Pete La Roca - Basra
Released - October 1965
Recording and Session Information
Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, May 19, 1965
Joe Henderson, tenor sax; Steve Kuhn, piano; Steve Swallow, bass; Pete La Roca, drums.
1576 tk.8 Candu
1577 tk.15 Malaguena
1578 tk.16 Basra
1579 tk.18 Lazy Afternoon
1580 tk.19 Eiderdown
1581 tk.20 Tears Come From Heaven
Session Photos
 |
| Steve Swallow |
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Malagueña | Ernesto Lecuona | May 19 1965 |
| Candu | Pete La Roca | May 19 1965 |
| Tears Come from Heaven | Pete La Roca | May 19 1965 |
| Side Two | ||
| Basra | Pete La Roca | May 19 1965 |
| Lazy Afternoon | John La Touche, Jerome Moross | May 19 1965 |
| Eiderdown | Steve Swallow | May 19 1965 |
Liner Notes
AT the end of January, 1964, I went up to Boston to interview Pete La Roca for an article that subsequently appeared in the March 26th issue of Down Beat. The young veteran (he was 27 in April 1965), had moved to the Hub from his native New York in the fall of 1963 to become drummer-in-residence at the Jazz Workshop, Beantown’s most renowned jazz club. He was in the midst of chat he called “a year to prepare.” That year never ended as far as Boston was concerned. La Roca returned to New York in April 1964, and shortly afterward became a member of Art Farmer’s quartet.
Despite its curtailment, Pete’s Boston sojourn did help prepare him for further growth as a musician and person. First he played with trumpeter Herb Pomeroy’s sextet; then as part of a rhythm section that backed a variety of visiting musicians, including Zoot Sims, Benny Golson, Ruby Braff, Milt Jackson, and Mose Allison. This was invaluable experience because it took him to areas he had never explored, and probably never would have if he had remained in New York. There, too, was the steady work which enabled him to make good use of his spare time in the relaxed, unhurried atmosphere of Boston. Some of La Roca’s off-bandstand pursuits include the study of Indian music, Sanskrit, yoga, and James Joyce.
This album is not the first time La Roca has led his own group. After gaining important experience with Sonny Rollins (off and on between October 1957 and February 1959), Tony Scott, and Slide Hampton (1959), and John Coltrane (Spring to Fall, 1960), Pete formed a quintet which worked intermittently, and remained together until the middle of 1962. Although it was far from a financial success, La Roca never gave up the idea of having a band again. Now that he is with Farmer, he plans to work with his own unit whenever possible in the periods when Art’s quartet is at liberty.
Toward the end of his Boston stay, the Jazz Workshop began importing established groups instead of one name player. Under this setup, the trio (the others were pianist Ray Santisi and bassist John Neves), played their own set, opposite the visitors. When I heard them, I wrote: “The three men play as individuals, but they also sound as one.”
La Roca commented: “I think that’s one of the places music will go. The idea of blending will get to be a little more involved. It will be like one person compounded on top of another — instead of each person holding down his point in the triangle — which calls for a more flexible kind of thinking. You have to be, because the thing is liable to change any minute. You can’t sit down and depend on playing ‘chanka-dank, chanka-dank, chanka-dank’, because it just might change. That intrigues me. I dig that.”
Then he added: “There are some people who you can really do it with.” The people he was talking about were two players he describes as his “main men”; pianist Steve Kuhn and bassist Steve Swallow. When he joined Farmer, Swallow was already in the group. Soon after, Kuhn replaced guitarist Jim Hall in the quartet. Pete expresses delight in his playing with the two Steves when he says: “You know you can do anything because someone will respond.”
The rapport among the three is in strong evidence here. They are revealed as one of the most attuned rhythm sections in jazz. Homogeneous would be inadequate in describing them. Although Joe Henderson had not played with the trio on a regular basis before, he came right in as if he had been with them for a great length of time. La Roca was familiar with Henderson’s work from the time the two spent together in Kenny Dorham’s quintet at the Coronet in Brooklyn during September 1963. Pete was also the drummer on Joe’s first two Blue Note LPs — Page One (4140) and Our Thing (4152). Since the spring of 1964, Henderson has been with Horace Silver’s quintet. La Roca likes Joe’s ability to “play loose” and admires the fact that he can “play all different bags, influenced by everyone he’s heard, and still be Joe Henderson.”
