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The
Surrealist Table
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The Ken Hatfield Trio
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Ken Hatfield
guitar |
Hans Glawischnig
bass |
Jeff Hirshfield
drums |
Few guitarists
in jazz have chosen to embrace the classical guitar as their main axe.
The late Charlie Byrd immediately comes to mind. Gene Bertoncini has performed
brilliantly on the instrument while Brazilians Oscar Castro-Neves, Carlos
Barbosa-Lima and Romero Lubambo continue to seduce and dazzle audiences
with their sambafied take on the nylon string acoustic.
Add one
name to the list—Ken Hatfield. With The Surrealist Table, his fifth
offering on Arthur Circle Music coming on the heels of 2002’s Phoenix
Rising, the talented guitarist-composer explores the warm-toned beauty
and inherent contrapuntal nature of the classical guitar in the stripped
down setting of guitar-bass-drums trio. And while Hatfield is indeed an
accomplished fingerstyle player with a deft chordal approach and a fluid,
formidable linear conception (i.e. plenty o’ chops), it’s
his harmonically sophisticated compositional sense and strong penchant
for melodicism, along with the overall vibe of his highly interactive
trio featuring longtime collaborator Hans Glawischnig on bass and Jeff
Hirshfield on drums, that makes this music so artistically successful
and eminently appealing.
From the urgently swinging opener “The Chimera” to the buoyant
jazz waltz “À Demain,” from the poignant minor key
ballad “Iphigeneia” to the jaunty bounce of the title track,
from the alluring bossa nova “Castalia” to the dark and delicate
“Berceuse,” the earthy blues of “Most Every Day,”
the odd-time workout “Ariadne’s Thread” and the closing
N’awlins flavored second line groover “Funkissimo,”
Hatfield and his crew of kindred spirits seamlessly weave harmony and
melody, improvisation and swing with refined aplomb.
Guitaristically,
Hatfield offers six-string connoisseurs a veritable feast on The Surrealist
Table. He applies a gentle, pianistic touch on tunes like the hauntingly
beautiful “Iphigeneia” and the evocative “À Demain,”
the graceful jazz waltz underscored by Hirshfield’s brisk brushwork.
On those two intimate pieces in particular, the degree of empathy that
the trio achieves approaches Bill Evans trio level. As Ken explains, “I
always liked the idea of playing the guitar kind of like the way people
play the piano, which makes piano players want to kill me sometimes. It’s
funny, though, that when I play with really great piano players like Harold
Mabern or Dom Salvador, it’s never a problem because they listen.
They don’t just play the way they play no matter what you do. And
similarly, I try to listen really hard to the musicians around me when
I’m playing.”
Elsewhere
on The Surrealist Table, Hatfield showcases an impressive single-note
facility on the swinging opener “The Chimera” while nimbly
navigating some daring intervallic leaps and challenging arpeggios on
“Mixed Motion,” a piece he originally composed in 1981 and
has reworked several times over the years before arriving at this fully
realized incarnation (the last four bars of whose blowing changes mirror
the last eight bars of the harmonic sequence of Joe Henderson’s
“Inner Urge”). His jaunty bounce on the lightly swinging title
track probably bears the strongest stamp of his mentor Charlie Byrd while
his spectacular playing on “Castalia,” in which he organically
shifts back and forth from fluid single note lines to rhythmically assured
chordal work, aptly demonstrates his strong affinity for Brazilian music.
And when Hatfield digs into the earthy blues of “Most Every Day”
with such gusto, this Virginia native is right at home.
Bassist
Glawischnig also offers some outstanding solo moments here with superb
pizzicato playing on “Mixed Motion,” “Ariadne’s
Thread” and the bluesy “Most Every Day.” His excellent
arco work is featured on the title track and the closing “Funkissimo”
and is prominently showcased on the delicate cradle song “Berceuse,”
a piece written by Hatfield after observing the bassist’s gentle
nature with his six-week-old son Caleb. Hirshfield, a veteran timekeeper
on the New York jazz scene, plays with huge ears and interactive instincts
throughout the sessions. As Hatfield puts it, “He listens in such
an intense way it’s almost like he’s inside your head.”
While Hirshfield demonstrates his deft touch with brushes on “À
Demain,” “Iphigeneia” and “Ariadne’s Thread,”
he also breaks out his trademark (and authentic-sounding) N’awlins
street beat on the lazy, slow-grooving closer “Funkissimo”
while offering up some hip, take-your-time fills on the breaks.
After
five highly satisfying recordings that prominently feature the classical
guitar in a jazz and Brazilian music setting, it’s safe to say that
Hatfield has truly found his voice on this nylon stringed instrument.
“I grew up playing steel string guitar,” says the Norfolk,
Virginia native. “The main impetus for switching primarily to classical
guitar really came out of composition. About ten years ago I was starting
to write pieces which were much more polyphonic, and while I had played
Dobro with a pick and my fingers and I also played the electric guitar
that way, you really can’t play on those instruments with any kind
of true independence in the parts. I tend to write without the instrument,
just sitting down and writing with manuscript paper. I just think this
stuff out in my head, put it down on paper, then try to figure out how
to play it on the instrument. And it got to a point where I wasn’t
able to play any of the things I was writing, at least not on steel string
guitar. So that led to me focusing more and more on classical guitar.”
Though
he had studied classical guitar when he was younger, his re-investigation
of the genre opened a Pandora’s Box that led Hatfield to some new
discoveries on the instrument. “I went back and looked at why classical
players could really balance multiple parts better than the guys that
I heard who were playing steel string guitar. What I found was something
that I had kind of forgotten. And that was that Segovia and a lot of classical
players developed a way of using a rest stroke for playing melodies with
their right hand that mirrored the way concert classical pianists played.
