Greetings All,
Happy Ides of March, with much to beware and also some things to celebrate. My new album, Torch Bearers, featuring the great Charles McPherson, is out and has made its way to various distribution channels:
Bandcamp is a good way to go for those of you who like to own physical media; ordering a CD will also get you an immediate download of the album, so you can have your CD and listen to it too (right away), in full, up to 96k/24bit, fidelity.
Charles’s “Late Style”
In a recent Substack post, Ethan Iverson had admiring things to say about what he describes as “late style” in Charles’s recent live performance at Smoke with his quintet (perhaps referencing Edward Said?). The sweep and freeness that Ethan found noteworthy in Maestro McPherson’s recent playing is also something I’ve experienced consistently in 45 years of hearing him and playing alongside him.
It has deepened and developed over time in a way wonderous to behold, but that freedom – the real freedom that comes with a fullness of knowing, of both materials and process – has been there for a very long time.
One place on the new record where you can hear this freeness is on the impromptu (we called it on the date and let it happen) version of “Blue N’ Boogie” with Orrin Evans on piano. Orrin has great skill in setting up magic moments, and the intersection of his and Charles’s inventiveness produces a lot of them here.
Check out the fours in particular – the pinball machine goes on tilt a couple of times in the hippest way! I love this whole performance.
More About Lonnie (& Charles)
Following my last post, I’ve kept on the Lonnie Hillyer trail in various ways. Checking out Bruce Harris’s YouTube dive into Barry Harris’s “Newer Than New” inspired my own cut into Charles and Lonnie’s great front-line playing on this classic quintet side, a call-to-arms for the eternal modernity of bebop in the face of modality and the “New Thing”. I thought it would be interesting to line up Charles and Lonnie’s solos on Barry’s hip treatment of Cole Porter’s “Easy To Love”:
I haven’t dug into an analysis yet, but I’d say features to check out include:
- Use of triplets. Both solos are effortlessly fluent in the unselfconscious use of a triplet group as part of an eighth-note run. It’s interesting to note instances where the triplet is on a downbeat (1,3) as opposed to an upbeat (2,4). Dig Charles’s hemiola triplets in his 2nd chorus.
- Rhythmic Approach: Both are swinging! Lonnie is a little more overtly syncopated (the Dizzy influence, maybe?), Charles is flowing, both have syncopation happening at multiple levels (shape contour, phrase beginnings/endings, rhymes within the phrase)
- They play “through” rather than “on” the changes. The harmonic rhythm is flexible; changes can be anticipated or delayed as the moment dictates.
- Charles’s solo is very motivic – dig how many times he refers to the motif in bar 1/1 (first chorus right after the break); a downbeat triplet followed by a descent of a third.
- Dig how Lonnie favors ending or bridging phrases with a series of syncopated eighth notes that “spread out” the line, much in the same way as passing tones or “bow-on-the-boxes” (Lonnie’s term for a neighbor-tone figure) can align and/or delay a linear motion.
Enter C Sharpe!
Recently, I reminded myself that somewhere on my computer was an old audio grab off a blog site of Lonnie in 1980 at the Tin Palace in the company of the legendary altoist Clarence “C” Sharpe and another legend (and true giant), pianist Walter Davis Jr. Found the file, and also ran down the original source, still up after all these years:
https://crownpropeller.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/105-minutes-with-legendary-clarence-c-sharpe/
It’s loose, off the cuff, prolix, and an important document of both C and Lonnie’s later playing. C Sharpe was around a lot in my early days in NYC, on the set at Star Cafe sessions, and of course at Jazz Cultural Theatre and University Of The Streets. He and Tommy Turrentine (another master be-bopper) were both very encouraging to me as I was finding my way around the 5-D topography of the New York scene.
Here are a couple of snippets from this gig. Jimmy Lovelace on drums, another beloved community member from back in that day, is on fire throughout the whole hour and a half of music. It’s very rewarding to listen through the lo-fi (one channel on the cassette recorder is down for the first 1/3 of the tape) sound – tremendous playing and vibe to burn. Walter Davis Jr. is in magnificent form throughout! If you’ve never checked out C Sharpe this recording is a good place to start. He recorded hardly at all; this tape is a prime example of his art.
C Sharpe and Lonnie Hillyer trading fours on “Cheryl”:
Lonnie’s solo on :”The More I See You”:
Lonnie on “Constellation” (up Rhythm changes):
It’s great to hear Lonnie stretching out!
The Tin Palace was a great place to hear music. It had closed by the end of ’81 when I finally moved to the city, but I went there a few times on visits (two bands I heard there were Lee Konitz’s Nonet and the Mickey Tucker Sextet with Marcus Belgrave and Junior Cook).
Hope you enjoyed this – comments are welcome! Talk soon…