Encounters With Great Recordings Of The Twentieth Century, #2: Roy Haynes/Phineas Newborn/Paul Chambers, "We Three" (Release date, likely early 1959, date of acquisition, some time in 1990)

I have no prob­lem admit­ting I’m a Phineas Newborn dilet­tante. Even Stanley Booth, the author of the thor­ough, admir­ing, and extremely pain­ful appre­ci­ation of Newborn that was my first expos­ure to the great pian­ist, wrote in that account that shortly before he met the man in the early ’70s he “knew almost noth­ing about Phineas Newborn except that he was a jazz pian­ist whose records I’d seen reviewed in Down Beat in the ’50s.” 

Booth’s piece, entitled “Fascinating Changes,” first appeared shortly after Newborn’s death in the spring of 1989, in a quarterly music­al sup­ple­ment that was then being pub­lished in the Village Voice, in the days when someone of Stanley Booth’s caliber would per­mit his work to be prin­ted in the Village Voice. It is reprin­ted in Booth’s 1991 col­lec­tion Rythm Oil, an abso­lutely essen­tial book for any­one with even just a passing interest in music, the United States of America, and good writ­ing. In the book Booth pre­faces the piece thus: “This piece was writ­ten before Phineas Newborn, Jr., died, but it ran in the Village Voice as one more obit­u­ary. I don’t like it, as a poet once said, but I guess things hap­pen that way.”

Booth’s account was of an extremely troubled, per­haps men­tally ill indi­vidu­al, more or less at sea, who plays piano like an angel. It is an angry piece that weaves in threads of fam­ily his­tory, Memphis his­tory, obser­va­tions on the vari­ous natures of the music busi­ness of the time, the vicis­situdes of jazz crit­ics (which Booth has very little patience for; after quot­ing a review of a Newborn set by one John Mehegan which takes it to task for a lack of “real jazz feel­ing,” Booth writes “The absurdity of a white piano teach­er from New York telling Phineas Newborn about real jazz feel­ing is delicious.” 

In any event, after read­ing Booth’s art­icle, I was kind of haunted by the oddity of the char­ac­ter that Booth had made out of Newborn. Booth’s per­spect­ive was not that of a clini­cian but as a kind of priv­ileged observ­er, and the mys­ter­ies in his story and Phineas’ story are kept mys­ter­ies, and among the most troub­ling of the mys­ter­ies sur­rounds a beat­ing that Newborn suf­fers at unknown hands for unknown reas­on not long after Booth first meets and hears the pian­ist. Booth also con­jures the sense of a world that most of us will not,  can not, ever know, and does this with some wry piqué, as in this digres­sion from a reas­on­ably sus­pense­ful and wor­ry­ing nar­rat­ive in the piece:

Leaving the Dickensons down­stairs with Fred, who was say­ing, ‘I have seen the time I could call six and have it come up, tell the dice what to do,’ Susan and I went up to my office, sat on the couch and passed the time until we heard foot­steps on the car­peted stairs. I looked around the door-jamb to see who was com­ing up and spied Fred on the land­ing. ‘Where Junior?’

Insufferable Yankee edit­ors have explained to me how offens­ive it is to quote Southerners speak­ing as we speak. Fred said Where Junior not because he did­n’t know it’s cor­rect to say Where Is Junior but because he knew I knew there was­n’t time to say Where the fuck is Junior?

And of course I needed to hear some Phineas Newborn music. A little easi­er said than done. I was liv­ing in Manhattan at the time, in Murray Hill, and as far as I knew, the record store with the best-stocked jazz depart­ment at the time was J&R Music World down­town, then an alto­geth­er dusti­er and more cramped envir­on­ment than it is today. Oh, yeah, and almost entirely vinyl. And even there, Phineas Newborn records were thin on the ground. So thin on the ground there were no “prop­er” Phineas Newborn records, that is, no solo piano record­ings or accounts of him lead­ing a group. No, there was only one record I could find fea­tur­ing Newborn, this trio set on which drum­mer Roy Haynes is the first play­er lis­ted and hence often cred­ited as the lead­er, although it’s not a “Roy Haynes Trio” record; We Three, ori­gin­ally released on Riverside’s “New Jazz” imprint, as far as I can tell. 

