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Giuseppi Logan - Quartet (ESP-Disk’)
Until resurfacing with the aid of Brooklyn pastor Dr. Bill Jones, reedman Giuseppi Logan was, like Henry Grimes, one of the lost enigmas of contemporary improvisation. Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1935, Logan studied at the New England Conservatory and worked in a notable but unrecorded Bill Dixon group (with Rashied Ali, drums; Gary Porter, trombone; Bob Ralston, tenor) in the mid-1960s. His performances with the rhythm team of drummer Milford Graves and pianist Don Pullen at the October Revolution in Jazz landed him two sessions with ESP-Disk’, including a live performance on a bill with Albert Ayler at Town Hall. Logan also made sideman appearances with Roswell Rudd (Everywhere, Impulse!, 1966) and Patty Waters (College Tour, ESP-Disk’ 1966) before disappearing from the scene in the latter part of the decade. Mental instability was probably the main reason for this, and he was occasionally spotted by other musicians throughout the ensuing decades living as a clochard. Most people had assumed him to be long dead until he resurfaced at last year’s Vision Festival. He was subsequently filmed by Jones while playing in Tompkins Square Park.
The first of his two ESP documents is this session, Giuseppi Logan Quartet, with Graves, Pullen and bassist Eddie Gomez collaborating on five original compositions. They recorded one other track, “Wretched Saturday,” that later appeared on More Giuseppi Logan (ESP 1013, 1965) to fill out what was mostly a live album. Though mistakenly credited with employing flute and bass clarinet here, this first ESP installment finds Logan strictly on alto and tenor saxophones and shenai. There’s a vibe that suggests Yusef Lateef (and Sun Ra) gone awry in the opening “Tabla Suite,” which features Graves’s surging multiplicity of attacks on a much smaller canvas than usual, supported by plucked piano strings and Gomez’s compact percussive pizzicato. Amending jazz with non-Western textures was nothing new in 1965, but the way in which Logan and his group approach these colors goes beyond “exotic” to certifiably unhinged. They are unabashedly setting their own rules — Graves’s tabla rhythms have little to do with Indian music in their agitated dual heartbeats, while Logan’s pinched lines are gooey and demark corners of sound that the overarching composition barely hints at. High string harmonics are coaxed impulsively out of their respective instruments, lending the music an arbitrary conviction that’s like nothing Ra or Lateef ever produced.
“Dance of Satan” is a 7/8 romp that finds Logan’s puckering, skewed alto riding a distractedly loping rhythm, in tandem with churchy piano chords. Graves and Gomez summarily break down meter into blocky surges as the leader winds bent waves behind and underneath expanding clusters. Gomez has a brief unaccompanied spot where he restates the theme, and its voodoo-laden sway is back with extraordinary precision—what seems like an off-the-cuff realization of a sketchy melody is, in fact, rendered with exactitude by the rules Logan has set. The fifteen-minute “Bleecker Partita” is a tour de force of mid-Sixties Afro-American art, beginning with gospel piano chords and subtle tom accents as Logan lilts and caresses his horn with an energy that is as much the charmed as the charmer. Even as Logan’s phrases run together and tumble out in Slonimnskian cascades, Graves jabbing and twisting as much as he directs, Pullen’s anthem repeatedly brings the quartet home and grounds it in the sweaty earth. While the group occasionally acts as four proximal parallels, that left hand and the curl of Logan’s alto wrap around the whole of the piece, chair-shifting swing and all, keeping it warm and connected.
ESP-Disk’ founder Bernard Stollman’s apocryphal story of being in the room where the session was recorded and watching the group start over mid-stream when the tape ran out is, apparently, what underscored for him the seriousness of the New Music. As much as these five tunes seem to roil in the depths of freedom, each is a distinct piece with compositional order that, while unique to the situation, asserts itself with nakedness and pride. Whatever Logan’s current status, there is no denying that his group was its own classic quartet.
~ Clifford Allen
Tags: free improvisation
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Points of Interest
“…he was occasionally spotted by other musicians throughout the ensuing decades living as a clochard.”
I’m not finding this word “clochard” in my Webster’s dictionary. What does this word mean?
His two ESP’s are among the wildest sessions on the label. Any word from NY’ers of him playing any concerts yet?
Better way of saying “street person.”
No idea - but I do wish that ESP had combined the sessions into a two-disc set, breaking them up by session.
And you living down there in a French speaking city Rob :))) “clochard” is French for homeless.
Seen this interview with Logan? He looks and sounds startlingly like Arthur Doyle. (Don’t expect any discussion of music though..)
http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=10180811720
THe Jack Kerouac’s novel “The Dharma Bums” was translated in french as : “Les clochards célestes”.
céleste = celestial
Yes Dan, and me having a french last name too! … though genealogical research revealed that the first of my ancestors to arrive here was a German named “Kammer” - but the french priests in Louisiana’s “German Coast” (Edgard, Vacherie, Destrehan, etc., just west of N.O.) frequently franco-phied the last names, hence Cambre.
Anyhoo, was just caught off guard by Clifford’s fanciful flourish there. It’s certainly a nicer-sounding word than “bum,” so someone notify Webster’s to add that to the next edition.
I recently became friends with Mr. Logan son, Jaee Logan. He too is an extraordinary musician! I would love to meet “The Giuseppi Logan”.