by Pico
Duck Baker has made his name over several decades as a virtuosic acoustic guitarist, one who prefers to play it solo. That might make him sound like another Leo Kottke, but there’s much more to Baker that makes him a compelling and interesting musician.
Baker obviously craves applying his advanced fingerstyle guitar technique toward tackling a completely new set of challenges with every album. He’s covered gospel, Celtic, blues, folk and Appalachian. And then there’s his love for jazz: everything from ragtime to swing to the modern stuff. Baker once even recorded an album consisting entirely of his unique interpretations of Herbie Nichols songs. It seems that all that was left for him to do in the jazz realm is to put out a record full of free jazz playing.
With next week’s release of Everything That Rises Must Converge, Duck Baker has gotten that covered, too.
It might seem out of place for a guy who has built a solid reputation playing older and rootsier forms of music with an unaccompanied acoustic guitar to be playing whack jazz. It’s not to Duck Baker, though. Baker has long had an affinity for the avant garde, even having performed with a leader of subversive improvised music, Eugene Chadbourne, the father of free jazz guitar Derek Bailey and other notables of the genre like Fred Frith and Marc Ribot. Furthermore, as Baker correctly points out in his well-written liner notes, people who play avant garde come to it from nearly every other form of music. While he’s recorded some free jazz bits here and there, it wasn’t until Jerry Roche of Mighty Quinn Productions approached Baker about putting out a whole record devoted to this music form through his label, finally realizing Baker’s intent of following up the Nichols tribute (Spinning Song, 1996) with a free jazz album.
Baker actually recorded these twelve tracks years earlier, over two sessions in the late nineties and in 2001, the earlier being expressly earmarked for that Spinning Song followup. The latter sessions were taped at the house of whack jazz guitar wunderkind Henry Kaiser.
Baker has put out guitar instruction records before; Everything That Rises Must Converge could work as a clinic on his accomplished fingerpicking style when there’s not sheet music in front of you. This being free jazz, it’s not the easiest task in the world to pick apart and dissect these songs, but the approach Baker takes to them is worthy of focus. He moves from idea to idea with grace and a good sense of timing; Baker is wise to never dwell in one spot too long. He modulates both the rhythm and cadence in much the same way it’s done in human speech. Many of his notes might be random, but they’re never wrong. But above all, it’s all executed with the precision and dexterity of someone who knows his way around an acoustic guitar. All of the qualities are on display from the first tack, “Juxta Pose,” to the last one, “Juxta Pose -2-” (a different take on the same song).
Probably the most intriguing track here is the title track. Baker takes a conventional-form song he originally recorded for Art of Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar (1979) and retains the basic melody, but also takes a lot of liberties with it, wandering off but returning to the theme just before the point where the listener might lose sight of it.
All of these songs have been composed by Baker, except for one. Ornette Coleman’s Peace is rendered with its sublime, distinctive harmony intact. A testament of the genius of Ornette, he wrote songs so revolutionary as this one is, and yet “Peace” is easily adaptable to a single instrument, such as an acoustic guitar. Baker has a lot of space to improvise around it, and does so while remaining sympathetic to Coleman’s vision.
And so, the notion of Duck Baker making a free jazz record isn’t all that far-fetched when you think about it. Hearing it in practice convinces me that it was even the natural thing for him to do. There really isn’t a type of music that can’t be performed on an acoustic guitar as long as the wherewithal and insight are there. Neither of those are things that Duck Baker lacks.
Everything That Rises Must Converge is slated to drop June 9, and will be distributed by Mighty Quinn Productions. Mighty Quinn’s website can be found here. Duck Baker’s own website is over here.
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