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Roswell Rudd/Rob Scheps Quartet with Dan Schulte and Alan Jones Creative Music Guild at the Community Music Center 3350 SE Francis St., 772-0772 7:30 pm Saturday, Jan. 23 $10 Jim Olding will present a Roswell Rudd radio tribute and interview on KBOO 90.7 FM, noon-6 pm Saturday, Jan. 23. "You blow in this end of the trombone, and sound comes out the other end and disrupts the cosmos."--Roswell Rudd When you honestly stop and think about music, it's astounding. How do those notes on the page somehow translate into unabashed joy, raw grief or pure rage? How is it a saxophone can sound more human than the human voice? How can a trombone laugh one minute and sob the next? If anyone knows the answer to the last question, it's Roswell Rudd, the finest and most important living trombonist. In the last 40 years, no one has taken the instrument further, from Dixieland to the outer edges of the avant-garde, often at the same time. His playing evokes city life--both Uptown and the Bowery, black tie and tails and the same suit you've slept in for days. His trombone sounds like a species all its own. Nat Hentoff has said that Rudd's sound goes "back to New Orleans and further ahead than anyone has yet reached." His trombone is alive. The 63-year-old Rudd spent decades of his life rummaging around the jazz avant-garde, playing with Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler to create some of the most furiously inventive music ever known. But the music that matters most to him is that of two jazz iconoclasts, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. "There was a great influx of music that came into my life when I first got to New York in the late '50s and discovered these two," Rudd told Willamette Week in a telephone interview. A young musician couldn't have two more eccentric mentors. Monk's music is a study in unorthodox quirkiness and is inseparable from its urban setting; it's the perfect off-key hip. Rudd has been studying Monk's brilliant corners since first being exposed to the music while playing in a quartet with Steve Lacy. "Steve was more inside, having played with Monk, and we'd go watch him live," Rudd remembers. "I was amazed at how I could listen, then go back home and play what I'd heard. Steve heard me one night, then called Monk up and asked him how he'd done the part I was playing. Monk played it over the phone on piano, almost exactly what I'd just done on the trombone." Around the same time, Rudd met Herbie Nichols. An incredibly prolific but under-appreciated composer and pianist, Nichols died young (at 44, of leukemia) having recorded only 30 of his 170 or so compositions. The two met in the last years of the pianist's life when, according to Rudd, Nichols was "leading a double life," working with a swing/Dixieland band to pay the rent while putting all his musical gifts into writing complex new music. This "high re-bop" (Rudd's term) was scorned by the older players as too difficult. "He needed adventurous younger guys who had the drive to learn new music," remembers Rudd, "and that was definitely me." The relationship benefited both men. "He wanted to know more about the trombone, and I wanted to learn about music," Rudd says. In the end, Nichols gave him some of the unrecorded material, and Rudd has remained obsessed with it for the past 20 years. In two 1996 discs, The Unheard Herbie Nichols Vols. 1 & 2, Rudd presents this music in a bold trio setting and proves that it's easily as deserving of wider acceptance as Monk's work. "I had this rattling around in my body a good many years, and I finally have the skills to play the stuff," Rudd says of the recordings. It's obvious that Rudd's goal is nothing short of getting his mentor's music into the jazz canon. Now working with a new quartet, Rudd has the opportunity to present the music of his two passions and hand down the legacy. The quartet is co-led by Portland saxophone great Rob Scheps and includes the outstanding rhythm section of Dan Schulte and Alan Jones. "I'm in excellent company," says Rudd. "The energy and the way these guys work is such a lift for me." Scheps has been the catalyst for bringing the quartet together, having worked in the early '80s with Rudd in New York and later with Jones and Schulte in Canada. He's booked the group on a month-long, 13-city West Coast tour--the first trip for Rudd on this side of the country since a 1966 gig with Archie Shepp in San Francisco. Scheps has planned the reunion well, inviting special guests along the way. John Tchicai, who co-led the New York Art Quartet with Rudd in 1965, will join them in Oakland. Former Bill Evans Trio bassist Chuck Israels will sit in with the group in Bellingham. After years in New York and Europe, Rudd says the return to the West
has been "a wonderful adventure--I can hear it in my music already."
On Saturday, we'll hear the fruits of that adventure, along with some
Monk and Nichols. "All who come will get an earful and are definitely
going to be changed," Rudd promises. If you like the sound of raw life
and aren't afraid of change, you'll be there.
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