Tracking The Serious In Play

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday May 21, 1990

GAIL BRENNAN

SO, FAREWELL to you, Dexter Gordon. Elegant force and the joyful motor rhythm - those were your hallmarks ... this "poem" with apologies to E.J.Thribbs of Private Eye. The Best Of Dexter Gordon is a good selection from a series of buoyant early 1960s albums.

In one of those superb Times reviews that might lead you to believe we have shrugged off the cultural cringe prematurely, Michael Woods finds some very plausible parallels between the life of Miles Davis (elaborated with startling frankness in his autobiography) and his music. These musical examples are mostly drawn from Porgy And Bess, an initially surprising choice. Made a year before the ever-popular Kind Of Blue, this is something of a forgotten album.

A rehearing of both the original pressing (a landmark of stereo recording)and the very acceptable current remastering does more than raise one's eyebrows. The Doctor Jesus track, on which Davis plays the preacher against the orchestra's responses, mounts to a climax that should stand your hair on end and freeze your blood. Ian Carr, in his biography of Miles Davis, called this a moment of primal force practically unmatched in any music.

Of course Gil Evans's arrangements have equal weight in this uncanny dialogue - a 20th century concerto, in which Davis reveals more ways of playing the trumpet, or flugel horn, than had hitherto been dreamed of, while approaching a range of basic emotions from the most unexpected directions.

There are, as far as I know, only two recordings of the complete opera of Porgy and Bess, with Gershwin's brilliant, Ravel-inspired orchestration. This is an album of selections, like most others, but it includes such rarely-heard delights as the street vendor's cries, which Davis renders with startling trumpet vocalisations, and it extends Gershwin's jazz ideas as no other performance does.

Altoist Frank Morgan has not been recorded much since the 1950s. In fact, he spent some of the intervening years in San Quentin. One might have expected him to emerge as the hardest of hard boppers, but what we hear on Mood Indigo is a small "r" romantic - a nice distinction I picked up from H.G.Nelson (if I read H.G. right over the port and cigars, this is a friendly sentimentalist as opposed to the Wagnerian upper-case specimen).

On ballads, Morgan's fingers often run to a rapture of arpeggios, and when he plays a blues he squeezes it for all the squirms, twists, yips, yelps and whizzing and bending notes it will yield. But a glowing warmth and sincerity extend to every decorative tendril. A lovely disc, with two appearances by Wynton Marsalis, who is coming on.

The real jazz depth in Marsalis's band, however, is still the blind pianist Marcus Roberts, whose second album as a leader is a superb example of neo-classicism. Rich, sensual, and often quiet, the arrangements by Roberts show there is much freshness to be found in some of the idioms of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.

Roberts has the touch of a great pianist. Some of his voicings remind me of Andrew Hill, but these are deployed with the economy of an Ahmad Jamal. Two trumpeters solo briefly and effectively, and each sounds suspiciously like Roberts's boss. Distributed by B.M.G.

The singing, gut string sound of bassist Charlie Haden is not best served on CD. Nevertheless, this series of duets with Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, Alice Coltrane and Paul Motian is essential in any form. It is to be hoped that Polygram will also make available The Golden Number, on which he duets with Don Cherry, Archie Shepp and others.

All tracks here are of paramount interest, but the duet with Ornette Coleman (with whom Haden came to prominence) should be played at school assemblies throughout the land as a demonstration that the most serious things are full of play, and vice versa.