№ 3
John Abercrombie
A Perfect Kind of Freedom
—Coda
This feature, commissioned by Stuart Broomer, was the cover story in the March–April 2003 edition of Coda magazine.
Just ask John Abercrombie if his work has changed over the past few years.
When I did, on a November afternoon in Toronto in the middle of his week’s engagement with Don Thompson and Terry Clarke at the Montreal Bistro, he quickly swung back nearly 30 years, to Timeless, his 1974 ECM debut. Soon, he started drawing lines to each stage in his career, showing how each shift informed the next — or how, in hindsight, it had all seemed to transpire. He was expansive and articulate, and he even left room for disagreement. Dates and anecdotes circled in and out: a tidbit about an early organ trio, a dinner with Manfred Eicher long ago. Still, everything hung together with striking clarity and perfect modesty.
Of course, the career he was setting out to describe is one of remarkable substance and scope. It’s now strange to think that John Abercrombie first gained momentum in the middle of the 1970s, the unpolished heart of fusion’s heyday. He wasn’t held hostage by the noise and muscle; craft and careful lyricism were more to his taste. With a label that sheltered him straight away, ECM, and a steady supply of like-minded peers, Abercrombie gradually refined his art, as a composer and as a guitarist.
When John Abercrombie and I met last fall, at a downtown hotel just a few blocks from the Bistro, he spoke a great deal about his musical past. He also talked about many of his longtime friendships and about the enormous changes in guitar technology he’s seen since the late 1950s. He became particularly animated when we talked about his current group, the quartet with Mark Feldman, Marc Johnson, and Joey Baron. Their disc, Cat ’n’ Mouse (ECM, 2002), his latest, was a real source of pride.
The Cat ’n’ Mouse project is in many ways a departure for John Abercrombie, and it seemed like a natural place to start. This isn’t a workaday band. It embraces freer music, something Abercrombie hasn’t always felt comfortable doing. Its sound — its basic configuration — certainly isn’t run-of-the-mill.
“There’s something about the setting of this particular band,” he explained. “You’ve got violin, string bass, and guitar. So it’s, really, strings and percussion in a way.”
Getting that sound was Abercrombie’s primary motivation when he formed the group. Sure, he wanted to re-examine some of the abstract elements he’d introduced on Open Land (his 1999 disc with Mark Feldman, Kenny Wheeler, Joe Lovano, Dan Wall, and Adam Nussbaum). But more than anything else, he envisioned a violin — a violin’s colours — front and centre.
“And I wanted Feldman in particular,” Abercrombie added, “because he was the best violinist that I knew of to negotiate my tunes.”
He’d actually wanted to play with Mark Feldman for years — ever since they met, teacher and student, at Banff in the mid ’80s. “Every time I’d hear him play, he was just blowing everybody away,” Abercrombie recalled. “He made me really hear the violin again. I always liked to listen to classical violin; it’s one of my favourite instruments. And now I’m hearing this guy, Mark, from Chicago, who’s classically trained, who can play a lot of the repertoire. He can really play it. Yet he can play bebop. He can play free. He can play my tunes, which are not easy tunes to play. Some of the harmonic things: they’d be hard for a saxophone player who knew a lot about harmony. I mean they wouldn’t get it right away. But Feldman is in there.”
After reconnecting with Feldman, Abercrombie targeted musicians who, he believed, would also feel comfortable moving in and out of more open music. He’d been writing more conventional compositions (which would eventually appear on Cat ’n’ Mouse), but he’d also been writing what he called “little vehicles,” brief motifs designed to jump-start improvisation.
“It’s a perfect little band, my favourite band, for playing so-called ‘free improvised stuff,’ where there’s little or no talk about what you’re going to do. There might be a little send off, or there might be a little vehicle. Or sometimes there might be no vehicle. But this band is so quick. Joey Baron is just one of the quickest musicians I’ve ever encountered. He can turn on a dime; he can do anything, absolutely anything. I knew him when he had hair! And he used to play with people like Carmen McRae. He’s just been through the whole gamut. So when he arrived at wanting to play more abstract music it was a decision based on what he really wanted to do. That’s the reason I like Joey, because he has that background. Feldman has that background. Marc Johnson definitely has that background. So when we play abstract music it’s because we really want to.”
