Some Jazz Records: Bennie Maupin Clippings
Comments on recordings from musicians and other actors of the jazz scene. Random and not-so-random listening cues from the archives.
Thelonious Monk Orchestra. At Town Hall. Riverside RLP-1230 (RLP 1138), 1959, LP; and John Coltrane Quartet, Africa/Brass, Impulse! A(S)-6, 1961, LP.
As a young saxophonist coming up in Detroit, Bennie Maupin had a few memorable encounters with John Coltrane. Independently, he also formed a friendship with Alice McLeod, who would later become Alice Coltrane. In Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane, Maupin recalls her advanced transcription abilities and how she was able to take the large ensemble arrangements of Thelonious Monk’s At Town Hall LP and voice them for her sextet, in which Maupin played. McLeod and Maupin heard Coltrane live together at Detroit’s Minor Key in early 1962. "But even prior to that, going to hear John live, we were already daily listening to Africa/Brass and just marveling at what had happened there. No one had made a recording like that," Maupin added, referencing Coltrane’s first Impulse album, which paired his quartet with a larger formation. "With that kind of intensity, with the sounds of animals, and you know, it was just, it was just very different."
Marion Brown Quartet, Marion Brown Quartet, ESP-Disk' 1022, 1966, LP.
Bennie Maupin’s first appearance on record took place on the hotbed of avant-garde jazz activity that was ESP-Disk'. Maupin played on the second half of altoist Marion Brown’s leader debut, taped in November 1965. "On that one we had a whole side almost tour-de-force where he and I play against this really moody kind of thing," Maupin told All About Jazz. "It was exciting working with Marion and his compositions, and his support of what I was doing really enabled me to have a completely different outlet. I hadn’t played music with any kind of free form like that, no real chord changes. We were working around some kind of rhythmic motif, some kind of melodic idea, and then we just did some kind of theme and variations improvisational things. My earliest recordings, I’m very proud of them. That enabled me to break free of the tyranny of a sequence of chords."
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew, Columbia GP 26, 1970, 2 LPs.
One of the first things heard on Miles Davis' fusion landmark Bitches Brew is the sound of Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet, an instrument that had once belonged to painter and saxophonist Marzette Watts. It was the only horn Maupin played on the Davis sessions. "I didn’t hear any of that music until the recording was released. I was in San Francisco the first time I ever heard it on the radio, in my car," Maupin told Steven F. Pond. "And I was going crazy. I was saying, 'What is that?' I said, 'It sounds familiar, but I don’t know what that is.' You know, that sound. And then finally after — you know how long those tracks are — the guy says, 'Well, that’s the new Miles Davis recording, Bitches Brew. It’s quite long, but we’re going to play it anyway.' And that’s when I first heard it. We just parked the car. This guy played the entire thing. […] I had no idea that that music sounded so beautiful. Because I couldn’t tell anything during the recording sessions."
Jack DeJohnette, Have You Heard?, CBS/Sony SONP-50282-J, ca. 1970, LP; and Andrew Hill, Mosaic Select, Mosaic MS-016, 2005, 3 CDs.
"I don’t think it’s the best I’ve played on record," Maupin said of Bitches Brew in a 1973 Down Beat interview. "An album I recorded in Japan with Jack [DeJohnette] has some things that I feel contain my best on record to date. Also, there are some other things that haven’t been released that I am pleased with. There are about six sessions I did with Andrew Hill featuring choirs and string quartets that I enjoyed playing on very much. You know, to record an album and then, for one reason or another, it doesn’t get released (or if it does, it’s a couple of years late) is very sad. Things will have to change in that direction, and it will as soon as musicians put more emphasis on promoting themselves, especially in the area of records." The choir sessions eventually surfaced as added material on a 2001 CD reissue of Hill’s Lift Every Voice. Part of Maupin’s other work with Hill appeared in 1975 on the Michael Cuscuna-produced One for One and, in more complete form, on a 2005 Mosaic Select set.