BLP 4261 (NR)

Sam Rivers - Dimensions and Extensions

Released - 1986

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, March 17, 1967
Donald Byrd, trumpet #1-4; Julian Priester, trombone #1-4; James Spaulding, alto sax, flute #1-5; Sam Rivers, tenor, soprano sax, flute; Cecil McBee, bass; Steve Ellington, drums.

1858 tk.10 Paean
1859 tk.20 Precis
1860 tk.25 Helix
1861 tk.32 Effusive Melange
1862 tk.33 Involution
1863 tk.34 Afflatus

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Precis	Sam Rivers	March 17 1967
Paean	Sam Rivers	March 17 1967
Effusive Melange	Sam Rivers	March 17 1967
Side Two
Involution	Sam Rivers	March 17 1967
Afflatus	Sam Rivers	March 17 1967
Helix	Sam Rivers	March 17 1967

Liner Notes

Recognition has taken its time catching up with Sam Rivers. The reedman/composer/arranger has played the blues with Jimmy Witherspoon and T-bone Walker; toured with Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, and Andrew -Hill; led groups of his own, which ranged in size from trios to big bands. He was playing professionally in Boston during the early-Fifties, and during the mid-Sixties, Blue Note released his Fuschia Swing Song and Contours. Finally, in 1975, his Impulse! albums attracted the notice of the jazz public, and attention began to be paid.

There is often a certain austeriry to Rivers's music. It isn't cold or forbidding, but it's more or less 'pure," uncontaminated by programmatic conceits and atmospheric or romantic allusions. It is music that follows its own rules and exists on its own strictly musical terms, independent of the kind of extra musical imagery so often associated with organized sound. There is also a certain austerity to Rivers's determination to be original. "I worked out my own chord substitutions, wrote my own exercises to practice," he says. "I listened to everyone I could hear to make sure I didn't sound like them. I wasn't taking any chances; I wanted to be sure I didn't sound like anyone else. A person doesn't have to sound like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane. It takes more work, but it can be done."

Born into a musical family on September 25, 1930, Sam was already accomplished on the trombone, viola, piano, and saxophone by the time he moved to Boston in 1947 to attend the Boston Conservatory. He immediately began working in a string quartet and in various jazz bands that included Quincy Jones, Jaki Byard, Gigi Gryce, Dick Twardzik, and Serge Chaloff, among others.

Except for occasional road tours with Don Wilkerson, Billie Holiday, and others, Sam made Boston his home for the next twenty years. In the late-Fifries, he led a quartet regularly in a coffee house near Harvard Square. One night in 1959, drummer Tony Williams, then thirteen years old, sat in and impressed everyone. A bond between these two artists grew quickly.

In 1964, Rivers was on the road with T-Bone Walker when he received a telegram from Tony Williams, who had moved to New York to work with Jackie McLean and later joined Miles Davis, telling him that Miles wanted him to join the quintet. Sam stayed for six months, touring the U.S. and Japan (where a live album was taped, but not issued in the U.S. for about a decade).

At this point, Rivers's music begins to be documented: a Tadd Dameron Septet date with Sam was started for Blue Note, but never satisfactorily completed (three Dameron originals and were recorded); Larry Young's Into Somethin' 4187); Tony Williams's Life Time (4180) and Spring (4216); Bobby Hutcherson's Dialogue (4198); followed by several Andrew Hill sessions (again for Blue Note). Meanwhile, Sam made an album a year, under his own leadership (for the same label): Fuschia Swing Song (4184); Contours (4206), A New Conception (4249), and finally this album, which remained unissued for years.

Fuschia Swing Song, with familiar associates Byard, Williams, and Ron Carter, stands as the definitive statement of the mid-Sixties Boston progressives. The chord progressions and voicings studiously avoid cliché, improvisational structures segue from chord cycles to free form and back in the course of single compositions, and the leader's playing refers to a lengthy history which encompasses blues, the classic tenors, and bebop. The modal structures then being popularized by John Coltrane are notably absent from the date. "I was never particularly into that." Rivers explains. "In most cases so-called modal jazz wasn't really modal at all. People were playing free over the top of modes or, more often, just staying in one key. Now, really playing in a mode would be limiting yourself to the eight or so notes in that mode, period. That's the way I teach modes. I guess I'm a kind of purist in that I don't believe you should say you're doing one thing when you're doing something else."

