Jazz horn quartets—wind ensembles that work without a rhythm section—are tricky. They flout accepted rhythmic and harmonic conventions. They don’t have much of their own repertoire. They’re latecomers to jazz, relatively speaking, and don’t conjure up a readily identifiable sound in listeners’ imaginations.
A few modern groups have disrupted—and continue to disrupt—these long-held notions about the limits of jazz brass bands, however.
As a young saxophonist in Detroit, James Carter loved the ground-breaking World Saxophone Quartet, with its experimental use of rhythmic melodicism, jolting harmony, and free improvisation. By high school, “I’d heard four of their albums—Point of No Return, Steppin’ with the World Saxophone Quartet, W.S.Q., and Revue,” Carter recalled in a recent phone call, and they changed his understanding of what the saxophone could do.
These albums, recorded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, have become, arguably, seminal recordings for jazz saxophone quartets. Begun in 1976, the group reflected the SATB (soprano/alto/tenor/baritone) configuration of classical sax quartets, with group founders Oliver Lake on soprano and alto, Julius Hemphill on alto, David Murray on tenor, and Hamiet Bluiett on bari. Their sound only hinted at the classical, however. They pulled much of their repertoire from swing, rock, funk, soul, and R&B, and they improvised creatively over only the sketchiest of changes.
So taken was Carter with the WSQ that while still in high school he started his own sax quartet, called The Plumbers, “because horns are like pipes,” he explained. “We [Alex Harding, JD Allen, and Harry Patton] wanted to re-create that [WSQ] sound, but we didn’t have any plans for the group. We played for our own personal delight.”
By the time Carter graduated high school that personal delight had progressed into professional accomplishment: In 1982, Carter shared the stage with his idols when the WSQ visited Detroit. Hearing Bluiett’s “Hattie Wall,” one of the group’s most popular tunes, directly from the horn of its composer blew Carter’s mind.
Today, Carter—who places consistently in Downbeat polls—is one of the last official members of the WSQ. He joined the group in 2011, taking over from saxophonist John Purcell, who’d filled the spot left empty by Hemphill’s death in 1995. By the time Carter joined he had subbed plenty with the group, so he fit in seamlessly as a replacement; that same year the WSQ released Yes We Can (Jazzwerkstatt), the group’s collective homage to then-President Barak Obama.
Recorded live in Berlin in 2009, this album would be Carter’s first and only recording to date with the WSQ, and the group’s last with founding member Bluiett, who passed away in October 2018. (Kidd Jordan played alto on the album, instead of original member Lake.)
Carter observed that in the years since he joined, and as Blueitt’s health declined, the ensemble’s performance schedule ebbed—regrettably. He doesn’t see this slowdown as an end to the quartet, however; he can readily imagine a WSQ revival. After all, some historic bands, like the Count Basie Orchestra, continue to outlive their founders, as the creative baton passes to the next group of willing and qualified musicians.
This could be the case with the WSQ. “Besides the core members of the group [Murray and Lake], there are other players who’ve worked with the quartet over the years and could fill in” he noted.
He would like to see it happen. “For me, the World Saxophone Quartet was freedom at its supreme height,” he concluded.
The freedom that Carter extols was hard-won, however, and an integrated all-horn sound still isn’t easy for contemporary brass jazz quartets to achieve. NEA Jazz Master saxophonist Dave Liebman, who’s recorded recently with two all-sax groups, explained in a phone interview the problem that these ensembles face.
“The classical world is definitely more into horn-only textures than the jazz world is,” he pointed out. “And the [modern jazz] saxophone quartet is really borrowing from the classical world.”
From Marcel Mule, the French classical saxophonist, specifically. In the late 1920s, Mule created the first classical saxophone quartet, a symphonic group that worked with the multi-layered sounds of the four instruments alone, without any rhythmic or chordal intervention. Later, jazz musicians co-opted the idea that an ensemble doesn’t need a bass, drum, or chordal instrument and can rely solely on the colors of the horns to create a desired effect.
Absent the bass and drums, however, an ensemble loses the defining characteristics of jazz—the rhythm, grooves, and feels. To compensate for this lack, Liebman explained, in most jazz brass quartets one of the horns will generate a pulse by playing an ostinato underneath the remaining three horns.
“But it’s a challenge,” he admitted. “The rhythm ends up usually in the lower instrument because of its range. So in a sax quartet, that’s the baritone sax and in a brass quartet, the tuba. You’re not likely to hear the soprano or the alto playing rhythmic vamps for others to solo on.
“And obviously, in classical, there’s little if any improvisation, as there is in jazz,” he continued. “If someone is soloing, that means that there are only three instruments left for harmony. That means triadic movement, and that’s more limited. So, how do you get the harmony across without sacrificing the melody?”
On Four Visions (Sunnyside), a collection of masterful compositions for four saxophones, Liebman explored various answers to this question with his former student from Manhattan School of Music, Samuel Blais, whose early fascination with the four-sax sound impelled him to compose for this sort of ensemble. The Blais-led Four Visions Saxophone Quartet (with Liebman and acclaimed saxophonists David Binney and Donny McCaslin) works in tight formation on the album’s 10 originals, carefully treading the thin line between jazz and modern classical music.
