Within a Song John Abercrombie Quartet

• 1 Where Are You 05:53
• 2 Easy Reader 06:37
• 3 Within a Song / Without a Song 07:55
• 4 Flamenco Sketches 06:33
• 5 Nick of Time 05:57
• 6 Blues Connotation 06:11
• 7 Wise One 09:12
• 8 Interplay 06:26
• 9 Sometime Ago 06:24
• Total Runtime 01:01:08

Info for Within a Song

“Within A Song” celebrates the spirit of discovery that illuminated the jazz of the 1960s, as John Abercrombie declares his musical loyalties in a quartet album that pays tribute to a range of early influences including Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins and Jim Hall. “This was the music that spoke to me. When I heard it, it was like finding a new home.” The group assembled especially for this production, recorded at New York’s Avatar Studios in September 2011 features tenorist Joe Lovano as the optimal partner for Abercrombie. Together they mine deep feelings from these modern jazz classics.

On “Within A Song”, John Abercrombie pays tribute to formative influences, to the recordings and the musicians that shaped his early listening and his future directions. The period addressed is the 1960s, with specific reference to key recordings by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Bill Evans. This new album, revisiting some classics of the era, is effectively a modern jazz primer, but it’s also much more.

“Manfred Eicher and I had been talking for a while about doing an album that might pay homage to a particular jazz artist or composer. But in the end I preferred to look at the era when my own musical tastes were shaped. The recordings that I was listening to back then were mostly post-bebop jazz albums, usually by artists who were stretching the forms, in their various ways.”

Guitarist Abercrombie and tenorist Joe Lovano convey their empathy with the original protagonists, while also bringing much of their own creativity into service. There is superlative playing from both of them, with encouragement and alert support from Joey Baron and Drew Gress, also vital contributors to the project.

The album opens with “Where are You”, from Rollins’ “The Bridge”, and from the same source comes “Without A Song”, the latter now enveloped in John’s title track. “Hearing Sonny Rollins and Jim Hall on ‘The Bridge’ was an epiphany for me,” Abercrombie says. “They just turned my head around. When I heard them playing ‘Without a Song’', I thought that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard! So for this new album I wrote songs based upon it.”

Jim Hall has long been one of John’s primary influences, admired for musicality and harmonic sophistication beyond the creation of great solos, and there are several Hall references on the disc, in connections to Rollins, Bill Evans and also Art Farmer. “I had the opportunity to see Art Farmer’s band with Jim Hall, Steve Swallow on acoustic bass and Pete La Roca on drums quite often, and every time I saw them they played Sergio Mahanovich’s tune ‘Sometime Ago’ in such a poignant way. It was so moving. In my mind, at least, it was the theme song of the Art Farmer-Jim Hall Quartet.” Hall was also on board for Bill Evans’s ‘Interplay’ album whose title tune is reinterpreted here. “I always liked this tune of Bill’s. It’s a very well-written theme on a minor blues. The construction of the melody, and Bill’s use of intervals, is quite unique. Plus, I welcomed the chance to play a blues on an ECM album.”

Ornette Coleman’s “Blues Connotation”, originally recorded on “This Is Our Music”, plays more loosely with the language of the blues. “I liked the total sound of Ornette’s bands with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and either Ed Blackwell or Billy Higgins. It was clear to me that Ornette had a concept and knew what he was doing. I heard his alto playing really as an extension of Charlie Parker. Having recorded ‘Round Trip’ already in the quartet with Mark Feldman [on ‘The Third Quartet’ in 2006], I was looking for another piece with that feeling of openness. ‘Blues Connotation’ has that quality. It’s a piece that gives you the option of playing in a blues style or freely, and this time we took a freer path.”

Abercrombie describes himself as “a late bloomer” vis-à-vis “Kind of Blue”: “It was released in ’59 but I didn’t hear it until 1962, when I was a student in Boston. I was completely captured by Miles’s playing on that album, the simplicity and beauty of it. Of course, the album is meanwhile so well-known that certain tunes have been practically worn out with repetition. But I thought it was still possible to play something fresh on the chord progressions of ‘Flamenco Sketches’ and create our own melodies.”

Coltrane’s “Crescent”, was also the subject of intense scrutiny in Abercrombie’s Boston years. “I had loved the way Coltrane played ballads, but ‘Crescent’ seemed to be a centrepiece for the new music he was working on: the new tunes, with the long rubato intros, of which ‘Wise One’ was a great example. Music of real beauty.”

Abercrombie also adds compositions of his own to the programme. “Easy Reader”, an amiable Abercrombie waltz, makes a nod to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s “Easy Rider”, another iconic production of 60s vintage. This like “Nick of Time” with its oblique melody, is integrated within the context of an album that looks back with admiration – and a measure of nostalgia – for an era when jazz was in the throes of great changes. “A celebration”, John says, “of an era when the musicians were stretching the forms”.

“Within A Song” was produced by Manfred Eicher at New York’s Avatar Studios in September 2011.

Abercrombie and Joe Lovano have previously collaborated on ECM for John ‘s “Open Land” album of 1998. They have many a shared jam session behind them. Abercrombie had a quartet for a while with Lovano, Steve Swallow and drummer John Riley. John and Joe also toured internationally with French bassist Henri Texier’s groups.

