THU., MARCH 22, 2007
Violinist Leroy Jenkins’ Expanding Perspective
by Kevin Whitehead
Leroy Jenkins died on February 24, at age 74, and if you want to know what made him special, listen to his Solo, recorded before a churchmouse-quiet audience in 1992. The violinist (and occasional violist) always had an idiosyncratic sound — a rough-hewn, start-from-scratch(y) approach that launched post-Stuff Smith violin into the jazz avant-garde. That rough-and-ready Jenkins is all over Solo — the one who sawed at the strings, whose bow all but bit into them when it reversed direction, whose pitches might fly outside the tempered scale: the schooled musician playing with the freedom of an ecstatic back-country fiddler.
His faux-primitivism was deceptive, making it easy to overlook the array of sophisticated techniques he employed — many of which he’d have discovered on his own: spiccato and sautille (bouncing the bow off the strings, with a tight or light grip), sul ponticello and sul tasto (bowing close to the bridge, for a whiny sound, or over the fretboard for a pan-pipey one), col legno battuto and col legno tratto (striking or bowing the strings with the back of the bow), etc. etc. On Solo’s “Blues #1,” he micro-manages pitches, double-stopping adjacent strings in streaking unisons and near-unisons. He gets into the cracks between notes like a blues musician, though some passages have the robust delicacy of a Bach partita. But on the following “Um Cha Chi Chum,” the violin’s squawky tone recalls Jenkins’ teenage crush on Charlie Parker’s alto saxophone, and he gets into a high-frequency hoedown like Evan Parker circular-breathing on soprano.
That’s Leroy Jenkins in a two-tune nutshell — exploratory and uncategorizable. He’d grouse that funding panels found him too jazzy for classical composition grants, and too classical to merit jazz dough. But by the end of his career he navigated among musical realms as skillfully as anyone — which is why his death prompted heartfelt tributes from classical, jazz and world-music communities.
Since the early '90s he’d turned more and more toward new classical music (always tempered with improvisation: an improviser by temperament, he demanded it of interpreters). Sometime he took the soloist’s role himself, as with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony on Wonder Lust. It’s a prime example of the raggedy textures improvising composers successfully coax from reading ensembles, bringing in a whiff of free jazz’s heady energy.
Jenkins had been mixing musical strains all along. Born in Chicago in 1932, he played violin in churches as a kid, and was exposed early to works by African-American composers like William Grant Still. At Du Sable high, Jenkins played alto sax, clarinet and bassoon, guided by the legendary nurturer of umpteen Chicago musicians, Captain Walter Dyett.
While at Florida A&M, Jenkins hit on his distinctive half-fiddle, half-violin sound. He then spent four years teaching in Alabama, which may be where he picked up the perpetual air of a distracted but indulgent schoolmaster. He returned to Chicago just as its homegrown avant-garde was shaping up, and joined the new Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). He and multi-reedist Anthony Braxton and trumpeter Leo Smith formed a co-op trio which recorded several daring and spare albums in Chicago and Paris (mostly under Braxton’s name).
They moved to New York, that band dissolved, and the violinist formed the open/loose Revolutionary Ensemble with thundering bassist Sirone and contrary drummer Jerome Cooper; Jenkins later claimed they rehearsed five days a week for four years. RE’s pristinely-recorded masterwork The People’s Republic remains unissued. Of two spirited but cassette-quality live recordings available, I’m partial to 1972’s crash-and-burn Vietnam, raw as it is. They’re a bit more genteel on 2004’s happy reunion And Now... the Revolutionary Ensemble, where the new wrinkle is Cooper’s pre-programmed electronics.
Also notable from the '70s — and isn’t it nice how many jazz folk defend that maligned decade nowadays? — was Jenkins’ Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival of America, a conclave of genrebusters past, present and to come: swinging/free drummer Andrew Cyrille, pianist/electric pianist (and future opera composer) Anthony Davis — those three also worked as a trio — plus George Lewis on trombone and electronics and Richard Teitelbaum on synthesizer. The latter two would develop interactive strategies and software to let computers improvise with live musicians. It’s a rowdy program ranging that vast terrain between modern chamber music and electric Miles, without sounding like either. Cyrille plays a pivotal stir-the-pot role, underpinning bonky abstractions with shuffle beats.
More good projects followed in the '80s: a thorny two-violin electric band (Sting!, he called it); a lovely Mixed Quintet with flute, french horn and clarinets. He was already composing for classical musicians — had written for the pre-fame Kronos Quartet. In the early '90s, he and librettist Greg Tate wrote the hip-hop-tinged opera Fresh Faust.
Jenkins’ frame of reference kept expanding. Makes sense: the fretless violin is beholden to no single scale or interval, and may travel anywhere in the musical world. (He’d been thinking globally by the early '70s, playing on Carla Bley’s “All India Radio” and “Rawalpindi Blues” from her pan-genre Escalator Over the Hill.)
In 1999 he joined yet another co-op trio, Equal Interest, with old AACM bud and Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist/flutist Joseph Jarman, and a pianist Jenkins had known since the '80s, Myra Melford. His own pieces on their lone album were the most dynamic: the alternately rambunctious and childlike “B’Pale Night” underscored his love of a good sing-song line. (His other tune is “In the Moment.”) Melford’s and Jarman’s compositions sometimes reflect their mutual interest in musics of India — she sometimes plays a droning harmonium — and Jenkins enters into that spirit without caricaturing an Indian accent.
