JAKI BYARD: FORGOTTEN GENIUS OF JAZZ PIANO (with amazing musical samples including a duet with Jaki and Roland Kirk)

Does anybody remember the pianist Jaki Byard? I started following Jaki around when I was about 15; a friend of mine (a guitarist) was studying with him, and said that Jaki was such a comprehensive musician that, even as a pianist, he had a lot to teach a guitarist. I had heard and been fascinated by a recording Jaki made for Candid in 1960 with the trumpeter Don Ellis; and then Prestige put out an amazing recording of Jaki playing solo – and suddenly I was in a new world. This was heady stuff for a teenager.

Even at that age I was fascinated by certain methods that certain jazz musicians used to alter musical reality without losing sight of the form beneath the musical skin, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot. Early on I became enamored of American song form, at the way in which classic American song melodies were constructed harmonically; the triad, for me, was king, even as, in the 1960s, the Coltrane/Miles Davis approach of modality and sparse chord changes was receiving, in the realm of the musically progressive, most of the jazz audience’s attention. Even the Bluenote LPs that everybody loved were less interesting, to my ears, than Sonny Rollins’ RCA’s, which still worked with song form, even as Sonny himself faced some new realities (which is a topic in itself, but another time).

In my young head I heard something different from the dominant sound; I heard how musicians like Jaki (and Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington) used the outlines of Western harmony, as regularly employed by the great American songwriters of the 1920s and 1930s, to build new and fresh structures. These structures were usually recognizable as form in an altered state, designed as they were in a way that had a new kind of plasticity and variability. This new method of revisionist design allowed for the reconstruction of not only song but of improvisation – take those moving chords, revisit them, restructure them, subdivide them differently in rhythmic terms, and then present them for musical reconsideration. Or let the strangeness of the new juxtapositions, of old chords with new melodies and resolutions, dictate their improvisational directions. And consider the American Songbook, as it is called: what could be done with those well-worn progressions and common chords? What new melodies could be constructed by looking at harmony in a different way, by substituting new resolutions for old while retaining the same basic structural emphasis (in new clothing) and the idea of linear melodic feeling?

This was not exactly new; the beboppers and, of course, Art Tatum, had all dissected song structures in ways that, as re-worked, were a fascinating combination of new harmonic expansiveness and classic tonal resolution; things went “outside” on occasion but usually came right back (though Tatum was a whole other thing, a genius of harmonic exploration who was still tied to song form, but in a way that was so completely free and so ingeniously explorative that he was a world unto himself).

Music 1: New Orleans Strut Jaki Byard Solo Piano 1968:

Certain other musicians, like Bud Powell, played and harmonized in ways that had powerful structural AND emotional implications – but Jaki Byard, who was already playing atonal music in the middle 1950s (as related to me by the legendary Boston pianist Charlie Banacos) was hearing things that probably reflected a broader exposure to “modern” classical music than that of most jazz people. And Jaki was musically inclusive, loving Fats Waller, Lennie Tristano, and Louis Moreau Gottschalk equally. My guitarist friend related how Jaki taught techniques to create sounds and sonorities rather than chords. And Jaki had another exercise in which the soloist designed multiple ways to get through the famous Rhythm Changes (chords based on Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm, a progression that was played thousands of times by the beboppers, usually with new melodies; which brings to mind Jaki telling me he was “tired of hearing those bebop cliches.”)

I wasn’t close to Jaki but I loved him, and after I wrote an article about him for a jazz magazine he told me “you are one of the guys who really understands.” I almost weep now as I think of him saying that, of Jaki and his great personal and artistic generosity, and of the sad fact that he was murdered in 1998 (the full story of which I cannot tell in public). I had talked with him just two weeks before; for some time I had been trying to get him to record with me, and he finally said, in our last phone conversation, “yes.” But of course it was not to be.

One last anecdote: Jaki was the Sunday pianist in the 1970s at a well-known piano bar in NYC called Bradley’s. I went to hear him frequently, and one night as he was playing, in walked Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk, together. Mingus sat at a table and had a meal, while Monk walked back and forth to talk to Jaki as he played; “Ladies and gentleman,” Jaki announced at one point, “the great Thelonious Monk” (as though anyone didn’t recognize him).

And, just as a bonus, I have also included a second performance, an incredible duo recording of Jaki and Roland Kirk performing Memories of You from another Prestige recording from 1969, The Jaki Byard Experience. This is one of my favorites in all of jazz:

Music 2: Jaki Byard and Roland Kirk: Memories of You

(All of the above is what made me want to be a jazz musician, the ability of musicians like these to bring their music, their lives, and their imaginations to a head in ways that represented a combination of spontaneous historical/aesthetic epiphany and the subconscious flailings of imagination. This was the ultimate freedom, of a kind which has sustained me for so many years; no one, in this music, can tell you what to do, and if they try you have no need to listen or obey. And this, as I talked about in another post, was form in action, a departure from the temptations of strict formalism which, as the film critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote “is a tyranny even when self-imposed, as it usually is.” Form to my mind was something to be dealt with as a frame of reference rather than as a series of coercive rules. Certain kinds of formal aesthetic discoveries are traps, but nothing ever kept Jaki Byard back from playing exactly what he wanted to, in the moment. That’s improvisation.)