ABOUT BILL PLUMMER
Bill Plummer was born in Boulder, Colo.,
27 March 1938, at 4:50 a.m. He says that
his “physical . . . strength came from my
father’s side—a family of pioneering miners,
chemists, and heavy construction enthu-
siasts.” The “musical influence” in his boy-
hood “came from my mother’s family. My
grandfather, Jasper Bartley, besides being
a (steam) railroad engineer, was also a full-
time trumpet player in the Kansas territory
dance bands. He taught my mother piano
and trumpet, and she played in her home
town parade and park bands and many
church local functions.”
Bill’s own lessons, from his mother, be-
gan with the piano at age six. Two years
later a local teacher started him on string
bass; and subsequently in his youth he
learned to play instruments as diverse as
trumpet, marimba, and vibraharp. By this
time he had moved to Los Angeles and em-
barked upon a jazz career that included
study with Monty Budwig and playing with a
high school group that gave noon concerts
in schools all over the sprawling Los An-
geles County.
From high school Bill went on for two
years further study at the excellent music
department at Los Angeles City College,
alma mater of more than a few top flight
LA musicians. There followed a period of
work with a number of local small groups,
the best known of which included the highly
touted (but rarely recorded) band of Herb
and Lorraine Geller, the Paul Horn group,
the Buddy DeFranco quartet, the Paul To-
gawa trio, and the Pete Jolly trio. Some re-
cording activity also came his way as a
result of these jobs.
During 1963, Bill began to wear many
hats: he toured with Nancy Wilson, rejoined
the Paul Horn group, and became a partner
in a new bass repairing shop, the Golden
Harp, an activity that ultimately had to be
sacrificed owing to the number of musical
commitments. Conflicting schedules also
forced him to leave Nancy Wilson and de-
vote full time to the Horn band. While with
the band, Bill recorded Lalo Schiffrini’s
Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts, the first mass
to be recorded in English and one of the
first jazz Masses performed in this country,
and two other albums, Rainy Day and Mon-
day, Monday.
Simultaneously, Bill’s encounter with
Hari Har Rao had increased his interest in
the music of the East, leading to private
study and his participation in the Hindu-
stani Jazz Sextet. Besides this welter of
activity, Bill was also involved in an experi-
mental (‘‘and quite unemployed,” he adds)
group called the Jazz Corps. (Two members
of the Corps, Maurice Miller and Lynn
Blessing, appear in supporting roles with
Bill on this LP.) “We tried to rehearse as
often as possible,” Bill says, “and after years
of limitations we were finally recorded on
Pacific Jazz.”
Since then, Bill has left the Horn group,
as the studio demand for his sitar playing
(not to mention his work on bass) under-
went a rapid upsurge. Not that studio work
occupies all his time. In 1966 he went on
an extended tour with Tony Bennet, and
followed that by working with Miles Davis
in San Diego and Los Angeles, a feat he re-
peated in 1967. Besides that, Bill continues
to break in new material with the Jazz Corp,
finds time for study with Ravi Shankar, and
who knows what else. All in all, he is not
likely to have the opportunity to become
bored, so many and varied are his musical
assignments.
For jazz, alas, controversy and factionalism
are nothing new. Its ranks are continually
being fragmented, as advocates of the new-
est developments butt their heads into
those who are unable or unwilling to evolve
with the times.
It would seem, moreover, than no sooner
do the wounds of one schism heal than
another one threatens to burst forth. A few
years ago, for example, the pages of the
jazz magazines were filled with scathing
denunciations of the new jazz, as practiced
first by the late John Coltrane, Ornette Cole-
man, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon,
and later by newcomers such as Pharoah
Sanders, Albert and Don Ayler, Archie
Shepp, Andrew Hill. Now, that that new
generation has begun to triumph and the
most obdurate opponents of their music
have gradually had to eat their most vitriolic
words (a diet very likely to provoke indiges-
tion, one suspects), peace and serenity
should reign supreme within the jazz world.
