Know What I Mean? (1961) — Cannonball Adderley with Bill Evans

Listening

This album can be heard for free on the web at Know What I Mean? @ Last.fm. To play a track, click the round button next to its name.

Nitty Gritty (Reference Section)

Recorded January 27 to March 13, 1961. Line-up: Julian “Cannonball” Adderley (alto saxophone), Bill Evans (piano), Percy Heath (bass), and Connie Kay (drums).

Background

This album comes at the intersection of a number of different jazz lineages. In some ways, Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans come from a shared line of thought, and Percy Heath and Connie Kay from another. In other ways, there is a strong connection between Bill Evans, Percy Heath, and Connie Kay, and Cannonball is a sort of outlier. There are, presumably, other ways of dissecting this as well. I’ll explain the two that seem clearest to me. First is that Cannonball and Bill Evans played together in Miles Davis’ band around 1958 and 1959. This was an important time for all of the musicians involved because it was in this band, and at this time, that the new frontier of modal jazz was being explored (in particular, on the album Kind Of Blue, 1959, on which both of them played). Indeed, some of this rubs off onto this album, for instance on the title track. While Cannonball and Evans were playing together, so were Connie Kaye and Percy Heath, in the Modern Jazz Quartet (along with Milt Jackson and John Lewis).

This brings us to the second way of thinking about the line-up on this album: the MJQ (and thus Connie Kaye and Percy Heath) were at the forefront of a jazz subgenre called Third Stream, of which Bill Evans was also an avid practitioner (as was Miles Davis for a period). From what I know, Cannonball wasn’t really involved in Third Stream (but I’m no expert on Cannonball, so please correct me if I’m wrong!). Third Stream was a subgenre which sought to combine Classical music (“first stream”) with Jazz music (“second stream”) to create something entirely new (hence “third stream”). Miles Davis was working on Third Stream, bringing sophisticated arrangements and classical instrumentation (tuba, french horn, etc.) into jazz. The MJQ (and thus Connie Kaye and Percy Heath) were also writing sophisticated compositions and arrangements and utilizing some compositional tropes common in classical music (take, for a striking example, their song Vendome, which is written in a fugal style). Although some of this music strikes me as gimmicky, the MJQ also played music that I find to be more tasteful, and which relied on classical music only subtly (I’m happy to make recommendations to anyone who’s interested). Bill Evans was trained in classical music and it influenced all of his playing and writing… always. (I’ll show some examples of it from Know What I Mean? below). Thus, he is also thought of as a Third Stream player.

The reason that I mention all of the above is two-fold: it really informs the music, and the line-up strikes me at once as bizarre and explainable. Anyways, however it occurred to them to do so, Cannonball and Bill Evans recorded an album together and this was the line-up they chose to work with. The billing of the album is one final thing that strikes me as unexpected. Take a look at the album cover. (Big Letters) “Cannonball Adderley” (small letters) “with Bill Evans”. I can’t tell if the suggestion is that they are co-leaders and Bill Evans is getting neglected, or if Cannonball is the leader, and Bill Evans is getting more mention than the usual. I’m not sure if this is for marketing reasons or what. (If you have any thoughts, please chime in!). A more exaggerated version of the same can be seen in the artwork on the album. At first glance, the only person in the scene is Cannonball. Go on and take another look at the album cover (last time, I promise). Ten points if you noticed the photograph of Bill Evans before I mentioned it. For those of you who still haven’t found it, that face just below the pair of legs (the white guy with the glasses) is Bill Evans. I’m further confused by the fact that I think that, to some extent, Bill Evans ought to get top billing on this album. Evans wrote two of the songs on the album (Waltz For Debby and Know What I Mean?), while Cannonball wrote none. Also, through most of the album, Evans just sounds like the one in charge (can you hear in his piano playing the same qualities that we found in Art Blakey’s drumming last week?). Now, neither of these are actually useful identifiers for leaders in general, but they do certainly make things just a bit more confusing here.

The Album

This is an album with wonderfully fantastic highs as well as some pretty dismal lows. It’s extremely rare for a piece of music to be a “miss” for me, and I tend to have faith in all music, so I’ll just say that there are a few tracks on this album that I haven’t been able to wrap my head around yet. Most of the great parts can be attributed (not surprisingly) to Bill Evans’ subtle, beautiful, and emotional piano playing (both as a soloist and as an accompanist) and to Cannonball’s post-bop stylings and his care with choosing licks and carving out phrases. In addition to faulting my own listening for the “bad” parts of the album, I’m also going to say that they were probably under-rehearsed and thrown together last minute (Know What I Mean?, for instance, was supposedly just put together on the spot during the recording session. Seriously though, listening to the main take, you really wonder why it sounds so off even after 7 tries. Even by the 12th try, also available on the CD, they still haven’t gotten the piece to work completely).

