Listening with Bob Brookmeyer

[brownie]

From The New York Times today:

LISTENING WITH BOB BROOKMEYER: RAGING AND COMPOSING AGAINST THE JAZZ MACHINE

Mr. Brookmeyer, right, with Gerry Mulligan, center. The bassist is Bill Crow. Mr. Brookmeyer joined Mr. Mulligan's popular quartet in 1953.

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: May 12, 2006

TO those listening closely, Bob Brookmeyer has become both the mature conscience and the hectoring elder of contemporary jazz, making late-period work that deals with the deeper emotions of living and raging against the business-as-usual of the jazz world. Yet Mr. Brookmeyer, the 76-year-old trombonist and composer, has largely absented himself from that world. He lives in rural Grantham, N.H., with his wife, Jan, composing new works for his own big band, the New Art Orchestra, based in Germany, and pieces commissioned for European radio orchestras.

Bob LaPree for The New York Times

The trombonist and composer Bob Brookmeyer at his home in Grantham, N.H.

The close listeners might include his students and colleagues in jazz education, as he has become a kind of guru at the New England Conservatory; those who knew him from Stan Getz's popular quintet of the 1950's, or as the formidable intellect of Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra in the early and middle 60's; and the dedicated bunch who seek out his new work, even though he is seldom invited to perform it in America.

The first track on his new album with the New Art Orchestra, "Spirit Music," is called "The Door." It begins almost primevally, with a gravitas rarely encountered in jazz. First there is a single sustained chord played on synthesizer and piano, for a full minute; then two seesawing chords among four trombones and five woodwinds, E minor and D minor. After that, the record keeps opening up different vistas, areas of tightly written, color-rich arrangements.

Mr. Brookmeyer is the composer and conductor of the music, and only occasionally allows himself a trombone solo, as on the track "Alone": with his first notes a dark jollity suddenly enters the picture, a depth of accumulated life experience. His sound is broad and emotional, roomy enough for old-fashioned song and tonal abstraction. His music is deep and tense and stubborn and extremely tender; his talk too, which comes in complete paragraphs, is full of these tempers.

He does not give up easily, though at various times he has been tempted. In his 40's, while living in Los Angeles and working in recording studios, he reached a protracted bottom point with alcoholism and, he says, almost died from it. Soon after, in his 50's, he nearly quit jazz altogether to become a classical composer.

Born in Kansas City. Mo., in 1929, Mr. Brookmeyer had a largely unhappy youth that coincided with the killer years of Kansas City swing, when Count Basie was the North Star. He first heard Basie at the Tower Theater in 1941, at a Sunday matinee between showings of western movies, with his father.

"I melted," he said in his low, rumbling voice. "It was the first time I felt good in my life. I was not a very successful child."

Sitting in his basement studio, overlooking a wooded slope, we first listened to Basie's "9:20 Special," from 1941, and Mr. Brookmeyer immediately focused on the structure of the piece, particularly the ensemble work. "You hear the sax background?" he remarked, under Buck Clayton's trumpet solo. But when it came to Basie's own contribution, he had too much to say. We stopped the piece to talk.

"New Orleans was a whole other feel, but Kansas City was concentrating on the smooth, rhythmic 4/4," he said. "That was everything. There was what you might call a coolness — that's an awful word — a subtlety, and a strength that didn't hit you over the head. Long beats on the bass. Drums really concentrating on cymbals, making a smooth patina."

Basie himself was the key to all this. "He had supernatural powers," Mr. Brookmeyer said. "He didn't evince a lot of effort. Whereas other people seemed to take music and pound it into the ground — bounce it off the earth — Basie came from under the crust of the earth and through your feet."

A year after Mr. Brookmeyer's Basie epiphany, Charlie Parker left Kansas City, about to help invent bebop, and jazz changed. When Mr. Brookmeyer was working in the city's black clubs, first as a trombonist at 15, then as a pianist at 17, Parker was making his first significant bebop records in New York. These were critical for a young musician to absorb. He listened to them repeatedly at 16 r.p.m., on a Navy-surplus phonograph, transcribing Parker's lines by ear.

