Live in Tokyo (Charles Tolliver album)

In the early 1970s, the jazz scene was dominated by the twin progressive movements of fusion and avant-garde jazz. Meanwhile, more modernist performers of the previous decade's post-bop development, such as the saxophonist Jackie McLean and the pianist Andrew Hill, experienced career declines.[1] Charles Tolliver, who had played as a side musician for both, was now leading both an experimental big band and a quartet (formed in May 1969 and billed as Music Inc.) to explore a creative middle ground between the avant-garde and the more traditional hard bop style.[2] Helping raise his stature among hard-bop peers, Tolliver's trumpet style employed a variety of techniques and musical ideas while based in a tradition of melodic, swing-rhythmed playing associated with predecessors such as Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, and Donald Byrd.[3]

In 1971, Tolliver founded an independent record label, Strata-East Records (in New York City), with his quartet's pianist Stanley Cowell in an effort to showcase their recordings and those of his contemporaries.[4] He had become close friends with Cowell while performing together in the late 1960s as part of the drummer-composer Max Roach's quartet, a tenure which had gained Tolliver renown as one of the most innovative trumpeters in jazz.[5] In late 1973, having released four albums together, Tolliver and Music Inc. embarked on their first tour of Japan, where Live in Tokyo would be recorded.[6]

Stanley Cowell in 1977

The recording took place at Yubinchokin Hall in Tokyo on December 7, 1973, the last date of the tour. According to the album's liner notes, it was recorded "in association" with Takafumi Ohkuma and Kuniya Inaoka from the Japanese jazz label Trio Records.[7] In concert, Tolliver led the quartet featuring Cowell on piano, Clint Houston on bass, and Clifford Barbaro on drums.[8]

A largely uptempo performance, the show opened in this very vein with two Tolliver-penned compositions, "Drought" and "Stretch".[9] The former featured an extended and intensely-toned solo by Tolliver, while the latter began with roughly five minutes of Houston soloing that led the quartet into a relaxed, dark-toned blues accompanied by Cowell's block chords.[10] The quartet transformed and concluded "Stretch" with a purely swing-rhythmed performance.[9] The midtempo Cowell-composed ballad "Effi" began in a waltz time signature and proceeded to different sections, during which the musicians employed complex fills and gradual variations that allowed them to explore modes from the blues, Latin, and Eastern music.[9]

While "Effi" was intended to end the concert, Music Inc. performed Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight" (1944) as an encore.[9] Segueing from the tempo of "Effi", the quartet opened in ballad pace but abruptly transformed in tempo and reworked "'Round Midnight" in an aggressive manner atypical for the jazz standard.[11] After showcasing a solo by Tolliver, the performance slowed down to ballad tempo again and ended on a series of bars played in uptempo.[3]

Live in Tokyo was released on LP by Strata-East around 1974 or 1975.[nb 1] Trio also released the LP in Japan.[13] Reviewing the album in January 1975, Billboard magazine considered it a "fine addition" to Tolliver and Music Inc.'s catalog of "some of the better jazz albums in recent years". The magazine praised the trumpeter's solos and the accompaniment from Cowell, while commenting on their interpretation of "'Round Midnight" as giving a "fresh new twist" to the composition.[14] Howard Mandel of Down Beat called Live in Tokyo a "very good" LP.[15] Cadence magazine's Bob Rusch was less receptive, finding it "good" yet inferior to some of Tolliver's other Strata-East recordings. He felt the trumpeter sounded uncertain and poorly recorded at times, while the rhythm section of Houston and Barbaro did not provide entirely reliable accompaniment, although he added that Tolliver and Cowell played well enough to not always need it. Rusch was most impressed by "'Round Midnight", calling it a "big surprise".[3] According to The New York City Jazz Record's Thomas Conrad, "small-group Music Inc. recordings" like Live in Tokyo "should have made Tolliver a star (and Cowell too) ... But for all the cult mystique surrounding Strata-East, the label never made anybody famous."[16]