John Abercombie, Joe Lovano and Drew Gress will be playing material from “Within A Song” in New York’s Birdland club for a week in August, the quartet completed on this occasion by Adam Nussbaum on drums. In November 2012, Abercrombie, Gress and Joey Baron will tour Europe in a quartet completed by tenorist Billy Drewes, last heard on ECM in 1982 on Paul Motian’s “Psalm” album.

John Abercrombie, guitar
Joe Lovano, tenor saxophone
Drew Gress, double-bass
Joey Baron, drums

John Abercrombie
Over a career spanning more than 40 years and nearly 50 albums, John Abercrombie has established himself as one the masters of jazz guitar. Favoring unusual sounds (he played electronic mandolin on McCoy Tyner's 1993 album 4x4) and nontraditional ensembles (recent quartet recordings have included violinist Mark Feldman), Abercrombie is a restless experimenter, working firmly in the jazz tradition while pushing the boundaries of meter and harmony.'

Born on December 16, 1944 in Port Chester, New York, Abercrombie grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he began playing the guitar at age 14. Like many teenagers at the time, he started out imitating Chuck Berry licks. But it was the bluesy music of Barney Kessel that attracted him to jazz. Abercrombie enrolled at Boston's Berklee College of Music and teamed up with other students to play local clubs and bars. One of those clubs, Paul's Mall, was connected to a larger club next door, the Jazz Workshop, where Abercrombie ducked in during his free time to watch John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk.

Abercrombie's appearances at Paul's Mall led to several fortuitous meetings. Organist Johnny Hammond Smith spotted the young Abercrombie and invited him to go on tour while he was still a student. During the same period, Ambercrombie also met the Brecker Brothers, who invited him to become a new part of their group Dreams, which would become one the prominent jazz-rock bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Abercrombie appears on the group's eponymous debut album.

After graduating from Berklee, Abercrombie headed to New York, where he quickly became one of New York's most in-demand session players. He recorded with Gil Evans, Gato Barbieri, and Barry Miles, to name a few. He was also a regular with Chico Hamilton?s group. '

But it was in Billy Cobham's band, which also featured the Brecker brothers, that Abercrombie first started to build a following. He was featured on several of Cobham's albums, including Crosswinds, Total Eclipse and Shabazz, all of which staked new ground in fusion jazz. The group was booked into large concert halls and arenas, appearing on bills with such top rock attractions as the Doobie Brothers. It was not, however, the direction Abercrombie had hoped his career would go. 'One night we appeared at the Spectrum in Phildelphia and I thought, what am I doing here?' he said. 'It just didn?t compute.'

In the early 1970s, Abercrombie ran into Manfred Eicher, who invited him to record for ECM. The result was Abercrombie's first solo album, Timeless, in which he was backed by Jan Hammer and Jack DeJohnette. Abercrombie's second album, Gateway, was released in November 1975 with DeJohnette and bassist Dave Holland; a second Gateway recording was released in June 1978.

He then moved on to a traditional quartet format, recording three albums on ECM--Arcade, Abercrombie Quartet, and M--with pianist Richie Beirach, bassist George Mraz and drummer Peter Donald. 'It was extremely important to have that group for many reasons,' Abercrombie told AAJ in 2004. 'It was, of course, a good band, but it was also my first opportunity to really be a leader and to write consistently for the same group of musicians.'

His second group, a trio with bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Peter Erskine, marked the first time he experimented with the guitar synthesizer. This gave him the opportunity to play what he called 'louder, more open music' with a propulsive beat, demonstrated in the group's three releases, Getting There (featuring Michael Brecker) in 1987, Current Events in 1988, and John Abercrombie, Marc Johnson & Peter Erskine in 1989.

From there, he moved to partnerships that he would shuffle and reshuffle for the next 20 years. He reunited with his Gateway bandmembers in 1995 for an album appropriately titled Homecoming, but not before forming yet a third ensemble that would make several recordings together. Abercrombie had long been enamored with the sound of jazz organ, so he teamed with organist Dan Wall and drummer Adam Nussbaum in While We Were Young and Speak of the Devil (both 1993) and, in 1997 Tactics. Another album, titled Open Land, added violinist Mark Feldman and saxophonist Joe Lovano to the mix.

His affiliation with Feldman, in a quartet that included Marc Johnson and drummer Joey Barron, ushered in a period of looser, freer, almost improvisatory playing. 'I like free playing that has some relationship to a melody; very much the way Ornette Coleman used to write all those wonderful songs and then they would play without chords on a lot of them,' he told AAJ. In fact, Abercrombie's work from this period has been compared to chamber music, with its delicacy of sound and telepathic communication between musicians.

Throughout the 1990s and into 2000 and beyond, Abercrombie has continued to pluck from the ranks of jazz royalty--and be plucked for guest appearances on other artists' recordings. One propitious relationship was with guitarist, pianist, and composer Ralph Towner, with whom Abercrombie has worked in a duet setting. (Abercrombie has also worked in guitar duos with John Scofield, for 1993's Solar and with Joe Beck in Coincidence, released in 2007). Abercrombie has also recorded with saxophonist Jan Garbarek and bassist Eddie Gomez.

Abercrombie keeps up a heavy touring schedule and continues to record with ECM, a relationship that has spanned more than 30 years. As he told one interviewer, 'I'd like people to perceive me as having a direct connection to the history of jazz guitar, while expanding some musical boundaries.' That, no doubt, will be his legacy.

Booklet for Within a Song