All That Jazz

BY SIMON ADAMS

REVIEWS

SHIRLEY HORN At The Gaslight Square 1961 (American Jazz Classics).

American singer and pianist Shirley Horn only had one speed: dead slow. Never once did she pick up pace to even a gentle stroll. On this double-headed CD, she appears first with a trio in an unknown club in the Gaslight Square entertainment district of St Louis, Missouri. Edging gently through a set of standards, her small voice is always evocative, the accompaniment so minimal as to disappear from time to time.

The second CD contains the big band album Loads of Love, recorded in New York in 1962 with the 12-man Jimmy Jones Orchestra plus strings. In truth, Horn does not need a big band to support her and sounds a little lost and more than uncomfortable at the faster speeds required. But three standout trio tracks from 1959 with raffish violinist Stuff Smith ending the set more than make up for that.

SATOKO FUJII Piano Music (Libra Records).

Japanese pianist and composer Satoko Fujii is quoted as saying that she “wants to make music no one has heard before”. Well, she has certainly succeeded with this solo ‘piano’ record. I say ‘piano’ with raised fingers, because the one you thing you never hear is the sound of notes and chords emerging from within. Instead, using short, pre-recorded snippets of prepared piano music – an elbow on the high strings, a rubbing of the lower strings with a felt mallet, a dropping of chopsticks on the piano strings – she edited them all together to create a patchwork quilt of varied, fascinating sounds.

The two extended pieces here evolve so organically that you cannot tell that they’re stitched together from such small, random fragments, but they do have a surprising structural coherence. This a long way from piano jazz as we know it, but it is a sonic adventure worth going on for the experience. A

NDREW CYRILLE QUARTET The News (ECM).

And more interesting music, this time from American free drummer Andrew Cyrille. By free, I mean a drummer more concerned with individual expression and feeling rather than merely keeping time, a main participant, not merely a backrow metronome. Here he is supported by wondrous Americana guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Ben Street and pianist David Virelles in a set of improvised pieces that are often quiet and always surprising: on the title track you can hear the whisper of brushes on a newspaper spread over the drumheads, while elsewhere he engages in hushed snare rolls, offbeat accents, and odd little taps of sound.

Frisell supplies three tuneful pieces in which his chiming guitar notes ring out delightfully, Virelles one intriguingly catchy number, while Cyrille remains an 81-year-old marvel. Most enjoyable.