ELLERY ESKELIN'S MUSICAL DEMOCRACY March 11, 2005
Changing of the Garde
by Paul Bennett

A recent show at the 55 Bar in Greenwich Village was a watershed of sorts for tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin: It was a celebration of his trio's tenth anniversary. Wearing a dark blazer and a pork-pie hat, Eskelin greeted the audience, introduced the band, and said, "We've got some music to try." Along with drummer Jim Black and accordion-, piano-, and sampler-player Andrea Parkins, Eskelin launched into the first of many tunes culled from the albums they've made over the past decade. They played with an easy brio. Most of the tunes were Eskelin's, but toward the end of the set the trio tackled the Thelonious Monk tune "We See." Monk's music has never lent itself to orthodoxy, and Eskelin took advantage of this to probe the hidden cracks in the tune's melodic and harmonic structure. Eskelin seems to enjoy roaming the hinterlands of the jazz repertoire; his choices of standards generally favor the obscure. Hearing how he approaches a familiar tune sheds light on what he does with his own material.

After playing the head, the trio charted a course that at first seemed to have little to do with Monk's jaunty, jerky melody. They moved among the more oblique angles of the tune, like strolling along a sidewalk and purposely stepping on the cracks. But just when it seemed they'd gone too far afield, they landed on the head as if the timing were preordained. Ten years of playing together have given them an uncanny ability to stretch. But they also know when--and how--to contract. No small feat on tunes with such jagged contours.

Like another contemporary trio at the height of its powers--the tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, the drummer Paul Motian, and the guitarist Bill Frisell--Eskelin's trio is more concerned with group interplay than individual soloing. "I think some people, whenever they see a saxophone player, the horn in your mouth, it must be that you're soloing," said Eskelin. For him, the group is an improvising entity: "I remember Ornette Coleman making a comment in an interview years ago. He was talking about how one of his early albums was mixed, and he said that the engineer put the sax up front, and he didn't like that, because he wanted to be inside the music with the other three. Everybody was equal that way." The 55 Bar show proved that after ten years, Eskelin's notion of musical democracy--more town hall meeting than stump speech--has reached a well-honed state.

By the time Eskelin began to play professionally, jazz had passed through perhaps its last great turbulence, the 1960s avant-garde explorations of musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Giuffre, Albert Ayler, Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane. Saxophone technique had been pushed to its limits, and improvisation had been liberated from the shackles of chord changes and form. For Eskelin and other players of his generation, what remained was a vast pool of resources.

But most players, it seems, choose to dip into only one corner of that pool. What sets Eskelin apart from his peers--and they are numerous; there are a dozen young tenor players with fantastic ability on the scene today--is that he has steadfastly refused to hew to one tradition or line of thought. For all their technical skill, the best of today's players often don't have a personal sound or approach, and it can be hard to tell them apart. This is not to say they're not making good--sometimes compelling--music. But as the soprano saxophonist Bruce Ackley once told me, John Coltrane's lesson (which holds for any great musician) was not to sound like John Coltrane but to seek one's own path with a similar discipline.

Eskelin's music could well be called "avant-garde," though it avoids the clichés that plague much free jazz and improvised music. In any case, the term has always been hard to parse--for many it simply means non-mainstream, or outside--and Eskelin makes any definition murky because of the number of strands he weaves into the fabric of his music, creating new rules from a mélange of old ones. The music is quicksilver and fluid, never static or predictable, partly because Black and Parkins are so deft at creating different grooves and textures, from punk-like fury to deranged new-age. This may be one reason why Eskelin says much of his growing audience has no traditional jazz background.

Unlike many avant-garde musicians, Eskelin honed his chops on blues and bebop--his mother made a living playing B3 organ in Baltimore nightclubs--only later in life giving rein to more adventurous leanings. The result is a command of technique and a far-ranging musical vision matched by few players today. Eskelin brings some of free jazz's audacity to bop and some of bop's harmonic complexity to free jazz. I have heard him in various groups over the years, and at each gig he never sounded rote or as if he were simply playing one set of ideas across the board. Eskelin does not cut and paste. Fully engaged in each situation, he uses the excitement and challenge of new musical combinations to draw forth new versions of himself.

