Erwin Helfer Trio - Careless Love

The Sirens 5011

Yesterday afternoon I received an ‘out-of-the-blue’ phone call that made my week, hell, maybe even my month. Jazz drummer and part-time pharmacist Alvin Fielder, a doyen in his own right, rang to discuss the prospect of an interview project documenting the life and anecdotes of Arthur Edgehill. Nearly a decade Fielder’s senior, Edgehill played with many of the bebop greats and is probably most familiar to readers as the linchpin of the influential late 50s Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis organ combo with Shirley Scott. Our conversation quickly veered off into an ad-hoc history of post-swing drummers with me the enthusiastic student and Alvin the erudite educator. After replacing the receiver an hour later I discovered my notepad scrawled with a long list of obscure, but by Alvin’s reckoning heavy-hitter, names: Art Martigan, Harold Jones, Joe Charles, Art McKinney, and so on. Any of those fellows jostle the synapses?

What does all this have to do with Erwin Helfer’s new trio disc on The Sirens? Well Helfer’s one of those sort of names, a player who usually doesn’t garner mention in popular jazz discourse, but has played an important part in the preservation and promotion of earlier forms of the music. Their numbers are near countless and the admirable work of imprints like The Sirens that ensures they remain remembered. Careless Love isn’t all that remarkable in the surface sum of its parts. Helfer fronts a trio with Chicago sidemen John Whitfield on bass and Avreeayl Ra handling drum kit. It’s a bit surprising to see the latter man in this setting given his past avant credentials in the bands of Ari Brown, Nicole Mitchell and most recently as the engine room of the Ernest Dawkins New Horizons Ensemble. But his supple and versatile touch fits right in, a preference for lithe brushwork and simple stick play adding even more bounce to already highly carbonated numbers like the opener “This is Better Than I Thought It Was Boogie.” Engineer Bradley Parker-Sparrow invests the music with a burnished, intimate fidelity and wisely leaves in the various vocal encouragements of the band members to further the feel of convivial rent party revelry.

Other tracks extend the optimistic flair of Helfer’s sturdy, frills-averse approach. The title cut strolls out slow on a gentle bass and brushes beat, the leader’s right hand shaping bright, gospel-dyed rolls. “Blue Monk” and the closing “Jambalaya” advance the merits of the trio’s inclusive ears. Helfer plays the first tune fairly straight, but slips tiny off-kilter collisions in at several points as Ra once again fashions a carefully brushed time beside him. If anything the jagged, stride-inflected preamble to “On the Sunny Side of the Street” sounds even more attuned to angular Monkish decorum than the earlier cover. “Jambalaya” salutes the influence of one time Ra employer Professor Longhair with sprightly syncopations and a plump bayou bass throb. Tracks like “Georgia” and “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” the trad jazz equivalent of hardtack biscuits and gravy, receive welcome spice and flavor thanks to Helfer’s tasteful interpolations. “Paris But I Don’t Know Why,” rendered solo, recalls the classical-fused Ragtime experiments of James P. Johnson. There's so much bellyaching going around these days about “oh, that’s been done before” and “oh gee, that sure is played out.” Seems to me we should all raise tumblers of canned heat and be thankful that this sort of historically-rich and emotionally-nourishing music is still even being played at all.

~ Derek Taylor