Harris Eisenstadt’s Desert Island Picks ~ The Free Jazz Collective

Photo by Petra Cvelbar

By David Cristol

With a discography beginning in the year 2000 and a couple dozen album
reviews on this blog, Toronto-born and Brooklyn-based drummer Harris
Eisenstadt, who turns 50 this year, is a discreet yet essential
character on the creative jazz scene, whether as leader of his own
projects (Canada Day, Golden State, Old Growth Forest, September Trio)
or as a band member. Accomplices include Nate Wooley, Pascal
Niggenkemper, François Houle, Larry Ochs, Alexander Hawkins, Adam
Rudolph, Tony Malaby, Angelica Sanchez, Ellery Eskelin… Eisenstadt
has also shown an interest in African music as exemplified on Jalolu (CIMP, 2004) and Guewel (Clean Feed, 2008) which reflect his time
studying in Gambia and Senegal and suggest a connection with the works
of the A.A.C.M., while his current direction is influenced by
afro-cuban traditions. In the last week of June he’ll be performing at
The Stone in duets and trios with former teachers and forever
inspirations of his: Wadada Leo Smith, Barry Altschul, Henry
Threadgill, as well as artists of a younger generation such as
bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck, sax player James Brandon Lewis and
pianist/singer/composer Melvis Santa from Cuba. 

Henry Threadgill – Song out of my Trees  (Black Saint, 1993) 

It’s hard to pick my favorite record by Henry, which I’m sure is a common
refrain amongst his fans because we love his music. It’s visionary, it’s
expansive. Out of many remarkable recordings from his long and
distinguished career, I chose « Song out of my Trees » because it’s one of
those that I actually go back and listen to often. I return to a lot of the
Sextett recordings and this one. Carry the Day and Too much Sugar for
a Dime could also have made the cut, records from his 1980s and 90s
period. I love the album’s opening tune, ‘Gateway,’ with Gene Lake
rumbling, Brandon Ross and Jerome Harris laying it down, and Threadgill’s
instantly recognizable alto sound and compositional voice. I love
‘Over the River Club’

which has a guitar quartet juxtaposed with Myra Melford’s gospel piano.
‘Grief’ combines Amina Claudine Myers’ harpsichord with Tony Cedras’
accordion and Diedre Murray and Michelle Kinney’s double cellos. Threadgill
comes in soaring plaintively, and then Mossa Bildner’s voice restates the
melody and they do this loose, beautiful double cry. Talk about
instrumental music that accurately captures the mood of the title of the
piece ! ‘Crea’ is my favorite tune on the album, with the guitar
quartet again and the majestic hunting horns of Ted Daniel. They hit this
rhythmic section and juxtapose it with this abrupt, romantic lyricism, and
then the rhythmic stuff comes back. It’s sublime. The record ends with the
title track : blues-drenched organ, Reggie Nicholson’s loose swing,
Threadgill’s unmistakable alto, Ed Cherry doubling Henry with his bluesy
guitar. It’s a varied record and emblematic of the vastness of Henry’s
imagination. Everybody who’s written for unusual instrumentation ever
since, is doing so in the shadow and awe of Henry Threadgill. There’s
Henry, Braxton, Leo, Roscoe Mitchell and other composers and improvisers
who stressed, either by example or by saying so explicitly, as Wadada said
to me :

« Write for unusual instrumentation, explore unusual combinations of
instruments »

. This is all ultimately in the tradition of Ellington, but with a
postmodern, kitchen sink aesthetic.

Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet (Tzadik, 2000)

Next record is the eponymous recording by Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden
Quartet, the first of the Golden Quartet albums. I love the opening
scramble of Jack DeJohnette and Anthony Davis; it was a revelation to hear
Jack play free like that. Eventually, Jack sets up the time. Anthony has
Wadada’s Ankrasmation language velocity units to work with, these short and
then long combinations of rhythms and pitches set against each other. And
finally, Leo enters with a beautiful melody, one of my favorites of his, in
little groups of five notes and then this long, trilling texture that you
just hear and know it’s him right away. The second track is a beautiful
ballad called ‘Harumi’. It’s a perfectly distilled lesson of when I
studied composition with him. He always spoke about finding the musical
moment, about only including the notes that matter the most and finding in
your own composition what those notes are or what that section is or what
that passage is or what that gesture is, drilling into the heart of what
you’re writing. I love the free march texture of ‘A celestial sky…,’
the depth and tree-like, rootedness of Malachi’s pedal tones, Jack’s free
swinging funk, Leo’s declamatory playing on top of it. I love the other
ballad on the record, The ‘Healer’s Voyage,’ with this beautiful
lyricism and an expansive approach to ballad playing, especially in Anthony
Davis’s voicings, using the entirety of the piano, independently,
polyrhythmically, and yet lush and beautiful. And then the last track,
which prefigures a lot of Leo’s titles of the last several decades. Leo’s
titles have always been poetic. They also often have a political relevance
to them. The title of the last track is

