LISTEN TO ONE: Hot House
You look at an album, and you see that the tunes on it are by Tadd Dameron, Fats Navarro, Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, and you start to get the feeling that this guy is serious about his bebop. That the two remaning tunes are by the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hammerstein will do nothing to dissuade you from that opinion. And then if you notice that the album is titled Bebop Revisited, even if you've never heard of the guy, you've got reason enough to pick up the album.
Of course, this is 2023, so you already know that Charles McPherson is one of the revered elder statesmen of jazz, with a career that few can match. But if it were 1964, and you were standing in Sam Goody's looking over the new jazz releases, you might not be so familiar with the name.
You might. McPherson had been playing and recording with Charles Mingus for three years by then. But this was his first recording as a leader. So you look at the names of the composers, and the names of the tunes: "Hot House," "Variations on a Blues by Bird," and if you're an old timer of, say 27 or 28, and you're already regretting the passing of the bebop era, you're definitely starting to be intrigued.
And if you start reading the liner notes by Ira Gitler, a real old timer in his thirties, you discover that Ira, too, misses the bebop era, and is saddened by the fact that younger musicians who play "hard bop" are not really challenging themselves -- they play the "simpler [bebop] tunes like 'Now's the Time' rather than 'Billie's Bounce,' 'Relaxin' at Camarillo' or 'Shaw 'Nuff.'"
And you'll certainly, as you plunk down your $3.98 for the album, be intrigued by the presence of Barry Harris, an uncompromising bebopper still playing in the new era and still making great music.
And in fact, McPherson had been a protégé of Harris's for quite some time, going back to when he was 14, newly moved to Detroit from Joplin, Missouri, and living on the same block as Harris and Lonnie Hillyer, another young teenager in love with music. McPherson and Hillyer used to sit outside the local club--also on the same street--where Harris played, and talk to the musicians when they stepped outside to take a break and grab a smoke or some fresh air.
McPherson started taking music lessons from Harris, but he soon found out that the pianist had a lot more to teach him than that. In a videotaped interview, he remembered showing Harris his report card, which was all C's,
And I thought that was fine...I was focused on other things than homework. As long as I'm not the dumbest guy in the room...he said, "I see you got a bunch of C's. You're quite ordinary, aren't you?" And I said -- I was proud of it -- "Yes, I am." And he said, "Well, I'm going to tell you. The kind of guys you like -- your musical heroes -- are anything but ordinary. If you want to learn to play this music, you can't be a C anything." And the moment he said that, it changed my whole way of thinking. He said, "Do you ever read?" I said no. "Do you ever do puzzles?" No. He said, "OK, let's start by doing the puzzles," and he brought out a newspaper -- the New York Times -- and I noticed that he could read the whole New York Times, the editorials, so he knew about...and I had not a clue. So I started reading, and I started doing the puzzles.
And Barry Harris had friends, people like Pepper Adams, who would come to his house, and I would listen to these guys talk, and quite often they would talk about things that had nothing to do with music. They would be talking about de Maupassant, Nietszche, Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant, they'd talk about Henry Miller and this book, Tropic of Capricorn, and I had not a clue that this was what jazz people...and I learned that, at least in Detroit, in order to be considered hip, not only did you have to know about Bird, and this kind of music, you had to know about painting, you had to know about philosophy, and if you could talk, and you had something to say, then you were considered hip.
Well, I've talked about Detroit before, and how it was one of the greatest schools of music in those days, but clearly with guys like Barry Harris and Pepper Adams around, it was a lot more than that,
And they would say, "Hey man, do you know that Charlie Parker can go to a museum and identify Marc Chagall, or Matisse, or Miro -- he could just look at a painting and say 'Oh, this is cubism' -- these people are great thinkers, as well as wonderful musicians, and if you want to be like that, you have to read.
Barry Harris gave young Charles a lesson that stayed with him for life. Harris, and Pepper Adams -- he doesn't mention Wardell Gray, but Gray was around Detroit in those days too, and he was another who valued learning. And Charlie Parker -- in another interview, given just this year, he recalled, “Bird could sit down and talk about quantum mechanics. Our notion of hip was a broad thing, and Bird’s the guy who started to make it that way.”
And McPherson paid it forward. The interviewer, Andrew Gilbert, mentions Rob Schneiderman, a fine young pianist who worked with McPherson, listened to McPherson, and went on to get a Ph. D. in mathematics at the University of California:
He credits his early conversations with McPherson about Einstein’s theory of spacetime with setting him on the path that led to his love of math (and his current position as a professor of mathematics at City University of New York’s Lehman College).
“Charles McPherson loves talking about Einstein’s theories,” Schneiderman said. “You look at all these books for the lay person on Einstein and you realize you’ve got to learn calculus in order to understand physics and why time stands still at the speed of light.”
All of this is completely irrelevant to a discussion of the music.
All of this is crucial to a discussion of the music.
Both of the above statements are true. But at any rate, we're back in 1964, and Charles McPherson, with Barry Harris, is in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, making an album of bebop, the music to which Charlie Parker brought his love of Marc Chagall, and Igor Stravinsky, and the blues. As did Barry Harris. As did young Charles McPherson.
It is ridiculous to suggest that in just a few years, bebop had exhausted everything it was possible to say within its framework, any more than it makes sense to say that the English language sonnet had run its course as a viable form after a couple of hot decades in the 16th century. Charles McPherson finds plenty to discover and build on in its complex use of chording, rapid tempi, and deconstruction of melody. His tone has a sweet lyricism to it, and it can reach to intellectually challenging improvisational passages or emotional immediacy in the Illinois Jacquet mode.
He is joined by Barry Harris, with whom he had of course had a long association, and Carmell Jones, with whom he had never worked before. Jones had spent time in California, where he had worked in movie studio orchestras and recorded with Bud Shank, Harold Land and Teddy Edwards. Coming east, he had been on Horace Silver's Song for My Father. He did not record again with McPherson, which is too bad, because they meshed well together; but he basically didn't stick around New York for too long. He did a couple of Prestige sessions with Booker Ervin, but then headed to Europe, where he spent the rest of his career as an expatriate, gaining less name recognition but more respect.
Barry Harris leads an outstanding rhythm section of Albert "Tootie" Heath and Nelson Boyd. Boyd came from Philadelphia, perhaps second only to Detroit for gestation of jazz talent, and he came by his bebop credentials honestly, having played with Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro. This session seems to have marked the end of his recording career, although he lived until 1985.
And of course, Harris's solos are invaluable.
Charles McPherson With Carmell Jones And Barry Harris - Bebop Revisited! was produced by Don Schlitten.
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