Charles Fambrough - R.I.P.

After a long bout battling liver disease and many years of suffering, the great jazz bassist Charles Fambrough passed away on Saturday, January 1, 2011. Fambrough had apparently been awaiting a transplant match. Several musical tributes were held in Philadelphia over the last several years to help Fambrough and his family pay the bassist's outrageous medical expenses.

Philadelphia resident Charles Fambrough was born on August 25, 1950. Fambrough studied classical piano throughout his elementary and high-school years. He gravitated to bass at the age of 13, attempting to imitate Paul Chambers, the first jazz bassist he ever heard. He began studying classical bass in the seventh grade but gave it up in 1968 to begin working in the pit bands for such theatrical productions as You Can't Take it With You and By e-Bye Birdie and, by day, playing on The Mike Douglas Show.

In 1969, Charles began working with a cover band called Andy Aaron's Mean Machine that also featured a young saxophonist by the name of Grover Washington, Jr. A year later, Charles joined Grover Washington's road band, staying with the saxophonist during his popular CTI years. In 1975, Fambrough joined Airto Moreira's band, where he stayed for two years until joining legendary pianist McCoy Tyner's group, playing on Tyner's Focal Point (1977), The Greeting (1978) and Horizon (1979), as well as Rahsaan Roland Kirk's Boogie Woogie String Along For Real (1977)—his earliest known recordings.

Upon leaving Tyner's group, Fambrough hooked up with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers at about the same time Wynton Marsalis was part of the group, recording with the great jazz drummer from 1980 until 1982 and featuring on the pivotal Album of the Year (1981). Fambrough once said “McCoy showed me how to play with endurance. Art gave me refinement.”

He continued, “With McCoy, the gig is about speed and strength. He plays so much stuff that you're lucky if you're heard, so you struggle to keep up with him. But with Art it was a lot different. He heard every note you played and if there was anything raggedy, he immediately let you know about it. He really taught you how to play behind a horn player, how to develop in a rhythm section.”

Surprisingly, Charles Fambrough made his own solo recording debut on Creed Taylor's famed CTI Records in 1991 with The Proper Angle, an excellent, star-studded affair featuring Wynton Marsalis (who featured Fambrough in his first band in 1982) and Roy Hargrove on trumpet, Branford Marsalis and Joe Ford (who first met Fambrough on a McCoy Tyner gig 13 years earlier) on sax, the late, lamented Kenny Kirkland on piano, Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums (both Kirkland and Watts featured with Fambrough in a trio at the time dubbed “Jazz From Keystone”) and Steve Barrios, Mino Cinelu and Jerry Gonzalez on percussion. The record is the first bassist-led date on CTI Records since the legendary Ron Carter in 1976 and it's clear that Fambrough, like Carter, was a bassist who could lead an interesting jazz record of his own. It also ranks among the very best the label issued during its 1989-98 resurgence.

The Proper Angle was not only one of CTI's only straight-ahead albums of the time, it also showcased some of jazz's best young lions at the top of their game. It surely proved that Fambrough was a tremendously capable leader adept at helming a band of great improvisers who worked beautifully well together and it introduced the bassist's amazing facility for interesting composition (”The Dreamer,” “Sand Jewels,” “Broski,” the bassist's nickname from his Jazz Messenger days, “Dolores Carla Maria,” named for Fambrough's wife and widow, a singer of great renown in her own right, “Earthlings,” “The Proper Angle,” “One for Honor,” originally written for McCoy Tyner's Horizon, and the beautifully titled “Our Father Who Art Blakey,” named for the drummer who had passed away the year before).

Fambrough issued two more records on CTI, The Charmer (1992), featuring Roy Hargrove on trumpet, Kenny Garrett on alto sax, pianists Bill O'Connell, Kenny Kirkland and Abdullah Ibrahim (!), drummers Jeff “Tain” Watts, Billy Drummond and Yoron Israel (!) on drums and a reunion on three tracks with Grover Washington, Jr., and the splendiferously excellent live album Blues at Bradley's (1993) featuring Donald Harrison, Steve Turre, Joe Ford, Bill O'Connell, Bobby Broom, Ricky Sebastian and Steve Berrios. These records remain the undisputed highpoint of CTI in the nineties.

Several other discs under Charles Fambrough's name also appeared, including Keep of the Spirit (AudioQuest, 1995), City Tribes (Evidence, 1995), Upright Citizen (NuGroove, 1997) and Charles Fambrough Live @ Zanzibar Blue (Random Chance, 2002). The bassist also continued to appear on a wide array of discs by others, including Pharoah Sanders (Crescent with Love), Bill O'Connell (including the pianist's great CTI album Lost Voices), Ernie Watts (Reaching Up), Kevin Mahogany (My Romance) and the jazz-rock cover bands Beatlejazz and Stonejazz.

