On his previous album, the critically adored Canto América,
Wayne Wallace broke with his own tradition to co-lead a chamber orchestra
featuring horns, winds, a double string quartet, and an array of vocalists. On
The Rhythm of Invention - released by Patois Records on June 7, 2019
- Wallace set an equally ambitious goal: to combine these added resources with
his Latin Jazz Quintet, whose albums have garnered three of Wallace's four
previous GRAMMY nominations.
"I wanted to come up with a way of coherently mixing
the quintet with the brass and strings from Canto," explains the esteemed
trombonist, innovative arranger, and notable educator. That desire now finds
voice in a dazzling set of new compositions and classic jazz standards (and
even one impressive mashup) on which Wallace uses the expanded sonic palette of
an orchestra to highlight the strengths of his core conjunto. Undergirding it
all is an effortlessly instructive survey of Latin rhythms, from the familiar
to the arcane, that reflect Wallace's lifelong study of these sounds.
"I wanted to retain the energy of Canto without
repeating it," he explains. To do so, he chose to redirect the music's
focus onto the quintet, while retaining the almost tangible richness of brass
chorales and the elegance of string ensemble writing; peppering the proceedings
are solos from such luminaries as Mary Fettig (flute) and Melecio Magdaluyo
(baritone saxophone). Wallace also features rapper and spoken-word artist Akida
Thomas on the title track, where he contributes a spontaneously composed ode to
this music - and to the spirit of all music - that also utilizes an interview
with Wallace's colleague and mentor, the late Dr. David Baker.
To tie all this together, Wallace came up with a
three-layered approach, built upon the foundational expertise of his longtime
musical co-conspirator, percussion master Michael Spiro. "The concept was
to have Michael play four congas" - the usual conga setup has three at
most - "and to have him play as melodically as possible." As a
result, "A good way to hear the
record is to listen all the way through and focus on Michael, and then to
drummer Colin Douglas's cymbal work - and then put it together. It's like a
history of Latin music." From there, Wallace created a second layer by
highlighting the other members of the Latin Jazz Quintet's rhythm section,
pianist Murray Low and bassist David Belove, and leaving space for his own
forceful yet lyrical trombone solos. Only then did he add the composed
material; the vital frosting to this multi-tiered concoction, it draws its
flavors from the previous ingredients.
As its title suggests, the album doesn't lack for
inventiveness. One case in point is Wallace's arrangement of the durable Paul
Desmond composition "Take Five," which famously contains five beats
in each measure (instead of the usual four). After some research, Wallace
realized that no one had previously recorded this song with a clave rhythm, the
heartbeat of Latin music - despite the fact that the clave itself comprises
five notes (within four beats). The finished product marries these two views of
musical time; add in a Santeria-derived coro section sung by the quintet, and
you have a memorable new take on a 60-year-old jazz hit.
Another example comes on "So Softly," in which the
ancient pop standard "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise" - from the 1928
operetta The New Moon - slides seamlessly into Miles Davis's "So
What," written three decades later. The idea to combine them arose from
one of the Latin Jazz Quintet's earliest experiments, in which the band
presented these two songs as a medley; but, says Wallace, "After time I
pleasantly found that the two melodies worked conversationally without
detracting from each other. This inspired the idea of re-imagining them as a
mashup" - an idea that, he points out, "stretches back to the
beginnings of recorded music."
Less complex (but no less inventive) are several homages,
including Wallace's slightly shrouded cover of "Vamanos Pa'l Monte"
one of Eddie Palmieri's biggest hits. Although this version mimics the blend of
trombone and flute that characterized Palmieri's famous band La Perfecta,
"The melody is really an extrapolation of what Eddie wrote," says
Wallace. (But anyone who knows the original will recognize it as the framework
of this arrangement.) Meanwhile, the completely unexpected inclusion of
"In a Mist" - an impressionistic piano composition by the legendary
early-jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke - represents a sort of personal triumph
for Wallace. "It took me eight years to figure out how to arrange it,
because it's just so idiosyncratic and challenging," he admits. "The
original piece was a kind of collision between ragtime and danzon rhythm; I
tried to combine the danzon with clave to get a Cuban feel. And I thought that
a string quartet was applicable because it would bring out the sonorities in a
modern way" - not to mention hinting at the classical roots of
Beiderbecke's small masterpiece.
The album highlight is the title track, which brings
together funk, bata, and traditional Cuban rhythms and encompasses three
generations of musical wisdom. On one end is Dr. David Baker, "the father
of jazz education," with whom Wallace worked closely as a professor at
Indiana University before Baker's death in 2016, and whose resonant voice is
heard, midway through the track, discussing the essence of jazz rhythm. On the
other end is Wallace's son-in-law, Akida Thomas, channeling the music to speak
of The pulse gyrating through the system . . . Boom-clacks all rolled into one,
stay connected through the soul of the drum. "There's this crazy counterpoint
between the strings and the horns," Wallace says; "it's some of the
most texturally adventurous writing I've done. Akida just listened to the track
and started writing." The invention took on a rhythm of its own.
But The Rhythm of Invention refers to something altogether
different from the riot of Afro-Latin beats and layered percussion that
characterize the album. For Wallace, the rhythm of invention is the pace that
allows him to be open to creativity: the tempo "that allows a space for
the muse to be available to me," as he puts it. It is the rhythm of a
gentle river, slowed but not stilled: the "flow" that banishes mere
busy-ness in favor of reflection and, yes, invention. "That's when I get
the best ideas," he says; in fact, the "Take Five" arrangement
"literally came to me when I was pulling weeds out of my garden."
When you slow the rhythm enough, you can better see the
speed of thought.
In a career that spans four decades, San Francisco native
Wayne Wallace has collaborated with artists ranging from Count Basie to Stevie
Wonder, Sonny Rollins to Carlos Santana, Tito Puente to Lena Horne and Aretha
Franklin, lending his talents as sideman, composer, arranger, and producer. His
debut album as a leader, 2000's Three In One (Spirit Nectar), showcased his
writing skills and his encyclopedic knowledge of Afro-Cuban rhythms, which he
developed in the close-knit Bay Area jazz community - most notably in his role
as music director of John Santos's Machete Ensemble, where he spent 20 years as
music director. Wallace's outsized role in Bay Area jazz includes his creation
of Patois Records, with a catalog that includes not only his own albums but also
recordings by vocalists Kat Parra and Alexa Weber Morales as well as two highly
regarded anthologies of Bay-Area salsa and Latin jazz. A gifted educator,
Wallace now spends the academic year as professor of jazz trombone and practice
in jazz studies at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, having
previous taught at San Jose State University and Stanford University.
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