Ray Comiskey meets one of the great masters of jazz guitar, John Abercrombie, who performs in Bray next weekend
Guitarist John Abercrombie is one of those players who, on the face of it, seem to defy pigeonholing. Music with a Brazilian flavour? He's part of a guitar trio with Larry Coryell and the Brazilian, Badi Assad. "A fun thing," he says, "but it's also all acoustic guitar, and that's something I've never done, so by the end of the night, my fingers!"
His fingers get a rest when he switches back to plectrum for his other groups, one of which is Jackalope, with drummer Bob Meyer and the hugely promising alto and soprano player, Loren Stillman. "Lee Konitz on steroids", he calls him, explaining that although Stillman is a highly individual saxophonist, Konitz is one of his big influences. "He seems to have this ability to improvise very thematically and musically, kind of like Lee would, but his tone is a little harder, I guess . . . a little more grit in the sound."
The guitarist has another working trio, with the Hammond B-3 player, Dan Wall, and drummer Adam Nussbaum, which harks back to his own professional beginnings, when he went on the road with organist Johnny Hammond's trio. And there's the state-of-the-art quartet he leads, with the great violinist, Mark Feldman, bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joey Baron. The band has already made two superb recordings for Manfred Eicher's ECM label.
Next Saturday he will play with bass guitarist Ronan Guilfoyle, drummer Conor Guilfoyle and the Callino String Quartet in Renaissance Man, a specially commissioned suite written by the bass guitarist in memory of the brothers' father. And that's a work which embraces both classical music and jazz.
So if you're about to ask, plaintively, will the real John Abercrombie please stand up, the answer is he's all of those things, yet very much his own man. But he still sees himself as standing unequivocably in the great line of jazz guitar that stretches back to the early 1940s and Charlie Christian, one of the pioneers of the amplified instrument.
He was born in Port Chester, New York, in 1944, which means he grew up musically in the hugely turbulent and creatively vibrant jazz of the 1950s and 1960s. "But, of course," he says, "at a certain point I think the music started to change a lot. In the 1970s there seemed to be a real split from the tradition of the jazz guitar and then people bringing in country music, rock'n'roll music, different effects. A lot of influences started to come in, not only to the guitar, but to a lot of instruments. But I think the guitar handles these changes really well, because there's so many different ways to play it."
Was he thinking of players such as Coryell, who first made an impact round that time? "Well, Gabor Szabo, the Hungarian guitar player who brought in his own country's music," he answers. "I was thinking primarily of guys like that who started to make the initial changes. Jerry Hahn was another guitar player, with Gary Burton. People like that I found very influential, because they were doing something different.So the music started to get more colourful. And people like John McLaughlin, of course, people that seemed to raise the technical level of the guitar to some supersonic place.
"But still," he continues, "my real love of jazz guitar is still primarily people like Jim Hall, Wes Montgomery. I still feel really connected to that, more than I do to the other stuff - the sort of fusiony stuff, rock stuff; I fooled around with it, but if I had to pick one thing that I like I would have to say it's the way that Jim Hall or Wes play the guitar.
"And that's a period of music where Miles was developing his famous bands, and [tenor saxophonist John] Coltrane and Bill Evans - I was just fanatic about Bill Evans - I was just going to music school and starting to get interested in jazz. Kind Of Blue [Davis's masterpiece and possibly the finest jazz record ever made] was just released and I heard the Bill Evans Trio very early on, so I guess music like that really made a very big impact on me."
Hall and Evans place him firmly in a romantic, lyrical tradition, along with two more guitarists he admires, Barney Kessel, himself a direct link with Charlie Christian, and Jimmy Raney. But the likes of Coltrane and Davis, as well as other players he mentioned, helped him access more innovative freedoms.
He took full advantage, playing in New York with such as Gil Evans, Gato Barbieri, Chico Hamilton and fusion player Billy Cobham. It was an amazingly diverse collection of individuals in terms of the jazz styles they favoured.
