Live in Tokyo (Charles Tolliver album)

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Live in Tokyo
Live album by
Charles Tolliver / Music Inc.
Releasedc. 1974/1975[nb 1]
RecordedDecember 7, 1973
VenueYubinchokin Hall (Tokyo)
Genre
Length49:53
LabelStrata-East
ProducerCharles Tolliver
Charles Tolliver chronology
Live at the Loosdrecht Jazz Festival
(1973) 		Live in Tokyo
(1974) 		Impact
(1975)
Alternate cover
Japanese release by Trio Records
Japanese release by Trio Records

Live in Tokyo is a

ballad composed by Cowell and the Thelonious Monk standard "'Round Midnight
".

Produced by Tolliver, Live in Tokyo was released about a year after the concert on

CD and compiled by the Mosaic label for a three-disc box set of Music Inc.'s live recordings from that same period, titled Mosaic Select. Critics have received the Tokyo disc favorably, giving praise to the quartet's passionate post-bop and hard bop performances. Their innovative interpretation
of the Monk piece was highlighted in particular, although some reviewers questioned the sound quality throughout the recordings.

Background

In the early 1970s, the

Black Power movement and the music of John Coltrane, employing the saxophonist's consistently strong dynamic of delivery and turbulent harmonies into his own harmonic jazz improvisations.[4][nb 2]

In 1971, Tolliver founded Strata-East Records, a New York-based independent record label, with his quartet's pianist Stanley Cowell in an effort to showcase their recordings and those of his contemporaries.[6] He had become close friends with Cowell while performing together in the late 1960s as part of the drummer-composer Max Roach's quartet, a tenure which had gained Tolliver renown as one of the most innovative trumpeters in jazz.[7] With Strata-East, Tolliver and Cowell became the first two young African-American musicians to head a jazz label, while releasing recordings by leading avant-gardists like Clifford Jordan and Pharoah Sanders (Coltrane's former sideman).[8] In late 1973, having released four albums together, Tolliver and Music Inc. embarked on their first tour of Japan, where Live in Tokyo would be recorded.[9]

Recording and performance

Stanley Cowell, Music Inc.'s pianist and Strata-East co-founder, in 1977

The recording took place at Yubinchokin Hall in Tokyo on December 7, 1973, the last date of the tour. According to the album's liner notes, it was recorded "in association" with Takafumi Ohkuma and Kuniya Inaoka from the Japanese jazz label Trio Records.[10] In concert, Tolliver led the quartet, featuring Cowell on piano, Clint Houston on bass, and Clifford Barbaro on drums.[11]

"Effi"
A 30-second sample, with improvised variations by Tolliver and Cowell
Problems playing this file? See media help.

A largely uptempo performance, the show opened in this very vein with two Tolliver-penned compositions, "Drought" and "Stretch".

ballad "Effi" began in a waltz time signature and proceeded to different sections, during which the musicians employed complex fills and gradual variations that allowed them to explore modes from the blues, Latin, and Eastern music.[12]

While "Effi" was intended to end the concert, Music Inc. performed a cover of Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight" (1944) as an encore.[14] Segueing from the tempo of "Effi", the quartet opened in ballad pace but abruptly transformed in tempo and reworked "'Round Midnight" in an aggressive manner atypical for the jazz standard.[15] After showcasing a solo by Tolliver, the performance slowed down to ballad tempo again and ended on a series of bars played in uptempo.[3]

Release and reception

Live in Tokyo was released on

Howard Mandel of DownBeat called Live in Tokyo a "very good" LP.[19] Cadence magazine's Bob Rusch was less receptive, finding it "good", yet inferior to some of Tolliver's other Strata-East recordings. He felt the trumpeter sounded uncertain and poorly recorded at times, while the rhythm section of Houston and Barbaro did not provide entirely reliable accompaniment, although he added that Tolliver and Cowell played well enough to not always need it. Rusch was most impressed by "'Round Midnight", calling it a "big surprise".[3] According to The New York City Jazz Record's Thomas Conrad, "small-group Music Inc. recordings" like Live in Tokyo "should have made Tolliver a star (and Cowell too) [...] But for all the cult mystique surrounding Strata-East, the label never made anybody famous."[20]

