A free flowing spirit of exploration permeates this
daring trio session. From the opening, aggressive strains of Richie
Beirach's "Pendulum" to the sublime reading of Bill Evans' fragile classic
"Blue In Green," from a turbulent, radically reharmonized take on "Softly
As In A Morning Sunrise" to a super sensitive rendition of Beirach's
"Elm," there's magic in the room as pianist Beirach, drummer Steve Davis
and bassist Francois Moutin give it up wholeheartedly to the muse. They
stretch and converse freely on familiar vehicles like "Stella," "Nardis"
and "Solar." And like the most intimate and animated conversations, the
music here takes on a life of its own, following a natural arc toward some
resolution that isn't quite known at the outset. And yet, all the
participants are clearly on the same page.
Records aren't
made this way anymore. To have three musicians walk into a room and
instantly begin to interact without ever having played together before,
let alone having rehearsed any of the material, defies all the current
marketplace wisdom in this very conservative time in jazz. But truth be
told, this wasn't supposed to be a recording date at all. What was
intended only as a casual jam in Steve Davis' home studio -- nestled in
rural quietude between Hastings-On-Hudson and Yonkers just 20 minutes
north of Manhattan -- became the CD you have in hand only because the
drummer had the foresight to roll tape.
As ringleader
Davis explains, "Richie and I had talked no less than 20 times about
playing together. Finally he called me one day and said, "Hey, bro', how
come you haven't called me to play?" And I couldn't think of any reasons.
So we arranged for a casual jam, just three or four hours. I had Francois
Moutin come up and play bass. We're very good friends and he has a
marvelous energy to play with, a great player. And Richie, needless to
say, is Richie. I always wanted to play with him so it was just kind of
inevitable that we did."
As Richie
matter-of-factly recalls, "It was a slow time in the winter, I wasn't
doing anything and I felt like playing. So I went up there."
Beirach had previously been up to Davis' Yonkers-based studio to
play on a Conrad Herwig session for Double Time's New York Breed, so he
was familiar with the studio and its seven-foot Steinway B piano. Davis
engineered but did not play on that session. And his intentions for this
jam with Beirach and Moutin were purely in the spirit of fun.
"I told
everybody upfront, 'Listen, this is just for a blast.' Part of my real
agenda for that was I'm a firm believer in always playing with different
people and not only in performance situations... just playing at home with
your old friends and new friends. Some wonderful stuff happens and you
experience that energy and you go on. So I rolled tape and went in and
started playing. You can hear me actually walking by the piano and closing
the control room door, sliding the glass door shut on the drum booth and
the whole nine yards. And then we just started playing. Nobody said
squat about directing the music anywhere. It didn't matter."
"We just hit
it and it felt very good," adds Beirach. "And there were no takes because
we weren't making a record. We just kept going. It was a very strange
nonevent that was happening, and yet it was being documented. It was that
'one stroke concept' that Bill Evans talked about in the liner notes to
Kind Of Blue. Not that this is in any way on the level of that, but it was
definitely in that spirit."
After entering
the studio, Beirach sat down at the piano and started playing and the
rhythm section eagerly jumps in. The first two tunes to emerge were a free
form take on "Stella By Starlight" and a similarly expansive treatment of
"Solar," underscored by Davis' interactive approach to the kit and
culminating in a surprising New Orleans second line feel at the tag.
"After that initial burst," says Davis, "we had a cup of coffee in the
control room and were hanging out, laughing. That was the only break we
had. Then Richie said, 'OK, what do you want to play?' I requested two of
his compositions, 'Pendulum' and 'Elm.' And I told him, After that, I
don't care. My Jones is covered."
The three
launched into an inspired version of "Pendulum," a Beirach piece based on
an F# pedal that has been documented several times throughout his career
(it was the title cut of an excellent 1978 Artists House record by Dave
Liebman). Davis' own personal favorite version of the tune is from a Live
at the Village Vanguard recording with Liebman (on tenor), Beirach
and trumpeter Randy Brecker. "Hearing that music touched me as deeply as
Trane and Ben Webster and all the classics," says Davis. And it made me
realize, 'This is how I want to play.'"
As the jam
progressed, they embraced Beirach's sparse, darkly beautiful ballad "Elm"
(title track of his 1979 trio album on ECM). Bassist Moutin literally
discovered the piece while playing it, as Davis explains. "Francois didn't
know that tune and he didn't have a chart. You can actually hear Richie
calling out the changes to him at one point. I tried to get rid of that
but it's all so much a part of what happened."
They
approached "Blue In Green" with a kind of hushed reverence before
turning "Softly" on its head, recalling an arrangement from a 1984 Quest
record with Beirach, Liebman, Al Foster and George Mraz. And they rendered
"Nardis" with a kind of forceful attack that generates sparks.
The result is
74 minutes of spirited music that bears repeated listening. "They're
really long tunes and they're done in the way that people used to play...
in depth, you know?" says Beirach of this highly empathic meeting. "There
was a surge to it, a lot of forward motion. It reminded me of the way
people used to get together and play in the '60s, for no other reason than
to play. Not to rehearse, not to get paid, just to play. We just sat down
and... bang!"
Thank goodness Davis rolled tape.
-- Bill Milkowski/Jazz
Times
