From the sound in his head to the realities of the road, here's ten years in the life of the creative improv trio comprised of saxophonist Ellery Eskelin with accordionist Andrea Parkins and drummer Jim Black. Story by Steve Smith, photos by Michael Galinsky

UNCONVENTIONAL
CONFIGURATION



Ten years isn't a long time in the grand scheme of things: a tick of the clock, a fleeting moment. But for an improvising band, a decade is an eternity. By its nature, improvised music demands change, which is probably one reason why its benchmark bands don't tend to stick around very long.

Examples abound: Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens and Charlie Parker's Dial and Savoy combos, for instance, barely existed outside the confines of the recording studio. The first quintet with which Miles Davis changed the course of jazz was subject to personnel flux on the piano bench and the drum stool; the second barely lasted three years intact. The classic John Coltrane Quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones -- in many ways the archetypal small jazz combo existed for only four years.

It's no surprise, really. The economics of improv have never made long-term career planning a viable strategy; folks need to keep food on the table. More to the point, however, improvisation is a fundamentally unsettled art form, fueled by uncertainty. No matter how inclined toward exploration, musicians who stick together over extended periods can become comfortable, their partners' moves predictable. The sound of surprise often dwindles steadily as the years add up.

Ellery Eskelin most likely wouldn't be comfortable to have his trio with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black measured by the yardstick of the jazz pantheon; to begin with, he's not the type to couch his own work in those terms. More to the point, however, his band is a protean entity, its music hard to pin down with just one label. The music it plays live, and the records it has made, surely emanate from solid foundation in jazz, from its most mainstream modes to its most outré inclinations. But from that starting point, the band proceeds to absorb and transfigure elements of rock, funk, classical and contemporary composition and countless other musical strains.

What's more, apart from the music itself, the trio has made its living by carving out an indefinable niche that partakes at least as much of an indie-rock, D.I.Y. mentality. A more accurate basis of comparison, then, might be Sonic Youth, a long-lived unit that has managed to keep its career fresh and surprising through a diversity of musical approaches, a steady stream of worthy recordings and a busy sideline in spin-offs.

Throw in a sidelong glance at Fugazi, the wiry postpunk group that built its devoted audience by rewriting in its own image the rulebook for live performance and touring, and you begin to approximate Eskelin's achievement in leading this band -- one that in 10 solid years of work has never threatened to grow state, while in the process creating a body of recorded work that surely ranks among the most consistent and significant of his generation.

Like most revolutionary ideas, Eskelln's band began with a simple notion -- or more specifically, a sound that the saxophonist couldn't get out of his head. A respected presence and valued sideman on the New York scene since 1983, Eskelin demonstrated outside-the-box values from fairly early on. After launching his discography with two conventionally configured sax-bass-drums trio records, Eskelin issued Figure of Speech, which tweaked the formula with Joe Daley's tuba and Arto Tuncboyaciyan's hand percussion. Three years later, in 1994, Eskelin's epiphany arrived.

"It all started with a sound in my head," Eskelin begins, "the same way any of the projects I've done have started." It's a question he's answered many times before, but he has yet to tire of it. Given the circumstances, in fact, it's impossible not to notice a hint of pride as he relates the story. Settling in for a lengthy conversation in the living room of the spacious midtown Manhattan apartment he shares with wife Michelle Van Natta and their bright, inquisitive son, Rami, Eskelin commences to detail a saga that began with the sound of thelowly squeezebox.

"I'm following a sound growing in my head," Eskelin continues, switching tenses like an internal conversation. "I don't know how to describe it; it's almost completely a non-verbal process. It's kind of like: 'Well, maybe some kind of chordal instrument. You've been doing all this stuff with bass,
drums and horn -- maybe a different kind of sound." And then maybe I heard an accordionist in Europe. Slowly, over time, it just starts to gel: Saxophone, drums and accordion. And so, the search begins.

The drum chair proved relatively easy to fill, Eskelin first met Jim Black shortly after he came to New York from Boston in 1991, and played with him in an early edition of Tim Berne's Bloodcount. "it was immediately like, Whoah, his phrasing and my phrasing, it's extremely natural," Eskelin says. "It's right there." Even before that encounter, Black had taken note of Eskelin. "I remember first seeing Ellery with Joey Baron's Baron Down band," Black explains, having just arrived back in New York from an overseas tour with his own current band, Alas No Axis.

"I was knocked out by the combination of his "old school"-influenced tone paired with this angular and unpredictable approach to rhythm, phrasing and shaping his improvisations. I also saw him perform in so many different musical contexts, sounding equally amazing in every one. Mostly I remember, Wow, this guy just added another page to the lexicon of the saxophone."

