GEORGE CABLES – “I Hear Echoes” Available media: CD
80 years old, and they don’t feel it. The list of jazz musicians who have crossed the fateful threshold of 80 springs and who continue to play, publish records, update their repertoire is now long, gathering the affection of an audience that perhaps only now comes into contact with artists who have often struggled in the background, in short between light and shadow as wise sidemen, those who know how to show the way with a nod or a decisive chord in a moment of tiredness.
Our friend Milton spoke very clearly about George Cables on these screens here, and also here, and one can only agree, he is a musician of high lineage who often visits our country where he has found above all in Piero Odorici a perfect standard-bearer for his proposal that requires partners of the same level, considering that Mr. Beautiful is a champion who has spent his life in jazz, working with some of the greatest of all time, from Art Blakey to Dexter Gordon, from Sonny Rollins to Art Pepper, just to name a poker of aces with which our man has recorded and played practically everywhere, developing an original and complete piano language, which has marked the history of the music we love.
The echoes of the title come in fact not only from the tons of music played, listened to and experienced during a memorable career, but also from effective intellectual suggestions, not at all obvious, that originate a handful of stylistically varied and perfectly crafted songs, thematic material that we hope can become common territory for many other musicians in the area who would be wise to take them into account and perhaps include them in their repertoire.
For example, we learn from the pianist himself in the liner notes that the first track in the setlist, “Echoes Of A Scream”, is inspired by a 1937 painting with this title, a desperate and powerful scream against war, against any war!, made by the Mexican painter David Alfaro and that many years ago deeply impressed Cables, to the point of making him compose a song of the same name.
“I think it’s still on display at the Museum of Modern Art. It made a big impression on me and I think it’s about the devastation of war: you have to see the painting to really feel its impact and get an idea. There are spaces and silences in there, and sometimes I think its echo and those silences are stronger than the sound itself that can reach you.
So this is nothing more than one of those echoes.” The piece turns out to be an excursion on a rhythm that recalls a sort of engaging Afro-Cuban guaguancó, with Jennings inserting a repeated drum passage, very underlined scansions that contribute to a dramatic effect, for a medium tempo that proudly shows deep roots, declined as best as could be in the modern jazz context.
The much sweeter and more relaxed tempo of the following piece, simply “Echoes”, stylistically harks back to the late Ahmad Jamal, who had brought his lyricism to a moving level, while “So Near, So Far” is a piece by Miles Davis that Cables heard for the first time listening to “Seven Steps To Heaven” from 1963 and which made a strong impression on him, so much so that for years he has included it in his recitals, subjecting it to continuous modifications and elaborations.
“Morning Song” is another echo from the past, in this case the reinterpretation of a piece he recorded with trumpeter Eddie Henderson, another octogenarian still on the dance floor in a big way, while in “Clockwise” the suggestions come from his friend and colleague Cedar Walton, a seminal and never-enough-remembered pianist, a praiseworthy jazz musician, to whom Cables himself is in some ways indebted.
Between reworked originals and explicit homages, such as the one to Duke Ellington in a biting version of “Prelude To A Kiss”, an intense and enjoyable album unfolds, which does not necessarily want to say new things but which is vibrant and anything but “old-fashioned”.
The rhythm section also makes a great impression, enjoying ample solo space, composed of Essiet Essiet on bass and the aforementioned Jerome Jennings on drums.
The solo finale is simply perfect: “Peace” by Horace Silver is both a prayer and a heartfelt appeal, a symbolic song that Cables honors in an enchanting version.
Long Live Mr. Beautiful!
“Someday”, released in 2023, had brought to the attention of jazz enthusiasts a new quartet led by pianist Marc Copland, with Drew Gress on bass, Robyn Verheyen on sax and Mark Ferber on drums.
We had talked about it here, underlining the “classic” character of contemporary jazz of that session recorded in a Manhattan studio with decidedly oriental connotations, “The Samurai Hotel”, in January 2022. At the end of that same year, the four met at the Fattoria Musica in Osnabrueck, Germany, to follow up on that first work, which is now coming to the market thanks to the same Dutch label Inner voice jazz with the title of “Dreaming“.
Marc Copland explains what has changed between the two albums, underlining the aspects of a formula that was already perfectly in place, also thanks to the long years of association between the pianist and Gress, and the understanding developed with the younger Ferber and Verheyen.
“We haven’t changed our approach, because the first CD really represents who we are in an exemplary way. We listen to each other, we try to give space to ourselves and to the music, we perceive in advance where the music wants to take us.
Having said that, we are developing and extending our way of playing, forcing the harmonic barriers, especially in the two challenging songs written by Drew Gress, adding a free ballad by Robin Verheyen, inserting some layered rhythms and deepening the intensity of our interaction. ”
All predictable, then? Yet another session of a project consolidated on levels of admirable but predictable technical excellence? Not really.
First of all because the identification and long familiarity between the four members has consolidated one of Copland’s main goals, that is to make the group sound “like a single organism”, which does not need too much theoretical sharing, but breathes on the wave of a musical understanding that is created instinctively. Listen to the version of “Yesterdays” by Jerome Kern that closes the album, totally improvised in every aspect, the beginning, the order of the solos, the conclusion, held together because “everyone is concentrated and listening to the others”.
But the details that Copland mentions also allow us to discover new aspects of the quartet, in this case equally divided between moments of rarefaction in which the interactions follow unplanned routes and subtle rhythmic injections that animate some episodes of a swing that is as incisive as it is discreet.
We start with two examples of this latter trend, with the initial “Eronel” by Monk, reinterpreted with a graceful attitude that rounds the corners of the theme exposed by the piano/soprano unison, and the following “All that’s left” which develops an articulated funky progression by grafting a repeated theme in 8/8 onto the rhythmic base in odd time, concluding on the marked accents of the exuberant Ferber.
And we arrive at the title track, an elusive and evocative theme developed with the pace of a dream where reality and fantasy, harmonic coherence and dissonance, coexist, in the voices of the piano and double bass, in a dreamlike and surreal world.
“One of the most challenging compositions I know,” according to Copland. An episode that summarizes the essence of this music – one might add – that shies away from muscular virtuosic performances to find one of its greatest merits in the changing ways in which the various parts coexist. Almost a symbol of the need for dialogue.
Melodies served almost timidly, buds to be developed in the collective game characterize two following tracks, signed, respectively, by saxophonist Verheyen and bassist Drew Gress.
“Destination Unknown” starts from a sly sax theme to offer a compelling sequence of solos, with Copland’s one hinting, in its carefully constructed development, at a Latin rhythm.
“Figment“, with the theme liquidly lying on a minimal rhythm, hosts, instead, a long exposition entrusted to the double bass before lighting up rhythmically with the interventions of the sax and piano and concluding with the drums protagonist of a series of breaks.
Between the two tracks “Passing Through“, a ballad with an abstract setting whose rarefied progression makes it an ideal candidate for an ECM album.
We save for last a piece that actually appears halfway through the setlist, “LST” (Little Swing Tune), a Copland composition that is all in the title, originally recorded by the pianist and Dress with John Abercrombie and Joey Baron on the album “39 steps” (ECM 2013): it is the most joyful piece of the collection, with the tenor displaying his deep and agile voice and a finale all in the name of rhythmic euphoria.
It sounds like the right complement to Copland’s final words, dedicated to the inebriating, unconscious spell of a music that, inevitably, ends up in the parts of the heart.
“I’m not so damn smart – after sixty odd years – building line upon line – using millions of steps – with these notes that can’t rhyme. I still don’t know – how this wonderful art – lika a Heisenberg dart – sends an arrow – that pierces – my heart.
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