Alto and soprano saxophonist Osby is one of those vital figures who have been somewhat obscured from view – beyond the core of listeners who still follow jazz developments – by the shrinking publicity for anyone who is not a household name, and by the jazz correctness preached by the Marsalis/Stanley Crouch axis. In fact Osby is a friend of Wynton Marsalis and says that he has been helpful to him personally, but the two of them argue quite vehemently about music. The main conduit for visits by the important-but-obscured is the Wangaratta Festival Of Jazz. Osby was here primarily for the Perth Festival, and as has happened with Wangaratta, he was offered a Sydney performance as an offshoot by SIMA and another job in Melbourne by the Melbourne Jazz Cooperative. Glorious opportunism.
Those who follow these things will be familiar with Osby’s work as part of M-Base, the new thing at the beginning of an era when new things of any depth were being marginalised. Some of M-Base’s recordings are still exciting and vivid – and perhaps more accessible with the lapse of time. At the time they were suggestive of the emerging cyber world – a theme we will take up later. Shame shame, I never heard the edition of Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition with Osby. Drummer Simon Barker said that hearing them live was a life-changing experience. The Edition I have on record, with Arthur Blythe on alto, was the very stuff, I felt strongly at the time, that should have been presented and publicised. Powerfully rhythmic, colourful and exciting – it was the stuff that would, I was sure, be a revelation to people who had fixed jazz as a retro music or a lightweight ‘jazzy’ fad. But here in Australia there is no glut of writers or editors interested in jazz, other than as an easily placed cliche.
Osby, who has also worked extensively with a rap group and served brilliantly as a sideman with Andrew Hill, has more recently recorded for Blue Note in more conventional post-bop settings. I have enjoyed these a great deal too. Whatever the setting, his playing is unique. This was indeed the setting in which he played here, with the great local team of pianist Matt McMahon, bassist Brett Hirst and drummer Felix Bloxom.
To hear a unique, if under-celebrated figure like Osby opens another path into his recordings when you go home and listen to them. Live and, on this rare occasion for me at the Basement, right up close, his sound is more beautiful than I had fully realised. It was lighter at first than I had expected, but brilliantly projected. It is a darkish alto sound – darker than his old colleague Steve Coleman’s, and sometimes more astringent – with a kind of citrous tang. At first there was a disjunction with the local band as Bloxom opened out with huge energy but, to my ears and feet a slight disconnection to the tangerine zephyrs of Osby’s lines. This sorted itself out very rapidly and Bloxom more than justified his growing reputation – and the national prize he won at Wangaratta – with a night-long supply of energy, flow, explosiveness, hair trigger reflexes and stimulating textures – all in the right place at the right time.
McMahon and Hirst were at their best. Osby treated the locals as an organic unit and in large part integrated himself with them rather than stamping his identity. He didn’t have to stamp his identity; it was in every line and inflection. Osby’s maze of arpeggios, lines snaking in from unexpected angles, whizzes and zips, often led to emphatic large figures – even riffs – which bounced on and pushed the rhythm. An aspect of his playing is related to the highly decorated, finely articulated work of masters like Benny Carter. It can be heard as an ultra-modern extension of that, and in its modern angularity and intricate subdivisions of the beat it can suggest circuitry, and perhaps even the snapping of synapses as ideas race in from different regons of the brain. A phrase might seem to disappear suddenly, only to continue an octave above, with a quantum leap effect.
Apparent discontinuities built into a mosaic, and a depth of field was suggested by notes all over the range being touched deftly at different volumes, giving even a suggestion of Webern. Even the most complicated playing danced on the rhythm – as Osby himself lightly bounced throughout on the balls of his feet. It was magic, really, moving against the dynamic surges and punctuations of the rhythm section like a complex of buffeting winds.
Increasingly these complexes were set against multiphonic gurgles and roars and cries in the upper register, brain storms or fits of explosive sound. The strange thing was that some people I knew to be jazz listeners asked me at the break what I had thought, in tones of voice that suggested they weren’t really warming to it, while people I had never seen at a jazz gig, or anywhere for that matter, were caught up in it completely. The lesson, I believe, is that if you are going to hear a very different player, you either listen a lot to his records and gain some grasp of it, or you come along in complete innocence. The local musicians all told me they were inspired by the experience. Matt McMahon told me a week later that he was still thinking about it.
Some originals were played that I don’t know, but I recognized one from Osby’s Public disc on Blue Note and one from his highly recommended trio disc Channel Three, his latest on the same label. A ballad was introduced by a long McMahon solo, glorious in its glittering lyricism, space and surprise dissonances. McMahon quoted My One And Only Love and I Can’t Get Started, but I don’t know what the foundation tune was. The two slow ballads I recognized were We’ll Meet Again and Nature Boy. On the first Osby displayed a sweeping rhapsodic approach that would have pleased any saxophone fan, while the second moved into the areas opened up in the lovely tune by Coltrane, while not losing the stately beauty of Nat King Cole.
An extremely fast original and an even faster version of The Song Is You (raising echoes of Charlie Parker’s early 1950s performance on Verve,) saw Osby and the band develop a breathtaking momentum. This was impressive playing from any point of view.
That the locals sounded as if they belonged with Osby almost from beginning to end, through some very different originals, interacting intelligently with his very different vocabulary, speaks of a level of musicianship, of inspired music making, that goes beyond the ability to run the standard paces immaculately behind some visiting straight down the line virtuoso.