In recent years, health problems prevented Charles Fambrough from participating as much as he once had on the recording scene. But he continued playing around his hometown as much as possible and was one of the bassists featured on drummer/composer Lenny White's 2010 album Anomoly (Abstract Logix).

A fellow musician and Fambrough friend, pianist, composer and educator George Colligan, said on his jazztruth blog today that “Charles had health issues for many of his last years, but it never seemed to deter him from his passion for music. He talked about his condition like it was a minor nuisance. He seemed determined to press on despite his health.”

There was something undeniably special about the sound Charles Fambrough made. While you never got the sense that his bass was leading the music's charge, you often stopped to wonder exactly what drove the music he was port of to be as magnificently magnetic as it was. Simple consideration reveals just how emphatic and empathic his role in the music was.

Fellow bassist Ron Carter has stated that he doesn't like his playing to be considered an anchor, something that holds a vessel from moving. Bassists hear that kind of thing all the time, and it's no wonder Carter resents it.

When listening to Charles Fambrough, it's clear that a good bassist propels the music where it needs to go. It's a shame that the music will no longer be propelled by Charles Fambrough, an inventive and imaginative bassist and one of the finest of “the young lions” who emerged in jazz's new traditionalism of the early 1980s.

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Jazz show to celebrate Coltrane, Johnny Hartman | al.com

Jazz show to celebrate Coltrane, Johnny Hartman | al.com

The Jazz Renaissance concert series begun in Mobile in October promises to maintain its straight-ahead character with its latest show, which will feature tributes to jazz greats John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.

The headliner for the Thursday evening show is saxophonist Azar Lawrence. St. Louis-based singer James Love will emulate the vocals of Hartman, with whom Coltrane recorded an album in the early 1960s.

Azar Lawrence promises music that is heavily influenced by John Coltrane, but says he's never had any interest in simply imitating the legendary saxophonist.

Saxophonist Coltrane is regarded as one of the titans of jazz, a trendsetting composer who set new standards both for technical command of his instrument and for working spirituality into his music. Show promoter Ron Bookman conceded that Hartman “is not as recognizable to most people,” but said his music also is well worth remembering.

Hartman gained a measure of posthumous attention in the mid-‘90s, courtesy of Clint Eastwood and his movie “The Bridges of Madison County.”

“In that movie he featured the vocal velvet baritone sound of Johnny Hartman,” Bookman said. “It brought him to a whole new audience.”

Coltrane fans may note the significance of show’s timing.

“We deliberately selected the concert date, Dec. 9, because that coincided with the original date of Dec. 9, 1964,” Bookman said. “That was the date Coltrane released his classic album ‘A Love Supreme.’”

The game plan for the show allows for at the Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center allows for some variety, within the straight-ahead framework.

Pensacola-based vocalist Cynthia Domulot and the Guffman Trio will open with a special salute to vocalist Nina Simone.

Lawrence’s set will include a tribute to Coltrane and “A Love Supreme,” with Love appearing during a segment focusing on the Hartman-Coltrane collaboration.

Lawrence, speaking by phone from Los Angeles, said that listeners can expect a living tribute, not a flat effort to parrot music of the past.

Jazz Renaissance concert featuring Azar Lawrence and his Quartet plus vocalist James Love, with special guests Cynthia Domulot and the Guffman Trio, 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 9, Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center at the foot of Government Street on the Mobile waterfront.

Tickets: $20, available at the Mobile Civic Center box office and other Ticketmaster outlets. To order by phone, call 800-745-3000; online orders can be placed at www.ticketmaster.com. For more information call the Civic Center box office at 251-208-7381. Student, senior and group pricing is available; e-mail info@rba-i.com for details.

Information: www.ijazzatmobile.com

“There never has been a day I’ve taken my saxophone out and put a Coltrane record on and played along with it,” he said. “I’ve never done that.”

Lawrence said his career includes a broad range of popular music: He’s worked with rockers Frank Zappa and Eric Burdon, among many others, he said.

But his growth as a jazz player was strongly influenced by working with former Coltrane collaborators such as McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones.

In him, he said, they found someone whose outlook and musical vision were similar to Coltrane’s. In them, he found mentors who could guide him as he explored territory Coltrane had opened up.

“These individuals ... John Coltrane didn’t stand up and just play solo,” Lawrence said. “All these people helped shape that sound ... they all grew, and each part was a major component of that sound.”

