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Music CD - Jimmy Giuffre: Free Fall
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Music CD: Free Fall
Artist: Jimmy Giuffre
List Price: $10.98
Our Price: $9.96
Your Save: $ 1.02 ( 9% )
Availability: Usually ships in 4 to 7 weeks
Manufacturer: Columbia/Legacy Euro
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Tracks:
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1. Propulsion
2. Three We
3. Ornothoids
4. Dichotomy
5. Man Alone
6. Spasmodic
7. Yggdrasill
8. Divided Man
9. Primordial Call
10. Five Ways
11. Present Notion
12. Motion Suspended
13. Future Plans
14. Past Mistakes
15. Time Will Tell
16. Let's See
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 5099706544623
Format: Import
Label: Columbia/Legacy Euro
Manufacturer: Columbia/Legacy Euro
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Columbia/Legacy Euro
Release Date: 1998-09-01
Studio: Columbia/Legacy Euro
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Fabulous Journey Into Your Own Future
Comment: However annoying, saddening, distressing the fact may be, it shouldn't be surprising that this great recording is not a popular one. I would like to address the reasons for this lack of mainstream recognition (even mainstream jazz recognition) because I think that precisely what keeps this recording from being more widely acknowledged is also precisely what will in time prove to be the reasons for its recognition as a great and important recording.
Personally, I love this recording deeply, but it is a very difficult one to review in a really meaningful, not overly technical, way. Even the best, most sensitive listeners are still beginners in learning to translate into rational verbal language the emotions that are summoned by music in which there is a pervasive, highly skillful, and genuinely artistic use of dissonance and irregular rhythm. I think music is an experience that always hits the listener on an emotional level first, regardless of the sophistication level of the listener, and then filters into whatever intellectual channels the listener may possess. But at the same time, the listener's emotional reaction can be highly conditioned by habit and convention even of a very intellectual sort. So obviously one of the first things this recording runs up against in the listener is how this particular listener reacts emotionally to dissonance, and lots of it. And there is also the fact that this listener is most likely going to be a jazz fan since this recording is categorized as jazz, but this recording is as influenced by certain strains of modern classical music (Berg, Bartok) as it is by jazz, and jazz fans can be as closed-minded as anyone about what they accept in music. But what I want to address specifically is the question of artistic dissonance and the emotions it expresses and induces.
Music, as a language that reaches very deeply into human emotion in a non-verbal way, is difficult to describe even when the emotions it summons are familiar and commonly shared, but when it starts probing and expressing unfamiliar emotions then it is difficult to avoid descriptions, if the listener is interested enough to even attempt a description, that are obviously overly reliant on merely technical terms that can never really reach the heart of the art. And I have also come to believe that the best dissonant music is revealing of emotions that are genuinely different from and just as valid in themselves as any that are expressed by consonance in music, but more importantly they are emotions that we are not deeply familiar with yet. Many people cannot at all relate, or comfortably relate, to music that does not resolve itself with some familiar consonance whether it be of a simple or more complex nature. There are listeners who love Charlie Parker or Miles Davis and even Coltrane, but they can't even begin to relate to Jimmy Giuffre's FREE FALL. Why? The alienated listeners are usually ready with an array of answers to this question, but I find these answers to be usually revealing of simple prejudices and an unwillingness to open certain doors inside the listeners. The answers are never valid music criticism of a really objective sort. No one can demonstrate that Jimmy Giuffre, Paul Bley, and Steve Swallow are not first-rate musicians by any standard or that their playing is not first-rate on this recording, so it comes down to whether the listener simply likes this music or not. And this takes us back to the question of dissonance that has a minimum of that reassuring cushion of consonance and regularity in rhythm. So what is dissonance in music?
For many people it is simply those notes (combinations of notes) that you must avoid when playing or composing music for what you are doing to still be music and not just NOISE. But how is it determined what those notes are? My contention is that these forbidden notes, when used by real artists, express and induce emotions that these listeners simply don't want to feel. The raw material of music, that amazing spectrum of measured sounds that corresponds to something profoundly deep in the human being, is an integrated whole. It does not in fact have disposable elements. All the elements are essential parts of the whole. The tritone and the minor 2nd are absolutely valid elements in the vocabulary of music. Though we, in our present condition, may find them unsettling in contrast with 3rds or minor 3rds or major 7th's or flatted 7th's, they still relate to genuine human emotions and are not merely a confusion of emotion or a warping of emotion. They are valid terms in the language of music and to deny them is to deny an element of one's own humanity and, in my view, a deeply and even critically needed element. It is very difficult for me to articulate the emotions I feel when I listen to this fabulous recording, but I know that they are deep and real and indicative of dimensions of experience that humans must and will go consciously into or pay a price of stagnation and even retardation. I am not exaggerating in the least. Great artists are our truest guides in the often dense darkness of our evolving (unrolling) into the realization of our own potential. If you don't know this recording then you should. If you like jazz and you also like modern classical then at the very least I can guarantee that you will find this recording very interesting and you might even, as I did, fall deeply in love with the genius of Giuffre. Even if you don't agree with me about the prophetic nature of genuine art it will be a valuable addition to your music collection. If you don't like this recording because it doesn't sound like "jazz" to you then all I can say is, Grow up, Look up, Look ahead.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Stunning! It should be more famous
Comment: I came to this album as a fan of free jazz (and indeed free improvisation) who was chiefly interested in Jimmy Giuffre because he'd played with Jim Hall, a mainstream jazz guitarist whose work I love. I read the back of the CD with a certain amount of surprise, as I'd never heard Giuffre's stuff and assumed on the basis of descriptions I'd read of his work that he was a fairly mainstream figure.
