Hands in Transit

Her hands breathe pliable, almost accordion foldable sideways from thumb to pinky, nearly malleable like clay; and their motion in relation to the keyboard equally recalls a potter or sculptor in persuasion of dense-soft working materials. While playing, the piano keyboard itself may seem to dip, curve and give despite the sharp apparent edges of right angles. She may reach a key from the side of a finger, or close to the palm, perhaps in shapes more kin to kneading bread, or the full flat of a digit, possibly with knuckles in rotation. Each of these variations of contact transfers to piano mallet engagement with the harp within, and, with that, to corresponding shifts of sonority. She perceives hands as conduits, music as moving through the vehicle, herself as passageway, kinesis-thought charging the hands even before they touch the instrument.

“I knew my hands were double jointed from when I was very young, but my classical training straightened all that out. That was until Lennie (Tristano) got me to play like this…” (with the flats of the fingertips in place of the suspended hammerclaw of conventional Euroclassical piano technique).

He directed her long term attention toward areas of tension in the body that block energy flow while playing and into gradually releasing these over time by maintaining an awareness of them. Nevertheless, a performance video shot during the ‘80s surprised her with the chronic regularity and “correctness” of her hand position, an image so in contrast with her conception of the keyboard and sound, that it set, almost imperceptibly, still further transformations into motion.

She waxes optimistic. In her understanding, art, despite all systemic efforts to the contrary, persists, not as some disposable, ornamental additive (as some would have it), but as vital to living. Otherwise, why else would it continue at all amid the more easily available corrosions of adversity? And, as much of a mess as the world may present itself to be, she also notices another consciousness, another model openly proliferating in plain sight, however noised off official radar. Louis Armstrong stepped out from the conventional trumpet ensemble role to extend the creative moment without restrictions as an improvising soloist. And, instead of this departure reinforcing standard, zero-sum assumptions that individual and collective must always risk each other at odds, Armstrong’s flights lifted the group, and each individual in it, to new levels. Enactment of this anti-entropic, symbiotic relationship continues as the regenerative core of the music. And, in an oppressively long moment of diminishing funds and audiences, she witnesses music booming with so much surprise and invention that it can be hard to take it all in. As she perceives it, where people become more willing to feel, they’ll hear it. This is a genuinely remarkable moment to be alive.

Emerging from her apprenticeship with Tristano, Connie Crothers enjoyed a flurry of attention for several years in the ‘70s that were immediately followed, in her telling of it, by about 30 years or so of relative invisibility, more dotted than filled with occasional (however notable) performances amid teaching to stay afloat. For her, music has never been an explicitly or exclusively commercial practice. Her friend Roy Eldridge once suggested that maybe she ought to give people a little more of what they think they want — which she then follows with a story about a gig her quartet would play just once a year at a very important NYC jazz club on the most difficult night of the year for drawing a crowd. The band would fill the house every time.

On the final evening of this annual “series,” after a couple of more familiar theme-solos-theme presentations, the quartet segued into spontaneously invented open form (carefully entitled in advance as an extended “suite”). The audience’s enthusiastic response, by the way, also left the club with a hefty take on what would otherwise have been a dead night. The prestigious venue has never since invited her back.

But, just off to the side of this particular model of gatekeeping behavior, a long affiliation with Arts for Art (best known for its annual Vision Festival) has helped reintroduce Crothers to wider audiences in a way that’s since led to much more frequent and regular performance opportunities and recordings during the past decade or so.

She handed me her most recent from a flush of new recordings, Deep Friendship, recorded live atThe Jazz Room at William Patterson University with her steady quartet of Roger Mancuso (drums), Richard Tabnik (saxophone) and Ken Filiano (bass). Then, she grabbed another one which documents an evening at The Stone, where the quartet was joined by trumpeter Roy Campbell, called Band of Fire.

There’s likely no such thing as a “bad” recording by Connie Crothers. Each recording draws yet another cup from an extensive and ongoing current of music. River Crothers flows out of the Lennie Tristano region. And, for those unfamiliar with this source, pianist and composer Lennie Tristano was a coeval of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell who synthesized his own experience and perception with what he was learning from them, evolving a parallel universe of its own distinct identity (rather than an offshoot imitation) in close rapport with the attitudes and procedures of what’s been called bebop.

A key organizational strategy in bebop (which, by the way, was not what the musicians themselves called their music; this term initially thrived as a press and PR hook) was to maintain the underlying cyclic infrastructure of the harmonic progression of pop songs or blues and superimpose “another beat” over that pattern in the form of a completely original melody, or theme, or “head.” Tristano built similar constructions over these substrates with deliriously long, elliptical melodic lines that incorporated some of the expanded tonal mobility of modernist Euroclassical music and the possibilities that Baroque counterpoint might offer within this context.

