Kenny Barron & Regina Carter
Inside Out
For some jazz fogies, improvising without any predetermined material is still, to borrow Robert Frost’s put-down of free verse, like playing tennis without a net: a fringe activity with a suspicious lack of discipline, a lazy rejection of skill and order. This quaintly reactionary position helps some free-jazz players and fans pretend they’re cutting edge, outlaws under siege. The subtitle of the documentary Continuum, showing at the Siskel Film Center as part of its music-movie series this month, is “Why the Jazz Establishment Can’t Hold Down Matthew Shipp”–as if the establishment weren’t busy marketing his many CDs and pitching magazine articles using his outsider pose as a hook.
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Three recent CDs show how easily free play fits into the jazz mainstream, and the variety of approaches in common usage. On their duo album Freefall, pianist Kenny Barron and violinist Regina Carter play mostly standards and originals, but slipped in between “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” and “Footprints” is the free-improvised eight-minute title track. Neither party is known for this sort of thing, although Barron came up in the freewheeling 60s and Carter–best known for her heavily produced mainstream and commercial discs–apprenticed in the String Trio of New York and Mark Helias’s quartet, where open improvising is part of the mix.
Keith Jarrett’s long-running trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette (performing Friday, November 9, at Orchestra Hall) mostly plays standards but gets an itch to play free once in a while too; having developed a group style through playing standards, the three can maintain the style even when they throw out the material. Jarrett and DeJohnette also played on Miles’s loosey-goosey free-leaning 1970 electric records At Fillmore and Live-Evil. And Jarrett’s improvising and composing styles have always been influenced by Ornette Coleman and by Paul Bley, the first pianist who figured out how to follow Coleman when he drifted off the script, twisting a form out of shape or temporarily jumping to another key. In the 70s Jarrett had a quartet with Ornette’s bassist Charlie Haden and tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman; Peacock was in Bley’s great 1970s trio, and before that was the string-thwacking mainspring of Albert Ayler’s peerless threesome.
In the last 20 years, more sophisticated models of group interplay have sprung up; Europe’s Globe Unity and ICP Orchestra, among other bands, have figured out how to marshal larger forces, via spontaneous entrances and exits, shifting allegiances, seizing and abdicating control. On most busy scenes, in fact, musicians who frequently encounter each other in one-shot gigs and insufficiently rehearsed recording sessions develop ways of operating that their peers can recognize and react to, ways to keep things varied without clumsy collisions.
