This just released recording hasn’t been out before but dates back to 1988. And following on from what Scofield said, 1979’s In Pas(s)ing is relevant. That’s because of the curiously titled first track the balladic ‘Feebles, Fables & Ferns’. On that record it had a different arrangement. It involved chunkily tender baritone sax, double bass and drums and the contributions of John Surman, Eddie Gómez and the great Bitches Brew and Keith Jarrett drummer Jack DeJohnette who sadly died last year. The same tune is the first track and done as a duo with the great Cincinnati born Jaki Byard taught pianist Fred Hersch who is now 70.
The first thing that struck me without even thinking about it – and I think this applies on every track on this recording – is how much Goodrick influenced Pat Metheny.
You can still hear it today on PM’s latest album especially on a Side Eye III track like ‘Risk and Reward’ where flickering thoughts of John Abercrombie also dance through my mind.
Carla’s partner Steve Swallow’s ‘Falling Grace’ which goes back to Gary Burton’s 1966 album The Time Machine is another of the tunes here. It has been interpreted down the years by Bill Evans, Jim Hall and Pat Metheny and Scofield too with Bill Stewart and Swallow himself.
Sco, in that Jazz Times piece referred to above, says Goodrick was himself influenced by Hall who died in 2013. “Jim Hall must have influenced Mick, but Mick was playing the new music of the ’70s and he sounded unique,” Sco reckoned. That’s a fascinating circle when you think about it: first Hall, influencing Goodrick, MG teaching and influencing Metheny on the stand beside him and then Metheny playing with Hall in the 1990s a piece in ‘Falling Grace’ that Goodrick and Hersch had – probably unbeknownst to them – privately recorded and now excitingly “we” as a global listening community hear for the first time a preposterously obscure distance of 38 years on.
It’s a gentle album and I ended up as a reaction making private reflections to myself, becoming philosophical a bit – thinking of past regrets and coulda-woulda-shoulda-beens but not bitterly however irrelevantly – as I listened, given its striking humanity.
Technically Mick Goodrick’s harmonic approach is found in works of his that include The Advancing Guitarist and his Almanac of Guitar Voice-Leading. He was all for close-voiced triads, four-part spread voicings, and three-part quartal or cluster structures.
But I think I like even more than the trio one the treatment that appeared the year before with the great clarinettist Eddie Daniels on Blackwood.
It’s lovely that this album comes out now. It keeps Goodrick’s memory alive. He didn’t record many albums because he was often busy teaching at Berklee. Apparently this session was a one-off with Hersch who himself is highly influential – you can’t really listen to the Jarrett of his generation Brad Mehldau without thinking how much a debt he owes Hersch in style and substance.
Feebles, Fables & Ferns as it now is [note the ampersand which it didn’t have on In Pas(s)ing] – I wonder did the duo even give it a name when beavering away in 1988 – wasn’t even meant for release when recorded, and was more of an impromptu collaboration done in Hersch’s private studio. So, definitely a collector’s item for this reason and also because it is touching and rewarding as a harmonic statement of huge classiness and taste that will send you searching, yearning, delving for more in ever increasing circles, picking up new insights every time you play it again. It brings on reactions and numerous reflections however randomly arrived at or not.
Final thought, as far as I know Hersch and Pat Metheny have never recorded together. Based on this album surely that would make sense. That would be something, wouldn’t it, given Metheny’s debt to Goodrick. Metheny recorded with Brad Mehldau for a release that came out 20 years ago very successfuly and as I mentioned earlier Hersch is a big influence on Brad. Hersch is great at playing Monk. So the idea then: Hersch, Metheny, maybe a bassist and drummer, lots of Monk, Hersch originals including even another version of ‘Heartsong’ and some Metheny classics. I’d be all ears. Maybe, dear reader, you would too.