I grew up with that harmonic thing," says Eskelin one afternoon a few weeks after the Bar 55 gig. "It's easy for me to go back into that. I don't have to make an artificial choice about sounding as different as possible. I like to think my sound has many things in it. Phrasing, juxtaposing textures--that's more indicative of free music in general--there's nothing really new about that. But for me, there's a certain blend. I like ingredients from both, where harmonic awareness and ideas about phrasing come together."

A number of different players have influenced him over the course of his career: "I started out liking R&B tenor playing. Night Train, Bill Dobbit, King Curtis, Earl Bostic. That sound. Then Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Stan Getz. Lee Konitz is a big hero. But when I discovered Coltrane, he became a focal point, from my teen years onward."

Eskelin took Coltrane's "sheets of sound" approach to heart. Bored with the conventional approach to jazz--based primarily on eighth-note lines--Eskelin began intentionally avoiding them, seeking as Coltrane did to craft lines from clusters of notes, complex rhythms, and a more deliberate use of space. And while his early work is jazz-oriented, Eskelin even then sought to shake things up by varying the instrumental lineups in his bands. "Different instrumentations became a real catalyst for me," he says, "because it forced me to play differently than I normally would. You function one way when you have bass, drums, piano behind you, playing standards. I wanted to resist that, do something else." Working with other musicians who favored this approach--such as the drummer Joey Baron, whose trio Baron Down featured tenor saxophone and trombone--eventually led Eskelin to where he is now: "That band really opened me up, opened my perspective up completely in terms of what's possible, how music can be put together. I don't write compositions in which improvisation functions to flesh it out or fill it in or color it. It's actually the opposite. I feel like I'm starting with raw improvisation and structuring that. And that puts a different slant on how we play everything."

Eskelin's most recent albums--including Ten, his anniversary album--appear on the Swiss label Hatology, whose catalog includes Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Ran Blake, and Joe Maneri, along with a number of lesser known but equally adventurous musicians. Steady recording dates have allowed Eskelin to document his musical development and build a fan base that supports him on tours in the United States and abroad. Hatology, long known for its recording quality and elegant packaging, is to the avant-garde what Blue Note was to the mainstream in the 1950s and '60s. Since the '70s, Hatology has released work from most of the key players in avant-garde jazz and improvised music. Eskelin's albums on the label have featured the trio as well as augmented lineups. And all along, he has appeared on a host of other people's albums; his discography includes more than 50.

His projects with Parkins and Black, though, are the core of his recent work. "In a nutshell, this is a band of improvisers," said Eskelin. "In fact, I chose them based on the criteria that they could improvise completely, that if I never wrote anything we could have a career doing improvised music, that each player is strong enough to get up on stage and improvise a solo concert, and that when we come together we will improvise. Except that I'm going to introduce into these otherwise open improvisations certain elements and schematics to insure that each piece is different. I didn't want to have an improvising band with a tendency to play the same piece every time."

Ten is far from falling into this trap and is replete with textural variety. It is, in a way, an improvised symphony with twelve distinct but related movements. The six musicians on the album play in various combinations, and Eskelin seems a musical polyglot: here playing fast and furious, there with an almost melancholic intimacy. One tune seems like an oblique paean to punk, another to circus music and cabaret. The singer Jessica Constable--one of three guests--is a revelation. On the second cut, she sings a quiet line of wordless, atonal plainsong. Unfettered from the burden of a text, her voice becomes an abstract sound sculpture that is disquieting, compelling--and slightly unhinged. Eskelin's tenor dances delicately around the voice. He gently slaps the reed with his tongue, and you can hear the air going through the horn as he slowly creates a pulse around which Constable--whose voice has the huskiness of Beth Gibbons and the crystalline ring of Björk--winds down her improvisation.

The presence of Constable, along with the guitarist Marc Ribot and the bassist Melvin Gibbs, was originally meant to be minimal: "My original idea was to be half Jim, Andrea, and I--the band--and the other half the band with guests. But we recorded for two days, completely improvised. Once I got the tapes back, I realized that no matter what I had set out to do, I had to go with what this music was telling me." After the record was made, Eskelin added Constable to the band--though she lives in Paris. "It's a new chapter in the group's development," says Eskelin. "Given what I've seen so far, I have a feeling that's going to be the direction for awhile. Not that the three of us will never just play again. I wrote some new music for the trio that we performed on the tour, and I'll probably want to record it. But I can see the writing on the wall." So in the end, Ten may be less an anniversary album than an augury of things to come.

Paul Bennett is a writer and musician who lives in New York City.