Ashes and Diamonds I
On the new release from Rob Clearfield
Headline: A Watershed Release
First things first: this is a big deal. This album is a quantum leap for the pianist and composer Clearfield and also contains some of the best performances I have heard from his collaborators: Greg Ward on alto sax, Sam Weber on bass, and Quin Kirchner on drums. It does many things that I have not heard on a jazz record before. It is innovative and generous—a generosity reflected in the publication of the music and Clearfield’s commentary: he wants you to understand this work and be inspired by it, in whatever form that might take. Generous and generative. So I’m going to devote a couple of posts to talking about various aspects of it, with your indulgence.
It is a single piece in five parts, which wants to be taken in in one sitting—ideal for a live show—and if you live in the Midwest (or in France) you are going to have some chances in the coming weeks to hear it live, which I recommend highly (Midwest tour is November 2–5; two shows in France in December; details on the Bandcamp page, or the bottom of this post). I was lucky enough to catch a performance in April of last year at the Fulton Street Collective in Chicago, just before the band went into the studio to record, and I can’t wait to get another chance to hear them at Constellation in Chicago on November 4. Maybe I’ll see you there!
My totally biased position
I first heard Rob Clearfield playing at Katerina’s on Irving Park Road in Chicago in the early aughts. I don’t remember who Rob was playing with, but I remember that the saxophonist announced that they were playing one of Rob’s compositions—it might have been called “Hartford,” or maybe “Ann Arbor,” but in any case it was a place name, and I was just immediately taken with this piece, and moved by it.
And that had not happened to me very much while listening to modern jazz compositions. I should say—I was moved by the piece itself, the melody and chords, its feel, even before any solos happened over its form. I was, at this moment, quite biased against modern jazz compositions: I thought they tended to be more like puzzles and games, and to an extent I lamented that they did not carry the sentiment and emotional arcs of, say, a good ballad from “the American songbook.”
I will admit that I was under the (excessive) influence of pianist Keith Jarrett at this time, the influence of views one could gather from his public statements (though I was often skeptical of these) as well as the output of his “Standards Trio,” with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, which played, as the titles hints, almost exclusively standards (i.e., popular American songs from the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s), and was also one of the biggest jazz acts in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s—consistently playing large concert halls and by far the biggest seller for their record label ECM. While I often found Jarrett’s statements rather jarring, I was almost entirely devoted to the art of his trio, at least when it was playing at what I perceived to be its best—e.g., recordings like Tribute or The Cure.
Jarrett would speak in the 90s about how he was sad that Miles Davis ever stopped playing “Stella by Starlight,” and there was an implication that the innovations and hybridities of 1970s fusion, and what Davis did from the 70s to the 90s, was unfortunate. The message to jazz composers was—your pursuit of complication and abstraction, on the one hand, or mass popularity, on the other, is separating you from the heart and soul of this music, which formed itself around interpretations and expansions of popular songs, as well as the blues, and songs focused on a few central emotions and human experiences. We in this trio, playing standards that we all know from having been professional jazz musicians in the 50s and 60s, are centered on those sentiments while also free to allow profound music to come forth from our interaction.
Anyway, please let that stand, or rather stand in for my version of the theory of jazz composition that I interpreted, in my teens and twenties, from my engagement with Jarrett. I will doubtless have much more to say about Jarrett in future essays, as he is a central reason that I play jazz piano. Though his opinions or the ways he articulated them could be exasperating, he was surely one of the most gifted musicians and astonishing pianists to have walked the earth in recent years, and I miss his music very much (since suffering strokes in 2018, he no longer plays publicly).
But that little sideline was all to establish that I was not, in 2006 or 2007, in a place where I was very open to being impressed by new jazz compositions—or I was, in the sense that I had largely written them off, and didn’t really expect to hear anything I liked other than something that might be an interesting set of challenges for improvisers to stretch around.
I was new to Chicago and new to the scene, and being carried away with this performance as I was, I got a burst of confidence and went up to Clearfield at the bar to talk about the music. He had, I think, just turned 21 at the time, and also just “turned pro,” although, since he had grown up in Chicagoland, he had been playing in a semiprofessional capacity for some time. (Also a topic for a future essay—Oak Park as incubator for Chicago jazz musicians.)
