Reissuing clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre's 1963 Columbia album Free Fall, presenting trio performances with bassist Steve Swallow and pianist Paul Bley recorded after their 1961 European tour, along with duos between Giuffre and Swallow and several solo tracks from the clarinetist himself, propelling himself and his band into his sophisticated, risk-taking chamber jazz compositions.
Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 1119 Squidco Product Code: 30427
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2021 Country: Austria Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded in New York, New York, on July 9th, October 10th, and November 1st, 1962. Free Fall originally issued on vinyl LP on the Columbia label in 1963 as catalog code CL 1964.
"It is common knowledge that the term "free fall" refers to the interval between a person jumping out of an airplane at a considerable height and the time when their parachute opens to slow their descent to earth safely. Referring to Newtonian physics, it takes place when gravity is the only external force affecting a body in motion.
Free Fall was the third studio album that featured the trio of Jimmy Giuffre on clarinet, pianist Paul Bley, and Steve Swallow on acoustic bass. The previous two albums, Fusion and Thesis, recorded in March and August of 1961 respectively, had initiated their adventurous exploration of small group interaction and formal reorganization, by substituting three-part contrapuntal layering and flexible rhythmic and tempo phrasing for the conventional chord-based, synchronized structures of song-form jazz. Shortly thereafter, in October and November of that year, the trio embarked on a European tour, including concerts in Stuttgart, Bremen, and Graz - all fortunately documented on disc (the first two currently on Emanem, the latter on Hat Hut's ezz-thetics). In these live settings, they were able to extend and redefine their earlier repertoire with ever-more spontaneous and abstracted contributions, leading them to the precipice of complete improvisational freedom. The leap came in this album, from their next studio sessions of July, October, and November 1962.
Giuffre has written that the duo and trio pieces here all followed the same pattern, that is, starting with a written (composed) section, opening up into freely improvised episodes, and ending with a return to the initial idea. The extent to which the musicians related their intuitive statements and responses to the given material or the actions of their counterparts - or ignored them - defined the formal nature of the ensemble. And while these performances were prophetic examples of small group free relativity - distinct from Ornette Coleman's already established free jazz subjectivity - their precedents can be traced through the trio's own gradual evolution.
What I feel to be the more revealing and revolutionary aspects of this album, then, are to be found in the five unaccompanied clarinet pieces. These are each "completely improvised," in Giuffre's words, and though not totally unprecedented, were likely the product of a fascinating, if circuitous and varied, sequence of influences. Without the support or consequence of assisting musicians, Giuffre's soliloquies were responsible, in the moment of creation, for their own drama, lyricism, and form - their own survival. So when Giuffre titled this album Free Fall, he was acknowledging not merely the risk involved in such an unprotected endeavor, but also the lack of resistance - or outside pressures - upon the movement of his musical lines in space. The sole creative force projected was the gravitational pull of his own melodic statements (a metaphor which Anthony Braxton has used to describe the "weight" and impact of intervals and the shape of phrases in a melodic contour).
Although pre-dating the better-known solo reed performances of Braxton, Steve Lacy, Peter Brötzmann, and others which commenced later in the decade, these were not the first unaccompanied clarinet pieces to be recorded in a "jazz" environment. The remarkable, indefatigably curious Tony Scott had presented his quirky, chromatic "Three Short Dances for Solo Clarinet" on an otherwise "swinging" RCA album in 1955, under the aegis of composer Stefan Wolpe, with whom he began studies in 1950. In fact, Giuffre himself had offered "So Low," a solo foot-tapping blues, on his 1956 album The Jimmy Giuffre Clarinet, and included unaccompanied clarinet vignettes in his 1959 clarinet-with-string-orchestra "Mobiles."
By this time, Giuffre's attraction to classical music was already well-documented and had been entangled in his music beyond even "Mobiles" and its discmate, "Piece for Clarinet and String Orchestra." But the unaccompanied improvisations on Free Fall are part of a longer legacy, beginning with Igor Stravinsky's capricious 1919 "Trois Pieces," which conceptually gave composers as stylistically diverse as Alan Hovhaness, Olivier Messiaen, John Cage, and Ernst Krenek, among others, subsequent license to allow the clarinet to sing on its own (that is, without the conventional benefit of piano or additional instrumental accompaniment). Given Giuffre's broad interests and study with Wesley La Violette, he no doubt was familiar with some if not all of these solo works - but there are two composers closer to home that Giuffre could not have ignored. In 1959, William O. (Bill) Smith, a one-time student of Darius Milhaud at Mills College and a member of Dave Brubeck's late-'50s/early-'60s combo, composed "Five Pieces for Clarinet Alone." And composer Donald Martino, a devoted dodecaphonist and jazz clarinetist as a student, created what is probably the most performed recital piece for the instrument since 1954, "A Set for Clarinet." Another link in the chain was that Martino was Steve Swallow's teacher at Yale, suggesting conversations between Swallow and Giuffre on Martino's music.
It was no coincidence that the first piece recorded at the July 1962 session was "Propulsion." Though improvised, Giuffre's unaccompanied leaps into open space were encouraged, if not motivated, by his sensitivity to and familiarity with the modern classical idioms. The freedom with which he expanded the jazz harmonic/melodic vocabulary and negotiated a provocative lyrical/dramatic formal tension required a free fall. His parachute was his imagination."-Art Lange, Chicago May 2021