"Yes," he agrees. "I think one of the things that sort of tied them together was the time period. If you look at Gil, he was still playing a lot of the old book he had recorded with Miles, but he had sometimes changed the feel for certain pieces. Like the classic arrangement of Summertime became a guitar feature and it was played not with a swing feel, but not really a rock feel, but what we call in the business an eighth-note feel, a more even call. And he was also doing Jimi Hendrix, starting to venture into that area.
"Gato Barbieri always had some of that Latin fire, so that made sense. And Chico? He was totally wide open, a wonderful guy to work for. He didn't write any music, so that was my first experience in writing music. I think he had two tunes in the book when I joined. One was Forest Flower, by Charles Lloyd, and I don't remember what the other was. And there were some standards, and he was always encouraging the guys in the band to bring in stuff, so that was a break for me, also."
Hamilton pushed him in other directions, too. "Sometimes we'd go on the bandstand and Chico would say 'let's not play any tune; let's just make something up; let's play free'. I was really harmonically oriented, so I was trying to improvise something that had a certain mood or harmony to it.
"Anyway, that was kind of experimental, so in a way they were all seemingly different, but there were certain ways that all those things connected. Chico was always trying to stay with the times, and so was Gil."
In the early 1970s Eicher heard him at the Montreux Jazz Festival and invited him to record for his label. The result was Timeless, made in 1974 with Jan Hammer on keyboards and Jack DeJohnette on drums. "I didn't think it would be quite as bizarre as it turned out," he laughs. "It was actually more fusiony. I think there's about one tune on it that sounds like jazz organ trio music, a tune of mine called Ralph's Piano Waltz, which was written on Ralph Towner's piano when I was house-sitting."
Nevertheless, although the album didn't really turn out as he wanted, he feels his colleagues were such dynamic players that they influenced it and it did really well, leading to an association with Eicher's label which continues to this day. ECM has documented several important Abercrombie bands, including Gateway, with bassist Dave Holland and DeJohnette, who were neighbours in the Woodstock area.
Gateway happened by accident. "We used to get together and play every once in a while," he explains, "and one time we were playing in Jack's place and he had a cassette recorder going and gave me a copy of the tape at the end of the session." There it might have stayed, except that Eicher took him from Munich to Stuttgart for a concert, asked if he had anything and suggested he play the tape in the car. "The recording quality was hideous, but he loved it, and he's the one that actually pushed us to become a recording and a touring trio." The results amounted to four albums over the next 20 years, each better than the previous one and culminating in 1994's reunion session, In The Moment. It's a dazzling account of three great players, still fresh and exciting, relaxing in mutual inspiration.
His most recent quartet, with Mark Feldman, Marc Johnson and Joey Baron is, he says, "the most fun I've had in years. I wish I could work with it more". The association with Marc Johnson goesback to when he heard him play with Bill Evans more than 25 years ago and, knocked out, invited him to come by his house and jam with himself and drummer Peter Erskine.
Mark Feldman he heard in Banff, Alberta, at the local Center for the Arts. Already a contemporary classical music violinist, he had backed country singers in Nashville, where he lived, "which I found completely strange for somebody like Mark", he says. Feldman was also older than the other students. "At every little concert for the students Mark would just blow everybody away. No one could believe how good this guy was, and it didn't seem to matter what kind of music he was playing . . . bebop, free stuff, or original music by someone else."
Abercrombie's original choice for the quartet's drummer was Billy Hart, who cancelled a few months before the group's ECM debut. The choice fell on Joey Baron. "I had no idea it would work with Joey. I just knew it would be very interesting, and it turned out to be great. I mean I enjoy playing with him probably more than any drummer right now."
Will there be more recordings from this group? "Yes. I talked to ECM about a week ago and I spoke to the head honcho," he laughs at the description, "and he agreed. He really wants to do something. It'll probably be recorded some time in the summer and, you know, it'll probably take them a year to release it, so by that time the music has changed, or it's already older." So will the audience, but it's unlikely to change in any other way. Abercrombie is too good to miss.
