Phil Markowitz

by Dave McElfresh

Pianist Phil Markowitz may not be a familiar name to many Jazz fans, but the
musicians he's played with certainly are: Toots Thielemans, Stan Getz,
Lionel Hampton, Al DiMeola, the Brecker brothers, Dave Liebman, and probably
the association he's most likely to be known for, Chet Baker. I caught him
by phone after he'd recently flown west from his Pennsylvania home to a gig
in Washington, and east to a Coltrane tribute with Liebman's band in Italy.
Florida's next on the agenda, to be followed by some summer Jazz festival
dates, a teaching position this August in Lisbon, Portugal, an internet
concert this September to be broadcast from the Blue Note, and the recording
of a follow-up to his recent release, In The Woods. His creative stretching
on In The Woods explains why Chet Baker called him "one of the most
sensitive, lyrical and inventive piano players of all times." There's not
much in Markowitz's music these days that would suggest he grew out of the
Jazz fusion movement.

"What I was coming from in the late sixties, fresh out of high school, was
heavily checking out Cream and Hendrix on the rock side as well as Bitches
Brew, and following Miles's getting more electric as his career went along,"
says the pianist. "Then there were the splinter groups which became the
repertoire of Petrus, the group I first played with. We weren't playing
Charlie Parker, we were transcribing Weather Report tunes for the Fender
Rhodes.

"I got known for that kind of sound, and when I got to New York I worked
with flautist Jeremy Steig, who was heavily into electronic playing at that
time, using the echoplex and all. I also did some gigs with Joe Chambers as
part of an electric band, a gig with the Brecker brothers on a Jack Wilkins
album, and later on some stuff with Miroslav Vitous."

Markowitz gradually moved away from the limitations of early fusion toward
the acoustic music scene of Manhattan. "I'd done a couple of gigs with Bob
Berg when he had a group with Tom Harrell and bassist Jon Burr, around 1978.
Chet Baker had this weekly gig over at a nearby club and was looking for a
pianist, and Jon recommended me. With Baker we continued to play weekly in
New York and then did a number of East Coast gigs, which was really a
departure for Chet, who, considering how much he favored European musicians,
must have really liked the band."

There were two European tours with Baker over a period of three years, each
one lasting eight weeks. "In between we came back and had a nice run of the
States, too. We played the Village Vanguard a couple of times as well as a
week at Fat Tuesday's with Ron Carter and Ben Riley. We played the
Lighthouse in Hermosa and the Keystone in San Francisco and the Jazz
Showcase in Chicago. This was all around 1979 and 1980."

Markowitz is too appreciative of the Baker association to contribute any
seedy stories regarding the departed trumpeter's life. In fact, he
intentionally avoided seeing the Chet Baker film bio, Let's Get Lost,
because "I'd heard from a number of close friends of Chet's that it wasn't
too flattering a portrayal." When informed of one of the movie's opening
scenesBaker severely chastising his backup band for not playing up to his
expectationsMarkowitz offers memories to the contrary. "I've heard a lot of
stories about Chet being rough on musicians but, as for my personal
experiences, he was always extremely cool. Musically, we were very
compatible, maybe because I had been listening to a lot of Miles and he came
out of that too. I feel like I really understood his music. We got along
really well.

"Baker recorded very indiscriminately," the pianist says, "and the recorded
performances range from absolutely stupendous to not so great. But the
audiences always hung on every note. Europe loved him. We'd find ourselves
playing seven to ten or twelve days in a row before a day off."

While many in Baker's European audiences came to see firsthand a tragic Jazz
figure, the rest were there to observe a still-potent improviser. "He was
such a great ear player," Markowitz remembers, "one of the most lyrical
players ever. His music was so sparse that if you took one note away it
would destroy the line. The harmonic implications of his melodies were so
well defined that it really forced me to get my comping together. If he was
playing something that suggested a diminished chord and you didn't get in
there behind him with it, it was really evident."