Another reason that some parts of the CD don’t work for me has to do, I think, with what Joe Goldberg writes about in the liner notes: “…The whole album is filled with the aura of relaxation… Ordinarily, this would get referred to rather tritely as an ‘after-hours’ mood, but in this instance it can be recognized as simply a matter of four highly skilled artists away from their usual tasks and delighting in one anothers musical company.” Like I said, I’m likely not yet ready for the simple recognition that he mentions. And so, I’ll say (tritely) that the album does, in places, veer too close to an “‘after-hours’ mood” for my tastes. Look, when they get rolling, they really get rolling. It’s just that they don’t always get rolling! A great example (again, I’m sure some one is going to tell me how brilliant this track is, and that I’m simply missing the point. I would like nothing more than to be shown the brilliance in the portions that I’m failing to understand) is the track Elsa, which, as far as I can tell, begins with two minutes of Bill Evans noodling on nothing terribly interesting before Cannonball joins in. It is at this point that it feels like the song finally begins. However, Cannonball, after entering, also fails to take things very far or to do anything profound. To be picky, some of his licks, in fact, seem quite stale (2:06-2:09, or 2:17-2:25, for instance). The section from 2:45 to 2:58 is almost comical in its failure. None of the licks make much sense on their own, and when strung together, they are a sequence of non-sequiturs (the passage reminds me, unfortunately, of something from the series of parody “guitarist shreds” YouTube videos, such as Van Halen Shreds). In his defense, it just sounds like he is reading the chart for the first time, without having practiced it.

It’s about time we turned to the good, because the truth is that I did really enjoy getting to know this album. There is so much that is great about it. In my opinion the four best songs on the album are (in this order): Waltz For Debby, Toy, Venice, and Goodbye. Waltz For Debby is a famous Bill Evans song. You can listen to the most famous version for free at Myspace (and I really recommend you do). It is a beautiful ballad, performed on the version linked above with Scott LaFaro on bass (he’s a man who really transformed the instrument. Hopefully I’ll have an opportunity to write more about him in a blog entry soon). The version on Know What I Mean? puts a new spin on the old favorite. Aside from Cannonball’s additions to the piece, take a listen to what Bill Evans does as an accompanist. He keeps things simple, but always refreshingly novel. One moment that stands out to me is the very beginning of Cannonball’s solo (2:03-2:14). Here, Cannonball is playing a very simple rhythmic game with the melody of the song (just making each note of the melody a little surprise in terms of its timing). It is not particularly unexpected (given the melody, and also given previous things that Bill Evans has done with the song in his solos), and Bill Evans presumably picks up on it instantaneously. In contrast, I have played with too many musicians in my time who would jump all over (and ruin) an idea like this once it is presented by a soloist. The truth is that it really isn’t their place to do so, and Bill Evans respectfully leaves the game in Cannonball’s hands. Bill Evans plants enough hints about it to support Cannonball and to make it clear that he is right there with him. But, he isn’t even close to the thin line between supporting a soloist and stepping on their toes. In my opinion, this is one of the most important lessons for amateur jazz musicians to learn.

Toy is a really joyful number, and it’s a great place to point out an example of the influence of Classical music on Bill Evans playing. He is constantly paying attention to the interplay and counterpoint between members of the ensemble, both in his compositions and in his improvisations. A very clear example of this can be heard in the B section of the head (0:39-0:47). Here, there is a very interesting and specific relationship between the melody (saxophone part) and the accompaniment (what Bill Evans plays). Together, they form a really interesting whole. Venice has another great example of the influence of Classical music on all of their playing (the song, by the way, is written by John Lewis, one of the other players in the Modern Jazz Quartet, and a big Third Stream guy). They are all able to play astoundingly quiet, and with great precision. This is used to great effect throughout the piece, but especially at the beginning of the head (0:21), and its repetition (2:24), where they create the impression that they are stopping (as if they got lost or something). Nope! We find ourselves deceived by them again and again!

One final word is about the saxophone playing in the song Goodbye. It is often said (of all musicians, but especially singers) that one of the things that separates amateurs from good players is their ability to create long phrases (amateurs only are capable of keeping the thought going for a short time). It’s true—it really does take skill, precision, and sometimes delicacy to weave a long thread of a phrase. I am finding more and more often that in my exposure to amateur musical theater, people take the easy way out to this problem. Singers (although it’s really their vocal coaches who are to blame) try to make phrases longer by simply keeping the sound going through them. Using this method, the phrase can only possibly be as long as a breath (although it tends to be even shorter). Cannonball teaches on this album that sustaining a long phrase has nothing to do with breath or with breaks in the sound. The most extreme example of this occurs from 1:56-2:27, where Cannonball constructs a very beautiful, long, and complete phrase. At the beginning, it is as if he is challenging himself to keep the phrase going, sometimes despite comically short notes. He is depriving himself of every possible crutch. Even though a lesser musician playing the same notes would have extremely short phrases, Cannonball is able to sustain the phrase for the entire 30 seconds (exactly as it ought to be played).

Bonus

This week, you get two bonuses from me! The first is a neat-ish blog post on I’m An Old Cowhand from Sonny Rollins’ album Way Out West, which I wrote about here. The blog post was sent to me from Caleb, and can be found on NPR’s A Blog Supreme. They touch on a few interesting things (in particular the YouTube video they include), but some of their points are, in my book, misses (notably the comment about the cow imitation, which the author acknowledges).

The second bonus for the week is a new page on my blog, where I will keep inventory of my personal jazz collection. I’m not sure why I wanted to include it. And I’m not sure why you’d want to read it. But it’s now available, as a work in prorgress, even though some amount of it is rather embarrassing (for instance, I’m even missing one of the important albums that I mention in this very blog post). I hope to add detail as I find the time to do so. The page can be found here.

Thanks again for reading!

Dan

Advertisement