William Ash Trio, The Phoenix

[Nate Dorward]

This is a release on Smalls Records; I'm posting on it in part because I think that since most of the excitement surrounding the Smalls label concerns its Frank Hewitt releases, the other releases on the label have been cast in the shadow. I don't think that's a huge injustice necessarily--the Hewitt material is by far the most significant stuff on the label.

Anyway, of the other records on the label I've heard the Across 7 Street release (nice hard bop with some good tunes) & the Sasha Dobson, which has a backup band led by Chris Byars from Across 7 Street. Somehow neither of those does a lot for me (sorry, Luke) but the other one I've heard, William Ash's The Phoenix, is more my speed. It's not a distinctive album: basically the pleasure of the disc is just hearing someone do something familiar just right. It's spare, no-tricks Wes Montgomery-style guitar, with a really nice old-fashioned live-in-the-studio sound. The tunes are mostly originals, usually just a simple call-&-response riff over straightforward chords (blues, "Rhythm", or the changes of tunes like "It Could Happen to You" or "All the Things"). Plus a blisteringly fast "Constellation" (doubletime solo all the way), "Bewitched" & a don't-mess-with-perfection "The Sidewinder". Nothing here out of the ordinary, but it's durable music: nothing here with an expiry date. & Ash makes the guitar sing, in his no-fuss way. The rest of the band: Dwayne Burno on bass, Mark Taylor, drums. A really nice album if you're a fan of elemental, laidback guitar which never gets too far from the blues.

Edited January 21, 2005 by Nate Dorward

[Leeway]

Nate, I have been eyeing that album and listening to all the clips on CD Baby for some time now; definitely one I want to get. Ash some other stuff out too. I note on his web site that he says Smalls held off issuing "The Phoenix" for a few years. He has some later albums out since "The Phoenix." Time to pull the trigger on it I guess.

[Nate Dorward]

Yes it's got a recording date of 2001 if memory serves. I haven't heard his other stuff, mostly Japanese issues I gather. Very much worth picking up, anyway: it won't blow you away but it's the kind of disc that sits in the CD changer for extended spells.

[lkaven]

Hi Nate,

I think we pretty much agree on the William Ash record. I think while it isn't ground-breaking, the level of playing is way out in front. William picked up his stuff from playing with C Sharpe (a year long engagement in C's band when he was 16, fifteen years ago) and Frank Hewitt (in Frank's Sat nite quintet), and what he does is actually pretty deep. He just makes it sound easy, and for him playing the guitar is somehow effortless at any speed. [Hewitt liked to call tunes "seriously up", often over 400mm, and that never seemed to be a problem for anyone in Hewitt's quintet.] Burno is to my mind one of the very finest bassists, and I find what he does on that record to be distinguished. Apparently that disk is somewhat infectious, because it made the charts even though nobody was encouraging radio stations to play it. I like to listen to it here and there because it's both smart and buoyant...a good rainy day record for some reason.

William's disk would have been released straight away after it was recorded. However, Smalls Records suspended business for 18 months prior to launch, to negotiate the exit of a co-founder, and to reform the company under my ownership. Unfortunately, this introduced a big delay.

What I like about the Dobson disk are the arrangements and band, the fact that she's for real, and the fact that I didn't overproduce it (all straight-through takes, no vocal retakes, no multitrack, no isolation). I'm amazed at how good Byars is in this role. Yet I confess I have a personal preference for his highly modernist works, and especially for his writing and playing with Across 7 Street, most of which you haven't been able to listen to yet, and which in my view is pretty deep. You will hear Dobson later in a small group setting, where she shows that she can swing a band. [The octet is more high-powered than it sounds even, and singing with it is a different thing than one might expect, and unlike most vocal albums done today.] She's been studying with an Indian master, learning ragas, etc., and developing an ability at microtonal inflection. I am interested in presenting her next in a slightly more adventurous setting, somewhat away from the traditional Ella-Sarah vein, and I think some of you might be interested in checking out that when it comes.

