Featuring: Bobby Naughton
Michael Rosenstein - Point of Departure
Vibraphone player Bobby Naughton was a model of musical self-determination. From his home base in Connecticut, he and a group of like-minded musicians banded together to create opportunities to perform and document their music. Naughton formed the label Otic and he and Wadada Leo Smith co-founded Creative Musicians’ Improvisers Forum which supported musicians and presented concerts. From the late 1960s onward, he played in various groupings with this cohort of musicians including Smith, Mark Whitecage, Perry Robinson, Laurence Cook, Mario Pavone, Randy Kaye, and Joe Fonda. In the fall of 1985, Naughton was able to secure a series of dates at Charlie’s Tap, a small neighborhood jazz club in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his working trio with Kaye on drums and Fonda on bass. He assiduously recorded the shows along with a session at the club during the day, archiving the tapes for potential release. After Naughton’s death, writer Ed Hazell gained access to Naughton’s archive and unearthed the recordings resulting in this release.
Over the course of a dozen pieces, all by Naughton with the exception of “Vashkar” by Carla Bley and “Composition 23J” by Anthony Braxton, the trio digs in with adroit collective interplay. This is truly three-way music imbued with a supple approach toward free lyrical improvisation. Naughton’s vibes playing owes much to his background as a pianist; his abstracted melodicism shaped by keen attentiveness toward attack and sustain. Fonda’s bass is a worthy complement to Naughton’s playing. His deep, rich plucked bass deconstructs the motifs of the tunes and wends around the vibist’s crystalline extrapolations. Kaye is one of Naughton’s longest collaborators, going back to the late 1960s and appearing on the leader’s debut recording Understanding. The drummer’s playing is focused more on timbral orchestration and accenting the group flow than it is about defining time or pulse. The drummer spent time playing with Jimmy Giuffre in the late 1970s into the 1980s and the fluid strategies toward ensemble interplay of Giuffre’s groups have many synergies with this trio.
Most of the performances range from three to just over seven minutes long. Eschewing the structure of thematic statement followed by solos, the group digs right into lithe spontaneous explication of the open lyricism of the leader’s pieces. It’s also intriguing to hear the way that the trio inhabits Bley’s lush “Vashkar,” letting the lines unwind slowly. One can hear how Bley’s music influenced Naughton’s writing, particularly on his tunes covered here like the languid “Shepaug Strut” or the floating interwoven harmonics of “Pomperaug Diversions.” Their reading of Braxton’s “Composition 23J” stretches to over nine minutes, allowing them more space to explore and expand on the piece with darting, overlapping angularities. NoBusiness Records and Ed Hazell have continued to do an invaluable job of mining the archives of Sam Rivers as well as projects like reissues from the Japanese Chap Chap label and more recently, the release of music recorded live at Studio Rivbea. It is fantastic that they also dive into lesser-known musicians like Bobby Naughton whose work deserves wider recognition.
