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CARNIVAL
Randy Weston is an all-embracing piano stylist. The percussive drive of
the Harlem stride players, the urbanity of Duke Ellington, and the
angularity of Thelonious Monk commingle in his music with a vast
vocabulary of African and Afro-Caribbean rhythm patterns and a deep
feeling for blues basics. He is also a visionary. During the sixties, when
back-to-Africa rhetoric was rampant. Randy Weston actually went. While New
York musicians were discussing the need for block ownership during breaks
of the Village Vanguard, Randy was opening his African Rhythms Club in
Tangier, Morocco.
Billy Harper, Live at Montreux's featured saxophonist and flutist, first
played with Randy at the Tangier Festival of African and Afro-American
Music in 1972. He'd been scheduled to perform with Max Roach's group, but
a ticket mix-up stranded Roach in the Stales, a drummer from Europe failed
to show, and Harper found himself playing traps behind Dexter Gordon for
the festival's opening set. He then joined Randy's band, without the
benefit of prior rehearsals, and soared on tenor through an astonishing
set. Halfway through it Randy signaled a troupe of dervish drummers, who
stormed onto the stage playing furious, insistent trance rhythms. The
Moroccan wizard who was running the sound and lights darkened the stage
and then turned on a strobe. A sudden wind came up, raising sand in great
clouds from the floor of the open air amphitheater. The combined effect
was overpowering, rather like being present at the sinking of Atlantis.
Weston and Harper played on, and they've played together since, at the
Newport-New York Jazz Festival, on Randy's Tanjah album, and now Carnival.
Randy has been dividing his time between New York and Europe during the
lost few years, leading groups ranging in size from duos to big bands.
William Alien, his bassist at Montreux, was half the Weston duo which
performed at Bradley's in Greenwich Village. Prior to working with Randy
he was employed by Mochito. Congo drummer Steve Berrios joined the group
on Alien's recommendation. Harper and drummer Don Moye were added after
Weston and company had arrived in Switzerland. The saxophonist was there
as a soloist with the Gil Evans and Thad Jones / Mel Lewis big bands, and
neither he nor Randy could resist the opportunity to perform together
again. 'And with Billy playing saxophone," Weston adds, "I wanted an extra
drummer, somebody who could complement Billy's drive and really put some
fire underneath the situation.” Moye, who is best known for his innovative
work with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, was just the man. "Carnival" has to
do with the preservation of African folklore In the New World as a
part of carnival celebrations from New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro, and with
a boomerang pattern observable in certain African / American musical
interchanges. Calypso, a Caribbean blend of African and European elements,
has bounced back to influence High Life, a West African dance music. Thus
the immediate Inspiration for the calypso- like "Carnival" was a High Life
party Randy attended in Lagos, Nigeria. "Billy Harper plays tenor
saxophone and solos throughout." the composer notes. “I'm not taking a
real piano solo, I'm feeding chords and different rhythmic accents to the
rhythm section, giving the drummers a chance to feel each other and warm
up.” The piano functions as another drum in the dialogue which develops.
Guy Warren, a drummer and composer from Ghana, conceived 'Mystery of Love"
as an African version of 'Romeo and Juliet.' Randy altered the melody
somewhat and kept the rhythm, which he describes as "a sort of hypnotic
Ghanaian rhythm, that beautiful slow kind of 6/4" During the mid-sixties,
when the Weston sextet included Booker Ervin, Roy Copeland, and Ed
Blockwell, "Mystery" was, its theme song. In this latest version Harper
solos on flute, displaying a gentle, lyrical bent and a tone Randy
accurately describes as "nice, round, and fat.' Randy's tribute to the
late Duke Ellington is on unaccompanied, spontaneously improvised piano
solo. "For me,' he says, 'Ellington is one of the greatest musicians and
composers in history, and certainly a major influence on modern music in
the twentieth century. He influenced me a great deal as o pianist, but in
a late-blooming kind of way. As a boy, in the forties, I listened a lot to
Ellington, but I didn't quite understand the music. His musicians, people
like Johnny Hodges and Jimmy Blanton, go) to me first. Thelonious Monk was
also a great influence on me, although I actually had a percussive,
rhythmic style of piano before I heard him. When I did hear him, I re
-listened to Duke and realized that their styles had a lot in common."
Randy's playing here, related though it is to the Willie The lion'
Smith-Ellington-Monk lineage, is lean and self- contained. Its timing,
tone, and touch are particularly noteworthy. It's emotional, but never
gushingly so, and its spare-ness is perhaps its greatest strength. Listen,
for example, to how the pianist recreates the sound of the Ellington
brass, even suggesting the sonorities produced by their various mutes,
with a handful of close-voiced notes. This tribute," he says, "is
something I felt very deeply, very spiritually. It was strictly
improvised; I didn't have a set for mot or know what particular
combination of tunes I was going to ploy. In this particular cluster
there's a blues which I wrote for Duke, in there with 'Sophisticated
Lady,' 'In My Solitude,' Take the A Train,' and various other things." A
Weston solo piano LP is on the way. So is a second Montreux album, to
include a North African flavored composition by and featuring Ahmed
Abdul-Malik and Randy's “The Sahel." In the meantime we have this varied,
cohesive, high-flying set of performances, firmly rooted in the past and
as contemporary as tomorrow.
1974 Robert Palmer.
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