THE STRAIGHT HORN OF RUDI MAHALL / Bebop (Dizzy Gillespie). Good Bait (Tadd Dameron). Sechseinhalb Brüder (Mahall-Giuffre-Mulligan). The Mystery Song (Duke Ellington). Petite Fleur (Sidney Bechet). Unbewusst im Puff (Konitz-Dameron). Pee Wee’s Blues (Russell). 17 West (Eric Dolphy). In-stable Mates (Benny Golson) / Rudi Mahall, cl; Simon Sieger, pno/tb; Joel Grip, bs; Michael Greiner, dm / Two Nineteen Records 2-19-12, available for purchase at Bandcamp
“Everyone hates the clarinet. It was then, and still is today, a pretty much out-of-favor instrument in jazz music. You can’t get anywhere with the clarinet.”
That quote from Rudi Mahall, who started out on a regular clarinet before switching primarily (but not exclusively) to the much more in-favor bass clarinet several years ago, opens the liner notes for this album. But we should ask ourselves, “Why?”
Because, as the late clarinetist Frank Powers once told me, it’s a very difficult instrument to play well…not as difficult as the soprano saxophone, which replaced it in jazz, but still pretty hard, especially when you’re playing it very fast all the time. It began to fall out of favor during the bebop era, despite the presence of virtuoso Buddy de Franco and Benny Goodman’s and Artie Shaw’s flirtations with bop, mostly because no modern black jazz musician would play it. The last “new” clarinetist of note to arrive on the scene was another white player, Tony Scott, who played the instrument with a breathy, reedy tone like his predecessor Pee Wee Russell, although bop alto saxist Art Pepper also played excellent clarinet on occasion. But I think the main reason why the regular clarinet died out was because it was a sweet-sounding instrument and sweet sounds were “out” in modern jazz. And even when Pee Wee Russell himself recorded an album of mostly modern tunes by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane (Ask Me Now!), he was largely ignored by the jazz community at large.
This album mixes a serious intent to re-establish the clarinet as a modern jazz instrument with some very tongue-in-cheek humor—for instance, the title of Sechseinhalb Brüder translates into English as “Six and a Half Brothers,” a take-off on both Jimmy Giuffre’s iconic Four Brothers and Gerry Mulligan’s lesser-known sequel, Five Brothers. But even the arrangements themselves are full of wildly funny ideas, such as the manic arrangement of Dizzy Gillespie’s Bebop in which single-note piano doubles the clarinet’s line while bassist Joel Grip moans and grumbles down below and drummer Michael Greiner splashes cymbal licks all over the place, and when they get into the improvisation they suddenly all jump off the cliff into a cacophonous free-fall. Gillespie is thus dragged, probably kicking and screaming in the afterlife, into the post-modern free jazz scene.
In Tadd Dameron’s famous Good Bait, it’s the rhythm that gets skewered, broken up into irregularly-metered fragments. The band sounds like a bunch of newbies trying to put these broken pieces back together again, and it’s all great fun. (Mahall and trombonist Simon Sieger, who is otherwise out pianist, stress the humor by playing a fraction of a beat off from each other.) Once they reach the improvisation, however, the beat maintains a steady 4 and Mahall plays an excellent solo, as does Sieger on the trombone, proving that he does know how to play the instrument. In the final chorus, Mahall and Sieger are back to their musical mischief, first playing the theme very quickly and then slowing it down and converting it to a 6/4 rhythm—then back again to playing out of synch with one another.
The liner notes explain Six and a Half Brothers better than I could:
Our version begins with prepared drums and bowed double bass playing their part of the Rudi Mahall composition Vier Halbe (Intakt Records, 2012), which he wrote on the chords of Four Brothers. A joint clarinet and piano solo leads directly into Gerry Mulligan’s 1949 composition Five Brothers, played by all in unison. 4 Brothers + 5 Brothers divided by 4/2 equals Six and a Half Brothers = Sechseinhalb Brüder.
