Neil Swainson - Fire in the West

2022 CD release.

Neil Swainson – bass
Renee Rosnes – piano
Lewis Nash – drums
Brad Turner – trumpet
Kelly Jefferson – tenor saxophone

In 1981, Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist and, at that point, world’s foremost interpreter of the music of J.S. Bach, rerecorded the composer’s Goldberg Variations, an aria and collection of 30 adaptations with which Gould had begun his recording career in 1955. As the 1981 recording would be Gould’s last, these two highly variegated interpretations, like two friends (to invert a Paul Simon lyric), bookend Gould’s career. Conveniently, the presence of this second recording provides an “other,” against which to compare, contrast and, tapping into the most agency-rich impulse of humanity, to look for evidence of growth, betterment, and evolution within Gould’s musical development. Given that the concept of self-determinism and harnessing one’s inner locus of control is a uniquely species-specific impulse, teleologies, “before and afters” and comparisons continue to fascinate.

Neil Swainson, the British Columbia-born bassist, composer and bandleader who has spent much of his life as a dependently brilliant side person for musicians both local (Pat LaBarbera, Don Thompson, Kirk MacDonald) and international (Woody Shaw, George Shearing, Roberta Gambarini), has no intention of making the fine recording his last. That said, a Swainson-led recording is a rarity indeed, and the fact that Fire in the West shares ensemble aggregation, similarly provides revelatory insight into Swainson’s challenging yet decidedly beautiful modern compositions, and offers excellent musical contributions from all principals involved, makes it a wonderful career and sonic analogue to his 1987 recording, 49th Parallel.

“Actually,” Swainson states from his Toronto home, “this recording came about because Cory Weeds was in the process of reissuing 49th Parallel [originally released on Concord Records]. In the process of preparing for that re-release, I thought that it was time to do something in a similar vein, using the same quintet format on some current tunes that I’d written.” Not surprisingly, Weeds was eager to offer Cellar Live as a home for a Swainson’s proposed project, and the two men began strategizing ensemble casting.

Now to be clear, it would be difficult to top the sacrosanct personnel of (late musicians all): Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson, Gary Williamson and Jerry Fuller, who appear on his first quintet recording. But, as Swainson recalls, it was at a Music by the Sea concert in Bamfield, British Columbia, when he performed with (and first experienced) the unique tenor-trumpet coupling of Kelly Jefferson and Brad Turner. “It had a magical quality to it,” elaborates Swainson, “the phrasing and sound was unlike any other trumpet/tenor combination I’d heard before. Like Woody and Joe, they were better than the sum of the parts.”

A long-time fan of the front-line pairings of the 1950s bands of Miles Davis, Art Blakey and Horace Silver (for whom “Silver Mine” is dedicated), Swainson shaped both his compositions and the blue-chip rhythm section of pianist Renee Rosnes (with whom he’d worked in the 1990s cross border band Free Trade) and Lewis Nash around this stylistic post-bop conception. “For me, that’s a classic jazz sound,” states Swainson definitively.