressive on all tracks.

Throughout As Ney, Cyminology’s easy rapport is audibly evident in their graceful interplay and the peaceful vibe of their music. Synthesizing their diverse influences, Cyminology creates truly transfixing music, with no one seeking the solo spotlight at the expense of group solidarity. Even Samawatie’s vocals sound like an equal and inseparable part of Cyminology’s whole. As Ney is a richly textured, refreshingly thoughtful recording. It is quite distinct from other jazz and world music releases, but fans of those genres should find it accessible and rewarding.

Note: Cyminology will be performing live in New York on May 7th at the Cornelia Street Café, May 9th at Alwan for the Arts, and May 12th at Puppetsjazz in Brooklyn.

Cool Jazz in Type and Graphics

Jazz: Cool Birth
By Gary Scott Beatty

Historically, jazz found a home in after-hours clubs and bars of varying degrees of repute. Of course, the nightlife world has always attracted a certain unsavory element, which has caused problems for musicians. Louis Armstrong’s loyalty to his problematic manager Joe Glaser always troubled his admirers, but the father of jazz was always grateful to his well-connected business agent for extricating him from some difficulties with the Chicago mob. In Gary Scott Beatty’s Jazz: Cool Birth, fictional trumpeter Smooth Willie Jefferson also gets caught up with the criminal element, but things will not work out as well for him. Birth is in fact a short, illustrated murder mystery, and Jefferson is its victim.

In format, Birth resembles a comic book, but Beatty uses type and iconic imagery to tell his story. There are no boxes or dialogue balloons. Deliberately using Jim Flora and other 1950’s record jacket artists as his inspiration, Beatty’s figures are representational but abstract, in a hip kind of way, perfectly suiting his story of the perils of the jazz life.

Fontessa, Birth’s narrator pianist, only played with Jefferson once, subbing on what would be the final gig of the trumpeter’s life. Stylistically and temperamentally, Jefferson sounds a lot like Clifford Brown, easy-going and popular with his fellow musicians. According Fontessa: “this hep cat had a real gift of diplomacy.” (p. 3) However, unlike the scrupulously clean Brown, Jefferson got involved with drugs and other dangerous entanglements and it cost him his life.

Needing someone hip to the jazz lingo, Detective Herschel Benedict (could that be a nod to Herschel Bernardi a.k.a. Lt. Jacoby on the jazz-scored Peter Gunn?) enlists Fontessa’s help with the investigation, which leads to the various nocturnal people who patronize jazz clubs.

Beatty’s opening description of Jefferson’s last gig is a nifty piece of jazz writing, as when Fontessa explains the perfect audience reaction: “when a room full of people sit there starin’ for two full seconds before thunderous applause, you know you’ve grabbed ‘em.” (p. 7) However, the hipster jive-talk gets a tad bit overdone. Still, Beatty shows a real affinity for his jazz subject matter.

Birth is a brief story (24 pages), more of an investigation than a full mystery, but Beatty’s art and typography is quite striking. Altogether, it is very evocative of the early hard-bop era of the mid-to-late 1950’s.

Norman Mailer, Celebrity, 1923-2007

Summing up Norman Mailer has been a thorny proposition for obituary writers. Roger Kimball had no trouble passing judgment on Mailer’s literary body of work, but on Sunday, The NY Times struggled to find a consistent note. It seems clear his literary reputation had been shrinking in recent years, particularly if one looks at current scholarship on jazz literature.

Mailer notoriously used jazz in his essay “The White Negro,” as a symbol of a sexual potent existentialism that only achieves full flowering in acts of nihilistic violence, leading him to glorify the hypothetical impulse killing of a candy-store owner by juvenile delinquents. Mailer infamously wrote: “jazz is orgasm” and as a result, created a raft of hipster baggage for jazz artists to deal with.

Mailer’s violent racial and sexual jazz associations were not well received by some at the time, and have aged poorly. David Yaffe is remarkably even-handed and dispassionate in his analysis of jazz and American literature in Fascinating Rhythm, but his portrayal of Mailer is not flattering. Of Mailer’s understanding of jazz, Yaffe writes:

“A detailed investigation of what was actually happening on and around the bandstand would have complicated his argument, and the nuance would have cooled the fire of his prose. Mailer needed musicians to be tough, black, and hypersexual men, and the last thing he wanted was for bop to be the ‘miscegenated’ phenomenon identified by [Anatole] Broyard.” (p. 36)

Yaffe dramatizes Mailer’s musical ignorance with this description:

“Those who knew Mailer well said he never did have an ear for music, and, according to Carl Rollyson’s biography, he rented a saxophone to play along with Monk’s music despite his complete inability to play the instrument. Indiscriminately honking along with Monk’s music was ‘hip’ to Mailer, who thought he was witnessing black masculinity in its purest unadulterated form.” (p. 38)

While Yaffe’s analysis of “The White Negro” as jazz writing is unflattering, he gives it credit on some levels, arguing it: “misses the music but succeeds as polemic.” (p. 197) Another recent scholarly examination of “The White Negro” comes from Scott Saul in Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. The political tone of Saul’s writing suggests he would be more inclined to cut Mailer slack for ideological reasons, but he quotes extensive criticism of “WN” from contemporary critics:

“Nat Hentoff criticized Mailer for inflating the acumen of the hipsters, whose ‘reactions’ to jazz were ‘as superficial and unknowledgeable’ as those of white ‘adolescents’ who loved the onstage hamming of Stan Kenton . . . Some of its practitioners, he added evenhandedly, led itinerant lives of adventure and disrepute, but many were ‘cigar makers, dock workers, artisans, sons of small businessmen,’ even ‘the children of the middle class.” (p. 68)

Others were even more caustic according to Saul, like Ralph Ellison, whose letter to Albert Murray complaining about Mailer and Jack Kerouac is also cited:

“These characters are all trying to reduce the world to sex, man, they must have strange problems in bed . . . That’s what’s behind Mailer’s belief in the hipster and the ‘white Negro’ as the new culture hero” (ellipsis in Saul, p. 69)

Mailer needed 1960’s jazz to be 1990’s hip-hop. That many jazz artists were consciously working to perfect their art while working to provide for their families was not sufficiently revolutionary. He would eventually move on to more suitable objects for hero-worship: convicted killers Gary Gilmore and professed Marxist Jack Abbott.

Kimball might be dismissive of Mailer’s talent as a writer, but I would argue there was at least some “there” there, at one time. The only Mailer novel I have read is his critically castigated Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Churned out in a matter of months when Mailer was in desperate financial straights, it is filled with foul language and misogynistic sex, perhaps the perfect window into his soul. It is also an oddly compelling crime novel that pulls you through the story by the nose (though Mailer would probably say he was reaching for a different body part). In the NY Times obit, Mailer actually identifies it as one of his favorites—sometimes the wolf at the door can be a heck of a muse. Mailer also deserves credit for his aspiration to write “the Great American Novel,” a lofty goal, that he can not be blamed for failing (by his own admission) to attain.

Mailer evidently came to consider himself above editing, as his books became increasingly long polemical doorstoppers. Fewer and fewer among the literary smart set would feel the need to keep up with Harlot’s Ghost and Oswald’s Tale. In his later years Mailer was evolving from vaunted literary figure to mere celebrity, writing an O.J. Simpson mini-series, and even guest-starring on The Gilmore Girls. Such were the demands of maintaining celebrity status. Guilty pleasures aside, Mailer’s future place in the literary canon is increasingly murky, and his writings on jazz in particular have already fallen into critical disfavor.