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Hearing Henry Grimes’s Jazz Spectralism

2022; Perspectives of New Music; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pnm.2022.a902895

2325-7180

Scott Gleason,

French Literature and Poetry

Hearing Henry Grimes’s Jazz Spectralism Scott Gleason (bio) Moments are the echoes of a spectral explosion . . . —Henry Grimes, “Moments,” Signs Along the Road: Poems Introduction: Spectralism and Jazz Henry Grimes’s (1935–2020) use of the word “spectral” in the epigram above is bound to catch our attention, not least because there’s a musical style so-called, and because there’s an acoustic phenomenon known by that name. I find it especially remarkable because Grimes’s double bass and violin playing forefronts a concern with timbre. Salient aspects I hear in Grimes’s solo music are: the continuous pouring forth of musical ideas, sometimes over very large-scale durations; the emphasis on timbre and harmonics via weighted and even over-pressed bowing, what we might call “gliding” bowing, and playing sul ponticello; rhythms occurring as waves; microtonal fluctuations of pitch during string crossings; the acoustic creation of what appear to be electronic or amplified sounds; utilization of room [End Page 201] resonance and the spatiality of music; and finally, or perhaps primarily, a cosmological poetics. While not a comprehensive characterization of Grimes’s music, I emphasize these aspects because they immediately jump out at me, and they sound a lot like French spectralism, in which the acoustic properties of sound—its spectra—are taken as primary determinants of musical events on the large and small. In this article, I will therefore analyze Grimes’s playing on double bass and violin, and his poetics, as a kind of spectralism. Brief Musical Biography Grimes was most prominently a sideman in bebop circles in the late 1950s, and ensemble player with some of the free jazz greats of the 1960s, playing on crucial albums from that scene, having in the very early 1950s studied with influential New York Philharmonic double bassist Frederick Zimmermann (1906–67) at the Juilliard School, and thereafter reaching his first prominence with Sonny Rollins in the late 1950s, but then also supporting Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monk, Lee Konitz, Miles Davis, and a host of others (Gleason 2021). After his work on the New York free jazz scene of the 1960s, working with Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, and others, and association with the Black Arts Movement, he fell silent in about 1969, moved to California working menial jobs, and was even said to have died, but eventually picked up the double bass again around 2003 in a triumphant return. There is more to his story than this, of course: from about 1970 to 2002, while he did not play the bass and indeed sold his instrument, while he was in and out of the healthcare system, this shouldn’t be read solely as lost time, even if it was certainly tragic (Frenz 2015). Although isolated from the broader musical public, during those decades on the West coast Grimes wrote many volumes of poetry in isolation, which he later featured at concerts, on his albums, and in a book (Grimes 2007). It does seem that, once “rediscovered” in 2002, he burst back onto the scene, performing with musicians such as Rashied Ali, Fred Anderson, Andrew Cyrille, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor, and John Zorn on both bass and violin (his first instrument) prolifically, but we can read his decades of musical silence as a turning inward and discovering of a larger purpose to his musicianship, which was always there, if non-verbally. Grimes is often left out of the “official” histories of the emergence of soloistic double bass playing in the late 1950s and early 1960s jazz [End Page 202] (which followed in the wake of Jimmy Blanton’s work with Duke Ellington around 1940), in favor of Scott LaFaro, Mingus (with whom Grimes played: see Mingus [1961–62] 2010; and Frenz 2015, 49–50), and Gary Peacock (with whom Grimes also played: see Ayler 1965; and Frenz 2015, 82–83), and others. Retrospectively, by 2005, he could be talked about as mediating Mingus and LaFaro’s styles (Frenz 2015, 40), as indeed, he was as much a soloist during ensemble playing as they were, appeared on landmark free jazz albums from that time, and...