Smoke gets in your eyes [Hannibal Marvin Peterson]

Now's The Time (1992)

Hannibal Marvin Peterson (trumpet)
John Hicks (piano)
Richard Davis (bass)
Tatsuya Nakamura (drums)

The great Marvin "Hannibal" Peterson

See these posts: Tell me about the blues: Trane,Ornette, Hannibal, Hannibal Lokumbe: "The most sacred place I've ever heard music performed in is a cotton field in Elgin, Texas," and this one over at 3QD: Tell Me About The Blues. From that last one:

I do believe that the worthies of the Pulitzer Prize committee should award some kind of prize to Hannibal. In my opinion he’s as interesting a composer as that other trumpet player. I mean no disrespect. Wynton Marsalis is a fine player, composer, and band leader. But he hasn’t led no army across no Alps on no elephants! I’m just sayin’. Yes, I understand you prized Ornette Coleman, Henry Threadgill, and Anthony Davis and you gave posthumous awards to Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane. Thank you very much. But Hannibal ain’t dead, not yet. Don’t let his dreadlocks put you off. It’s only hair. Now’s the time. Get on it.

Tell me about the blues: Trane, Ornette, Hannibal

Where have we been? We started with Old School jazz, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and Henry Allen. Then we zipped ahead a couple decades to hear the very different blues of Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and Frank Foster, blues shorn of much of the funk, but not the juice. The juice is always in the performer, not the specifications of the tune. Then we went back to fill-in the interval. Duke Ellington and Count Basie aren’t so far from Louis Armstrong but they work with the full force of a big band and so have more sonic resources and have to devote more attention to scheming out the course of a performance.

Then Charlie Parker showed us what happens when you fill the blues up with a zillion chord changes. Can you push that any further without the form collapsing in on itself? Monk increased melodic angularity to the point where the melody split into two streams. Mingus turned the form back on itself into an endless loop. How does it end? Miles washed all that away in the radical simplification of “All Blues.”

Now we’re going to continue on with John Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.”; jump off the deep end – well, not quite – with Ornette Coleman’s “Broad Way Blues”; and become a snake swallowing its own tail with Hannibal Lokumbe.

John Coltrane: Mr. P.C.

John Coltrane is a tenor saxophonist who came up in the late 1940s on through the 1950s and apprenticed with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. That is to say, he came up as a bebopper, learning that style inside-out. Through his work with Davis he got ready to move on. That’s what we see him doing in “Mr. P.C.”, from his Giant Steps album, which was released early in 1960. He’s poised at the precipice.

Giant Steps came out at roughly the same time as Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), on which Coltrane played. The title tune, “Giant Steps,” is known for its difficult chord changes to be taken at a furious tempo. “Mr. P.C.” – named after Coltrane’s long-time bass player, Paul Chambers – is just as fast, perhaps faster, but the chord changes are more tractable. It’s a 12-bar blues in a minor key, which is common enough, but not so common as blues in a major key (though we should keep in mind that the blues tonality, if you will, is neither major nor minor, but something else). The fact that it is in a minor key puts it within the ambit of the modal jazz on Kind of Blue and which Coltrane would embrace whole-heartedly soon thereafter.

Let’s listen:

Coltrane starts right on the melody, which takes a standard blues form:

1) The first 4-bar phrase consists of a 2-bar phrase that goes up and then comes back down (bars 1 & 2); it is followed by a 4-note phrase in the third bar, which alternates on two pitches.
2) The second 4-bar phrase repeats the opening 2-bars, but transposes them up, to follow the shift in harmony (bars 5 & 6); it is followed by the same phrase we heard in bar 3, and on the same pitches.
3) The phrase in bars 9 and 10 is different from the one in 1 and 2, 5 and 6, but return to that same 4-note phrase in bar 11.

Easy-peasy.

Coltrane plays the melody twice and them launches into a solo (0:22). Listen closely for phrases that he repeats at various points in the solo. Listen as well for the parts where he hangs on a dissonant note (e.g. 0:28, 0:43, 0:49, etc.) and where he plays little (and not so little) runs that go chromatic (e.g. 0:34). There’s a nice cry at 2:26. In the next chorus plays rapid arpeggios (starting at 2:37) down and up and down and up for eight bars or so; there are more rapid runs in the next chorus (starting at 2:53). He’s building up a head of steam. Trane finishes his last chorus with the melody (3:18). He’s signaling that he’s done. Now Tommy Flanagan gets a piano solo – forgive me if I don’t offer some play-by-play; I’m burnt out. At 4:54 Trane starts to trade fours (that is, four bar phrases) with the drummer, Art Taylor. We return to the head at 6:25, for two choruses, and we’re out.

