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[Giant Steps]
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The Either/Orchestra’s Afro-Latin connection
Plus Patricia Barber and Fire in the Valley
BY JON GARELICK

After 17 years, the Boston-based 10-piece Either/Orchestra (who play the Regattabar this Wednesday, September 18) continue to evolve. This week they release Afro-Cubism, their eighth album since they played their first gig at the Cambridge Public Library, in December 1985. Planned in the coming months are collaborations with John Tchicai and Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra, plus a recording session of Ethiopian music for the French Buda label. And in March, the "second half" of the Afro-Cubism sessions will be released as Neo-Modernism. The dual Accurate Records release is a marketing strategy deployed by E/O main man Russ Gershon after he realized he had too much good material for one CD and didn’t want to attack the marketplace with a double CD — something he’d tried before, on 1996’s career-spanning retrospective Across the Omniverse, with less than optimal success.

Gershon’s decision to release the 42-minute Afro-Cubism and then Neo-Modernism as separate "LP-length" pieces at $10.99 list price is his way of competing with the tonnage of major-label budget catalogue. Also, he says, "We’re always looking for new people who’ve never heard of us, because we’re pretty underground still, after all these years."

The richness of the Either/Orchestra catalogue bespeaks Gershon’s ability to respond to regular personnel turnover even as he maintains the band’s signature postmodern sensibility — his eagerness to mix genres, his embrace of humor (both musical and verbal), his willingness to stretch the jazz tradition. In the past, that’s meant covering King Crimson’s "Red" and Bob Dylan’s "Lay Lady Lay," creating a musical diptych of Thelonious Monk’s "Nutty" and Bobbie Gentry’s "Ode to Billie Joe," or combining Kansas City and Charles Mingus in the Grammy-nominated "Bennie Moten’s Weird Nightmare." On the new album, George Harrison’s "Don’t Bother Me" gets a Latin treatment (with a subtitle, "No me molesta," that doubles as the lyrics).

Each period of the band’s history is marked by distinctive personalities (current trumpeter Tom Halter has been aboard since the beginning, and the two current CDs mark the departure of saxophonist Charlie Kohlhase, who joined in 1986). For the past couple of years, the key identifying factor in their sound has been the dual-rhythm team of Surinamian drummer Harvey Wirht and Dominican percussionist Vicente Lebron.

"I feel like I’ve been in Afro-Cuban rhythm academy for the last three or four years," says Gershon, "particularly since Vicente joined the band. He’s from Santo Domingo, and he’s a real master drummer — he knows that music down to his bones. He grew up playing it, and he hears how all the parts and the grooves fit together, and so hanging out with him, just riding in the bus with him and banging on the seats, has been a real education for me and for everybody in the band."

The Lebron/Wirht combo drove the compelling "Ethiopian Suite" from More Beautiful Than Death (2000), but on Afro-Cubism they’re at the core of a more expansive jazz palette. Driven by a chugging ostinato horn figure, "Blue Attitude" takes off on Kohlhase’s ferocious baritone solo. The flute-based "Soul Song" has a soul jazz gloss of expanded harmonies, and "Harvey’s Entrance" spins off in swirling counterlines from its rich opening melody.

"It makes the band sound bigger than 10 pieces," agrees Gershon about "Harvey’s Entrance." " ‘The Ethiopian Suite’ was more linear and didn’t take full advantage of the full harmonic possibilities of all those horns. It was more about rhythm and line. ‘Blue Attitude’ also has some orchestral qualities to it. It’s very Ellingtonian to my ears. But with Harvey and Vicente — throw a 6/8 groove at them and it becomes a whole world of its own."

Gershon entered Boston’s rock-music scene as part of the Sex Execs, and he says that as far as writing goes, he’s still looking for that hook. "Each the pieces on Afro-Cubism has some kernel of an idea. With ‘Harvey’s Entrance,’ it’s the very first thing the piano plays at the beginning, and with ‘Blue Attitude,’ it’s the bass and sax line for the first 12 bars. ‘Soul Song’ came from a little four-bar melody that was haunting me. The fun part is bringing it to the band and hearing how it spirals out from that little spot."

Writing at the piano, Gershon made the Latin elements of Harrison’s "Don’t Bother Me" explicit. "The song is in E minor, and I moved it to G major, which is the relative major — a pretty small but significant change. And in the G major I wound up discovering this real Latin cliché kind of riff structure, and so the whole song wound up evolving from George’s kind of minor lament to this major, peppy salsa or Latin jazz approach.

"When you’re covering a Beatles song, or any really well-known songs, you don’t want to sound like an elevator-music band playing an instrumental version of a Beatles song. So when we do those things, I’m always looking for some way to unlock the song and take it apart and put it together in a different way. And that seemed to be it: going from minor to major and turning it into Latin jazz. And I managed to work in a quote from Mingus’s ‘Orange Was the Color of Her Dress’ in the bridge."