Retrospective professional reviews
Review scores
SourceRating
Tom Hull – on the Web
B+ ((2-star Honorable Mention)(2-star Honorable Mention))[24]

The album was reissued on

CD in 1998 by Strata-East and Charly Records.[25] In Richard Cook and Brian Morton's The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (2000), it was appraised as an indication to "some measure of Tolliver's stature as a player", as his performance here was mostly perfect. "Drought" was singled out in the guide for showcasing "his radical simplicities", Barbaro's consistent rhythm, and Houston's typically aggressive bass playing, "a consistent feature" of a concert that only faltered at the end with "'Round Midnight". While the overall audio was well regarded, Cowell was not "recorded to best advantage", according to the guide.[22] In a contemporaneous review for AllMusic of the CD reissue, Scott Yanow applauded Tolliver's playing on the extended renditions of his original compositions and the "adventurous" version of "'Round Midnight". However, he noticed occasionally distorted audio quality, particularly in the rendering of some trumpet sounds, which led him to assign a lower grade to what he deemed an otherwise "strong" post-bop album.[21]

Charles Tolliver in 2009; his performance on the album has received retrospective acclaim.

In 2005, Live in Tokyo was reissued by Mosaic Records as the second disc of the three-CD limited-edition box set Mosaic Select. The set compiled Tolliver's live quartet recordings for three of his early-1970s Strata-East LPs, which by that point had gone out of print.[11][nb 3] Richard Brody, who had been a big fan of the original LP, reviewed the box set for The New Yorker and appraised the recordings collectively as "fervent, intimate classics of live jazz". He added that "they convey the spirit of the cramped bandstand and the rapt crowd as keenly as Charles Mingus's Debut recordings from the Café Bohemia, Eric Dolphy's Five Spot dates, and John Coltrane's sets from the Village Vanguard".[1] Thom Jurek from AllMusic was also very impressed by the Tokyo disc, highlighting Tolliver and Cowell's "symbiotic" musical interactions on tracks like "Drought" and "Stretch", while finding "'Round Midnight" to be a "radical" interpretation that "has to be heard to be believed".[12]

In All About Jazz, Javier Aq Ortiz described the box set's music as "superior hardcore hard bop material with sympathies toward structured-yet-freer jazz stylistic tendencies" and much "gritted heart" in both compositional and performance aspects. From the Tokyo disc, he called "Truth" "forcefully melodic and endowed with just the right touch" by the quartet and enjoyed "'Round Midnight" for being "all about deeply gutted feeling", while noting the "brighter" recontextualization of Houston's "sinuously mysterious bass solo" on "Effi".[26] JazzTimes critic Nate Chinen also wrote favorably of Music Inc.'s performances on "Effi" and "'Round Midnight". But he ultimately found the Tokyo recordings somewhat marred by inconsistent sound quality and expressed some disappointment in the rhythm section, specifically observing a lack of rhythmic poise in Barbaro on "Drought".[11]

Track listing

All compositions are by Charles Tolliver, except where noted.[10]

Side A

  1. "Drought" – 12:22
  2. "Stretch" – 10:42

Side B

  1. "Truth" – 7:07
  2. "Effi" (Stanley Cowell) – 10:46
  3. "'Round Midnight" (Thelonious Monk, Cootie Williams) – 8:38

Personnel

Credits are taken from the album's liner notes.[10]

Music Inc.

Technical personnel

  • Toshinari Koinuma – concert production
  • Masahiko Yuh – MCing
  • Kunio Arai – recording engineering
  • Shigehisa Nagao – floor engineering
  • Ted Plair – graphics

Notes

  1. ^ a b The publication year printed on the original LP record label is 1974 and the catalog number is SES-19745.[10] The album itself appeared in Billboard magazine's listing of "New LP/Tape Releases" for the week of February 8, 1975.[16]
  2. ^ In the liner notes to the 1998 CD reissue of Live in Tokyo, Tolliver wrote: "One of the reasons the music of that era sounds the way it does is because there was at that time a oneness of purpose among black people in general and musicians in particular. The whole push toward equality, along with John Coltrane's music, permeated everything we did for about five to eight years."[5]
  3. ^ The first disc of Mosaic Select is Live at Slugs' (recorded in 1970), the second disc is Live in Tokyo, and the third disc has six previously unreleased performances from the other two discs' concerts.[26]

