Night In Tunisia
Last Sessions Vol. 2
Elmo Hope
Produced by Herb Abramson
Recorded at A-1 Sound Studio, N.Y.
Engineers: Herb Abramson and Andrew Berliner
Cover Design: Leo Buck
Inner City Records 1037
1977
From the back cover: Producer: Herb Abramson - Vol. 1 (Inner City 1018) – Hope, who died in 1967, is virtually the forgotten man of modern jazz piano. A singular stylist, his blend of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk results in angular improvisations that emphasize his unique personality. The eight titles are all Hope originals and the trio setting is an ideal one. There is precious little Hope available on record and that makes the discovery of these sides even more important. - Bob Porter
Also from the back cover: When I was growing up, it was a commonplace for teachers, radio announcers, and certain kinds of critics to use the term, "serious music," as applying only to classical sounds. And I still hear and see that phrase used in the same misleading and wholly uninformed way. As if Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and Ornette Coleman and thousands more jazz musicians were not passionately and disciplinedly serious about their music. As if Bessie Smith were any less serious than Claudio Muzio.
Indeed, during some forty years of knowing jazz players and composers, I am continually struck by the enormous seriousness it takes not only to master an instrument but then be able to so improvise on it that it becomes an extension of yourself. No classical musician takes that kind of risk or makes himself that seriously vulnerable.
Being serious about what you do does not, of course, have to mean being pompous or unremittingly solemn. Joy is serious, so is wit. That is, to communicate any emotion, you need hard-won skills. And to achieve a strongly distinctive style, you need that other dimension-imagination. Actually, a case can be made – and I hereby make it-that jazz players are more serious than any other musicians because they have to know and reveal more as continuous improvisers.
Elmo Hope is an illustration. He was always working toward clearer and more inventive expressiveness. He was always "exploring," as he put it. And that drive toward perfecting his music did not diminish even though he paid hard dues throughout most of his life-never breaking through to a large audience, although musicians recognized his importance.
More lay listeners are now beginning to appreciate the substantial, invigorating pleasures of Hope's performances. This does him no good now, but Hope's music keeps on quickening spirits and that's what he always had in mind. A recent Inner City album, Last Sessions (IC 1018) distills his quite special improvisatory language, and now this second Elmo Hope set should further increase the number of serious enjoyers of his uncompromising jazz.
Having detailed Elmo Hope's odyssey in the notes to Last Sessions, I will say briefly here that he was born in New York in 1932 and died in 1967. A boyhood friend of, and piano collaborator, with Bud Powell, Hope also was an early colleague of Theolonious Monk. Later, he worked with Sonny Rollins, Lou Donaldson, Clifford Brown, Jackie McLean, Chet Baker, and Johnny Griffin.
Hope did not record anywhere near the number of albums as a leader that his singular, probing inventiveness merited, but at least there were some. Like this one. On all the tracks except Somebody Loves Me and Bertha, My Dear, the drummer was an old associate of Elmo's in the Joe Morris band, Philly Joe Jones- then and now the most effortlessly exciting of all jazz drummers. On bass, throughout the date, is the resilient, attentive John Ore.
The opening Cole Porter tune, I Love You, reveals how crisp and airy Hope could be. And how harmonically witty in a kind of Monkish way while melodically, he paraphrases the theme and develops variations with intriguing, quicksilver logic. Rhythmically, there is a sureness and incisiveness that make his time both personally authoritative and yet easefully integrated with the rhythm waves of Philly Joe and John Orr.
Dizzy Gillespie's Night in Tunisia illuminates the disciplined passion that also characterizes Elmo's playing. He was a pianist, by the way, who appreciated the percussive nature of the instru- ment, as you can hear on this track. But even while accenting that element of the piano, he simultaneously creates dance-like melodic designs over the resounding rhythm-textures. And, as on the other tracks, the crackling, challenging interchanges between the three players witness to a mutuality of feeling, let alone skills, that make this a true trio date.
Stellations, a Hope original, has an angular lyricism that marks many of Hope's compositions. Building on an assertive and dis- tinctive theme, he creates entirely organic variations. And again, there is a dance-like aura to his improvising. At times, it's easy to imagine leaps in the air. Or, Thelonious Monk's slashing feet underneath the piano, for Monk too had dancing on his mind.
Somebody Loves Me is a rather astonishingly ingenious transformation of the Gershwin song into a pungently personal flight. With regard to the seriousness of Hope's explorations, listen to how he pursues the implications of the continually evolving lines. There is such intensity of discovery that his playing retains its absorbing freshness all these years later.
Bertha, My Dear was written for, I expect, Elmo's wife, herself a pianist. A lovely, lyrical theme, it sometimes floats as it grows, and sometimes it glows with drama-evocative of past and pres- ent memories and desires. In all his work on this session, Hope plays with immediate and sustained authority, but this command of his resources is all the more impressive on a tender ballad.
The final Elmo's Blues is a subtle addition to this common language of jazz. And once more, there is a multiplicity of moods -compelling, infectious, deeply diving. Hope surely was a persuasive regenerator of the blues. His roots were strongly in the tradition while he told his own true story. And along with his emotional strength, there is also-as in all his work-a swift and searching intelligence.
This set of Elmo Hope performances is both part of an essential retrospective of a musician who had so much to say in a short time, and it is also an extension ahead of his heritage. For increasingly, what Elmo Hope contributed will be heard as a durable part of jazz. – Nat Hentoff
I Love You (Cole Porter)
Night In Tunisia (D. Gillespie - F. Paparelli)
Stellation (Elmo Hope)
Somebody Loves Me (G. Gershwin - B. McDonald)
Bertha, My Dear (Elmo Hope)
Elmo's Blues (Recorded 3-8-66) (Elmo Hope)
