Tenor sax giant Michael Brecker, who has just died at age 57 of a rare blood disease, was far and away one of the most important figures in my early development as a musician and a jazz listener. I spoke with him only once, on the phone, while doing research for a Downbeat piece on drummer Ralph Peterson in 2002.
I’ll never forget Brecker’s incendiary run at the Blue Note, I believe in 2000, with Adam Rogers on guitar, Larry Goldings on organ and Idris Muhammad on drums. Another fond memory: In 1987, just about to finish my first (and only) year at Berklee College of Music, I brought my folks to see Brecker and his group at the time (with Mike Stern, Joey Calderazzo, Jeff Andrews and Adam Nussbaum) at the Berklee Performance Center. It was a double bill with Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition, featuring Greg Osby, Gary Thomas, Mick Goodrick and others. Mom and dad were baffled by DeJohnette, as I recall. Brecker they enjoyed thoroughly.
About two years ago, Jazz Times magazine invited a number of critics to offer personal reflections on a cherished album of their choice. My selection was Chick Corea’s Three Quartets, one of Brecker’s landmark performances on record. Below is what I wrote.
—
Chick Corea, Three Quartets
This was my introduction to Michael Brecker; Pat Metheny’s 80/81 would soon follow. I was about 16, all I cared about was the guitar, and my only serious exposure to jazz had been Joe Pass’s Virtuoso series. Three Quartets, recorded for Warner in early 1981, was in fact the first guitar-free jazz album that ever knocked me to the ground. With Chick on Bösendorfer grand piano, Brecker on tenor sax, Eddie Gomez on bass and Steve Gadd on drums, this was a group that combined studio-cat savvy with bandstand-warping heat. The album may have been cut in LA, but to me it represented nearby New York, where I would soon make my home.
Compact discs were still some years away when I first heard Three Quartets. A friend lent me his library LP copy, which I promptly transferred to cassette. If memory serves, “Quartet No. 1” and “Quartet No. 3” were on side A, and parts one and two of “Quartet No. 2” were on side B, disrupting the numerical sequence of the pieces. Stretch’s 1992 reissue preserved that playing order and added four previously unreleased bonus tracks. The last of these found Brecker and Gadd [update: I’m told it’s actually Corea on drums] dueting with casual brilliance on Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.” The other three, “Folk Song,” “Hairy Canary” and “Slippery When Wet,” made it into the book of Corea’s transitional band with Joe Henderson, Gary Peacock and Roy Haynes, which toured in the summer of 1981 (hear Live In Montreux, reissued by Stretch in 1994).
I didn’t manage to catch the one and only reunion of the Three Quartets band, at New York’s Blue Note in December 2001, but luckily the tape was rolling. “Quartet No. 2, Part 1” is the final track on Corea’s live two-disc retrospective, Rendezvous In New York, and I’m struck by the fidelity to the original—although Gadd swings more emphatically under Brecker’s solo and Gomez favors a far more acoustic sound than he used to. Another nice surprise: The new take ends not just with a ritardando, but also a second duo passage from Brecker and Corea.
The semi-classical conceit of the title Three Quartets wasn’t lost on me back in the ’80s, but I didn’t make too much of it—and still don’t. To this day, the severe chromatic ascent that kicks off “Quartet No. 1” is enough to drive me wild. Ditto the segue from Brecker’s terrifying solo to the indigo lyricism of the movement’s second theme. I’m reminded how and why this music expanded my impressionable ears: the extended forms, the dissonant harmony, the instantly accessible melody, the burning swing, the noise, the funk. Jazz seemed impenetrable, but after Three Quartets, I was in. I got it.
Comments are closed.