Larry Kart schreibt:
As the idiot who gave „Natural Essence“ a ***1/2 review (out of *****) for Down Beat when it came out (in a review that coupled it with the first or second Steve Miller album!!!) and who then grew to love the album in general and Washington in particular, let me quote from a piece I wrote back in ’86 that touches upon „Natural Essence“ by way of a Stanley Crouch remark about the then-current band Out of the Blue:
„These young men aren’t about foisting the clichés of twentieth-century European music on jazz,“ writes Crouch of a group called Out of the Blue, which tries very hard to sound like the clock had been turned back to 1965. „It is an ensemble luminously in tune with integrity.“ But if „integrity“ and „foisting“ are indeed the issues, it seems fair to ask how the music of Out of the Blue’s eponymous first album stands up alongside a representative and stylistically similar album from the late 1960s: tenor saxophonist Tyrone Washington’s Natural Essence, which includes trumpeter Woody Shaw and alto saxophonist James Spaulding. The two groups share the same instrumentation and the same musical techniques, as the heated rhythmic angularities of bebop are linked to free-floating modal harmonies. And even if Out of the Blue’s trumpeter Mike Mossman and alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett haven’t directly modeled themselves on Shaw and Spaulding, they certainly sound as though they have. But the emotional tone of the two albums is quite different. While most of the members of Out of the Blue sound as though they thought of their music as a style (that is, as a series of rules one must adopt and accept), the music of Washington and his partners is fundamentally explosive, a discontented elegance that keeps zooming off in search of extreme emotional states. In fact a passionate need to exceed itself lies at the heart of Washington’s music. And while stylistic patterns can be found on Natural Essence, they only emphasize the mood of turbulence and flux–defining the brink over which Washington constantly threatens to jump. So even though the music of Washington and his mid-sixties peers was less openly radical than that of Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, it was by no means a separate phenomenon. Indeed, the strains of transition that supposedly were confined to the jazz avant garde may have been even more violently felt in the music that lay, so to speak, just to the Right of it.
Das stammt aus dem Tyrone Washington Thread dort, dessen Lektüre sich lohnt, auch im Hinblick auf Joe Henderson – und hier in Bezug auf Jackie McLean, über dessen „Right Now“ Chuck Nessa eine kleine Erinnerung mitteilt:
You have to understand the times – when each performance seemed to reveal some new advancement towards more/new beauty. Silly as it sounds today, this was expected (under the current circumstances).
After Judgment and Dialogue we felt betrayed by Bobby Hutcherson. Joe Henderson seemed another link in this chain.
I remember being at a small party in Joseph Jarman’s apartment (’66/’67) when he received a call saying the new Blue Notes were at Met Music (the hip store on the south side). We jumped in a car to retrieve Jackie McLean’s Right Now.
When we returned and threw the record on the turntable faces sagged. It was a wonderful JM date, but seemed to be a half step back. We were a tough audience.
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #164: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv, 10.6., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba