© -Steven
Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Gene
Lees wrote
of him:
“Jim Hall is the perfect musical partner.”
- Joachim Berendt, Jazz writer and producer
Today [12/4/2012] is Jazz
guitarist Jim Hall’s eighty-second birthday and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles
thought it might be nice to honor him on these pages with a profile
that touches upon his many contributions to the music.
Jim Hall is such a
quiet, understated and unassuming person that it’s very easy to overlook his
many accomplishments in a career that has spanned almost 60 years!
“Jim Hall
sometimes is compared by critics to Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, but
then probably every guitarist in jazz has a debt to Christian who, in his short
life — he died in 1942 aged twenty-four — became the most important early
explorer of amplified guitar as a solo instrument. However, Jim and his trombonist
friend Bob Brookmeyer both cite the unsung Jimmy Raney among their influences.
From Raney, they say, they developed their integrated and highly compositional
approach to the improvised solo, the pensive development of motifs.
Jim started
playing guitar professionally in Cleveland Los Angeles New York
Jim had close
associations, too, with Paul Desmond, with whom he recorded a series of superb
albums for RCA, and with Bill Evans. He and Bill recorded two stunning duo
albums together, achieving a rapport that at times was uncanny. Another close
associate has been the bassist Ron Carter, with whom he has worked as a duo
from time to time since 1984.”
Elaborating
further on the duo albums that Jim made with pianist Bill Evans, author Peter
Pettinger remarks in his Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings biography:
“One of the
mysteries of music that defies analysis is the ability of two musicians to play
especially well together, to feel and instinctively adapt to what the other is
doing. The duet recording made by Evans and Hall, Undercurrent [and a
latter collaboration entitled Intermodulation], exemplified this
secret. In this sublime meeting, the artists shared a common ground of musical
values, Hall confessing to having long been influenced by Evans. Both, too, had
a strong feeling for chamber music: the interactive trio was the pianist's
aspiration, and Jim Hall's small-group pedigree was high, especially within the
intimate settings of the Jimmy Giuffre 3. Quality of sound encompasses a
blending of timbres, in this case lovingly conjured; singing tone shines out
from every note.
There is a hazard
attached to combining piano and guitar, both essentially chordal instruments.
Although jazz musicians use alternative chords with ease, the simultaneous
choice of two valid but different chords may well not work. Evans and Hall had
the intelligence and mutual awareness to escape this snare. And to avoid
textural overcrowding, both were conscious of the value of space, every note
being made to count in their joint tapestry.”
James Isaacs describes
Hall’s value this way in his insert notes to Intermodulation:
“While Evans was
bringing jazz piano to a new pinnacle of sheer beauty, Hall was spending the
first half of the 1960's as. in the words of the German critic Joachim E.
Berendt, ‘the perfect partner.’ He shared the front line with tenor saxophonist
Sonny Rollins and flugelhornist Art Farmer in two of the outstanding small
groups of any decade, and recorded a series of debonair LPs with the late
altoist Paul Desmond.”
Since the
mid-1980s, thanks to long association with two labels, Concord and Telarc, Jim
Hall has performed and made recordings
with some of the best and brightest musicians on the current Jazz scene
including trumpeters Tom Harrell and Ryan Kisor, trombonists Conrad Herwig and
Jim Pugh, saxophonists Joe Lovano and Chris Potter, guitarist Pat Metheny, and
bassists Don Thompson, Rufus Reed, Steve La Spina, Scott Colley and George
Mraz.
