Ken Vandermark's Joe Harriott Project
Straight Lines
[Atavistic]
Rating: 8.2
When it comes to poetic justice, Ryan Schreiber is second only to God. Ever wonder why it takes
him so long to get our discs to us to review? Because he's portioning out holy recompense for
each of our virtues and each of our transgressions. Every time he sends out that big list of
review discs to the Pitchfork writers he seems to say, just like God: "I have set life and death
before you this day. Choose life." I have actually caught him on occasion wearing an oversized
white t-shirt with CHOOSE LIFE written in big letters, to reinforce his message. I asked if he
had any fingerless fluorescent gloves to go along with it and he punched me in the stomach. I
asked him to "help me up before you go-go" and he kicked me in the back. I swear if it weren't
for all the money and the floozies, I'd have a good mind to quit this job.
Ah, poetic justice! Not the casual ass-whooping-- those are just par for the course. Rather the
irrevocable fact that I am inevitably compensated for my pretensions with every piece of
avant-jazz, experimental noise or Kranky-style cerebral post-rock that traffics through the
front offices at One Pitchfork Way. Every shipment of discs I get seem to scream: deconstruct
this, you prick! And so, I find myself on the business end of an OED and a dog-eared copy of
Adorno, trying to come up with two dozen different ways of saying the word "groove" without
being implicated in a bourgeois aesthetic ideology. Goddamnit, how many discs can I describe
as "Kafkaesque" without eventually losing every last shred of credibility? I don't even know
what rock music sounds like anymore.
What's in the mail today? A McArthur fellow fronting reinterpretations of the free jazz work of
an obscure Jamaican alto player. See what I mean?
The contributions of Joe Harriott (1928-1973) to the free-improv movement have largely gone
unnoticed. Branded a follower of the celebrated free jazz pioneer, Ornette Coleman, Harriott
didn't live long enough-- nor famously enough-- to have the world take pause at his radical
innovations in modal jazz. Students now suggest that the London-based Harriott and the American
Ornette developed their compositional and improvisational technique in near-total isolation
from one another, advocating a strong review of Harriott's ideas in light of his removal from
the American free jazz scene of the 1960's.
Like John Zorn's hyperkinetic 1989 Spy vs. Spy, a furious reinterpretation of Ornette
Coleman's work as composer, Ken Vandermark's Joe Harriott Project isn't offering a tribute, but
a retelling. Harriott's arrangements are transformed into Vandermark's spacious and disconnected
lines. The signature piano of Harriott's work is absent, and the alto is augmented by clarinet
and trombone duels intertwined in the rhythm. The album exudes a beatnik vibe of radical ease.
Vandermark's staccato sax lines suggest a Joe Harriott refracted through the work of another
short-lived horn player, the immortal Eric Dolphy. The sparse angular attack is always executed
with meticulous control, free from any trace of the excess or self-indulgence that seems to mar
other contemporary exercises in collective improvisation. Even the fragmented "Shadows" remains
intensely lyrical, while the defiantly looping "Straight Lines" is reminiscent of the near-perfect
Oliver Nelson album, The Blues and the Abstract Truth, in muted uprising and subdued
discord. Jeb Bishop's quiet trombone solo on the title track is one of the album's simple
highlights. The entirety of Straight Lines revels in the glory of revision: the giddy
thrill of hearing for the first time what the world was formerly deaf to.
As for me, I can't complain. I thrive on precisely this kind of music, this marriage of melody
and resistance. Sure, it sounds like a boulder slipping down from the top of a great hill in
hell, but for a sound this strong, I'm willing to go back down to the bottom again.
-Brent S. Sirota