Following their first encounter, Eskelin promptly told Black of his hope to make a trio featuring the two of them and an accordion player. "I said that to him for about six months," Eskelin says, chuckling. "I think he was starting to think I was a flake, because I was having a hard time. Where was I going to find an improvising accordionist in New York? I was looking in Europe, and there was somebody in San Francisco at one point, but then I started hearing Andrea's name from a couple of different people. I hadn't heard of her, but I noticed that she was playing at Roulette one night with Ikue Mori and Kato Hicleki, I went to hear her play, and I had a sense that it might work."

A New York based pianist and electronic musician with a background in the visual arts, Parkins was a deft accordionist who was thoroughly devoted to exploding traditional notions about the instrument, through both unorthodox playing techniques and liberal application of effects and electronics.

"I plugged her into a rehearsal and it worked," Eskelin says. Discovering Parkins, he had found his band. "She fit very naturally into what I was doing. I think that the sound in my head shifted a accommodate the players, but I was able to accomplish that original sound." The band made its first public appearance on March 20, 1994; in October of that year, it went into the studio to record its first CD, Jazz Trash, for the Canadian label Songlines. If it's not as accomplished as the trio's later sessions, the initial combination of Eskelin's brawny lines and burnished tone, Parkins's idiosyncratic sound and coloristic range, and Black's itchy funk and timbral mastery remains compulsively listenable. The album retains a brash, infectious charm all its own.

According to Parkins, one of the initial attractions of the band was precisely that sense of discovering what the three of them were capable of creating together. "At the beginning, Ellery had a very clear concept about what he was wanting to hear," she says. "There was a whole process we went through in rehearsal, where he had this material and he was pretty open as to how it got resolved. He did take our input, but this was his vision, his conception. Having said that, I think he very quickly began to realize that both Jim and I would bring very original stuff to it that he could capitalize on."

The more he worked with his two new collaborators, the more potential Eskelin realized he could access. "We could do all these things I didn't anticipate," he says. "Andrea played sampler and could do piano and keyboard things ... I found out we could be a rock band if we wanted to be, and that was really cool. It could be a string quartet if I want it to be. In my mind, it could be any number of things. I thought, well, this could be a band ... maybe we'll stay together for a couple of years, do two, three records or something." After that first album, credited only to the leader, the trio would from then on be known as "Ellery Eskelin with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black" ... unwieldy, to be sure, but an unmistakable declaration of the band's democratic complexion.

"With Ellery, it's impossible to feel like a hired gun," Black adds, "because the three of us are so responsible for the overall sound of the music, whether it is fleshing out a composition with parts or changing the mood or direction of an improvisation. The compositions, general structures and arrangements are all Ellery's: He will describe a sound he has in mind, and then the trio experiments with different ideas until we find the approach that works best. It feels quite democratic even though Ellery has the final say. I appreciate the challenge to play something I would never think of, and being asked to go beyond my normal musical and conceptual boundaries."

The trio's second record, One Great Day.... appeared some three years later, beginning an association with the Swiss hatOLOGY label that continues to this day. On it, the trio sounds considerably more seasoned and secure, its members more forceful and confident in navigating Eskelin's increasingly distinguished compositions and responding to one another's cues. That this confidence was hard-won isn't immediately apparent-, but Eskelin's liner notes offer a clue. "There's still no substitute for playing night after night," he wrote, "and since most clubs no longer offer extended runs, that means touring."

Growing up in Baltimore as the son of jazz organist Bobbie Lee, Eskelin had witnessed firsthand the evaporation of steady gig opportunities. At the beginning of the '60s, his mother could play six gigs a week for months and even years at a time; by the end of the decade when he embarked upon his own career, that was no longer the case. Moving to New York City in 1983, Eskelin found more opportunities to work, leading his own projects, playing with the cooperative quartet Joint Venture (with trumpeter Phil Smoker, bassist Drew Gress and drummer Phil Haynes) and working as a sideman with leaders such as Joey Baron and Mark Helias. Early on, Eskelin took whatever work he could find, but from the beginning, it was clear that even in New York, playing regularly didn't come easily.

"When I first came to New York, you could still get a gig playing three sets a night, the whole night to yourself, and actually get a fee," he says. "You can still do that in a few places, but the norm became splitting the door with a whole bunch of bands. After a while, that didn't work for me, because as a bandleader I didn't want to ask the band to play for the door. I'm used to getting paid-I demand to be paid if I'm a sideperson. So I lost a lot of money in the first few years playing with this band in New York, but I got the ball rolling with it so that I could take it out of New York. That's the way you do it now: New York is like a meeting place, you get it together here, get a little buzz going and split, take it out on the road."

If finding work in New York jazz clubs proved difficult, playing in other cities could be close to impossible. Jazz venues dwindled in number throughout the '90s, and most of the ones that remained weren't open to the kind of music that Eskelin and his bandmates were making.

