{"id":615,"date":"2013-03-20T15:54:38","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T15:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=615"},"modified":"2018-03-20T18:44:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T18:44:53","slug":"the-abiding-glow-of-thomas-chapins-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=615","title":{"rendered":"The Abiding Glow of Thomas Chapin’s Light"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The first time I heard him play was sometime in 1988 on an LP (ask your parents, kids, because I hear they may be coming back) entitled, <\/em>The Sex Queen of the Berlin Turnpik<\/a>e, a jazz-and-poetry mix written and produced by a central Connecticut crony of mine named Vernon Frazer, novelist, raconteur, boxing aficionado and bass player who\u2019d provided musical accompaniment to his readings here and, in years to come, at such venues as the Nuyorican Caf\u00e9 and the Knitting Factory.<\/em>
\n As I listened, I became acutely aware of this flute coiling around Vern\u2019s incantations and bass lines in lucid, deceptively simple patterns. As I grew up a flautist manqu\u00e9, however reluctantly, I paid attention when people did unexpected things with the instrument, especially in jazz. And whoever was playing had nailed down a lyrical, probing style that refused to lean heavily on the flute\u2019s naturally pretty tone. (The tone wasn\u2019t pretty. It was beautiful, rich and \u2013 was it possible? \u2013 evenly layered.) And then I heard the alto sax solos. They could burn like scalding water. But they also soared; sometimes like jets, other times like gliders. More than anything, it was the relentless invention, the let\u2019s-try-anything ingenuity that knew how to swing, bop and blow the blues in the grandest manner, but could step \u201coutside\u201d conventional changes with a nonchalance that seemed highly evolved even for the greyest of beards.<\/em>
\n I checked the name on the cover: Thomas Chapin. Hadn\u2019t heard of him before that point and was chagrined at myself for not paying attention. I\u2019d assumed he was this lesser-known veteran of the black music wars who likely spent the previous decade-and-a-half trolling through lofts along the eastern seaboard. \u201cWho is this Thomas Chapin cat?\u201d I wrote Vern, who in turn told me he was this barely-thirty-something white guy from Manchester, Connecticut.<\/em>
\n Manchester? Really? I\u2019d spent part of my early newspaper years writing about that east-of-the-river suburb and, whatever its myriad virtues and defects, the next-to-last thing I\u2019d have expected was someone who could wail like this. When I played this record to another colleague from those long-ago Hartford Courant days, his head swiveled as sharply as mine had to the sound of Chapin\u2019s alto. When I told him who was playing and where he was from, my friend shook his head. \u201cShit, man,\u201d he said. \u201cNobody from Manchester ever blew like that!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been fifteen years since Thomas Chapin died at just 40 years old and I still find myself wondering what he\u2019s been up to. I keep thinking he\u2019s got to be on some club\u2019s weekend schedule, leading a trio or quartet in support of a new disc or performing yet another homage to his idol Rahsaan Roland Kirk. No matter where Tom would be, he would be turning heads, winning friends, encouraging people to come over to his side, no matter how forbidding or unconventional the setting. That\u2019s what he always did, on- or off-stage. That\u2019s why we miss him.<\/p>\n

He was a member in good standing of the crowd of cutting-edge dynamos who waved the progressive-jazz banner throughout the eighties and nineties in downtown New York (a scene whose central HQ was that aforementioned Knitting Factory). Yet he also turned heads among more-traditional-minded listeners as a distinctive and highly accomplished post-bop player with a bright, lightly jagged tone and a prodigious, often-stunning range of expression. As with generations of musicians who had apprenticed under Lionel Hampton (in whose big band he\u2019d worked for five years), Chapin carried \u201cGates\u2019s\u201d lessons of brash showmanship in his own trick-bag<\/a>. But he never pandered to or shortchanged expectations, whether swinging from the core of a hard-bop standard or generating torrents of chromatic density off a simple riff.<\/p>\n