PATRICIA BARBER, whose new Verse (Blue Note) came out last month and who’ll play the Regattabar next weekend, September 19 and 20, also has ideas about covering pop tunes. The singer, songwriter, and pianist has a knack for offbeat choices: Sonny Bono’s "The Beat Goes On," Bill Withers’s "Use Me," Peter Green’s "Black Magic Woman." What’s surprising is that she can turn these pieces into real jazz, even if her ideas about how to do it come off as more blunt than Gershon’s. "My opinion is that it has to come in the arrangement," she explains over the phone from her home in Chicago. "You have to smarten up the pop song somehow. If you don’t do that, it’s a complete failure." And as vehicles for jazz, she adds, "most pop songs do not have enough harmonic complexity to work."

For a lot of her fans, Barber is the jazz vocalist of the moment — not only for her arrangements of pop but for her incisive piano playing and her witty, original songwriting and vocal phrasing. Verse is all originals, full of her typical urbane allusions (Zeus and David Hockney get name-checked). The page doesn’t do justice to " ‘Guilt’ like garlic/Needs to sauté with cream, butter, and wine" (from the new "I Could Eat Your Words") — you have to hear it delivered in her cool-bronze alto. But there’s hardly any Barber piano playing. "In general, I kept piano out of it. It was a Joni Mitchell–esque recording, and I wanted it to sound more guitar-intensive."

Mitchell has become a touchstone for female jazz vocalists hoping to cross over to pop (see Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones). "Above all the pop artists, she’s the one that I find interesting. Her lyrics are interesting. I learned a lot about how to cram lyrics into a small space from her. Her instrumentation is pretty interesting — it’s not as interesting as having jazz musicians really stretch out, but for pop it’s pretty interesting. And I love her voice, love the way she sings, and she’s prolific. So if I could do anything close to that, that’s definitely what I’d be trying to do."

But Barber’s goal is still jazz — "lyrics that work with songs that jazz musicians can play over." And her songs have as much to do with jazzheads like Dave Frishberg and Mose Allison as with Mitchell. Also on the new album is trumpeter Dave Douglas, who’s worked with her in the past, and whom she calls "the most interesting jazz-trumpet player on the planet right now." She envisioned him in writing the tunes: "He can stay right near the heart of the song harmonically, and yet he can step outside."

THE FIRE IN THE VALLEY FESTIVAL, after several years in the Amherst area and a couple of years on hiatus, comes to the ICA this Saturday, September 14, as a co-production of the Boston Creative Music Alliance (BCMA) and Eremite Records. Starting at 2:30 p.m., the event will feature the band 2 Days in April, with Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, and William Parker; the Jemeel Moondoc Quintet; Parker’s Clarinet Trio with Perry Robinson and Walter Perkins; and bassist Alan Silva in his In the Tradition Band and in a trio with violinist Malcolm Goldstein and drummer Roger Turner.

Eremite honcho Michael Ehlers pretty much single-handedly revived the stateside career of Silva — an innovative bassist who worked most notably with Cecil Taylor before disappearing to Europe for several decades. And Ehlers has put Moondoc — an alto player with a singular post-bop/avant-garde sensibility — back on record for the first time since his Soul Note recordings of the ’80s. Moondoc’s Revolt of the Negro Lawn Jockeys is one of the highlights of the Eremite discography.

The 33-year-old Ehlers, a native Minnesotan, describes himself as coming from "a fairly standard liberal-arts-college background with a lot of nights spent in jazz clubs and days spent in jazz record stores." Add to that some gigs in college radio (he attended Marlboro College in Vermont) and a father who had a collection of "1950s college-boy jazz — Brubeck, André Previn, Basie, etc."

The record label and the plans for the first Fire in the Valley fest started around the same time, in the mid ’90s. The festival ran from 1996 to 1999. By 2000, however, Ehlers found that his hands were full running the label and managing the tours of artists like Moondoc, Silva, and Parker. "It’s a pretty grassroots scene," he says over the phone from the road, "and if you’ve got a label, you have so many distribution problems — challenges really — that one way to get your records out there is to hit the road and sell them out of the back of a van."

Ehlers says it was his interest in the first generation of American free-jazz players — Silva and Taylor, Albert Ayler — that led him to "second-generation" players like Moondoc and Parker. As for this weekend’s festival, "Who knows what will happen in terms of little spontaneous collaborations, because everybody’s going to be there, and it’s not a family of musicians that gets an opportunity like this on any regular basis. At least in America."

For information on the Either/Orchestra and Patricia Barber shows at the Regattabar, call (617) 876-7777. For Fire in the Valley ticket information, call (617) 354-6898.

 

Issue Date: September 12 - 19, 2002
The Giant Steps archive
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