John Coltrane's Giant Steps at the Nashville Jazz Workshop

Aylor, Finnie, Nardone, and Aliquo

When one lives in rural northwest Tennessee, there aren't quite enough opportunities available to enjoy good live jazz. However, just a couple of hours to the east there's the Nashville Jazz Workshop, on Adams St., in the Germantown area of the Tennessee capital. The Workshop is a haven for jazz fans and musicians in a city that's usually better known for other kinds of music. Last Saturday night, as part of a series focusing on great jazz albums, the Workshop presented a quartet led by tenorist Don Aliquo and featuring pianist Jody Nardone, drummer Marcus Finnie, and bassist Jack Aylor. The band, which got together exclusively for this gig, played all the tracks on John Coltrane's classic 1959 LP Giant Steps, one of the most celebrated of Trane's fabulous discography. I attended the early show (at 6:00 p.m.; there was also a late show at 8:30) with my wife, my daughter and some close relatives and enjoyed some fantastic music played to a few dozen people sitting at tables in a small, welcoming venue that seats around 100. Pittsburgh-born tenor saxophonist Aliquo has lived in Nashville for almost 20 years and is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, as well as a much in-demand jazzman around the Music City and all over the country. As the albums he's recorded so far suggest, he is influenced not only by Coltrane, but also by other sax greats like Dexter Gordon and Stanley Turrentine. His flawless technique and uncanny ability to create engaging solos at a breakneck speed make him the perfect choice to handle Coltrane's complex, highly demanding compositions. Yet Aliquo can also play in a sensitive sensual manner, as he did on the ballad "Naima," and as some of the tunes from his recent collaboration with pianist Beegie Adair (Too Marvelous for Words) demonstrate.

This blog's author with Don Aliquo

Aliquo was in fine company last Saturday at the Workshop. New Jersey native Nardone has also worked with countless jazz legends and displays an attractive, energetic piano style that worked well both in support of Aliquo's tenor and when it came time to solo. The wistful introduction he played on "Naima" was one of the highlights of the concert. Finnie, who hails from Memphis, is a very accomplished drummer with a great deal of experience both in and outside of jazz. His dynamic approach and spectacular drumming constantly met with the general approval and applause of the audience and helped propel the quartet's inspired performances. Finally, Aylor, by far the youngest musician on the stage on Saturday night, and currently a jazz student at New York's Columbia University, is quickly becoming one of the most promising young jazz bassists in his hometown of Nashville. Aylor has a natural sense of rhythm and blended perfectly well with the rest of the rhythm section, handling Paul Chambers's often complex bass solos with great ease. The evening began with a sprightly version of the title track, which set the tone for the rest of the concert, with Aliquo leading the quartet in an authoritative but always generous fashion, stepping to one side of the stage whenever he wasn't soloing in order to allow the rest of the musicians to take the spotlight. Though the idea was to play tribute to the legendary LP, the band didn't try to merely imitate the great Coltrane quartet, but rather they reinterpreted its timeless tunes (from "Cousin Mary" to the flurry of notes that is "Countdown" to a spirited reading of "Spiral" to the intriguing "Syeeda's Song Flute" to "Naima," the only slow number on the album) with great reverence and respect. Showing he's also an educator, Aliquo even took the time to briefly introduce some of the tracks, providing a little background information that added to the audience's enjoyment of the music that was being presented. The evening came to a close not long after a rousing drum solo by Finnie on "Mr. P.C.," the bluesy album closer. In short, it was a lovely event at the Nashville Jazz Workshop that served not only to showcase a magnificent live performance of a legendary album but also to introduce some of us in the audience to four musicians of different backgrounds and ages brought together by a common love of classic jazz.

