I’m finally releasing the music I wrote about in this post! I won’t write a great deal more (I’ll leave that to the considered words of David Sampson below) other than to say having put this project well and truly into the background while I went through a very busy 2019 with a range of other projects, releasing it from the isolation we’re all experiencing feels very strange and unnerving, but important nonetheless.
It’s available to listen, stream and purchase here.
I’m really excited to have this out in the wider world, I can’t thank everyone involved in this project enough (all the musicians, Myles for the engineering + mix and master, David for the words, and Joris for the artwork). I hope that in a post COVID-19 world there will still be some kind of physical product + associated launch, tour etc., but for now I just hope you enjoy the recordings.
Thank you most of all to Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Mal Waldron for the music and the inspiration!
Liner notes - written by David Sampson
Oscar Neyland is a young, gifted and dedicated double bass player, Tasmanian-born and pursuing his vocation in Melbourne. His outstanding band, Wirecutters, whose name celebrates one of Charles Mingus's greatest compositions, is a major project, a personal labour of love, dedicated to re-imagining the work of three great African-American musicians, Eric Dolphy, Mal Waldron and Charles Mingus.
Wirecutters marks Neyland's first release as a band-leader, although he has previously excelled as a recording artist, in a prominent role on exploratory, political folk-roots musician Ruth Hazleton's Daisy Wheel and as integral part of The Rookies, a ferociously swinging freebop band with a long-standing Wednesday pub residency at Brunswick’s Rooks Return.
It's a rite of passage now for young jazz musos to fund and self-release their first record. It's unusual though for a debut record not to include any self-written or contemporary compositions. This much cannot be asserted too strongly: the decision to excavate three African-American compositions dating back over half a century does not reflect any deficit of ambition, chops, originality, contemporaneity or relevance, whether musical or political. Wirecutters' choice of material and the way it is re-created has serious underpinnings and significant contemporary meanings which are worthy of investigation.
Let's recognise two central foundations of jazz, its African-American musical and cultural roots and its improvisational core. The elements of spontaneous execution and its transgressions of European harmonic forms, rhythmic limitations and illusions of perfect transcription may appear to situate jazz entirely in a continuous present, regardless of a composition's source history, musical patterns, birthing influences and the learned skills and values of its creators. Yet nobody creates music without prior referents, selected influences, lessons communicated and learned patterns of previously expressed sounds and values. In music, art, culture and life we are all creatures of histories, cultures, learnings and debts.
Jazz musicians are not passive recipient-transmitters but agents - active re-interpreters and re-creators. The wise learn from the best of what precedes them; the honest pay tribute to it openly and generously; the creative and contemporary refresh and build newly upon it. Exciting, mysteriously satisfying, often obscure new creations re-emerge from compositions by the few titans (Ellington, Mingus, Monk, Miles) belatedly recognised by a jazz-phobic commercial music industry, or from the vastly more numerous ranks of sadly neglected greats like Don Redman, George Russell, Herbie Nicholls, Mal Waldron and Julius Hemphill to name a few. Mingus, Dolphy and Waldron were themselves proud to record creative re-interpretations of compositions by their own hero of an earlier generation, Duke Ellington.
The freedom, oral intonations and improvisation that are heartbeats of jazz imply that great compositions and recordings are not finalised, embalmed museum artefacts suitable only for passive recognition, reverential re-enactment and posthumous tribute. They are vital raw materials, still breathing and pulsing with potential, impossible to contain, futile or meaningless to duplicate. They are itching for re-animation and re-purposing; ever available for reshaping and re-imagining by new musicians for new audiences. That is why a particularly satisfying pleasure for jazz devotees is when creative musicians, often from a different generation, gender and/or culture set out to breathe new beauties into old master-works whose power and urgency has inspired them.
But why would Wirecutters select these three musicians and why do they speak with such immediacy to young musicians today? I suspect that the reasons are political as well as musical.
The musical lives of Charles Mingus (1922-79), Eric Dolphy (1928-64) and Mal Waldron (1926-2002) intersected.
Waldron played with Mingus in the 1950s and 60s; Dolphy, the most important solo voice Mingus ever had, was with Mingus over a shorter period in the USA and on a European tour in 1964. Dolphy left the Mingus band and stayed in Europe where he soon died from undiagnosed diabetic shock. At his funeral, a grief-stricken Mingus howled with enraged desolation.
In some ways, Waldron was the odd man out – a New Yorker where the other two were LA; the one who lived out the normal span of a human life; the one whose innovations and virtuosity didn't suddenly and permanently revolutionise the subsequent possibilities of the instrument he played and the tonal, rhythmic and harmonic possibilities of jazz thereafter. All three, though, had much in common.
