Kevin Eubanks - Guitarist (1983)

"Untitled Shapes" by Kevin Eubanks

After three years, Branford Marsalis quit as Tonight Show bandleader partially due to frustration with the non-musical expectations that went with the job: forced repartee, requisite laughter at unfunny jokes, and host ass-kissing (as he put it.) Kevin Eubanks, guitarist with the band since Leno's start and composer of its closing theme "Kevin's Country," got the promotion to bandleader in 1995. He was more comfortable in the role than his predecessor and had better chemistry with Leno. As bandleader, he was also more attune to the attentions and expectations of the audience. Branford wasn't as amenable to the audience nor to the brass. His exit, then Eubanks's literal "swearing in"—a skit which hit upon tardiness, non-responsiveness to jokes, and the playing of obscure music—inadvertently revealed the rough dynamic Kevin had to follow.

Kevin and Branford had previously toured with the Grateful Dead as Branford Marsalis and The X-Men. Drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts and bassist Robert Hurst III rounded out the quartet and, with Kevin, supposedly pushed Branford into taking the Tonight Show job after his initial refusal. Both bandleaders go even further back to the near-beginning of their careers. Kevin (and his brother Robin) played alongside Wynton and Branford as members of Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers. They toured Europe with Blakey in 1980 and set the experience to wax on the album Live at Montreux and Northsea. Kevin played with other luminaries (Roy Haynes, Dave Holland, etc.) in New York City before releasing his debut album Guitarist in 1983 on the sub-label Elektra Musician.

Like Fathers & Sons, Guitarist is a family affair. Kevin is joined sporadically by his brother Robin (trombone) and his cousins David (guitar, bass, the only other musician to play on all eight tracks) and Charles (piano.) And although Kevin had gotten his start with straight-ahead jazz, he seems more amenable than the Marsalis family to fusion as he plays the electric guitar on most of the album's tracks. The style of the music still follows along straight-ahead expectations, but does incorporate a bit of funk on Side B opener "Urban Heat." The album opens and closes with the spotlight on Kevin accompanied only by veteran David Eubanks playing rhythm guitar on the Spanish-inspired "The Novice Bounce" and bass on the Kind of Blue track "Blue in Green."

As the guitarist goes, so goes Guitarist, and neither take you very far. As much as Kevin shows his technique on the opener, his solos can be frustrating. On "Inner-Vision," he plays from thought to thought without variety or story, and the following track "Yesterdays," has Kevin playing a solo that sounds out-of-step, bloated and monotonous in an arrangement that just as readily befuddles. The Side A closer, Thelonious Monk's "Evidence" starts faithfully with the guitar in the Monk role, before this version drops the concept of the composition for a bouncy middle section of generic solos and a very sickly sounding trombone/bass combo at its heart. Only veteran drummer Roy Haynes (playing on just this track,) who recorded the song with Monk in 1958, seems to know how to bring out the song's immediacy, humor and eclectic joy.

Side B recharges the album with the aforementioned, breakneck "Urban Heat" before channeling Wes Montgomery in another Eubanks/Eubanks duet for guitar and bass, which starts devotedly and ends simplistically. "Untitled Shapes" is the last Kevin Eubanks composition on the record and his best one. His performance is vibrant, inventive and directional and the rest of the rhythm section takes that clarity and, for a first in any of the ensemble arrangements, can creatively react and support the titular guitarist. Kevin passes the solo to his cousin Charles on piano. Charles Eubanks plays a brightness and spontaneity into the track that makes you wish he could do the same for the rest of the album. You just wish Kevin knew how to end a song; this one, like many of the other originals, repeats itself one too many times before petering out into the closer where it's just Kevin again—a young guitarist.

Here is the discography surrounding Kevin Eubanks's debut album:

Guitarist

"Urban Heat" by Kevin Eubanks

"Alfie" by Kevin Eubanks on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

Pass the Headphones!!

