John Abercrombie / Marc Johnson / Peter Erskine

ECM 1390   837 756-2

John Abercrombie   Guitar, Guitar Synthesizer
Marc Johnson   Bass
Peter Erskine   Drums

Digital Recording, April 21, 1988
Live at The Nightstage, Boston
Engineer: Tony Romano
Remixed at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Cover Design: Barbara Wojirsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher

An ECM Production

1989 ECM Records GmbH
1989 ECM Records GmbH

ECM Records
Gleichmannstrasse 10
8000 München 60

Home On The Dynamic Range

When Peter Erskine says that the John Abercrombie Trio "plays more dynamics" than any other band he's been in, one sits up and takes notice. After all, Weather Report hardly lacked for dynamics. Nor, indeed, did the Stan Kenton Orchestra on such records as "7.5 On The Richter Scale" and "National Anthems Of The World". There, the dynamics were of a terrifying order.

Abercrombie's group contains its firepower more carefully but, when it chooses to let rip (as on "Furs On Ice", "Four On One", "Samurai Hee-Haw"), it's anyone's blazing equal. On the more reflective tunes ("Beautiful Love", the group composition "Inner-play") the sound is refined, at times, to silence's fringe and finds another, concentrated, intensity there. The Trio's correlation of climaxes and emphases, of spaces and respites, is re-established on a nightly basis; this is an improvisers' group in a sense that few modern jazz groups are. The material is constantly reworked. This live album is an overdue indication of the group's ability to reinvent its repertoire. At the very least, I think, it demonstrates that there is no freer group playing standards today. And that, perhaps, begs the question: why play them at all?

John Abercrombie: "It feels really important to me to play them. The've become so personal to me that I don't even think of them as 'standards' any more. It's almost like they're my tunes. The standards and the more 'traditional' guitar tone are tied up together, in my mind, as the foundation of my music, and I'm working to expand that the way that players like Keith (Jarrett) and Paul Bley have expanded the piano — to get to this open dimension." "Open" is a word that comes up often in conversation with the Abercrombie Trio. Peter Erskine describes John as "the most open of all guitarists", adding "I couldn't really play trio music at all until I came to this band. Playing piano trios, I've often felt blocked by the pianist's left hand — it interferes with the free flow of my ideas. The guitar doesn't have that aspect and with John, particularly, it seems like there's so much room to allow things to evolve".

Marc Johnson agrees. "The more we play together the more we develop our own voice, inside the standards. I'm always pleased to return to them in the course of an evening. John is really starting to play something very different, linearly, going right outside the chords, in a way that's coherent, all the way through a chorus. It's exciting to me, it's stretching my ears and I'm finding new things, intervallically — leaving the root movement of the chord, even changing the root entirely. It feels to me like the harmony is really beginning to open up." Blossoming, yes. It's the appropriate image.

All four of the standards on this live set are associated with Bill Evans. Evans, of course, was once Marc Johnson's boss and (with Coltrane) probably the biggest influence on Abercrombie's music. (John's vision has never been limited by guitar history. He's always been drawn to those players who transcended their instrument and gave us a music.) And the Trio would, I think, subscribe to Evans's view of introspection and dedication as the main route to profundity.

"Alice In Wonderland" was a tune that Evans salvaged from the Walt Disney production of the same name, thirty years before it became "hip" to look to Disney for inspiration, the pianist's version appearing on the unimpeachable "Sunday At The Village Vanguard". The Abercrombie Trio made an extremely delicate pass at it on their 1985 debut "Current Events" (ECM 1311). The present version, less rarefied, bites a little harder on the melody line that so delighted Evans.

"Stella By Starlight" was around before Evans got to her but never the same after a 1958 Miles Davis Newport show where Bill's choice of chords made both Stella and the trumpet sound more luminously ethereal than ever. The sprightlier Abercrombie reading could be seen to amplify Evans' take on the tune on "Conversation With Myself". Johnson's lithe bass is almost like a second guitar here.

"Haunted Heart" and "Beautiful Love" were ushered into the Evans discography on 1961's "Explorations" and the latter returned to, again and again. There's a transcendent version of it on the Evans concert recording from Paris in 1979, with Marc Johnson on bass. That same year an earlier Abercrombie trio (with George Mraz and Peter Donald) also recorded "Beautiful Love" but John was moved more by Marc's ability to get inside Evans' music: "I remember going to the Village Vanguard with a whole bunch of musicians, including Ralph Towner and Richie Beirach and we were all amazed by the way Marc was playing those tunes. Afterwards Bill said to me that he felt the trio with Marc and Joe (LaBarbera) was the best he'd had since the group with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian". Its excellence, however, was to be short lived, terminated by Evans' death in 1980.

"After Bill died", Marc Johnson recalls, "I was just... wandering, musically, trying to gravitate toward something that might feel like 'home'. And it wasn't until I started working with John that I rediscovered that feeling. I like the trio format very much and the freedom it gives me to interact with what's going on and help shape the flow."

Abercrombie and Erskine had met in New York's clubs but not actually played together until a Bobby Hutcherson record date united them in Los Angeles. John became intrigued by the notion of Johnson and Erskine inside the same band. Musicians from such different corners of jazz... could it work? "I just wanted to see what would happen."

