Jazz: Liberated Spirits

They come onstage like three hippies and an undertaker’s assistant: a blond-mustached leader who looks like a young General Custer in buckskin and beads, a guitarist wrapped in a double-breasted blue jacket and a pageboy haircut, a woolly thatched drummer who appears to be wearing an entire rummage sale—and a gaunt, somber bassist in black mufti. What is more, their music is as motley as their garb. The blues jostle with Bartok. Country and western blurs into flamenco. Rock blares through misty impressionism.

It adds up to strange jazz, and the strangest thing of all is that the Gary Burton Quartet makes it work brilliantly. The four—Vibraharpist Burton, 25, Guitarist Larry Coryell, 24, Bassist Steve Swallow, 27, and Drummer Bob Moses, 20—have been together only since July. Already they have caught on not only with hard-core jazz buffs in clubs from New York to Los Angeles but also with rock-oriented youngsters on college campuses and in San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. Their concert last week in Manhattan’s Carnegie Recital Hall confirmed that jazz has found two major new voices—Burton, with his soft, lacy textures and tumbling melodic lines, and Coryell, with his swatches of classicism, vaulting arpeggios and bluesy twangs.

But the group’s real virtuosity is collective rather than individual. Sorting like musical pack rats through a patchwork of influences, they piece together witty collages that throb with asymmetrical rhythms and fierce intensity, yet never neglect an unashamed capacity for lyricism. “We are playing jazz that represents our particular generation, time of life and background,” says Burton. “The people who have been the major influences for the past five to ten years are now getting to be over 40. We’re less traditional than they are, but we’re not out to destroy traditions like some avant-garde players. We have very little reservation about drawing on anything.”

Hair Down. Burton’s blithe eclecticism started when he began adapting violin and piano music to the vibes and marimba, which he had taken up at the age of six. At eleven, he organized his father, brother and sister into a band that performed around their home town of Princeton, Ind. Later he went on to absorb jazz in club dates at nearby Evansville, country music in recording sessions at Nashville, and classical composition at Boston’s Berklee School of Music.

As a sideman with George Shearing and Stan Getz, Burton looked and acted like an earnest graduate student. He had a polished vibes approach that was based on the flowing style of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Milt Jackson, but he still felt that his musical personality was as neatly buttoned down as his collar. So he went on his own, decked himself out in the Custer buckskins, and literally let his hair down. “I felt I should get my personality across to people,” he says. “All short haircuts look the same, but no two long ones do.”

Musically, Burton plans next to experiment by combining a string quartet with his ensemble. And the other liberated spirits assembled by him have just as many odd new ideas as the leader. Coryell, who likes to incorporate the drone of amplifier feedback into his solos, is seeking new electronic effects such as “a very quiet fuzz tone that suggests a little radio turned up as far as it goes. I see a lot of beauty in distortion.”

Moses, whose repertory already includes “silent solos” in which he flails the air without hitting his drums, is now working on “a more multidirectional pulse that suggests infinite rhythmic feelings, so that the listener chooses the bar lines. It’s like Jackson Pollock’s painting.” And Swallow, the most venturesome composer of the group, wants to pursue such directions as those he charted in General Mojo Cuts Up, in which the players improvise over a five-minute mélange of taped music, then pile their instruments into another impressionistic fancy while the tape is repeating. “Jazz,” he says, “has to mutate in order to survive.”

In the hands of groups like Gary Burton’s, it will.