In the better-late-than-never department, I have to double back and say a brief word about the recent death of pianist Ronnie Mathews. Because when I entered the New School jazz program in 1987, Mathews was the first teacher I had. It was a jazz harmony course, and my memory of it is hazy (I turned 40 this year, folks). But I recall running out after the first class and buying Mathews’s 1978 album Roots, Branches and Dances (on the Bee Hive label — out of print and never reissued on CD, and not to be confused with John Ellis’s Roots, Branches & Leaves of 2002). I’ll never forget the driving modal sound of the first cut, the Mathews original “Salima’s Dance,” with Frank Foster on tenor, Ray Drummond on bass and Al Foster on drums.
I was so taken with Ethan’s succinct
appreciation of Mathews a few weeks ago. “Mathews (like John Hicks, Kenny Barron, Harold Mabern, and others) took the ‘energy style’ comping of McCoy Tyner in the 1960’s and made it work in more straight-ahead contexts from the 1970’s on,” Ethan wrote, and that’s exactly what you hear in “Salima’s Dance.” At some point during that school year, I went to see an Off-Broadway play based on the life of altoist Frank Morgan, and while Morgan didn’t star in it, he did lead a house quartet. Mathews was the pianist. I remember they used “Salima’s Dance” as an interlude between scenes, almost like a leitmotif.
I also remember seeing Mathews on TV, playing with Johnny Griffin in Europe, in a long concert clip that I taped and watched over and over. When I told Mathews about it, he shot back, “Everyone’s seen that but me!”
Ethan also nailed it in this comment: “The music that [John] Hicks and Mathews represents is too dependent on a communal feeling for it to be documented. It has less to do with Art than Culture. You need to be there, close to the bandstand, preferably in a small club, hopefully surrounded by other patrons who really love and understand the language.” Bradley’s was like that — a place that Mathews played in often if memory serves, right around the corner from the New School.
“So, the moral is, go see the older straight-ahead masters now,” Ethan concluded. “When they are gone, it is done.” I would add that when places like Bradley’s are gone, it’s like losing an entire village of Ronnie Mathewses.