They were African-American, with all the cultural and musical roots that implied as well as the unrelenting economic and racial penalties. They all found greater recognition of their music, culture and racial identity beyond American shores. Musically, they were crucial figures leading the transition from the conventions of bop and post-bop, via gospel sources, emphasised blues intonations and harmonic innovations towards the beginnings of freedom and the avant-garde. Politically, they – especially Mingus – were part of an unprecedentedly daring political and cultural vanguard that risked all to proudly assert African-American cultural and musical values, defiantly spotlighting the dominant forces of racism, bigotry and militarism against non-white peoples.
Charles Mingus was one of America's greatest composers of any genre or era and without a doubt the most volatile, fearless, controversial, confrontational warrior against injustice. He called out club owners and recording companies for exploitative practices and creative indignities to jazz musicians; reprimanded audiences for failing to pay due attention to his music; halted his own public performances to berate his own musicians, forcing them to repeat parts until they satisfied his standards. In one fit of rage one he smashed his expensive double bass, in another a tooth and embouchure of his own trombonist. Other initiatives were presciently constructive. He launched his own Jazz Workshop label to press his own records in runs of 200 and distribute them by the online equivalent of the 1960s. He fought a personal battle against unfair rental practices and got himself evicted onto the street; conducted vociferous campaigns against racism, Native American dispossession, imperialist war and economic inequity; wrote major works against every injustice he perceived and in homage to the women, men and culture that he loved. It all came at the cost of mental anguish, erratic behaviour, turmoil and crisis. Self-destructive, impulsive, hurtful, passionate, sexist, phallocentric and bullying, prisoner of a multitude of compulsive passions from overeating to sex, booze and drugs, he was tender too, thoughtful, sensitive, fearlessly principled, unimaginably brave. If Coltrane was saint-like, Mingus was a wrathful Greek or Old Testament god of superhuman passions and frailties. He had gifts, emotions and flaws magnified beyond reason and containment. Above it all there was his turbulent and beautiful music, which expressed every aspect of him and his world as swelling grand drama.
In his lamentably short lifetime, Eric Dolphy was scarcely recognized as a composer or arranger. Aside from co-arranging John Coltrane's Africa/Brass in 1961 and the creative leadership of his epochal Out to Lunch LP for Blue Note in 1964, the year of his death, Dolphy's critical renown was due solely to his startling and unprecedented solo virtuosity on alto sax, flute and bass clarinet. Even that was subject to conservative critique. Absurdly, he was accused of ruining the sound of John Coltrane and his band. Coltrane adored him as a person, a brother, a blazing beacon of inspiration. Perhaps still the only musician to establish pre-eminence on three instruments, his leaps and vocalised innovations pointed a way forward into the avant-garde, inspiring generations of free jazz musicians. He was Mingus's greatest soloist and collaborator; maybe Coltrane's too. His passions and creativity were tightly channelled into his music. A master of blues tonalities and gospel cries, Dolphy's musical imagination was borderless, trans-cultural, cross-species, his fascinations extending to the music of India, Pakistan, Mbuti Pygmies and bird-sounds.
It took half a century for recognition of Dolphy's technical sophistication and compositional genius to decisively emerge. Before he left for Europe, Dolphy left five boxes of material to his friends for safe-keeping. In 2014 the contents were passed on to the Library of Congress. They include unperformed works, alternative arrangements of his compositions, his transcriptions of Charlie Parker, Bach, Stravinsky and bird calls; hundreds of scales of his own devising; practice books, lead sheets and the bases for improvisation. Plus a seam of pure gold: unreleased masters of his recordings (more of this in an endnote).
Wirecutters are in excellent company. Electrifying Mingus and Dolphy performances, perpetuated on recordings and Youtube, inspire countless re-creations wherever jazz is played. The long-standing Mingus Big Band, led by Mingus's widow Sue is the most famous (check out a powerful collection of Mingus's political compositions called Blues & Politics); other fascinating projects include a magnificent CD, Mingus by Ta Lam 11 led by the German reed player Gebhard Ullmann. Mingus bands seem to thrive underground in Australia. In Sydney, there's a thrilling Mingus Amongst Us outfit led by baritone saxist Steve Fitzmaurice. There's another Mingus band in Melbourne I've yet to hear and perhaps others elsewhere, seemingly gestating like fungi in our warming climate.
Any Mingus band will, to an inevitable extent, also be an Eric Dolphy band. But Dolphy's recordings and incomparable mastery of three instruments has also inspired the greatly admired Sydney reeds master Paul Cutlan to create a fascinating and ongoing Dolphy project band called Far Cry that has met with high acclaim.
