How Time Passes: Liner Notes

[liner notes are for educational use only]

Writing of the 1960 session of The School of Jazz in the November, 1960, Jazz Review, Gunther Schuller noted: "Don Ellis has already found his own voice, which seems to consist of a fascinating blend of jazz and contemporary classical influences. In fact, his playing represents one of the few true syntheses of jazz and classical elements, without the slightest self-consciousness and without any loss of the excitement and raw spontaneity that the best of jazz always had... It seems to me that Don has found a way of expanding the rhythmic vocabulary of jazz to include rhythm patterns heretofore excluded because they couldn't be made to swing. If this is true, it would constitute a major breakthrough, and its implications would be far-reaching... Ellis' rhythmic approach is closely related to his harmonic-melodic one. In fact, the one is inseparably related to the other. It is evident that Ellis has listened to and understood the music of Webern, Stockhausen, Cage and others of the avant-garde... here again, Ellis' jazz feeling has more than survived...."

Although Ellis was a student at The School of Jazz, he had already had intensive experience in jazz and classical music Born in Los Angeles, July 25, 1934, Ellis has a Bachelor of Music degree from Boston University, has studied privately with several major brass teachers, and has played in as well as written for all manner of combinations up to and including full symphony orchestra and chorus. He has led his own jazz combos since grade school and has worked with, among others, Herb Pomeroy, Jesse Smith, the Glenn Miller orchestra under Ray McKinley, Charlie Barnet, Kenny Dorham, Sam Donahue, Claude Thornhill, Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, Lionel Hampton and George Russell.

John "Jaki" Byard, before going on the road with Maynard Ferguson in 1959, was a strong influence on a number of Boston-based jazzmen, Don Ellis among them. Byard has played as a solo pianist as well as with Earl Bostic, Herb Pomeroy, and others.

Ron Carter, a brilliant bassist who has worked with Thelonious Monk, Randy Weston, and Charlie Persip, among other combos, has a bachelor's degree from the Eastman School of Music and is working on his master's at the Manhattan School of Music.

Charlie Persip, who became most widely known for his work with the Dizzy Gillespie big band, has been alternating wide-ranging New York studio work with leading his own driving combo. "He seemed," says Ellis, "the only choice for the date. He has so wonderful and consistent ability to swing and can also sight read just about anything as well as play all manner of phrases and time signatures, making them come out natural and relaxed."

I have asked Gunther Schuller to provide a descriptive analysis of the music itself.

-Nat Hentoff

The genesis of Don Ellis' IMPROVISATIONAL SUITE goes back to some experiments he made in the summer of 1960 while working with a trio in a Greenwich Village coffee house. Don, at first inspired by the innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, in more recent years had come upon certain contemporary non-jazz work composed with the so-called "twelve-tone" and/or serial techniques. Since a gifted musician sooner or later will express himself via those musical experiences he has encountered and assimilated, it was logical that Don would at some point try to combine his jazz experiences with the idea of using a single tone row as the basis for a piece.

In August, 1960, Don went to the School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he met Don Heckman, a composer and writer for The Jazz Review, who had been conducting similar experiments with John Benson Brooks. Upon his return to New York, Don Ellis participated in a few rehearsals with Brooks and learned some of the practical aspects of twelve-tone writing and possible ways of improvising on tone rows.

When the opportunity came to do this recording, Don Ellis decided to make use of some of these experiments in his own way. The IMPROVISATIONAL SUITE NO. 1 was the result.

The SUITE uses twelve-tone rows only as a point of departure. It does not develop the row material along orthodox methods. It would be accurate to say that the row is used as the basis for a kind of musical "free association." The tones (pitches) of the row and the specific order in which they are organized are guide posts which the improviser uses in a free manner. In the free-tempo sections this approach guarantees - almost - a built-in atonality; while in other parts of the work, the free use of the tone row allows the improviser to slip back into relatively tonal areas. Formally the SUITE consists of a series of loosely strung together sections, alternating between free cadenzas and strict time improvisations...

[On the original liners, Schuller speaks extensively about the Suite. I will get around to typing them sometime...]

