Right Place, Wrong Time: A Jazz Messenger Comes to D.C.

by Anthony Medici in Concert Reviews, Editorials, Musician Reviews, Opinion Posts, Reviews

The liner notes to his recent CD, “Sketch,” put it bluntly:  “David Schnitter is the jazz world’s forgotten messenger, a marvelous musician who just happened to be in the right place before the right time.”  Except I would amend that statement to read:  “…in the right place after the right time.”   For Schnitter was not just a “jazz messenger,” but a “Jazz Messenger,” one of the members of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, a graduate of Blakey’s famed College of Hard Bop, that saw such other alumni as Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Jymie Merritt, Cedar Walton, Curtis Fuller, and Bobbie Timmons.  I went to Twins Jazz last night to hear Schnitter and to see if the jazz message was still being delivered. 

I tuned up for the show by listening to some earlier efforts by Schnitter.  I worked back from his fairly recent CD (2001),  “Sketch,” with James Zollar on trumpet, Thomas Bramerie on bass, and Jimmy Madison on drums.   I like the CD.  Schnitter’s playing, although primarily mainstream, straight-ahead bop, moves easily from inside to outside, frequently showing a spiky edge.  It swings but in an offbeat manner. 

I also checked out Schnitter on two late Blakey albums, “In This Korner,” recorded live at San Francisco’s Keystone Korner about 1978.  Beside Blakey and Schnitter, the band includes the hard-blowing Valery Ponomarev on trumpet, Robert Watson, alto sax, James Williams, piano, and Dennis Irwin, bass.  The music is standard hard bop.  The playing is standard as well.  Even Blakey seems a bit tired.  Things are tighter and sharper on Blakey’s “In My Prime, Vol. I” (1977) with the same lineup as “Korner,” with the addition of Curtis Fuller on trombone (a glance back to the classic Messenger lineup) and Ray Mantilla on percussion.  Everyone plays hard and clean. 

For comparison, I then played a classic Blakey Jazz Messenger effort, “Caravan” (Riverside 1962), with Freddie Hubbard, trumpet, Curtis Fuller, trombone, Wayne Shorter, tenor sax, Cedar Walton, piano, and Reggie Workman, bass.  Everything was that much stronger, tighter, hotter, cooler, fresher.  The music was molten.  By the time of Schnitter’s tenure in the Messengers in the late 1970s, the music was an after image of the real thing.  The group was following in the tracks of its own insuperable greatness. The music has been superseded  by Fire Music, Free Jazz, late Coltrane.  Of course, the Era of Marsalis was on its way.  Wynton and Branford were yet later arrivals in the Messengers, but Wynton was above all determined to nail this music to an archival display board, like a butterfly pinned by a lepidopterist for examination, without life or true animate beauty. It worked– for a while, but has now been swept aside as so much rubbish.  Schnitter was in the right place, but the time had already passed. 

Schnitter turned 61 this past Thursday.  He has been teaching at The New School in New York City for the past 14 years.  As he happily told me, “It’s a steady paycheck and they even have health insurance!” not something most jazz players have.  He continues to play gigs around New York, occasionally with Ponomarev.  For a while they had a Blakey tribute band.  Schnitter told me that playing with Blakey was the “best experience of my life.”  Blakey was good to the band members.  Schnitter acknowledged that Dexter Gordon and Sonny Stitt were early influences but “that was 35 years ago” and he has been developing and trying new things since then.  The first set was standard hard bop.  The rather diminutive Schnitter played big and strong.  Dexter’s influence was still apparent, although there were occasional moves to stretch the envelope.  It seemed that Schnitter was mostly willing to give the audience what it wanted:  straight ahead hard bop jazz.  The band members were a local pickup group.  This was music that has been produced in jazz clubs for the last 50 years.  I didn’t stick around for the second set.

For me, the jazz message is being delivered by other artists, with a different concept of the music, who are trying to maintain that “sound of surprise” that is so vital to jazz.  For others, its hearing the music played as it has been played for decades.  Either way, Jazz Messengers, and even jazz messengers,  grow old, go on to ancestry, but the message continues to be delivered.