Out There: Unissued Barre Phillips, Beb Guérin, and Léon Francioli Bass Trio, 1976
Notable jazz resources online and elsewhere.
Josh Haden, bassist Charlie Haden’s son and a musician himself, is currently digitizing his father’s extensive personal archives. There is a lot of material ("half of my garage and a large offsite storage space"), and Haden steadily shares discoveries on a Substack page titled Josh Haden’s Mémoire. A recent find did not involve Charlie Haden at all, instead, it featured three other noted bassists: Barre Phillips, Beb Guérin, and Léon Francioli. A cassette dub of a concert they gave as a trio in France in 1976 was sent to Haden. It can be heard in full below.
Checking rapidly in French jazz periodicals Jazz Hot and Jazz Magazine, I did not find mentions of this performance. I did find short coverage of its immediate context in the daily Le Monde. Between May 31 and June 13, 1976 Phillips gave three concerts for an official 3-week program of musical outreach to the Paris neighborhoods of the 13th and 14th Arrondissements that featured many workshops and performances outside the concert hall. The first concert (where Phillips was photographed by Guy Le Querrec) featured a lineup very close to his 1970 Alors!!! Futura LP, the second featured the same trio heard here, and the last included material from Mountainscapes, Phillips’s recent ECM album.
The June 19, 1976 recording shared below seems to have been an immediate continuation of this program in an adjacent neighborhood. This time, the bass trio played in a public garden of the 15th Arrondissement. The local birds are heard prominently. Most of the material is credited to Phillips, with one piece by Guérin (via "DC") and one by Francioli. Writing this post, I realized that today, December 22, was Beb Guérin’s birthday. He died by suicide at 38, in 1980. He was an outstanding musician. Look for him in the music.
New writing elsewhere: Review of Prince Lasha Featuring Sonny Simmons, The Cry!, New York City Jazz Record, December 2024, 22.