Word: sax
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Within each bag, imitation of the "daddy" spreads through the ranks like summer fires. Trumpeters try to play like Miles Davis. And hold their horns like Miles. And dress like Miles. Bassists imitate Charlie Mingus or Scott La Faro; drummers, Max Roach or Elvin Jones. Sax players copy Sonny Rollins or John Coltrane, who is presently so much the vogue that the sound of his whole quartet is being echoed by half the jazz groups in the country...
...stand looks like a portable museum of musical instru ments. Dangling from his neck is a manzello, a quasi saxophone that forgot to grow up, and a stritch, which resembles a dented blunderbuss and hangs well below his knees. The third instrument is more familiar; it is a tenor sax, and stuffed into its bell is a flute. The musician rocks back and forth on his feet as if uncertain how to begin. Then he makes his decision. He puts all three big horns in his mouth at once, and blows like a whale. What spouts forth sometimes sounds like...
...lost chord. His quest began at 19, in his native Columbus, Ohio, where he literally dreamed of playing two horns at the same time and was entranced by what he heard in his mind's ear. After an antique dealer turned up the manzello, which approximates the soprano sax, and the stritch, which is close to an alto sax, Kirk began practicing what he had dreamed. Since then he has blown his horns all over Europe and the U.S.; he is a dauntless explorer of the frontiers of sound, a man who simply wants to play as much music...
Back in Bean's Bag (Coleman Hawkins, Clark Terry; Columbia) was intended as an epochal encounter between Hawkins' tenor sax and Terry's virtuoso trumpet. Then something went wrong; the true soloist turns out to be Tommy Flanagan on piano. During Hawk's flights of fancy, a wildly distorted recording balance hides the horn behind the accompaniment...
...clean. But individual solos are the test of small-group jazz, and the Blue Notes' soloists shone. Tenor Saxophonist Ben Friedman, a real crowd-pleaser, is technically master of his instrument. His best solo, on Thelonius Monk's Straight, No Chaser, was a honking, exuberant anthology of tenor sax styles, jumping from Johnny Hodges to Ornette Coleman to John Coltrane with deftness and humor. Friedman is strongly influenced by Coltrane, with a little Getz and "Fathead" Newman thrown in, and he has not yet found his own niche...