""For much of the next decade, Tolliver's own Music Inc. was among Slugs' resident ensembles, in company with Sun Ra's Arkestra, Charles Mingus' combos and bands of such incandescent stars like trumpeter Lee Morgan, who, just off the bandstand, was shot dead by a jealous lover. Music Inc. 'Live at Slugs'', released originally by Tolliver's semi-collective Strata-East record label, has long been treasured as a like-it-was document of the high, hot music born in that smoky, boozy, seductive room (reopened in the mid '80s as the Nuyorican Poets' Café). Put this CD on, and you're there.
"'For jazz you'd start at the Vanguard, maybe hear Sonny Rollins playing to five people, then go to the Gate to catch Cannonball Adderley, who was often there, then pass by the Five Spot—all glassed—in on the corner of St. Mark's and Bowery, so you could see in before deciding if you were going in. You'd end up at Slugs',' Tolliver recalls with satisfaction.
"For a taste of the real thing; the hard, bright exuberance of clarity or the down and sometimes dirty but nevertheless spiritually untarnished intensity of urban dwellers grappling with that very day's practical, personal, social and aesthetic issues, finding rough and tumble answers often beyond conventions, limits or constraints. For instance, the music on this record—urgent, probing, hoodoo chasing performances, able to satisfy one's itch to get up, maybe bust open some new possibilities (dig the collective improv peak of 'Wilpan's'), or tenderly craft and linger in the luxuriance of a ballad (as on 'Felicite' and 'Orientale').
"Music Inc., live at Slugs', typically played generous sets, each tune easily running 10, 20 minutes or more. Energy was the watchword of the era's music, due partly to the influence of John Coltrane, among the jazz masters Tolliver idolized while coming up. Indeed, Coltrane's quest for musical fulfillment, and his great quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, informed Music Inc.'s horn/piano/bass/drums format and repertoire of modal improvisation, motivic melodies and stretched-out hard-bop minor blues. As for Tolliver himself: 'The whole point of Music Inc. was not to have an alternate — a saxophonist to spell me if I got tired,' he explains, 'and to gain urgency from having to deliver myself, as the only horn player and composer-leader. I had to keep my chops up and strengths about me all the time.'
"By the date of this recording, Tolliver had long distinguished himself as a comer among the full range of pace-setters of the day (including Miles, Dizzy, Kenny Dorham, Freddie Hubbard, Don Cherry, Donald Byrd, Blue Mitchell, Woody Shaw and others). His particular forte is the focus with which he unleashes dramatic strokes — and those strokes themselves, broad figures he brings to inspired heights. He'd gigged with Jackie McLean, Max Roach, Roy Ayers, Roy Haynes and Andrew Hill, woodshed with Joe Henderson, Jack DeJohnette, James Spaulding and Chick Corea, recorded on Blue Note and led his own band (featuring pianist John Hicks) up at Count Basie's, a lounge in Harlem. With firm command of attack, tone and tempo, in the tradition of trumpeters such as Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown and Booker Little, Charles Tolliver was not so modest as to eschew the dazzling showcase; here he blazons swaggering statements over churning rhythms, floats ultra-pretty, heartfelt lines upon mousse-rich piano chords, dares to try—and nails!—thrilling lip trill climaxes. But he also surrounded himself with colleagues who superbly supported, challenged and balanced him, for utmost interaction and groove. If they don't top the Coltrane quartet's transcendence, Music Inc.'s members for sure demonstrate admirable physical concentration and enviable musical imagination.
"Pianist Stanley Cowell was Tolliver's dream accompanist: percussive, rhnythm-grounded, sly yet churly-soulful, an evocative soloist and harmonic visionary with exemplary keyboard technique. 'I was so lucky to meet him at the beginning of my career,' Tolliver says. Bassist Cecil McBee was also indispensable, a fluid bedrock giving constant bottom and lift to the band. Drummer Jimmy Hopps stirred up and juggled a storm of polyrhythms, tending the pots, tubs and cymbals at a bubbling simmer as emphatically as at a ferocious boil. And he's exceptionally well recorded.
