interviewer for WNUR
Jazz: Jason Guthartz
transcribed and edited by: Seth Tisue
WNUR: We have Ken Vandermark and John Corbett here in the studio to talk about the music of Joe Harriott. John, can you give us some background on this quasi-mythical figure?
John: Sure. Joe Harriott's a really interesting figure. He's an alto saxophone player and composer, and also doubled on baritone saxophone. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1928 and moved to London when he was about 25 years old. Early on he was playing bebop, hard bop, with Tubby Hayes and folks like that. Then in about 1958, after having established himself as an important figure on that scene, he started doing things that he called "free form" jazz experiments. He formed a working quintet to do these regular "free form" jazz concerts. Although he's been compared more or less ad nauseam to Ornette Coleman, it's clear that he didn't know about Ornette's music when he started doing these things. Ornette's music wasn't readily available at that time, really until 1960 or 1961, and by then Harriott had already recorded and released some of these pieces. He only made these explorations for a period of 1958 to about 1962 or so. Or he may have continued doing some of that later in the 1960's, but he didn't record any more of it. He reverted back to a hard bop thing, he was a very wonderful hard bop player, and he made a couple more records in that vein. Then he made another innovation in 1966, which was to do some "Indo-jazz fusion" records, which are relatively early examples of world music or world jazz, although they're not his most successful records by any stretch of the imagination. These were groups where he had a double quintet of a jazz quintet and a North Indian classical group playing sitar, tabla, and so on. He died in 1974, horribly young, and it's really a shame that he didn't get to follow up on some of the things that he was doing. So that's, in a nutshell, the Joe Harriott story.
WNUR: Unfortunately for us today none of his work is available on CD, but John has been kind enough to bring in some LP's, so let's listen to something from from the Abstract LP.
John: This is a funny record because it came out on Capitol Records, which is a major American record label. It's hard to imagine a record like this coming out on a major label. It would be like Columbia Records turning around and, uh, issuing something like this. Somebody else want to give some perspective on this?
Ken: It would be very strange.
John: [laughs] Thanks, Ken. This was released in the early sixties, about '63 is when it came out in the states, at the beginnings of psychedelia or just pre-psychedelia. I think there were people who thought free jazz was going to be the next big really popular thing --
Ken: They were wrong.
John: [laughs] They still are. So the record's called Abstract, and it was advertised as "revolutionary contemporary jazz by London's most exciting combo". The tune's called "Shadows".
Ken: This is one of the cuts we're going to be dealing with. It's an interesting piece because it's pretty open time-wise. It's an early example of something that is free in terms of rhythm. Most of the pieces that Harriott wrote go into some kind of swinging jazz time feel. So this is an interesting piece historically -- and musically.
[music: Joe Harriott, "Shadows"]
WNUR: Ken, you've had the pleasure, or perhaps nightmare --
Ken: [laughs]
WNUR: -- of transcribing some of these tunes. What do you find unique about Joe Harriott's music?
Ken: Well, it's been interesting to try to deal with, in that, to be honest, I don't really know anything about this music. You know, John made me some tapes about a year ago and said "Oh, this is cool stuff." I liked it, but it was really the first time I'd ever heard it. And there's a big difference between listening to something and actually trying to get it down [laughs], and deal with it musically, firsthand. The two records that I was dealing with were Abstract and Free Form. I went through those, the pieces on those records, and to be honest, some of the music I wasn't into. There's certain things that he does that for me are a little bit... they sound kind of corny. Part of it was trying to find music that... to me it's not enough to say, "This was a really cool thing for 1962" if it sounds really dumb right now, if it sounds extremely dated. I don't think that Harriott's good stuff is that, I think it's just good music. It doesn't matter if it's the first example of something. With some of his material, he was pushing the envelope in terms of trying to come up with new ways of dealing with what it meant to be an improvisor at that time. A lot of people were. There was a lot of incredibly interesting music happening in the late fifties and early sixties, a lot of people asking the same questions that Cecil Taylor, Jimmy Giuffre, and Ornette Coleman were. There were a lot of other people who aren't ever talked about that were doing similar kinds of things. Like Gil Melle for example. Teddy Charles. Mal Waldron, lots of people. And Harriott's one of them. But because of the way history works, you don't know about him. The English jazz scene isn't discussed too often. Even the straightahead scene, there are people that are talked about, but not very much. The United States still remains the focus of discussion in the media. Particularly in the United States [laughs]. Which is unfortunate because there are a lot of people doing interesting music. Harriott's best compositions just stand up and are very interesting pieces of music. The next one we're going to play is called "Formations" and it's an example of his more hard-swinging stuff. It's also indicative of his tendency to have segments in his compositions, even during the main themes. He'll start something and then stop it, and then start it and then stop it. He'll have a phrase, and then it cuts to something else, and there isn't a sense of overall flow. Like Ornette's pieces have like a very distinctive flow, they start a mechanism, even if the phrases change, the melodies change, the mechanism is set in motion. Or Cecil Taylor's music is so much about flow, it's very non-interruptive music, in terms of the way that things unfold. Joe Harriott's compositions tend to be extremely interruptive. To a fault sometimes, sometimes the pieces don't work. He's doing something very interesting and different with that. When it works it's really cool. It sets up an interesting tension. When it doesn't work, you feel like you're hopping back and forth on two feet, and it kind of feels kinda stiff to me. But this next piece is an example of that where it really works. It's called "Formations".