“Some of the music he has given us I find is the best vehicle in which for me to carry some of my message over as well,” Lawrence said. “We’ll do some of the ‘Love Supreme’ suite, but you’re going to hear the ‘Love Supreme’ of today.”

“If John was there, he wouldn’t be playing the same thing over and over,” he said.

He does, however, share Coltrane’s sense that music has a spiritual component and can be more than just a night of entertainment. It’s a notion he’s explored in his original work, such as his recent album “Mystic Journey.”

“What we’re endeavoring to do ... is raising our vibrations, raising our spirit, which produces a healing,” he said.

But for those who really do want just a night of classic jazz entertainment, the music works perfectly well on that level, he said.

“I think they’ll be pleasantly surprised,” he said. “They will understand it’s nothing foreign to them and they’ll find a part of themselves in the music. It’ll be quite familiar.”

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Music Review - McCoy Tyner Honors Charlie Parker at Marcus Garvey Park - NYTimes.com

Image via WikipediaMusic Review - McCoy Tyner Honors Charlie Parker at Marcus Garvey Park - NYTimes.com

By BEN RATLIFF
The permanent amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem is a void right now. It’s being rebuilt, band shell and seating. So the Harlem part of the two-day Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, on Saturday afternoon, was moved to a rented stage on a lawn at the northeast corner of the park, next to the farmer’s market, which was still open when the first band started. Later on, a boisterous African drum circle took shape not 100 feet from the stage while McCoy Tyner, though unhappy with the piano’s tuning, boistered back through a solo set.

The free festival has corporate sponsorship but soul prestige; for a Parks Department gig, it books competitively. In the Harlem lineup was Revive Da Live, the changeable collective of young musicians combining jazz and hip-hop; the tenor saxophonist J. D. Allen’s trio; the pianist Jason Moran with his trio, Bandwagon; and Mr. Tyner, one of jazz’s bishops since his time with John Coltrane’s quartet in the early 1960s. (Part 2 of the festival took place Sunday at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.)

It was a really, really good scene, despite the direct sun pouring down on the audience and the stage. This is where some of the best dreams and desires for jazz in America, neither commercial nor bohemian, come out in a burst: jazz is a cause to defend, a collective memory, a spiritual thing, a Harlem thing. Politicians knew enough to be there: Representative Charles B. Rangel, State Senator Bill Perkins. So did lots of musicians, checking out their friends. Older men and women with hats and picnic baskets, returnees every year, all looking as if they owned their patch of park, asking who brought the corkscrew and what’s the name of that song. A festival operative standing in front of the stage, hollering praise during the music like a running commentary.

Mr. Tyner, now 71, wasn’t doing that much with the idea of a solo-piano concert; if there had been a band behind him, it might have sounded much the same. Still making his left-hand chords boom like kettle drums, he played some of his own songs, Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.,” and a rubato “I Should Care,” weighed down with ornament. He kept his foot on the sustain pedal for almost the entire 40 minutes; nearly the only exceptions came when he stole away from the song to splash the keyboard abstractly. It was a strange set, monolithic but distracted. He ended by apologizing for the weather’s impact on the piano, as yet another politician escorted him offstage: his younger brother, Jarvis Tyner, executive vice chairman of the Communist Party USA.

Revive Da Live, an octet with a rapper and D.J., Raydar Ellis, brought arrangements of Parker tunes and solos. The modern frames were cool sometimes, but it was individual performances, especially from Marc Cary on electric piano and Marcus Strickland on tenor saxophone, that put it over. And Jason Moran’s Bandwagon played a loose and typically meta-historical set that went heavy on sound samples and recontextualized quotations. The band played hard over recordings of Eddie Jefferson’s vocalese version of “Body and Soul” and Billie Holiday’s “Big Stuff.”

But J. D. Allen made the most of the day. His trio doesn’t try to be comprehensive or world-spanning or express the new jazz pedagogy; it performs strong, short melodies and rhythms that develop a little and then end. Its music is bracing and easy to follow, looking toward the language of free jazz but staying close to the themes’ guideposts, and never letting the rhythm get baggy.

Something really good has happened to this trio over the last five years. First it secured its sound on the bandstand. (One of the quirks of that sound is that the bassist, Gregg August, roams furthest from the groove, while the leader and the drummer stay in lockstep; here he was boosted good and loud in the mix.) Then it set to work on its performance ritual, its relationship with audiences.

On Saturday the band got its pacing exactly right and didn’t let the crowd rest. It kept coming with new melodies; sometimes it joined pieces together, and sometimes it came to a complete stop, but only for about a second and a half. It changed tempo and mood, not much but just enough. And it got the most concentrated response from the audience, even from the older folks.