As
the more vivid and visible
jazz blossoms fade and fall, certain
long-overshadowed players feel the warm
rays of popularity, and so we meet the
great saxophonist Sam Rivers on a rainy
opening night in Hollywood.
When he celebrated his 75th birthday last
fall in New York, a bunch of the cats
he'd been playing with came to see him,
such as Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, Jack
Walrath, Britt Woodman and James Carter.
Of course, there were a lot more he
palyed with who couldn't make it, guys
like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and
Bill Evans on the famed side and Don
Wilkerson and Jacki Byard on the
not-so-famed side.
On Cahuenga Boulevard, Tuesday's audience
was sparse but intense -- and young.
Young, too, were his bandmates Doug
Mathews, bass; and Anthony Cole, drums.
But like the music, they were not to be
confined by custom, so their roles
included excursions for Cole on tenor
saxophone and for Mathews on bass
clarinet.
They
would pick up these horns
and flank the unquenchable Rivers in
extended free jazz passages, providing
wonky counterpoint as the maestro barked
and crooned, uttering ferocious squiggles
and kindly tendrils of sound on his
soprano or tenor saxophone. Hearing
these, you knew right away why he had to
leave Miles Davis after a single tour
back in the 1960s. He was too far ahead
of him.
"Beatrice," named after his
"lovely wife of 50 years,"
brought from his tenor saxophone gruff
but tender arpeggios that were brawny and
chesty. Here you could feel his affinity
for Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill and Andrew
Cyrille, among his many other musical
companions.
"Iris," a flute piece that drew
a bead on "There Will Never Ever Be
Another You" from a great nocturnal
distance, was more merciful to the ear,
the instrument being more difficult to
undress.
It was one of several
creatively distorted ballads presented by
the versatile trio. Cole played piano on
one, free as a buzzard in a style he no
doubt absorbed from the generous Rivers,
who teaches, and Rivers played piano on
another, in his Cecil Taylor vein.
It was really quite an evening. This is
the avant-garde without question --
inventive and intellectually challenging
as you could ask for.
Yet
Rivers, who has led many
cutting-edge bands in New York and now in
Orlando, where he and Beatrice make their
home, kept it drenched in soul. It was
like all of a sudden Bartok started
rocking out.
