another one of the greats is gone...

http://speakeasy.jazzcorner.com/speakeasy/showthread.php?p=745297

> I'm sorry to report that I just heard from Juanita Giuffre that Jimmy died
> of pneumonia and Parkinson's today (April 24) two days before what would
> have been his 87th birthday.
>

Graham Lock in his book "Chasing the Vibration" (writing in 1988):

> Someone must have been telling lies about Jimmy G, for without him doing
> anything wrong his career was arrested one fine moning.
> Club owners shunned him; record companies didn't want to know him;
> compositions gathered dust on his shelf. From being a successful, acclaimed
> musician, he found himself edged farther and farther from the scene until,
> finally, he had to take a teaching job to pay the rent. Without a trial,
> without charges being brought, Jimmy G was sentenced to silence. *** Ask him
> what he thinks lay behind that Kafkaesque blackballing a quarter of a
> century ago and he'll say, with a mild shrug, "Well, I got into the free
> jazz." Long pause. "And I didn't use any drums." Long pause. "So -- some
> people didn't think it was jazz."
> Ah. Someone must have called the *Jazz* Police.
> ***
> It was almost certainly his three lps with Bley and Swallow that made
> Jimmy Giuffre a marked man in the eyes of the *Jazz* Police.
> "I started getting more daring in my recording," he asserts softly. "I
> started with *Fusion*, then *Thesis*, then I let everything go on *Free
> Fall* -- there's no time, there's no key, no metre. We just -- I found
> the right people to play with, that listen to each other and aren't greedy.
> Everybody got plenty of room to play."
> ***
> Ironically, it may be Jimmy Giuffre's quietness (musical and personal)
> which has caused us to overlook the more revolutionary elements of his
> music. Comparisons to Taylor and Coleman perhaps seem absurd; yet Taylor
> and Giuffre were two of the first people in the 1950s to question the
> tyranny of the stated beat (and came up with diametrically opposed
> solutions), while Coleman and Giuffre turned to melody as an alternative to
> bebop's improvising over the chord changes pretty much contemporaneously.
> *** This emphasis on the [melodic] line led Giuffre to suggest, as early as
> the mid-50s, that the instrumental parts in his trio were interchangeable --
> ie, that all the lines were equal; a concept of ensemble democracy well
> ahead of its time, and which came to fruition on *Fusion* and *Thesis*,
> two of the most perfectly-integrated and beautifully-realised small-ensemble
> recordings in all creative music.
>

--
Jason Guthartz
jguthartz@...


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