{"id":105752,"date":"2016-12-12T17:20:14","date_gmt":"2016-12-12T22:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105752"},"modified":"2016-12-12T17:52:59","modified_gmt":"2016-12-12T22:52:59","slug":"quiet-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/12\/quiet-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"Quiet Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Frank Kimbrough\u2019s album\u00a0<\/em>Solstice\u00a0and the late Paul Bley.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

From the cover of Paul Bley\u2019s Open, to Love<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

As a journalist, I have often had to explain to an English-speaking audience the rise of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant prejudices in France. But on election night, I found myself in the temporary offices of the radio show France Culture<\/em> in midtown Manhattan, explaining to a French audience the triumph of the same prejudices in my own country. Struck by (though far from relishing) this irony, I was reminded of a novel I\u2019d reviewed for the London Review of Books<\/em> last year<\/a>, Michel Houellebecq\u2019s dystopian Submission<\/a><\/em>, in which a demoralized France elects an Islamist presidential candidate backed by the Gulf states. In the final pages, the hero, a pathetic white male academic named Fran\u00e7ois, converts to Islam because he fears being deprived of a future in a country where darker-skinned worshippers of Allah have taken over. Our president-elect is a Muslim hater, not a Muslim, but he, too, was catapulted to power with help from influential friends abroad, and his millions of supporters were driven by related fears of finding themselves without a place in an increasingly multicultural society\u2014victims of what the French fascist theorist Renaud Camus has called \u201cthe Great Replacement.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I returned home at four in the morning, I poured myself a whiskey and reached for the nearest CD, Gil Scott-Heron\u2019s 1974 album,\u00a0Winter in America<\/em>: a title that seemed almost cruelly appropriate even if it was still November. I listened to his Watergate monologue, \u201cThe H20gate Blues\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019m sorry, the government you have elected is inoperative. Click, inoperative<\/em>. Just how blind will America be? The world is on the edge of its seat. Defeat on the horizon. Very surprising that we could see the plot and claim that we could not \u2026 How long will the citizens wait, it\u2019s looking like Europe in \u201938, did they move to stop Hitler before it was too late? \u2026 Four more years, four more years, four more years of that<\/em>?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I found comfort in Gil\u2019s words, and I\u2019ve returned to them frequently in the last few weeks. But as fall has turned to winter and the president-elect has formed a cabinet so outlandishly right-wing that not even the\u00a0Onion <\/i>could have invented it, the album that has provided me with the deepest consolation is a jazz piano trio with no political aspirations, and indeed no words at all: the pianist Frank Kimbrough\u2019s Solstice<\/em><\/a>, released by Pirouet in November. The absence of rhetoric is particularly refreshing at a time when we\u2019ve been inundated with rhetoric. In a climate as coarse, bullying, and deceitful as ours, sometimes the most subversive response is not to engage directly with authority, but to dance around it, creating what\u00a0Deleuze and Guattari called \u201clines of flight.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Music, the most abstract and least referential of the arts, has this potential in abundance. It can communicate beyond language, and therefore, as Ornette Coleman said, \u201cin all languages.\u201d Some might consider a record like Solstice<\/i> to be an escape from the real\u2014a charge once raised against abstract art\u2014but I hear it as offering a different entry point\u00a0into <\/i>the real, those lower frequencies of expression that political language tends to render inaudible. I hear a\u00a0work of such bewitching lyricism that I have found myself humming its melodies on the street.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What accounts for this powerful vocal quality, I suspect, is Kimbrough\u2019s long-standing association with singers, starting with his early mentor Shirley Horn, whose plaintive, heart-stopping account of George Gershwin\u2019s \u201cHere Come the Honey Man<\/a>\u201d is re-created to exquisite effect on Solstice<\/em>. In recent years, Kimbrough has also collaborated with the classical soprano Dawn Upshaw, and with his life partner, the jazz vocalist Maryanne de Prophetis, who wrote the hushed, evocative title track. The nine songs on Solstice<\/em> are best experienced as a wordless cycle, a narrative that takes us through states of turbulence and longing, mourning and rapture. Solstice is not so much their subject as their condition of possibility: a moment of intensified contrasts of darkness and light, when the sun is at its greatest distance from the celestial equator.<\/p>\n

