Page One
a column by
Bill Shoemaker
Marty Ehrlich: Influence and the Expressive Voice
Hillard Greene, Marty Ehrlich, Pheeroan ak Laff - Courtesy of Marty Ehrlich
Influence: it is unavoidable in post-modern art, where nothing is new and originality nears extinction; it is now both the filter and the silt of artistic expression. In some art forms, discernible influence in a work can gleam like a medal for valor; in others, it is a grievously wounding liability. In The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Harold Bloom contended that poets are ambivalent about the wellspring works of the masters, their presumably unintended, but discernible, influence resulting in derivative works – read: weak.
To the contrary, influence has radical value in jazz, where the artful nod can convey palimpsest-like layers of meaning – read: brilliant. However, the rub is that any and all influences need to be circumscribed by an individual aesthetic, albeit one employing a wide assortment of filters. The morphology of jazz languages in the second quarter of the 21st Century will center on how influence is expressed, be it through nuanced, cosmopolitan lexicon, emergent slang, or some market-savvy mix of the two.
Where jazz composers and improvisers differ from Bloom’s poets is that they are comfortable and conversant – sometimes on a first-name basis – with the precursors of the present. Creating new work and exploring repertoire are not at cross purposes, but operate in quiet tandem, a dynamic that ripens as one grows from acolyte to hired hand, then from peer to elder. In the process, the tradition transforms from something experienced second hand to something lived.
It is trajectory Marty Ehrlich began in the early 1970s as a teenager in St. Louis, where he met and performed with leading exponents of the Black Artists Group, one that he continued in his studies at New England Conservatory in the ensembles of George Russell and Gunter Schuller, and through his yeoman years in the large ensembles of Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Leo Smith of the late 1970s. Until the turn of the millennium, Ehrlich was a member of the octet that premiered the bulk of John Carter’s Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music and performed in Muhal Richard Abrams’ various ensembles (Ehrlich was one of the few artists who recorded a duo album with Abrams), and in the early 2000s, he played in both Andrew Hill’s late-life sextet and orchestra, and was the musical director of the Julius Hemphill Sextet.
Yet, for much of this fifty-year period, Ehrlich has also led a staggering number of inspired and durable recordings, documenting his own prolific and pointed output as a composer in settings spanning duos and other chamber music ensembles, and from classic trio and quartet configurations to orchestras. In their own right, Ehrich’s collaborators have made significant contributions to the shapes that jazz has become: percussionists like Andrew Cyrille and Pheeroan ak Laff; bassists like Mark Dresser and Michael Formanek; pianists like Uri Caine and Craig Taborn; and horn players like Ray Anderon, Howard Johnson, and J.D. Parran.
To be sure, Ehrlich is not a mold-breaking composer. He exemplifies what Braxton means with the term “restructuralist,” a composer who is not simply unafraid of influences, but one who uses them to create something fresh and newish, if not altogether new. Consider a 1,000-piece puzzle of a John Constable-like landscape of trees, meadows, and a diagonally running stream; the pieces are then rearranged into a line of camels being led across the Sahara at dusk – in the extreme, that’s what a restructuralist does.
Ehrlich’s sources are relatively unobscured in his less severe approach. The more frequently tapped can be bundled for discussion purposes: the Texas triumvirate of Carter, Ornette Coleman, and Hemphill; the Schuller sphere, which implicitly includes Ellington and Mingus in addition to the faculty he recruited; and the St. Louis to Chicago circuit that includes Abrams, Braxton, and Oliver Lake. There are also outliers like Bob Dylan. However, Ehrlich knows the restructuralist project is more than just erudite namechecks; that instead of presenting these sources as templates to be tweaked, they need to support the voice of the composer/improviser.
Ehrlich’s ongoing immersion in the music of “strong poets,” to use Bloom’s term, provides constant reminders of the bar to be cleared. His oversight of the Julius Hemphill Archive, housed at New York University, requires granular engagement with Hemphill’s scores, recordings, and letters; projects like the digitization of Hemphill’s saxophone quartets (recently published by Subito) can take months. Ehrich also pursues a different modality of preservation with Air Legacy, a co-op with Hillard Greene and Pheeroan ak Laff celebrating one of the loft era’s and the AACM’s most consequential ensembles, Air – Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins, and Steve McCall (after McCall’s passing, ak Laff joined what was then called New Air).