"'T always like to hear the drummer, yeah!' Tolliver enthuses. 'When I sat down to mix these recordings — which were recorded analog, of course, the format which I think retains the most warmth and punch — I made sure the drums were prominent. Because, you know: a trumpet player's got to have drums!'
"In the '90s, Jimmy Hopps has disappeared from view. Cecil McBee remains an internationally renowned, first-call New York bassist. Stanley Cowell, based around Washington, D.C., continues to perform and teach jazz. Tolliver lives in NYC and is a professor at New York City's New School for Social Research (Mannes School of Music).
"'We had a style then,' Tolliver says 'which endures in some players of the 90s I could easily name, which was based on being half-free, half-straight ahead. Or maybe 30 percent free to 70 percent straight ahead, mainstream — I don't know. Everything had a structure, but we could take the music any way we felt.
"'The music we created then is of course historical — but also, 30 years later, it still sounds as if it's just about to be conceived now. Some of that's the urgency which encompassed our lives at the time, also the necessity of having to deliver, on the fly! Some of it's because we're still living with Diz, Monk, Bird, Miles and Trane,' Tolliver considers.
"'Slugs' was a forum for us, an opportunity,' he notes, 'and we took good advantage of it, The audience at Slugs' was there to hear that kind of music, our kind of music, so we didn't have to satisfy them with standards or pop songs, didn't have to hold back or save something for another take or deal with producers who wanted to put other stuff under us than what we'd written ourselves. We were 95 percent acoustic — Stanley tinkered with the Moog and Fender Rhodes keyboards, but we always had an upright, not an electric bass. We got to play the way we were thinking at the time, and as long as we cared to.
"'Also we could always feel something from the audience there. Maybe not something specific about their responses: something intangible. We were able to play for ourselves, and for the real fans, members of the community who knew what we were trying to say, what the music meant. They're on the record, too, somehow, as much as Freddie Freeloader adding his ‘Yeahs!' to a Miles solo.
"'Of course, today, it's not written that I'm an enfant terrible, the way they used to,' Tolliver cautions. 'But I'm still playing, of course, and I've got to say I don't feel any different in 1998, at age 55, than when it came out, almost three decades back. It's all for real, and that's forever.'" (Howard Mandel, February 1998. Reprinted in the liner notes.)
"Slugs' Saloon, which was located on 3rd Street between Avenues B and C on the Lower East Side of New York City, was created in the mid 60s by two guys named Jerry and Robert. In its brief history, roughly 10 years, Slugs' became one of the main arenas to perform and listen to the music during those turbulent and extremely creative times.
"One day during the summer of '64 I got a call from the saxophone great Jackie McLean, who at the time lived just one street from the club, to do an afternoon ‘hit' at this new place called Slugs'. It would be the first time live music would be presented there. No bandstand had as yet been erected. So, in the middle of the club on a sawdust covered floor, Jackie, myself, Larry Willis, John Ore, and Billy Higgins inaugurated the place.
"The rest is history as just about every artist involved with creating the music during this period either played the club or passed through to see and hear what was going on. The music presented here is from a week engagement I made at the club in 1970 with my first Music Inc. group featuring Stanley Cowell, Cecil McBee, and Jimmy Hopps." (Charles Tolliver, 1998. Reprinted in the liner notes.)
"The music and philosophy of Charles Tolliver hails from a time when the most powerful artistic minds in Black America were in sync with its radical elite. As the trumpeter and self-made label executive puts it, 'One of the reasons the music of that era sounds the way it does is because there was at that time a oneness of purpose among Black people in general and musicians in particular. The whole push towards equality, along with John Coltrane's music, permeated everything we did for about five to eight years.'
"In 1971, under the influence of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and John Coltrane, Tolliver, along with business and musical partner Stanley Cowell, began what has become the most successful musician-run label in jazz history: Strata-East. But though the Strata-East story dovetails nicely with that of '60s, Black cultural nationalism and the desire for independence, Tolliver recounts also being motivated by the death of Kenny Dorham, a legendary trumpeter, friend and idol:
"'Kenny Dorham was truly one of my heroes and one of the greatest artists jazz has produced. As a player and composer he did amazing work, yet he died in obscurity. I went to see him just before he died and I asked myself, how does this happen, that someone who has recorded all this music has nothing? That's when I realized he didn't own any of his masters, and that recognition is what set me on the course I've been on to this day and I have not swerved from it. As musicians, I knew that we've got to leave something behind for our children.'
