from: BENEATH THE UNDERGROUND:EXPLORING NEW CURRENTS IN “JAZZ”
by Robin D.G Kelley

The aesthetic emerging out of DJ practice and digital sampling has also reshaped live improvisation in some profound ways. Greg Tate's latest project, Burnt Sugar is THE big band of the new millennium.

Flexing at times to over a dozen on the bandstand, Burnt Sugar (The Arkestra Chamber (nods there to both Sun Ra and the Wu Tang Clan) is a kind of gypsy band of young musical masters who mess with all manner of electric and acoustic instruments - Vernon Reid, Michael Morgan Craft, Rene Akhan, Kirk Douglass among the electric guitarists, Nioka Workman and Julia Kent working the cello, Suphala on tablas, drummers Swiss Criss and Qasim Naqvi, Vijay Iyer on piano, Bruce Mack synthesizing, bassists Jason di Matteo, Jared Nickerson, Maximina Juson, Lewis Flip Barnes on trumpet, Micah Gaugh on tenor, a flock of flautists including Atiba Wilson, Monet Dunham, Satch Hoyt, and various vocalists singers, poets, moaners and hummers ranging from Justice X, Lisala Beatty, Eisa Davis, Shariff Simmons, Latasha Natasha Diggs, and still too many music-makers to mention.

As Tate has said on many occasion, this band, is his extension of "Bitches Brew," what we might call his hom(ey)age to Miles Davis. And he is committed to building on what Miles started in the late 1960s - groove-based, funky, free improvisation rooted in a true musical conversation rather than a dozen cats all talking at once.

Surprisingly, Tate has not employed a DJ or used sampled music, and yet all the essential aesthetic principles are evident. Tate, who plays some guitar but primarily occupies in the conductor's spot, works his band like a DJ. While building on Butch Morris's system of conduction, Tate moves his musicians in and out of the groove in the manner of a DJ or engineer adding and dropping tracks at certain points in the song. What the artists bring to the groove, however, is improvised, generating fresh spontaneous responses from other instrumentalists/voices as well as from Tate himself.

We can hear the process so clearly on "Sirens of Triton" from Burnt Sugar's debut album, Blood on the Leaf (2001). After calling for Vijay Iyer's spare, funky acoustic piano solo, Tate gradually surrounds him with rich, thick textures from electric guitars, synthesizer, and electronic and acoustic percussion. "Gnawalickenlallibella" opens in 6/4 time with Iyer's steady arpeggios overlaid with "choked" staccato lines from electric guitar and synthesizer, giving the song the feel of needle on vinyl. Three minutes later here comes Swiss Chris banging out drum n' bass beats, until Tate moves the band into another mode where the guitars sound like sitars playing scales reminiscent of an Indian raga. (Is this what we might call a live sample?)

Perhaps more than any other cut, "Beloved" seems most directly related to Miles electric funk--particularly in their ingenious use of the repeated motive and the critical role of percussion as the prime engine for improvisation. It has a chant-like quality, which never seems repetitive over Swiss Chris' drumming. The amazing thing about Tate's concept is the way it draws on aesthetics of sampling and yet it is completely improvised instrumental music. Except for the title track, there are no scores, no pre-arranged chord progressions or modes, just music invented on the spot. As Tate put it in the liner notes, "anything that sounds like it was orchestrated before-hand was actually improved and conducted into being on the spot, on the fly, off the cuff, in the raging, bloody-impromptu moment."

Burnt Sugar's follow-up 3-CD release, That Depends on What You Know, has really thrown a wrench into the increasingly calcified "jazz canon." It proved that Blood on the Leaf was more than a temporary, experimental jam session. Continuing to build on the concept of completely improvised groove-based conduction, many of the tracks here deserve the kind of study given to Coleman Hawkins' "Body and Soul" or Coltrane's "Giant Steps." "Two Bass Blipsch" from disc 1 (an obvious reference to John Lewis and Dizzy Gillespie's "Two Bass Hit") opens with Bruce Mack playing the synth with such rhythmic precision that it sounds like it's been "looped"; once Tate brings the drums in percussion becomes the improvisational driving Force.

