Nobody Knows the Troubles I've Seen

Ross Hammond - Flight

The liner notes to Joe Pass’s 1973 solo guitar album Virtuoso attempt to mine profundities from a classic jazz truism: “If you can’t swing alone and unaccompanied, you can’t swing.” Over four decades after Pass’s album was recorded, such negative platitudes sound quaintly archaic. Phrases such as “you can’t play out if you can’t play in” or “if you have to ask what swing is, you’ll never know” seem culled from an older psychology, one that elevates the quickest draw and the cutting edge. The 21st century landscape for jazz and improvised music, on the other hand, is so amorphous that if often seems as if there are no real edges--the art of the improviser scatters in a multitude of directions, those paths often folding in on themselves, and the real estate governed by creative musicians is narrow and ill-defined. Under conditions that now, maybe more than ever, favor cooperation and integration among artists, you “swing alone” at your own peril.

Few musicians seem to understand this truth better than guitarist Ross Hammond. Hammond draws from both a vast lineage of individualistic folk and blues music as well as the more egalitarian traditions of collectively improvised jazz and free improvisation, arriving at a synthesis of concepts that is strikingly current. His solo music is a testament to the notion that there is plentiful depth, soul, and, in all meanings of the term, “swing” in guitar playing that embraces diverse musical strategies while striking out, in definitive fashion, on its own journey.

Flight, like much of Hammond’s music, is both disarmingly intimate and radical in nature. What distinguishes this record is how starkly pronounced these qualities are, both in terms of fidelity and repertoire. Hammond’s playing is at once personal and embedded in the zeitgeist of modern music production. It leans on the documentary nature of home recording, utilizing minimal editing and working with ambient noise--the record is a bold artifact of a moment when the worlds of professional music and dogged DIY-ness converged. This is not a traditionalist record, even as it works with tools that have entrenched themselves in the lexicon of music making.

Hammond’s album also arrives at a time after the vernacular of improvised guitar music was exploded wide open, collapsing the rubrics of jazz, free improvisation, manifold flatpicking traditions, country blues, linear electric blues-rock, and modern classical guitar, among others. Several decades after Pass’s then-radical convergence of intricate voice leading and Leo Brouwer harmonies, shaped by a jazz vernacular that somehow accepted both the harmolodic ramblings of James “Blood” Ulmer and Sonny Sharrock’s cataclysmic solo music, and encompassing a world that was gifted Fred Frith, Derek Bailey, Sandy Bull, and Bill Frisell, the schooled guitarist is a gestalt that often comprises a number of languages. On Flight, Hammond coaxes shadows of Black Woman-era Sharrock, the eerie depth of Bert Jansch, and the tireless finesse of Tommy Emmanuel, sometimes all at once.

The repertoire that has been chosen for Flight, too, is refreshingly eclectic and often surprising. Hammond has a soft spot for the pathos and grandeur of a classic spiritual, and his treatment of a number of songs, including “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen” and rarer fare like “On The Rock Where Moses Stood,” is laced with both reverence and unusual vitality. More impressive still is where Hammond can latch onto and energize a more unlikely melody, as his transformative take on Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has A Master Plan” conveys. Even where the melodies are unfamiliar, such as the Nicky Skopelitis-esque “Womuts!” or the epistolary “Alecia,” the guitarist has an uncanny ability to render the most winding improvisations with the inevitability of an ancient hymn.

That is perhaps the ultimate goal of the contemporary individual artist--to communicate as deeply as possible across as wide a gamut of styles as is at his or her disposal. Hammond both recognizes this urge and refuses to underestimate either the capabilities of his music or the knowledge of his audience. Flight is indeed a swinging document, but it is also remarkably inviting, speaking to all manner of human rhythms.

-Karl Evangelista, Oakland, CA, August 2014