Featured Artist: Stefon Harris

Jazz CD cover CD Title: African Tarantella: Dances With Duke

Year: 2006

Record Label: Blue Note

Style: Straight-Ahead / Classic

Musicians: Stefon Harris (vibraphone, marimba), Anne Drummond (flute), Greg Tardy (clarinet), Steve Turre (trombone), Xavier Davis (piano), Junah Chung (viola), Louise Dubin (cello), Derrick Hodge (bass), Terreon Gully (drums)

Review: After playing Stefon Harris’s latest CD from beginning to end, it occurred to me that I had played the CD in the wrong direction, forward instead of backward.

It would have been more beneficial to play first the last track, Harris’s “Dancing Enigma.” For “Dancing Enigma,” in a single composition, kaleidoscopically summarizes the moods, the shadings, the richness, the dances, the nonet’s surprising fullness of sound, the swing, the naturalism, the brilliant musicianship and the intriguing instrumentation on African Tarantella: Dances with Duke.

Harris intends “Dancing Enigma” to express the tension and accommodation between between his forward-looking intent to assist in the progress of jazz and his indebtedness to the innovations of the past. Certainly, Harris’s inclusion of Duke Ellington’s songs from The New Orleans Suite and The Queen’s Suite on more than half of the tracks is more than sufficient acknowledgement of the willing inescapability from the past’s influence. Still, “Dancing Enigma,” with its content of several moods, evolves through Latin rhythms, song form, six-eight rumbling, grandness of crescendoed intensity offset by hushed peacefulness, vibraphoned showers of notes, and finally a fading away, rather than a fadeout, of the music...after the composition’s dramatically shimmering false ending (which turns out to be but a prelude to the real ending).

All of these elements within “Dancing Enigma” occur within the length of almost nine minutes. And so Harris’s concluding piece restates through concision much of what preceded it.

As one proceeds backward through African Tarantella: Dances with Duke, next comes the actually penultimate number, “African Tarantella.” This piece expresses the album’s overriding aesthetic: that of a dance in six-eight time which exorcises the demons that cause an irresistible compulsion to dance (tarantism). This second-to-last track covers several themes, such as the danceability of Duke Ellington’s music (often overlooked now), Harris’s interest in the integration of the arts including dance, the African origins of jazz—specifically in Harris’s and Ellington’s music—and the infectiousness of the music. In many ways, African Tarantella: Dances with Duke recalls James Newton’s groundbreaking African Flower (also on Blue Note), for Newton too used vibes (Jay Hoggard’s), flute and violin to suggest with naturalism the African origins of Ellington’s music…a topic infrequently discussed until then.

Perhaps out of deference to the master or as a matter of protocol, Harris sequenced his own suite as the last of the three on African Tarantella: Dances with Duke, despite it advantages for prelude and exposition of themes. Similar to the circumstances for the genesis of Joe Lovano’s recent suite-based Blue Note CD, African Tarantella: Dances with Duke started as a commissioned work. In Harris’s case, The Wharton Center at Michigan State University commissioned him to compose a new composition, as the 2001 Monterey Jazz Festival similarly commissioned Lovano to write a composition honoring Miles Davis. Even though Harris’s The Gardner Meditations arose from personal reflection, rather than as a reworking of another’s works, Harris after the fact realized the similarity of some of Ellington’s suites to his own results. And so, he chose five Ellington compositions to complement his own suite.

While the first and last suites—Ellington’s New Orleans Suite and Harris’s The Gardner Meditations—attain their liveliness from the dancing rhythms within, the middle two tracks from The Queen’s Suite describe objects of nature, and thus are quieter, less volatile and more meditative. Harris plays “The Single Petal of a Rose” at his own pace, as the notes unfold naturally into deeper chords and broader arpeggios over bassist Derrick Hodge’s long arco lines. Harris appreciates too Ellington’s inspiration from a mockingbird as he simulates its trill on “Sunset and the Mocking Bird”—an entirely appropriate song for vibraphone as Harris captures not only the suggestion of birdsong but also inserts his own grace notes and quicksilver triplets.

Moving backward still through African Tarantella, Ellington’s “Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies,” a light beguine with a gorgeously blossoming bridge, serves as a link between “Sunset and the Mocking Bird” and “Portrait of Wellman Braud,” another song (along with “Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies”) from The New Orleans Suite. Delicately impressionistic and orchestral though “Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies” may be, “Portrait of Wellman Braud” is raucous and rambling, as Wellman Braud’s movement is signified by the six-eight bass line pronounced by pianist Xavier Davis and Hodge. Comical and exclamatory, “Portrait of Wellman Braud,” a blues after all, creates visual and aural images, particularly when Steve Turre wails a Braud monologue that could as appropriately appear as part of a film’s sound track.

And so, as we reach the first track at the conclusion of this upside-down review, the nonet’s fullness of sound on “Thanks for the Beautiful Land on the Delta” is instantly apparent, from Turre’s low trombone foundation to Greg Tardy’s eloquent clarinet work—not to mention Harris’s bluesy extended exposition of the theme.

The orchestral effect that Harris attains with but a nonet is one of the consistently rewarding achievements of African Tarantella: Dances with Duke. Harris’s musicianship was a highlight of his early recordings as he led his own group, gaining him recognition as one of his generation’s leading vibraphonists. Grand Unification Theory marked Harris’s entry into extended composition and his talents for arranging as well.

On African Tarantella: Dances with Duke, though, Harris subsumes his playing into the larger sound that his group achieves as it brings to life Harris’s ideas, as well as his perspectives about Ellington’s work. As Harris’s artistry continues to broaden, that in the future he may be as recognized for his compositions and arrangements as he has been for his musicianship.



Tracks: Thanks for the Beautiful Land on the Delta, Portrait of Wellman Braud, Bourbon Street Jingling Jollies, Sunset and the Mocking Bird, The Single Petal of a Rose, Memoirs of a Frozen Summer, African Tarantella, Dancing Enigma

Record Label Website: http://www.bluenote.com

Artist's Website: http://www.stefonharris.com

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Reviewed by: Don Williamson

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