La Roca’s conception of drumming allows him to state the beat, and imply the beat, all over his set. “You don’t have to keep it happening,” he says of the pulse, “because it’s already happening. I don’t have to play so many notes. I can breathe and phrase in a broader fashion, which is something a drummer can’t usually do.”
In a sense, Pete’s early experience prepared kind for this kind of playing. In junior high school, at the age of 10, be started out by playing snare drum parts when all the flutes (his first choice) had been given out. At the High School of Music and Art he played more tympani than anything else, and after six years on the kettle drums, he played timbales in a Latin orchestra for three years. (This was where he also picked up the surname that had served him in good stead long after his departure from Latin bands to jazz.) He didn’t begin working on a regular set of drums until the mid-Fifties.
The philosophy of Indian music has affected La Roca’s jazz concepts. He is interested in “how many ways can you use monotony? — or how much monotony can be used without hurting the music, without it getting to be a bore?” There is a kinship here with whirling an object around so fast that it appears to be standing still.
He feels that this kind of music can be “listened to in the foreground or in the background with your third ear.” Its relation to Indian music lies in their idea of music reduced to a hum (the Indian “aum” wherein you sing that word, controlling your breath as long as you can, thereby producing gradations in pitch and tone as dictated by your physiology) . “It’s something to meditate on,” says Pete. “You tune in what part of it you like. h’s like listening to the world — it’s always going on.”
His title number, Basra, which utilizes one chord throughout, is the most pertinent example in this album. Swallow’s introduction takes us in a brightly-sailed boat from the waters of the Persian Gulf, up the Shatt al Arab River into the Iraqi port. Henderson then gives us a tour that is never boring as he explores the street of the song. Then La Roca continues the journey with a fascinating, hypnotic solo that definitely speaks.
Ernesto Lecuona’s famous Mulaguena, included by Pete “as something Spanish” to remember from his musical past, is wider harmonicaily than Basra, but it doesn’t move around that much. The players do, however, and vigorously. Henderson is a flamencan cantador and blues sayer (the affinity between the two forms has been proven before), using powerful vocal effects and bursting out with some basic blues phrases that make you laugh and shout. Kuhn’s solo, like Joe’s, is very strong rhythmically. In this album, Steve demonstrates how he has moved away from his Bill Evans influence to a more personal expression. Underlying everything is La Roca’s flaming beat.
The very expressive Lazy Afternoon by Jerome Moross is the ballad of the date, one of La Roca’s favorites by way of explaining its inclusion. It, too, does not use a wide harmonic area but its arresting beauty is not in need of searching far. Joe emulates an alto flute in his entrance and gives a sensitive interpretation, in keeping with the song’s mood, aided strongly by Kuhn, who weaves in and out of the piece’s fabric and takes a reflective solo.
La Roca’s Candu is the “blues” of the date. It has a subtlety within its groove, that makes it just that — a groove, rather than a rut. Henderson does some screaming and hard-swinging, and lie and Pete get into some four-bar exchanges toward the end. Swallow alternates a single line with sonic strumming in his short but telling solo.
Steve has a longer solo on his own Eiderdown, which finds Henderson in softer voice as lie states the lovely melody. Swallow plays convincingly, high and low; his improvisation extremely horn-like in its contours. Kuhn’s solo is crisp, with some descending figures that are closer to Evans than his other work in this set.
La Roca talks about writing in which the chords change irregularly. An example is his Tears Come From Heaven, which contains four chords. The first eleven bars are a C minor 6; the next five are Ab7; then there are four bars of Ab7; four of C minor 6; four of D minor diminished; and a final four of C minor 6. It comes out to a 32-bar pattern but one of very different construction from the usual song of this length. There is some pretty strong, straight-ahead swinging on this one; a tide that carries you forward until the rhythm breaks for La Roca’s solo. That soon heats things up again, leading back to the swift exposition of the plaintive theme.
To the non-technical, don’t let the explanation of the chords throw you. Above all, this is emotional music that is not complicated. “Simplicity is the key,” says La Roca. “If we worked regularly as a group, the base might get even simpler but what we did on it would be more complex.”
Basra, his first album as a leader, is one of which Pete La Roca can be proud. It is a fine group effort, and Joe Henderson’s most impressive recording to date. It also is a demonstration of how to do new things in jazz without losing sight of the music’s entire tradition and spirit.
