Jazziz Magazine
April, 2000 page 53
The Art, the Facts & the Artifacts
...in piecing together his family history, Ellery Eskelin has found more than his parents
past...
By Bill Meyer
When Ellery Eskelin dedicated two pieces to his parents on his 1994 album, Jazz Trash
(Songlines), he not only honored his elders -- he served notice that his music is
deeply informed by family history. The 40-year-old tenor saxophonist's early heroes
include Gene Ammons, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and John Coltrane, but his very first musical
memories are of hearing his mother; Roberta, play the Hammond B-3 organ at home,
in church, and on stage.
During the early '60s, using the stage name Bobbie Lee, Roberta led a group that played
music not unlike the propulsive groove that opens Eskelin's 1997 recording, One Great
Day (hatOLOGY/Hat Art). "My mother doesn't consider herself a jazz musician per se, although she swings and has a feel as deep as any jazz musician I've heard. She
played standards, mostly," Eskelin proudly recalls."She had jazz records in her collection,
which I listened to very closely. I could sing all the parts on the Dizzy Gillespie big-band record she had. She taught me standards, and we played together a lot;
that got me started and was extremely important emotionally:' When Ellery turned
10, Roberta taught him the fingerings on his first saxophone and schooled him by
playing in-home duets, a practice that continues to this day.
"She improvises very close to the melody," says Eskelin."l do have a keen awareness
of and respect for melody, certainty gained from my mother: Before I learned how
to play over changes, melody was really all I had. When I later learned enough theory
to be able to improvise lines over chord changes, the idea of melody was already a strong
force in my playing. Nowadays, I recognize that this feel for melody still informs
what I do even if I'm doing texture-based free improvisation."
The influence of his late father, Rodney Keith Eskelin, who also played keyboards,
is less direct and more shrouded in mystery. Eskelin's parents split when he was
just a toddler according to Ellery, Roberta could handle Rodd's penchant for playing
Stan Kenton's spooky and dissonant City of Glass to the baby, but not his nonchalance in
the face of potential homelessness when they drifted into Los Angeles with
nary a penny. Roberta and Ellery eventually moved to Baltimore. Rodd settled in
L.A. and became an arranger and performer for bottom-feeding record labels like Film City,
Preview, and M.S.R.
Using promises of showbiz success, these outfits solicited lyrical submissions in
the classified ads of cheap magazines. For a price, they put the submissions to music,
pressed them, and dumped them straight to cut-out bins. What the lyricists didn't
know was that their work was recorded assembly-line style (up to 30 first-take performances
per one day session) by mostly bored, stoned session musicians.
According to Phil Milstein, who curates the American Song-Poem Archive, "Where the
rest of the song-poem musicians were craftsmen, Rodd was an artist." Working under
the aliases Rodd Keith and Rod Rogers, he showed an exceptional capacity to turn
sow's ear lyrics like "Do the Pig" and "The Watusi Whing Ding Girl" into silk purses of mad,
exuberant, so-wrong-it's-right pop. The archive (www.channel1.com/users/fxxm) carries
three song-poem-compilation CDs that are liberally sprinkled with Rodd's work. Rodd
died in 1974 following a mysterious, early morning plunge from a highway overpass.
Eskelin didn't know that his father was a posthumous cult hero until the early '90s,
when he bought a song-poem LP at a record fair; but a close listen to Rodd's music
had a liberating effect. "lt's freed me up conceptually not to worry about issues of 'art'"
Eskelin says, "since his music went against practically every definition of art I've
seen and yet does all the things that art is supposed to do for you emotionally."
In 1995, John Zorn's Tzadik imprint released "I Died Today", Eskelin's own collection
of his dad's "greatest hits."
Eskelin left Baltimore for New York City in the early 80s. There, he jobbed with everything
from big bands to wedding bands before forming the cooperative ensemble Joint Venture
with Paul Smoker, Drew Gress, and Phil Haynes in 1987 (they split up in 1994). He joined Joey Baron's Baron Down in 1991, and made several solo albums with progressively
more unconventional instrumental lineups before establishing his regular group with
accordion and sampler player Parkins and drummer Black in 1994.
