Boston now, of course, is a jazz hub, with the Berklee School of Music, which has become the largest and probably the best known school of jazz and contemporary music in the world. Berklee has recently annexed the even older Boston Conservatory, which was a place for the study of classical music, and really did not have a jazz program. But it did produce Ken McIntyre (and Gigi Gryce, Slam Stewart, Don Redman and Sam Rivers), although after he graduated he set aside a lot of his classical training, looking for notes that were not in the score of any classical piece. "I was a singer before I played," he told Joe Goldberg, who interviewed him for the liner notes on this album,
but I stopped when I took up the saxophone. There are many notes other than the ones a piano is capable of - quartertones and semi-quarter tones that the voice can sing. The ear is not accustomed to hearing them all, but that's only a matter of training. They can be played on the saxophone.
But he continued to make Boston his home, and when he came to New York and Englewood Cliffs to make his first recording, he brought with him the musicians with whom he had been playing in clubs and developing his craft.But the business end of the recording industry is sometimes a little weird (well, so is the music end, but it's supposed to be). McIntyre was brought into the studio in May to record a session with his guys, and then four weeks later, in June, with a group of some of New York's top musicians, including fast rising star Eric Dolphy, But the June session was released first, so it ended up being McIntyre's debut album, and Joe Goldberg was left to try and make sense of the apparent order--why go back to his Boston pals after playing with New York's elite?
McIntyre answered the question just as though that were really the situation:
That we are truly in a new era in jazz can be seen in the critical treatment of new alto players. For two decades, they had been described in terms of their stylistic proximity to, or distance from, Charlie Parker. Now it's Ornette Coleman. Goldberg rejects the comparison to Ornette, and I think he's right. To me, McIntyre seems closer in approach to Yusef Lateef, with his explorations of different tonalities. He doesn't share Lateef's passion for Arabic sounds, but in his later career he would come to that in his own way, becoming more and more interested in African music, and ultimately choosing a new name that would reflect that: Makanda Ken McIntyre. He described one facet of his sound this way to Goldberg:Ken McIntyre's... previous Prestige/New Jazz release, Looking Ahead... featured Eric Dolphy, and a top-flight New York rhythm section made up of Walter Bishop Jnr., Sam Jones, and Arthur Taylor. It is often the case on a new musician's first recording, that he will be put with such a group: professionals who are sympathetic to the newcomer's style, and whose names, it might be added, will help the record to sell. This practice can work out well, as I think it did in McIntyre's case; but sometimes the presence of old pros on a new musician's first date, plus the possibly awesome surroundings of the recording studio, can serve to inhibit whatever talent the newcomer has to the extent that is never made apparent on the record.With this new release, McIntyre has now recorded in both situations. His associates on this record are all from Boston, as is Ken, and were, for a while, a regular working group. It is inevitable that this new record is a more complete statement of his music than was the other.As he puts it, "The musicians on Looking Ahead were all marvelous musicians, but I was in no position to dictate to them. On this record, I was the leader."
I like the sound of alto and trombone, and particularly of flute and trombone. But you have to have exactly the right trombone player to compliment you, and I think I found him. Take Brubeck and Desmond, for instance. Paul plays very melodic, and Dave is rhythmic and harmonic. If either one of them played like the other, they'd have nothing. In our group, John Lewis, the trombonist, plays a few notes, staccato, and my style is to play many notes, legato. That way, we compliment each other.John Mancebo Lewis shared the same multicultural leanings, which is undoubtedly part of why they fit together so well. Lewis was shortly to embrace Islam and become Daoud Haroon, and to become an African and Middle Eastern percussionist as well as a jazz trombonist. Haroon went on to a distinguished career as a musician, but also as an author, scholar and educator--he would teach both American History and Islamic Studies at colleges in Texas. He passed away just this past year.
Pianist Dizzy Sal had more of a connection to Ornette. The previous summer, he had taken a workshop at the Lenox School of Music in the Berkshire Mountains, yet another Massachusetts
Drummer Bobby Ward is hard to find out much about. Most of the Google links, even if you search on Bobby Ward, drummer, are to another Bobby Ward, this one a British drummer in punk bands. There are a few more to Robert Ward, blues guitarist. But no links at all to a young jazz drummer from Boston. No Wikipedia page. One comes away with the feeling that Bobby Ward never amounted to much, although he certainly sounds good here.
One might feel that way, that is, until one looked on YouTube. There, one would find two videos of the Henry Cook Band, featuring Boston jazz legend Bobby Ward on drums. And there's also a video of a "Bobby Ward Amazing Drum Solo," and in the notes that video one would find that:
Bobby has played with Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, Chick Corea and Cat Anderson among others, and has recorded with Makanda Ken McIntyre, Wallace Roney, Bob Mover, Salim Washington and Henry Cook.All the compositions except for "I'll Close My Eyes" are McIntyre's. Stone Blues was a New Jazz release, Esmond Edwards producing.
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