While everything is improvised, Tate uses conduction to create particular conversations and dialogues, as in the way he brings out Eisa Davis's voice interpolating triplet figures or generates a sweet, tender dance between Jason DiMatteo's bowed bass and Iyer's piano. Iyer, like Craig Taborn, is a masterful improviser on the keyboards who always seems to know what to play and how much to play. Himself a composer and band leader who draws on anything that comes his way, particularly South Asian and African-American traditions, Iyer has worked with many, many different artists with some kind of association with "jazz," including Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Imani Uzuri, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, and Amiri Baraka. Iyer brings all of this history to bear on their Burnt Sugar's interpretation of Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight" (disc 3). This can hardly be called a "cover." Tate says it best in the program notes: "Monk in dub. Rufus in VERSION. What this world is coming to. Depending on what you know."

Over a heavy reggae beat, Iyer launches into a funky, haunting single-note interpretation of the A section of the melody in Gb min., followed by Lewis Flip Barnes who plays the first four bars of the theme in Eb min. (the key in which Monk originally wrote "Round Midnight"). Whether or not this was deliberate, it generates a very Monkish sound of surprise while underscoring the band's transformation of a 32 bar AABA song form into an open-ended "round" a witty musical pun Monk himself would have loved. The groove allows band members to enter with melody at any point and it sounds just right. They noodle around theme for eight minutes, then switch gears a kind of R&B/disco remix version.

The masterpiece in all this innovative music is their thirty-eight minute "Fubractive Since Antiquity Suite." Built on repeated North African-sounding chant that "remixed" or rather "reconducted" several times over different rhythms, tempos, instrumentation, too completely improvised while conveying turntablist texture sensibility. Tate understands rhythm everything, it's the lifeblood of the music; it's the rhythm that drives the entire suite.

Part III, for example, is an exciting contrapuntal marriage between drum n' bass piano obbligato, Kirk Douglass' monster solo, nicely interrupted by line travels from Dirty Dozens brass old school (read: Negro) 50s Rock Roll heavy funk heavier metal. Segue into IV, dense funk groove with a lot conduction going on. As result, we hear final section suite what Miles always tried achieve when he told his band members to improvise by asking question and then answering it.

We also hear something else: that sampled computer programs will never replace live musicians playing tonal instruments, for the spontaneity, experimentation, imagination, wonderful mistakes improvisation generates can never be replaced. New technology can certainly enrich possibilities for new modes of improvisation, and it has already shaped the way musicians with open ears have approached improvisation. But there's no substitute for the raw, natural smell of burnt sugar.

CODA

Graham Haynes told me recently that, "You can't really say jazz exists now. It can't be what it was because those days are gone. The social settings that made Coltrane's music, that made the Jazz Messengers, that made Louis Armstrong simply don't exist. We are in a different time and place. If there is jazz, then what I lm trying to do would be it." This may seem like a contradiction, but it makes perfect sense if we think of "jazz" as improvised music created in and for its own time and place, a music that draws on the sounds and sensibilities of the moment. At the very least, these artists are not rejecting jazz so much as critiquing it for failing to move forward. They are embracing new technologies and milking them for rhythms and timbres, colors and textures they have never heard before. They are not only crossing musical genres and using new instrumentation; they are thinking differently about improvisation, composition, sound. Haynes himself underscores the point by "sampling" no less an authority than the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young. He closes out the final track on BPM the way I will end this essay--with the gauntlet-throwing question: "Fuck what you played back in 1949. What the fuck you gonna play today?"

 

Robin D. G. Kelley; professor of history and Africana studies at New York University, is a writer completing a biography of Thelonious Monk. His most recent book is Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press 2002).