newcritics

You’ll have to excuse Hank Jones if his fingers aren’t as nimble as they once were. At 88 years of age, performing three months after quadruple bypass surgery, his stiffness is only ocassionally audible, like when he reaches for an Earl Hines-style, ragtime, triplet bounce up the keyboard during his first solo on Kids: Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, and plays it far less precisely than he would have in 1939 when he was 21.

The song is Lady Luck, the opening number from a set of duets with saxophonist Joe Lovano recorded last May in performance at Dizzy’s at Jazz at Lincoln Center and released this month on Blue Note. Throughout the song Jones moves from background to foreground–crisply supporting the theme statement with orchestral flair (for years Jones worked in TV studio bands for CBS), soloing across bar lines in fast triplet runs, serving up soft chords fat as clouds behind Lovano’s solo, all the while swinging a gentle cocktail stride.

Hank Jones’ style always sounded old fashioned particularly compared to the music of his younger brothers (Thad, a modernist bop composer and arranger, and Elvin, the volcanic drummer at the heart of the John Coltrane Quartet). Hank’s approach to the piano was predicated on the old time notion that it was the pianist’s job to keep the rhythm. And like his contemporary Thelonious Monk, Hank grew up in an era when stride was a basic part of every pianist’s vocabulary, like Chuck Berry licks to a rock guitarist.

Where Monk used stride percussively, a rhythmic device to sets off his angular melodies and turnarounds , Jones uses it more organically. It floats behind his playing; offering a steady pulse that is sometimes stated, sometimes implied; delivering what the old timers used to call swing.

Swing has become something of a quaint, precious notion. Like boogie woogie, swing is inescapably tied to a time and place, quickly receding from memory as swing’s pioneers drop off, consigned to retro, repertory status. This is what happens to pop rhythms. New ones spring up, signaling great schisms in pop music history, changing the way music sounds and the way musicians play. Then they fade into museum status as new rhythmic ideas bury the old. Ragtime, boogie, swing, be bop, honky tonk, rock and roll, hip hop. Each displaced the earlier way of playing time in its turn.

But everything is present in Jones’ playing. It’s not that his style is a pastiche. It’s that Jones long ago found a personal vocabulary catholic and embracing.

As Gary Giddins wrote in the June 4 issue of The New Yorker:

He began performing near his home, in Pontiac, Michigan, at the age of thirteen, in 1931, a time when jazz piano was by no means a settled practice. In the twenties, ragtime habits had given way to the free-spirited, resilient rhythms of the Harlem stride masters, chiefly James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, and their style was given further impetus by the improvisational bravura of Earl Hines. Jones chose Hines and Waller as models, and soon added the most adventurous pianists of the early thirties: Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum. Tatum, whose virtuosity galvanized a generation of musicians ….He was also soaking up innovations of the new jazz, called bebop, pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Few established swing stars could make the leap into its harmonic complexity and rhythmic volatility, but Jones grasped it immediately. He didn’t trade in his old style but, rather, modified what he already knew.

Kids: Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, is the third record that Lovano has cut with Jones in recent years, but listening to it marks the first time I understand the collaboration. Like Jones, Lovano is a traditional modernist, an innovative classicist, an all-embracing jazz player. In some ways Lovano–a burly tenor player with a dry tone full of audible, husky breath–is typical of baby boomer jazz musicians. As rock and rhythm and blues displaced jazz as the dominant pop musical genre of the post war era, musicians and fans found themselves torn apart. It was a culture war of the sort that played out politically among their generation. Modernists who embraced free playing, third-stream classical-jazz hybrids and fusion (jazz music with rock rhythms and instrumentation) found themselves pitted against neo-classicists obsessed with defending jazz from the barbarians who would defile it with their impurities.

Fans found it easy to choose sides, as they always do. For musicians (and record labels) it was harder. While there were polemicists like Wynton Marsalis who became almost obsessed with keeping the Huns on the other side of the gates, most musicians were less judgmental, absorbing musical influence from whence it came–Duke Ellington AND the Beatles, Miles Davis AND Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charlie Parker AND Parliament-Funkadelic. For contemporary reedmen like David Murray, Don Byron and Joe Lovano, the world is their oyster. Murray has no problems writing an octet arrangement of Coleman Hawkins’ famous unaccompanied solo Picasso AND writing a stunning octet arrangement of the Grateful Dead’s Dark Star; Don Byron has no problems recording a clarinet improvisation on Puccini’s Nessun Dorma AND playing Ornette Coleman songs with a free bop quintet; and Joe Lovano has no problem recording a album of jazz arrangements of Italian Bel Canto and Neopolitan songs AND a cooking duet record with a swing era giant.

Duke Ellington famously resisted the label “jazz,” calling his music “beyond category.” Kids is a jazz album, but the men who made remain thankfully beyond category.

Associated Listening:

Joe Lovano (w/ Hank Jones) - Joyous Encounter, I’m All For You

David Murray Octet - Dark Star: The Music of the Grateful Dead

Don Byron - A Fine Line: Arias and Lieder, No Vibe Zone: Live at the Knitting Factory

Hank Jones, Christian McBride & Jimmy Cobb- West of 5th