"I thought of words as a cinematic way to describe things. If you write something about a field of daisies, for example, you should make the reader see it and feel it. The same goes for music."
William Parker
“We’ll all be on our feet, ready to spar, to react, to move immediately and be open to the moment and what’s going to happen because I think that’s the key,” the legendary cutting-edge bassist/composer/bandleader William Parker said of his performance this weekend at the historic Aetna Theater at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
“We’ll be ready to switch and flip the rhythm, to read the room like a Geiger counter,” said Parker, a celebrated savant of spontaneity, of the starting point for the freewheeling creations of his ensemble, In Order to Survive, as it launches its explorations at 8:00 pm on Saturday, November 8, on stage at the downtown Hartford museum.
“What you want to do,” he said of his opening strategy to win his Hartford audience’s hearts and minds with his interactive mix of shock and awe, “is make the music dance. And always have that funk and feeling of liberation going for the people, and keep it lively. It’s not the goal of music to be clever. Really, the philosophy is to make the people happy. But it’s the happiness and nourishment you get when you eat vegetables, not candy,” he said by phone while on the road with his band.
Parker, a multi-faceted artist and at 62, a still relatively youngish patriarchal figure for the avant-garde, stresses that the new music, which he regards as transcendent, magical and healing, is, in the immortal words of the seminal jazz writer/photographer Valerie Wilmer, “as serious as your life.” Music and life for Parker go hand in hand, forever harmoniously and spiritually bonded.
Canonized by The Village Voice as “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time,” Parker leads a premier seven-piece contingent whose fellow explorers are Kidd Jordan, tenor saxophone; Hamid Drake, percussion; Dave Burrell, piano; Rob Brown, alto saxophone; Lewis Barnes, trumpet; and Steve Swell, trombone, with the extemporaneous maestro himself on double bass booming with his unconventional ideas and signature sound.
Parker has composed in forms ranging from operas and oratorios to ballets and film scores, and has collaborated with a legion of new music luminaries, including quite famously his ten-year stint in the 1980s with the iconic, iconoclastic Cecil Taylor.
Early on as a young man, with his original approach to bass technique and improvisation, Parker was the double bassist of choice for an array of now venerated new music figures, including Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell and Sunny Murray. Getting around more universally than even Woody Allen’s seemingly omnipresent Zelig character, the globe-trotting bassist has popped up virtually everywhere, winning acclaim as the leader of his own innovative ensembles and through his creative associations with a host of cutting-edge heavyweights, both on the European scene as well as in the States. Most particularly, he’s renowned as an industrious, intellectual, experimental mover-and-shaker on the New York scene.
A long-time grassroots advocate for and exegete of the new music’s aesthetic, Parker is a multi-instrumentalist who also draws, paints, and is a poet and writer. His written works include Conversations, an invaluable oral history collection of his interviews with such fellow free jazz practitioners as the great violinist Billy Bang, and Who Owns Music?, a collection of his poetry and wide-ranging essays touching on everything from politics to his philosophy about music and life and the DNA-like bond binding the two.
Even in a telephone conversation, whether expounding on aesthetics or on the need to find one’s own artistic voice, he makes his points with scintillating, wide-ranging allusions that can pirouette impressively from quoting Plato’s dialogues to citing classic radio comedy routines by the hilarious satirists, Bob and Ray.
His passion for expressing himself through words, he explains, preceded even his discovery of his own unique voice on bass.
“I was into poetry first. I discovered Samuel Beckett and then Harold Pinter. I became interested in the work of the experimental Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski and the innovative work of The Living Theatre, plus the writings of Kenneth Patchen(a cutting-edge poet and novelist), Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal (scholar/writer and major contributor to the Black Arts Movement) and James Baldwin,” he said.
“Words always came before music. I wrote lots of songs. The words came very easily to me. I thought of words as a cinematic way to describe things. If you write something about a field of daisies, for example, you should make the reader see it and feel it. The same goes for music.”
Immersion in jazz was a key part of Parker’s childhood growing up in the Bronx’s Claremont Housing Project where he and his brother used to dance madly to his father’s jazz record collection, heavy on music by Duke Ellington (dad’s godlike hero) and other historic titans like Coleman Hawkins. One of Parker’s father’s fondest dreams was that someday young William would grow up and play in the Ellington Orchestra, his personal beatific vision with a beat.
“When I was seven or eight years old,” Parker said, “my father would come home and would put on Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” which he would play religiously almost every time he got home from work. My brother and I would have a dance contest, dancing to saxophonist Paul Gonsalves’ famous choruses at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival.
“One day my father came home with a trumpet for me and a saxophone for my brother,” Parker said, “and I began to take trumpet lessons. I switched from trumpet to trombone to cello, and then bass in the latter part of high school.”
What happened next on Parker’s musical pilgrimage was the life-changing discovery of John Coltrane. Suddenly, a brave new world opened up with its promise of the ascension of the imagination and the possibility of taking giant steps towards creating something new.
“I didn’t really get serious until I began to listen to John Coltrane,” Parker said, “and that happened because record companies were switching over from monaural records. You could get marvelous monaural LPs for only 99 cents. I got my father Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster LPs, and started to experiment with the other bargain recordings. If my brother and I liked an LP’s cover, we bought it, including Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz album with the Jackson Pollock cover. [Pollock’s 1954 painting, White Light.] We wondered what these albums sounded like, so we began listening to different kinds of music through this form of experimentation.
“When I was listening to John Coltrane and read the liner notes for A Love Supreme, I got the idea of why music was being played. Then I decided I could step into this arena seriously. I kind of had this brand of fire music in my head and still do,” Parker said. The concert is presented by Real Art Ways in partnership with the Wadsworth Atheneum and The Hartford Jazz Society, a harmonious alliance of Hartford non-profit arts groups. Tickets: $15.00, general public; $12.00, RAW, HJS and museum members. Tickets online at realartways.org or by calling the museum at (860) 838-4100.
