Revising History: Low End String Quartet On Fly Away Little Bird

Check it out, duders: We just ran our first edition of Revising History the other day - h/t Rainbow Arabia - and we already have another delectable contribution.

This one’s from Low End String Quartet, and while we were thinking about holding it for a little longer, we just couldn’t resist, since the experimental classical group are putting out a new release, the six-song Blunt Objects (Improv Arts), next week.

Yeah, that’s right, ya bahstids: classical. But as much as the Quartet channel the spirit of John Cage and Kronos Quartet, they also cite Shellac and Fugazi as influences. And they have ties with Discord too. So shove that in your cello.

One-quarter of the band, Jonathan Morris, was kind enough to consider our Revising History pitch for a bit. And after mulling it over, he scribed this thoughtful reflection on Fly Away Little Bird, an album by Jimmy Giuffre, Paul Bley and Steve Swallow that came out 17 years ago.

Here’s what Morris had to say about it:

Disclaimer: I am not a music critic, nor am I a jazz scholar. Honestly, I was just trying to get someone to review my own new record when Kurt turned the tables on me. So here we go. I’m taking this opportunity to shine a little light on an overlooked jazz record that blows my mind every time I hear it.

I don’t want to spend too much time on the history, but let’s get some context. Jimmy Giuffre was an important, brilliant figure in jazz: as a composer, arranger and reed player. He’s most famous for his clarinet playing, although he was also great on sax. His contributions are usually categorized as “West coast jazz” and “third stream.” Most of his groups had no drums, which gave them an open, chamber-music kind of sound and put more emphasis on his arranging. He could swing hard but did so without the kinetic propulsion of a drummer.

This particular trio lineup (billed often as “The Jimmy Giuffre 3″) made several groundbreaking records in the sixties (most notably “Free Fall”), providing a template for free jazz that was quite different from the East Coast, ecstatic, hard-blowing of the Albert Ayler / Cecil Taylor continuum.

In the early nineties, they got back together and made this record. All three had long, successful careers, and with an average age of 61,  I think it’s fair to label this as a “late-period,” or “mature” piece of work. To my ears, one sign of this maturity is the ease and comfort with which they manage to conjure and dwell in so many contradictions. It’s not so much a matter of resolving contradictions as transcending them. Let’s count the ways.

1. This isn’t an “inside” jazz record or an “outside” jazz record; although these guys had, by this time, made plenty of both. Here they simply make such distinctions irrelevant.

2. The album’s make up: a mix of standards, free solo improvs by each player, and several original trio pieces seems like it would be an incoherent jumble, but somehow it all holds together beautifully.

3. The roles of each instrument are fluid. Swallow often moves into the upper register of his electric bass to take solos more like a guitarist than bass player (although the most tastefully restrained guitar player I’ve come across), and Paul Bley often changes register on piano, taking over the bass duties with his left hand. In several places, Bley makes use of the absolute bottom of the piano’s range, perhaps a joking wink in response to Swallow’s use of his extreme high register on bass? Additionally, Giuffre’s comping; a mix of melodic commentary and filling in of harmonic material, allows the trio to float in and out of their typical roles.

4. They play the standards “straight” but the arrangements are so wide-open that they’re seemingly able to do anything they want. It reminds me of the score to Christian Wolff’s piece “Edges” which is a mostly blank page with symbols scattered across it. The performer(s) are instructed to play the space around the symbols. This trio’s treatment of the standards leaves so much space open, it feels to me as though they are trying to play the space around the tune. For example, listen to the intro to “All the Things You Are.” They do a little vamp on a three note motif, which leads to a short bass solo and then they eventually arrive at the head, a minute and a half into the tune.

5. These guys are playing jazz, and they are not playing jazz. Track 4, a gently swinging “I Can’t Get Started,” is followed by a Paul Bley piano solo, “Quaalude.” It opens with a statement of material in his left hand that becomes the basis for the rest of the piece, developed through a series of contrapuntal, linear variations. There’s a bluesy rhythm that is present, then absent, then present again. This tightly constructed, through-composed approach sounds to me like J.S. Bach improvising at the keyboard, if he was playing in the 1990’s instead of the 1740’s. Then look at Giuffre’s solo track, “Tumbleweed.” It is, in some ways, the most un-Giuffre-like thing I’ve heard him play. He starts on clarinet, with some squirrelly phrases that give way to some doleful chant-like phrases, interspersed with vocal outbursts (in what language?) and keeps juggling these contrasting ideas. After a particularly thorny clarinet phrase fizzles out, he shouts “horn!” and switches to soprano sax, continuing the contrasting free-jazz outbursts with more lyrical phrases. I don’t hear any attempt to reconcile the two, but to inhabit both; ending with one exasperated, quiet breath through his horn. (I can’t help wondering if that last clarinet phrase, and maybe that last silent breath through the sax are signs that Giuffre was already suffering from Parkinson’s and perhaps he was trying to, literally, get out of his own skin on this one?)

The real dynamite gets lit during the original trio numbers. The title track, also the album’s opener, unfolds as a deceptively simple composition. After each player takes a short solo, things get into free territory based on a pulsing rhythmic figure (foreshadowed by Giuffre’s comping during Swallow’s bass solo). Even though the tempo is relaxed and the texture has so much open space, there is tremendous intensity throughout. I like to call this “virtuoso listening.” The way these three listen to one another is just as impressive as their playing.

The album’s closer, a ten minute trio (I’m guessing it’s a spontaneous group improvisation?) is made up of such fluid exchanges between the players, it’s hard to even suggest that one player or another is “soloing.” Yet it unfolds in an effortless way, all the while remaining quite focused, harmonically, never straying into terribly disonant territory. The biggest shock, to me, is when Bley (following a particularly tranquil interlude, just before the seven minute mark) reaches into the piano and takes a swipe at the strings. Even this unorthodox and dramatic gesture doesn’t phase his bandmates. And you’ve gotta hear how he then uses hand-muted low strings on the piano to play an otherworldy bass duet with Swallow as Giuffre solos over top. There was some serious inspiration caught on tape that day.

This incredible surplus of ideas, combined with the trio’s telepathic ensemble improv skills, makes for a musical language that’s hard to believe. Maybe that’s the greatest contradiction: that three humans were able to actualize this music that really shouldn’t be possible. Another time I had this feeling was following a concert by the Emerson String Quartet. They played an all Shostakovitch program that left me in a daze. It seemed totally impossible: both that such music could be written, and such a performance could be done. Totally impossible for music to exist at that level. This record does it too. I don’t know how such a thing can be, but let’s give thanks: here it is.