Of course, solstice<\/em> can also refer to a climax or peak, and this album represents both for Kimbrough, who recently turned sixty. Working with two exceptionally sensitive musicians\u2014the bassist Jay Anderson and the drummer Jeff Hirshfield\u2014he has made the album of his career, a work characterized by what Miles Davis liked to call \u201cquiet fire.\u201d Long admired by his peers for the beauty of his touch and the grace of his phrasing, Kimbrough has never attracted a large audience, or attempted to ingratiate himself with one. On the contrary, he has spent much of his career celebrating the work of other <\/em>pianists\u2014notably Herbie Nichols, a brilliant Harlemite of Trinidadian origin who wrote hundreds of idiosyncratic tunes (among them \u201cLady Sings the Blues\u201d) but could hardly get them heard before he died of leukemia in 1963, at forty-four. Kimbrough has also been a champion of his friend the late Andrew Hill, whose Blue Note recordings in the sixties wedded hard bop to a gloriously ruminative modernism; on Solstice<\/em>, Kimbrough covers \u201cFrom California with Love,\u201d Hill\u2019s hauntingly elliptical ballad from his 1978 album of the same name.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

But Kimbrough\u2019s greatest influence, by a considerable margin, is the late Canadian pianist Paul Bley. A bebop prodigy who cut his 1953 debut with Charles Mingus and Art Blakey<\/a> when he was barely out of his teens, Bley was leading a band at the Hillcrest Club in Los Angeles a few years later when a young, bearded alto saxophonist from Texas showed him that you didn\u2019t have to improvise on the basis of chord changes\u2014the foundation of bop. As Bley put it in his memoir, Stopping Time<\/a><\/em>, \u201cwe were all waiting for something, we knew not what. Unknown to us, we were waiting for Ornette Coleman to join our band at the Hillcrest Club<\/a>.\u201d During his 1958 stint with Coleman, he realized that \u201cA-A-B-A was over, to be replaced by A to Z.\u201d Bley would adapt Coleman\u2019s \u201charmolodic\u201d ideas to the piano, much as Bud Powell had done for Charlie Parker\u2019s bebop improvisation.<\/p>\n

Solstice<\/em> was recorded only a few months after Bley\u2019s death at eighty-three in early January of this year, and it contains ghostly echoes of Bley\u2019s work, not only in the repertoire but in Kimbrough\u2019s clarity of articulation and his singing tone. Bley never achieved the fame of Bill Evans, who, in Bley\u2019s words, \u201calready owned 99 percent of the jazz piano business\u201d when he settled in New York in the early 1960s, but his range and influence may turn out to be greater. In fact, Bley changed the history of jazz piano twice in the space of a decade.<\/p>\n

The first time was in 1963, in a two-minute solo on Sonny Meets Hawk<\/em>, an album that paired two of the finest tenor players in the history of jazz, Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins. As Kimbrough wrote shortly after his death, Bley blithely ignores the chord changes of \u201cAll the Things You Are\u201d in his solo<\/a>, almost miraculously playing \u201cwhere the harmony was GOING.\u201d (The guitarist Pat Metheny, another Bley admirer, called this solo a \u201cshot heard \u2019round the world.\u201d) A few months after that session, Bley completed the tracks on his breakthrough trio with the bassist Steve Swallow and the drummer Pete \u201cLa Roca\u201d Sims,\u201d Footloose<\/a>. <\/em>The album introduced a more lyrical, contemplative alternative\u2014freely interactive yet melodic\u2014to the furiously percussive style of free jazz pioneered by the pianist Cecil Taylor<\/a>, who had combined the orchestral approach of Duke Ellington with the bent notes of Thelonious Monk and the dissonances of European modernism. Keith Jarrett\u2019s trio with the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the bassist Gary Peacock\u2014a Bley collaborator since the early 1960s\u2014is inconceivable without Footloose, <\/em>as Jarrett himself has acknowledged.<\/p>\n

