Leroy Jenkins' Sting! - Urban Blues (Black Saint)

Of all the first generation AACM'ers, I've always like violinist and violist Jenkins' music the least. Sure, the Revolutionary Ensemble (Jenkins, bassist Sirone [aka Norris Jones], and percussionist Jerome Cooper) could be thrilling as the similarly configured Air, but the group's discography is all but non-existent in the CD era, and it never really did great justice to what was much more than a "free jazz cooperative." Jenkins own projects -- Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival Of America (1978), The Legend Of Ai Glatson (1978), Mixed Quintet (1979) -- all feature impressive ensembles and inventive, vibrant scoring, but, in large measure, I have failed to connect to that music so that it lasts for me once the stereo has been switched off. Maybe it is Jenkins' compositional sense, which is more conventional than Braxton's, George Lewis', Wadada Leo Smith's, Roscoe Mitchell's or Muhal Richard Abrams'. Maybe it is Jenkins' intonation, which, to my ears, has definite longhair associations; at times, he sounds as if he is angling for a legitimate sound on a period string instrument, such as a viol or violino piccolo, instruments whose resonance is thinner than what I have come to want from the fiddle. And I do mean fiddle.

More than just stating a preference for less trebly, grittier players such as Stuff Smith, Rat Nance, and Billy Bang Maybe all I am revealing here is that Jenkins' music violates too many of the personal stereotypes I have attached to the jazz violin. If so, shame on me. Having said that, then, how to convince you of the excellence of this live recording from 1984, which may do nothing more for some listeners than make them want to rip it off the turntable and slip on their Sugarcane Harris' LPs instead? Well, Urban Blues is different altogether. It is also a record that makes perfect sense to me, in that it is quintessentially of its time, and because, in being so uncharacteristic of Jenkins' work up to this point in his career, it most fully communicates how and where he concentrates his instrumental and formal energies.

Sting! consisted of Jenkins and Terry Jenoure on violin, a pre-Cassandra Wilson Brandon Ross on electric guitar, James Emery on amplified acoustic guitar, Alonzo Gardner on electric bass and Kamal Sabir on drums. Despite all the electricity, the chief characteristic of the band is the preponderance on stringed instruments. In fact, Sting! itself is like one giant violin, one in which the pizzicato and the arco engage each other in a cutting contest. You can hear this within the ensemble itself, in the juxtaposition of Gardner's pop-pop funk bass and the sawing lyricism of Jenoure and Jenkins in particular, or in the way the Emery's jagged, multi-noted lines prickle against Ross' sinuous, sustained twang, like a barbed-wire fence running alongside a river bank. You can also hear it in the compositions, all of them by Jenkins, in which ecstatically bent tones, notes articulated with fat vibrato, vertiginous glissandi and hard-strummed passages fall into step and then dance free of charging staccato and stop-time rhythms. This is electrified, jazz-based improvisational music that also makes reference to rhythm and blues, old-time stomps and hollers, gospel, and early hip-hop. The twinning of the instruments may initially suggest that Ornette's Harmolodics offer a point of comparison. But although collective improvisation is prominent in the Sting! repertoire -- the resulting cacophony is often impressive, as "O.W. Frederick", a tremendously exciting performance that belongs on any Black Saint label sampler ever assembled or ever to be assembled, bears out -- Jenkins' approach here is much more single-minded than Coleman's. At times, the accompaniment is so precise that it almost slackens into Fuzak ("Looking For The Blues", a "string of solos" piece which is less about flash than it sounds on first audition), but Sabir especially does not allow the tension to slip. These beats belong to the boom-box blaring at the corner where the break-dancers are spinning out on flattened cardboard boxes, not the dentist's chair.

In addition to funky work-outs, Urban Blues features a selection of pop songs, all of which serve as reminders of the talents of Terry Jenoure, a fine improviser and piquant, declamatory vocalist who has not been heard from on record, it seems, since John Carter completed his Roots And Folklore cycle. One of these songs "Why Can't I Fly?" is one of the album's highlights. I'd like to think the lyrics were inspired by Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, for as universal as its sentiment of wondering is ("Here I am / once again / right back where I started from... / Why can't I fly?"), it assumes a more variegated, subtly graded hue in light of music which soars upward, glides a bit, then swoops down into a landing that becomes a trudge. The performance also features Jenkins best solo on the date. His somewhat delicate sound renders the feelings of hope, awkwardness, distress and defiance the solo carries all the more poignant.

I wonder myself what the folks at Sweet Basil that January in the mid-1980's thought of it. "Why Can't I Fly?" seems to me to fit right into a tradition of coded African-American songwriting in which the lyrics, at a strictly literal level, remain inoffensive to a mass audience even while they convey a message of protest against a systemic evil in which that same audience is complicit. Percy Mayfield's "Please Send Me Someone To Love" is a great example of this art, as is Waller and Razaf's "(What Did I Do To Be So) Black And Blue". Is it strange that an avant-garde musician of Jenkins' (supposed) inclinations would try his hand at this? Art Lange, who wrote the liner notes for Urban Blues quotes Jenkins on Sting!'s origins as follows:

Musical periods come and go, and there seems to be particular styles popular in each period. I had heard a lot of the other "electric-type" groups, and I wanted to feel like a part of this time. I always felt that I could do that sort of thing, put together a band, with a more commercial sound -- at least, in my own style -- and get more people involved in my music, get more people to hear me.

What happened to the African-American audience for "jazz" beginning in the late 1960's? Is there any way for today's creative musicians to get that audience back? Yes, we've all heard the questions before. Perhaps they have even been bludgeoned to death, or, if not, then at least to the very limits of their endurance. But I beg of you not to perform the autopsy just yet. I do not think these questions have gone away. Whatever the case, they are questions that deserve to be treated with the complete disregard for dispassion that Jenkins and his worthy constituents demonstrate on this occasion.