The eMusic Dozen: Beards

Multi-reedsman Dolphy is one of the rare jazz players to serve as sideman to three giants of modern jazz, working with Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman on their groundbreaking works. Dolphy mastered not just alto sax but the far more obstinate bass clarinet and flute and made their tonalities work in the post-bop vernacular. Culled and collected after his untimely death in 1964 from an untreated diabetic condition, Here and There draws from three different sessions, though there's no reason to consider them shavings. Opener "Status Seeking" comes from a stand at the Five Spot with the similarly doomed Booker Little and second-line timekeeping whiz Ed Blackwell, and it remains lightning-quick and ferocious for its 13-minute duration. At the other end of the spectrum, Dolphy's solo bass clarinet reading of Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child" stops the earth spinning on most days.

BEARD TYPE: Hep, modified van dyke with stroke-able chin beard.

There will come a day when Albert Ayler's visage will become as prevalent and defiant an image as that of Che. Call him a freedom fighter, a revolutionary, a fire brand, seeking the ecstatic essence at the core of all music, not just jazz. Through the '60s, Ayler's fervent breathing and circular huffing through the simplest of children songs and New Orleans marches revealed the ecstatic and cathartic beneath the song's surface, and he brought forth such energy so that each phrase flared like a comet through the cosmos. His fellow spacemen, drummer Sunny Murray and bassist Gary Peacock, provided a foundation that both tethered Ayler's mungo vibrato and launched him further into the stratosphere. On "Spirits" and the two versions of "Ghosts," such ethereal entities can be felt coursing through Ayler's music.

BEARD TYPE: Striking white-blemished tuft on an otherwise jet-black goatee.

How to encapsulate the sonic universe of extraterrestrial jazz pianist and arranger Sun Ra? It's as impossible as to calculate his exact trajectory through this terrestrial life. From polyrhythmic space chants to all out skronk and blat, from Ellingtonian swing to experimental electronic noise, from Africa to Saturn, Sun Ra and his disciples rocketed through it all. Rare was the man's solo outings though, and this one stands out in the vast discography. While already employing ARPs and Moogs in his live set-up, Monorails and Satellites finds Ra focusing on his piano straight-up. Whether it's a standard like "Easy Street," playing the blues or boogie-woogie, Ra reveals that despite the foil-wrapped solar crown, sequined gown and cosmic dogma, he was first and foremost a working-stiff swing pianist from Alabama that knew his roots enough to eschew them for outer space.

BEARD TYPE: Alternating soul patch and goatee, dyed either pink, purple or maroon.

Randy rude boy (and pretty boy) Max Romeo started off spouting X-rated skanks before growing out both his dreads and beard, putting down the lad mags for Marx's Das Kapital. Righteous Rastafarianism aside, Iron Gate encompasses the two Romeo records that bookend his outright classic, War Ina Babylon, but are fantastic in their own right. Communist dogma ("Revelation Time"), cries for repatriation and an outlook that's both F*#$ tha Police and f*$# the Pope ("Fire Fe the Vatican") brunt up against a Romeo obsessed not just with Marley and Marx but also with Manson. Hear how he prophesizes the blood of the rich flowing freely down the hill on the violent "Warning Warning" and shiver at its smoothly crooned cry for Helter Skelter.

BEARD TYPE: Dreader than dread.

Scottish guitarist John Martyn deftly melded American blues to British folk with his wife Beverly early on in his career. He then veered off the road taken by his more pensive and poppy contemporaries like Nick Drake and Al Stewart in favor of something more vague and disquieting. With the nimble shadow play that longtime upright bassist Danny Thompson brings to the table, the two utilized jazz's improvised openness on this live outing at Leeds University to plunge down into the netherworlds implicit in songs like "Solid Air," "Outside In" and Skip James' menacing "I'd Rather Be the Devil," doubling (or even tripling!) their album lengths. Out at the edges, with Martyn's heavily echoplexed guitar thickening the snaking lines, the two players writhe and worm into very dark areas of the psyche here, something the record label wasn't too keen on loosing. Hence Martyn pressed the first 10,000 of these himself.

BEARD TYPE: Scruffy, ginger-tinged.

Waylon Jennings is not the Man in Black, unless it means he's swimming in black label Jack with a mind humming from a handful of Black Beauties. Too miscreant for Nashville's countrypolitan scene in the late '60s, Waylon rode off on his own, growing out a beard as greasy, grungy and black as his raven tresses. He spearheaded the "Outlaw" movement in country along with drinking buddies Willie Nelson and Billy Joe Shaver in the early '70s, emphasizing hard loving, living and substances (not necessarily in that order). Making a comeback in the grunge era, Waylon casually creaks about such times and cronies on "Best Friends of Mine." His throat fissured, every bit the grizzled elder, Waylon still wades deep into the swamp of the title track and the Stones' "No Expectations" to stare down the blackness.

BEARD TYPE: Jet black, with or without whiskey slobber.

While he would've always been a post-bop guitarist of some regard, James ‘Blood' Ulmer took his craft further by bringing Ornette Coleman's revolutionary Harmolodic ideas to his instrument, imbuing labyrinthine funk and frenzied rock to his jazz chops. An influence not just on jazzmen like John Zorn and Bill Frisell but post-punks like Public Image, Ltd., Ulmer returned to his roots in the new century with a stop off at Sun Studios for Memphis Blood. Here, with Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid in the producer's chair, Ulmer dives into the muddy Mississippi to play blues like "Dimples" and "Little Red Rooster." Of course, all distinctions melt in Ulmer's hands, the variants — be it gutbucket, barrelhouse, or Chicagoan electric-juke — played sloppy or clean-toned, all have their primordial root dug out by the guitarist.

BEARD TYPE: Curly and black, slightly speckled and long at the chin.

Devendra Banhart, the barely-legal baby-faced wunderkind that babbled his surreal song slivers onto answering machines for 2002's lo-fi Oh Me Oh My… grew up quickly in a two year period. Banhart spearheaded America's free-folk resurgence that also uplifted his hippie cohorts Joanna Newsom, Vetiver and Coco Rosie. He released two stunning albums in that calendar year, Rejoicing in the Hands and its follow-up, Nino Rojo. For these 16 songs, Devendra re-pays his debt to Ella Jenkins with her "Little Sparrow" and other furry creatures in the woodland. Yes, there are some capricious songs ("We All Know" and "Little Yellow Spider") but also a serious attention to craft. Banhart can fingerpick and sing with the best of them, and he touches on everything from American blues to campfire jamborees to South American tristes to the stark sound of UK folk, yet nimbly evades being pinned down in the end.

BEARD TYPE: Bushy, thick, soft.
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