"Though the roots of Strata-East may lay in the above observations, the label's fruits were a catalogue of music that spoke to jazz as an art form in transition, poised between triumph and trauma. By the early ‘70s jazz had firmly established itself on the international scene as the definitive American contribution to world culture. The usual suspects, Monk, Mingus, Max, Miles, Ornette and Trane — a litany of giants really — had changed the face of 20th-century music in ways never predicted by Western modernism, and had proven the seriousness of jazz as a challenging aesthetic endeavor. For conscious and daring young African-American musicians of Tolliver and Cowell's caliber, the moment must have seemed like a rite of passage: one in which they would have to prove themselves worthy of assuming the mantle of their forefathers. Leaving Howard University's School of Pharmacy in his third year, Tolliver had come up in jazz the old-fashioned way, apprenticing with the masters. His post-college internships were with Jackie McLean, McCoy Tyner, Gerald Wilson and Max Roach. His recollection of that time identifies him as someone who caught the meteoric tail end of a golden age:
"'I played with all the great guys who were around then: Hank Mobley, Philly Joe Jones, Horace Silver, Elmo Hope, Sonny Red, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey. I was close to all of them. The camaraderie was really high at that time, because everybody grew up playing together. It was really a once-in-a-lifetime period when everybody was living here. Old cats like Pee Wee Russell got a chance to see us and we got to see them. From 1965 to about 1975 there were a group of guys who played together, stayed together, did everything together. When Miles would come to the Five Spot, he was just one of the guys. And this even after he had given us several turning points in the music, like 'Round Midnight and Kind of Blue.'
"Anything but a retired veteran, Tolliver continues to oversee the Strata-East legacy, while actively performing and teaching jazz orchestration and the repertoire of Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers at the New School. Quizzed on the musical instruction methods of his younger days, he cuts to the chase: 'the real players' way of letting you know that you could play back then was by calling on you for gigs. I never got instruction, nor did I ever harangue anyone to show me anything. You learned this stuff from your elders by listening to the records. If you've got any craft in you, that's going to come out as you're practicing anyway. Like the old saying goes, ‘if you can't hear it, you don't belong.'
"Musically, the question on the table for Tolliver's generation at the dawn of Strata-East's inception was deciding what parts of bebop tradition remained viable in an age set on fire by Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. As can be heard on this and his other Strata-East releases, Tolliver's Music Inc. group proposed clear answers to such questions, with meaty and melodious playing that celebrated the classical virtues of swing, virtuosity and the unbridled expressionism and spontaneity that were the '60s stock-in-trade. Call it a case of eating your cake and immolating it too.
"The lengthy, open-ended forms Tolliver preferred provided for incisive explorations of a composition's crevices, fissures and depths. On Cowell's 'Effi', a superb mid-tempo ballad, as well as the band's sumptuous and dangerous reading of Thelonious Monk's ''Round Midnight', Tolliver puts his globular and molten tone (often compared with Freddie Hubbard's), to driven yet sublime use. (On the subject of those Hubbard comparisons by the way, Tolliver has this to say: 'We have a similar sound and attack but the idea usage is completely different. Because we used to hang out, people assumed I was sitting at his knees, but it wasn't like that at all.')
"Tolliver brings an assured and bold approach to ''Round Midnight', where he jumps from a languid introduction to a near triple-time explosion of crisply chosen bursts of brass that almost seem in flight from Monk's famous changes. His sudden return descent to cruising altitude is incredibly smooth and romantic, if only to sucker punch us again by flaring up an Afro-Cuban groove that brings the song in for a three-point landing. Bassist Clint Houston and drummer Clifford Barbaro make for an energetic and sympathetic rhythm section, and the passages where Cowell stops comping and leaves the trio to blaze without his harmonic signposts make for champion feats of agility and dexterity. Imbued in this music is a fanatical devotion to both viscerality and technical acumen that unabashedly proclaims the enduring impact of Coltrane on Tolliver: 'Trane was in every fiber of what I did and still is. And Bird too. The point was to mix it up and make something of it that's my own. That's what being a jazz musician is all about.'
