Having love and appreciation for the masters among us, and those of yesteryear, coupled with a deep exploration of the language and customs of such mastery is essential. You must come to the table with erudition, and bassist/composer Michael Feinberg is among the most erudite artists active on the scene today. On From Where We Came – the new recording, his seventh as a leader (and his debut for SteepleChase), Feinberg displays a set of compositions that enlighten his musical ancestry, and essentially, from where he came. The artist suggests as much in the album’s title, and in naming each of the compositions after a city, one could infer that he’s lived many places and moved around quite a bit.
But there’s much beneath the surface of the song titles. Feinberg has never lived in any of these cities. They are, in fact, the hometowns of his personal heroes; the artists and athletes whose examples have inspired him, and Feinberg has turned them into impressionistic lenses on his predecessors’ lives.
“Each location is the birthplace of a historical figure meaningful to me,” he explains. “But for each of these figures, I became inspired more by the time and place than by the individual person. So the songs are not so much about these people, but rather about the environment where they grew up.” From Where We Came really catalogs from whom Feinberg’s music came, by focusing on his sense of the settings in which these extraordinary individuals came of age.
On the subject of extraordinary individuals, From Where We Came features a superbly balanced cross-generational ensemble, including Dave Liebman, designated an NEA Jazz Master in 2011, and a veteran of bands led by Elvin Jones and Miles Davis. Liebman also played a crucial (and arguably the leading) role in establishing the soprano sax as a stand-alone voice. His early recordings opened the door to an almost indescribable lifetime of jazz performance, education, and mentorship; the more than 500 albums on which he has appeared (about half of them as leader or co-leader) attest to his indefatigable vitality as an improvising artist.
At 34, less than half Liebman’s age, Noah Preminger ranks among the most accomplished artists on the scene today, admired for not only his technique but also the soulful immediacy of his message. Gary Versace’s puckish imagination and unbounded creativity have placed him among modern music’s deservedly busiest keyboardists (on organ as well as piano) – a jazz whirlwind sought out by such leaders as Maria Schneider, Matt Wilson, Kurt Elling, and the late Lee Konitz. And drummer Ian Froman, a widely respected professor of percussion at Berklee College of Music, brings thunderous gravitas to the endeavor, and something more: like Liebman, he has a visceral connection to Elvin Jones, with whom he studied directly.
That shared lineage is neither coincidental nor incidental to this band, which originated in 2010 as a group performing cover versions of Jones’ repertoire. A couple years later, Feinberg gave this band a name: the Elvin Jones Project. As he added his own compositions to the book, “Elvin Jones” eventually disappeared from the name of the band. But the legendary drummer’s influence never vanished from the band’s concept, and it roars into view here – the first of Feinberg’s albums to feature Liebman, whose contributions recall his tenure in Jones’ two-and three-saxophone bands of the early 1970s.
“Elvin is one of the most essential people in my musical life.” Feinberg proudly admits, “It all stems from those classic John Coltrane Quartet albums, but also his records with Larry Young, Wayne Shorter, so many others. And Elvin’s [1982] album Earth Jones – wow that’s one of those records that kind of makes you turn left! Elvin’s records introduced me to the other saxophonists in his band, Steve Grossman, Joe Farrell – but now those bands are totally lost. I don’t hear others referencing them at all. ”Feinberg’s fascination with those albums, and with Jones’ patented beat – that swaggering, deceptively relaxed lope that launched a thousand fiery solos – impelled him to resurrect their spirit for the current era.
But that’s not the beat you hear at the start of Pontiac, named for Jones’ Michigan birthplace. In keeping with Feinberg’s desire to capture the milieu that shaped his heroes, Pontiac pops along with a peppy swing that emerged from bebop – the music that Elvin’s brother Hank had performed on piano with Charlie Parker, and that Elvin and his other brother, Thad, would have heard on the nearby Detroit scene of the 1940s. Not until the solos unfurl does Froman incorporate elements of Elvin’s signature sound, most winningly when the band drops out and he and Liebman work as a duo.
Tryon, North Carolina, honors Nina Simone, born there in 1933. When Feinberg first encountered her music, “I was unaware of her life story, which reminded me a lot of Ron Carter, another musician who wanted to enter the classical world but was denied because of skin color. I took so much inspiration from her. I teach a course that deals with protest music, and we use her song Mississippi Goddam – for me that’s one of the great pieces of American music, ever. You really feel her pain. And that’s what we try to do as musicians – express our point of view and communicate to as many people as possible.” A free-form elegy, it evokes the painful no-man’s-land inhabited by Simone during much of her career.
Another North Carolina town, Hamlet, is the birthplace of Coltrane, who lived there through his high-school years (and whose immeasurable impact on modern music needs no delineation here). Coltrane’s early champion, Miles Davis, remains the most famous musician to come out of East St. Louis, but it is also where trumpeter Russell Gunn and drummer Terreon Gully grew up. Both of them now live in Atlanta, Feinberg’s hometown, and during high school he had the opportunity to see them perform on a weekly basis. (While still a teenager, he even played in Gunn’s band for a short while.) They’re the ones Feinberg honors here, with a gritty melody that follows the gentle cry of his a cappella introduction.
The music of Ryuichi Sakamoto, who has earned international praise for his film scoring, prompted Feinberg to write Tokyo. “I first heard his work in the film Furyo” – released in the U.S. under the title Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence – “and I still get goose bumps thinking about it. Then I discovered some of his solo piano work, and his prog band, and the music he wrote for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. He is one of my favorite contemporary composers.” In Nogales, the Arizona town where Charles Mingus was born in 1922, the composition channels the towering muscularity of Mingus’ music, along with the heartbreaking tenderness that always hovered nearby. Feinberg may not have meant to evoke the monumental bassist directly, but his opening cadenza does that all the same.
While these musicians take no back seat in Feinberg’s life, the athletes he admires definitely jockey for position. Thus we have Louisville, birthplace of Muhammad Ali and a piece that, says Feinberg, “actually does express some of his bravado and bombast, in that the composition is very open and allows for a lot of dynamics. That describes Ali, who went to jail and suspended his career to protest the Vietnam War.” (Feinberg, who has trained in boxing and martial arts, sees a parallel between the sweet science and jazz, “in terms of having a game plan but knowing that once you get into the ring, anything can happen.”)
And Cairo – not the one in Egypt, or Illinois (or nearly a dozen other states) – refers to the Georgia birthplace of Jackie Robinson, the electrifying second baseman who integrated major-league baseball in the 1940s. Feinberg says, “Coming from Georgia, as I do, he’s a hometown hero – not the first black ballplayer, but someone who had to have the character to stand up to everything he endured.” The fact that Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, where Feinberg now lives? Icing on the cake.
You have to know where you came from to understand where you are. And knowing where you are can help you decide where you go next. Hearing Feinberg and esteemed company clear the first of these hurdles, we should all keep an ear out for what lies ahead.
