The Wire
Adventures in Modern Music
London, December, 1996
Ellery Eskelin
Jump-cut jazz head
In both his saxophone playing and composing alike, Ellery Eskelin somehow expresses
a point of confluence between Arnold Schoenberg and Ben Webster. The Viennese klangfarben
specialist and the swing stylist were both master line-manipulators, able to combine
wholly different textures, timbers, shapes and shades into coherent statements. Whether
by means of a subtle embouchure shift or a bold new tone colour, emphasis is on nuance, the accretion of discrete, isolated sounds. But the real rub comes in the relationship
of these microcosmic events to the macrocosm of musical form.
"The sheer shape of a piece, the effect that a form has on it these are what most
interested me," says Eskelin from his apartment in Manhattan. "Figuring out how to
juxtapose phrases and ideas within phrases, to see what effect that could have on
the overall music." A prominent player in America's post-jazz creative music community since
releasing his debut Setting the Standard
in 1988, Eskelin has worked as a member of Joint Venture (with demon trumpeter Paul
Smoker), in drummer Phil Haynes' 4 Horns & What? and bassist Mark Helias' Attack
the Future, and as a member of march-crazed Baron Down. The Baltimore-raised saxophonists oeuvre includes Figure of Speech,
a great release with the unlikely line-up of tuba and hand percussion, and his most
recent album The Sun Died,
featuring guitarist Marc Ribot: an idiosyncratic trawl through tracks associated with
the star-crossed Chicago soul-jazz saxophonist Gene Ammons.
In 1992, Eskelin started accumulating material for solo tenor concerts, and it was
in this context that his exploration of microcosmic juxtaposition crystallized. Taking
the generally accepted organic fluidity of jazz sax as a departure gate, he began
interrupting the flow, interspersing unrelated ideas into the space of a single phrase.
Eskelin's self-produced solo disc Premonition
which includes versions of "Body and Soul", "Off Minor", and "Besame Mucho" as well
as his own pieces came directly out of this investigation, and he was soon at work
creating a group context in which to realize his arresting notion.
The trio he settled on includes Andrea Parkins playing accordion and sampler (using
only samples of piano and organ, no 'wacky' intertexts or citations), and brilliant
young drummer Jim Black, along with Eskelin's own highly refined tenor dialect. This
group's first album, 1995's Jazz Trash,
effectively integrated integrated Eskelin's' solo concepts into an ensemble, drawing
together disparate sound worlds from contemporary classical to bebop to restructuralism,
without making obvious genre -mix-match out of them. Instead, Eskelin rethinks instrumental roles, playing tandem melodies on equal terms with Black's percussion and
Parkins' squeeze-box, then breaking for the imposition of a cool organ chord (Eskelin's
mother is a professional Hammond organist, which could explain the Gene Ammons connection), then suddenly jumping back into an Archie Shepp-like sax statement.
"I didn't want to call so much attention to it, to make the juxtaposition the only
thing," insists Eskelin. "I was interested in the fact that two or three ideas could
be articulated and perceived as one." This interest in integration distinguishes
Eskelin from an orthodox postmodern jump-cut methodology like John Zorn's. "Guess one thing
I have in common with that work is that I don't believe in hierarchies. I'm listening
to lots of different music, and my influences come from wildly different places.
I don't think of one is superior to the others."
JOHN CORBETT
The Sun Died is now out on Soul Note (through Harmonia Mundi). Jazz Trash is still
available on Songlines, 1003 - 2323 W. 2nd Ave., Vancouver, BC Canada V6K 1J4
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