Charles Tolliver, who was he? Even many jazz fans of my geological era will ask themselves the same question։ Videos, Photos

In the previous episode I announced the sighting of a message in a bottle: now it has finally landed on our shores.

This too has come to us from distant times, from 1973. For America, it is a time of ebb and retreat, especially in the field of civil rights struggles. Malcom X, Reverend King and Bob Kennedy have all fallen under the blows of the usual ‘isolated deranged man’, who as usual arrived undisturbed punctually at the right time and in the right place: many great hopes died with them. We are still frantically looking for a way out of the Vietnamese quagmire, which has now become “the dirty war” for a large part of American public opinion. The world of jazz is not doing well either: rock steals the scene and the attention of the young audience, while the last flames of historic free jazz fade, obscured by the glittering spread of fusion, which in its most plasticized manifestations suffocates the much more vital vein of electric jazz.

But there are those who resist, tenaciously and lucidly. Not only that, but they create and coagulate music that treasures the lessons of the 60s, tying together many scattered threads. In my opinion, no character is more representative of this tenacious and creative resistance than him:

I saw Tolliver like this again a few years ago. All that’s missing is the Black Panther Party badge on the lapel of his leather jacket and the outfit is complete.

“Charles Tolliver, who was he?” the four least ageè ​​readers will say. The point is that many jazz fans of my geological era will ask themselves the same question. And this is something that makes you think a lot.

Ours, born in 1942, grew up with a trumpet in his hand (his grandmother gave it to him, his uncle weaned him on Miles Davis and Clifford Brown records), but a career in the pharmacy seemed to open up for him. Luckily in his free time he hangs out with his instrument in hand in the bars of Harlem, where he is noticed by Jackie McLean: in no time at all he finds himself acting as a sideman on his recordings for the usual Blue Note, which then pairs him with people like Herbie Hancock, Roy Haynes, Booker Ervin, Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson. The degree in pharmacy ends up at the bottom of a drawer. In 1966 he is on the West Coast with a refined bandleader like Gerald Wilson, and immediately after he is called by Max Roach to join his group. After this brilliant apprenticeship, in 1968 comes this:

A debut with a bang, as you can see from his companions in adventure…….

The album was released by the valiant Arista Freedom, a label that disappeared despite the catalog teeming with absolutely unmissable titles (one of the producers was the young Michael Cuscuna). I hunted for it for more than 15 years, catching it only in 1989 in a fascinating and dusty London shop where I even had to fight for it with a friendly mouse. The rest of Charles’ discography required other long years of sifting through second-hand shops, of stakeouts to grab rare semi-clandestine reissues intended for a few close friends. The paradox is that Tolliver was one of the few jazzmen deeply aware of the need to take care of the diffusion of his own production to the point of founding, together with his friend Stanley Cowell, Strata East, an independent and almost self-managed label that will allow many musicians to publish albums in their own time that elsewhere would not have had any chance in the early 70s. Even Strata East and its catalog now border on myth: suffice it to say that the record producer Tolliver made a certain Gil Scott Heron debut with his fundamental, unforgettable ‘Winter in America’.

But like any self-respecting myth, Strata East and its magnificent records have become elusive chimeras following distribution vicissitudes, rare and poorly curated CD reissues, and finally the usual elitist and classist LP reissues, which are also sporadic. And here our Charles has put in his own, in recent years his recording talent has missed several shots, making him miss several opportunities to widely re-propose his records and those of his fellow adventurers from Strata (albums far more worthy of rediscovery than many more negligible things exhumed starting from the early 2000s).

One of the many Strata East pearls: the Music Inc. quartet (‘Musica srl’ …) and the very gritty Tolliver big band. Take a look at the lineup …. The year with Gerald Wilson in Los Angeles has not passed in vain. After a long period in the shadows, at the dawn of the new millennium Tolliver will return with two more memorable albums for large ensemble, “With Love” and “Emperor March”, both for the usual Blue Note

As you may have understood, the stainless Tolliver is in my heart. And to think that my concert-going diary only records three of his passages: 1977, 2007 and 2017, he competes with Halley’s comet …. You can imagine my reaction when weeks ago among the waves of the web I spotted this, announced among other things with few details:

A gift from heaven, considering the long discographic silence that has surrounded Tolliver in the past decades and also in the most recent years. At first I even thought that it was a revised and rearranged re-release of material already published in another form. But no: it is a completely unreleased live concert, recorded in Edmonton, Canada, in 1973. It is brought to us by the Canadian Reel to Real – Cellar Records, other meritorious copyists of the web: in digital version it can be purchased on Bandcamp, as well as listened to on the well-known Big Brother Sweden (but in this place the great work of audio restoration done on the original tapes is slightly debased). For the more daring (it is a question of challenging freight forwarders and customs) you can risk buying a double CD or double LP online: in both cases the price is substantial for various factors.

Here too we are faced with a passion fruit: just browse the substantial booklet (also available in digital edition), which among other things includes a rare interview by Jeremy Pelt to Tolliver, who reveals to the young colleague some of the secrets of the trade that allowed him to perform his well-known white-hot performances. Other precious chapters follow on Hicks, the Captain’s Cabin, the historical moment etc.

 

The stage formation in the Captain’s Cabin (a carefully camouflaged basement under a grocery store) is not the famous Music Inc. with Cowell, Novosel and Hopps or Queen of the Arista and Strata East albums, but the ‘working band’ with which Tolliver faced long tours at the time: John Hicks on piano, Clint Houston on bass and Cliff Barbaro on drums.

To the other two Tolliverians listening (let’s hope…) I can assure you that this band has absolutely nothing to envy the more famous Music Inc. Indeed, at the end of the long tour that landed in Edmonton the quartet now presented itself as a perfectly run-in war machine.

The material includes Tolliverian classics like ‘Earl’s World’, ‘Truth’, ‘Impact’ (a title that says it all…), but also a long and not otherwise known ‘Black Vibrations’. There is no room for any concession to beauty of any kind, always and only volcanic essentiality. The songs come straight to the listener like incendiary arrows, lightning-fast and effective. Even a ‘Compassion’ taken on a slightly more moderate tempo oozes tension and passion from every note: even when he shows us his most lyrical side, Tolliver always remains ardent.

The over 80 minutes of music fly by, keeping the listener riveted from the first to the last minute. In short, we are faced with another splendid example of ‘necessary music’, animated by an absolute expressive urgency, served by well-calculated audacities that take Tolliver and his band well beyond the horizon of an excellent hard bop: our Charles had his ears pricked up in the previous decade and you can hear it with absolute evidence.

In conclusion, another little treasure that goes to keep company with the McCoy Tyner / Henderson of a few days ago: if you have put the latter under the tree, also put the Tolliver in the Epiphany stocking, it also weighs little :-). Milton56

And after so many words and so many notes, we get to know Tolliver ‘in person’: 1971, studies of the French ORTF (needless to say ….), ours in the company of the great Stanley Cowell here exceptionally on the organ, Wayne Dockery on bass and the trusty Alvin Queen on drums․