Scenes/Orbits/Carns

Friday Playlist: A tiny sliver of several legacies

Each of the records in the Jazz Is Dead series can serve as a breadcrumb generator: Starting from these recent jams, it’s possible to follow the paths of the featured artists through stone-cold classics and undercooked experiments and distantly-remembered releases in between.

If, for example, your point of entry for Brian Jackson is his forthcoming This Is Brian Jackson, discussed here, or his Jazz Is Dead effort, it’s a short hop into the deep waters of his collaboration with poet and activist Gil Scott-Heron, an astonishing run of consciousness-expanding classics. Side trips are available to, among others, an unusual 2006 collective work, Get G.O.I.N., assembled by guitarist Eugene Chadbourne as a protest against the Iraq war. Did not know that Jackson and Chadbourne created music together until five minutes ago.

There are countless encounters like that, available wherever credits are found. (That’s an evergreen rant we’ll revisit another day….). Today’s playlist is a very brief attempt to show the orbit around the criminally underappreciated keyboardist Doug Carn. It includes projects with his former wife, the jazz and R&B singer Jean Carn – who is the star of her own upcoming Jazz Is Dead release. (Doug Carn was featured already, on Jazz is Dead Volume 5.)

Together and separately, the Carns contributed in powerful ways to the discussion about improvised music in the 1970s. Following Doug’s debut, a trio side for Savoy in 1969, the Carns moved from Florida to Southern California, where they lived in a star-crossed apartment complex that was also home to Janis Joplin and members of Mandrill (future Echo Locator focus!) and Earth, Wind and Fire. That led to involvement in EWF’s first two recordings (hence Doug Carn’s version of “Mighty Mighty”) and eventually a contract with Black Jazz Records – the Oakland based label that was among several indies focused on spiritual jazz and socially aware music by African Americans.

Doug Carn made four albums for the label, each of them notable for energized, forward-looking originals – and gorgeous reworkings of hard-bop classics that revolve around Jean Carn’s pinpoint-precise phrasing. (See her “Infant Eyes”). The couple split up after 1973’s Revelation; Doug’s projects continued in the questing spirit of the Black Jazz titles, and several of his many accomplices from those days, including trumpeter Charles Tolliver, have become provocative original thinkers (check Tolliver’s casual brilliance on the 2019 spiritual jazz work Web Max, which features rising-star harpist Brandee Younger).

Meanwhile Jean traveled in several directions, singing with the last iteration of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and after guesting on “Valentine Love,” a restrained hit on a 1975 Norman Conners record, blossomed as a wholly original R&B voice. Carn’s four records for Philadelphia International and subsequent works, which deserve their own extended playlist, have influenced generations of singers including Phyllis Hyman and Patrice Rushen.

If you can only listen to one thing on this tour, make it “Come As You Are” from Jean Carn’s Jazz is Dead session, which is due for release May 13. Against a space-age modern rhythmic backdrop, Carn lingers over long-tone melodies that sail on serene waters, and delivers impeccably timed ad-libs that carry the spirit of those ‘70s projects into the frantic present moment. She sounds as vital as she did in 1972. Which is to say she like no one else — playful, fervent, engaged in steering and shaping the music as it unfolds. She is 75 years old.

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