SAMUEL BLASER

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notes for SAMUEL BLASER QUARTET - SPRING RAIN 

春雨や暮れなむとしてけふもあり-- 与謝蕪村

Twilight suspended / The kind of spring rain today / Never seems to set

Haiku by Yosa Buson

Spring Rain is a tribute to the late American saxophonist, clarinetist and composer Jimmy Giuffre who has inspired me tremendously for the past few years. The selected pieces on this album focus particularly on Jimmy Giuffre’s trio with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow. In addition of being a tribute to one of my favorite musician, this recording is dedicated to my dear friend and former manager Izumi Uchida.

I have selected music from two well-known albums entitled 1961 (ECM) as well as Flights & Emphasis (Hat Hut). To complete the album I have also composed six pieces of different characters inspired by Giuffre’s music.

The musicians featured on this album are Russ Lossing on piano, Wurlitzer, Rhodes and Mini Moog, Drew Gress on double bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums.

The album was recorded in two stages. The first part was recorded in early January 2014 at Water Music in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the second part was recorded in early January 2015 at Teldex Studios in Berlin, Germany. Like the first Consort in Motion album (Kind of Blue Records), the session is produced by Robert Sadin and engineered by Dave Darlington.

I discovered the music of Jimmy Giuffre at a very young age when my elder brother and I joined a local Jazz School Big Band. When we both reached a decent level of playing we got introduced to Four Brothers, a famous jazz standard written by Giuffre in 1947 and performed by the Woody Herman Orchestra. That was my very first contact with his music and at that point in my life, that's all I needed to know about him.

It was only much later that I was brought to two of his wonderful trios: the first one with guitarist Jim Hall and valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and the second one with bassist Steve Swallow and pianist Paul Bley. The music of both trios opened my ears and brought me to new musical universes startlingly fresh and compelling. Although, in reading a recent article about Giuffre in the New York Times written by Nate Chinen, I was shocked to learn the way the trio with Bley and Swallow “tragically” ended: “In a story that Steve Swallow delights in retelling, the trio played its final gig at a coffeehouse on Bleecker Street, after dividing the earnings from the door and coming up with 35 cents apiece.”

When Robert Sadin and I decided to record a tribute to Jimmy Giuffre, we instinctively tried to find original ways to emphasize his works as a composer and reinterpret strong melodies that deserved to be known by a larger audience. Of course one of my advantage here was to be a trombonist instead of a clarinetist. In a sense we did here what Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd did for Thelonious Monk: a tribute to the composer without using a piano in the case of Monk or a reeds player in the case of Giuffre.  

Spring Rain is an attempt to bring Giuffre’s music to the next level by coloring his compositions with electric sounds including Würlitzer, Fender Rhodes and Mini Moog and shaping it with our own vocabularies. According to Steve Swallow, Giuffre has always had interest in keeping each player’s musical personalities while playing his own music. Therefore, it was crucial for us to respect his philosophy without literally imitate his music.

Included on this album are three tracks written by Jimmy Giuffre: Cry Want and Scootin’ About both recorded in duet with Russ Lossing and two different interesting versions of Trudgin’. We also recorded two wonderful pieces written by Carla Bley: Temporarily and one of my favorite pieces all time Jesus Maria. They are six pieces written by myself: Missing Mark Suetterlyn, a blink to the late Albert Mangelsdorff; Homage a short solo trombone composition in tribute to the 3 pieces for clarinet solo written by Igor Stravinsky in 1920, Spring Rain, The First Snow, Counterparts and another solo trombone piece called Trippin’. Russ Lossing and I also recorded a short improvisation entitled Umbra.

Thanks to the support of Izumi Uchida, John Guillemin, Robert Sadin, Patricia Johnston and Nicolas Glady, I was able to record my ninth album as a leader. I hope you will enjoy this recording as much as I enjoyed creating and composing it. May Spring Rain leads you to fertile imagination!

Samuel Blaser
Berlin / February 2015

In a world of trends and marketing plans, it is beautiful to encounter a musician who is dedicated to invention, to spontaneous interaction, to trudging on a road less traveled, or perhaps where no path exists at all. Surely this is the only solo trombone tribute to Jimmy Giuffre- as wonderful as it is unexpected. Samuel honors the intelligence and the concentration of the listener. The quality of his musical mind, his virtuosity...extraordinary. His colleagues on this journey weave ideas together with a sly subtle sense of conversation. And how wonderful is that.

Robert Sadin
New York / 2015 

Samuel Blaser has made several wise choices int the making of Spring Rain. Foremost, the music he's put together does great honor to Jimmy Giuffre's intentions, without descending to literal imitation.

All the players on this CD sound like themselves, which was always a paramount objective in Jimmy's music. But I can also hear that Samuel and his cohorts have addressed, in their own way, many of the issues that most concerned the Giuffre Trio in which Paul Bley and I played. How do you play a specified rate of speed, but without fixed tempo? How do you address the needs of each discreet song, without forsaking your own voice? How do several individuals simultaneously arrive at a coherent statement and a balanced form? Is it possible to improvise for more than a brief moment without reference to a tonal center? How do we account for this paradox: the more we listen to each other, the more we express ourselves?

The list is long; I've only made a start at the concerns that captured Jimmy, Paul and me. Very often our rehearsals (and we rehearsed much more often than we performed in public) involved more discussion than playing. Many of the questions we asked ourselves have since been sorted through for more than half a century, and as a result perceptive players, like those on this CD, can take for granted certain assumptions and attitudes. What Samuel Blaser has done so well is to construct a repertoire and a musical environment that gives free rein to the impulses Jimmy Giuffre imagined and nurtured. This CD presents a mature music, one which allows its players to be daring and bold, yet is also respectfully aware of what Jimmy Giuffre and a few other visionaries have bequeathed us.

Steve Swallow, 2015