If you’ve ever looked into a Bosendorfer piano you’ll notice
that the bass strings are a lot longer than the treble strings. Consequently,
you have to play harder with your right hand than you play with your left
hand if you want things to balance out. Polyphonic playing on the guitar
presents similar difficulties.”
During his period of investigating classical players, Hatfield also retained
an abiding love of two towering guitar influences from the jazz world,
ultimately incorporating some of their dramatically disparate aesthetic
into his own vocabulary. “The two players that spoke to me the most
. . . and it’s a weird combination . . . were Ralph Towner and Wes
Montgomery,” he says. “If somebody asked me when I was 17
or 18 years old what I would want to be when I grew up I would say, ‘Put
those two cats in a blender and I’ll take the end result.’
It’s like how I love Cezanne but I also happen to love Vermeer—very
different but both speak to me. And while I do tend to have an analytical
mind, when things speak to me really clearly and I don’t know why,
I try to embrace that without having to figure it out.”
Ironically,
Hatfield was a stone bebopper playing a more customary steel string electric
guitar back in the mid-1970s when he left the Berklee College of Music
in Boston and moved to Baltimore, where he began working with the great
Charlie Byrd while also working in the funk band Pockets. “I was
such a hardcore bebopper when I met him,” he recalls of Byrd. “I
wanted to play everything as fast as I could and I worshipped the ground
that Pat Martino and Wes Montgomery walked on. I was probably driving
him crazy at the time.” (Twenty years later, Hatfield met up again
with Byrd, who was surprised and pleased to see his young protégé
playing nylon string acoustic guitar and mixing jazz and Brazilian music,
a direction that Byrd pioneered back in 1962 on his landmark, chart-topping
collaboration with Stan Getz, Jazz Samba).
After
moving to New York City in 1977, Hatfield began to work the greasy organ
circuit between Newark and Harlem with the great Hammond B-3 burners Jimmy
McGriff and Jack McDuff, learning the ropes of the trade the hard way
through unglamorous, low-paying but musically rewarding roadwork. (He
ended up recording an homage to McDuff, “Riff for Brother Jack,”
on Phoenix Rising).
Hatfield subsequently worked with such jazz greats as Chico Hamilton,
Bob Cranshaw, Harold Mabern and Dom Salvador. His versatility also kept
him busy as a freelancer on the New York session scene. Before switching
to classical guitar and focusing more intently on composition in the ‘90s,
he wrote scores for film and for the Judith Jamison and Maurice Béjart
ballet companies. He began documenting his own unique blending of jazz
and Brazilian music on his 1998 debut recording for Arthur Circle Music,
Music for Guitar and Bass (with Hans Glawischnig) and followed up in 1999
with Explorations for Solo Guitar. 2000’s Dyad was an expanded project
featuring violinist Valentin Gregor, bassist Glawischnig, Brazilian drumming
great Duduka da Fonseca and vocalist Maucha Adnet. And last year’s
Phoenix Rising incorporated the colors of Billy Drewes’ tenor sax,
Dom Salvador’s piano and Claudio Roditi’s trumpet along with
the rhythm tandem of Glawischnig and da Fonseca.
As on
his previous offerings, the titles for the tunes on The Surrealist Table
bear various arcane literary and mythological references, which Hatfield
takes some delight in explaining: “Iphigeneia” is a reference
to the daughter of Agamemnon who was sacrificed to appease the Greek sea
gods and prompt the return of Helen from Troy. “The Chimera”
is a mythological beast that has the head of a lion, the body of a goat
and the tail of a snake, serving as an apt metaphor for Hatfield’s
vision of the trio. “I wanted to have these three disparate elements
that could go anywhere at any point in time, that could stop on a dime
and change shape rapidly, where it could be the Jimi Hendrix trio one
minute and the Bill Evans trio the next minute.”
“Castalia” is the name of a spring on Mount Parnassus near
the oracle of Delphi. As Hatfield enlightens, “It was often said
that for poets to become poets they needed to drink from this spring because
it would cause them to remember.” The guitarist slyly drops in a
quote from “I Remember You” at the end of this song (whose
title also is a reference to Herman Hesse’s futuristic novel, The
Glass Bead Game).
“Ariadne’s
Thread,” Hatfield explains, is a reference to the myth of the Labyrinth
and the Minotaur. “As the story goes, every nine years Athens had
to send a group of young men and young maidens to the Labyrinth to be
sacrificed to the Minotaur. Ariadne was King Minos’ daughter and
she had fallen in love with Theseus, who was sent into the Labyrinth.
And the secret to getting in and out of the Labyrinth successfully was
a ball of thread given to Theseus by Ariadne.
“All of those things don’t make the music work or not work
but they can be clues to certain aspects of things,” he says of
the various literary references strewn through The Surrealist Table. “Who
knows if that stuff means anything to anybody, but it does to me so I
incorporate it when I build the structures of things. In a sense it’s
like I’m trying to write musical crossword puzzles. That’s
something that intrigues me.”
The music
here does indeed stand on its own. The intriguing literary references
are merely icing on this very sumptuous cake being served by Hatfield
at The Surrealist Table. Sit down, savor each bite and enjoy.
-- Bill
MilkowskiBill Milkowski is a contributor to Jazz Times and Jazziz magazines.
He is also the author of JACO: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco
Pastorius (Backbeat Books) |
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