Imagine my surprise. 'Free Fall' is nothing less than one of the most ground-breaking and brilliant recordings in jazz, an essential counterpart to other more famous (and equally fine) contemporary ventures into pure improvisation like Ornette Coleman's 'Free Jazz' and John Coltrane's 'Ascension'. Giuffre's album sounds nothing like either of those great recordings, but it is no less intense, imaginative and ahead of its time.
The clarinet is an instrument that I normally associate with older jazz, apart of course from the bass clarinet of the late great Eric Dolphy, and Giuffre's playing here is a revelation (at least, to me). His attention to timbre and tone is acute. Some of this music reminds me (in a good way) of the chamber music of one of my favourite modern composers, Anton Webern. Paul Bley and Steve Swallow provide forward-thinking and acute accompaniment on a good number of the cuts, but I think that this is really Giuffre's record. He summons up a huge variety of moods from the humble clarinet.
This CD has changed my mental picture of the history of jazz. It ought to be on anyone's top 10 list of great avant-jazz recordings of the 60s. Not to be missed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Another Classic Giuffre
Comment: Another Giuffre gem. Clever and innovative. If you enjoy clarinet small ensemble work this jazz will likely satisfy you. Three kindred spirits at their professional peak, completely emmersed in their well thought out project. I recommend also Giuffre's '1961', Michael Moore's 'Chicoutimi' and 'Bering', and the Ben Goldberg-Kenny Wollesen duet disk, 'The Relative Value of Things'.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A strange musical exploration worth investigation
Comment: This is one of those albums which, before you can be truly critical of it, you must understand what it is. This album was made with the understanding that some, indeed maybe large chunks, may not "work", or that it may only appeal or connect with small numbers of people. When reviewed with this understanding in mind I must give it 4 stars; the album is a unique direction in free jazz; the jazz rhythm section was very much still a part of free jazz at this point and the idea of taking more of a "Euro" approach, with a chamber "ensemble" idea (and henceforth removing the pulsating drums), is an interesting one. It has always been easy for me to detect whether free music is just self indulgent junk or intelligently crafted sound sculpture, and this one is firmly in the latter category. In the lp notes, Swallow discusses the long rehearsals and the intensity of them. You can hear the results of this hard work in the album. However this album stops just short of total perfection for my taste; I think that the group should have been exploited far more; "The Five Ways" works so much better than the solo clarinet improvisations; the solo things are fine, but the balance between those and the ensemble numbers are not quite where they should be. However, this sort of problem always exists with records that try to reinvent the musical wheel, so this is certainly forgiveable; had the group stayed on longer in the sixties they probably would have had records that would develop on what worked so well on Free Fall. Still, this album is a classic; as a composer and guitarist there is much for me to learn from Giuffre's unique approach.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Out on a Limb
Comment: There once was a Lennie Tristano tune called "Out on a Limb", but while the pianist's contributions to the realm of free music has been known for decades, this Giuffre album has been a hidden treasure for more than 30 years ... and I can't help asking why?!
Perhaps because this music can't be defined as jazz in the purest sense, it's obviously white and bears no traces of black improvised music at all. By the time of the recording ('62) Jimmy Giuffre had found a musical language all his own and even abandoned his well-known clarinet chalumeau sound, which had rightfully made him one of the princes of the 50's West Coast Scene, in order to develop something new, though you'll still recognize him very easily. The music has much in common with European improvised music, Schoenberg unmistakably just around the corner. It doesn't swing , except for some bars where especially Steve Swallow shows that this is a jazz ensemble after all. But it's not merely an experiment but an accomplished
invention, almost a feat. The trio is undoubtedly well-rehearsed and that makes me wonder why JG relied so much on playing solo, where he encounters his creative limits sometimes before he has come to a logic end. It leaves something to desire, even more he would never again be given the opportunity to record with musicians of that calibre (Swallow/Bley) for a major company.
But they were really "out on a limb" and one only needs to take a glimpse at the current improvised music landscape in Europe to discover that this group was a tough forerunner.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre was solidly established as the leader of unorthodox but coolly restrained groups when he enlisted pianist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow in 1961. With this trio, he would take listeners into challenging terrain and offer the avant-garde a different direction--witness the 2-CD reissue 1961. Often taking its style cues from European modernism, this group mixed pointillism and atonality while moving seamlessly between composition and free improvisation. Free Fall, from 1962, was the group's ultimate recording and Giuffre's most radical statement, balancing duos and trios with unaccompanied clarinet improvisations that explored novel sounds, spontaneous structure, and uncommon brevity. Quietly revolutionary and brilliant in itself, this music was the culmination of the "Third Stream" synthesis and also paved the way for a younger generation of radicals. Today it still sounds fresh. This CD restores edited portions and adds five unissued clarinet solos that range from spiky inventions to the original lyricism of "Future Plans." -- Stuart Broomer
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