His quartet Driftwood, recorded live in 2004, was one more mixed ensemble: virtuoso Min Xiao-Fen on pipa, the raised-fret Chinese lute; Denman Maroney on hands-on/hands-in spontaneously treated piano; Rich O’Donnell on clackety percussion from hand drums to hi-hat. The emphasis is on timbre and texture, and you get multiple perspectives on what strings can do, from violin, pipa and rattling slide piano. Momentum is more a matter of pulse than localized rhythms (or melody). Driftwood’s sound wasn’t that universal folk music some players aim for, but a universal new music: compositional, improvisational, international. So Leroy Jenkins’ career had a happy ending straight out of Emerson: he merged with the universe.
His faux-primitivism was deceptive, making it easy to overlook the array of sophisticated techniques he employed — many of which he’d have discovered on his own: spiccato and sautille (bouncing the bow off the strings, with a tight or light grip), sul ponticello and sul tasto (bowing close to the bridge, for a whiny sound, or over the fretboard for a pan-pipey one), col legno battuto and col legno tratto (striking or bowing the strings with the back of the bow), etc. etc. On Solo’s “Blues #1,” he micro-manages pitches, double-stopping adjacent strings in streaking unisons and near-unisons. He gets into the cracks between notes like a blues musician, though some passages have the robust delicacy of a Bach partita. But on the following “Um Cha Chi Chum,” the violin’s squawky tone recalls Jenkins’ teenage crush on Charlie Parker’s alto saxophone, and he gets into a high-frequency hoedown like Evan Parker circular-breathing on soprano.
That’s Leroy Jenkins in a two-tune nutshell — exploratory and uncategorizable. He’d grouse that funding panels found him too jazzy for classical composition grants, and too classical to merit jazz dough. But by the end of his career he navigated among musical realms as skillfully as anyone — which is why his death prompted heartfelt tributes from classical, jazz and world-music communities.
Since the early '90s he’d turned more and more toward new classical music (always tempered with improvisation: an improviser by temperament, he demanded it of interpreters). Sometime he took the soloist’s role himself, as with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony on Wonder Lust. It’s a prime example of the raggedy textures improvising composers successfully coax from reading ensembles, bringing in a whiff of free jazz’s heady energy.
Jenkins had been mixing musical strains all along. Born in Chicago in 1932, he played violin in churches as a kid, and was exposed early to works by African-American composers like William Grant Still. At Du Sable high, Jenkins played alto sax, clarinet and bassoon, guided by the legendary nurturer of umpteen Chicago musicians, Captain Walter Dyett.
While at Florida A&M, Jenkins hit on his distinctive half-fiddle, half-violin sound. He then spent four years teaching in Alabama, which may be where he picked up the perpetual air of a distracted but indulgent schoolmaster. He returned to Chicago just as its homegrown avant-garde was shaping up, and joined the new Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). He and multi-reedist Anthony Braxton and trumpeter Leo Smith formed a co-op trio which recorded several daring and spare albums in Chicago and Paris (mostly under Braxton’s name).
They moved to New York, that band dissolved, and the violinist formed the open/loose Revolutionary Ensemble with thundering bassist Sirone and contrary drummer Jerome Cooper; Jenkins later claimed they rehearsed five days a week for four years. RE’s pristinely-recorded masterwork The People’s Republic remains unissued. Of two spirited but cassette-quality live recordings available, I’m partial to 1972’s crash-and-burn Vietnam, raw as it is. They’re a bit more genteel on 2004’s happy reunion And Now... the Revolutionary Ensemble, where the new wrinkle is Cooper’s pre-programmed electronics.
Also notable from the '70s — and isn’t it nice how many jazz folk defend that maligned decade nowadays? — was Jenkins’ Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival of America, a conclave of genrebusters past, present and to come: swinging/free drummer Andrew Cyrille, pianist/electric pianist (and future opera composer) Anthony Davis — those three also worked as a trio — plus George Lewis on trombone and electronics and Richard Teitelbaum on synthesizer. The latter two would develop interactive strategies and software to let computers improvise with live musicians. It’s a rowdy program ranging that vast terrain between modern chamber music and electric Miles, without sounding like either. Cyrille plays a pivotal stir-the-pot role, underpinning bonky abstractions with shuffle beats.
More good projects followed in the '80s: a thorny two-violin electric band (Sting!, he called it); a lovely Mixed Quintet with flute, french horn and clarinets. He was already composing for classical musicians — had written for the pre-fame Kronos Quartet. In the early '90s, he and librettist Greg Tate wrote the hip-hop-tinged opera Fresh Faust.
Jenkins’ frame of reference kept expanding. Makes sense: the fretless violin is beholden to no single scale or interval, and may travel anywhere in the musical world. (He’d been thinking globally by the early '70s, playing on Carla Bley’s “All India Radio” and “Rawalpindi Blues” from her pan-genre Escalator Over the Hill.)
In 1999 he joined yet another co-op trio, Equal Interest, with old AACM bud and Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist/flutist Joseph Jarman, and a pianist Jenkins had known since the '80s, Myra Melford. His own pieces on their lone album were the most dynamic: the alternately rambunctious and childlike “B’Pale Night” underscored his love of a good sing-song line. (His other tune is “In the Moment.”) Melford’s and Jarman’s compositions sometimes reflect their mutual interest in musics of India — she sometimes plays a droning harmonium — and Jenkins enters into that spirit without caricaturing an Indian accent.
His quartet Driftwood, recorded live in 2004, was one more mixed ensemble: virtuoso Min Xiao-Fen on pipa, the raised-fret Chinese lute; Denman Maroney on hands-on/hands-in spontaneously treated piano; Rich O’Donnell on clackety percussion from hand drums to hi-hat. The emphasis is on timbre and texture, and you get multiple perspectives on what strings can do, from violin, pipa and rattling slide piano. Momentum is more a matter of pulse than localized rhythms (or melody). Driftwood’s sound wasn’t that universal folk music some players aim for, but a universal new music: compositional, improvisational, international. So Leroy Jenkins’ career had a happy ending straight out of Emerson: he merged with the universe.
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