Certainly the group’s instrumentation is an essential part of Abercrombie’s plan. “In a setting with just strings it really creates more of a chamber effect. So it’s not as much like free jazz with saxophones or trumpets. It doesn’t sound like that. It has another quality, which I find more interesting because it suits me. It sounds more musical to my ears.”
To some, Abercrombie’s attraction to open music might come as a surprise. He’s often dabbled in freer situations, but to embrace them, to make them central to a performance, is something he’s shied away from. Yet he’s played improvised music for years: even as a student at Berklee in the mid ’60s.
“There’s stuff I experimented with early on playing with Mick Goodrick back in his apartment [in Boston] when he first got a cassette player. We used to improvise free duets. I remember we used to carry around a tape. Every once in a while we’d be on a gig together and we’d just want to check ourselves out. We were just being silly. And we’d put it on and other musicians would just look at us like we were completely insane. Except for Charlie Mariano, I remember, who happened to be nearby when we were playing the tape onetime. ‘Wow, what’s that. That’s pretty cool,’ he said. We knew there was a comrade in arms.
“So I’ve been thinking about this kind of stuff. It had been in there for a while. I was never completely turned off to this kind of improvisation, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to play ‘Stella By Starlight’ and ‘Blues in F.’ That was what I wanted to do, you know.”
Gateway, he suggests, the trio with Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, was probably the first time he’d played open music with a band. “Even when we made the first Gateway record [in 1975] I hadn’t done a lot of that kind of playing. But Dave and I got together once and we ran through a couple of his little pieces in my old apartment in New York. He told me, ‘You have a real natural sense of how to play this way.’ And that kind of got me inspired. And then when we actually started to play with Gateway. That’s one way I got into it.”
Another formative experience, Abercrombie remembered, was his duo with Ralph Towner. Often, they’d arrive at a rehearsal with bundles of songs. “Ralph would say, ‘Why don’t we link them together with some kind of free playing.’ OK, cool. So that’s what we would do. We would play a tune, and we might start out with something atmospheric, and we’d work our way into it, and then we’d play free. We’d try to connect it, as the tune was trailing off, we’d go off into this other zone, make all these different colours and sounds and effects and whatever. And then usually one of us had to change guitars, because in those days I was playing a mandolin and an electric and I had an acoustic and Ralph had a nylon-string and two 12-strings, one tuned to some strange chord. Some of the free episodes actually became tunes. Or atmospheres, or areas, we would return to. They just became part of what we did. And that came out of free improvisation.”
But something else also sets Abercrombie’s current quartet apart: it’s a real, working band. Too often his studio dates were just projects, one-offs. He rarely has groups that record and tour, then keep playing together.
For five years (starting in 1978) there was a quartet with Richie Beirach, George Mraz, and Peter Donald. Then in the late ’80s there was a trio with Marc Johnson and Peter Erskine. In the early ’90s he formed an organ trio with Dan Wall and Adam Nussbaum, a group that still plays together from time to time.
“The quartet with Beirach was very compositional and very structured in a way. Really nice. It was one of my first opportunities where I wrote a lot of songs and Richie wrote songs. It was co-operative in that sense, but it was my quartet. I got a chance to really write regularly for a band.
“And then when I made the shift to playing with Marc Johnson and Peter Erskine I think I wanted to get a little more … I wanted to play louder! Not necessarily fusiony but a little more electric. With the piano, with Beirach, that was impossible. You can only play so loud with an acoustic piano, although he [Beirach] really wasn’t interested in playing the kind of music I wanted to play.
“Pete [Erskine] was perfect. Here’s a drummer who’d played with Stan Kenton and Weather Report and then the bass player [Marc Johnson] was Bill Evans’s bass player. I’d loved all the colours and stuff that Weather Report had done. And of course I was a Bill Evans fanatic from the early days. So this was kind of an ideal little trio for me to have for that period of time.
