Jaki Byard: Blues For Smoke

If Jaki Byard is most commonly categorized as a proud progenitor of the 'new jazz,' as his seminal work with Eric Dolphy on Outward Bound and Charles Mingus on Black Saint and the Sinner Lady would suggest, then a record like Blues for Smoke may throw listeners for a loop. Byard's notoriously difficult to pin down—a student both of Chopin and Fats Waller, romanticism and ragtime, always billed as a 'respectable,' austere and forward-thinking performer.

All true enough, and certainly Byard never objected to such characterization, as he enjoyed an academic career as lucrative as his recording one, but it ruefully neglects the artist's debt to rag, the blues halls and the honky tonks. Kin to Herbie Nichols more than Hancock, Byard was no stranger to the raunchy, the vulgar, those sections of African-American music deemed novelty acts by white audiences against more palatable modern masters.

Blues for Smoke, newly rereleased by Candid records this year, is the finest distillation of Byard's pension for old-time inspiration. Recorded nine months after Outward Bound and just a week before reuniting with Dolphy on Far Cry, the album is comprised entirely of original blues compositions, beginning with new interpretations from "European Episode," first premiering on Byard's Out Front, though this recording predates the record by three years. On Out Front, the suite is a fairly conventional bop quartet. Perhaps the hard fingering at the beginning reveals some ragtime influence, but once Walter Perkins' drums join the fray, the piece is torn right back to 1964. In the Blues for Smoke version, Byard speeds up and hits heavy from the get-go. A moody modal track is excavated and reinterpreted into a lazy stride, seeping in blues and unapologetic schmaltz, resembling both the rickety steam engine on the album's cover and an old piecemeal jazz club, where a lazy-eyed pianist leaves drunks in a dizzy haze.

Byard's tonal ability does not stop at stride. Both in composition and performance, he seems hell-bent on running the gamut of turn-of-the-century pop music's myriad styles and modes. "Spanish Tinge No. 1" and "Jaki's Blues Next" exhume the forceful bounce of theatrical repertory songs played to accompany silent films and nickelodeon showcases. At the same time, the title track and "Diane's Melody" express a devotion to classic piano blues, close to the kind of work Memphis Slim would be notorious for, but complicated by Byard's signature drawl, like a sore that bleeds bitter-tasting molasses. "One Two Five" manages to fuse a classic bop opening phrase with a far more sentimental waltz reminiscent of Southern rags.

"Diane's Melody" and "Pete and Thomas -Tribute to Ticklers" are the modern, conventional outliers in the sea of old-time hits. The former is sad, slow and bare, a tune thoroughly of its time, while the latter is airy, twinkling and just a bit more classical than the rest of the record would suggest. Nevertheless, hearing them caked in between the bluesier tracks, the listener is given an opportunity to put Byard's musical acumen under the microscope. When we begin to spot the rag even in these comparatively modern composition, the artist reveals an intense bawdiness even in the most 'civilized' of works. Byard seeks no delineation between the bop of the 1960s and the rag of the 1910s. There is neither an intellectual nor aesthetic difference between the two. What is denigrated as 'simplistic' or performed simply as cinematic accompaniment is, in Byard's eyes, vivacious and free, certainly worth consistent reinterpretation, and never to be discounted.

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