Flexing the trio
A new release from Madsen/Sommers/Hemphill
Facets of Form, by the FLEX Trio, Chris Madsen, saxophones, Clark Sommers, bass, and Neil Hemphill, drums, is widely available on streaming services, and studio videos are on Madsen’s YouTube channel, chrismadsen81
There are no originals on this pleasing and accessible record, but there are some quite interesting threads of mostly 60s and 70s jazz/fusion/funk/pop that I’m quite excited to follow out for this stack. So without further ado, here we go!
“Why Not” is by pianist George Cables from Bobby Hutcherson’s Knucklebean (1977), a record that also includes a tune by Hutcherson that is the first track of Facets of Form, “’Til Then” (we’ll return to it in a minute). Hutcherson is a masterful performer and great composer, who was comfortable in many musical situations and absorbed many influences. To demonstrate the band from this era, I found a performance from 1977 of a different piece from Knucklebean, “So Far, So Good,” composed by bassist James Leary. Cables isn’t here, but the rest of the band is the same: Leary, Hadley Caliman on tenor saxophone, and Eddie Marshall on drums.
So this is a more straight-ahead jazz tune than “Why Not,” but it still shows off the intensity of the group, and particularly the aggressive playing of Eddie Marshall. “Aggressive” is maybe not the right word: but the quality of the drumming in this body of work, and its loudness and pushiness, seems important for the backdrop of the entire sound of the Flex Trio. It characterizes Marshall’s playing on most of the record. It also characterizes Art Blakey’s playing on “Hammer Head,” a composition by Wayne Shorter for this version of the Jazz Messengers on Free for All (1965), which included Shorter, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Cedar Walton on piano, and Reggie Workman on bass—if you’re not familiar with that album, please check it out right away!
Blakey’s shuffle (my not-very-technical term for it) on “Hammer Head,” and the general vibe of this band seems to me all about pushing the limits of the amount of sound a small jazz ensemble can create: the unamplified piano and bass have to pummel their instruments to avoid sinking into inaudible irrelevance. Notably, the Hutcherson recording above is well balanced though it seems to me that this band generally plays about as loudly as Blakey’s—but 10 years later, perhaps what we are witnessing is an advance in sound production and engineering.
Is there something lost where engineering and sound reinforcement makes a good mix a piece of cake, where previously musicians participated in an escalatory spiral and exercise of pure physical strength to produce sound and be heard (and hear oneself)? Perhaps.
A different source of energy that the trio draws on—New Orleans funk—comes from a tune by the astonishing band the Meters called “Ease Back.” It appears on their debut album (1969), and while I couldn’t find a live performance, I could find this performance on television from 1974, introduced by Dr. John, and featuring the expanded early lineup of the band: Art Neville on organ and clavinet, Leo Nocentelli on guitar, George Porter, Jr., on bass, Ziggy Modeliste on drums, and Cyril Neville on percussion, mainly congas here. They sing too! The songs here are “Look-Ka Py Py” and “Jungle Man.”
You’re welcome!
So then, it’s kind of a merging of these two threads of tradition that we hear on the opening track from Facets of Form, “’Til Then,” composed by Hutcherson, also featured on Knucklebean, but there as a relatively laid-back bossa nova. The Flex Trio reimagines things pretty thoroughly, starting with a back beat with subdivisions coruscating across the cymbals in the manner of Marcus Gilmore (to name one possible influence). This YouTube link is to a video of the studio performance that is the same one on the record:
What I can’t recall Gilmore groups doing—say in his trio recordings with Vijay Iyer, is using a transition into a swing feel with a walking bass line as a big developmental moment in a solo, as it is here, about 3 minutes in. Such a transition is a powerful tool for improvising groups, but in versions I have encountered before this—say with the Keith Jarrett Trio—it is as a resolution from a looser period of interactive development during a piano solo, where the musicians are emphasizing various aspects of form and rhythm, gradually building energy, before coming together around the bass and ride cymbal playing quarter notes together: it’s an extended delay of the “swing” that makes its arrival all the more satisfying. This at any rate was something that the Jarrett group specialized in, and made, at times, thrillingly memorable. It’s quite thrilling here too, but it comes out of the development of what is essentially a rock beat: I haven’t heard it done like this before!
Then at the end of Madsen’s saxophone solo, Hemphill returns to a version of the original backbeat feel, and develops things in response to Sommers’s bass solo with almost the same level of intensity and volume as during Madsen’s solo. This seems to be an affordance of Sommers’s bass sound, which is harmonically focused enough that it can speak through what in other circumstances might appear far too unrestrained playing from the drums. This freedom and trust is another tool the trio uses to great effect: the bass solos are not of appreciably lower energy or volume than any other part of the performance: no chance to get your side conversations in here, audiences!
So, under the straightforward appeal of this record, we have a lot of things going on: mining the musical archive for better- and lesser-known music, sometimes taking a piece as a jumping-off point for substantial reimagining, including reimagining of roles in the trio, and sometimes presenting material with unfussy straightforwardness (e.g., the version of Wayne Shorter’s “Hammer Head”). The odd one out in the set at first seemed to be “Wichita Lineman,” as performed here by Glen Campbell on his own television show from the late 60s and very early 70s:
The song was new to me—I’m apparently one of the last people to hear it, as it has been loved and covered by an astonishing array of musicians in lots of different genres. But the Flex version is quite lovely too, and shows off everyone’s sensitivity and soulfulness, before we launch into a breakneck version of Cedar Walton’s “Firm Roots” to finish things off.
The FLEX Trio can often be heard at Dorian’s in Chicago, among other places.