REVIEW
-- Liner Notes
ON
FIRE ! The Rhythmakers
Live
at Andy’s in Chicago (1989)
Forget
the music here for just a moment and consider only the sound.
There
is an unseen instrument at work in every jazz recording, and it has as
much to do with how we experience a performance than the music or
musicians. It is the microphone. It is our proxy, our portal, our ear to
a moment we were not privy too. And how it chooses to hear and color a
performance to a large degree controls how we will hear and respond to
it. In the micro-managed cocoon of the studio, the mission of the
microphone is to capture pure music, with all undesirable ambient
dimensions filtered out. Often one of the first such dimensions to go is
space. In a typical studio session today musicians are routinely
outnumbered by microphones, this so that distance may not intervene to
distort the spotlessness of the sound. The result can be an idealized
but unnaturally small and straitjacketed sound. Thus, the microphone and
the process often impose themselves on the music and, whether we realize
it or not, manipulate our emotional response to it.
In
a live club performance such as this one by the Rhythmakers at Andy’s
in Chicago, the space between the music and the listener is part of the
pleasure. It imparts openness to the sound. It fattens the music and
mixes it with the sound and personality of the room itself, which in the
case of Andy’s has about it the working class hospitality of a
friendly roadhouse. This superb CD gives us not only the music but the
ambiance in which is was performed. From Barrett Deems’ first booming
bass drum accents and the jolt of the horns slicing into "Wee
Dot," we know that we have something rousing and real here; and
that the recording is serving the music as it should be, documenting a
quintet of great players in its natural habitat without excuse or
apology for any unfiltered ambiance.
Bobby
Lewis’ trumpet and flugelhorn have been a cornerstone of the
contemporary Chicago mainstream for more than four decades, for most of
that time steering a solid center course between the town’s trad
groups on the right (though Bobby is at home in the repertoire) and the
more edgy avant guardists of the AACM on the left. After touring with
Jack Teagarden, he settled in Chicago and became a first call studio
player by day and leading jazz musician, leader and composer (Lewis’ The
Trumpet Section Suite was born of a National Endowment for the Arts
grant in 1975) by night.
Eric
Schneider grew up on the North Shore of the Chicago. His first impact on
the local jazz scene was felt on several otherwise unremarkable Winnetka
landmarks, which suddenly found themselves adorned with spray painted
proclamations that "Bird Lives!" – this when he was at New
Trier High School. That was in the early ‘70s. But all the while he
was polishing an explosive tenor sound and technique that soon enough
would make him the match of any player anywhere. After lengthy stints
with Earl Hines and the Count Basie band (he is on Basie’s 88 Basie
Street and Me and You albums for Pablo), Schneider has been a
regular at Andy’s.
The
long life of the much admired Barrett Deems took him around the world
with the Louis Armstrong All-Stars in the 1950s and to Hollywood where
he appeared with Armstrong and Bing Crosby in High Society
(1956). But the root and branch of his career was in Chicago where he
appeared in countless clubs and groups. In his last years he led an
excellent big band in partnership with his wife until his passing in
1998 at 85.
Joe
Johnson and Charles "Truck" Parham were contemporaries of
Deems who also lived long lives; Parham passed in 2004 and Johnson in
2005, shortly before the release of this CD. Johnson favored light
single notes lines set off between strong two-handed rhythmic clusters.
Parham, born the same year as Deems in 1913, carried much historical
baggage along with his bass. He first recorded with Roy Eldridge in
Chicago in 1937 ("After You’ve Gone," "Heckler’s
Hop"), then joined the Earl Hines (1940-42) and Jimmie Lunceford
(1942-47) bands before settling back in Chicago to balance a day job
with years of local gigs.
The
Music:
"Wee-Dot"
is a blues that originated in a 1947 Savoy session by baritonist Leo
Parker, who shares composer credit with J.J. Johnson, also on the date.
It became a bebop standard in the ‘50s when Miles Davis, Art Blakey
and others picked it up. This thundering version drives from the first
notes and inspires a flood of fierce, pin-‘em-to-the-wall playing from
everyone. Lewis and Schneider go at each other with a special zest,
first in a bout of fours and later in a round robin with Deems, whose
rim shots crackle like fire crackers. In between Schneider rips a round
of JATP-worthy choruses.
Lewis
moves to flugelhorn on "Just for a Thrill," whose melody may
also remind one, without too much coaxing, of "You Turned the
Tables on Me." Originally composed and recorded by Lil (Hardin)
Armstrong in 1936, it has served Peggy Lee, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin
and others. Lewis sings a chorus and Schneider throws a wide rhapsodic
net over the tune before Lewis brings a touch of Louis Armstrong-like
spectacle to his solo.
"I’ll
Remember April" may have been written in 1941 as a ballad (for the
movie Ride ‘Em Cowboy), but its intriguing changes seem to work
at any tempo in any style, as the Rhythmakers demonstrate here at battle
speed. Lewis and Schneider duke it out in a strong dropout chorus. The
quote Schneider inserts into his solo is from "The Nearness of
You."
"Strange
Blues" has been a long time favorite of Lewis’ since he first
heard Bob Scobey’s 1955 record. Scobey in turn had played it in the
late ‘30s with the Yerba Buena band. But it had originated with Wingy
Manone’s record in 1934, a disk I had the pleasure of introducing to
Lewis recently. Its strangeness perhaps hangs on the fact that despite
its title and its blusiness it’s not a blues at all, but a 32-bar
song. Schneider moves to alto on this one, and Lewis moans a couple of
choruses plunger style.
John
Clayton’s "Blues For Stephanie" (which is a blues, by
the way) was written for the Basie band in 1979 and was part of the book
Schneider played during his Basie period.
Lewis
sings a couple of choruses on Cole Porter’s "Night and Day,"
which swings at a relaxed mid-tempo gate.
"Coba’s
Blues" is about as low down as the blues can get, with Lewis
wailing on the plunger and Schneider grinding away in his huskiest,
three-day-beard sound. Nothing works a crowd like a procession of
familiar blues licks likes these. And this one has everything going for
it but a stripper.
The
set ends as it began, at full throttle, with "It’s You or No
One," first sung by Doris Day in Romance in the High Seas
(1948). Lewis and Schneider, who can chew a note with Jacquet, Phillips
and the best of them, toss the tune back and forth before converging for
a graceful denouement.
This
is what it really sounds like ringside at Andy’s. The "unseen
instrument" got it right.
John
McDonough
(Down
Beat, The Wall Street Journal)
