Tag: normanconnors

Exfiltration Radio: can’t we smile?

An hour of bliss at the intersection of spiritual jazz and jazz-funk, circa 1969-1976.

Detail from Betye Saar’s “Window of Ancient Sirens,” 1979

Not enough people talk about the through-line from spiritual jazz to smooth jazz.

That may seem like a strange, almost nonsensical thing to say, to compare Coltrane’s A Love Supreme to Grover Washington or Kenny G. Nevertheless, there’s a path there, and it runs through some artists that I’ve talked about on this blog many times before. Generally speaking, the sound I’m talking about, and that I explore in this hour of Exfiltration Radio, blends the soaring messages of hope of Pharoah Sanders’ Karma with the more cosmic sounds of the Fender Rhodes. Many of the works are more audibly optimistic, i.e. in a major key; many of them have lyrics; several have full-blown string arrangements. Some are more spiritual in focus, while others just enjoy the groove. And they almost all seem to come from the late 1960s to around the mid-1970s, with the sweet spot being from about 1969 to 1973.

That said, the overall driving force for this mix was definitely tunes that put a smile on the face and lower the blood pressure. So enjoy! The track listing:

Lonnie Liston Smith, “Expansions” (Expansions): The title cut from Smith’s 1975 album on the Flying Dutchman label, this is a darker groove than most of the songs on the show, but with that deep plea for peace at the heart of it: “Expand your mind to understand/we all must live in peace.” With a great band comprised of Cecil McBee on bass, brother Donald Smith on flute and vocals, Dave Hubbard on saxophones and Michael Carvin on drums.

Ramsey Lewis, “Bold and Black” (Another Voyage): This track from the perennially sunny improviser’s 1969 album points toward more smooth experiments, like 1974’s Sun Goddess, while providing a sunray of musical joy. Classic top-down, driving around music.

Norman Connors, “Carlos II” (Love From the Sun): Drummer, composer and arranger Connors spent most of his career in R&B and smooth jazz, but this, his third album as leader, is a fascinating, fantastic collection of straight ahead jazz with hints of spirituality poking through around the corners. A great line-up of players, including Herbie Hancock on Fender Rhodes, Gary Bartz on saxophones, Buster Williams on bass, Hubert Laws on flute, Kenneth Nash on percussion, Eddie Henderson on trumpet, and Carlos Garnett, who wrote this track, on tenor sax. Dee Dee Bridgewater guests on two tracks. The whole album is a great listen.

Azar Lawrence, “Theme for a New Day” (People Moving): Lawrence played on McCoy Tyner’s Enlightenment, Sama Layuca and Atlantis before recording his first album as leader. By 1976’s People Moving he was producing fully orchestrated sonic experiences that were full of spiritual energy and deep grooves.

Donald Byrd, “Places and Spaces” (Places and Spaces): By 1975, Donald Byrd was in a very different place than when he played on Herbie Hancock’s second album, or even his mid-1960s spiritual jazz outings for Blue Note. His 1973 album Black Byrd, produced by Larry and Fonce Mizell, was a jazz-funk fusion high point that for many years was Blue Note’s biggest selling album. Places and Spaces is the fourth of Byrd’s Mizell-produced albums, and cranks much of what made that album successful up to 11, including swooning strings and a guitar-driven hook that wouldn’t be out of place on an O’Jays record. The chant that drives the record isn’t quite P-Funk quality, but it gets the job done, and Byrd sneaks in a fully respectable trumpet solo amid the rest of the funk.

Bobbi Humphrey, “Harlem River Drive” (Blacks and Blues): Humphrey, a hugely talented flautist, also benefited from the Mizell brothers’ production on the 1973 Blue Note album Blacks and Blues, including their writing this ode to summertime cruising. The band here is mostly session players, including Jerry Peters on keyboards, Chuck Rainey on bass and the great Harvey Mason on drums, but Humphrey’s flute solo is the main thing here, a work of searing beauty in an otherwise light track.

Johnny Hammond, “Can’t We Smile?” (Gears): This work, by keyboardist and sometime jazz organist Johnny Hammond, née Johnny “Hammond” Smith, not only gave me the title for this hour but kicked off the process of putting it together, after Lisa asked me why I was listening to smooth jazz; defending the track made me realize how much I liked it and how much depth lurked beneath its smooth exterior. Released in 1975 on Milestone Records, it’s another Mizell Brothers joint with Mason, Rainey, Peters, and Nash, along with trombonist Julian Priester (from Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band) and avant-spiritual violinist Michael White.

Lonnie Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes, “Rejuvenation” (Astral Traveling): Before there was Expansions there was Astral Traveling. Smith’s first album with the Cosmic Echoes was recognizably straight-ahead jazz, with much the same crew as on Expansions, but again Smith’s composition leaned forward to the optimistic and hopeful, particularly in the ebullience of George Barron’s saxophone melody. Smith’s solo similarly feels extroverted in an almost soul-shouter kind of way.

Alphonse Mouzon, “Thank You Lord” (The Essence of Mystery): Mouzon’s first album, in 1973, has tinges of the same mystery that the drummer brought to the first incarnation of Weather Report, combined with a melodic and compositional sensibility that feels akin to with Smith was doing at the same time. It also feels like some of Keith Jarrett’s 1970s work, broadly anchored in major-key tonality with a swooping saxophone shining a light in the darkness.

Pharoah Sanders, “Astral Traveling” (Thembi): Before there was Astral Traveling, there was … “Astral Traveling.” The first track on Sanders’ 1971 album, his last with Smith, was legendarily composed by the band as Smith sat and played a Fender Rhodes for the first time ever in the studio. I like this version better than the one on Smith’s later album because I feel more wonder in the playing, as though the band is together exploring a new world. It’s also a welcome view of a side of Pharoah Sanders that we don’t often think of, but he could be as gentle as he was often fiery.

