The title is also the programme for one of guitarist Abercrombie's most exciting projects, in which his 'organ trio' is augmented by some exceptional talents: Kenny Wheeler on trumpet and flugelhorn, Joe Lovano on tenor saxophone and Mark Feldman on violin.
Tracklist:
1 Just In Tune 6:35
2 Open Land 10:08
3 Spring Song 8:59
4 Gimme Five 7:23
5 Speak Easy 6:43
6 Little Booker 6:10
7 Free Piece Suit(e) 6:56
8 Remember When 8:15
9 That's For Sure 4:07
Drums – Adam Nussbaum
Guitar, Written-By – John Abercrombie
Organ – Dan Wall
Tenor Saxophone – Joe Lovano
Trumpet, Flugelhorn – Kenny Wheeler
Violin – Mark Feldman
BACKGROUND
The title of John Abercrombie’s new album is also its programme. The music on “Open Land” comprises some of the most open and wide-ranging material heard in years on one of the guitarist’s discs. The guests added to Abercrombie’s “organ trio” here – trumpeter Kenny Wheeler is aboard, as are saxophonist Joe Lovano and violinist Mark Feldman – bring in many new colours. Abercrombie and Feldman have been talking about a collaboration for more than ten years. John first heard the violinist in the mid-80s at a workshop in Banff, Canada but, outside a couple of jam session situations, they had not previously played together. Joe Lovano and Abercrombie fronted diverse quartets at the beginning of the 1990s and worked together inside bassist Henri Texier’s band, then drifted apart as Lovano’s commitment to John Scofield’s group and to his own projects began to claim more of his time. However, after founding his trio with Dan Wall and Adam Nussbaum, Abercrombie continued to think about the saxophonist: “Joe has such a warm, wet sound on the tenor. I knew it could blend really well with the organ.”
A discussion with producer Manfred Eicher during sessions for Charles Lloyd’s “Voice In The Night” added Kenny Wheeler to the “Open Land” project. Trumpeter and guitarist first played together on Wheeler’s “Deer Wan” in 1977 and continued their recorded association on “Music for Large and Small Ensembles” and “The Widow In The Window”. In between there have been many live encounters. Latterly Abercrombie’s also replaced Bill Frisell in Kenny’s “Angel Song” band. At the time of the Lloyd recording he’d just come off the road from a tour with Wheeler and pianist Marc Copland where “it was clear that Kenny was playing stronger than ever.”
Abercrombie took time off in North Salem to write music for the sextet, writing for the characters involved. Almost all of the music on “Open Land” is new, an exception being the first song “Just In Tune”: “It’s one I’ve had for a while. I played it first in a band I was in with Peter Erskine, Bob Mintzer and John Patitucci. It’s me in my standard bag – it sounds perhaps more like a standard than the other tunes. A pretty song – nice tune and nice chords that set up Kenny’s entry...”
The title track, named for the Open Land Foundation in Abercrombie’s corner of the world which maintains a protected tract of land for the use of the community, was inspired by the writing of Hungarian composer Ernó Dohnányi: “I’d been listening to his Piano Quintets and something about the quality of the melody influenced me, something in the motion of the line. Obviously this song of mine’s a very ‘open’ piece”. After the “head”, the melody line played in unison by Abercrombie and Feldman, “everybody can take all the freedom he needs. I feel it worked well because each musician plays so differently, the approaches to the solos are so different.”
If the ballad called “Spring Song” reveals a certain feline grace, Abercrombie suggests this is because it’s dedicated to one of his cats, “a female cat named Spring”. Lovano’s slinky way with the melody is particularly evocative. “Gimme Five”, meanwhile, could be construed as a late rhetorical response to “Take Five”. “It’s a pretty corny title,” the guitarist ruefully admits, “but of course the song’s in 5/4. It’s like a bluesy folk tune, essentially on one chord, and was one of the first things I wrote on my new tape recorder.” He is now the owner of an 8-track ADAT machine: “I was excited about its overdubbing potential and I’ve been busily putting things on tape. I had this idea with a little delay-box, one of these cheap digital delays, and I played a bassline into it and it was looping. And as it looped I played a melody over it. So I honed that down, and then I added a harmony part...”
The apparently simple title “Speak Easy” contains a wealth of reference in dedication to Kenny Wheeler, whose own tunes are often heavily coded puns. “I wrote the tune on the piano and the melody reminded me of Kenny, the way he writes. He said [adopts quiet Canadian accent] ‘Oh, It sounds more like Tchaikovsky or one of those fellows.’ The title is wordplay in the Wheeler tradition. I was thinking that Ken is very soft-spoken but also that ‘speak’ is the present tense of ‘spoke’ and a wheel has spokes. So this was a roundabout way of paying tribute to a Wheeler.” Wheeler is also indirectly responsible for the “Little Booker” title, which, obviously, reverses the names of the doomed trumpet giant of hard bop. “The piece got named at the session when Manfred rushed into the room and said, ‘This is great, it sounds like Booker Little!’ I hadn’t thought about that, but Kenny would be the first to say that he was very strongly influenced by Booker. When I listen to it I think of it as a sort of jazz song but not really. It’s very lyrical and it wasn’t written to be played as a jazz swing tune but more as an even-eighth-note tune, kind of floaty and loose. But when we started running it down, Kenny began playing the melody with more of a jazz phrasing and Adam started playing swing time, and it sounded perfect. I wrote the tune but they made that happen. Which just goes to show that’s it best not to tell musicians what to do. Just let them play.”
James Farber, engineering at Avatar, volunteered “Free Piece Suit(e)” as a title for the six-way collective improvisation. “He said he’d been saving that title, having noticed that ECM albums often include free exploratory pieces. This one was totally spur-of-the-moment. It’s great the way Mark, Joe and Kenny all jump into the free zone with both feet.”
“Remember When”: “I wrote this piece, which sounds like an old-fashioned waltz, on piano and then changed it for the record. I originally had the melody harmonised in thirds which gave it almost too sweet a sound, it sounded practically Guy Lombardo-esque, so I changed the harmony and added the guitar as a third voice and now it’s somewhat jazzier. Manfred said it reminded him of Jackie McLean.”
Finally, there’s “That’s For Sure”, which Abercrombie has previously played in the context of his long-standing association with pianist Andy Laverne: “We were rehearsing for a gig in Washington DC, looking at some new tunes. I said ‘You might want to try this, it’s not really a jazz tune.’ He said, ‘That’s for sure’! It is what it is, which is a little oddball. It’s sort of country, but warped, and it has odd phrase lengths. There’s a bar of 6/4 that recurs and gives just a little twist, makes it a little off-centre. The way Feldman plays he gives it little country inflections that were never written. And we do this collective improvisation this is basically built upon an organ solo. When I listened to the playback I realized that I was doing this commentary throughout, little answering phrases, and the overall feel is like a country jam session.”