‘America’s Third Century Spiritual Awakening’. Talk about a prescient title, from the vantage point of 2025… My
goodness. I wish more people, beyond the people who know, would listen a
little closer. I love, again, the urgency of Jack’s free bop, Anthony’s
stabbing interjections, Malachi’s rumble, Wadada’s restating of some of the
stuff Anthony was playing at the beginning. Leo had invited me to the
recording session of this album at Avatar Studios in Manhattan, in the
middle of my time at Cal Arts. I remember the thrill of watching, the
interactions in the studio, the collegiality and reacquainting of old
friends working together who hadn’t worked together much in those recent
years, but these are people that Leo, especially in terms of Jack and
Malachi, had gone back with to the mid-sixties in Chicago and, of course,
his long association with Anthony from New Haven. It was a revelation to
see these heroes of mine catching up and getting to it and creating this
profound music. I feel so lucky to have been there.

David Holland Quartet – Conference of the Birds (ECM, 1976) 

Another recording that I love is the hardly secret album Conference of
the Birds by the David Holland Quartet, as it says on my CD cover. I’m
looking at the autograph of Barry Altschul which says

« Thanks ! Barry »

. The album features Sam Rivers, Anthony Braxton and Barry : what a band !
I love the exuberance of ‘Four Winds’, the first track, and the both
melodic and textural pointillism of ‘Q and A’, the exquisite lyrical
beauty of the title track ‘Conference of the Birds,’ the incantatory
nature of ‘Interception,’ the capacious open space of

‘Now here (nowhere)’

, and the colossal and insistent free bop of ‘See-saw’. Each track
is a perfect sonic picture of 1970s creative music. For those of us too
young to have attended concerts in the various loft scene venues, Rivbea or
wherever, this has to be one of the great statements from that period. I
actually read about this record before I heard it. I was getting into jazz
via mostly Coltrane and Miles in the late nineties. I’d borrowed a copy of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on LP or even cassette, I think it was. It
might have been the second or third edition, around ’96. And I was letting
my fingers do the walking type of research and looking for recordings to
check out. I was already interested in the Coltrane Quartet and 60’s Miles,
and then in fusion of the early seventies, Mahavishnu, Tony Williams
Lifetime, the earliest Weather Report and Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band.
I started reading about European free improvisation and 70s free music,
Jarrett’s European and American quartets, Dave Holland’s ECM recordings. I
heard this and it was the the ultimate inspiration, especially what Barry
was up to. It was such a wide open concept of what being a creative music
drummer and percussionist could be. I remember studying with Gerry
Hemingway later in the 90’s. Barry’s a decade older than Gerry and Mark
Helias and Ray Anderson and Anthony Davis and George Lewis, other creative
musicians coming up in the seventies. He said they called Barry

« the cash register »

because he had this incredible ability to not just create staccato,
non-pitched sounds on his expanded drum kit, but he had this constant
imagination, scampering around, searching for different sounds. I remember
Barry talking about the expression that he credited to Beaver Harris

« from ragtime to no time »

, that was really his concept as a teacher. When I lived in New York in the
late nineties, I was reading The Village Voice looking for gigs to go to
one night, and there it said « Barry Altschul solo ». I’d known Conference of the Birds already. Oh my god, my hero is playing in town.
He had been living in Europe for most of the eighties and early nineties
and was back in New York. I went to hear him play and asked if I could
study with him. He gave me his card. The image on his business card was
this seventies-looking beautiful painting of him that someone had done.
Lessons took place at his apartment on 105th and Central Park West, in his
two-story apartment with a spiral staircase, a block or two up from the
building that Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Paul Motian lived in. He gave me a
facsimile printout of 12 steps to follow, a range of skills that he insisted
on his students mastering or practicing anyways, from the freest, most
abstract spiritual pursuits, long meditative upstrokes and downstrokes as a
standing meditation for minutes at a time, to Charlie Wilcox on and swing
solos, old school jazz pedagogy, books like Syncopation and

Stick Control

, the bibles of rudimentary drumming, the whole gamut. Make a sound, make
another sound was one of the exercises that he had his students work on
weekly. There I was getting to all this formative, aesthetic and practical
information. It’s not every time that your heroes as artists are also great
teachers, but he was. At that time, I was undecided. I knew I wanted to be
a musician. I was in my early twenties and a drummer, but I also was
writing. We’d record interviews after our lessons. I would turn on a tape
or dictaphone, and remember asking him about playing with Jimi Hendrix at
Woodstock and all this amazing history. And this record, it’s not just
because of Barry that I love it so much, it’s the perfect alchemy of the
musicians involved. But Barry’s playing really pointed me forward for the
entirety of my career. I saw him play at Big Ears a couple months ago,
still swinging like crazy, stopping on a dime and exploring the nooks and
crannies of his kit, all pointillistic. He’s over 80, playing his butt off.
What an inspiration.

