John Blum - In the Shade of Sun

by Jon Rogers

published: 24 / 10 / 2009

Label: Ecstatic Peace
Format: CD

Effectively performed free jazz from pianist John Blum, which nevertheless seems out of context and out of time

Review

If you take “free jazz” as starting with Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking 1960 album ‘Free Jazz’ with his double quartet then the movement is close to being half a century old. At the time the avant garde branch of jazz was truly radical breaking with ideas of melody and motifs. As cultural commentators have indicated the style as utilised by the likes of late period John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Don Cherry was in many ways a response to the oppressive Cold War atmosphere at the time. As Ayler once said, "For me, [bop] was like humming along with Mitch Miller. It was too simple. I've lived more than I can express in bop terms. It's a new truth now. And there have to be new ways of expressing that truth." Free Jazz, at the best of times can be a difficult, troubling and difficult listening experience. It grabs you by the throat and forces you to listen. All too often music is just the soundtrack to a nice dinner party with a nice, pretty melody and a singalong chorus. Free jazz is in your face, not necessarily aggressively, but it makes its presence felt. It demands attention. The best exponents of the genre make the music mesmerising. It doesn’t demand your attention in a threatening manner, but captivates like the flames of a fire does. Once you’ve started to stare the flames become all encompassing and everything else going on in the room, effectively, disappears from view. With a western culture that likes its music to conform to more conventional notions of melody and song structure, free jazz is still far from the mainstream. But if you consider that the jazz style is almost half a century old it’s hardly developed in all that time. Since the days of albums like ‘Spiritual Unity’ or ‘Ascension’ what has become of it. To these ears at least, very little has changed. It may still be considered avant garde by most but it hasn’t developed much in that time. The thing is, once you have rejected notions of standard time signatures and rhythm and melody, where else is there to go? What other sacred cows – in jazz terms - can you slaughter? And pianist John Blum is the latest exponent of free jazz. In fact Blum has been part of the scene for around 15 years as was part of the Improvisers Collective for two years from 1993. ‘In the Shade of Sun’ sees him form a trio with veteran drummer Sunny Murray and bassist William Parker with the album focused around Blum’s experiences of being a jazz musician, according to email he sent to one of Newsweek’s senior writers David Gates. The title refers to Blum’s collaborator Murray. The six tracks that make up the album see the trio playing tightly and ideas and phrases bounce around with the three of them drawing on each other and feeding off each other. It’s hard to fault the playing with Murray providing a strong grounding for Parker and Blum. And Blum draws from a rich tradition of jazz pianists but mostly he conjures up the spirit of the great Thelonius Monk with his choppy style. So the album’s great but then why do I feel rather underwhelmed by it all. If anyone wants to investigate free jazz further then ‘In the Shade of Sun’ is as good a place to start as any. It’s not really that album per se that is troubling but it might just be a wider problem. At its zenith free jazz perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the Cold War, student protests and the social and racial unrest in America but what can the scene still remain relevant 50 years on. The Cold War is over, the supposed ‘threat’ from the Communist USSR is no more and students aren’t really into protesting anymore in any great numbers. Where does that leave free jazz? It might be the great contradiction of the genre. Stylistically it may still be the avant garde but it has been left behind by events.