BRANFORD MARSALIS ON “GIGGIN’”
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
I recently heard Ornette Coleman’s “Giggin’” while listening to FOOTSTEPS OF OUR FATHERS, a record by the Branford Marsalis Quartet that features Marsalis on soprano sax, longtime associate Jeff Watts on drums, Joey Calderazzo on piano and Eric Revis on bass. the song is originally from TOMMOROW IS THE QUESTION by Ornette Coleman… another great Coleman line, that sounds sort of like a blues but has some surprising twists and turns and is thirteen bars long. i can’t remember the last time i heard the original, nor do i have a copy, so i don’t know how faithfully Marsalis’ group is to it. nonetheless, i lifted it from their CD. they put down the melody with a really aggressive stance, the soprano sax and piano stating the melody in unison for the most part; they split up into harmonizing at times. i love the way Marsalis moves into the blowing in such a way that the listener has a hard time knowing where the melody ends. Marsalis has one of the best soprano sax sounds that i’ve come across. honestly, i’m not a huge fan of the soprano in general. i mostly hear it played with a shrill, thin tone, often out of tune. Marsalis’ tone is dark, round and controlled in every register. he goes on to play a really nice solo. cop the CD and check it out…
What is it about women that inspire men to write such incredible music? never mind… i’ve been listening to “Kathelin Gray” by Ornette Coleman over and over again. what a beautiful melody. what i enjoy so much about Coleman’s music is its conversational quality. his phrases expand and contract- they breath as Coleman breathes. he’s accompanied here by Pat Metheny on guitar, Charlie Haden on bass and Denardo Coleman playing drums. I wrote a sketch below. the biggest difficulty in transcribing it is notating it rhythmically. i thought about not including a time signature at all- i’ve seen this song written out in 3/4. since the whole band plays freely (Metheny dovetails the melody, Denardo Coleman lends splashes of sound mostly as color and texture, but also to provide a little propulsion, and Haden outlines the harmonic underpinnings to Coleman’s line) a transcription could turn out many different ways rhythmically, but i think the most important aspect to highlight is how the phrases fit together. this to me is the element that makes playing Ornette Coleman’s music so appealing. there’s such a beautiful logic in how each phrase blurs into the next in quirky and subtle ways. this song in particular invites a performer to inject his own personality into it, to breathe life into it… the effect of this way is playing is to make the song sound as if it’s being composed on the fly. there’s obviously a lot of preparation involved but there’s still wide latitude in the direction the lead, and consequently the rest of the group, can take…
I heard Charles Lloyd play “Hommage” in Los Angeles with Cedar Walton, David Williams and the one and only Billy Higgins many, many years ago. Aside from being one of most stylish cats i’ve seen on a bandstand, Lloyd blew some fifteen or twenty inspired choruses over this tune. “Hommage” has a blues quality to it, somewhat along the lines of “Mr. PC”. toward the end of the head the rhythm section plays and ostinato figure, emphasizing beats two and four while the lead riffs over it. it serves as a reservoir to build energy for push into the next section. the ostinato is on the five chord, but instead of going back to the one, it moves to the two chord, which cranks up the energy another notch. Lloyd was incredible but the catalyst was Higgins, who found unique, funky ways set up successive choruses. he rarely did it with volume, the most obvious way. rather he used subtlety, understatement and an incredible psychic energy that could be felt throughout the club to push the proceedings to ever higher levels… he possesed the same quality that i felt with Sonny Rollins when i heard him here in Tokyo a few years back. he’d lost a lot of the power in his sound but the bigness of his aura and the power of his beat, even in the huge concert hall where he performed, was reeeeeediculous…
