The Sign of Three: Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard
by Mark Schiebe
- Fly: Sky & Country (ECM, March 2009)
My personal and admittedly partial lineage of the jazz saxophone trio starts with Sonny Rollins’s pair of 1957 recordings Way out West and A Night at the Vanguard. Way out West was a studio album, with bass icon Ray Brown anchoring and Shelley Manne on drums. The cover pictures Rollins in full cowboy get-up, Stetson, gunbelt and holster, the lone hornman in the desert. The explosive live set entitled A Night at the Vanguard paired the saxophonist with Wilbur Ware (bass) and the young and still developing Elvin Jones (drums), who three years later would storm the citadel with the John Coltrane Quartet. Rollins was instinctively attracted to the trio configuration for a couple of reasons. The absence of another horn provided extra space for his tenor explorations, allowing him to develop at length thematic seeds he planted in the early choruses of a solo and which often bore brilliant fruit on the tenth or even fifteenth chorus of the song. Charlie Parker, the inventor of bebop saxophone playing, who had died three years earlier, once said that anything more than two choruses was “just practicing.” Rollins might have responded that anything less than two choruses was “just warming up.”
The idea of a horn playing “on” chords without a piano “comping” the harmony behind the soloist had been pioneered at least five years earlier when Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker formed their “pianoless quartet,” which allowed Mulligan to compose melodies for two horns in counterpoint, rather than the standard (then and now) horn melody in unison with the piano supplying the harmony. Rollins seemed to like the pianoless format because he was an intensely lyrical player who emphasized the priority of melody over harmony, and without a piano filling in a preexisting harmony he could, in the process of improvising, discover new harmonies under the standard melody of the song. So beginning with Mulligan/Baker and Rollins, the pianoless format had really been a kind of jazz frontier; it was about what could be done with more space, both in terms of melodic development and harmonic freedom.
The pianoless format became far more common in the 1960’s after Ornette Coleman’s pioneering free jazz albums from 1959. On The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century the leader’s elastic blues lines and trumpeter Don Cherry’s spastic explosions were heard in a kind of improvised counterpoint with bassist Charlie Haden, a running dialogue between horn and bass. This music was less about melody against harmony, and more about melody against melody. In Stockholm in 1965, Ornette recorded in the saxophone trio format with bassist David Izenson and drummer Charles Moffett on Live at the Golden Circle, this time ditching his trademark plastic horn for a metal one. (His playing was never the same…) By 1961, Coltrane’s pianist McCoy Tyner was “laying out” large sections of the leader’s solos, allowing Coltrane to conduct his explorations simultaneously vertically and horizontally. In 1964, the tenor player Albert Ayler recorded Spiritual Unity in New York City with the like-minded Gary Peacock (bass) and Sonny Murray (drums). Peacock and Murray think more texturally than rhythmically, creating washes of sound, while Ayler communes with Dionysius through blues-drenched howls and screams. No words could do justice to the sustained and joyous energy of Spiritual Unity, a record that has achieved cult status but has made less headway among wider groups of jazz listeners.
By the 1980’s then, a substantial if slender body of saxophone trio work had been recorded. It took the master tenor player Joe Henderson twenty-five years before he tried the format, recording State of the Tenor live in 1985 at the Village Vanguard with Miles Davis alums Ron Carter on bass and the underrated Al Foster on drums. Two years later, with the crucial substitution of Charlie Haden for Carter on bass, Henderson’s trio recorded a sublime live set in France (An Evening with Joe Henderson). The archetype for this trio’s style is most certainly the early Rollins recordings, as Haden “walks” quarter-note bass lines throughout the set, but his superior sensitivity to the harmonic nuances of Henderson’s playing sets up breathtaking moments of improvised counterpoint as they explore such Henderson favorites as the Latin-colored “Invitation” and Thelonius Monk’s knotty ballad “Ask Me Now.”
In 1988, bassist Dave Holland pared down his usual quintet and sextet linups to give extra space to the innovative young alto saxophonist Steve Coleman on Triplicate. Joined by his frequent cohort Jack DeJohnette (drums), the result was one of Holland’s freshest records to date – far more spontaneous than much of his last five or six efforts, which have fallen into comfort and predictability. Coleman has gone on to become an important bandleader in his own right. The 80’s and early 90’s brought the “young lions,” a new generation led by Wynton Marsalis (and his institutional backers) dedicated to a resurgence of “respectable,” tradition-based approaches. Wynton’s brother Branford is joined Reginald Veal (bass) and powerhouse drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts for the post-Coltrane exercises Bloomington and The Dark Keys, where no new ground is broken. And a more recent, self-conscious trio effort was recorded by another young lion, tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, who is arguably the current jazz improviser with the widest audience. (Sincerest apologies to Kenny G fans who think he is a jazz musician). On Back East, Redman tips his (cowboy) hat to Rollins by covering two of the latter’s selections on Way Out West, and employing a variety of trio configurations featuring a handful the best postbop players on the New York scene (bassist Larry Grenadier of Fly appears on six of the tracks). On Back East, Redman does what he does well, taking elements of the tradition (in this case the trio tradition), and distilling them into a style that is uniquely his, always tasteful and soulful, though never quite goose bump inducing.