References

  1. ^ a b Brody 2008.
  2. ^ Brody 2008; Chinen 2006; Anon. 1974.
  3. ^ a b c Rusch 1977, p. 10.
  4. ^ Ratliff 2008, pp. 180–181.
  5. ^ Ratliff 2008, p. 181.
  6. ^ Conrad 2018, p. 8; Brody 2008; Chinen 2006.
  7. ^ Conrad 2018, p. 8; Anon. (c) 1975, p. 6.
  8. ^ Conrad 2018, p. 8; Ratliff 2008, p. 95.
  9. ^ Anon. (c) 1975, p. 6; Anon. 1974.
  10. ^ a b c d Anon. 1974.
  11. ^ a b c Chinen 2006.
  12. ^ a b c Jurek n.d.
  13. ^ Cook & Morton 2000, p. 1467; Jurek n.d.
  14. ^ Jurek n.d.; Cook & Morton 2000, p. 1467.
  15. ^ Rusch 1977, p. 10; Cook & Morton 2000, p. 1467; Giddins 2004, p. 586.
  16. ^ Anon. (b) 1975, p. 50.
  17. ^ Lord 1992, p. 1469.
  18. ^ Anon. (a) 1975, p. 70.
  19. ^ Mandel 1979, p. 18.
  20. ^ Conrad 2018, p. 8.
  21. ^ a b Yanow n.d.
  22. ^ a b Cook & Morton 2000, p. 1467.
  23. ^ Swenson 1985, p. 192.
  24. ^ Hull 2021.
  25. ^ Ratliff 2008, p. 230; Cook & Morton 2000, p. 1467.
  26. ^ a b Ortiz 2005.

Bibliography

  • Anon. (1974). Live in Tokyo (LP liner notes). Charles Tolliver / Music Inc. Strata-East Records. SES-19745.
  • Anon. (January 18, 1975). "Billboard's Recommended LPs". Billboard. Retrieved February 2, 2021 – via Google Books.
  • Anon. (February 8, 1975). "New LP/Tape Releases". Billboard. Retrieved February 2, 2021 – via Google Books.
  • Anon. (March 1975). "Recordings" (PDF). Buffalo Jazz Report. Retrieved February 2, 2021 – via buffalo.edu.
  • Brody, Richard (August 12, 2008). "All That Jazz: Charles Tolliver". The New Yorker. Retrieved February 2, 2021.
  • Chinen, Nate (January 1, 2006). "Charles Tolliver: Mosaic Select 20: Charles Tolliver". JazzTimes. Retrieved February 2, 2021.
  • Conrad, Thomas (June 2018). "Charles Tolliver: Last Man Standing" (PDF). The New York City Jazz Record. Retrieved February 2, 2021.
  • ISBN 9780140514520
    .
  • ISBN 9780195304497
    .
  • Hull, Tom (May 3, 2021). "Music Week". Tom Hull – on the Web. Retrieved May 6, 2021.
  • Jurek, Thom (n.d.). "Mosaic Select: Charles Tolliver - Charles Tolliver". AllMusic. Retrieved February 2, 2021.
  • Lord, Tom (1992). The Jazz Discography. Vol. 23. Lord Music Reference.
    ISBN 9781881993223
    .
  • Mandel, Howard (January 25, 1979). "Clint Houston". DownBeat
    . Vol. 46, no. 2.
  • Ortiz, Javier Aq (October 27, 2005). "Charles Tolliver: Mosaic Select: Charles Tolliver". All About Jazz. Retrieved February 2, 2021.
  • ISBN 9781429998628
    .
  • Rusch, Bob (February 1977). "Charles Tolliver Music, Inc., Live in Tokyo, Strata-East SES-19745". Cadence.
  • Swenson, John, ed. (1985).
    ISBN 0-394-72643-X
    .
  • Yanow, Scott (n.d.). "Live in Tokyo - Charles Tolliver". AllMusic. Retrieved February 2, 2021.

Further reading

External links

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