BTW, so far, nothing distinguishes you from the biggest Across 7 Street fan. It has a funny way of growing on one. My only regret is that we stuck too closely to the two-choruses-each form in an attempt to keep the time down. But I also wanted to have a number of their compositions. On a live date, they will spin up something longer and more progressive. I see some label them as hard bop, and yet they're much more akin to bop than to hard bop. The compositions are too complex and harmonically challenging for hard bop. And YET, many of the compositions and conventions that they use aren't really even identifiably bop either, but come more out of later period. Tunes like Apollo 7 and One for D.T. (sheet music available on my website in Finale format) remind me more of 20th c. classical music in some ways. One for D.T. is very darkly funny in its bold use of bitonal harmonies and faux melodrama. Apollo 7 is haunting, dark, unlike anything else. The melodies and harmonies are the toughest of anything I see written in NY these days, and there is hardly another jazz player who can improvise over those tunes. And nobody else can play it with that kind of facility, which they developed over fifteen years together, and ten years of weekly appearances at Smalls. Who can deny John Mosca's talent? The "Sacha Perry chords"? The out-there arco bass-solos, and the smart-as-hell and imaginitive lines of Byars? Just considering Mosca, it is hard to think of a better trombone player who can make sense like that playing over the weirdest chords at top speed. He's one of the only players I know anywhere who is as deep as Hewitt. Byars is close in there, with a command of chromatics that is almost never heard of. [Like the others, he was an early bloomer, got awarded his MusM at age 19 from Manhattan School.]

I labor this partly because I know how Frank came to become the late Frank Hewitt qua "underrecogized master" that he is now believed to be. The syndrome is insidious enough for me to actively encourage people to suspend judgment. Also, coming up are two related disks. First is the Sacha Perry trio disk (Eretik), which I recorded just recently, and which comprises ten of his original compositions. This is brilliant playing, and the compositions are stunningly beautiful. He's widely respected. But I know a couple of people will be tripped up by the use of the bop lexicon as the language of choice. Elmo Hope and Frank Hewitt were his biggest influences, along with, of course, Bud and Monk. And yet, when one digs into it, one will realize that he isn't a copycat, he's progeny; he really has something to say that's his, and this language suits it. His solos, like the quadruple entendre title, have more layers than most will suppose at first. And I don't know anyone else out now who is a master of this kind of harmony. Ari Roland flatly plays some of the best I've ever heard him play ever. [And I took a cue from some of you out there and developed another mic technique to cover him, one that doesn't overemphasize bow-string noise, and which presents him more the way I experience him.] The second record coming out is the Frank Hewitt Quintet live at Smalls from August 21, 1999. This incarnation of the Hewitt quintet features Byars on tenor and altoist Mike Mullins out front, Roland on bass, and the late Jimmy Lovelace on drums. Besides being a killing Hewitt date, this is partly a tribute to Lovelace, and a fitting one. It also demonstrates how much people like Byars and Mullins got from spending years on the bandstand with Hewitt. You can really see this with a tune like Oblivion, which I think is very difficult for most people to really make a lot of sense on it on a long extended solo.

Luke

[Leeway]

Luke,

I don't know if you'll get a chance to get back to this thread, but, if you do, could you explain a bit about how Mr. Ash was recorded. I quote from the CD Baby site, but I think this is the same description that appears on Smalls website. My attention was caught by the following comment:

The groove is funky, and to complement that, we fashioned the sound somewhat after the warm sound of a Rock-Ola jukebox playing your favorite 45s, with bigger-than-life bass and reverb.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to my copy.

[Nate Dorward]

Luke--thanks for the considered response. Yes, Ash may sound "easy" in the sense of "comfortable" & "enjoyable" but it's definitely not easy-sounding in the sense of "simple"! It's incredibly hard to play that way, actually. You never get the sense that Ash is just running off things already under his fingers: he's a thinking player. Not an adventurous player, but a thinking player nonetheless.

