Bariton master from Lovejoy appears with Billy Bang and Kahil El’Zabar
By K. Curtis Lyle
For the St. Louis American
Hamiet Bluiett is coming to town. On Saturday, November 26 he will appear at Mad Art Gallery, 1227 So. 12th St. in Soulard, in the TriFactor Jazz Concert also featuring Billy Bang on violin and Kahil El’Zabar on percussion.
Bluiett, the current superstar of the baritone saxophone, was born in Lovejoy, Illinois on September 16, 1940. He was first taught music by an aunt who was a choral director. He began doodling on the clarinet when he was nine. He took up the flute and baritone sax while attending Southern Illinois University. He later joined and served several years in the U.S. Navy.
In the mid-‘60s he moved to St. Louis, where he met and played with many of the musicians who would become the Black Artists Group – Lester Bowie, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Floyd and Shirley Le Flore, Vincent Terrell, Georgia Collins, Muthal Naidoo, Emilio and Pat Cruz, Charles “Bobo” Shaw, Ajule Rutlin, Baikida Carroll and Malinke’ Kenyatta.
He moved on to New York in 1969 and joined Sam Rivers’ large ensemble. In 1972 he joined forces with Charles Mingus and, along with the Orphic pianist Don Pullen, anchored Mingus’ last great band. He left Mingus in 1975.
In 1976 Bluiett played a concert in New Orleans with Julius Hemphill, David Murray and Oliver Lake that became the genesis of the World Saxophone Quartet. For more than a quarter of a century this stellar woodwind quartet has created as unique a sound as any group in the history of jazz. They are still going strong and, although Bluiett continues to be their anchor, their bottom man in the bottom land, he has moved on.
The baritone saxophone has always had a quality in its timbre that forces the player to be alert to outside influences. Its immutability, its refusal to be melded into the song of something other than itself, is its greatest strength and its most annoying quality.
The sax family has the soprano, screaming like a banshee or piercing the eardrum like a laser. The alto can literally laugh and cry. The tenor can sigh at midnight in the dank back seat of any big car or bully a bad crowd in a black bar. The baritone has the tougher task of carrying the bite of a poem or a film or a book.
Hear the long tongue of the baritone? It’s convoluted. It’s complex. It asks no easy questions. It gives no simple answers. It takes a while to get the sound out and it takes an effort to find the line or the frequency along which the player and the listener meet.
Harry Carney was the first great jazz baritone saxophonist. In him I hear the blues transposed to a river of dignified discontent. He was Duke Ellington’s bottom man, best friend, chauffeur and confidant. He was the warm deep voice of music that made the Depression bearable.
Cecil Payne, the first great be-bop baritone player, was Dizzy Gillespie’s longtime collaborator. He anchored the big band that made the great connection between be-bop and Afro-Cuban music. He helped Gillespie re-establish the link between Africa and Afro-America.
Serge Chaloff was Woody Herman’s main man. He was the fourth of the four brothers who rode through World War II with Woody and established the link between the the devastation of an event like the bombing of Pearl Harbor and music’s ability to heal a whole nation through cadence, tempo and intensity.
Leo Parker rode with Ray Charles through the 1950s. He was at the core of Ray’s final fusion of the sacred and the profane. Think of “I Got A Woman” being played at the funeral of the four little girls who were murdered in Birmingham on September 15, 1963. It seems inappropriate at first, even sacriligeous, but wait for the line to unfold, the long tongue to unfurl, and suddenly it works.
Gerry Mulligan brought counterpoint and a cooling of the social and psychic temperature that marked the late fifties and early sixties. It was as if opera and samba could see through the same lens.
Where is Bluiett in this scheme?
The culmination of the horn? The end of the baritone river? Harry Carney’s dignified discontent? Cecil Payne’s linking of the children of Africa? Serge Chaloff’s intensity and healing optimism? Leo Parker’s fusion of the sacred and the profane? Gerry Mulligan’s layered vision of operatic harmony and sambista rhythm?
He’s all of these, and more.
Bluiett and the TriFactor Jazz Concert will be at Mad Art, 1227 So. 12th St. in Soulard, on Saturday, November 26. Tickets are $20 at the door. Two shows at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. More information at www.madart.com.
