#hat hut

Despite the combined confidence of the players and the massive strides they made together as a unit, their viability as a commercial interest always carried an air of precariousness. Two studio albums cut for Verve (and reissued almost forty-years later by ECM) quickly became collectors’ items. The songbook for the tour coalesced in part from those documents. Five of the disc’s eleven pieces are heard in concert incarnations for the first time in an authorized form, including a beautifully restrained and atmospheric rendering of the ballad “Brief Hesitation.” Spontaneous counterpoint figures frequently as fulcrum alongside divebombing rhythmic digressions with each man securing his place in the architectures while remaining instantly flexible to his colleagues’ deviations. 

Swallow’s “The Gamut” draws on the bassist’s keen ear, adroit fingers, and talent for germane titling as he threads variable speed lines through the vivid color field of harmonic obstacles erected by Giuffre and Bley. “Suite for Germany” contrasts as the notation-driven side of the trio’s program, unfolding as a series of episodes held together as much by what isn’t played as by the filament webs of sound spun by the principals. An epic ten-minute take on another dark-hued Giuffre tone poem, “Cry, Want,” milks the pastoral and melancholic components of the piece for all they’re worth through an austere meditation on unrequited longing. Playfully onomatopoeic and relentless in its forward propulsion, “Whirrrr” juxtaposes jump cut hijinks with the tensile strength of Swallow’s sprinting lines. 

The release is also important as the inaugural entry in a new imprint from producer Werner X. Uehlinger, Ezz-thetics, which builds on his earlier label ventures in presenting both archival and new releases. Uehlinger was previously responsible for releasing two later dates from band’s tour (subsequently reissued with additional material on the Emanem label). His Giuffre stewardship is longstanding and the full support from both Bley’s and Giuffre’s widows along with Swallow means that the presentation of the music is faultless. Swallow is the famous source of an anecdote connecting the trio’s initial demise to a Bleecker Street café gig where they earned less than a dollar in proceeds from the door. Welcome reunions would occur decades later, but this first tenure remains the true vine.

The band was an exceptional aggregate of talent and scope from its genesis. Lacy drew abuse that inexplicably still endures today for including his spouse Irene Aebi, a cellist and self-styled vocalist whose sing-song delivery frequently forewent strict pitch adherence for brio and exuberance.  Saxophonist Steve Potts was an easier sell, distinctive and soulful with both alto and soprano and voicing a rich vernacular that could both complement and contrast the sometimes more measured and meticulous vocabulary of his employer. Bassist Kent Carter brought a deep classical background and an elegant artistry with bow while Oliver Johnson conjured equal parts color and energy on drums.

Corbett vs. Dempsey does the package lavish justice, duplicating the gatefold design and original calligraphic font along with interior reproductions of action photos from the concerts. The first disc documents a late-summer of 1977 hit at the Willisau Jazz Festival with a bonus track added while the second preserves a Parisian club date from six months later. The set lists are stacked with lengthy renditions of Lacy tunes of the time, starting with the extended theatrical tone poem “Existence”, which opens with the grand existentialist gesture of invocatory gong and Aebi’s spoken-sung lyrics amidst spiraling horns and arco bass drone.

The other pieces are largely structured in more familiar Lacy fashion with tightly wound and knotted motivic patterns expanding into freer solo and ensemble statements, by turns prickly and buoyant. The stubborn influence of Thelonious Monk on Lacy is all over these originals in the slippery shuffle rhythms and trapdoor twists. Carter and Iebi scrape several layers of rosin from their strings with concentrated sawing on the acerbic “Ire” prefacing the violence and reconciliation of dueling sopranos by Potts and Lacy. “The Dumps” and the previously unreleased “Follies” shift from jaunty prancing earworms into churning abstraction and back in transitions that are at times jarring and disorienting, but always wholly intentional.

From the Parisian hit, the comparatively terse title tune embodies perhaps the best example of Lacy’s ability to contrast punishing, compacting repetition with soaring, optimistic elegance as he and Potts aim for the cloudless heavens above a roiling groundswell of drums and strings.”Duckles” features a blast of mic distortion and Lacy’s debut on Japanese bird whistle, each that feel wholly in spirit with the sharp angles and fractious, rambunctious flavor of the piece. Potts’ alto absolutely owns “Wickets” in a solo that’s near perfection in terms of emotive effulgence and emphatic impact. The composer gladly cedes the win and goes for a different direction in his subsequently limpid and systematic soprano statement.

Lacy would treat the quintet as adjustable template in ensuing years, adding and subtracting players and eventually steering the band into more conventionally structured straits. Potts remained a reliable foil with Jean Jacques Avenel and John Betsch assuming the bass and drums chairs in place of Carter and Johnson. Iebi remained a semi-regular too, attracting ill-considered opprobrium and shrugging it off in equal measure. Those later examples were often excellent, but there’s something unequivocally exceptional in hearing the original outfit holding eloquent and ecstatic court in its incandescent prime.