A clue to how Ehrlich maintains his creative sovereignty is hidden in plain sight within the name of his current working band with John Hébert and Nasheet Waits – Trio Exaltation. It is the secondary definition of exaltation, the action of elevating someone in rank, power, or character, that particularly applies. In this case, that someone is the listener. Each of the nine tracks of their recently issued second album, This Time (Sunnyside), provides uplift, be it through the jaunty swing of “For Twelve,” the introspective probity of “This Space, This Time,” or the athletic volleys between Ehrlich and Waits on “Conversations II,” which ends the album with the equivalent of several bold-faced, italicized exclamation points. In addition to Ehrlich’s compositions, the album includes poignant readings of Hill’s “Dusk” and “Images of Time;” given that Hébert and Waits, as well as Ehrlich, worked with Hill, the performances land like payments forward.
For Ehrlich, negotiating the dynamic between influence and originality is simply part and parcel of learning. “This subject is a big one,” Ehrlich recently assessed in a recent Zoom conversation, “because people now question the whole idea of originality. That’s a post-modern idea that doesn’t apply to jazz, which I view as a modern art form. One of the ideas of modernism was that you could create your own language, whether in poetry or music or other art forms. The African American jazz tradition was an oral tradition, learning on the bandstand, as it were. The acceptance of jazz as an academic study is relatively recent, even though it’s everywhere now.
“The first example of what I know as being a somewhat formalized setting was the Fate Marable band that played on the Mississippi riverboats. Though it wasn’t a school, he was known to be a fairly strict but effective teacher. I remember that [Louis] Armstrong recommended to someone they take that gig because you come out of it being able to read and have other skills that would help you going forward. But you surely couldn’t go to a university and learn the idioms of the language. I see you have [Robin D.G. Kelly’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original] behind you. Coltrane and others went to Monk’s house every day to learn his music by ear. Mingus did the same thing with his musicians; taught by ear. That’s how they got the vibe of the piece.
“For me, meeting members of the Black Artists Group and the Human Arts Ensemble in St. Louis as a teenager, and getting to participate in what was, at the time, a fair amount of collective improvisation with any number of musicians, any number of instruments, the use of small instruments, gave me a strong sense of what it means to create a music collectively as shared composers. ‘Comprovisation’ is the term I use in my teaching. And here I would throw in a little critique: Too much of jazz education focuses on the development of the facility of the individual soloist. You can go through a lot of these programs and not really develop a sensibility for comprovisation. I grew up playing classical clarinet. I didn’t follow it, but you get an idea of collectivity through playing chamber music, where there are primary parts and secondary parts.
“In general, for me, the new jazz wasn’t a sound; it wasn’t even a language; it was an artistic and political movement that made room for a really broad range of sensibilities. And I say that as not any kind of value judgement. There’s always a place for the great soloist who leads. We talk about the great bravura of Louis Armstrong and the great bravura of Sonny Rollins. Those two protean examples; there are many more. For me, one thing was clear, and that was political and socio-economic.
“When I started playing around St. Louis in 1970 or ‘71, it was a time of Black Nationalism. BAG was a group of artists organized around their identities as African Americans and self-determination. Many of these artists like Jim Marshall – who did so much organizing the Human Arts Ensemble and doesn’t get the credit he deserves – were quite accepting of me and I got it that they weren’t looking for a carbon copy of something. That was clear to me then, and later in George Russell’s orchestra, and when I first went to Europe with Braxton’s orchestra and then Roscoe and Leo’s orchestra. Here I am sitting next to Roscoe and soloing after Roscoe. I’m really influenced by Roscoe but I’m not going to play a Roscoe Mitchell solo.
“The challenge then and has always been how to assimilate and then give it expression. The thing the new jazz did was make a space to work on that. I think that’s one of the things that angered what you can call the jazz mainstream during the jazz wars of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the rise of Wynton [Marsalis] and Jazz at Lincoln Center, the recording industry recording the young lions, and all that. Part of that – and Wynton said as much – was this idea that until you could prove that you could play the past with authenticity you can’t do something new. I’m not a Wynton hater. He’s a phenomenal musician and an amazing composer at times. And that’s not a new point of view. It’s been around for hundreds of years.
“But the question is: Who decides and at what point do they decide that you can create something new? You are never given a diploma that says you have internalized the past and now you can move ahead and do your own thing. It’s fascinating to look at any artist and see how that goes. In truth, it’s an ongoing thing. I’m 70. I made my first record when I was 16 with Lester Bowie, Oliver Lake, Jim Marshall, and [Charles] Bobo Shaw. I started really early. It’s been a long time, and the majority of contexts I’ve worked in have been with older musicians, stubborn individuals, and it was all their original music.