Markowitz plays on a handful of stateside and European Baker releases and is
responsible for supplying one of the most adventurous, outside-playing
environments the trumpeter would incorporate. The pianist's comfort with
moving beyond the obvious is evident throughout In the Woods.

While Markowitz was taunted for his acoustic work with Baker, the fusion
crowd had not forgotten his capabilities as an electric player. One of the
first players to snag the pianist's talents after the Baker gigs was also
one of fusion music's greatest guitar stars. In 1985 Markowitz played for a
year with Al DiMeola and Airto, adding a lot of electronic keyboards as part
of a trio, a sparse setup that " afforded a lot of freedom in the music,"
Markowitz remembers.

Other fusion associations were to follow, the next being with Yellowjackets
saxophonist Bob Mintzer. "That began back in 1987 and continues on to this
day. The band doesn't get together very often because of Bob's work with the
Yellowjackets, so we mostly get together just to record, which we've done
almost every year since we got together."

A more productive coupling came about through a saxophonist who had played
with Miles Davis in his fusion heyday, bringing Markowitz full circle.

"I produced a Chet Baker tribute record that Dave Liebman played on. We
worked together pretty well, so Dave asked me to join his band. That's been
a really serious working band with a lot of dates every year, and there's
been about six records so far, three or four of which I've coproduced. That
band has developed a very unique vocabulary and a very unique sound.

"There was a change in feel when the group peaked out with the electric
sound shortly after we did a Miles tribute. Now we're doing more acoustic
music."

And depending on the band, Markowitz is required to either stretch out or
restrain himself. "Mintzer and Liebman are both very contemporary-sounding
in their Jazz writing, but Mintzer goes more for a tighter, more controlled
sound while with Liebman, just about anything goes. Bob is very much looking
for his band to get inside what he is doing; Dave wants you to feed him
something freer with more chromaticism, something further out for him to
jump into. Liebman is looking for constant introjection."

Now, with In the Woods, the pianist is at the helm. There's a great deal of
dimension in his playing, Markowitz confidently leaping from one register
and mood to another over the course of several bars, punctuating the mostly
familiar cuts with attention-catching angularity. Whether his lines are
comprised of single notes or thick chords, he plays with a skill that
validates his impressive rŽsumŽ.

"The band on the album has been together for three and a half years," says
Markowitz, "so we had a lot of time to develop our sound." And it shows.

by Dave McElfresh

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Jazz Now Interactive
Jazz Now Magazine
Volume 7, No. 6
Copyright Jazz Now, October 1997 issue, all rights reserved
jazzinfo@jazznow.com

August 15 - 22, 1 9 9 6

[Cool]

Coming to blows

Mulligan and Baker explain what's so hot about cool jazz

by Jon Garelick

[Mulligan] Watch who you're messin' with when you call jazz
"cool." In the Village Voice's recent supplement on
cool jazz, musicians offered their frank assessment. "When they
were calling me cool, we were playing about as hot as you can
play," recalled Dave Brubeck. "If you had called Miles a cool
player, he probably would have punched you in the nose," said Art
Farmer. "The fact is," concludes Lee Konitz, "we were trying to
play as intensively as possible."

Nonetheless, "cool" is one of the key adjectives that non-fans use
in describing jazz, and it's that elusive concept that's made
crossover stars out of the likes of Miles and Chet Baker and Gerry
Mulligan. Since the release of Bruce Weber's worshipful
documentary about Baker, Let's Get Lost (1988), the record-store
bins have been more stuffed than ever with product from the
trumpeter, who died the year the film was released. As with Miles,
familiar tracks are recycled endlessly, so that every season
brings a "new" '50s-era Chet: the boxed set The Pacific Jazz
Years, The Best of Chet Baker Sings, Embraceable You: Chet Baker
Sings and Plays (with "previously unreleased" material), and Young
Chet (all on Pacific Jazz). Now we get another repackaging of
Mulligan and Baker, the four-CD The Complete Pacific Jazz
Recordings of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker, which
overlaps not only previous Gerry and Chet single-CD packages, but
the Baker Pacific box.