Comprising four McPhee compositions in lengthy forms, the original album tests the limits of vinyl duration. “Touchstone” is a volatile duet for drums and tenor with Ntshoko forcefully framing the ensuing interplay at start and finish with solo features. That dominance in approach may be in part what McPhee hints at in later reflections of the incongruous fit between sensibilities, but the piece is bursting with action as it moves from free form raucous blowing to a more measured and melodic conclusion. Early on, McPhee resorts to shouts and screams, his horn momentarily insufficient in voicing an appropriate amount of ecstatic release. “Voices” brings Snyder’s analog synthesizer and looped voice into play in a layering of low monastic drones that joins legato tenor phrases that are at once raw and delicate. The entrance of Ntshoko’s flexing tidal beats changes the tenor of the piece drastically, but they are sporadic and at times almost subsumed by the swirling electronic textures that pour forth from Snyder’s consoles.  

“Bahamian Folk Song”, a piece composed in honor of McPhee’s family ancestry opens from a place of diffusion. Audience whoops and hollers overlap with a synthetic rhythm by Snyder augmented by Ntshoko’s drum kit. McPhee’s explores a chirruping and soulful calypso motif, but once again the pervasive electronic elements of the music threaten repeatedly to overwhelm the acoustic ones. “Harriet” also honors heritage in an ode to the activist answering to the surname Tubman. McPhee’s tenor traces a fine-grained line as Snyder eases up on the volume and density of his contributions. The result still feels subtractive rather than additive in sustaining a mood of reflective reverence and Ntshoko’s disjointed press rolls carry the air of a player somewhat uncertain as to his role. The Corbett vs. Dempsey reissue duplicates the original LP gatefold packaging down to the calligraphic script describing concert particulars. Even more valuable is a bonus version of “God Bless the Child” ripe with resplendent McPhee tenor. Ultimately a mixed bag, the album is still an important entry in the leader’s near-half century as a recording artist.

Saxophonist Albert Ayler was advancing another sea change in his music when he recorded the two studio dates included on the disc. Seven months separated the New York City sessions and across that temporal distance, Ayler solidified a working band that would become arguably his most iconic. The music was released under different titles in the ensuing years with Witches and Devils an alternate identifier for Spirits and Vibrations replacing Ghosts on occasion, but the evolutionary differences in organized sound still evident between them. 

Ayler assembled bands for both that allowed him to jettison earlier and awkward adherences to jazz standard conventions made to accommodate convention-minded sidemen and focus instead on his own compositions. Spirits explores longer improvisational forms over four pieces with drummer Sunny Murray and bassist Henry Grimes slotting ably and enthusiastically into Ayler’s raucous theme-to-freedom frameworks. Trumpeter Norman Howard and bassist Earle Henderson fare less well by comparison. The former often resorts to abrasive scalar trills while the latter resorts at times to leaden thrums but each recoups in avidity what he might lack in facility. 

Ghosts benefits from better sound and augments a core trio of Murray and bassist Gary Peacock who took part in Ayler’s seminal Spiritual Unity session that summer by adding trumpeter Don Cherry. The launching themes are still elemental and protean in feel and intensity, but the resulting polyphonic barrages don’t show their seams as easily. Murray and Peacock are often a blur of concerted motion with Ayler and Cherry injecting grain and texture into their galvanizing horn bursts that are by turns jarring and beautiful. 

Aside from the convenience of bundling the sessions in a single package and a typically astute accompanying essay from Ayler expert Art Lange the release has other aspects to recommend it. Full licensure by the Ayler Estate for the contents means the proper parties are being compensated. Engineer Peter Pfister, like Lange a mainstay for project producer Werner X. Uehlinger, cleans up the recordings considerably with a fresh remaster completed this past summer. Seventy-plus minutes of Ayler is an investment, but nearly fifty-five years later there’s still nothing exactly like it.

Two variations on the title piece open each of the disc’s bifurcated program sides with a third version serving as a penultimate entry. On each, Koglmann plays with both structure and content, aligning and eliding the brass and wind instruments against the strings of cellist Atilla Pasztor and bassist Peter Herbert in droning snatches of cantilevered counterpoint that maximize tonal contrasts. John Clark’s French horn and Milan Turkovic’s bassoon jockey the oboe and English horn or Mario Acari. Daniele D’Agaro’s instruments betray his jazz background, but whether wielding tenor saxophone, clarinet or its bass sibling, he slots comfortably into the richly woven chamber-polished surfaces. 

Koglmann’s originals blend seamlessly with his cherry-picked and quietly radical reinventions of obscure jazz covers. “Martians Don’t Go Home Anymore” slyly references a similarly titled 1955 tune by West Coast trumpeter Shorty Rogers, retaining a walking bassline and only to distort and fragment it in a succession of terse horn features and harmonization. Jimmy Giuffre’s roughly contemporaneous “Finger Snapper” and Dick Twardzik’s “Yellow Tango” receive similar revisionist treatments that retain only structural remnants of their original incarnations but persist in reflecting the ghostly identities of their composers. Other than a still formidable technique, Koglmann’s ability to take materials vaguely familiar and historically important and fashion them into fresh forms of personal expression remains an enviable strength.