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Marionettes On A High Wire
Baikida Carroll (OmniTone)
performance
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sonics
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STEREOPHILE
November 2001
by Chip Stern
In this era of lingering
backward glances, it’s difficult to abide the academic
infomercials that often pass for jazz releases. If one is
to believe the accepted historical revisionism of the moment,
then the ‘60s and ‘70s never really happened; the
recombinant genetics that distinguish that era’s giddy
intermingling of musical styles and artistic disciplines was
irrelevant; and the collective impulse in jazz improvisation
as practiced by Coleman, Mingus, Evans, Coltrane, Davis, Dolphy,
and Taylor is meaningful only insofar as it explicitly referenced
blues and dance rhythms. Pass the hemlock, please.
But despair not – the
young lions of our collective youth never stop pushing the
envelope. And Marionettes On A High Wire is a comprehensive,
deeply moving evocation of creative values as enunciated by
such artists’ collectives as the Black Artists’
Group of St. Louis and Chicago’s AACM. Following in the
footsteps of Clark Terry, Miles Davis, and Lester Bowie, trumpeter
Baikida Carroll is one of the most original in a long line
of singular trumpet voices to emerge from St. Louis. The well-traveled
listener will recall his stunning solos on Julius Hemphill’s
legendary Mbari recordings, The Hard Blues and Dogon A.D.,
and his ubiquitous presence in the finest large ensembles
of the loft era – those chaired by John Carter, Muhal
Richard Abrams, and Sam Rivers. Nor is Carroll a stranger
to blues, R&B, and the post-bop mainstream – his
resume also includes stints with Jay McShann, Little Milton,
Dr. John, and Oliver Nelson.
Marionettes honors all of these without
being beholding to any of them; Carroll and his quintet attack
group improvisation with a lyric fervor and rhythmic focus
that belie post-modern jazz as a repository of European harmonic
decadence – the last refuge of the non-swinging scoundrel.
This rich analog recording is shot
through with all manner of collective elegance and seat-of-the-pants
danger. For all the bravura complexity and calculated ambiguity
of Carroll’s lines, there is a swayed elegance to his
tone, and on his “Ebullient Secrets,” Carroll’s
unhurried yet fervent conception recalls the manner in which
the ebullient one himself, Sonny Rollins, manages to abstract
a phrase and suspend time, yet always land gracefully on a
ripe, melodic phrase. While the trumpeter’s long, fluid
lines over the dancing, stop-and-go groove of “Thrill
a Minute,” are proof of his commanding bop chops, he
also shines on the ballad “Our Say,” where his muted
finesse inspires a torchy tenor solo by Erica Lindsay.
Still conceptually, this is post-modern
expressionism, and in the title tune Carroll displays an indomitable
feeling for jazz abstraction. Avant-garde? Nah . . . Mid-garde
is more like it. His opening theme suggests such proto-modern
jazz-funk amalgams as Miles’ “Stuff” and Eddie
Harris’ “Freedom Jazz Dance”; the lovely airborn
dialogue between himself and akLaff illustrates that no matter
how far Carroll stretches the harmony or pushes the envelope
of expressive canvas, his phrases indirectly reference Don
Cherry. Likewise, on “Flamboye,” pianist Adegoke
Steve Colson’s cubist harmonies retain a chamber-like
intimacy, while bassist Michael Formanek and drummer akLaff
display a similar talent for switching up between a non-metric
pulse and a groove, even as the group’s broken syncopations
and polyphonic lyricism evoke the flamboyant side of the trumpeter’s
long-time collaborator, Julius Hemphill.
The band closes out this warmly recorded
recital with the good-natured vaudevillian stride of “Cab,”
as if to say: No, we’re not distancing ourselves from
the mainstream tradition, Horatio – it’s just that
there are more sounds in heaven and earth than are dreamed
of in a Ken Burns’ documentary.
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