Albums
Double ExposureReleased: 1978Joe Chambers
Album Credits
Larry Young - Organ
Mark Larson - Art Director
Chuck Irwin - Engineering
Bob Blumenthal - Liner Notes
Bob Cahill - Photography
Frederick Seibert - Producer
Surprise, which is supposed to be the sine qua non of good jazz, has been absent lately in the work of many leading musicians. Rather than search for something new to say, or a new way to articulate an ageless truth, too many players have been caught up in carving out a narrow identity and sticking with it. From one club or concert date to the next, and from album to album, we come to expect the same ideas, the same textures, sometimes even the same note-for-note solos.
Joe Chambers is one musicians who has never fallen into such patterns. In every step of a career that reaches back to the early ‘60s, he has been consistently provocative (if not always adequately documented on record.) Chambers always seems to give us a little more than we expect, and on Double Exposure he has done it again. Those listeners familiar with his excellent first album on Muse, The Almoravid (MR 5035), know Chambers doesn’t simply deal in blowing sessions. That he has chosen a dup format, and that his partner is the similarly iconoclastic Larry Young (aka Khalid Ibn Yasin), promises one-of-a-kind music making. But this is not merely an organ/drum album -- it is also Chambers’s debut on piano, and thus in part an extraordinary two-keyboard collaboration.
Based on his extensive recording in the middle and the late ‘60s, primarily on Blue Note with Bobby Hutcherson, Andrew Hill, Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner, Sam Rivers and others, Chambers is considered one of the great drummers of the post-bop-to-free transition. He is a master of dynamics, percussive color, polyrhythmic density and abstract variation, and his ability to drive yet contain a horn group is second to none. Yet there has always been more to Chambers. On his first Blue Note session, Freddi Hubbard’s Breaking Point, he contributed a beautiful ballad called “Mirrors,” and subsequent collaborations with Bobby Hutcherson (on the Dialogue and Components albums) produced six more Chambers compositions in freer moods. When The Almoravid appeared the writing was again different -- percussion centered, loose yet controlled, hypnotic.
All of this varied activity is not so difficult to understand in light of Chambers’s background. This still-young (born in 1942) veteran is a serious student of music with time spent at the Philadelphia Conservatory, American University and the New School (in the last he worked with the late Hall Overton) amid his long list of performing credits. In the past decade Chambers has been able to blend playing and writing more thoroughly, through his work with the six-member ensemble M’Boom Re Percussion and the New York Jazz Repertory Company (which performed “The Almoravid” at Carnegie Hall in 1974).
Chambers has often credited his older brother Stephen A. Chambers, aka Talib Rasul Hakim, as a major influence on his compositional activities. Hakim, who is categorized as a “serious composer,” actually creates complex Afro-American scores which are difficult to pigeonhole in any single slot. His 1975 piece “Placements,” heard on Volume 3 of the Folkways series New American Music/New York Section/Composers of the 1970’s (FTS 33903), has much in common with “The Almoravid” and M’Boom’s work and features brother Joe, Warren Smith, Omar Clay (all from M’Boom) and Stanley Cowell.
The second half of Double Exposure’s performing team is another innovator who first made his mark on Blue Note over a decade ago. At a time when most organists concentrated on triphammer attack, swelling block chords and the most overt funk, Larry Young showed that there was another way. The beautifully mysterious voicings he produced, and his ability to look at the organ’s electric capacity in a more subtle and abstract way, won him a legion of admirers among musicians and fans. His own albums (with the likes of Sam Rivers, Elvin Jones, Joe Henderson, Grant Green and Woody Shaw) established that the organ had a place in the exploratory music of the ‘60s, and there are still many jazz fans who consider Young the only organ player worth hearing.
When fusion activity began at the close of the last decade, Young was in the thick of it, on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and in one of the first (and to my mind the best ) fusion band, the Tony Williams Lifetime with John McLaughlin and (later) Jack Bruce. It was in Lifetime that Young’s unique talent for accompaniment flowered -- rather than chords or simple riff patterns, Young played washes of color and harmony behind McLaughlin and Williams. Lifetime was also a perfect place to develop sensitivity for playing in balance with an active percussionist which Young does so well on the last two cuts of the present album. Since 1972 Young has been leading his own bands, primarily in a jazz-rock vein, and recording for Perception and Arista. This album represents his most creative, and most satisfying work in years.
Double Exposure’s six tracks are linked through instrumentation and thematic material, thus producing a chain of performances with the overall effect of a unified suite. The opening “Hello to the Wind,” which can be heard in a septet version on The Woody Shaw Concert Ensemble at the Berliner Jazztage (Muse MR 5139), is the most beautiful tune, and a perfect introduction to Chambers the pianist. The mood of wistful wonder is reinforced by the magical support of Young’s organ. Young’s “The Orge” is a more sprightly ramble, with Chambers overdubbing a rhythm track on tabla. Both keyboards bubble along, fading at track’s end only to reappear at the beginning of Chambers’s “Mind Rain.” Then a brief transition passage, with Chambers adding electric piano and cymbals and Young on synthesizer, leads to the strong Chambers theme. Again, Young shades in fascinating background figures which highlight the piano lead.
“After the Rain” is a feeling many musicians, most notably John Coltrane, have tried to capture; here Chambers realizes the mood in an acoustic piano solo. Given their primary instrument and technical limitations, many drummers turn out to be very percussive pianists; Chambers, however is gentle and warm, with a romantic’s feeling for harmonic nuance, and doesn’t reveal any technical limitations. He is also a highly musical pianist, playing just enough to get his message across without wasted notes or wasted motion.
Both of the final tracks are organ/drum duets, a format which Young and Elvin Jones employed on their reading of “Monk’s Dream” contained in Young’s Unity album. “Message from Mars” can also be heard on Young’s Spaceball (Arista 4072), while “Rock Pie” is a more rock-inflected version of “Mind Rain.” That ability of Young’s to play with a drummer is on good display -- he leaves plenty of holes which Chambers fills with his personalized version of popular rhythmic figures. Also note Young’s strength on these more assertive tracks, which significantly alters the character of the melodic material in “Rock Pile.”
There are several special things about this album: Joe Chambers’s piano work, the memorable writing (especially “Hello to the Wind” and “Mind Rain”), Larry Young’s continued ability to do something different on electric organ and the evident sympathetic spirit in which the project was carried out. Not your typical drummer’s album or organist’s album by any means, and a sure indication that both Chambers and Young have more surprises in store.
--- Bob Blumenthal
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