The exercises did him good. "At that stage of the game," he said, "bebop was such a distant language that what I learned, I owned." But he preferred to play in swing bands. "They were more fun for me," he explained. "Some of the beboppers played very well, but they seemed to imitate the worst parts of progress: heroin, bad attitudes, cliquishness." (He was also viewed as a square, he suspects, once he started attending the Kansas City Conservatory of Music.)

In 1951 he endured six months of Army service in Columbia, S.C., under the scorn of an officer who looked unkindly on white aesthetes with black friends. (Trying to defend himself, Mr. Brookmeyer says, he was publicly dressed down for being prone to "homosexual fits.") He was given an honorable discharge. Back in Kansas City, he found a job with Tex Beneke's orchestra, which eventually led him to New York.

By this time Mr. Brookmeyer was playing the valve trombone — a variation on the instrument's better-known form, with valves instead of a slide. (It has been his principal instrument ever since; the piano has only returned off and on.) He worked with Stan Getz, and in 1953 he took the trumpeter Chet Baker's place in Gerry Mulligan's quietly intricate quartet and sextet for a few years.

At the time he basically idolized only tenor saxophonists, not trombonists: Lester Young, Al Cohn and others. Bill Harris, who played trombone in Woody Herman's orchestra, was the only exception.

Harris was a brilliant, natural musician, a practical joker and a drunk; according to legend he once arrived at a hotel before a gig by driving his car up its steps and into its lobby. Mr. Brookmeyer never got to know him well, and he says he regrets it.

Mr. Brookmeyer chose a 1952 live version of "Lady Be Good," performed by one of Harris's small groups, a quintet including Eddie Davis, known as Lockjaw, on tenor saxophone. Harris's improvisation is extravagantly musical, bursting with melody — he yanks it out of the instrument — in a tangle of swing and bebop phrases.

Bill Harris had an overpowering voice on his own, I said. Was he too large a presence for a big band, too disruptive?

"I wouldn't say disruptive," Mr. Brookmeyer corrected. "He was influential. His sound was highly emotional. His personality was so strong that he guided the band a lot. As a trombonist in a big band, you're in the middle of everything. You learn how things are made. My old joke is that saxophonists get all the girls, trumpet players make all the money, and trombone players develop an interior life."

In the 1960's Mr. Brookmeyer began to struggle against the conventions of jazz, the aspects he has come to call, with derision, "rituals." Increasingly he turned to composing. "Playing is easy for me," he said. "It's a nice hobby. I can pretty well turn it on and off. I can't do that with writing. A blank piece of paper is a great leveler."

What interested him most was overturning the consensual hierarchies in jazz. His work in the mid-60's for the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis big band — like his own "ABC Blues," which used 12-tone sequences over blues changes — was intellectually challenging. But when he returned to the band as musical director after a decade in Los Angeles, which ended in two hospital rehabs, he really started pushing the band to its limits.

He had quit drinking for good and was studying composition with Earle Brown, the modern classical composer. He became interested in the most aggressive kinds of modern music —"music to make your teeth hurt," as he puts it. And he set about creating pieces for the fairly mainstream Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra (Thad Jones had left by then) in which, as he explained, "solos became the background to the background."

This was an idea first hatched while he was arranging and composing for Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band in the early 60's. He wanted to integrate solos fully with ensemble passages, at times even making them secondary, an idea dating back to Count Basie, which through his sensibilities would influence Maria Schneider and Jim McNeely, two current composers for large-ensemble jazz who owe a great debt to Mr. Brookmeyer.

Back in New York in the early 80's — which was also when he started his teaching career in earnest — he began to question the entire established language of jazz performance, but especially solos, which he had come to regard as "ritual gone mad."

"My first rule became: The first solo only happens when absolutely nothing else can happen," he explained. "You don't write in a solo until you've completely exhausted what you have to say. If you give a soloist an open solo for 30 seconds, he plays like he's coming from the piece that you wrote. Then he says, 'What the hell was that piece that I was playing from?' And the next 30 seconds is, 'Oh, I guess I'll play what I learned last night.' And bang! Minute 2 is whoever he likes, which is probably Coltrane."