In . . . HOW TIME PASSES . . . Don Ellis joins the growing ranks of musicians concerned with the freeing and expansion of tempo and meter. Once again Ellis' forays into the world of non-jazz contemporary music were the source of inspiration. In this instance the impetus was his reading of a highly specialized and complex article on the function of time, also titled . . . HOW TIME PASSES . . . by the young German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. The composition makes use of "increases and decreases in tempo," which are led by the improvising soloist of the moment. The stretching is applied also to the theme statement. The opening line, which in its jagged contours is quite typical of Ellis' melodic ideas, starts very fast. During its course, it gradually relaxes to less than half the tempo. When this same time returns for the final recapitulation, it starts slowly and finishes fast. The accelerating and retarding improvisations are geared to "changes" which are based on a B-flat major scale (with a lowered sixth), each note in the scale generating a different chord and each change of chord being initiated by the leading soloist. Quite logically the tempo increases on the ascending scalar pattern. In the current concern in jazz with new time relationships and the elasticity of time, this piece if undoubtedly one of the most successful efforts.

A SIMPLEX ONE features another of Don Ellis' striking melodic lines which seem to have developed naturally out of his improvisational style. The word simplex, a fusion of simple and complex, suggests the dual element of a "simple melody - a rudimentary development of a motivic fragment, with a relatively complex chord progression." It was originally written as an exercise for Ellis' Village trio in search of more challenging material than the ordinary tunes and blues. In this respect it springs from Don's and Jaki Byard's desire to extend the rhythms, harmonies and melodies of jazz further than they are commonly used today, "but always trying to swing, and not forgetting the blues as one of the foundation stones upon which jazz rests."

WASTE by Jaki Byard was originally written as part of a large history of jazz for Herb Pomeroy's Boston-based big band. It has a logical place on this recording, because, like the other pieces, it is concerned with a varying time relationship. Each soloist is free to select any tempo he desires for each chorus he plays. The challenge, both for the soloist and the accompanying rhythm section, are obvious. WASTE, in its original context, was a section of the final part of Byard's history of jazz. The verbal rumblings by Byard at its close are meant, he explains, "to indicate the rebellious feelings of the so-called natives in Africa to those who were exploiting indigenous African rhythms and emotional nuances by applying to them European harmonies and other devices."

SALLIE, which Don calls a "sensuous, modal ballad," is included to show the group's abilities in a more consistently relaxed tempo and mood. Charlie Persip's cymbal work, although very simple, is strikingly effective in the context of the piece, and adds a note of intensity to Don's very poignant solo.

Don Ellis indicates with this, his first recording to be released, that he is a man with a rich and disciplined talent, that he is adventurous in his ideas, and that, even at this youthful stage, he is a strong individual and musical personality.

-Gunther Schuller

The original liner notes - with some excisions - have been retained and then updated in the epilogue.

Epilogue [written for the 1978 reissue]

Since this recording, the protean Don Ellis has undertaken many and various musical journeys. He has headed a number of daringly complex big bands, as well as provocative smaller units. With the large groups, as he told Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler for their Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies, Ellis has been a pioneer in the extensive use of odd time signatures; the inclusion of an electric string quartet; the use of a vocal quartet as an instrumental section; the fusion of Indian music with jazz; the introduction of quarter-tones in improvised solos as well as in passages by the entire trumpet section; and the harnessing of the Fender-Rhodes piano, clavinet, ring modulator and phaser. Mr. Ellis' mind is never at rest.

Don's bands have been featured at many of the prestigious jazz festivals, and he has been especially in demand on television. (For one thing, his multiply festooned orchestras have a decidedly visual impact). He has continued to be a prolific composer, both for his own units and, on commission, for others. Ellis, for example, created Contrasts for Two Orchestras & Trumpet for Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Yet, though this judgment may be colored by my involvement with this album, I still believe How Time Passes is Don's most satisfying album so far. Without a large canvas on which to indulge his hyperinventiveness, Ellis, in the context of his quartet, had to make each line and sound sustain its own weight and direction. (In the spareness of this instrumentation, any excess would have sunk the ship).

I also think that Don Ellis - having now fulfilled his overwhelming need to stretch out all his skills (often simultaneously) - may well return to the comparatively austere challenges of this kind of music-creation in the years ahead.

Jaki Byard, on the other hand, for reasons that continue to elude him, has not enjoyed anywhere hear the exposure and range of opportunities that his extraordinarily individualistic talents merit. As a pianist, leader and composer, Byard - as can be heard on this set - has a commanding grasp of all of jazz history as well as a style and conception that, in Duke Ellington's phrase, is beyond category.

In any case, How Time Passes has resisted the erosion of time, being its own self-perpetuating microcosm. I remember the controlled intensity in the studio, and it has not dimmed.

-Nat Hentoff