"For over twenty-five years, the WHO Trio have toured internationally, infusing the rich heritage of jazz and improvised music with contemporary sounds. The focus of their Willisau recording is Ellington compositions, but their approach to him is a radical one. Their interpretations raise general issues for interpretation of songs in jazz. Many songs have become known as "standards". The term "standard" appeared in the late 40s and early 50s, and refers to what became known as the Great American Songbook of classic show-tunes and film-themes, written mostly between the 1920s and 1950s. A working jazz musician knows them intimately; they provide a fruitful basis for improvisation, and a common language. "I'm a jazz player, but I don't know any standards" makes no sense.

Before the sixties, hit songs came from musicals - Sinatra's fifties albums were replete with them. With the Beatles, hit songs no longer originated in Broadway musicals. So increasingly, "standards" now belong to an earlier era, and are known only to jazz fans - my music students are probably familiar with "Summertime", "Over The Rainbow", "Moon River" and very few others. The songs on this album are "jazz standards" - a smaller category of songs, written by jazz musicians such as Ellington, Monk, Coltrane and Davis. Many of these composers, and a few others - Morton, Ellington, Monk, Gil Evans - are jazz composers in a further sense of writing their songs, and those by others, for a band. So "the role of the composer in jazz" refers to

(1) pop and jazz composers of songs including standards

(2) jazz composers like Morton, Ellington and Gil Evans, and finally

(3) the improviser as composer - improvisation as a compositional method

The trio's improvised treatments of their Ellington material certainly count as a compositional method in its own right. However, Hemingway stresses that their selection of songs is unusual: "A 'standard' is played often by many different musicians over time and so made popular. But some of Ellington's and Strayhorn's repertoire that we play are more obscure, such as 'Self Portrait of the Bean' - which I am unaware of anyone else of note interpreting - and 'Birmingham Breakdown'."

"What is a standard, what is a song (with lyric) and what is both?" Hemingway continues. "The songs are sometimes originally instrumental but eventually incorporate lyrics. Lester Young could not play a song he did not know the lyric to. I raise this because the examples I cited above have nothing to do with 'standards'. We are focused on what happened with these pieces in the hands of its creators and the remarkable orchestra which dedicated its life to this music."

Although in jazz the song or standard becomes a basis for improvisation, there's an idea of authenticity. Bill Carrothers told me a story that in Miles Davis's mid-60s band, Wayne Shorter wanted to use a song but the leader rejected it, "because I don't know what that tune wants". Carrothers continued: "When you start to impose your willon the song, it doesn't quite work. [I have] to refer back to its original essence in some way - or what I think the essence is!" Trumpeter Brad Goode, in contrast, commented to me that "My goal is to use the song as a means of expressing my own essence...I need to know a song to a great depth before I perform it [so it] can become an adventure in exploring new possibilities, rooted in spontaneity and interaction...".

Songs can be reinterpreted in many ways without losing their identity. When Bill Evans recreated "Beautiful Love", he transformed a rather trite pop song into art music, finding possibilities never previously conceived. Lee Konitz's method of looking at the original publication, then making incremental changes to the theme rather than treating it as a set of changes, encourages in-depth treatment. But "updating", as in Wynton Marsalis's Standard Time or the work of pianist Jessica Williams, undermines the material's integrity.

On the Willisau album, conventional improvisation on theme and harmonies often transmutes into something looser and more allusive. Hemingway occasionally plays harmonica, and there's a recording of Duke speaking over the performance of "Fleurette Africaine", followed by vocalisations from Hemingway. But the trio rightly object to my use of the term "deconstruction".

For Michel Wintsch, "It's not deconstruction, it's not intellectual, it's just joyfully playing with these object we love." Three things in particular inspired him in Ellington's music:

"The harmonic rhythm: The way chords don't have the same lengths - four bars for one chord, and later two chords in a bar, and so on - opening spaces, and different speeds. Suggesting windows, modal possibilities.

Object-oriented composition: simple riffs he is putting in situations - 'Angelica', 'Wig Wise', 'In A Mellotone'. This is an invitation to grab these objects and do my own construction out of them.

The deep sensible and intelligent mixture between major and minor, between occidental cadences/harmony and the blues, this pentatonic reminiscence beating deep in my stomach. How the music is between masculine and feminine, between tension-resolution events and modal-meditational-spiritual spaces. Ellington was a master of that.

Through all this, his compositions touch very broad artistic fields: tenderness, humour, anger, sadness, joy, and always in movement, in a dance, in a vibration."

Hemingway comments that "We are in the business of transformation, applying our knowledge of improvising together for twenty-five years, interwoven with our resonance with these melodies and forms. We have found our collective way with honouring what these pieces express to us, through our personal language." He agrees that there's a concept of authenticity. "The feeling of swing is our own, but shaped by the pieces we are playing. Authenticity is acquired through assimilating traditions, and one of the traditions is finding one's personal way of sounding, of swinging, of conversing with each other." The result is one of the finest, and most unusual, of Ellington tributes."-Andy Hamilton, May 27, 2024

This album has been reviewed on our magazine:


The Squid's Ear!