The brief version of what happened after: I was directing student plays as an English professor at a university in northwest Indiana; I hired Rob to do music for the plays; some years later I asked if I could take a lesson with him; some years later I began to play at jam sessions in Chicago; some years later I left my professor job to pursue jazz music full-time.
So now, my bias goes way in the other direction: I have had the benefit of innumerable conversations about music with Rob, all kinds of music, and from all kinds of points of view. And lately I have had a good number of conversations about the profession, the business of music, and I am incalculably the richer for all this.
So, what I have to say about Ashes and Diamonds is deeply unobjective. On the other hand, I have just been reading/rereading Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s still-remarkable Contingencies of Value (1988) and am reminded that objective evaluation of art is not possible or even desirable. So fuck it, it’s fine, to quote Olivia Rodrigo.
Getting actually into the record, sort of
How long does it take to write a piece of music? Somewhere between a moment and infinity. That always seems true in the sense that all music participates in all other music, as Roland Barthes famously claimed for all writing in The Death of the Author. It seems true in the sense of what it means as a musician to prepare to play—a lifetime of experience is always there, as well as all of the immediate preparations for whatever particular challenge is presented by one performance or another. (And I’m sympathetic to the *provisional* argument voiced some time ago by Ethan Iverson, that jazz musicians, in some important sense, do not improvise.) But given that I have had a reasonably good view of at least some substantial highlights of Clearfield’s work over about 15 years, I find myself ready to hear how Ashes and Diamonds displays the long growth and evolution of several threads of that work. It also clearly but not I would say ostentatiously displays a relationship to various musical projects with which it shares some characteristics, including some big ones, particularly Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. I also hear clear displays of Clearfield’s engagements with Bach and Brahms. Clearfield resists the name “suite,” ordinarily used for multi-movement jazz compositions; the names of the movements of this piece, “Adagio,” “Gigue,” “Lento,” “Passacaglia,” and “Furioso,” hearken to Bach’s innovative collections of dance-structures and tempi, as well as more recent markings focused on emotion—though Bach did that too on occasion. The piece is surely not a suite in the way Ellington and Strayhorn wrote suites—it deserves another name.
Among other things, the piece crosses generic and historical boundaries in new ways: to be able to hear Brahms and Messiaen and Ligeti and Parker and Coltrane, and also not hear them within the powerful continuity of the piece—that seems remarkable. That is to say, it’s one thing to have a variety of influences, and there isn’t really anything so unusual about that set of five for jazz musicians (the obvious connections to Brahms in the work of Jason Moran and Brad Mehldau come to mind), but it is more rare to hear those and many more surfacing within a tapestry that is so internally bound by its own logic as this piece, especially a piece that is unified and lengthy. They are audible, and also the compound sounds new.
This album deserves to be widely heard and absorbed into the larger creative consciousness of musicians. Who knows in what way that will happen? I can’t predict, but I can speak in future posts about what I am hearing and what pathways this seems to open. Here’s my list of things I’d like to/am thinking about addressing:
Bach as a model for poly-vocality (building on my last post): the singing lines of the bass; the self-division of polyrhythms on the piano, including some true three-voice passages
Greg Ward’s amazing playing: sound effects, percussion. Wholly convincing bebop-related improvisations over the very non-bebop harmonic structures of the piece. Emotional commitment, everywhere; playing sax like a violin, in a good way
Brahms as a demonstrator of large-scale structure; of the lower register; of development of materials with maximum discipline and vision for profundity . . .
Messiaen—some specific apocalyptic vocabulary, vocabulary for contemplating cosmic forces
Ligeti: pulling lyricism from abstraction, abstractions that push the piano beyond itself
Stay tuned!
Ashes and Diamonds release shows:
Nov 2, 2023 - Merrimans’ Playhouse (South Bend, IN)
Nov 3, 2023 - Origins Jazz (Lexington, KY)
Nov 4, 2023 - Constellation (Chicago, IL)
Nov 5, 2023 - Sugar Maple (Milwaukee, WI)
Dec 13, 2023 - Club 27 (Marseille, France)
Dec 14, 2023 - Sunside (Paris, France)
Everything available for purchase on Bandcamp.