It's to be expected that younger Australian jazz musicians are familiar with the work of Mingus and Dolphy. But it's a particular pleasure to hear Oscar and Wirecutters pay homage to the work and life of Mal Waldron. Waldron played in Mingus bands from the 1950s and also recorded with Eric Dolphy and Booker Little in classic recordings at the Five Spot in 1961. He had earned early prominence as accompanist to Billie Holiday over the last few years of her life, his personal and pianistic sensitivity shepherding her physically failing artistry all the way to her to her death. It affected him greatly and he fell into a debilitating psychological crisis which turning to heroin exacerbated. During a long, arduous rehabilitation from complete breakdown, he had to relearn music, in the process transforming his style and quitting America to re-establish a questing new career in Europe and Japan. He collaborated with major free jazz musicians and his long-standing, mutually exploratory musical relationship with Steve Lacy, incomparable patron saint of soprano sax, was unceasingly revelatory.
Waldron's playing was gently insistent, verging on hypnotic; many of his compositions had a wistful, interrogative quality. It seems that intermittent performances in America could spark visceral all-stops-out responses as in The Crowd Scene, an urgent 1989 live recording with two saxophonists. Waldron's music sometimes took on trance-like, meditational qualities but these were politically expressive too. In 1995 he travelled to Japan for the 50th anniversary of the nuclear bombings where he recorded Travellin' in soul-time, live concerts that offered perfect, poignant tributes to its victims and survivors
The lives of these three Wirecutter inspirations were marked by the Holocaust; nuclear bombing of civilian populations; entrenched racist practices against African Americans; blanket racial segregation and sustained police-vigilante-government violence in the southern American states; the birth of the Civil Rights movement and systematic FBI subversion against it; horrific American wars against the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; and illegal government subversion of Black Nationalist resistance. The music of Mingus, Dolphy and Waldron was birthed in this cauldron of violence and racial prejudice, even as it was nurtured by African-American culture, community and churches. In their day, control by record companies and the stifling conformity of a centralised media made it perilously difficult for struggling African-American musicians to speak out. But their music expressed no doubts about their cultural allegiances and political righteousness.
The musicians in Wirecutters aren't African-American. Young, educated and living in a wealthy country, they are well aware of, and perhaps a little embarrassed about their personal advantages. But their young lives' immersion in the internet, Youtube and social media has made them instant, appalled witnesses to the consequences of the nationalist right-wing militarism that is ascendant in our era - the Trumps, Dutertes, Orbans, Bolsinaros, Johnsons; the prison camps on Abu Ghraib, Manus Island, Guantanamo and Gaza; state-sanctioned solitary confinement of truth-tellers Bradley Manning and Julian Assange; the destruction for profit of our ecosystem, fellow animals and climate; the obscene transfer of wealth to the 1%; a devious refusal to yield justice to the Indigenous people of Australia.
Is it any wonder that young jazz musicians instinctively respond to the eloquent, courageous political struggles of African-American brothers and sisters born almost a century before, in addition to their music? Appropriately, the Wirecutters generation of musicians are helping to rectify some practices of sexist exclusion perpetuated by their forebears. Notice the two outstanding young Melbourne alto saxophonists, Flora Carbo and Cheryl Durongpisitkul, and dazzling drummer Chloe Kim guesting on Meditations.
Forms of resistance are no less variegated now than they were generations ago. Some jazz musicians might find something that speaks to them in the confrontational, ideological combativeness of Mingus; others in the hyper-expressive, primal cries of Dolphy, voicing the wordless pain of our dukkha; or perhaps the thoughtful, quietly insistent, understanding grace of Waldron hinting at redemption. All of them used the depth of blues, the communal power of gospel and the infectious propulsion of swing to convey their truths of their experience and these are qualities that Wirecutters retain from their musical inspirations.
Blue Cee comes from an early Mingus LP, The Clown, recorded for Atlantic in 1957. It's seriously important record, unduly neglected, that included three classics, Haitian fight song; Reincarnation of a lovebird; and Tonight at noon, in addition to one of Mingus's compelling if uneven passions, jazz poetry. But Blue Cee was a Mingus obscurity, scarcely noted even then and little remembered since, on a record that is itself half-forgotten. Trombonist Jimmy Knepper, reluctant recipient of Mingus's instantly dispensed dentistry and successful litigant, described the arduous process by which Mingus taught his compositions: “He sang them to us, or played them on the piano. And he'd teach us four bars at a time … It was a very time-consuming process.” But it was worth it and Blue Cee is worth revisiting. It's one of Mingus's unorthodox blues compositions, a genre in which his mastery was compelling. Wirecutters' version swings like fuck, while emphasising the tensions, stops and shifts characteristic of Mingus' music as well as taking it further outside than the original. Adam Halliwell's guitar contributes here and elsewhere with telling, intricate lines punctuated by moaning horn interjections and adding new qualities to the original instrumentation. The multi-horn work is rambunctious and Shaun Rammers' tenor work thrills here and throughout.