Fathers and Sons - Fathers & Sons (1982)

"Twelve's It" by Fathers and Sons

A new Tonight Show host means a new Tonight Show Band, and Jay Leno recruited a hesitant Branford Marsalis to lead an overdue overhaul. Signing on after turning down the job at first, Marsalis made good on a promise from Leno: that he could play "whatever he wanted to play." Jazz progressed quite a bit from the Big Band sound the Tonight Show had been playing for nearly 40 years, and Marsalis used his encyclopedic knowledge of jazz to show where the genre was now and where it had been to get there. Branford's reverence for jazz history is a family affair that stems from pater familias and jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis. Along with brother Wynton Marsalis, the three were Side A on the album Fathers & Sons released in 1982 on Columbia Records.

Led in part by the Marsalis family (particularly Wynton,) the 1980s saw a resurgence in straight-ahead jazz. The sub-genre got its start two decades earlier as a reaction to the opening avenues of free jazz and jazz fusion. The latter adopted the electrification of a traditionally acoustic genre while combining with the pop of the era (rock, funk, R&B,) while the former challenged the very foundations of jazz itself. Straight-ahead became from artists dubious of these new and potentially destructive developments. Exactly what it delivered isn't original but more a collation of the established sub-genres and forms of jazz up until, essentially, the last explorations of John Coltrane. When the Marsalis brothers hit the scene, they became heralds (alongside jazz critic Stanley Crouch who wrote the liner notes for Fathers & Sons) of straight-ahead jazz or the homophonic "neo-bop."

Besides the basic tenets of straight-ahead jazz (a sub-genre akin to a setlist where every song is a different mixture of older jazz sub-genres,) neo-bop is also defined extra-musically in its concern for the elevation of jazz in popular, scholarly and historic tastes (think "America's classical music.") It is buttoned up, drug-free, upper middle class. Branford Marsalis playing for The Tonight Show or Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch narrating Ken Burns's Jazz documentary made them (biased) jazz spokespeople to mass audiences. The reverence for the past makes it fitting that one of the earliest neo-bop recordings would be collaborations between jazz fathers and their jazz sons. Side A has Ellis Marsalis (piano) leading Branford (tenor sax,) Wynton (trumpet,) Charles Fambrough (acoustic bass,) and James Black (drums.) Side B is another session with Von Freeman (tenor sax) leading his son Chico Freeman (tenor sax,) Cecil McBee (acoustic bass,) Kenny Barron (piano,) and Jack DeJohnette (drums.)

Both Sides A and B start off with egalitarian manifestos: Ellis Marsalis's hard bop "Twelve's It" and Von Freeman's swinging "Jug Ain't Gone." The combos are clear and practiced and each player takes a solo (but for Charles Fambrough who can't go without notice anyway.) The jazz is fun and welcoming and a throwback, seemingly perfected. The sons get their chance to shine. Branford and Wynton play at sibling bickering on "A Joy Forever" and Chico Freeman takes the album its furthest down the path towards free jazz ("Time Marches On") with a rhythm section that has been there before. (Note: I don't know enough about Von and Chico Freeman to declare the difference between their tenor sax styles, but I'm guessing that Von plays a cooler sax to Chico's more staccato and wailing one.) Ellis and Von are veteran jazz educators and their solos casually bring in disparate influences and color that show how inventive neo-bop can be. The only two songs not written by the "fathers" are each side's closing numbers: Ellis Marsalis, alone, plays Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" and Chico Freeman composes a toast in "Tribute to Our Fathers." The sons make way for their fathers.

The overall product and the real effect of neo-bop at large is a jazz reclamation project. Where jazz in the popular consciousness had been alienated by free jazz or numbed by smooth jazz, the standard bearers of a "classical" form of jazz, through their polished Scholasticism, reminded listeners what made the music the dynamic and revolutionary sound of the first half of the 20th Century. Even if the Marsalis and Freeman families aren't writing the future of jazz, they do their part to underline its past.

Here is Fathers and Sons complete discography:

Fathers & Sons

"Rib Tip Johnson" by the Tonight Show Band

(Also, be sure to revisit Leno's first episode in the last entry for a great first performance by Branford and the Tonight Show Band.)

"Tribute to Our Fathers" by Fathers and Sons

Pass the Headphones!!