Miguelito León – Mina Mina  (Ocha Records, 2024) 1-song digital
streaming 

So now to three that are influential to me in my current research focuses.
The first is a track called ‘Mina Mina’ by an artist named Miguelito
León. It’s released as a single, rather than as an entire album. A single
and a video, on streaming platforms only. Maybe a departure from the
purview of this column, but I’ve been listening to it nonstop, since a
friend of mine hipped me to it a couple months ago. Musically it’s, not
unrelated, but in a different lane, so to speak, than Wadada and Henry and
Barry and my own work in creative music, likewise in terms of its
dissemination strategy. This is not an old school recording in any sense of
the word. The production aesthetic, of course, is much more meticulously
polished, overdubbed and all that stuff. Still it has a nice organic feel
to it, in a very different aesthetic than creative music in the ways that
creative music is generally recorded. What he’s doing, and it’s something
that I’m interested for my own work, is taking traditional materials used
in afro-cuban ceremonies, particularly the song ‘Mina Mina,’ and
reimagining it. He also intersperses, in the background, verité recordings
of a venerated elder singer named Dayan. I mean an elder in in terms of
his legitimacy and experience growing up in Cuba in a folkloric family. You
hear Dayan teaching his young son some traditional praise poetry, and
teaching it in the traditional call-and-response way. Teaching a language,
teaching linguistics in a way that is preserving the tradition. Miguelito
is including this verité example of traditional pedagogy as a way of
connecting what is a forward-looking produced track to the traditions that
it comes from. It’s a salient example of how to reconstitute traditional
liturgical materials in new and unexpected ways, which is a a central
preoccupation for me these days. Not so much in the creative music sense as
we are talking about it, understanding it to be coming out of jazz and
improvised music, but creatively nonetheless. My research in batá and
afro-cuban music has taken me deeper and deeper and deeper into it, but I
still am sorting out for myself how to reimagine these things in creative
music.

Ilú Keké – Transmisión en la Eritá Meta (Music Works-Sendero, 2018) 

This recording bears the name Ilú Keké, which is a set of sacred
batá drums from Matanzas, Cuba. The artists involved on the recording are
numerous. There are essentially three people who play a set of batá drums.
There are usually three drums in a set. This recording has a series of
tracks by elders from Matanzas, which is a small city near Havana where I
have done a lot of research and visited and studied there and been involved
in religious, ceremonial stuff for a little more than a decade. It’s a
sleepy workers’ town, about 90 kilometers, an hour and a half drive East of
the capital. Not much going on there, at first glance, and yet it is also
known as this rich repository center that preserves afro-cuban traditions,
that date to centuries but particularly to the nineteenth century. The
afro-cuban population who lived in the city of Matanzas and in the province
of Matanzas were slaves on the sugar plantations there. The city has
preserved traditions that don’t exist in the more global city of Havana or
anywhere else on the island. These traditions are in various degrees of
decline, being forgotten or not being preserved, or elders are dying with
the secrets and not passing them on to the next generations. The recording
is this ethnomusicological document from 2017. Ritual drummers heard of a
set of sacred drums that were from the 1950s and had been in disrepair, and
hanging on a wall. Sacred drums are hung, they’re not supposed to be on the
ground ever, so they’re hung on walls in the homes of the people who own
them. They were hanging on a wall, at the home of the owner who they had
been passed down to, by earlier generations. They weren’t being played and
had been forgotten. It’s as though, in terms of creative music and jazz,
someone had found a secret drum set of Baby Dodds in New Orleans that no one
had known, that its existence was not even known for many decades. So the
recording documents the rediscovery of those drums, and on half of the
tracks, those drums are being played by elders who were already in their
late seventies, early eighties. In fact, one of them died within weeks of
the completion of the recording. Another died some months after. The third
died a year or two later. This is like recording dinosaurs barely while
they’re still walking the earth. And then the other recordings are live
tracks of actual ceremonies, multitrack recordings with great microphones,
excellent recording technology. Capturing not only the oldest set of drums,
but also a younger set of consecrated drums being played at ceremonies
throughout Matanzas. I’ve included this because it’s this vital document of
elder musicians in their final moments and not just a museum piece that you
put in a museum and say, wow, look how cool that looks, but, emblematic of
living vessels as sacred batá drums are believed to be, able to continue to
transmit their messages through the rhythms that are played on them,
through the songs that are sang, that the drums accompany the participants
in these ceremonies with. I have a particular connection to this recording
based on studying and having religious affiliations with the people playing
on it. Matanzas is like if there was some small city just outside of New
Orleans, not the Ninth Ward, not the Treme, not a neighborhood in the city,
but some quiet community that was almost forgotten and that was a
repository of New Orleans African-American traditionss. I joke that
Matanzas is like the Hartford or the Cleveland or the Binghamton of Cuba. I
hope that including this recording on this list will point some ears in the
direction of this exquisite tradition, not the globalized better-known
versions of it, but the super O.G., the real Mecca. Mike Spiro, a great
American practitioner of this music and religion, has referred to Matanzas
as Mecca for afro-cuban folkloric practices. This recording is like a holy
grail of almost forgotten ancient knowledge.

