Looking For The Light

The grandeur of relaxed, serendipitous jazz:
I've got a soft spot in my heart for the artists who got me into creative improvised music, namely, Kirk Lightsey, Joe Pass, Andy Narrel, Egberto Gismonti, Chico Freeman, Bobby Hutcherson. And George Cables. His 1979 disc Cables Vision, which I bought as an LP way back then, greatly helped me ease my way into this marvelous music. I will probably be reviewing that wonderful disc one of these days. But right now I want to sing the praises of George Cables circa 2003. His new disc, Looking for the Light, uniquely sings with beauty and glory. It takes a very high level of musicianship to create music this simple, this beguiling, this fabulous. It's obvious these men have known each other and played together for years. And Cables affirms this, in his wry, understated way as he thanks each of them in the liner notes. Here's what he says, e.g., about Gary Bartz (alto & sop. sax): "We go back a couple of years, actually to the sixties . . ." Yes. And this music exudes the same kind of casual professionalism and understatement, all the while operating at the very highest level of conversation, group improv, and solo expression. It's not nu jazz, world jazz, post-bop, free-bop. It's just jazz--but of the absolute highest order. You don't look to music like this to be revolutinary--just starkly beautiful. And there's really nothing revolutionary going on here. It's so classic that it's almost anti-hip--but not in some dead classicism Marsalis family way. Maybe it's because he's a West Coast guy (although this session was recorded in The Big Apple). Maybe it's because he's got nothing to prove. Maybe it's because he's assembled some old musical friends who also happen to be among the finest (though, sadly, somewhat neglected) players out there. Victor Lewis, late of Bobby Watson's great post-bop outfit, Horizon, and Stan Getz's last drummer, certainly needs no introduction to any serious jazz fan. I count him as perhaps the greatest drummer of his generation. He brings a hard-groovin', deep-in-the-pocket vibe to every session he plays on. These surrounding suit him perfectly, what with their requirement of highest order yet totally relaxed sensibility. Gary Bartz, himself a monster player who has seldom found the ideal setting for his saxophonic brilliance, sounds almost transcendent here. It's not that he astounds with his fleet fingering; he simply always seems to find the perfect mood and line. I especially like his approach to "Klimo," a Bobby Watson-like loose, swinging blues--indeed, he even sounds a little like Watson with his hard-boppish lines and richness of tone--and they way he locks into "Senorita de Aranjuez." Peter Washington, one of the most in-demand bass session men, here shows why again and again. A deeply swinging but amazingly deft bassist, he has this amazinging ability to become almost invisible--rather, one might say, aurally unexceptional--while all the time shaping the bottom of the music in a profound way. Cables himself stamps the proceedings with--and I don't want to go over the top here, but the temptation is almost irresistible--a kind of majestic simplicity that transmutes, alchemically, its base materials into gold. It's very difficult to make ordinary jazz materials shine--hence, the plethora of nu jazz, world jazz, hip-hop jazz, jazz-punk, funk-jazz, third-stream jazz offerings that litter today's scene--but Cables does just that. Two waltzes, four boppish blues, three ballads, and one tango make up the program--one could hardly imagine a more prosaic set of tunes. But it's what Cables as composer, arranger, and leader imbues them with--and what the group as interpreter does with them--that turns such modest music into burnished musical gems. Give a close listen to this glorious music and be magically transported into realms of musical felicity as I have been.

What to say?:
Superficially, and to a casual listener, this music might seem to be little more than another melodic, mostly reflective, somewhat chamber-like jazz session played by skilled and seasoned professionals possessed of a remarkable yet unobtrusive ability to express themselves with a subtle fluidity and mastery of dynamics and texture. And that in itself is quite an accomplishment. But what this surface form actually serves as the vehicle for, is of another dimension entirely. One might approach the matter by saying that the music conveys the spirit of its players-- men who have lived long and fully enough to exude life's beauty while embodying the quiet dignity bestowed by its "eternal note of sadness". And that description might begin to describe a deeper layer of this music, however inadequately. For the sake of exploring this vein more deeply, maybe the CD's title will serve us as a guide. Perhaps to something along the lines of discovering tragedy and illumination as the primal partners wrapped in a helix around life's own core? Beyond that, probably nothing more can be said. But after all, music emerges from that same silence and continuously weaves that silence into its own fabric. Combine all the preceding layers, and you may have a foreshadowing of the spirit this music expresses from and out of its totality. Or just listen to it and forget all the talk.

Disappointing:
As George Cables and Gary Bartz are two of my favorite musicians, I was thrilled to discover this title. However, upon listening to it I was disappointed by the lack of tension and dynamics; perhaps this is what one reviewer was referring to by describing it as "chamber Jazz"-- Jazz with, seemingly, most of the rough corners smoothed over and the heat suppressed to a cool blue flame. The reviewer from San Francisco described the music in a psychological/spiritual context-- a context with which I'm quite familiar and sympathetic. He may well be right, but try as I may, I don't sense the "deeper" aspect lurking below the surface of the music to which he alludes. What I do hear suggests the musicians have chosen to utilize a vocabularly that emphasizes consonance and de-emphasizes dissonance to such a degree that there is little tensile strength left in the music. It seems to occupy a very narrow spectrum; one in which, for lack of a better word, "prettiness" dominates. The problem is, it seldom deviates from a sort of burnished, soft-focused, rapture (perhaps what the first reviewer referred to as "grandeur") to anything more tart or vigorous, and to my ears, such "prettiness" quickly palls. I may be in the minority in terms of my lack of enthusiasm for this; it's certainly well-played, but I prefer listening to Jazz with more heat, energy and variety.