Endangered Species
NEW CD RELEASE
Endangered Species, is getting great reviews from Asha Small of Jazz Review as well as the All About Jazz writers Dan McClenaghan and Jim Santella. Click the
Sound clips from Dave's other CDs are available on the Free MP3 page. Neil Tesser's Liner Notes
Liner Notes
For all intents and purposes, though, you can really consider this disc, his debut on the Summit label, the first David Schumacher album: his two previous albums, on his own Amosaya label, arrived in obscurity and remain hard to find (except via www.daveschumacher.com). So for most of you, this will serve as Schumacher’s calling card: your introduction to one of the hardest working, most accomplished, soulful, and swinging baritone saxophonists in jazz today. It features some of Schumacher’s old friends and a new acquaintance (the legendary drummer Jimmy Cobb); it unveils Schumacher’s innovatively shaped organ quintet and his penchant for Cuban music; it even offers up some unpretentious, offbeat poetry that might have caught the ear of another poet-musician, Charles Mingus, whose brawny group sound has left its mark on Schumacher’s own. Consider Endangered Species a portrait of the artist as – well, if not exactly a young man (his 22 years on the New York scene having established his stature as a veteran player), then at least an exceptionally busy one. His dark, edged tone has anchored the sax sections of the big bands led by Lionel Hampton and Art Blakey, Nicholas Payton and Chico O’Farrill, and he’s a founding member of the excellent big band organized 15 years ago, with which he still plays. That’s a divergent cross-section of jazz orchestras, but Schumacher has been keeping his ears open since his high school years in Chicago, when he would divide his time between the under-21 matinees at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase – the mecca for visiting mainstream giants – and the Birdhouse, the funky storefront club run by avant-garde saxophone icon Fred Anderson. Growing up in Chicago, he also developed his love for the organ groups that have always graced the city’s musical landscape. And shortly after receiving his degree from the esteemed music department at Rutgers University, and joining Lionel Hampton, he received a hands-on course in Afro-Cuban music, courtesy of that band’s percussionist, Sam "Seguito" Turner – who plays the quinto (the small, high-pitched conga drum) on the piece named in his honor on this album. )This tune also presents Dave’s good friend Howard Johnson, a pivotal contributor to jazz over the last four decades, in that rarest of sightings: a two-baritone front line. Schumacher’s experience in the Connick band bears fruit with the tenor battle near album’s end ("Arch’s Nutty Variation"); it features a rare appearance of Schumacher on the smaller horn, along with two of his Connick bandmates, Ned Goold and Jerry Weldon (with whom Schumacher co-leads quintet dates around the country). If you’re keeping score at home, Weldon solos first, then Goold, and Schumacher last. And the poetry? "Well, that’s something completely new," Schumacher explains. His voice is burly, deep with a throaty rasp, and his words tumble out with a practiced urgency. (It’s not hard to see how he gravitated to the baritone sax: he talks like he plays.) “I’m kind of a frustrated writer: I’ve been writing poetry on and off for several years. I write a lot on the road; even before the poetry, I was very much into wordplay, and punning, and that kind of developed into the poems. So I said, Let me put these down with some music and see what happens." In blending all of his predilections into a cohesive whole, Schumacher started with several old friends and a favored concept, and built from there. "Basically, the organ group is the core," he says; "I’ve always wanted to do that. There’s only one bari-and-organ thing I know about, a recording with Jimmy Smith and Cecil Payne, and it was never issued until recently. You don’t hear the combination so much because the bari is so low, and unless it’s captured just right, the sound gets lost. But I always loved playing with the organ, first in jam sessions on the south side of Chicago, then in Harlem; I always loved that groove." He didn’t have to look far to find it in his own circle: he’s known Rob Bargad, a gifted pianist and composer, with a smoky and relaxed approach to the organ, since both attended Rutgers. "We tried to expand a little on the concept without getting too far out," Schumacher explains. "And the trombone just makes it totally unique. The two horns are such a beautiful sound together" – rare enough in jazz as a whole, and essentially unheard in combination with the organ. Once again, an old friend does the honors: Robert Trowers, who met Schumacher back in 1983, in the Hampton band. As for the album’s guest luminary, Jimmy Cobb – best known for his work on classic albums by Miles Davis and then Sarah Vaughan, and these days still making noise with his band Cobb’s Mob – Schumacher just "happened to see him play one night, as I was planning the disc, and I thought, ‘If I can get him, why not give it a try?’ I’d met him before that, though we weren’t really friends" – or at least not until these sessions, if the cameraderie between drummer and leader is any indication. All the planning, and the various interrelationships, hit home time and again on this disc – from Trowers’ take on the rollicking dedication to Pharaoh Sanders, to Schumacher’s gorgeous tonal portraiture on "I Think You Know"; from his discursive storytelling on the far-out descarga ("Seguita") to his introspective musing (both verbal and saxophonic) on the album’s finale; from the underrecorded Hank Mobley gem "18th Hole" to Bargad’s surly blues line "398." But all the planning doesn’t get in the way of Schumacher’s ability to let it fly – to "play from the heart, to try to find the new harmonic ideas," as he says. "I try not to be one of the ‘connect-the-dots’ players, you know?" I did not know that term before he used it, but I do now: it refers to the by-the-numbers, well-schooled but essentially soulless virtuosity you can find on any number of perfectly listenable, perfectly interchangeable recordings from any era of jazz. It’s the music from the heart – the music heard throughout this disc – that remains an "endangered species" in every day and age. NEIL TESSER
The Dave Schumacher Press Kit is available here: page 1 page 2 page 3 (40K pdf each) Dave Schumacher - North Bergen,
NJ
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is the same tune in RealAudio.
