This review appears in the February 2009 print edition issue of All About Jazz-New York.
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Keith Jarrett/Gary Peacock/Jack DeJohnette, Live In Japan 93/96 (ECM DVD)
Bill Carrothers, Home Row (Pirouet)
Lowell Davidson, Trio (ESP-Disk)
David R. Adler
The bass is something like the spinal column of a jazz ensemble, where rhythm and harmony are made to cohere. For over 40 years, Gary Peacock has fulfilled the role with mastery, enmeshing himself in nearly every modality of modern jazz, in trios as dissimilar as Albert Ayler’s (Spiritual Unity) and Bill Evans’ (Trio 64). While he can point to a respectable archive as a leader and composer, he’s spent the bulk of his time interpreting the music of famous and not-so-famous colleagues. Admirers of this complex figure can now sink their teeth into three piano trio recordings — Keith Jarrett’s double-DVD Live in Japan 93/96, Bill Carrothers’ Home Row and Lowell Davidson’s Trio — to get a fuller sense of Peacock’s aesthetic range and adaptability.
Obviously, Peacock’s highest-profile gig is with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette in a trio that continues to parse the American Songbook. To Jarrett’s already extensive trio catalog, Live in Japan 93/96 adds a pair of ’90s dates from Tokyo, the first of which is filmed outdoors and has more of an up-close-and-personal feel. The Peacock we encounter here is a fierce bebopper and sensitive ballad player — his melody feature on “Mona Lisa,” from the ’96 date, comes across like a classical piece, short and to the point. But we also hear Peacock as an expounder of funky straight-eighth vamps, on “Caribbean Sky” and “Extension” (improvised codas to “Last Night When We Were Young” and “Solar,” respectively). For all its focus on straightahead swing, Jarrett’s trio is also quite the soul-jazz band, putting the grooviest spin on Ray Bryant’s “Tonk” and venturing the dark original “The Cure,” which could even be said to recall Jarrett’s electric Miles Davis period (imagine the tune played on Rhodes).
Peacock is as much if not more effective on Home Row, Bill Carrothers’ long-shelved 1992 date with Bill Stewart on drums. Living off the grid on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Carrothers is Jarrett’s heir in some ways: an elegant, vehemently swinging pianist who composes but devotes serious time to standards, playing within tonal bounds yet leading off Home Row with a weirdly polyphonic gloss on Ornette Coleman’s “When Will the Blues Leave.” The sound is consistently rich and assertive, and the woody, three-dimensional bass tone greatly helps. Peacock leaps from the speakers on the hard midtempo swing tunes, including Thelonious Monk’s “Off Minor” and the original title track. He makes short work of the extremely difficult head to Carrothers’ “A Squirrel’s Tale.” His patient, deeply felt single notes lend a haunted quality to the pianist’s more meditative works, “Hope Song” and “Ballad of Billy Milwaukee.”
On Lowell Davidson’s Trio, we hear Peacock in late July 1965, when Carrothers was one year old, and Jarrett’s breakthrough with Charles Lloyd was still a year away. In a mere two weeks, Peacock would enter the studio to record Spring, Tony Williams’ second avant-garde album for Blue Note. Davidson, a trained biochemist, was subsequently injured in a lab accident and never recorded again. On his one and only outing, very much a product of those extraordinary times, he joins Peacock and drummer Milford Graves for five riveting pieces of post-tonal jazz totaling 44 minutes in length. There are echoes of Cecil Taylor in the dense and ceaseless movement of “‘L’” and “Ad Hoc” (the latter featuring an unaccompanied bass solo). But “Stately 1” starts in a calmer rubato feel with a minor-key tinge, bringing Andrew Hill to mind. The sound is rewarding, although Peacock’s is the least present instrument in the mix. Still, he cuts through the oddly placed intervals of “Dunce” and the acidic motifs of “Strong Tears,” heightening the record’s aura of mystery.
*Gary Peacock will lead a trio with pianist Marc Copland and drummer Bill Stewart at Birdland, February 25-28.
