Western Suite

Description

180g audiophile vinyl reissue.



In late 1957, jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, composer, and iconoclast Jimmy Giuffre broke up the original Jimmy Giuffre 3 with Ralph Pena and Jim Hall. In early 1958, for a recording session, he formed a new trio without a rhythm section. For the album "Trav'lin' Light", his new trio included Hall on guitar and the underrated trombone giant Bob Brookmeyer. For a year, they gigged together up and down the West Coast and played summer festivals, recorded, and even played clubs in New York.



They became a trio of adventurous musicians for whom form was not an obstacle to creativity. As the year wound down, Giuffre wanted to document the trio once more, sensing its life was coming to an end. He composed the four-movement "Western Suite" with the trio's strengths in mind, as a way of documenting how they had come together as a band during that year. The piece itself stands as a crowning achievement in a career that included discovering the talents of Steve Swallow and Paul Bley and making the truly revolutionary recording "Free Fall" for Columbia three years later. The roots of that thinking lie in this set. Jim Hall's playing was dark, funky, ambiguous, sounding like drums and voices all at the same time - particularly in the fourth movement. Brookmeyer became the pace setter. His lines were played as stage settings for the other two players to dialogue and narrate against. Giuffre, ever the storyteller, advanced the improvisation angle and wrote his score so that each player had to stand on his own as part of the group; there were no comfort zones. Without a rhythm section, notions of interval, extensions, interludes, and so on were out the window. He himself played some of his most restrained yet adventurous solos in the confines of this trio and within the form of this suite.



"In the liner notes Giuffre makes the point that not having a drummer or bassist to "make time" gave this band the freedom to flow, as he put it: "I believe in letting the music play itself instead of forcing it." That is clearly what he achieved on a remarkable album that sounds as good as you could imagine thanks to Pure Pleasure's painstaking remastering and high quality pressing." - Jason Kennedy, The Ear



"The trio plays quiet, haunting music that, is not as challenging as Giuffre's masterpiece Free Fail , three years in the future, is also more approachable. Sounding redolent of ECM sound, the ambiguous instrumental timbres signal a freedom from jazz's strictures of the 1950s and a direction that still sounds modern and familiar more than a half century later. Pure Pleasure's 180-gram reissue, mastered by Ray Staff at Air Mastering, presents a nice stereo image, better than average for 1958." - Dennis Davis, Hi-Fi+