Lots of luck! Burying the hatchet from the
last feud has not yet even been completed,
and already a new set of antagonists are
again breaking out the weapons.
The dispute this time revolves around
the use of material from popular music in
jazz; and, perhaps, not so surprisingly, the
most adamantly negative position is held
by just those writers and journalists who
were dead set against the new jazz of Col-
trane and his fellows. While this factsdoes
not prove anything, it certainly does sug-
gest that there is a very vociferous faction
in jazz that is fixated on the status quo and
is opposed to change per se, whether in the
direction of Coltrane or of Lennon and Mc-
Cartney.
As you will see if you look over at the list
of selections, this recording, the debut al-
bum for bassist and sitarist Bill Plummer
as a leader in his own write (as Lennon
spells it), includes two pieces from the world
of pop—Lady Friend, a minor hit by one of
the first American art rock groups, the
Byrds; and The Look of Love, a delicate and
haunting ballad sung to perfection (flat
notes and all) by British pop star Dusty
Springfield. If you will go further than just
looking at the album and actually set it on
the turntable, you will hear that, although
it draws extensively on rock rhythmic pat-
terns (listen to the playing of drummers
Maurice Miller and Bill Goodwin and elec-
tric bassist Carol Kaye), it also incorporates
many aspects of Indian music, particularly
on compositions such as Plummer’s Arc
294° and fellow sitarist Hersh Hamel’s
Journey to the East. Those who have their
faces dead set against the use of contribu-
tions from pop in jazz will no doubt be quick
to cry “Sellout!” here. They will see inclu-
sion of Look of Love and Lady Friend as
blatant concessions to commerciality; they
will condemn the presence of sitars (and
the other Indian instruments—sarode, tam-
bura, and tabla) as attempts to cash in on
the current pop fashion for Indian music
created when Beatle George Harrison and
Rolling Stone Keith Richard began playing
sitars and Harrison went to study with
master sitarist Ravi Shankar.
And they will, to my mind at least, be
wrong on all counts. To take matters in
reverse order, consider the use of Eastern
instruments and musical ideas, such as the
raga, in jazz. Far from originating in the
wake of Rubber Soul, the first Beatle album
in which Harrison employed the sitar, the
marriage of jazz and raga has a solid his-
torical precedent. There are several record-
ings in which sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar
improvises with American jazz musicians;
and an approach to improvisation broadly
similar to raga has long since consolidated
a permanent place in the jazz literature
through the model playing of John Coltrane,
several of whose solos (most notably on the
original Atlantic recording of My Favorite
Things) are more than a little suggestive of
a sitar raga line. Indeed, Coltrane, whose
music. has sired a whole generation of
younger musicians in just the same way as
did the earlier innovations of Charlie Parker,
was so taken with Shankar’s playing that he
bestowed the name Ravi on one of his own
children. A more striking testimonial than
that would be difficult to imagine!
In recent years, experiments in utilizing
the sitar within a jazz context, like an in-
terest in Indian religions and philosophies,
have flourished especially on the West
Coast; and Bill Plummer—whose work on
sitar probably antedates that of George
Harrison—has been intimately involved in
most of them. In 1965, he states, “I met
Hari Har Rao. . . while attending classes at
vibraharpist Emil Richard's Percussion |n-
stitute. | became very interested in Indian
music at this time and began study of the
sitar under Hari Har Rao, a 10-year student
and musical associate of Ravi Shankar. Hari
was teaching at U.C.L.A. and privately is
one of the main gurus in the influence of
Indian music in our culture.” A natural out-
growth of this interest in Indian music was
the formation of the Hindustani Jazz Sextet,
with Plummer, Richards, trumpeter Don
Ellis, Ken Watson, Dave Mackay, and Paul
Beaver as the original members. Subse-
quently, the HJS underwent fission: one
element, under the leadership of Emil Rich-
ards, became the New Time Element; the
rial ultimately took form as the Don Ellis
and.