Retrospective professional reviews

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[17]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD	[18]
The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide	[19]

The album was reissued on CD in 1998 by Charly Records. In Richard Cook and Brian Morton's The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (2000), it was appraised as an indication to "some measure of Tolliver's stature as a player" as his performance here was mostly perfect. "Drought" was singled out for showcasing "his radical simplicities", Barbaro's consistent rhythm, and Houston's typically aggressive bass playing, "a consistent feature" of a concert that only faltered at the end with "'Round Midnight". While the overall audio was well regarded, Cowell was not "recorded to best advantage", according to the guide.[18] In a contemporaneous review for AllMusic of the CD reissue, Scott Yanow applauded Tolliver's playing on the extended renditions of his original compositions and the "adventurous" version of "'Round Midnight". However, he noticed occasionally distorted audio quality, particularly in the rendering of some trumpet sounds, which led him to assign a lower grade to what he deemed an otherwise "strong" post-bop album.[17]

Charles Tolliver in 2009; his performance on the album has received retrospective acclaim.

In 2005, Live in Tokyo was reissued by Mosaic Records as the second disc of the three-CD limited-edition box set Mosaic Select. The set compiled Tolliver's live quartet recordings for three of his early-1970s Strata-East LPs, which by that point had gone out of print.[8][nb 2] Richard Brody, who had been a big fan of the original LP, reviewed the Mosaic box set for The New Yorker and appraised the recordings collectively as "fervent, intimate classics of live jazz". He added that "they convey the spirit of the cramped bandstand and the rapt crowd as keenly as Charles Mingus's Debut recordings from the Cafe Bohemia, Eric Dolphy's Five Spot dates, and John Coltrane's sets from the Village Vanguard."[1] Thom Jurek from AllMusic was also very impressed by the Tokyo disc, highlighting Tolliver and Cowell's "symbiotic" musical interactions on tracks like "Drought" and "Stretch", while finding "'Round Midnight" to be a "radical" interpretation that "has to be heard to be believed".[9]

In All About Jazz, Javier Aq Ortiz described the box set's music as "superior hardcore hard bop material with sympathies toward structured-yet-freer jazz stylistic tendencies" and much "gritted heart" in both compositional and performance aspects. From the Tokyo disc, he called "Truth" "forcefully melodic and endowed with just the right touch" by the quartet and enjoyed "'Round Midnight" for being "all about deeply gutted feeling", while noting the "brighter" recontextualization of Houston's "sinuously mysterious bass solo" on "Effi".[20] JazzTimes critic Nate Chinen also wrote favorably of the quartet's performances on "Effi" and "'Round Midnight". But he ultimately found the Tokyo recordings somewhat marred by inconsistent sound quality and expressed some disappointment in the rhythm section, specifically observing a lack of rhythmic poise in Barbaro on "Drought".[8]

All compositions are by Charles Tolliver, except where noted.[7]

Side A

1. "Drought" – 12:22
2. "Stretch" – 10:42

Side B

1. "Truth" – 7:07
2. "Effi" (Stanley Cowell) – 10:46
3. "'Round Midnight" (Thelonious Monk, Cootie Williams) – 8:38

Credits are taken from the album's liner notes.[7]

Music Inc.

• Charles Tolliver – trumpet, recording production
• Stanley Cowell – piano
• Clint Houston – bass
• Clifford Barbaro – drums

Technical personnel

• Toshinari Koinuma – concert production
• Masahiko Yuh – MCing
• Kunio Arai – recording engineering
• Shigehisa Nagao – floor engineering
• Ted Plair – graphics

• Giddins, Gary (October 14, 2003). "Vanished Hard-Bop Trumpeter Resurfaces with Many Friends". The Village Voice. Retrieved February 2, 2021.

• Live in Tokyo at Discogs (list of releases)