Leon Thomas, “The Creator Has a Master Plan” (Spirits Known and Unknown): This brings us to the last track. Vocalist and composer Leon Thomas collaborated with Sanders on the composition of “Creator,” and both Sanders and Smith are here on this recording. This version from Thomas’s debut album gives a good view of his approach: a wide-eyed spirituality, still with some of the ululating vocal flourishes of Sanders’s recording, but overall less cosmic brimstone and more bliss.

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Pharoah Sanders, Black Unity

Album of the Week, May 11, 2024

When I was listening to free jazz in college and the years after, I had a fairly narrow conception of Pharoah Sanders’ contribution to the art. On the basis of performances like Meditations and Karma, I assumed that all his work was out there, shamanistic, wild. And while that is indeed a good description of some of his playing, it’s far from the whole story. Some of his performances preceding and following Karma are good jumping off points to make the story delightfully complex, starting with this one, recorded in November 1971.

We’ve seen before how issues of black power and civil rights influenced some of this music, particularly in John Coltrane’s “Alabama” (discussed in the context of Trane’s follow-up album Crescent) and in Archie Shepp’s poem for Malcolm X and elegiac salute to W.E.B. Dubois. Black Unity seems at once to be a nod to the Black Unity and Freedom Party, a Black Power political party in the UK, and a statement of musical purpose that underpins the group improvisation recorded here.

The group is top-notch, with Marvin “Hannibal” Peterson on trumpet, Carlos Garnett on flute and tenor sax, Joe Bonner on piano, Stanley Clarke and Cecil McBee on bass, Norman Connors and Billy Hart on drums, and Lawrence Killian on percussion. Bonner was an underappreciated hard bop pianist from Rocky Mount, North Carolina who had a series of collaborations with Hart and saxophonist Billy Harper in the 1970s as well as solo outings. Garnett played with Freddie Hubbard and with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Stanley Clarke might be the best known name on the album, having come to prominence as a founding member of Chick Corea’s Return to Forever and winning five Grammy awards for his jazz fusion work over the years. And Norman Connors had a varied career, sitting in for Elvin Jones with the John Coltrane Quartet when the group performed at his middle school (!), playing with Sanders, recording as a leader on Cobblestone Records, and switching to R&B in the mid-1970s.

The variety of talent that Sanders’ group brought to the collective improvisation accounts for some of its sheer exuberance. The entire album is one long 37-minute collective exploration of sound, most but not all centered around a deep-grooving three-note theme that emerges within the first minute out of a cluster of sound from the Stanley Clarke, Joe Bonner and the collective percussion section. From the groove, though, emerge other sounds – a sustained wash of what sounds like a hurdy-gurdy, the balafon, and finally a version of the groove theme from the three horns, played in unison. From there the music seems to overflow outward, with all the players going in different directions over the continued groove.

The first moment of “breakage” into free jazz in the collective comes from Sanders, whose horn begins to climb a rocky hill about eight minutes in. “Hannibal” Peterson plays with fierce intensity, alternating between chromatically ascending the scale and then playing an extended improvisation around the supertonic. And Garnett grounds his playing in the original key, bringing it back to the tonic. The horns pause for a second and a relatively brief moment of respite in which the forward pulse of the bass is the main motion gives us the breath we need to flip the record.

Side two opens with a Joe Bonney solo that leans into the upper reaches of the melody. Bonney’s work with other artists ran the gamut from wild to celebratory, but his playing here is solidly in the post-McCoy Tyner world; while a good chunk of his solo firmly subscribes to the Tyner block chords model, there’s also a moment of complete and utter freedom that seems to stop time before he shifts back into a more melodic mode that calls to mind some of Herbie Hancock’s mid-1960s Blue Note output. Sanders follows Bonney, this time on the balafon. The percussive nature of the instrument, which Wikipedia helpfully describes as a “gourd-resonated xylophone”, means that its sound is approximately equal parts tone and wooden thud, and the bassists and percussion step up to support and enhance the sound.

The last part of the work is driven by the basses and percussion. McBee gets a solo that quietly underscores the similarity of the main theme to the “A Love Supreme” theme and time stops for a minute as the two bassists trade ideas against each other. When the beat comes back, emerging from a cloud of clicking percussion, dueling pizzicato, and drone, it’s less frantic, more assured. There’s a higher pitched string instrument in the mix as well, perhaps a harp or koto, that together with the basses transports the entire soundscape for a few minutes to a different world. This entire section is the most eye opening, as the collective groove that has underpinned all the free exploration and melodic expansion seems to stand revealed. If Sanders was making a philosophical—or political—statement on this album, it might be in this revelation of common cause underneath many different expressions of black musical identity In the last three and a half minutes, the rest of the band re-enters to quietly bring the theme back home. When they stop, we hear a crowd burst into applause and calls of “Right on!,” providing the final mind-blowing moment of the album—that it was recorded as a single live performance.

Sanders would explore the axis between group improvisation, deep melodies, and ecstatic free jazz throughout the rest of his career. You can find more examples of any of the sides of his work throughout his discography; for more like Karma, check out “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah” on his Jewels of Thought. By the mid-1970s he was playing more melodically (as you can hear in this great 1975 live set from Transversales Disques), and it’s that Pharoah that appears in his last recording, the 2021 Floating Points collaboration Promises. But regardless of whether he was playing fierce and free or achingly sweetly, the common core of all the work is searching (and finding) transcendence, putting him firmly in line with the work of his mentor Coltrane. We’ll get one last check-in with another Trane associate next week as we see how McCoy Tyner continued to evolve following his departure from Blue Note.

You can listen to this week’s album here: