Evocation: Jimmy Giuffre @ 100
Prescient yet tradition-bound, modest but innovative, the clarinetist and saxophonist was a jazz cult hero whose music turns up in the most unexpected places.
by Ben Ratliff
In his perceptive new book, Finding the Raga, the Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri puts a name to something that perhaps many of us have experienced: “double hearing.” He describes a period in his 30s when he became reacquainted as a listener with Jimi Hendrix’s blues playing, and realized that the minor pentatonic scale of the blues is identical to a scale found in certain kinds of ragas Chaudhuri knows as a singer of North Indian classical music. With a turn of his head, the blues became a raga or vice versa, no matter if that thought might seem contradictory or confusing.
When I listen to Jimmy Giuffre, the clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, arranger and hero of the recessive strain in American jazz — he would have turned 100 on April 26 — I’m double hearing all the time. His records often suggest connections, usually through some quality of inner motion or atmosphere or harmonic relations, toward other traditions far from his own. Some of those connections can appear contradictory or confusing. Some of them are to music that didn’t exist when he was creating his own. Some of them are to musical expressions that do not seem to square with what type of guy Giuffre was.
What type of guy was he? White; Texas-raised; a 1940s dance and swing-band player whose first landmark work was as composer-arranger of the 1947 Woody Herman song “Four Brothers,” which led to an often-copied four-saxophone style and helped define the sound of Herman’s popular second Herd. Later, he became a 1950s West Coast jazz progressive and a respected arranger both for his own projects and for jazz singers like Anita O’Day; also, a maker of drummerless, folkish Americana miniatures that threaded improvisation through baroque counterpoint and became quite popular. (His meditatively relaxed clarinet sound in the late ’50s centered in the lower register, and his tenor saxophone voice sounded so elegant and congenial, so rooted in Lester Young and swing-band aesthetics, that he seemed to belong in two eras at once.) Later still, in the early 1960s, he was a New York free-jazz improviser, both soft and hard-edged. To hear this, visit the strange and sensitive trio sessions for Verve with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, reissued much later by ECM as Jimmy Giuffre 3, 1961, and the challenging bite of that same group’s record Free Fall, on Columbia, from the following year.
After that, he became a bit elusive. The major labels couldn’t use him, and his focus fell off. (The ’70s were a demeaning time for about half the extant jazz tradition.) But Giuffre’s work between 1956 and 1962 — everything around it seems like prelude or postlude — asks us not to attend so much to its outward aspects of technique or style but to its wiring and gears, just as Chaudhuri did with Hendrix and the ragas. When we do, the music’s interior doors seem to swing open, connecting to all sorts of sounds from different times and places.
For instance: a slow piece for clarinet, guitar and trombone called “The Green Country,” from Giuffre’s Trav’lin’ Light, released by Atlantic Records in 1958, during a period when that label had pinned some commercial hopes on him. In it I hear modal affinities with the Grateful Dead, as well as Tears for Fears’ “Head Over Heels.” That same year, Giuffre also made The Four Brothers Sound, in which he multitracked his tenor saxophone to suggest four separate musicians. A corny concept; a smart, surprising execution. The album contains a track called “Blues in the Barn,” and when I hear its beginning I can drift into believing that it was written 25 years later by Julius Hemphill and/or the World Saxophone Quartet. Its middle contains an interlude by Jim Hall on guitar and Bob Brookmeyer on piano, presumably composed by Giuffre, which seems to share a mode or scale-based similarity — à la Chaudhuri’s discovery — with the Doors’ “L.A. Woman.” (If you want to really double hear, try playing “Blues in the Barn” from two different streaming windows and start them any number of seconds apart. It doesn’t matter whether the beats line up. You’ll just hear more of Giuffre’s counterpoint.)
This is getting weird, I know. More? OK, sure. In movements 9 and 13 of his astringent clarinet-and-orchestra piece Mobiles, recorded in 1960 in Baden-Baden, I hear the clustered-strings background of Scott Walker’s “It’s Raining Today.” In the Americana pieces of the late 1950s, the most famous of which was “The Train and the River,” you can detect a blueprint for Bill Frisell’s music a few decades hence. And in the Giuffre-Bley-Swallow trio, there is a suggestion of Evan Parker, Franz Koglmann and lots of European experimental improvised music that followed.
What’s going on here? Who was this stethoscopist, this future-seer, this non-joiner in a music of togetherness? Why would a mellow player, a figure of West Coast cool and something of a commercial arranger, become highly enthused (as he did) about a musician as far apart from those dispositions as Ornette Coleman? How did he suggest presents and futures that weren’t verifiably adjacent to his own world? And why has he so often been discovered in retrospect?
Some of these later musicians may have only heard Giuffre’s lessons indirectly, or simply shared musical affinities with Giuffre that go back much further in time. Some might have liked his records or (as in the cases of Parker and Koglmann) found them essential. It doesn’t really matter. But I like to think that Giuffre’s own sense of hearing, which he transferred to his music-making, wasn’t pointed toward an outwardly defined future or a past but an interior present. He usually got there by counterintuition or subtraction. He abjured grandiosity or loudness or cliché, and this instinct led him toward flowing, horizontal counterpoint writing (instead of the vertical chord voicings that had been standard in big-band writing); chorale-like structures and vamps that don’t lead to a big event but are the big event; folk or blues ideas with no clear point of origin, as opposed to the composer-as-genius model in postwar jazz; and minimal drums or none at all. This last tendency might be the hardest one to come to terms with. Giuffre wasn’t soft-selling jazz by taking the drums out. He wasn’t afraid of a beat. He was re-contextualizing it. He wanted you to listen closer, not for you to lean back and tune out.
Giuffre, who died in 2008 at age 86 from complications of Parkinson’s disease, represented the opposite of a brand. He served jazz well by complicating it and essentially writing himself out of it. His creativity was decisive, but also easily camouflaged, or hard to track, and for long stretches barely documented at all. His ongoing obscurity reduces to the fact that we still don’t know what to do with him, how to write the one-sheet on him. For instance, I am convinced that the live blowing-session record he made for Verve at the Five Spot in 1960, The Jimmy Giuffre Quartet in Person — with Jim Hall on guitar, Buell Neidlinger on bass and the 18-year-old Billy Osborne on drums — has not been reissued because of the confusion it would engender. At times it burns, it surges, and history tells us that this is the guy who made quiet music without a drummer. But find it, hear it, hear it again and then double hear it: Allow whatever it proposes and confuses.
