John Abercrombie : Insights

A great friendship, sessions and holidays

Guitarist John Abercrombie was one of my best friends. He was also a major voice on guitar for 50 years.

Over an 11 year period , we spent a lot of time together, playing, eating, laughing, and talking. John was a great storyteller and I learned all kinds of things.

Just rapping about his early days with the likes of Billy Cobham, Randy and Mike Brecker, Dreams, Chico Hamilton,Dave Holland, Richie Beirach, Dave Liebman,Collin Walcott, Gil Evans, Jack DeJohnette, and many others was a fascinating look into some of jazz’s most interesting musicians.

Eating: Usually near John’s home in upstate NY. Golden House , a Chinese restaurant with a bar, was a favorite. An odd place with giant fishtanks, a waiter named Wing , a tiny bar with locals, and excellent grub, this is where I learned John’s fave cocktail- vodka martini, dry, with a lemon twist.

Other times, the meals were excellently prepared by his wife Lisa at home where a white cat named Al ruled the roost. Steak, chicken, big salads. These meals were usually preceded by a jaunt to the local liquor store where we’d grab a bottle of Bordeaux (his favorite), and maybe a little junior bottle of vodka for a post -prandial taste.

John and I had a band together, along with drummer Eliot Zigmund and bassist David Kingsnorth. We performed in NY, PA & CT. These gigs were great, and they gave us some road time to hang. Stopping for sandwiches in Milford, PA; having an incredible gourmet meal at the gig in Old Lyme , CT; dining by the waterfalls outside The Falcon near Newburgh NY.

John had a few platitudes that upended the ways you might think about music.

Re: chord symbols, he would say, “ It doesn’t matter what you call it.”

Re: new tunes, he’d quote his pal Ralph Towner: “ If your tune works as a march, it’s a good tune.” Not as cryptic as some of the pearls dropped by Wayne Shorter, but requiring some deciphering nonetheless.

Treading lightly, I once asked John, “ What’s the worst record you ever made?”. “Hold on a minute”. He left the room and came back with a record with an amazing title: “Voyage To Uranus “. YES, THAT WAS THE REAL TITLE. After two tunes, John gave the cd to the drummer and said “ please get this out of my house”. It was hilarious. The record had some good musicians, but the rough mix and the title said it all.

A little known fact : John composed on piano almost as much as on guitar. His piano chops were pretty good, and there was nice instrument in the studio. We had almost weekly sessions there, where we would often be th first to test drive his new tunes, many of which weren’t even titled yet. On batch was called, number one, number two, etc.

John eventually found apt names for all of these tunes - “Retractable Cell”, “Al The Cat”, “ Up and Coming”, ….. and most of them got recorded later for his longtime label, ECM, where he had the unwavering support of founder Manfred Eicher for over 40 years. The last tune I recall John writing, “Try Me” hasn’t been recorded.

John had a rapier wit. Usually as we had a few he’d get funnier late into the evening. As musicians do, he and his bandmates developed some secret language.

He taught me the word suspone, a slang word possibly coined by Mike Stern and used by Michael Brecker and Adam Nussbaum, among others. It means, something fishily suspicious, like a bad solo, or some old suspect food, or maybe a shady promoter .I don’t know man, that’s a little suspone.

In the classic John Abercrombie Quartet with Richie Beirach, George Mraz & Peter Donald, the band had secret joke titles for many of their own tunes. For example, “Night Lake” was known to the band only as “ Night Clerk” after a strange dude working at a hotel in Germany they encountered.

John had an interesting theory about why pianists are, in general better readers than guitarists in jazz.. In the era he came up in, the 1960’s and 70’s, he said many guitarists worked primarily with organ groups, himself included. In these bands the tunes were often learned by ear; whereas, John said, pianists came up in big bands so their reading chops were well honed.

As a Berklee student in Boston, John studied with Jack Peterson, who is still with us today in Texas. He fondly recalled Jack’s helpful tutelage. John and his friends went to hear Brother Jack MacDuff live; the first time the guitarist was George Benson. A year later it was Pat Martino. Also, Wes Montgomery came to Berklee to give a clinic. John said that all three of these cats couldn’t have been nicer.Wes kept an ashtray nearby while he played, and was very complimentary when listening Jack Petersons guitar ensemble of which John was a member.

Holidays with John.

Briefly, we once tried to watch the historically bad film “Santa Claus Conquers The Martians” on Christmas, but it was just too awful. We did drive in a snowstorm to a Chinese place even closer than Golden Palace though.

John had an enduring love for the original monster movies. We have watched “Dracula” and “The Invisible Man” on Halloween. Most saliently, one of John’s favorite standards, Victor Young’s “Beautiful Love”, originated in the the film “ The Mummy” with Boris Karloff . John was a happy camper watching these classics.