As serious as WHOSE life?: Experiencing Frank Glover's Free Jazz Trio

Steve Allee and Chris Parker backed up Frank Glover in free jazz.

 While I awaited the start of a set of free jazz at the Jazz Kitchen by clarinetist Frank Glover, accompanied by Steve Allee at the piano and Chris Parker at the drums, news popped into my iPhone of the death on Feb. 8  of Ron Miles. Born in Indianapolis, Miles was a cornetist/trumpeter long active in Denver, where he often partnered in small groups with tenor saxophonist Fred Hess, who predeceased him in 2018.

Miles and Hess were provincial exemplars of regional small-group acoustic jazz with free-jazz influences. I knew their music only through several recordings made in this century's first decade. The influence of jazz without set tunes and patterns, and absent steady tempos, chord progressions and bar lines, extends to musicians (like this Denver coterie) who feel that the expanded horizons of free jazz are invitations to come up with unconventional frameworks for improvised music. Frameworks of some kind are established — not that this guarantees the music's merits beyond absolute free jazz.

What Glover's trio offered was a personalized version of the original free-jazz impulse to hit the bandstand and simply allow the rapport among the musicians to direct the music's course. Decades of experience clearly gave catalytic energy to what the veterans Glover and Allee offered, and Parker is a much-admired young player who seems to be a quick study and has imagination to spare. The interplay worked on some level. For just over an hour Wednesday evening, the trio played to a rapt full house.

Another former Hoosier, John Litweiler, helped me understand free jazz through his "The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958" (1984). Further insights have been gained, focused almost exclusively on Black musicians (Steve Lacy being a notable exception) in Valerie Wilmer's feisty, illuminating "As Serious As Your Life" (1977), whose title I've adapted to headline this review. In doing so, I intend to question the communicative purpose and result of free jazz. It was evident that the Glover Trio's music connected with the crowd; now and then, it did with me as well.

But I'm left with the suspicion that free jazz is a workshop concept. Musicians can test to the ultimate how well they listen to each other and how responsive they can be in the moment. Of course, jazz musicians are used to doing that, whether they are playing "Stella by Starlight" or "One Up, One Down."

The claims made for free jazz are sometimes baffling, however. Wilmer, a white Briton, racializes everything, linking what happened in free jazz to Black struggles for freedom in society. Litweiler also focuses on Black musicians, but he sometimes seems to find the music an excuse to write well about it. At the end of his book, he rises to rhetorical grandstanding, suggesting that free jazz can alter human consciousness above all other modern innovations, whether technological or spiritual. 

How does understanding, and even liking, any kind of music alter your consciousness about anything outside music itself?  Beats me. I'm with W.H. Auden, who once declared "Poetry makes nothing happen" and Oscar Wilde, who proclaimed "All art is quite useless."

I have no idea if this trio subscribes to the idea that free jazz is as serious as your life, or my life. To some degree, it's serious to the musicians, possibly up to the level of life itself.  But for every moment I enjoyed, there were times I was simply at sea. 

On the one hand, Allee seemed to know what he was doing, as he typically does. At other times, he sounded merely tentative, as though any guess as to what to play next would be as valid as his more assertive passages. Parker moved adeptly around the drum set and brought into play a tambourine and a string-instrument bow drawn upward on a cymbal's edge. That's all well and good, and added color and texture. As to the context of everything he did, that was anybody's guess as to its suitability.

Glover began with mutterings in multiphonics, executed confidently. His technique for producing multiple tones at once, largely woody and buzzing, seemed secure and was employed often throughout the performance. I noticed that his multiphonics occurred in slow music, which made me wonder: Is this the emotional weight multiphonics carries, to evoke mysterious or reflective moods only? Or is it that multiphonics simply don't work if the player attempts to go fast? Or is there no particular meaning as to when they are employed and they are just another facet of the variety available to the clarinet, and a freakish one at that?

Occasionally the trio would get into a groove with somewhat familiar characteristics. Then the groove would be abandoned. Was there a collective feeling that a groove is boring, or even a fear that the musicians would find it too attractive to continue in that vein if they didn't soon move on? At any rate, the trio spent a lot of time out of the groove, in what jazz musicians sometimes call "rubato," in which phrases float untethered and don't settle into any tempo. This is part of what underlines the notion of "free," as such playing does in all too many solo introductions and codas in conventional jazz.

A significant evocation of earlier music was when Glover would bring up the four-note signature phrase of "A Love Supreme," the highly venerated John Coltrane piece. Not a bad idea, but what did it mean in these surroundings? One often hears it quoted in solos, because it's such a treasured anchor, and it shifts readily over the middle range of any instrument, subject to infinite sequences, if desired.  Glover knew when to move on, fortunately. But here it had something of the feeling of a magnificent torso without limbs. I could find more relevance in a soloist's "Love Supreme" quotation in such a standard as "Falling in Love With Love," where Coltrane's interval skips would make a nice contrast to the song's repeated notes. And there's that title resonance, too.

Oh, please think outside the box for once! I can hear someone saying. I will grant free jazz a certain integrity, though I can't always grasp it. In the introduction to "As Serious as Your Life," Wilmer tells an anecdote about a country blues musician of whom an admiring colleague said: "Shorty's a real free-form guitar player; he don't play nothing right!"

Well, despite my questions about the import of what they did, let me end by saying that, whatever it might have meant, Glover and his bandmates seemed to play lots of things right Wednesday night.

[Photo by Rob Ambrose]