Mulligan himself was one of the architects of the "cool" sound, a
prime composer and arranger within the Miles Davis Nonet sessions
of 1949-'50 that were released first as individual 78s but were
later collected on album as Birth of the Cool. It was a
little-big-band sound modeled on the Claude Thornhill orchestra,
its luxurious bottom filled out with Mulligan's baritone plus
French horn and tuba. It's been a perennial bestseller for
Capitol.

What makes this music, particularly that of the Mulligan-Baker
groups, so commercially inexhaustible? For one, people are in love
with the image. It's got the jazz mystique. Even at the time, the
distinctive looks of Mulligan and Baker -- their twentysomething
handsomeness combined with bewildering mastery -- were part of the
sell. And there were the sharp suits and William Claxton's
dramatic black-and-white movie-idol photos (especially of Baker),
and the rail-thin Mulligan's angular dominance of his big horn.
It's arguable that Mulligan's later piano-less groups with,
variously, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, tenor Zoot Sims, and
trumpeter Art Farmer rival the Mulligan-Baker ensemble, but the
people want Chet, the hipster junkie, the pretty-boy vocalist, the
"romantic" soloist.

Then there was the sound itself. Tenor saxophonist Lester Young's
smooth, flowing legato lines are often cited as the beginning. As
has been noted, Young phrased slightly behind the beat, and the
phrase lengths themselves crossed the bar lines in an elongated
fashion that seemed to make 4/4 time itself disappear beneath his
slippered feet, even as you heard that time being counted
explicitly in the tock and swish of Jo Jones's drums. There was
also the essential beauty of Young's light, vibratoless tone.

On the new Pacific set, Mulligan and Baker work with that light
tone and dynamic restraint. Baker in particular plays in the
middle and lower register, avoiding Miles's more dramatic effects
-- no sneering half-valved notes, none of the "fluffed" high notes
that arrived in Miles's work like shocked exclamations. Mulligan
has smoothed out the knotty bebop style of baritone-sax
trailblazer Serge Chaloff. And the design of the music itself
bespeaks restraint: a minimalist quartet with no piano, a
preference for pop-song structures rather than blues, drums that
are more often played with brushes than sticks.

And yet this outfit (which originally recorded in 1952-'53) does
play "intensively." The tempos are often up -- way up when you
compare them with that later signpost of cool, Miles's 1959 Kind
of Blue (Columbia). For minimalist music it sometimes feels
impossibly busy -- the relentless whisk of Chico Hamilton's
brushes, the brainy, hurtling counterlines that Mulligan and Baker
play against each other, and the astute harmonic sense that
allowed Baker and Mulligan and the bassists (there were several)
to flesh out the sound, fill in the blanks left by the absent
piano, and ultimately make the line-up feel bigger than it was.
Bigger, even, than most quintets with a piano. That was part of
the beauty of the Mulligan-Baker quartet; like masterful
naturalistic oil painters, they created an illusion of space that
was intimate, personal, all their own.

Mulligan had a fascination with steam engines (one of his best
known LPs, The Steam Age, pictured him in front of a locomotive),
and his compositions often feel like little perpetual-motion
machines. Listen to those interlocking seesawing opening lines
from Baker and Mulligan on "Swinghouse" bursting into a unison
fanfare, then baritone and trumpet solos (Mulligan "comping"
behind Baker) and a last round of unison figures, two-bar drum
breaks, and double-helix runs. The final held notes come to a
skidding, hilarious stop.

