It's so great I found these words from Stanley Crouch in a 1991 reissue of two recordings from 1969. There isn't much information available, and when Stanley really puts what was happening on the West Coast in perspective it's gold dust. "We are fortunate that Thiele saw his way to make these recordings". Amen
In 1969, when the John Carter-Bobby Bradford Quartet and the Horace Tapscott Quintet made these recordings, Los Angeles was no longer considered much of a jazz town. Even though musicians like Lawrence Brown, Lionel Hampton, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Mingus, Art and Addison Farmer, Teddy Edwards, Frank Morgan, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Gary Peacock, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins and others were either born and bred there or put together their music in that land of smog and movie stars, the scene these two bands found themselves in the middle of was essentially quite bleak. Long gone were the good times that rolled along the black community's Central Avenue during the forties, when there were clubs in which the night creatures and the musicians they listened to congregated, when there were dance halls, when there were theaters and stage shows. By this point in time, the best jazz heard on any consistent basis in public situations of professional quality was played by New York bands on tour, either at the Lighthouse all the way out in Hermosa Beach or at the Manne Hole in Hollywood. Other clubs tended to close almost as soon as they appeared or to last no more than a couple of years.
None of those few situations were available to these bands anyway. They both existed in an underground dominated by what was then called "garage music"that is, jazz far more often rehearsed than heard in public performance. That mightseem hard to believe now, given the sophistication, the excitement, and the virtuosity exhibited by these musicians. The line from Ornette Coleman is quite clear in the Carter-Bradford group, while Tapscott's band combines an original approach to the influence of Monk, Weston, Roach, and Coltrane. It all seems so clear now and so far removed from the kind of charlatanism that occupied too large a position in the world of avant garde jazz, But that is not how it was then. These bands were largely dismissed if heard, but more often than not ignored. Such was Los Angeles.
Yet the dismal nature of the jazz scene at that time didn't lessen the layover of fervor that had come into the black community following the Watts Riot of 1965, when the August sky had filled with smoke and flame and it really seemed that race war would spread through the whole state — until the National Guard arrived and made it quite clear what the difference was between fighting a war and putting down a riot. Government programs and arts projects either followed the riot or benefited from the attention it brought to the black community, and to Watts especially. In Studio Watts, founded by Jim Woods and boasting a theater under the direction of Jayne Cortez, John Carter and Bobby Bradford rehearsed their band once a week. Down the street was the Watts Happening Coffee House where Budd Schulberg presented the work of members of his Watts Writers Workshop and where jam sessions were held and plays were performed. In that coffeehouse on some jam session night, Arthur Blythe might come and startle everyone with his sound, or trumpeter James Lee and alto saxophonist Lattus McNeeley could stand up and show off the compatibility that led to their forming what was one of the best underground quartets of the time. When a Sunday series of "Cultural Afternoons" was initiated, the Watts Happening Coffee House presented poetry readings and concerts. One particularly memorable concert featured Black Panther chanteuse Elaine Brown in big band arrangements written by Horace Tapscott for the UGMAA Arkestra.
During those years of dashikis and black leather jackets, of afros as large as woolly igloos, of a romanticized Africa, of revolutionary hot talk, and of interest in Eastern religions, it seemed as though much would come of the activity that took place below the sight lines of the big time. There were illusions of creating a following for the kind of music heard on this recording, of musicians making their own records, owning their own clubs, and freeing themselves from the commercial markets that made it so hard to achieve artistic satisfaction and earn a living at the same time. Of course, none of that happened. Militants eventually sought the great leap forward to the middle class, the music scene was knocked for a loop by fusion, and the beliefs that were behind the making of the music heard here adjusted to the realities of our time. But when one listens to this work, it is obvious how much we can add to our understanding of what might have been, for these musicians would perhaps have, as Michael Cuscuna points out, "been very startling if they had come to New York. Nobody in New York was playing like John Carter and Bobby Bradford or the band Tapscott had with Arthur Blythe. They would have been completely different from everything else that was going on."
If you happened to be in Studio Watts on those nights when the John Carter-Bobby Bradford Quartet rehearsed, or if you heard one of their rare appearances at a college or one especially memorable night at a place in Pasadena called the Ice House, there was no doubt that this was one of the best new jazz bands around. Though both had once been professional musicians in Texas, neither Carter nor Bradford at that time — nor this one — made his living as a performer. Both were schoolteachers and family men. Each had known Ornette Coleman before he had come to the attention of the jazz world, even before he had left Texas for Los Angeles. Bradford had worked in Los Angeles with Coleman before Don Cherry, leaving the band when military duty called, only to replace Cherry in 1961 at New York's Five Spot. Coleman considered Bradford one of the best trumpet players alive. Carter had conducted one of Coleman's long works during a 1967 festival in Los Angeles and enjoyed a reputation as a thorough musician, though the attention he then gave the alto saxophone would not have led one to believe he would one day put it down and so focus on the clarinet that he is now recognized as one of its premier virtuosi.
