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| Rufus Reid photographed by Jimmy Katz. |
Rufus Reid: Art to Art
In the work of the
late sculptress Elizabeth Catlett, bassist and composer Rufus Reid found
emotional and physical revelations – and the inspiration to take on the mos
ambitious project of his career
It’s little wonder that Rufus Reid’s
landmark new album, Quiet Pride: The Elizabeth Catlett Project (Motéma), responds to the work of another artist. Now 70,
he’s always had a way of cloaking his most significant contributions in someone
else’s shadow.
So Reid will understand if we take a moment at the
beginning to appreciate Elizabeth Catlett, one of the 20th century’s most
humane and influential sculptors. Her pieces tend to show rounded, earthy human
forms that emit an almost circular dynamism. They come across as visions of a
body’s perfect potential rather than distortions of its physique (though they’re
that too). Her favorite medium was wood, because its grain has a natural flow,
which presents obstacles that can double as opportunities.
“When she was knocking off the wood and she would find
that a knob in the wood was a few inches to the left, she would change the
entire direction of the figure’s arm in order for the notch to fit the elbow,”
remembers her son, the drummer Francisco Mora Catlett. When he looks at his
late mother’s pieces now, “the wood stays so alive, it spooks the hell out of
me. She loved it because the grain of the wood gave her problems, and problems
gave her solutions, and solutions gave her form and created depth in the
piece.”
Quiet Pride features
five long pieces inspired by Catlett’s sculptures, and the album invites a conversation
about Reid’s own relationship with wood—its pliable humanity and the home it
makes for sound. It also demands that we broaden our understanding of his
abilities.
He’s never become a household name (you might say he
conducts himself too quietly for that), but since the mid-1970s Reid’s
commanding sound—stout, viscous, constantly dilating—has made him a first-call
comrade to some of straightahead jazz’s most notable musicians, and landed him
on more than 400 albums (hence his willingness to admit to a sliver of pride).
As the author of the jazz bass’ fundamental instructional book, The Evolving Bassist, and
former head of William Paterson University’s jazz studies and performance
program, he’s a patriarch of modern jazz education.
But the world has yet to really uncover the extent of his
powers as a composer and bandleader, roles he’s been toying with outside the
limelight for over 30 years. Quiet
Pride makes yards of headway
there. Recorded with a 20-piece orchestra, plus a conductor, the album features
operatic vocals from Charenee Wade and multi-movement pieces that run well past
the 10-minute mark. It ferries a brassy tonnage between regal large-ensemble
jazz and modern classical density.
The record’s countenance can come across as almost stern,
heavenlier than thou, but a dedicated listen reconciles you to its powerful,
simple beauty. Deep musical panorama like this should be a challenge as much as
a tonic. Anyway, it’s whatever Reid wants it to be. “We don’t do much of
anything in our lives without fulfilling some kind of demand,” he says.
Composition can guide you to a different kind of thinking. “I learned this from
Eddie Harris, though I didn’t really know I’d learned it until maybe 15 years
ago: He didn’t care if anybody liked what he played. He knew people would, but
he didn’t care, because that means you’re asking them, ‘Am I doing good? Am I
making you happy?’”
Saying this, Reid is sitting at a booth in a Midtown
Manhattan restaurant, black cardigan over neat, button-up shirt. A thorn of
speckled white hair seems to sprout straight out of his bright-eyed face. Reid
tends to begin sentences at a jog then slow down, maybe getting a notch louder,
drawing out the final syllables of a phrase for emphasis. His Georgia roots
peek out when the words begin to ooze. Musicians always like to say that their
playing is just a reflection of their whole selves, and they often talk about
improvising as a kind of speech. In Reid’s case the connections draw
themselves: Each sustained note he plays on the bass has a way of slowly
rising, like a heaving breath or a drawl, and cresting to explain itself with
feeling. “I’ve played with innumerable bass players and he’s one of the best,
because he makes his notes sing,” says the saxophonist and composer Benny
Golson, who hired Reid for his New Jazztet in the 1980s and played with him off
and on since then. “It’s like a big, rubber-band sound.”
Partly because of his warmly swelling glissandos, Reid’s
playing conveys movement as well as speech. Not just in the way that a bassline
“walks,” but in the way a note can reach to the top of a vaulted ceiling and
keep going up. From afar, those might be the two readiest signs of human
life—movement and speech—and his playing digs a well of vitality. Though we
think of him primarily as an accompanist and educator, you’d never call his
playing deferential, and the thing that defines it can’t be taught.
A lot like Elizabeth Catlett’s work.
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