"As 'Live in Tokyo' and all his Strata-East recordings make apparent, Tolliver's achievements as a musician and as an entrepreneur mark him as one of the great independent minds of the jazz tradition. As the music finds a pathway into the 21st century, he appears destined to remain an intrepid frontrunner." (Greg Tate, April 1998. Reprinted in the liner notes.)
"Charles Tolliver arrived on the jazz scene in 1964, just in time for the last cycle of the golden era of hard bop. Had he arrived 10 years later with the same considerable talents as a trumpeter and composer, he might hardly have been noticed. But in the 60s, jazz had an ad hoc infrastructure of its own. There were thriving labels, jazz on the radio, jazz clubs in all five boroughs and every major city, bandleaders mentoring sidemen, booking agents, managers and tours.
"And that infrastructure was real. Consider that the equally talented trumpeter/composer Woody Shaw hit Manhattan around the same time and how parallel their careers ran for the next six years. They both gained their greatest initial exposure on Blue Note sessions, worked with Jackie McLean who gave their compositional skills a platform and gigged and/or recorded with Horace Silver, Joe Henderson, Art Blakey, Willie Bobo, Archie Shepp and Andrew Hill.
"In May of 1969, Tolliver formed Music Inc., a quartet featuring his close friend and musical cohort Stanley Cowell. While there are a lot of quartets fronted by saxophonists and guitarists, the format is rare for a trumpeter. And for good reason. The physical demands that the trumpet places on a musician far exceed those that a saxophone or a guitar would have. In fact, there are very few quartet albums featuring trumpet, let alone working bands!
"But Charles, a quietly determined man who sees no reason not to face a challenge head on, picked this demanding context and made it work. He picked rhythm sections that would engage and push him. He built a band book of contemporary pieces rather than familiar standards, which meant the originals had to be strong, varied and memorable.
"It's interesting to note that many of the originals on these three CDs had been previously recorded, but at the time of these sessions only versions of 'Truth' (Jackie McLean, 1964), 'Earl's World' (Tolliver, 1968) and 'Effi' (Max Roach, 1968) had been released. The original recordings of 'Orientale' (Bobby Hutcherson, 1969), 'Effi' (Hutcherson, 1968) and 'On the Nile' (Jackie McLean, 1965) would not be issued until years later. And the first recordings of 'Drought' (Roach, 1968), 'Felicite' (Yusef Lateef, 1969) and 'Wilpan's' (Charles Lloyd, 1966) are still unreleased. Still these compositions, especially those by Charles and Stanley, have had considerable currency once they were introduced into the jazz world.
"As the music on this set proves, Tolliver's Music Inc. met every challenge and then some. These live recordings from 1970 and 73 embrace hard bop in all its various approaches and epitomize the teamwork that is so essential to any successful jazz performance. And Charles' endurance is absolutely remarkable.
"In 1971, Charles and Stanley took on another risky venture. Partly out of self-determination and partly because of the fading recording scene at the time, they formed Strata-East Records, a label that would be run by Tolliver to issue albums produced and owned by the artists themselves. And he took to this task with typical drive and thoroughness. When the first release came out, he brought promotional copies to my apartment personally! Now free records are one things, but hand delivered by the president of the company!
"It was on Strata-East that two volumes of Live at Slugs' and one LP of Live in Tokyo were first issued. On the occasion of this Mosaic Select set, Charles dug into the vault and came up with another 73 minutes of unissued music from these gigs. Hopefully this is just the first in a line of co-ventures between Mosaic and Strata-East." (Michael Cuscuna, September 2005. From the liner notes.)
Performers: Charles Tolliver (tp), Stanley Cowell (pi), Cecil McBee/Clint Houston (bs), Jimmy Hopps/Clifford Barbaro (dr)
1.1. Drought
1.2. Felicite
1.3. Orientale
1.4. Spanning
1.5. Wilpan's
1.6. Our Second Father
2.1. Drought
2.2. Stretch
2.3. Truth
2.4. Effi
2.5. 'Round Midnight
3.1. On The Nile
3.2. Ruthie's Heart
3.3. Repetition
3.4. Impact
3.5. Our Second Father
3.6. Earl's World