Eskelin's broad, raspy tone and aggressive yet elaborately etched lines betray his
deep jazz roots, but those roots are just one element in the band's mix. Black jump-cuts
from delicate textural ornamentation to James Brown grooves, and even articulates
the hypnotic drone that grounds the ensemble's performance of John Coltrane's "lndia"
on 1999's "Five Other Pieces (+2)" (hatOLOGY/Hat Art). Parkins pumps dense, off-kilter
chords and tendrils of feedback from her squeezebox, and her sampler generates nostalgia-tinged organ tones, writhing electronic mirages, and defiant, artificial-sounding
piano notes.
Parkins uses a much broader palette of samples on their 1996 duo CD, "Green Bermudas"
(Eremite). She loops droning Thai mouth organs, rains sheets of bells, hails arrhythmic
drums, and lobs big, undigested chunks of song poems, including several of Rodd's, at Eskelin's adroit tenor figures. Son defers to both sampler and father on the title
track; Parkins speeds up the tune, slows it down, compacts it, then plays it unprocessed.
Eskelin finally steps in after two-and-a-half minutes to blow off-kilter R&B licks.
"I provided Andrea with the raw material to sample from and then I shaped each piece
in advance. The idea of dueting with my dad's music, obvious as it was, did not fully
occur to me until I heard it all back. At the time, I thought of it simply as sonic
color, and in actuality it's Andrea that I'm dueting with. When I hear it back, however;
I do realize the connection rather strongly, which adds another dimension to an impossibly
ironic situation.
"Let's see" he riffs. "Song-poem company solicits general public for lyric. Musician
sets them to music and records them, the result being a strange hybrid of art and
commerce. Thirty years later, this recording becomes a cultural artifact. Saxophonist
and son of musician samples artifact and, in the process of connecting with the father
he never knew, reveals layers of conceptual irony that only an archaeologist could
figure out.
Eskelin's other connections are more direct, such as his poignant solo take on the
old chestnut "Flamingo," played as a slow ballad. "lt was in my mother's repertoire,"
he says, "and we've played it together as well. I was also thinking of my stepfather, who was a very strong supporter of my playing the saxophone. His favorite music
was probably from the 50s and a song like 'Flamingo' as played by Earl Bostic, was
sort of emblematic of that period.
"One thing that I absolutely love about Ellery's music is that it embraces the signifiers
of genre without actually playing genre," observes Parkins. "At the same time, I
don't believe that there is anything cynical or arch about his music.
"I may use recognizable musical fragments from time to time, but I'm not thinking
in terms of genre,"explains Eskelin. "I think in formal terms, looking to effect
a degree of contrast among events and bring out a change in the music's flow and
shape. Rather than write a theme for the musicians to elaborate upon in their improvisation,
I'II compose some written sections and then ask them to improvise new sections in
between those, usually with some instructions about the purpose of those improvised
sections. I'm looking for contrast with which to shape the architecture of the pieces.This
demands that the improvisation stay very focused and not meander or get fluffy."
Parkins' and Black's passionate engagement with Eskelin's material turns his heady
concepts into fluid, surprising music; the band's yearly tours of Europe and the
U.S. have made them as fluent at articulating Eskelin's transmutational compositions
as his old heroes were at negotiating chord changes. The birth of Ellery's son, Rami, last
year has cut into the trio's road time, but they're still moving ahead. According
to Eskelin, the group's next album adds cellist Erik Friedlander and tubist Joe Daley
to the mix, while its name, "Ramifications", celebrates the newest Eskelin generation.
"I'm sure that having not known my father will have an effect on my relationship with
my son, Rami. The word 'Ramifications' means the act or process of branching, outgrowth,
subdivision. It's an apt description of what happens musically over the period of one's life and describes literally the ongoing life process that we all are a part
of."
Of course, it's a little early to tell if Rami will also be a musician, but early
signs are encouraging. "He does seem to respond to certain music he hears on the
radio already," says Eskelin."He'll dance around a little or play his drum. The saxophone
still scares him though."
Bill Meyer lives in Chicago, where he writes about music.
ELLERY ESKELIN WITH ANDREA PARKINS & JIM BLACK
"Five Other Pieces (+2)" (hatOLOGY/Hat Art)
ELLERY ESKELIN WITH ANDREA PARKINS & JIM BLACK
"Kulak 29 & 30" (hatOLOGY/Hat Art)
ELLERY ESKELIN WITH ANDREA PARKINS & JIM BLACK
"One Great Day" (hatOLOGY/Hat Art)
ELLERY ESKELIN WITH ANDREA PARKINS
"Green Bermudas (Eremite)
ELLERY ESKELIN
"Jazz Trash" (Songlines)
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