“My career in jazz has included very little activity where I’m hired for a small group to play repertoire from the American song book. I would do that at weddings and jam sessions. The one time I played standards for an entire week was with the Anthony Braxton Piano Quartet, which I listened to the other day. I’m so proud of that recording. It was controversial at the time, with Anthony playing the piano, but I stand by it. And I was prepared. A lot of what I did at New England Conservatory was working backwards, because I had already been very involved with the new jazz. But I didn’t know early jazz and I didn’t know a lot of standards, which you have to be prepared to play. I strongly believe that having roots is helpful as long as they’re not used to tie you down.
“I have worked on Julius’ archive over the past three years, making complete scores in parts for 90% of his music, and putting it in editions so that it can be disseminated and performed. It was a huge amount of work but it was fascinating. He has this famous line, ‘you often hear people nowadays talking about the tradition, tradition, tradition. But they have tunnel vision in this tradition. Because tradition in African-American Music is wide as all outdoors.’ I didn’t know Julius in St. Louis. It’s not until we were both in New York and he began to hire me that I got to know him. But my teachers before that – Jaki Byard, George Russell, Gunther Schuller, Ran Blake, and others – these were people who required you to have a huge knowledge of the whole music. I’ve always been drawn to what George called ‘pan stylists.’ Julius was an amazing example of that. Muhal Richard Abrams was, as well.
“I always felt that one pushes oneself to do that, to have this knowledge of the entire tradition. When I talk about stubborn individuals, I’m talking about people who created contexts, because a lot of what is talked about – who can play and who can’t play – is based around this idea of this common rhythm section, and you put your stuff on top of it. I think this is limited. I also love to listen to Sonny Stitt at times. As Julius said, there’s a lot of Stittisms. And a lot of them, whether they’re cliches or not, contributed to the evolution of the language.
“There are hundreds of lineages like Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Sonny Stitt, and Sonny Rollins, and there is a time to really internalize them. In the old days, you learned a solo by ear, listening to a record and writing it down. We have oral histories about that process, but now you can buy the complete Charlie Parker. I love those books, but I also say eight bars learned by ear is better than a thousand measures read off the page. Take “Law Years” on [Coleman’s] Science Fiction, Dewey Redman comes in with a totally swinging two-bar riff that you could build a whole Basie chart from. I have students play it slow, play it in different keys, and see if they play it in different ways with different feelings. Let’s try to do everything we can to it.
“So, this is my thing: How do we think?”
One thing Ehrlich thinks about is the morphologies of jazz languages, generally, and his in particular. Each morphology that passes and amends lexicon from one musician to the next, over the course of generations, contributes to the layered richness of current jazz languages. Despite its changing usages – and, implicitly, its meanings and connotations – the roots of lexicon remain, if obscured. That’s why linguistic anthropologists make a habit of pointing out root words and original meanings. “Religion,” for example, is itself a metamorphized word, amalgamating two Latin words: “regilio,” which refers to sacred reverence, and “religare” – to bind, to bring together. The latter has been marginalized over millennia, but its residue persists, just as the radical lexicon of Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Freddie Keppard, can be found if the contemporary gloss of 21st Century jazz is scraped away.
Referring to his experiences playing in Hemphill’s ensembles, Ehrlich suggested that how to think about morphology in jazz languages entails a triangulation of the tradition in its totality, the specifics expressed in a given work, and one’s own voice. “He asked that you have a pretty broad knowledge of historical style in African American music, to play with some depth on a one-chord blues, to play with some depth on a harmonically complex Charlie Parker composition, to play with some depth on a ballad, because he wrote all of these things. At the same time, he was looking for your ability for individual and collective improvisation.
“That was the standard he brought to situations outside his own ensembles. A tape recently surfaced that I’m going to release of a duo concert Julius and I did in 1983, playing my music. What’s really great about it is that he is bringing to my music what I was bringing to his, a broad sense of tradition and a personal voice. Now, I consider myself a student for life, but school was out the moment I took my alto out with Julius.
“When it comes to my music, I like to think about the emotional resonance of a LP, a CD, or a concert. So, I’m looking for a balance. When I look back at my recordings, I’m proud of how I combine different elements in my writing, some simple and some complex. In terms of repertoire, I like the fact that I have a Hemphill piece and a Bob Dylan piece on the same record [Malinke’s Dance; 2000], which at the time felt a little transgressive. Now we know of a lot of people who were closet Dylan fans for years. I recently found my application to New England Conservatory, on which I wrote my two main influences were John Coltrane and Bob Dylan. And you know what? My main two influences are John Coltrane and Bob Dylan.
