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Phil Haynes’ 4 Horns & What?
The Complete American Recordings
Corner Store Jazz CSJ-0066
New York’s “downtown scene” was so-called because folks mostly played (way) south of midtown, not because folks lived there. Many did live below 14th Street, but home might be anywhere from western New Jersey to the Bronx to affordable Brooklyn neighborhoods that seemed quaintly remote, at eight subway stops from Manhattan. That alone establishes this was another century. As folks point out, that 1980s/1990s scene was really a dozen or more subscenes with overlapping personnel, a Venn hula hoop. Zorn’s circle was not the same as Tim Berne’s, or Steve Coleman’s, or Henry Threadgill’s – even if a few folks (Bill Frisell, Mark Dresser) seemed to float effortlessly among camps.
One of the farther Brooklyn outposts of greater downtownism was a corner store converted into a ground floor apartment/rehearsal space, rented in 1983 by drummer Phil Haynes (and guitarist Jim Yanda), at 8th and Prospect Avenues in South Slope, near the Dog Day Afternoon bank. Haynes was born in Oregon before attending Coe College and becoming a cultural Iowan. There he’d been a protege of trumpeter Paul Smoker, a frequent Brooklyn visitor. Their New York allies included up-and-comers from Baltimore Ellery Eskelin and Drew Gress, their bandmates in the co-op 4tet Joint Venture. Haynes was aw-shucks affable, if less than happy about how hard it was to break into any New York jazz scene. To get something going he’d have to do it himself. Which led, by and by, to Corner Store Syndicate festivals at the old Knitting Factory on Houston Street. Haynes’s 4 Horns & What? was the syndicate’s flagship band. They were outsiders, but Haynes’s music placed them right in the thick of it. Ideas were in the air and their antennae were up.
In 1988, Haynes had started his 4+1 with a self-deprecatory interrogatory title: two brass, two reeds, and drums – a format of its time, in a good way: unstandard rhythm section; a horn choir kept busy in solo and background roles. As new leaders do, Haynes asked his friends: Smoker, Eskelin, and alto and baritone saxist Andy Laster, who’d recently used Phil (and original 4 Hornist Frank Lacy) on his debut Hippo Stomp. The fourth horn on 4 Horns and What?’s 1989 debut (on Open Minds) is ex-Sam Rivers tubist Joe Daley, also on baritone horn – recommended by Lacy when he got hired away by Art Blakey.
Drum-and-bugle-corps energy informs the band. So do the possibilities Julius Hemphill opened up with the World Saxophone Quartet, not least when Laster blasts Bluietty low riffs. His sound is big and sounds even better mixed up with Daley’s virtuoso tuba. The bari-ostinato propulsion of “A’lil Iowa Get-Down” nods to Hemphill’s influence, ditto “Corner Store Strut” with Julian slinky riffs sliding in and out. There Ellery’s tenor rides a ferocious bari-tuba wave. The four horns also play free jazzy quadratic improvisations where everyone pays attention. The breadth of the horn sound is imposing. Smoker’s power and quick ascents from mid-range to the stratosphere foster the illusion of larger forces. (He’d survived the era of rock bands with screeching brass.) Paul can plead with a plunger; his harmon-muting bristles rather than whispers – as if the mute might shoot across the room. Back around then Eskelin said Smoker’s timbral manipulations helped inspire his own sonic plasticity.
Drummer Haynes can sit on top of a tippin’ New York beat (as on “Iowa Get-Down”’s telegraph-key rhythm) but often loosens the time to bat out tom-tom melodies in implicit or explicit dialogue with the horns, informed by Blackwell bata and Max Roach’s lively tunings, as on “Blues for Israel.” Haynes factors in contrasting episodes that keep things moving forward, “putting fences around the free” as Steve Lacy put it, and there are some deft and precisely played four-horn voicings, as on stop-and-go “Point Period.” Where Laster switches to his gleaming, plaintive alto (“Ballad for Heike”), the texture brightens. Andy Laster’s own albums from the period are ripe for rediscovery (they’re on Sound Aspects, like Open Minds run by the elusive Pedro de Freitas). But that tuba-greased doubled-bottom roar would not be documented again, though Ellery would use Joe Daley on a couple of 1990s recordings.