— IRA GITLER
RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes
A NEW LOOK AT BASRA
Ira Gitler's excellent original liner notes, filled with illuminating quotes from drummer/leader Pete La Roca, echo the message articulated quite clearly in this bracing music: LaRoca and his quartet were absorbed by new ideas that defined the inquisitive progressive (as opposed to radical) post-modern jazz musicians of the mid-'60s. The limited harmonic motion of "Malaguena," "Basra," and "Lazy Afternoon," and the cross-cultural rhythmic references in the first two of those tracks; the way the blues could be molded into something sleek and sexy ("Candu," which bears comparison with the Ron Carter opus "Eighty-one" recorded by Miles Davis's quintet four months earlier) or tense and brooding ("Tears Come from Heaven," which pace Gitler sounds more like a 16-measure blues variant than a 32-bar form); an ability to swing in the tradition ("Eiderdown") while elsewhere affirming La Roca's taste for an interdependence and equality within the ensemble that may receive its clearest expression when he solos over the rest of the rhythm section on "Tears" — all of these notions were alive in the music of the titans from the preceding generation who influenced, and frequently employed, the young talents heard here.
La Roca had been a vital if infrequently documented part of this progressive mix since his recorded debut on one track of Sonny Rollins's epochal 1957 Blue Note collection A Night at the Village Vanguard, and an acknowledged forward-thinker since his highly original "Minor Apprehension" solo on Jackie McLean's New Soil in 1959. The drummer's service with Tony Scott found him alongside Bill Evans and Jimmy Garrison in the rhythm section, and his tenure with Coltrane included a first meeting with Steve Kuhn that carried over initially into Stan Getz's 1961 quartet (with Scott LaFaro on bass). Steve Swallow and La Roca first teamed in 1962 under the leadership of Paul Bley and George Russell. In addition to its work with Art Farmer, heard on the March 1965 Atlantic album Sing Me Softly of the Blues (where "Tears Come from Heaven" appears under the title "Tears"), the Kuhn—Swallow—La Roca trio was also a freestanding unit, and made the disc Three Waves under Kuhn's name for the Contact label in 1966. The previous work of La Roca with Joe Henderson and Kenny Dorham (who had been Kuhn's first New York employer a few years earlier) added one more layer of uncommon rapport to what otherwise might appear to be a studio pickup session.
While this album can be justly celebrated as the finest recorded hour of a rhythm section that was among the best of its era, or the session on which Swallow's now-standard "Eiderdown" made its first appearance, it has been primarily remembered in the four decades since its appearance as a stellar chapter among the rarefied quartet sessions with piano trio that Henderson created on Blue Note, a body of music that also includes Andrew Hill's Black Fire (1963), the saxophonist's own Inner Urge (1964), and McCoy Tyner's The Real McCoy (1967). All of these recordings bristle with rhythmic energy, thanks to the presence of one or another of the period's premier drummers (Roy Haynes on Fire, Elvin Jones on Urge and The Real McCoy). but the present set features the most open and unpredictable feeling of all, and creates the most space for Henderson to display a range of tonal effects that clearly set him apart as his own man. His work on "Malaguena" is particularly enlightening, as this flamenco/modal terrain had been defined by John Coltrane on such 1961 performances as "Teo" (with Miles Davis) and "Ole." Henderson had explored the same setting five months earlier on Urge's "El Barrio," another point of comparison underscoring the singularity of the present foursome; but Henderson excels throughout, on what is indeed one of the finest hours of his definitive early era.
Still, La Roca is the album's defining force. His writing is at the core of the program, and his drumming balances complexity and openness with a generous, optimistic spirit. Much more music under his name and along these lines would have been expected and welcome, but after a 1967 sequel with John Gilmore, Chick Corea, and Walter Booker completing the quartet that initially appeared as Turkish Women at the Bath on Douglas, the frustrations of playing uncompromising jazz for a living got the best of the drummer. He chose to complete his education and, under his given name Peters Sims, became an attorney, relegating music to an occasional pursuit. The other members of the Basra quartet experienced their share of lean years as well, yet by the '90s all four were thriving — including Sims—La Roca, who finally got around to his own second Blue Note album, SwingTime, in 1997, featuring a new version of "Candy."
- Bob Blumenthal, 2004
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