Ummm, OK if you say so. I’ll take your word for it. Nonetheless, with the bass and prepared drums ostensibly struggling to find the beat, and a lick that sounds as if it’s being played by a toy piano, the overall effect of this track is something akin to Spike Jones lampooning bebop. Eventually, as in the preceding track, the piano somehow lags slightly behind the beat. When they reach Five Brothers about 3/4 of the way in, the tempo slows down to a lugubrious tempo as both piano and prepared drums drop about two octaves, dragging the music across the finish line.
The liner notes tell us that this version of Duke Ellington’s 1931 Mystery Song is based more on Steve Lacy’s 1961 recording than the original Ellington version. Nonetheless, it’s still a wonderful rendition of this ahead-of-its-time piece and, for the first time in this recital the band seems to be taking the music seriously, with good results. Mahall’s solo on this one is really exceptional, highly inventive tet respectful of the advanced chord changes, as is Sieger’s trombone solo. Here he tries to pay tribute to Ellington’s legendary trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton by using a plunger mute, but like all plunger-muted trombonists since Nanton, Sieger plays “wah-wah” instead of “yah-yah.”
Next up is a famous piece by a famous clarinetist, and the first soprano sax virtuoso in jazz, Sidney Bechet. This is played (more or less) in a straightforward way, at least until the break where Mahall suddenly derails himself in terms of pitch and rhythm and the rest of the band gleefully jump into this mess to join him instead of trying to rescue him. Mahall eventually gets lost in a flurry of flutter-tongued notes, ending with a raspberry played through the horn, before eventually finding the melody for the ride-out.
Unbewusst im Puff combines two contrafacts based on What is This Thing Called Love?, Tadd Dameron’s Hot House and Lee Konitz’ Subconscious-Lee. Again there is a certain amount of purposely disjointed playing from the musicians in the group, although Sieger’s single-note piano lines struck me as more serious and sober than Mahall’s playing in the first half, but later on it is Mahall who “plays it straight” while Sieger somehow falls behind by a hair while the bass and drums just say “to hell with it” and go on their merry way, ignoring both of them (yet eventually falling into tempo behind them).
Considering that this is, at heart, an avant-garde jazz group, it’s sometimes hard to tell the tongue-in-cheek musical jokes from the serious moments, however. This was especially true of Pee Wee’s Blues, a piece that the clarinetist composed in the early 1950s. Despite a few purposely corny squawks from Mahall, however, this is pretty much a “straight” reading of Russell’s very strange piece. Sieger again provides an excellent trombone solo. In fact, considering that he plays more trombone on this album than piano, I thought of him more as a trombonist who also plays the piano than a pianist who also plays the trombone. At any rate, on this disc, he comes across more as a pianist who very ably fills in behind Mahall but a trombonist who is every bit his equal as a soloist. (We have one such musician here in Cincinnati, Kim Pensyl, who plays both piano and trumpet. At a local concert about a dozen years ago I said to my friend Carol, “I’d like to see him play both at the same time.” And wouldn’t you know? On one number he DID! Left had playing the piano while his right hand played the trumpet!)
Pee Wee Russell gives way to Eric Dolphy, in this case 17 West. Despite the rhythm section playing some totally different rhythms from Mahall and Sieger (on piano), this is a relatively straightforward performance and a good one. Here, Sieger’s piano solo has some very strong Monk overtones, which is odd because, although Dolphy liked Monk, the feeling was not mutual. This one really goes out on a musical limb, but from start to finish they are deadly serious about the music for once. Mahall’s solo, though respectful of Dolphy’s style, does not copy him.
The final selection is described by Greiner in the liner notes as taking Benny Golson’s Stablemates with its odd structure—a 14-bar A section with an 8-bar bridge—and here it sounded to me as if the group combined seriousness with nutty humor.
But this is a wonderful and often wacky CD that will provide you with hours of enjoyment upon repeated listening. There’s so much to follow here, and sometimes there is seriousness underneath the humor and vice-versa.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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