“Using repertoire is based on what you hear in it. Take ‘Johnny Come Lately’ [Side By Side; 1991]: if you take the melody away from the song form, it sounds like Alban Berg. That’s the thing with Strayhorn – the odd intervals in those structures. I’m fascinated by that. That’s why I use repertoire. It’s why I kept Julius’ music going for ten years with the Sextet. And now I’m going back with Henry, who sent me some of the music – I’ve taken some off the records – and I’m working on it with Hill and Pheeroan, finding things in them that we think are interesting. Air did a great job of stirring the waters, but it’s always been an ongoing stream and continues to be an ongoing stream until this day. It’s fun and it’s interesting to take whatever repertory is and not limit that concept to music before 19-whatever. It was Henry who came up with ‘Legacy.’ He also gave us this beautiful quote: ‘Time for new runners.’”
Flame keeping and torch bearing are long established tropes in jazz. It is a function regularly assumed by or assigned to young artists, be they fully prepared or not. While it may be a stretch for some to think of the 70-year-old Ehrlich as one, it is incumbent upon those skeptics to pinpoint when the teenager who happened upon the Black Artists Group ceased to be a new runner. And to consider that persons of all ages and physical abilities carry the Olympic flame to the site of the next games. What matters is that it arrives on time, which is dependent upon the diligence of those that carry it.
The other factor to weigh is that the new runner carries two torches, one for the larger relay of history and the other lit by original work, agendas not always in lockstep. What the septuagenarian new runner demonstrates is how an aligned core, measured strides, and steady pace, yield the requisite balance to carry both for the long haul. The veteran in the role of new runner also has vantage; in Ehrlich’s case, proximity to composers like Hemphill and Threadgill.
“While cataloging everything Julius ever did for the archives and publishing it, I discovered that Julius didn’t put dates on his music, which, for someone as meticulous as Julius was, seemed interesting to me,” Ehrlich said. “It struck me that he didn’t think it was so important. It made me think of this idea in the European tradition – the Eurological tradition, as Professor Lewis calls it – that the way you’re taught music theory is this progression of tonality: temperament; Beethoven; Schumann; then it blows apart. It’s this sense of a long line. What I’ve been thinking about is that in African American music – in creative music – it’s circles within circles within circles.
“I think repertoire should be a living thing, and I think it is, with so many different people approaching the music of so many composers in so many ways. Gunther Schuller, bless him, insisted that we try to play Ellington as close as we could to the original, even in the solos. One night, one of the tenor players on the famous Ben Webster solo on ‘Cottontail’ starts to do his own improvising. He was a really good player and it was artfully done. Maestro Schuller was not pleased. And then you go hear Sun Ra play Ellington and Fletcher Henderson – completely different, totally Sun Ra. It was a roomier approach. The point is: there’s more than one way to do it.
“For me, I’m always looking for some emotional resonance in a piece of music. That’s where I find creativity a lot of times. Ornette is a good example of what I’m talking about. He had this incredible conviction in his expressive voice. And it never let him down. Bobby Bradford said that Ornette had a certain benign disregard for people’s criticism of him. It wasn’t going to stop him from doubling down and doing it as strong as he could to create that emotional resonance. So, I’m looking for that and, as a leader, that means making everyone sound good.
“Trios are important to me in this regard – in many regards. My first album was a trio record. I was part of two collective trios – C/D/E with Andrew Cyrille and Mark Dresser, and then Relativity with Peter Erskine and Michael Formanek – very different trios. Had a good run with both of them. I then had a lot of projects that were compositionally oriented like A Trumpet in the Morning with a large ensemble, and others. I wanted to get back to the core of the trio.
“Because John, Nasheet and I met through Andrew Hill, and because the piece ‘Dusk’ became so iconic when I was in the sextet, it’s a piece we play at every concert and it’s on both of the trio’s recordings. It’s the sun that we build everything around. It’s such a fascinating piece of music. It’s this one simple melody that was originally on one of Andrew’s more obscure solo records that Ron Horton transcribed for horns. It was a great collaboration between Ron and Andrew.
“I also brought in some of my older pieces – circles within circles – like ‘Generosity,’ which is on my first record, The Welcome. It’s a piece I used to play a lot with John Lindberg. I’m finding everything is not a straight line.”
Sometimes, the line circles back to roughly the same place it was years ago. In many ways, the conditions of the current domestic scene are eerily similar to those during the Reagan winter, when Ehrlich first struck out on his own: grassroots venues facing existential pressures; ensembles downsizing to minimize the cost of touring; and a portion of the money-pinched concert-going public opting to stay home. Whereas Ehrlich faced it then with youthful energy, he now faces it with wisdom.
“You find a way,” he said of navigating the squalling climate, “and the music gets stronger because of the challenges.”