So much for the sitar and raga. | trust
that no one will question either the propriety
of jazz's involvement with Indian music or
the genuineness of Plummer’s own abiding
interest in trying to bring off the jazz-raga
fusion. But once the legitimacy of incor-
porating Indian musical ideas in jazz has
been admitted, | do not see how, in all logic,
the exclusion of other kinds of music, par-
ticularly American pop, can be insisted
upon, as some of our more refractory writers
are prone to do. To be sure, their argument
is that popular material will pollute the pure
streams of jazz with an inferior musical
substance. From what | have seen in the
studios, the opposite is far more likely to be
the case: in an attempt to find instant pop-
ularity, the jazz musician may end by
schmaltzing up a perfectly lovely pop work
by, say, the Beatles or Donovan or the
Jefferson Airplane, until very little of the
beauty or simplicity of the original remains
in the final version.
That this vulgarisation of popular mate-
rial does indeed take place cannot consti-
tute an argument against the use of such
material by jazz artists; at most, it ought to
suggest that the transmutation of pop into
jazz be handled with extreme discretion—
as it always has been by the foremost jazz
performers, from Louis Armstrong, Charlie
Parker, and Thelonious Monk to Miles Davis
and John Coltrane. But as long as there is a
distinct musical persuasion recognizable as
jazz, it is likely that, dialectically, it will be
both contributing to and taking from Ameri-
can popular music. That being so, discretion
indicates that we ought to stop short of any
blanket condemnation of the ongoing pop-
and-jazz symbiosis; it makes much better
historical sense simply to evaluate each
case on its own merits. As for the two such
instances included here, | confess that they
are not my favorite tracks on the album;
but by the same token neither do they do
great violence to the spirit of the originals.
If | have laid emphasis on the presence
of Indian and popular elements in this al-
bum, it is because, to the jazz listener, they
are the ones that are likely to be considered
“strange” or “foreign.” For all of that, | do
not see how there can be much debate that
the final musical product fashioned by Bill
Plummer and his associates has that unique
feeling that sets apart jazz from other
musics. If you have doubts on that score,
you might try listening to the spontaneous
jamming between the Indian instruments,
the percussion, and the precocious tenor
saxophone of 19-year-old Tom Scott during
the final third of Arc 294°; or to the free im-
provising of Plummer, Lynn Blessing on a
variety of miscellaneous percussion instru-
ments, and Maurice Miller on steel drums
on Antares. Though somewhat different in
texture, both of these works stand up quite
well in comparison with the brand of new
jazz being played on the East Coast these
days. (Lest the Gentle Reader think his
sanity is slipping, he should be told that
Plummer makes use of overdubbing to
record two bass tracks on Antares, a device
| RECORDS |
MONO A-9164 STEREO AS-9164
which he also utilizes on Are 294° to allow
him to play both sitar and upright bass.)
If those two examples don’t convince you,
then | don’t suppose you'll be persuaded by
even something so unequivocal as Tom
Scott’s Coltrane-inspired (and Varitone am-
plified) tenor solo on the mystical Journey
to the East, or his more overtly swinging
(and much too short) effort on the same
horn in Pars Fortuna.
Too bad, | say, because you are missing
out on some very enjoyable musical experi-
ences. | was present in the studios for a
number of the sessions that produced this
album, and | enjoyed what | heard then.
Now, my pleasure has been enhanced by
being able to listen to the selections which
make up this recording in their final form.
FRANK KOFSKY
Associate Editor, Jazz & Pop Magazine
TOM SCOTT
PERSONNEL:
SITARS
BILL PLUMMER, HERSH HAMEL,
RAY NEOPOLITAN
SARODE
JAN STEWARD
TAMBURA
HERSH HAMEL, JAN STEWARD
TABLA
MILT HOLLAND
TRANSCELESTE, DUO VIGONG,
AMERICAN TREE BELLS, BOO BAMS,
SURROGATE VITHARA, WHICH STAND
MIKE CRADEN
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