World Party

BEAMS
MOVEMENT
FACE IN THE CROWD
The Joe Harriott Quintet
Movement
Columbia : 1964

JH, alto sax; Shake Keane, trumpet, flugelhorn; Pat Smythe, piano; Coleridge Goode, bass; Bobby Orr, drums.

“I don’t want to be equal. I want to be superior….
All the others, they play inside the room, in here. What I play is out de window, out de window!”
–Joe Harriott

So there was jazz in the White House again recently. The Marsalis family, other musicians, and students rolled up on Monday and by all accounts put on an educational and entertaining show. In First Lady Michelle Obama’s opening remarks, she stressed the democratic nature of jazz, and noted its status as America’s great indigenous art form. All fine — great, even! — but lest we think jazz evolved in an American vaccuum, we return to Joe Harriott for a taste of what some great Jamaican/British musicians were up to in the early 1960s.

Harriott played in a wide range of styles, but for fans of the aesthetic fields plowed here, the key documents of his career are the trio of remarkable albums Free Form (1960), Abstract (1962), and Movement, in which he explored spontaneity as intently as any jazz musician at the time. Here was Harriott embracing freedom at the same time Ornette Coleman was breaking out all over — a classic example of parallel evolution. After Free Form and Abstract tanked — in the latter case, despite a five-star Downbeat review from Harvey Pekar (the first ever for a British jazz album; and the mag was dated 11/21/63 — how many read that issue?) — Harriott headed in other directions, before a precipitous decline. Cancer killed him at age 44, in 1973.

Movement is a curious record, featuring experimental group improvisations interspersed with modified hardbop workouts. A hedge, perhaps, given the unenthusiastic reception of his previous two efforts. Fortunately the avant tracks more than pull their weight. “Beams” has a steady pulse but the band is fragmented, and the song has an unorthodox structure. There is harmony — unlike Ornette, the piano is integral to the sound — and a rhythmic regularity, but it’s off-kilter. The title track sounds like an inverted redo of “Beams,” minus the steady beat.

Most intriguingly, “Face in the Crowd” serves up tantalizing riffs and melody but then refuses to resolve them in any expected way. Over the course of a mere five minutes, the tune is both magnet-coil tight and driftingly diffuse. The band pulls the music apart like taffy until you’re aware of the fabric of time itself and how it seems to be moving at different speeds during different parts of the song. A stunning effect.

Here’s bassist Goode: “It was criticism from established musicians that was so demoralising. We thought they should have been able to understand what we were trying to do and treat it sympathetically even if they thought we weren’t approaching it in the right way. But often their reaction was one of astonishment and sometimes complete mockery.” Sound familiar?