One of his heroes at the time was Witold Lutoslawski, the Polish composer. We listened to Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto, a nearly 25-minute piece finished in 1970, as performed by Mstislav Rostropovich. It begins with a series of short D's played by the cello soloist; after some side roads, confrontations between the cello and the orchestra, the repeated note comes back.

"Interested?" Mr. Brookmeyer said, grinning. At the beginning of the second movement, the woodwinds go up and down, in thirds. "It's so lovely, and so subtle," he said enthusiastically. "It's like a rainbow shooting up. He uses material that's so beautiful, and makes it happen again, so he raises expectations."

Mr. Brookmeyer talked about the qualities of music that are important to him. "How do you begin to speak to the listener?" he began. "The listener doesn't have to like the process, but he needs to be in the process, to make the trip with you.

"In the 80's," he continued, "I began to wonder how long I could extend my musical thought and still not break the relationship with the listener, not put the listener to sleep. When I became a teacher, I realized that everybody writes too short. You've got to finish your thought."

His new large-ensemble pieces can be decently long, but they don't make anyone's teeth hurt. (He gives Jan, his fourth wife, some of the credit for cooling him out.) But he still has a problem with solos, even in his own band, his pride and joy.

"I never think about a soloist when I'm writing a piece," Mr. Brookmeyer said. "I just think about the piece and say, O.K., maybe it would be a good place to have a little release." His advice to jazz composers: "Keep your hand on the soloist, somehow, with long tones, chords, punches. Keep your hand on him, because he needs it."

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Recordings that Bob Brookmeyer chose to listen to for this article:

COUNT BASIE ORCHESTRA "9:20 Special," from "America's No. 1 Band!: The Columbia Years" (Sony Legacy, $44.98)

BILL HARRIS "Lady Be Good," from "Live at Birdland 1952" (Baldwin Street Music, $18.98)

WITOLD LUTOSLAWSKI Cello Concerto, from "Dutilleux, Lutoslawski: Cello Concertos," featuring Mstislav Rostropovich and the Orchestra de Paris (EMI Classics, $11.98)

Recordings featuring Mr. Brookmeyer recommended by Ben Ratliff:

BOB BROOKMEYER "Traditionalism Revisited" (Blue Note). Recorded in 1957, a fresh, modernized look at the Dixieland repertory, sonically compact and emotionally rich.

JIMMY GIUFFRE TRIO WITH JIM HALL AND BOB BROOKMEYER "Western Suite" (WEA International). From 1958, a lovely, quietly radical record, half through-composed and half freely improvised, based loosely on cowboyish folk-music themes.

STAN GETZ-BOB BROOKMEYER "Recorded Fall 1961" (Verve). A casually virtuosic reunion of two improvisers who played together a great deal in the mid-1950's, in a quintet including the drummer Roy Haynes.

GERRY MULLIGAN "The Complete Verve Gerry Mulligan Concert Band Sessions" (Mosaic, four-disc set). A brilliant big-band project of the early 60's, well received at the time but overshadowed in history by the contemporaneous free jazz movement. Mr. Brookmeyer was co-founder, principal arranger and, next to Mulligan, the prime soloist.

CLARK TERRY-BOB BROOKMEYER QUINTET "Complete Studio Recordings" (Lonehill). A warm, terrifically smart band from the mid-60's, with some of the best rhythm-section players of the day, including the pianist Hank Jones and the drummer Osie Johnson.

BOB BROOKMEYER NEW ART ORCHESTRA "Spirit Music" (Artist Direct). Mr. Brookmeyer's largely European 18-piece band, with the American drummer John Hollenbeck, in a program of new music, rich in color and harmony: the latest step in the evolution of modern, large-ensemble jazz writing that wound through Count Basie's 1950's music and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra of the 1960's.

Edited May 12, 2006 by brownie

[Guy Berger]

Thanks mucho for posting that, Brownie.

Guy

[sidewinder]

Just the other day watched again the Jazz 625 broadcast with Clark Terry/Bob Brookmeyer. Brookmeyer absolutely on top form in that performance (he must be one of the most consistent guys in jazz) and just over-running with ideas. What a great combination Terry and Brookmeyer were !