The sextet heard here is a kind of all-star group, though the rhythm section was intimately familiar with Rivers's music. Drummer Steve Ellington had been particularly close to the saxophonist for some had recorded tapes earlier in the decade which Rivers remembers as some of the most advanced playing he ever did. The prodigiously swift and solid bassist Cecil McBee was only beginning to build his reputation; his land mark bass solos with Pharoah Sanders were several years in the future. Donald Byrd and Julian Priester must have seemed strange choices for a date as "conceptually free" as this one, since they were associated with more "inside" playing, but Priester had worked in Sun Rats earliest bands and Byrd frequently played with some of the younger musicians who were revamping jazz time and techniques, though not on records. Alto saxophonist James Spaulding was a kind of Blue Note regular at the time. He had been associated with Freddie Hubbard and Bobby Hutcherson, and his direction was basically neobop, with free form leanings.

Rivers probably chose each player for this combination of adventurousness and grounding in tradition; he was never one to advocate total freedom at the expense of musicality and roots. Rivers's scoring for the horns is almost uniformly dense, but his remarkable ear for color and the personal sounds of the players result in a parade of marvelously sensual and ever-changing colors. Rarely has atonality in jazz writing sounded this warm. The solos are as varied as the diverse styles of the musicians, and Byrd and Priester in particular reach for continuities and effects not even hinted at on their other recordings from the same period.

Spaulding has the bright opening solo on "Precis." Byrd then permutates a series of intervals from the theme, demonstrating his grasp of the new music's improvisational procedures and producing, with his broken tones and various speech-like attacks, a kind of polytonal funk. Rivers follows on tenor. "Paean" has a smooth, almost slippery Priester statement, a great flying pizzicato workout by McBee, and then Rivers on soprano. The saxophonist swings hard and then begins loosening and tightening the time, producing an elastic resilience. Back on tenor in "Effusive Melange," he sputters and tears into long, held chords in an exemplary display of his control of harmonics. Priester joins in before the fade out.

"Involution" is scored for two flutes, played by Rivers and Spaulding, and rhythm. The first flute solo is by Sam, who's identifiable in the improvised ensembles by his more mercurial, wider-ranging playing. Steve Ellington's drum solo produces a wide, open sound/ with high cymbals ringing and low tom toms underneath. "Afflatus" is a slow, reflective number, a kind of tenor incantation during which Rivers elaborates into some forceful overtone playing, and, after McBee switches from bowing to plucking for his solo, a faster but still deliberate rethinking of the theme. This trio performance, with its free-flowing time and broad tenor sound, is more reminiscent of Albert Ayler's work than anything in Rivers's later recordings. There's a Moorish flavored ending. "Helix" closes the album in an optimistic mood. Byrd has a bright, strutting solo, and Spaulding sails in with a tone reminiscent of Eric Dolphy's and a sense of line not unlike the late Booker Ervin's. Rivers soars on tenor over jabbing punctuations from the other horns.

In the years following the recording of this material, aside from a brief but very memorable stint with a McCoy Tyner Quintet that also featured trumpeter Woody Shaw, Sam worked mostly with pianist Cecil Taylor, or on his own projects. In 1970, he opened Studio Rivbea, on Bond Street in lower Manhattan, in partnership with his wife, Bea. He's also found time during the past few years to work as composer-in-residence with the Harlem Opera Society and perform and teach as an artist-in-residence at Wesleyan University.

The tall, lean saxophonist with the high forehead, creased brow, and penetrating eyes continues to make singular music. "The way I see it," he says, "the music of the Seventies should be a fusion of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties." That's as good a description as any of the sounds in this package, though the listener will be tempted to add that the warmth, wit, and intelligence of those decades, as well as their styles, are evident throughout.