[music: Joe Harriott, "Formations"]
WNUR: Which album was that off of?
John: The record called Free Form, and it was recorded in, I think, 1960.
Ken: It was originally called Free Form, Baby!, but they took the "Baby" off when they released it. They had a baby in a baby carriage on the cover doing an abstract expressionist painting with a milk bottle, but they dumped that idea, so they just called it Free Form.
John: [laughs] That's not true.
Ken: Oh, but it should be.
John: The group, if you're interested in the lineup, is Joe Harriott on alto saxophone, Shake Keane on trumpet, Pat Smythe on piano, Coleridge Goode on bass, and a big band drummer who was also a fantastic figure on the scene, Phil Seamen --
Ken: He's amazing, actually. Phil Seamen is an example of why the history's messed up. He's an amazing, amazing, amazing drummer. And I never even knew who he was until, like, this year. He's an incredible figure for the whole scene there and just as a musician, period, compared to anybody who played drums. And he's completely unknown, for the most part.
WNUR: John, I wondering if you know of anyone who picked up on what Joe Harriott was trying to do, anything specific that has a Harriott influence?
John: Well, he was the kind of person whose spirit rubbed off on a lot of people. I know from talking to Evan Parker that he was an important influence, not necessarily in terms of the specifics of the music, but in terms of what he was interested in, and the fact that he was there doing these things in a fairly hard situation. But in terms of people coming directly out of Joe Harriott, maybe the best example would be that his drummer Phil Seamen, who Ken was talking about, was a very direct influence on John Stevens, particularly the material with Harriott. Also people like Trevor Watts, who is a great freebop saxophone player and also an early free improvisor, were clearly also listening to this and influenced by this. I'm sure somebody like Evan could give us a better historical framework to situate this in. There's a great story to be written about the English scene, along the lines of what Kevin Whitehead's done with the Dutch scene [in his book "New Dutch Swing"]. The English scene couldn't be a richer, more fractious scene, with people on either side of any fence you can draw. What I think is really interesting is how diverse these scenes are, how there was a pocket of West Indian musicians in London who were doing this. Coleridge Goode and Shake Keane and Joe Harriott were all West Indian musicians. You never see any historical mention of a pocket of West Indian musicians in London no matter how hard you look.
WNUR: Hopefully if anything at least some of this music will see the light of day on compact disc.
John: One of the Indo-jazz records is coming out this year. Koch Jazz, I think, bought the rights. But like I said, that's not indicative of the best work that he's done. I mean, corny? This is stuff that didn't date very well. Anyway, I don't think people should be on the lookout for Abstract or Free Form to be reissued in the next few years.
WNUR: Well, the groundswell will begin with all the people listening next week at the Bottle.
Ken: [laughs] Yeah, right.
John: A notable thing to mention is that Harriott is a composer whose music has, to the best of my knowledge, never been transcribed and never been featured this way. This music doesn't have a life anywhere, it's not available to anyone except fanatical record collectors, so I think it's really neat to hear it. I'll be looking forward to hearing it in concert.
Ken: Well, wait until you hear the transcriptions.
John: [laughs] The proof is in the pudding.
Ken: Something that's worth noting is that these pieces of music were written to be performed. A lot of times we can't get some record, you know, like these records. We can't hear them, and that's frustrating. But, part of the idea that I've had in trying to do music by other composers is, what is it to deal with these compositions now? These pieces offer a lot. They're open-ended vehicles. They're not set on a record and that's it, they're done. Sometimes I think the focus becomes on recordings because they're artifacts. But it's improvised music. Ideally when they were performing these tunes, they would be different every night. The record is just the snapshot we have. It's all we have left of that experience. That's valid and important, but it's interesting, I think, to tackle this music and see what we'll do with it in 1998. It's not 1962. I wasn't even born then. It's not like going back in the time machine, like we're going to try to play like the Joe Harriott group. It's like, what are these compositions going to be like for us now with our experiences and our backgrounds? I think that the material warrants that kind of investigation.
WNUR: Unfortunately, when a musician or an innovator gets put in the free form, free jazz bag, or whatever you want to call it, the jazz community looks at their innovations as just along lines of pure improvisation, rather than looking at the structures they created to spur innovative improvisations. Ornette, Sun Ra...
John: Albert Ayler.
Ken: Yeah, he's not taken seriously as a composer at all, and he should be.
WNUR: Exactly. Well, we're running short on time, so let's get to one more piece, I think, a slower ballad piece --
Ken: Yeah. It's a piece called "Pictures". One of the things that's important to me is to try and do something that gets into a space that isn't just always aggressive. This is a very beautiful tune, very abstract. Harriott was trying to deal with introspective work too. This is a really amazing, beautiful tune.
[music: Joe Harriott, "Pictures"]