Burning Ambulance Podcast

The latest episode of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with tuba player Bob Stewart.

I have said all season long that we’re going to be exploring a single subject for ten episodes, and that subject is fusion. But as I hope has become clear over the course of the five previous episodes, during which I interviewed techno pioneer Jeff Mills, drummer Lenny White, trumpeter Randy Brecker, pianist Cameron Graves, and guitarist Brandon Ross, most of whom come from different musical generations and are not peers, when I say the word fusion, I’m talking about a state of mind, not a style or a genre. It’s not what you play, it’s how you approach music-making.

I understand that when most people hear the word fusion, they think of the big name bands from the 1970s: the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, and Weather Report. Those groups, and the Miles Davis bands from 1969 to 1975, and many other less immediately recognizable groups, all did a particular thing, playing extremely complex music that blurred the lines between progressive rock and jazz. We talked about those acts in the second and third episodes this season, with Lenny White and Randy Brecker, both of whom were around then and were actively participating in making some of that music.

If you think of fusion as a mindset, though, rather than a style, the discussion gets a lot more interesting. And that’s really how I prefer to think about it. Because the people who fall into the latter category are the ones who I find to be the most interesting, and the ones who are more likely to have careers where almost every record they play on is at least worth hearing, worth giving a chance. You may not like all of it. But they’re creative enough that they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt.

A perfect example of this is Bill Laswell, the bassist and producer. He doesn’t use the term fusion. He calls what he does “collision music,” bringing together players from wildly disparate areas — stylistic areas, and literal geographical ones, putting African players together with guys from Southeast Asia and New York rock artists and whoever else he thinks has something to say — and seeing what comes out when they all work together toward a common goal. And sometimes you get something glorious, that you never could have predicted or imagined beforehand. Like pairing Pharoah Sanders with a troupe of Gnawa musicians from North Africa. Or putting improvising guitarist Derek Bailey together with drummer Jack DeJohnette, DJ Disk from the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, and Laswell himself on bass. I heard a recording of that group just a few days ago, and you might not expect it to work, but it really, really did.

Bob Stewart is a fusion artist in that he takes an instrument that has had a relatively low profile in jazz for decades — the tuba — and created a variety of fascinating contexts for it. Not only on his own albums, but particularly in partnership with the late alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe. They began working together in the early 1970s, and Stewart’s playing on some of Blythe’s albums, most notably Bush Baby, where it’s just the two of them and a percussionist, and on Lenox Avenue Breakdown and Illusions, where they had some incredible bands that included at different times James “Blood” Ulmer on guitar, Cecil McBee on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums, James Newton on flute, and Abdul Wadud on cello. On the album Blythe Spirit, Blythe and Stewart record a version of the spiritual “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” with Amina Claudine Myers on organ, that’s absolutely amazing. We talk about that piece a little bit in this interview.

He’s worked with a lot of other artists over the course of his career, too, including Charles Mingus, McCoy Tyner, Carla Bley, Gil Evans, the Jazz Composers Orchestra, Bill Frisell, the David Murray Big Band, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, and on and on. The reason he’s able to do so many different things is that his approach to the tuba is really expansive, conceptually speaking. He treats it as much more than a substitute bass. He understands its full range, and the subtleties it’s capable of expressing, and he uses it in ways lots of other people would never even think of. On his own albums First Line, Then & Now, and Connections — Mind the Gap, he puts to...

Andrew Cyrille is the last man standing from the first wave of free jazz drummers. He and Milford Graves, Sunny Murray, and Rashied Ali really revolutionized jazz rhythm in their playing with Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and other musicians in the early to mid ’60s. Their influence was huge, and each of them brought a different perspective and instantly identifiable style to the music. What I hear when I listen to Andrew Cyrille, whether he’s playing with Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton or in any other situation, is an incredible precision and consideration. He really seems to be thinking about every single strike and placing it with unbelievable care, even when he’s playing ridiculously fast.