Tom Williamson had a big sound and was hard at work on inventing bass lines that were at least as melodic as they were harmonic, often grounded in motives rather than chords. Buzz Freeman was then a tennis instructor most of the time, though he had been a house drummer in Chicago during the high tide of bebop, playing with Charlie Parker among others. As a member of the famous Freeman family that includes tenor saxophonist Von and guitarist George, he was well grounded in traditional jazz time and swing. As a unit, these four men made music as thorough as any derived from the innovations introduced by Coleman. In fact, what they were doing now seems a long way ahead of most who then claimed to be inspired by Coleman.
Much of the musical success heard in the Carter-Bradford band is the result of every member really knowing jazz. This is not the work of men who picked up instruments and went on bandstands once they realized that it was a time when, as Marshall McLuhan observed, art was anything you could get away with. The first thing one notices is how precise the ensemble playing is and how well each musician handles his instrument. Carter's work is straight out of the bebop tradition, so far out of it that those who didn't know him during those years only pretended to believe that he knew well the work of men like Charlie Parker and James Moody, both of whom Carter used quite precisely as he built a style capable of working within the post-Coleman context of this band Bradford was then surely the most lyrical and assured of all the trumpet players associated with the avant garde. As Call To The Festival illustrates, Bradford's tone, the quality of his swing, the ability to create sustained melodic extensions of the pieces, and the elegant combination of defiance and pathos give his work a level of craft that still looms above the fray these many years later. Williamson and Freeman slide through the songs with the freedom that comes of knowing the fundamentals of jazz time. In fact, Freeman's conception of time and of flow set a standard for so-called free drumming that few have met since these recordings. In all, a marvelous band. While Carter and Bradford were only part of a bandstand movement, Horace Tapscott and his men were involved in the Underground Musicians and Artists Association, a collective founded by Tapscott and known as UGMAA. During those years, Blythe and other musicians were living and holding sessions at the LJGMAA House in the fifties near Figuroa, a distance from the Watts Happening Coffee House on 103rd Street, or they played in the UGMAA Arkestra under the direction of Tapscott to small groups of listeners at a church on 85th Street to the east and not far from Watts. Every so often, some sort of situation would open up at a club on Crenshaw Boulevard and those who delighted in the African garb of the day would sit listening next to the black bohemians in pursuit of a local version of the unconventional. Or over on Orange Drive, the UGMAA musicians would live and jam, attracting visiting New York players like Howard Johnson.
Brown's quintet music heard here reflected the best of what the UGMAA musicians were doing. Tapscott had organized an ensemble style that took advantage of a number of the options available to adventurous musicians of that era. He also had brought into his music two instrumentalists who then had positions of legendary proportions: Arthur Blythe and Everett Brown, Jr. Blythe was the local hero of the saxophone underground; his big sound and the fire he brought to the mastery of his instrument always came up in conversations with musicians like Owen Marshall, Richard Aninag and Raymond King, who were also putting heavy shoulders against the door of convention. Brown was one of the master drummers of the time. He could read well and had enough independent coordination to play in four different time signatures at once! Brown's command of his instrument was such that had he gone to New York on his own, he would soon have become known as one of the best in the city. Tapscott himself displays a remarkable attention to form and development in his improvisations, pulling together Monk, Ellington, Hassan Ibn Ali, and Randy Weston fora style that is far from derivative. His ringing sound and the clarity of his ideas make one wonder with some disappointment why he never came east. The two bassists, David Bryant and Walter Savage, Jr., are used percussively and harmonically. And the overall effect achieved by the five men is still quite fresh.
More than twenty years later, this music exists as the residue of a period that now seems to have never existed. Los Angeles is now so different a town than it was then, perhaps even further removed from the sensibility of jazz. Bradford and Carter rarely perform in public and are documented mostly on recordings made for small labels. I have no idea what happened to Williamson, and Freeman seems to have dropped out of music. Blythe is now a well-known player in New York, having left Los Angeles for good in 1974. Brown is ill in Kansas City, his national and international promise never achieved. Bryant is near seventy and Savage resides in the Bay Area. Tapscott is still more of an underground figure than anything else, though now and again he is heard in concert or working a club like Memory Lane, when not recording for obscure labels. But when Bob Thiele came west and made these recordings, capturing a glowing moment in the music of the West Coast, it all appeared to have a very different future than the one actually preparing to roll forward. We are indeed fortunate that Thiele saw his way to make these recordings, for there was no music like this being made at that time. But, as with all superior recordings, these performances provide us with a vitality invincible to the teeth and claws of time.
---- Stanley Crouch
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