SPINcycle -- October 10
eye WEEKLY
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eye WEEKLY October 10, 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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SPINcycle spinCYCLE
by
TIM POWIS
This week: Firespitters and jerk jazz (as in Jamaican style).
* JAYNE CORTEZ & THE FIRESPITTERS/Taking The Blues Back Home
(Harmolodic/Verve/ PolyGram): A blues-inflected harmolodic-jazz-cum-
poetry session led by Ornette Coleman's ex-wife on Ornette's own label
with Ornette and Jayne's son Denardo on drums -- which can be a real
drawback, but he actually sounds better here than he did on, say, last
year's Tone Dialing by Ornette and Prime Time. That's not to say
Denardo doesn't pull off the occasional stumblebum fill, but the
biggest problem with this album is none other than Jayne Cortez, whose
idea of incisive political commentary consists largely of college-
radio hokum like "operation same old right-wing multinational think-
tank manipulation of history." She fares better away from politics,
but frankly what I'd like to hear is Cortez's band -- which includes
saxophonists Frank Lowe and Talib Kibwe and Ornette's former guitarist
Bern Nix -- on its own, without words.
* DELAWARENESS/Excellent In Woe (Independent): Starting on a
deceptively New Agey tip with nylon-stringed guitar player Larry
Lewis's "Come Away Death," this is actually a highly likeable album of
acoustic chamber jazz recorded at the Music Gallery by a Toronto trio
that also includes soprano saxist/bass clarinettist Tim Abbott and
bassist George Koller. Besides eight original pieces there are two
nicely rendered Thelonious Monk numbers ("Hackensack" and "Evidence")
as well as Irving Berlin's "Cheek To Cheek" and a surprisingly
effective rendition (featuring singer Meredith Hall) of "Music For A
While" by the 17th-century British composer Henry Purcell, who seldom
gets covered in jazz circles.
* JAZZ JAMAICA/Skaravan (Hannibal/ Denon): The title track is a ska
version of Duke Ellington's "Caravan" and I'll be damned if it doesn't
sound like this is how God intended "Caravan" to sound. The ska-rific
cover of Charlie Parker's "Barbados" is almost as good. Contrary to my
expectation, the track called "Ramblin' " isn't the semi-famous
Ornette Coleman number but an equally infectious song by trombonist
Rico Rodriguez, a founding member of the Skatalites. Hard-hearted
jazzbos might say much of the soloing is more workmanlike than
inspired, but when the grooves are this infectious such an observation
seems churlish.
* GREG OSBY/Art Forum (Blue Note/EMI): The cover artwork mimics
classic Blue Note sleeve art from the '60s, and the music -- a clean
departure from saxophonist Osby's recent hip-hop experiments -- owes a
good deal to some of the more adventurous music that Blue Note brought
forth in that decade: Andrew Hill's Point Of Departure, for instance,
or Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch. (Dolphy's name, oddly enough, does not
appear in the roster of inspirational jazz figures Osby includes in
Art Forum's sleeve notes; Hill's does.) There's a contemplative, moody
cast to most of this album's music -- and also, once you penetrate the
somewhat forbidding surface, a lot of excellent playing, particularly
by the leader and the underrated pianist James Williams.
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