“I was fooling around with the guitar synthesizer, which I apologize for to a lot of people. Some of it was interesting but some of it was pretty hideous. But that was a good band for me to experiment with all that stuff because they were totally open to it. That’s where I started to play some freer, more open types of music. We played some pretty open, crazy stuff with that trio. And we also played standard songs. So it was a chance to do a lot of different stuff that I hadn’t been able to do. I could get into the more abstract and colourful areas, but I could also still play the Bill Evans songbook, which was my favourite stuff, and I had Marc Johnson on bass. So it was kind of ideal for me.”
Here, Abercrombie veered off into guitar talk; it’s something he’s quite keen on. For all his accomplishments as a composer and a bandleader, he’s still a real guitar player and a shrewd observer of the instrument’s affairs. Abercrombie, 58, remembers guitar technology in its infancy, crude and temperamental. He even recalls the first effect he ever bought: Tim’s Fuzzer Buzzer.
“When I was starting to play there was Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall, Jimmy Rainey, Grant Green. All these people I used to see live. Basically in those days you had a guitar and you had a connecting cable and you had an amplifier. And that’s all you had. There was no such thing as an ‘effect.’ Except some of the amplifiers did have little spring reverbs in them and some guys used them and most guys didn’t really care about it.”
While Abercrombie comes directly out of the classic jazz guitar tradition, he’s quietly stretched the instrument’s range. He’s always liked effects and the different options they provide; for a very long time now he’s had a bag of tools ready to go. Many of his musical shifts have been marked by a change in sound — whether it’s a touch of reverb, a mound of distortion (think, Billy Cobham), or an oddball synthesizer patch.
Still, he’s never overestimated the importance of a processed sound. The guitar certainly provides a lot more possibilities than other instruments, he said. Effects allow the guitar to take on new characteristics, which is a blessing when you’re trying to play jazz. Guitarists, he observed, have always envied horn players — especially the long legato lines — and have often tried to simulate breath. In other instances, guitarists have used the volume pedal to move closer towards a violin or a cello. Abercrombie himself finally hit a wall when the guitar synth came along.
“It seemed at the time like the ultimate toy,” he said. “Now we can really sound like another instrument. But in the end that was the drawback. You got so close that it was kind of a fantasy. But then in the end it wasn’t real. It was too fake. It was better to try to do something with the little boxes and try to create a sound that really was something in your head, that was an approximation. Rather than with a synthesizer where you just press a button and you see “Flute 1” and “Flute 2.” … You’d spend so much time trying to program this damn thing, the days would go by and you’d be sitting there and your head would be frying and you’d just be tweaking little buttons.”
Where is he today? He’s still using effects, but they’ve been integrated with real subtlety, organically, into his whole approach. The noodling has been jettisoned.
“Now,” he said, “I just play guitar.”
Looking ahead, Abercrombie’s upcoming projects certainly keep him focused. There’s a brief trip to South Korea with Dan Wall and Adam Nussbaum, and a possible spring tour with Charles Lloyd. Then in February the quartet records the follow-up to Cat ’n’ Mouse. When we spoke he still hadn’t prepared music for the date.
He also alluded to a project that he’s had a tough time trying to schedule: a quartet session with Kenny Wheeler, Steve Swallow, and Pete La Roca. ECM is on board. Now all he needs is a workable date. The basic idea was inspired by the legendary Art Farmer-Jim Hall Quartet, of which Swallow and La Roca formed the rhythm section.
For just one moment, set aside everything else: the guitar talk and the possibilities for playing freer music, the follow-up to Cat ’n’ Mouse and the different tours this year. Abercrombie would be delighted to get this special project off the ground.
“That’s still probably the strongest period of music for me,” he said, referring to the mid-’60s American scene and the Farmer-Hall Quartet. “But I think that’s true with a lot of musicians. The stuff that you’re really first attracted to, that really grabs you when you’re a kid. If it’s really good and if it was really that influential it will probably hold up. It’s almost like it’s your parents. That’s family music. That’s the root of the tree.”