Leaning House Jazz: Wessell " Warmdaddy" Anderson Live at the Village Vanguard

Thinking of Wess Anderson This recording is a hot plate. Watch yourself: you could get blistered handling it. At the Village Vanguard, the most durable jazz bandstand in the world, Wessell Anderson is caught in the act of serious swinging, track after track after track. Yes, he is heard painting the air with steam, or crooning on sweet subjects with operatic intensity, or playing the talking blues in one place when not the rippling blues in another. The result is that the highly significant relationship this man has to the living state of contemporary jazz saxophone is made superbly audible. As with all superior talents, Anderson is himself and he is all of jazz saxophone, from Sidney Bechet to John Coltrane to all of the ways in which the various languages of jazz reed expression are successfully mixed at this point. His virtuoso command of the basic elements of the music makes him both traditional and contemporary. In a given improvisation, he is able to make you feel the way people have always felt and the way people feel right now: the past functions in an individually created orbit that includes the moment's accumulation of human emotion. That is why it has been the pleasure of all who love the sound of jazz saxophone to hear him develop as with such deepening command over the years. That development is a signal aspect of what we have come to expect of those younger musicians who have the courage to work out the very difficult elements that give clarity to the artistic sound of homemade adventure, which is what any improvisation is. The improviser is on an expedition and, along the way, sometimes beat by beat, he is trying to capture the present in a net of compelling order. No young player tracks the wild thing of the present with greater skill than Wess Anderson, who is a growing expert at bringing the moment back alive. Capturing with his saxophone the successive conditions of the now in all its vibrance has become his powerful business, the jiffied up joy of his accomplishment. In order to bring the present back alive–for your entertainment, for his own sense of value, and for the elevation of the human spirit–Anderson uses the fundamental elements of jazz, which are 4/4 swing (fast, medium, and slow), the blues, the ballad, and Afro-Hispanic rhythms (which now include adaptions from the Third World at large). These are the musical particulars that have been in place since jazz came into its position as a high order twentieth century art. Everybody who has become anybody of innovative importance or who has carried the aesthetic flag of the idiom with brilliant skill works through them. Over and over, they have been reinterpreted but have maintained their essential importance because those are the elements that separate the sound of this art from all others in the world, that make unique its mixture of African, European, and Caribbean sources. Anderson is totally at home with all of those fundamentals. He is a first caliber swinger. His blues can go to the bottom of the gutbucket then turn that gutbucket over and transform it into a helmet or a skyscraper or blast it into space as a vehicle of abstract imagination. The tone that he has worked on is now so communicative that the saxophonist is able to get to the substance of lyric statement at the highest possible speed, which is just one fat note laid on the air, a note so thick with expression that the musical experience on the part of the listener is immediate: The music begins not with a touching phrase but at the every instant that the sound is heard. In the arena that began with what Jelly Roll Morton called ?the Spanish Tinge,? when the rhythms step outside of the toe-tapping, stomping, or shuffling beats of straight ahead swing, Anderson feels no pain and exhibits no uneasiness. In all, the development of Wessell Anderson is the cultivation of a full array of tools meant not for display but for the tracking and trapping job of bagging all the feeling that circulates on the tip of the tongue of the air. The saxophonist has been working on this kind of stuff for a number of years. When he was just a chubby kid assigned the role of playing Charlie Parker's improvisation on ?Koko? for a Jazz at Lincoln Center concert that focused on the music of the alto saxophone innovator, he caught the attention of Charles McPherson, the overwhelmingly volatile master and extender of Parker's language, perhaps the hottest rebop, bebop, post-loop, hop-hop alto saxophonist on the planet. McPherson noted that, "Now He's the one to watch. He's got the thing. He understands the music. He's going to be all right." During his years with Wynton Marsalis, Anderson matured and evolved into an extraordinarily melodic improviser in an era when linear invention is not always accorded the level of celebration it forever deserves. But one stands up to one's era or sits down or is knocked down. Wess Anderson stands up with an extemporaneous theme as his goal and a saxophone in his hands. When he plays, there is little reliance on the common, up and down stuff that may well fit the harmony of a tune but has not much to do with the thematic direction set by the melody line. This writer first became fully aware of that tendency in Anderson's playing when listening, over and over, to his improvisation on "Sometimes It Goes Like That,? from Marsalis's Blue Interlude. Anderson finishes out that piece with a feature of pure melody from start to finish, every note part of a very long line of such quality that it distinctly separated him from the saxophone kiddies of the jazz world. He was there. His equipment was fully geared That kind of playing is heard throughout this recording. What Anderson brings to the improvisational table is a sense of how to use all kinds of elements in his explosive improvisations. As well as he understands the primacy of melody, he also recognizes that repetition at the right places can create a compelling rhythmic force that lines up the rhythm section and mashes in on the listener's attention through the eternal remaking of the chant, a device that goes back to the collective experience of the species. The saxophonist might play a very complex melodic improvisation then begin to back into riffs, each one getting stronger and stronger, reversing the process of starting with something simple and building to complexity. This conception is so effective that Anderson might begin as a featured player then become, as he does by the end of his work on "Now's the Time," a compression of a big band arranger. He works the other way on "Dis Here," where the saxophonist begins with melodic repetitions and superb interplay with drummer Jaz Sawyer (which is something that happens over and over throughout the recording) before stretching his imagination into rhythmically and thematically intricate developments. One gets that improvising-arranging experience on a number of tracks because Anderson is such a well ordered improviser who is also filled with basic magic and a startling sense of contrast. The saxophonist always sounds as though he is creating a more and more complete context for himself at the same time that he is improvising within it. The combination of virtuosity, form, and statements so imposing but free of hysteria that they make the walls sweat is a combination evident from the variations on the theme of the humorous first track. Or on the standard, "I'll Remember April." Or in the mood shifts achieved from his interpretation of the repeating breaks of "Quick Scheme." On a ballad, he has the character in his tone that allows him to create Lyric drama such as he does on "The Star-Crossed Lovers," where, perhaps for the first time on record, the song actually sounds like the emotionally wooziness defining the couple that the adolescent Romeo and Juliet were. "Soul Eyes" is worth the price of the listening time for just the extraordinary ending of Anderson's feature, which has an Armstrong-like bravura, something that one encounters in almost all of these improvisations: the moment when everything is stripped away in the interest of a monumental sensation put in place by melody. The blues is a welcome home for Anderson and he knows how to handle it at any tempo. When the saxophonist plays those blues he knows how to call all of the children home, which is what Buddy Bolden is said to have done at the very beginning of jazz, when this century was still crawling around in the baby pen. But the Wessell Anderson blues is not a baby thing. It is the sound of a man who knows where he comes from and where all of us are going. He can make you feel the way people have always felt and the way our world touches our hearts right now. In short, Mr. Anderson is an artist and all we need to do in order to celebrate his gifts is listen to him. As we listen to him, we also listen to pianist Xavier Davis, bassist Steve Kirby, and drummer Jaz Sawyer, who comprise a first class rhythm section ever attentive to each other and to Anderson, using swing as the fundamental issue. They line up their beats well, discover intriguing syncopations, even, on "Red Top," create a double meter of duplex and triple interplay. The heat and the sensitivity of their work is further proof of just how well jazz is doing, since any art is only doing as well as the quality of the work its practitioners bring to it. Jazz continues to draw high quality talent and those talents continue to develop their relationships to its power. When you get to the end of this hot plate, you will understand just what that means. Stanley Crouch