The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

Allen Ginsberg apparently told fellow poet Robert Creeley that, following several critical and artistic successes, he needn’t worry about writing a bad poem anymore, he could “afford to”. I’m not sure about that, but maybe you get to a point where, after so much practice and experience, it doesn’t worry you so much and so, in an improved “flow state” you simply don’t write one. Here are two musicians who are extremely unlikely to produce a bad record, together or apart, but that doesn’t mean there are no surprises. Part of being that good as an improviser, as opposed to being an excellent surgeon for instance, is to lay oneself open to accidents, to mistakes…pursue them even: there’s something eternally unfinished about it.

The material here is a mix of tunes by both composers, and the contrast in their approaches makes for an interesting repertoire. John Scofield has always been more like a songwriter for me, whereas Dave Holland, like Mingus, favours ambiguous chord structures in which the soloist must create their sense of place. Where Holland’s sound is full, round and even, Scofield’s is wilfully choppy and revels in its inconsistencies. (In the recent documentary “Inside Scofield”, he talks about how he is “uncoordinated” but makes up for it in his determination to make the notes work). The crackle and buzz of Scofield’s slightly cranked up amplified sound cutting across the rock-solid softness of Holland’s tone creates a wide open space of possibilities.

Scofield’s opening “Icons At The Fair”, based on the chords of Scarborough Fair, sounds a bit like a Frisell-styled opening, all drone and mystery, but it soon moves into a deep swinging head, albeit one interrupted by an eccentric handbrake turn of a phrase that preserves his love of the askew. Already, the pulling of strings, play of accents and sheer dirt is rendering a drum kit not only unnecessary but positively inappropriate. “Meant To Be” feels more like a standard here than in its previous quartet incarnation, but Scofield’s tunes never move with that Tin Pan Alley inevitability…they may sound like standards because they are beautifully constructed, but they’re full of strange jumps and interruptions between worlds, where jazz progressions take on a folk-edged hue and vice versa. However, “Mine Are Blues” turns out to be exactly that, and it’s where the real depth of these players’ approaches shines most, the guitarist constantly undermining jazz licks with blues asides, skewing lines with bends and tonal variation, and even evoking Jim Hall comping over Holland, who’s sheer drive and energy makes you forget he’s playing an instrument almost as tall as the person playing it.

“Memorette” has a typical off-centre (but catchy) Scofield riff at its centre that elevates it beyond the “jazz waltz” (thank God that genre hasn’t yet spawned an actual dance to accompany it). Holland’s “Mr B” is a dedication to Ray Brown and has a chord sequence that zigzags through red herring tonalities in a way that is fertile ground for improvisers. “Not For Nothin’” is an asymmetrical Holland bassline, characteristically groovy and jagged – Scofield responds to its M-Base prods with a series of smears and bends broken up by fierce runs that manage to sound virtuosic and offhand all at once. “Easy For You” is a reminder that Scofield might be (along with Steve Swallow) the greatest living songwriter for improvisers, and “You I Love” again shows Holland’s compositional penchant for dissonance and disguise, perhaps a nod to the Tristano school of contrafacts (not fake truths but tunes written on the chords of existing standards).

The biggest surprise for me was Dave Holland’s “Memories Of Home”, a tune I could have sworn was written by the guitarist until I looked at the sleeve notes. It moves simply but never where you think it will, the guitarist injecting it with all kinds of emotion, then wailing through a solo, and in doing so questioning those “jazz values” so prevalent these days: evenness of sound, consistency of attack and uniformity of rhythmic feel. Holland’s solo is almost a whole new melody that darts across the whole range of the instrument without losing itself or resorting to histrionics.

As the final statement of the tune ends, it feels like a wrapping up of the whole album, as if some mysterious process of symbiosis between them had been unfolding throughout and culminated here, in a tune that could have been written by either musician. The casual nature of this encounter belies, or perhaps creates the iconic status of the music, and we’ll never know where the mistakes were, because they are already transfigured into gemstones of sound by the time they reach us.

(https://ukjazznews.com)