Yeah, I think that both with the Dobson & the Across 7 Street discs I basically have a sense of players I have sympathy with but maybe not quite the settings I'd most like--the very compressed, one-after-the-one solos on the A7S disc, & the tight standards arrangements on Dobson's disc. Not that I dislike either disc--both are very nice. But there's a difference between appreciating & really feeling personally engaged by/involved with a disc.....

Thanks for the peek at the forthcoming lineup--that sounds great. I really appreciate what you're doing with the label. Did you see the inclusion of the Across 7 Street disc in the Coda top-tens this Jan., & Duck Baker's very nice, thoughtful review in the same issue of the first Hewitt release?

My formal writeup of the disc is now up at

http://www.bagatellen.com/archives/reviews/000747.html

though it doesn't say much I didn't say above.

[lkaven]

Luke,

I don't know if you'll get a chance to get back to this thread, but, if you do, could you explain a bit about how Mr. Ash was recorded.  I quote from the CD Baby site, but I think this is the same description that appears on Smalls website.  My attention was caught by the following comment:

The groove is funky, and to complement that, we fashioned the sound somewhat after the warm sound of a Rock-Ola jukebox playing your favorite 45s, with bigger-than-life bass and reverb.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to my copy.

This was one of the sessions where the late David Baker (the recording engineer) was brought in to consult. Baker taught me a lot about old school recording, and a few van Gelder tricks, as best we know them. In the end, there's a certain amount of alchemy; one experiments until one can get something nice with whatever one happens to be given.

In my sessions, the musicians are always in a natural performance situation. There's no isolation. It often works best when the musicians are close together, believe it or not. Instruments are close-miked, with the object being a naturalistic rendering, but not a purist rendering (2-mic stereo). I pan the instruments to correspond to real space to preserve ambience and timing cues. [i dislike ultra-wide panning, and timing cue anomalies induce nausea.] I mix live to stereo in the studio and put it down dry, with no EQ or f/x.

In William's session, we had William, Dwayne, and Mark in tight the way they'd be on the bandstand. You can hear the snare rattle. Dwayne set up a speaker for the bass back behind the drummer. At first, I hesitated to use it, but then decided to try to work creatively with it. Baker miked the guitar using his trick, with a Coles 4038 ribbon out front of the amp (which by the way, had some abberations which we managed to turn to advantage), null plane facing the drum kit (a ribbon mike is used because it has a near-perfect null on the sides, and it smooths out high frequency harshness from the amp), and a Sennheiser MD421 in the back of the cabinet with phase reversed. Then we took the two guitar mikes and panned them to L and Center respectively, to give the guitar a spread. We used a Neumann M149 on the bass very close to the drums, but with the highs rolled off, in order to reduce the high-frequency "directional cues" from nearby cymbal taps. One side effect of this is to emphasize the "feeling" of the drum hits around the room.

In the final mastering step, a little sculpting is done on the overall mix, then a convolution reverb is applied using an impulse response sample from a warm wood room. The reverb was tuned fairly extensively to resonate with the frequency of the bass notes and add sustain. Lastly, roughly 3 dB of fast compression is applied to bring out the instruments.

Right now, I'm extremely happy with the sonics on the new Sacha Perry release coming up in a couple of months. I've been experimenting with a technique for miking the bass that I saw in a photo taken at van Gelder's. He puts an RCA 77 down near the floor angled up about 45 degrees towards the bridge. It took me a while to figure out why in the world he did it that way, and eventually I realized. You have to understand that this is miking an instrument that sits directly next to the drums...think Elvin Jones or Art Blakey, and you know what I mean. How the hell did he get the kind of separation on the bass? I realized that, besides rolling off the highs, which we can hear he did, he also made brilliant use of the naturally near-perfect nulls of the 77, a ribbon mike with a figure-of-eight pickup. The drums are almost invisible to the side of the ribbon mike. But why at 45 degrees and why there exactly? Turns out it minimizes reflections from the floor and ceiling as well by about 50%. And it covers the bass beautifully. I think I did more justice to Ari Roland's arco sound this way.

Luke