John Esposito: Down Blue Marlin Road
John Esposito, Defying Gravity
By Kyle Gann
To talk to John Esposito about jazz (and unlike the stereotypical taciturn jazz guru, he’s happy to talk about it), is to realize that he thinks of it not as a repertoire or a style, but as kind of a logical universe. Songs, standards, compositions, are partial and interlocking maps of that universe. Those maps can be turned backwards and upside-down, or one map imposed on another. Any song can call any other song to mind, and in fact, any song is every other song – just a variant, with its own particular inner logic, on how to get from the expectant two chord at the beginning to the pungently altered one chord at the end.
In Art Tatum’s music, this kind of thinking results in an eclecticism whereby any song can turn up as a momentary, stream-of-consciousness quote in another song. For Esposito, it results in something quite the opposite: a kind of purity in which quotation is hardly possible, since each song already contains every other song.
Also (though you won’t learn it from this album), John is one of those supremely versatile pianists who can sit down and play a standard in the style of Willie “The Lion” Smith, then in the style of Bud Powell, then in the style of Herbie Hancock, and on and on into the night. Once again, this could be a chance for an eclectic mix. Almost as a reaction against that, however, John has finely honed his own jazz playing to sound unlike everyone else’s. He strips his tunes down to the essence, not in the Thelonious Monk way of using few notes, but by isolating archetypal melodic figures as signifiers of the original (or any similar) song. (Is this what postmodern jazz sounds like?) As a stylist, and also as a person, he is acerbic, ruthlessly unsentimental, yet playful, sly, lightning fast, and – as you’ve already been able to tell if you’re listening while reading – endlessly inventive.
On this disc John plays standards, and while he knows them all, he doesn’t respect them all equally. Some are included because he’s sick and tired of being asked to play them, and he turns them inside-out to make them his own. I mean it literally. That old mushy evergreen “Autumn Leaves,” for instance? He told me he plays the tune here backwards. I was incredulous. But he showed me the chord chart, I listened to the tune, and sure enough, after an opening recognizable reference, he plays through the melody notes in reverse order. That’s not supposed to work: jazz harmony is based on a supposedly irreversible forward pull toward the one chord. But defying gravity is John’s great delight.
He defies it rhythmically as well. John’s own original compositions tend toward odd metrical patterns of 11 or 13 beats, but in standards, he applies rhythm as a shaping force so subtle as to sometimes pass unnoticed. Listen to “I’ll Remember April” – his version, unlike the original, switches back and forth between 3/4 and 4/4 meter, and if you listen carefully you can hear those changes. More likely, though, you’ll be tapping your foot or nodding your head in 3/4, then at some point realize it’s in 4/4 and correct yourself, barely in time to have the music switch back to 3/4 and fool you again. Drummer Pete O’Brien, for all his propulsive rhythmic energy, exerts a very light touch on the meter that matches John’s own, and it’s often not until they coincide at the end of a verse, like Indian musicians playing off the tala, that you realize how much in control the rhythmic flow is. Meanwhile, bassist Ira Coleman participates as an equally subtle independent line, not just playing roots of chords but filling out a texture of elegant give-and-take.
And so on for the other songs. Body and Soul is turned inside out, the bridge appearing before the melody you’re used to. On the feverish first of three renditions of “Just One of Those Things” on track 2, John’s melody floats somewhere above the melody you’re used to – perhaps an illusion caused by taking liberties with the mode. Track 6 gives us the same song with a lighter, more traditional touch, but hardly more sentimental, and framed now with Ira Coleman’s bass patterns in 9/4 meter. Phrases from On Green Dolphin Street are rearranged into Down Blue Marlin Road. Red Cross never uses the original rhythm changes chord progression.
It’s a virtuoso feat of recomposition as well as performance, but its purpose is to extract newness from the familiar, to give you notes you’ve heard before but rearranged so you can hear them in a refreshing way. It’s jazz purified to the essence, and performed with an infectious love of jazz’s inner logic.