Tristano was a deep thinker who was willing to reconsider on his own terms the essences of the music he was involved in — this versus grabbing bits of other musicians’ gestures piecemeal. He followed the natural implications of collective improvisation into the earliest known (and recorded) formal exercises of collective free improvisation, which is to say, music dialogically composed without any preset coordinating parameters such as a specific theme, harmonic grid or rhythm pattern. Because of other musicians’ attraction to what he was doing, he found himself in the position of a teacher who came to influence an important stream of musicians including Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, Sal Mosca, Lenny Popkin, Sheila Jordan, Marylou Williams, Charles Mingus and Connie Crothers.

On Deep Friendship, the continuity with Tristano’s practice is audible in the themes and in the organization of the music around repeating standard tune chord sequences, all of which adds relief to the individuality of each of the players. One of the most important compositional elements of this music is that it’s developed by a longstanding real band, whose shared experiences, mutual recognitions and understandings allow for their compositional interaction to be tuned at a very fine degree. Drummer Roger Mancuso recorded with Crothers on her very first recording in the ‘70s and has been playing with her since. Richard Tabnik has collaborated with her since the ‘80s. 21st century addition Ken Filiano brings such supple ears and reflexes to any musical situation that he can almost instantly sound like he’s been with a band for decades.

Connie Crothers’ pianism is nobody else’s colony. She doesn’t sound like Lennie Tristano; and she doesn’t sound like Thelonious Monk or any other Ellingtonian. However, like Monk (or Duke), she can unravel a gargantuan assortment of textural and coloristic variety within a short period of time with great surprise and coherence. There’s an appealing muscularity to the way she can push a chord from just the right trajectory behind a soloist; but the chords act as sculptural bodies as much as conglomerations of pitches and overtones. A rich repertoire of attacks and sustains shapes each mass of sound uniquely in a way that a chord’s envelope continues to modulate through space while it sounds. She can shift instantly from crisp single pitches to Alice Coltrane sustain pedal wet (although with very different content) to a rapidly arpeggiated, wide angle burst that recalls a staggered, multicolored firework. No sound, combination or sequence of sounds is kept off limits. A “pretty” triad capped with a trill may ride next to a swishing tone cluster that precedes intricate two handed counterpoint, all of this unfolding with the heroic pace of revelation.

There’s a superficial resemblance at first glimpse between the sounds of Steve Coleman and Richard Tabnik to Lee Konitz, Coleman in the dryness of his tone and Tabnik in a certain wispiness in the upper register — but there’s also much more shout in his sound than in either of the others. All three are virtuosos of their instrument, the stubbornly unruly alto saxophone, and none of them, very much to their credit, are ardent students of cliché. Tabnik is also eloquently oriented in the altissimo range as are few others. He plays an astonishing flow of inventive ideas all over the horn, carefully sensitive to the shaping capacities of the breath. The nearly telepathic hand in glove simpatico of saxophonist with leading pianist in this quartet stands on par with Charlie Rouse’s parallel particle spins with Monk.

Trumpeter Roy Campbell augments the quartet on Band of Fire, and I can understand Connie’s excitement about this disc as well as the title. The recording opens with the same Connie Crothers composition that introduces Deep Friendship,Ontology (built over the same reference matrix as are Tadd Dameron’s Hot House, Lee Konitz’ Subconscious Lee or Charles Mingus’ What Love? — the chord sequence to Cole Porter’s What is this Thing Called Love?). Roy enters with a countermelody to Crothers’ and Tabnik’s unison figure then proceeds into an exuberant solo at the height of his dramatic abilities. The contagion passes on to Tabnik, whose sound expands lucidly with flying overtones across thick swooshes and dips. The rhythm section is sympathetically on it, and the music swells on and on from there.

The following two tracks, Cosmic Fire and Song for Henry and Margaret (titled for the curators of that particular series, the landmark bassist Henry Grimes with his wife Margaret), both listed as entirely improvised by the group, only step all of this up still further. (It’s funny, but I’d have to pinch myself as I’d be listening to Cosmic Fire. I’d involuntarily keep superimposing the chord sequence from What is this Thing Called Love? from the previous track over what I was hearing, and it would seem to fit. I’d hear the same sort of symmetrical 4/4ish cadences in the soloists’ phrasing as if they were still playing off of an 8 bar matrix — not so on the even more variegated Song for…, however.)

On the other hand, the seamless coordination of the collectively generated compositions is also evidence of the seasoned discipline this band has already long cultivated, allowing unpremeditated group form to cohere and convince as well as anything mapped out ahead of time. All of the music on these two recordings is alive, rich in detail, moving … and sounds better and better each time one listens. In other words, this is the real (and more than worthwhile) deal. Not only are these records exhilarating to listen to; even better yet, if you can, you should make an effort to catch this band (more than once) live and in person while it’s all still present tense.