Bembesito – Yemayá Guiro (Bembesito, 2018) 1-song digital streaming 

This is another example of a song rather than a complete album, more in
keeping with the way things are, perhaps not in creative music, but
certainly in most genres or fields of music. This is a digital-only
streaming release by a singer named Bembesito. Bembe essentially
means party in Caribbean Spanish. Bembe sito is a
diminutive and affectionate ending to the name. Bembesito is someone who is
bringing the party with them. It’s an appropriate name. Bembesito is a a
singer that I have been working with in New York, playing afro-cuban
ceremonies often with for the last seven years. It’s an example of
afro-cuban folkloric music. In this case, the form is known as

guiro

, and is made up of gourd rattles called chekere, also known as
agwe. So even though the form is called guiro, no one is
actually playing a güiro like a scraper. They play these two,
sometimes three shakers. And there’s a metal bell which is actually the
blade of a hoe, the tool you use to break up the earth before you plant
stuff in it. It’s called guataca. And then there’s a single conga
drum that improvises quite spaciously, as the singer and chorus sing in
this call-and-response way, antiphonally : a singer sings the first verse
and then the chorus responds. They might repeat it a couple times, move on
to the next one. The singer goes through a series of cantos, which
are praise songs. In this case, it’s for Yemayá, which is the

orisha

or the deity, the mother of the world, who lives in the oceans.

Lucumi

is the name of this afro-cuban religion. It’s the most well known, but there
are afro-cuban traditions practiced commonly, including Palo,

Abakua

, and to a lesser extent, Arara. I’ve worked with Bembesito a lot,
and continue to learn so much from him. He’s another young master, in his
forties and actually Dominican, and has grown up in the very active
afro-cuban religious community in New York, singing guiros andtambores,
which are the names for the ceremonies that involve batá drums, for twenty
five years. There’s a Latin, Spanish speaking community in New York made up
of Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, also English-speaking black Americans
and afro-caribbeans who are part of this larger afro-cuban community, and
he is one of the most in-demand singers of that scene. He has a soaring
voice and is in command of a song repertoire of more than one thousand
songs. The improvisation in this music is like in any traditional music,
very much contextual. The singer chooses the order of the song
spontaneously, in the moment, and modifies the songs that he or she is
choosing based on both expectations and expected sequences. When you’re
singing this, there’s an expectation that this is coming next and then
that, and then that. But it also allows for the spontaneity of the moment
to decide which direction a series of songs will take, not just based on
musical distinctions or choices but also on what’s happening in the context
of the ceremony, extramusical circumstances dictating what musical choices
are made improvisationally, which I’ve always been fascinated by. It’s an
example of someone that I work with often, in this case, making a
recording. And that’s him not only singing the lead and singing all the
tracks in response to his lead vocals, he’s also playing all the
instruments. A virtuosic demonstration of the way a guiro ceremony
would sound. 

Harris Eisenstadt, The Stone Residency June 25–28, New York

• 6/25 Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet) Harris Eisenstadt (drums)
• 6/26 Melvis Santa (piano, voice) Harris Eisenstadt (drums)
• 6/27 Barry Altschul (drums) James Brandon Lewis (sax) Harris Eisenstadt
  (drums)
• 6/28 Henry Threadgill (woodwinds) Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon) Harris
  Eisenstadt (drums) 

Harris Eisenstadt on the Free Jazz Blog: