The Known Unknown: Ira Sullivan and Horizons

Ira Sullivan is one of those artists who’s best known for being unknown: praised by critics but never a big name. Sullivan, still going strong at 84, is a multi-instrumentalist, playing tenor and soprano sax, flute, trumpet and flugelhorn. He splits his time between Chicago and Miami, which, in this Big Apple-centric music, may explain why he’s not a bigger name.  He’s also not content to be pegged as an adherent of a particular school. He played with Charlie Parker but also heard and assimilated the sounds of John Coltrane and other free and spiritual players of the 60s and 70s.

A case in point is Horizons, recorded in 1967, a year full of non-Western musical ideas. Except for a fine interpretation of the standard Everything Happens to Me, on which he plays trumpet, flugelhorn, as well as tenor, Sullivan sticks mostly to tenor and soprano.  He shows a lot of Coltrane influence on that hard-to-play horn while still adding his own touches, as on Nineveh  and Adah. The title track has that uplifting late 60s Blue Note sound, with Sullivan on tenor. E Flat Tuba G features some strong free playing from all hands. Just to break things up, Oh, Gee!, a composition by trombonist Matthew Gee (I need to blog about him one of these days), takes us back to the 50s for a bluesy bebop romp.  

I’m not familiar with the rest of the band, but they make a real contribution to the overall group sound. Pianist Dolph Castellano doubles on electronic harpsichord on a couple of tracks, bassist William Fry provides strong, individual lines, Lon Norman adds color and depth on trombone, and Jose Cigno furnishes strong rhythmic support on drums and percussion.

A while back I blogged about Herbie Mann’s Middle Eastern-tinged The Wailing Dervishes album, with a focus on his version of Norwegian Wood. Sullivan’ version has that same feel. Check out Fry’s bass intro and bass drone, Cigno’s polyrhythms, Castellano’s harpsichord, and Sullivan’s passionate, grasping for the infinite solo. This is my kind of music!

New Ideas from Don Ellis

I mainly missed Don Ellis. I never heard his early avant-garde music (and it probably never got much airplay, anyway), I wasn’t into big band music enough to seek out his odd time signature stuff, and too snobbish to listen to his electrified records. His sadly premature death from chronic heart problems ended what was a very interesting and diverse musical career. When I had the opportunity to pick up one of his early recordings, I decided to educate myself.

New Ideas, recorded in 1961, is an good example of how the revolution kicked off by Ornette Coleman was affecting younger musicians with a bent for shunning bop clichés. Ellis used some of the best people around: his friend Jaki Byard, Ron Carter, Charlie Persip (before he lost the “e” in Charlie), and the unfairly obscure Al Francis on vibes. Overall, I enjoyed this music, although I think the totally improvised and collectively improvised pieces (Despair to Hope and Imitation, respectively) were a bit too studied and cold for my taste. Of course, very few musicians then or now can execute these challenging techniques very well, and the experiments  were worthwhile.

The compositions that used tonal clusters (Tragedy), unusual time signatures (Four and Three), and patterns (Uh-Huh) worked better for me. Al Francis, who apparently is still active in music, displays a really fresh approach to the vibraphone, Carter and Persip seem comfortable in any setting, and Jaki Byard is always a joy to hear.

New Ideas is a good example of the post-Ornette ferment in jazz. Not everything worked, but neither did playing 99 more versions of On Green Dolphin Street, and much of the album holds up very well, indeed. Here's one of the more conventional pieces (sorry for the wacky video accompaniment) that still provides a sense of what the musicians were trying to accomplish.