Muriel Grossmann :: Plays the Music of McCoy Tyner and the Grateful Dead
After Bob Weir’s death on Jan. 10, the tributes came pouring in. One of the most unusual came a few weeks before, at the very tail end of the old year, with Muriel Grossmann’s double album (one song per side, known around these parts as “the devil’s double album”) Plays the Music of McCoy Tyner and the Grateful Dead. On it, the Austrian saxophonist, working with a trio (longtime guitarist Radomir Milojkovic, organist Abel Boquera and drummer Uros Stamenkovic, the latter two of whom appeared on Grossmann’s 2023 Third Man debut Devotion), explores two tracks each by the renowned jazz pianist and the pioneering jam band. The Dead cuts – “The Music Never Stopped” and “The Other One” — were both written by Weir.
On the surface, the work of the percussive, harmonically intense Tyner and the circumspect rhythmic style of Weir would seem to share little in common. And maybe below the surface, as well. Tyner’s work is galvanic and aggressive, as if he were trying to make up for the absence of John Coltrane, as a member of whose band he helped redefine midcentury jazz. Both “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” and “Contemplation” come from Tyner’s post-Trane years, when he was figuring out his own role as a leader. With the Dead tracks of course, Weir was working within the confines of his primary band, very much in the shadow of Jerry Garcia. Though Weir had a knack for a hard-charging chorus (not Jerry’s bailiwick, to say the least), Weir had to write with Garcia in mind, leaving space for his outsized contributions. Tyner had to make exactly zero concessions, aside from wrestling with Coltrane’s ghost. That was probably enough, come to think of it.
So, what connections can we discern in the work of these two musicians? The time period, for one: “Contemplation” and “The Other One” were written in the late 1960s, while “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” and “The Music Never Stopped” hail from the ‘70s. “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit,” like the Dead cuts, is a massive jam – in its first appearance on Tyner’s live Enlightenment (1973), it lasts a staggering 24 minutes. (Grossmann’s version clocks in at a relatively tidy 14:29.) “Contemplation” in its studio form on Tyner’s 1967 The Real McCoy, is a compact nine minutes; Grossmann stretches it out by five. In all these tracks, Grossmann seems to locate a common theme of kinetic potential and flexibility – the ways in which a song can offer a wealth of opportunities for spontaneous interaction, complex evolution and sudden swerves into undiscovered country. Weir and Tyner may have used different tools and followed different methods, but they both wanted to crack open compositions and see what they were made of, and figure out how they could be remade.
Grossmann’s treatment of Tyner is complicated by the lack of Tyner’s instrument, the piano. Boquera’s zesty organ adds tropical colors to the mix, but its bouncy zephyrs can’t replace Tyner’s roiling gale. Grossmann mostly sticks to Azar Lawrence’s sax line, duetting with Milojkovic’s guitar in a way that allows her more space than Tyner gave to Lawrence. Grossmann has a big, round tone, and she uses it to full advantage here, playing robust, juicy-fruit notes in the manner of mid-70s Sonny Rollins, with maybe a smidgen of David Sanborn’s tart felicity thrown in. There’s not a lot in the way of Tyner’s glittering dissonance, but the band does capture his amiable abandon.
“Contemplation” has a bluesier feel, aligning it with the Dead right away. Grossmann enlarges upon this giving Milojkovic plenty of room to solo, which mostly accounts for the track’s extra five minutes of length. Milojkovic incisively interprets Tyner’s rapid right-hand trills, but a guitar lacks a piano’s weight, and it refracts Tyner’s dazzling density into a wigglier wavelength. Grossmann again spends a lot of time dueting with the guitar, just as Joe Henderson chops it up with Tyner on the 1967 studio track, and, if her version lacks the chiming sharpness of the original (perhaps having more in common with the gentler rendition on 2003’s Land of Giants, featuring vibraphone king Bobby Hutcherson on the front line), it manages to bring out the rich interiority of Tyner’s piece. And, especially in the guitar-heavy latter half, it starts to sound a lot like Bobby Weir.
Grossmann’s adaptation of the Dead maps more easily onto the source material due to the presence of Milojkovic’s guitar. The Serbian has uncanny ear for the way the Dead’s intensely American music glides and twangs, and he can set up a rolling simmer with the best locked-in jammer. Check out how, after it dissolves into abstraction about four minutes in, Milojkovic resurrects “The Other One” into a fractal burble. Grossmann, for her part, nails the vocal lines, sounding more steadfastly tonal and limber than the notoriously wavering Weir. And when she departs from the main melody, she achieves a kind of soulful rigor that suggests Garcia at his yearning best without imitating him. It’s fun to think about which live versions of these tracks Grossmann and crew could be drawing from – I’d say their “Other One” has the panoramic gusto of the Donna/Keith years, while “The Music Never Stopped” bears the funky verve of the Brent Mydland years (like “Contemplation” it gets expanded by about five or so minutes). But other heads with different ears will surely have their own opinions.
Muriel Grossmann’s tribute to the music of two very different American visionaries may not make an overwhelming case for shared ground, but it nonetheless finds a lot of intriguing links. If nothing else, Tyner and Weir devoted their lives to a common purpose: keeping the music of their deceased Other Ones alive without losing themselves in the process. Now that they have departed into myth themselves (Tyner died in 2020), they leave behind countless ways to remember – and more importantly, reinvent – their legacies. | r jackson
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