Download - Downbeat

Trio 3 + Geri Allen
Celebrating Mary Lou Williams
Intakt 187
HHHH
In the past few years, alto saxophonist Oliver
Lake, bass player Reggie Workman and
drummer Andrew Cyrille, who together are
known as Trio 3, have taken to the habit of
inviting pianists to perform with them. Their
initial collaboration with Geri Allen, 2009’s
At This Time, did not fully deliver on the
promises, but on this new occasion the quartet
realizes the full extent of its potential.
Perhaps, the idea of honoring great pianist
and compoer Mary Lou Williams gets the
creative juices flowing. Not only do they pay
tribute to her music, they also embody her
spirit because Williams was never afraid of
innovation as witnessed by her famous duel
with Cecil Taylor.
While the band does not embrace such
radicalism, it takes a wide range of approaches
and appropriates the material—Lake actually
makes “Intermission” his own. The compositions
the musicians cover are for the most
part deeply steeped in the blues, but the new
life they are given helps prevent the mood
from getting too somber.
In this context, Allen really shines and
confirms that she is currently going through
one of the most creative periods of her career.
She gives the whole range of her talents. Her
main attributes and talents are condensed on
her solo on “Blues For Peter.” Her performance
is so strong that Lake cannot help but
chiming in for some commentaries.
Ultimately, this live date does not simply
make a case for how inspired Allen is or how
tight a unit Trio 3 is. To the musicians’ credit,
it underlines if it was necessary how modern
and relevant the music of Mary Lou Williams
was and still is.
—Alain Drouot
Celebrating Mary Lou Williams—Live At Birdland New
York: Birdland; Blues For Peter; Ghost Of Love; New Musical
Express; Intermission; What’s Your Story, Morning Glory; Libra;
Roll’Em. (67:17)
Personnel: Oliver Lake, alto sax; Geri Allen, piano; Reggie Workman,
bass; Andrew Cyrille, drums.
Ordering info: intaktrec.ch
Books | By Ted Panken
Terry Memoir
Revels In
Humor, Passion
Midway through his sparkling memoir,
Clark: The Autobiography of Clark
Terry (University of California Press),
the author brings readers backstage at
Washington D.C.’s Howard Theater, circa
1948. Count Basie, his most recent
employer, is informing his “Old Testament”
band that the end had come.
As he does throughout the book’s 58
chapters (co-authored with Gwen Terry,
his wife), the trumpet grandmaster, who
turned 90 this year, addresses the scene
with emotion, humor, concision, acuity
and analytical discernment.
“We all knew about Basie’s monumental
debts from losing on those damn
ponies,” he writes. “And since we’d also
been bitten with the sweet and sour
sting of gambling, nobody said a word.”
Terry then encapsulates the salient
qualities of his bandmates, not one
of them “a copycat of anyone in the
world,” each having “mastered a sound that
reflected his unique personality.” Dickey Wells,
he writes, “was older than most of us, and I admired
his neatly trimmed moustache. He was
a master of the slide trombone, with his octave
jumps, slurs, slurps, and bends that sent notes
swirling. His sound was gut-bucket raw and
soul-stirring. One of his features was using a
tin straight-mute. He’d hammered lots of nail
holes in it. He held it reversed in the bell of his
horn, and it made a very signature kazoo-like
sound, like a magnified version of an old comb
covered with tissue paper.”
A host of similarly pithy, eloquent evocations
of the picturesque cast of characters with
whom Terry has crossed paths during his brilliant
career appear as the narrative unfolds. We
meet Duke Ellington and his band members.
Quincy Jones and Miles Davis appear at different
stages of their lives. Terry paints a vivid
portrait of his impoverished childhood in St.
Louis—early adventures with colorfully nicknamed
friends, constructing his first trumpet
from scavenged junk, learning to box proficiently,
navigating an ambivalent relationship
and eventually falling out with an exceedingly
strict father, receiving the loving kindness of
his older sister. His journey takes him on the
ballyhoo with a carnival band and Depressionera
Mississippi Valley juke joints. He also observes
the gangsters who ran big venues in St.
Louis and idiosyncrasies of the musicians who
played for them.
Terry writes matter-of-factly about race,
spinning no small number of stories that illuminate
the challenges black troubadours faced
on the road during Jim Crow days. Humor is
never far away, though—read Terry’s account
of sharing an upstairs room with Basie in a private
home in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and try not to
laugh. He reveals unabashed pride at his World
War II service at Great Lakes Naval Training
Center, where he helped whip into shape
a host of all-black bands. He picks apart the
pros and cons of integrating Charlie Ventura’s
first-rate swing band and, 15 years later, the
“Tonight Show” orchestra, a gig that granted
Terry first-call status on New York’s peripatetic
“Mad Men”-era studio scene.
He offers equal time to the sensuous, profane,
erotic components of his character. Terry
drinks, cusses, devours tripe sandwiches, attends
to bodily functions, gambles without
much skill, is expelled two months before
graduation for impregnating a girl with whom
he enters unhappy matrimony. As he moves
into and through his 20s, he liaisons with
shapely women of dubious virtue, neglects
his son and eventually settles into love and a
stable, mature marriage.
Nothing if not a blues epic, the narrative is
also a true-grit portrait of a diligent, inspired artist.
From the end of his first decade through his
ninth, Terry focuses on his craft, and evolves
into one of the great virtuosos on the trumpet
timeline, a disciplined master of the art of section
playing and a formidable improviser. At the
cusp of the ’70s, he transitions from the studio
assembly line to a freelance career revolving
in equal measure around jazz education—he
plunged into it with the same fierce passion
that marked all his prior activity—and leading
ensembles of various sizes. DB
Ordering info: ucpress.edu
DECEMBER 2011 DOWNBEAT 101