Library Offers Top-Shelf Fare
Hartford Public Library’swarm, cozy atrium is once again one of the city’s premier haven’s for jazz fans seeking a weekly Sunday antidote to the wintry blahs as the free, 16-concert Baby Grand Jazz series runs in 2015 from January 4 through April 26 at the downtown main branch.
Eli Yamin, a blues and jazz pianist/vocalist, leads his quartet on opening day, marking the first in the series of popular jazz matinees that run each Sunday from 3:00 to 4:00 pm. As a cultural ambassador for the U.S. Department of State, Yamin has performed around the world and even played for President Obama at The White House.
Pianist Hey Rim Jeon, a native of Seoul, Korea, and a summa cum laude graduate of Boston’s Berklee College, performs with her trio in the series grand finale. Her acclaimed improvising skills and versatility make her at home on the range inventing on anything fromChick Corea’s Spain to Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune.
Besides these two pianists, the series’ varsity piano bench also features the Eri Yamamoto Duoas well as trios led by Mihoko Abe, LaszloGardony,Matt DeChamplain, Jonny Kingand Brian Marsella.
Although called Baby Grand Jazz -- named after the piano which is the handsome centerpiece in the atrium -- the series also showcases non-piano playing artists. Among these are the noted guitarist Joshua Breakstone; theSurvivors Swing Band, a septet celebrating Swing Era classics; and the Hartford-based multi-percussionist Alvin Carter Jr. leading his project, Confluence of Influence, focusing on African-American improvisational music.
Among the series highlights are performances by Hartford’s gifted, globe-trotting Curtis Brothers, Zaccaion piano and Luqueson bass, as well as an appearance by the splendid vocalist Jolie Rocke Brown. A classically trained singer, Brown basks in an ecumenical style which, in a state of grace, embraces everything from grand opera to soulful spirituals to swinging jazz.
Here’s the complete schedule: Eli Yamin Jazz Quartet, January 4; trumpeter Nicholas Di Maria, January 11; Eri Yamamoto Duo, January 18; saxophonist Alexa Tarantino and pianist Dariusz Terefenko Duo, January 25; Jolie Rocke Brown, February 1; Survivors Swing Band, February 8; bassist Steve Clarke Trio, February 15; and Mihoko Trio, February 22.
Also, Laszlo Gardony Trio, March 1; Matt DeChamplain with his wife, vocalist Atla DeChamplain, and trombonist Steve Davis, March 8; Joshua Breakstone Duo with pianist Noah Baerman, March 15; Jonny King Trio, March 22; Alvin Carter Project: Confluence of Influence with pianist Emery A. Smith and bassist Vishnu Wood, March 29; Curtis Brothers, April 12; Brian Marsella Trio, April 19; Hey Rim Jeon & Friends, April 26. The library’s 12th annual series is sponsored by The Charles H. Kaman Charitable Foundation. Information: hplct.org.
Pizzeria’s Sizzling Jazz Pizzazz
If you like Neapolitan cuisine and wood-fired brick-oven pizza served with red-hot jazz, Pizzeria Lauretano,the award-winning Bethel bistro, continues to heat up its weekly Sunday matinee, "JAZZ at the Pizzeria" series. Its musical menu for the rest of the month ranges from master samba jazz guitarist Joe Carterto the noted trumpeter and big band veteran Marvin Stamm. All shows are at 6 p.m, with music fees at $12.00, except for the Stamm performance, which is $15.00.
On Sunday, November 9, the woefully under-recognized guitar masterTony Purroneshows why he should be basking in world-wide acclaim as he teams up with acoustic bassist Preston Murphy and noted French drummer Thierry Arpino. Marvin Stamm, who has played with the bands of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, leads his quartet on November 16, followed by Carter, who performs with his Samba Rio Trio on November 23. Carter’s seamlessly swinging sounds on nylon string guitar synthesize straight-ahead jazz and bebop with Samba, Bossa Nova and Northeast styles of Brazilian music.
In the finale for the month, The Orgone Jazz Quintet, with Mike Leventhal on sax and Dan Donofrio on trumpet, is the pizzeria’s main musical course on November 30.
A new project, The Orgone Jazz Quintet is named for Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s theory of the orgone as a curative cosmic force with Viagra-like potential. Reich’s concept of the orgone was most notoriously embodied by his invention of the orgone box, a cosmic contraption, magical panacea and collector and generator of the universal life force. Hopeful patients sat in Reich’s healing orgone box awaiting a cure for everything from impotence to cancer, with miracles showing up about as often as Godot.
Leventhal’s and Donofrio’s Orgone colleagues in the generation of genuinely galvanizing jazz energies—a force field free of all Reichean nostrum hokum-- are guitarist Chris Morrison, bassist Henry Lugo and drummer Bobby Leonard. The pizzeria is at 291 Greenwood Avenue, Bethel. Information: pizzerialauretano.com and (203) 792-1500.
Free, Shipshape Band Concert
The Commodores, the United States Navy’s premier jazz ensemble which has triumphed at major jazz festivals and toured throughout the United States and abroad, presents a free concert at 2:00 pm on Sunday, November 9, at Leamy Hall at the US Coast Guard Academy, 31 Mohegan Avenue, New London.
Led by Master Chief Musician Philip Burlin, the 18-member ensemble has performed with many famous guest artists, including vocalist Jane Monheit, Ray Charles, Branford Marsalisand James Moody. Its repertoire is a mix of traditional big band music, jazz vocal arrangements and new instrumental music written specifically for the band, which has been wailing and sailing since weighing anchor in 1969. Information: (860) 701-6826.
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