№ 4
Jimmy Giuffre 3
Bremen & Stuttgart 1961 (Eminem)
—Point of Departure
This article appeared last year in Moment’s Notice, Point of Departure’s quarterly series of reviews.
Producer Martin Davidson salvaged treasure with Bremen & Stuttgart 1961. This two-disc set includes complete reissues of hat ART’s early 1990s CDs Flight, Bremen 1961 and Emphasis, Stuttgart 1961 (with Art Lange’s original liner notes), along with six – yes, six! – previously unissued performances from the Bremen concert. “Used to Be” and an unused take of “Trudgin’,” recorded in New York City six months before the trio’s European tour – and left off ECM’s reissue of the Verve dates – are also here, on CD in pristine shape for the first time.
I’m not sure I need to make another case for how extraordinary the edition of the Jimmy Giuffre 3 with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow was. It was – and remains – extraordinary, one of the irreplaceable groups in the history of jazz. These live performances were an archeological wonder when they were acquired from German radio in 1992. At that point, there were just three recordings available, on ECM (1961, a masterful reissue of the original Verve recordings, Fusion and Thesis) and on Columbia (Free Fall). Lange called it the official canon.
Bremen and Stuttgart included new material: Jimmy Giuffre’s “Call of the Centaur,” “Trance,” and the largely through-composed five-movement “Suite for Germany,” as well as Carla Bley’s “Postures.” But most of all, they just gave us more: more from a group that had lasted less than two years and then, in the early ’90s, was being re-examined by an entirely new generation of musicians.
Now we have something else to ponder. Among Emanem’s discoveries are three piano-bass duos from Bremen: “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues Are,” “I Can’t Get Started,” and “Compassion for P.B.” Davidson is delightfully direct about his decisions. He’s quite sure he slotted the new trios (“Jesús Maria,” “Carla,” “Venture”) into the set correctly. “However,” he wrote, “I have no idea where the duo pieces fitted in, so I have used them as a break between the two concerts.”
These duets are exceptional finds. Steve Swallow has, even in these early days (he’d just turned 21), a complete awareness of sound and space and his role in these new forms. Paul Bley was, well, Paul Bley even then (he turned 29 mid-tour), producing a prescient, perfectly balanced microcosmos. The choices epitomize the era — Monk, show tune, Ornette – and, as this concert hall morphs into a coffee house (or the Hillcrest Club), you see, in less hyperbolic ways, shades of Bley’s famous 2002 quip: “I’ve spent many years learning how to play as slow as possible, and then many more years learning how to play as fast as possible. I’ve spent many years trying to play as good as possible.” (He finished by saying, “At the present I’m trying to spend as many years learning how to play as bad as possible.”)
“Compassion” is played exponentially quicker than Coleman’s original quartet on Tomorrow Is the Question nearly three years earlier. (Did Bley learn this from Ornette in Los Angeles?) And to put the duo – and the phrase “as good as possible” – in context: at the end of 1961, Bill Evans, still mourning the death of Scott LaFaro barely six months earlier, had begun playing with bassist Chuck Israels. Hindsight makes it clear: Bley and Swallow were their natural peers.