Horace Tapscott: The Dark Tree, Volume One

The amazing pianist Horace Tapscott made a fateful decision about fifty years ago to forsake the grueling life of a traveling musician to maintain a permanent base in south-central Los Angeles, where he labored long to promote both music and community, especially through his organization (first, in 1961, U.G.M.A.--the Underground Musicians' Association and then reconstituted as U.G.M.A.A--Union of God's Musicians and Artists' Ascension).  Far from the spotlight, he worked mainly in obscurity and was little recorded, but he had a significant impact on those he dealt with and for.  Late in life, he finally was receiving some long overdue recognition and more frequent opportunities to record his excellent compositions and document his impressive style on his instruments, before he died too young at age 64 in 1999.

YHB had the opportunity to see Tapscott perform several times.  The first was at a free performance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, when nothing was known about him.  That changed in moments when the pianist erupted into a beautiful torrential solo peppered with amazing arpeggions and punctuated by precise applications of his sustain pedal.  There was also a fiery series of solos by saxophonist Michael Sessions that stood out, as well.

The next trip to the record store (it was the very early 90s!) yielded a search for Tapscott recordings and there were only two CDs in the bin, volumes one and two of a live recording called The Dark Tree on the foreign HatHut label.  It was pricy, but so worth the expense.

This was true because of the remarkable compositions of the leader, because of his irrepressible playing, and because of the excellent support he had in clarinetist John Carter, bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Andrew Cyrille.  While Carter was not particularly well known, his playing was stunning, wide-ranging and compelling on an instrument not often found in jazz (though the young clarinetist Don Byron was getting a lot of attention in those days and the great Eric Dolphy is a great favorite of this blogger.)

With McBee and Cyrille there are two of the giants of jazz drumming and bass playing, musicians whose resumes are filled with stints with some of the finest bandleaders of the last fifty years, including AMERICAcacophony favorites like Sam Rivers and Cecil Taylor.  Tapscott couldn't have asked for a better rhythm section to back up him and Carter.

The title track is generally considered Tapscott's masterpiece and this is a thunderous performance with McBee's repetitive and hypnotic bass and Cyrille's crystal-clear and march-like drumming setting the tone for the others to solo off of.  Carter is especially awesome on this piece, conjuring up all kinds of wonderful sounds and turning in a virtuoso performance.  Tapscott's soloing is majestic, thundering at moments and then releasing the tension a bit before building it up again.  Hearing him on a long solo often reminded this listener of the ocean, stormy seas, puncutated by thick block chords, giving way to placidity as waves of sound emerged from the instrument in ways that really were unique to his playing.

The other tunes, while not as earth-shaking as "The Dark Tree," are all excellent Tapscott compositions, with "Sketches of Drunken Mary" and "Lino's Pad" both in sprightly waltz time and the former having a melody that seems to evoke the intoxicated state of its subject, who was someone the young Tapscott knew well in his native Houston.  "Lino's Pad" is another feature of Tapscott's expressive and impressionistic playing.

Horace Tapscott (1934-1999), a great jazz pianist and community leader and builder.

Something needs to be said about the fact that this awesome disc was recorded at Catalina Bar and Grill in late 1989.  The current Catalina facility is a far larger and less intimate one than the older venue where this show was recorded and where this blogger spent many happy hours in the early to late 90s hearing some incredible jazz, including a few performances by Tapscott, in which this blogger sat at a bistro table directly behind and to the side of the pianist as he worked his magic on the keyboard.

Truth is, you cannot get a better concert experience than that--sitting within inches or a few feet from masters improvising and interacting with their fellow musicians as the crowd (small, but highly appreciative and empathetic) soaks it all in.  It was a great pleasure to witness the great Horace Tapscott perform and it was a sad day when reading about his unexpected death in 1999.

Recently, a combined double-disc package of the two volumes of The Dark Tree has been issued, but the cover art shown here is for the original, very hard-to-find, 1991 edition of the first volume.

One other recommendation:  John Isoardi's 2006 book on Tapscott is also called The Dark Tree and is a fascinating interview/narrative that details his life from his upbringing in Texas, to his military service, to his short career on the road, and then all of amazing work he did in Los Angeles.  YHB read the book just several months ago and raced through it with great interest.