In Europe, on the other hand, government arts subsidies made touring a welcome proposition. Like most adventurous bands during that decade, Eskelin, Parkins and Black found opportunities abroad that weren't to be had at home. One Great Day... recorded in 1996, documents the end of the trio's first European tour. The band's confident sound, the disc reveals, was forged not only by rehearsal, but also by days and nights spent on the road together.

That record, and those that followed roughly annually, surely helped pave the way for the trio to begin playing out in America. College radio airplay, which Eskelin personally worked hard to bolster through hands-on promotion, created a potential new audience for the band -- not necessarily jazz fans per se, but curious kids who listened to whatever sounds emanated from their campus stations: hardcore punk, experimental noise, dance music, jam bands and so on.

With interest in college communities on the rise, a grassroots touring circuit began to take shape in the mid-to-late '90s. Along with a handful of other hardy explorers like Matt Shipp and Tim Berne, Eskelin and his bandmates did what punk bands had done for years before them: They got in the van and hit the road.

"In the States, it's hard to get to your audience," Eskelin says. "It's a big country to get around. In Europe, there's a train system. There are arts people who are used to doing this. There's a certain protocol, a certain assumption that, yes, you're going to get fed. Yes, you can count on certain things happening at a certain time. It's a matter of people's reputations and prestige that things are taken care of on a certain level."

By contrast, early tours of the States proved a learning experience for band and presenters alike, one that required careful negotiation on levels apart from mere finance. ”I’ve had some promoters in the States get a little miffed sometimes and tell me ‘So-and-so comes in here and expects us to gets towels and music stands, they want a hotel or this, that or the other.' They almost perceive musicians as being prima donnas for wanting what we would consider the minimum in Europe. And I still get surprised reactions when I say that the band really does need hotel rooms." At the same time, Eskelin understands and respects such grassroots efforts. "I know that those people are doing this from nothing," he says. "It's like a group of three disgruntled fans in town that never get to hear any music. They're completely soulful people who are just trying to make something happen, and I want to do everything I can to work with that. There can be some satisfaction in that, too, just to be able to make that work "

After a few lean years at the start, Eskelin has seen stateside prospects begin to Improve. He refers to a particular Midwest tour the band undertook earlier this year. “We had a couple of concerts at the Chicago Cultural Center that were totally professional, and we had a few club gigs that were good money. And then we had a couple of routing gigs where it was, We've never played in Indianapolis, we've never played in Cincinnati; I'm going to work with the local cats there. Maybe 20 people show up the first time, but you're building an audience. You're building a relationship with promoters, so that maybe the next time you come through, it's a little bit better. It might be grueling, but you do it, and it can be great: Some of the most fun we've had was playing some of there really funky rock clubs. We don't en play our tunes; we put the book ay and improvised two hour-long sets back to back, and people grooved on it." Meanwhile, the band doesn't view the additional comforts of European touring as a sure bet these days, especially with arts subsidies on the decline. "It's still vastly different there than in the States," Eskelin says. "But still, it's an issue. Tours that used to be five, six, seven weeks long 10 or 20 years ago may now be two to three weeks. And people are struggling to keep fees at a certain level. It's good for us to keep in touch with the bottom line about how all this works, and never take it for granted."

"In a way, it's gotten a little less illustrious in Europe and a little more illustrious in the States," Parkins concurs. "It's all economics there, and here it has to do with the merging of audiences, the fact that here, sometimes you really do get young audiences who are interested in this music. There's college radio, and musicians like Thurston [Moore], who's gotten a lot of appreciation for a lot of stuff, so he kind of creates scenarios where people who might be exposed to rock bands and noise bands are also exposed to this stuff. Not to mention that I think this stuff is getting to be a whole lot more like that stuff."

0ne place the band has definitely seen less action over the course of the decade, ironically, is New York City. Eskelin rarely leads his trio at home more than twice a year; moreover, even working as a sideman, he estimates that he probably plays only a dozen live dates here in a given year. "Part of that is my own doing," he explains. "I've seen the downside of this rock-club mentality. As much as I love [the Knitting Factory], this idea of having five stages with three bands a night on each stage didn't work for me. I would go to all this trouble to book a gig to play for the door in one of these little rooms, only to walk out into the hallway and see five people I know; they'd say, 'Oh, man, haven't seen you, what's up? I'll say, Oh, I just played a gig. 'Oh, really?'And they're in the building!"

Still, even without the regular live opportunities to which previous generations had access, Eskelin has enjoyed one benefit that guarantees his band will continue to enjoy a degree of notice. The steady stream of recordings issued by Werner Uehlinger's hatOLOGY label since 1997 -- ten to date, initially subsidized by a grant from Rolf Fehlbaurn and the Vitra furniture company -- has afforded Eskelin an opportunity that no American label could likely offer: namely, the chance to grow, experiment and take risks.

