Lighting Down in Amherst: Joe McPhee and Chris Corsano at the Old Chapel

As 100 people entered the Great Hall in the Old Chapel to hear Joe McPhee and Chris Corsano make music, ushers Lew and Peg Louraine remarked that I seemed to know each one of them. It’s true, much of the audience at the concerts I produce belong to a loose League of Adventurous Listeners, of which I’m a long-standing member.

McPhee, the eternally youthful 78-year old saxophonist and pocket trumpeter, and Corsano, the baby-faced, 42-year old drummer, brought out core League members, along with some special friends of Corsano’s, who has roots in the Pioneer Valley. We were treated to an engrossing concert of spontaneously composed music that made the rounds of sound and emotion.

The March 8th, Magic Triangle Jazz Series performance was simple, unadorned and exquisitely complex. No written music, no amplification, no pre-concert discussion of how the evening should unfold. Just two master improvisers with a good amount of shared history, at different stages of their life journeys, letting us eavesdrop on their heavy musical conversation.

McPhee has developed a distinctive range of sound producing techniques on saxophone since appearing on Clifford Thornton’s Freedom and Unity in 1967. About 20 minutes in, Corsano dropped out and McPhee sang through his alto sax, while playing multi-phonically. “Blues feeling” doesn’t quite capture the deepness I heard. I witnessed a thumbnail history of the African in America told through sound. Many players vocalize through their horns, but McPhee has his own way. Likewise, he likes to produce sound on his sax without blowing, by fingering alone. His subsequent percussion discussion with Corsano was delicate and pointed.

McPhee told me when he was new to New York, he’d practice in the same building on Barrow Street where Ornette Coleman had a loft, and they’d cross paths. Once Ornette knocked on his door to offer him a trumpet. After John Coltrane’s funeral at St. Peter’s, McPhee was ready to split when Ornette invited him to ride to the Long Island cemetery in his limo. The Clifford Thornton recording was made the next day. The opportunities openness provides.

Both McPhee and Corsano are open. Open improvisers, open hearted, open to playing with a wide range of musicians; hell, they’re even open for business.

I’ve known Chris Corsano since the late 1990s, when he worked the door for Michael Ehlers’ Fire in the Valley and Amherst Meetinghouse concerts. Since those days, he has travelled the world with Björk, Thurston Moore, Paul Dunmall, Sir Richard Bishop and dozens of others across many genres. Other than his December appearance with Mars Williams’ Ayler Xmas project (that included McPhee), this was my first time producing a concert with him. How easy and what a pleasure.

And what a drummer. Corsano is a colorist, a pile driver, a basic sound scientist, a collaborator of the highest order. At one point, he played an end-blown flute onto a membrane, producing a very satisfying drone that vibrated deeply, while McPhee’s wind-blown trumpet went up in smoke. Another time, he used three resonant bells placed on his drums, radically changing the vibe in the room. He rubbed wood blocks on the skins, bowed cymbals and used mallets with small rubber ends to produce a slew of notes and tones.

McPhee and Corsano both live in the Empire State, Poughkeepsie and Ithaca, respectively. But they are itinerant musicians in the image of Don Cherry. Travelling the world, open to what comes, making things happen, busting categories, with no regard for music industry hierarchy. And no regular teaching gig. They are lifetime members of the LAL.

Prodigal Son Returns: Ricky Ford Quartet in Massachusetts

Long-lost Massachusetts native Ricky Ford came back to the Bay State on Friday, February 23 and brought out the largest Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares audience of the season to Hawks & Reed in Greenfield. Over 100 folks filled the 4th floor Perch to hear the great tenor saxophonist lead his Quartet, which included John Kordalewski, piano, Jerome Harris, acoustic bass guitar and Barry Altschul, drums.