“This is a very interesting record because you have four musicians with uniquely different views,” Liebman observed. “I was really impressed with the variety we got in spite of the limitations of working with four saxophones. And we’re not doubling. Doubling is a common tool to change textures very easily by picking up another horn—a soprano player switching to alto, for example. We didn’t do that on this record. We all stayed with our home instrument.”
According to Liebman, the exploration of rhythm-less ensembles is on the rise among younger players, who are less inclined to see categories—like jazz versus classical—in music and thus are more inclined to cross over.
“The new generation of musician is schooled [across genres] to a person, almost 100%,” he added, noting the innovations that arise from this kind of education. “[For instance], odd meters are very popular nowadays. You wouldn’t hear that so much in jazz, but in the classical world they’ve been doing it a long time. So we’re back to looking at the classical world as a source of beauty and rigorous training for jazz musicians.”
A desire to cross over is what led the classical saxophone ensemble PRISM Quartet to commission a composition from Liebman and several other high-profile jazz saxophonists for their 2015 album, Heritage/Evolution, Vol. I (Innova). Liebman’s contribution to the album, “Trajectory,” gives the classical players room to improvise on a 12-tone row, something that traditional classical musicians would likely never undertake.
More and more, however, as genre-defining rules and concerns about musical provenance fall away, modern musicians feel free to experiment with instrumental variety and different sound clusters.
“There are horn ensembles today that are more unorthodox than sax quartets,” Liebman noted. “There are many directions to go in. It’s just a matter of keeping up with your imagination and making it viable.”
Like Carter’s early quartet The Plumbers, The Westerlies first met as student musicians growing up in a musical hotbed—albeit Seattle, rather than Detroit. They met again in New York City, where each had moved individually to attend a prestigious music school: Juilliard (trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and trombonist Andy Clausen), Manhattan School of Music (trombonist Willem de Koch), and the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music (trumpeter Chloe Rowlands).
Though deeply embedded in their respective courses of study—all were jazz majors except de Koch, who was classical—the group wanted more. “We were all wanting to play music that we didn’t have an outlet for in either the jazz or classical worlds,” Clausen said.
The solution was to form an “unorthodox” brass quartet: two trumpets and two trombones that parse the languages of jazz, classical, and experimental music fluently. “As far as we know, we’re the only brass quartet out there [doing this],” Clausen added.
He credits composer Wayne Horvitz for “pointing the ensemble in the direction of genre agnosticism.” Horvitz, who had taught each of the group members during their youth in Seattle, also produced their first album, Wish the Children Would Come On Home: The Music of Wayne Horvitz (Songlines). The 16 compositions on the album are alternately affecting, amusing, and staunchly impressive: Horvitz hadn’t intended any of these pieces for brass ensemble. (Founding member Zubin Hensler played trumpet on the recording.)
To sidestep the common pitfalls to which jazz brass ensembles are subject, The Westerlies write or arrange their own pieces exclusively. “The individual personalities of the players are central to the sound of the group and how we think about the instrumentation,” explained Clausen. “Each player has personal and expressive devices that they use, and a wide range of timbres and colors that they can get out of their instrument. So, when we’re writing arrangements, we know the characteristics of each person’s sound and can write parts that specifically utilize those to create a vibrant repertoire—something compelling that can engage an audience for two hours.”
Unlike other ensembles, The Westerlies also spend considerable time workshopping their arrangements before they ever perform them, often for a year or more. During that time, the group will work and rework an idea until they’ve discovered, collectively, a unique way of expressing a piece of music. “We put our brains together and really crack open each piece and rebuild it in a way that’s interesting,” said Clausen.
In 2016 the ensemble released their second album, The Westerlies (Songlines)—all clean, dynamic originals—and they’ve two more albums on deck for 2020. In January, they plan to release their most varied album to date, Wherein Lies the Good—a jumble of tunes culled from disparate sources: a solo piano work, a 1930s doo wop group, and their own democratically vetted original ideas. Later next year, they’ll also unveil a recording of their collaborative efforts with vocalist/composer Theo Bleckmann, Songs of Refuge and Resistance, a dive into protest music past and present.
With these two pending albums, The Westerlies are moving in sync with their stated group mission, which is to “amplify unheard voices, paint new sonic landscapes, and cultivate a global community.” It’s a mission that the group members take seriously, and one that influences the repertoire they choose, the musicians with whom they collaborate, and the gigs they curate.
Sporting this forward-leaning vision, The Westerlies join a decades-long line of wind players who helped to shape jazz history, each with its own brand of genre agnosticism and freedom fighting. (The WSQ might even have shared The Westerlies mission statement, had they had one.)
Liebman, however, takes a more sweeping view of jazz innovation. “That Marcel Mule. He really started something big,” he muses.
(Reprinted from Downbeat Online,