No ol' man Rivers

The sax great is still playing his ass off

by Jon Garelick

All it takes is a quick listen to the new Concept on Sam Rivers's own Rivbea Sound label to know that the one-time avant-garde firebrand of the Boston scene (and New York after that), now 73 years old, is still playing his ass off.

The second tune, "Sprung," is vintage Rivers: a concise, abstract "head" arrangement, full of shifting rhythmic accents, angular melodic leaps, and fetching unison stop-times for tenor sax, bass, and drums. Twice through the theme and the trio are off on a fast run, Doug Mathews's bass speeding along in fours, drummer Anthony Cole's hi-hat keeping a fast snip-snip-snip after him, and Rivers's tenor, still robust, full-throated, and raspy, leading the way, firing off strings of eighth notes, breaking every now and then for a bluesy joyous trill or a low, honking exclamation, each phrase shaped in a clear rhythmic arc that seems to drive the whole piece forward.

Rivers makes a rare Boston appearance (his first in nearly 20 years, by his count) when he plays and leads the New England Conservatory Jazz Orchestra through 10 of his recent compositions next Thursday in Jordan Hall. He was recruited for an NEC residency by Jazz Studies department chairman Allan Chase, who caught him at a Knitting Factory gig in New York. "I've always followed his career," says Chase, "and when I saw him he sounded better than ever. I like the fact that he's doing something new but that he's really grounded in traditional jazz language and hasn't skipped over anything. He's almost as old as Bird would be [Charlie Parker, born in 1920], but he's doing more challenging things than most 30-year-olds are doing at this point."

Rivers, meanwhile, has been living in Orlando for the past few years. He discovered the area while touring there in the late '80s as part of Dizzy Gillespie's band. In Orlando, he found a wealth of good musicians who were more or less employed full time at Disney World and the surrounding hotels.

"But they were playing Mickey Mouse music," Rivers explains over the phone. "You have all these good musicians down here who have no music to play, so that's the reason I'm here. They're so busy they have no time to write. So I'm working. Sixteen hours a day. I'm composing, playing."

No surprise that an entire scene seems to have grown up around Rivers and his music, with both musicians and audiences gravitating toward him. Besides his trio, he works regularly with his own big band, and he claims to have written "over a hundred big-band pieces in the last four years." And Rivers and his various aggregations have found no shortage of venues. "I'm playing tonight at a club called the Sapphire Club, where I can work pretty much whenever I want," he says. "It could be like my Village Vanguard."

"I still marvel at how one person could move here and alter the musical consciousness as much as he has," reports Matt Gorney, who's been working with Sam and Sam's wife, Bea, to help run the label and manage Rivers's affairs. "He's recognized in public places, other young groups [who have heard him] have gone from punk bands to improv bands."

That news won't surprise other musicians and jazz followers who have observed Rivers's career over the past 40 years. In Boston, he studied at the Boston Conservatory and BU and, in the late '50s and early '60s, worked with the big band of trumpeter and Berklee founding faculty member Herb Pomeroy.

"At that point [1961-'63] Sam was the major soloist in the band," recalls Pomeroy. "He was the excitement factor. A lot of people can turn on the energy button, but not as many people can play with a great deal of energy as well as musicality. What's more, he had a lot of sensitivity on ballads."

Rivers was also playing in Boston small groups with drum prodigy Tony Williams from the time Williams was 13. The two appeared at the legendary Club 47, which later became Passim, in Harvard Square. "They'd have Joan Baez or Judy Collins some days, and us on other days," Rivers recalls.

The Pomeroy aggregation, meanwhile, featured a slew of Boston's top players and arrangers. "It was a great band," says Rivers. "It was probably the most inspirational band I've ever been in. It had music by all the exciting writers at the time -- Jaki Byard was in it, Mike Gibbs. In fact, that band was one of my inspirational guides to writing for big band. A lot of other musicians came up through Herb's band -- Dick Johnson, who runs the Artie Shaw Orchestra, Charlie Mariano, John Neves, Alan Dawson. Keith Jarrett also came through. I don't know what happened to that music. I'm sure Herb still has it." Thinking back on those days, he adds, "Without Herb Pomeroy, there probably wouldn't be a Berklee College of Music."

