Pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader
Keith Tippett's first album, You Are Here...I Am There, was issued in 1969, and received some notice as the work of an ambitious composer looking for a voice. Apparently, by the time he recorded
Dedicated to You, But You Weren't Listening, which was released in 1971, he'd found it in spades.
Tippett has become one of the great lights of the British free jazz movement, and for more than 30 years he has led groups of improvising musicians, from two to 40 in number, on some of the most exploratory and revelatory harmonic adventures in musical history -- whether those in America know it or not. The band here is comprised of 11 pieces, including
Elton Dean,
Robert Wyatt,
Nick Evans,
Roy Babbington,
Gary Boyle,
Neville Whitehead, and others. The commitment to jazz here is total, as
Tippett grafts the dynamic sensibilities of
George Russell, the textural and chromatic palettes of
Gil Evans, and the sheer force of
Oliver Nelson onto his own palette. The interplay between soloists and ensembles is dazzling -- check "Thoughts for Geoff," with blazing solos by
Nick Evans, cornetist
Marc Charig, and
Tippett himself in a series of angular arpeggios interspersed with chordal elocution.
Wyatt's drumming, which opens the record with a bang on "This Is What Happens," is easily the most inspired of his career on record. The nod to
Mingus on "Green and Orange Night Park" is more than formal; it's an engagement with some of the same melodic constructs
Mingus was working out in
New Tijuana Moods. In sum, this is an adventurous kind of jazz that still swings very hard despite its dissonance and regards a written chart as something more than a constraint to creative expression. Brilliant. The CD reissue by Disconforme is fantastic in sound and in package. ~ Thom Jurek