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One day not long after I moved to New York in the mid-1980s, I was browsing through a used record store in Greenwich Village when I came upon a record entitled 520 Out by a quintet led by an alto saxophonist named Walter Thompson. Featured was the great free violinist Leroy Jenkins. I'd never heard of Thompson at the time, but my interest in Jenkins and an insatiable hunger for exploring the unknown prompted me to buy the album. I remember being shocked at just how good it was. I'd never heard of the musicians involved (except for Jenkins), yet they played as well as famous players with whom I was more familiar. It seems incredible to me now, but at the time I was still naive enough to believe that the best Jazz musicians were the ones everyone had heard of. After all, that's why they were famous—because they were the best, right? Well, that's wrong, as I would come to find out soon enough. If it were true, then Walter Thompson would be playing the Village Vanguard on a regular basis. Eight years or so later, I had an opportunity to hear Thompson's big band in concert at La MaMa's Galleria, a downtown Manhattan art and performance space. Once gain I'm knocked out. Thompson uses his band of wonderful improvisers to realize a beautifully well organized and most utterly musical type of big-band free Jazz. They say that Duke Ellington played his orchestra as if it were an instrument. Walter Thompson does the same thing, but in a much more literal fashion. While Duke composed music that was dependent upon the specific personalities in his band for its realization, Walter improvises compositions with the voices of his improvisers. He adapts Ellington's concept to a free Jazz context. Though Thompson puts pen to paper and writes notated music, on this night his concert consisted of fully improvised pieces based on a conducting language of his own creation. He has devised a system of conductor's hand-and-arm gestures that he uses to pull from the band remarkably precise sounds, rhythms, and textures. He even cues specific tonalities, which I find fascinating. His work here is spontaneous composition in its most highly realized form, for Thompson takes what I believe to be the essential virtue of small-group improv (the immediacy of expression of an organic creation and arrangement of musical elements that have never before been heard) and combines it with an expanded tonal palette in the form of a more or less traditional big-band instrumentation. His music maintains an admirable coherence that's due in no small part to the studied sophistication of his directorial technique and a finely honed musicality. If my description seems overly general, it's because there was so much to see and hear. It all happened in such rapid sequence, and I can't take notes that fast. Thompson resembled a football referee in the way he waved his arms, pointed at players, ducked and lunged in this direction or that. He takes the traditional role of conductor a step beyond the European archetype. Where a classical conductor acts as an intermediary between the composer and the ensemble, Thompson does away with the middleman. The conductor is no longer the interpreter of somebody else's music but is himself (in collaboration with the musicians of the orchestra, of course) the composer. Thompson literally plays his band as if it were one of the saxophones he plays so well. He improvises with a big band as he would on a single-line instrument, with the same intelligence, sensitivity, and sense of order. Special mention should be made of slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein, guitarist Dave Tronzo, and Thompson himself, who are among the most interesting soloists in a band that's worth considerably more than the sum of its parts. If you're ever offered a chance to check out Thompson's work, jump at it. |
© 1995 JazzNOW |