Of the ten, half feature the trio with Parkins and Black; two more augment that lineup with additional musicians, including the latest, Ten, which features contributions from guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Melvin Gibbs and vocalist Jessica Constable. (The remaining three include an encounter with drummer Han Bennink, a string-heavy free-improv session and a reissue of Eskelin's second trio album from 1990, originally issued by Sound Aspects.)

One might argue that recording for a European label with limited distribution and a relatively high domestic price tag could be viewed as a potential drawback, but that's not the way Eskelin sees it. "Of all the people that are out there doing this, Werner has been the most interested and the most dedicated to us," he explains. "I can't stress strongly enough what that has meant and continues to mean. On the other hand, he is a more-or-less one-man operation, and has a way of operating that either works for you or doesn't" -- a reference, in part, to Uehlinger's policy of minimal promotional expenditure, an effort Eskelin has done his part to bolster. "And it's worked for me: In spite of the fact that they're expensive and not in all the shops, we're pressing 3,000 copies -- that's a lot for these records -- and they're selling out."

As well they should. Taken as a whole, the seven records on which the trio performs constitute a body of work as consistent as any since the glory days of the Coltrane Quartet's run on the Impulse label (a comparison at which Eskelin would no doubt blanch) with the other discs as valuable adjuncts offering further insight into the leader. In a sense, they chart an almost counterintuitive direction: The earliest records feature the most conventional structures and formal arrangements, whereas the later records build songs from minimal material, relying more heavily on individual and collective improvisation.

Upon consideration, however, that trajectory seems perfectly logical: As Eskelin, Parkins and Black have grown more accustomed to one another, it only makes sense that the band would gradually develop and refine a voice that would allow it to turn less direction into more result.

"On 12 (+ 1) Imaginary Views and Arcanum Moderne, Ellery started making pieces that were about having a very small amount of written material that is very repetitive, kind of like a pop song in my opinion," Parkins says. "And what happens is that through the repetition of this material -- some of which is quite anthemic, some of it harmonically has that kind of satisfying aspect that much of pop music has -- there's a kind of tension that builds up, wherein it allows the improvisations to sort of erupt in a particular way. Some pieces, Ellery will just hang on one note while the harmony is shifting, just voice-leading very gradually. I've really enjoyed this phase of Ellery's writing, and on [Ten], I found myself in the recording sessions looking for ways to make that happen without the written material."

In fact, Ten is in fact completely improvised; what's more, the trio rarely appears intact. Instead, its members intermingle in varying configurations with the guests. Despite the constantly shifting terrain, the band's sonic stamp remains indelible. And while it might seem odd to celebrate an anniversary without making explicit reference to the past, in a sense, it's in keeping with this particular group's mission that the music points resolutely forward. That extends to the inclusion of Constable, a keen improviser who has collaborated with the band extensively this year, but a bone of contention among instrumental purists, according to Eskelin -- at least, until they overcome their preconceptions and listen to the way she integrates with the instrumentalists as an equal.

Further evidence is provided on a new DVD, On the Road with Ellery Eskelin wlAndrea Parkins & Jim Black, a charmingly homespun tour documentary available via the saxophonist's website. The disc offers a glimpse of the band's 2003 European tour. The performances -- as a trio, but also as individual soloists and as a quartet with Constable -- are unsurprisingly gripping. But just as engaging is the footage of Eskelin, Parkins and Black interacting offstage. It reveals a camaraderie that illustrates one more reason for this band's remarkable duration. Off the road, all three pursue separate lives and different interests: Parkins and Black have their own ongoing projects, while Eskelin selectively continues to take on work as a sideman. But together on tour, their commitment to one another is abundantly clear.

"We love each other," Eskelin states simply, in a sentiment that both of his bandmates echo. "When you're on the road, you get to know things about people," he continues. "Spending all that time together on a train, you talk. It becomes intimate that way. A lot of bands share that. But there's a certain chemistry that we have personally as well as musically. We're different enough to keep it interesting, and yet we're similar enough to always be able to communicate and find something."

Again, Eskelin returns to the band's unconventional configuration. "There's only three of us, so I fashion music that conjures up a bigger sound than it really is. That's a certain way of playing that has provided a certain amount of longevity, because it's more than what it is. It's less defined. The roles can change so fluidly that it allows us to pretend to be anything we want to be. We can imagine anything, and be it."

Ten is available now on hatOLOGY On the Road w/ Ellery Eskelin & Jim Black is available at Ellery Eskelin's website: home.earthlink.net/~eskelin. This is Steve Smith's first feature for SIGNAL to NOISE.