Ornette Coleman: Broad Way Blues

Ornette Coleman is an alto saxophonist and is Coltrane’s contemporary, a couple years younger. But, while Trane was based on the East Coast, Coleman matured out West, in Los Angeles. Nor did he apprentice in bebop. He created his own apprenticeship. Thus when he came East in 1959 no one knew what he was doing. He played a plastic alto sax and his compatriot, Don Cherry, played a funny looking little pocket trumpet. Are these guys for real, playing toy instruments and music that don’t make no sense no how. Sheesh! Yes, they’re for real. Some people dug them strait off, others had to warm up, and some never did.

He recorded “Broad Way Blues” in 1968 on New York is Now. It’s not a blues in any conventional way of thinking about such matters. And yet, in a somewhat less conventional way, it’s as all blues as “All Blues,” if not more so. Why don’t you give it a listen and see if it makes sense to you:

Make sense? Yes? No? Maybe? Or perhaps you did not try to make sense of it and it just sounded wonderful, though perhaps a bit sideways.

It sounded that way to me. When I tried to count it out, I got lost. So I looked at the sheet music. 22-bars long. That’s not a blues form, it’s not a 32-bar standard, it’s not made of 4-bar phrases (adding up to, say, 16 bars). And there are some bars in there that don’t count out to four beats; they’re in six. When solo they – Dewey Redman joins Ornette on tenor – time undergoes a different discipline, courtesy of Elvin Jones.

Let’s take it easy. I’ve been doing this for a while and my brain is running low on the neuro-transmitters that make for quick shifts of concentration. So I’m going to minimize my attempts get timings for you. But I’ll do this much: The melody starts at the beginning. That descending line at about 0:13 – the first one in the tune – is in six. We play a quick cyclic flurry across the bar and land on two quarter notes to end the first part of the head. We return to the opening figure at about 0:17, at bar 14, to begin the second part of the head. The descending line at 0:21 is in 6. We jump to come down in the next bar, up for a bar, and down for two. We’re at the end of the head. Starting at 0:28 we go around again, then into solos, where everything is up for grabs.

So listen and grab some why don’t you. Coleman is endlessly lyrical, no?

Hannibal Lokumbe: "The most sacred place I've ever heard music performed in is a cotton field in Elgin, Texas."

New Music USA
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Frank J. Oteri's conversation with composer/trumpeter/raconteur/poet/community activist/force of nature Hannibal Lokumbe is a roller coaster ride that is part testimonial, part reminiscence, part philosophical manifesto, and part performance art, but all pure emotion, as you will see in this video presentation by Molly Sheridan. He explains where he found the sounds that inform his music, how "the spiritual land mass of humanity is music," and why he feels there is "no us and them" between musicians and the audience. To read their entire conversation, please visit NewMusicBox: http://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/hannibal-lokumbe-always-go-with-the-feeling.

From the interview:

FJO: I was hoping you could explain what that means to you and how—if other musicians and composers, as well as concert presenters and others are mindful to that—it could result in a different experience in making music.

HL: Well, my initial encounter with music was in the kitchen of my mother and my grandmother, but collectively, it was in the cotton fields of Elgin, Texas. So I saw no “us” and “them,” you know, it was all us. And to this day, the most sacred place I’ve ever heard music performed in is a cotton field in Elgin, Texas. So I don’t let a room take that from me, take from me the fact that my grandfather would sing a certain pitch when the sun is over your head and it’s unbearable. He would say [sings], “I love the Lord; he heard my cry.” Then the rest of us would say [sings], “I love the Lord. He heard my cry.” Then he said [sings], “Bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me.” Then somebody said [sings], “Yes, Lord. Mercy. Yes, Lord.” But because I’m sitting in a box seat at Carnegie Hall or the Kimmel Center, if I feel that presence of the ancestors in what I have struggled and given my blood to produce, I can’t say, “Yes, Lord.” I can’t say, “Yeah, Hallelujah.” If I can’t say that, then something’s wrong. Then all that I experienced is a lie. All that I experienced is nothing. All that I’ve experienced is second to any other culture, and I don’t see that. So if I feel the need to testify, that’s what I’m gonna do! And I always encourage the people to do the same, because what would it be without the people?

The spiritual Pangaea of humanity:

Of course, there was Pangaea. The physical example of the oneness of everything and everyone—that’s Pangaea. That was the land mass. Well, the spiritual land mass of humanity is music. No matter where you go, you’ll hear a common human tonality if you listen for it. But if you go saying what I hear is greater than this, you won’t hear the commonality. You’ll miss out on all that richness. Music is the spiritual Pangaea of humanity.

There's much more at the link.