Volume 26 Issue 5 - February 2021

BRIAN MCMILLEN
Frank Kimbrough
A couple of days ago I was practising the
bass – for what, I couldn’t tell you – when I
began playing a blues in F. And sure enough,
just like always, the structure was 12
bars long.
transparency from them have made things worse. Sometimes it seems
like they’re making it up as they go along. Then there’s the mounting
socio-economic and psychological fallout from all of this, hence the
Twilight Zone fog we’re stumbling around in, as if somebody opened
up a great big can of WEIRD. The horrific and (almost) shocking
events of January 6 only served to ratchet up the insanity of everything
a few notches. A couple of days later while swimming upstream
in this mucky soup, I began laughing out loud while drooling slightly
as a strange thought hit me: compared to all of this, jazz seems
normal, a veritable oasis of reason, order and sanity. How often do you
hear that?
Throughout its history, except for a couple of decades in and
around the 30s through the 40s when it was popular music, jazz has
suffered from a reputation of being confusing, flighty, inaccessible, too
complex and abstract to be really enjoyable. Its practitioners were seen
as low-life bohemians, drunks and drug addicts who wore strange
clothes and affected insider hipster dialogue. Like weirdsville – dig,
baby. And all this was before jazz discovered atonality. Like the coronavirus
itself, jazz cannot be seen or touched. Really it can only be heard
and felt, but at least it won’t make you sick or kill you – at least not
most of the time. But it’s only taken life during a little old pandemic to
make jazz seem solid, almost intelligible.
For example, a couple of days ago I was practising the bass – for
what, I couldn’t tell you – when I began playing a blues in F. And sure
enough, just like always, the structure was 12 bars long and no matter
how many different chord-change variations I played, it always went
to a B-flat 7 in bar five. And the particular minor-major dichotomy of
that chord change had the same thrilling and mysterious rub as ever.
It’s nice to know you can count on something these days.
It’s the same with jazz records. For the umpteenth time the other
day I listened to “Shoe Shine Boy” from the immortal 1936 Jones-
Smith Incorporated session which marked Lester Young’s recording
debut. And it knocked me out just as much as always – the
darting velocity and swing of it, Young’s swooping two-chorus
masterpiece solo as brilliant and daringly inventive as ever.
Ineffable, yet carved in stone.
Then over to Kind of Blue, and sure enough, Jimmy Cobb’s
cosmic ride-cymbal splash just ahead of Miles Davis’ solo
entry on “So What” – still for me the most magic moment of
many on that magical record – was still there in all its glory.
It’s not that I expected these and other gleaming gems to have
changed – after all, once music is recorded, it’s fixed in place
forever and I know that. But these days, you find yourself
wondering.
Jazz is neither weird nor confusing. Like everything else, it only
seems so if you don’t understand it, or at least try. But life with
COVID is decidedly weird and confusing. The only saving grace is
that like wars, pandemics eventually end, whereas jazz is forever.
Thank goodness.
Sound the Knell Again
As I mentioned in a previous column, 2020 was a horrible year for jazz
musicians dying and unfortunately this parade has continued through
early January. New York pianist Frank Kimbrough died of a sudden
heart attack on December 31 at the age of 64. A very creative improviser/composer
and a revered teacher, Kimbrough was known for his
long association with the Maria Schneider Orchestra, for founding
the Herbie Nichols Project with bassist Ben Allison, a longtime
collaborator, and for being a charter member of the Jazz Composers’
Collective. His last recording was the ambitious 6-CD 2018 release,
Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere
Monk, with multi-reedman Scott Robinson, bassist Rufus Reid and
drummer Billy Drummond. Kimbrough died far too young and his
death will leave a big hole.
Composer/arranger Sammy Nestico, best-known for his prolific
writing for Count Basie, died on January 17 at 96. At least he made it
to a ripe old age and if I had a dollar for every time I played one of his
Enjoy live music from home!
ONLINE EDITION
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