— Robert Palmer

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT DIMENSIONS AND EXTENSIONS

Sam Rivers was one of the last new voices of the classic Blue Note era, and (as Robert Palmer emphasizes in his original liner notes) shared the fate of many earlier Alfred Lion discoveries in receiving greater acclaim years after having left the label. Then again, Rivers's career has never progressed according to familiar timetables. His birth date, established only relatively recently as 1923 rather than 1930, makes him one of jazz's true late starters (his frequent Boston companion Jaki Byard was another), a venerable 41 when he recorded his debut Fuschia Swing Song. His rare command of both the repertory and stylistic conventions of modernism, best heard on his great standards album A New Conception, and the more adventurous notions of harmony, rhythm sonority, and structure made him an ideal representative of Blue Note's progressive mid-Sixties profile. Unfortunately, whatever career momentum was generated by his contract effectively stalled when the label was sold to Liberty in 1966. Lion was still in the production booth when this final Rivers Blue Note session was taped in March 1967; but despite gaining a title, a catalog number (BST 84261), and cover art, the music remained unissued until it was paired with an Andrew Hill quartet date featuring Rivers on tenor and issued as the two-record set Involution in 1976. Palmer's notes, originally written for that twofer, were edited into their present form 11 years later, when Dimensions and Extensions finally appeared with title and cover as originally intended.

There were other twists and turns to come in what remains the ongoing Rivers saga. For most of the 1970s he led a trio featuring bassist Dave Holland and drummer Barry Altschul, a rhythm section also featured in Anthony Braxton's ensembles during part of the same period. This Rivers unit developed the open, stream-of-consciousness approach in which the leader would shift among flute, soprano sax, tenor sax, and piano as the band worked through various moods. Rivers's approach became emblematic of the tradition-informed freedom that characterized some of the best music of the '70s. He adopted a lower profile when the 1980s began, only to emerge at decade's end on Latin jazz recordings by Hilton Ruiz and in the quintet and United Nation Orchestra of Dizzy Gillespie. These surprisingly inside affiliations were followed in the early-1990s by a move to Orlando, Florida, inspired in part by a large talent pool that allowed Rivers to compose and rehearse the music for larger ensembles that had first been heard on such fascinating discs as Crystals (Impulse! 1974) by his big band and Colours (Black Saint, 1982) by his woodwind ensemble, Winds of Manhattan. He also assembled a new trio in which the other members (Doug Matthews and Anthony Cole) shared their leader's multi-instrumental proclivities. Both the large and the small ensembles continue to perform regularly as these notes are written in Rivers's 85th year.

For a variety of reasons, the present album is more indicative of Rivers's future efforts than its three predecessors. The absence of piano provides a more open canvas for the harmonic exploration that had defined his music from the outset, while the use of four horns anticipates the mutating colors and densities, and the preference for thematic repetition and collage in support of solos, that would characterize his later and larger efforts. The writing on the four sextet tracks is of a piece with that on Fuschia and Contours, with suggestions of blues ("Paean"), atonality amidst AABA structure ("Helix"), and the heat-seeking swing that later came to be known as free-bop ("Effusive Melange"), while the expressive tones of Donald Byrd and Julian Priester (each with and without mutes) and the tart alto saxophone of James Spaulding produce ensembles of uncommon delicacy and range.

"Involution" and "Afflatus" anticipate another road taken, that of the innovative Rivers trios, The former, a quartet track with both Rivers and Spaulding on flute, retains a swing beat, while the trio piece has Rivers on tenor and a rubato approach featuring bowed bass and cymbal flourishes that suggest a movement from a typical performance of the '70s, Both tracks, and the sextets as well, gain immeasurably from the contributions of Cecil McBee, an occasional Rivers associate in the '70s, and drummer Steve Ellington, who (possibly through his connection with Rivers) would later play with Dave Holland, ultimately becoming the original drummer in the bassist's first working band.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2008