In the last few years, Cyrille has been making some really interesting records as a leader for ECM. He started in 2016 with The Declaration of Musical Independence, which featured Bill Frisell on guitar, Richard Teitelbaum on synth, and Ben Street on bass, then he made Lebroba with Frisell and Wadada Leo Smith, and now he’s got a new album out, The News, which features Frisell and Street again but has David Virelles on piano instead of Teitelbaum. And right before that string of records, in 2015, he was on guitarist Ben Monder’s album Amorphae. And I also want to mention a record he did in 2017, Dione, a trio record with Ivo Perelman and Matthew Shipp. He’s had an incredible career as a sideman, too, working with David Murray, Leroy Jenkins, Muhal Richard Abrams, Marion Brown, Horace Tapscott, Peter Brötzmann, and of course he’s also one of the members of Trio 3 with Oliver Lake and Reggie Workman — they played at the 2021 Vision Festival, where he also presented a solo tribute to Milford Graves.

We talk about Graves a lot in this interview, as well as Cyrille’s approach to rhythm and to music generally, and a lot of other things. It’s funny, the conversation has kind of a false ending, because I had been told by his publicist that he only wanted to talk for a half hour, and I negotiated us up to 45 minutes, and then at the 45 minute mark I started saying goodbye and thanking him for his time, and he showed no interest in stopping, so we kept going and probably could have talked for another half hour.

If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music featured in this episode:
Andrew Cyrille/Wadada Leo Smith/Bill Frisell, “Worried Woman” (Lebroba)
Andrew Cyrille, “Go Happy Lucky” (The News)

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Joe Chambers is a legend. He made his name in the early 1960s, playing on a string of some of the most adventurous Blue Note Records sessions of the time. He can be heard on albums like Bobby Hutcherson's Dialogue, Wayne Shorter's The All Seeing Eye, Andrew Hill's Compulsion, McCoy Tyner's Tender Moments, and many more. He also backed Archie Shepp on Fire Music, On This Night, New Thing At Newport and For Losers, and he was the drummer on Chick Corea's debut album, Tones for Joan's Bones. He maintained a long creative partnership with Hutcherson; the two men made something like 10 albums together.

Chambers didn't record as a leader until the 1970s, but one of his pieces had a significant afterlife in the '90s. "Mind Rain," from Double Exposure, an album where Chambers played piano, duetting with organist Larry Young, was sampled by DJ Premier for "N.Y. State of Mind," from Nas's debut album, 1994's Illmatic. On his new album, Samba de Maracatu, Chambers reworks the piece as "New York State of Mind Rain."

This is a really interesting conversation about Chambers' long career as both a musician and an educator (he taught at the New School in New York for many years, and now lives and teaches in North Carolina). I hope you'll enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it. And if you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Joe Chambers, "Mind Rain" (Double Exposure)

Joe Chambers, "Visions" (Samba de Maracatu)

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Episode 55 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with saxophonist Wayne Escoffery. Fair warning: there are some sound dropouts here and there on this episode, because I got a new iPhone and consequently had to try out a different method of recording. So this conversation was recorded through my laptop using a Skype phone call, and for the most part it worked, but there are a few moments where it doesn’t.

I’ve been following Wayne Escoffery’s career for a long time; the first time I interviewed him for Burning Ambulance was in 2012. For a long time, he was in trumpeter Tom Harrell’s band, and for even longer than that, and up to the present day, he’s been a member of the Mingus Big Band, which played on Monday nights at the Jazz Standard in New York back when live jazz was a thing. He’s also made some really excellent records as a leader. The 2012 album The Only Son Of One and the 2018 album Vortex were real breakthroughs, allowing him to show deeply personal and at times even political aspects of his music.

He was born in England and moved to the US as a child when his mother left her husband, who was apparently not a great guy. Some of the music on The Only Son Of One is about that, and about coming to grips with his father generally. The music on Vortex deals with life in America following the 2016 presidential election, and particularly the cultural environment’s effects on his son. His new album, The Humble Warrior, is autobiographical in a more oblique way, and we talk about that some, but what’s really important on all of these records is that the music is terrific, a blend of hard bop tradition with real melodic and harmonic innovation.