In those days, Rivers was a bebop player with a strong formal music education whose solos were already pushing the tradition. He very quickly caught the "free jazz" bug from the likes of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor. He left Boston (and a stint with T-Bone Walker's band) to join Williams in Miles Davis's quintet for only a few months. In the liner notes to the new Complete Blue Note Sam Rivers Sessions (Mosaic), Rivers says about his time with Miles: "I guess it sounds funny, but I was already ahead of that. I kept stretching out and playing really long solos, and that's probably why I didn't last."

Rivers was soon playing with some of the more adventurous player-composers on the Blue Note label. He recorded on Tony Williams's debut as a leader, and on albums by organist Larry Young, pianist Andrew Hill, and vibist Bobby Hutcherson. And he began his own series of groundbreaking releases documented on the three-CD Mosaic set. In these sessions, you can hear what's always distinguished Rivers as a composer and player: a combination of freedom and structure, fire and intellect, and his own unique sound as a soloist. Rivers can write with chord changes or without, or he can base pieces on a simple melodic motif, repeated and harmonized on by the other players. Or he'll employ various methods within a single piece. He likes fast tempos, harmonic freedom, and dense textures (especially in big-band pieces), but his work is also full of space and light.

On the Mosaic/Blue Note set, a number like "Dance of the Tripedal" moves through several moods and textures, alternating an easy swing in "three" with tempoless passages for trumpet (Freddie Hubbard) and bass (Ron Carter), and with Rivers's tenor, both tender and gruff. The '60s jazz avant-garde is lambasted (sometimes rightly) for self-indulgence, but Rivers's pieces demand a lot from the players: a sensitivity not only to the composition but to the evolving collective improvisation. When he caught Rivers's current young trio in New York, NEC's Chase recalls, "I was impressed at how well trained those musicians were at playing his music."

When Rivers moved to New York in the '70s, he and Bea opened Studio Rivbea in SoHo, which helped spawn the loft-scene jazz of that era. The trio became his primary recording ensemble. He worked with, among others, bassists Cecil McBee (with whom he hopes to reunite at NEC) and Dave Holland, and drummers Barry Altschul and Norman Connors; he recorded a couple of famous duet albums with Holland and made several LPs for Impulse, including a big-band record.

During his time in New York, Rivers also got a reputation as a teacher. Coming up on his own, he worked hard to create his own sound, distinct from the pervasive influences of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. He wrote his own exercises and made his students do likewise. This, after all, was someone who had played with Cecil Taylor and T-Bone Walker. Just the same, Rivers is a product of the era that produced epic saxophone solos, for which Taylor's marathon rehearsals were a prime training ground. "It's like a long-distance runner," he once told writer Michael Ullman. "After a while, you don't feel the pain; you don't feel anything. You've run through all your clichés. You have to deal with something new in a different way altogether. It gets to be like total creativity."

That might sound like a recipe more tasty for the players than for an audience, but on Concept you can hear how well Rivers's methods have stood by him. Although there are recognizable Rivers patterns, his solos remain unpredictable. He can play long, gestural "sheets" of notes, but he also breaks those images down into more gnarly calligraphy, and one long arc of development is often infused with little gems of melody. His rhythmic patterns, meanwhile, always sustain a sense of continuity in his lines (one Blue Note album, after all, was called Contours).

Rivers's solo style is based, among other things, on physical stamina, and you have to wonder how he's coping at age 73. Does he still approach soloing the same way?

"I still do because I didn't run my body down," he says. "I'm still in good shape and exercising every day." Trying to compare himself to his contemporaries, he finally concedes, "I really don't know anybody my own age. In fact," he adds with a laugh, "I don't know anyone over 30 down here." Anticipating his gig at the Sapphire Club, he concludes, "And the audience, they're all between 18 and 25. They're gonna pack the joint tonight. And I don't let up. I give 'em the full dose of music."

Sam Rivers plays with and conducts the New England Conservatory Jazz Orchestra at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street, next Thursday, December 12, at 8 p.m. Admission is free. Call 262-1120 extension 700. You can call Mosaic Records at (203) 327-7111. Write to Rivbea Sound at 1414 East Harwood Street, Orlando, Florida 32803.