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Artist: Joe Pass
Album: Songs For Ellen
Genre: Mainstream Jazz, Bop
Label: Pablo Records
Released: 1994
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
1. The Shadow Of Your Smile - 2:43
2. Song For Ellen - 2:55
3. I Only Have Eyes For You - 2:52
4. Stars Fell On Alabama - 4:07
5. That Old Feeling - 2:53
6. Star Eyes - 2:40
7. Robbins Nest - 2:42
8. Someone To Watch Over Me - 3:00
9. Blues For Angel - 3:36
10. There's A Small Hotel - 2:53
11. How Deep Is The Ocean? - 2:25
12. Stormy Weather - 3:16
13. Just Friends - 3:21
14. Blue Moon - 3:29
15. Satellite Village - 2:34
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It may come as a pleasant sort of shock hearing this, Joe Pass's only solo recording on acoustic guitar. But the writ ing was on the wall. Towards the end of his life, the late, great guitarist's ears were leaning evermore towards the essence -if not the actuality-of being unplugged (pardon the parlance). He relied less and less on amplifiers, preferring to run straight through the board, and professed admiration for acoustic states of being.
As a grand, final flourish in his musical life, Pass was the only electric guitarist engaged in the "Guitar Summit" tour shortly before his death of cancer on May 23, 1994. And yet, alongside the gut and steel-string naturalism of guitarists Paco Pena, Pepe Romero, and Leo Kottke, Pass's luminous, lucid tone was perfectly complementary. From a listen er's perspective, the technocracy of plugs and wires was the furthest thing from the mind as Pass's fat-bodied sonorities float ed gently from the large stages of that groundbreaking, genre-bending tour.
As always, Pass made his notes sing and weave, creating delicate, real-time webs of improv and accompaniment. At heart, Pass was an acoustic musician bowing to jazz tradition and logistical necessities.
True to the somewhat paradoxical nature of great jazz musicians, Pass was at once articulate and exploratory. The only things constant were his reverence for the classic American Songs that he continually championed and reexamined, and for a clean, ringing tone. And both of those qualities ring true throughout Songs for Ellen. The intrinsic values of Pass's trademarked solo style -his deft and unpredictable interweaving of single lines, bass runs, chordal comping, and rhythmic change-ups-are fully intact. Only the instrument and the timbre have changed.
Recorded in Hollywood in three sessions in August of 1992, the recording was one of several which Pass completed in the last few years of his life. The late breaking studio workload came about not only because that the cancer-afflicted gui tarist knew that time was of the essence.
Pass also felt that he had something to impart at this point in his development: a time-burnished wisdom, a sense of a musical mission come full circle after along, twisting, and sometimes tortuous road.
Never a prolific composer, Pass nonetheless includes three originals in this set, highlighted by the beautiful ballad "Song for Ellen. " Written for his widow (also the tributary of the album's title), the song's main theme, based on four wellplaced notes, is simple and bittersweet, and is ideally suited to the dark timbre of gut strings.
But, despite the languid emotionality of that tune, as well as the autumnal glow of his version of "Someone to Watch Over Me," this is not an album of undue introspection. Balance is the key to the album's flowing sense of continuity. Fast single lines surge through "That Old Feeling, while Pass curls up into a warm medium groove on "Robbins Nest" and "There's a Small Hotel. " After a wandering, rhythmmic preamble, Pass settles into a looselimbed, lazy feel on his own "Blues for Angel. " For all of his reputation as an improviser, in Pass's case, brevity is the soul of wit and wisdom. Most of the takes here clock in at less than three minutes, and you never get the feeling that the musician has deplaned from the song in question to whereabouts unknown. To hear him tell it, Pass was a song man, foremost.
Among the 15 songs here are many that Pass had played and internalized for most of his 65 years, opening with "The Shadow of Your Smile" and including "I Only Have Eyes for You, " "How Deep Is the Ocean?," and "Blue Moon. " But a familiar songlist never translated to a familiar, formula approach with Pass.
Witness the permutations and mercurial turns he takes on "Stormy Weather" and "Just Friends, " now floating in rubato, now swinging. Closing the album, the Pass composition "Satellite Village" sends us out on an up note, with boppish matriculations on a swingsome theme.
Straddling swing and bop instincts was, in a sense, Pass's historical birthright and his forte. Born Joseph Passalaqua in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1929, the guitarist remembered, in an interview, his trajectory into jazz: "I was 12 or 13 and I was around a lot of swing players. At that time, swing was becoming more sophisticated.
You had Benny Goodman, and the Nat King Cole trio-bebop swing. So I had good foundation in that kind of music, feeling-wise, concept-wise, and time-wise.
Then bebop came along and that really took me away. I had this other back ground, playing in groups that played "Honeysuckle Rose, " "Christopher Columbus, " "Stardust," and blues. That's held me in good stead, because I had some kind of a good basic foundation there.
"But, through bebop, I became very interested in harmony: what kind of changes were they playing on this tune that I was already playing? I'd hear some body playing an old tune with different changes. " Of course, how a jazz musician deals with the changes-chordal and oth erwise-is what makes the difference.
The point is lost on no one who loves jazz that when cancer finally took the life out of Pass, music lost one of its titans-a humble, self-effacing one, but a titan nonetheless. With a characteristic wry grin beneath a bushy mustache, Pass had a way of shrugging off the praises lavished on him. In particular, he had to suffer his legendary status conferred upon him since he began, in earnest, his official career as a jazz guitarist in the early Seventies, finally setting aside studio work and other musical detours.
In particular, Pass wore the crown as the premier practitioner of solo jazz guitar for some 20 years, after Norman Granz pushed him onstage - alone. That ner vous-making moment was the beginning of an invigorating tradition that leads us to Songs for Ellen. Here, we have access to the fruition of a guitarist at the top end of his form, where craft and inspiration converge.
"I just like to play, " a typically unas suming Pass said, not long before his death. "I'm not heavily involved in the mechanics of the instrument or who's doing what. It's too bad, because maybe that makes me not a devoted musician, but I'm devoted when I'm playing. A hun dred percent. " That percentage of commitment is a rare thing, and Joe Pass was a rare bird whose legacy now rests in vital docu ments such as this album.
Josef Woodard