Sweet and Low Eddie Gomez remains among the most revered of bassists. By Ted Panken Photo By Richard Condé jazziz july 2012 35 “Eddie has the most surprising flexibility. Thirty-five years after leaving the Bill Evans Trio to pursue Sometimes I wake up in the morning to The Today new opportunities and musical adventures, Eddie Gomez, once Show and see an Israeli folk group playing their averse to public discussion of the 11-year run that made him the most visible — and perhaps most emulated — jazz bassist of that folk music, and there’s a bass player in the back era, is happy to dwell on the subject. playing like he was born in Israel. It’s Eddie. Or he’ll “It’s been a third of a century, there’s a body of work, and I’m get on that very free, expressionistic bag. Eddie is more self-assured and confident in my career and art,” Gomez said marvelous in that he has a very wide scope. As in June at a café a few blocks from his Greenwich Village home. At much as he fits me like a glove, you would almost 68, he looks a decade younger, his barrel chest and muscled fore- think that this is the only way he can play because arms obscured by a loose black sport jacket and black button-down he does it so perfectly, but it’s not true.” shirt. The skin on his fingers, which he spreads in fan-like waves —Bill Evans, Helsinki, 1970. when emphasizing a point, is smooth and barely calloused. “I feel there are lots of other things to talk about, but being with Bill is huge in my heart,” Gomez continued. “It’s like getting away “Certain musicians arrived on the scene who from a parent or father figure, recognizing what a certain time in were just complete. Paul Chambers would be one your life really was, that it’s part of you and you are part of it. So I’m of them. Tony Williams would be one. They had able to feel it and express it and verbalize it.” everything already in place, and they were inno- The Evans-Gomez connection is once again a hot topic, thanks vative. Maybe I was too busy being fragmented to two recent drops of first-commercial-release archival material. to develop that. There’s a positive side to playing Few extant Bill Evans trio dates can match the creative energy generated on the two April 1968 sets with drummer Marty Morell in many genres, which I like to do. But to play my that comprise Live at Art D’Lugoff’s Top of the Gate [Resonance]. Nor own devil’s advocate, maybe it took away my does anything in the canon more effectively represent the breathe- ability to focus on one particular way or style. In as-one simpatico the pianist and bassist could achieve as the five any case, that’s who I was, and still am.” duets they play on Disc 1 of The Sesjun Radio Shows, recorded in the —Eddie Gomez, New York City, 2012 Netherlands in 1973. 36 july 2012 jazziz Photo by Steve Sussman Performed with the real-time bustle of late-’60s Bleecker Street partner in the ’00s — and late-period Evans drummer Joe unfolding outside the club’s glass doors, the Top of the Gate tracks LaBarbera, and a summer 2011 concert with LaBarbera and Sicilian are unremittingly intense, the protagonists exchanging opinions pianist Salvatore Bonafede devoted to the legacy of the virtuoso with a freewheeling, serious-as-your-life attitude akin to the South bassist Scott LaFaro, who, during his 20 months with Evans and Village coffee shop and saloon culture that prevailed when Evans Paul Motian from 1959 to 1961, established the template of bass himself was coming of age a decade earlier. The radio broadcasts — expression upon which Gomez would place his own unique stamp. which include a five-tune 1975 performance by Evans, Gomez and Gomez’s gift for melodic expression and the commanding aura drummer Eliot Zigmund — retain only a hint of that unruly flavor; of his tone, whether produced by his fingers or the bow, suffuses the musicians, intimate with each other’s moves after years of recent duo recordings with pianists Cesarius Alvim (Forever) and bandstand proximity in clubs and concert halls, finish each other’s Carlos Franzetti (the 2008 Latin Grammy-winner Duets). His voice thoughts with burnished, cosmopolitan phrases. even more palpably dominates CDs of trio concerts in Mexico City In both contexts, Gomez displays the gifts that placed him atop and Italy with his longstanding pianist, Stefan Karlsson. That his instrument’s food chain by his early 20s. When accompanying, he’s fully capable of subsuming his Olympian gifts to one-for-all he gooses the flow with clear, limber lines that both anticipate and purposes is evident on two recent releases: Sofia’s Heart, which complement Evans’ train of thought. When soloing, a horn player Gomez produced for saxophonist