In one of his
timeless and superbly written essays for The
New Yorker magazine that have been collected in his American Musicians: 56 Portraits
in Jazz, Whitney Balliett offered the following depiction of Jim Hall:
“Hall, though,
doesn't look capable of creating a stir of any sort. He is slim and of medium
height, and a lot of his hair is gone. The features of his long, pale face are
chastely proportioned, and are accented by a recently cultivated R.A.F.
mustache. He wears old-style gold-rimmed spectacles, and he has three principal
expressions: a wide smile, a child's frown, and a calm, pleased playing
mask—eyes closed, chin slightly lifted, and mouth ajar. He could easily be the
affable son of the stony-faced farmer in "American Gothic." His hands
and feet are small, and he doesn't have any hips, so his clothes, which are
generally casual, tend to hang on him as if they were still in the closet. When
he plays, he sits on a stool, his back an arc, his feet propped on a high rung,
and his knees akimbo. He holds his guitar at port arms.
For many years,
Hall's playing matched his private, nebulous appearance. When he came up, in
the mid-fifties, with Chico Hamilton's vaguely avant-garde quintet (it had a
cello and no piano), and then appeared on a famous pickup recording, "Two
Degrees East, Three Degrees West," that was led by John Lewis and involved
Bill Perkins, Percy Heath, and Hamilton, he sounded stiff and academic. His
solos were pleasantly designed, but they didn't always swing. But as he moved
through groups led by Jimmy Giuffre, Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, and Art
Farmer, his deliberateness softened and the right notes began landing in the
right places.
Then he married
Jane [in 1965; she is a psychotherapist], and his playing developed an
inventiveness and lyricism that make him preeminent among contemporary jazz
guitarists and put him within touching distance of the two grand
masters—Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. Listening to Hall now is like
turning onionskin pages: one lapse of your attention and his solo is rent. Each
phrase evolves from its predecessor, his rhythms are balanced, and his harmonic
and melodic ideas are full of parentheses and asides. His tone is equally
demanding. He plays both electric and acoustic guitars. On the former, he
sounds like an acoustic guitarist, for he has an angelic touch and he keeps his
amplifier down; on the latter, a new instrument specially designed and built
for him, he has an even more gossamer sound.
Hall is
exceptional in another way. In the thirties and forties, Christian and
Reinhardt put forward certain ideals for their instrument—spareness, the use of
silence, and the legato approach to swinging—and for a while every jazz
guitarist studied them. Then the careering melodic flow of Charlie Parker took
hold, and jazz guitarists became arpeggio-ridden. But Hall, sidestepping this
aspect of Parker, has gone directly to Christian and Reinhardt, and, plumping
out their skills with the harmonic advances that have since been made, has
perfected an attack that is fleet but tight, passionate but oblique. And he is
singular for still another reason. Guitarists are inclined to be an ingrown
society, but Hall listens constantly to other instrumentalists, especially
tenor saxophonists (Ben Webster, Cole-man Hawkins, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins)
and pianists (Count Basie, John Lewis, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett), and he
attempts to adapt to the guitar their phrasing and tonal qualities.
In his solos he
asserts nothing but says a good deal. He loves Duke Ellington's slow ballads,
and he will start one with an ad-lib chorus in which he glides softly over the
melody, working just behind the beat, dropping certain notes and adding others,
but steadfastly celebrating its melodic beauties. He clicks into tempo at the
beginning of the second chorus, and, after pausing for several beats, plays a
gentle, ascending six-note figure that ends with a curious, ringing off-note.
He pauses again, and, taking the close of the same phrase, he elaborates on it
in an ascending-descending double-time run, and then skids into several
behind-the-beat chords, which give way to a single-note line that moves up and
down and concludes on another off-note. He raises his volume at the beginning
of the bridge and floats through it with softly ringing chords; then, slipping
into the final eight bars, he fashions a precise, almost declamatory run,
pauses a second at its top, and works his way down with two glancing
arpeggios. He next sinks to a whisper,
and finishes with a bold statement of the melody that dissolves into a flatted
chord, upon which the next soloist gratefully builds his opening statement.”
Fortunately for
all of his many fans, on March 30, 2009 , the Library of Congress sponsored the
following video interview of Jim Hall recounting the highlights of his career
and his approach to Jazz guitar. Larry Applebaum moderates the discussion.