The tunes are filled with details that reveal themselves on
repeated listens, so that even the damned alternate takes (the
academic taint of all boxed sets), rather than becoming tedious,
feed your craving. The quartet's conception of collective
improvisation, refined over their year together and in Mulligan's
subsequent groups of the '50s, ensures that you're never listening
to mere solo and accompaniment. Every part feeds and balances
every other part, and the band are learning as they go, so each
piece feels spontaneous and fresh. Brainy as the music is, there's
nothing studied about it. Each chorus offers a new development --
the little up-and-down chase figures of "Bernie's Tune," bassist
Carson's Smith's now-you-see-it/now-you-don't alternating patterns
on "I'm Beginning To See the Light," Mulligan and Baker
unpredictably switching off between "lead" melody lines and
accompaniment throughout.

For music that's "cool," this stuff is full of tension and wit.
And Mulligan's arrangements of standards are never conventional.
"Get Happy" has a surprisingly suspenseful introduction, a long
held baritone note over fast-walking bass and a cymbal-crash
punctuation. The melody of "Love Me or Leave Me" gets an angular,
rhythmically aggressive working over, and the bizarre "Tea for
Two" is positively cubist. Nonetheless, even with Mulligan's piano
versions of some songs, you can find yourself wishing for a
broader range of dynamics and color. On a live version of the
Burke/Van Heusen "Aren't You Glad You're You," when Mulligan lets
out one wavering long note, he sounds momentarily out of
character, and it's shocking -- in context, that little cry is a
bellow, more Hamiet Bluiett than Gerry Mulligan.

Disc three chronicles the Mulligan/Baker reunion album, from 1957
(Mulligan's 1953 drug bust had broken up the band), with more
extroverted solos and less emphasis on ensemble interaction. On
disc four, "The Collaborations," Lee Konitz's alto brings a
welcome new voice -- a light Lester Young tone that flies high
above Mulligan and Baker, into the ether, double-timing sunny
lyric arabesques against their brooding charcoal-gray chorus. When
vocalist Annie Ross (of the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and
Ross) joins the group, Mulligan himself finds a new lyric voice.
No longer is he obsessed with wringing every harmonic possibility
out of the chord changes of a tune. The abstractions fall away to
reveal melodic grace, a singer's instrumental voice that would
make him a worthy foil to Ben Webster on their 1959 duo album.

Cool, of course, is rarely about laid-back savoir faire. It is, as
the artist and critic Barbara Kruger once pointed out, more often
about contempt, a pair of shades, the shuffle in a walk, the turn
of a collar, a wit that's withholding and parodic. Mulligan, as
anyone who came into contact with him will tell you, was an
intense guy. You can hear it explicitly when he threatens to punch
out a noisy audience member on At Storyville (recorded in Boston
in 1956, also on Pacific). But most of the time, on stage at
least, he seems to have kept his cool. Baker is the more famous
junkie (mostly because he so publicly deteriorated over the
years), but it was Mulligan who got hooked first. Various writers
have chronicled the tension between the two stars, but the
dysfunction is easy to imagine. Mulligan was brainy, focused,
ambitious. Baker was intuitive (he was, apparently, not much of a
sight reader), passive (or passive-aggressive), a narcissist whose
most ardent love songs simmer with a sinister reserve. Apply that
formula for personal chemistry to any band you know.

Miles Davis still stands as the emblematic cool jazz dude, even
though his propensity to violence (in language and deed) is
chronicled frankly in his autobiography. Wynton Marsalis has
defined swing as "relaxed intensity," and maybe that as much as
anything sums up the musical aspect of cool. Miles, of course, was
famous for turning his back to the audience, which some read as
hostility, another form of cool contempt for the crowd. But the
writer Leonard Michaels pointed out that in fact when Miles turned
his back, he was in fact identifying himself with the audience,
listening to the band, saying, "Don't look at me. Listen to it."

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- C O O L -
Chow Yun-fat | Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker | Vertigo VŽritŽ
Kevin Banks | '70s | Grateful Dead Nation | Perry Farrell

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