Marco Pignataro, and Per Sempre, or singer might envy the speed and dynamics of his phrasing, as a Gomez-led studio date with Pignataro, flutist Matt Marvuglio, he moves in the course of an idea from fortissimo bellows to mezzo pianist Teo Ciavarella and drummer Massimo Manzi. piano whispers, seamlessly incorporating extended techniques But the only item in Gomez’s recent corpus that stands up to the more commonly associated with “outside” playing into Evans’ rarefied environment of clarity and unfettered interplay that Evans harmonic world, never with “because I can” intention, but always facilitated is Further Explorations. A two-disc masterpiece of collec- toward unfailingly musical imperatives. tive improvisation on the Concord Jazz imprint, it cherry-picks from a fortnight-long engagement at the Blue Note during which Chick Corea, Gomez and Motian (it was the late drummer’s first recording In recent years, Gomez has applied his skills to several projects with either partner) refracted Evans-associated repertoire in their that denote his willingness to no longer “shy away from trio things own manner. Among the many highlights are Gomez’s arco solos and homages to Bill.” These include an Italian tour in 2010 with a on the second disc. (It’s hard to think of a location recording on highly stylized trio comprising pianist Mark Kramer — a frequent which a bassist has bowed improvised melodies with the spot-on intonation that Gomez brings to his variation on Motian’s “Mode listened to a lot of saxophone and trumpet, but singers — Sinatra, VI,” which transpires in the cello register.) Nat Cole, Peggy Lee, Cheo Feliciano, Bobby Capó — were crucial. To Gomez and Corea have brought out each other’s best since 1961, me, it’s all singing or dancing, and if there’s no pulse, as is often when the pianist, then a 20-year-old Juilliard student, and the the case, then it’s cerebral. But I’ll make the dance and singing bassist, a 17-year-old senior at the High School of Music and Art, work through the brain somehow. I think there’s song and dance in jammed together in Corea’s loft in the Manhattan neighborhood 12-tone music, too. Genre didn’t get in my way.” now known as Tribeca. At the time, Gomez, a bass player for all of At Zimmerman’s suggestion, Gomez enrolled at Juilliard in 1962. six years, was already a member of New York’s Local 802, and had For the next four years, in addition to his studies, he supported conceptualized the bass-as-an-extension-of-the-voice approach his young family by playing gigs of every stripe. He worked an that he follows to this day. extended engagement at a midtown steakhouse with Marion “We moved to New York when I was about a year old, and my McParland, who welcomed sit-ins by such elder icons as Buck deepest recollection of music is my mother singing to me at home,” Clayton, Edmond Hall and Bobby Hackett. He played on a Latin jazz he recalls. “My grandfather had an evangelist church in Puerto Rico, album led by conguero Montego Joe, titled Arriba!, with Corea on and when we visited, I’d sing in the church in English. Singing was piano and Milford Graves on timbales. Via Graves, Gomez began my musical connection, not an instrument.” taking downtown outcat gigs, including concerts with Giuseppe A junior high school music teacher placed Gomez on the Logan and Paul Bley — on whose ESP recordings he performs — as contrabass path. Once in high school he dual-tracked in classi- well as with John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, and the Jazz Composers cal music and jazz, becoming ever more embroiled in the latter Orchestra. His future direction became more focused in 1965, when endeavor via such classmates as Jeremy Steig, Jimmy Owens, Billy he went on the road with vibraphonist-composer Gary McFarland, Cobham and Richard Tee, and such fellow members of Marshall then played a stint with Gerry Mulligan’s sextet. Brown’s Newport Youth Band as Eddie Daniels and Ronnie Cuber. “I could play the bass pretty well, but I wasn’t mature as a By 15, he was studying privately with “a wonderful mentor-teacher” musician or as an artist,” Gomez says. “Gary and Gerry were very named Fred Zimmerman, “a crusader for broadening the scope and nurturing. Perhaps my role was defined, but traditional contexts repertoire of the double bass.” made me dig deeper inside to find the creative part of myself.” “I wanted to play music and sing, and although the bass seemed In the summer of 1966, Gomez was at the start of a run at the an unusual instrument to be a singer on, Zimmerman played Copacabana with Bobby Darin when Evans — who, when his trio expressive, gorgeous melodies that inspired me,” Gomez says.