Paul Motian 1931 - 2011

 

(So somebody has to die before I'm inspired to write here again.  Oh well...)

I was looking at the excellent Destination Out website of jazz rarities (http://destination-out.com/) this afternoon when I noticed a mention of "Paul Motian appreciations".  That worried me because there is usually one reason in particular why people start posting appreciations of a particular artist. I checked a couple of other sites and my fears were confirmed. The great jazz drummer, Paul Motian, had passed away this morning.

Paul Motian R.I.P.

Motian was special among the many jazz drummers of the last fifty years.  Whereas a lot chose to follow the multi-directional power drumming route of the likes of Elvin Jones and Sunny Murray,  Motian went the other way playing with subtlety and sparseness and creating a velvety carpet of accents and colors for his bandmates to work with. He played with an insane number of great musicians, Lennie Tristano, Tony Scott, George Russell, Bill Evans in his most famous trio, Keith Jarrett, Carla Bley, Paul Bley, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, John Abercrombie, Jason Moran, Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, Jim Pepper and Lee Konitz just to name a few.  In looking over a couple of his credit listings today I was reminded that he was also the drummer for Carla Bley's epic recording, Escalator Over The Hill, and that he had played with Marilyn Crispell on a bunch of her ECM CDs. You could play the Six Degrees game with Motian and link him to most of the great jazz players of modern times.

Like Count Basie in his later years, Motian eventually reduced his art to its essence, never hitting a lot of notes but always hitting the right ones and letting the music breathe. He could throw down a 4/4 rhythm with the best of them, often in his Electric Bebop Band when he played with younger musicians, but it was always the abstract interplay with others that got me.  Right now I'm listening to one of his many trio recordings with Lovano and Frisell and the rustling decorations and lazy feathering he does around the sax and guitar is simply amazing. He sounds like a free falling ballet dancer.

This clip is from a 1995 performance at the Umbria Jazz Festival where Motian does his thing expertly with a heavyweight group consisting of Lovano, Frisell, Konitz and Marc Johnson. Nobody could float and drive simultaneously like this man.

CD Impressions

This is the first of occasional posts on music I have been listening to, not necessarily new stuff just what I pull out of my collection:

Lee Konitz, Satori (Milestone)



The great Mr. Konitz from 1974 doing his usual magical liquid improvising, mostly in the company of another iconoclast, pianist Martial Solal. The session is notable for trying to stay up with the times by using electric piano on two tracks, the free-falling title track and "Sometime Ago" where Solal adds burbling keyboards to Konitz's sweeping waltz time playing. Also notable here are the two young turks in the rhythm section, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette.

John McLaughlin, Extrapolation (Polydor)



This is McLaughlin's celebrated first disc as a leader and on of the few that captures him still as a member of Britain's fine jazz scene. Listening to his brawling with John Surman's muscular baritone, you wonder how his career would have gone if he hadn't gone to America to work with Miles Davis and gone the Mahavishnu-Shakti route. This is tough, punchy music of exceptional quality.

John Zorn, "Alhambra Love Songs" (Tzadik)



John Zorn tries out the piano trio format on this disc, writing music supposedly in the style of West Coast musicians like Vince Guaraldi and Hampton Hawes. There is some good mellow jazz here in tunes like "Half Moon Bay", "Moraga" and "Alhambra Blues" but Zorn being Zorn, he can never stay in one genre for very long so there's also exotica, rock, serialism and noir faux-soundtracks. The players, Rob Burger, Greg Cohen and Ben Petrowsky, are very capable but to get the real feeling of the classic West Coast sound, stick with the original Mulligan or Guaraldi recordings.

Amazing-Lee

It was said of Miles Davis in his electric period that, no matter what craziness was going on around him on the bandstand, he always played like Miles Davis. The same can be said for one of Miles' innumerable collaborators, the venerable Lee Konitz. No matter what setting he puts himself in, large groups, small groups, duos, solos, with strings, even free improv, he always sounds like himself with that distinctive, high-flying, behind-the-beat sound.

I saw that first hand last night watching him in a concert at the Kennedy Center. At the age of 82, he still has it. He played with a trio called Minsarah whose members looked young enough to be his grandkids. They went through a broad swath of styles and approaches from minimalism to the restless pulse of the Sixties Miles Davis Quintet but whatever the kids threw at him, Konitz was on top of it with unflappable cool. A calypso beat under "Cherokee"? No problem. Ghostly noir sounds on "Stella By Starlight"? Got it covered. A quick dash of Tristano-like unison melody. In his wheelhouse.

Konitz is known as a cerebral player. That is certainly true but he is also capable of great beauty. He proved this when a gorgeous solo alto improvisation led into a ravishing "Body And Soul" that sent lazily sighing notes spiralling out of his horn weith no seeming effort. It was a soft, sensual soundthat seemed to be channeling Lester Young. Through all this he was cracking jokes awith audience and seemed to be having a ball. When drummer Ziv Ravitz ended "Body And Soul" with small tinkling cymbals, Konitz responded with a few notes of "Jingle Bells". This was a fabulous show from a living legend.

Lee Konitz

Since I haven't posted in a while, here's an extra for today: some beautiful playing by the ageless master Lee Konitz.

Cool Part 2

Here is the second part of the "Cool" episode of "The Subject Is Jazz" featuring Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh duetting on "Subconcious-Lee".

The Subject Is Cool Jazz

An intelligent and hip program about jazz on a major American television network? It sounds like the stuff of fantasy today but back in the 1950s, it was possible. Case in point: "The Subject Is Jazz", a 13 week show that ran on Sundays on NBC back in 1958. JazzVideoGuy has posted parts of the show on YouTube and they are great fun, critic Gilbert Seldes discussing various subgenres in the music which are then demonstrated by a band that includes Billy Taylor, show's musical director, on piano, Mundell Lowe on guitar, Ed Safranski on bass and Ed Thigpen. This excerpt is the fisrt half od a show on cool jazz with added musical guests Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh and Don Elliott. Even PBS would never do a show like this today. Heck they probably would never rerun this one.