The straight-ahead side blooms like fireworks on Never Let Me Go<\/em> (Playscape), a recently-released triple-CD of Chapin leading quartets at two New York venues. The first two discs are from a November, 1995 show at Flushing Town Hall with pianist Peter Madsen, bassist Kiyoto Fujiwara and drummer Reggie Nicholson. The third disc teams Chapin and Madsen with the bass-drum tandem of Scott Colley and Matt Wilson at the Knitting Factory on December 19, 1996 \u2013 Chapin\u2019s last live date in New York City. (He\u2019d been diagnosed with leukemia the following year.) Though Chapin\u2019s last studio recording, 1997\u2019s Sky Piece<\/em>, remains the one true gateway to his life\u2019s work, Never Let Me Go<\/em> evokes the warmth of Tom\u2019s personality and the exhilaration he could communicate even to those who may not have fully appreciated his chosen idiom.<\/p>\n

Ecstasy leaps from the first track, \u201cI\u2019ve Got Your Number,\u201d whose chord changes provide a gauntlet for Chapin\u2019s breakaway speed and power. There was never anything tentative about his attack; not even when, on the silky \u201cMoon Ray,\u201d the tempo gears down to stealth mode and Tom summarily shifts to shrewder thematic tactics. Along with his many other gifts, Chapin easily complied with Lester Young\u2019s directive to \u201csing a song\u201d when he played \u2013 which meant, as Prez suggested by example, to find the songs within the song that needed to come out. More than most of his downtown confreres, Chapin always exercised this prerogative, even on songs that weren\u2019t part of the classic-pop canon as exhibited here on both \u201cYou Don\u2019t Know Me\u201d and \u201cWichita Lineman,\u201d whose melodies Chapin irradiates with such conviction that you get the feeling he could have, in time, single-handedly embedded them both in the traditionalist fake-book.<\/p>\n

His own compositions become occasions for Chapin\u2019s more imaginative dramas of harmony and rhythm doing their approach-avoidance ritual. These are most prominent on the Knitting Factory gig; it must be noted that Matt Wilson, whose own embraceable style and personality are mirror images of Chapin\u2019s, opens wider terrain for both Madsen and Chapin to lunge at the edges of time and space. On such pieces as \u201cBig Maybe\u201d and \u201cFlip Side,\u201d whatever ambiguities, discordances and incongruities play their way through each solo do so from a solid core, which Wilson tends with inviolate calm, but also with a gentle persistence of vision. Madsen makes his presence even more pronounced on the latter set; he builds his own model airplanes to fly as eccentrically, yet as emphatically as Chapin\u2019s own. Together, this group could have helped make the cutting-edge a place where all would be welcome, exalted and, eventually, transformed. It\u2019s nice to think so anyway.<\/p>\n

When someone dies as prematurely as Chapin, there usually come in his wake several voices inspired by his example to fill the void. (Think of all those bright, hot horns who picked up where Clifford Brown left off. Or all those actors who are still filling in the blanks left behind by James Dean’s car crash.) In the decade-and-a-half since Chapin\u2019s death, those examples are harder to find, especially his ability, or more accurately, his impulse, to bridge the gap between progressive and traditional jazz music \u2013 or to, at the very least, extend what critic Jim Macnie characterized as the \u201cdialogue\u201d between two wary, warring factions. As jazz kept shifting shape at the close of the century, bending and twisting itself into new forms while struggling with how much of its past forms it should retain (or shed), Thomas Chapin offered a model for the music\u2019s future by making his own art pliant, inquisitive and open enough to accept whatever the times demanded. I don\u2019t know whether the \u201camalgam of freedom and discipline\u201d described in Chapin\u2019s Allmusic.com biography could have slowed down or even stopped jazz\u2019s free-fall in a music marketplace that became even more mercurial after his death. But I\u2019m far from alone in wishing he\u2019d had more time to try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          The first time I heard him play was sometime in 1988 on an LP (ask your parents, kids, because I hear they may be coming back) entitled, The Sex Queen of the Berlin Turnpike, a jazz-and-poetry mix written and produced by a central Connecticut crony of mine named Vernon Frazer, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[205,206,191,194,196,201,197,195,199,204,203,202,190,192],"class_list":["post-615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jazz-reviews","tag-flute","tag-kiyoto-fujiwara","tag-knitting-factory","tag-manchester-connecticut","tag-matt-wilson","tag-never-let-me-go","tag-peter-madsen","tag-rahsaan-roland-kirk","tag-reggie-nicholson","tag-saxophone","tag-scott-colley","tag-sky-piece","tag-thomas-chapin","tag-vernon-frazer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=615"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2186,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions\/2186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}