The quartet on stage at the Nashville Jazz Workshop

Giant Steps: Woody Herman in 1973

By 1973, bandleader and occasional vocalist Woody Herman could look back on several decades of memorable recordings and consistently outstanding bands, the numerous editions of his Herds that he'd led over the years. It had been an amazing career, though full of vicissitudes and financial ups and downs, all the way back to those earliest days of the Swing Era, when his orchestra was dubbed "The Band That Plays the Blues" because of its appealing blues-tinged sound. Herman's recorded output was also full of ground-breaking recordings, such as those featuring the saxophone section known as the Four Brothers, which included, among others, legendary names  like Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Serge Chaloff, and Herbie Steward. Herman had been celebrated for his willingness to listen to new ideas, try out different arrangements, and showcase the budding talents of the younger musicians within his bands, thereby becoming instrumental in bridging generation gaps in jazz. To a certain extent, his open-mindedness had allowed him to make music that remained current and exciting throughout the decades, way past the demise of the Big Band Era. It had been an amazing career, I say, and Herman was regarded as a living legend of jazz, but that wasn't enough for him. So that year he went into the studio with his big band and recorded one of his most successful, forward-looking albums for Fantasy—Giant Steps.

The record is absolutely fantastic, a creative whole that is even more engaging than the sum of its parts, an LP that sounds modern because it is modern and that features Herman surrounded by a group of excellent musicians including guitarist Joe Beck, bassist Wayne Darling, percussionist Ray Barretto, trombonist Jim Pugh, trumpeter Bill Stapleton, and saxophonist Frank Tiberi, among others. The song choice is rather eclectic, from the opening track, Chick Corea's "La Fiesta," a high-powered, Latin-flavored tune that sounds incredibly exciting in the hands of this band, to "The Meaning of the Blues," a lovely slow-paced number written by Bobby Troup that is only tangentially related to the blues form. In between there are highlights such as the funky "Freedom Jazz Dance," driven by the horns and the electric bass, "The First Thing I Do," with Beck adding some wah-wah effects to his electric guitar, and of course, the version of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" that lends its title to the album. Herman's reading of this Trane classic is so good that one can't help but wish someone had kept the producer from fading the song out. Gems like these somehow deserve to last longer than a mere 4 minutes. Thad Jones's "A Child Is Born" sets an atmospheric mellow mood that is the perfect counterpoint to the explosive "Giant Steps," which precedes it. Herman even has time to step into contemporary pop territory on Leon Russell's "A Song for You," and the album is brought to a close with a swinging rendition of Alan Broadbent's "Be-Bop and Roses." Giant Steps is one of the many highlights of Herman's career, an LP that has definitely stood the test of time, and listening to it today, it's not hard to see why it was awarded a Grammy back in 1974.

Martin Luther King, Jr. on Jazz, 1964

Today, as we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the United States, I am reminded of a speech that Dr. King wrote for the opening of the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival. Although apparently he wasn't in attendance at the festival, Dr. King composed a memorable text for the event in which he discusses the social and spiritual role of jazz, as well as its role within the Civil Rights Movement. The speech was shrouded in mystery for a long time because no images or recordings of it are extant, but researchers David Demsey and Bruce Jackson have recently established that Dr. King never actually gave the speech, which was written to be printed in the program of the festival. Fortunately, the text of the speech has survived and is stunning for its beauty and poetic value, as well as for its social and historical significance. The following is an excerpt, which is good proof of the high esteem in which Dr. King held jazz as both artistic expression and catalyst for social change.

"Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. 

This is triumphant music. 

Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument. 

It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. 

Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down." 

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., 1964
Read the whole speech here.

One of those jazzmen who, in the words of Dr. King, "were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls" was saxophonist John Coltrane, whose music was growing increasingly experimental around the time that Dr. King wrote this speech and whose work of this period often illustrates the social changes that were occurring in the United States throughout the 1960s. A perfect example of this is Coltrane's composition "Alabama," included in 1963's Live at Birdland, a tune he wrote after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four African American kids were killed. Coltrane's powerful, mournful composition is one of the highlights of the album, and it's inspired precisely by the rhythm and cadences of a speech by Dr. King that Trane had heard following the events in Birmingham. Coltrane is joined by McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, and their passionate cry for freedom, justice, and equality hasn't lost any of its poignancy more than half a century after it was recorded. It is, indeed, the perfect tune to play on a day like today.