Phil Haynes © 2024 Adrienne Schott
Daley was unavailable for late 1991’s 4 Horn Lore (Open Minds), where the brass section is now two trumpet extroverts who’d go wild with a plunger mute, adding Herb Robertson who lived a couple of blocks away and was frequently about. He’d already shown his manic creativity on a few Tim Berne and Mark Helias projects and his own records for Germany’s JMT (including The Little Trumpet credited to label honcho Stefan Winter, and Certified with Haynes). Herb was the rare non-Amsterdammer on both the 1987 and 1991 improviser-hoedown October Meetings, an index of his popularity among his peers, and his wildman guest shot on David Sanborn’s Upfront (funking up Ornette’s “Ramblin’”) was just ahead. Robertson and Smoker were two exploding peas in a pod. Herb also doubled on valve trombone and tuba, however briefly, but the double-trumpet chatter is the stuff. But it wasn’t the whole show. There’s more good dense harmony, “Out of the Bowels.”
“Some Slick Sick” showcases Ellery’s internal drive and overtone-rich tenor over Haynes’ backbeat and sidestrokes, and Laster’s reliable-as-ever bari gravel. “Holler for Horns” is an opener in the Art Ensemble vein: start silent, come in gingerly, a bit of melody, bring slowly to a boil. “Goofus’s Step” is a jaunt with deliberate wrong notes and inept voicings, sour candy: jazz you can trace back to Charles Ives’ affectionate echoes of amateurism. But then forward-looking bands look back for ideas all the time. “Adrienne’s Jazzmarchrag” puts brass in the barnyard and the drummer back on his rudiments. As a general observation, the influence of Brooklyn’s Lester Bowie is hard to overestimate in period trumpet daring, tongue-in-cheek orchestration, and drum-and-bugle-corps energy. He’s still hard to top.
The last of three CDs here is newly released: an October 1995 concert recorded by Jon Rosenberg at Brooklyn Academy of Music, less than two miles from the Corner Store as the crow flies, and a long step from nights at the (now closed) old Knitting Factory. They appeared on a series curated by Don Byron as counterpoint to Manhattan’s Lincoln Center jazz. 4 Horns & What?’s Complete American Recordings is a handsome compact set graced by Nicholas Horner abstracts and annotated by Shaun Brady. About the lone misstep was to present the B.A.M. concert gavel-to-gavel with applause and (hard to hear) stage announcements intact – presumably to rope in Byron’s endorsement of this “group full of leaders,” though his intro to the evening is oddly back-handed. Short version: Tonight, some music you might hate. Good luck with that. (4H opened for P Bley/Swallow/Motian.) By then Eskelin had moved on, busy with his own projects notably his rigorous trio with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black.
4H&W? trot out their sure-fire “Holler,” “Goofus” and “Iowa” already mentioned, and three new ones, including “Waltz for Jerry” spotlighting Laster’s singing, clean, rhythmically buoyant alto, neither too heavy nor light, and a desert-caravan “Saeta” featuring Herb in vocalized mode, if far from Miles Davis’s same-named most dramatic Spanish sketch. A murmured one-note bari-sax bass figure completes the picture. But we’ve buried the lead: on tenor tonight only is the elder John Tchicai, evidently psyched to playing B.A.M. himself, in a band reminiscent of some earlier free-ish colloquies he’s remembered for. Tchicai gets a nice spot over Haynes’s quasi-taiko thunder midway through a crisp/wooly/long “Eclipse.” The leader also sounds especially up tonight. Tchicai blends into the horn choir very well where in some other contexts his turkey-gobble articulation can make him the odd man out. The band rise to the occasion, go out with a bam.
By October 1995 Andy Laster had been playing in Julius Hemphill’s saxophone sextet (before and after Julius passed), putting this choir practice to good use. Laster went on to pursue a composition degree and now records less often than fans of his playful thoughtful lyrical music would wish. Joe Daley still records, leading a trio. Herb Robertson has continued to go in and out of the limelight, sometimes sidelined by family commitments; in 2000 he and Haynes recorded as a duo and as leaders of a quintet with Vinny Golia, Ned Rothenberg, and Ken Filiano for Cadence. In 2003 Phil Haynes got a job teaching at Bucknell in central Pennsylvania, not too many hours’ drive from Smoker’s base in western New York. Paul died in 2016. When the pandemic came, Haynes relistened to this music for the first time in ages, and thought, this stands up OK. He’s not wrong.
–Kevin Whitehead