The second time that Bley altered the course of jazz piano history was on September 11, 1972, when he recorded the solo piano album Open, to Love<\/em>, in an Oslo studio, for ECM Records. Open, to Love<\/em> is an obvious precursor to albums like The K\u00f6ln Concert<\/em>, which appeared three years later on the same label, but it inhabits an entirely different expressive universe<\/a>: austere, almost secretive, impervious to the kind of extroverted romanticism that made Jarrett\u2019s album the best-selling solo-piano record in history. The power of Open, to Love<\/em> lies in in the notes that Bley withholds<\/a>, as much as in those he plays; his silences suggests awkward hesitations, phrases broken off prematurely, and they lend the album an intimate, sometimes disquieting frisson.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Bley was the first of two great Canadian-Jewish musicians to die this year. The other was, of course, his fellow Montrealer Leonard Cohen, who was two years his junior. Like Cohen, Bley luxuriated in melancholy; he often seemed to want (to quote Cohen) to \u201cmake it darker.\u201d He also shared Cohen\u2019s interest in women\u2014not just as muses but as creative partners. Much of the music that Bley recorded (when it wasn\u2019t fully improvised on the spot) was composed by Carla Bley, his first wife, whom he met when she was working as a cigarette girl at Birdland in the midfifties; and by the singer Annette Peacock, his bandmate Gary Peacock\u2019s former wife, who became his partner from the midsixties through the early seventies. Open, to Love<\/em> featured tunes by both of them, and so does Kimbrough\u2019s Solstice<\/em>, which opens with Carla\u2019s lamentation \u201cSeven,\u201d and includes two of Peacock\u2019s best-known pieces, the slow, somber \u201cAlbert\u2019s Love Theme\u201d and the Andalusian-accented \u201cEl Cordobes.\u201d His only contribution as a composer, \u201cQuestion\u2019s the Answer,\u201d suggests a cousin of the midtempo, noirish tunes that Carla wrote for her former husband on Footloose<\/em> and other albums.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t mean to suggest that Bley\u2019s female muses, who went on to distinguished careers of their own, share a single sensibility. Carla Bley, for all her ironical poses, is a closet romantic, a balladeer at heart; Peacock has explored eerier, near-vanishing states of being, which attracted the notice of David Bowie when he heard her 1972 debut record, I\u2019m the One<\/em>. Yet their compositions share something that Paul called an \u201cinevitable\u201d sound, thanks to a structural starkness verging on immateriality: their scores are fragile organisms, created out of small melodic fragments and asymmetrical silences. They are ideal, in other words, for adventurous improvisers like Bley and Kimbrough. As the critic Arrigo Cappelletti has written in a perceptive study of Paul Bley\u2019s work, this is music that \u201cgoes to the limit of silence. The pauses and the irregular intervals between phrases do not function only as musical punctuation,\u201d but express \u201ca desire for extreme authenticity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his search for expressive authenticity, Paul Bley was joined not only by his former partners, but by the drummer Paul Motian, who made his name with Bill Evans and the bassist Scott La Faro at the Village Vanguard; and by the bassist Charlie Haden, another Ornette Coleman disciple, who recorded with Motian and Bley in one of the great trios of the 1980s. Motian, who played in one of Kimbrough\u2019s bands, died in 2011, Haden in 2014. I hear strong echoes of the Bley-Motian-Haden trio<\/a> on Solstice<\/em>, particularly in Kimbrough\u2019s cover of Motian\u2019s \u201cThe Sunflower,\u201d where Hirshfield\u2019s solo evokes the shimmering timbres of the cymbals Motian cherished.<\/p>\n

Yet for all of Kimbrough\u2019s homages to Bley and other heroes, Solstice<\/em> is not a commemorative or nostalgic work so much as a stately, delicate declaration of renewal. If it begins with the elegiac tones of \u201cSeven,\u201d it concludes with an achingly hopeful ballad, a slow, gorgeous aria composed by the jazz orchestrator Maria Schneider (whose pianist Kimbrough has been since the early nineties). The title is \u201cWalking by Flashlight\u201d: solstice brings rebirth, Kimbrough suggests, yet it also forces us to wander through a new and uncertain landscape that we cannot yet see. There is something very honest\u2014and therefore all the more moving\u2014about this tentativeness. Music alone is not enough, but so long as we have it, it can provide what Stendhal called a promise of happiness, illuminating the darkness.<\/p>\n

Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the\u00a0<\/em>London Review of Books\u00a0and a fellow in residence at the New York Institute for the Humanities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Kimbrough\u2019s new album \u201cSolstice,\u201d Adam Shatz hears an uplifting, lyrical escape from our beleaguered political 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