TENAFLY, NJ
SEP-OCT 1995
Monkish in his angularity and in his sly humor-he begins his "Blue Chopsticks" with a stuttering evocation of the "Chopsticks" we all know-the late pianist Herbie Nichols spent much of his career accompanying Dixieland groups. But he was an important, if underrecognized, bebopper. More than any other pianist in the early 50s, Nichols showed how Bud Powell's music could be taken in a direction different from hard bop: toward lightness, openness, even toward a sort of whimsical evasiveness. As we can hear on Thc Bcst of Hcrbie Nichols (Blue Note 99176 2 4), Nichols's own playing is fluid, carefully nuanced but unemphatic. He never wanders, and yet his improvisations, like is compositions. sound free, unbound by the more obviously exciting tension and logic of Bud Powell's music. His accents are not as strong, and his choice of notes makes him seem to skim over the chords. In all this, Nichols is probably an important precursor for the playing of Cecil Taylor. Miraculously, he seems totally without cliches, even the bop cliches that were just developing in the time he made his few recordings. Original, even eccentric, he was the composer of one tune that has become something of a jazz standard: "Lady Sings the Blues," which he wrote for Billie Holiday. Aside from that. he seems to have been almost totally forgotten, except by the musicians who knew him.
One of these, the distinguished bassist Buell Neidlinger, who has played with Cecil Taylor, Frank Zappa-and the Boston Symphony-has made a wonderful new disc in the pianist's honor: Blue Chopsticks: A Portrait of Herbie Nichols (K2 B2 Records 3169). Neidlinger collaborated with Nichols in the 50s in the trio led by 20s tenor star Bud Freeman. When in 1963, Nichols was dying, Neidlinger called the pianist and promised to make a recording of his music. Blue Chopsticks is the much delayed result. It's a curious, touching recording, that features Neidlinger on cello with Marty Krystall, reeds, Hugh Shick on various brass instruments and a violin and viola: Richard Greene, who sounds frequently like he stepped right out of a bluegrass band, and Jimbo Ross. It's instructive to go from Nichols's jumpy performance of "2300 Skidoo," with its tight phrases and sudden swirls and turns, to the swaggering performance of Neidlinger's crew. Blue Chopsticks is a sleeper.
