HOW IT GOES NOW
by Stanley Crouch
Liner Notes to UP JUMPED BENNY

One of the best things happening in jazz today is the bandstand combination of past masters and talented whipper-snappers. When everything gets right, what results is music that has both the reflective substance of time spent at the craft and the ambitious bite of focused youth. We hear that phenomenon on this recording, where Benny Golson has surrounded himself with youngsters. This is good for him and good for them. He can count on their energy and and they can count on his knowledge. This is how the culture of jazz is most truly passed on--up there on the bandstand, back there in the dressing room discussing music, out there on the bus, in the hotel, on the train, in the air, where stories of the old days and of mythic personalities are told, some funny, some strange, some tragic, a few remaining in the memory with the force of something that will never ever leave.

Golson, with a sound now larger and more given to poetic subtleties and grand gestures than ever, is a long-term virtuoso. He is one of those whose experience brings us all the way up to date by addressing John Coltrane's harmonic details and the traditions that lay beneath them. Golson also lets us hear his very personal redefinition of the classic sound of that tenor saxophone as inherited from Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas, Chu Berry, Ben Webster, and Lucky Thompson. In his playing Golson gives the horn the lyric textures of contemplation and, at will, achieves aural recognition of the rough and tumble ways of the big city. The delicate revelations of high order intimacy are as clear to him as the overcrowding, the confusion, the vitality, and the will to civilization that we see in our best cities. He is an extremely sophisticated man.

That is one of the reasons why Benny Golson doesn't fit any of the stereotypes about jazz musicians--even the ones they might put on themselves. If you were to meet him in the company of his extremely fine and equally sophisticated wife on the neutral ground of an art show in lower Manhattan , you might not think he was a musician of any sort, jazz or otherwise. Benny Golson —to the confusion of all who think they can read people like crystal balls—doesn't exhibit any of the superficial characteristics we associate with musicians, in or out of the concert hall. He is neither distant nor inarticulate, given neither to slang nor mannerisms, neither pretentious nor incapable of having himself a big, big laugh. He reminds one of those jazz musicians from the thirties whom Ralph Ellison described as men given to carrying themselves like college professors or high church deacons once they stepped off stage and left the environment of the night club or the concert hall. They were relaxed and their intellectual interests might be broad. They weren't "just like everybody else" once they put their instruments down. These were special people, on or off the bandstand.

Throughout his career that special quality has been obvious in the playing and the composing of Benny Golson. From his background in Philadelphia, where he knew John Coltrane as a young musician who then had to walk the bar and honk like a foghorn in rhythm, all the way through his experiences on notable bandstands, composing for television in Hollywood, and working in the various ensembles one hears him with now, there has never been any laxity once he starts blowing through that mouthpiece and fingering the pearl buttons of that saxophone. Then everything becomes clear, which is probably why he began playing music in the first place. It is the chosen art of a person intent on speaking with clarity to friends, acquaintances, and strangers.

The sound he had forty years ago has gone through some changes. So has his rhythm. What it all adds up to is the more philosophical kind of engagement that develops with maturity and many, many years of becoming progressively familiar with an instrument. It is also the sound that knows the meaning of "many thousands gone." Benny Golson is one of those musicians whose very being connects us to the grandeur of the jazz story because he was wide awake at the start of his career, back when many of the seminal giants still walked the earth, their powers intact. Such musicians as those he heard or worked with could have tones carrying information which had arrived from the last century. The trumpet, from Louis Armstrong to Miles Davis, was having its bell blown off nightly; as was the tenor saxophone, from Coleman Hawkins to Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane; the piano from Willie "The Lion" Smith to Ahmad Jamal; the bass from Pops Foster to Charles Mingus; the drums from Zutty Singleton to Elvin Jones, and so on. It was like that and Benny Golson heard it and that is clear when you hear him.

All of that comes forward clear as a bell in instances like "Up Jumped Spring," "For Old Times Sake" and "Whisper Not." On the first, that sound reorients the melody and gives it a more mysterious quality, however happy it might seem. Then Golson moves through the song with such broad-toned ease, working with a few motives and gestures, one of which is a trill. He leans against the waltz meter or melts his notes through it. On the second, we hear the kind of swing that Golson has at his command, the beat wide and the fast passages of arpeggios placed so compositionally that they have dramatic effect.

On the last, that sound of his is so explicitly human that the very statement of the melody carries a particular majesty. What makes these tracks so special for me is that Golson's vast knowledge doesn't impede his expression or the quality of his rhythm, which has as much to do with the ballroom as it does the practice room. None of which is to say that the other tracks aren't good, which they are. After all, this is about Benny Golson. But we all do have our favorites.

The rhythm section of Kevin Hays, Dwayne Burno, and Carl Allen is a triangle of serious young talent. Each of these men knows his instrument and is well aware of the precedents set by his artistic ancestors. I have heard them all on various bandstands here in Manhattan over the last few years. While each of these guys has a quite different personality, what they have in common is the determination to make the most of their individual talents. The leader picked the right guys. They listen to each other and they listen to him. They know how to catch a groove and hold on to it. And, like all masters of the game, Benny Golson knows just what to do with what they provide.

© Stanley Crouch