feature photo: Juan Hitters
Solo piano records have become more prolific of late but solo double-bass records remain a pretty rare thing, though there have been at least a few dozen of them stretching back to Barre Phillips’ Journal Violone from 1968, with many of them issued as ECM Records releases. Still and all, when I first got wind of Larry Grenadier making such a record for the storied label, I wondered what he could do to make this an arresting listen for an hour or so.
There’s no question that Grenadier is widely regarded as one of the top current bassists in jazz, and has been for at least a couple of decades, now. But to make a whole album of playing bass with no accompaniment that will capture attention for that period of time requires more than chops, it demands artistry. The Gleaners is this long-time in-demand sideman’s declaration that he is, indeed, a seriously viable artist in his own right.
Like his predecessors, Larry Grenadier leverages the double bass as actually being a vessel for two instruments: played both pizzicato and arco. The arco on the opener “Oceanic” is played with precision, oscillating between doubling notes and harmonizing them with equanimity, on a fairly brief chamber music piece.
“Pettiford,” as one might suspect from the name, is a tribute to a hero whose first name is Oscar. That, too, is performed with nary a note resonance out of place, as Grenadier climbs up and down a scalar progression that hints at the blues, and you can almost fill in the rest of the instrumental parts in your mind and come up with a bop tune in the style that Pettiford could have performed with Thelonious Monk.
When Grenadier returns to the bow for “The Gleaner,” he plays in a much higher register, delivering an almost singing quality rarely hard from this instrument. “Woebegone” is also a blues-based melody but its distinctiveness comes from Grenadier overdubbing himself: a pizzicato overlaid by another pizzicato, with an arco appearing right at the end.
For the first cover to appear on this album, Larry Grenadier went with one from his singer-songwriter wife; he plucks the lyrical lines of Rebecca Martin’s “Gone Like The Season Does” with an uncommon sensitivity. “Compassion” is a great choice for a Coltrane song, and the spiritual outpouring at the heart of this modal hymn translates well onto Grenadier’s bass. “The Owl of Cranston” being put right next to Trane’s tune within the same performance underscores Grenadier’s recognition that Motian’s compositions put forth ideas that were just as subversive as the great saxophonist’s, and if anything, more melodic at its core.
Guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel — like Martin and Motian — is another composer Grenadier is very familiar with from having served as his bassist. Muthspiel’s “Bagatelle 1” and “Bagatelle 2” presents a contrast in sentiments, the former rigid and somber, the latter, kinetic and happy. The Gershwin classic “My Man’s Gone Now” is recognizable only after a minute-plus long intro. But once Larry Grenadier really launches into it, he constructs a heartfelt rendition that is basically faithful but also has much of his own personality invested in it.
The way that every note, every timbre is captured matters more when it’s just a single, non-chordal instrument. That’s why it helps that a setting such as this is tailor-made for ECM chief and primary producer Manfred Eicher’s spotless touch.
Perhaps being acutely aware that this project would reveal more about the creative talent of himself than anything he’s ever done before, Larry Grenadier obviously invested a lot of thought into it, from choosing which of his musical heroes to honor to portraying each song in such a way that gets his essence across in the spirit of the song. I sense that essence, one of someone who’s elevated himself above ‘bass player’ to ‘complete artist.’
The Gleaners will become available on February 15 (digitally) and February 22, 2019 (CD and vinyl) from ECM Records.
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