Escoffery is also one of the co-founders, along with trumpeter Jeremy Pelt (who was on episode 21, way back in 2018), of the Black Art Jazz Collective. Their third album, Ascension, recently came out, and while it features three new members, it’s very much in line with what they’ve been doing to date, which is presenting extremely high level modern acoustic jazz. Trumpet, trombone, tenor sax, piano, bass, and drums, playing complicated melodies and extrapolating on them with really skilled and beautiful solos. We talk a lot about that group, too, and where he sees them fitting into the jazz tradition, particularly in relation to the acoustic jazz of the 1970s.

Like everyone else I’ve ever had on this show, Wayne Escoffery is a sharp guy who I had a lot of fun talking to, and I think you’re going to enjoy hearing our conversation. If you do enjoy this podcast, please consider visiting patreon.com/burningambulance and becoming a subscriber. For just $5 a month, you can help keep this show and Burning Ambulance as a whole active and thriving. Thanks!

Music heard in this episode:

Wayne Escoffery, "Chain Gang" (The Humble Warrior)

Black Art Jazz Collective, "Twin Towers" (Ascension)

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It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these. In fact, the last episode was released in December of 2022. I talked then to film critic Walter Chaw about his book on the work of director Walter Hill. Since then, a lot’s been going on. Most notably, I wrote a book of my own, In The Brewing Luminous: The Life And Music Of Cecil Taylor, which will be released this year. It’s the first full-length biography and critical analysis of Taylor, who is not only a hugely important jazz musician – along with Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and others, he was one of the pioneers of free jazz and really pushed the music forward in undeniable ways – but is also, I believe and argue in the book, a brilliant and under-recognized American composer whose work spans a much broader range than many people realize.

Ethan Iverson is also a really interesting American composer. You could be reductive about it and call him a synthesist of old and new pop and jazz styles, but he has a strong and recognizable voice that becomes easy to hear the more of his music you listen to. There are chords and types of melodies that he favors that set him apart from his peers, and he’s got a real attraction to big hooks, which manifested in the Bad Plus’s work in a number of ways and shows up in his solo work too. The Bad Plus developed a reputation for piano trio covers of pop songs that people often seemed to think were ironic, but were in fact performed from a perspective of real love for compositional form. A great tune is a great tune. And it’s worth remembering that they also recorded Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which is an avant-garde landmark but also has some really kick-ass and highly memorable melodies. After all, it was originally written for dancers.

Ethan’s new album, Technically Acceptable, is his second record for Blue Note and he’s doing some things on it that he’s never done before. First of all, he’s playing with two different rhythm sections that are made up of musicians more or less his own age, even younger than himself. Until now, he’s tended to record with older players, legends like Jack DeJohnette, Albert "Tootie" Heath, Billy Hart, Paul Motian, Ron Carter, etc. This is his first time post-Bad Plus making an album entirely with musicians of his own generation. Also, it includes a solo piano sonata – three movements, fifteen minutes, a through composed classical piece that still manages to fit under the umbrella of jazz in a George Gershwin meets Fats Waller kind of way. This album is a real showcase for him as a composer.

Ethan and I talk about Cecil Taylor in the interview you’re about to hear. We also talk about his work and how it’s evolved over the years, the economics of surviving as a jazz musician in the 21st century, and we talk about other piano players of his generation like Jason Moran, Aaron Diehl, Aaron Parks, Jeb Patton, and Sullivan Fortner. We talk about diving into the music’s history, and about how there’s as much to learn and draw from in the music of the 1920s and 1930s as in the music of the 1960s and afterward, and about the increasing movement toward composition in current jazz. This is his second time on the podcast – a couple of years ago, I interviewed him alongside Mark Turner, because they’d made a duo album together. But this time it’s a one on one conversation, and I hope you’ll find it as interesting as I did.