Blue Chopsticks Reviews
2300 Skidoo Buell Neidlinger's omissions, commissions, fusions and fissions BY GREG BURK BUELL NEIDLINGER HAS AT LEAST THREE great talents: a talent for music, a talent for unprecedented artistic choices and a talent for pissing people off. From beginnings in the late-'50s avant~garde alongiside the man he reveres as "the great master of Amercan music," piano abstractionist Cecil Taylor, Neidlinger has allied his bass and cello with a wide range of styles, from free jazz to bluegrass to classical, and now frequently leads the bass sections on the soundtracks of movies like Pochahontas and Waterworld . Of ten in the Company of saxist Mary Krystall he has steered a number of his own projects, including Krystall Klear and The Buells, Buellgrass, Thelonious, and the Buell Neidlinger Quartet and Quintet, and released recordings associated with them, the latest of which is Blue Chopsticks: A Portrait of Herbie Nichols. He has encountered many of the lights of modern music, and has something bad to say about a lot of them. Neidlinger has nothing bad to say about pianist Herbie Nichols, a gentle being whose delcate, innovative composing and playing skills have been rewarded by near-universal neglect in the jazz world. Before dying of leukemia in the indigent ward of New York's Creedmore Hospital in 1963, Nichols used to have visiting sessions with Neidlinger in the latter's apartment in the mid-'50s, playing Nicho!s' tunes and talking about music. He'd call them rehearsals," says Neidlinger. "I don't know why, because no gigs ever happened. He liked classical music, and he knew a lot about it. I had a lot of Bartok and Stravinsky records, and he just ate that stuff up. He'd stay and listen to those records sometime 'til 10 or 11 in the morning, and then I'd kind of fall asleep, and he'd say, 'Well, I've gotta go home now.' And 1 found out years later he had no home. He'd go into the subway and ride it 'til it was time to come back to worl (playing standards in a hotel lounge). Just before Nichols died, Neidlinger promised him that one day he'd record an album of Nichols' music with strings, the way Nichols often imagined them. Blue Chopsticks, on Neidlinger's own K2B2 Records, is the fulfillment of that promise, though the orchestral arrangements Nichols probably had in mind proved impractical. Instead, Neidlinger applied the same approach he used with his own StringJazz ensemble when the group interpreted the compositions of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk on the Soul Note album Locomotive. He took the music of pianists and performed it in small ensembles.without pianists. And for Blue Chopsticks, he took it one step further. Nichols recorded almost exclusively in trios of piano, drums and bass. "I 1eft out the piano, and I left out the drums, and I left out the bass , all for different reasons," says Neidlinger. "There was a guy in town who was telling all the contractors that I couldn't play jazz bass, so I thought.-he tilts his eyes skyward in an attitude of mock humility-"maybe he's right, so I played the cello on that album instead. And then I could never find anyone to play the piano in the way that Herbie played it. And then drums - I'm very down on drummers. I want a drummer to match up to certain qualities and I don't know any that do except for Vinnie Colaiuta, and he's not available, he works for Sting. If Philly Joe Jones was alive, I'd call him." One night, Neidlinger had a dream that he, Krystall, brassman Hugh Schick, and violist Jimbo Ross and violinist Richard Greene were playing Nichols' tunes, and he decided to make it a reality, though only the dreamer was familiar with the material. Nevertheless, without arrangements, using only lead sheets and chord changes, with only three four -hour rehearsals and two six-hour record dates, the quintet whipped together a recording that's nearly shocking in its originality and musicianship. Richard Greene is the greatest living blue grass violinist,. says Neidlinger. "He's the bluegrass boy, and has the belt buckle to prove it. He traveled with Bill Monroe and played in that band." So it should be no surprise that Blue Chopsticks strays rather far from the bebop milieu in which its compositions were created. Greene and Ross are old partners, so their teamwork is effortkssly telepathic. Greene shows off with a sharp accelerando violin solo to introduce the bumblebee chug "Cro-Magnon Nights.". And listen to the two's tight barn dance work on "The Gig," Neidlinger has been playing with Krystall for 25 years now. "When we started, he played totally free jazz," says Neidlinger. "But now he knows all about the chords, the working out of a melody! He has an angular way of playing that works with Monk." It works just as well with Nichols, whose bent phrasings and idiosyncratic chord juxtapositions have often been compared to Monk's - the pianists both came up in New York around the turn of the '40s. You can hear Krystall to good advantage on the slow-stepping, straw-hat-waving blues of "2300 Skidoo," his breathy tenor solo bouncing through the chord changes like cones through the boughs of a pine. Or consider his chromatic improvisations within the dense, understated ensemble work of "Nick at T's," whose "Saber Dance" riff is set off by Neldlinger's tripped up walk on cello. And Schick is never left behind: especially notable is his sensual trumpet spot on "The Lady Sings the Blues" (which Nichols wrote with Billie Holiday), whose soulful cello intro, withit's series of searing two-note chordings, also shows Neidlinger at his most commanding. You miss the percussion at first, but soon reaize the problem is your preconceptions, not the music. The leadoff tune, "BIue Chopsticks," tells you all you need to know about Neidlinger's concept: forceful 16th-note bowings supply the beat, and counterpoint exchanges add rhythmic depth to a bunch of surprisingly catchy tunes. Neidlinger's success in studio work means he's occasionally able to make make market-unconsious recordings like Blue Chopsticks and that he doesn't have to rely on playing jazz for a living. "A lot of people have made me feel like I should be guilty for not playing jazz full time," he says. Charlie Haden put me down because I didn't devote my entire existence to The Music, as he puts it. But sometimes you have to veer off and do something that people like, or else do something that you can earn a living doing. All music to me is, if I want to play it, I just do. That's why I play bluegrass, and old-time jazz, and whatever. Each music is it's own challenge-that's what I thrive on." Judging from the mud he slings at fellow music professionals, Neidlinger also thrives on a certain amount of antagonism. He speaks softly, strokes his beard and eviscerates his victims with lurid tales of their narrow-mindedness, venality, artlessness and sexual peccadillos. (A certain famous symphony conductor: ("If you could bend over, you'd be his favorite.") Oh - and an alert to critics: Neidlinger warns that he labels his promo CDs with a code for each addressee, and has spies to tell him when copies show up in "used" bins. He says one L.A. scribe turned Blue Chopsticks around in just two weeks. There's an element of perversity to all this: playing the music of pianists without pianos, deliberately bucking the trends of the business, gleefully debunking the myths of jazz purity. Still, Neidlinger is a likeable guy, if you take your abrasiveness with a little milk and sugar. One myth of musicians is that they're individualists; here's one of the few who lives it, all the way. |