The 80-minute concert was filled with robust originals and some very muscular horn playing that brought to mind tenor titans of a bygone era. Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1954, Ford has crafted quite the resume. After studying with Ran Blake, George Russell, Jaki Byard and Joe Maneri at the New England Conservatory, he launched an impressive career that has included recordings and performances with Lionel Hampton, Mercer Ellington, Charles Mingus, Mal Waldron, Abdullah Ibrahim and Yusef Lateef. Besides an impressive catalogue of dates as a leader for Muse and Candid, Ford can be heard to advantage on Ran Blake’s The Short Life of Barbara Monk, Abdullah Ibrahim’s Water From an Ancient Well and Tenors of Yusef Lateef & Ricky Ford, among many others.

Soon after headlining Magic Triangle Series concerts at UMass in 1991 (alongside George Cables and Pete LaRocca) and 1994 (with Danilo Perez, Alan Dawson and a brass section), Ford embarked to Paris, where he has resided since.

As so often happens in the myopic and self-centered U.S. jazz scene, artists who live abroad quickly drop out of sight and mind. So for decades we lost track of Ricky Ford, who was busy teaching at Istanbul Bilgi University, running the Toucy Jazz Festival in Yonne, France, curating a gallery space, painting, gigging, recording and raising a family. For the last couple of years, he has made annual pilgrimages to the States around this time.

Ford has lost none of his drive and fire, tearing through uptempo originals with the swagger of a Johnny Griffin or Paul Gonsalves. His ballad playing also evoked an earlier era when unhurried storytelling and a full, round sound carried the day.

Born in 1943, Barry Altschul is the elder statesman of the band. Like Ford, Altschul lived in Paris for about 10 years, beginning in 1983. Ford has 11 dates as a leader on Joe Fields’ Muse label. Altschul’s first two hugely influential records as a leader, You Can’t Name Your Own Tune (1977) and Another Time/Another Place (1978), were also recorded for Muse. But their paths have only crossed in recent years. Although the Bronx-born drummer is associated with progressive musicians like Paul Bley, Anthony Braxton and George Lewis, Altschul has the whole of jazz history under his fingers. He propelled the band mightily on Friday. During each piece he would swing on one part of his kit before moving the energy to another. Each time he changed focus, our attention would freshen and momentum would build.

Jerome Harris, who spent years playing bass for Sonny Rollins, certainly knows a thing or two about providing momentum and a solid foundation. We heard him accomplishing the same thing in a different context in October, when his atmospheric underpinnings gave body to Mike Baggetta’s Trio. Here in a more traditional setting, Harris got to solo more often, taking full advantage of the space to launch a number of nimble and lyrical statements. Along with Steve Swallow, Jerome Harris is the pre-eminent acoustic bass guitarist in jazz. Valley audiences get one more chance to hear his artistry on March 21st, when he performs with the Marty Ehrlich Quartet at Hampshire College.

Pianist John Kordalewski, a 1976 graduate of Amherst College, leads the Makanda Project, a 13-piece band dedicated to preserving the compositional legacy of Makanda Ken McIntyre. They gave a transcendent Jazz Shares concert in Springfield in 2014. Kordalewski also arranged a fabulous event with South African trumpet great Feya Faku last year at the UMass New Africa House. Kordalewski, who has his doctorate in Education from Harvard, not only arranges concerts, he is a first-rate, self-taught jazz arranger. Kordalewski remarked that the Etsey piano, “didn’t have a sound”. But despite the limitations, he found things to say on the instrument.

The stories flowed before and after the concert. Jazz artists are nothing if not tellers of tales. Saxophonist Charles Davis told Ford about the time Sun Ra was being hassled by police. “This is the worst planet I’ve ever been to,” Ra told the officers. Altschul recounted how much grief Sam Rivers endured in the 1970s for hiring two white guys, Altschul and Dave Holland. And so on.

After gigs at the Side Door Café in Old Lyme, Connecticut, Mark Morganelli’s Jazz Forum in Tarrytown, New York and some others, Ford is back to his life on the Continent. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 25 years to see him again.