A lot happened. Marc Johnson discovered a passion for the guitar — "A light just sort of went on" — and formed Bass Desires, a quartet with Erskine plus Bill Frisell and John Scofield. John Abercrombie and Marc recorded as "sidemen" on Peter's "Transition" album. A community of musicians was gradually established whose number also included saxophonists Joe Lovano and Michael Brecker, the latter guesting with the Trio on "Getting There" (ECM 1321) and crediting Abercrombie with the freeing of his own concept.
John: "It's become a little network and we've talked about making it more like a corral, some kind of collective. I'd like us to play more of each other's music, get the music melted around a bit. Maybe that's the next step." To those who follow the music chiefly via records, it may seem to be happening already, with the inclusion of "Samurai Hee-Haw" as the climax of the sequence of linked pieces here. "Samurai" has come to be considered Bass Desires' biggest hit, as it were, although the Abercrombie Trio were playing it first in concert. In either rendition, it remains a splendid, robust song and Johnson is over-modest in his assessment of it as "just a sketch to blow on". On the contrary, it is on its way to contemporary standard-hood. Erskine's solo inside the structure on this live version, moreover, is among the great moments in recent drum history. Erskine's been developing this way of playing over the last few years and it has come to brilliant fruition in the Trio. As he says, "this trio could paraphrase that famous statement of Zawinul's: 'We always solo but we never solo'."

"Killing Time" on "Current Events" already proposes the idea of rhythmic freedom within a framework and successive records — Bass Desires' "Second Sight", Gary Peacock's "Guamba" and particularly the title track of the Trio's aptly named "Getting There" — have taken it further. On all of these, Erskine threads daringly free drum solos right down the centre of the compositions.
Peter: "I've got better at doing that partly as a result of the opportunities Manfred Eicher's given me, but it's connected to several other aspects. Paradoxically, it also has to do with the session work I've done with clicks and sequencers and clocks. That forced me to really get a focus on my time keeping and also helped me to see that I didn't have to define the beat or the phrase as much as I was used to. I was able to learn from those experiences and bring something back to the Trio."
John: "It's hard to define, but there is a new way of playing where anybody can solo at any time and all the statements work together. Like, I don't count on any of the pieces anymore. I play through and across things. In the Trio we've found a way to fit the different components of our musical personalities together, so that we can just cross over each other. It's 'free' without being random."

A freedom this side of randomness has, of course, been one of improvisation's priorities from Lennie Tristano's "Crosscurrents" through harmolodics, so-called, and beyond. The Trio have no grandiose name for their method but it works, at both ends of the dynamic range, whether the musicians are playing their post-Evans inner-directed material or raving, extrovertedly, with the guitar synthesizer turned up loud. By my reckoning, Abercrombie is one of exactly three jazz guitarists playing something vital on guitar synthesizer (the other two, incidentally, have also recorded for ECM). John's colleagues share his fondness for the instrument.
Peter: "Oh yeah! As much as I love acoustic drums and standard jazz instrumentation, I'm also a real propellerhead! I'm fascinated by all of that, the way technological developments open new worlds."
John: "The synthesizer has gotten me in touch with a sound that' s almost like a throwback to the rock and roll side of my past. Back at the beginning of the fusion era, I was using every gadget available, and then I abandoned all the devices for a 'purer' jazz sound. Now I'm working in both directions at once. The synthesizer makes me play differently, both rhythmically and melodically, because the sound is more sustaining. Often, I'll limit myself to playing more chordally with it. I'll set up a couple of intervals and then keep bringing in different sounds until I get this thickness of timbres. I'm thinking in blocks of sound when I play synthesizer, big polyphonic chords...".

In terms of timbre and texture, is the wood of the acoustic bass an appropriate response to the synthesizer's otherworldliness?
Marc: "It's part of the group sound's character. Plus, the bass keeps the combination of elements firmly planted in the jazz tradition and that's important, for us, too."
Peter: "The acoustic quality of the bass is to me much more interesting than the direct signal of an electric bass."
John: "I've worked with a lot of electric bassists and never been as happy as with the blend we've got now." Four years into the association, the players are still discovering new shades of colour in the music. "I love the soaring sound of the synthesizer up against the growl of the acoustic bass, the bass drum's thud, the splash of the cymbal..."
When all these elements pull together, as on Abercrombie's "Four On One" (again, radically transformed from the rendition on John's "Night" album, ECM 1272) or Marc's other hook-laden coup, "Furs On Ice", one doesn't often stand back to assess components. These pieces are unities, swelling fields od force, the more dramatic for the context from which they emerge, billowing, like a dangerous turbulence up and around the precisely-latticed standards (Erskine's triplets and swung eighths: a watchmaker's meticulousness) to dizzy us.

A susurrus rising to a roar, the John Abercrombie Trio works a wide dynamic range, indeed.

Steve Lake

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К сожалению в оригинальном тексте было обнаружено множество грамматических ошибок (Abercombie, transcendant, gettimg и так далее). Всё, что было идентифицировано как ошибка, исправлено. Однако уверенности, что все они исправлены, нет.
Я прошу всех, нашедших грамматические ляпсусы, сообщить о них.

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Обновление: 14.03.2004