Whereas Blue Cee is a Mingus obscurity, Meditations is recognised as a high water mark in jazz, a major work by anyone's standards. Also known as Meditations on a Pair of Wire-Cutters or Meditations on Integration or Praying for Eric, it's obviously enough the source of the Wirecutters band name. Mingus was determined to make listeners understand that the unsettling masterpiece was political - a roiling message of demand against the perpetuation of racism from African-American slavery to the Nazi Holocaust to existing discrimination in the American south and further afield. As he advised the audience at political benefit concert when it was premiered in 1964: “Eric Dolphy explained to me that there was something similar to the concentration camps once in Germany now down south [of the USA} and the only difference between the barbed wire is that they don't have gas chambers and hot stoves to cook us in yet. So I wrote a piece called Meditations as to how to get some wire-cutters – before someone else gets some guns to us.”
Were Mingus alive today he'd be on the front lines, confronting cops at BLM actions. Maybe that's why ex Pretenders rock-pop diva Chrissie Hynde has included a 3 minute version on her 2019 album Valve Bone.
The greatest Mingus renditions of Meditations were thrilling, extended sextets or quintets with his greatest band – Dolphy and Clifford Jordan (two alto saxists, like Wirecutters), Jaki Byard, Dannie Richmond and often Johnny Coles. The recordings from Cornell University and throughout their 1964 European tour are staggering, unrepeatable feats of open composition, inspired musicianship and flaming chemistry, honed by a two month residency at the Five Spot. Mingus also did a big band version at Monterey but recordings of it have been dire and it often sounds ragged and under-rehearsed.
So Neyland's decision to augment Wirecutters' to a slightly miniaturized big band, a dectet, by adding trumpeter Reuben Lewis, trombonist James Macaulay, pianist Daniel Sheehan and the thrilling Sydney-Korean drummer Chloe Kim is a master-stroke. To be brief, there is no doubt that this is a highly significant re-orchestration and a titanic recording of a major work in jazz history. Neyland's arrangement is superb, the soloists and swirling ensembles exciting and each of the additions in personnel is crucial. The prospect of seeing it performed live makes the hear pound and the mouth water.
How brave are our festival organisers?
Warm Canto comes from Waldron's LP The Quest, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder on 27 June 1961. It's a marvellous record, deep and warm with a cast of all-star heavies: Dolphy on alto sax and clarinet; huge-toned Mingus alumnus Booker Ervin on tenor; Joe Benjamin on bass and Charlie Persip on drums. Oh yeah, add Ron Carter on cello too. Its most famous tracks were Fire Waltz and Status Seeking and Waldron explained the latter like this: “Everybody's trying to make it, and I try to show here the two main ways in which that struggle is carried on – some guys are pushing just to … do it in a materialistic way. Other guys, like John Coltrane, are pushing to realize their full potential as musicians, and that's the kind of status I identify with.”
As with Mingus, this Waldron perception is no less starkly relevant in today's age of rampant greed, narcissism and harvesting of social media likes. The original Warm Canto begins with its lovely theme, caressed by Dolphy on B-flat clarinet, followed by Carter on pizzicato cello. Neyland's arrangement sensitively prepares the ground, whispering brushed drums gently playing with silence before breathy horns insinuate the theme.
Oscar Neyland and the Wirecutters have cut the mustard. From their contemporaries in Australia and the predecessors who inspired their band, they are aware that financial recompense for highly committed, creative jazz is scant. Let's hope that people who support social justice and those who love jazz support this terrific music. That's for the future to decide.
Already though, this fine record has earned them the important sort of status that Mal Waldron learned from John Coltrane – achieving their full potential as musicians.
Endnote: Last year, Resonance Records issued a boxed set of the unreleased master recordings left by Eric Dolphy when he departed for Europe in 1964, never to return alive. The collection is called Eric Dolphy: Musical Prophet. Magnificently recorded and perfectly packaged, it is a revelation of incomparable beauty. If you enjoy the very fine music on this Wirecutters CD, try to buy the Dolphy too. It took over fifty years to emerge and it will reward you for a lifetime.