Horace Tapscott:  The Dark Tree (Volume One)  (Hat Hut, 1991)

1.  The Dark Tree  20:56
2.  Sketches of Drunken Mary  11:32
3.  Lino's Pad  16:46
4.  One for Lately  10:24

Sam Rivers: Trio Live

It was almost a year ago, at the end of 2011, that the underrecognized Sam Rivers died at the age of 88.  A multi-instrumentalist, who played tenor and soprano saxopones, flute and piano, Rivers came up in the jazz ranks in Boston, but remained a little-known figure elsewhere until his former sideman, the teenage drum phenom Tony Williams, recruited him to join the Miles Davis Quintet in 1964, when Rivers was already 40.

While Rivers' tenure with Davis was short, because his playing just was too free for the leader's tastes, it is definitely worth hearing the long-delayed release Miles in Tokyo, which demonstrates just how inventive and distinctive Rivers' sound was.

After that brief period with Davis, though, Rivers was signed to Blue Note Records and delivered some interesting, if not particularly high selling, albums during the mid-1960s.  After another period of obscurity, the Impulse! label signed him in 1973 and a couple of fascinating live albums were released, including Streams, which was this blogger's introduction to this amazing performer some twenty years ago.

However, the Trio Live album, while somewhat similar in structure of the group and arrangement of the pieces, is just a bit better.

The first three pieces, a suite called "Hues of Melanin," present 44 minutes of perfomance at Yale University in November 1973 and teamed Rivers with the supple and creative Cecil McBee on bass and the polyrhythmic and vigorous drumming of Barry Altschul.  McBee was also outstanding on Streams, which also featured future disco-era hit maker Norman Connors on the traps.  While some suggest that Connors was not suited for Rivers' style, and this may be true, Altschul did seems a better fit.

The rhythm section does do a great job creating an accompaniment that holds up to Rivers' prodigious playing.  It's one thing to be a master of a chosen instrument, but Rivers was spectacular on three.  His tenor playing was truly his own, not sounding like any of the masters before him, and his navigation from the lower to the higher ranges is impeccable, though on Trio Live, he only played this instrument on one five-plus minute section of this concert.  

In the 34-minute first section, he plays expansive on both soprano sax and flute and, on the former, he displays a stamina, clarity and expressiveness that would give such better-known masters as Steve Lacy and John Coltrane a run for their money.  His flute playing is also excellent and it is on this instrument that he tended, in these extremely free trio performances (the only type, he said, where he felt he could be truly free) to engage in a stream-of-consciousness series of yelps, screams, and other forms of vocalizing that might turn some listeners off, though it strikes this listener as a joyful reaction to the freedom he and his bandmates were enjoying.

While there is no comparing him to any of the greats, his piano section, comprising just over four minutes, finds him playing quite well, with flowing, graceful lines that cascade and flow easily and attractively.

The last two pieces are called "Suite for Molde" and take in just under 20 minutes of a show at the Molde Jazz Festival in Norway in August 1973 with Arild Anderson playing bass.  Anderson plays well and works smoothly with Rivers and Altschul, with his bowed work on the second part meshing nicely with that of Rivers, though he doesn't have the strength and elasticity of McBee (but, then, few bassists did.)  This work has over half the time, denoted as part two, devoted to Rivers playing tenor and he is simply awesome here, ranging rapidly and mightily on this highly expressive and emotive instrument. 

But, Rivers' work on the first part with the subtitle "Onyx" used for the soprano sax portion and "Topaz" for the flute section.  It would be interesting to know just what the bandleader felt distinguished each by the names of the precious metals, while perhaps the denotation of "Ivory Black" for the piano section of "Hues for Melanin" seems obvious, while the term "Violet" for the tenor portion of that Yale performance might reflect something visceral and striking?

Those terms would aptly describe the entire recording and it is interesting to read Rivers' comments from the original 1978 liner notes:  "You can come out here and be an intuitive musician and be really happening, but your dreams and visions won't last forever.  If you don't get into the books and get this technical thing together while your intuitive things is happening, it's over."

This could be interpreted to mean that the spiritual vibe that animated much free jazz in the 1960s and early 1970s was driven more by the former quality, which has its virtues, but that the technical ability developed through much hard work and practice can take that intuitiveness and give it something more solid and substantial.  Conversely, technical talent alone, with the emotive power of intuitive improvisation, can come across as cold.  This might be an apt way to distinguish craftsmanship (technics) with artistry (intuitiveness), provided that the exceptional artist has both.

That, the great Sam Rivers had in overflowing abundance on these performances.