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All of which brings us to Sky & Country, the second release from the New York-based jazz trio Fly, comprised of Mark Turner on tenor saxophone, Larry Grenadier on bass, and Jeff Ballard on the drums. Fly’s roots are west coast as Grenadier and Ballard met playing in high school and college together in the late 70’s in northern California and Turner grew up in Long Beach. Predictably, after their paths diverged, all three ended up in the thriving New York postbop scene in the 90’s and Grenadier and Ballard currently form the rhythm section of the pianist Brad Mehldau’s important trio. Two of the most in-demand players on their respective instruments, Grenadier has toured extensively with such high-profile acts as the Joshua Redman quartet and the Pat Metheny trio, while Ballard is a member of Chick Corea’s working band. Turner, who has recorded four albums under his own name (check out Dharma Days), had also worked with Ballard for several years as a member of the guitarist (and kindred spirit) Kurt Rosenwinkel’s group. So when the three decided to form Fly in 2002 and to record their eponymous debut two years later, there was already a deep familiarity and a lot of shared territory.
The band does not identify as a saxophone trio, as they strive toward a more collective approach to trio playing, with no one instrumental voice as the leader. This in itself is not novel, the idea having been pioneered fifty years ago by the pianist Bill Evans, who allowed equal creative freedom to the traditionally subordinated bass player and drummer. This approach in a saxophone trio, at least on such self-conscious terms, is somewhat new, however. “What we do in this band,” Ballard says, “is work collectively. I always use gears and mechanics as an analogy. The way we’ve written the tunes, there are these functional elements. A bass arpeggio may be outlining the chords, but it’s also laying down the rhythmic foundation, which any of us might respond to. It’s wide, it’s not constricted. But what I love about it is the interdependency.” Turner adds: “We’re trying to distill that element of interdependency within the repertoire. We’ve been writing music where the tunes themselves will make that apparent. And the solo sections are engineered, in a sense, with that in mind.”
Turner, Grenadier and Ballard eschew such currently fashionable gimmickry as covering British pop and indie rock tunes (done sublimely by Mehldau and less successfully [though with some commercial success] by the Ethan Iverson-led piano trio The Bad Plus). Instead, their compositions are all originals, with each band member contributing material. For Fly, composition and improvisation are seamlessly integrated, and on Sky & Country it often sounds as if the compositions are mere sketches setting up melodic or rhythmic motifs, and leaving an optimal amount of room for each player to explore. Turner commented on the trio format in an interview for Jazz Weekly, “I like the simplicity of it. It is just three people… There is no…How can I put it… Harmonic middleman.” It is on the one hand an album that takes on a kind of rarefied mood, full of hints and guesses. Says Ballard, it’s about “filling the spaces, and not filling the spaces. It’s about what’s inferred, what’s in the air.”
This, of course, is the introspective side of the group. What makes Fly work is a heady blend of introspection with groove, plenty of which is provided by Grenadier’s supple, funky bass and Ballard’s irrepressible polyrhythmic undertow. On “Lady B,” the opening track, Turner displays his vaunted command of the tenor’s altissimo register, soaring and landing in unexpected places, pursued and sometimes overtaken by Ballard’s ecstatic thirty-two-note answers. Those of us who have seen Turner live know the collective breath-holding that takes place during these flights. His sound and vocabulary are utterly his, a wicked fusion of Coltrane and (the largely forgotten west coast tenor great) Wayne Marsh. On the title tune Turner plays soprano saxophone, the first time I have heard him do so. The song begins with Turner and Grenadier reticent, almost testing tones, picking the sound palette, before a meandering rock feel is established by the bass and drums. Turner’s soprano floats above the groove as he gets an almost flute-like tone from the horn, prodded lightly by Ballard’s bass drum suggestions. On this track, as on others, these musicians make the stripped-down sound of the trio format work to their advantage, achieving a lazy, pensive flow – a modest, even a minimalist sound.
Sky & Country is a record whose beauty lies in its nuances, Turner’s grace notes as he slips into or out of a melodic run (the “wow: he did that on purpose” moment comes on the third or fourth listen…); the way Ballard tunes each drum in his set, conceiving of each as a separate instrument; the contrapuntal consonances and dissonances established by Turner and Grenadier. Frankly, this is a difficult, demanding record because of the uncompromising musicianship of those involved. Yet the payoff is well worth the effort. Sky & Country is a noteworthy step forward for these three players, all of whom stand at the pinnacle of the art form, and who have collectively produced the best saxophone trio record since Joe Henderson’s collaboration with Charlie Haden and Al Foster twenty-two years earlier.
