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Home brews
Checking in with Jamie Baum, Steve Kuhn, and Mulatu Astatké
BY JON GARELICK

For Jamie Baum, the flute is a means to an end. The composer, bandleader, and, yes, flutist, who brings her septet to the Regattabar on November 17, is one of the few jazz players on the scene to focus on that single instrument; one can name only a handful of others — James Newton, Boston’s Fernando Brandão, and, of an earlier generation, Hubert Laws. In most cases in jazz, the flute is a "double" — a second or third instrument played by saxophonists along with, say, clarinet.

"I wish I could say it was some kind of magical moment that clicked in my head about playing the flute," Baum tells me over the phone from her home in New York City. "But it was really more that I’d always played the piano and wanted to pick up something that was mobile, where you could go out and have fun with friends and play." So she played the flute in high school in Fairfield, Connecticut, and didn’t really decide she wanted to be a professional musician until her first year of college. Her mother was a Juilliard-trained pianist and trombonist, and as the saying goes, there was always a lot of music around the house, as well as early concert encounters with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Dizzy Gillespie. On her own, going to concerts by Laws and Miles Davis, Baum finally did feel that "something" click, whereupon she transferred from the University of Vermont to New England Conservatory.

Even so, she says, "I never thought so much about being a flute player. It was more like a vehicle for me." What’s more, at NEC, she felt she was playing a "catch-up game" with life-long instrumental specialists and prodigies. There was no time to pick up a second instrument — maybe if she’d been studying flute since the age of eight, she’d have felt differently. "Another factor was that I always felt that I wanted to write my own music, and I knew that that would quite time-consuming."

One advantage of the route that Baum has taken is that she’s become a compelling small-band composer and leader. She was a regular on the Boston scene of the early ’80s, gigging in duos and trios, and as part of the band Genso, with Dominique Eade, Mick Goodrick, John Lockwood, and Gary Chaffee. Her part of the scene also included pianists Donald Brown, Fred Hersch, Mokoto Ozone, and Kenny Werner. Her 1996 album Sight Unheard featured Werner and trumpeter Dave Douglas, and it was notable for its lean, unpredictable pieces. Baum has virtuosity aplenty — but one thinks of Douglas or vocalists like Patricia Barber or Betty Carter, who put their stamp on their music as writers and conceptualizers as much as by being star soloists.

The new Moving Forward, Standing Still (OmniTone) is similarly concept-driven and similarly fresh. Working with a group she put together in 1999 — trumpeter Ralph Alessi, saxophonist Doug Yates, French-horn player Tom Varner, pianist George Colligan, bassist Drew Gress, and drummer Jeff Hirshfield — Baum has created a program of varied material that draws from her studies of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps in several pieces as well as the Bartók string quartets in one ("Bar Talk," natch) and Charles Ives’s Central Park in the Dark in another ("Central Park"). She doesn’t offer a "jazz interpretation" of the Stravinsky composition but instead uses it as source material: bits of melody, ideas about rhythm and counterpoint. The melody from the introduction to part one of Sacre recurs in "Spring Rounds" and a diptych medley of Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu’s "From Scratch" with Baum’s "Primordial Prelude" as well as in "Spring." The borrowings in "All Roads Lead to You" are more abstract, with a snatch of melody bearing more resemblance to John Coltrane’s "Naimi" than to anything in Sacre.

The opening "All Roads Lead to You" builds textures from Baum’s simple flute introduction through a variety of contrapuntal lines and a mix of contrasts both rhythmic and tonal. Fast-moving upper-register lines are set against a slow, deep background of that "Naima" figure arrayed in colors from flute to French horn, all of it giving way to a galloping alto-sax solo from Doug Yates.

Throughout the album, Baum’s flute lines have a distinctive weight, especially in her use of alto flute, that distinguishes her from the "fluty" (her word) sound of smooth jazz or the more decorative use of the instrument by other composers. Alessi’s work provides another highlight, especially on his feature in "From Scratch/Primordial Prelude," where he shows his talent for Miles-like minimalist lyricism and an elastic line that stretches with long, held bent notes and condenses with tumbling arpeggiated runs. Baum’s mixing and matching of colors and timbres is a tonic — in Colligan’s occasional use of the Fender Rhodes electric piano, in Yates’s doubling on bass clarinet against French horn in "Central Park," in the wonderful flügelhorn/alto-flute duet between Alessi and Baum in "South Rim," which confuses the ear as the sound of one instrument blends with another.

Baum worked with the band for a couple of years before recording, and that helps account for the music’s seasoned quality. At the Regattabar (where bassist Johannes Weidenmueller will fill in for Gress), there’s a chance they’ll play a couple of new pieces commissioned by the Doris Duke Foundation, which is also financing a couple of theater gigs on the band’s short tour.

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Issue Date: November 5 - 11, 2004
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