After Years of Exploring the Frontiers of Avant-Garde Jazz, Saxophonist Ellery Eskelin Pays a Rare Visit to his Hometown
"When I look back on it and start to articulate what I've been doing, sometimes it's enlightening even for me," says tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin from his New York apartment, describing how he's arrived at his current career point and where he may be headed. Casual and affable, Eskelin, 44, unwinds sentences the way he parses sax phrases: thoughtful, engaging bundles of compact information that can veer into touching, witty, reflective, impassioned, or any other mood ring and back with a seemingly effortless dexterity. He has a quiet voice, almost soft-spoken, and as thoughts become words leaving his lips you suspect that he's hardly exhaling to tickle sound from his larynx. Then you remember that those same lungs power the eyebrow-singeing opening sax salvo of "43 RPM" off the 2003 Hat Hut release
Arcanum Moderne, the eighth album from Eskelin's long-running trio with accordionist/electronics player Andrea Parkins and polyglot percussionist Jim Black.
"I'm not always so methodical in terms of knowing what it is, where I'm going to go," he continues. "I'm much more intuitive. It's not even a verbal process. All of a sudden there comes a sound in my head that I have to deal with. That's how I've always operated in the past. I just work hard to make it happen and document it, and then I look back and I can then trace an arc of development over time. But I don't use that sort of intellectual process to extrapolate into the future."
It's an elliptical evasion of having to put into words what comes naturally, but dealing with the sounds in his head is one of the more frank responses you'll get from a musician trying to describe why and how he does what he does. And however Eskelin has handled it, that internal muse has brought him to where he is now.
It's a journey that started as a child growing up in Baltimore, falling under jazz's spell listening to his mother play Hammond B-3 organ and jazz LPs (particular those of Gene Ammons), through a move to New York's jazz culture cauldron at the dawn of the 1980s, when both the city and the art form experienced growing pains that still afflict both today, and on to his present-day status as a veteran of the so-called "downtown" scene, even though his work with his nearly decade-old trio with Parkins and Black--making its first appearance in Baltimore in almost six years this weekend--incorporates so many sounds and unpacks so many ideas that branding it anything is a fool's errand.
And to hear Eskelin tell his story, his arrival at his unique, doors-wide-open approach follows a causal logic that makes perfect sense every step of the way. His mother brought him to Baltimore in 1961 when he was 2, and--having decided at the age of 10 that he wanted to be a jazz musician--he spent his formative years with the city's jazz community of the 1970s, studying music at Towson University (then Towson State University) under the direction of Stan Kenton arranger, Hank Levy; catching national headliners at the Left Bank Jazz Society's Famous Ballroom; listening to local luminaries such as Mickey Fields at clubs now long gone (the Closet, the Park Plaza Café, the Bandstand in Fells Point); and playing in some of those very clubs with locals such as pianist Bob Butta, receiving an education in improvisation that complemented his formal training.
"Baltimore was a big enough town that there was a lot of talent, a lot of good musicians to play with, a lot of scenes," Eskelin says. "But it was also small enough that musicians were serious enough to want to play well . . . it wasn't so rigid that there was an orthodoxy.
"So it was a good place for me because I studied music in school, but when it came to improvising, I did that by ear. I didn't really understand the technical, theoretical, harmonic information that went into that. I wasn't always as consistent as I could've been. But on the other hand, I was allowed to develop my own idiosyncrasies and my own sound, and by the time I got to New York I got all the knowledge that I needed, and I put it all together in my first couple of years here."
Eskelin arrived in New York in '83 to find a '60s and '70s free-jazz community still fanning its embers and the seeds of the eventual '80s turn toward a neo-classical rebirth just starting to take hold. His straight-up jazz background in Baltimore gelled with that moment, but he soon realized that the old-school jazz model was changing, and that he'd have to adapt.
"I always knew that my personal expression was going to be more inclusive of a lot of other ideas and elements," he says. "I switched gears after the first couple of years in New York, once I realized that the jazz scene that I aspired to was changing and in some ways dying. The writing was on the wall. It became clear to me that I was going to need to do my own music--not only for the fact that I had strong musical ideas, but that in order to establish myself I couldn't depend on trying to be one of 7,000 saxophone players trying to get a gig with three groups."
In addition to working on his own music, he started playing with expressive trumpeter Paul Smoker, bassist Drew Gress, and drummer Phil Haynes in Joint Venture, a wiggy quartet that enabled Eskelin to stretch out his sound, and by the time he released his debut as a leader, 1988's Setting the Standard, he had already forged the beginnings of a muscular lyricism and ever-expanding vocabulary that marks his mature sound.
His unconventional urge found its most sympathetic setting in 1993, when he started playing with Parkins and Black. The trio is unusual not only for its instrumentation--it's a fearlessly nimble rhythmic beast despite the lack of bass--but also for its wide mouth of material. Eskelin's original pieces are a combination of improv and composition written explicitly for the group, but its expansive breadth is best felt in its choices--and executions--of its interpretations, which include an imaginative deconstruction of Thelonious Monk ("We See"), an inspired tackling of Eugene Chadbounre ("Paris Swallowtail"), a daring serration of John McLaughin ("The Dance of the Maya"), and even a blisteringly beautiful take on Gershwin ("Prelude II"). If a noise exists, it's a possible riffing point for this ensemble, and it's one of the few that doesn't split hairs about whether it's "doing" improv or jazz. It is what it is.
"I've never really got hung up on the idea of traditional or mainstream as opposed to avant-garde or as opposed to anything else," Eskelin says. "I think I've always had that. Even when you're talking about avant-garde jazz you're talking about a historical entity that's 40 years old, plus. So growing up and coming of age in the '70s it was just like all this stuff was there and around, and so it was just a natural thing for me."
Now, he's finally getting another opportunity to play in the place where it began for him, where he first started thinking everything he heard could be part of what he played. "It's actually pretty rare that I get to play Baltimore," he says. "Now I play all over the world, and I think the last time I played in Baltimore would've been '97. And the time before that was at least eight or nine years before. So this is the second time in 15 years that I've played in my hometown, so tell people to come on out and say hello."
Ellery Eskelin, Andrea Parkins, and Jim Black play the Red Room at Normals Books and Records Oct. 18.
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