All Together Now: BassDrumBone at UMass

The average length of a marriage in the United States is just over eight years. Mark Helias, Gerry Hemingway and Ray Anderson have been together as a band for 41 years. You can imagine the familiarity, the shorthand, the sense of trust developed over that span of time. Being in a working band is a kind of marriage. The trio has travelled hundreds of thousands of miles together to countless performances, multiple recording sessions, and social gatherings. There have even been a few name changes over the years (the trio began their career as Oashpe).

Fresh off performances at Cornelia St. Café in New York, Dartmouth College (hosted by band director Taylor Ho Bynum) and a cool space in the very small town of Honesdale, PA, BassDrumBone gave a masterful and highly nuanced concert for 90 attentive listeners at the new Old Chapel at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on Sunday, February 11, 2018. The concert was part of the Fine Arts Center’s Magic Triangle Jazz Series.

As was clear during the pre-concert dinner, and equally apparent from the bandstand, bassist Helias, drummer Hemingway and trombonist Anderson have a ton of shared experience, musical and otherwise. They spent the 75-minute performance in a constant state of becoming, confidently marching to an uncertain future. They hovered between grooves and frequently shifted meter. They locked in for stretches, referencing funk, swing and bop, only to dissolve into a delicate openness that privileged sound. Because we were in the presence of highly trained musicians, we could relax into whatever pose they proposed. The compositions, all originals by the band members, had character, personality, a point of view, an architecture we could relate to.

Each musician had been to the Magic Triangle Series many times over the years as both leader and sideman. It was a dream come true to finally present them in their most illustrious and longstanding ensemble.

It was a big treat to hear Hemingway, who for the past nine years has lived in Switzerland, where he is a professor at the Hochshule Luzern. His last appearance in the area was a 2002 concert with Miya Masaoka (koto) and Reggie Workman (bass), which highlighted his delicate, textural skills. Those were well displayed on Sunday. At one point, he used a metal cup on his floor tom to produce bent notes of other-worldly proportions, and he used multiple brushes, mallets, sticks and hands to color the proceedings. But on his Don Cherry tribute, Cherry Pickin, and elsewhere, he bashed and wailed, providing energy and drive, sub-dividing beats, teetering between feels.

Helias was last here in April, 2016, at a Magic Triangle concert featuring Jane Ira Bloom, who premiered Wild Lines, her beautiful evocation of Emily Dickinson. He has appeared four times previous: an Ed Blackwell tribute, with Joe Lovano and Tom Gianpietro (2014), the Michael Gregory Trio (2007), as half of the Marks Brothers, with bassist Mark Dresser (2002) and his own Quartet (1997). From my perspective, it’s hard to name a more consistently engaging bass player in jazz over the past 40 years. He is the anchor in BassDrumBone, or perhaps it’s more accurate to call him the rudder, charting the band’s direction, steering the ship. The superior acoustics in the room allowed Helias to say a lot at low volume.

Last summer, up and comer Joe Fieldler told me about his “turning point moment” as a budding musician. While listening to the radio, he remained in his car after reaching his destination to hear the name of the fellow trombonist blowing his mind. It was Ray Anderson. With Roswell Rudd’s recent passing, the mantle falls to Anderson, whose impish spirit and loquacious sound, are essential in advancing the trombone language. Besides an impressive circular breathed, unaccompanied solo statement to begin one piece, Anderson played the horn without multi-phonics or other extended techniques. Just pure vocalized expression through nine feet of coiled metal.

During a gorgeous interlude towards the end of the evening, we heard bird sounds. Where were they coming from? Just as we were settling on Anderson as the source, a bird appeared, making large arcs through the Chapel’s rafters. Just birds being birds, we thought. Except it was a bat, silent, perhaps roused by Anderson’s aviated offering.

The staff was in a tizzy, not reassured by Helias’ comment that his barn is full of them. But the animal’s swoops and whooshes made manifest the dramatic and unexpected nature of this music.