It’s not a record with any kind of agenda; it feels as cas­u­al, maybe even “tossed off,” as any record fea­tur­ing three instru­ment­al­ists as accom­plished and dis­tinct­ive as Haynes, Newborn and bassist Chambers could be. Its open­ing cut is “Reflection,” a tune by Ray Bryant, anoth­er under­ap­pre­ci­ated pian­ist­ic mas­ter of the Memphis baroque, but the first voice you hear isn’t this ses­sion’s key­board­ist; no, the tune begins with the sweet thun­der of Haynes’ floor tom, I believe, rum­bling with the clar­ity and crisp­ness that has ever been the defin­ing fea­ture of his style; then the piano comes in, a bouncy, Latinish right-handed melod­ic theme with some unex­pec­ted for­ward somer­saults,  backed by a tricky hi-hat pat­tern (Haynes takes his own sweet time here before giv­ing the snare one of his inim­it­able smacks) and some sneaky scale-climbing from Chambers. Then it’s off to the races for Phineas, whose runs have an incred­ible fluid­ity and play­ful­ness but also what I myself always took for not just real “jazz feel­ing” but real blues feel­ing. There’s mas­ter­ful tech­nique here but also a bed­rock love of the forms and con­ven­tions of what they’re play­ing; call it authen­ti­city, or organic-ness, or what you will; this is “down home” music in a very deep sense. It’s also music that’s mind-blowingly vir­tu­osic in ways that you’d nev­er neces­sar­ily pro­cess unless you were sit­ting down try­ing to pro­cess it, and the music always feels so good that you’re hardly ever inclined to devote your listen­ing time to pars­ing in that way. The album’s center­piece is a ten-minute-plus tour-de-force workout of Avery Parrish’s  “After Hours,” which Newborn opens with  a sim­ul­tan­eously knotty and very low­down iter­a­tion of the theme, runs off a bit like it wer­en’t no thing, twink­ling the high notes mul­tiple bars before break­ing off with an exclam­a­tion point or a wink. Then he’ll slow down and breathe in and out a couple of cool chords. The bassist and the drum­mer provide what appears to be mere com­fort­able, con­fid­ent sup­port, pick up the tempo to take things for a stroll, and on it ambles; it isn’t until you really start pick­ing the thing about that you notice in sec­tions of the jam each play­er is in a dif­fer­ent time sig­na­ture; it’s all so in the pock­et you’d nev­er sus­pect a con­triv­ance of that sort.

It’s all just pure pleas­ure as it fills the room, and I guess that’s why this appar­ently not par­tic­u­larly his­tor­ic ses­sion has grown through the years into one of my favor­ite, if not my abso­lute favor­ite, records. I don’t enter­tain the whole “desert island disc” ques­tion all that often, but when I do, We Three is always a very strong can­did­ate. I’ve nev­er been in a situ­ation or mood, good or bad, where put­ting the thing on did­n’t do some­thing to improve things. I’ve listened to a good deal more of Phineas Newborn’s music since then, and of course Haynes’ Out of the Afternoon, an actu­al his­tor­ic ses­sion fea­tur­ing Roland Kirk on reeds, Tommy Flanagan on piano, and Henry Grimes for heav­en’s sake on bass, is and ever shall be an all-time fave too, and I don’t sup­pose I need to start on Paul Chambers’ oth­er work (played bass on Kind of Blue, you know…three years pri­or to this)…but still, We Three has a big hold on me. It’s a remark­ably joy­ous record without being par­tic­u­larly sap­pily demon­strat­ive about it; and of course it only rep­res­ents a par­tic­u­lar moment of cre­ation, an after­noon in Hackensack, N.J., at the home stu­dio pion­eer­ing jazz record­ist Rudy Van Gelder. (Who set down this producer-free ses­sion impec­cably, of course.) Chambers was all of 23 years old at the time; in 1969, after struggles with alco­hol and heroin, he would die of tuber­cu­los­is. Newborn was 26, and just a couple of years away from his first stay in a men­tal insti­tu­tion. Haynes was the eld­est of “we three,” 33; he turned, if I can believe my eyes, 86 this year, and is still play­ing; he made an appear­ance on The Late Show With David Letterman in June of this year.