jazzhouse.org

[James Hale]

THE ANTIGROOVE

by Mike Zwerin

Copyright (c) 2006 Mike Zwerin

The term “Euro-Jazz” is used pejoratively in the U.S., meaning “they don’t swing.” It is in fact a euphemism for “white.” While in Europe, on the other hand, it has become a sort of badge of post-colonialist honor, and the “ECM Sound” personifies it.

Paul Motian’s recent ECM album Garden of Eden exists in space more than time. It would work as an alternate soundtrack for the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. Based in Munich, ECM Records has been releasing über-intellectual, spacey music made by a variety of races and nationalities since 1969 - the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Pat Metheny, Dewey Redman, John Surman, Tunisian oud player Anoar Brahem, Moldavian pianist Misha Alperin, Brazilian multi-instrumentalist and composer Egberto Gismonti.

First imported to the U.S. by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, 4/4 swing seems to be increasingly politically incorrect. ECM has been relying less and less on American grooves. A groove is an African concept, not taught in European conservatories until maybe a decade ago. A groove is the basis of what is called “swing,” and swing is not native to Europe.

Django Reinhardt swung, but he was a Gypsy. Igor Stravinsky’s composed swing into “The Rite of Spring,” but it took flocks of fly-specks in the score, and a plethora of tempo-changes to do it. Now it has come full circle - there is a French jazz band (not on ECM) with the in-your-face name: Antigroove Syndicate.

The ECM Sound tends to hover like a Scandinavian winter night, motionless as a zen master meditating. Listening to the Jan Garbarek, or to the Swedish tenorman Trygve Seim, for example, you wonder if the sun will ever rise again. ECM artist the Swiss pianist Nik Bartsch leads a group called Ronin, which means a samourai warrior, and which makes what might be termed post-Reichian minimalism - Steve Reich also recorded for ECM. Bartsch calls it “funk zen.”

At the root of what has become ECM’s franchise sound are Gil Evans’s impressionistic arrangements for Claude Thornhill’s dance band in the 1940s. Evans described them as “a sound that sits there like a cloud.” The sound was deployed by Miles Davis, who hooked the cloud to the slots of the likes of Philly Joe Jones and Tony Williams. Davis’s misty 1969 album In A Silent Way was a giant step in the de-emphasis of the groove. It is no coincidence that ECM was founded the same year.

ECM’s founder and producer Manfred Eicher has been accused of being responsible for “New Age” music, but that’s probably a bad rap. Though the fact remains - musicians everywhere are shunning vigorous African-American-based grooves. More and more sets in clubs start with a dirge rather than a medium bounce. Recently, I’ve heard, for example, Bill Frissel, Joe Lovano, and Branford Marsalis energetically avoid a walking bass and a ding-ding-de-ding on the ride cymbal for entire one-hour sets. What little pulse there was was camouflaged behind odd time signatures. We are not living in groovy times.

You have to admire a respected veteran bebop drummer like Paul Motian choosing to make such a flagrant “antigroove” album. This does not sound like a drummer’s record. Motian is the sort of drummer Chet Baker was talking about when he said that you need a very good drummer to sound better than no drummer at all.

Motian’s first track, Charles Mingus’s “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” is the ECM Sound brought to orgasm. The implied time Motian is famous for reaches under to support and massage the haunting melody, and to trigger stirring improvisations by saxophonists Chris Cheek and Tony Malaby. If only Euro-Jazz sounded like that more often.

With its trademark heavy reverb, the ECM Sound can be supremely pessimistic. Echoing the current bad news, it is stark and hypnotic and pertinent like a play by Samuel Beckett. Africa seems very far away. Does the antigroove really lead to the “Garden of Eden?”

Mike Zwerin lives and writes in Paris. He is the jazz columnist for Bloomberg News, which originally distributed this piece. You can find Mike on the Web at www.mikezwerin.com.

[David Whiteis]

Disregarding for a minute Zwerin's insistence on "swing" (instead of, let's say, "funk") as his "groove" sine qua non, this piece raises some considerations that a lot of folks don't like to talk about but which I, personally, have been thinking about for quite some time. Much of what even many of the most accomplished European improvizers are doing these days seems so abstract and mathematical, so devoid of blood and sinew, that it moves neither the mind NOR the body.

Here in Chicago (home of the AACM) a lot of "Euro-jazz" artists peform on a semi-regular basis. Much of their music is intriguing, even emotionally involving. But all one needs to do is to spend an evening in the presence of Fred Anderson, Avreeayl Ra, Nicole Mitchell, Hamid Drake, Ari Brown, Kirk Brown, or any of the legion of others whom AACM has nurtured through the years, to realize what's missing from too much of what the visitors are putting down.

Recently Don Moye came through town and performed a set at the HotHouse. No horns -- only percussion, electric bass, and electric guitar. It was an unforgettable afternoon of soul-stirring, boogity-shoe FUNK, impelled into life by Moye's dancing-spirits-of-the-ancestors percussion magic. I can't think of a "Euro-jazz" artist who could have come close to even taking the stage with Moye and his crew, let alone reproducing any of the music -- nor can I think of any who could have so effortlessly and indelibly represented the AACM's well-known aphorism, "Ancient To The Future."

(Just to make sure no one thinks I'm Crow Jimming here, by the way: a lot of white musicians who studied and learned from the music pioneered by Ornette/Coltrane/Ayler/AACM-era "free" trailblazers [let's start with Ken Vandermark] also compose and improvize with deep soul, and are no strangers to "the groove." AND, for that matter, a good listen to what the JazzBaltica Ensemble sounded like in October of 1992 under the directorship of David Murray should dispel any illusion that European jazz artists are incapable of finding and celebrating that very same groove, if given the opportunity and the inspiration.)
_________________
Listen!